Autumn music

It has been said that greatest hits albums are like political careers, since both tend to end in failure. Stephen Duffy turns this truism on its head.

Launching himself on the charts as Stephen 'Tin Tin' Duffy, in 1985, Kiss Me was a top five hit in the UK and top 20 in Australia. I remember rolling my eyes that someone would be so desperate to call himself Tin Tin, as if he had any call on this name. I carried on listening to The Smiths/Go-Betweens/Triffids/Chills/REM/etc.



In 1989 I left for a little trip overseas and my friend Jim Payne, late of Dada Records and always of impeccable taste, made a me a C90 with all sorts of things on: Julie Cruise, Devine and Stratton, Kitchens of Distinction...and this one.



Which I had pretty much forgotten about until I received Stephen Duffy's career sampler Memory & Desire: 30 Years in the Wilderness. I have been playing the two-CD set constantly, breakfast, lunch and tea, for the past couple of months.

Hearing 'Lost Girl' after 22 years instantly set my feet tapping, taking imaginary walks around autumnal Hyde Park, Streatham High Street at Christmas, through spring to Kew Gardens and Southbank. It's a song I had forgotten, buried under the leaves, I suppose.

I came back to Stephen Duffy and the Lilac Time by a curious route. In France in early 2008 I read review of the Lilac Time's Runout Groove album. Intrigued, I poked around a few record shops there and in London hoping to find it. No luck. So I forgot them, more or less, but something about that review stuck in my mind. So before we returned to France this year, I went in search of Runout Groove at iTunes. And there it was, $16.99, and no need to leave my study. While I was in France earlier this year, I listened to Runout Groove all the time. It was almost as though the intervening years hadn't happened.



Alexis Petridis at the Guardian reviewed the album here in 2007. In 2009 Caitlan Moran interviewed Duffy for The Times.
Runout Groove is apparently the band's lowest selling record in a three-decade career where under-performing sales became the Lilac Time calling card. The album is loaded with poignant, personal and exquisitely crafted songs. Influences of Nick Drake, Incredible String Band and the Beatles linger but have been turned into something new and lasting. In the 1980s the Lilac Time were darlings of the indie scene, but that doesn't shift units. Not like the 2005 eight million-plus sales of Robbie Williams' Intensive Care, for which Duffy wrote or co-wrote most of the songs. Is that not one of the strangest musical alliances ever? The money he made working for Robbie Williams paid for Runout Groove.

Strange is the word that best describes Duffy's career. He left formed Duran Duran in 1978 and left just as they were getting their flounce on. Showed up briefly in the electro-pop period with a song leaning heavily on the Song of Solomon. Became a Peel favourite, swapping record companies like football cards, formed a band with violinist Nigel Kennedy, moved to Alaska, crashed, returned to England, wrote and toured the world with Robbie Williams, all the time piling up songs and albums that the world largely ignored. He even has an album titled Keep Going (1993). And many of the best songs are gathered up on Memory and Desire.

Duffy reflects in the film Memory and Desire. "What would you call him? A maverick? An outsider? A cult? Or just a failure?"



All of these travails are documented in a film about Stephen Duffy titled Memory & Desire. At least I think so. The film has had limited festival screenings in the UK in 2009 and 2010 and is not currently available on DVD, so I haven't seen it in full. So keen am I that earlier this year I alerted the Melbourne International Film Festival, suggesting they might like to include Memory and Desire in the program, which always runs a section on music documentaries.
I figure that if a low-fi, country-influenced, semi-successful indie band of impeccable taste can't find a home in the hearts of Melbourne inner-city music fans, well, I have cabbages for ears.



I really am a bit obsessed with the Lilac Time. My wife remains politely neutral, and like most, finds them pleasant but not exceptional. But there is something, the sound of a man wrestling with success, with failure, his own worth and place in the world, that has its hooks into me. The songs are seductive, the landscapes timeless, the emotions sharply felt and described in images that linger. As a writer Duffy's songs become more detailed and more direct over time, and shake off the vagueness of early work.



Stephen Duffy turns 51 next week. Happy birthday Stephen Duffy, and may we share Lilac Time for many years to come. This career isn't done yet.

For more Duffy/Lilac goodness, don't miss the Duffypedia, an awesome labour of fan-love.

Heavy Trash unload in France

This post is dedicated to the team at Rock Town Hall.

One of the highlights of the Angouleme Festival de la Bande Dessine were the Concerts des Dessines. Here's a taste of Heavy Trash, led by Jon Spencer, getting down to business.



Jon Spencer speaks not only the worst French you have ever heard, but forgets the name of one of the premier illustrators. But heck, c'est la vie, c'est la pierre.



