#08 - The Parisian Roundabout - A Painting Of Eloise

Deciding that records were really fun, but with my father wanting me nowhere near his expensive Hi-Fi system, my Sister and I were handed down my mother’s portable record player from her art school days.  It was like a little suitcase, with one mono speaker in front.  You’d flip it open, plug it in, and you’d be off.   There was a space in the lid to lock your favourite eight or so records in place, and a multiple speed selection switch:  16 - 33 - 45 - 78.

Lacking any records of my own, my father gave me a copy of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, ‘The White Album’, 'Sgt Pepper' and a bunch of other psychedelic singles that he obviously thought were now old hat compared the ultra-modern futurism of the ‘Saturday Night Fever’ soundtrack and that interminable Jeff Wayne’s ‘War Of The Worlds’ thing.  His taste was so bad compared to the great selection he gave me that I often wonder if they actually were his records to begin with.

I’d lie on the floor, put on these records, and just *vanish* into a whole different world of backmasking, spooky echo, weird sound effects and Random Interjections Of Classical Instruments To Prove You’re Not Just Making Pop Music For Kids.  The end result being that they’re perfect records for kids, because there’s always something new happening every couple of seconds, and, like most children’s entertainment, it probably involves talking animals.

The flipside of which was records actually aimed at children, which, even as a kid, made me feel eye-rollingly patronised.   If there’s a record that talks down to children more than Burl Ives’ ‘Little White Duck’, I’ve yet to hear it.  Or, worse still, The Chipmunks.  I’ve never understood the obviously-cross-generational-appeal of hearing the popular songs of the day completely Phoned In by an uncaring backing band, whilst some barely-intelligible squeaky voices sing the melody, or possibly ‘Hail Satan’:  I mean, who could tell?  It still was nowhere near as hilarious to my sister and I as all fifty seconds of ‘Wild Honey Pie’.

Now *that’s* a confronting record for a kid.  It stopped us dead our (vinyl) tracks, until the only obvious reaction was outright hilarity.

“This is *so* stupid,” I’d say.  “It just goes BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING and then stops.”  (It totally does!)

My sister thought about this.  “It sounds like Mrs. Mason,” (our sour-faced elderly nemesis from two doors up), “on a trampoline”.  Which meant I had to skip the needle back again, at least for the mental image alone.

“Nope - it sounds like Mandy Simpson running after the school bus”, (who was our school’s ‘Glandular Problem’ Poster Child).

So my sister put it on again.  After 20 seconds:  “Nah-uh, it’s Boo chasing cars”.

This was the Red Setter from the house across the street, an animal that wasn’t definitely wasn’t like normal dogs.  I once saw it knock itself unconscious running headlong into a brick wall, and it didn’t even have the excuses of a) not seeing the wall; or b) to have been chasing a cat or something.  We thought it was dead, which would have been OK with me, meaning it might be now safe to walk to and from school without it endlessly trying to hump the legs of every kid who passed, except it was taller on its hind legs than most teenagers, leading to a horrible daily ritual of the slowest screaming kid being basically rugby-tackled by Boo and sexually-assaulted, (which is why I often chose to walk home with Mandy Simpson, thinking that at least this way I wasn’t the slowest, but had to give up her corpulent protection when she mistook my doggy-lipstick-induced-cowardice for romantic interest and asked me to ‘Go With Her’).

The Scary Twins dared Hot Gossip to poke Boo with a stick, which, as every kid knows, is the only sure test of determining if Something Is Dead Or Not.  She outright refused, claiming she’d been ‘gotten’ up near Old Ray’s house a few weeks ago.  “It was horrible,” was all she would say.  Further coaxing only made her add, “And *wet*.   No-one else was game either, so in clear violation of the end of every childhood ‘faithful dog’ movie that ends with snot-nosed-yet-stoic-beyond-their-years youngsters shooting and / or  burying their canine companions, we simply went elsewhere and decided Boo was someone else’s problem.

