Dead Dad Dictum

  Jimi Hendrix had a problem. He’d broken through with his 1967 Monterey Pop performance, where he closed his set with a raw, confronting version of The Troggs’ proto-punk track  Wild Thing  and, as the song came to an end, he smashed his Fender Strat against the stage, set it on fire and then threw the pieces into the crowd as his rhythm section, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, kept up a syncopated backbeat.    The performance was a statement of intent, and Hendrix’ fame only grew over the next few years before his untimely death on 18 September 1970. The problem Hendrix had is that he wanted to grow as an artist and musician, but the audience wasn’t having a bar of it. They wanted more of the same:  Purple Haze , Hendrix playing his instrument behind his back and with his teeth and, yeah, the guitar smashing. What most of the audience didn’t want were extended jazz-blues fusion jams or collabs with Miles Davis.   And so Hendrix was t...

  I pulled the clingwrap from the pantry, tore off a sheet and wrapped the phat bud I had sitting on the kitchen bench tight. Then I grabbed my hair gel and pushed the wrapped bud down to the bottom.   Later, when I got off the plane to Tokyo and made my way to the hotel, Eliminator Jr, who was doing research in Japan at the time, pinged me from reception and made his way up to my room. I dug out the bud, rolled a doobie and we got supremely baked, spending the arvo wandering around Akihabara before finding ourselves in a small bar off some side street.   We kinda stressed that there was no more bud, but as I rolled a smoke from my pouch of Champion Ruby tobacco, I realised I’d left another bud in there, unconcealed, that I’d somehow forgotten about. Back to my hotel, another phat boy and more time wandering through neo-Tokyo.   Another Tokyo trip. Eliminator was doing research at a lab in Tsukuba and took time off to meet me in the city. He’d scored tix to Canadian ...

  It was that liminal moment when one class has finished but you’ve yet to make your way to the next period. She walked out onto the veranda of the demountable building school had installed while the permanent classrooms at the ‘new school’ were being built and told me to wait a ‘sec.   I had probably lingered longer outside class than was strictly necessary. Next period was maths and both the subject and teacher – Mrs Grindley, who oversaw enforcing uniform violations by doing things like getting the girls to kneel and then measuring the distance from the bottom hem of their skirts to the ground, and whose extremely hairy legs were visible through the sheer stockings she wore in winter – were not favourites.    English, on the other hand, was a favourite. I loved reading and I loved books. And our new year ten English teacher, Miss Cusack, was excellent. She made the books come to life, and I looked forward to her classes. It was 1988. The Bicentennial Year. I’d bee...

  Having spent most of my life as a rock pig, it’s been liberating and eye-opening to have discovered electronic music and hip hop in recent years. The sounds are fresh and point to the future. Most of the hip hop I’ve been listening to is ‘90s gangsta rap. The beats, the bottom end and the rhymes are SO on point. But it also makes me feel deeply conflicted: the raps are often misogynistic, treating women as objects of male desire and nothing more than a receptacle for male lust. I can overlook it, with the old idea of separating the art from the artist coming to mind. But it’s not ideal. (as an aside, I’ll generally hold to the art vs artist thing, but there are a couple of areas where I draw the line: if the artist is anti-LGBTQI, and particularly anti-trans, then that’s it. I won’t listen.)   One of the things I find so fascinating about modern pop, and hip hop in particular, is just how avant-garde the music is. Listen to it closely, and it shouldn’t work, but it does. Thi...

  “Why are your legs shaking?” she asked.   “I’m cold,” I replied.    It was late in the evening, a clear night with a bright moon casting jagged shadows across the small courtyard at a mutual friend’s house where we sat facing each other, our legs entwined.   We were both 17, and had grown close, recognising in each other a kindred spirit and a mutual desire to escape from the straight-jacketed dogma and conformity of the Pentecostal school we unwillingly attended.   The Cure’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me album played quietly on a boombox as we sat, content in each other’s company, smoking Dunhills and talking about the future. What would happen when we left school in a few months? What would our lives look like once we were finally liberated?   It wasn’t a boyfriend / girlfriend thing. We’d never held hands, let alone kissed. And the idea of sex? That just seemed like an alien concept. Our relationship wasn’t like that. I needed her and, I guess, she nee...

  A couple of years ago my life changed. I was hopped up, wanting to find something new to listen to, and Frank messaged me. “You gotta listen to Underworld,” he said, recommending an album called Dubnobasswithmyheadman.   I’d long been interested in electronic music, a fascination that began when I found a copy of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn album in my dad’s collection as a young teen. But I’d never put any real effort into exploring it. Over the years I’d gotten bored with rock. Too often I’d hear something, and it just seemed like the same tired old riffs and ideas being trotted out. Rock had become stale for me.    Where was the new stuff that would challenge me, I wondered? Where was the new music that would change my perception of what was possible with guitars like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine did all those years ago?   But with Frank’s recommendation, I had an epiphany. Electronic music sounded like the future. Here was music I could get on board with, ...