You’re the Kind of Girl I Write Songs About

by Daniel Herborn

  ‘Yeah, I thought I couldn’t really go on just seeing him at his gigs.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you need to see people in the cold light of day, away from alcohol and flattering lighting.’

  ‘And I don’t want to come across like a groupie.’

  ‘I don’t think you ever would have, but this is cool. You sound like you know what you’re doing.’

  I shrug and take what I like to think is a cool, noncommittal swig of my cocktail. I hope it comes across that way, that I’m in control, because actually I’m running on instinct and imagination and completely making it up as I go along.

  Tim

  The good thing about working in a newsagency is all the magazines you get to read. My favourites are MOJO, UNCUT, NME and The Word. Kerrang! is alright, I guess, but all the guys with tattoos of dragons on fire and naked women with swords kind of scare me. In the afternoons it’s pretty quiet, and I can always write down song ideas, and flick through a magazine between customers and then return it to the shelf dog-eared, but behind all the other copies so nobody loses. Then there’s New Scientist, which is good for random science stuff and making me feel smarter.

  I find all the stuff I read seeps into the songs, so something I’ve read about Leonard Cohen or how scientists have discovered a new tenth dimension will randomly appear in what I write. When people find out I’m a songwriter, one thing they often ask is where I get the inspiration for my songs. I’m always tempted to give some smart-arse answer, like tell people there’s some old guy down at Chinatown who hangs about in back alleys and sells musicians song ideas for a few hundred a pop and nobody knows who he really is. But it’s a hard question to answer, because the answer is that it can really come from anything or anywhere and at any time and I’ve got no real insight into it. Honestly, I’d be useless at trying to teach someone how to write songs because I’m not quite sure how I do it myself.

  Sometimes I feel like I need to have something happen to me, a little story that can be retold in song form, or that I need to read something interesting to kickstart my writing, but today my mind is already on overload and it’s all I can do to just stand behind the counter with my magazine and not do laps up and down the aisle with nervous excitement. It’s all mystery and expectation, a note in a book and a girl waiting in a café.

  Mandy

  Right on cue at noon on Sunday, Tim walks into the Olympia milk bar, wearing a black Clash T-shirt that is so well-worn and faded it looks like it would dissolve in summer rain. He places a copy of The Rotters’ Club down on the wobbly wooden table in front of me.

  ‘I’ve decided I like this book,’ he says.

  ‘What, you’ve read it already?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘But you found the note?’

  ‘I did. Nice move, Amelie. You know, when I got your message I thought I was meant to read the whole book and get some lesson out of it. I was pretty glad when I got it home and this note fell out.’

  ‘Are you serious? Were you going to read a whole book for me?’

  ‘Maybe … Is it any good?’

  ‘It’s the best.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Growing up in a crap city in the English Midlands in the seventies, prog rock, betrayal, terrorism, corruption, violence, sexual frustration, canals, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Sounds grim.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s funny as hell.’

  ‘Even though I always walk past there, I haven’t been in that bookshop before. It’s pretty cool. I feel like I could get lost in there.’

  ‘You’ve never been inside? I have to stop myself going in there and spending all my money.’

  We both order sugary coffees and talk comes easy, like the other night never ended.

  When the owner of the milk bar disappears out the back, Tim puts his hands in the pockets of his black hoodie and asks me what the story is with this place, why it looks so old-fashioned and unchanged by time with its checkered vinyl floors, peeled-off stickers, signs faded by years in the sun, and boxes of lollies that nobody makes any more.

  I tell him that I heard the man who owns it was devastated when he lost his wife decades ago and he refuses to stock anything that wasn’t available when she died, that he’s keeping the milk bar how it was when she last saw it.

  ‘Do you believe that?’ he asks.

  ‘I think it’s an amazing story.’

  ‘Maybe he has some weird condition where he thinks it’s still the sixties.’

  ‘I think the story about his wife is better.’

  He laughs. ‘Yeah, so do I.’

  A middle-aged man comes in wearing full military gear and big, clunky army boots that echo through the shop. He orders a nice pot of tea (that’s actually what he says when he’s ordering), and smiles at us mildly as he slowly sips from his cup and reads the Herald. He nods at the owner when he leaves.

  Tim tells me he feels sorry for him.

  ‘Because he’s alone?’ I ask.

  ‘No, because he hasn’t got any purpose now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t you feel bad for soldiers without a war to fight?’

  ‘Not really. I mean, he’s not at risk, just doing training or whatever he does now. And there are a couple of wars going on.’

  ‘Yeah, but he doesn’t get to be in them.’ He thinks for a moment. ‘Would you still live here if you could live anywhere you wanted?’

  ‘What, would I still live in the Inner West?’

  ‘Yeah, if you could live in any place in any city in the world?’

  ‘I’ve never really travelled overseas so I don’t have anything to compare it to. I think I’d like to live in Melbourne, for some reason. I don’t know it well but it seems more moody, or something. Or Paris. I’ve never been there obviously, so I’m just judging it from films and tourist posters.’

  I don’t say it, but right now this little café seems as good as anywhere. ‘Would you leave here if you had the choice?’ I ask.

