#06 - The Lysergic Suede - Uruguay (1981)

I’ll say it now - I’m not cool. Especially when it comes to Rock ‘n’ Roll. I’ve never understood what exactly it is that makes people respond to rock god posturing with awe and envy, because the whole Michael Hutchence / Bono / Jim Morrison thing just doesn’t do anything for me. I mean, Hoboes piss in their clothes as well, but do you see gangs of teenage girls squeal-chasing them down the street?

Even now, I only have two real perceptions of ‘cool’ as filtered through music. One is the Beatles on the back of the ‘Revolver’ sleeve. Look how confident they are in that picture, so nonchalant about dropping of the most creative and varied albums of all time in your lap, and they’re off for a smoke whilst you listen to it, because they aren’t remotely insecure that you won’t be impressed. Plus, you know you’d dress like that if you could get away with it.

The second? Ray Davies, *all the time*.

Teenage girls, however, have a very different idea of cool, and it never seems to change. You either have your squeaky-clean, sexually-non-threatening pin up boys, whom they can get together with their friends and have endless discussions about which of them would marry whom; or you have the ‘Bad Boys’, who supposedly ooze sex and drugs, but usually just look very peaked and smelly, to the extent you wonder if you should toss their velveteen rabbit onto the fire.

Richard Maiden was one of the latter, the Pete Doherty of his day. Girls were obsessed. One minute it seemed the girls at school were all squealing over David Essex and Rick Springfield, the next, he was unceremoniously dropped as every girl was clutching a pin-up of Richard from that month’s issue of ‘Dolly’, (Australia’s preeminent teenage girl magazine, full of in-depth and exhaustive three paragraph articles about Periods ‘n’ Shit, framed by explosions of squiggley lines in every shade of pastel, which girls loved it because it talked to them ‘on their own level’, which to my eyes just seemed to mean writing, say, ‘ver. brill’ instead of ‘very brilliant’, and displaying an almost pathological hatred / obsession with a town called Budgewoi, wherever the hell that was. Girls *still* are a mystery to me).

I came home to find my sister and the Twins From Next Door lying in a semi-circle on the lounge room floor around a copy of ‘Smash Hits’, taking turns to read aloud all the ‘fun facts’ about Richard’s band, ‘The Lysergic Suede’.

It’s was Catherine’s turn. “According to Richard,” she said, with all the serious pomposity of a Catholic High Mass, “Mick has the hairiest legs in the band”.

Merrideth looked puzzled. “Which one is Mick?”

My sister dragged her copy of Dolly closer and looked. “He’s the drummer”.

They took this in for a second, then chorused “Ewwwww”. Looking now, I can see his Excessive New Romantic makeup did him the least favours out of all of them. He looked like what you’d get if you took a cricket bat to Split Enz for a couple of hours, and I doubt that even if was only for the combined lengths of ‘I Got You’ and ‘I See Red’ matters wouldn’t have been improved much.

“My turn,” Merrideth said, pulling the magazine closer. She paused, then said “Oh wow,” and was dumbstruck, clutching the magazine to her chest.

I was puzzled. What on earth had she read? Had one of them died? Luckily someone eventually had the sense to ask her what was wrong, and it snapped her out of it long enough for her to deliver a hyperventilated explanation.

“It says Danny writes in his diary every day! I write in my diary every day as well! It’s meant to be! We’re soulmatessssssss”. I was surprised she had enough air to drag the last word out, but she managed.

I expect the other two to say “get real”, (as was the style at the time), but no, the three of them just squealed again.

“What do they sound like?” I asked, not realising that this was of lesser import to girls than what the bass player’s favourite colour was.

“They don’t have a record out yet,” Catherine said, with that particular undertone-that-isn’t of ‘don’t-you-know-anything’ that kids specialise in delivering to someone three years younger than them.

My sister rolled her eyes theatrically, then filled me in, desperate to prove that despite the fact she didn’t know they existed until that morning, she was the one true fan in the room, not like these Johnny-Come-This-Afternoonlys. “Their first single comes out in three weeks”.

This confused me even more. “Then how do you know they’re any good?”

“You’re sooo dumb. They had heaps of record companies fighting over them.”

“Just tell him to go away,” added Merrideth. “He’s too much of a baby to understand”.

Being obsessed with a band you haven’t heard seemed really strange to me, but Richard Maiden had either a very big mouth, or an even bigger talent for self-promotion, depending on the source. I think Rock stars understood the ‘sound bite’ concept a good 20 years before the mainstream media latched onto it. “Love me or hate me, you’re going to remember me,” he’d say, predating the ‘Haters Gonna Hate’ meme by a good 29 years. Of course, I’d argue it’s only sad bastards like me who do still remember him.

He claimed to have been signed by Arista for a million pounds, after an intense bidding war between most of the major labels, but there were suspicions it was just a hugely inflated figure purely to fuel the hype machine. A photographer who wanted to remain anonymous had done two photo sessions with the band with the month of the bidding war:

“They were fine at the first shoot and acting like stars at the second, and all that was happened was the hype. It got them believing they were far bigger than they were. In their eyes they went straight from being totally unknown to being famous, and wanted to be treated as such.”

Arista were keen to capitalise on said hype, and quickly threw the band into the studio with seasoned producer Rod Toddsten, which is where things started to get even worse.  Toddsten’s quotes about the band are taken from a very funny online interview.

He dismissed ‘The Lysergic Suede’ as being both ‘overpretentious and undertalented’, and that ‘they spent more time in the studio practising their posing than their playing’. A week’s studio time had been booked to complete both the A and B-side of their first single, but the band ‘would turn up hungover 7 hours late into a 10 hour recording block’.

It gets better. “Maiden called me an out-of-fashion Dinosaur, and said that he knew better what the kids wanted since he was what they all wanted. Then he turned around and unceremoniously sacked the drummer”.

I guess even the band thought he was unfuckable.

“Richard decided the future was the Roland 808 drum machine. He couldn’t be told anything. I remember scanning the lyric and asking him if he didn’t mean ‘observes the sad parade’, and the temperature dropped 10 degrees in the space of the second.”

