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Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth

~ The life of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the art of biography, and other things

Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth

Category Archives: music

I got a piece of my soul back

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by Nathan Hobby in music

≈ 4 Comments

I started listening to music again, properly, in the last year, and it makes me feel I got a piece of my soul back.

I’m not musical, but songs mean a lot to me.

Everyone’s musical, some people insist – usually kind musicians. That’s what she said at first; but then she heard me try to sing. I used to think it was because I wasn’t singing loudly enough; so I sang louder in Sunday School. The girl behind me – her name was Tasha – she said, Please stop singing. It was the first time she’d spoken to me. An early humiliation. I aced all the tests at school, but not the Instrumental Music Program. To my great horror but little surprise, it was two others from my year who went off to learn the trumpet.

I had an early crush on Amy Grant and her adult contemporary pop songs – some upbeat, others melancholy. This was 1991, I was ten, and I was weird, because adult contemporary was my thing – Amy Grant, Bryan Adams, Jimmy Barnes. (Strangely, I also spent hard-earned $21 – three months savings – on a MC Hammer tape which I never came to like. What was I thinking? I liked the Addams Family Groove at just the wrong moment. I’d heard he was a Christian, and thought my parents would be pleased; then I started singing a line I did not understand about a ‘glass dildo’. MC Hammer’s Christianity did not completely infuse his lyrics. I think I only recently, in this last move, got rid of that tape.)

I got back into music in year nine. Perhaps I was partly conforming, but I was also genuinely attracted to the anger of Metallica. It had little swearing, and so my parents were remarkably tolerant. Is it possible, at fourteen, to not regard lines like TIME AND SPACE NEVER ENDING /DISTURBING THOUGHTS, QUESTIONS PENDING /LIMITATIONS OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING as being equally profound as the great poets?

My taste evolved, growing to the Smashing Pumpkins and then Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, The Cure and Joy Division. I spent my childhood savings on a great five disc CD player when I moved out of home at eighteen. What a glorious machine it was! What deliberation deciding what soundtrack to my life to create before the days of itunes!

The CD player broke just before I got married, which is maybe just as well, because she’s a violist with a perfect ear who prefers silence and tells me L. Cohen is out of tune. It seemed to me Triple J stopped playing anything decent, too, that it had become overwhelmed by urban music, beats and gimmicks, and lost most of the alternative rock I liked. What’s more, I’d exhausted the eighties.

So there were lean years. But this last year, I’ve had a laptop which plays music quite well and been better connected to the internet, meaning I have bought too many songs on itunes. I have discovered new music on Radio National’s Inside Sleeve and occasionally Triple J. There’s this group of women singer-songwriters whose work my wife and I have come to like together – Holly Throsby, Regina Spektor, Sarah Blasko and recently Ane Brun and Lisa Mitchell.

The two albums I have had playing on relentless rotation (wait, this is an inept metaphor when I mean on itunes) as I write my novel are both by Mazzy Star. Their gently sad music makes me feel I’m underwater, or falling into a lull. It has a beautiful ache which never quite resolves. “Fade Into You” is representative – but then every song is. This sums them up well:

 Their fuzzy guitar workouts and plaintive folky compositions are often suffused in a dissociative ennui that is very much of the 1990s, however much their textures may recall the drug-induced states of vintage psychedelia.

Music for writing really, or perhaps a certain kind of dinner party.

*

In that first flush of music mania as a ten year old, I used to create a weekly (sometimes daily) top twenty – the songs I thought should be in there. Amy Grant’s “Every Heartbeat” broke every record by staying number one for twelve charts, even as it sank in the real chart. Now I have real, annual charts, the most played songs of the year that’s been. Yet it is distorted by background music on repeat. No chart is perfect. Here are the songs I played the most in 2012, one per album:

Song Artist Year Plays
1 Fade Into You Mazzy Star 1993 39
2 Warm Jet Holly Throsby 2008 29
3 Flowers in December Mazzy Star 1996 28
4 Hey Love Winterpark 2011 26
5 Undertow Ane Brun 2012 24
6 Silk Giselle 2012 23
7 The Last Party The Hampdens 2008 22
8 I Awake Sarah Blasko 2012 21
9 Get Free Major Lazer 2012 20
10 Youth in Trouble The Presets 2012 20

The Long Sunset

10 Thursday Feb 2011

Posted by Nathan Hobby in music

≈ 1 Comment

His early success, and now his long sunset. His brief peak in 1971 and now everyone wants him to play That Song. He talks a lot on stage. Like a sad old man in a pub, except the audience has paid to listen to him. He tells us stories, drops some names. He has had to become a performer. Once he was going to change the world. When you are a performer, you have to get the baby boomers to sing along, and you have to ‘play it like you mean it’ – when you don’t really mean it, because this is, in his estimation, the 15th-20th tour of Australia.  He told the audience they had a paid a lot of money, so he and the band would play it like they meant it.

