My best friend. Who understood me. Who forgave me. Who looked beyond a hundred band rehearsal room tantrums. (For band-mates squabble and fight more keenly than hair-trigger family members on Christmas Day except band-mates do it all year round.)
In front of me was the Unknown.
Beside me was Kindness.
Smiling out at the ocean.
As was I.
Drugs
* * *
There was something reassuring about that holiday house’s polished wooden floorboards, a satisfying resonance when you walked on them, funny little cocktail bar to one side in the warm lamplight, bean-bags on the floor on which we sprawled, watching videos late into the night.
‘I’ve got something for you here,’ said Steve, inserting a VHS cassette into the player.
‘What,’ I chuckled, ‘another of your “Y’probably won’t like this” specials?’
‘Nah, I think you’ll get into this,’ he hummed, and pressed Play.And thus I had my first ever glimpse of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, instantly recognising up on the TV screen the very same comic team from my beloved Life of Brian and Holy Grail: John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and my genuine comic hero ever since Ripping Yarns, the wonderful Michael Palin. What I was now witnessing was their first group effort, an early-70s TV sketch comedy series that elevated humour to the level of surrealist art. Night after night on that holiday, how I didn’t actually pass away from laughter I will never know…
I witnessed John Cleese opposite Michael Palin in the immortal ‘Pet Shop’ sketch — an extended argument between Cleese as the disgruntled recent purchaser of a parrot, disgruntled on the grounds that his new pet was sold to him dead, Palin as the shonky vendor claiming that the bird is in fact ‘resting’ due to being ‘shagged out after a long squawk’, Cleese’s counter-claim being that the animal had only been sitting on its cage perch to begin with as it had been nailed there.
There was physical comedy too, Cleese’s performance as the ‘Minister for Silly Walks’ now being the stuff of world-wide comic legend. One sketch featured the whole Python troupe with visibly camp performers to swell their number in an immaculately choreographed military parade of the men of the Second Armoured Division and their famous ‘Close-order Swanning About’.
I witnessed ‘Everest Climbed by Hairdressers’, the intrepid team of mountaineers hounded not so much by freezing cold winds, oxygen deprivation and death by falling off as by extreme levels of bitching in the tents, people borrowing your hairdryer and not returning it as well as the inevitable ‘blazing rows’.
And there was political satire aplenty, a round-up of the day’s proceedings in the British Houses of Parliament featuring ‘the Minister for Not Listening to People’, ‘the Minister for Inserting Himself Between Walls and Chairs in Mens’ Clubs’ and ‘the Junior Minister for Being Frightened of Any Kind of Farm Machinery’.
Graham Chapman, in real life the wild man of the Python team, was forever playing the ultra-conservative authority figure, on one occasion no less than a Royal Navy Admiral vehemently expounding against rumours of cannibalism in the Royal Navy on the grounds of it being far worse in the Royal Air Force. And there were ‘The Gumbies’: Imagine a middle-aged unfortunate with a knotted handkerchief hat, beady spectacles, Hitler moustache and gumboots who is at all times loudly livid though not quite sure about what and with a compulsion to bash a brick against his own head. Then multiply this livid figure by six and you get ‘The Gumbies’. Chapman, a qualified medical doctor in real life, played a ‘Gumby Brain Surgeon’: Surrounded by a surgical operating theatre full of other hooting Gumbies he is about to commence brain surgery on a Gumby patient whose ‘brain hurts’. When the patient wakes up on the operating table, they realise they have forgotten the anaesthetic, hooting as one towards the operating theatre door for the necessary anaesthetist to join them, the medical specialist surely arriving though by smashing bodily through the wall next to the door.
And every one of these sketches was surreally ‘linked’ to another by the insane cartoon animations of Terry Gilliam, the title of just one of these being ‘Conrad Poohs and His Dancing Teeth’.
No, Steve and I didn’t take drugs…
Drugs?
With Flying Circus who NEEDED them?
The Information Revolution
* * *
Apparently I was to be part of it.
Yes, me personally, assured Steve. It had just kicked off and promised to change the way Everything would be done from now on: Where it had once been done on stone tablets, then wax tablets, then papyrus scrolls, then on paper memos and ledgers, in bank passbooks and on paper blueprints, Everything would now be done on computers. Of course, people would still write and post letters to each other, of course they would, but everything else: on a computer. Steve, God-bless-him, showed me what one was…
His dad had recently bought one for their home, the first I had ever touched. An ‘IBM Personal Computer’. ‘PC’ for short, said Steve. Though the big new thing, his gaze narrowed at me, was called an ‘Apple Macintosh’. He was crazy to get his hands on one, the ‘Mac’ being the next big thing in computers as it showed things ‘graphically’ on the screen as opposed to a ‘text-based’ display.
‘But your dad just bought this one,’ I goggled at him.
Steve smiled. ‘Nah, y’don’t understand… Nobody does yet, not really. The thing about this new “Information Age” is that technology will move more quickly than it ever has up till now.’ He patted the IBM PC. ‘This is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s already out of date. There’s already a better one.’
