Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer

by Justin Sheedy

  The rhythm-driving beat of the drums had been central to rock music since its beginnings. This beat had been provided by a hyper-coordinated human being going insane with wooden drumsticks and foot pedals behind his kit of snare drum, tom-toms, bass drums, high-hat and any number of crashing cymbals. 80s soft rock replaced all this with one sound. A single sound for a thousand and one songs.

  The ‘Bish’.

  Which was generated either by one of the new 1980s ‘drum machines’, thus without any human feel at all, or by a human drummer who was playing somehow with no human feel. And always in the same tempo. Say the following aloud: BISH ( pause) BISH ( pause) BISH and you’ve got it, sound-and-tempo-perfect. And again: BISH. BISH. BISH. (Now you’re really getting it!) Think Danger Zone by Kenny Loggins, also from the movie Top Gun. If you’re ever unfortunate enough to have to listen to Danger Zone while stuck on a bus, the ‘bish’ will be instantly recognisable to you, dominating as it does the whole sound of the song (whereas drums once used to be a driving ‘part’ of the song). And in the 80s the ‘bish’ really did dominate a thousand and one songs: Perhaps THE song of the decade was Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA. Bish. Bish. Bish.

  Incidentally, 80s ‘rock’ also killed the saxophone. Killed it dead. Since rock’s early days the sax had been a key instrument in rock and soul bands in both ‘horn section’ and solo roles. ‘Bill Haley and The Comets’, ‘Little Richard’, ‘James Brown and The Famous Flames’ to name but a few used saxophones to grindingly, swaggeringly, sexily funky effect. Saxophones were the sound of Raunch. In the 80s their sound was cleansed. Now it was high-pitched wailings to no effect other than providing the ‘token saxophone solo’ in every mainstream song as played by some git in a day-glow vinyl jump suit and Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Yes, there they are again: The Ray-Ban Wayfarer, in the 80s, omnipresent. Especially when it came to 80s saxophone players who apparently couldn’t play without wearing a pair. An exaggeration on my part? What was U.S. President Clinton wearing when, during his first election campaign, he played his saxophone for the TV cameras to show he was ‘cool’? He was wearing a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. I rest my case.

  Musically, the 80s had started out well with, from 1980, (Just Like) Starting Over by John Lennon himself just before he was assassinated for having brought previously unimagined joy to the planet. 1980. Freddie Mercury and the ultra-talented lads of ‘Queen’ gave us Crazy Little Thing Called Love, a 50s-retro hoot fused with (for the first time on TV!) almost open gayness, specifically, that of Freddie and of the black leather variety. 1980. Veteran British psychedelic adventurers ‘Pink Floyd’ reinvented the ‘protest song’ with Another Brick in the Wall. From a New York band aptly named ‘Blondie’, the searingly attractive Deborah Harry sang out Call Me, in doing so daring young women for the first time to be sexually demanding — ‘Blondie’, a band of the so-called ‘New Wave’ movement whose signature visual style was at once retro and glisteningly futuristic. And of the ‘New Romantics’ movement, England’s ‘Adam and the Ants’ gave us Ant Music. Just like Adam and his band with their freaky Dick Turpin Red Indian Pirate look, Ant Music was funny, stylish, sexy, didn’t take itself seriously, and was catchier than a great big Catchy Thing.

  And that was just 1980!

  The happy abundance of pop gems over the next few years rendered the early 80s what has ever since been considered a minor golden age for pop music. The briefest random sample from that time might include the incredibly catchy Counting the Beat by New Zealand’s ‘The Swingers’ from 1981. Australia’s iconic ‘Men at Work’ scored a U.S. Number 1 hit in 1982 with Who Can It Be Now, a song whose key melodic ‘hook’ was nothing less than a renaissance of quality saxophone playing and one that quite possibly influenced David Bowie’s key use of saxophones on his 1983 Number 1, Let’s Dance, Bowie having been since the late 60s not only a musical force of startling originality but also a proud saluter of his musical ‘influences’ which included Australian bands. One of the most groundbreaking Number 1s from 1984 was Karma Chameleon by ‘Culture Club’, a magnificent pop song by Boy George and his band, the worldwide print-media publicity following on from it being THE FIRST TIME that a major showbiz figure ever said, ‘Yes, people, I am Gay and proud of it’, Boy George’s ‘coming out’ as the act was now called rendering homosexuality at long last an Open Matter. Indeed, the decade had started out well…

