With any of us, there’s the story or impression that lingers and then there’s the truth, and with the singer and songwriter raised as Norma Egstrom but known as Miss Peggy Lee, lets just say, that’s not all there is.

Peggy Lee’s soft and sultry vocal delivery was an abject lesson for me (and a million other young dreamy hopefuls) into singing cool, jazzy numbers and creating real atmosphere. Peggy seemingly didn’t have to do much to make a scene. She stood quite still, only languorously clicking her fingers and smiling a little lop-sided and cheeky like she had a secret she was keeping, taking the audience someplace far more intimate than they were used to.

In Peggy’s (quite astonishing) autobiography she reveals that in her first real big break, where she had been invited to audition with Benny Goodman at The Dollhouse in Palm Springs, after the ‘girl singer’ Helen Forrest left, Peggy sung ‘My Old Flame’ in Helen’s key instead of her own and it sounded terrible. A review the next day was headlined ‘Sweet Sixteen and Will Never Be Missed’. She was actually seventeen, but truth has always been meaningless.

She got the gig, but struggled to find her place in the big band and the loud crowd.

At this point I feel a little Peggy backstory is in order. She grew up in poverty on a farm in North Dakota just preceding The Great Depression. Her mother died when she was four years old and her dad, an sweet but pathetic, alcoholic railway man, remarried a woman who would regularly smash Peggy over the head with a cast iron frypan, kick her in the stomach, make her slaughter her own pets and subjected her to constant verbal abuse about her looks and the terrible fate she was headed for.

Little Norma was in charge of all the cooking and cleaning at home from age seven, had multiple part-time jobs like washing blackboards, scrubbing halls, milking cows and took over her father’s duties at the railway so he wouldn’t get caught for slacking off. She says her schoolteachers, neighbours and her employers all knew about the conditions she was enduring at home, but were terrified of the woman and so nobody said anything. She survived this time by constantly thinking ‘I am going to be a singer. I know it’.

She started singing with a ragtag orchestra while she was still in school, at local halls and out-of-towners, using a megaphone as a microphone and hitchhiking to shows if she had to. Her first radio audition, the boss picked the name ‘Peggy Lee’ out of the air for her, saying Norma Egstrom would never do. She was on her way.

Eventually Peggy saved up enough for a bus ticket to California, where she narrowly escaped being sex-trafficked and still worked multiple jobs, although some of those jobs were now radio based and sometimes involved singing. She says Hollywood Boulevard at that time was as clean as a whistle and polished like a marble living room.

Peggy was mainly surviving by picking oranges from a tree, eating day old bread and milk and fish direct from the fishing boats. She got a new job as a ‘shy fairground barker’, where she had to entice crowds to ‘Hit The Wino With The Baseball’, which would dump him in the water. She felt so sorry for ‘the geek’ she couldn’t look at him.

She had brought one dress to California with her, ingeniously hand-stitched by her sister from her long-dead milliner grandmother’s collection of fine, delicate Maline lace, and the first night she wore it, the lace disintegrated under the hot spotlight and ‘I was left standing in my slip’.

Let’s skip forward now, to The International Hotel, Las Vegas sometime in the early 70s, Peggy is ending a stint there and Elvis Presley is taking over from her. Peggy’s granddaughter was there with her and remembers that the hotel had arranged a playdate for her and Lisa Marie - they were around the same age - during the turnover period. They got on great and had tons of fun. Elvis called for them to brought to him in his hotel room - he was sick and sitting ‘in the middle of this big, grand bed’, wearing sunglasses. All she could think to say was ‘My grandmother wears sunglasses in bed too!’ and he laughed and asked her to take a message to Peggy to say thank you for her covering for him an extra couple of days while he recovered, and when she got back to Peggy’s room, she was also sitting in the middle of her big, grand hotel bed, wearing sunglasses. She asked her granddaughter, ‘Well did you meet Elvis?’, to which she replied ‘yes’ and Peggy then wanted to know ‘Did he ask about me?’. Her granddaughter told her ‘Yes’. Peggy was happy.

This reminds me of one of the best stories I’ve ever heard, also about Peggy Lee in bed. I was filming a TV show with the Australian director Stephen McLean, who would go on to write the Peter Allen biography ‘The Boy From Oz’ which would become the enduring hit musical. Stephen, a truly gorgeous, sensitive man, loved showbiz and spent a lot of time in LA and New York and had somehow become very good friends with Peggy in his travels. He told me that for a little while they were hanging out together for a few hours every day, maybe he was interviewing her for a new book or something, but she was on total bedrest, extremely ill with something, all alone in her huge LA mansion - Peggy was absolutely plagued by health issues and endured a ton of operations.

She kept a reel-to-reel recorder in bed with her, with which she would entertain herself by recording perfect impressions of her favourite singers into it - Stephen said her impression of her very old friend Frank Sinatra was absolutely uncanny and she would while away hours singing in his voice, doing all the music solos too. She also loved to ‘do’ Billie Holiday - who Frank Sinatra credited with being the reason he sings. What I would give to hear these tapes!

In her autobiography, Peggy tells a story of singing Billie’s signature, self-written song ‘God Bless The Child’, for Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole who were in the audience at a show. One of Billie’s bookers was also there and apparently ‘turned white as a sheet, it was so much like Billie, but of course Billie was already dead. Later, Nat King Cole came into my office and cried, saying, “That was Billie.”’

The story shouldn’t really be surprising, because nearly everything that little traumatised, tough, hard-working farm girl from North Dakota grew up to do was nothing short of unusual and surprising.

Here’s ten fabulous facts about Miss Peggy Lee:

1. She was the inspiration behind the karate chopping, feminist icon and Muppets diva Miss Piggy - who was originally called Miss Piggy Lee in homage by her creator Bonnie Erickson, a fellow North Dakotan, but the network freaked out that she would sue them so shortened it so her inspiration would be less recognisable. Funnily enough, Miss Piggy’s backstory involves a tough upbringing on a farm in Iowa with a mean stepmother ….

2. She performed voices for multiple characters (both feline and human) and co- composed and performed all the songs for Disney classic ‘The Lady & The Tramp’. She smartly retained the rights to ‘phonograph and future ‘transcriptions’ of the works in her contract. When the film was released on VHS, Disney gave her a single $500 payment. She requested they pay performance and publishing royalties but they refused. So, she sued and won - after a four year legal battle - according to Wikipedia, Peggy ‘was awarded $2.3 million for breach of contract, plus $500,000 for unjust enrichment, $600,000 for illegal use of Lee’s voice and $400,000 for the use of her name’. In 1992 she was given a further compensation payout. By 1995, Disney had earned a sweet $72m in VHS sales.

3. Although she is not registered as a songwriter on her most enduring hit ‘Fever’, she built on the original song when she recorded it, writing the additional verses about lovers throughout history including Captain Smith and Pocahontas and Romeo and Juliet. When she recorded her version, two years after the original hit version by Little Willie John, she totally reinvented it. The piano player was late to the session and Peggy loved the way it was sounding in rehearsal with just double bass and drums, played by hand, and her finger clicks and decided to record it that way. I don’t know why this was never rectified - all you have to do is listen to the two versions back to back to see her contribution to the standard. Her version of ‘Fever’ was nominated for four Grammys, including Song of the Year, Record of the Year and Best Vocal.

4. Peggy wrote what she called ‘mood poetry’ as well as songs - and many of these reflective, storytelling kind of poems were put to music, most famously the incredible ‘Is That All There Is’. She published a collection of poetry called ‘Softly, With Feeling’ in 1954 and recounts this story in her autobiography: ‘I wrote a poem called New York City Ghost which is about nine minutes long. Victor (Young) scored it for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and asked me to recite it in the Hollywood Bowl, which holds about 18,000 people. I said “Oh Victor, I couldn’t do that” but he replied “If I thought enough of this poem to score it for the orchestra, you should think enough of it to do it”’. So, she did.

1. Paul McCartney loved her so much he wrote a song for her; ‘Let’s Love’, which she recorded and titled an album after in 1974. Paul also produced the recording with a phenomenal group of musicians and played piano (uncredited) on the recording.

2. She is cited as the inspiration behind the Margarita cocktail, after a Texan bartender whipped up a drink to her specifications - she was trying to recreate something she had tried in Mexico. ‘Peggy’ is the diminutive of the name ‘Margaret’, and that is what the bartender presumed her name was - the Spanish version of that is ‘Margarita’.

3. She used to bring hordes of showbiz friends back to her hotel room after late night gigs for hot dogs with onions (she’d cook them herself) and expensive champagne.

4. She once fell over onstage so hard she broke her pelvis, but since it was at the beginning of the night she didn’t want to let her audience down and so propped herself on a chair and continued. This story is not a one off, her book is crammed with tales of her endurance onstage through agonies and sever illness - she describes performing another sold out show - her second of the day - ‘leaned up on a pressing board’, until she fainted during it, an ambulance was called and she spent the next six months recovering from pleurisy and double pneumonia.

5. Frank Sinatra came up with the concept of her album The Folks Who Live On The Hill and then conducted and produced it himself down to the last detail, including putting menthol in Peggy’s eyes for the cover shoot so she would look ‘suitably misty’.

6. She received this message offering her an acting role in jazz film Pete Kelly’s Blues: “ I have a wonderful script. I don’t know if you’ll be interested in the role because we’re not going to shoot you in the best light. It’s not glamorous and we’ll deliberately light you poorly and things like that…”. The role was as an alcoholic washed-up messed-up jazz singer. Peggy read the script and said she couldn’t wait to do it. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role in 1955. A review stated: “it is Miss Lee with her underplaying, particularly in a poignant asylum scene, that you will remember longest.” On a 70s TV talk-show, Peggy once told the interviewer ‘You have to love the song or leave it. It’s like picking out a role, or picking out clothes, or picking out a dog’. Peggy, I concur entirely.

What continues to be so striking about Peggy is that in an era when women in music were very much thought of as simply ‘girl singers’, Peggy was writing songs (over 250 of them, including huge hits ‘I Don’t Know Enough About You’, ‘It’s a Good Day’, ‘Mañana’, ‘I’m Gonna Go Fishing’, ‘Don’t Smoke In Bed’ ), writing quite weird, long, experimental personal poetry, writing film scores and theme songs and dreaming about inventing a healing device inspired by the colours and sound waves she saw in her mind after being hit on the head. She was friends with Robert Oppenheimer (Mr. H Bomb) who took her idea to Albert Einstein, who believed it had merit and planned to have dinner with Peggy to discuss it further, but died before that could happen.

Her haunting song ‘Johnny Guitar’, written with Victor Young for the Joan Crawford movie of the same name has always been one of my very favourite songs and I’ve been singing it in my sets for years (as well other Peggy classics like ‘Fever’, ‘Black Coffee’, ‘I’m A Woman’ that I’ve sung in the nightclub style duo I have with my dad Peter Head). Here’s our version of ‘Johnny Guitar’.

Peggy had that reel-to-reel I mentioned before by her side for years, travelling with it and recording informal sessions at home with musician friends. Her granddaughter Holly Foster Wells has been slowly transferring Peggy’s massive personal recorded archives and recently released this exquisite version of ‘La Vie En Rose’, recorded live in Peggy’s living room 75 years ago - a song she didn’t ever record officially. Holly says “Hearing her in so many different settings has allowed me to keep getting to know her in new ways. Even with their imperfections, so much of the music on these tapes is stunning. There is something especially moving about hearing her sing just for herself.”

Her long-time manager once said ‘Peggy has worked so hard and so long to be somebody that she has built up a rushing river inside her. She can’t dam it now. It spills over and carries her along.’

Here’s to rushing rivers and experimental mood poems and champagne and hot dogs and black coffee and Maline lace and knowing what you want and taking wild chances and endurance and fantasies and fever and fingersnaps and recording everything on reel to reels to burn forsooth forever … and of course, to Miss Peggy Lee.

Lets get on the turps darlin, he said

So I turned off the water boiling on the stove

And said, alright.

