Tommy Maken and Liam Clancy...okay, okay, Eric Bogle

April ’08 – Here’s a song from this very moment: THE BAND PLAYED WALTZING MATILDA as sung by Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy (written by Eric Bogle). Just a moment ago, I was innocently listening to a batch of songs poached from my brothers’ playlist, while I was log-cabinning (any patch-worker will understand that verb) a cushion-cover I’m making for another brother, and thinking, “I should get ready to go out and meet Chris, just as soon as I’ve sewn on this strip…” (and so I reveal that my habitual lateness can be blamed on the allure of hobbies). Next thing I know, I’m sobbing away for the man whose legs have been blown off at Gallipoli, and who realises that there are worse things than dying, and, when he disembarks at Circular Quay, sings, “I looked at the place where me legs used to be, and thanked Christ there was no one waiting for me.” And now my eyes are red and if I leave my room, I might bump into a flatmate who’ll ask me what’s wrong. Unplanned bouts of weeping are also very occasionally a cause for lateness. And having two legs, and being able to walk, is regularly a cause for great happiness. If you happen to be in Sydney, visit the War Memorial in Hyde Park (go by yourself, and bring a handkerchief).

Ian and Sylvia

January ’08 – I have years where I love Ian & Sylvia, interspersed with years where I find them simply too twee and tame. The past couple of years have been Ian & Sylvia years. Maybe when my life is wearing aprons, knitting blankets, cooking from recipe books and having five-hour-long cups of tea with mature-aged neighbours, then listening to Ian & Sylvia (on top of all that) would be pushing myself dangerously close to an overdose. But in years where my Vacola Preserving Outfit is shoved to the back of the cupboard and piled up with plastic bags of plastic bags, Ian’s dignified, school-teacher appearance and Sylvia’s demure poses, and their polite, proper voices no longer (quite the contrary!) make me want to puke. I once had a tape of American sixties folk songs; Mississippi John Hurt’s ‘Candyman’ was on it (I used to think that song was creepy) and so was the Tyson/Fricke classic ‘YOU WERE ON MY MIND’. Last Saturday, I played all four sides of an Ian & Sylvia Best Of (I hope that doesn’t reveal too much about my Saturday), and the very last song ended up being ‘Y.W.O.M.M.’. I thought, “I should learn that.” I already knew the words, and it sounded simple, like a standard 3-chorder plus a little optional extra something (e.g. an F#m thrown in among the Es, As and B7s). But I learnt it mainly because it is one of those handy songs that perfectly captures a thought-cycle that most people will experience at some point in their lives, and it’s better to sing and play it aloud, and possibly even pair up with someone who can add an Ian or Sylvia harmony, than to have it trapped, voiceless, in your brain, where it circulates tiresomely. And it’s somehow morale-boosting to apply a light and pretty melody to lines like “Woke [well, it’s “got”, but I prefer “woke”] up this morning/ You were on my mind/ Got some aches and got some pains and/ Got some wounds to bind.” Or, “Went to the corner/ Just to ease my pain/ I got drunk and I got sick and/ I came home again.” There! Only one more verse to learn and you’ve got the whole song.

Vamping Rose

December ’07 – A friend was talking about when his granddaughters had gone through their Spice Girls phase, and he assumed that in my pre-pubescence, I’d had an equivalent late-70s-early-80s, destined-to-be-embarrassing fancy for a pop band. I couldn’t think of one. I can remember going to a friend’s house in Year 2, and being played a Chipmunk Punk record, followed by an Abba record…I recognised it as the culture that I should have been absorbing (or at least pretending to absorb – I pretended to have seen Grease for years, finally genuinely watching it at the very mature age of fourteen) but for the time being, I was satisfied enough with my parents’ records.

On my father’s side, there was his clanging metal filing-cupboard full of Tom Waits, The Supremes, Chuck Berry, Frank Zappa, The Beatles, Daddy Cool, John Lee Hooker; my mother liked Linda Ronstadt, Nina Simone, Elvis, country compilations; my stepfather’s record collection included Blondie, Ry Cooder, Orchestral Manouevres In The Dark, Brian Eno, The Persuasions, Rick Nelson, Sarah Vaughan, Sam Cooke, Keith Jarrett. I didn’t bother about the music of my generation until I was fifteen and going out to pubs and hearing it (seeing it!) live. I told my sister recently about how in Year 8, our gym class had been given the assignment of pairing off and working out a dance sequence; so I subsequently brought in a bluegrass banjo instrumental taped from a warped LP of my father’s called ‘Blue Ridge Mountain Music’ and forced my partner into doing a square-dance-esque routine, complete with full, twirling skirts (supplied by me). My sister said, “When I was in Year 9, we had to review a song for our English class, so I taped VAMPING ROSE off the gramophone and reviewed that.”