The dignified guy with the silver hair is Baru, festival president. I have fallen just a bit in love with his work, which depicts working class men and their lives in an un-sentimental way, like the love child of Raymond Briggs and Paul Kelly. I like the way he draws, very tentative, feeling his way through to the character, nothing formulaic. Baru is joined by Chauzy and Flao.

Tour Baru's fantastic exhibition here.

But there is nothing stopping Jon Spencer, and when it all comes together at the end, well, it is indeed a very rock and roll moment. Or as the French say, un pur moment du rock and roll.



This year the festival presented three concerts with drawing. I was lucky enough to see all three. Fatoumata Diawara, the Malian singer and her polished, nimble band appeared with illustrator Clement Oubebrerie, his gentle watercolour and ink pen lines occasionally showing something stronger and darker.

There is more video and Concerts des Dessines at the festival website. Areski Belkacem, sorry - I'm drawing a blank, led a band through a story titled Coup de Foudre (a sudden blow to the heart/falling heavily in love) that involved masked wrestlers, femmes fatales and cross-dressing to audience heavily loaded with school kids. Who loved every biff and clinch. The music was a slithery, rhythmic set that offered endless twists and surprises, a kind of rootsy, moorish funk.

Comics and music: who knew they could be so damned groovy?

Everything old

At Moonee Valley racetrack last Saturday, Daryl Braithwaite was whipping the crowd up with his 1991 hit Horses. No finer music critic than Drew Morphett observed that ’20 years ago Darryl seemed gone for all money, and yet here he is, the crowd in the palm of his hand’.

Later that night Ricki Lee Jones, the writer of Horses, was doing similar at the Myer Music Bowl, lacking only Darryl’s equine anthem. Ms Jones joined Sinead O’Connor and John Cale, others whom we might say did their best work in another generation, or two, or three. An appearance from Archie Roach was cancelled due to his suffering a stroke a week prior. Only the indigenous quartet - Dan Sultan, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Ursula Yovich and Leah Flanagan - could be said to be of more recent or current times. The occasion was the closing night of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

(Dan Sultan, delivering the goods.)

The theme of this geezer jamboree was transcendence. A topic those of us greying at the temples, thin of pate and/or thick of waist, might easily turn to. The artists’ brief was simple: select and perform seven songs ‘to leave behind’. Which is, I guess, an elaborate version of the parlour game: ‘what song would you have played at your funeral?’ Each performer also chose a Leonard Cohen song. (Had Leonard been in attendance the average performer age would have risen by at least a decade.)

John Cale, who could make a case for popularising Cohen’s anthem Hallelujah, evaded time's tidemark with a bent version of Heartbreak Hotel. This stratagem seemed like the novelist dabbling in historical fiction, a neat sidestep around more current concerns.

Like Moonee Valley, the Myer Music Bowl was packed, even if those on the lawn could be forgiven if they huddled for warmth. But given the audience paid around $110 each to be here, this gig was as much about their involvement with transcendence. What songs you would leave behind; what songs you would take with you? Perhaps such questions are the luxury and privilege of middle-age. Surely twenty-somethings are too busy living, than to sit on a freezing hillside contemplating their eternal soundtrack.

A slightly different version of this post appeared on the Wheeler Centre website.
(Thanks to George Dunford.)

Down time

Lately I have had a few things on. But today I found myself at home with nothing I absolutely had to do. Weather too damp for laundry, shopping for the weekend done, my wife and daughter out looking for a 40th birthday present for sister/aunt.



So, a good moment to kick back and dig in to the record collection and establish some ambiance for the afternoon.
For some reason I have always had a soft spot for this solo record by David Johansen. He of the New York Dolls and later, improbably, one Buster Poindexter. All of these clips are songs from David Johansen's first solo album, filmed, I think, in Germany around 1978 or '79. The audience is torpid to put it politely but nobody on stage seems to give a damn: Johansen is all swagger and the guitars rip and roar.



There are a lot of spin offs and connections for Johansen: after all, he has been in the business for nigh on 40 years. But I just love this record. It's full speed ahead from the get-go. Cool Metro is the first track. The band don't do anything ground-breaking but have all the moves and there's none of the desperate-to-get-noticed drag act nonsense of the New York Dolls. It's not particularly punk but god it's loaded with energy and excitement.



I would have been happy if Johansen went on to make ten more records like this, but I suspect he finds a straight line hard to follow. As for later New York rockers The Strokes, I am afraid I wouldn't know them if they bit me on the ankle. There was something a bit Spinal Tap about that album cover that made it impossible for me to listen to them. So my education on New York style begins and ends here.
Has it really been 30 years?

