News: Chats shows for $5 via myspace.

Me and my band have done some fun shows lately; two specifically memorable shows: we're going into the studio to record our first EP, but these shows have the relaxed fun of a gathering of friends, which, in both cases, they actually are.

FREE MP3's AND PURCHASE CHATS MP3 ALBUMS:

For $5 you will receive an exclusive one-time link where you can download a rare, unique show by The Chats, including between-song banter, rare improvised songs and others.
We accept payment via paypal or direct deposit. Msg or email ben(dot)cheshire(@)optusnet(dot)com(dot)au for free mp3 or payment details. Leave your name as payment description and send me your email address so I can email you the link.

Shows available are:

1. The Living Room Gig:

The Chats blow off a shitty band-comp and took our friends back to Joe's place for a private performance to remember. Recording thanks to Joe Gould.

Introducing the Audience / Nightingale / Heaven / Who Am I / Love Song / Mexican Gin / Happy / Looking Out / Noting's Going To Be The Same Again / If Life Were Like Porn (excerpt) / Holiday / The After Party.

2. Chats in the Thicket:

The Chats were invited to host the birthday picnic of a special musical friend; the Chats first outdoor performance is accompanied by the lovely rustling of a gentle wind; and the laughter of a bunch of friends having a great day. Recording thanks to Alex Shaw and Peta Wood, and all others who made it a special day.

Happy / Nothings Gonna Be The Same / Love Song At The End of A Rope / Holiday / Lull in the Set / Heaven / Ice Song (Who Brought The Ice?) / Who Am I (Drunken Sing-a-Long Version)

Curio: Pic on the back of a sanitarium box

Bad direction, or twisted sub-text?

This was supposed to be a shot of a mother and son, but if you look close up, the kid actually didn't know it was an ad, this random woman just came up to him and held his hand. He thought he'd scored.

Blog: Recent Acquisitions

Something told me I needed to spend $100 on books this week; some of my recent acquisitions being:

Allen, Woody. Complete Prose.
O'Rourke, P.J. Eat the Rich, Give War A Chance and others.

Palin, Michael. Diaries 1969-1979, The Python Years
Thompson, Hunter S. Gonzo Papers 2.

Wolfe, Tom. In Our Time; Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.

I then proceeded to spill a hot coffee on most of them, then pore over them, wimpering, with a hair-dryer. At no point during this did I wonder if I had become too attached to my books. Luckily no words were damaged in the making of this sad physical comedy routine.

I watched a documentary today on how Americans are using computers to rig their elections now. It was called "Hacking Democracy." It made me proud to be an Australian. Mainly because I don't know how they rig our elections.

I spent some time today being glad that I don't have a speech impediment. It was the most valuable time I spent all day.

Happy birthday Dan.

Ben

Blog: Writings That Are Not Drug Induced But Have Nothing To Do With Anything Especially David Foster Wallace

New idea for character: carrot man. Second thoughts: perhaps limited in emotional aspects, but possibilities for merchandising good. Read today that David Foster Wallace died. Strange because I read it today, but it happened a week ago, but at least my world-awareness gap is getting smaller; earlier this month I read that Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes had died on the same weekend, a month before I read about it, which made me feel bad, but not as bad as their loved ones, and perhaps for different reasons.

Hayes and Mac had just completed work on a movie about a man whose only joy in life is composing internet blogs about dearly departed celebrities, or dead celebrities as people with other joys in life call them. In the film the man (unemployed, alive) had an unhealthy appetite for loneliness but constantly failed at it, acting out by going out all the time and meeting lots of people. The man, not apparently based on the screenwriter or any of his family or friends or internet favourites, despite being memorable to all those who remembered him, had the strange fear that he was completely unmemorable; that even his very own mother would just walk past him on the street, even if he was bleeding from the eyes and she recognised him. The man also had a private paranoia that there was very little money in his bank account, even when there was none at all. To assuage this, the man retreated into the internet, like Hollywood Star in one of those 80’s sci-fi movies where special effects are hand-drawn. The rest of the picture dissolves into self-reference and the greater bulk of the audience are lost, with only those who can find a good book or supermarket brochure on their person not realising that the final twenty minutes don't make sense.

Apparently its Citizen Kane meets David Bowie; sad about Mac and Hayes though.

More thoughts on carrot man: definitely a promising idea. Refer to Coles docket from January; I remember I left another vegetable themed character there who would go nicely with carrots.

Have begun painting my nails with this cleverly titled don’t-chew-your-nails paint, which looks just like a bottle of nail-polish, which seems flammable enough to add fuel to the fires of my masculinity, ongoing ever since I began walking like my first female “crush.”