‘I don’t make mistakes’ Richard said.

“He really was an insufferable twat, so when he came to do his vocals and started singing the chorus, I looked at Mike [the engineer] and asked if we should say something. Mike only thought for a second, and then said ‘No, he doesn’t make mistakes’”.

Which is how ‘Uruguay’ b/w ‘Uruguay (instrumental)’ ended up in the hands of a very-disappointed Arista, whom faced with an already-set imminent release date and an consumer base of undiscerning teenaged girls and older paedophiles, threw up their hands in defeat and put it out there anyway.

Rod’s finishing line, “It came out the same week as ‘Planet Earth’ by Duran Duran. They were over before they began.” Indeed, my sister seemed to have instantly forgotten them, since things move very fast in the pop world for teenage girls, and instead was obsessed with John Taylor. (In her defense, at least her allegiance to ‘Duran Duran’ lasted through the initial run of singles and albums, through side projects, disappearing members, unexpected comebacks, outright derision, and original line-up reformation).

As for the Suedes, they supposedly recorded two, (much cheaper), follow-up singles: ‘Earthbound Memories’ and ‘Pin Up Video Girlz’ before splitting up. Both went absolutely nowhere, and are seemingly impossible to find.

As a footnote, ‘Uruguay’ lived on in my memory in two ways. I think of your standard new wave song as being about countries, since Kim Wilde’s ‘Cambodia’ and Flock Of Seagulls ‘I Ran’ were roughly contemporaneous, even if that childhood misunderstanding proves I never actually listened to the later song.

The second way? For about a year or so, when the older boys would beat up the younger ones on the playground, they’d often sing ‘U R Gayyyyy U R Gay...’.

#05 - Melantha P - 2Gether 4Ever (1986)

Today's post is possibly NFSW, due to embarrassing descriptions of teenage record-sleeve self-abuse.  Oh, come on.  Don't look at me like that.  Like you never once felt a bit frisky with a Roxy Music album.

Despite the myth that dance music is only the domain of teenage girls and gay boys who dance with their arms above their head, I have an unhealthy knowledge of relatively-interchangeable eighties electronic bimbo singers entirely because of my heterosexual friends.

Originally the teenage schoolyard determination of who was best was entirely pitched between Madonna and Cyndi Lauper.  The girls all picked Cyndi, because she’d be a fun friend to have, where Madonna was denounced as ‘Obviously A Slut’, with all that particular kind of haughtiness that can only be displayed by girls who haven’t yet experienced any remote interest from boys, let alone actually had sex.

Of course, this is why all the normal boys loved Madonna.  She looked like a low-impact aerobics instructor for very undisciplined women to my eyes, and couldn’t sing worth a damn, but the boys didn’t care.  There were whispers of pictures spotted in Older Brothers’ ‘Penthouses’, (where her bush was bigger than ‘one of those Gonks you’d win on the clowns at the show’), and having starred in what Molly Meldrum described on Countdown as being a ‘pornographic movie’, thereby dooming a generation of horny Australian boys to a hard life lesson in extreme disappointment.

A tidal wave of First-Name-Only Female Singers doing video aerobics in a succession of different outfits-picked-by-stylists followed, all possessing what can only be charitably described as ‘chirpy’ voices, which were always buried under a blanket of increasingly-desperate recording effects to give the effect of Being Able To Sing.  More often than not, they sounded like Marilyn Monroe having an asthma attack, to the extent that I assumed the Seven Year Itch was something to do with hayfever.

I was getting into my Teenage Indie phase at the time, so with the resulting feeling of smug superiority as my shield, I managed to avoid hearing most of these Madonna Wannabe records, (obviously oblivious to the fact that the people I was judging as inferior for listening to such rubbish were judging their taste as superior to mine for doing exactly that).

Still, with friends trading Smash Hits pin-ups to put on their wall, I quickly learnt what the girls looked like.  I first encountered former Page 3 pin-up model turned singer ‘Melantha P’ after being shut into a friend’s bedroom to ‘wait until he gets home’ by his scary Dutch mother, which, admittedly, was preferable to sitting with her as she snort-laughed her way through 'Gilligan's Island'.

With nothing else to do, I grabbed a foolscap school book by the side of bed to read and was confronted with page after page of glued-in pictures of girls cut out of 'Smash Hits', as well as K-Mart Catalogue Bra Models, which seemed rather strange to my eyes.

Cluelessly, I flicked the pages, until I came to a page that wouldn’t quite open all the way.  I only managed to make out a Toreador Hat on top of an enormous mess of crimped hair, before it finally peeled apart with a loud rip, which, as an adult, makes me realise my friend probably ran out of Clag Glue and added his own home blend.  Of course, this was the moment my horrified friend Eric chose to appear in the doorway.

“You ripped Melantha!”  Eric was obviously upset.  He snatched the book from my hand, and started trying to smooth the edges of her picture back down.

My friend Steve was behind him, and ran his finger down his index finger towards me.  “Shame, shame on you.  You don’t touch someone’s Wank Book”

“What the hell is a Wank Book?” I asked.

Steve rolled his eyes.   “It’s where you keep all your sexy pictures, you dork”.

This was news to me.  I’ve always had much older friends.  They were two years above me in high school, which, in those days, might as well be twenty.  Still, I felt like this was unfair.  “How was I supposed to know?”

Eric had managed to push the picture back into place.  “Don’t lie.  Everyone’s got one!”

I was horrified.  “But I don’t!”

“Come off it,” Steve said.  “I’ve got one too”.

This was news to me.  “Does your Brother?”

“Don’t be a dickhead, he has a subscription to Penthouse”.   Obviously, this was something guys do before they can buy Proper Porn.

The conversation eventually became about The Girl In Question, which is how I learnt ‘Melantha P’ had become famous for regularly showing her breasts in 'The Australian Post', a magazine aimed at that weird breed of old men who hang around the TAB, race greyhounds and find something funny about the wacky lo-jinks of 'The Ettamoogah Pub' crowd.