My father also had a lot of 78s and a great, big wind-up gramophone that had been his father’s (our grandfather had been a haunter of auctions and a lover of bargains, even useless ones). I claimed a song called ‘Lu-Lu Belle’, my older brother John claimed a song called ‘Oh, Johnny, Oh’ and my sister Julia (middle name Rose) had ‘VAMPING ROSE’. I can only remember the chorus of my song, but almost all of ‘VAMPING ROSE’, a 1920s, bitchy, lilting, conversational dance-song, is fixed in my mind: “Vamping Rose, there she goes in her fancy clothes. Goodness me! – can it be? My, what class she shows! She don’t care for a heart, she just tears it apart – that’s why they call her Vamping Rose. She wears a gem from the Pilot’s End [no idea what she is really singing there, probably the name of a famous jewellery shop, but I pictured a perilous diamond mine in Africa], with her flash and her dash, she gets all the men. She’s got rouge on her cheeks, it’s been on there for weeks – that’s why they call her Vamping Rose.” Having been obsessed with boys from a very early age, Vamping Rose was exactly the sort of role model I sought (I am sorry to report that, in that respect, adult-Lucy has let down child-Lucy – I never wear rouge).

Nina Simone

November ’07 – Nearly two weeks ago, I played a show in Brisbane, supporting Pikelet and Darren Hanlon. I felt a bit like the one who had won a competition – “Be a muso for a week! Go on tour with a real band!” After the Brisbane show, the other members of the tour drove on to Tweed Heads, and I was billeted out to the hospitable Sue Ray (or Suray, as I called her until the next morning). Not only did she give me - a complete stranger - a comfy bed (next to her blue-tongue lizard enclosure), a cup of tea, a burn of a Pete Molinari CD, but she even gave me a lift to the airport in the morning. On the way, a Nina Simone tape [note: tape] was playing in Suray’s car…I recognised it as an album I’d had and loved then somehow lost about twelve years ago. When ‘PLAIN GOLD RING’ came on I realised that I had been subconsciously anticipating (for twelve years!) hearing it again – I almost shuddered, and asked Suray to rewind it and play it again. We sang along (two sing-alongers shamelessly outing themselves). Hearing ‘PLAIN GOLD RING’ wasn’t like being reunited with an old friend; it was like coming face-to-face with a truth that I thought I had successfully avoided. As soon as I was home again, I picked it out on the guitar – what I could remember of it - looping Nina’s ominous piano riff and singing over the top of it, disregarding (or relishing) the discordance of any ill-suited notes that clashed together. It is a reminder of a time when a whole life (and usually more than one life) could be ruined when someone married the wrong person - of course, I interpret this song to suit my anti-marriage agenda. But agendas aside, it is one of the darkest songs in existence: “In my heart, it will never be Spring/ Long as he wears that plain gold ring.”

The Roches

October ’07 – I am going through a phase of having to ration my intake of The Roches. I don’t usually ration music, because I (sadly) know myself well enough to realise that I go through passionate fads that come to their end simply by being usurped the next month by the next passion. So I reason, “Why hold back? Devour it while I have the appetite for it!” But The Roches are different…not because I am fooling myself that I have found a passion that might last forever, but, rather, because The Roches could be justifiable grounds for my flatmates to stage a walk-out. My sympathy would be with Janet and Stella if they marched in with their hands over their ears, crying, “As if it wasn’t enough that you practise your songs ad nauseum (FYI, even when you close your bedroom door, we can still hear everything – EVERYTHING), but now this? It’s too much!” The fact is, three-part harmonies are simply in a different solar-system to two-part harmonies. In the two-part harmony solar-system, couples skip hand-in-hand through beflowered meadows. In the three-part harmony solar-system, conjunctions exist that beggar belief (stop! Don’t even try to imagine it! You might see something that you don’t want to see – and that you’ll never get out of your mind).