I’m always too shy to admit it, but when I hear about a celebrity who’s died I feel kind of like the first time a grown-up gave me free money. I sit there, helpless as to when the good news will next return. My days are long and quiet, and aside from packages arriving bearing the latest Bryce Courtney, which I need because I have a squeaky door that disturbs my writing, all that keeps me going is the hope that each dawn will be greeted of something significant.

For what is more significant than dying? I mean, not many things we have no control over, aside from being born. Everything else we can influence to happen to some degree: getting married, getting a job, voting to encourage the politicians; its all stuff that in a free and right-thinking society we have full control over. But I have to admit that aside from writing another book, dying is one of the only ways I can get any excitement out of David Foster Wallace; and I find that sad, which is why I say I’m sad he’s died. But J.D. Salinger is another story. That bastard has for years stubbornly refused to let me read any of his unpublished books or died, so I get nothing from him.

If I ever do something significant, I’d like it to be very reckless; like wearing a bath-robe and slippers to the shops; because I think I’ve been through my sensible period. The only times I’m scared about are the puritan period and the idealistic period. As soon as I start shouting at dinner parties because of baby seal farming or baby Jesus farming just shoot me dead with a witty insult and bury me in hypocrisy.

Final decision on carrot man, and any derivations of the vegetable theme: I retract all these ideas and deny I ever had them.

Blog: Why the white suit?

Or What Is It That Tom Wolfe Thinks About As He Is Dressing In The Morning, And Other Time-Saving Tips.

Or Is Tom Wolfe Wearing A White Suit Or Is He Just Happy To See Me?

Or Ernest XIII: Ernest Wears A White Suit, Starring Tom Wolfe.

Or Imperial Trooper Cloning Facility, or Tom Wolfe's Wardrobe?

The House That Tom Built
In His Long White Suit
Was a long boring book.

Tom's significant other: Tom, come in here for a minute.
Tom (or, if you prefer, Foghorn Leghorn): Why yes Maude?
Tom's significant other: I was just getting ready for the wedding, and I was checking what you were wearing...
Tom: Why Maudie, I'm wearing my birthday suit, you know I always wears my birthday suit when I'm composing a thousand-page novel.
Tom's significant other: I'm sorry dear, I didn't realise you was workin', will this one be about racist rednecks who dress up in white suits and talk like Foghorn Leghorn too? I so loves it when you writes like that; hot darn.

We interrupt this smattering of jabs at Tom Wolfe to inform you of a real tragedy in the literary world: David Foster Wallace has died.

News: Third Time's The Chat

That little band went to bluesfest, that other little band went to America to make it big... This little band is going to the Excelsior Hotel, Surrey Hills.

It just doesn't get any bigger than that.

Particularly with the likes of Jack Carty and the Party, alumni of the Sydney Uni Band Comp and other places where young people go to meet other young people, and the lovely Emma Davis (lovely both as a person and as a singer, and she's also cute.)

In the intervening weeks since the last time the Chats went live Joe Public has often come up to me in the street and said, "Ben, I'm sorry I couldn't make it to your lounge-room gig, even though I was invited and it sounds amazing on myspace (http://www.myspace.com/bencheshireandthechats that is) and I've had to say to them, "just don't let it happen again." But perhaps I shouldn't be saying that, since I told you it was ten bucks for a twenty-minute gig and I told you it was an all-ages band comp at the Stag... But that shouldn't matter... Just the very notion of a live performance by the Chats... We could do it in the very living room of my drummer Joe's place and it would be magical! Right? Wrong. You missed that already, that was last gig, and its on myspace, so check it out. But forget about that. That's in the past. This gig is in the future, which is way cooler. Its at the Excelsior, Surrey Hills, and we're not even going to try and treat it like our living room, because people don't like it when I take my shirt off in bistro-areas.

Jack Carty and the Party
with Emma Davis and Ben Cheshire and the Chats.
Excelsior Hotel Foveaux St, SURREY HILLS, between Central Station and the Hopetoun.
18th Sep, 8pm. $8
(All the 8's... Freaky.)

Ben

Lyrics: Looking Out

We’re going out, we’re buying beer, until the bartender won’t let us anymore
We’ll sleep on the floor, but we’ll look up, we’ll look up

Then we’ll go out and find a job so our landlord doesn’t nail us to the door, and look under the floor... We'll look up, just look up...

When there's no-one left to impress... When the girl's gone home... All you wanna do is roam...

I’ll come to you, so don’t you move, I don’t want you to come back from the beach, to keep me company
I’ll just look out, I’ll look out.