After one glass of white wine

I fell asleep

He painted the town red

Or so he said

Paris 2006

Waiting on a slow Paris dawn

Awoke and reading Billy the Kid

Hair lit and long by lamp and shadow

White leather pressed against my foot

Trouble breathing

Tightness in the chest

Streetlights streaming through

False promise of new morning

House heavy with sleep

My pen scratches like chickens in a yard

First Paris show last night. One of those clean-cut generic funk club clubs that you suspect/know will never really take off. Good sound though and nice enough people. We got a good free meal, omelette and legumes, carafe of wine…the whole bit. Felt like a real band with Delphine and Dimi, I think we immediately could all tell we could play together. Rehearsed the day after we arrived and it all just clicked in. Funny French rehearsal studio with super cool world music dudes standing around smoking hash and nodding enigmatically. Really enjoyed turning the amp up LOUD and leading the band – just doing those few NY shows with Jim has given me a new confidence with the guitar that I’m enjoying. I’m starting to feel like I have my own weird cool sound and I know how to work it, rather than feeling that I can’t play like everybody else. Playing with Jim was so great, felt like riding a wave of drums, being lifted and thrown then floating, sometimes going under…it was fantastic. And really allowed me to lose my self-consciousness about my crappy guitar sound, cos our sounds kinda washed into each other and blended. That happened last night too, and when Warren got up and played with us it sounded particularly incredible. It was already tight and fluid and atmospheric between us but Warren took it into a whole other realm. Felt like we were a world class band, a good feeling. The show wasn’t particularly well attended but the audience seemed so focussed and appreciative. Sold 5 CDs, 2 Tshirts and art book and a badge. Pretty damn good, but it could’ve just been Holly’s charm on the merch desk. And she manned the video camera – I half really want to see it and half want to wait ten years. Dimi really wants to see it – he sung backing vox on ‘Nashville High’ with his great French accent – I’ve been hearing it in my head all day – hope that’s a hit indicator. Just saw on the net I missed out on a songwriters grant for $10,000 that I was desperately hoping I’d get. I’m tired of being scary broke. Gotta change my flight to Berlin so we can do Beasts of Bourbon support in Nimes! And send posters to Berlin. And drop CD to radio station. Just feel like staying in bed actually – my face has swollen up and hurts and I’ve lost my voice, feel like hell. Going to sleep…

Paris 2006

Feeling better. But bad. Its late. We just woke Warren up cos we couldn’t make the key work in the gate. Went to see teen sensations Les Shades et Les Brats at Fleche d’or where I’m playing in a couple of weeks. Huge beautiful venue. So smoky we could hardly breathe – and surging with drunken teenagers taking each other’s pictures and looking Eurotrashy and beautiful. Holly said she’d never seen more beautiful people together at once. Bumped into Hubert and his wife there and they gave us a lift to the Metro so we didn’t have to transfer. Lots of creepy Euro homeboys hanging around the exit in Ivry but it still felt pretty ok walking home at 1am. I dig the way Les Shades dress all in white. I want matching outfits too.

THINGS I LEARNT TODAY:

1. When a song is stuck in your head and it’s driving you crazy and everything you replace it with drives you crazier, sing a verse of Karma Chameleon and your head will clear.

2. The Fall are really good and everybody copied them. They sound like all those slacker 90’s bands but they did it years before.

3. Delphine’s wah wah pedal is the only one Jimi Hendrix ever used and Prince uses. A good thing to know indeed. Must find out what it’s called again, I forget already.

4. A baritone guitar is tuned beadgf# … or something like that.

5. Holiday plays great piano on my songs.

6. Ronnie Spector is putting out a new record. At one point, Phil Spector had her legs put in plaster casts and kept her in a wheelchair for 2 months so he could control her.

Still trying to confirm dates for Berlin. Still haven’t got confirmations from promoter.

Still haven’t managed to change my ticket for Berlin or found my lost itinerary or colour copied posters. Or sent them.

Had a really nice rehearsal here with Delphine today, sounded sinewy and a bit psychedelic but delicate… she’s so great.

My throat is nearly better though I coughed a lot last night and felt horrible hoping I wasn’t waking the house up. I hate being a noisy guest. I hope I sleep tonight.

MORE: IMPORTANT

If you turn the MASTER VOLUME down and VOLUME up on the amp you make your own OVERDRIVE.

Bob Dylan says metaphor is the key to songwriting. I never thought about it like that but now I can’t stop thinking about it.

Paris 2006

Saw three dogs who look like my Hockey dog today and each of them kind of paused and looked directly at us. Holiday took it as a foreboding sign of something bad and got worried but I refuse to be superstitious. We traipsed around all day. I hate being a tourist. I’m such a grinch. We went to Notre Dame and I just enjoyed thinking blasphemous thoughts and about tripping little children up and the like – churches really bring out the devil in me. I can’t stand being in a crowd of hideous tourists with their cameras and videos and mobile phones, really seems to render the whole experience meaningless. Hol and I went to the mosque for the full Turkish bath experience then saw all the ladies had swimsuits on, which we didn’t have, so we just drunk tea de menthe and watched guys trying to suck their hookahs while looking reflective. Then we wandered around the Musee de Natural Histoire but I was cold and had aching legs and was coughing so let Hol go in while I hung around the bookshop. She came out and said it was the most boring museum she’s ever been to. So much for culture. Noah arrived from London so we went to meet him at his sweet little hotel in Bastille. He brought over an incredible screen print of a poster he’s had an artist he knows make for me, fresh off the press, ten of them, so beautiful, all gold and teal with a big 60’s style eye and lashes with a tear spilling from the eye – it says ‘Oh lord, its Loene Carmen bringing you her rock’n’roll tears’. Wow, first artwork I haven’t designed myself, what a joy. Actually, Noah did me a great flyer ten years ago. He took us out for a nice dinner at the Blue Elephant, fancy Thai jungle setting, orchids everywhere, carved radish roses, that sorta jazz stuff, warm and lovely – compared our fairly divergent opinions and ideas about music mainly and giggled a lot. Me and Hol metro-ed it home and now I want a good night’s sleep before tomorrow night’s show so I can ROCK!

Yesterday I learnt:

1. Angus Young doesn’t use any pedals.

2. Hendrix’s favourite guitarist was Billy Gibbons, ZZ Top.

Last night we played a fairly incredible show at Le Palais Bar, in the dark heart of Paris. A rather inviting Turkish looking little bar, with chandeliers, a flaming lamp, cosy tables and chairs, a surly bartendress, nervous young Russian waitress and seemingly genial jolly Russian owner, who apparently came downstairs where we were playing and harangued customers about whether or not they had bought a drink…

London

Wee hours of the morning. Fighting jetlag. Trying to remember through bluish haze. LONDON, HEATHROW, check in: family ahead of me, typical British, more luggage than humanly possible, shaggy dough-faced dishwater blonde in expensive logo tracksuit who is obviously not into any kind of exercise, 8 year old daughter with inappropriate glitter slogan top and a nasty little ponytail, popping gum, practising weird stripper like moves whilst simultaneously whining, peremptorially, constantly, Mum! Mum! Dad looking harried, bored, bored teenage son with iPod trying desperately to pretend he’s not with him, not anywhere, 120 quid excess baggage and a sad knowledge that all that expensive overload is worthless, full of more polyester slogan comfort wear than they could ever wear, on their Aussie holiday that you just know will be full of boring tourist traps and disappointment and bad food choices … my heart hurts for their awfulness.

Roma

Blue hotel, we can’t stop singing blue hotel, its like a holiday inn on the outskirts of town, no one knows the rest of the song, blue hotel, over and over til we’re all hysterical and slightly mad with it…tonight we play at a famous jazz club…

Thessaloniki

On the way to the show in a 30 seater bus that we had to get in order to transport the double bass, six of us, driving through wasteland, little kids sitting on front steps of houses with half a roof and tangled weed patch of garden, our hotel a few blocks away, fancy, clean and plush…. poverty everywhere, lots of 4 story houses, open, exposed to the elements on one side, literally half built, like the money ran out halfway, with suspended laundry blowing in the breeze… our driver, sweating copiously in his leather jacket in the 30 degree spring heat but refusing to take it off even while he lugs and loads gear… we drop suitcases at hotel, the lobby absolutely swarming with heavily made up teenagers celebrating end of exams, 20 minute lie down then back on the bus, to the venue, a huge community centre with various bars, restaurants, a burnt out art gallery, an open air stage, buzzing with people, long long soundcheck, I’m reading Peter Guralnick’s Elvis biography and get to the end, I’m choked up bad, Rosie comes rushing to me from stage, oh Lo what’s wrong… Elvis just died I manage to tell her through unexpected tears and have to take a walk… it takes a while to regain equilibrium…

Athens 2006

Soundcheck, reading Elvis again, transfixed, gorgeous Maria (the best teeth in Greek rock) tells me to stop, its bad luck to read about dying musician before a show… I agree… sensational Greek dinner, cats winding in and out of tables, abundant food, croquettes of eggplant, spinach, haloumi, tomato, salads with pomegranite seeds, white wine in little square bottles... band goes back to hotel and I continue on to venue with Maria, slip into my 5 euro silver mini from the Paris flea market and try to transform myself inside… a long walk from dressing room across narrow passage looking down on stage, an old theatre, holds 1000, about 40 people waiting for the show, why is empty scarier than full… that step, that hard first step towards my gear I have to push myself to take each night, walk across large stage, plug things, bang out a chord, yassou, hi, and I’m off….Thomas tells me at soundcheck, turn it up Loene, play loud tonight, they are Greek, they like it like that … my amp is nicely loud and buzzing, my voice strangely distant and hard to hear… I do what I can with regard to rocking alone, bang the songs out hard and proud, the crowd are encouraging, lots of flashes going off, a few whoops, I sing the one about the bee that transports me back to a haphazard picnic in the still afternoon sunlight, my head on my darling’s thigh, a bee on my finger, so still… sometimes songs seem so strange, that you can couch experience in melody and dress it up with words that blissfully interact, almost scientifically, to produce the same chemistry you felt that inspired the song… my guitar sounds like a tree trunk falling, hard and wide and long… I sing the one about stumbling on, singing my song and loading up cars and feel no truer word was ever spoke… after, for the first time, I am shaking, I sit alone above the stage and listen to the sounds of Mick’s show wafting in, they sound so good, so vibrant, like all the colours of the rainbow but at night, I drink Greek white wine made by priests on a mountain where no woman may go and wonder idly if they are allowed to drink the wine ... only one show left then home, to a home my darling managed to tell me in fraught phone call seconds before boarding the plane, that we have been evicted from…. I wonder what I am doing, again, on a fantasy tour, I have no money, no prospects, an album in the can I can’t pay for, a record label that resolutely ignores me and now a home no longer ours, filled of ten years worth of junk… my songs feel like treasures that no one else can see, then I wonder, are they the emperor’s new clothes… we sit drinking in the hotel lobby, clean and Greek and white, another band stumbles in, really stumbling, so drunk they can barely stand, arms around each other, supporting, bare chested, stage pants, hilarious…we find out the next morning they are the Finnish or Norwegian or something monster band that just won Eurovision… I manage to snap a picture of their backs as they disappear into the mawing hole of the lift then discover later they have sworn never to reveal their faces behind the monster masks… if I’d snapped seconds earlier I could have sold my picture for a small Euro fortune maybe…

Hobart 2010

When on tour alone, the transmutable quality of time becomes rather fascinating.

Yesterday, first day of the tour, was a 24 hour day for me.

Tuesday night I mastered the dark and delicate art of snuggling loop pedals and highly breakable merchandise in with my flannelette pjs, stockings and stage gear. I retired around midnight to arise at 5am to make it to the airport for my super cheap and thus super early Hobart flight. Quarter to three my little Dutchie awoke and insisted on fussing, fidgeting and generally fucking around until finally giving into sleep again 5.15am, leaving me just enough time for a quick cup of joe before the taxi arrived.

Arriving in Hobart was a breeze, got the city bus and easily located the suburban bus route to Lutana where the Kill Devil Hills had sensibly rented a house. A kindly bus driver told me where to get off and what direction to walk in.

I found the house, and evidence of some serious partying in the shattered expressions of the men inside. Though beer lingered in the air, someone had made the homely gesture of stuffing a large bunch of jasmine in a jug. I thought this boded well. We reacquainted ourselves after only meeting briefly at the Annandale show a couple of nights before and headed off to do a rather pleasant university radio interview.