He is polite, but the audience can hear the bitterness. At MP3s, at music these days, at the youth these days. And he keeps talking about That Song. Everything is dated by it, and if he’s not mentioning it directly, he’s hinting at it obliquely. He’s 65 now, and he said he imagines he’ll do this for another five years. His stories, they were trying to explain to the audience why he had done what he had done. An account of how he had spent his life. But it wasn’t to the audience, it was part of the inner struggle to keep his chin up, pull out that guitar, night after night, in the long sunset.

RIP Mark Sandman, died 3 July 1999

03 Friday Jul 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in music, R.I.P.

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

mark sandman, morphine

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Connecting to the music

12 Wednesday Dec 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in life, music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

John Howard, red wine, Whitlams

I had a moment of perfect connection to the album I put on.

I was cooking, and drinking a glass of Cab Merlot (and enjoying it more than I’ve enjoyed red wine for a long time) and I was listening to The Whitlams’ Little Cloud album. The wistful lyrics and sound of Tim Freedman connected with me and felt so poignant.

I always find it so hard to choose an album to match my mood. I misjudge so often – the same way I misjudge my mood for film, novels and treats – but for once I chose well. I wonder if there are truly only a few pieces of music that will match a particular mood.

Tim Freedman keeps talking about the ‘year of the rat’ and ‘the rodent got back in’, and I suddenly realised that he might have been talking about John Howard – famously called (my wife reminded me recently when she dressed as) the Lying Rodent. Did he write these songs during the 2004 election, feeling depressed about Howard getting in yet again?

When more isn’t better

30 Friday Nov 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in life, music

≈ 1 Comment

I remember when I saved up to buy my first CDs. It was the mid-nineties and there weren’t many cheap CDs around. Big W was wonderful because it sold the top 30 for $25; five weeks pocket money, and that’s five weeks of no chocolates or books or comics.

So I didn’t have many CDs.

My brother and I got a secondhand copy of U2’s The Fly single with our first CD player from the pawnshop. We played it to death, and then Bush’s Glycerine single. I think the first album I bought was Metallica’s Load, maybe followed by Ash’s 1977. I got to know every single song so well. I have this theory that if you listen to a decent CD enough times with enough desire to like it, you will like it eventually. (Am I saying Load is a decent album? I don’t know! It certainly suited who I was at the time.)

Fast forward to today, where there’s a whole CD shop full of great albums for $10, which with inflation is something like $5 in the mid-nineties. I can borrow eight great CDs from my local public library and battle to play them all through once in three weeks. (Back in 1996, my local library only had classical CDs.) I have a very modest 2800 songs on my I-tunes, which would still take me 8 days to play and about 200 CDs mouldering away in racks, 200 LPs inherited or bought at opshops in noughties and at least 50 tapes.

Consequently, there’s not many albums I know really well any more. Not in the way I knew Bush’s Glycerine single with it’s two B-sides ‘Solomon’s Bones’ and ‘Alien’. I think a mindset of acquisition is a dangerous one. If only I had this CD and that one, then I’d be happy, then I wouldn’t need any more.

Imagine a situation similar to the one in Borges’ story “The Library of Babel”, except with songs, not books. You have every single song ever released. But instead of bringing you happiness, it brings you dissatisfaction, because every time you hit random, you get yet another song you have no affinity with. Just the task of scrolling through your album titles is an odious one. It’s too hard to find what you want. You sound like a radio station.

Sometimes more isn’t better.

The Cure in Perth

06 Monday Aug 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in music

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

concert, Perth, review - music, The Cure

Me and Nicole went to see the Cure on Saturday night.

It was at Challenge Stadium, a basketball stadium, and the setting for part of my novel The Fur. It was strange to be back in that place again; the last time was nine years ago when I was playing volleyball at countryweek. Robert Smith was standing on that same ground where I’d been playing sport.

They played for over three hours, a loud and generous set that seemed to cover every single album except Bloodflowers. (I wonder if he regrets Bloodflowers? I have always liked it and I always will.) Some of the songs I remember him playing are:
– Us or them
– A hundred years (a real treat)
– Wrong number
– Lovesong (at this point Kath and Kim next to me got up and did a chicken dance.)
– Plainsong
– Pictures of you (another highlight for me; but if only he’d played Last dance.)
– Fascination street (actually this was early in the set)
– Deep green sea
– Friday I’m in love (was this in the encore? I think so)
– The kiss (the only song I remember repeated from the last Perth concert in 2000 – when he played every single Bloodflowers song.)
– Why can’t I be you?
– Just like heaven
– Jumping someone else’s train
– Killing an arab
– The forest
– The walk
– Never enough
– Three imaginary boys
– Fire in Cairo

The bass player, Simon Gallup, was annoying, he kept on bending his knees and crouching and swaying; he didn’t have any of the dignity of the others. He looked like a little boy playing with his older brothers. Even if he’s been with the band since the start.

I wish Robert had said more, revealed something of himself, or about the songs. I guess he wanted them to speak for themselves. At one point he said he wasn’t saying much because he kept forgetting he spoke the same language as us.