Through the week, the news I read, gets bad and badder still, the more I make it up, I get more and more stuck,
I’ll just look out, I’ll look out.

When there's no-one left to impress... When the girl's gone home... All you wanna do is roam...

I write a word on a line, then I fold and fold and fold until it fits, in the creases of your lips, looking out, looking out

I’ll take a shower or a bath or maybe shower and then bath then shower, bath
Behind protective glass…
Looking out, looking out…

Lyrics: Nothing's Gonna Be The Same Again

In a world that’s so full of hate
When I smile, it hurts my face
In a time when time is short
Its reassuring just to know you’re there at all

In a place where we wave with guns
And we trade our friends for gum
Its hard to imagine the bond that we used to have
Its reassuring just to know you’re there at all

Its like nothing’s gonna be
Nothing’s gonna be
Nothing’s gonna be the same again.

Though I run in a human race.
No-one looks at my DNA.
Though you stare with a pair of empty eyes
Its reassuring just to know you’re there at all

Its like nothing’s gonna be
Nothing’s gonna be
Nothing’s gonna be the same again.

Its like nothing’s gonna be
Nothing’s gonna be
Nothing’s gonna be the same again.

Though we’ve lost our Mother Teresa
We’ve doctors and others who think they’re about to save her
Though I laugh, you don’t laugh back
Its reassuring just to know that you could.

Lyrics: Happy

All my lonely days are gone
My nights are filled with scorn, but I'm happy.
This summer we're at war,
We don't know where we are, but we're happy.

All the people in my bed,
A couple in my head make me happy.
We're going down the coast
To settle up a grudge and be happy.

Ah help me,
I've had a bad night,
And I don't feel beautiful,
Like you made me feel,
But that was long ago...

If I could lose some weight,
That would make my day, I'd be happy.
But there's biscuits in my loo,
The bears are two-by-two and they're happy.

There's biscuits in my mouth,
The bears are flying south and they're happy,
But there's beer inside the fridge,
Let's make each other rich and be happy.

Ah help me,
I've had a bad night,
And I don't feel beautiful,
Like you made me feel,
But that was long ago...

Poem: Ex in the Ocean

I walked right out on the windy pier
And thought I saw your head – bobbing there.
No, not there. A bit to the right. Yes, there.

I told my better half, a blonde Retriever
That I should probably fish you out,
If only I’d brought my pole.

I forgot to mention I can talk to my dog.
Probably should have mentioned that.
Nevertheless, Jessie, as she liked to be called,

She looked at me with those humanbaby eyes
And I knew she was going in the drink.
“Wait,” I called out, for I’d remembered I hate you.

I stood at the railing, watching her sadly.
For on her own, she meant more to me
Than all my Exes in the ocean.

I couldn’t look. I shut my eyes until I heard her
Padding along the pier. I looked.
There she was. Wagging happily, with an old boot.

“Lucky she’s deaf,” I muttered, then mouthed silently,
“Good dog. You found my boot!”
I put the soggy boot on to continue the ruse.

Jessie watched me as I did it. I stood there,
Watching you floating in the distance; then
Jessie went and found the sandal I’d hid in the bushes

She dropped it next to my foot,
Sore from the waterlogged boot,
And looked up at me. “Not impressed.”

B.C

Poem: Birthday Suit

Last night I was waiting to cross the road,
When a man wearing no more than Speedos
Came abreast of me and stopped. My fingers
Tightened around the fly-spray can I’d gone to get.

I prayed, for the first time in years,
For the lights to change or the man to go,
Whichever got hit by a bus first
(Sorry, I mean whichever came first…)
When I inspected his facial area
And discovered him grimacing in regret.

I didn’t want to be that guy, but before long I piped up,
“You’re a little underdressed.”
He smiled like a straight man on reality TV,
“I’m freezing,
But it was so humid in my apartment.”

B.C

Blog: A Guide To Embracing Politicians

Politicians have it tough. They have to put up with the hard parts of fame, like being surprised in public by political comedians with cameras, without the good parts like producing any music we like to listen to, or movies we like to watch. But I think the two-party system is good; I think the stage-like atmosphere of the parliament floor enables one group to keep another honest, without any unwanted side-effects, like the inflation of ego that goes along with the fact that question time is televised (which doesn’t make anyone any more right, it only makes them seem more right).

Despite what everyone believes, politicians are good people. Also, they are usually required to be educated at least till year 12, and in some cases beyond. One or two have even been educated at foreign universities that no-one can pronounce. This alone gives them a chance at being good at running a country. Travelling overseas is hard. The people there are not like us. Their very body odour tells us that. Putting up with this is hard enough, but when combined with university, the challenge becomes insurmountable. If politicians can not only surmount it, but come home afterwards without running out of money, then the rest of us should be happy to put the keys of the nation in their hands and not expect things they are not capable of like independence and decision making and self-doubt.

