For once, Rose was silent, taking in everything around us as the greaser bartender free-poured her a massive sambuca. My treat.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, steering her back on to a path of comfort. ‘Soon the record will come out and we’ll be drinking cocktails at the Chateau Marmont and doing satellite hook-ups with Richard Wilkins.’
She managed a small smile.
‘Will he be wearing a shiny suit?’ she snuffled.
‘Yes he will, and he’ll have had his hair highlighted especially for the occasion.’
Rose settled down on her bar stool with a misty look. Los Angeles was very good for my cousin’s constitution. Over the next month of our stay here she would visit all number of psychics, astrologers, healers and numerologists to the stars. She would get a mystical wrist tattoo and refuse to tell me its meaning. She would be given a secret word to chant while meditating that she must not tell me either.
We would buy alfalfa shakes and soccer socks and vintage white roller skates to live the dream on Venice Beach, a photographer from Elementary in tow. We would tweet pictures of each other doing snow angels on the Hollywood stars, cropping tourists’ legs out of shot. We would spot Ke$ha at the Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax and follow her three blocks, coughing her name behind our hands. Rose would write ‘Count Your Blessings’ about the period, which was about making gratitude lists—although her own gratitude lists were worded so passive-aggressively as to urge the universe to do better next time.
ROSE’S TOP 5 TWEET TYPES
1. The magnanimous: ‘Sending energy and blessings out to the world.’
2. The cryptic: ‘No telling what I’ll do.’
3. The spiritual retweet: ‘You Must Be the Change You Want to See in the World—Gandhi’
4. The feisty: ‘Mess with my family and you mess with me.’
5. The lazy:
LA didn’t feel the need to self-reference and backslap all the time—it had no need to. In Sydney, at every award ceremony or industry bash, each speaker always waxed on about how the city had the richest music heritage in the country. Same in Melbourne, which was said to be the musical capital of the Southern Hemisphere. Clap, clap, clap. Yet Australia’s record companies were smaller, no one had heard of their bands or moguls outside of the country, and their A&R men couldn’t promise the world.
Away from Australia, we looked better: clothes worked, our eyes were dewy, our faces more animated. I might get the urge to wear pastels or bling; sometimes both. Whenever my personality threatened to return to its default settings, I reminded myself: WE ARE IN AMERICA. Anything could happen. As we walked to bars with Clay in the evenings I transmitted my pleasure up to the stars.
Clay was always on hand to take us clothes shopping and bar hopping, chalking up such trips with ‘my girls’ as business meetings. We perved on the street names that had infiltrated our childhood—Melrose Avenue, Rodeo Drive, Santa Monica Boulevard—and in such glamorous surrounds, it wasn’t hard to obey Jenner’s Law #257: no more dressing like demented children.
While much would be made of my future jaunts in rehab, addiction comes in many forms. If we wandered into a gallery, Rose would drop $1800 on a table in a heartbeat. She physically could not go into a shop without buying something, even if it was an extra toothbrush at the servo. Her purchases started to pile up in a corner of our hotel suite, as though the Department of Immigration would have to let us stay if they saw how much junk she’d accrued.
The law of attraction clearly decreed that if an attractive person obsessed enough on their own selfish dreams, the rewards would flock to them like migrating birds. Working to this same ethos, Rose dropped Jimmy like a hot potato, by text. It wasn’t that she was into anyone else; it was just that she was now married to #dreamchasing. She was like a bride of Christ.
•
It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns
Press clippings: Australia and New Zealand
‘Behold, the much anticipated, glittering debut from The Dolls. As a plinth on which to set your teenage nostalgia, it’s solid; yet the spark of those crazy live shows has been dulled by over-production. It’s not the Dalls’ fault that ‘Fight Like a Girl’ hyped them up beyond reasonable expectation, but their essence has been criminally diluted by the use of predictable co-writers—familiar names found on the back of practically every album you bought last year. Surely what we loved most about The Dolls was their unpredictability?’
