The picture was a black-and-white photograph showing a young man and woman dancing close opposite each other under a light on a darkened dance floor, their mode of dress casual but stylishly tapered to their bodies, and both in black, raised-heel, pointed-toe boots, the man’s of ankle length, the girl’s up to her knees beneath her rather short skirt. Though the dancing pose in which the couple had been frozen in time could only be described as one of Go-Go Frenzy, their facial expressions were strangely serious, beaming intent, their physical forms somehow elegant, dual-statuesque.
The photograph transfixed me. And what transfixed me was that this ‘passing dance craze’ as pictured exuded something that a mere dance craze shouldn’t exude…
Gravitas.
All downhill from here
* * *
Across Bulls’ face crept a reluctant smile.
‘Well, I can’t give you my permission,’ he hummed, ‘but I can’t stop you either.’ The smile broadened. ‘Now get out of my sight.’
Thus I began rollerskating to school.
Leading the last mile or so from Lane Cove to Riverview’s grand sandstone main gates was a long, straight and rather steep hill called Tambourine Bay Road. As I’ve said already, I’m not into ‘past lives’. Nevertheless I suspect I may have been a Kamikaze in one. For the inherent dangerousness of my new daily activity was only compounded by the danger of the half-eaten oranges thrown at me from the school bus as it managed to overtake me down that hill. Even when you got inside the main gates the driveway through the school’s vast grounds went for at least another mile but this did provide the mile necessary for me to lose my so meteoric speed. My mathematics teacher, Mr Soames, christened me ‘Sssoooper Sheedy’ in front of the class. True. This man was the ray of sunshine who walked into class one day, turned and faced us beginning, ‘So, watch’all do on the weekend? Me, I got m’face all covered in red paint and a mouthful of custard. Went to a costume party dressed as a pimple.’ He always had a smile for me, did Mr Soames. Passing him anytime in the crowded corridor between classes I’d hear, ‘There goes Sssooop-er Sheedy.’
Every day at my home in North Epping in Sydney’s wild and distant north-west I used to pack my rollerskate boots into an army-style backpack on top of all my hefty text books, folders and soon-to-be squashed packed lunch, catch the bus from North Epping to Epping, then the bus from Epping to Lane Cove where I would don my skates and zoom down Tambourine Bay Road in zig-zag ‘parallel skiing’ fashion. This technique, as with actual skiing, keeps one’s downhill speed from becoming terminal and also rendered me a slightly harder target for the oranges thrown at me from the Riveview school bus. And I went to such effort, particularly given the heavy weight of my backpack on the non-skating legs of the journey, because I enjoyed that mad downhill skate. Equally, if it appears that I was making some sort of try-hard ‘statement’ to the school’s thousand-or-so boys, broadcasting to the free spirits amongst them that you can break the school’s golden rule of FIT IN and still flourish…
…that’s because I was.
A case of rabid adolescent self-proclamation?
Yes, I suppose that too.
In any case I did it. And for about a year.
The Cleverest Boy in the School
* * *
In two out of that year’s three school terms I made a single mistake the whole time and as a result won the Latin Prize. The cleverest boy in the school remarked, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’ Neither did I, simply grateful that I’d been able to manage it.
In Goodbye Crackernight I described my earlier experience of that rare breed of person who strides through life as if the world revolves around them because it does. One such boy was Riverview’s Max Van Cleef whose crown I’d briefly borrowed in my managing to become ‘dux’ of the Junior School. And though I was still doing fairly well academically, Max’s crown was drifting back to its rightful owner as my obsessive hard work ethic was no long-term substitute for what he possessed.
Utter Genius.
The son of Australia’s highest profile Queen’s Counsel, also nephew of an iconic ‘founding father’ of the Australian rock and roll industry, Max blended his QC father’s moral integrity and professional excellence with his uncle’s showbiz luminescence. Just one in a dynastic line of Van Cleef boys at the school past and present, all universally praised and admired, Max was Napoleon-short and of average looks yet with a charisma that would have George Clooney feeling a wall-flower. In fact, it’s possible that George Clooney was also a relative because Max had Clooney’s eyes. If possessing a flaw — as does any great diamond — Max’s was the occasionally revealed vanity of the born leader: Though they deserve to lead and do it naturally, just occasionally they have to remind you that only one can lead. Still, we forgive them, we love them, we need them. And I made him laugh.
