John Villiers was doing incredible things with The Dolls’ songs, preserving their vim while revving them up like a Mack truck. He said it was all about capturing the unbearable urgency of being a teenager; that sense that everything comes in limited supply with a short window of opportunity. He said it revolved around the cause and effect of hormonal impulses and bad decisions. Since the fifties, old songwriter creeps had tried to bottle it, but it came most authentically from the horse’s mouth, he said: ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones, ‘Alright’ by Supergrass, ‘Can’t Say No’ by The Dolls.
John Villiers remembered that urgency, and he reckoned we had it locked deep inside us, like a glowing gemstone in our bellies. He actually got us to touch our bellies as we sang, to feel our diaphragms expanding. Between takes of ‘Bad Influence’ he put his hand on my throat and got me to drop my larynx.
THE DOLLS: THE GLASSHOUSE DEMOS
‘Bad Influence’: The first track we recorded, which took approximately eighty-five takes. (Alannah was said to refuse to do more than one.) Rhymes ‘rock’n’roll’ with ‘filled a hole’ and ‘this old town’ with ‘what a let-down’. And that’s after John Villiers tidied it up.
‘Can’t Say No’: Sets the tone, albeit clumsily, for a lot of my later work on the subject of culpability, such as ‘Rue the Day’, ‘My Dark Places’ and ‘(The Way) I’m Wired’. Mixes metaphors a bit, but not bad. You can detect the beginnings of what will become my trademark cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof yowl.
‘Your Street’: Rose puts on a saccharin tone Taylor Swift would baulk at, over a vaguely ska rhythm and hideous synth chords. (Do synth chords have any place in a Dolls song? I would argue not. I’d told Rose nobody ever looked hot playing keys.)
‘Dish Served Cold’: Marking the start of a long career of passive-aggressive revenge songs for Rose Rogers-Dall. (‘It just happened, so you say / And you didn’t mean to hurt me anyway . . .’) Awesome detuned guitar assault from John Villiers.
After John Villiers scratched his chin at all our other suggestions, we decided to call ourselves The Dolls, which he reckoned had more ‘longevity’ than The Bain Maries and was less ‘subversive’. We chose it partly because it was a pun on our surname—my surname—and partly because we called each other ‘doll’, like gangster molls or gum-snapping waitresses on Route 66. Anyway, it was too late to turn back now, because I’d stencilled it on my guitar case with spray paint and created a Facebook page. Mysteriously, it was also starting to find its way onto the toilet wall of every rock venue in the inner west.
Rose texted her mum to let her know we were done for the day, then turned back to me.
‘It’s all right,’ she said about the engineer, because she knew I couldn’t help it. I had a compulsion to sleep with people; it helped me to get a grip on a situation. She pulled me next to her against the wall and took a photo with her bejazzled phone, pursing her new lips.
‘Just be careful,’ she went, examining the shot. ‘We’ve got to keep John Villiers on side. Just stick to the plan.’
2
REMEMBERING THE BAIN MARIES
Everybody liked to think they discovered me, as though I simply didn’t exist until they wrote out a cheque. But long before anybody had heard of Alannah Dall, the hallways lined with platinum records and the kidney-shaped swimming pool were as real to me as this book you’re holding now.
POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)
Before we were The Dolls, we were The Bain Maries, and it’s worth acknowledging the impact that cult three-piece had on our career. It was the only time Rose and I took on an additional band member—and it explains why we were reluctant to do so again.
Erica Riley.
One of the Year Ten scene kids. Blue streaks in her fringe, leopard-print stockings under her school skirt, a colourful mouth. The teachers always ragged on her to take off her tiara, which she would place elaborately on her desk and then refurnish in her fluffed hair when the bell rang.
Even more than wanting to be a drummer in our band, it was Erica’s burning ambition to be a Hooters Girl. Parramatta was the first city (it calls itself a city) in Australia to open a Hooters Restaurant, but Erica wasn’t the first girl from our school to aspire to wear its orange satin shorts. She reckoned you could get all the wings you wanted.
