Turds and Music

I'm in the middle of trying to write a musical. I'm not writing the music bit of the musical, just the 'al' bit, which in the musical world is called 'the book'. I'm writing all the stuff people say between the songs and some of the words of the songs, and then someone else who has trained in musical theatre in New York and can actually read music is writing the music. My co-writer is more than happy to listen to my musical suggestions, although so far my only contribution has been to suggest a melody that later turned out to be 'The Gambler' by Kenny Rogers. I blame my parents. They loved a bit of Kenny Rogers and thrashed the phonograph with him, John Denver, Nana Mouskouri, James Last, and Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass all through my formative years, so it's no surprise Kenny's been incubating inside me like a silver beardy alien just waiting to burst out and embarrass me in front of my collaborator.

I used to love a good musical. Some of the first shows I was involved in were musicals put on by the St Joseph's Light Operatic Society. I'm not sure who St Joseph was but he obviously loved his light opera. Here's a picture of him in The Sound of Music.

The resemblance to Julie Andrews is uncanny, although he could have shaved. Here he is with a pipe wrench in West Side Story.

Bit of a dodgy prop but you work with what you've got. Finally here he is in the role he's best known for, Joseph, with his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat was the first musical that started to really get on my tits. I think Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote it as a high school musical before High School Musical and boy did he nail it. There's only so many years a young man can be forced to sing, 'I closed my eyes, drew back the curtain, AH UH AHHH, to see for certain....AH AHHHHHH, what I thought I knew', before his thoughts turn to self harm and Silver Dollar Vodka brewed in Kaiapoi. And the line makes no sense. So, this young man thinks Andrew Lloyd Webber is outside his window furiously masturbating, but to make sure of it he draws back his curtains to have a look...with his eyes closed. You can't blame him, but he still won't see for certain what he thought he knew. Not content with inflicting horror on high school students the globe over, ALW decided to prolong the agony by letting rip with this little gem in 2007.

Holy Hannah. It was called 'Any Dream Will Do' and kept viewers gripped for 9 weeks to see which boy Andrew would choose to handle his big part. ALW was looking for a young man, "who's a bit of a Justin Timberlake, tiny touch of the Michael Jacksons and a bit of the Jude Laws", and in the only disturbing episode I saw was sweating like a sea bass on heat as young men descended into his dungeon studio in nothing but loincloths for a bit of one on one mentoring.

Andrew Lloyd Webber waiting for his next Joseph

But before Joseph I was really into musicals. I sang 'Dites-Moi' in South Pacific and 'This Was A Real Nice Clambake' in Carousel, even though I didn't and still don't have any idea what a clambake is. I was the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz in Form One, and the lead in some bizarre Form Two show called Hunter's Gold that was set in Central Otago and ripped off all the songs from Paint Your Wagon. I may have been the first and last person to ever sing 'Wand'rin Star' in the register of a choir boy. I was Oliver on alternate nights in Oliver! for The North Canterbury Musical Society, Bugsy Malone in Bugsy Malone, and the retarded boy who got killed at the end of the first half in The Doctor and The Devils, which wasn't a musical but probably should have been.

I went and saw Cats! in Sydney with my mother when I was about 13 and loved it. I even wrote a puff piece gushing about it for the school rag. I saw Le Mis and loved it as well. All the musicals I'd been in I loved. And then we started singing Every bloody Dream Will bloody Do every bloody year and I decided musicals were a bit shit. It didn't help I went and saw some touring production of Chess and got sick as a dog half-way through while the Arbiter forgot his lines. Even just watching this makes me sweat and shake and go all foetal. By the time an international musical makes it to New Zealand all the good people have long since scarpered, and we end up witnessing a bunch of bored understudies dance around Ray Woolf. I finally saw Phantom, thankfully with free tickets, and the best part was the dry ice.

The final nail in my musical coffin came while I was living in London. My parents were coming to visit and wanted to see a musical. They'd seen all the usual West End suspects, so I booked three tickets to see a show that had been getting rave reviews called Passion, by Stephen Sondheim. It had Tonys coming out of its arse and Sondheim had written the lyrics for West Side Story which has lots of finger clicking in it, so it was bound to be good. The curtain went up and my parents and I were greeted with two people shagging and singing a song that sounded nothing like 'Something's Coming'. It was all highly uncomfortable and I couldn't make any sense of it and there was no finger clicking. My parents bravely stuck with it to the very end and we made a pact never to speak of it again. I'm sure it will cost me some of my inheritance.

And now I'm helping write a musical of my own. I can't tell you what it's about, but it's going to have lots of dry ice and finger clicking.

What did I do last Summer?

Many years ago I was walking past a strip of bars in Christchurch known collectively as The Strip. Every time I went back to Christchurch the names of these bars had changed. Celsius had become Fahrenheit, Liquidity, Solidity and Coyotes, Coyotes Bar and Restaurant. The one constant was their horribleness. They were horrible places filled with horrible men trying to put their horrible penises into horribly drunk young girls.