—Alt-Z
‘Can we really address the subject of The Dolls’ hotly anticipated debut without acknowledging Greg Mickiewicz’s undoubted desire to get publicly embroiled with another generation of Dalls? Could this be the most expensive industry prank ever?’
—The Modern Collector
‘It’s a shame The Dolls couldn’t have used their family connections to just jump the queues at Darlinghurst clubs. Whoever told them it would be a good idea to try and outdo Alannah “the lungs” Dall should be strung up by the balls and used as a piñata.’
—Elf Wrangler
‘The sort of try-hard girl-posturing the Spice Girls annoyed us with fifteen years ago, and some drivel about Chiko Rolls.’
—Pulverizer
‘Shiny, fun pop perfection from the two beauties said to be the next big thing. If you loved Kristen Stewart in The Runaways, you’ll love this.’
—All About You
‘A grotesque display of self-adoration and the sort of offensive faux-lesbian routine you’ll see in any club around the country after a few Jäger shots.’
—KiTTy LiTTer
‘Relax, it’s not nearly as bad as you’ve heard. . . . Ponies and Unicorns is a gluttonous feast of pop culture for those who enjoy picking out reference points, it’s just that Rose and Nina are yet to have their musical epiphany.’
—NZ Times
‘Is this the sound of hormonal lust? If so, it’s uncannily similar to The Vines played at 45RPM.’
—Beat Goes On
‘One hit wonder, one hopes.’
—Zeitgeist
14
TALL POPPIES
Beyond the touring, beyond the waiting, beyond the breakdown of relationships, the most frustrating thing about being an artist was being misrepresented. More often than not the finished album, into which you had poured two years of Greek tragedy, had been interfered with to the point of being unrecognisable.
POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)
‘Well, I would actually want to hear that album,’ was Jenner’s response to the litany of quotes from reviews that Rose presented him with. He made a show of looking at the printout to appease us, but it was like it didn’t even register with him.
‘It’s just tall-poppy syndrome,’ he said. ‘A two-million deal isn’t unlikely to go uncommented on by the critics. But the sales are telling the real story and everybody’s already stoked with those results.’
‘We weren’t true to ourselves,’ I raged. I wanted someone to blame, but I knew better than to tell Rose her insistence on synths diluted our agenda, or to tell John Villiers that he should have scrapped the Tomkat tracks, or to tell Jenner that as our manager he was supposed to make sure things like duff albums didn’t happen. So, I blamed Elementary for keeping us in LA when we could have been getting creative in the studio at home. Around Grandiose I would blame Elementary and around Elementary I would blame Grandiose.
Looking through the press clippings Carmel had put together, I could see a bunch of familiar names. There was the stammering reporter we’d met after a show in Melbourne, who’d sat quietly as Rose rewrote his questions for him and I headbutted the table in boredom. Not so quiet now.
Then there was the ‘gonzo’ hack with a bad pseudonym, whose claim to fame was that Rose Dall had told him to fuck off. And here was the girl who asked if we were feminists and now complained in her assessment: ‘They have little understanding of the third-wave paradigm and yet they ask us to believe they are the guardians of this post–Girl Power was
teland. I’d sooner believe in a unicorn.’
One thing was clear: everybody thought they could do better than that.
‘We were savaged,’ Rose said, throttling her latte. Rose could quote any one of those reviews. Picture her stricken like Blanche DuBois at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, with one-liners echoing dramatically around her as she cowered in a Hervé Léger bandage dress.
‘They build you up to knock you down,’ Jenner soothed. ‘It’s like modern-day gladiators. The critics in the States will love it, I guarantee. And once an Australian band makes it big overseas, the media back home suddenly takes an interest again.’
‘Can you release a statement pointing out we write all our own songs?’ Rose wanted to know.