Four days earlier I had a rather nasty fall and had developed an evil looking black bruising across one entire bottom cheek. The bruise had begun to pulse and developed a kind of angry red egg. I thought I better get it seen to before it turned into a blood infection or something and so parted ways with the fellas as they set off to pick up amplifiers and drumkits for the impending soundcheck. Then the rain came down. I made a bedraggled and probably slightly wild eyed appearance at the local medical centre who in no uncertain terms told me they had no appointments available AT ALL and didn’t know of any other doctors. At all. I got the feeling the snooty little receptionist thought I looked like a weirdo and was after drugs. I was tempted to show her my ass but resisted. I walked the unfamiliar streets, feeling like Elvis in the Kentucky Rain, until I came across a pharmacy where I explained my predicamant. ‘Mmm, arnica is probably helpful’ was the unhelpful advice I received. I was again tempted to drop my pants and give them an eyeful of my scary cheek but thought it probably wasn’t prudent. I went to call Brendon from the band to ask them to pick me up and realised I’d lost my telephone.

Georgia 2014

‘Y’all GOTTA go to Stone Mountain, it’s a real special place, Atlanta’s finest attraction, a natural wonderland…’ Thus spake the hillbilly dude at Sweetie’s Flea Market, and all his people lounging around the stall nodded and murmured in agreement. ‘Oh yes, the young uns’ll just lurve it’. So I looked it up, and discovered it had a Scenic Railroad that travelled around the mountain and being that Master D, five years old, was a Southern steam train enthusiast, I was sold. When next Saturday afternoon rolled around, we set off around 2pm for the long journey, a good hour or so, armed with edible distractions and much excitement for an afternoon of nature trails and playgrounds and real old rattlers. On the way we listen to what passes for country music these days.

We arrive in the relentlessly vicious heat, buy our family twilight adventure tickets and head on in. “Y’all got 4 minutes before the next train departs, you’ll make it if you walk brisk” a helpful worker advises. It is quickly apparent that this is more along the lines of theme park Thoreau than actual nature immersion. The worst of clichéd Americana is parading by, hokey fake Southern restaurants, glass blowing demonstrations on the hour, behind glass, giant globulous drips of pump action ketchup in the soulless fast food cafeteria, gawping sweaty unhealthy looking children and multiple family groups dressed alike in matching logo T-shirts of one variety or another; Ingalls Family ReUnion 2012; Harvest Church Graduates; all converged in a fake ye olden street scene with signs pointing to ‘Shopping Adventure’ or ‘Food Adventure’. We make a beeline for the train. A evil looking man ambles past with the Confederate flag proudly visible on his hat, his mate brazenly sporting a Swastika tattoo. We look around at passing handsome black families and kids and feel sick and horrified. Why weren’t these messed up right wingers arrested at birth? How can this be real? After dragging Dutch at a cracking pace we make it in the allotted four minutes and are told the train is full and to be sure to come back within twenty minutes to queue for the train that will leave forty five minutes later. My heart sinks. I heartily hate queues and trying to kill long stretches of time waiting for lame tourist attractions with a fidgety kid and a hot baby that has already been trapped in a car seat far too long for anyone’s comfort is definitely not my idea of fun in any accent.

Georgia 2015

There is perhaps no more unbridled joy than driving down Georgia backroads, scent of magnolia in the air, trees bending under the weight of pink, red and white blossoms and blasting the first mixes of one’s new album through splendid car speakers, bathing in its potential greatness, free to imagine adding cool handclaps and sweet backing vocals and completely unburdened by a single soul’s opinion or the pointless, nervous mental negotiations of release plans. Simply getting high on your own supply. This is why we do it. Praise the Lord and pass the mescaline!

Georgia 2016

Once you’re out of the city, the deafening roar of hopelessness is unavoidable.

Stretching as far as the eye can see is a society that has turned its back on the idea of individualism and embraced the promise of homogenized franchised culture that has given back nothing but an illusion of convenience and a pervasive sense of desperation.

It is so ingrained the possibility of change doesn’t even seem plausible.

When there’s nothing in sight for miles and miles of highway but a relentless procession of pawn stores, Waffle Houses and Walmarts, you can’t help the feeling sometimes that people’s hopes and dreams got sold down the river. Human billboards dot the landscape, trying to assuage their humiliation with humour, performing funny little dances, wearing masks and crazy costumes, blasting music from a boom box, some just stand there, still and dead eyed, wearing their sign advertising something terribly inconsequential that could just as easily be propped against a wall. I have to avert my eyes. Boarded up former restaurants and the occasional thrift store or street stall selling peaches or boiled peanuts provide the only flash of color or momentary break in the ever-repeated franchises.

Los Angeles 2017

I woke up dreaming of a cheese and lettuce sandwich, the kind you can only get driving through an Australian country town; road trip lunch. Slightly stale white bread, lots of butter, thinly sliced swiss cheese with cold iceberg lettuce, the sweet pique of salt and pepper, a dash of mayo. I got up and walked to fridge and whipped one up in a trance. It was perfect. I could almost go back to sleep it was so satisfying.

Last night I had a night on the town in Los Angeles. We started with a Hollywood producer’s Christmas party, at his home in mid-Wilshire. After a tour of his pristine office, where we admired the neatly stacked Hollywood magazines and framed movie posters, conveniently next to the glowing fairy lit pool, I ended up talking about absolutely nothing to another producer, an elegant, pregnant woman. Although the food and libations were plentiful there was a strange slightly desperate glassiness in the eyes of every person I met, everyone hopelessly hoping for a meaningful encounter. I was beset by an uncomfortable urge to assuage everyone’s nerves, their loneliness and neediness. It was an impossible task.

Ah your McJob she said.

I had to Google it: A "McJob" is slang for a low-paying, low-prestige job that requires few skills and offers little chance of advancement. Originally derived from the fast-food giant McDonald's, the term is a catch-all for any unstimulating, dead-end service sector job.

It entered the 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2003, upon which it was virulently objected to by the fast food magnates who called it ‘demeaning’ and ‘a slap in the face’. Ummm, methinks someone doth protest too much? Or is this where I should use that people who live in glass houses saying?

Anyway, as long as McBosses have been shilling their ethical responsibilities, artists of all stripes have been taking McJobs that tick just enough boxes to get them by.

We all know that the main trouble with being any kind of a creative entrepreneur - a writer, a musician, an artist of any kind - is that getting paid for your endless efforts is a rare gift.

So these McJobs are ways of working for what you need without committing (or as put it so well recently: I was looking for a side gig that paid well enough to support my full-time career of professionally losing money as an indie rock musician) , or being required to waste any extra effort on caring about what you do too much. You’re not angling to be noticed or promoted or to make your way up the ladder. You turn up, put in the time and the required effort, get paid your lowly pittance and you’re out that door. Win-win situation, kind of, and one that does have its own esoteric merits and rewards beyond the pittance.

There’s something about a shitty job that requires your physical presence but not so much your mental efforts that allows us creatively delusional folk to daydream, which is necessary for the making of our work.

Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker enjoyed being an “unmotivated law clerk wage slave, walking around Perth delivering court documents, singing and writing songs in his head for a while”, explaining “I loved it cos I just got to walk around all day in total solitude all week.” T.S. Eliot was an accounts clerk for Lloyds Bank - The Waste Land was partly inspired by things he saw on his way to and from work. Franz Kafka worked as a Chief Legal Secretary of the Workman’s Labour Accident Insurance Institute in Bohemia, Prague from 1908 until 1922, calling it his Brotberuf (bread job). The administrative tasks he spent his days preoccupied by were later transformed into literary masterpieces The Trial and Metamorphosis, published after his death, eventually spawning the descriptor ‘Kafkaesque’ in reference to the absurd bureaucratics within.

John Prine and Charles Bukowski trod the pavements as US Postal Service workers. Prine would later release an album entitled ‘The Singing Mailman Delivers’, featuring songs first written and recorded in the early 70s inspired by what he witnessed while doing his deliveries, and eventually released on his own label in 2011, stating in the press release ‘I always likened the mail route to a library with no books. I passed the time each day making up these little ditties’. Songs inspired by the mail route included ‘Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore’ and ‘Souvenirs’.

Bukowski’s first semi-autobiographical novel was entitled Post Office, written in 1969 after he was offered a small wage by Black Sparrow Press to write full time and was finally able to leave the postal service after ten years there.

The streets were full of insane and dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn’t seem to work, and you wondered how they did it.

from Post Office by Charles Bukowski

Kurt Cobain daydreamed his way to saving up enough cash to make Nirvana’s first demo while working for Lemon’s Janitorial Service at his former high school, that he’d dropped out of. Kris Novoselic said “Here was a man who would never clean his kitchen or take out the garbage, or do those kind of chores, but Kurt Cobain was not a lazy person. Basically he cleaned toilets – that’s how he paid for that demo.”

The music video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ features a smiling, swaying janitor lost in the music inside his own head, inspired by Kurt’s time spent in service to helping to eradicate the lingering scent of teen spirit in the byways and hallways of Aberdeen High School.

Country star Carly Pearce has also put in some hard service time scouring other people’s toilets, toiling as an Airbnb cleaner for years in Nashville before finally breaking out in music. She has recalled breaking down in tears at work after hearing a song on the radio she had on hold with her label and was expecting to be released soon, sung by another singer, as she was in the midst of scrubbing away.

Of this time she has said, “….people are Nasty! Gross! I would clean these massive homes for bachelor and bachelorette parties and I would have to bake cookies for them and leave them... I think that the most memorable is just how disgusting people are”. She says she always thinks about it when she is leaving a hotel room, or a fitting room, knowing that someone else will have to clean up after her, reiterating “The things that I saw may have scarred me. They don’t care.”

Bon Scott worked as a day labourer literally ‘shovelling shit’ at the Wallaroo Fertiliser Plant in Adelaide, Australia, while working on learning guitar, writing songs and making music at night, before getting the gig and - eventually - hitting the payload as AC/DC’s lead singer. Malcolm Young slogged away as a sewing machine mechanic at the Hestia bra factory in Sydney from the age of 15, before starting the band.

I recently saw an uncredited snippet of a video interview with the late Elliot Smith recalling “the last real jobs I had were like, odd job construction work. It didn’t really require much, like mental activity, so I could think about songs through the day and I couldn’t wait to get home and see if what I was imagining sounded like what I thought”.

Doing the menial, thankless jobs other people would rather avoid is the dirty pool from which most artists source work to keep their heads above water, their lives afloat. It’s not just cleaning and hard labour, the relentless care-taking of children and animals is often outsourced to those hungry for a little cash to get by.

Sting’s career as a schoolteacher was preserved in amber forever in the hit song ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’, and according to Wikipedia, he also worked as a bus conductor, a building labourer, and tax officer before his gig in The Police became sustainable. Art Garfunkel was teaching Mathematics at the Litchfield Preparatory School in Connecticut until ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ hit the top of the charts.

Charlotte Bronte wrote “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart!” inspired by her time a governess, and though the work was too demanding for her write anything while she was employed, her experiences later were woven into Jane Eyre, from which the above quote was ripped.

The governess in the nineteenth century personified a life of intense misery. She was also that most unfortunate individual; the single, middle-class woman who had to earn her own living. Although being a governess might be a degradation, employing one was a sign of culture and means . . . The psychological situation of the governess made her position unenviable. Her presence created practical difficulties within the Victorian home because she was neither a servant nor a member of the family. She was from the social level of the family, but the fact that she was paid a salary put her at the economic level of the servants. (from Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 by Bonnie G. Smith)

Little Eva famously parlayed her McJob as a teen maid and nanny for Carole King and Gerry Goffin into a short-lived career as a popstar with the 1962 number 1 hit, ‘The Locomotion’, apparently inspired by her particular ‘crazy’ way of dancing. She later had to invent a dance to accompany the song and encourage a dance-craze when it hit the charts. Sadly, she was also responsible for inspiring the Goffin/King tune ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) after coming to work with a black eye and telling her employers that her boyfriend hit her because he loved her. She had a few big years but faced reality when the gigs weren’t paying enough to sustain her and her three children - she was by then a single mother - and returned to North Carolina and working various service jobs. When the equal-in-stature Kylie Minogue hit it big in 1988 with her revamped version of ‘The Locomotion’, renewing interest in the original, Little Eva was re-discovered cooking at a soul food diner. As she didn’t write the song and didn’t own the master she therefore didn’t make any royalties and was dead broke - an all too common turn of events for many musical icons who didn’t understand the intricacies of the music business or had no choice but to sign bad contracts when they started.