“What’s the ‘P’ stand for?”

“She’s Melantha, the Sex Panther,” Eric said in his best ‘don’t you know anything?’  I failed to see what was supposed to be sexy about the feline metaphor:  It wasn’t like his Wank Book contained ‘Garfield’ strips.  Still, every generation brings a new generation of Batman, and everyone goes crazy over the concept of 'Who Will Play Catwoman?', leading to skin-tight spandex and the sight of a grown woman pretending to purr every two seconds: which, in real life, would be completely retarded, but I guess as a Wank Fantasy must push some Universal Button in straight guys.  Is it the whole unsubtle 'licking cream' metaphor?

Steve complimented Eric on his taste.  “She’s bloody sexy, mate.  I got her record last week”.

I was curious.  “What does she sound like?”

He shrugged.  “I didn't buy it to listen to it.”

That wasn’t enough for Eric, whose face literally was bathed in a beatific glow, or possibly the embarrassed flush of anticipatory wanking.  “You have it?  Can I borrow it?”

“I already leant it to Andy,” Steve said.  “You’ll have to wait.”

Eric frowned.  Andy was far cooler than Eric, and hated Eric’s guts because he said all the girls couldn’t stand him, and he’d end up looking like a loser by association.  As cruel as it sounds, it’s good to know at least one of us actually had a clue about the opposite sex, because girls really loathed Eric.  He had anti-charisma.

Still, this wasn’t enough for Eric, who won Steve over with the lend of a couple of Commodore 64 games, a Bananarama record, and a Toto Coelo pin-up that he had ‘two of’, as long as we could go over and get it from Andy ‘right away’.

One ten minute walk over to Andy’s later and the three of us ran into his mother and sister as they were pulling out of the driveway.

“He’s inside,” his mother said, far more interested in reversing the car than talking to the three of us.  “Let yourself in the back door”.

“Hi Carrie!”  Eric waved at Andy’s older, completely-untouchable sister, who had never acknowledged his existence in any way whatsoever, since he was just a combination of pimples 'n' pubey stubble in grey-zip-up K-Mart shoes, and gave off the desperate stench of A Guy Who Spends A Lot Of Time With His Wank Book.  True to form, she suddenly looked very interested in the contents of her handbag until the car was out of sight.  I was struck once again with wonder at his magical power of repulsion.

As we walked around the back, Eric said Carrie had “Totally smiled at me”.  I often thought he operated on his own reality when it came to women.

“Then you don’t want the record anymore?” I asked.  I didn’t like Andy much either, and this expedition was so uninteresting to me by this stage that even watching ‘Simon Townsend’s Wonder World’ was looking good by comparison.

Steve stopped by the door.  “Just shut up, Eric, and I’ll get the record of him.”

I nodded at this.  “Just don’t say anything, because if he knows you want it he’ll keep it just to screw you over”.

Even Eric saw the logic here, and mimed buttoning his lip.

With our exaggerated mission of Being Quiet, it made perfect sense that we would open the door without being heard by Andy, which is how we discovered him squatted back on his haunches passing beyond the moment of no return, as he proceeded to give a facial to Steve’s copy of Melantha’s debut / only album, ‘Sexual Connexual’, and whilst he wasn't playing the record, his hand was surely moving at 45 rpm.

This was definitely something I did not wish to see, but I did note that at least it was still in the protective plastic sleeve.

Regardless, Steve was still horrified.  “Why the fuck are you doing that?”

I got the sense Andy was more angry at being interrupted, if anything.  “Well, what the fuck else would I be doing with it?”

Having bought and heard the single many years later for nostalgia’s sake, I understand his logic completely.

#04 - The Electric Suffragettes' Ice Cream Social - My Lovely Lollipop (1969)

The Electric Suffragettes' Ice Cream Social were a cartoon band created by Allied Farmers to compete with General Foods, whose line of cereal box records by ‘The Archies’, ‘The Jackson 5’ and ‘The Banana Splits’ had drastically increased their market share in the sugaring up the pre-teen set at breakfast.

They were a somewhat-derivative bunch of teenage mystery-solving musicians, including:

- cravat-and-Roger-McGuinn-glasses-wearing guitarist / singer MacArthur Parker;

- mini-skirted blonde bombshell bassist Jane Fender;

- keyboard player Abbey Rhodes, (who was possibly the prototype of ‘Ghost World’s’ Enid); and

- eternally-hungry, love-bead-and-fur-vest-wearing drummer Lenin McCarthy.

They were assisted on tambourine by their comic relief canine companion, Scooby Tuesday, which made no sense to my learned six year old mind, since a dog obviously would have no skill at percussion.  Why I didn’t take this logic further and realise he wouldn’t have been able to talk either, (admittedly, with an obvious speech impediment that meant every word started with an ‘R’), is still beyond me.

They were obviously a poor imitation of the real thing, but upon reading the cereal box that promised that if I sent in five box tops I’d not only receive a copy of ‘a full-length comic adventure!', but also an ‘extra-groovy’ vinyl record, I put such apprehensive thoughts out of my mind, and proceeded to make myself sick by eating the rest of the box in one sitting, so my parents would have to buy more.

They really made you work for it too.  Boxes of ‘Cap’n Ellis Dee’s Rainbow Melts’ obviously respected the laws limiting sugar content in breakfast cereal aimed at children by being at least a whopping couple of micrograms under the limit.  They were fortified with fruit, (‘Real Chunks of Haight-Ashberries’), and to this day, my excessive binging turned me off eating the bright, multicoloured berries for life, though I occasionally find myself daydreaming fondly of them.

I sent the required box tops away, and spent what seemed like months dying each time the mailman went past without delivering anything package-sized.  Of course it finally turned up after I’d written it off, and switched my allegiance to the more prosaic Rice Bubbles, who were promising me my very own ‘unbreakable Skippy plate’, (which, incidentally, wasn’t).