All that being said, even then I thought my sister was clearly wrong.  ‘Wild Honey Pie’ doesn’t sound like a running Red Setter:  that always sounds like the theme from ‘Roobarb’.  Still, I doubt These Kids Today ever have these kinds of discussions about, say, a Lady Gaga record.

After our eighth-listen, our sides were sore with laughter, and the tenor of discussion changed.

“I don’t get it.  Why on earth would you make a song like that?”

“Don’t you know anything?”  She sighed loudly, so worldly-wise with her nine-and-one-half years of experience.  “They were On Drugs”.

I only had the vaguest idea of what Drugs were exactly.  I mean, Fat Albert might have taught me that Smoking Was Bad For Some Vague Reason, but he also failed to explain to me why everyone did it anyway, especially Everyone’s Parents.  Sure, there were many exaggerated schoolyard legends about the Drug Horrors of ‘Go Ask Alice’, but I figured that was just something Teachers made up to scare children into behaving, like ‘Struwellpeter’ or ‘The Diary Of Anne Frank’.

Something was clearly wrong about what I’d been taught: if the Beatles had been using drugs, then how come none of them had written terrible books about the horrible things that happen to you on drugs, conveniently getting the manuscript finished before those horrible things killed them, requiring Someone Else Entirely to step in on the last few pages and say “By the way, she’s dead”, which I never thought was much of a twist ending?  It’s not like ‘Go Ask Alice’ is revealed to be a cookbook.

Still, I spent many more hours listening to these various psychedelic singles, and soon thought I had drugs all figured out:

-  they made you dress like a Day-Glo Victorian General;

- they let you talk to the animals, but in a far less crap way than Rex Harrison, (which gave me hope that maybe I could tell Boo that No Means No);

- you were always having a lot of fun, probably getting to bathe in jelly and custard on a daily basis;

- and you made thoroughly awesome fun music in a playful spirit.  This was far preferable to me than being as lame as Kiss, whom everyone at school was obsessed with.  To my childhood eyes, all those guys needed was some drugs and then they’d be much more fun.

Which, in a very apt circular fashion, brings me to the ‘The Parisian Roundabout’, whom, on first glance, I assumed was some kind of Carousel-based metaphor, and secretly-hoped was close to the Magic one, thinking that if some animal has something to say, then it might as well be Dougal.  As an adult, I still like to think they were chasing some kind of circus / fairground metaphor, rather than naming themselves after something as mundane as a giant traffic island.

The band was formed in late ’66 by former folk singer Bob Dilettante, critically-regarded as one of rock’s premier lyricists, despite poor album sales for titles such as ‘The Ripsnortin’Bob Dilettante’ and ‘Byway 61 Resurfaced’.  A chance meeting with ex-British Invasion hopeful, Reggie Van Gough Gough, lead to the formation of band designed to meld baroque music (via Reggie) with literature and art (via Bob) into ‘ultra-groovy pop’.

By the time they roped in bassist Davis Mavis and drummer Bongo Snarkey to record their first album, Bob was already growing disillusioned with the record company asking him to rewrite his lyrics into ‘something simple that teeny-boppers would want to hear’, culminating in being presented with a re-recorded main vocal ‘purely for consideration’ sung by an anonymous singer that changed the chorus from descriptions of painting to being about ‘a boy wanting to kiss a girl’.  This was an offense to his notions of high art, (even if the results sound more like pretentious bubblegum), and he left the band, which had no choice but to dissolve after Reggie soon after lost two fingers in a serious mishap whilst changing mellotron tape banks.

To make matter worse, the single was banned by the BBC for the line ‘I long to trip into your world’, meaning the song didn’t sell, and remains a cult classic occasionally referenced by cultish power pop figures like Jellyfish and Matthew Sweet, who counted the Roundabout as ‘possibly as big an influence as the Banana Splits’.  A mid-80’s cover version by English Goth Rock band ‘The Gloomy Doomed’ did go Top 10 in a few Eastern Bloc markets who undoubtedly mistook an attempt at faux-period recording as being The Now Sound of Western Teens!, but at least it stopped them listening to Nena Hagen.  Briefly.

