A Better Australia Day: concert review by Paul Nolan

Luke’s kind friend Paul Nolan who writes for the Sydney Arts Guide wrote us a little review for me to publish online and for us to save as a keepsake! How lovely is that!! C

The focus of the latest Clare Heuston studio concert was our diverse Australia, and our need to find a way to sing together. In particular this country’s reconciliation of past wrongs and the many true voices of musical creatives past and present rang true in fair dinkum voice.

The Australian musical accent has always sat boldly beside others on the global stage, as we were ably reminded of here.

The Better Australia Day concert was a substantial chronological medley highlighting in a very fair go our country’s diversity of comment, style, humour and our engaging sense of grit.

Whilst administrators still stumble over fundamental blocks of dealing with the effects of colonisation in all its horrific glory, the two massive sets heard here ensured any musical critics of the Aussie voice were given a right serve.  

Here was more than enough proof that local songwriters are so worthy, multi-hued and detailed when it comes to packaging narrative and getting stuff off their chest.

Songs made world famous even before You Tube were heard in a fresh light here. It dawned on me listening that the level of description and word-mongering of local writers is some of the best anywhere.

The true humours and colourful sentiments were nicely presented by the singers on the night in their sea of bonza flanelette. Some stunning covers have obviously been well-prepared by the keen and clever workin’ class persons with mentor Clare here.

And the icing in the lammo were two very beaut self-accompanied originals in premiere by Matilda Danta and Elizabeth Yung Cheung.

From the broad range of choices chucked pretty carefully on the barbie here, something of a decent Great Australian Songbook excerpt was started.

Even without Men At Work, Barnsey or Farnsey, feeling was still able to ring out true, to grab us by the throat and keep our interest like any fair beer garden chat. The ebb and flow of contrasted Aussie tides was quite deadly, to borrow a word from a community of survivors still battlin’ for real recognition.

From Luke Travis Tuite’s bold start with Bow River and later well-shaped heartstring storytelling of Missy Higgins, we also heard Teri Lianos’ beautifully intoned Truly,Madly Deeply from those classic nouveau-romantics Savage Garden. Then we went walkabout right through Cold Chisel, Crowded House, Olivia, expat Tina Arena (so nicely réalisé by Julie Le Roy) and many classic Aussie stars right up to the hectic Kate Miller-Heidke and the demanding modern art song tone of Montaigne, whose character and complexity was poignantly presented by Edwina Howes.

All songs and performers chockers with integrity included in this event-and there are too many to round up by each name here-gave us a too-right musical wake up call.

They showed us if nicely rehearsed songs can work in live performance to express reality then surely politicians can work to prepare necessary change in the government chamber to issues as simple as one non-offensive National Day of joint celebration.

We certainly heard local talent in songwriters and emerging artists during this concert to show what bounding-kangaroo enthusiasm and freshness is capable of.

From intimate outpourings through to rock anthem, from heartbreak and ‘head in the ditch’ moments of band blokes like Crowded House and Hoodoo Gurus to the wisdom of wry wit from Thirsty Merc, James Reyne and Tame Impala, Heuston’s Sydney stable of rising Southern Cross stars reminded us of the hope and working  variety this country can produce on any day of the year.

                                 ©️Paul Nolan 2022

50 yos on fb: why does the 20XX hottest 100 suck?

TLDR: It probably doesn’t.

Every year at this time I have to put together a little set of recent songs for a particular teaching exercise, so I am seeking the most singable and funnest currentish pop hits. In Australia we have this annual public indie radio station best-song-of-the-year thing called The Hottest 100 voted for by station listeners, and it’s always contentious. This year The Wiggles - a vintage Australian band that plays music for 3 year olds - won with a cover of a ten-year-old song, and oh my god you should have heard my fellow 50-somethings wailing about the state of music today. They were very unhappy about the #1 song - I know, it’s unbelievable! Middle-aged people with issues about 16yos favourite songs! They were trying to not actually shake their walking sticks but it was the same old questions… Why is there so much crap? Why do the cool 19 year olds have no taste? Why is it all porn? Why is the standard of the songwriting so terrible? Why aren’t there any GOOD songs like “It’s All In The Game” (google it) or “That’s Entertainment” (by The Jam, not the one from “The Band Wagon”, what am I, 90?) How could THAT TRACK have won the prestige #1 slot??

