Another Boring Article from Some Name-Dropping Twat in a Rock Band
Inexplicably, ROOT! were asked back to the even bigger, even more high profile 2009 Sounds Of Spring Festival in Brisbane. Not only that, but I was asked once more to provide a piece for the Festival program. I knew the program would be full of dreary PR blurbs about all the Triple J-endorsed this-month’s-Iced-Vo-Vos up the 'business' end of the bill, so my presence would stick out like Robert Mugabe at an Amnesty fundraiser. So, I figured, better call a spade a spade (see title), and if the indie kids are STILL reading, might as well confuse the shit out of them…
Sounds of Spring. September 26.
Do you know what day it is today? Yes, I can hear you say it: it’s the 429th anniversary of Sir Francis Drake circumnavigating the globe!
That’s why you’ll find many bands on today’s bill sporting Sir Francis Drake-like facial hair, as a mark of respect for the great man. The Panics will be eschewing their normal blistering set for a fifty-minute conceptual piece about the fall of the Spanish Armada, you can expect plenty of ‘ooh arrrr’s from Little Birdy’s Katy Steele, and if you see Clint Boge of The Butterfly Effect – named, of course, after a rowing manoeuvre popular in Drake’s era – walking around backstage in a fetching set of those wee booties that turn over at the top, don’t laugh; that’s a cutlass he’s packin’.
But enough rock star gossip. If you get tired of all the Sir Francis Drake commemorations going on at the main stage, come over to the Time Off Stage – there’s a whole other subplot happening. You probably think the Time Off Stage is where you’ll find the really cool bands, the bands who are championed by Brisbane’s street-press cognoscenti, right? Wrong.
The ‘Time Off Stage’ is actually a misprint. It was meant to be The Fucked-Off Stage. That’s because everyone on this stage agreed to the gig before they realised the promoters had scheduled Sounds of Spring on AFL Grand Final day.
What were the organisers thinking? Oh, I know, I know, Sounds of Spring is run by IDEALISTS. They believe in the power of music. They don’t want their festival besmirched by multinational dollars, so they chose the one day of the year when corporate freeloaders are all somewhere else – in Melbourne, driving in their leased Saabs by the tens of thousands over the ugly melee of football supporters fighting for the thirteen remaining tickets. The Sounds of Spring brains trust is striking a blow for the anti-football lobby, for pencil-trousered bookish dilettantes who wear black on the outside because black is what they feel on the inside, who sneer at sprawling suburbia from the rigid confines of their inner-city mores, one hand on a copy of Camus’ ‘L’Etranger’ and the other on a bottle of mescal, who’d live in a squat but die if you ever asked them to DO one.
These people won’t be bullied by the Stepford Wife presenters on Channel V, or the sinister agenda of Triple J’s ‘We love music!! (– just not yours).’ They know how to pick Crepe Suzette from Short Stack. That’s why you won’t find them being herded into the main stage cattle pens to squint into the middle distance at some ‘popular’ act when they could be here with the REAL ones (read: ‘unpopular’). These people don’t change their allegiance on a whim, they don’t conform to the fickle dictates of attention-deficit-disorder consumer culture. But if they knew what evil secrets lurk behind the scenes here at the Fucked-Off Stage, they’d drop us quicker than you can say Kyle Sandilands. (Possibly even quicker than that.)
You see, the star-studded cast of the Fucked-Off Stage have addictions, ladies and gentlemen. And not the ones you’re SUPPOSED to have. Push up the front at The Fucked-Off Stage and you’ll see all the bands appear to be using a teleprompter, like Axl ‘What year is it?’ Rose. But it’s not the lyrics scrolling karaoke-like in front of them, oh no. It’s… the footy.
That’s right. Football. Everyone here on the Fucked-Off Stage is a closet jock. Did you know Tex Perkins’ contract stipulated – along with pure grain alcohol, chewing tobacco and a bowie knife – that he must not be onstage during the AFL Grand Final? That’s not the half of it, let me tell you.
Quan might well be Australia’s most gifted and fiercely idiosyncratic songwriter, but did you know he has other talents? Back in the days before his incandescent arrival on the scene, Quan chose music over a promising career as a nuggety run-with player for St Mary’s in the Southern Queensland District Churches Football League. Quan took no prisoners back in the day, often wearing his mother’s wedding ring to make sure blokes he king-hit STAYED king-hit.
Clare Bowditch weaves beautiful melancholy through her songs, but that’s only because she knows the pain of defeat. Clare spent eight years in the Airport West Junior Football Club cheer squad, where she’d still be – if not for her lifetime ban for throwing a stubby at a boundary umpire.
Wander pre-show into Dave McCormack’s dressing room, and you’ll see him sitting cross-legged, chanting a mantra at a small candle-lit shrine to 1963 Hawthorn premiership Captain Graham Arthur. Dave’s repeated words echo those of the Hawthorn skipper when he once famously stood over a team-mate writhing on the ground due to a perforated bowel: ‘Get up, you weak bastard.’
And then there’s Tim Rogers. If there’s the slightest question mark over Tim’s toughness on the football field, the answer can be expressed in two words: Missy Higgins. Who could forget those endless replays of the incident, Rogers a blur of malevolent comeuppance, Higgins’ head snapping sickeningly on impact with the ground, Bruce McAvaney in a froth of hyperbole, special comments man (and no stranger to criminal proceedings) Leigh Matthews muttering, ‘Missy’s not a well girl…’
Yep, that’s the truth, ladies and gentlemen. You might imagine backstage here to be some kind of Graham-Greene-inspired opium den – rock stars holding court on eco armageddon while their roadies service groupies with a shark, tortured artists carving ‘porco dio’ on their arms with a broken mic stand, Truman Capote scribbling anecdotes for his next novel; that type of thing. Nope. Sorry to disappoint you, but the only bit of excitement round here will be Quan punching a hole in the fibro-cement dressing shed wall at a bad umpiring decision. And the LAST thing to go out the window will be our TV sets.
PS. In case you’re wondering, I hate football. You would too, if you spent your life barracking for St Kilda.
DC Root is the legendary frontman of garage punk poets ROOT!, whose second album, ‘Surface Paradise’, is out now. Visit the official ROOT! website.
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