But I knew it was time to get back to Australia. Soon after my return, Susie became pregnant with our first-born. I find it amusing that our children were conceived in Michael’s bedroom in Hong Kong, so there’s a claim to fame.
I was back on the road, about to go onstage at The Arts Factory in Byron Bay, when I received an urgent phone call from Susie. I was really worried that something might be wrong, but she told me something completely unexpected.
‘We’re having twins,’ she told me.
For the initial few months of the pregnancy, Saskia and Montana, our daughters, had been right on top of each other in the womb; the ultrasounds had revealed what we thought was one rather large baby. Now there were two.
I was relieved and deliriously happy.
You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone
When I finally completed writing this bunch of memoirs documenting my experiences from the late sixties to 1990, I was anxious to have my daughters sanction my work. Obviously, I was worried about the tales from the dark side and did not want to publish a book that would in any way embarrass them. Their response was really interesting. They brushed aside the references to all the partying, metaphorically patted me on the head, and told me that they had always known about my wild ways back in the day. Their reactions to my shenanigans were nonchalant to say the least.
Despite it all, my girls have grown to be well-adjusted young adults. They are simply my raison d’être. The fact that they are identical twins is an added blessing, because they are like bookends.
Saskia is a music obsessive; she grew out of nineties pop very quickly and, by the time she was in her late teens, she was listening to Etta James and Otis Rush and the purest of blues artists. She is now ‘teaching’ me about Talking Heads and Richard Thompson. Isn’t that ironic?
Montana, on the other hand, went on to study Japanese at Sydney University. She now lives in Tokyo and has introduced me to Hikaru Utada and some of the better J Pop acts. Montana was a gifted drummer at an early age, but gave it away after a few years. It’s her life and she deserves her own space, and I totally respect the choices she has made. You see what I mean about bookends? One of my daughters is an obsessive musician who is into Talking Heads and the other is into J Pop and living in Tokyo!
But it was my documenting of a golden age that was of most significance to my daughters. And they asked: ‘What the hell happened to the world?’
To so many young people, the Old World is a world of wonder—a vibrant, colourful and exciting time that has now been replaced by a world more akin to George Orwell’s 1984. We are now just white rats on treadmills forced to do our master’s bidding, which is simply work work work and more work. I am well aware that the phrase ‘panacea of the masses’ belongs to a political and theological argument, but one could just as easily apply it to what is happening to our lives today. The evening news is a smokescreen, ignoring real information and keeping the realities of life hidden behind bright, shiny illusions: Kim Kardashian’s ingrown toenail, or Miley Cyrus coming down with the flu because she has been gallivanting around buck naked for too long. This is the stuff that now dominates the news and totally eclipses what is really going on.
The arch larrikins I remember from my childhood—such as Bea Miles, Frank Thring and a long list of notable characters—have long passed on, with no eccentrics left to colour our world. Let’s face it, we live in a ‘no-fun zone’ and are so trapped by political correctness that we have forgotten how to live. As Basil Fawlty said: ‘. . . that particular avenue of pleasure has been closed off!’
When I reminisce about the last 25 years, it is easy to see the progress of the seismic shift that has brought us to this point. I’ll make music the centrepiece of all this because, after all, that is what I know best. However, there are much broader ramifications.
I reckon that way back in the day—the late sixties—the conservatives eyed off the anarchistic young rockers with utter contempt and fear. But then the most successful bands of the day slowly moved out of the garage and eventually ended up filling stadiums. At this point the corporations noticed the music industry growing exponentially into a business worth billions. I believe that the corporations then became determined to grab a piece of this action for themselves.
By the time I entered the music industry, record companies were already noticeably influenced by their accountants. The accountants were representing the interests of the corporations (who now owned the record companies), and the pursuit of profits started to overtake and ultimately eclipse the purity of music as an art. As I said early on in this book, I initially found this abhorrent, and kicked hard against the pricks, making life difficult for myself in my early years as a musician.
I kept running back to Berlin, chasing a cultural world that was fading fast, until Volker finally convinced me that I could perhaps still manage to survive in the music industry with a little ‘rat-cunning’. So I wrote ‘Girls on the Avenue’, appeared on Countdown and played the corporate game, and I have managed to survive in this business for 40 years. But despite my difficult beginnings, I would have to say that this has been one fantastic ride and I wouldn’t swap it for anything. Sure, a lot of things have pissed me off, but over this 40-year rollercoaster ride, the good times have certainly outweighed the bad.