‘But it’s brand- new,’ I squinted.
‘That’s the thing about the new age we’re in, Juz… As soon as something’s available there’s something better.’
‘But,’ I struggled, ‘how will anybody wanna buy anything if it’s already out of date on the store shelf?’
‘Good question,’ Steve grinned. ‘Nobody really knows, not yet… But it seems to me what’s gunna be most important about computers is not their hardware,’ he patted the PC again, ‘but their soft ware…’
‘Their WHAT?’
Steve explained the revolutionary new term to me, and in due course initiated me to a whole new inner world: one of ‘directories’ and ‘sub-directories’, computer ‘files’ and ‘sub-files’ and great long lines of text punctuated by all the non-alphabetic symbols on the computer keyboard. Even I knew what he was showing me was a whole new language.
Indeed, Steve prophesied, there would be a whole new profession starting from now, something called Information Technology. IT for short. And whatever happened in the immediate future, I would be using a computer, using many, he assured me, in my uni degree and from then on. In fact he would be using them in his Landscape Architecture degree straight away: in something called Computer Aided Design. CAD for short.
The Most Beautiful Building in the World
* * *
Thus the tower building of Sydney’s University of
Technology had once been described. Presumably by the most darkly sarcastic person on the Planet. An isolated monolith, it looked as if once intended to join Sydney’s forest of magnificent skyscrapers except no other building in Sydney had wanted to come anywhere near it.
What is the ‘opposite’ of architecture?
If one exists, the concrete tower block of the University of Technology is a textbook example. I can only presume that, just before it was built, for an April Fools’ Day prank a bunch of uni students stole the proposed plan for a decent looking building and substituted their own joke plan but then to their wide-eyed horror saw the joke plan adopted. Think 27 floors of artillery pillbox slits and you’ve got it. That’s the tower building of the University of Technology.
Inside, the whole place was just as squarely, concretely soulless as it was outside, the internal parts that weren’t geometrically cavernous being low-ceilinged, claustrophobic
and artificially lit. (Hitler in his last days: ‘Ya, I can verk vith this…’) Still, going up in the elevator of the tower, being a skyscraper in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, I nevertheless anticipated a superb view from the tower’s classroom windows! Only to find their artillery slit window frames denied any view from student desk level, only when standing up in one’s transient seconds while entering and exiting the room. Presumably the classrooms were designed that way: so that students wouldn’t be distracted from their work by such a stunning view, then to be ‘rewarded’ for their concentration with a stunning view when standing up again at the end of the class. Of course, if there’s any truth to this then the building’s design was based on Lab Rat Deprivation & Reward Theory and really was a student prank!
In any case, though brimming with the best of intentions, a lab rat was how the place made me feel.
Newboy
* * *
‘University’ is supposed to be the best days of your life. The prime of your youth. And though still young, for the first time in your life you get treated like an adult. Plus, though you technically are an adult, you’re in that window of personal freedom just before the adult responsibilities of your nine-to-five career, marriage, children and mortgage kick in. You’re at uni for the purpose of hard academic work, sure, but your intense effort for at least the next three years will be balanced out by your being in the most excellent environment: an academic institution with a bar, even several, in any of which for the first time in your young life you are legally allowed to have a drink. With friends, in time, whom you will surely make as you’re surrounded by thousands of souls just like yourself: young, basically intelligent, optimistic.
Uni. A place of glorious rationalism: unlike School, here you don’t get in trouble for wagging or being late; it’s your responsibility, it’s your future. And though the place has just granted you that most exhilarating sense of responsibility, at its heart a university is a permissive place, a ‘liberal’ place where diversity is not only permitted but encouraged, a place of weird and wonderful clubs and societies, where radical thought flourishes (because it can) in that brief life-moment before young adults become just adults and ‘grow out of it’. Yet until they do, here is the place to which they will one day look back on themselves as having been ‘young and crazy’. A place that allowed even a bit of wild behaviour on occasion as the institution trusted that its young people had a brain in their heads and so wouldn’t abuse the privilege of the blind eye turned. University. A place whose corridors, walls and hang-out spots have soaked up a bit of the spirit of the thousands upon thousands of young people allowed here to be the best they could be, allowed here to have the best days of their lives.
So I can only assume that, in my first moments there, I’d caught the University of Technology’s student cafeteria on a bad day as it felt nothing like it was supposed to.
It might have felt different if I had been with a friend or two or if I had caught a familiar, smiling face across the plastic-furnitured room yet I didn’t. By contrast, across the room, though at considerable distance, I saw no less than Emma St. John and her identical friends, Emma rolling her eyes, I could have sworn, in my direction.
A Warm Welcome
* * *
My first ever university lecture was to be an orientation and welcome to all First Year students on the first day of their Business Degree and I punctually took my place along with a few hundred other First Years just like myself in a vast lecture theatre.