Of course, I read the comic first, where the gang solved the groovy mystery of the ‘Kandy-Koloured Klown Ghost’, and, having saved the day, spent the last panel preparing to play a song.  To my eyes, this would seem rather anticlimactic after wreaking havoc through a Candy Factory and foiling a villain disguised in a Day-Glo bedsheet’s perfect scheme in a somewhat pesky fashion, and also somewhat presumptuous a measure of your average candy production line worker’s fondness for cheesy teenybopper music, but they picked up their instruments regardless and froze in mid-frame in that 'We're rocking out' pose I recognise from bands that simply don't.  The - patronising - type underneath hyped the multimedia experience:  ‘Now play the record and you too can hear their fab song!’

The record was multicoloured vinyl, and still is a beautiful sight to behold.  My sister and I immediately ran to my room, put it on the portable record player, and proceeded to dance around like idiots.  I was doing what I thought rock stars did, which was basically pretending to play a tambourine in a two-second, limited-animation loop.  My sister had perfected a similar two-second shimmy from watching Kitty Jo from ‘the Cattanooga Cats’.  Who needed anything else?  Based upon their illustrated instrumentation, Josie and the Pussycats didn't even have a bassist, which in retrospect makes me think they would have sounded more like the White Stripes.

Whilst to the untrained eye we might have seemed like stupid kids being stupid, we were both well aware that we were training for our obvious futures as Rock Stars.  We weren’t concerned with such mundane trivialities as fame, groupies, drugs and alcohol!  Could a Grammy Award or a drunken blowjob compete with the thrill of being chased by a werewolf down a seemingly-endless hallway in a spooky house after midnight, constantly passing strangely similar bookcases and paintings, whilst our latest Top 10 groovy hit played in the background, emitting from some ill-defined aural source?

The record was an acceptable prediction of our obvious future to the pair of us, being totally far out to our pre-teen ears, so we immediately put it on again and started singing it loudly to each other as we danced.

Without warning, the bedroom door slammed open, and my furious-looking father stomped across the room and ripped the needle off the vinyl with an enormous screech that was probably heard by the musicians who originally recorded it.

“Awwww!” we both said, putting the whine in ‘Why?’

He looked down as us, so very tall.  I hadn’t seen him this mad since he found me reading the comics that were hidden in bedroom cupboard, which seemed to involve some fuzzy-haired siblings who were obsessed with lawn clippings, for some unfathomable reason.

“You are never,” he said, with ‘never’ almost literally appearing etched in bold type into the air between us, “to sing that song again!”

Then he stomped out with the record in hand, leaving us obviously confused, but we both knew better than to question him.  We retreated to the safety of the Stone Pony’s ‘Different Drum’, but That Record That Made Dad Mad became family legend.

My sister reminded me of this the other week, so I searched through his old boxes of vinyl records and turned it up.  My jaw hit the floor as I played it, so I just had to rip it from the vinyl.  What were they thinking?  No wonder the ‘soon to be a NBC Saturday Morning Cartoon!’ didn’t eventuate.

#03 - R.F. - In The Year 2010 (1980)

Like the preceding entry, this is more android futurism, so I don’t have a lot more to say on the topic.  R.F. are desperately obscure, even for this blog, to the extent that I simply can’t find any information about them, though I remember hearing this single as a child and being thrilled it at how modern and futuristic it sounded, since it was the 70’s, and mankind was obviously doomed, though in that particular way of the time that suggested people would probably be wearing Unisex Jumpsuits as it happened.

However, it does bring back this roughly contemporaneous memory:

I was a very lonely kid, since, besides my sister, there were only three other children in my street, all of them girls.  I soon learnt not to play with them, especially as a group, because then it would always devolve into one of two games, the first being “Let’s put make up on him!”  One of the Scary Twins from next door was the school High Jumping star, so there was no outrunning her, and the combined weight of four older girls were always enough to overpower me.

Besides which, they never did a good job at it.  I’d always grimly accept my fate, but would always get my hopes up when they handed me the mirror:  maybe this time I’d look like Gene Simmons.  Of course, I’d be eternally-disappointed:  the makeover was always Pure John Waters.  (When the New Romantics came around, I remember being very relieved that I was too young to have to bother trying to slap it on like Nick Rhodes).

The second game was ‘Beauty Pageant’, which would mean being forced to sit in a chair in the backyard, whilst all four girls ran back and forth into the house, taking forever to change into a variety of different outfits for the ‘Fashion’ section.  As boring as that was, at least it wasn’t the Talent section, which usually devolved into someone singing a song, (usually from ‘Grease’), or what can only charitably be described as ‘Interpretive Dance’ with all the skill of Isadora Duncan... after her famous car ride.

Then would come the moment of truth:  I’d have to who was the most beautiful, which meant four sets out eyes boring into your very soul, each one clearly indicating that It Had Better Be Me, Or Else.  I got out of this by discovering my inner Kissinger and saying that it was “so hard to make a choice, because you’re all so beautiful” and suggesting that “I wasn’t sure” about whomever I picked, and maybe they’d “have to do it again”.  This meant I’d have to sit through it four times, so everyone would win at least once.  It was deathly boring, but far less painful to my physical being than only playing it once.

Playing with the girls was always traumatic, so I was usually happy to be left out, or at least that’s what I thought until the twins appeared at our front door with an envelope for my sister.  As always, some squealing was involved, so I went to ask what was going on.

My sister explained.  “It’s a Birthday Invitation!  It’s tomorrow.”

Though I’d never been invited to one, I’d heard about these at school:  other Kids had Birthday Parties and invited all their friends.  It was supposed to be ‘Neat Fun’.  Cake and lollies were definitely involved.

“Wow,” was all I could say, before the girls resumed their over-excited discussion of what was going to be The Best Birthday Party Ever.

Ever so casually, I happened to mention I wasn’t doing anything tomorrow.

Their conversation didn’t falter, so I mentioned that I’d have to be back at home in time for ‘The Wonderful World Of Disney’, which was my Sunday Night ritual, if my sister didn’t want to watch ‘Young Talent Time’.