Anyway here are my answers to some of my peers’ questions. Maybe my teen readers can use this info when their parents start whinging at them. You know, all those TEENS who are on FACEBOOK and love reading old ladies’ pedagogy blogs! Cooltastic!!

Q1. Why is there so much crap?

A1. This is an easy one. Say the greatest era of popular songwriting there has ever been was the 1930s. Sorry that came out a bit wrong, I didn’t mean it was a hypothetical scenario. I meant: SAY IT: The 30s was the greatest era of popular songwriting there has ever been!

Yes, but even in the little Hal Leonard 30s Songbook - in between 2/3rds of my absolute favourite songs of all time, there are songs I don’t like THAT MUCH. I mean how good is “Boo-hoo” really? Even “I’m Just A Gigolo”, which has been a hit several times, greatly benefited from being mashed with “I Ain’t Got Nobody” by Louis Prima in 1956! And my little book is definitely a highlight reel. There must be thousands of songs that were written in the 30s, recorded by someone half decent, printed, played on the radio etc - that maybe enough people liked at the time for other people to make a living off them - but that probably ten and definitely 80 years later almost no one could recollect. This is a super obvious truism, but: the longer ago a song is from, the more stringent the winnowing process that has been applied to all the songs from its year. I mean who remembers any of the hits of 1582 except that one titanic banger “Unto Us A Boy Is Born”? Maybe some totally brilliant songs do get lost and forgotten as well as the dross, too - but someone will find them and bring them back. (“Te Quiero Dijiste” anyone?) Because I was 18 in 1985 think the 80s was a golden era of intellectual Britpop, but sometimes if I listen to other peoples’ naff 80s mix tapes, I’m a bit ‘good grief, what’s all that crap?’

At less than a year’s distance it’s impossible to know what is going to seem like a deathless classic after its moment has passed. Was it just the awesome video that whipped everyone into a frenzy and made them think they loved it? Was it that the lyric was DEAD-ON for its cultural moment? Is the singer just an all around top chick and our admiration for her makes us love her slightly weird boring ballads (more of Billie Eyelash later.)

Q2. Why do the cool 19 year olds have no taste?

A2. a) 19 yos are still engaged in the work of self- and peer-defining through cultural choices. Taste in current pop songs is their life, so much so that if you ask them about it they get embarrassed and might even say “I never listen to new stuff.” If you are roughly in their parents’ cohort, your taste and theirs basically CANNOT overlap except ironically when it comes to the music of now. They might, however, be quite into the music you used to play around the place when they were five … or they will be when they are 90. (Trust me for that last bit.)

Also. Soooo. Ummm. b) Maybe 19 yos’ taste is fine and YOU ARE A BIG OLD NANNA slash GRANDPA and also a GIANT DAG. I mean I pretty much hate most Drake songs. I don’t get his thing. It’s sort of boring and nothing happens. Yet I remember when the ATMOSPHERE of Icehouse’s Love In Motion seemed madly, irresistably intoxicating. (Actually I still quite like that, but I once thought Moving Pictures were cool - good grief!) So I know I am not cool. I mean: did you feel 20-80% ridiculous when you put your pronouns on your email signature? (I was reminded to do it by writing this and I just did it and felt a slave to fashion, like Elizabeth Banks in the Hunger Games.) Have you not done so AT ALL yet? Then - entschuldigung - I think you probably are no longer Herr Zeitgeist. I think you have to assume there may be some nuances of current youf culture (or all the nuances and some of the major themes) that are getting by you… maybe there are a million things in some current tracks that are whizzing straight through all of us olds without leaving traces, like radio waves, or puns in a Japanese movie… There are Billie Eilish songs that I am sure are doing a LOT of things that I am just missing. They may be alluding to thoughts that I just haven’t had or something. I dunno.

