takin' the slack back-real worlds-dark matters

Putting out a cd is a leap into the void that gets tougher and tougher. Eventually artists get shy of it and stay home with their mouths shut. They get to a point and cain't go no further.
I have been quite impatient with "Knock yourself out" I always want more than is possible. I think thats the only approach you should take, the most impossible one. The Australian music scene is rather like the country itself. A closed, gated community, fearful and home alone, looking offshore to the real world. Where real things come from. Critics, programmers, HANDICAPPERS!They think they own the track. Conjurers ! Mediocrity from Gold!
I try to keep my mouth shut and smile and wave. You get tired of the saps though and have to lash out occasionally. Was lucky to do a spot on radio with a large audience. Adult. Talk. They played "Martha and the Vandellas " before talking to me. Impossible to air my stuff of course. . I had to fashion an acoustic version of a track from my very very studio constructed set of songs. I pulled it off. I said I come from a "post punk" background. So funny after all these years to be still explaining myself. The interrogator , who had a default mocking attitude to all music and artistic pursuits, gasped and said "you weren't a punk!" It was useless to argue. I did my best though. He let his angst out totally on the next guest who was a young guy whod written a book about graffitti. He copped it. I thought he was gonna vault the desk and snap the dj as hed threatened to do earlier, off air. That wouldve been a first.

I sucked it in and continued my rounds. A writer mockingly responded to us lamenting that we didn't sound like Bon Iver. I asked who the fuck that was. Sad pricks everywhere.
Bearded yanks in demand still.
Saw Jay Z on tv with "DOA" (the death of autotune) Jeez, thats the real world!

Found myself in a radio studio waiting room again. A show about "songs that changed your life". Some jiveass shit that civilians moan about, who gives a fuck? A young girl was sitting, stroking her iphone. I made conversation as I read a paper. She asked what kind of music I made. I said I'd made 22 albums and left lt it at that. I asked her about her work. She said she'd studied jazz and had a jazz band with a very well known jazz impressario/composer and also an indie pop band. I was filled with inertia. How could you balance these two? One is an application of technique and skills and the other hangs around waiting for an accident to happen. I asked what her life changing song was. She said "rufus Wainright". I was tired and couldn't help myself. I said, "I can't stand him, or his sister or his father." She looked up briefly and inquired could I really not like the fathers work, I said "Motel Blues" is alright but only if Alex Chilton is singing it.
She indied away to the studio . An extremely bright and pretty girl sat down. I asked her where she'd come from. She said she was in a production of "wicked " and had been doing 8 shows a week for a year in the city and had moved from Perth to Melbourne to do so. Her smile beamed. This was another real world to me.

She left and the indie jazz girl came out and said, as she consulted her iphone, "have a great day". Not very convincingly. I nodded.No conviction there either.
She was identifiably an artist. She had studied . In a school, and exhibited a self absorption that was total. I've met those types before. They got no stamina. They end up in hick towns like New York.

Eventually I went on air, full of gas and energy from all this swirling miasma I had been diving through. It was the rough surf I had come in on. The two hosts were pinned against the wall as I threw bomb after bomb and took as much of the airwaves as I could. My fave song was "down on the killing floor" by Howling Wolf. A song from Chicago, the abatoirs of Chicago where all the black workers got actual jobs as they took trains from the Southern states of the USA to the Northern industrial and transport hubs that needed tough bodies to toss all that meat around.A song from the real world, in fact.
I qualified it by talking of the time I heard it. I was a teenager and rock music, like it must feel to young people today, was dead. Deader than the papal penis as Nick Tosches would have it. I tried to explain how depressing it was to endure a tv show like "Happy Days". The inane Fonzy and the mediocrity of all the dames in that show. Horrible melancholy music like Neil Young and Gallagher and Lyle. Ridiculously anachronistic acts like AC/DC! I talked of hearing the Rolling Stones , (with Brian Jones already dead!) playing their version of "Little red rooster" and how they always credited their influences and how I looked up some Howlin Wolf and got to meet the monster! His gargantuan voice and presence and the brilliant guitar sound of Hubert Sumlin.
Sad people kept texting their melancholy ideas about music in and it was all duly reported.
I only care what artists think, its so hard to hear them nowadays, the goddam audience is yammering so much!

This kind of stuff I'm writing about. It isn't cynicism or bitterness, its a reaction to life. People can be so goddam soft nowadays, an opinion is ascribed to darkness and bruised , pained injury when its just an opinion. Give it some air!

The launch show at the arts centre in melbourne show is on sale now. Here....

http://www.theartscentre.com.au/whats-on/event.aspx?id=1750