If they were unsuccessful they would stagger en mass, like a tribe of chambrayed Neanderthals to Cashel Mall, to put their horrible fists into the faces of anybody who dared challenge their manlihood by glancing in their general direction. I hardly ever ventured near The Strip on Friday and Saturday nights, however when I did inadvertently stumble into the land of chambray and spew, I felt relatively safe due to the white flag perched on my nose. I have no idea what goes on in the minds of men who like to hit other men just in case other men hit on them and they kind of like it, but I'm pretty sure they are hard wired with two conditions that must be met before the angriness is meted out.

1. The man must not be woman.
2. The man must not be wearing glasses.

You'd hope there would be more, like 'The man must not be lying on the ground', or 'The man must not be over 80', or 'The man must not be already having the shit kicked out of him by three other men', but unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case. Glasses unmaketh the man. I don't know what we spec-wearers become in the drunken eyes of Mr Fisty, but it's something infuriatingly unpunchable. They may push us out of the way as they travel along their vector of violence, but as long as your glasses don't fall off when you hit the ground, you'll live to not fight another day.

Which is why, many years ago while walking past The Strip, a chambrayed chap pulled his hazy gaze away from the rump of some 16 year old lamb dressed as mutton, to glower at me in my 508's, purple Mossimo top, terrible bowl cut and glasses, and not punch me. I could see he wanted to. He was slowly expanding, rising and falling from his seat as if his angry anus was letting off a staccatoish series of furious farts, but the two pieces of prescription plastic over my eyes were an invisible force field that kept him at bay. I smiled, smug in my short-sightedness. He squinted and shook and slathered and slurred, "The library's that way mate", before returning to perv and his pint.

Which is where I am now. Not the Christchurch library. That's still in the Red Zone and The Strip is long gone, except for Coyote's which managed to stay erect thanks to a two inch coating of spew and jizz. I'm in the Melbourne City Library, which for a city of four million people is surprisingly small, although it does have a piano that you can tinkle on as long as you're Grade 5 or above and the person playing it is into that sort of thing. I love the library. It's full of books and stuff. There's also lots of computers, and yesterday I booked a computer with a scanner to scan something at home on my computer because I don't have a scanner at home. Here in the silent reading room they even have little desks with power points so not only can you read a book, you can plug your computer in. It's a bit of a hassle lugging my old desktop PC here on the tram, and sometimes it takes two trips because the monitor's quite heavy, but it's worth it. To top it all off they have wireless internet, so I can book the scanner with my computer and then watch all the angry people who want to use the scanner but can't because it's booked, even though I'm not using it.

Not having a library has been hard for the people of Christchurch who wear glasses. Not having The Strip has been hard for the people of Christchurch who wear chambray. No books. No booze. No biffo. The things that made the city of my birth great were suddenly no more. Sure, there were suburban libraries and bars and brawls but it wasn't the same. In Cashel Mall on a Friday night, people knew your name as they glassed you; 'Ian!' they'd cry as they clouted you with their bottle of Steiny Pure, and if the bottle didn't break they'd offer you a suck on their stubbie as they put the boot in. The Christchurch Central Library was huge, much bigger than Melbourne's, and it had escalators and scanners and a special area for Margaret Mahy to wear her freaky wig. You don't get that in Bishopdale or Shirley.

In January I went back to Christchurch and along with some very talented friends, put together a show called 'The Complete History of Christchurch Abridged'. We did it in Hagley Park and about 25,000 people saw it. They turned up with food, and rugs and booze and dogs, and they all laughed and cried about their city and all the shit they'd gone through, surrounded by other people who loved the city and had gone through the same shit as them. We were all proud of the show but what made this one special was that in some small way, I think we made a difference. One woman, who had been trapped in a collapsed building for three hours told us this was the first time she had laughed since Feb 22nd 2011. One old fella with tears in his eyes gripped both my hands and just said thank you over and over again. We took the piss out of those in power, we said the things everyone wanted to say, and it was immediate, affecting and alive.

And it was free. So I hope some chambray clad chap suffering from Strip withdrawal came along and had a laugh. And I hope he remembers it in ten years time when I'm walking down Cashel Mall on a Friday night wearing contact lenses.