I might leave

3. Why is it all porn? and 4. Why is the standard of the songwriting so terrible? Why aren’t there any GOOD songs like [ancient song from when I was 15]? and 5. How could THAT be #1?? till next time! I have 8000 tasks! It’s Day 3 of the working year!

I think all of my students know all of my other students

So one persistent dream of the teacher with her own studio is that all her brilliant students will meet each other at student concerts and have a chat and then do AMAZING collaborations … to the eventual performances of which she could swan in in a big scarf, ‘oh don’t you know they MET at the studio, yes, that’s where it alll began you know…’

Anyway it almost never happens because of course all the people have their own things and collaborative partnerships etc, but just this once it did!! Shari is the v cool songwriter and violinist (it’s dropped in the track from memory) and she is a shy singer so Vee Ebert stepped up to do it! Everything else in the recording is super basic but you can get the effect of the song! Hope you love it, here’s the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fidB1e_g7C8

One more reason to be a rich person if you have the option…

I played piano for our two student concerts on Saturday; it was grouse.

Now it has been my genuine belief for many years that rich people buy a lot of super expensive things that are WAY worse than normal person things… gross spiky or pinchy watches that aren’t even waterproof, ugly branded clothes, just awful, embarrassing, torturous shoes, super big two or three storey houses that are not near the shops and have no lifts or dumb-waiters for sheets and towels, pointlessly grotesque SUVs... exy variants of things that ordinary middle class people sometimes have, but in supersized dumb versions.

BUT! one thing that rich people sometimes have that is NOT DUMB is a quality grand piano. My frands these items cost one gazillion dollars and they fit nicely in a loungeroom the size of your WHOLE HOUSE; and they are to nice ordinary uprights as Adam Shapiro’s oaty sourdough is to a plastic-wrapped loaf of wondershite. Even if you are QUITE BAD at the piano, those bad boys almost play themselves. They are super quiet at the quiet end, they have one ton of grunt at the loud end, and there seems to be a lot more difference between mf robust and mf comfortable and mf lonesome than on a normal pno. Instead of two 8ves of ugly barking, the bass end just goes down and down into beauty like the Marianas Trench twenty years ago. The bouncy action gives even a techniqueless wonder like myself the illusion that they can play repeated notes in time…

The good news is that (although she is definitely not the Gucci-purse-and-$200-tshirt-type rich person in any way) by the simple expedient of working herself half to death and saving up for about 40 years, my very own auntie got one a few years ago for her 70th and I will probs get another chance at it at Christmas… woooo!

Stay safe kids. Cases are on the rise in Sydney. Get your booster when it’s time - I have to get onto mine! C x

Singing teaching and minefields

Every grumpy old singing teacher and probably every radiantly joyful and affirming one too has at least one horrific story about a young singer wanting to perform a contemporary song that has adult content that they clearly do not understand. Singing in public always makes you vulnerable, and the feeling that everyone else is in on a joke that you are somehow missing and of which you may somehow be the butt is the stuff of nightmares. No-one wants to set up a young singer so that they find themselves with a shocked audience, or one that is sniggering behind their hands.

Then there’s the weirdness we experience around young singers in their spring awakening, as it were, knowing very well that they are singing a song that is super sexy. We teachers sometimes worry that they may be generally soliciting kinds of attention that they absolutely would not want except from very specific people who may or may not be present at the student concert, or trying out something contentious in a public space that will be hard for them to walk back from. Or that the song choice will DEfinItELY lose them their Eisteddfod section or get a dismal mark in their exam because the adjudicator/assessor will react with a hard “no”.

Or you know, maybe they’ll sound great, it’ll be great, they are making their own decisions after all, they aren’t BABIES, and everyone can probably deal with reality. Risk-taking in self-expression can be a great thing, right?