I still love this.  It makes me want to be On Drugs, and Lots Of Them, but only those far-out 60’s drugs that made you into some kind of playful and silly love child of Lewis Carrol and Edward Lear, instead of what drugs actually turned out to be:  boring people sitting around doing nothing except having slow, boring, endless, unfocused conversations.  It’s basically like being trapped in a room with Paul McCartney during the Let It Be Sessions as he tries to explain his vision of the album to you in excruciating detail.  There’s not even any Jelly and Custard:  just a sour-faced Yoko Ono inflicting everyone with her mundane, puerile notions of What Constitutes Art.  As such, you can see why records like ‘A Painting Of Eloise’ can only prime a curious child for disappointment.

#07 - William, Maybe - Always Sunday Doomtown (1987)

‘William, Maybe’ were dubbed ‘The New Smiths’ by the NME for a brief spell back in early ’87, in that period between The Smiths and The Las, when anyone who even remotely glanced at a guitar in the pawn shop window was labelled ‘The Next Johnny Marr’.

The band were never destined for great popularity.  The first obvious problem was naming themselves after a work by obscure English Romantic Poet Calicia Dore: printsetters often forgot to include the comma, which lead to much confusion with the teenage scream pop element who believed fey, androgynous lead singer Heathcliff Trent was actually a flamboyant solo artist called William Maybe, backed by some boring, unsexy musicians.

This could have been easily cleared up if Trent had deigned to give an interview to, say, ‘Smash Hits’, but he deemed them unworthy, and would only talk to the Serious Music Press, who kept playing up the ‘Heathcliff Trent Is The Artist' angle to compensate, thereby also ignoring the terminally-anonymous Other Three, (who were nothing if not the ‘Sleeperblokes’ prototype).

Unfortunately, all this meant that when the debut single, ‘Always Sunday Doomtown’ arrived for sale, the general confusion all round meant it sunk with barely a ripple in the sea of Depressive mid-80’s Singles about boring people doing boring things in boring places. It was no surprise to me that Madchester had to happen: all the dopey, smiley teenagers were popular music’s penance for all the mopey, frowny teenagers of the preceding few years.

Even Trent’s sudden death a week later behind the wheel of a Morris Minor with his revealed-in-death-to-be transsexual girlfriend Cathy, only lead to a minor pop scandal, with no resulting increase in sales, but instant canonisation from the clove-cigarette-and-beret-wearing art school crowd.  To this day, if you see a girl with a Louise Brooks Bob,clutching her charcoals whilst dressed entirely in black, odds are good there’s a black-and-white Unhappy Snap of her stretched out on his grave in Yorkshire, albeit Photoshopped. ‘They were a band too good to last’, she’d probably say, sighing heavily, before suggesting a walk in the rain to a nearby non-American-franchised coffee shop to partake in a spiritual ‘l'heure verte’.

None of this mattered to me. I was a lonely teenager, over-sensitive and under-talented, convinced of my specialness whilst displaying absolutely no evidence of it. So, the logical course of action was to buy a bunch of singles about how resoundingly shit things were in crappy, eternally-rainy towns in Northern England, and thus get around in a calf-length black wool coat and scarf in the decidedly non-cold and excessively-arid surroundings of a rural Australian town. It didn’t matter. I was a northern lad in spirit.

Luckily, I was snapped out of this by my Eric, who had seen how crazy the girls at school were over Robert Smith and Heathcliff Trent, and decided that he too was a moody, misunderstood rebel outcast, as being one was obviously how you’d get girls. I can see why he’d pick that option: like me, it was easier than admitted no-one liked you because you were ugly and weird. It also seemed flawed logic. They always dated rugby players, no matter how much they'd scream over pop stars.