Part of the mythic origin story of the pop star Jewel is that she was sleeping in her car trying to make her dream come true in music, a story she disputed in Billboard explaining “I was living in my car because I wouldn’t have sex with my boss. I refused to be leveraged and he wouldn’t give me my paycheck and I couldn’t pay my rent and I started living in my car and then my car got stolen and I was homeless because of that, because I wouldn’t bang a boss.” She goes on to say “It was an act of defiance [sic], it was an act of courage. It cost me a lot, but it won me myself. It won me my humanity. I’m so proud of that decision. It was so funny to see it portrayed as some cute, fluffy little, ‘Aw, she was fighting for her dream.’ I didn’t even have a dream. It’s not what I was doing.”

Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin from Tropical Fuck Storm worked in hospitals selling television access for profit to very ill and dying patients, a job Gareth described as ‘really fucked up’, but one that also gave him insight into the limits of human existence and contributed to a bunch of his most revered songs. (You can listen to Gaz talk about this on my podcast Death Is Not The End here)

Patti Smith wrote ‘Piss Factory’ about being bullied by co-workers while working in a New Jersey factory that made baby equipment, saying “The stuff those women did to me in that factory was horrible. They’d gang up on me and stick my head in a toilet full of piss.”

The truth is that doing these shitty, sometimes awful, depressing jobs, will give you rare revelations into ‘the human condition’, that can be incredibly valuable to the deepening of making meaningful art. You know things. Soul destroying stuff can be good for the soul.

Billie Holiday worked from the age of twelve, running errands for the sex workers in the local brothel, and most likely briefly working as one herself, alongside her mother before they were arrested in a raid. Ella Fitzgerald worked as a lookout for street sex workers as a young teenager, before moving on to collecting money for the mafia. Jay Z sold crack on the streets, later saying “I know about budgets. I was a drug dealer. To be in a drug deal, you need to know what you can spend, what you need to re-up.” Debbie Harry took drugs to get though her nights spent as a Playboy bunny at the Playboy Club. Courtney Love was a stripper at the notorious Jumbo’s Clown Room in LA, telling LA Weekly “To me back then, 300 bucks in a day was fine. I was able to do the kind of stripper economy which is … for every $5 I made, I would give Eric Erlandson three of them and that’s how we bought our van and we bought our backline.” James Brown, who was born to a sixteen year old mother in terrible poverty, worked as a shoe-shine boy and a pimp for his aunt Honey. Despite having a degree from Harvard, Tom Morello, from Rage Against The Machine, moonlit as a stripper for bachelorette parties to pay the rent before the band took off.

Mick Jagger worked part-time as a porter at the Bexley Mental Hospital (and famously lost his virginity in a cupboard there to a nurse). Eddie Vedder was a night security guard for the Valencia Hotel. Sean Connery and Whoopi Goldberg both worked in funeral homes pre fame; Connery polishing coffins and Goldberg as a mortuary cosmetologist. Jon Bon Jovi and Kris Kristofferson both did time as janitors in recording studios.

David Bowie was a delivery boy for a butcher, Jarvis Cocker scrubbed crabs for a fishmonger and Ozzy Osbourne worked in a slaughterhouse, remembering “I had to slice open the cow carcasses and get all the gunk out of their stomachs. I used to vomit every day; the smell was something else.” Ozzy’s bandmate Tony Iommi worked as a welder and gas fitter at a factory and lost the tips of his fingers in an accident there. When he was very young, my dad also briefly worked with dead animals, plucking feathers in a chicken factory and also collecting garbage, which he recalls seemed to involve a lot of dead dogs and cats left on the kerb. He also dug graves for a while, an experience he shares with a young Rod Stewart and The Clash’s Joe Strummer.

I’ve done more menial, odd jobs than I can remember, including house cleaning, nannying, waitressing, bartending, typing, filing, answering phones, loading and unloading trucks, packing and unpacking houses and offices, lugging, driving, retail and other selling of things, holding street signs, stringing jewellery and handing out pamphlets, which is weirdly the only one of these jobs that I actively disliked (probably due to a very disturbing day where an entire busload of sports-lovers aggressively screamed ‘Show us your pink bits!’ at me out the window as they were pulling up at the cricket match I was working at … I dumped my pamphlets in the trash and ran home). My dad and I wrote this ode-of-sorts to day jobs done in service of our real contribution to society: putting good music into the world.

But my favourite job will always be the time I spent working at Mamma Maria’s pizza bar in Kings Cross, after school a few nights a week aged 14. I loved all of it, and I don’t just mean the pizza, although I ate my way through at least two of them and a bowl of spaghetti every night, it was the camaraderie of working in a family business, Mamma pinching my cheeks too hard and calling me ‘a good girl’ while Pappa and son Enzo groaned in protest as we were all forced to chip in to hand-roll the gnocchi with Mamma from steaming vats of potatoes, it was the ringing up the till and the flashing of cash, writing up the orders, wiping down the stainless steel benches, sweeping the floor, staring wistfully out at the traffic zooming up and down William St. There’s just something endlessly romantic about pizza and its environs to me.

Tom Waits also started his working life surrounded by the pungent aura of pizza, at 15, trading school for washing dishes and eventually working his way up to actually making the pizzas til 4am at Napoleone’s in California, where he worked for 5 years, earning accolades from his boss Sal years later who said Tom was ‘an excellent worker and made good pizzas’. Could you wish for a better review? Tom reminisced: I liked washing dishes because everyone leaves you alone. You can listen to everything going on in the room, and the stuff you hear when you’re washing dishes is priceless. I remember sweeping around the jukebox and saying to myself, How do you get in that jukebox? How do you come out of there?”

Tom found the songs ‘I Can’t Wait To Get Off Work (And See My Baby On Montgomery Ave)’, ‘The Ghosts Of Saturday Night - After Hours at Napoleone’s Pizza Parlor’ and ‘Shore Leave’ while working at Napoleone’s. His songs now waft out from the jukebox there every now and then.

Vanity Fair (2004): When and where were you happiest?
Tom Waits: "Nineteen sixty-three, one A.M., washing dishes on a Saturday night in the kitchen of Napoleone Pizza House, 619 National Avenue, National City, California."⁽¹⁹⁾

Voltaire stated “Work banishes those three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty.” Samuel Johnson claimed “To be employed in useful labor is one of the greatest blessings of life.” The truth is probably somewhere in between, like most things. I am a believer in the value of work and acts of service. I think everybody - especially those who are financially cushioned from needing to engage in such activities - would benefit from spending a little bit of their time as a server or a cleaner or otherwise engaged in the unseen, oft unappreciated quiet grinds and crappy trades that make our world spin at least once in their lives - these jobs give you a different, wider perspective of the world, and your place in it. There’s a lot to be said for recognising we’re all just ants doing what we can really. And there’s no feeling in the world quite like getting to the end of a tough shift and stepping back into your own realm, where your time is finally your own again and your thoughts can dance away unimpeded, turning dirt to gold dust if you’re lucky.

The workers united will never be defeated. Or take this job and shove it. The harder I work, the luckier I get. Don’t give up your day job. Get a job sha-na-na-na. My work here is done. Wishing great pizzas for everyone.

Thank you and goodnight x

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I love musical ephemera, small souvenirs, tickets, flyers, photos of the moments behind the moments, scraps of paper that conjure meaning from dust. I still have a small golden ‘Dolly’ embossed box that once housed a chocolate butterfly, that my friend Jane brought me home from a hotel stay in Vegas where Dolly was performing in the late 80s. I have often considered throwing this now tattered small empty box out, but I just can’t. It means something to me, there’s some connection to a world of my musical dreams held inside that box and I can’t let it go.

In what seems to me to be a shameful reflection of our lack of appreciation for our collective cultural heritage in Australia, as far as I can tell, apart from the Kylie on Stage (2016-2018) costume gallery at the Arts Centre Melbourne the only other exhibition dedicated to a single female musical artist in Australia, was the 2016 Wendy Saddington: Underground Icon exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery.

I’d like to see more cultural spaces lovingly preserving, curating and celebrating the worlds and experiences of musicians - like the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, New York, Prince’s Paisley Park in Chanhassen, Minnesota, the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, Jamaica and The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, OK.

I’ve mentioned this before but I’ll say it again in case there’s any philanthropic music loving readers out there who would like to make my cultural dreams come true, I’d love to open and curate a space for rotating immersive deep-dive multi-media exhibitions of Australian artists and their personal archives to educate, motivate and inspire visitors. It would be so special, and valuable to growing understanding of lives spent dedicated to working in music.

Here’s an excerpt from my book Lovers Dreamers Fighters, about why museums matter and what happened when I finally made it to Macon, GA, a place I was excited down to my bones to go because of its deep musical roots.

Macon, Georgia, is the birthplace of those thrillingly named luminaries The Architect of Rock’n’Roll, aka Little Richard; The King of Soul or The Madman of Macon, aka Otis Redding; and Soul Brother Number One, The Godfather of Soul, The Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness, Mr Dynamite, Mr Please Please Please, aka James Brown. The city was far smaller and greyer than I’d expected, considering the heft of its musical significance. The streets were desolate, even the impressive-sounding Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard where the museum was located. The highlight of the museum was reportedly Tune Town, a replica city with its own miniature Jazz & Swing Club, Vintage Vinyl and Rhythm & Blues Revue, a chapel, a cafe and Backstage Alley.

On our arrival I was dismayed to find that the doors of the museum were shuttered and padlocked, and had been for a few months. State funding had been cut due to low attendance, and despite a few passionate attempts to keep it afloat or take it elsewhere, the museum authority had voted to close it down. Thirty thousand books, records, artefacts, items of memorabilia and costumes were returned to donors, sold into private collections or moved into storage at the University of Georgia.

But I didn’t really need a museum. I tried to feel the remaining miasma of the musical ghosts lurking down every street and behind each doorway.

* * *

Etta James, aka Miss Peaches, told a story of touring through Macon on the Chitlin’ Circuit in the late 50s, supporting Little Richard with her band The Peaches on the back of their hit ‘Dance with Me Henry’ (originally written as ‘Roll with Me Henry’ before that was deemed too provocative for a group of young girls to sing). This was before Etta proclaimed herself ‘the female Otis Redding’ in the 1960s and covered his hits but after she ‘went steady’ with B.B. King as a teen and he wrote ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ for her. Etta travelled everywhere with her beloved pet monkey, but the restaurant they stopped at for lunch refused to let her bring it inside. A young James Brown was hanging around out front, just hoping to get close enough to the musicians that some of their electricity might power him up. He offered to mind her monkey on the stoop, so she could eat, and gratefully she allowed him to help her out.

At this time young James carried around everywhere with him a treasured, tattered napkin on which Little Richard had scrawled, ‘Please, please, please’. James was determined to absorb these words and turn them into a song somehow – he was close enough to feel it. He recorded the finished song at Macon’s WIBB radio station, which broadcast from the basement of the Professional Building, the Launchpad for Southern Soul, and it indeed became his first hit. Next time Etta saw little James Brown, she was standing in the wings, side of stage, atThe Apollo in New York, and he was onstage singing ‘Please Please Please’.

Inspired by the two-sided folklore of this tale, I wrote and recorded a duet with Jed Kurzel and called it ‘Oh Apollo!’, for the dream destination they both made it to. I named my album It Walks Like Love, after a casual Etta aside that grabbed me on the outro of a song. The ongoing chain of inspiration, the never-ending domino effect,whispers on the wind from artist to artist. That’s where we find our call to arms.

Oh Miss Peaches, I will hold your monkey

While you eat, and in my pocket I keep

Torn paper crying, please please please …

The reel-to-reel recorder that compressed Mr Please Please Please’s irrepressible whoops and pleading shrieks to tape is on display in the Tubman Museum in Macon, which was closed on the day I visited, a Monday. It sits alongside the piano played by Little Richard at Ann’s Tic Toc Lounge, where he got his start as both dishwasher and entertainer, after its white rock’n’roll-loving owners adopted him when his preacher-bootlegger daddy kicked him out of home at fifteen years old for being ‘a sissy’. The genius boy king of self-invention went on to perform as Princess Lavonne in a red evening gown for Sugarfoot Sam’s Minstrel Show down the road to make some cash, before working on barely hidden odes to hot longing – ‘God Golly, Miss Molly’, ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Tutti Frutti’ – while washing dishes at the Macon Greyhound bus station. Little Richard learned to play boogie-woogie piano from teenage musician Esquerita, later known as The Magnificent Malochi, after spotting him and his powerful pompadour as he disembarked from a bus late one night. Little Richard said he used to hang around thebus station hoping for action all the time, explaining, ‘I couldn’t sleep … and I would sit there all night watching people get off the bus … you understand.’ What a meeting of minds, what sparks must have flown between them, what a hotbed of hullabaloo ol’ Macon had going on! Down the road apiece at Club 15, James Brown attempted to murder Joe Tex with a shotgun for making fun of his caped stage act.