Can't get you out of my Radiohead

It must do your head in being in Radiohead and not being Thom Yorke. Not only does Thom get to be greedy with extra letters in both of his names, he's also the only one anybody recognises as being in Radiohead, except perhaps for the tall skinny one called Jonny I think, who leaps in super slow-motion like a girl into a carvan in the video for Street Spirit (Fade Out). Stuttery, squinty, winky Thom IS Radiohead, and with one doleful squinty wink of his sad glad-eye, all doors open and impediments evaporate. Imagine being Jonny Whats-his-name  leaping all slow-motioniny through the doors of The Ivy and being told before you hit the ground that you can't come in because you don't have a booking and nobody knows who you are. Jonny would press his slow-mo-nose up to the glass and inside Thom would be scoffing and squinting with Damon Albarn, Richard Ashcroft, Debbie Harry, Chris Martin, Chrissy Hynde, Mark Knopfler, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Tom Petty, Trent Reznor, Sting, Gwen Stefani, Michael Stipe, Jon Bon Jovi, Florence Welch and Huey Lewis. Michael Hutchence would be hanging around somewhere as well. Jonny would plead with the maitre d and perhaps play the 'rain down' bit of Paranoid Android that he wrote on an  ondes martenot but to no avail. He would be tossed in slow-motion back onto the street in winter with an empty tummy and nothing to do but breath on the glass and write rude messages to his lead singer, like 'Thom Dorke!, or 'At least I can read music!', or 'Ronan Keating thinks you're a muppet!'. The rest of Blur, The Verve, Blondie, Coldplay, The Pretenders, Dire Straits, The Badseeds, Pulp, The Heartbreakers, Nine Inch Nails, The Police, No Doubt, REM, Bon Jovi, The Machine and The News, INXS and JD Fortune would all be doing the same and the window would look like an angry version of the wall outside Abbey Road studios, except be on glass and written with angry fingers in angry breath and nothing to do with The Beatles except for the fact that Radiohead like The Beatles can sell out Shea Stadium in less time than it takes Jonny to leap into a caravan...much less time.

That would do your head in as well. I've done a few shows and one of the absolute joys is waiting for that email everyday to reveal you've sold no tickets. The emails usually come though at around 5pm and I'd be circling and wagging like a laptop dog, salivating and slobbering and ready to tear the email open with my teeth to reveal the rows of '0's for all four shows in a 30 seat venue with no airconditioning and a much bigger poster for the show after yours above the urinals. The disappointment never lasted long and only led to an dance exponential increase in expectation, hoping against hope the next one would contain a mystical '1'. 0,0,0,0,0,0.....1! Never has binary been so erotic and exciting. Someone somewhere has spent $16 on a concession ticket to my site-specific one man show featuring an ear-splitting burst of pop music, defecation and aggressive masturbation.

Radiohead don't get to experience any of that. Thom just gets on Facebook and sends a message to his friends like, 'Hey guys, doing a world tour. Come to my show!!!! We'll have a drink after', or 'Creep has had over 23 million views, that's almost viral (I reckon). Come to the show and see stuff in for reals life yo!', or 'Hey World - Looking for some late night madness? Come along to the biggest stadium nearest to you. They'll be performances by heaps of artists. Probably quite a bit of drinking and it's only a gold coin/koha for entry.', and before Thom can poke Jonny they've sold 1.9 trillion tickets and 2.8 million FB groups have been set up asking for extra shows or whether they can possibly make it down to Invercargill 'cos there's heaps of Radiohead fans down there and they'd be sure to show Thom and the other guys a good time.

Social networking. My old flatmate Michael Legge tweeted about the death of someone he made up and then The Guardian did a story about it because it was trendy. I was there in the 90's when Michael put his knob in the mouth of his girlfriend's dog to cheer her up...his girlfriend, not the dog, but that happened before Twitter so nothing appeared in The Guardian about it. In the library where I'm writing this, I saw Amanda Palmer and her hubby Neil Gaiman perform and read to over 400 people and the only advertising they did was a couple of tweets. Just amazing. Here's a pic of the concert.

Can you see me? Just treat it like a game of Where's Greggy? Given up yet? OK, I'll put you out of your misery. I'm the one on the right checking my emails on my phone to see if anybody has purchased a ticket to my one-man show that I wasn't even doing. What an arse. Who goes to a ninja gig and checks their emails on their phone? If I had been tweeting about being at a gig I heard about via a tweet that might have been cooly ironic, but no, I was...bloody hell, the guy next to me in the supposedly silent room of the library has put on headphones and is listening to The Party Rock Anthem at an eardrum piercingly loud volume while he sends his emails. Who does that? The whole bloody library has free Wifi, why can't he FRO and go and blast his LMFAO SOFP? Oooooh...maybe's he's been reading over my shoulder as he's just petulantly slammed his laptop shut and stalked out of the room. He's left his Macbook here. If it was a PC I could change his screensaver to read something hilarious like, 'You're a dork', or 'I can hear your shitty music', or 'Greggy thinks you're a muppet', but Apples are Greek to me.

Where was I? I don't know. This whole post is rambling. Oh hell, he's come back so I'm going to finish here without checking for typos and spelling eras. I didn't even get to talk about what I've been doing for the last few months instead of writing insightful crap like this. Have you missed me?