We have entered into that terrible window of the year when it becomes the norm to be subjected to Christmas carols. And crap Christmas pop sung by pop acts who caved and went straight down the filthy, hard cash route. You know how some people have a psychological aversion to clowns? Well, I don't have that, but I have a very similar reaction when I have to listen to these kinds of songs. You know, the ones that you find behind the silver/red/white packaging that harp on about peace and good tidings when you know all the singers are thinking about are the dollar signs they can't see past. I think I can trace all of this back to my days in retail, back when I was a university student. I used to have to listen to Mariah damn Carey's original Christmas album on loop, from like, October. The effect? If I hear sleigh bells now, it makes me want to slash the throat of the first reindeer that passes. I don't think that was Carey's intention you know, but we all deal with trauma in our own way. Anyhoo, can something good come out of this kind of thing? Maybe? I mean, the Christmas spirit is strong, and was strong enough to bring Kylie and Dannii together on a record for the first time ever. There are still echelons of the gay gasp being heard in Australia and beyond. That 100 Degrees song sounds like it should've been on the Priscilla soundtrack, so how fitting that it seems to have inspired a drag, flash mob on Sydney's Bondi Beach. Watch it if you're up for a bit of a giggle and enjoy the ongoing Kylie/Dannii 'rivalry'. Have to say it was good for a chuckle, and a timely reminder that Christmas is not about snow, eggnog and mistletoe, but rather, surf, sand and sun!
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IN my new novel, Vinyl Tiger, I explore the world of Alekzandr. He starts out as a bit of a musically challenged 80s disco act who needs to rely on his looks and his charm to get ahead. His short term goal is to overcome the stigma of being a disco act or a one hit wonder. But his long term goal is that of being taken seriously as a pop act and making music that is true to his artistry. It's an arc that a lot of acts have to go through. Especially if their roots are firmly lodged in dance or pop music. Some of you might be familiar with Tina Arena. For those that aren't, she's a Melbourne gal who got her first break as a child via Young Talent Time. She's the show's most successful alumni, even if Dannii Minogue also graduated from the weekly variety show. Tina has a pristine, powerful voice. She's capable of bending more than the odd note, and in the mid nineties she worked hard to overcome the stigma of having been both a child star, and a pop act whose biggest (and only real) hit to date had been I Need Your Body. (Search it out on Youtube). After being dropped by her label, in the late nineties she moved into adult oriented pop-rock. And in Australia at least, it was a move that proved crucial in her becoming the most formidable female artist on the scene, thanks to songs like Chains and Sorrento Moon - and their ENDLESS airplay on Australian radio. Her album, Don't Ask moved close to a million copies there alone before it became a hit in a lot of other territories. Back then I was working in the record bar of a department store. Because we were in the city centre we were a bit of a target for the visiting record company reps. I remember one of the old Sony music reps coming in one day when Tina's follow up album In Deep came out and being a little blase about it not doing as well as hoped. In Deep was another smash hit, but was on track to sell about a third of what Don't Ask managed to. Speaking with the rep I had to read between the lines a little. While it was clear In Deep wasn't going to be another million seller, Tina was on her way internationally: rerecording her songs in Italian, Spanish and French. That meant she'd proved her worth to the label. But more importantly for Tina herself, she'd unshackled herself from the chains of the idea that Don't Ask had been a fluke, or that Tina no longer needed to be taken seriously. Tina's subsequent albums never sold anywhere near what those two albums did, but they've kept up her profile over the years, and routinely sell well in Australia. She's onto her eleventh album - Eleven - and although it went straight into the Aussie charts at No.2, she's not the radio staple she once was. In fact, she's seen by some as being something of a legacy act. Why? She's released a couple of cover records (which did pretty well), but for the most part, she has focused on releasing new material. Her previous album, Reset was being touted as a bit of a Ray of Light moment, and although it went platinum, I think the majority of the public wouldn't be able to recognise any of the songs on it. The voice, yes. The songs, no. Why? Well, there's much to be said about the music industry's ageism. While they have no problem championing a 25 by someone as young as Adele, getting behind a project by a woman in her 40s is a tough proposition. We saw the debate about older actresses play out in recent years, but, because pop music is usually a no go area for almost anyone over 40, the theory hasn't been pushed and provoked enough. Last night Arena was inducted into the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Hall of Fame - and inducted by another 40 something Aussie - Kylie - but it's likely that you haven't heard anything that Kylie has done in years either. Yep. Tick tock, tick tock. Radio is not a place for women in pop after a certain age. WHY? In my novel Vinyl Tiger I play with this idea. I