The trick with politicians is not to focus on how much they irritate you, but to focus on what aspects of them do not irritate you. For instance, my favourite thing about politicians is that if they do something scandalous, I always find out about it; my neighbours could do almost anything and I would never find out about it. If you look at it that way, politicians are more open. What impressed me most the first time I met a politician in person was how they displayed their true personalities, without the unconvincing smiles more familiar from their television appearances. In person, they respect us enough to not even try to pretend to be something they are not; instead they merely behave as if you were not there on a school trip to parliament house, and they were actually somewhere else, with someone more significant, and nothing they said could possibly make a difference; primarily because you are a good ten years away from voting age, and the age of consent. Therefore politicians are an honest sort of people in that they do not generate niceties when they do not mean them, which they never do.

So I think recent calls to give politicians any real power are worth considering.

B.C

Prose: "Eighteen Years Young" excerpt.

From a semi-autobiographical

novel I wrote in the holidays

between my first two semesters

of university in 2002, reminiscing and fantasising

about that golden period just after finishing high-school.

I think about Delila. For a while there I thought of nothing else. I stopped writing, doing school work or anything else. All I did was see her, talk to her, or think about her. If you want to know the truth I cried when I told her I couldn’t see her anymore. I didn’t like that I couldn’t make my brain work while I was on her. She was addictive, but I don’t think about her like that now. Now all I remember is the good things and all I remember about our breakup was how sad I was and the fact that it wasn’t her fault, but the fault of my desire to concentrate on schoolwork. When I left her I took a good impression with me. For a year now i’ve blocked it all out. I’ve been alone, so alone, with only learning to accompany me. Its all i’ve thought about. But now, I don’t want to be lonely anymore.

I decide to track her down.

I go inside and look through the address book in my mobile. I know already I won’t find anything. I remember deleting all her numbers from my files at a traffic light on my way to practice for my music practical exam with my band. At the time I couldn’t play the song. Remembering that brings it back. I remember the night I played it to her...

*

It was at an open mike night at Mona Pub. We shouldn’t have even been allowed in there, but it was a Wednesday night so the bouncers were much more relaxed about checking ID. It was one of the first times I went to Mona, actually. I still remember how special it felt, how magical. I never put my name on the list, but once the last poor feller had finished, Delila and I went outside to the Beer Garden, and I stood up on the edge of the waterfall and played it to her. People started clapping along with the beat of the song. I couldn’t believe it. It was a moment that I can’t explain to you properly, can’t describe, any more than I can make you believe that it really happened. But it did, and I feel like blowing a kiss to the moon every time I think about it. Halfway through the song I slip and crash, billowing water all over Delila and nearby quiet drinkers. Delila still loved it. She grabbed me by my twenty-cent jacket from Vinnies and kissed me, then jumped on top of me in the water. My guitar got completely waterlogged and I found out later on that it was rendered driftwood by that episode. Luckily Dad bought me a new one when I told him how I broke it. I guess he’s a romantic at heart, too.

*

I go inside and find my guitar by the piano in the middle level. I take it up, and for the first time since we broke up, I play that song. My fist plucking the mysterious intro on the middle strings, I see myself in multiple - the night I wrote the song sitting on my bed for hours. It was the one exception to the rule that the shorter a song takes to write the better it feels. The main themes, of course, when they came, came in bursts. Nothing important was pored or slaved over, it was a matter of putting my hands on the guitar and breathing life into it. The melodies just meandered out of the sound hole almost without effort.
I slip the pick into my fingers and move into the regular rock-waltz rhythm of the verses. I shut my eyes tight and sing the first verse:

I can’t breathe without you
I can’t sleep without you
My world is real only with you.

Words that defined a thousand hours, a thousand moments, a thousand kisses.
My voice rises to falsetto at the end of the final note and I sigh, my mind falling apart. My hand stops, but wavers a little at rest. I watch it like its someone else’s, then clutch it into a fist, the pink pick lost in my hand. I skip over the pre-chorus and play the slow and more compelling, I think, second chorus with the poppy C-D progression that was the last part I wrote of the song. I sing this over it, in a strained and shaking voice

You define me
And never let it end.

But it did end. I stop playing, my chest heavy with sorrow. I am finished. It is over. I breathe a long breath out. My chest hurts from memory. I realise now that I will speak to her. I must hear her voice, if only just once more.

