Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer

by Justin Sheedy

  As a TV show it was remarkable for many reasons including its title having no apparent connection to the show: Its heroes never ‘persuaded’ anyone in any way, shape or form. Yet as a title The Persuaders somehow fit the show perfectly, a perfect fit though making no sense, perhaps in keeping with the perfect fit of opposites Sinclair and Wilde.

  Still another of the show’s perfectly-fitting incongruities was that of its musical opening theme, a drivingly haunting instrumental piece by John Barry, composer of the 1960s James Bond movie themes. Just as these contributed to what the 1960s Bond flicks remain (i.e., silly action flicks with gravitas), so too here Barry’s theme for The Persuaders, a ‘light drama’, is powerfully melancholy in its tone. It opens with the descending minor chords of a solo harpsichord played over the side-by-side ‘life dossiers’ of Sinclair and Wilde. What ensues is a split-screen image montage of their chalk-and-cheese lives in parallel, all underpinned by a ‘Moog’ synthesizer melody of interwoven human sadness and resilience. The whole thing is driven on by an irrepressible electric bass-line but, most enigmatically, just perceptible behind it all is a chorus of almost plaintive vocal chanting.

  In one word, the musical theme of The Persuaders was a ‘lament’.

  Little wonder that it and the luxuriously escapist TV show it introduced so agreed with me that week in which I was forced to remain precisely where I shouldn’t be instead of precisely where I should. The Persuaders was for me in that awful week my first ever living example of Art making sense of Life. How it did, how it does, makes no sense. It just does. As if a pill taken once a day every day that week, The Persuaders lifted me not only out of my depressing reality but out of my lousy fucking Decade.

  Madeleine may as well have been on Pluto. Remember, in those days there was no instant messaging, no email, no texting, long-distance phonecalls were impractical and telegrams were something received at weddings. Unlike today, long-distance human interaction was a rare and valuable thing and toddled up your street with the postman.

  So you can imagine my euphoria when one morning the phone rang and the voice in the receiver breathed, ‘Juz, it’s Mads.’

  Once the fireworks exploding in my heart had simmered down to a level over which I could maybe speak, ‘You go first,’ I managed.

  ‘No, you!’

  ‘I’ve been watching The Persuaders!’

  ‘So have I!’ she gushed. ‘I LOVE that show… I just wish we could be watching it together.’

  ‘Well we have been, haven’t we!’

  ‘You know you’re a cross between Curtis and Moore, Juz?’

  ‘You say the nicest things.’

  ‘I know!’

  After speaking for a blissful half hour — yes, about everything and nothing — we promised each other we would be patient, and wait for each other; it would all turn out alright in the end somehow; we had each other. And that was more powerful than anything.

  Nearing the time when we simply had to ring off, Madeleine put to me: ‘If there was one thing you could change about yourself, what would it be?’

  I came straight out with it. ‘Me being angry at everything.’

  ‘I’d change my nose,’ she offered.

  She could have said, ‘I’m a teapot.’ I was in love.

  Wel-come Back…

  * * *

  Kelvin Farrow had been kicked out of Riverview in 1966. As a fresh young English teacher at the college Mr Farrow had been moonlighting as an up-and-coming television comedy writer for The Mavis Bramston Show, the hit locally-produced satirical sketch program of the day on which the marvellous ‘Mavis’ never once appeared. In any case, apparently the Archbishop of Sydney had taken offence at something young Mr Farrow had written on the show and he was flung out of Riverview on his bum.

  Now, 19 years later, he was back. Slim and dynamic, his medium-short brown hair only just touched with grey, his deep brown eyes fixed you with a look of ‘Take heart, my fellow inmates; Shakespeare has our escape tunnel well underway.’ Basically, if ever Riverview had a Dead Poets’ Society teacher figure, Kelvin Farrow was it.

  ‘Don’t know about your 60s fetish, Sheedy,’ he slung at me. ‘Very boring time…’

  ‘But, sir,’ I countered. ‘What about The Beatles playing at Sydney Stadium, Gough Whitlam becoming leader of the Labor Party, the White Australia Policy being ditched, Aboriginals getting the vote, the anti-Vietnam War marches down George Street and the Bogle and Chandler LSD murder mystery?’

