22 Dreams

Part 2: I laboured with viola lessons throughout 1983, guiltily aware that my parents were forking out their precious work-for-a-crumb ( beer : dad) income for an instrument I found onerous to play.  Alternately, as an antidote to this tedium, and being terribly bad and bored by viola, I discovered pop music with all of its refreshing charms. Simple, contemporary pop, straight from my little transistor radio I kept at my bedside table.  I’d taken scant notice of pop music in earlier years.  I did recall the video to ABBA’s ‘Fernando’ closing Countdown for about upteen weeks in a row during 1976.  There were other songs that may have come through my brother’s radio that I’d taken some notice of – the one that went “…January, sick and tired you’ve been raining on me…” but that was it really.  No real interest in pop, and no demonstrable facility either. I enjoyed the Top 40.  Luckily, in late 1983 into 1984, Top 40 music was plentiful and – for a ...

Part 1: Music for some is a means to making money.  For others, it attracts fame, or a steady job.  In many ways music has been a saviour to me.  Sometimes, a stress and a strain.  But mostly, music has been a joy, and my life’s journey has been a series of ever contrasting and changing musical scenes of different varieties and colours. As a child I demonstrated zilch aptitude for music.  I didn’t particularly demonstrate an aptitude for anything in fact, and nothing was encouraged of me in any way either.   I recall loving geography books and maps, and I still enjoy maps to this day, but in hindsight I see that my childhood interest in maps stemmed out of intense boredom – aside from my summer trips to my cousin’s farm in the country, my parents weren’t that interested in going anywhere, so maps were a lonesome substitute for my travelling imagination.  Any outing however small was always a major event for me.  My natural childhood cur...

Finally it's happening.  I've been waiting for the opportunity to lay down some word-threads for quite some time now, but work and work-related projects have taken over my life.  Even now I find I'm too tired to write.  I've had many plans for my writing - to which I instigated this blog in the first place as something of a launching pad - and I now have a fair idea of where to take things: critiquing, creative non-fiction, passionate mumbo-jumbo and the like, but the lack of free time proves to be the ongoing stumbling-block to satisfactory writing.  Anyway, as it's often said, if I want it enough I'll make the time. Writing - narrative writing - is a secondary talent for me, and not a primary one.  Music is primary for me.  I pick up an instrument, play it, record with it, and if sounds good to me then I'm happy.  With writing I find I need constant reassurance and constructive criticism from others.   I find it much harder to qualify writing ...

I've posted an article about ukulele in Suite 101 .   I've returned to learning-up, playing and performing with the ukulele with a view to making this my 'main' instrument.  The quest for me is divine the instrument's complexity, its magic , contrasting as it does with its face-value simplicity. Ukulele's a great way to meet new people.  Carrying your ukulele around is a bit like walking your dog. If you meet someone else holding a ukulele there's no barrier to striking up some conversation.  It's real, it's vital; the ukulele represents that sensitive area in the solar-plexus or the human psyche that is innocent and luminous.   Barriers are gladly overcome with ukuleles in hands.  And like dogs, we often want to know and chat about which breed of uke the other is holding. You can't really have any of that guitar-attitude bullshit with the ukulele which is one reason I find playing it so refreshing.  The ukulele disarms all sense of ...

To me, the magic of songwriting isn't so much about writing a great song or being able to just write songs.  I think the magic lies in witnessing talented writers who've been granted the opportunity and freedom to write a string of great albums that are touched by that certain 'spark' or spirit; zeitgeist.  All styles of music apply, as do all art-forms.  Channeling the zeitgeist never lasts for any artist; all who've been blessed with the opportunities and freedoms to create great work must one day forgo it, either by the times that have moved on, by death, by change, by life. Where we can all think of numerous artists whose work is charged by the comet of genius within a certain trajectory of time and space, my favourite example of this is Joni Mitchell.    I love how Joni's first two albums of the late '60s: folky, sensitive, albeit startlingly & piercingly deep given her uber-creativity and free use of open-tunings, are nonetheless akin to compila...

Shit - I have in mind to "formally" review the Cure at the Sydney Opera House for the Vivid Festival concert for "sweet one oh one" but I'm stuck in this quagmire of trying to make every sentence right, every word right, every passive phrase reversed so that the active is thrust out in front (always), and it's tiring me out like writer's quicksand.  So this is it, the looser-uperer blog.  After this I'm hoping that I'll be able to draft that thing properly so that a formal review is written and that it gets posted and I can start earning big bucks for my efforts.  Why, my Neil Finn article has been sitting in the "sweet 1 oh one" for over six months now and already I've accumulated 40c.   Ok. Cure.  Best concert ever.  They performed their first three albums with two intervals in between each album, coming back afterward for three encores.  It was...sensational.  I couldn't believe it was happening, but there it was.  I...

All these photos taken in July 2008 Perhaps the most iconic of Sydney's many singer-songwriter nights had its final gig last Monday night.  We're talking about a place everyone called "the X".  Sadly, the pub has been sold to a pub-entrepreneur who is infamous for ripping out the p/a systems and destroying any vestiges of the live music that in the past had served each venue so well and the people and performers who had involved themselves with it. Monday nights at the X were a great deal more than just a singer-songwriter night.  There are many of these all over Sydney, and many fine ones too.  With the X there was the location, the room and the buzz all combined; making it a creative and social hub with few comparisons. The X is situated on Foveaux Street, Surry Hills, just at the base of the steep hill with the one-way traffic running towards Elizabeth Street and Central Railway Station down towards the southern end of the city.  It's one of those pl...