However, having said that, the problem for my generation is that the music of the last ten years or so has become so heavily marketed that it is about as exciting as shrink-wrapped products on a supermarket shelf. Many modern songs are egocentric and self-obsessed, and they are pretty silly when one considers the relatively limited lives and experience of the writers. Most of the time, the ‘angst’ described by some young writers is just a bit supercilious. One wonders how much they have really experienced. I don’t mean the trials of adolescence that we all experience—I mean real angst. The problem with the ‘Me’ generation of pop stars is that they simply don’t seem to have done much of anything, so there is not much to mesmerise the public. There are no stories to tell, no real adventures; ostensibly they have led quite sheltered lives and seem solely motivated by the desire to make a lot of money. So they study commerce and marketing and this becomes a prerequisite for a career in music. (Yes, this may be a sweeping generalisation, but more often than not this is the way things are nowadays.)
For about the past 20 years, music has lapsed into a homogenised and rather uninteresting state, because the system that dictates what we will and won’t hear is based on false principles. Pop music is fine unless it is taken too seriously, but it is about as satisfying as a Big Mac. It’s okay while you’re eating it, but has no lasting nutritional value and therefore is ultimately unsatisfying, and you feel like shit afterwards. This probably explains why many reunion tours by pop stars of the past fail.
As a musician, I need the challenge and stimulation of my peer group pushing the envelope and coming from left of centre with bold new ideas that challenge the boundaries of music. Otherwise, the music becomes stale and homogenised and is just not fun anymore. I will always remember hearing the first album by the British band The The in London in the early eighties, and thinking to myself that music had reached a brave new frontier, that there would be truly interesting and exciting times ahead. There were a number of acts around in the early eighties who showed promise of a real New Wave (as opposed to the heavily markete
d ‘hairdresser bands’ who bastardised the term). There were cool things happening with World Music (Mory Kante) and Kraut Rock (Kraftwerk) and, more significantly, some of the post-punk bands were trying different and interesting ideas (The Blue Nile, Talking Heads). Yet, somehow, most of this music has failed to survive the test of time (not Talking Heads, of course), and I suspect that this is a result of the dumbing down of music.
My generation grew up with bona fide iconic heroes who were, in every way, ‘the real shit’. The music of the new millennium too often fails in the most vacuous way, because it is simply an imitation of the real thing. As a reaction to this many young people I know are going back and listening to old albums that were recorded 40 or 50 years ago. In recent years, a career in music has often been contemptuously treated as merely a vehicle for becoming rich and famous in the quickest possible time and by the easiest route.
Many of the young people on today’s talent shows appear to be experts at the art of mimicry. Fifty years ago our parents would buy us those ‘paint-by-numbers’ kits, where all we had to do was make sure we painted neatly and tidily between the lines of a Mona Lisa outline, and the end result was quite impressive. But that didn’t turn a kid into Leonardo da Vinci! Too often I get the feeling that a lot of the apparently talented kids nowadays are more akin to a building façade on a set at Universal City. There just doesn’t feel like there’s a lot going on—‘light’s on, but nobody home!’
Then again, the more I heard about the angst-ridden alternative bands of the 1990s, the more I learnt that in private life many of these stars were merely young capitalists who had found an easy way to accumulate vast wealth—simply by masquerading in ripped jeans and flannel shirts. (The tour manager of one of the world’s biggest alternative bands told me that as soon as they came off tour their whole persona morphed into attire and behaviour that was more akin to bankers and stockbrokers than rebellious rock stars. Oh, I see—so it was just an ‘act’.)
In this new millennium, I guess one would have to credit aspiring pop stars with being a bit more honest than their ‘indie’ predecessors. Today, young artists quite plainly state in interviews that their priorities for a career in music are to find the right stylist and personal trainer, followed by the right lawyer and accountant before they go chasing a record deal.
Jack Black’s School of Rock was packed full of gems like:
‘There used to be a way to stick it to the Man. It was called rock’n’roll!’
‘Rock is about passion, man. Where’s the joy?’
‘You forgot about one thing. It’s called music!’
Let’s face it. So much of modern music is just a sign of the times. Too often it is dull and colourless, just like the world it is reflecting. Many of the current crop of modern musicians don’t seem interested in their listeners; and more often than not their music is simply myopic. Instead of music being a vital and integral part of people’s (the listeners’) lives, it has become disconnected and egocentric.
Something else that I feel has been badly overlooked is the perfect imperfection that once gave rock music its soul and joie de vivre. Nowadays music is made on computers. The timing is locked into a grid, the pitch is corrected by ‘auto tune’ and hit songs can be written to a blueprint or template. As a consequence, the rhythm has lost its swing and those delicious blue notes by singers of the past (especially the blues singers) have been overcorrected so that the vocals lack soul; in reality it is actually the computers making the music. Modern music software is absolutely incredible—but it is vitally important that the musician uses the computer instead of allowing the computer to rule them and produce the music by machine.
