Though the Mullet is today a satisfactorily endangered species, there is one 80s hair abomination now extinct. The ‘Perm’. Short for ‘permanent’ and at one time flourishing on Perfect Match, the chemically-induced perm was based on the perception that beautiful, naturally straight hair on women should be changed into sheep’s wool-like fuzz and dyed silver. People actually thought this staggeringly unnatural look was a ‘good’ one. No one has EVER been able to explain why.
Now called ‘product’ by hairdressers, in the 80s it was called ‘Gel’ and though its user benefit was blurry at best, no 15-year-old, male or female, felt complete without some of it in their hair. If ever Advertising succeeded in its job of making the masses regularly buy something they don’t need, in the 80s ‘Gel’ was that success. Of colourless jelly translucence, it had a strangely reassuring perfume like sharp raspberry cordial. As one applied it to one’s hair, between one’s fingers it had a feeling as ambiguous as sticky lubricant. Then turning crispily dry in one’s hair, it seemed to set straight or wavy hair in a loosely sculpted shape. Sort of… Though my own hair was now stubbonly wiry with a mind of its own and responded to no comb, hairdryer or known chemical, it was still reassuring to apply gel to my hair as at least it gave me something stickily, fragrantly in common with everyone else. And by that I mean with every 15-year-old in the whole First World.
Today, if I could time-travel, I would go back to 1984 and corner the market in Gel. Given their hopeless addiction to the stuff, I would have every teenager in the First World under my Control. (Cue 1950s sci-fi ‘creepy organ music’ here…) They would become my slaves…
Bwah-ha-ha-haaa…
HHEOWWWWH!
* * *
Steve sat me down on his bedside, crossed the room to his stereo cassette player — a 2-foot wide rectangular plastic audio device of the 80s called a ‘ghetto-blaster’, inserted an audio cassette into its fold-out tray and pushed it shut. ‘You probably won’t like this,’ he said, and pressed ‘Play’. The song was I Feel Good (I Got You) by James Brown.
It began with a human sound that the English Language has no word for. But by the sound of whatever it was that left the mouth of Mr James Brown he had clearly just got something he’d badly wanted: I had never heard the word ‘HHEOWWWWH’ before! In any case his soul-searing whatever-it-was launched his immortal lyrics as per the title of the song. This was the Afro-American James Brown, the ‘Godfather of Soul’ as in ‘soul music’. His backing band was called The Famous Flames, their quick-wavering saxophone unison, horns, guitar, bass and drums laying down a sound as shatteringly good as only James Brown can feel. There was an urgency to their rhythm, their swagger a sharp one, their groove infused with a military precision, even discipline. This was Black ‘Soul’ music from 1965!
It had fire. It had ice. It flowed and it halted and it flowed. THIS was ‘the Devil’s Music’ and at its very core was Mr Leigh-Barnett’s ‘Holy Trinity’ of Rhetoric: Pitch, Pace and Pause. It was golden syrup. It was quicksilver. Purest tension. And release. 2 minutes 44 seconds of music so immaculately slick I felt dizzy.
After its banshee-cry finale, I turned to Steve. When once again able to draw breath I loosed, ‘How could I not like THAT? What WAS it?’
‘James Brown.’
‘Thank you, my friend.’
‘Wait till you see him dance…’
The British Invasion
* * *
One of the most warmly-received TV shows in 1980s Australia was Minder, a quirky British comedy-drama portraying the ducking-and-weaving street life of the grimier districts of London via the exploits of the irrepressibly dodgy ‘Arthur ( Arhfa) Daley’, an ‘alternative economy’ wheeler and dealer as played by British screen veteran, George Cole, his youthful ‘minder’ or bodyguard being the rough-edged but impeccably moral ‘Terry McCann’ as played by Dennis Water-man. Singlehandedly bringing the word ‘minder’ into its now universal Anglo usage, the show was a homage to London working class life, local dialect and cultural idiosyncracy. Becoming an instant ‘cult classic’ as a result, the show was a masterful tapestry of colourful social realism, hilarity and at times the most profound human warmth and poignancy. We cherished each and every episode, even adopting into our daily speech certain gems of the Cockney-speak in which the show immersed us: ‘On yerr bike’ for ‘Go away’, ‘Leeave it out’ for ‘Please desist’, ‘DO be brief’ for ‘Get to the point’, ‘a nice little earner’ for ‘a source of income’, ‘There’s a drink innit for ya’ meaning ‘You will receive reward’, ‘’Er indoors’ for ‘the wife’ and many others.
