Nothing About the Melbourne Cup, Although Ponies are Briefly Mentioned
I‘d just sat down in a Carlton café, around midday on Sunday, when, within the space of a minute, two shocking things happened. Three, if you count the gargantuan muu-muu-clad flesh-mountain I’d just seen wolf down an entire cream horn in one sudden darting gulp, even as her seemingly multi-buttocked arse appeared slowly to be consuming the tiny stool upon which it was so improbably perched.
Assuming, wrongly as it turned out, that nothing in the Sunday Herald Sun could top that moment for sheer ghastliness, I opened the paper to page three, to find a picture of what looked like Derryn Hinch, but which turned out to be Split Enz founder Phil Judd, accompanied by the headline ‘I Stalked the Girls’. Judd had always done things differently from his Enz colleagues – eg, shaving all his hair off as they teased theirs into ever more elaborate topiaries – but the sordid details of his latest ‘solo project’ hit me like a flung schooner at a Woolloongabba hotel.
Since leaving Split Enz thirty-odd years ago, Judd’s musical career has been all over the shop, from leader of The Swingers to the theme from Stingers. His band in the late eighties, Schnell Fenster (German for ‘fast window’ – no, I don’t get it either) had few devotees, but I was one of them, as disappointed as any when they broke up, allegedly due to Noel Crombie’s battle with tinnitus (I always knew he was playing those spoons way too loud). Though never a mad Judd fan, I’ve often been taken by various of his more obscure endeavours: his ignored post-Swingers single ‘Dream n Away’, his cover art for the unobtainable Coconut Rough album, his soundtrack music for Ray Argall’s forgotten second movie, Eight Ball, and when, every couple of years, yet another Enz reunion comes around, I always await his customary snubbing.
But while Judd has been candid about his battles with mental illness, I really wasn’t ready for the news that he’d admitted ‘stalking three young girls’ and ‘photographing them at their pony club’. The cringe-making excerpts from his Facebook exchanges with one of the girls (‘I was a pop star once…Google “Counting the Beat”’) are yet another example of the negative impact the internet has had on older musicians; not just illegal filesharing, but the so-often-unresisted urge to visit certain sites ‘for research purposes’.
So, I’m sitting there, trying to work out why, in the middle of all the stuff like ‘to admire amazon beauty is not a crime’ and ‘U want to be friends with a painter/composer???!’, Judd suddenly says to the girl, ‘I love fruit’, when something hits me hard in the back. Has somebody just punched me? Has Phil Judd himself just entered the café and spotted me furtively scrutinising his shameful correspondence? But, before I can turn, a sickening crack directs my glance to the floor.
There, face up and unconscious at my feet, is the head of an elderly woman. She’s just collapsed, right behind me, spearing headfirst into my back. I’m so startled that for a second I just sit there, and by the time I react, her relatives’ hands are already swooping in and helping her up. ‘Mum? Are you all right, Mum?’ someone says. As someone’s mum is carefully disentangled from my chair leg, I catch the eye of one of her rescuers and find myself saying these words: ‘Should we call a hospital?’
A hospital? An ambulance maybe, or a doctor – that would make sense, but a hospital? The word is so oddly chosen that the now-stirring woman’s presumed daughter stares at me like I’m a lunatic.
Then, as the slow-motion process of restoring the victim to an upright position continues, I notice that, despite being knocked out briefly, the woman has retained a vice-like grip on her enormous handbag. No one seems to have noticed this and so, as she’s righted, I guide the dangling bag upward in an attempt to stop its contents spilling onto the floor. And at this point, the woman’s two offspring see what I’m doing, and I realise it kinda looks like I’m trying to steal her handbag!
‘I was just trying to…’
And for the few horrible seconds in which this misunderstanding is maintained, I know what it must feel like to be Phil Judd and have people suddenly look at you in a completely different way.
‘Stuff was falling out…look.’ I hand them a comb and a pen.
Their frowns slacken as they turn their attention to their bestirring (and seemingly okay) mum.
I feel sorry for those people. And, of course, I feel sorry for the three traumatised girls and their mother. I feel sorry for Phil Judd. I feel sorry for everyone concerned.
Even the bloke at the Herald Sun who had to come up with the headline ‘I Stalked the Girls’. I know how hard he must’ve worked to fashion a twist on one of Judd’s song titles, how long he must have toyed with ‘Stalking the Beat’ or ‘Thinkin’ About You, Thinkin’ About Me’, before realising it was in poor taste.
‘How about just “I Stalked the Girls”?’ someone would finally have said.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ he would have replied, typing it in.
And then he would have pushed his chair back, stepped to the window, and jumped out.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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