  But things started to go wrong. Horribly wrong. Initial signs of impending disaster had come in 1982 with the bowel-bursting Eye of the Tiger by Survivor: all ‘bish’, all intensely serious vocals, all feverishly feel-less guitar work. 1984 brought us Footloose by Kenny Loggins, bish-master of Danger Zone. Gawd, was Kenny ever on a roll… Footloose was from a film of the same name, less said the better except that it featured lots of so very vital young people in stonewash jeans and chunky ankle-length white trainers with a so very vital urge to rock and roll. Unfortunately there was simply nothing, not even the slightest whiff of anything ‘rock and roll’ about stonewash jeans and chunky trainers or the so very vital young people who wore them.

  For what it was, the work of Kenny Loggins was fantastic. He was a highly talented musician and composer. Who presumably laughed all the way to the bank. What he did, for what it was, was perfect. I just wish he hadn’t done it. Because it was perfect. Because it was rock and roll wearing a cardigan. It was rock that wasn’t young and dangerous any longer.

  It was safe. It was clean. Bish.

  Musically, the 80s could have been so much. SO much…

  One band that richly deserved to rule the decade was a band called ‘Split Enz’. Originally from New Zealand, they were huge in Australia and we adopted them as our own. Their music was of world-beating quality but they never cracked it internationally (i.e., in the USA), hence their tragically limited influence on the decade. Of the ‘New Wave’ movement, Split Enz were everything the 80s could have been, blending all that they did so beautifully together: Visually they covered many styles, dynamically shifting from one to the next (as healthy pop culture should), though perhaps their most memorable phase was their ultra-theatrical ‘harlequin’ style. Musically they displayed retro influences despite their sound being genuinely original, even ‘unique’. Their persona was profoundly artistic, poetic, theatrical, ancient and modern. But most importantly their song writing was, frankly, up there with The Beatles, by whom they were significantly influenced. (Sorry about all the florid adjectives and adverbs of the above paragraph but Split Enz deserves them. Here come some more…)

  In 1979 they had given us I See Red, one of the most pumplingly manic pop-rock songs ever written. Their True Colours album of 1980, with its famous ‘Mondrian’ style cover artwork, gave us some of the finest and most resonantly poetic pop songs ever written including I Got You, I Hope I Never and Nobody Takes Me Seriously, songs of white-knuckle urgency, of profound human intelligence, sadness and regret, and always of unspeakable beauty. In 1981 they gave us History Never Repeats, in 1983 Message to My Girl. And then in 1984 I saw their ‘farewell’ concert at Sydney’s grand old State Theatre, a blow-out of a concert where girls screamed in a way that girls had only ever screamed for The Beatles twenty years earlier.

  And Split Enz were gone.

  Yet the musical bottom line of the 80s is that if the inhabitants of Mars picked up the phone and requested we send them something by the Earth’s top musical performer of that decade, we would have to send them a ‘Best of Michael Jackson’. Not so much for the fact that Jackson transformed himself via plastic surgery from a handsome Afro-American boy into Diana Ross into a Martian as for the fact that ‘Wacko Jacko’ truly was Earth’s kick-ass musical performer of the 80s in terms of song-writing, vocals and dance. His work never moved me to dance but even at the time I knew I’d be a thick-head from Pluto if I couldn’t at least appreciate Jackson’s genius; by age 16 I had read the words of Jimi Hendrix: ‘If you can’t step outside your own musical scene, you need your head examined.’ Something I stick
by to this day.