I squinted my eyes and tried to imbue the faded tumbleweed of a town with all the history and the myth and the romantic air of possibilities and wild devilry I wanted to eat up like candy. It was so hard to see. But it was, in fact, real. These originators of music as we know it took their dreamed-up selves, their hand-stitched capes and stuck-on sequins, and hit the road, poured their songs into hot wax and changed the world.

Tom Waits claimed that witnessing James Brown perform in San Diego back in 1962, when he was thirteenyears old, ‘was like putting a finger in a light socket … You’d been changed, your life is changed now. And everybody wanted to step down, step forward, take communion, take sacrament, they wanted to get close to thestage and be anointed with his sweat, his cold sweat.’

All hail the brave and beautiful trailblazers who have soundtracked our lives, and may we find exciting and innovative ways to preserve their legacies.

What’s the best music themed exhibition, museum or archive you’ve ever seen?

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Young Kylie Minogue used to make her own outfits with the help of her grandma. Reflecting on her pop superstar status she has claimed “I would never have reached that point in time, or that place, without the Lycra and the Janome [sewing machine] and throwing in a few beads or something, back in 1989”.

Texan popstar Selena Quintanilla used to design and make her own outfits with her mother, embellishing Victoria’s Secret bras, improvising with scarves and sticking rhinestones or beads on belts and hats, because nothing existed in the Tejano style (a Tex Mex blend of folk, country and pop with mariachis, accordions, and strings) she wanted to wear, in her size - and mostly the stage wear was made for men.

Kacey Musgraves has paid tribute to Selena’s unique style with her latest album cycle looks, - evidenced here in some side-by-sides created by @lost.in.pieces.

Slayyyter made her own costume for her Coachella debut this year - that may also owe a nod to Selena-style - a ruffled vintage lace patchworked top teamed with a trucker cap that proudly stated ‘Worst Girl at Coachella’ spelled out in rhinestones and boots she handprinted the night before.

She told Vogue “I like being very hands on with my costume design—every time I make my own outfit, it just feels comfortable. I know what silhouettes and proportions I like on myself.” She explains making her own costumes is fun and says she didn’t stress about it at all, creating her piece just two days before the show.

It actually reminds me a little of the wedding dress from classic Australian film Muriel’s Wedding - made BY MY MAMA! Yes my mother, Mouse, worked in the film and TV industry for years as a mainly self-taught seamstress - I think I have the story right (I often don’t) when I say the designer Terry Ryan gave Mouse a very detailed sketch and said ‘make this’, and she had to sneak to Spotlight after work to find patterns she could use to cut it. This costume is now on display in the National Film and Sound Archives.

I have regularly taken advantage of my mother’s fabulous skills to turn some gigantic, daggy, ill-fitting long 70s dress made from some unnaturally great 70s fabric and found for five or ten bucks into a tight-fitting mini fit for stagewear minutes before heading out to do a show.

Here is my mama stitching hearts and flowers and bees and evil eyes and music notes to jazz up one such frock, in an very basic homage to the Nudie suit, just before heading out to this gig in LA… the back of the dress is really quite a work of art, but I didn’t think it through very well because I forgot to turn around and I wore my hair long, covering up Mouse’s amazing design work there! Ah well, add it to the list of onstage costume secrets, which include dresses held together with gaffa tape, staples and safety pins, holes in old fabric covered up with stitched on embellishments, dresses slashed at the wrist or the armpit or with a busted zip taped together to enable me to slide myself into it. That’s showbiz kids.

My daughter Holiday Sidewinder makes many of her own stage outfits from scratch - often with a helping hand from Grandma Mouse - but she is super inventive and clever and can always work out how to cut and stitch and drape an outfit instinctively. This wild pirate wench look is a total testament to the power of imagination.

Debbie Harry detailed in her memoir how she used to throw together outfits from whatever she could find - this iconic zebra dress was upcycled from a pillowcase her landlord found in the street and said ““Oh this would be a good dress! Just cut here and look, it’s already there!’”. Might be the best landlord story I’ve ever heard.

Patsy Cline used to like to imagine up her own outfits, and her mama Hilda would make them.

When Destiny’s Child were starting out, Beyonce’s mother Tina Knowles- Lawson designed and made many of their matchy-matchy outfits, with a tiny budget and a lot of imagination, trying to highlight each girl’s favourite feature to help their confidence. Ms Tina, in an interview with the Washington Post, said “The label, after the girls started getting a lot of recognition, they had a meeting with my husband and they told him that basically I was the problem and I was going to be the reason why the girls would be limited in their crossover appeal, because they were just a little too flashy, a little too Motown, but what they really meant was that they were a little too Black.

As an African-American, I know, I’ve always known, that our fashion, our vibe, our style, our swag, has influenced the fashion world greatly,” she said. “I remember I used to design things and I would get criticized for it, but they next thing I know it would be on somebody’s runway.”

Beyonce would also catch the designing bug and launched her own label, with Tina - -named House of Dereon after’s Tina’s mother - in 2005.

Gwen Stefani is also known for whipping up her own outfits and later, launching her own fashion label, L.A.M.B.

FKA Twigs invited her mother to design her incredible costume for Glastonbury 2024, saying she wanted something that could incorporate ballet and Vogueing and contemporary dance and ‘there was only one person that could really nail it, and that was my mum’.

@britishvogue#FKAtwigs reveals her mum made her #Glastonbury performance outfit.

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The fabulous Charo has been wearing costumes designed and made by her sister Carmen since they left Spain together as teenagers. In 2022 Chart posted this pic with the message: Hola Amigos I Want To Share With You This Bitchy - Bitchy Outfit Design and Make by My Sister Carmencita That Start Start a Fashion Explosión When My Cuchi - Cuchi . Was Only a Kitchy- Kitchy . I Hope You Like It . PS l Was Holding My Breath For 3 Minutes to Look Skinny Winnie . Besos

I’ve always kept a (small) box of half-made dresses with a lot of potential and amazing trims and fringes for future exotic stagewear of my dreams. I’d still far rather make something to order than buy an expensive designer outfit. I just need some fancy gigs to justify making some costumes…. although I could always chop up some curtains a la Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music for my next lewk.

Here’s to mamas and sisters and grandmas and tiny budgets and big imaginations and bold homemade visions.

Til next week!

Lo x

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What was I dreaming, I hear you all clamouring, because apparently we all love to hear each other’s dreams…..well, I was just right where I was meant to be, in the middle of a stage, doing a good gig, playing guitar beautifully and effortlessly, singing like a demon/angel/Bob Dylan acolyte, in a great sparkling outfit, to a warm, receptive crowd hanging off my every word. Everything was plugged in correctly, I knew all my words and the lights were magic. I belonged, my songs meant something and all was right with the world.

I tell you this because I have dreams that are the absolute opposite of this all the time. I’m at the wrong gig, with no instrument, no underwear, nobody likes me, my shoes are broken, my strings are broken, my fellow musicians are sneering at me, or just completely ignoring me when I say hello, I’m setting things on fire, blowing up amps, falling over onstage, tangled in leads, can’t work my gear, the audience are booing me or actively rolling their eyes or walking away while I’m playing… you know all the fun stuff. Work dreams. Fear dreams.

When I used to waitress I would dream I was taking the wrong order to the wrong table, I was falling over and plates were flying, everyone was yelling at me, oh wait that wasn’t a dream… anyway, I think dreaming that everything is going wrong is natural and healthy even if it isn’t any fun. Because sometimes in life everything does go wrong, and you just have to wallow your way through the sodden hell-mire and get through it, and dreams are maybe just little lessons in that.

I’m having trouble thinking of much else this week because a dear friend is going through the most intense and terrifying medical hurdles and I feel so worried for her and her family and keep meditating on the idea of time, and our ability to move through it even when we are anchored to an awful reality.

When we are in the midst of these times, I find sometimes it’s helpful to zoom right out and slow time down in your mind and try to see yourself and your world as a tiny part of a larger microcosm. Change always happens, just sometimes it’s so slow we can’t even see or feel it. Its incremental. But there is movement, even if its in unexpected directions, and you can only see the trajectory when you finally get the chance to look back from the other end of it.

Last night I saw my cousin for the first time in many years and he reminded me that when I was little, I used to climb on top of these goal cages on the oval and pretend I was on a stage singing. I had forgotten it but now I remember the feeling. I guess I was manifesting, as the kids say. And I eventually manifested it right into existence! That’s my main gig, my raison d’être, the love of my life.

I will be getting back to manifesting some of that feeling back soon-ish, but right now, the way things work, is I need to spend some time planting seeds and toiling the soil before I get to pick the flowers. It’s quiet, heads down, do the work time. I’ll get there. We all get there, or somewhere, in the end.

This morning I found myself thinking about the times back when Twitter was a big thing and people would be on there all day wittily snarking about their bus rides and their lunch and their boss and stupid shit other people said, and Sia used to just tweet this one thing; ‘I love you. Keep going’, and the Twitterers would lose their minds, and honestly I thought it was a bit silly, until one day I saw her tweet ‘I love you. Keep going’ when I obviously needed to be reminded of that and it made me feel deeply emotional and a bit blubbery.

So today, though I’m not usually one to be so earnest, I’m making an exception and saying; whatever it is you’re manifesting or making your way through, I love you, keep going.

Here’s a playlist about time in its many manifestations for you, there’s hits’n’misses’n’memories’n’milestones by such wonderful artists as Doris Troy, The Rolling Stones, Robyn Hitchcock, MJ Lenderman, Margo Price, Nick Drake, The Delfonics, Just Townes Earle, Oscar Peterson, Kris Kristofferson, Arthur Russell, Big Thief, Donnie & Joe Emerson, Angel Olsen and many more.

TIME TIME TIME on Apple Music

TIME TIME TIME on YouTube

TIME TIME TIME on Spotify

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Play it loud. Cry if you must. Shake a tail feather. Remember time keeps moving, and so do you.

Til the next time,

Lo x

I’m a singer/songwriter and I grew up in a rock’n’roll household. My family has always traded great books about music between us, memoirs, biographies, scientific studies, deep dives into subcultures, industry exposes – I love them all and find a good music book impossible to resist. I always get excited when I find books written by other obsessive music-loving kindred spirits––if I can feel the love I’m right in there with them. I especially love the behind-the-scenes stories and insights into the work and fascinations that helped forge an artist’s career.

When my own book, Lovers Dreamers Fighters came out in 2022, I was invited to compile a list of my favourite books in any genre/on any topic for this new book recommendation startup, now called Book DNA. It works really well as a ‘if you liked that, you might love this’ … it got me anyway, see below:

So, I thought I’d share what I wrote on BookDNA back in 2022 - my feelings remain true - and then update with some more, especially as I started realising that many of my favourite musical books are written by fellow Substack writers!

(from BookDNA - do check them out - they are building a wonderful author friendly platform for handpicked recommendations and trying to take on the behemoth of Goodreads - follow here for updates, and if you’re an author, get in touch and make some recommendations for them)

Lo Carmen’s favorite books about being in love with music

Chronicles

By Bob Dylan#1 of Chronicles series

A tender meditation on all the disparate threads, sounds, loves, conversations, and lessons that meld together to create an artist. Watching Bob trying to throw off the accolades and labels that want to pin him down like butterfly and explore whatever takes his fancy is my favorite part of this trip, weaving through all the stolen records and ghosts and signposts and colored lights beckoning.

Just Kids

By Patti Smith

Patti Smith manages to capture the purity, sacrifice, and unfettered excitement of those nascent times when you’re still becoming who you want to be, and the sweetness, power, and longevity of true friendship forged in art – as well as drawing a thrillingly gritty, vivid portrait of New York City just as it became the place we all still wish it was.

Shots

By Don Walker

Written by the revered god-daddy of Australian songcraft, Shots is a beat peek behind the curtain of what it is to be a young band on the road and on the rise, all lens flare vignettes; dry, brutal, and perfect, as cool as The Don himself. His uncanny way with words lets us bear witness to the country hall dances, Kings Cross streets, and back of the van like a poetic spy cam.