So it was to our delight (and eccentric education) that stepping right off the screen of Minder and into our home life at Howard Place was London’s 19-year-old Dom McQueen, eldest son of my parents’ bosom-buddy friends from the first years of their marriage in late 50s London. In his ‘gap year’, Dom was anything but working class but though the children of London’s upper middle class to which he belonged may once have spoken in refined and plummy tones, Dom’s accent was directly out of Minder, as were his mannerisms and verbal expressions.
He was an actual Fulham ‘football hooligan’ though with a heart of gold and there was nothing he didn’t find or couldn’t make seem funny. Our personal ambassador from the great English Eccentric tradition, Dom lived life not as a continuum of normality punctuated by eccentric moments but as a continuum of eccentricity interrupted by moments of normality. Everything was ‘a gudd lahff’, every moment the opportunity for a joke or trick to be played and delighted in.
Prisoner, to me and my brother, was a nauseating Australian TV soap opera set in a women’s prison, mediocre viewing to be shunned and avoided. To Dom it was a thing of gloriousness and hilarity, a cultural experience to be savoured. Where for my brother and me the show’s rough-as-guts lesbian inmate, ‘Frankie’, was a character we viewed with squinting incomprehension, at his very first viewing of this character Dom’s eyes opened wide with the bliss of a prospector in the moment they have just struck pure gold. ‘This… is brilliant,’ he vowed of this low-budget Australian drama. Dom was a natural connoisseur of ‘so-bad-it’s-good’, opening our eyes to the hidden value of the seemingly mundane, in time also drawing our attention to scenes of Prisoner that demonstrated screenwriting of profound quality, moments of true human pathos including the episode where the prison’s most ancient and mischievous character, ‘Lizzy’ ( ‘Orrhhh, me ticker!’), is discovered to have been innocent despite her whole adult life spent behind bars for murder. As a result she is granted her freedom, only to prove an alien in an outside world she has never known and be rejected by her family, intentionally re-offending so as to return to the safety of ‘inside’. It was moments like this, the product of writing and acting of the deepest humanity, to which Dom truly ‘woke us up’.
And added to or perhaps despite his intelligence, Dom really was a classic English ‘football hooligan’, regaling us in awe and hysterics with graphic tales of all it meant to be one, physically demonstrating for us his all-limbs-flailing ‘whirling Dervish’ technique against the football hooligan supporters of opposing teams, also how his one-armed mate would topple whole lines of Chelsea supporters in a fell swoop by brandishing his motorcycle helmet as a weapon (with his one arm) at extreme close-quarter combat. Dom assured us that the violence in which he and his mates revelled was in a spirit of purest fun for violence’s sake — Nobody was ever seriously injured, he claimed, but his team, the legendary Fulham club, was actually forbidden to play against the Chelsea side as the opposing supporters of each team inhabited geographically neighbouring suburbs of London and the violence and destruction resulting from the two teams playing against each other was simply too great to be deemed sustainable.
Being such a mad-keen football devotee, even though ‘football’ in England meant what we in Australia call soccer, Dom was very keen to go to an Australian football match, which of course means Rugby League in this country. One Sunday afternoon Pat an
d I took our guest to a match being played by the Western Suburbs team who had Dom’s instant and lifelong loyalty as their black and white team colours were the same as Fulham’s. The dress code for any Australian footy match, particularly a Western Suburbs game, was working class casual to say the least. To the match, Dom wore no less than his Fulham FC ceremonial necktie, making him the first and only human being ever to wear a shirt and tie (and jacket) to an Australian Rugby League game. Though genuinely disappointed that his new team lost the game, it was a decent afternoon, Dom confiding in us, however, how lacklustre the experience had been for him by contrast to any English match, the Western Suburbs fans having engaged in no hooligan violence whatsoever.