  Get Me Out of Here

  * * *

  I think Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is the only film I ever walked out of. I just couldn’t see the point in staying in front of it. Another film of its unfortunate 80s ilk I would have walked out of if only I could have…

  Apparently Steve and the wonderful Germaine from Melbourne had a bit of an ‘open relationship’ — it was a long-distance one and they were a pair of 16-year-old bohemians after all. Steve had invited me to the Killara home of his new ‘sort-of’ girlfriend, the pearl-necklace-wearing blonde yuppie high-priestess of Loreto Normanhurst, Emma St. John herself. I was more than a shade uneasy about this but Steve assured me I’d be welcome on this Saturday afternoon where we would be watching — with Emma and a clutch of her identical friends, I saw on our arrival — a video of a latest release film called The Breakfast Club. The girls had all seen it before, Steve said, and were ape-shit for it. In any case, he raised an eyebrow, Emma’s parents and family were away and we would have the run of her place…

  The film turned out to be an American teen flick about a group of self-indulgent upper middle-class high school kids who, despite all their advantages, are dense enough to get sent to weekend school detention, some not even for the first time, hence the movie’s title. None of the characters displayed, to me, any redeeming feature to make me care about any of them, the film, as a result, dragging to say the least. There was, however, one character who stood out from the group, an ‘alternative’ / Gothic style of girl played by the credibly gorgeous Ally Sheedy (no relation). Despite the absence of any sign within the film that it would be a good thing to happen or that the ‘alternative’ girl would want it to happen, the film ends with the yuppie girl of the group physically transforming the alternative girl into a yuppie also, group homogeneity is achieved and they all live happily ever after, though having really ‘learnt’ something about themselves from their stay in the Breakfast Club despite the fact that nothing happened. Their detention task for the day having been for each of them to write an essay on themselves, the nauseating ‘revelation’ they end up having about themselves is expressed solely by the ‘nerd’ of the group as the voice of the group as the group can’t be fucked. Though in the fog of disbelief through which I’d watched this film it seemed to me the scriptwriter couldn’t be fucked. THE END.

  Emma St. John must have caught my gobsmacked expression as the credits rolled: ‘How could you not like THAT?!’ she demanded, her pretty face aghast.

  My reply was something like, ‘I honestly don’t know where to begin…’

  I never saw Emma St. John again. Which was lucky as I’d probably have been forced to sit through other cinematic masterpieces of the 80s…

  Like…

  Top Gun!

  Bish. Bish. Bish. Starring Tom Cruise. What a simply wonderful film. The lingering bathroom scenes! The smoky golden light on everything at all times indoors and out! Tom in his jocks poised bent over the sink in soft-focus moments of soul-searching crisis! The tearful magnificence of Meg Ryan! U.S. jets triumphing in a Zone of Danger! Bish. Bish. Bish. Loveya, Kenny Loggins!

  I honestly wonder who financed this mega-budget blockbuster, showcasing as it did the actual U.S. Navy ‘Top Gun’ fighter pilots’ training course that gave U.S. pilots complete dominance over Iraqi pilots in the first Gulf War just a few years later. That the film caused a Biblical flood of recruitment applications for the U.S. Navy was perhaps due to the way it portrayed life aboard an operational aircraft carrier as not only visually magnificent but also as a socially unified and ruggedly satisfying place to work. When the reality was and still is that a U.S. aircraft carrier, even in peacetime, is about the most lethal place to work on Earth and also one of the most depressing, the vast majority of the good people on or under the decks of any U.S. carrier being young Americans with scant employment prospects anywhere else or for whom joining the Navy is their sole salvation from imminent murder by rival neighbourhood drug gangs. On a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, anybody over the age of 30 is called a ‘lifer’, as if in jail, and I wish each and every young man and woman aboard the very, very best and I mean that. Especially if they’re doing Life as a result of once having watched a film called Top Gun as an impressionable teenager.

  Angry Young Man

  * * *

  On the last day of term, we stood on the grass of Riverview’s 3rd Field waiting for the school bus to take us out through the college grounds and up the long hill of Tambourine Bay Road to Lane Cove: Max Van Cleef, Francis Phelan, Steve and I talking of what the term holidays that began tomorrow held in store for each of us. Tony Basara sat on his bag just a few yards off, playing his guitar for the small audience of younger boys entranced before him. Even unplugged he made that Gibson Les Paul sing.

  Max was going skiing with his family, albeit not in the French Alps as last holidays, just to Australia’s Snowy Mountains. Francis thought he might do some pig-shooting with his dad. Steve was toying with hitch-hiking to a place in Northern New South Wales: small country town, good for camping, he said. A place called Nimbin.