‘Do you realise, Max, last night I was THIS far from a blow-job?’ my palms held a short distance apart. Heaving my face forward down towards my groin area, I sprang back up, palms now indicating a marginally shorter distance. ‘Correction. THIS far.’
1984
* * *
Orwell’s long-dreaded year at last arrived, to mark it the world around our young lives being one poised to blow itself to fiery bits at any moment courtesy of two superpowered clowns. Each with their finger hovering over a button marked END OF THE WORLD, a single press would launch their opposing arsenals of inter-continental ballistic missiles, I.C.B.M.s for short. In the USA corner, and allegedly representing the ‘Free World’ of which we were part, was a hyper-conservative, fundamentalist Christian who had once been a second-rate Hollywood actor. In the USSR corner was simply the next in a very long line of Russian wax-works dummies with apparent vital signs as long as the intravenous vodka drip remained connected. In any case, this monstrous pair were letting us live for a few precious seconds longer, bless them, thanks to their policy of nuclear ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’. M.A.D. for short.
No wonder I took mortal risks rollerskating; how much longer had we? Our parents remembered a time when there would definitely be a tomorrow. We did not. A set text for English that year was Hiroshima by John Hersey, a marvellous book: written in 1946 it provided us with a vivid foretaste of exactly what we could expect at any moment except a million times worse — a most thoughtful gesture on the part of our elders to put it on the curriculum; at the time I had every expectation of being blown up before I ever kissed a girl.
One Saturday night my older brother Pat took me and my friends Francis, Steve and Max to a concert by the politically outspoken Australian rock band, ‘Midnight Oil’. It was an early-evening outdoor event at Parramatta Park and my first ever rock concert. By this time I was already a major music fan, especially of Midnight Oil and their manic bald-headed front-man, Peter Garrett. At greater than six foot he was a statue gone berserk, his limbs an apoplectic fit of protest, steam rising off his bald dome in the spotlight of the rock and roll stage. Their music was exhilaration itself, evoking the rugged, burning blue experience of their Australian beach culture living as it did on the edge of nuclear apocalypse and I knew their songs intimately from our home record player thanks to my brother and the rock and roll hand-me-down-system. But this was the first time their iconic sounds, or indeed the sounds of any rock band, had entered my ears live and for real via the air all around me. It was magic. And on that warm and golden early evening in Parramatta Park, despite the band’s lyrics and music being so angry, so stridently critical of the military/corporate madness prevailing, the atmosphere in that crowd was one of peace, one of hope, one of a few thousand perfect strangers as one with each other and the band; together we would be OK, in our united voice. And our voice was one of Rock and Roll.
Such optimism may seem like a nonsense now but in that moment in time, against M.A.D., it felt like sanity: I was together with my brother, with my friends — Francis the superman, Steve the hippy, Max the genius — and with a few thousand others who may as well have
been my friends. We were young. And would not only prevail, we would triumph. For a moment the world didn’t belong to the nuclear superpowered clowns. It belonged to us. This was our world.
May I have this dance?
* * *
I was 15. She was 19.
Eleanor Tripp was no model. She was, however, the friendly, sexy side of pleasant with light brown wavy hair to her shoulders and a wicked glint for me in her smiling eyes. With a glass of champagne in one hand she was also quite blissfully one-third drunk — My parents were away for the weekend and my brother was having a party with his first-year university friends at our home in Howard Place.
‘I was just wondering if your younger brother,’ she put to Pat, ‘might perhaps be available for marriage. …Just wondering.’
The party had just started and already there was dancing in the kitchen, stereo speakers piping into it the music of ‘The Cockroaches’, a local band of ex-St. Joseph’s boys who would later go on to fame and immense fortune as ‘The Wiggles’. A far cry from the ‘serious’ rock majesty of Midnight Oil, the music of The Cockroaches was an early-Beatles/Rolling Stones-influenced 1960s ‘retro’ sound which shouted out ‘Let’s have the take-nothing-seriously time of our lives tonight; we’d be crazy not to.’