For female singers of all ages, there’s an even weirder cultural minefield around tone. Twentyish years ago, it was absolutely standard to sing pop and folk with a high larynx, tons of nasal twang, breath mix in verses, and a some-kind-o-lect - I don’t think I can call it an idiolect or an ethnolect - which I can only describe as a baby-voice. When I and a student were repertoire hunting recently and listened to an excellent song from that period, Michelle Branch’s “Goodbye to You”, her sound in the verses made the student flinch! It is like she is singing the quite sensible lyrics of the song as - well - to be shockingly specific - a sexualised five year old. It’s super yuck til she gets to the chorus, and her nice waily belt.

This was the era of Britney I in her school uniform and lip gloss and frankly, any radfems around then who wanted to define ours as a pedophile culture wouldn’t have had to do more than point at the TV to convince people. The twangy baby wheeze voice seems not to have the iron grip it used to, although I still hear current versions of it. Sometimes the strangeness of the sound-as-cultural-artefact vanishes into the music and you miss it - after all, how we choose to sing is sometimes generically driven to the point where language and tonal choices have almost NOTHING to do with the speech or self-presentation of the singer or even the ‘character’. If I am singing “Come Sleep” by Peggy Glanville Hicks, (both of) our Australianness is almost completely erased, isn’t it? And I choose to participate in that erasure - or suspension - of identity.

Anyway. Singers: your tonal choices either strengthen or push back on currents in our/your culture. Sing the world you want to live in into existence, or maybe you will have to find a musical way to reclaim your babytalk voices. (Eg: is it your inner child singing? if so, does she WANT to be hit one more time, or not really?) You are all simultaneously free songbirds and cultural operatives in a complex powerscape.

As the kids say, "no pressure.”

From draft to thing

I was a bit delighted to uncover an old FB status from 2012 the other day in which I had, in my winsome way, publicly jotted down some vague song ideas. I’ll spare you the draft of the first song except for the chorus, which seems to be addressed to a younger fitter gay male friend:

so let me just say that if you seriously meant it / and if you really think you aren't ridiculous

then dude you have Body Dysmorphic Disorder - heyeyey / and you want to get that looked at

My favourite part is the heyeyey! They should put a few of them in the DSM VI or whatever number they are up to now.

I also quite like the next idea. I think it’s quite modern-feeling actually. Here it is.

hey you are like - good - and you could maybe - be relaxing to be around - and you know - possibly there could be something there in the way of feelings

and I sometimes think of you when - the weather is like this - breezy - at this kind of time of day or something

I want to make some words - a poem sort of thing - to show the way I feel

but there's no real details that stand out - and I won't make shit up - because in a way it seems pretty serious

You have like - nice enough eyes - and you are a good height - and I like it when it's more or less four or five o'clock if I've gotten a few things out of the way

and then sometimes you send me a text about stuff - that is nice

Chorus: I'm sorry to be so vague but I do actually like you quite a lot

That’s quite nice and dreamy isn’t it?

OK the last one interested me the most because it actually turned into a song I used to sing quite a lot with Tessa Aboud and Dan OpdeVeigh back when I was cool and in a band.

sometimes you find yourself / feeling under pressure / to do stuff that you know how to do

sometimes there's a thing to do / with really clear rules / and you can do it so easily

that's it's really hard NOT to do it / even if you don't wanna

or you don't wanna just then anyway

sometimes it's useful to just go through it / to run your programme and just get the result

and then sometimes it is exhausting / and you'll find yourself with another outcome

just like the last twenty times you did it

And you'll be asking yourself why why why

 So one of the things about writing songs is that mostly it is better to SAY what it is you HAVE TO SAY and not just dance around it. People can be mystified and uncomfortable and half-aware about their own emotions. They need writers to write something down that might help them make sense of their experience, I think! Anyway that was the draft and this was the ‘‘thing”.