  ‘Yes, well…’ he tapped out his pipe, ‘a few decent points there, I suppose… Look, I’m putting on Hamlet this term. Interested?’

  The question threw me. ‘I’m not sure I’ll have the time, sir. What with my band and everything…’

  ‘Shame. I could use you. Max Van Cleef’s playing the Dane. I’d thought of you for his smarter friend: Horatio. Too bad; it’s a young man’s play… Correction,’ he grinned, ‘an angry young man’s play.’ And with that he was off down the crowded school corridor.

  ‘WHAT band?! ’ let fly Tony Basara, his face regarding mine as if the sorriest mug on Earth. ‘I’ve gone PRO, dip-shit.’

  ‘Eh?!’ I floundered.

  ‘Pro-fessional…’ To Tony, my five types of no idea were clearly apparent: ‘…As in making money from playing…’ He rolled his eyes to the heavens, then let fly at me once more: ‘In a REAL band.’ Yet something gave him pause, on his face a look of actual pain for me. ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I would make a bee-line for Farrow.’

  ‘Sorry, Sheedy. Part’s gone.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘He who hesitates is lost, I’m afraid, Justin.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Still… there is a part for you. If you want it…’

  In the classroom Mr Farrow inspired us to think about Shakespeare in a way that was revolutionary for the time…

  ‘Boys, Shakespeare isn’t for the classroom. It’s for the stage. The text, it’s only a recipe. You don’t eat the recipe, do you. You eat the marvellous dish the recipe generates. And only a culinary moron follows a recipe to the letter — especially when everybody’s already had the dish a thousand times. A good cook, a worthwhile chef, a great chef is guided by, but more importantly, inspired by a great recipe to create something truly memorable. For hundreds of years now, school students just like you the world over have dreaded studying Shakespeare… That’s because it’s been taught wrong. All wrong. Shakespeare’s plays are not sacred texts! They are plays. To be brought, by us, to wonderful life. Shakespeare wasn’t a high priest; he was a playwright and a showman. Who put on profoundly thought-provoking entertainments and who would want us to take his play, bring it to life, and put on a damn good Show.’

  Born to be wild

  * * *

  Be late for Anything.

  But do not be late for a theatre rehearsal; in the Theatre World, it is No-No Number 1. For if ever there existed a complex system of moving parts, each one acutely dependent on every other, it is a theatre production in Rehearsal. Complex? Each moving part is a highly focused human doing their professional best to be somebody else whilst making their magic-promising entrances and exits amidst everything that opens and shuts. (And all the time with loud hammering going on.) The leading man may have a hot affair with his gorgeous leading lady, the amorous pair then having a highly emotional and highly public breakup precisely mid-way through the rehearsal program (their emotional state only intensifying the on-stage electricity between them) yet neither magnificently wounded love-bird was ever Late. Even a minor player being the L-word can put a spanner in the whole supercharged system and your name is Mud.

  I was going to be late.

  Early one Sunday afternoon I emerged bleary-eyed from my Latin homework to realise the expected car lift to take me the long, long miles from Epping down Epping Road to Lane Cove thence Riverview had left without me. Shit. That my parents had gone sailing that morning had clean escaped me.

  With no local buses on Sunday, I
fairly jogged the two miles from North Epping to the Epping 290 bus terminus, there seeing I’d just missed the last bus that would get me to rehearsal anywhere near on time, so, as was completely common in the mid-80s, I put my thumb out for a hitch-hike lift with any passing car. To my profound relief, within moments a car stopped: a friendly young mother, infant in back. But she was only going down Epping Road as far as Macquarie Shopping Centre, then turning off left towards it. There I thanked her, waved her away and stood at the traffic lights across Epping Road from the tastefully named ‘El Rancho’, an iconic beer barn famous for its moulded plastic chairs being bolted to the floor to stop them being thrown.