Yet right on the lip of everything you ever wanted to be part of, adolescence can be an awkward place and, standing to one side of the kitchen, just as with my first Crackernight at age 4 the magic right in front of me was just too wonderful for me to step into: So dearly wanting to dance with everyone and particularly with the lovely Eleanor, I had simply never danced before, not properly like this, and felt physically tied up with rope.
‘Dance with me, Justin. DANCE with me,’ pleaded Eleanor over this music so bluesily pop-rocking it’d make a dead man get up and groove.
‘I — I can’t,’ feebled out of me, within me a stone reluctance just itching to be shattered.
‘Yes — You — CAN,’ decreed Eleanor, in one movement grabbing someone’s half-full glass of champagne, with one raised eyebrow gliding on air towards me, physically pouring the bubbly liquid down my throat in one go without spilling a drop and whisking me out onto the floor.
And she was right. I could dance.
‘Ooooh,’ she cooed after a short while, ‘you’re GOOD…’
And I do not know how or where my ability to dance came from, a past life? But Eleanor Tripp was on the money and I knew it.
Crimes of Fashion
* * *
The difference between ‘outrageous fashion’ and a ‘fashion crime’ is that outrageous fashion gets repeated. Even if only in jest: To a 1970s theme costume party today you might wear a wide-lapelled dusk-blue satin jacket and flaired ‘slacks’ with Hawaiian motif polyester bodyshirt unbuttoned to reveal chunky gold chest medallion, your two-toned tan and chocolate-brown platform shoes rounding off your so-bad-it’s-good 70s ‘spunk-rat’ look. But try stepping out to a party in a 1980s Michael Jackson-style shoulder-padded red leather jacket with high-waist stone-wash jeans and zip-up grey moccasins. With any luck you’ll get pulled over by the Police before you leave a trail of pedestrians physically sick in your wake.
In the 1980s I was cursed to witness, and indeed wear, fashions which have by now had ample time to become acceptable once again, fashions which, like their equivalents of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, could by now have come ‘back into fashion’. And yet they have not. Because they were Fashion Crimes. Because they were, quite simply, Wrong. 80s fashions were original, I’ll grant them that, including looks never seen before in the whole history of fashion yet, uniquely in the whole history of fashion, never to be seen again either…
The hit U.S. cop show, Miami Vice, popularised pastel-coloured t-shirts worn beneath white or pastel casual jackets with the jacket sleeves always hitched up to the elbows and I mean always: For the entire duration of the 1980s no casual jacket was ever worn without the sleeves being hitched up to the elbows, the reason why now lost in time. Also, the Space Shuttle Age having blessed us with the miracle technology of Stretch-Denim, TV cops could now leap fences in pursuit of baddies whilst wearing skin-tight designer-label jeans and not go sterile in the act! And for the first, revolutionary time in the history of policework, cops wore chunky gold bracelets, white ankle-length gym shoes and Ray-Ban sunglasses, specifically, Ray-Ban ‘Wayfarers’.
Ray-Bans. An icon of good taste in an era of bad. The odd thing about them in the 1980s was that, though the 1956 Ray-Ban Wayfarer is a stylish design classic, for the duration of the 80s there seemed no other style of sunglasses available in the whole Western World: only the Ray-Ban Wayfarer and a billion cheap copies of it. They were, in fact, probably the icon of ‘Cool’ of the whole decade, especially after Tom Cruise was fitted with them in the hit film, Risky Business, a host of Hollywood films, film stars and pop stars following suit and to such an extent that Ray-Bans became the only way of conferring ‘coolness’ on anything. Dogs, children, babies, anything. Amidst such a sadly limited popular culture as this, even at the time it felt to me as if ‘Cool’ was something lost in this new dark age all around me, a forgotten value from some previous decade. Now ‘Cool’ was merely something you put on. And same-same-same-same-same was now cool instead of fucking Alarming. Indeed, homogeneity was ‘the new black’.