<

Blog - Saviour Rudd, Bluesfest 2007

Someone at Bluesfest HQ must have noticed that John Butler and Xavier Rudd both play slide guitar, and both look as though they’ve been plucked from a ‘special’ Byron Bay plantation, so they decided it would be a good idea to put them one after the other on the same stage at Bluesfest 2007. I can understand where they’re coming from: until I saw Xavier Rudd live, I thought they were similar artists too. As soon as Rudd started playing, however, it was pretty obvious that something was happening that John Butler, even if he noticed it, wouldn’t understand. Although this was just one guy on stage, and it wasn’t too unique musically (simple chord progressions), the audience were really responding to it. He may use the same four-on-the-floor foot stomp percussion as Ash Grunwald, but I think to borrow one of Xavier’s own phrases, the “energy” in the air is different from any other gig I’ve been to. It takes a certain character to thank an audience for their “positive energy,” a gesture that could sound hokey coming from somebody else, but is undeniably genuine when coupled with the elation on Xaviour’s face at the end of a song-slash-happening.

Rudd does seem to want to make people happy with his music: similar to Ben Lee’s hit “Catch My Disease” which created its own flower-power image for Lee, replete with toy piano and flowers stuck to microphone stands at live gigs. But the irony of Ben Lee was that “Catch My Disease” was written when Lee was feeling bitter and unloved. He separates himself from even the weirdest Aussie bands (Sleepy Jackson) who were getting radio play when he wasn’t, and likens pop music to a contagious disease, suggesting a degree of shoulder chippage which must have conversely reveled in the fact a song complaining ‘they don’t play me on the radio’ ended up saturating Australian radio waves. Xavier Rudd must be a refugee from the hippie generation, where music was still thought of as a collaborative venture. These days people don’t usually live in communes, and drum circles are comparatively rare, even on university lawns. Producers behind the R&B hits we hear too often today seem to have reduced music to its most cynical state in the modern era; eliminating everything except those frequencies which excite people on the level that sells downloads. It is important to point out that what Xavier Rudd did to the crowd at Bluesfest was not about money. His festival appearance would generate him the same amount of income whether people liked him or not. It was about something much more important: communication.

Although Rudd cuts a mysterious figure when he’s singing, hunched over his microphone, as soon as he leans back from the mic, particularly when he feels the crowd’s really responded to a song, he simply radiates genuine human emotions. Rudd is not just reproducing a rehearsal or recording that worked in a different setting, he’s behaving organically in his present environment. There is a subtle but crucial difference, because I think that’s why there’s this feeling of a communion between Rudd and his audiences, because they feel they genuinely are having an affect on the action onstage, which is, let’s face it, every rock fan’s dream.

Afterwards, John Butler had the unenviable task of playing to a crowd still stuck on Xavier Rudd. So much about performing is physical, very little about it is verbal. Whether John Butler knows it, the crowd are watching him closely while he performs, expecting a reaction, a connection of sorts. Unfortunately, Butler gives the impression of being bored, as though the audience were transient and interchangeable: Butler is not present as a performer, and after the vivacity of Rudd, gives the impression of going through the motions. Sadly, with the inevitable comparisons to Rudd rolling in, it is hard to not ponder on everything that Butler could be doing, when one thinks back to the cult following of ‘Better Man’. Today, some might feel that there is little genuine or relatable about Butler, despite his technical superiority over Rudd.

I think John Butler is popular for the same reason prog bands hit big in the 70’s, because they broke out of the pretension occasionally to produce catchy pop hits like Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale and The Moody Blues’ Nights In White Satin, and because instrumental virtuosity which was their hallmark is alluring to a certain kind of crowd, because its something they can never do. Its like buying meals at restaurants you wouldn’t be able to make yourself. There’s something to be said for that, and so its fitting that John Butler, who decks his music out with plenty of impressive-ish solos, gets a respectful and impressed sounding applause between songs. I was watching the crowd with my rock scientist hat on, and during John Butler they were deadly still between tracks. They were watching him like he was on TV, because not only did they feel like they could never do what he was doing, so it was a bit alienating, but they perhaps didn’t feel there was any need to let John know how they were feeling because they couldn’t have made a difference. They couldn’t have been heard over the sheer volume of the band, whereas Xavier was responding to squeals and dancing he was observing during songs.