Things you can do / Lie there in wait for you / Knowing you know how they’re done

Things you have learnt / Lodge in your fingerbones /Wink in your eyes like the sun

The rules are so clear / And they fit in your hand / It’s easy to roll ‘em out dry

You know you know how / And when it’s that easy / There isn’t much need for a why

It’s good that I never learned

How to poison someone

How to hold up a bank with a gun

For too many things I have learnt how to do

I keep doing and doing until they are done.

Sometimes it works / At least something happens / You run your routine and an outcome comes out

But somewhere inside / You know you’re not driving / The road drives the car and you’re wincing with doubt

It’s good that I never learned (etc)

You feel the pull to start it

The method is right there

To not just sleepwalk through it

You have to let what you don’t know

Have time and light and air

Everyone should really write their own songs. You feel great singing them to people. You have to keep working on them til you really like them yourself first of course. You can in fact get quite a lot of satisfaction, in my experience of life.

My Cheugtastic Blog

Now that all the cool people have stopped starting podcasts, I figure the time has come for me to get a great old school like early 2000s style blog going. Also Facebook is increasingly annoying, and so I thought posts that were just a link to my own dear little website would get people away from the Wish ads for incomprehensible objects and garments faster.

Anyway I’ve no time to write today because I am trying to sort out the song order for two student concerts for the end of the year. I have already filled out the 3000 field Covid Safety plan form so that’s the main part of my job over isn’t it? Now all I have to do is help 20 people pick and finalise their songs and order the programmes for two concerts and then play all the accompaniments and sing the backing vocals - mere bagatelles.

Feel free to message me with any questions about singing - or anything you think I might know - and I’ll put the answers in a post!

Fitter than THIS, anyway.

I remember many years ago telling a chronically ill student that she needed to be fitter to sing well … it was both a) true and b) genuinely well-intentioned but it didn’t really fit the third criterion for helpful criticism: c) we should only recommend POSSIBLE courses of action. No point telling a 30 year old that their showjumping would work better if they were shorter. I don’t think I really understood about chronic illness then. I’m lucky she didn’t decide I was a complete fool and hate me from then on! Well - we are still friends on Facebook, so at least I can hope she didn’t.

Anyway every year I get to November and think “OH LORD OH NO IT IS CLASSICAL SEASON - WHYYY did I not work out harder from August to now?” and then I do a few mad swims and get through it somehow. However this year I am older than I have been any other year (it’s asTOUNDing the insights you will encounter in this series) and we have just come off the worst two years and the worst two summers for exercise of my life. There was the Black Summer of 2019 when they shut the pools because of air quality, then there was lockdown and they really shut the pools, then shingles and then recovery from shingles, then a summer when I hardly got in the water, a mad 6 months of work, then the BIG lockdown, then they finally opened MY pool (ITAC) but SHUT the LR that goes there…

I have nice middle-class parents with high standards, and normally I would berate myself for weakness, laziness, stupidity and gormlessness, thinking if I yelled at myself hard enough it would motivate me. However, after that lot, even I am not up to trying to shame myself into change. What are ya gonna do?

Anyway here we are at the end of the year and I have to perform of course, and I have recently bought some crippled old-lady exercise equipment that I can use RIGHT HERE in the studio and now I just have to do that agonising habit-pruning stuff, where I stop typing or transposing or learning songs or practicing or trying to get government money and a) roll this little spiky purple ball around the wall with my back and my bum b) squeeze a ring thing with my knees c) balance on a wobble cushion and d) do other physical jerks, about four times a day.

Change sucks and having to generate change yourself is THE. WORST. but if I can’t get out because of the work mountain, the BASIC FITNESS REQUIREMENT for singing means I HAVE TO EXERCISE right here in the studio. Stand by for some embarrassing time lapse videos on Facebook!

BTW the photo is of me in about 2010, having my self-diagnosed arachnophobia cured in a ONE DAY TREATMENT at Taronga Zoo where they threw EVERYTHING at your irrational fears - exposure, information, hypnotherapy, whatever. It worked. Change is possible.