Being a card-carrying Fulham football hooligan, Dom was physically adept in a way that Pat and I would never be: He was capable of explosive violence at the drop of a hat. ‘Useful’ in the parlance of Minder. And though we never saw him being aggressive except in a spirit of sidesplitting fun, on one occasion Dom proved to be our ‘minder’ and in very real sense…
In Goodbye Crackernight I gave an account of the bully of North Epping, the legendary Bruce Banner, perennial terrorizer of smaller boys including me when very much younger. One warm night Pat and I and Dom were talking on the kerbside of Howard Place when from out of the laneway appeared Bruce, presumably on a brief stint between prison sentences, on his way past stopping and trying to inspire some sort of fear in us for old times’ sake. It had been years since we’d been subjected to his reign of terror and Pat and I hadn’t even mentioned his reputation to Dom. Dom, however, had Bruce sussed out and sized up in the blink of an eyelid and, after trading a few low-level insults with Bruce, showed us that there are weapons against classic thugs other than physical ones, also that, though he may have been a classic football hooligan, Dom was no thug.
Though the course of their verbal argument now escapes me, Bruce ‘threw down the gauntlet’ to Dom, challenging him to prove his manhood by surrendering an answer to some pointedly direct question of Bruce’s. Dom, however, refused. Bruce insisted that Dom account for his refusal to answer: ‘WHY, why won’t ya answer me?!’ he demanded. ‘It’s ’cause ya scared of me, isn’t it…’
‘No,’ Dom replied, arms folded.
‘Then why? WHY won’t ya tell me?’
I will always remember the slight smile in Dom’s voice and in his eyes when he delivered the reply that slayed Bruce Banner.
‘Because you don’t DESERVE to know.’
Bruce was never seen again.
Something divinely ours
* * *
My Irish ancestors came to Australia on a sailing ship. Escaping the poverty and famine of their homeland, their new home on the bottom of the world, though home to the Aboriginal peoples for 40-thousand years, was now a British-occupied colony whose dominant culture, language and institutions were English. As a result, despite an Australian shift from British to American loyalties in World War II and my childhood being heavily infused with American TV culture, the heart of my own cultural formation was English. As was its soul. As for any post-colonial Australian national identity, I can only suggest that its fully-formed existence remains in doubt or we Australians wouldn’t still feel excited like a child being held up in front of a mirror for the first time every time someone shows us who we are as a nation. And I do believe this is how we still feel, even as our now ‘multicultural’ identity displaces one we never quite figured out. Yet whatever our national identity may or may no longer be, though I grew up into and remain a proud Australian, in large part due to the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s television programming of the 1980s in my formative teen years my cultural oxygen was English…
It was a humid, long-light Sydney summer’s Saturday evening and, with Mum and Dad out for the night, after tea Pat and I installed ourselves on the TV lounge, Pat lunging to switch on to something he apparently had some prior awareness of as essential viewing.
The show began with a quite arrestingly thrilling trumpet fanfare over a collage sequence of ‘Boys’ Own’-type illustrated book covers from the pre-war years: Two intrepid lads with lanterns uncovering treasure under a secret trap door! A school cricket pitch scene whose subtitle could have been ‘What a CATCH!’. A scene from deepest, darkest Africa, subtitle ‘Take THAT, Zulu blaggard!’ and other gems from an era when boys were men, gay meant happy and China was British, the fanfare concluding with an unmistakable ‘call to adventure!’ trumpet round-off over the show title, RIPPING YARNS. And, Gadzooks, it appeared we were in for one!