During John Butler’s set, the audience’s reaction was much more akin to their reaction to Vanessa Amarossi, who inexplicably had been standing right where Butler was just a few hours before. And she was really singing. She was singing like it was a high-wire trapeze act, like she had to climb higher and higher up the registers until she just… exploded! Because that’s what you do. Not because it feels right. Because Mark Holden’s told you to, and he’s the guy of Australian Idol, and that’s how the business works. No. That might be the state of pop music today, but you do not come to a blues and roots festival, no matter how jaded, and do something you don’t feel. The audience clap because its something they can’t do, and sounds really tricky, not because they’re feeling what the performer is feeling. They couldn’t feel more different from the performer, because the performer won’t quit shoving their brilliance in the audience’s face. Same problem with Joss Stone. It’s a very impressive party trick, but its just a trick. Having all the right moves, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re playing for real. Joss Stone sings like someone who’s had to grow into a role higher powers in the industry have allotted her: ie, soul diva. She tosses her hair and writhes around just like James Brown, except she’s faking it, something James Brown would never do: just watch him on DVD Live at the Apollo, he virtually induces an orgasm onstage. For ninety minutes. This might sound extreme, but these kind of ecstatic moments are possible in music today, and I had one at Bluesfest 2007, with my first encounter with Xaviour Rudd live.

The reason is this: John Butler may be technically competent, but Xavier Rudd’s music, and his personality, as it comes across onstage, have something that Butler lacks; namely, honesty. If Butler was an actor, people would ask him, “Do all your lines mean the same thing?” to which he would reply, “Of course not.” The underlying question would then be, “Well, why sing them all the same way?” I am personally glad I am not in charge of mixing live rock gigs. Understanding an entire line of words on first hearing is a rarity, let alone an entire new song as a whole. Performers must fight to communicate, and make every effort to enhance their chances. John Butler seems to love a challenge: it was enough for R.E.M to write one hit in the four words a beat style (It’s the End of the World), quickly retreating following the fans’ backlash to more manageable fare, but John Butler seems intent on making every song sound like the end of the world. Perhaps Butler is naïve, otherwise he’s just brash, thinking it humanly possible to communicate anything at that speed. Whichever is true, the result is giving himself needless trouble getting a simple message across, unless he does not care whether people understand him. Why write lyrics at all, then, one might ask, why not just scat? It worked for Ella Fitzgerald, maybe that could be the new direction for John Butler?

I’ve been looking for a magic formula to what Xaviour Rudd did to cast a spell over the crowd at Bluesfest, which is something most industry types prefer to think of as the mysterious “X-factor,” but I think there’s no reason the phenomenon can’t be simple, why not, since that’s what I think his secret is: keeping the music simple. Rudd’s progressions are simple indeed. Three chords, sometimes four, ones we’ve heard before, often in the same order, but born out of necessity. If Meat Loaf wasn’t allowed a band, and had to produce every noise on “Paradise By The Dashboard Light,” he never would have agreed to the bombastic arrangement (as it happens Meat Loaf had nothing to do with Jim Steinmans’ arrangements)… If you have to play several instruments at once, of course you can’t afford to be complex. But I argue this is a great thing for pop music.
Rock history has so far has been like a wave: one one side of the wave, it gets complex and interesting, but at a certain point it gets too tricky and people stop listening, so a ritual cleansing takes place. This effect can be seen with the punk movement which cleaned the decks after the misguided moog wanna-be symphonies of “super” groups like Emerson, Lake and Palmer and other musical excesses of the late 70’s. The first punk music, years before Green Day, was simple: two chords is fine, three chords is just for jazz. But its other defining characteristic was its anger. Johnny Rotten couldn’t “sing,” but he didn’t care, and the fans loved him for it. Usually when you simplify your chord progressions and song structures, you find you’ll concentrate more on whether the vocal tells a story, and whether that story is worth telling.

Rock is a continuum, and there’s no precise equation for working out the right amount of honesty and complexity, but just judging from the fact that none of Butler’s lyrics come across live, and the arrangements swamp the lyrical sentiments of the song with unnecessary riffy bombast, and so audiences don’t respond to it in that special way they respond to Rudd. Butler, I argue, has gone too far in the wrong direction of the continuum. Popular song existed in Beethoven’s time, Schubert wrote his Lieder, and they were popular because they were simple: Pop music is popular because it’s easy. It is music at your fingertips, music in the first place you look for it. It doesn’t try or want to be difficult. Of course, as in all arts, artists can choose to be difficult, if that’s their thing, but generally they’ll only be difficult to their mum and, if they’re lucky, a small cult following. If Butler wants to stay in the game, I’d suggest an acoustic album, and replace his pro-muso partners with looser jamming buddies from simpler days, who might be more interested in complementing a song than showcasing their personal talents. Like the boys in the bars say: too self-indulgent.