take a look at what it would be like for Alekzandr - who's gay, so therefore his treatment in the industry is in a category on par with that of women - to age in the face of the music industry and in the pop world. It's a bit of a pisstake of the hipocrisy that exists, but the problem is it is very real. But last night, Tina ripped the Australian industry a new asshole. In a fifteen minute speech which earned her a standing ovation, she called out their ageism and noted that Australian radio, despite its local music quotas, still won't get behind her or her ilk. Nor will it get behind other international acts like Madonna, Annie Lennox or, erm, J.Lo, who she name checked - and who are upwards of 40. Sad fact is that, as she noted, it should be the ladies themselves who should decide when the gig is up not fat, balding radio programmers. Tina may have firmly come out on the other side of the pop arc, but, girl's got a whole other battle to fight. Congrats on being inducted. And let's all just get over ourselves regarding age. We need to respect 'older' acts: male or female. Because the best music is timeless. Note: scroll down to the end of the post to download the Vinyl Tiger introductory chapter/PDF (suitable for adults only!) Or read on if you'd like a little bit of insight into one of the themes before downloading it. AUSTRALIANS are pretty well known for their wanderlust. Young and old, people often feel the need to just get away and live somewhere that's far away, old or unfamiliar. Some choose places where the language and the customs are unfamiliar. Others places where the history and culture are palpable. Others still choose to pack up and leave to forge a career elsewhere, chasing opportunities that a small country they might love can't otherwise offer. I'm one of the many Australians who let wanderlust and the desire to follow my heart take me away. As much as Australia is always "home" to me, I've lived and worked for a great deal of my life in foreign places. London, Kyoto, Rome...and now the south of Italy. As an outsider, you can't ever really predict how well you're going to mesh with a place. The motivations that took you there in the first place can be critical or prove to be pointless when it comes to the people you meet and the life you carve out for yourself. In Vinyl Tiger, Alekzandr's departure from Australia isn't just the usual right of passage we tend to associate those big scale moves with. His forms part of another category: that of unplanned refuge. He jumps at the first chance to escape a future that he sees no value or hope in. And so the opportunities and desire to do something interesting and challenging sets him on a journey that will eventually take him to a variety of places around the world. Wanderlust and the idea of following our hearts- even across the continents and at great, personal cost, - is at the heart of the first chapter of Vinyl Tiger, and I'm delighted to offer you the chance to read it here (by clicking on the attachment below). So, enjoy this exclusive excerpt - the first chapter from Vinyl Tiger - and use it to discover the starting points of Alekzandr's quest to live an interesting life. I hope you enjoy discovering how he begins to try and soothe the restless wanderlust that lurks within during his formative years. If you like what you read, please feel free to share it around with others. But be warned: Alekzandr's life is a racy one, so this material is only suitable for adults.
Brandis and co strike again.
In its infinite wisdom, the Australian government has decided to strip the long standing Australia Council of much of its funding...to the tune of $105 million over the next four years. This on top of its slashing and burning of arts funding to the tune of almost $50m last year. The govt spin is it will widen opportunities for artists. The reality is it is already very difficult to secure funding. The decision to downsize the Oz council will kill programs that have yielded good results for emerging artists and force the govt to go through another trial and error process of setting up new wings, thereby also doubling the administrative costs of what is essentially the same pie. I don't think anybody can say that the Australia Council system is perfect. But it's well established and has a great web and far reaching network that is often just as useful to artists as the funds it disperses. Artists and creatives are effectively small businesses. They're often like sole proprietors whose work has flow on effects. Stripping the funding in this way sounds like it's just attrition of lefties but the reality is it makes it difficult for people who work in these fields to find paying opportunities to work. If you strip Screen Australia of almost $40m funding in one year, that's a hell of a lot of professionals being forced to compete for diminishing roles. But that seems to be the point behind such a decision. Interesting that Brandis didn't see fit to announce these changes when he flew, at taxpayer's expense, to Venice for the Biennale the other week. Guess that would have been inconvenient. See more detail about the cuts here. "The Indians are the Italians of Asia...They are both people of the Madonna - they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one." Gregory David Robers, Shantaram Up until recently, Australian rock and pop was dominated by the concept that a musical act was generally a group of mates rocking out with their cocks out. Even today, the idea of a solo artist is more the exception than the norm in a country where the collective of mateship remains stronger