Nina Simone’s Gum

By Warren Ellis

As someone that lovingly collected fallen sequins from a theatre dressing room floor after a show as a kid, I relate hard to this story of the intense love and awe Warren Ellis has for Nina Simone, and for seeing the world through a lens of music in general. His snowballing obsession with Nina Simone’s discarded gum (which I once had the pleasure of seeing, back when it lived unceremoniously inside a plastic bag on a shelf) makes for a wild absurdist ride through true love.

Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be

By Marissa R. Moss

This is such a fascinating insight into how three hard-working, single-minded, music-possessed country outliers worked their way in, through, and against a deeply conservative, by-the-book rule obsessed country music system that did not welcome them with open arms, and emerged 100% artistically victorious, revealing all the inspirations, letdowns, lucky breaks and collateral damage they experienced and witnessed along the way. The wider story is of course about so much more than just their personal stories, painting a portrait of how things have always been done in Nashville, and making it patently clear why it’s high time for that to change.

Now here comes the brilliant collection of musical meditations by Substack brothers and sisters (all linked, go subscribe) … its a pretty amazing list … get your shopping fingers on! Note these are official descriptions, not mine.

Game Is Her Middle Name: The Life and Times of Betty Davis

By

I am scary excited for this - pre-order now!

The first full biography of the funk pioneer cited as an inspiration by artists from Beyoncé to Questlove. As a girl, Betty Davis fixed her eyes on stardom and never looked back. After leaving a violent marriage to her husband Miles Davis, Betty took unprecedented control of her musical career for a Black woman working in the 1970s, performing and producing a string of defiantly feminist funk records with a screaming, sexually intense style like no one else. And then, at the crest of her powers, she fell silent. Built on decades of interviews and told through the eyes of Danielle Maggio, Davis’s close friend in her final years, Game Is Her Middle Name reveals new aspects of Davis’s life, music, and struggles. In telling her story, Maggio gives us a nuanced portrait of what happens to a pathbreaking artist when the spotlight moves on from her, and what happens when the world finally catches up.

Stranded In The Future

By

The new memoir from Robyn Hitchcock, out July 7, 2026
STRANDED IN THE FUTURE is a kind of dystopian self-portrait. It’s about obsession, and obsessive behavior. Spanning from 1968 to 1978, it takes in the mythology that teenagers weave around their musical heroes and their early loves: in this case, one specific hero and one specific love. The book explores the way that Hitchcock, in his own head, linked these two figures to each other, although they never actually met.

God’s Own Singer: A Life of Gram Parsons

By Jason Walker ( )

A new edition of the classic biography that takes us “as close to the heart and soul of Gram Parsons as any author could.” (Nigel Williamson, Uncut)
Gram Parsons sang like an angel and dressed like a country star. Sadly he was neither, at least not in his lifetime. But before his tragically early death he played a key role in bringing together the worlds of rock and country music. And he made groundbreaking records whose impact has only grown in the fifty-some years since he died at the age of 26.

(Note *I’m reading this now, its wonderful)

Girl To Country: A Memoir

By

The follow up to Girl To City! Broken-down vehicles. Premenopausal libido. A punk rock-loving teen to share the culture shock with. I don’t think Hank done it this way. A few years after her 1996 breakthrough album Diary Of A Mod Housewife, singer/songwriter Amy Rigby is still figuring out who she is. Closing in on forty, a newly-divorced mom trying to tour, work temp jobs, and keep a car running, Amy is ready for a change. She trades her beloved NYC for Nashville, where she navigates music, men and motherhood to learn the hard way that outside validation is no substitute for self-belief.

Dylan in Cincinnati (American Made Music Series)

By

Dylan in Cincinnati takes a fresh approach to Bob Dylan’s performance art by asking what happens when we focus on a single city across six decades. When we think of Dylan in concert, we imagine Newport, New York, or London. But most of his shows were in places far from the spotlight―venues largely ignored by music critics and scholars. Cincinnati, a city with little fanfare in the heart of the American Midwest, becomes an ideal site for study. Its concerts and bootleg recordings tell a story of reinvention night after night, year after year.
This history requires planting a shovel in one locale and digging down, layer after layer. What emerges is a portrait of Dylan as a restless itinerant artist who never abandoned audiences in flyover states. In fact, some of his strongest performances were given there. By recovering these overlooked shows, Dylan in Cincinnati documents not only the history of one city’s concerts but also the essence of Dylan’s enduring power as a live performer.

Maybe We’ll Make It

By

Maybe We’ll Make It is a memoir of loss, motherhood, and the search for artistic freedom in the midst of the agony experienced by so many aspiring musicians: bad gigs and long tours, rejection and sexual harassment, too much drinking and barely enough money to live on. Price, though, refused to break, and turned her lowest moments into the classic country songs that eventually comprised the debut album that launched her career. In the authentic voice hailed by Pitchfork for tackling "Steinbeck-sized issues with no-bullshit humility," Price shares the stories that became songs, and the small acts of love and camaraderie it takes to survive in a music industry that is often unkind to women. Now a Grammy-nominated “Best New Artist,” Price tells a love story of music, collaboration, and the struggle to build a career while trying to maintain her singular voice and style.

Boy On Fire

By

A deeply beautiful, profound and poetic biography of the formative years of the dark prince of Australian rock 'n' roll, Boy on Fire is Nick Cave's creation story. This is a portrait of the artist as, first, a boy, and then a young man. It charts his family, friends, influences, milieu and, most of all, his music, revealing how Nick Cave shaped himself into the extraordinary artist he has become.

Lou Reed: King of New York

By

“The only Lou Reed bio you need to read.” --The Washington Post
A Rolling Stone best music book of 2023 One of Pitchfork‘s ten best music books of 2023 A Variety best music book of the year A Kirkus Reviews best nonfiction book of 2023. The most complete and penetrating biography of the rock master, whose stature grows every year.

Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women In Pop

By

A weave of biography, criticism, and memoir, Shine Bright is Danyel Smith’s intimate history of Black women’s music as the foundational story of American pop. Smith has been writing this history for more than five years. But as a music fan, and then as an essayist, editor (Vibe, Billboard), and podcast host (Black Girl Songbook), she has been living this history since she was a latchkey kid listening to “Midnight Train to Georgia” on the family stereo.

All I Ever Wanted

By

Go-Go’s bassist Kathy Valentine’s story is a roller coaster of sex, drugs, and of course, music; it’s also a story of what it takes to find success and find yourself, even when it all comes crashing down.

Wild West Village: Not a Memoir (Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1)

By

In this “darkly humorous” (Harper’s Bazaar) memoir-in-essays, actress and singer-songwriter Lola Kirke untangles an extraordinary upbringing in a family of eccentric, messy artists and explains how a big city girl went a little bit country.

Something To Believe In

by

For Andrew Stafford, music was a way up and a way out. There was just one little problem: he couldn’t play. Because those who can do and those who can’t review, he carved out a niche writing about it instead. This is the story of a self-confessed wannabe’s life: of growing up in public, of family, of falling in and out of love, and music, sweet music, everywhere. Written with enormous heart and a thumping rhythm, Something To Believe In is an uncompromising, inspiring book for anyone whose life has been saved by rock & roll.

How To Write One Song

By

One of the century's most feted singer-songwriters, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, digs deep into his own creative process to share his unique perspective about song-writing and offers a warm, accessible guide to writing your first song. How to Write One Song brings readers into this intimate process - lyrics, music and how they come together. It's equally about the importance of making creativity part of your everyday life and of experiencing the hope, inspiration and joy available to anyone who is willing to get started.

Cash On Cash

By

Cash on Cash offers unprecedented insight into one of the most significant American cultural figures of the twentieth century. A comprehensive collection of Johnny Cash interviews and feature stories, some widely published and others never previously transcribed, culled from the 1950s through the early days of the new millennium, Cash on Cash charts a singular evolution. From hardscrabble Arkansas poor boy to rockabilly roustabout; international fame to drug addiction and disgrace; born again Christian to gimlet-eyed chronicler of spiritual darkness; TV and movie star to Nashville reject; redemption to loss and back again, several times. Cash’s story, told in his own words, shines unfiltered light on a journey of archetypal proportions that resonates still.

This Is: Essays on Jazz

By

With an ear for the overlooked, Aaron Gilbreath chronicles the forgotten corners of the mid-century jazz scene. Shadowing the greats from Sonny Clark to John Coltrane, Gilbreath traces the tragedy of saxophonist Hank Mobley, unearths the story of self-exiled pianist Jutta Hipp, and pauses on the meaning of heroin for trumpeter Lee Morgan. He also revisits a few standards, like The Connection, an influential film with its own take on drugs and sobriety; the ten-year evolution of Miles Davis' "So What"; and the impact of record labels' vault archives. This Essays on Jazz celebrates the joy, genius and struggle of jazz, in essays both intimate and deeply researched.

Workshy

By

“Dave Graney is a genuine hipster bohemian street intellectual. A committed rock'n'roll theoretician and a contrarian outsider of he first order.
This second memoir is as entertaining, funny and well written as his previous book '1000 Australian Nights". He has a terse and semi-abstract approach to writing about the absurd reality of being a non-mainstream musical artist in Australia and Europe, and also of the succession of dispiriting and occasionally quite tolerable day jobs he has had.
The book is liberally spattered with hilarious observations of the art and culture of the recent past and many amusing personal anecdotes. There are also some arcane metaphysical ruminations on the technical minutiae of writing recording and performing his excellent songs.
Dave is the unchallengeable King of Australian rock memoirists. Buy this book now!” Reg Mombassa

Phew!

Now lucky last, though not a Substacker, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also recommend this wild ride of a musical memoir by my father Peter Head, written with MJ Cornwall:

Headonism

By Peter Head with MJ Cornwall

From his early teens, Peter Head has played 'em all. Strip joints, rodeos, clubs a glitz and seedy, sideshow alley, off the grid rude boy clubs, sharpie pubs, speedways, remote US bases, ocean-going liners and way more, with John Farnham, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Bon Scott, the Bee Gees, Robyn Archer, Wendy Saddington, Jimmy Little, Keith Moon, John Mayall, The Angels, Jeff St John, Cold Chisel and hillsides of others. Along the way, encounters with larger than lifers from Sydney’s Mr Big Abe Saffron to SA Premier Don Dunstan, on a trip from his first bands in Adelaide, South Australia at the dawn of the 1960s to England of 1968 to the crimehubs of 7Os St. Kilda and Sydney, to north of the Tweed to the Top End and just about all of his native South Australia. It's a life lived head on, a ride you won't want to end.

I do hope you find something in here that makes you want to crack the spine and soak some words up. I’m sure I’ve missed some beauties that will drive me crazy when I remember them the second I hit publish on this, please make up for my bad memory with your own musical memoir recommendations below.

See ya next week, music lovers x

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1. I made you a playlist of songs about & for dancing!: OUT DANCING AGAIN

   

Listen on Apple Music

Listen on Youtube

Listen on Spotify

It’s for busting moves in the kitchen, late night swaying in the garden, cha-cha-cleaning the bathroom, playing dress-ups in the bedroom, whistling while you work, or other grooves of your choice; 25 fine songs soundtracked by the likes of Suzi Waterhouse, MJ Lenderman & Lorelei, Cale Tyson, Frank ‘The Wild Jalapeño’ Rodarte, Suzi Quatro, Booker T & the MGs, King Harvest, Brittany Howard, David Bowie, Ella Langley, moi, Johnathon Richman, Velvet Underground, Valerie June, Neil Young, Baccara, Dave Brubeck Quartet, PJ Harvey, Professor Longhair, George Strait, Leonard Cohen, Blossom Dearie - something for everyone!

2. I have been listening to some great podcasts lately!

   Fela Kuti: Fear No Man: this is a truly wild deep dive into the life, times & inspirations of Fela Kuti, made by Jad Abumrad, who also made the Peabody Award winning Dolly Parton’s America, one of my favourite podcasts ever. Here’s a great NPR interview with Jad and here’s a taster:

Trace: This pioneering 2017 ABC (Australia) podcast traces the story of Maria James, a woman who was found stabbed to death in her home, behind her Melbourne bookshop in 1980, and her killer has never been found. The warm and personable Walker Award winning journalist Rachael Brown investigates and digs up far more compelling information - implicating the Catholic Church - than the original police investigation ever did, especially from Maria’s neurodivergent son, sparking a new coronial inquest. Here’s a Guardian article about it, written by fellow Substacker . Listen here.