‘We could,’ Jenner said, ‘but I don’t think that’s a good idea. Save the press releases for the sex scandals when you need to appeal for privacy.’
Jenner sent us home to cool our jets before the evening’s show. Our last duty in Australia was a token show in Sydney to prove to the Aussie fans that they came first—before we disappeared to the States, hopefully never to return.
I couldn’t hack sitting in a cab with Rose with her in that kind of mood, so I took the train out to Dad’s. As the wheels beneath me beat a double pulse on the rails, I took out my laptop and re-read the bio that Carmel had sent out to the national media.
We’d approved the line: ‘The Dolls have really paid their dues’—insisted on it, actually—but it seemed our two years spent trawling around the likes of Dingo’s were being dismissed by certain sectors of the music press as not enough. It also seemed to have become a quote other Australian bands were fond of tweeting. Like: ‘I was thinking of going to rehearsal this evening, but I reckon I’ll stay in and crimp my moustache instead. #PaidMyDues.’ Even The Dummies were at it.
‘Are you working on an essay?’ the bloke next to me said, which I could tell he’d been working up to saying for about five minutes just by the way he was sitting.
‘No.’
‘Homework?’
‘I’m nineteen,’ I said, heaving him a look. I didn’t tell him I had a two million-dollar record deal as it could be construed as a conversation opener. ‘Did you forget to bring something to do? There’s a newspaper over there.’
That was a conversation closer. You could also try tapping your face in disgust: ‘You’ve got something there.’
My bag vibrated at my feet as the bloke sat in silence apart from a whistling through his nose. I read an email from John Villiers with the phone screen angled towards the window.
‘You should have been more honest and marketed it as a pop record,’ was his response to the email Rose sent him about the reviews.
My phone buzzed again.
‘Don’t ever sleep with him again. xo,’ Rose texted. I pictured her brow knitted into a V in the back of a cab.
‘I haven’t slept with him at all yet,’ I reminded her.
‘Good, then don’t. xo.’
I would have quite liked Rose to titillate me more about John Villiers, the way we used to drag out fantasies about boys when we were kids. On the way home we’d take turns to thrill the other by constructing a soft-porn plot about some older boy at school galloping through the surf on a black stallion, or a fireman kicking down a burning door to save us. But when I followed up with a winky face I didn’t hear back.
Over the last few stops I mourned the record that never was. What happened to our early visions for It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns, of tribal rhythms, steel drums and jangly guitars? What became of my grand plan with John Villiers to bring back the fade-out? All our fade-outs had been removed during mixing by one of Mickiewicz’s celebrity knob-twiddlers who we never even met.
Mickiewicz had interfered with it so much it didn’t even sound like us any more. The last time we’d heard from him, when ‘Fight Like a Girl’ came out, he’d rung to say, ‘How does it feel to be number one?’ That was three months ago.
We had been encouraged to take the path of least resistance and our penance would be a tour playing to teenagers who thought Taylor Swift was the height of sophistication. Little girls these days, jumping up and down in their lounge rooms, wanted to be the big nobody with the big hair on the talent shows. In one ear, out the other. Once upon a time a little girl would have wanted to be me, just like I’d wanted to be Alannah.
TOP 5 WAYS IN WHICH FAME HAS FAILED US
1. Spending video shoots dancing in front of a green screen as everyone in the room scrolls down their Facebook news feed.
2. Not having an entourage so much as a junior publicist eavesdropping on everything you say. Private conversations and lines have to be conducted in the toilet.
3. Not being consulted about anything, for our own good.
4. Having to answer the question ‘What’s it like having your cousin in the band? Are there lots of fights?’ in every single interview.
5. Discovering it’s only thirteen-year-old girls and fifty-year-old men who come up and say hello in the street. The stylish, witty people you fantasise about have no idea who you are.
•
Here they came, clutching their posters.