  I checked my watch, scanned back down the long, straight highway hill towards Epping, from which direction my next lift would hopefully come, and once again put out my hitch-hike thumb. The afternoon was bright and warm and from that spot at the traffic lights you can see a long way: at least a mile back down the hill to where the highway rises again all the way to another traffic lights crest in the far distance. There I could see cars, just specks, waiting for their traffic lights to turn green, which they did, a stream of specks now setting off down the hill towards me. Reaching the bottom of the hill, now they were coming up it on approach to the red lights by which I stood, the first of about twenty cars soon slowing and stopping right by me, my thumb still firmly out, the rest now drawing up behind, stopping, idling as they waited for the lights to turn green. I stuck my thumb out a bit more intently. No takers. And the lights went green.

  Bugger.

  Knowing I needed a lift right now or land directly in the theatrical shit, I peered again to the distant crest, there, another cluster of specks at red lights, which now turned green. In the long seconds that followed, just as before a stream of specks set off down the hill in my direction, yet leading the way this time was a single speck, smaller than a car, dark in colour and way ahead of the stream. It reached the bottom of the hill rather quickly and now grew in size as, all on its own, it climbed the hill directly towards me, as it did, a hint of gurgling thunder in my ears. What then majestically slowed until it drew up and stopped right beside me was a black Harley Davidson chopper motorbike, the traffic stream in its wake still yet to arrive. Sitting comfortably upon it, leather gauntlets spread wide and relaxed on his high ‘chopper’ handlebars, was a thick-set man in early middle age in full black leathers and boots, no motorbike helmet but a black woollen beanie and flat, rectangular ‘granny’ glasses of the type once worn by 1960s hippies. Their lenses were blue. As the man revved the chopper with the slightest twist of one handlebar grip, you could almost feel the energy buzzing in the air between you and this magnificent machine, the sun reflecting off the backward sweep of its exhaust pipes, also in shining chrome its front forks extending way forward to its silver-spoked front wheel.

  In my now desperate hope that the cars soon to pull up behind him might see me in plenty of advance and give me a ride, my hitch-hiking thumb was still very firmly out. Though there were no cars yet; only me and this man on his chopper. He revved it again — I could feet it in my stomach. And though I never, ever expected he would turn to me, he did.

  ‘Where y’goin’?’ came his voice above the Harley’s awesome gurgle.

  ‘Lane Cove,’ I replied without thinking.

  He revved again, just slightly. Then spoke again.

  ‘Hop On.’

  I did. Onto the small passenger seat space directly behind him.Seeing there was nothing to hang on to for the passenger, (this chopper having no ‘chopper bar’ at the back), as I didn’t want to put my arms around the waist of a real-life ‘bikie’, ‘Where do I hold on?’ I put to him.

  ‘You’l know where to hold on,’ was his reply, and that’s verbatim.

  With one hand I gripped some part of the leather seat behind me, with the other hand the leather ribs of his motorcycle jacket, cars having now drawn up and stopped beside and behind us. And there we were: all waiting for the traffic lights to go green.

  In this day and age most motorcycle riders are armoured against the horrible injuries that result from falling off: full-faced helmets, carbon-fibre reinforced jackets and gauntlets, non-rip trousers and metal reinforced boots all being standard. On that day I was armoured with stove-piped faded jeans with a hole in one knee, a white cotton collared shirt, black winkle-picker boots and a light canvas shoulder bag with ‘THE DOORS’ texta-graffitied upon it. In those final moments before the lights had to go green I secured the bag’s strap across my torso; this bag contained my Shakespeare script! I had on not even sunglasses to protect me against serious head injury. Ahead of us was a long, straight, downhill stretch of highway. And the lights went green.

  He took off so smoothly yet so fast that all the cars were left very firmly in our wake. The whole highway ahead was ours and we shot down it like a two-man rocket. Instantly was I aware that this man was riding us FULL ON, a thousand butterflies in my stomach dropping as we flew up the next hill and into a sweeping left — in fact we very soon caught up to traffic from the lights-change before ours and there wasn’t a car we didn’t pass in smooth and exhilarating magic carpet swerves to left and right. And Epping Road is full of sweeping lefts and rights and ups and downs and that bikie squeezed maximum excitement out of everything the way ahead put in front of us. Yet perhaps most exhilarating of all was that on this, my first ever time on a motorbike with someone else in control and riding it full-on, I felt NO FEAR; it was being ridden just so beautifully, so expertly as to inspire complete confidence in a rank first-timer.