It is human to crave communication, if we didn’t, MTV and commercial radio wouldn’t jab at our ears with nothing but drum and bass and lyrics containing nothing more thought-out than ‘booties’ and ‘bitches’. My hope is that Rudd’s frequent aural resemblance to dance music (with his drumming and simple vocal style), a current fad, might help him rise like a condor to be the saviour (pardon the pun) of the scene, using the ultimate superficial music, dance music, as his platform, and wipe the slate clean again of the drum’n’bass epidemic.

I’m normally quite cynical, and I pride myself on not getting swept up with crowds, so I hope it’s a testament to Rudd’s talents, not my naivety, that he managed to move me like he did. Music moves us in mysterious ways, most are non verbal, but I believe music that survives its year of being current must gain its strength by saying something people can’t help hearing. Keeping it simple may get you heard, but then the choice is what to do with your platform once you’re on it. For today’s R’n’B stars, it’d be as simple as spending the night before thinking what the song should be about, or turning up to the studio and expecting something brilliant to come on the spot. After ten years of this crap haven’t they realized it doesn’t? Look at some of the longest living songs, ‘What A Wonderful World’, ‘Stand By Me’: we don’t have to concentrate, they just communicate, because their entire body has an Aristotilean unity of purpose, which their every syllable contributes to. Do you think that kind of thing just comes blurting out?

This is probably the biggest reason why Xaviour Rudd’s songs are so simple, for they are not trying to be different, but are simply the natural expression of the man’s soul. I don’t know if Xavier Rudd has written any songs that will live beyond next year, but by caring about communicating, and communing messages of real love, not just using pop music to spread his image like a Ben Lee-esque disease, he’s done all he can, and let time tell the rest.

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Prose: Excerpt, "The Age of Perfection"

Binty moved through the outskirts and into the heart of the party; as he passed, I overheard several people get dirty-minded; which I hope was a coincidence. It would be terrible to think that Binty no longer needed to speak in order to corrupt hearts and minds. I hung by his shoulder, checking for dandruff, just for the sake of giving myself something to focus on. There were so many things that bothered me about these partygoers that I knew I could never share with anyone; in his better moods, I would find Binty shared some of my attitudes, but given the preponderance of Binty-standard “desirables,” I did not expect to hold his attention for too long tonight. There was, of course, only one reason why I had allowed Binty to talk me into coming; and I estimated that I had only five minutes remaining to take advantage of it. The party-music was blaring loud-enough; I tore my eyes away from the dandruff and looked around for something to say. As when writing a lyric, I had tried to cultivate the ability of allowing my mind to wander enough to trip over something worth saying. It sometimes failed, particularly when fired before that something was ready. We were nearing the outside when something finally occurred to me, I can’t remember what, and I leaned in to say it; the music was so loud I had to lean in till I could smell him. Let’s say it was a remark about the recent spate of fashionable androgeny we were suffering through. Why is no-one happy to look like what they really are… It doesn’t matter, of course, what I said. I only care to remember the feeling of my breath on his ear, and how he had responded with a charming glint in his eye and a chuckle, and suddenly we were outside, a place where it was too windy to whisper, and where people could hear you talking a shoulder-length away. It was in conditions such as these that Binty was liable to talk to drunk women; of all the pointless things to do with women who are inebriated on a Saturday evening, this was by far the most pointless. Two such wandering minstrels, too-skinny models with gorgeous body images, approached and identified themselves as Kate and Kate 2, as if it was important, and conducted the following dialogue which I can vouch is word-accurate, because it nearly made me want to pull my eyeballs out and floss my teeth with the strings, but even that would probably not have pulled their attention from how good Binty looked with his peppering of stubble. So, their attempt at high conversation, complete strangers, walking up to Binty, went approximately:

“Kate and I were wondering if you were a good kisser.”

“What did you decide?"

“She thought not.”

Instead of excusing himself, as I begged him with my eyes to do, Binty encouraged them.

“Actually, it depends on who I’m kissing,” he said, and winked at me. If I thought that wink was some kind of attempt to include me in the conversation I would have vomited, but realistically, I don’t think Binty knew what he was doing when girls like this started to give him attention. He became Cliché Binty, a boring creature who commits flagrant crimes against the laws of interesting conversation, particularly in mating season, and is maddeningly rewarded for his efforts, which gives him no incentive to improve his schtick. I could see how this was going to pan out the minute these girls decided they only needed one name between them, yet I was helpless to make it go any quicker. I tried not to listen, but their voices were grating my brains into a fine powder. I must have been staring at Binty with my evil eye, because he thought I wanted to be introduced. I would have rather have these girls listed as an endangered species, but Binty had invited me, so I had to be polite.