That got Merrideth’s attention.  “You’re NOT INVITED!”  She always was the Twin with the mean streak, and was clearly relishing this.  I once saw her call her grandmother a ‘stupid old bag’ to her face, and when I told her that wasn’t very nice, she punched me and said ‘she can’t tell anyway’.

Not to say Catherine didn’t have her moments either.  “It’s for GIRLS ONLY.”

I didn’t know what to say, so fell back on reverse psychology.  “Fine!  I didn’t want to come to your stupid birthday party anyway.”

Which, of course, never works:  “Fine!  Go away then, Slime-on!  We have to discuss the party!”

“O.K. Fine!”  I’d show them.  I’d stomp away, and they’d feel guilty, and then they’d have to invite me.

10 minutes of sitting on the backyard swings later, lazily scraping the dirt with my sandals instead of swinging, I realised they weren’t coming.  My burden was heavy - if I looked in the bathroom mirror, surely the words ‘NOT INVITED’ surely would be clearly-visible on my forehead.  I couldn’t go to school on Monday, because then they’d All Know.

What do you do in this situation?  Well, if you were me, the obvious logical progression of events was to build my very own robot for a best friend, because that would definitely Show Them All.

Of course, I had absolutely zero understanding of electronics, but I knew that wouldn’t matter:  books and movies had shown me that kids ended up with Robot Friends all the time.  You’d build a robot, and then Something Would Happen:  being struck by lightning; magical wiring; your four-eyed friend called Brains; or that crazy old inventor from up the road.  (Kids always were friends with crazy professors, unfortunately I only had Old Ray in my street, the elderly widower whom our mothers clearly instructed us to be polite to if he said hello, but that ‘if he invited us inside, we were to say no and come back home right away’).

Of course, I knew deep down that this wouldn’t really happen.  My childhood was always filled with hope that something Out Of The Ordinary would happen, only to be repeatedly shown that Nothing Ever Did, which soon meant the Scripture Lesson Nuns learnt to hate the sight of me in their classes, with a rather Unchristian passion.  But I only needed to give them the impression that I’d built a Cool Robot Friend to fool them long enough to change their minds and invite me to their party.  Obviously, I’d be having so much fun with my Robot Friend, that I’d really have to think about it, because a boring old party wouldn’t possibly be anywhere near as much fun as Robot-related hi-jinks, but maybe I could tear myself away for a couple of hours...

As my sister spent the following morning preparing for the party, I made preparations of my own.  Mum had recently been given some glass saucepans, tinted a sexy seventies orange, the larger box for which made a perfect torso.  The smaller saucepan box was a good-sized head.  Cutting up the long cardboard tubes my father had bought home from work made perfect arms and legs capped off by dissected paper plate hands and feet.  Wrapping everything in aluminium foil gave a convincing robot-style effect, until I realised you couldn’t draw on it, which I solved by drawing suitably-impressive electronics onto some butcher’s paper with crayon, and gluing it on top of it.  Still, the eyes weren’t quite impressive enough.  Two Patty Cake wrappers later, and I stepped back, satisfied.  I decided to call him Robbie, (because that’s obviously what you call a robot, don’t you know anything?)

The heavy work done, I set about preparing stage two of my cunning scheme.  I’d realised no-one would be fooled if the robot didn’t talk, so I’d glued the box of the head the right way on that I could simply pull back the cardboard tag, and open up the robot’s ‘brain cavity’, which was big enough to hide Dad’s portable tape recorder inside.  (Never mind the weight of the thing was probably heavier than the entire weight of the robot).

I had it all figured.  I locked myself in the bathroom for that ‘spooky electronic reverb’ effect, started the tape, counted to 100, and then started recording the things the robot would be saying to me IN A VOICE LIKE THIS.  I don’t think I have to even describe it.  It’d then count to twenty inside my head, and record the next line.  This way, all I had to do was to start it playing, and then the robot would be convincingly talking to me.

I managed to impress even myself.  This would totally work – even if Robbie was now too top-heavy to stand up by himself without my holding him, which I would obviously be doing because we were such good friends and all.

I took Robbie out to pre-emptively wow my sister with, but, of course, she had long left for the party by then, so I could only find my father, who was in the kitchen, reading the paper.

“I built a Robot!”

He didn’t look up, and just grunted something non-committal.

“He talks!”  I said, then waited for Robbie to talk.  Hadn’t it been one hundred by now?

I waited expectedly, until Dad eventually said “Look, I’m reading.  Go bother your mother.”

“Mmmmph mmm brmph,” said Robbie.  I’d forgotten that the tape recorder was now inside a sealed box wrapped in foil.

That was when Mum came in, who didn’t even give me time to explain I’d built a robot before she started lecturing me on the cost of aluminium foil, and that I should have asked before doing something like that.

“Mmmph mmmmph mmmm ooo,” said Robbie.

“Go play outside,” Dad said, so I did, though not before hearing him say something about it being “From your side of the family, Woman”.

I quickly did some ‘internal rewiring’, (ie. turning up the volume of the tape recorder as high as it would go), counted to 50, the ever-so-casually strolled into the backyard with Robbie, knowing I’d be easily spotted over the low fence, and they’d have to be impressed.  I was so wrapped up in my performance that I was halfway to the swing set before I noticed the neighbouring back yard was completely empty.

It turned out they were all in the front yard, and it wasn’t just my Sister and Cathy.  There were at least six other girls there.  Who were they all?  How did they know the Twins when they never seemed to leave our block?  They were all squealing and laughing.  Were they putting makeup on someone else?  But that was *our* thing.

A couple of minutes later, I restarted the whole performance in the front yard, but quickly realised the high hedge along their border meant that they could only see me if I jumped up and down on the verandah, and then only just.  Since Robbie was far smaller than me, I would have had to hold him above my head.  I slumped in defeat, until I jumped the necessary foot into the air when Robbie suddenly screamed “MY NAME IS ROBBIE I AM A ROBOT”.