Whatever was in store for us began with a live-action shot of a charismatically hatted and caped man with the actual subtitle of something like ‘A very famous and respected figure’, who, standing atop a suitably impressive oceanside clifftop, turned to the camera with an air of authority and launched into some ‘immortal quote’ about the follies of one’s youth. … Only to hopelessly and repeatedly flub the quote, due to his incompetence having to be audibly prompted by the film crew just off-screen, the clearly long-suffering prompter himself effectively delivering the quote in its entirety, the caped figure so absurdly ‘show-biz’ full of himself that he accepts the crew’s applause as the scene finally wraps. The actor playing this warped part was one I knew; it was someone called Michael Palin — I’d adored his multi-part performances not only in Life of Brian but also in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. (This man was the genius responsible for the ‘Knights of Ni’, dark lords of the forest whose ‘sorcery’ torments King Arthur until he exposes them as silly time-wasters…)
Yet tonight’s ‘ripping yarn’ now began, its opening shots being of a classic English Public School, the period 1913, an atmosphere à la Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the accompanying music fittingly grand yet sombre, the title of the story: Tomkinson’s Schooldays.
The initial scene was of a corridor of schoolboys lined up in wretched silence as if awaiting punishment, the camera tracking towards a closed door through which comes the sound of repeated whacking, Palin’s voice in the title role narrating that, of all the dreadful things designed to break his spirit in this school in which he feels but a prisoner, perhaps the cruelest thing was the daily ritual of ‘beating the headmaster’: The door now opened to reveal the headmaster in full academic gown having just had his behind most satisfactorily whacked by a student, the boy exiting, another taking his place, the surreal scene continuing.
The show proved to be the most delightfully wicked parody of the Tom Brown’s Schooldays genre, including scenes of younger boys being ‘nailed to the wall’ by older boys (though literally — all up the side of a classic school building). There was a school bully permitted ‘unmarried Filipino women’ in his room instead of daily chapel, Tomkinson’s ‘escape attempts’ from the place being thwarted by ‘the School leopard’, also by a randy Spanish master pouncing on him as he tries to walk out dressed as a washerwoman. The story concluded with a 30-mile enforced ‘hop’ so gruelling that students actually die though which Tomkinson miraculously survives thanks to hallucinogenic nose-powder courtesy of the school bully.
Co-written by Palin and his Monty Python team-mate, Terry Jones, the show was typically Python-esque in that, with exquisite irony, it captured the very spirit of the original stories that it satirized. My discovery at age 12 of the lines of Groucho Marx had been like the sun coming up: ‘Next time I bump into ya, remind me not to talk to ya, willya?’ Groucho: the soul of irreverence. But this Ripping Yarns was comedy in a new dimension: It was simultaneous homage and parody, reverence AND irreverence hand-in-hand.
Ripping Yarns became a Saturday night ritual for me and my brother, each episode immersing us into an antique world, a world brought back to life in being turned upside down: The Testing of Eric Olthwaite, a Great Depression-era mining town saga, starred a young man so irrepressibly boring that his illiterate North of England coalminer father pretended to be French to avoid talking to him. The Curse of the Claw featured a young man’s across-the-oceans-and-back da
te with destiny in order to save his hero uncle, a man on his last legs despite having spent his whole life actively seeking out exotic diseases to contract and enjoy. Escape from Stalag Luft 112B was the saga of the only man never to escape from Stalag Luft 112B despite having constructed an aircraft out of toilet rolls and a catapult to fling his body hundreds of miles across Occupied Europe. Across the Andes by Frog rather speaks for itself.
In any case, this inspired British comedy was speaking my language; its irreverent reverence, its wicked perception and expression, they felt like coming home, as if to old friends somewhere within me already. As if to something divinely mine. It was escapism, escape to the past to enrich my present, and its timing was perfect as, for an adolescent, escape from the present is a Godsend.
Girls’ Own Stories
* * *
I simply wasn’t ready for Jane Austen…
At the age of 45 I enjoy a good bonnet drama as much as the next man, but my 16-year-old brain was NOT wired for it. Whereas Austen may have been manna from heaven for teenage girls, it had a few teenage boys I saw climbing the walls. And my genuine engagement with Ripping Yarns hardly helped: Toiling through Austen in hot Sydney classrooms, I found myself looking out the window, fantasizing…
Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer Page 4