“Ladies, this is my friend Charles.”

“Ladies, where?”

A Kate slapped me and laughed, and I found myself laughing, because I have no control over my laugh-reflex.

“Charles is the rudest man you’ll ever meet.”

“He sounds charming.”

I had resisted bestowing them with separate identities until I found myself succumbing to whatever gas it was they had secreted to make Binty uninteresting, and admitted to myself that Kate 2 found my utter disdain for her appealing, and that I found that an attractive quality. I would have loved her at first sight if I didn’t find her utterly ridiculous. The aim of parties, as I understood it, was to locate a sexual vacancy and fill it; and this theory was confirmed when Binty, the Kates and I retired to a greenhouse to set out the terms of our one-night engagement. The greenhouse was full of unlikely objects: a silver space-suit, a inappropriately positioned telescope that could only have been functioning as an overpriced garden gnome, both of which I suspected that Binty had planted there that afternoon in case he ran out of conversation at this crucial stage. Having known Binty for years, it took me no time to realize I had a part to play, and I was flattered to be asked to play it. The worst things I could do at this point would be to talk to Binty’s girl, or to distract them in any way from having sex. So I entered into a dangerous conversation: with a woman.

“You don’t like women?”

“Oh, I hardly know any, you’re the first, and you seem honest.”

My Kate laughed; which, despite myself, made both of us feel good.

“You’re the first man I’ve ever not wanted to have sex with.”

“I’m honoured.”

“Are you gay for Binty?” She said, though she didn’t know us as Binty and Charles, I remember, because we gave them fake names; the first step in any lasting relationship.

“No,” I said.

“We thought you had to be either gay for him or one of those fish that swim around with sharks.”

“I’m more like a porcupine who swims around with an ass.”

“I’m like Siamese twins minus the twin, and plus a friend with the same name.”

“I like your mouth.”

We kissed for a moment. I turned her flavour over my tongue.

“You taste like someone I’m going to regret tomorrow.”

“I don’t know why, cause you taste completely sober.”

“I’m capable of doing stupid things when I’m sober; aren’t you?”

“No, I prefer it with alcohol.”

Prose: Excerpt, "Castle Fantasia"

As I drew near the castle I adjusted my technicolour dreamcoat, grown faded since the advent of newer processing technologies. My every movement was dictated by the H.P Lovecraft story I was reading, which I had applied to the Guinness Book to have declared the best story of all time. I had yet to determine whether Lovecraft had based the book on a sample of my brain, or that I was so infatuated with the master’s voice that I had consented to follow it to my doom. I had recently been fired, and my girlfriend had left me, and I had developed a resentment of everything non-fictional about my life. My thoughts ran to the exotic because my waking life was so mind-numbing. I parked in the castle carport, drew a hook with a magic marker and hung my hat on it. On crossing the threshold of the castle, I was eviscerated by a secretary who, upon taking possession of my insides, slung them around her neck to protect her from the winter chill, for it was forecast to be the first day of winter that evening, and the rest of that day. I was then rudely informed that anyone superficial enough to be empty inside was not welcome in the castle, so I cooled my heels outside and waited for the clouds to part. I smoked a roll of cowhide stuffed with bacon rind I had procured from an exotic smoked meats distributor in the last town I passed. I smoked it purely in memory of my wife, who was a vegetarian at the time, and Jewish. A group of youths strolled by on their way to a party and called out that they could smell bacon; I told them their joke didn’t work when it was literal, but they had left school before they discovered the difference between the figurative and the literal. A somber duet between viola and cello accompanied my lonely wait by the door. I played percussion with my feet in a different time-signature to try and put them off as I thought about H.P. Lovecraft and the sound of his name.

Poem: Globes

All the little globes
Stare out across the sea
Blink their eyes then die.
That’s life on an ocean liner.

Sep, 2007.

Blog: "Still Life" in contention for gala final of Short + Sweet.

Last week four out of ten wildcards were chosen to be "in contention" for the gala final; this week three out of ten wildcards were nominated.

They were "Bathing with Tadpoles," the monologue and Still Life.

Thanks to all who attended, and if you didn't, don't worry, it sold out, if you hadn't booked, you wouldn't have been able to get in anyway.

On Feb 17 they will nominate one play from the "in contention" list to play in the Gala Final, and stand the chance of winning money and possible adaptation for television.

I'm not too worried about that; being my first play submitted in any competition, I'm just thrilled as punch to get this far. The production went amazing, and that's what really counts. A 3-camera crew filmed the performance, so as soon as I get my hands on the video, I'll post it online so anyone who missed out can see it.

Ben