Another Space Shuttle Age fashion technology was that of Lycra, another 80s miracle ‘stretch’ fabric which, ideal for skin-tight gym leotards, gave the wearer’s body a sexily glossy look, its most famous exponent being the pop singer Oliva Newton-John in the video clip for her hit song, Let’s Get Physical. Where she also wore ‘leg-warmers’ as did millions of other sexily glossy women in the 80s for no apparent reason. For reasons equally mysterious, ‘day-glow’ coloured head-bands were worn by both men and women in public places other than the gym.
‘Day-glow’ stands as conclusive proof of 80s fashion being non-repeatable by contrast to the fashions of other decades. 80s day-glow clothing wasn’t quite ‘mainstream’ fashion; it was more ‘cutting edge’, a look that proclaimed the wearer to be slightly more radical and socially daring than mainstream. ‘Day-glow’ was the zenith of ‘trendy’. ‘Trendy’, a word now gone from common usage and the key pop-cultural term which, in the 80s, replaced ‘cool’. In any case, day-glow clothes are worn in the present era by none except construction workers and civic wardens. Worn by ‘trendsetters’ in the 80s, day-glow didn’t only stop other people from rampantly bumping into you, it made some sort of ‘statement’: A statement that, even at the time, felt like a statement of nothing yet, in day-glow, a statement of nothing made so very loudly. ‘ Radical! ’
Even 80s mainstreamers were loud, relatively conservative citizens wearing busily over-colourful ‘pattern-knit’ jumpers (sweaters in the U.S.) as so horrendously popularised by The Cosby Show and Webster. Today even the most dedicated retro clothing devotee would not be caught dead in one of these garments.
Though they are, just occasionally, still worn by people…
A word of advice, dear reader, and I speak from experience…
Avoid those people.
The Opposite of Hairstyle
* * *
I do not normally believe in ‘absolutes’. But the most unfortunate hairstyle in the history of the world is the ‘Mullet’.
I do not know why it’s called the Mullet — In my opinion the Mullet ‘fish’ is a fine and handsome creature of the deep by contrast — yet Mullet gives a name to a head of hair cut short all over (sometimes spikey-short) with an incongruously long mane left at the back. Still seen very occasionally, the Mullet hairstyle, if ‘style’ it be deemed, was originally sported by female members of Australian ‘skinhead’ tribes of the 1970s and, though skinheads have since become all but extinct, their Mullets apparently went feral in the wild, in time cross-breeding with blow-waved ‘non-criminal element’ hairstyles of the 1980s, in due course propagating the unisex ‘Mullet Bouffant’ which in the 1980s swept the planet in plague
proportions. For if in the 1970s hair became ‘long’, in the 1980s hair became ‘big’. And in all the wrong places.
Hair went up. And out. It went everywhere it shouldn’t have. And though it may not have achieved beauty, it did achieve volume. Think ‘Boofy’ and you’ve got it. In the current era the height of women’s fashion is classic minimalism (a renaissance of enduring 1960s style and I say ‘Woo-hoo’). Yet in the 80s the height of women’s fashion was an excess of fabric: The classic formal gown, or ‘frock’ as it was then called in Australia, involved wrapping a woman in a whole bolt of deep burgundy curtain fabric, such excess having to be balanced out with puffy shoulder ruffles and a sash for good measure. And all this bulk needed hair to match or the woman’s head would have been grotesquely dwarfed by her garb. A hair product TV commercial at the time had a woman pining, ‘I need more Air in my Hair!’ And did she ever get it, along with unfeasibly large earrings to balance her new hair boof, boofiness balancing boofiness, 1980s women presumably spending weeks at a time simply dressing and undressing.
Australian TV audiences of the 80s had a love-hate addiction to a blind-dating TV show called Perfect Match. It was hilarious even with the sound turned down; just to see what the contestants were wearing! Every time we watched it, Steve and I and my brother used to play a game called ‘Spot the Mullet’: A young lady contestant would be probed by the host, Greg Evans, as to her favourite hobbies to which we’d yell out in answer for her, ‘Gettin’ off m’face an’ RAGING, Greg!’, the curtain screen then rising on a trio of male suitors for her, each with his own hairstyle, the first of us ‘home contestants’ to accurately yell out ‘MULLET!’ winning points. These would be carried over to Round 2, the second half of the show where the curtain would lift on three lady suitors: ‘ MULLETS!!! ’
Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer Page 3