  ‘I think I’d always come back. It’s home. And the Inner West, man, it’s got the beautiful girls.’

  ‘That it does.’

  ‘I mean, I did have the choice, kind of. My parents both left and I’m still here.’

  ‘They split up?’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it, yeah.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Nah, it’s cool. I live with my uncle Ned now. He’s got a milk crate full of Elvis records. You know, 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong, the Vegas albums, all that stuff. It was weird at first because he’s always been this quiet guy who I didn’t know that well — he’d come to our family barbecues and just hang around on the edges, you know? But once I got used to him and stopped worrying that I’d be getting in his hair, it’s been great. He’s so old school. He’s thirty-four but he talks like he’s in an old people’s home. He does his hair with that rockabilly hair wax every morning. He’s really helped me out. He even got me a job at the newsagency.’

  ‘The Newsagency? That cool little music venue with the fairy lights?’ I ask.

  ‘Ha, I wish. No, just a regular newsagency with newspapers and magazines and chewing gum and a lot of old people buying lotto tickets. The one down the hill from Glebe Point Road. He owns it and works there most days.’

  ‘I think I’ve been in there. Is that the one where the guy’s always playing Motown music?’

  ‘That’s him. People love that shop. It’s got a lot of loyal customers. You know, me and my friends always used to skate down that hill, we thought we were so hardcore. It seems so lame now.’

  ‘When was this?’

  He laughs. ‘Last year.’

  I notice him light up when he talks about Ned, but he has moments when his energy seems to seep away, when it’s like he’s making an effort to be bright and talkative.

  He picks up a sachet of sugar and pours it into his second half-drunk coffee. He stirs it without seeming to even notice what h
e’s doing. It’s got to be more liquid sugar than coffee at this point.

  ‘You’re into Jens Lekman, right?’ he says. ‘I learnt “Farewell Song to the Blind Girl” the other day. I might even play it for you sometime.’

  ‘Are you trying to impress me, Tim? Tim … actually I don’t know your last name.’

  ‘Tim Carter.’

  ‘Are you trying to impress me, Tim Carter?’

  ‘Maybe. But I’m succeeding, aren’t I?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’

  ‘Ha. You know, you remind me of someone famous but I can’t decide who it is.’

  ‘What does that even mean? Are you trying to neg me?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s what pick-up artists do. They make some ambiguous comment like what you just said, some backhanded compliment to get a girl’s attention.’

  ‘Never heard of it. Sounds stupid.’

  ‘It’s in this Neil Strauss book called The Game.’

  ‘I think I’ve heard of that guy, didn’t he do the book about Motley Crüe?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him.’

  ‘Dude should have stuck with hair metal. So what other tricks do these pick-up artists do?’

  ‘It seems to mostly be doing magic tricks and asking girls to guess numbers you’re thinking of. Like, pick a number between one and ten right now, and don’t tell me.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Did you pick seven?’

  ‘Yeah. How did you know?’

  ‘Most people pick seven. It’s hardwired into us. Seven days in a week, lucky seven, all that stuff.’

  ‘Well, it’s not that impressive, is it? The whole thing sounds lame. I mean, magic tricks? Number games? Writing a great two-minute song with three chords, that’s magic.’

  We sit in thoughtful silence for a minute, lulled by the nonstop rhythm of cars wobbling down the bumpy road outside, then I tell Tim that I’ve been thinking maybe I could make a little movie and enter it in a competition. Not Tropfest or anything massive like that, but one of the local film festivals that you see running at pubs and town halls and that kind of thing. I’m kind of improvising, because directing a short film is only one of the many ideas I’ve had for how to fill my days that I haven’t bothered getting around to actually doing. I also thought of writing some sonnets (or at least some haiku, they seem like less effort), taking up taxidermy, learning to speak Spanish (so I can travel around old Mayan ruins without looking like a dumb tourist) and taking guitar lessons. So far I haven’t even got around to cleaning up the massive pile of magazines that’s taking up the entire space under my four-poster bed.

  ‘I’m sure you’d be good at it,’ he says.

  ‘I’d just make the film on DV probably,’ I say.

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Digital video. It’s a really cheap way to make movies. It means you don’t have to go through all that shit of having to get anyone else to fund your film.’

  I don’t know what’s going on, but I know I’ve said the wrong thing. He looks away, lost for a moment. But then out of nowhere he recovers and seems fine again.

  ‘It is great if you can just do your own art and not have anyone else impacting on it at all,’ he says. ‘I mean, that’s what any artist really wants. It’s kind of the ultimate you can achieve when you’re creating something, isn’t it?’

  Wow, where did that come from?

  ‘Yeah, I guess it is,’ I say and ramble on about how I feel that I need to get some more life experience before I can do anything that’s creative and interesting in terms of making art.

  He tells me that I’m interesting enough and looks at me like he means it, but I’ve never really known how to take compliments so I brush the comment aside. I explain how Diablo Cody was a stripper before she wrote Juno, so she had some totally different life experience to draw on. But I don’t think I’m making my point properly, so I have to point out that I’m not saying I want to be a stripper, not at all. Tim tells me that she also used to cut her boobs with razor blades, and you don’t really want to be doing that.

