the Stooges

Iggy Pop: World’s forgotten boy just wants to be loved

“Hey! Turn the lights on, I want to see everybody,” shouts Iggy Pop. And he grins that huge, irrepressible grin. Here he is, on the lip of the Concert Hall stage of a sold-out Sydney Opera House, with thousands of ecstatic fans cheering back at him. And he can’t get enough: he extends his hands, accepting everyone’s love and joy, touching that famously bare, Florida-tanned and now ever so slightly pot-bellied torso, as if to smear it upon himself.

“You’ve made me very happy,” he says, in all sincerity. But he’s no happier than anyone else in the room, after 21 of the greatest songs of all time that were never hits. Well, Lust For Life almost was, after its immortal tom-tom rhythm jump-started the film of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting. But that was in 1996, 19 years after its original release. Nothing else, other than Candy (not played this evening) ever came close.

I’ve started this review at the end of the show for the sake of some context. How could Lust For Life not have been a major hit in 1977, the year punk broke? The answer is that the death of Elvis Presley meant that Iggy’s label at the time, RCA, poured its resources into reissuing the King’s catalogue at the expense of promoting what should have been the biggest success of the World’s Forgotten Boy’s career, just when he thought his Chinese rug was at hand.… Read more..

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Descent into the Maelstrom

The drama of the dysfunctional band has long been a staple of the rock documentary form. In a case of life imitating art imitating life, films from Some Kind Of Monster (which sat in on Metallica’s group therapy sessions) to End Of The Century (which chronicled the tragically bitter life and death of the Ramones) play like a reprise of the intra-band bickering so perfectly satirised in This Is Spinal Tap.

As the credits roll on Spinal Tap, Marty DiBergi, played by the director, Rob Reiner, asks bass player Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) whether playing rock & roll keeps you a child. I was reminded of this watching Descent Into The Maelstrom, the story of Radio Birdman, as this brilliant, influential and notoriously volatile band squabble over their history and their legacy.

For the uninitiated, a brief snapshot: formed in 1974, Sydney’s Radio Birdman were, alongside Brisbane’s Saints, Australia’s first and most lasting contribution to the punk movement. Like the Saints, they had a brief and extremely turbulent existence, breaking up in in the UK in 1978 while making just their second album. Their massive influence saw them reform for the first time in 1996, only to almost immediately break up again.… Read more..

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Gimme gimme the Ramones, forever

My favourite quote about the Ramones comes from Richard Hell, the New York provocateur who, along with Tom Verlaine, formed the art-punk band Television in 1974 and – with the help of threadbare clothes held together with safety pins, on account of the fact they were too poor to buy any more – was already busy changing the sound and look of rock & roll in a Bowery club called CBGBs.

“The first song the Ramones wrote was called I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You, the second was I Don’t Wanna Get Involved With You, then came I Don’t Wanna Be Learned, I Don’t Wanna Be Tamed, soon followed by I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement,” Hell wrote in Hit Parader in 1976, just before the release of their self-titled debut. “So Dee Dee says, ‘We didn’t write a positive song until Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.’”

So much for lyrical content. The music? “It gives you the same sort of feeling you might derive from savagely kicking in your smoothly running TV set and then finding real thousand-dollar bills inside,” Hell went on. It is impossible to overstate, 40 years after their first album, just how exciting the Ramones were when they first appeared on a flaccid mid-’70s rock scene, even if you’d already heard the Stooges.… Read more..

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Flowers in the wheelie bin

In 1977, John Lydon – née Rotten – launched a vitriolic attack on the monarchy that brutally summed up the status of England’s youth in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee: “When there’s no future, how can there be sin? / We are the flowers in the dustbin / We’re the poison in your human machine / We’re the future, your future!”

God Save The Queen, as performed by the Sex Pistols, is one of the greatest protest songs of all time, but I’ve long pondered over these lyrics. Was Lydon inferring that Britain’s future had been literally thrown out with the garbage, as the nation celebrated? Or making a statement about how great art can be constructed from throwaway refuse – one of punk’s defining tenets?

Or was he saying that art itself is nurtured by the oppression of the state? “We’re the poison in your human machine” is a wonderfully subversive argument to this effect, and it’s a line with ongoing resonance to Queensland. It’s a common assumption, for example, that the 1970s punk explosion in Brisbane, spearheaded by the Saints (who, let’s not forget, pre-dated the Pistols by as much as two years) was a reaction to the excesses of life in Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen.… Read more..

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Big black car: Paris

La Méchanique Ondulatoire feels a bit like a railway tunnel: a curved brick room under a funky little bar, tucked away in the narrowest of side streets off Rue de la Roquette, in the Bastille. And the light at the end of the tunnel, ready to crush anyone stupid enough to get in the way, is HITS. It’s their fifth show in six days – a lot, for a band that’s never done more than three on the trot – and the band is cooking.

It’s a Wednesday night, but we’re in Paris, and so relieved and astounded just to be here that it might as well be New Year’s Eve as far as we’re concerned. Upon pulling up at the venue, we’re met by fellow Brisbane emigre Ben Salter, who’s over here for at least the next five months, living off a songwriter’s grant and building a new fan base in Europe. He greets us like lost friends, which I guess we are. All of our eyes feel like saucers.

We’d left La Louvière in Belgium in the morning, crossed the French border to the east and made something like a five-hour drive to Caen, the extraordinarily beautiful capital of Lower Normandy, much of it built in the 11th century during the reign of William the Conquerer (also known as William the Bastard, due to his lineage as the illegitimate son of the unmarried son of Robert the Magnificent and Herleva.… Read more..

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The Great Australian Songbook III (30-21)

Following on from the previous thread, as the title suggests, here’s tracks 30-29.

30. YOTHU YINDI – Treaty (1991)

Did this song start a national conversation, or just get people dancing? Actually, scarily, it managed to get politicians dancing, spurring some very awkward shuffling by certain members of the ALP after Paul Keating’s famous “victory for the true believers” in 1993. I’m sure there’s incriminating evidence of Ros Kelly and Gareth “Gareth” Evans out there somewhere. But buried under the Filthy Lucre dance remix is a great song sung in both English and Yolgnu/Matha, written by Mandawuy Yunupingu with help from Paul Kelly and Peter Garrett. It was the first song by a predominantly Aboriginal band to chart in Australia (reaching number 11), and peaked at number six on the Billboard dance charts in the US. In 2009, the song was added to the National Film and Sound Archive.

29. DADDY COOL – Eagle Rock (1971)

I’m nowhere near as crazy about this song as those who routinely put it in the top 10 of these kinds of lists (APRA had it right up there at number two, behind Friday On My Mind), but I’m not about to deny its charms either, from Ross Wilson’s opening exclamation “NOW LISTEN!”… Read more..

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