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     Austin Member Username: Bruegelpie Post Number: 72 Registered: 09-2004 |
Interesting article below - Part 1 THE GO- BETWEENS Michaela Boland. Weekend Australian. Canberra, A.C.T.: Feb 20, 2010. pg. 4 A new exhibition travels the music and art highway from Melbourne to Brisbane, writes Michaela Boland ONE of Chris McAuliffe's favourite memories from the years when Melbourne's punk scene was flourishing is when he attended a gig by the Lunatic Fringe. The band gave everyone a tiny piece of fur as they entered, the idea being that audience members would stroke the fur while they listened to the music. "You'd have to say some of these bands were out of the theatre of the absurd," says McAuliffe, the director of Melbourne University's Ian Potter Art Gallery, laughing in recollection. The Lunatic Fringe was one of the many small bands that flourished in Melbourne in the 1970s and early 80s punk and post-punk era, a time recalled in We're Livin' on Dog Food, Richard Lowenstein's documentary about the making of his cult movie Dogs in Space -- both available on a just-released DVD -- and to be celebrated with an exhibition opening next week at the Potter gallery. The exhibition connects Brisbane with Melbourne and draws links between the political and social happenings in those cities with the music and art of that time. McAuliffe says it is sheer coincidence that the Potter is staging Melbourne><Brisbane: punk, art and after so soon after the release of Lowenstein's documentary. "We think some of those strategies, the do-it-yourself and the desire to operate from outside the normal cultural institutions, are relevant again," he says. "It would be useful for this young generation equipped with MySpace and endless technological tools to see how people did it without those tools." (Some proponents of punk, for example, have sought to create music with devices, such as electric saws, that were anti-music in the extreme.) More than a quarter of a century has passed since punk first reared its discordant head in Australia. The accompanying art movement included Tony Clark, Brett Colquhoun, Peter Cripps, John Nixon, Howard Arkley, Jenny Watson and Peter Tyndall, each noted for having in part rewritten either the rules of how art was created or the rules of how it was distributed. Punk's essential anarchism and disdain for the mainstream has made this a challenging story to tell. Heroin claimed some lives, derailed others, and was integral to the plot of Dogs in Space, which starred Michael Hutchence, who died in 1997 (albeit not from drug abuse). Arkley, another who experimented with materials, from using spray guns on canvas to painting a tram, died of an overdose in 1999. On December 30 last year, Rowland S. Howard succumbed to liver cancer. Howard was pivotal to the Melbourne scene with his bands the Young Charlatans, These Immortal Souls and Crime and the City Solution; most famously he was a founding member of the Birthday Party with Nick Cave. Howard was the band's guitarist, most revered by many -- much to his chagrin -- for the song Shivers, which he wrote at the age of 16. With lines such as "I've been contemplating suicide and it makes me feel so weary" and "My baby's so vain, she is almost a mirror", it has become the unofficial anthem of the era. Howard sang an original version with the Young Charlatans, but it became popular after Cave and the Birthday Party years later recorded what Howard recalled as a "hammy" version. If, with its melancholic edge, the Birthday Party emerged as the biggest band from Melbourne's punk scene, a rather different sound was being created in Brisbane by the Saints and, later, the Go-Betweens. One of the original members of the Go-Betweens, Robert Forster, describes the Brisbane sound typified by his band -- it had big hits with Cattle and Cane, Spring Rain and Streets of Your Town -- as sensitive. "Our influences were partly the first flush of New York punk rock, the Ramones and some 60s bands as well," Forster says. The curator of Melbourne><Brisbane, David Pestorius, says the Go-Betweens mostly defined the Brisbane sound, which was "very fragile, thin, deconstructed". The Go-Betweens' influence would be heard later in bands such as the Triffids from Perth, and today the band is still considered to be important internationally in the evolution of contemporary music. "They were often polyrhythmic and not 4/4 time, and their influence is heard today in outfits like [Scotland's] Belle and Sebastian," says Pestorius. Historians find the punk and post-punk epoch of Australian music and art compelling because it signalled such a significant break with an era in which recreational entertainment had become