Wrote an email to a friend, and realised in the glowing AfterMASH of composing it, that the subjects covered were of general-enough interest to form the basis for a fire-up restart for this long dormant/just about healed over webslight. So I tidied it up a little, and hyar she blows. (Possibly quite literally.)

So all due thanks for completely inadvertent inspiration to my semi-anonymous pal Buddy Dennis, and to the upcoming Hulk Hogan tour that provided the unlikely stimulus for the lively email exchange. (And which, out of clemency, is not mentioned below at all.)


THE ACKNOWLEDGED WORLD CENTRE OF PURE SHOWBIZ GOLD

If you love a good Aussie showbiz disaster, please avail yourself of Channel Ten’s The Spearman Experiment before they yank it off television, which going by the first show I saw, could be within the proverbial New York minute.

It’s Nine’s 20-to-1 show (a programme I’ve always felt was innovatively named after the viewer’s likely odds of getting any entertainment out of the show) except the young, swingin’, bopster hepcat version, in theory, which actually translates to nostalgia stuff aimed at people watching television in the 1980s, so Ten’s idea of cutting-edge young people’s TV is actually aimed at 40 year olds.

The show I saw was about the “great Australian TV comedy characters”, and I’m now convinced that the real greatest Australian TV comedy characters would include Jim Waley, Laurie Oakes and Tony Barber in the wake of the ones they came up with, such as Kylie Mole, two of the scintillating comic characterisations by the ever-hilarious Glenn Whatsisface who used to be on The Panel, and anyone else who ever was in a comedy show on Channel Ten.

Just to pull the shroud over the deceased, they had “celebrities” talking with their great comedic knowledge about the ‘great comedy characters’, in a manner that suggested they’d just been brained with a baseball bat prior to taping, and most of them were “television personalities” I’d never previously seen or heard of. I’d guess they were from the Witness Protection Program channel.

The finishing hold was provided by the hosting of Magda Szubanski, and I can honestly say without any hyperbole that this was the single coldest, unfriendliest job of hosting anything on TV I’d seen, perhaps since Bryant Gumble was at the height of being tired with his co-host/weather presenter combo on NBC’s Today show, or anything Daryl Somers has done in the last 20 years, minus the smarm. I don’t know whether she was trying for being ‘cool’ or ‘dry’, or some other aspect of personality that a deodorant might have, but it seemed like one of the greatest examples in television history of a host clearly conveying to an audience that she’d rather be lying in a puddle of cold mud than hosting the show she was presenting.

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ROCKETING TO THE POORHOUSE

This business of music promoters (and in some cases I mean alleged music promoters, as there’s no apparent promotion involved) bringing out music acts to Australia that have a specialist appeal - i.e. not mainstream, but there’s probably a cult audience there if you can tap into it - and then murdering any chance of success by not doing anything other than hanging the shingle of the act’s name out there, and assuming this will draw an audience without any other advertising, explanation or promotion, has gone from being a definite trend a few years back to a confirmed epidemic. They book the dates, they buy the plane tickets, they book the hotel rooms, and then they sit back with a stupid smirk on their faces and assume the deal is done, and fans will flock in.

Recently I went to see the LA pop singer-songwriter Aimee Mann at the Palais. (Explanations would take up valuable time, but I’m a fan of her stuff.) She should have a solid little cult following here (did the soundtrack for a movie called Magnolia which a lot of the alternative types seem to know her from, and she was in the band Til Tuesday in the 80s) but the show pulled about 50% capacity, maybe 1000 people being generous. She’s never been out here before. The reaction when I mentioned going to the show to a fellow fan a few days later was, and this is close enough to verbatim: “Really? Aimee Mann? When is she playing?” I’m guessing the message didn’t quite get out to the people who knew her stuff, or to other folks who would have liked her music but weren’t aware who she was or what she played.

When the 70s heavy metal band Budgie came out here a couple of years ago, there was no advertising to speak of, and nobody explained to the kids that, wait a minute, these guys were contemporaries of Zeppelin and Sabbath, were covered a couple of times by Metallica, and were the roots of the metal we’ve had since. They drew about 200 people at the Forum. Now someone, who I’m imagining needs a major tax loss on the books for the current financial year, is touring them again! I’ll bet you anything that the level of publicity will guarantee another venue mostly filled with dry ice, tumbleweeds and cicadas. Those poor guys will be going back to Wales and telling everyone that Australia must have a population of around 2000 people, and that you see more koalas than human beings there.

Even when the Dictators came out here a fair while back - and that was a band that was a super-easy sell, being the pre-Ramones roots of punk rock, and contemporaries of the New York Dolls, the Heartbreakers, KISS etc - nobody remembered to do the sell, and with a stacked support card, they still didn’t do much better than about 60% fill the Corner Hotel, and the show at The Tote was fairly packed, but if a quarter of my brother-in-law’s family members turned up, the Tote would be chockers. Had they been sold properly and advertised adequately, I think they could have done a Forum show at least, and maybe a Palace (Metro) or Billboard sized venue. (And the bizarre thing was, when Whitesnake came out last time, which was only a few weeks prior to WASP from memory, and it was apparently promoted on the basis that it was some sort of official state secret, they (a) put them in the Palace/Metro, when I think that properly promoted, that’s at least a Festival Hall/Vodaphone gig, and (b) thanks to the hardcores, it was apparently chockers anyway.)

It’s amazing how often people miss the boat on this stuff. I think touring bands here is like the old tablecloth trick of movie and stage magic fame – where a guy tries and whips the cloth off the table in one snappy motion, leaving all plates, cutlery and glassware atop it undisturbed. Basically there’s a lot of drunk people who think they can do this, and none of them realise they have no idea whatsoever until we’re all knee-high in food scraps and crockery fragments and drenched in leftover wine.

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BASE PLUG FOR CURRENT MOVIE

Regarding this latter sentiment, and for a bunch of other reasons, you should make an effort if you can to catch the movie Anvil - The Story of Anvilwhile it’s still in the cinemas. This is being promoted as a real life equivalent to This is Spinal Tap, which in some ways isn’t a bad description. These guys are a real-life Canadian metal band, who had influential albums out in the early-mid 1980s, but while virtually everyone else they played with went on to become multi-million sellers, nothing ever happened for them. There are still two original members, now in their 50s, still touring around as Anvil, with a couple of younger guys. The movie, in part, follows them on possibly the worst-organised European tour since Germany’s tour of Stalingrad in WWII. You have just got to see the wacko woman booker who promotes this tour in action. She’s incoherent in any language she encounters - actually I couldn’t even work out what her first language might be, other than it’s definitely not English - and screws up every single date, venue, and train/plane transfer, one after another. It’s so well organised that at one venue the club manager attempts to pay them in bowls of goulash. I’m not making this up.

The movie is actually kind of a feel-good movie because the two main guys are so likeable. Also (and this point is made by various of their contemporaries, including Slash and Lemmy) they’re actually a pretty damn good metal band. In some ways it’s a lot like the movie The Wrestler because the main guys are working Joe-jobs throughout the week to feed their families, and then keeping the dream alive working crappy clubs on the weekends. However, it’s more feel-good than that (well, almost anything bar The Spearman Experiment is) because the band is good, and by the end, they kind of start to finally get a break, and play a big show in Japan. (And the movie has kind of given them a career, I gather.)

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