At the venue, Jenner had lined up a meet-and-greet, which we had discovered was the bane of any band’s existence. Top artists would pocket up to five-hundred dollars per fan for a quick autograph and a grope around a table of sandwiches, but in our case Jenner had accepted a group of winners from a radio-station competition, which meant we got nothing but airtime out of it.
‘It’s to give the fans a feeling of ownership,’ Jenner had explained. ‘You’ll get higher return-on-investment if you personalise an experience—give them a hug and they’ll snap up all the merch for you to sign and be your friend for life.’
‘And, Nina, every time it’s been mentioned on air they’ve played our song,’ Rose reminded me.
‘And each time they play it . . . ker-ching!’ Jenner said, fixing his cool eyes on me. ‘Get those hugging arms ready.’
I was appalled to be around such mercenary characters.
By the time the fans arrived, I was in a major funk. They came bearing gifts: drawings of us; T-shirts that they’d designed themselves; cuddly toys; presents for our parents. There were ten of them—five winners and their plus ones—all looking ravenously at us as though they hadn’t eaten in days. Most had smoothed their backstage-pass stickers onto their chests, unaware that no one worth knowing would be so obvious.
They swallowed us up like quicksand. Fans always wanted to tell you their experience of you, to try to emblazon themselves upon your memory. They first listened to you when they were thirteen. They are on the street team. They once met you that time in the queue at McDonald’s. They shook your hand outside a stage door. I nodded along, but one girl was just staring like her eyeballs were molesting me and I thought I’d scream if I had to stand there another second.
More than once I’d told Jenner we should be doing meet-and-greets with sick kids instead, but he reckoned the public were too cynical to buy into all that. On the instruction of their agents, every star aligned themselves with a cause these days, so normal folk got charity fatigue just watching from their couches.
The girl with the molesty eyes was crowding Rose into the wall as she tried to hold court about how proud we were of the album. ‘Rose. Rose. Rose.’
‘Hang on, darling, I’ll get to you again in a minute,’ Rose said in her schoolmarm tone. Rose actually didn’t mind all this. She saw the fans as her little choir, to conduct into some sort of orderly tunefulness and send them off singing more sweetly. My mind just wanted to float off like a balloon until they were craning uselessly after a little speck.
I went to the toilet to top up my levels with the miniatures of vodka I’d secured in the waistband of my skirt. Jenner had advised us to adopt coping strategies to help us deal with fame, and my favourite was Smirnoff.
Rose’s coping strategy was lovely things. She’d requested pink drapes, s
oft lighting, incense and chilled strawberries for this backstage room, although that was nothing compared with the extravagancies she’d would go on to demand from US promoters, spurred on by tales of Mariah Carey’s puppy requests. Worse, Rose was always rude to people she dealt with, particularly in hospitality and anyone hired to drive us around. That was my pet hate, I mused, pulling my stockings straight in the mirror and going back out to the backstage room. I was rude to grabby people, not people paid sod all to help us. They were the ones who could get the drugs, for god’s sake.
Jenner called time, to give us a breather before going on stage. As soon as I was out in the corridor, I shuddered and brushed down my hugging arms. In the dressing room I headed straight for the rider table to check the cheese. More often than not we got cheddar instead of Swiss, but this time they had it right.
Before a show Rose and I always ran through a few songs with our guitarist—whoever they were—while Brendan sat on his laptop and kept the evening running smoothly, but tonight I couldn’t relax. I kept checking the stage times tacked up on the wall, and then looking over at the door.
I was convinced John Villiers wasn’t coming. I’d texted him and told him I needed to talk to him about something, urgently. The last time I’d seen him was at the kids’ awards when he got the upper hand, and this was my last chance before we left for the States to stop this foolishness once and for all, and root him. I’d been driving myself to distraction imagining his hand in my hair and the sound of a zipper being pulled down. That was pretty urgent.
‘Brendan,’ Rose called out. ‘I can’t see the atomiser in here. Where is it?’
Cherry Bomb Page 15