More ‘rewiring’, followed, until I realised the only way they’d be able to see me was if I nonchalantly played in their driveway, and whilst I’d like to say that would have been too transparently desperate an action for me to have done, I did it anyway.

Robbie and I stood at the curb, with me laughing over-enthusiastically at some imagined witticism from Robbie, in that particular way kids trying to look like they’re having more fun than you when they clearly aren’t do.

“Oh Robbie, that’ so funny,” I said.

The girls noticed me right away, and Merrideth ran up to the fence protectively.  “Go away Slime-on.  You’re know you’re Not Invited.”

“Huh.  I don’t want to come to your stupid party,” I lied.

“Sure.... Why are you here then?”

Robbie instantly jumped in with:  “HELLO MY NAME IS ROBBIE I AM A ROBOT”

I was vindicated, though rushing through my speech, just in case.  “Robbie is my best friend and he’s a robot too and I’m just showing him around the neighbourhood”.

She started her contemptuous reply: “Just go away, that’s the dumbest...”

Robbie blurted out:  “THAT WAS A GREAT GAME WE PLAYED EARLIER YOU ALWAYS THINK OF THE BEST GAMES TO PLAY SIMON”

Merrideth was starting to look really angry, since the other girls had gathered by the fence by now.

“You’re ruining my party, you lameo”.

I snorted again.  “I don’t want to go to...”

“WE CAN GO FOR A FLY USING MY ROCKET LEGS IF YOU WANT SIMON”, Robbie blurted again.

“He flies?” Catherine said, contemptuously.

“Yes, he does.” I lied.  “He flew me to the top of the hill and back earlier”.  I thought that would impress her.

It didn’t.  “Prove it then.”

Oops - quick, what was a legitimate-sounding excuse?  “He doesn’t feel like it.”

“I’m going to go get Mum and she’ll tell you you have to go away and not bother us.”

“Go away!” my sister added , clearly getting angry, or embarrassed, or both.

“Robbie and I have lots of stuff to do any...”

Robbie interupted again.  “HA HA HA THAT WAS A FUNNY JOKE YOU TOLD EARLIER SIMON YOU ALWAYS TELL FUNNIER JOKES THAN ANYONE”.  In retrospect, I should have programmed him to be just a tad more subtle with his sycophantism.

How had this happened?  All the girls were walking away by now.  Merrideth stuck her middle finger up at me, and said both Robbie and I could “Sit on this and rotate,” then followed.

“Fine then,” I said.

“Is he really your brother?” one girl I’d never seen before asked my sister.

“No.  Mum told me he was adopted.”  And with that, they went inside.

“Fine then,” I said again, to no-one in particular.

“THAT’S NICE OF YOU TO INVITE ME BUT I NEED TO GO AND CHANGE MY OIL BUT SIMON SHOULD GO TO YOUR PARTY WHEN I’M DOING THAT”

And with that I realised my friendship with Robbie was inevitably doomed.  He was making my already socially-awkward situations even more awkward.  I recycled him into a Scooby Doo-style Haunted House by the next weekend.

All that being said, you can easily see why I would choose to side with the androids when the Inevitable Robot Apocalypse happened.

As a footnote, my sister was kind enough to bring me back a piece of birthday cake that no-one had wanted, because it had ’fallen on the floor’.  I’d tell you I was too proud to eat it, but I suspect you won’t believe me.

#02 - Gunter Liebe - Plaz-tik Sex-O-Matik (1980)

Background information taken from the now sadly-defunct, if rightly-named ‘The Web’s Only Gunter Liebe WebSeite [awkward sic]’.

By the time I was nine in 1980, I was more than ready for whatever the new sound was going to be, for I was deathly tired of disco, and the ponderous rock operas my father favoured. Punk and new wave weren’t exactly easy to access in Rural Australia, though I was often given glimpses of something new and fun happening via ‘The Kenny Everett Video Show’. Sure, I could watch Ainslie Abbott and Sideshow Alley awkwardly miming to their latest single in a stark white room, but where on earth did you actually buy a copy for your own?

As such, TV really was my only way of seeing the interesting bands, for they definitely weren’t played on the radio in Australia. To this day, I’m still not entirely sure I’ve ever discovered a band via the radio.

The new wave music I heard was intriguing and exciting, but it was only with the increased need for a visual component that I realised the eighties were going to be really different. The first clear indication I had of just how different things were going to be was from seeing a video clip of Gunter Liebe performing ‘Technical Girl’ as a fill-in bumper, run between the episodes of ‘The Goodies’ and ‘Doctor Who’ on the Government-Run ABC channel.

It was my sister who caught my attention, spitting out each syllable for dramatic effect. “What. Is. That?”

‘That’ was entirely right. We were both too young to have lived through Glam Androgyny, and never would have come across it even if we had been. To quote Luke Haines of the Auteurs: “There was no androgyny round our way”. Still, I thought, being older and far more worldly with her extra two-and-a-half-years, that my sister could obviously clue me in. “Is that a girl, or a boy?”

My sister rolled her eyes. “She’s wearing pedal pushers and high heels!”

Sure, and sprayed on PVC, which was only for girls, but something was still not right to my eyes.

“But why does she have a palm tree on her head? That’s just dumb”. It was bright pink, and it would be another 20 years before I’d see it again, for now I recognise it as some kind of prototype Croydon Facelift.

Then ‘she’ started singing, and all bets were off. She had a worryingly deep voice. Was it a dude? How did it frug in pumps that high, when high heels for my sister always ended in flat-on-her-face humiliation rather than grown-up sexiness, whatever she thought that was? And where was it from? How on earth did it manage to rhyme ‘Technical’ with ‘Girl’?

“See. It’s a boy!” I said. “He’s singing about a girl”.

“ Duh! She might be a lezzo”. I didn’t know what a ‘lezzo’ was, but this proved my sister knew nothing: It’s the Aging Male Rock Stars who look like Old Lesbians.

Before I could ask any of these pressing questions, the camera pulled back from his/her frantic shimmying to reveal, (you guessed it), a stark white room, containing the rest of the band, the sum total of which was one dude in pink tights and sunglasses operating what looked like a computer bank that belonged in U.N.I.T. Headquarters.