Word got around that in lunch break I’d said they’d never have her, not even if they found some shorts big enough. It was only a joke, but then when I turned up late to double maths after my extra music tuition, she pronounced me a stuck-up bitch in a show-stopping voice. It went ignored by Mrs Thompson, and by me, and so the trolling escalated. Dirty looks in a sweltering demountable classroom would not satisfy her ire.
After school, on the netball court, the boys made monkey noises as the girls crowed in their little packs. All I wanted to do was go home, untie the damp jumper from around my waist and drop it on to the floor on my way to the shower, where I’d raid Helen’s Body Shop supply and soap the day off me—but Erica was rounding me off at the goal circle.
‘Sing us a song!’ some toolbag yelled, bursting into a bit of vintage Alannah and pulling his regulation blue shirt into two points away from his chest.
The injustice of the situation stung more than Erica’s crack across my cheekbone. I fished the hair out of my face and shielded my eyes from the sun.
‘If that had hurt . . .’ I said.
I knew I wasn’t the horse the crowd was backing and I couldn’t understand why. Everyone knew that Erica begged all her mates for money for an abortion and then turned up to school with a new phone. Where was the baby? What baby? It was forgotten almost immediately. Yet, dare to command the spotlight in the annual school concert and you were marked for life.
The trick to being in a fight if you were a girl was to not fight like a boy. Boys needed to rein their fists in tight and stay boxy. Girls needed to extend their arms and keep their hair tilted out of reach. Whether you had clips or a proper expensive weave, the sight of a raccoon’s tail of synthetic pink hair on rubberised asphalt was a great leveller.
I grabbed hold of the chain around Erica’s neck as she dug her nails into my arms. She was a big unit, but we managed to drag each other in clean arcs, eyes locked. Erica had the unfair advantage, because I’d sprained my ankle jumping out of the bathroom window tipsy a few days earlier. Before I’d even hit double digits I had learned to plot escape routes, wherever I went. Like now: across the oval, into the bushes, over the fence, away. Sometimes I’d do proper dress rehearsals, rolling up clean socks and stuffing them in my pockets, sticking my ATM card down my bra and putting on three pairs of undies. I might sit on the bathroom window ledge, poised, for half an hour, or for as many cigarette stubs as I had to smoke. Then I’d take everything off and put it all back again.
The world funnelled down into Erica’s face—like the freckles on her nose that I’d never noticed before. I gave her one last heave to the left and her chain broke in my hand. I heard the little rip in my pencil skirt as I was skittled. I stood up quickly, like nothing had happened.
The broken necklace gave Erica the opportunity to cry foul and brush the gravel off herself with laboured concern as her friends gathered round. You’ll be paying for the skirt and my necklace both, was the suggestion of that gesture.
‘Bitch,’ she actually said.
‘Whore,’ I countered.
How embarrassing was that on a scale of one to ten? Molly Meldrum asked, as I watched everyone disperse across the oval, dwarfed by their schoolbags.
Ten.
•
Rose had held my coat the whole time and said nothing. We both said nothing until we pushed through her front gate twenty minutes later and she unlocked the front door. Its panel held stained-glass roses, and when we were little I managed to convince Rose that her parents had named her after the door.
‘I’m starving,’ she announced, slinging her bag down in the hallway under the ornate mirror and coat hooks. I hung mine on a hook so
that Rose’s mother, Dee, would be pleased with me.
It would take me years before I realised that everyone has a story, even Rose. This truth would be reiterated to me by a series of professionals whenever the record company packed me off to rehabilitation retreats with names like Dry Cedars to ‘refresh’. I should have been refreshing, but instead I’d wind up festering between stiff sheets that had an unbearable texture beneath my thumbs. Flanked by bottles of expensive mineral water and sentimental cards adorned with cautious floral designs, I would contemplate how intolerably perfect my cousin’s life was.
For example, while I might hang out of the bathroom window and smoke of an evening, planning escape, Rose would be eating dinner in the bosom of her family, at this kitchen table under the low wicker lightshade that threw little rectangles all over the walls. I sat down in one of the chairs, just picturing it. She’d be served proper homemade lasagne, because Dee made decent meals with incredible ingredients like nutmeg and chives. I loved dinner at Rose’s house. I had to put up with visits to church if it was a Sunday, but I could pretend I was their favourite daughter and they’d play along.