than the individual. The 80's music industry was a world where the number of female acts (musos or singers alike) was positively miniscule in comparison to the number of men in the industry. Kate Ceberano was arguably the first of the local goddesses that the Australian public were demanding. She was still a teenager when she broke the mold by straying from the group I'm Talking that had established her as a female vocalist to be reckoned with. In those early years of her career, she quickly established herself through a combination of likeability and genuine talent. But there was something that separated her from the others. Australia had already claimed Olivia Newton John as their own, and later, Kylie Minogue who arrived in 1987 would eventually earn the title of Pop Princess, but ONJ and Minogue were never really part of the Australian music industry. They were Australians who were loved more for the success that they achieved outside of Australia. And in the case of Minogue, it was a hard earned love. Australians en masse loved her as a soapie star, but resisted her musically until she had been indoctrinated by Michael Hutchence and blessed by association with Nick Cave in the 1990's. Ceberano, like a handful of other local artists (Renee Gayer, Chrissie Amphlett among them) was genuienly a muso in a muso's world, and this laid the foundation for her acceptance by the Australian public. But whereas the trajectory of Geyer and Amphlett's career were linear, there was something about Ceberano that seemed to fight the idea to conform. Part of Ceberano's charm was that she was always thoroughly, a suburban, down to earth girl. Her charm continues to see her through bad career decisions and creative missteps, but it has to be said that there is an underlying appreciation in her willingness to constantly stray at a musical level, to actively sabotage herself at a business level, sometimes in aid, and sometimes in opposition to her own artistry. This was evident right from the beginning. I'm Talking were an arty pop-funk group that grew out of Melbourne's burgeoning dance scene in the mid 1980's, and as their lead singer, it was assumed that when she stepped out solo, that she would build on from that foundation. But in 1988, with the accompaniment of Wendy Matthews, Ceberano released You've Always Got The Blues, a curveball release which quickly established her as an Adult Contemporary fave. It seemed she was distancing herself from her roots, but in fact, she was broadening herself, as just a year later, she released her benchmark Brave album, brimming with pop, dance and funk covers which screamed "Pop!" and dominated the mainstream for a year. Brave could have been, and should have been the start of a long run of pop-dance hits, but it seemed Ceberano had no intention of following that route. In yet another of her trademark curveballs, she seemed to defiantly go back into the direction of jazz, deeming a release with her own septet, Like Now, complete with cubist inspired cover art, the only logical way forward. And here in it became established that Ceberano's every move could only be unpredictable (she followed it with the criminally ignored Think About It; another pop album experimenting with textures and sounds which more than occasionally were house oriented). The constant to and fro, and shifting of genres and audiences probably created a patchwork fanbase that could never really unify musically, but it also served as the basis for a sort of longeivity, where there was no longer any sense of how contemporary or relevant she was. She simply was, and if she recorded something of interest to your specific tastes, then you could be pretty much guaranteed that the quality, intent and soul where all there for the taking. Those jumps in and out of different musical worlds occassionally yielded huge commercial and critical gains, particularly in the early 90's when she hosted her own acclaimed television series Kate Ceberano and Friends which was commemorated with a sensational soundtrack, wowed audiences with her turn in the arena style Jesus Christ Superstar revival, all the whilst continuing to record and perform live with her own band (alternating between her own septet and the Ministry of Fun). But during the 1990s, mainstream interest in her began to falter, allowing her to experiment with her songwriting, secure in that she still had a record deal, but without the pressure of needing to produce a hit to remain in work. Another commercial resurgence came for her in the form of Pash and its massive success alongside the accompanying compilation album True Romantic seemed to reinforce the genuine affection Australian audiences hold for her, as would again be demonstrated when she won her season on Dancing With The Stars. But I'm fighting the fight for Kate not because of her occassional commercial endurance, but instead for the fact that she is something of a one of a kind. In Italy, people are always asking me about Australian artists, particularly female singers. Aside from the Minogues, and the new generation of acts such as Sia, it's Ceberano who always comes to mind, not because she is consistently brilliant (she's not), or not because she's got a mystique (she's as suburban as they come, but in the best possible way)...it's because in many ways, she has carved out something of a European style career for herself. She's unafraid to really dabble, to push herself. She has created a singular niche for herself, but the goodwill of her public is genuinely wider than the arc she herself has sketched for herself. Where she lets herself