i make my music for a me who isnt me

i imagine some brutal critical ruthless critic

in fact i am him

i guess you know i  rant on about  the music i cant stand

its like i’m in this tiny niche market and all the rest drives me crazy

i find and have always found most music unlistenable

that is , theres the stuff i love and verily i doth love it in spades

and theres the rest ….its pointless for me to listen to it…

there are  mysterious qualities one must have or acquire

a ha this is the bit no one can really manipulate

i was born the vessel of a potential songwriter

i had a few certain things in my favour

my dad playing the piano

my mum interested in words

i have the dogged persistence of an idiot/savant

i am an encyclopaedia on rocknroll make no mistake

my brain is crammed with millions of pictures songs and triviae

this is my phd

this is my longs life work

i have only just realised i had a lifes work

i mean i wasnt planning to be me as i am now

once i was a very shy unsure sulky little twit

but (just like my mother)

as i hit my fifties i guess the sheer gravity of all those years…..

i improved a bit

not so frosty and all that

anyway here i am

it seemed i had a small vocation after all

i have made some very elite rock music

some of my stuff is not for everybody

you gotta be interested in subtlety and ambiguity …all that carryon

taking my cue from strawberry fields i hope to conjure dislocation

with my music and my words and my voice and my trip

but what the fuck is my trip…….?

my trip is some fine line between song and suggestion

my trip is reincarnation

my trip is drug dream and all other states of minds

my trip is 1960s heavy but i have tried to distil the quintessence

i want to open that door in your head you need to go

my songs are shifting as you approach

they often give up their secrets and beauty later

the words can be daunting for some types of people (philistines)

the music is idiosyncratic and is a synthesis of everything i love

as a painter i just started one day

you cant call picasso or van go go my influences

i dont have any painting influences

but my music is such a blend of things

oh yes the beatles of course the original and best

but everything i heard went into my deconstructive process

i analysed rock songs every song i heard

i broke it down into its successes and failures

how were these accomplished ….

the whole damn thing

i was figuring it out

meanwhile i did little else

at school i was a clown and a pest

i wasnt much of a friend or boyfriend either

i was preoccupied you see my rocknroll

in canberra i had a guy at an import record shop ring me

as each consignment came in

I USED TO BUY

EVERY VAGUELY INTERESTING LOOKING RECORD!!

i ended buying loads n loads of rubbish

stuff i just could nae abide

but i got some good stuff too

stuff like metro for example

in guitar terms a huge influence on me/us

my head was full of rock figures facts riffs myths

i knew i had the ability to manipulate the elements

i believe i understood the deep deep beauty of this music

so much fucking awful pathetic rubbish but every now n then……

aaaaah….someone writes a good vibrations or love will tear us apart

or someone like iggy would make a raw power which was incandescent

or the stones would  up the  swagger and sleaze

neil young ….harvest…..such fragility …. a delicate thing

genesis had some astounding music and words

yes it was art

i liked the sex pistols but no other punk bands that much

i always appreciated it when someone pushed an envelope somewhere

be rawer be faster be slower be nastier be nicer be louder be softer

be something no one else has done

take it further in your direction than they thought possible

look at nirvana : an explosion of iconic and iconoclastic stuff

any way accidentally ive ended up playing to a discerning crowd

they want rock but they dont know why rock is supposed to be dumb

dumb as in ac/dc for example

if that schtick isnt dumb….

….the geezer in the hat bawling out that malarkey ..?

you see this is one of rocks great wonders and its weaknesses

rock tolerates heavy handed” dumbness” pretty easily

some silly old geezer every song sounds like every other

some rocknroll platitudes about rocknroll itself…real cliches..jesus..

rock also tends to reward great commercial success

with a total dismantling of any honesty or distance

if youre successful that is the main thing

it seems people stop noticing the sillinesses anymore

maybe you love ac/dc but to me its literally painful

its not even funny (beyond a limited benny hill nudge nudge)

bon scott was enough of a maverick rascal to pull it off

but with that geezer in the hat its just bloody stupid to me

an audience of teen boys

singing and gesticulating along to them is saddening

for christs sake we are the heirs of incredible art

the iliad and the tempest

we must strive

the beatles and stones were striving

dylans striving

bowie n bolan too striving on n off

and all the others

the byrds

big star

paul simon

bruce springsteen

julian cope

all those NZ bands

the go betweens the triffids the underground lovers

striving

patti smith television

leonard cohen yes and nick cave

greg dulli led zep pink floyd

they strive on n off

that is where the line between music and magic blurs

a guy with a guitar and 3 chords and some random words

it can bewitch or fascinate you or repel you forever

i love my type of rock so much

it is a pantheon that fits  hawkwind and lou reed and whoever i like

theres the contenders n theres the schlock

in the sixties n seventies n eighties n the nineties n now : schlock

and good stuff always too

the contenders always someone gonna cook up something good

i dont know

i’m usually wrong about the most ordinary things

i love some music vehemently

i hate some music dearly

i am an odd conglomerate of music myself

yes i loved every bread single

there was a beauty in there worthwhile of analysis

i’m not a punter n i never was

i was an obsessed rock fan crossed with a computer like brain

a brain which processed innumerable data and then interpreted it

and stored it

i took my whole from a million bits and pieces even i dont know

blustering bawling macho tripe

its like green kryptonite to me

at one end of rocks catalogue of horror is the boyband fairy floss

at the other the meatnpotatoes of heavy metal n nickelback n whoever

the angry yelling excitable types draining all your energy

you plot your course aided equally by that which attracts

by that which repels

i do this music now its pretty much my own

all the 5000 songs i love and hate fight it out in my head

its just the way i’m made

its the way that i do things

the need to worship and disdain i suppose

the SHP doesnt help me here

understand the madman and genius and average geezer coexist

in us all to varying degrees

some us got a bit more of the first two

its the way things have to be

it takes troubled tormented artists sometimes

it takes ordinary geezers who must count their blessings

it takes good guys n villains and fakes frauds and fairies

so i have partitioned off my little demi-acre here

here in this imaginary landscape of rock

where nothing is really good or bad

its all a point of view

the real question is :

why wont one of those glossy music mags in england

ever write about us for years n years….?