SEPARATION BY NINA’S PARENTS
The question on everyone’s lips with this new direction for the beleaguered Dall family is simply: could Separation be too little too late after the epic disappointments of recent years? Hopes waned after Nina’s Parents’ first effort, Your Father and I . . . (2007), failed to ring true with its depressing refrains including ‘You’re just going to spend a few months with your grandparents’, and so this follow-up must quit all the backtracking and forge ahead. I fear we will never again have the halcyon days of, say, Nina’s Fifth Year or Nina’s Favourite Christmas, but already things are sounding more harmonious. Separation could be a bold move in the right direction. 4/5
MOLLY MELDRUM
Dee and Tim weren’t home yet, though. Rose put vintage No Doubt on the stereo and I hopped on the counter and picked gravel out of my palms as she made sandwiches. Gwen Stefani really was the ultimate. It was uncanny how alike we were. She had a mezzo-soprano range; so did I. She paired platinum blonde hair with pink lipstick; so did I. She liked bra tops; I liked bra tops.
In Rose’s bedroom we lay on the bed and ate our sandwiches with the windows cranked open. Rose drew eyes on my arm. She never drew anything but slightly feline eyes, colouring the pupils in blue. She’d Tippexed her nails and then coloured them in black with a Sharpie.
‘Don’t eat the bread,’ she said. ‘Or just eat one slice.’
She wriggled up next to me and slipped a thin arm through mine. Rose was tactile. She’d reach out and touch my hair or pat someone’s thigh, without worrying about whether they thought she was a pervert. And because it was Rose, they didn’t.
‘You’ve got such beautiful eyes,’ she mewed with her mouth full. I could tell she was practising her voice for boys. We had the exact same colour eyes, so I was just a walking mirror to her half the time. Rose was the sort of girl who’d look at a sunset and think, ‘That would look nice on me.’
She had a silky warmth that made me envious, but Rose was the master of the put-down buoyed up like a pom-pom shake.
My mother, who had asked me to call her ‘Helen’ as of this year, reckoned: ‘If Rose were any smarter, she’d be dangerous.’
And also: ‘She’s knows she’s boring. She’s so boring she can’t even bring herself to finish anything she says.’
And: ‘She’s so highly strung you could play “Twinkle Twinkle” on her’—which was unkind, because Rose had been picked on at private school, which was why she’d downgraded to my school. You couldn’t blame her for never daring to have my back.
Helen was more of an unsentimental, pull-your-socks-up sort than most. There was no talking to her: everything you said got filed away and used in future evidence against you, after she was done being defensive about it. I didn’t want to be like her, bunched up with bitterness. Rose and I had spent hours hanging out in Parramatta Park at dusk with just a goon bag and a few possums for company, speculating on what vexed her so much. I knew all about the adultery stuff, because since he moved out Dad used me as his confidante whenever he’d had a few beers—and I’d get a few beers out of it, too. It was just hard-done-by talk as he stared sightlessly at the TV in the corner of whatever pub he’d treated us to. His revelations rarely surprised me. Men always wanted me to bear witness to their sexiness, for some reason; it didn’t matter what their relationship to me was.
Nothing got Helen madder than mentions of Alannah, though. We put it down to jealousy. Helen had been Alannah’s personal assistant back in the early eighties, but it hadn’t lasted more than a year. ‘She was my rock,’ Alannah explained in her memoir. ‘But we were too close, if anything.’
Rose had a careless disdain for her own mother, Dee, but despite Dee’s reproaches about not being a taxi service, they enjoyed spending time together. When she was younger, Rose used to get up at seven in the morning and, unbidden, clean parts of the house for her parents, just for good-girl points. Cleaning brought her peace. Each odd item organised in an orderly fashion satisfied a need in her brain; the same satisfaction she would get from putting people in their place later in life.