  I couldn’t help it. I showed them the photograph I had been sent by the girl I should this holidays be flying on a cloud to be with but wouldn’t be. It was a 5 by 4-inch colour portrait of Madeleine of the classic type taken annually by school photographers. I had pasted it into the inside hardcover of my Riverview-issue school diary.

  ‘God, Juz, she’s beautiful,’ flowed Max. ‘I do declare.’ As if some sacred tome, he proffered the open booklet to the toughest boy in the school.

  ‘I gotta handit to ya, Juz,’ Francis Phelan almost smiled, ‘that’s a honey if ever I saw one.’

  Steve smiled his usual. ‘That she is,’ he winked. ‘Worth waiting for.’

  Tony Basara stopped playing his guitar. ‘Givvus a look,’ he called over.

  Francis peered at me squarely, his eyes gauging for my consent. I nodded, he took the diary the few yards over towards Tony, handed it down to him.

  The richest rockabilly rebel in the school considered its inner cover, his French-Lebanese eyebrows raising markedly. No disguising the approval on his face, a change, even a softness had invaded his brow. He looked up at me. ‘Fucked if I know how y’ do it, Sheedy…’ He grinned with one corner of his mouth, and handed back my dearest possession.

  The girl in the photograph was smiling fully and directly at the camera. Perfect teeth, perfect skin, her eyes full of contented excitement, 80s bob-style fringe swept forward above them, a look on her face as if simply delighted to be in front of you. And though you might expect her green-and-grey-chequered school uniform summer blouse would conceal the form of her medium-full teenage breasts, it didn’t.

  ‘Whel ,’ released Tony Basara. ‘I know what I’d like to be doin’ this holidays…’

  The first morning of them was, for me, aptly grey. And still. From our Epping back door the air outside just the coolish side of tepid, it was one of those days when a stagnant layer of overcast cloud turns the whole of suburbia black-and-white. And maintains one light the whole fucking day.

  I had woken late to find the house empty; Mum was at her job as a makeup lady at Macquarie Shopping Centre — she was putting me through school, bless her heart — Dad of course gone since the crack of dawn to his dental surgery at Burwood and my older brother and sisters having long since left home. I made myself a cup of tea (you guessed it: Earl Grey), switched on the TV, and listlessly plumped down on the couch in front of it.

  Only to find myself lifted on contact with the show that had just begun on Epping’s Channel 7…

  It was called The Persuaders.

  A high-quality British light drama from the very early 70s, it featured Brit idol of that era, Roger Moore, and the utterly delightful American Tony Curtis, an actual ‘star’ of the very tail-end of the classic ‘Hollywood studio system’, as a result his screen presence beaming his obvious range and multi-talent. The duo play the classic ‘odd couple�
�, Moore as Lord Brett Sinclair, British upper class playboy at a loose end after his earlier military and racing driver career, Curtis as Danny Wilde, dynamic and irreverent self-made millionaire from The Bronx. Together they get into adventures and intrigue in exotic European locations, sometimes as the ‘reluctant’ agents of higher justice, sometimes by chance, but always with the urgency of a pair of early-middle-aged men grasping for the excitement of their fading youth. This hint of melancholy and desperation for life to be lived not only instilled a deeper dimension in this onstensibly ‘light’ drama, it was the perfect accompaniment to my current mood.

  The show was an escapist mix of many things: exciting action, intrigue, comedy, and at times quite profound warmth between the odd couple duo. There were fight scenes with ultra high-tension groovy music that turned on like a light, there were beautiful female supporting stars, funkily stylish early-70s fashions, those exotic Euro locations and all shot in the delicious film-stock colours of that moment in TV history.

  And it really was great TV as it pushed the boundaries of the medium, at times the on-screen performances of Curtis and Moore seeming thinly-veiled projections of their real-life selves: Curtis, particularly, seems to be saying to the viewing audience ( Bronx-savvy accent here), ‘Look here, kiddoes, I’m taking the opportoonity to have the time of my life with this role but witness the ‘serious actor’ I can be despite no-talent Hollywood schmucks calling me washed up of late…’ Indeed, at times both Curtis and Moore seem to take their roles quite seriously: One early moment between Sinclair and Wilde crystalises their unlikely partnership as Wilde offers his life that Sinclair might live in an ‘unexploded bomb’ scene of quite arresting humanity.