  ‘There’s some stuff that happens that might help you to write,’ he says, ‘but I hate it when people think they want to go through something bad just to have some inspiration for their songs or their film or whatever.’

  A huge silver petrol tanker shudders past the doors of the little milk bar, churning out black smoke and spitting and spluttering as it slows down. I wonder what life experience he’s talking about, and what I’m going to experience with him, whether he’s ever going to play a part in what I create. He seems a lot older than he is as he leans back in his plastic chair, hands in the pockets of his hoodie.

  ‘You said before that you’d always come back here. Did you ever want to run away?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, all the time.’

  ‘So, what did you do?’

  ‘Every time I felt like that, I’d lock myself in my room, plug my headphones into my guitar amp and write a song.’

  ‘How many songs have you written now?’

  ‘Too many to count. Hundreds.’

  Tim

  Mandy’s not like anyone else I know and I feel like I want all the details, all the back story, I want to know what she thinks of every book and every band. I want to introduce her to every friend I have and see how she reacts to them.

  We get on to talking about all the inner-city Sydney bands we like, about Crow, early Whitlams, 2 Litre Dolby, Love Me, Lazy Susan and Dappled Cities, although Dappled Cities belong to the world now, not just a few little suburbs in Sydney. We work out that we must have been at some of the same Dappled Cities gigs, the ones at the Hopetoun where they walked through the packed crowd with giant balloons and colourful streamers before they played, but we never saw each other there. It’s strange to think about.

  Then we get on to all the singer-songwriters round here we like: Bernie Hayes, Sam Shinazzi, Perry Keyes, all those guys. Mandy gets on to this band called The Nits, and she’s telling me how she saw them a couple of times at the Annandale and downstairs at the Art Factory and how she thinks they’re really talented but have never got much support from radio or the media. She says it isn’t fair how they’ve never got any recognition beyond the real die-hard inner-city punters.

  I try not to grind my teeth. God, any band but them. ‘Well, I don’t know, there’s a lot of problems with that band,’ I say.

  ‘There are lots of rumours, but you don’t really know for sure.’

  ‘I do actually.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was in The Nits once. I was one of their many, many bass players. I answered an ad in the street press that said they were looking for someone who was into the New York Dolls and The Go-Betweens, but it didn’t say who the band was. I flipped when I found out it was them.’

  ‘What! When was this?’

  ‘Like, early last year, I think.’

  ‘I thought you played guitar?’

  ‘I play bass too, but I’m not as good. I can play drums as well, a bit of keys at a stretch.’

  ‘That’s crazy … I don’t remember ever seeing you in The Nits when I saw them.’

  ‘I was only in the band for maybe three or four months. I was a fair bit younger than the other guys so I didn’t have much say in what we did. Dougy, the singer, was all moody and temperamental and a real asshole. People think he’s really tortured and poetic, but he’s just a dick when you know him — like, he was known to have stolen money from people in the band. Big problems with drugs, you know. This one time he made all of us put in three hundred dollars each so we could record a single at this studio where all these famous bands had done stuff. None of us had much money, but we managed to get it together somehow, and then on the day of the recording he comes in late and obviously completely out of it. He didn’t even apologise, just complained that he was under pressure to nail the performance. What we did was so rubbish we couldn’t use it, we couldn’t even put it on the
Bandcamp.com page for free or anything. But the thing that finally made me quit was when he threw an amp at the guitar player’s head after he wasn’t happy with how he played one time.’

  ‘A bad gig?’

  ‘A bad rehearsal. Actually, I don’t think I ever officially quit, I just kind of stopped going to practices. Then one day I saw an ad for one of their gigs in The Music and there was some other guy in there as their bass player, this guy they’d stolen from another band that had supported them for free. Predictably, Dougy got the shits with him and kicked him out a month later. The other guys in the band were alright, but they just went along with whatever Dougy did. Then after not hearing anything from him for months I get this text saying You’ve still got my tambourine, you low dog. I never even touched his precious tambourine. The whole thing pissed me off at the time, but, look, whatever.’

  I realise that I haven’t thought about any of that stuff for what feels like a decade, though it’s actually less than a year since I last played with them. And I realise that I genuinely don’t care about them or what happened any more. The Nits only ever got around to putting out one EP: five recorded songs in four years and dozens of gigs.

  Mandy says that she thinks the EP is ruined for her now and then I feel a bit bad, like I shouldn’t have told her, though when I quit I was determined to turn every single one of Dougy’s many female fans against him using only the truth of what an incredible and disappointing douchebag he really is.

  ‘The best song he ever wrote was called “Write to Me From London”,’ I tell her. ‘He was trying to lure one of his ex-girlfriends back from overseas, trying to convince her that he missed her and loved her, but he was banging her best friend when he wrote that heartfelt little number. The next song he wrote was one you probably know, “Pretty Girls With Douchebag Boyfriends”. At some point he became the character he complained about in his songs.’

  Mandy runs her tongue along her top lip and leans forward. ‘So that’s your claim to fame. Want to hear mine?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  ‘Do you happen to have Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland at your place?’