down, is in the latest arc her career has taken...somewhere along the line, she or the people behind her seem to have lost their faith in her own creativity, and have instead pushed her down a line of covering other songs, standards, that allow us to enjoy her voice, but frustratingly, don't give us any sense of where she is at on a personal or artistic level. And although hers has always been a career where dalliances in other people's music have often reaped rewards, its telling that her last spectacular release was the self penned The Girl Can Help It (2003) which, perhaps by not reaching a significant mainstream audience, crushed the last strands of that sassy, self assuredness that set that original train on its unpredictable course all those years ago. Search it out. It's a spectacular album that personifies her talents much more so than Brave or even True Romantic ever did. To give you a few more clues on how thoroughly good she can be, I'm grouping some of her best songs into the two divides that she has since established for herself. Covers and Originals. Check them out and fight the fight for Kate. ORIGINAL KATE Bedroom Eyes, Love Dimension (1989) from Brave. Intelligent pop, the soundtrack of 1989. Everything Will Be Alright (1991) from Think About It. Hard to find, but a fabbo uplifting house number. All That I Want Is You and Love and Affection (1994) from Blue Box. Time to Think and I Won't Let You Down (1999) from True Romantic. Latter covered by Zucchero (RANDOM!) Sunburn from The Girl Can Help It (2003). One of her best. The sound of a late Australian summer afternoon. Beautiful Life from The Girl Can Help It (2003) from True Romantic. COVERED KATE Young Boys Are My Weakness Feeling Alright, I Can't Make You Love Me and The Cake And The Candle from Kate Ceberano & Friends I Don't Know How To Love Him (a very special performance ;) ) Love My Way from Nine Lime Avenue I'm writing a novel at the moment. It's taking forever to finish. The basics are that it's a story set against popular culture from the 80's through to the present. One of the problems I have, aside from the millions of things and people that are distracting me here in Rome, is that I often get lost in revisiting and researching the past trends and crazes that we communally have been swept up in during the last thirty years. Being born and raised in Oz, the prism through which I understood and accessed music was to a large extent dominated by what reached the far shores of Australia. And then, there was a second border control in that the media; particularly radio, ensured that only the most devout music lover could truly stay abreast of what was happening outside of Australia. Australia's musical past was dominated almost entirely by men. By rock music, by what we affectionately call Pub Rock. Right through to the nineties, the airwaves were controlled by rock acts, and acts from the old FM guard. Even at the height of acts like Culture Club and Wham! (whose visits to Australia sparked pandemonium), and later the sacred trinity of Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna, it was near impossible to find them on radio dials. Instead you had the choice of iconic Aussie acts like Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil, maybe even a bit of AC/DC or hoary old rockers from the 70s to listen to or see live. But the interesting thing that happened in the mid eighties, was centred around the generational change that was being ushered in. Back then, Central Station, a Melbourne record store in Flinders St opened its doors, and it was one of the few places where you could find imported 7" and 12" records. It's arrival marked the first real alternative movement; the electronic one. Hard to imagine today, but back then, not only was dance music limited to a couple of locations in the CBDs of Australia's bigger cities; particularly in Melbourne, and Sydney. In Melbourne, King St was once the nexus of dance music and the club scene, alongside a handful of locales in Prahran. With the imports and newly emerging DJ culture growing, the first of what would go on to become a slew of Electronic pop-funk groups arrived on the scene. The kids loved them- bands like Wa Wa Nee, Pseudo Echo and Eurogliders quickly amassed strong followings, even when traditional live audiences often greeted them with the odd beer bottle and 'Poofta' insults. Most of these bands never got their dues on radio, but they were part of that new breed of artists that knew that by harnessing visual imagery; distinct looks, music videos and progressive cover art they probably stood a good chance of an appearance on Countdown which would basically offer them a bypass straight to the top of the charts. These groups, often introduced phenomenal songwriting talents, or talented vocalists who would go on to carve out significant and versatile careers. Melbourne based I'm Talking, introduced Kate Ceberano, a precocious teenager, a buxom and then exotic beauty who had the voice to match. They had a handful of hits over a three or four year period before they imploded, but somehow, despite, or perhaps as a result of a number of counter intuitive genre swings (jazz, pop, house and funk) she managed to carve out some kind of longeivity for herself. And in doing so, became one of the few acts from that early electronic revolution to mostly remain afloat long after. |
Dave
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Dave Di Vito is a writer, teacher and former curator.He's also the author of the Vinyl Tiger series and Replace The Sky.
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