He decided my black coat wasn’t moody enough, and had to go one better, so went down to the Army Disposal store and returned with a German Uniform coat. Since Doc Marten’s were unavailable in our area, he had to make do with Army Combat Boots. Looking back, he looked less Heathcliff and more Future School Semi-Automatic Shooter. (I’m just glad that 80’s depressiveness required far less ammo than the 90's version, let alone far less hair product than the 00’s version).

I went with him to the dodgy store down the road from the school that would sell cigarettes to anyone in a school uniform – undoubtedly even a Kindergartener would have been able to walk away with a packet of Gold Label Benson and Hedges. He said he had decided to take up smoking, because it was ‘cool’. I had long before decided not to, because who had the kind of regular income a smoking habit required? It was hard enough scraping together money for books and records.

Still, encouraged by his certainty that we were on the right track, I started the long process of being cool with him. This resulted in many hours standing against walls at the Roller Disco, kicking rubbish around, waiting for girls to approach. None ever did. All the cigarette's had done was make him Smelly on top of the original Ugly.  Eventually, I started reading a book for something to do. And not even a fitting one, like Colin Wilson’s ‘The Outsider’. I was probably reading Stephen King.

“You can’t read!” he’d say. “That’s not cool!”

“But I’m bored! Can I at least go for a skate?” I hadn’t tried that since I went with the girl up the road five years previously, and the experience was marred by her singing every Olivia Newton-John song from the Xanadu Soundtrack. (I’m just thankful it was before the world was subjected to the horror of ‘The Grease Megamix’).

He wasn’t going to let me. “Don’t skate! That’s *really* uncool!”

So this led to more posing. I was starting to feel all these gorgeous, depressive pop singles were somewhat dishonest.  This wasn't all melodramatically bleak and romantic.  There was no wind off the moors blowing my hair about into something that might, by chance, resemble sexy.  No beautiful bleak desolation to stand alone in and make the fact that no-one loves you no less tolerable, but at least seemingly-noble.  All there was were squeaky wheels, cheap coloured bulbs, water-stained cement, and empty chip wrappers stained with tomato sauce.  It was just outright depressing.

Eventually, Eric realised his moody posing with an, (usually unlit), cigarette wasn't working.  (At least it wasn't a toothpick, the oral substitute for tough guys who don't want to get spotted by their Mums smoking).  No parade length line of cute teenage girls wondering who the mysterious loner+1 leaning on the wall near the Pepsi Machine was forming, so he decided to go one better and started wearing sunglasses at night, (‘like the song!’), which turned out to be the breaking point I didn't know I had.

“Now that’s really not cool!’ I said. “That’s just poxy! And that song *really sucked*”. (It is, and it does).

“Tom Cruise does it!”

This just lead to a heated argument where I refused to wear mine, or stand near him if he was wearing his.

“That’s OK with me,” he said. “I’ll reckon I’ll have more luck by myself”.

That was all I needed: I was off the hook. It seemed like a win-win situation to me: being cool was damn boring, and Eric had failed to realise that the moody, misunderstood outcast act doesn’t work because people think you’re mysterious and therefore interesting, it usually works because the people doing the posing are Good-looking to begin with. The pair of us, all pale and pimply, decidedly weren’t. Therefore, I officially decided to give up all adventures in Being Miserable, but kept the coat because it was useful in Winter.

Eric, however, didn’t, and decided the problem had to be the place, since it was hard to catch a girls eye when she’s whizzing unsteadily past with a gaggle of friends at 30kms an hour to the tune of Bananarama’s ‘ Venus’ awash with distant, cavernous Cheap P.A. Echo. As such, he soon abandoned the Roller Rink, and started hanging around the Bowling Alley instead. “I’ve realised there’s only one scene in town,” he explained over-enthusiastically. “And it’s the bowling scene”.