The Greatest Menace:

Described as ‘A world first queer true crime show’ and ‘Australia’s S-town’ journalist Patrick Abboud stumbled across hints of a ‘gay prison’ in a small town in Australia in the 1960s and was intrigued to start researching it, a mission that proved far harder than he expected, uncovering ‘a secretive government operation to eradicate homosexuality’ in the process. Fascinating, moving and horrifying in equal measure, its not at all surprising to learn this 2022 8 part series won a ton of awards.

Listen links here.

3. A couple of things to watch:

   Fallen Leaves: I’m generally behind the times, and had heard this was great but I only recently watched Finnish film Fallen Leaves, the 2023 deadpan rom-com written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki, that won the Jury Prize at Cannes - his 20th film. It is set in a timeless world of factories, supermarkets, karaoke bars, kitchens and cinemas and kind of reminded me of early Jim Jarmusch films - I absolutely loved it. Performances were beautiful.

   Margo’s Got Money Troubles

   Despite being a big, glossy, premium TV drama/comedy, and often pretty silly, there’s a lot of heart at the heart of this show and pitch perfect performances from Elle Fanning as titular aspiring writer Margo who gets knocked up by her college professor, Michelle Pfeiffer as her ex-Hooters waitress-gone-pillar-of-society mother and Nick Offernan as her sensitive recovering junkie ex pro-wrestler dad. Margo’s foray into the weird, wild world of online sex work is the window through which the fucked up morals and general hard state of the world are examined - and how she gets her mojo back.

What else do you want recommendations for? What should I listen to/read/watch next?

Keep it loose friends, dance in the dark

Lo x

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When a songwriter’s metadata is messed up, it means they don’t get paid, because there is a complex system in place where royalties flow like honey from reporting systems to collecting agencies, and if the codes that are linked to identify a song and a writer and the recording of the song don’t match up, the system doesn’t know how to pay out that royalty.

Metadata gets easily lost or messed up by human admin errors, typos, missing apostrophes, information input by people that don’t know the full data story of a song, old publishers that refuse to waste their time to let an agency know they no longer represent you, things like that. I have been trying to get help to change my name being listed as “Leone” rather than “Loene” on one song for years (one of my only songs that actually generates a tiny bit of money), but despite assurances the request has been made, it never happens. There is no recourse for me to do it myself, so I remain permanently frustrated, and whatever small monies I should have earned on that song, get placed into what is described as a ‘Black Box’ of unmatched royalties that can’t be paid to the rightful owner. And that is only one of my many tedious metadata dramas.

After sitting in a black box for three years, currently there is 2.5 billion dollars in said box, this sum of money is shared out among the major publishers. I find this state of affairs very unfair and depressing, and consequently lose a couple of days to creating spreadsheets of missing/messed up metadata and requesting the agency that represents me correct it, getting confirmation that has happened, only to check back few months later to discover it hasn’t happened, and the cycle starts again. If I had access to get in there and doing it myself it would all be so simple.

This excellent article by explains it all very throughly:

The Artist Economy

How The Majors Get Rich Off Your Typos

The Invisible Tollbooth…

Read more

2 months ago · 97 likes · 39 comments · Joel Gouveia

Anyway. I’m digressing before I even start this week’s Loose Connections, because what I really planned to tell y’all about was that in the process of analysing data and making spreadsheets, I found out that I have a couple of songs that are earning tiny royalties from a place I’d never heard of: Securus Technologies -according to Google ‘a US-based company that provides communication services to correctional facilities — prisons and jails. They offer phone, video, and digital services to inmates and have a music streaming component as part of their tablet/entertainment service offered to incarcerated people’.

Somewhat ironically, one of the songs is ‘Lonesome Beauty’.

I was intrigued and dug in. Currently there are 1.8 - 1.9 million inmates in the US. If they are in prison that has a contract with tech provider Securus, they will be given a tablet preloaded with a music library featuring over 10 million tracks, vetted for a correctional environment and explicit language. They can also watch TV shows, send and receive emails and make calls.

I found this scam on YouTube that encourages independent artists to pay $300 to a company who will give them a downloadable .pdf detailing how to get their music onto the Securus system. It’s kinda worth watching for the hilarious animations.

I thought this tablet communication system sounded pretty humane and was quite impressed, until I dug a bit further and discovered that Securus charge for every stream, every download, every email, every call, making it completely unavailable/useless to many inmates, who earn under one dollar an hour - and according to anecdotal evidence I found on Quora, as little as 12c per hour.

Spotify, Apple Music etc are not accessible in the prisons; inmates pay for individual songs and charges vary from state to state.

This Prism article on exploitation of the prison system by private technology companies reports that in Washington, it costs anywhere from 99 cents to $14.99 for an album, while in Missouri, the majority of albums are priced between $1.51 and $25.93.

An incarcerated journalist in Missouri, Patricia Trimble, told Prism that to download a compilation album “By Your Side” by Intel Music, with 80 songs; at $1.91 per song, would cost $152.80.

Prism also spoke with an incarcerated writer who said using his tablet cost him around $300 per month and he was only able to pay that with family support. Securus generated $438,000 commission on music sold to inmates in Washington (the DOC also receive a 25.8% commission on tablet services), during the first three-quarters of 2023.

The tablets often malfunction or simply don’t work. Inmates report receiving emails weeks after they were sent from the outside. Often they can’t place a call, and it is difficult to get through to the service line for Securus - if they do make contact, there are reports of inmates being subjected to a serving of racial abuse by the operator and not receiving the assistance they need. Photographs, along with books and other writing in the ‘Notes’ type software on the tablets will often just disappear. These devices cause a lot of frustration.

Legislation changes in 2023 have allowed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to limit the cost of prison calls nationwide. Until 2025, according to the Wall St Journal, a 15 minute phone call from a large prison could cost $11- it now costs less than $1, and in California, Connecticut, Colorado, Massachusetts and Minnesota, calls are now free. So maybe there’s hope the institutional system is improving, but I don’t really expect those hopes to be well placed.

I am reminded of strolling though the aisles of the Freshway supermarket on Highway 19 just outside of Zebulon, Georgia where my family and I stayed for a while, and discovering an entire aisle devoted to Institutional Foods, where shelves groaned with oversized cans as big as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head full of baked beans, okra, mashed potato, corn, peas and mystery meats. I thought it was hilarious to feel like I was in the Land of the Giants until I had the sobering realisation this food was to service the nearby prison, and probably local schools and aged care homes.

On a brighter note, while strolling the aisles of IKEA (OK, yes, hopelessly lost in the endless maze of IKEA), I was struck by the samey-soothing tones of the piped music, and couldn’t help wondering where their playlist came from - so, like any curious person would, I Shazamed every tune that played for the next half hour and discovered that none of them existed in the ‘real world’.

Now I was really curious. Did IKEA commission their own soundtrack from affordable, innovative Swedish producers? This would probably make sense for them to do, because any public place that plays music to its customers has to purchase a not-cheap license to do so. Producing their own music would be a smart IKEA hack!

I was surprised to discover how impossible it was to find any information about this. I found articles about a fantastic program IKEA ran in 2024 where employees submitted music they created for a chance to win a trip to record with fellow winning employees from all around the world in Atlantis Studio in Stockholm, where ABBA recorded many of their hits. “IKEA has given us an outlet to express our talent, our gifts”, commented Cristle from IKEA USA. There is a Spotify playlist featuring the top 15 acts from IKEA Talents but sadly this programme seems to have been a one-off venture, and the tracks on this playlist sound nothing like the hypnotic ambient murmurations that accompany a trip to IKEA.

I tried to describe these sounds myself, but I feel this obviously AI generated description I weirdly came across on Ali Express does the job better:

Do you suddenly feel the need to purchase a relaxing thermostatic wine cabinet?

The only other comprehensive information I could find about the sound of IKEA was from an advertising agency that created an IKEA campaign blending ‘Scandinavian charm’ with found sounds from “the squeak of a children’s chair to footsteps on a doormat and the soft thud of a rug hitting the floor, every sound felt instantly familiar”. This is described as ‘sonic branding’. Ouch, sounds painful.

It was supposedly a viral hit - according to the agency itself: The success wasn’t a subtle thing, it garnered a reach of 50M on TikTok (5x more than 2021 Oscars eyeballs), 41,000+ People used the “Build the Flatpack” track on their TikToks and UGC. Overall people spent SIX YEARS of viewing time interacting with Ikea’s Summer Festival idea (52K Hours) and created 285M Streams (A Double Platinum record!) of this track and its many spawned sound-alikes, UGC, and send ups. 43 Creators made 2.2M engagements and 248.3M views out of the simple idea of a Gen Z rallying cry around creating a better home space for your mental wellbeing and singing about Ikea’s flatpack contribution to it. Because, well… home is where the flatpack is.

All very impressive, but we are still no closer to knowing where The Soothing Sounds of IKEA really come from!

Next, I turned to Reddit, where people who knew things revealed what they knew:

IKEA headquarters have seemingly addressed the question only once, on Twitter:

Comments about the instore music from IKEA co-workers include: [–]LowerTheExpectationsFormer Co-Worker[S] 2 points 4 years ago

….We had bulletins about it in the employee area of the store and people wrote all kinds of negative comments on it, how “it’s shit” and how it makes them “lose the will to live.”

Another comment stated:

“It’s very bland, generic and makes you feel like time is standing still. I’ve heard negative comments from customers as well but since they come to shop primarily, the question of whether they like music doesn’t really come up that often. So after a questionnaire on the new music that us employees got to fill out the response from the Swedish was basically that regardless of our negative opinion the flavorless, soul-sucking music was here to stay.”

Seems about right.

Stay weird friends, fuck the systems, make art etc, I know you know what to do, or you wouldn’t be loitering here in Loose Connections with me!

Fuck the algorithm too, press the heart for me, or engage by sharing, commenting blah blah to help me rise above the system that is annoyingly gate-kept by interaction data.

Excuse all my very rude swearing today, spending time inside the worlds of metadata, prison exploitation and innocuous corporate/human exploitation just brings it out of me!

But nothing but love for all y’alls,

Lo x

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I somewhat obsessively watched my battered videotape of Breakfast at Tiffanys and wistfully sung Moon River constantly and had tried to tape every Audrey movie I could by compulsively scanning the weekly TV guide, amassing close to a complete collection. I had soaked up every biography I could lay my hands on and had been teasing my hair into a ragged attempt at a Breakfast at Tiffany’s era bouffant since I was 14, mostly paired with an array of 1960s cocktail dresses. I would name my baby daughter Holiday after her infamous Breakfast at Tiffany’s self sufficient ‘party girl’ character Holly Golightly (her nom-de-plume was actually Holiday Golightly in the actual book it based on, by Truman Capote).

So, it was not surprising that one fine evening in 1989, a family friend would feel compelled to call me to announce that Audrey Hepburn was at that very moment about to give a speech for Unicef in the Wentworth Hotel Ballroom and I should get some gladrags on and try to inveigle my way in. He said the place was crawling with high society matrons and their debutante daughters and it shouldn’t be too hard to slip past any gatekeepers.

I have never been someone who longed to meet celebrities, in fact I’ve actively avoided it on many occasions, but I couldn’t help feeling this was unmissable.

Everything I owned was vintage (aka thrifted) and mainly ripped or held together with safety pins if you looked closely, but I did have one contemporary glamour dress that looked like it could have belonged to an Eastern Suburbs socialite, a refined chocolate sheer chiffon with embroidered gold leaves and pink tulle underskirt hand-me-down from some rich lady we knew (back when giving teenage girls bags of hand-me-downs was the source of so many of my clothes) – an 80s version of a rather Breakfast at Tiffany’s inspired party girl dress. I put it on and brushed my two-tone teased hair smooth, a complete rarity. I almost looked the part.

My friend was with me, egging me on and urging me forward each time I decided I felt too foolish to go ahead with the scheme; ‘This is a once in a lifetime opportunity! You will regret this for the REST OF YOUR LIFE if you don’t go!’. I wanted to play it cool, but I knew she was right. She also slipped on ‘a nice dress’ from the pile strewn around my bedroom and we raced like maniacs to the nearby taxi rank. Within fifteen minutes of receiving the call we were in a cab to the hotel, a mere ten minutes away.

From there it was frighteningly simple. We strolled into the lobby like fancy bitches that no-one ever would dare ask for proof that they belonged there, asked the concierge for directions to the Unicef function and were sent to the Ballroom upstairs. There was no security. No ticket takers. The lift doors opened and there was Audrey Hepburn, directly in front of us, onstage, just beginning the opening remarks of her speech.