commodified. "By 1975 you're hearing constant complaints that rock 'n' roll is an industry, it's corporate, that they're swanning around in five-star hotels and they've lost touch with their fans," says McAuliffe, citing as prime examples the Bee Gees and Little River Band. The counterculture movement in Australia developed at about the same time as it did in Europe and the US, and was distinctively Australian. Furthermore, according to Pestorius, it was further characterised by the cities in which it was happening: Sydney punk exhibited a hard edge and didn't share the cultural exchange enjoyed by artists in Melbourne and Brisbane. It was astonishing that a place such as Brisbane could produce the Go-Betweens, whose approach to pop music was so innovative that it is still reverberating around the world. The city's art gallery did not have a permanent home until 1982 and at the time Brisbane had no contemporary music foundation to speak of. "What strikes me [about] then, there was absolutely no infrastructure for anyone doing anything vaguely creative," Forster says of Queensland in the 70s. Real estate was booming, the end of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's long reign was still 10 years away and the cultural landscape was barren, he says. So when punk music began to emerge, it did so without a pub circuit and without the community radio stations, street press or record labels that were flourishing in Melbourne, and to some extent in Sydney. "It was basically people working in houses with networks of friends. It bred a lot of instant creativity, a feverish response; not that the Go-Betweens were overtly political," Forster says. The music scene was simply a group of people connected socially and with shared ambitions. Visual artists joined the fray and created posters and album cover art. The Melbourne cubist painter John Nixon had moved to Brisbane to run the Institute of Modern Art; his then-wife Jenny Watson, who had been Cave's art teacher, was invited to create the artwork for early Go-Betweens albums. "The world of art and the world of music merged," says Pestorius, who is keen to explore the notion that the interaction between artists during this time was not just about frustrated creatives fleeing Brisbane to Melbourne (although writer David Malouf and actor Geoffrey Rush were among those who found it difficult to pursue their careers in Brisbane). "There's absolutely a story of refugees from Brisbane, but [the exhibition's thesis is] the cross-fertilisation of the two cities," he says. "Melbourne has always had these large institutions; the history of Australian art is written in Melbourne, about Melbourne," Pestorius says, citing the Heide commune and the Heidelberg School. But punk and post-punk were about rewriting the rules and Brisbane offered a blank canvas. | ||
| Austin Member Username: Bruegelpie Post Number: 73 Registered: 09-2004 |
Part 2: "The Saints played in their house in Petrie Terrace [inner Brisbane] and made a recording in 1975 that was just about the first punk recording anywhere," says McAuliffe. "The vibe in Brisbane in the late 70s was a genuine political oppression. People talk about the cops turning up and busting up gigs. A band called Razar recorded a song called Task Force which directly referred to that. "There was a sense in Brisbane that you had to fight for what you got, but there was equally almost a sunshine sound to the music being produced." Forster says of one quirky Brisbane art movement: "There was a group of people who were heavily into Dada and it would be like walking into Europe in 1917." But for all the creativity, by the early 80s the Go-Betweens hit a ceiling. "There were no rungs on the ladder," Forster says. So the trio decamped to Melbourne. "Melbourne very much made us performers. We got better live," he says. "Brisbane's always been a little bit anti-show biz. Melbourne demanded a show." And it provided venues. Initially, punk grew up outside the entertainment circuit in Melbourne, as it did in Brisbane. Partly as a consequence of this, art and music ran together. Spaces were appropriated and filled with art and video installations. Parties were initially thrown for social reasons and only later evolved into something more. In time, the Crystal Ballroom, located at what is now the George Hotel on Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, became the unofficial home of punk. Gigs were held in dusty rooms inside the dilapidated multi-storey building, giving people a regular meeting place. Fashion designer Alannah Hill cut her teeth amid a scene in which people created their own clothing, often transforming existing pieces out of a desire for self-expression. Or necessity. Punk didn't pay