The first song that piqued my interest was ‘Runs In The Family’. “I’ve never heard of The Roach Sisters,” I said. “Oh! Well, you have a treat in store.” I was a treat-hoarder in my early youth, but no longer, so I tracked down their first album and loved it. When I saw another album, ‘Nurds’, in a two-dollar milk-crate at the Glebe Record Fair, I bought that one, too. Their harmonies might be their distinguishing feature, but their song ideas and lyrics come from another solar-system, too. At first, I feared that the sisters were just too silly (for example, the song sung by the woman who runs the laundromat where Suzzy Roche washes her stinky, crusty socks; or the one where the singer is a chocolate bar and her addressee is a bag of soybeans), but it didn’t take long to learn their language. Now my current favourite is ‘ONE SEASON’, where the harmonies go so dreadfully awry in the third verse that even Steve Reich might be envious. I like the line, “I am the only tree, and everybody leaves.” I imagine that it would be hard to bring heartfelt, diary-esque material to your two sisters…wouldn’t they (at best) be stifling sniggers as you unveiled your earnest, new song to them? It makes sense that the songs’ painful hearts are disguised as witticisms, similes and wordplays; decoys that would distract the other sisters long enough for the wound to heal…a year or so later, they might say, “I just realised! This song’s about that bloke you were seeing - the one who didn’t leave his wife after all.” By then, the songwriter would be capable of asking breezily, “Which one was that?”

Fred Eaglesmith

September ’07 – A couple of months ago, Fred Eaglesmith came at me from two directions at once. First, Roddy Cameron played me a song he’d written after a disappointing Fred Eaglesmith show (among other things, Fred had bitched all night about Scotland). The next day, my attention was arrested by a song playing on my brothers’ computer, with a chorus that went, “Time to get a gun, that’s what I been thinking. I could afford one, if I did just a little less drinking.” With lurching drums (and garbage-bin lids and beer bottles?), idiot savant banjo, and some raucous neighbours joining in for the chorus, it was a sound I couldn’t resist. The title of the song alone, ‘TIME TO GET A GUN’, would have appealed Danny and Teddy, who got their gun licences as soon as they turned 18. They played me other Fred Eaglesmith songs that they had downloaded (such as ‘I Shot Your Dog’, and ‘Lucille’, about a 19-year-old boy’s affair with a 50-year-old woman)…I liked all of them. He has a loose, conversational style of songwriting, where the melodies are simply an exaggerated version of the natural risings and fallings of speech, and the dramas are everyday and domestic. He might seem to be an unxepectedly-eloquent yobbo-redneck, writing from a sidelined, semi-rural, Canadian outpost, but I suspect that the imagery in his songs is just as exotic and marvellous to him as it is to me. He is an expert in setting up a story so that it’s believable, then nudging it to an extreme. The listener swallows it all…then, a few weeks later, thinks, “Hey! Did he really take his Cobra to the nursing home, lift her out of her wheelchair and put her in the passenger seat so that they could go for a joy ride?”

Neko Case

August ’07 – Neko Case’s albums are my favourite sing-along albums at the moment. I put her on when there is no one else in the house and sing along with all my heart, approximating the vowel sounds when I don’t know the words. I often don’t know the words. Sometimes there will be a single line that hits me – “I leave the party at 3am, all alone, thank god” or “In the end I was the mean girl, or somebody’s in-between girl” or “The most tender place in my heart is for strangers” – but the overall concept of each song generally eludes me. Sometimes I even fear she can be waffly. But the singing is amazing, with melodies flying off in all directions, and the performance is so uninhibited and hot-blooded, or sometimes scarily cold-blooded, that I can only love her music. But I have found a song (on the live album ‘The Tigers Have Spoken’) that is perfectly crafted…taking into account that perfectly crafted includes a few humanising blemishes and flaws. I told one of my brothers that he should download it. I watched over his shoulder as he typed in the song title; he typed “hecs”. I said, “No, the other sort – ‘hex.’” Danny (currently a student) said, “She’s obviously not Austalian.”

There is an impotent evil about a curse song; an evil that is born out of nothing more than scraps – unanswered phone calls, dates that fell through, words that turned out to be meaningless, love that was unvalued after the object got past the initial, thrilling ego-boost. The curse song is tiny fists pounding against the vast, nerveless back of someone who has simply, and finally, turned away. Neko sings, “You hear me calling your name out at night, do you run to your window thinking a coyote might be howling?” and, later, “When the stars in the sky begin to fade, do you tell yourself ‘Don’t be afraid, it’s just the night that’s dying’?” I have always believed that when you put a curse on someone, you run the risk of the toxic poison of the curse splashing back onto you. At the time, of course, you are prepared to take that risk, sure that it is impossible for you to feel any worse (or better) than you do. Later, you come to regret it. “You took my heart, cast it aside, laughed when I cried – like it was just no big deal! And here, all alone in the dark, I know just how you feel.” That last line is my favourite, for its double-edge. Has he been dragged down to her level of suffering, or has she been reduced to his level of baseness? - the curse of the curser, the heartlessness of cursing someone to heartlessness.