To make matters worse, it seems that whenever really worthwhile young artists manage to scratch and claw their way to the middle, they are given their fifteen minutes of fame and disappear as quickly as they appeared in the first place. My iTunes library is littered with lots of these young artists, many of whom are really talented, but simply can’t get any traction. Maybe this is because the only successful music artists nowadays are so corporatised that their music is little more than an advertising jingle.
So you may wonder whether there are any younger artists that I actually do like—a lot. Yeah. Ryan Adams. A truly great songwriter in the accepted sense of ‘great’. Jack White—he is really cool!! Used to love Frou Frou (speaking of pop music) but they made one brilliant album then Imogen Heap drifted off somewhere. But then there are the Foo Fighters, Wilco, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Robert Glasper, Laura Mvula, etc etc etc. There have been a lot of other artists who showed much promise before they disappeared into the ether. Maybe this is because there is simply too much music. There are so many aspiring young music acts these days, one wonders if there are more music acts than there are people available to listen to them. (There was a very interesting and thought-provoking article titled ‘The Long Tail’, published in Wired Magazine in 2004, which you may be interested to read.)
Nevertheless, I would like to believe that we can still turn this thing around. Music is a vital part of the human condition. It serves as a catharsis we cannot live without, and it should just make us feel good within ourselves, with our fellow man and the world in which we live. I love the huge sign on the side of the Tower Records building in Tokyo: ‘NO MUSIC, NO LIFE’!
Thank God, life is cyclical. There is no way I would want to be seen as simply a grumpy old man, raving and ranting about ‘back in my day, son’. Back in my day, life could be pretty bloody awful, too. Back in my day, we watched in horror as the Bay of Pigs incident unfurled; we had Pat Boone on the radio and we lived on a diet of Chiko Rolls. So no—I am not singing the praises of ‘my day!’
If you refer back to the early chapters of this book, you will see that I was born into a world of McCarthyism and Menzies, of a steel-fisted Christian Coalition which turned us against each other and was largely responsible for the savage rampant violence on the streets of Sydney in the sixties. Young people were oppressed and full of pent-up but misguided energy and rage. Not just in Sydney but in London and Brighton and elsewhere in the world. Yet, somehow, the hippies managed to turn this around so absolutely, but not without great sacrifice. It took years and years of marching in the streets, sometimes resulting in loss of lives; the Stones wrote ‘Street Fighting Man’ as an anthem for the times. Although it’s an awful cliché, ‘no pain—no gain’ rings so true. The myopic egocentricity that is now so prevalent impedes our everyday lives so much, and without realising it, we surrender to the faceless one per cent who control most of the world’s wealth and therefore keep us being the white rats on the treadmill. So while we are totally distracted watching gorgeous young chicky babes getting their gear off on MTV, the capitalists are tightening the screws. (This is the bright, shiny end of the long tail.)
The music of the 1950s and early 1960s, epitomised by Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon and the Mickey Mouse Club, was just a vacuous waste of vinyl. And I’m talking about way before American Idol. Yet somehow, in the fifties, a small group of musicians (both black and white) with real integrity managed to survive, despite having to endure great hardship. From those little embryos of music emerged the Beatles and the Stones, and a gigantic cultural movement was born.
I am immensely proud of the fact that I was able to be part of the beginnings of a revolution in Australian Rock. We endured considerable har
dship (I couldn’t even pay the rent in my first twelve years as a professional musician). My posse of musical mates just lived to play real music without any regard for whether it would lead to a profitable career or not. And so, from acts such as Chisel and The Oils and then INXS was born ‘Oz Rock’.
On a personal level, the last 25 years have been a lot of fun. Just different, that’s all. I truly believe that Diamond Mine and Harlequin Nights are by far my best albums, and I’d like to think I finally figured out how to craft great songs. But you get that. Every artist is going to dote on their newest songs, for fairly obvious reasons.
Quite frankly, I used to view some of my earlier songs like ‘Deep Water’ as a bit amateurish and ramshackle, and it used to frustrate the hell out of me that some of my more recent songs were unfairly ignored. But John Lennon said something back in the day like, although songs are like children to the writer, once we put them out there in the public domain they then belong to the listener. At that point it is not up to the writer to be the judge of his or her own work. These days I try to show respect for some of my earlier songs because you love them, and that is simply how it is. You have all given me so much for so many years and I have sacrosanct respect for that.
Seven years ago I was coerced into attempting a solo gig at Sydney’s magnificent State Theatre. As daunting as that was, I jumped in at the deep end and to my surprise we had a hit. In the second year the first show sold out in less than an hour and we went into a second show. This tradition has endured for several years now despite the fact that none of us has really understood the serendipity of its continued success. My theory is that it has much to do with the State Theatre itself. There just seems to be something about Richard Clapton at the State Theatre that resonates with people. It could be that people who want to see a Richard Clapton gig do not want to stand on a beer-soaked carpet in a pub. But then again there could be a lot more to it than that.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 23