  But then an icy rush of fear shot through me…

  In the morning of this very day, my parents had gone sailing. They could at this very moment be on their way home. In their car. Via one road only. This road. And coming right now in the opposite direction to me…

  ‘I say, John, look at that…’

  ‘At what, dear?’

  ‘Oh, you’ve missed it now.’

  ‘Missed what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing… Just thought I saw our son go past on the back of a motorcycle… With one of those ghastly ‘bikie’ fellows… Imagine!’

  ‘How could you tell it was our son if he was wearing a motorcycle helmet?’

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t…’

  Yet even despite the fact that if my parents were on approach then they probably would see me, I had an involuntary smile on my face that I physically could not wipe off, no matter how hard I tried; the thrill of the ride was that great. And I truly did try to wipe it off; my thinking in the moment went like this: If my parents should see me doing what I was doing right now, that would be terrible enough. Yet if they should see me doing it with a great big, fat smile on my face, well, I may as well move to Jupiter. And despite even this conscious thought, I could NOT get rid of the smile. And the act of consciously trying to get rid of it only plastered it more firmly to my face.

  Alas, even magic carpet rides must come to an end and Lane Cove we approached, the highway’s giant L-A-N-E C-O-V-E flower bed letters passing and slowing on my left, my black-leathered friend shifting down through his Harley’s gears for the first time in the whole ride and bringing us to a reluctant halt at the Longueville Road traffic lights.

  Climbing off, ‘Th-thank you,’ I managed from the kerb.

  He winked through one of his blue lenses. ‘Right on, brother.’ And roared off.

  I was so physically and mentally keyed up from the experience that I stepped off the kerb onto the highway directly into the path of oncoming traffic. Luckily a car honked, I realised what I was doing and stepped back.

  As for rehearsal?

  I was early.

  Company… Camp it — UP!

  * * *

  The part I’d been offered was not a big part in Hamlet, not at all. It was, however, an important ‘cameo’ at the very climax of the whole tragic drama. The role was that of ‘Osric’, traditionally described as a ‘foppish courtier’, in this case of a royal court whose current king has ga
ined the throne by murdering his brother, the now ghostly father of young Hamlet who finds out! Except Hamlet’s hardest evidence for the das-tardly deed is, well, the testimony of a ghost, this fact rather placing Hamlet in a netherworld of his own for the whole play.

  But the evil king susses that Hamlet has sussed the murder and determines to murder Hamlet by way of a rigged (poison-tipped) sword-fight. Osric sets up and referees the rigged fight, which results in Hamlet plus all the baddies snuffing it (conspicuously all except Osric), their kingdom being lost because all they can do is in-fight and because pissed-off Hamlet couldn’t make up his mind, THE END. No, ‘Osric’ was not a major part but Mr Farrow, through his inspired direction, made it a great part: He told me to ‘camp it up’. Wildly. Force-10. And he offered the assembled company a demonstration of what he had in mind…

  Set up in Riverview’s ‘Great Hall’ (site of my maiden rock and roll act), our stage for Hamlet was a symmetry of black terraced platforms descending from upper back to lower front before the first row of the audience. Though 100% straight himself, Mr Farrow came flouncing down that terraced stage like a drag queen possessed: from the upper back corner, down across stage, he minced round one side and sashayed back to lower, centre stage like a mardi gras star in fan-dance as he delivered Osric’s opening lines to Hamlet: ‘My lord is right welcome back a’to Denmark!’

  When opening night came, in my own performance I actually didn’t go quite as campily far as Mr Farrow had directed; I held back slightly: back somewhere about Force-9 Camp instead of 10 but it worked. And why? Because Mr Farrow’s idea injected a complete atmosphere shift into the terminal heaviness of the drama unfolding: This was Hamlet. And my ‘high-camp’ explosion provided Force-10 ‘light relief’ in the immediate lead-up to the tragic climax of the drama and pulled the rug from under the audience in the most delightful and unexpected way. Thanks to our inspired director, my performance not only brought the house down on cue night after night but brought the house down JUST when the audience never expected it to be. Theatrically, it was divine. Also, this comic shift highlighted the darkness of this immortal play by providing the perfect counterpoint to it, a moment that exhilarated the audience like a last-moment unexpected loop on a rollercoaster.