I was obviously confused. There was supposed to be a sweaty drummer doing drums fills requiring a stick tossed high in the air on every bar, and a guitarist whizzing his fingers in a blur to prove to you he had learnt all his scales, so was going to damn well show you every note even if you didn’t want to hear them. Where was the bass player, leaning back and closing his eyes, lost in ‘the groove man’. Where was the stupid makeup and explosions?

Basically, where was everything that was so de rigueur, (and desperately lame), about rock music in the 70’s, which meant I thought all the 60’s stuff was far, far better? All I could come out with was, “Where’s the rest of the band?”

“They’re not a *real* band!” my sister said, laughing. “Eewwww. They have no friends!”

Light bulb time! I had no friends, which I’d thought had put a damper on my future career as a mystery-solving musician, which had irritated my teacher to no end on Career Day, when he’d pulled my half-completed drawing of my fully tricked-out mystery-solving van out of my hands with a disgusted expression, before telling me to start again, and ‘just be a fireman or policeman like all the other boys’. More on that in a future post.

But here was the evidence it would work. There was only two of them in this room, but the sound that was coming out, although desperately cheap, was a Band Style Effect, and I realised that would probably do for me. Finding five other friends was an intimidating Holy Grail Quest, but now all I had to do was find one other bastard as sad as I was.

Taking this logic further, I realised I didn’t want to go to all the trouble of having to slip into PVC and shimmy like a hyperactive child on a red cordial binge to get attention, so set out paying attention to every keyboard player I saw from then on, determined to become someone else’s Other Sad Bastard, standing in the background.

I have to thank Gunter Liebe for this revelation, if nothing else, though the clip was over seemingly before it began, and I realised I’d have to pay closer attention next time, because I wondered where the drum sound was coming from when there was no drums.

My sister had noticed. “Oh wow... You liked them!”

“No, I didn’t!” Of course, I did. Whilst I can’t say they were any good, they were clearly doing something New and Different.

“They had no friends, and they were lame and you... liked... them!”

“I didn’t. Leave me alone!”

She woudn't let up.  “They’ll play them every day and you’ll watch ‘cause you think they’re neato mosquito!”

This is where she was wrong. The ABC never did play ‘Technical Girl’ again, because in the space of the 2 ½ minutes during which that song was airing, the station received a then-record number of phone complaints from outraged viewers over the ‘excessively lewd’ bump and grinding on display by ‘the flaming fruit’, especially during a time where innocent and impressionable children might be watching. (Which is the exactly time when you could usually catch a Hot Gossip video, but no-one was complaining about sexy thrusting if it’s done by pretty girls and Sarah Brightman).

The first result of this was the ABC was very timid with its bumpers in future. Thus, if you’re Australian and of a similar era to me, you can probably sing every cartoon-frog-delivered word of Roger Glover’s ‘Butterfly Ball’ from memory, because it was almost run every single day after that.

The second result of this was instant demonization by the tabloids, talkback radio and religious groups. Mike Willisee led a handwringing panel discussion on his nightly news show over the state of pop music, where:

- red-faced religious leader Fred Nile decreed this was a clear sign of declining moral standards;

- Molly Meldrum promised that ‘Gunter Liebe’ was a degenerate and would never appear on 'Countdown’, the nation’s leading youth music programme, which he clumsily hosted, before once again mentioned Elton John was ‘A Close Personal Friend’;

- Michael Gudinkski conveniently forgot his Mushroom record label was made a lasting concern by the similarly-controversial-for-their-time Skyhooks and reminded viewers that ‘Split Enz’ was a family-friendly alternative, who just happened to have a new album out now.

The third result? Gunter Liebe realised that everyone was suddenly paying attention to him, having gone from total obscurity to downfall of the nation in the space of two minutes... ...and that he really, really liked the attention.

He was all over the news for weeks, happy to throw soundbites at anyone with a microphone. “I am the future,” he said. “You are all remnants of the past. You have every right to fear me.”

Was he out to corrupt the nation’s youth?

“The youth of this nation is already corrupted. I am simply a mirror”.

On the national news, one interviewer asked him if he was a Homosexual. His response: “The barriers between the sexes will fall. In the future, everyone will be AC/DC”.

This statement confused me no end. I thought AC/DC was the dreadfully dull music favoured by those scary, greyhound-muscled older boys with cigarette packets rolled into their sleeve, who made every after-school walk home a possible matter of life and death.

Gunter also predicted that to survive the coming apocalypse, society would have to lose its humanity. I couldn’t have put it into words at that age, but between daily bully beatings, I didn’t see much evidence that society already hadn’t.

Such were the times. The Year 2000 was an impossible dream for a child my age, as mankind’s doom was guaranteed, from a myriad of grim possibilities. Either the government would become totalitarian; aliens would invade and exterminate; robots would become self-aware and enslave; overpopulation would force us resort to cannibalism; global thermonuclear war would scorch the planet; Jesus would come back and prove his love for us, but only after all non-believers died in horrible apocalyptic fury; or Nostradamus would be right.

Gunter saw this. When asked if he had male or female groupies, he said “It’s confusing these days. The new frontier is love between man and android”. When asked to explain further, Gunter helpfully pointed out it would be explained on his forthcoming single, proving he certainly knew the art of the bally, if nothing else.

The outrage when the single emerged came from all sides, including the Catholic Diocese of Australia; Sisters In Solidarity, a politically-far-left feminist wymyn’s collective; and The Spastic Council of NSW; all of whom had received letters concerned letters of outrage over the lyrics, demanding immediate action be taken, all of which had been helpfully sent by Gunter under various pen-names to begin with.

The tabloid journalist fury was in overdrive. Some of the papers chose to not even print the name of the single. When Mike Willisee once again used his programme to wonder ‘What is to be done?’, they showed a silent excerpt from the video, due to the ‘controversial nature’ of the lyrics.

I was in awe. What on *earth* could be so bad? I *had* to get the single.