The nature of the welcome we then received was my direct inspiration for an opening scene of my second book, Nor the Years Condemn (2012), an historical fiction based on the saga of the shining young Australians who volunteered to become Spitfire pilots in World War II. The following is an excerpt…
The Wing Commander’s opening address to the assembled course was for Quinn a carbon copy of one delivered by a pro-fessor on day one of First Year. Slim, thirty-ish, immaculately tailored RAAF tunic, the officer strode up to the rostrum and, fixing his gaze on the seated recruits, stood perfectly still for long moments before beginning.
‘Gentlemen. I would like you, every one of you, to look sideways. I’m perfectly serious, take a look at the man next to you. First the man on your left. Now the man on your right. Have a good, hard look at him. Alright?’
He held their silence a well-practiced number of seconds before continuing.
‘That man… will fail.’
When they say writers write from experience, it’s certainly true in my case: The only key difference between the above scene set in 1940 and my own first day of uni in 1987 was that the speaker used the words ‘drop out’ instead of ‘fail’. In any case, the use of demoralisation as a motivator (in a bastion of intelligence like a university) just so inspired me to work hard from the word go. Either that or I had a track record of hard work as something that came naturally to me. For at the close of my first week of business subject lectures and tutorials — Financial Accounting, Microeconomics, Commercial Law and others too painful to remember — 7 o’clock Friday night saw me at home and buried in my books, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.
When the phone rang.
It was Steve, inviting me to come out and see a band. A good one, he said.
‘Mate, I can’t,’ I sighed. ‘I’d love to but I just can’t; it’s been a bastard of a week and I’ve simply got to make a dent in all this stuff or I never will.’
‘All work and no play, Juz… I’ll pick you up.’
The Kindness of Strangers
* * *
You will have gathered by now that I always felt great in proximity to Steve. Though he’d lived just a lightning bike ride away when we were kids, halfway through our time at Riverview his father had made a fortune and relocated the family to East Lindfield. And now Steve would, just as if riding his bike over at the drop of a hat, drive his VW many miles in the wrong direction to pick me up, then, after a night out, more than likely drop me back home again. And always as if unaware of how generous he was being.
As he now guided us through the long-light summer evening towards our destination, the inner-city’s Harold Park Hotel, playing on the white Beetle’s car stereo was a sound, quite simply, unlike anything you’ve ever heard: A multi-band compilation released by Glenn A. Baker titled Ugly Things, it featured rock and roll sounds from 1967 now being referred to in 1987 as ‘60s Punk’. It was guitar and drums-based rock and roll but taken to a blistering new level; the vocals aggressive in tone, the electric guitar sounds featuring some of the first ever electronically-induced ‘distortion’ in popular music. Called ‘fuzz-tone’ at the time, this effect gave an electric guitar the sound of a Formula 1 car stuck on full blast. And not only was this dazzling music 20 years old and still fresh-sounding, all the bands were Australian! Yet even more than that: Some of the bands were easily as anarchic as the ‘Sex Pistols’ (the accepted ‘founders’ of Punk Rock music) yet predated the ‘Sex Pistols’ by 10 whole years.
Ugly Things was the sound of 60s ‘Counter-Culture’, of youthful opposition to mainstream society and culture by projecting the fangs-out opposite of anything polite, sober, polished and pretty. Perhaps most distinctive of all the bands on the compilation was one called ‘The Creatures’ with their song, Ugly Thing, after which the compilation had been named, and not just for the genuine eccentricity of the song (which was deliberately and most magnificently UGLY) but for the remarkable pop-legend surrounding the band: Each of The Creatures’ five members had shoulder-length hair dyed a different, very loud colour — purple, red, green, blue and pink respectively, something that, in 1960s Australia, could get an adult male driven out of a small town. Deservedly did this dead-set brave gimmick, along with the band’s raw talent, render them a local sensation in 1967, though only a ‘local’ sensation: Along with nearly all the other bands on the Ugly Things compilation, they never had significant Top 40 chart success, let alone international success, as they were j
ust too freaky, too defiantly uncommercial to be played on mainstream radio.
I would go so far as to suggest that if The Creatures had in 1967 been spotted and sponsored by Andy Warhol just as Lou Reed’s band was, then The Creatures would quite possibly today be as internationally renowned as ‘The Velvet Underground’. For The Creatures were just as boundary-pushingly-Out-There as Warhol’s darlings, if not more so. Indeed, given that The Creatures derived glamour from ugliness (precisely as Warhol did), Warhol would have found this band artistically irresistible.
Yes, I had heard the music of The Creatures and of the 60s Punk bands of the Ugly Things compilation before tonight but I had not before heard the music of tonight’s band. The sign outside the Harold Park Hotel promised ‘The Psychotic Turnbuckles’.
With the exception of the iron-lace-verandahed type in country towns, Australian pubs had long been characterless places built for the function of drinking beer with one’s mates away from the wife and usually with tiled interiors for ease of hosing out after use. Though since attractively redeveloped, in 1987 the Harold Park Hotel was a tiled testament to the Great Australian Bland against which The Creatures had once placed themselves in such strident contrast. Just like all Australian pubs, the Harold Park’s main feature was the sanctuary of moderate cool it provided in Australia’s near year-round Summer.
Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer Page 14
