Dean Biron

A discussion of the outstanding albums of the 1980s might begin with the Shanachie label’s Mbaqanga compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, 4AD’s Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares by the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Choir, and American Clavé’s Tango: Zero Hour by Astor Piazzolla (all 1986), three signal moments in the packaging of global music for Western sensibilities. One could go on to cite such landmarks as Brian Eno’s On Land (1982), Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa (1984) and John Zorn’s Spillane (1987). Add to these Joy Divison’s Closer (1980), Gang of Four’s Solid Gold (1981), Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime (1984), and the decade is beginning to look superior. Australia, too, produced various near-perfect LPs – the likes of Mr Uddich Schmuddich Goes to Town by Laughing Clowns (1982), Born Sandy Devotional by the Triffids, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express by The Go-Betweens, Free Dirt by Died Pretty (all 1986), Cold and the Crackle by Not Drowning Waving (1987) and Tender Prey by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (1988) while New Zealand’s The Chills deserve a mention, courtesy of their Brave Words (1987). To this fledgling list, author Jeff Apter would presumably demand the addition of True Colours (1980) and Time and Tide (1982) by Split Enz, as well as Crowded House’s self-titled début (1986) and Temple of Low Men (1988), each of which is accorded canonical status in Together Alone, his new biography of Tim and Neil Finn. This ought to be a matter of personal taste buttressed by (in the appropriate forum, such as a book like this) robust argument, but there is precious little of the latter in Together Alone. Critical analysis is promised but not delivered. Instead, readers are left to trawl through a skip-load of secondary material, including snatches from the omnipresent Glenn A. Baker and one-too-many customers at Amazon.com, in order to learn what supposedly makes this music definitive.

Though born and bred in Brisbane, I had never read anything written by Nick Earls prior to this assignment. The closest I had come was a book reading over a decade ago when Earls amused the audience with excerpts from his Bachelor Kisses (1998), before the late Grant McLennan beguiled them with an acoustic rendering of The Go-Betweens song of the same name. The Go-Betweens connection remains palpable in Earls’s latest novel, The True Story of Butterfish. The title of the failed third album of the fictional rock band Butterfish, Written in Sand, Written in Sea, can be nothing other than an allusion to ‘Man O’ Sand to Girl O’ Sea’, the song which rounds out Forster and McLennan’s classic record Spring Hill Fair. Beyond that, references abound to the streets, monuments and cloying humidity of the Queensland capital Nick Earls what to Brisbane as Lou Reed is to New York.  Earls is also one of a long line of individuals Anton Chekhov, Stanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard and others who gave up a career in medicine for a life of literary endeavour. Yet while the work of Ballard, to take the most contemporary example, includes disfigured bodies, transplanted limbs and exotic diseases, Earls seems to have left his life as a sawbones far behind. It is rather his misfortune to have been associated with the style known as ‘lad lit’, for which Nick Hornby is poster-boy.

Shots, so the media release claims, is written in ‘mesmerising prose.’ Yeah, right! This is the life story of a rock musician they are talking about. I can recall attempting to read one such memoir, a well-meaning present from a friend who might have known better. It was by Ray Manzarek, of The Doors; it was called Light My Fire (1999) and it was completely and utterly awful. Manzarek’s organ may have on occasion swooped and swirled like a graceful albatross, but his prose is as scruffy and unsociable as a giant petrel. After twenty pages, I couldn’t care less whether it was Jim Morrison or Jack the Ripper buried in that Paris graveyard. Now, here I am faced with the journal of another borderline celebrity with too much time on his hands, a keyboardist from an ‘iconic’ rock band to boot. This book could not be anything other than a waste of everyone’s time.

Movie Of The Week. The MacNeil–Lehrer Newshour. Helen Vatsikopoulos. Andrea Stretton. Tales From a Suitcase. Pria Viswalingam. Italian Serie A Football. Annette Sun Wah. These are just a few examples of SBS programs and personalities that helped me – and no doubt many others – negotiate the fetid swamp that was Australian television in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, the swamp is a lot bigger and the stench even worse, but does SBS still provide an effective alternative?