well. Another defining aspect of punk -- or, more precisely, post-punk -- was the increased inclusion of women in bands and greater equality generally. The dole under the Whitlam government was a kind of living wage that was still widely used by musos and artists after Whitlam's demise as an unofficial arts grant. Punk, for some, was deliberately pretentious. Sound designer Philip Brophy laughs when he recalls some of the antics of his band Tsk Tsk Tsk and acknowledges that many people thought they were wan*ers. The witty wisdom and self-deprecation displayed by many of Melbourne post-punk's practitioners suggests their pretentiousness was part of the game. One delicious quirk of the times was the emergence in Melbourne of the little bands, a folly that came about when Ollie Olsen's band Whirlywind happened to live in a terrace house next door to communist collective band the Primitive Calculators. Little Band rules of engagement stipulated bands were formed for gigs at which only three songs could be played. Members tended to play instruments they were not especially adept at and each band could play only twice before it disbanded. Little Band Nights tended to descend into disarray, with more people on stage than in the audience, but a few permanent outfits emerged from a gambol that threw up such names as the Oroton Bags, Use No Hooks, Thrush and the C . . .s, the Leapfrogs and Too Fat To Fit Through the Door. Permanence clearly wasn't an ambition. The Little Band phenomenon lasted three years and, despite the aspirations to ephemerality, produced an EP. According to Pestorius, 3RRR announcer Alan Bamford made some reel-to-reel recordings at gigs that he took to a community radio station in Fitzroy and broadcast. Some bands taped the broadcast to use as a soundcheck. "I remember all these bands playing in a kindergarten and these tiny toilets," McAuliffe says with a laugh. "They were prepared to take a chance, to see a rule and break it. There was a hell of a lot of activity and creativity, but not too many stars emerged," he says of the era generally. In Australia, at least. Not for want of trying, Forster adds. "There was always a sense of fun, freedom and joy, everyone was definitely giving 100 per cent." Great things did, however, grow. The fertile live scene in Melbourne laid the foundations for what remains Australia's premier city for live music, underpinned by street-press papers Beat and Inpress and public radio stations PBS and 3RRR. In Brisbane the post-punk era led to some intriguing offshoots, including a keen burst of electronic music energy through the 80s and 90s. Pestorius is keen to point out that while the domestic post-punk scene may have petered out or morphed into other forms, some stars gathered an international following. The erratic but enthusiastic London music press, in particular, was keen to embrace the exotic. The Go-Betweens spent only a year or so in Melbourne before moving to London and finding a deep and enduring cult following in Europe. So did Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, with Cave now a long-time resident of England. The Saints moved to London in 1977 and Jenny Watson has in recent decades enjoyed greater popularity abroad than in in Australia. The Go-Betweens split in 1979 and pursued solo careers through the 90s; Forster and Grant McLennan reunited in Brisbane in 2000. That collaboration ended in 2006 when McLennan died unexpectedly from a heart attack. His death was noted by newspapers in Europe and a German-based journalist wrote an obituary for Variety, which is published in Los Angeles. In a great post-punk irony, the Go-Betweens' legitimacy was cast in iron last year when Brisbane City Council announced that a four-lane bridge between Milton and South Brisbane would be named the Go Between Bridge when completed in July. It's not punk, it's not art, but it serves its purpose. ______________________________ >> Dogs in Space, a two-disc set, is distributed by Umbrella. Melbourne><Brisbane: punk, art and after, Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, February 24-May 16. | ||
| Pádraig Collins Member Username: Pádraig_collins Post Number: 3390 Registered: 05-2005 |
It's a pity the article says they broke up in 1979, before they released any albums! | ||
| Andreas Severins Member Username: Andreas_severins Post Number: 137 Registered: 11-2007 |
But Padraig, not everything is lost... the article also says that they reunited in 2000. So all the 9 albums they released came out in the 2000s  Would like to know how Amanda and Lindy fit together with Adele Crazy idea... | ||
| Michael Bachman Member Username: Michael_bachman Post Number: 1755 Registered: 01-2005 |
Amanda, Adele and Lindy would make a nice trio. |