The obvious problem was that I was 9, and had no idea how to buy a record, and doubted I could have talked my Dad into getting it for me, as his opinion on the Gunter Liebe subject was perfectly clear by the turd-sniffing expression on his face whenever he appeared on the news.  (You've seen the exactly same look on display on every Disney Cartoon Baddie, ever).  Besides which, Mike Willisee took much pleasure in explaining that ‘Plaz-tik Sex-O-Matik’ was banned by ‘all good retailers’.

This was Gunter’s mistake: with no radio play, television exposure or access to consumers, his career really had nowhere to go. Left with boxes of unsold copies of the single, The Downfall Of The Nation was rapidly replaced as the Boogeyman De Jour by something else and vanished back into obscurity. No-one has ever managed to track him down since.  (Possibly. About 8 years later, I could swear that’s him out of drag playing the bass in the video for the Choirboys’ bogan classic ‘Run To Paradise’ - a record those Scary Smoking Boys would have been all over).

Of course, he had long faded from my memory, until I, (very unexpectedly), discovered a copy of the single in a Second-Hand Charity Store, inbetween the copies of the requisite Dead Granny Records you find at those places: Mrs Miller's Drunk Again; Val Doonican Moos About Ireland; Someone Resembling A Beatific Paedo Sings Danny Boy And 11 Other Songs; A Clockwork Moog Plays The Age Of Aquarius And Other Far-Out Hits!; Music To Drive Your Truck And Beat Your Wife By; and the inevitable Scottish Highland Bagpipe Platoon Upskirt Extravaganza. They all have that unmistakable scent of Iced Vo-Vos, Dust and Despair that these days makes me afraid she's not really sure if her name is Veronica.

So, discovering a copy of ‘Plaz-tik Sex-O-Matik’ there instantly triggered off strange thoughts in my brain: someone had A Very Kinky Granny. Did she shuffle with her kettle into the lounge to pour her tea, then place the record on her Fully-Automatic Phonogram, then sit down and slowly sip her Chamomile, whilst feeling some kind of illicit thrill over the fact that the other egg-suckers from the Country’s Woman’s Association were clueless about her sexual deviancy: ‘Whips and Chains! Call me names!’

Still, fate had delivered Gunter back into my life, so 5 cents seemed a perfectly reasonable price to pay to finally hear experience the society-threatening, explicit pornography of ‘Plaz-tik Sex-O-Matic’.  I hurried home with a speed that surprised me.

Much like my childhood fear of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, fuelled by horrific, hush-whispered playground stories told by kids who had claimed to have seen it, but obviously were lying through their teeth, I was hugely disappointed. How jaded did I get over the years that I now could only hear sordid, futuristic sexual deviance as something hopelessly-quaint, like the concept of a meal in a pill, picnics on the moon, or self-driving cars with bubble-domes?

The Future never really did happen for me. I-Pods seem damn unimpressive compared to the concept of getting a Happy Ending from C-3PO. And you know he’d be totally into it.

#01 - Bling Baybez - The Girl U Wish U Were (2010)

Warning: Video contains some NSFW language.

I’ve recently gotten back into vinyl records, so have been trolling Ebay, looking for lost records from my youth. The aim of this blog is to highlight some of the more ridiculous ones.

This first post is more of an aside, so as to get the grumpy old man out of the way.  Recently, I happened to be sitting on the bus behind two teenage girls who, although they got on together, were soon both cocooned away in their individual oblivious bubbles of Mobile Phone Texting and I-Pod Listening. I was feeling old and grumpy, when one of the girls suddenly spoke.

“Oh Jayleen, this is that free song I was talkin’ about. It’s soooo good.”

She offered one of the earbuds to her friends, and they listened, as I felt slightly guilty for being so cynical about music no longer being communal.

“This is fully sick!” Presumably Jayleen said. “Who is it?”

Her friend read the screen. “It’s ‘The Girl U Wish U Were’ by the ‘The Bling Babies’.”

“You should fully play that at Taylor’s party. It’s wicked jam”.

Then someone’s mobile beeped a message and they went back to their own bubbles.

I would have forgotten about it, but then a few days later my friend Shane was raving about how good music was in the last few months. He may be 40, but he’s a teenage girl in spirit. He’s big into dance music, and I’m Definitely Not. He showed me his latest dance compilation CD and pointed out his favourite was ‘The Girl U Wish U Were’.

I explained how I’d heard two girls on the bus talking about it. “Well,” he said. “They would, they’re soooo awesome”.

“OK,” I said, trying to not sound too interested, whilst not wanting to hurt his feelings.

“I’ll put it on,” he said.

“That’s ok...” I started, but by then it was too late, which is how I finally heard the song.

After a minute, he was singing along, at least until I noticed my face. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s so...” I was lost for words, eventually settling for “...Basic”. I explained that dance music used to have harmonies, and counter-rhythms, and breakdowns. This sounded the same all the way through, and the rhythm was simply THUMP CLAP THUMP CLAP.

“That’s how dance music is now!” he said. “Lady Gaga’s made everything minimalistic, cause it’s really cool. This song is huge!”

Confused as to why anyone would like this, I consulted Metacritic for reviews, and was confronted by a 10 out of 10 review from Pitchfork Media, speaking of ‘woofer –munching synth lines’ and the ‘combative taunts’ of the lyric. The vocals are ‘sped up, slowed down and stretched out. The effect is almost psychotic, suggesting three or four inner monologues fighting over smashed emotions.’

I feel like I’ve wandered into some kind of alternate universe where Bad is Good.

They linked to a free download of ‘The Girl U Wish U Were’, complete with what modern cover design has devolved into: cheesy photoshop done by a friend. Did someone really think using the ‘Impact’ Font would look professional, rather than some Caturday / LOLCats pictures?

I’ll put it up here as illustration. Whilst I'm going to post some cheesy, awful, goofy very obscure records that I grew up with during my life as a pop consumer, I truly believe not one of them is anywhere near as soul-crushingly bad as this.