‘Project Bain Maries,’ said Rose, emphasising each word as she pushed aside her plate. ‘I’ve been thinking, if you pash the guy in Cash Converters he might loan us a drum kit. Just for a little while.’
Her tone of voice told me she wasn’t serious, but sometimes Rose would recruit me for just such a mission. I knew well the thrill of being able to make someone groan just by using my body, but Rose didn’t understand the power of it all. So she left it to me.
‘No way,’ I said. There was something very wrong about that bloke; more wrong than I could handle, so I didn’t need Rose putting thoughts in my head.
‘It’s either that or a drum machine, so choose,’ she said. ‘Okay, next item on the agenda: what to wear on stage. Don’t freak out, okay, but I got you this.’
She reached under the bed, where she kept her diary, and pulled out a biker jacket that bore the battle scars of a thousand hectic nights. I knew it had cost a hundred and fifty bucks, because I’d checked the tag when we were in Threads and made a sad face.
Every weekend Rose and I made the pilgrimage to Sydney’s inner west. Newtown, with its tattoo parlours and vintage-clothes stores hunkered under coloured tin awnings, was like the Land of Oz to us. We followed the curve of King Street from one end to the other, stopping in at every shop, although it was only Rose who ever had any money. I’m not saying she was spoilt, but her dad did once pick her up from school camp in the Benz instead of the ‘everyday car’, and when she squealed ‘Daddy!’ and took a running jump into his arms, I had to turn away.
Rose knelt on the bed behind me and gently released my hair from its ponytail. A strand fell down my face and I closed my eyes. ‘Now we both have one. Your old coat’s so stinky, I can’t stand it anymore.’
I lifted the jacket off the bed. It was heavy.
‘I got it when you were in the changing room trying on that T-shirt,’ she said, pleased with herself. I thought she might have. I spent ages in there.
Rose was on the money with the jacket. Usually we had very different tastes. I was already starting to realise that there were some clothes that only women thought were adorable, including clogs, culottes, brogues and berets, and so I tried on things with unisex appeal, such as hotpants and tight pedal-pushers, tilting my head for the sideways-on smooth-down. Rose always bought herself variations of the same thing; say, two polka-dot cardigans in minutely different shades. She saw patterns and repetition everywhere; it drove me nuts. And pairs. She was especially interested in pairs.
‘Nina,’ prompted Rose. ‘Try it on.’
‘It doesn’t smell,’ I grumbled of my old coat, but I was already disowning it, pulling this one on and getting to my feet so that I could examine myself in front of her full-length mirror. I’d boil in it, but
I looked super hot-hot. Definitely, I looked like I might be in a band.
‘Fits like a glove,’ Rose crowed. It confirmed her long-held belief that she knew me better than I knew myself.
But she didn’t, that was the thing. I didn’t deserve jackets. I didn’t deserve Rose. I’d done something to my cousin that she’d never forgive me for if she ever found out.
I couldn’t bring myself to think about it, ever.
•
It was my fault that Erica asked to join the band. She and I had fallen into a truce whereby we had stopped calling each other skanks in the corridor and would phone each other after school in the spirit of keeping one’s enemies close. I’d sing her some song that was probably going to be a big hit and she’d tell me who she was thinking of bashing. When it came to hanging up we’d both stay silently on the phone, trying not to breathe.
During those calls I’d say things like, ‘Yeah, it probably, like, won’t come to anything, but we’ve got an album’s worth of material now,’ and I’d mention the Telecaster I was saving up for, even though I was still dragging a Strat copy to and from Rose’s house. It was just brags, but then Erica expressed an interest, forcefully. I probably still had some wriggle room if I wanted to escape, if it were not for the fact that her brother had the only known drum kit in Parramatta, other than the ones in Cash Converters.
‘It’s a temporary measure,’ Rose said intensely, when we had a meeting on her bed to discuss it. ‘This band is you and me. And if either of us ever leaves, it’s over.’
TOP 10 ROSE AND NINA BEDROOM BAND NAMES
1. The Bain Maries
2. The Cruella Devilles
3. Las Chicas
4. The Alannahs
5. Hot Tamales
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