Warming up to The Chills

When The Chills last toured Australia I missed them - twice. So the prospect of seeing the Dunedin band live - a mere 18 years later was not to be sniffed at. Since the early 1990s, The Chills fortunes have declined while their reputation has grown. But in their day, the Flying Nun label was as much a rallying flag as the Postcard label was for Glasgow or Factory Records for Manchester.



The Chills play a sort of surf music, if you were to surf the cold, dark green and turbid waters that surround New Zealand's south island. But it is music of surprising depth and beauty, too.

Four songs into the set last night Martin Phillips, the mainstay of the band, had the misfortune to have his amplifier blow up. And so they set about repairing it. Several minutes later Phillips told the audience, " I don't whether it's more professional that we were able to fix it, or more amateur that we didn't have a bunch of roadies up here to do the job for us". The 400 bodies crammed into the East didn't seem to mind.

The set was entirely old stuff. But jesus, what a catalogue. Highlights were Pink Frost, a thunderous Love My Leather Jacket, Rolling Moon, Part Past Part Fiction and Wet Blanket. A two-song encore ended with Phillips pleading the need to save his voice for the gig in Sydney tonight.

Along with the guitars - sometimes driving, sometimes chiming - The Chills run on a precise metronomic rhythm and Phillips' words. He is a master of the simple declarative statement that, delivered in his awkward tenor voice, hits straight at the heart.

You could see these guys were doing it tough. They were pioneers in the days before this internet thing, heading off from the south of New Zealand to conquer England. Were they successful? Taking the two albums Submarine Bells and Soft Bomb as evidence, the answer is an emphatic yes. Neither of these mighty documents are in print today, though there is talk of re-issues and re-masters.

When we were in Christchurch earlier this year a guy in the big secondhand record shop made a good case for the Chills and other Flying Nun bands as a vital but neglected part of the cultural heritage. "The number of times I have been asked for their stuff - it kills me that we have nothing", he said.

A year ago today the Guardian newspaper ran this long feature on Flying Nun and the bands it championed.

I can only imagine that Phillips left the stage last night with a mixture of humility, pride and a burning desire to be back. And not to leave it another 18 years.

The illustrated Shakespeare and Co.

Over at the ever-fabulous Baudade you can follow her progress - illustrating the walls of Shakespeare & Co, the famed Paris bookshop.

In bookshop news closer to home, I popped in to Readings Carlton tonight to hear Robert Forster talk about 10 Rules for Rock and Roll, his reviews and essays. He's a fantastically balanced writer about music, possessed of a snappy turn of phrase and keen pair of ears. He's also a modest and straightforward speaker on music. Which is amazing given that he opened the conversation tonight by playing a new song called I Love Myself A Lot and I Always Have. He remains a diamond, always curious, never grinding an axe.

You can hear Robert talking about the 10 Rules of Rock and Roll, courtesy of ABC Perth.

Geezers III

Ladies and gentlemen, Leonard Cohen.

Fifteen years since his last tour, and 24 years since I saw him in Perth on the Various Positions tour, Leonard Cohen opened this Australian tour at the Rochford Winery for Day on the Green. Think of it as the Big Day Out for the over 40s.

His band was simply magnificent. The arrangements were all about respect for the songs and the singer. Virtuoso players were kept on a firm leash by the musical director Roscoe Beck, himself deftly working over a five-string bass throughout. But the stand-out (besides Cohen obviously), was Javier Mas. You can see Mas here playing 12-string with Sharon Robinson, Cohen's collaborator and vocalist on this tour. 

There is something European and decidely non-rock and roll about Cohen's songs. The language of his music often seems to be the cast-off idioms of gentle waltzes,  cabaret and torch and in this he was brilliantly aided.

Leonard Cohen has forty years of songwriting and he picked the eyes out of them in a perfectly paced set. Highlights were a wonderful reading of Bird on a Wire, the spoken word If it Be Your Will, the sweet satisfaction of Democracy and I'm Your Man. But there were so many highlights that I'm merely lining up my own. I don't thing I've ever seen an artist receive so many standing ovations. It was just spontaneous and sincere. (Also, no Bono!)

The tour is all about recovering the financial losses inflicted by a shonky manager. Five million short in the retirement fund is a compelling reason to perform live again. That may well be so but I wonder if there is also something about showing off the tapestry of a long and interesting career. As I type this I can almost hear Neil Young at the real Big Day Out where my stepson has gone. Ragged glory was never Cohen's way. 

And yet this wasn't merely about trotting out the big moments. He wasn't doing cover versions of himself, a victory lap for the benefit of baby-boomers. (Even though his appeal is mostly to the boomers, there is plenty for everyone.) Yes, the show was slick and the set list in the Yarra Valley is the same as in Amsterdam or Auckland. But even at 74 he pushed his voice hard, gave the songs all the care they demanded and showed that he remains a rare and valuable artist.