With two guitars, a bass and drums in a heavy rock stadium setup, the interpretation of the songs was really aggressive. I guess that’s my main criticism. I would have liked to have seen a softer, more varied performance. And keyboards. Give us that 80s sound! Instead, we had a clear message that ‘we’re not too old for this’.

UPDATE: Here’s a complete setlist- 
 http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ChainofFlowers/aug0407.html

Smashing Pumpkins’ Zeitgeist – Billy Corgan is no poet

24 Tuesday Jul 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in music

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

review - music, Smashing Pumpkins, Zeitgeist

This album was released on my wife’s 26th birthday. We were in Geraldton, four hundred kilometres  from Perth, and yet there it was sitting in Sanity for $20 on Thursday morning. Nicole is so kind; it was her birthday and yet she bought it as a present for me!

 I was waiting in a department store, so I read over the lyrics to Zeitgeist before I listened to the album. I was not impressed. I found them almost unreadable. (Most lyrics sound a bit wrong read without the music, I think; I wasn’t expecting W.H. Auden – but these were particularly bad.)

Billy should stick to personal angst; I’m afraid his detours into politics and religion are unconvincing. I think he is a stupid genius – he’s got this intuition for writing brilliant songs, but he’s not a thinker.

I haven’t listened to it enough time to form a good judgement yet. It seems to sound more like Billy’s solo album than any Pumpkins album. There are a couple of songs which I like already. And let me say this: I’m so glad this album has been released! I had given up on ever hearing new Pumpkins songs seven years ago.

I hate scalpers

27 Wednesday Jun 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

scalpers, some people i hate, The Cure

My favourite band, the Cure, are coming to Perth. But one day after the tickets went on sale, the only place to buy tickets was on e-bay. Sellers in Melbourne were advertising twenty tickets for sale at $159. (The original price – $119 – already seemed excessive.)

I can’t believe how unethical I’ve become, because I even contemplated buying a ticket from one of these scum. But then I realised that I was perpetuating an injustice. As soon as everyone refuses to buy tickets from scalpers, they’ll stop doing it.

 So I reconciled myself to not seeing the Cure. I decided to stop listening to them, because it was a painful reminder.

But then yesterday at lunch time I decided to go to the Ticketmaster outlet in the city. I don’t know how these things work, and neither did the girl at the counter, but she had restricted viewing tickets. So for $238 me and Nicole will be seeing the back of Robert Smith’s head – but at least the scalpers aren’t getting any money off us.

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Recent Comments

informatika on Stella #1: The prologue
informatika on Giving a sense of everyday…
informatika on I’ve started a new blog…
industri on The biography of Hugo Thr…

Bookmarks

  • Adventures in Biography
  • ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
  • Bernice Barry
  • It only goes up to your knees
  • Jane Bryony Rawson
  • Jenn Plays Recorder
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre
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  • Glimpses of KSP - Tarella Station
  • Paul Auster's Moon Palace : an overview
  • [Thursday 3pm #4] The tragedy of Robert Wadlow, world's tallest man?
  • Anger and Love by Justina Williams

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  • 165,460 hits

Tag Cloud

9/11 19th century 33 1920s 1921 1930s 1950s 1970s 1971 1981 2000s 2004 2011 2015 2017 20000 Days on Earth A.S. Byatt Aboriginals activism Adam Begley Adrian Mole adultery afterlife Agatha Christie Alan Hollinghurst Alberto Manguel Alfred Deakin Amazing Grace Americana Amy Grant An American Romance Andre Tchaikowsky Andrew McGahan angela myers anne fadiman Anne Rice Arabian Nights archives art arts funding A Serious Man Ash Wednesday ASIO atheism Atonement Australia Australian film Australian literature Australian Short Story Festival autism autobiography autodidact Barbara Vine beach Belle Costa da Greene Bell Jar best best-of Bible Big Issue Bill Callahan biographical ethics biographical quest genre biographies birthday birthdays Black Opal Bleak House Blinky Bill blogging blogs Blue Blades Bodega's Bunch bog Booker book launch booksale Borges Brenda Niall Brian Matthews Brian McLaren Britney Spears Burial Rites Burke and Wills buskers C.S. Lewis C.S. Lewis canon capitalism Carol Shields Carson McCullers Catcher in the Rye Catholicism celebrities Charles Dickens Charlie Kaufman childhood Child of the Hurricane children's books Choir of Gravediggers Christianity Christian writing Christina Stead Christmas Christopher Beha Cinque Terra Claire Tomalin classics cliches climate change Coen brothers coincidence Collie Collyer coming of age Communism concert Condensed Books consumerism Coonardoo Cormac McCarthy Corrections cosy fiction Dara Horn David Copperfield David Ireland David Marr David Suchet death Death of a president definition demolition Dennis LeHane dentist diaries divorce doctorow Doctor Who documentaries donald shriver Don DeLillo Don DeLillo Donna Mazza Donna Tartt Don Watson Dostovesky doubt drama dreams of revolution Drusilla Modjeska E.M. 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