We aimed for casual-verging-on-bored vibes, sauntering in and leaning on the big doors at the back of the room. We listened, hardly daring to breathe. Her command of that shadowy, sparkly ballroom, her tiny frame, her extraordinarily heartfelt voice, with its odd European lilt, was powerfully moving and everything you would hope for from an audience with Audrey Hepburn. You could hear a dainty handkerchief drop in that room.

Her handsome, bearded husband Robert Wolders waited for her side of stage, to escort her back to her seat at a large round table not far from the doors at the back of the room where we were malingering. Strangely, no-one else appeared to be sitting there with them, they were an island unto themselves.

Audrey sat down, back straight as a ruler, pulled a long white Kent cigarette from her purse and began to smoke so elegantly it killed me. After each drag, she would drape her hand down low behind her back so as to offend the least amount of people possible with her bad habit. She would exhale down low and to one side. Undercover smoking. Audrey had a way of making smoking look smokin’ hot, and cool, she certainly had enough practice, smoking up to 3 packs a day from the age of 15, and towards the end of her life when she was asked if she had any regrets, she apparently said she wished she hadn’t made smoking appear so glamorous. She used to say that freedom smelled like British petrol and British cigarettes, because when she ran out to welcome the soldiers liberating her hometown of Arnhem from the Nazis, she inhaled their petrol fumes like ‘a priceless perfume’ and demanded a cigarette, even though it made her choke.

Another speech began. Audrey listened, beautifully, and I watched Audrey listen, awkward. Her husband murmured something in her ear and left the table, leaving Audrey sitting there completely alone. She didn’t look bothered by this. Knowing what I now know about how torturous most swanky events are, she was probably grateful for small mercies.

People were milling about a little by now, quietly conversing, not really paying attention to the boring corporate speeches now taking place on stage. My friend began elbowing me relentlessly and giving me the kind of look that clearly said ‘Do it now or I’ll kill you’. So I did.

It was the moment of truth. I swallowed hard, walked over to her table, knelt down at her side and whispered ‘Excuse me Miss Hepburn?’.

‘Yes, my dear?’ she replied in that unfathomably strange but exquisite accent of hers, as I uncomfortably balanced in a dangerously weird position on one knee.

‘I … er…I just wanted to say what a beautiful speech you made and …thank you so much … for … uh … just, everything. I really, really love your … work’.

Much to my embarrassment I had choked up so much with the emotion of being in her actual rarefied presence that my voice became a tiny croak and an actual tear crept out of my heavily liquid-eyelinered eye. Jesus. Mortifying. She grabbed my slightly trembling hand within her bony elegant hands and held it steady, squeezed it, looked me dead in the eye, so sincerely reassuring me ‘You beautiful girl! Thank you! I am so glad you enjoyed it. And I’m very touched! What’s your name?’ I told her. She repeated it. Told me it was lovely and unusual. Most people said ‘Hi Lo, get it?’ and thought they were hilarious.

Audrey Hepburn said my name.

‘Well thank you for coming tonight, Lo. It was so very nice to meet you’ she said, then turned away to welcome back her returning husband and return to the good work of squeezing money for desperate children from overfed Australian socialites and mysterious wealthy prancers (see below), and as I could not think of another thing worth saying, I somehow extricated my hand, patted her inappropriately on her impossibly delicate shoulder, probably bruising it, untangled my legs and stood up from my difficult perch, mouthing ‘thank you again’ to the perfumed air that had already forgotten me, before exiting backwards straight into the lift.

She turned and gave me a sweet little wave and a raise of her beautifully arched eyebrow. My friend stumbled into the elevator beside me and we sailed back down to earth gawping at each other in the stunned silence of those who have awakened to find themselves still in a dream.

We kept it together until a dashing hotel attendant opened the door of a waiting taxi cab and we elegantly slid in like we were Audrey Hepburn in a rush to a fancy dinner date with some rich jerk in NYC in 1965 before suddenly losing it and giggling hysterically and tearing up with the absurd beauty of the everything and nothingness that just happened.

The entire escapade had taken less than an hour, taxi rides included. I, of course, began thinking of the million and one things I should have said and asked and fascinating conversations we should have had and the champagne and swan shaped choux cream filled pastries we could have easily nicked on our way out - but I also knew the almost wordless meeting was perfect in its own way, and that somehow just inhaling Audrey’s exhaled smoke, hearing my name in her mouth and absorbing a melting moment of grace with her was enough to sustain me for life.

Many many years later, I read Susanna Moore’s biography Miss Aluminium, in which she reflects on spending time with Audrey when she was a teenage model and they were both staying at the same mansion in Hollywood in the 60s. She describes Audrey poring over a box of Swiss chocolates to select exactly the right two for Susanna, then saying ‘There is something I have been meaning to tell you, it will make all the difference in your life, I promise you…’ before being interrupted by a call she had to take. Susanna spent the next few days trying to find herself alone for a moment with Audrey again to hear the end of what she was going to say, to no avail. Susanna says ‘I sometimes wondered if she was trying to torture me’. Finally, as they passed each other on the stairs ‘she grabbed my arm and said gaily, “I’ve been wanting to finish our conversation … You must always wear shoes the same colour as your hose…it means everything. It has been my secret for years” and continued down the stairs, waving goodbye over the top of her beautiful head.’

Now tell me all your meeting your idols or your never meet your idols moments below in an orderly fashion please. I want all the details! And your secret life changing words of advice.

And please, press that little ‘ol heart button below for the cold ravenous heart of the algorithm…. wishing you swan shaped choux pastries, pricey prances and melting moments ahead,

Lo x

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It was an oddly moving soft-focus easy-listening concoction kicking off with the almost ridiculously breathy, baby-voiced French accented singer performing a sultry cocktail version of Everybody’s Talking. I found myself dropping the needle on the record’s soothing sounds often as I cleaned my messy bedroom or drifted off to sleep in the 90s. Everything sounds better in French.

Eventually I discovered prolific master arranger/producer Nick de Caro was behind her soft’n’sexy easy-listening sounds; he was also the arranger behind hits such as Here You Come Again (probably my favourite Dolly track), Elton John’s Your Song and Barbra Streisand’s The Way We Were. Dude knew how to elicit some emotion from his listeners.

I would snatch up another couple of Claudine albums soon after, discovering her fantastic soft-oddball versions of Rolling Stone’s Let’s Spend The Night Together, Neil Young’s Birds, and Leonard Cohen’s Hey Thats No Way To Say Goodbye.

I was amazed to discover years later that she had also shot and killed her boyfriend in 1976, champion Olympic skier Vladimir ‘Spider’ Sabich.

They had been living the high life together in Aspen, Colorado for a few years (also home to Hunter S Thompson), a gorgeous couple active on the social scene. Spider was allegedly a bit of a player and Claudine was - in the parlance of the times - becoming ‘possessive’ and ‘clingy’ (or maybe just reacting to her boyfriend’s constant flirting with other women in a natural way?) Spider’s ski buddy, Billy Kidd, told People magazine “There wasn’t any girl around who, from the instant she heard the word ‘Hello,’ didn’t want to spend more time with him.” GQ reported that Spider was '“Known for his charm, generosity and humour, the Californian effortlessly excelled in every area of life that most young American men openly aspired to, with the significant exception of monogamy”.

Things were supposedly breaking down in their relationship, Spider had reportedly had lunch with his ex not long before his death and told her that Claudine was becoming a drag, she was ‘throwing tantrums’ and he was over it, her three kids (from her previous marriage to ‘Adult Contemporary’ crooner Andy Williams) were cramping his style.

Aspen was known for its wild theme parties (including a ‘Best Breast’ party ) and it was alleged in court that Spider was planning to go to one of these alone the night he was shot by Claudine, while standing in the bathroom in his underwear about to take a shower. Claudine maintained he was giving her a lesson on how to use the cheap imitation World War II .22-caliber German‐made pistol and she walked toward him pointing it playfully, said ‘bang bang’ and much to her horror it went off. She desperately tried to give him mouth to mouth but didn’t know how. Spider was pronounced DOA at hospital.

She had never handled a gun before. Although the gun lesson story she proposed was happening seems rather unlikely, cold blooded murder doesn’t sound particularly plausible either - the gun was a cheap imitation, and .22s are usually used for target practice or hunting very small creatures. Spider was shot only once, in the abdomen, and there was apparently a lot of grease around the trigger, making it unstable and unpredictable.

Claudine was however alleged to be high on cocaine and had been day-drinking - her blood and urine taken at the scene but as the police did not have a signed warrant to test her at that time the analysis was ruled inadmissible, along with her allegedly ‘explosive’ diary containing details of the breakdown of the relationship, that was also removed from the scene before it should have been and so was kept from evidence presented to the jury.

Claudine faced up to ten years in prison for Reckless Manslaughter but after a four day trial was charged with the lesser crime of Negligent Homicide - a gross deviation of a standard of caution one could be expected to have. She was give two years probation and 30 days in prison, that could be served whenever and however she wanted. Claudine completed the term on weekends, and she was allowed to repaint the jail cell because she found it was too ‘drab’. One of the jury members commented ‘I don’t think she’s a threat to society’.

Her ex husband Andy Williams supported her in court and paid for her top legal team. Her defence attorney later left his wife and young family and married Claudine.

She never spoke publicly again, apart from a short voiceover in a tribute to Andy Williams, who she met as a seventeen year old showgirl appearing at the Tropicana Resort & Casino in Las Vegas when her car broke down and Williams drove by in his limousine and rescued her; they would go on to star together in ‘The Andy Williams’ show, along with their children, performing saccharine family Christmas skits and MOR duets, and he would encourage and support her recording career. She was rumoured to have been writing her memoirs, but a civil suit settled with Spider’s family on there terms that she never commented on his death.

Now I’m merely rehashing the information I’ve found on the ol’ internet and have no idea of Claudine’s guilt or innocence, all I know is this tragic saga adds an extra air of mystery to Claudine’s already strangely haunting recordings.

Though there were many reports of her death at 84 earlier this week, understandably mostly mentioning the murder and her marriage to Andy Williams, very little was written about her gentle musical contributions to the world and I just wanted to say, for the record, thank you for the quiet times and the lullabies Claudine. Rest easy in your Golden Slumbers.

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This podcast was just something I dearly wanted to make and put out into the world. It was important to me to make it exist.

I didn’t try to sell it or monetise it or publicise it (I know, I probably (definitely) should have, but it was made during a tricky period in my life where I didn’t have a lot of time, so I had to make decisions about what I could and couldn’t manage - and just getting it out in the world was enough). If you feel like listening and then being kind and leaving a nice review on a podcast app, I’d still be super grateful!

So all I did was a bit of posting here and on my social media - and much to my surprise, my little podcast went off wandering by itself and has now been listened to in 442 cities and 72 countries! WTF! I look at this list of names of cities where people have listened and not only do I not know where many of them are, but I honestly can’t quite believe it. I generally avoid looking at any stats because they are generally depressing, but these location ones give me a little flutter.

I remember shooting the breeze backstage with a few years ago when talk drifted to how exciting Myspace was back in the mid 2000s. There was suddenly this tangible sense of connections, of threads across the universe, this thrilling idea that you might have a typed conversation with someone on the other side of the world - or that your music might travel there without you!

My teenage daughter discovered myspace long before I heard of it and told me I needed to set mine up. I thought she sounded crazy. Then a few of my rock’n’roll friends told me the same thing, so I entered the unimaginable world of attempting to flog my musical wares online. I came up with the very easy to remember and spell, internet-friendly SEO optimised title: https://myspace.com/loenecarmensrocknrolltears. Try it yourself - good luck!

Like Lana del Rey’s myspace profile back from when she was still Lizzy Grant, my three musical description words generally included Glam and Hawaiian.

At that time, the only way I could conceive of reaching someone on the other side of the ocean was to post a cd with a handwritten letter from my home of Sydney, Australia, which believe it or not, I would do every now and then at great expense in the hope that someone from America or the UK or France or Sweden might write about my album or play it on the radio or record one of my songs.

The absolute highlight of the myspace era for me was receiving a message out of the blue from the great Texan songwriter Josh T. Pearson to say how much he loved my song ‘Nashville High’. I was high on that for months. I still might be. One of my favourite songwriters from America had heard my song and loved it. I felt goddamn international gold standard. And exploding with possibilities!

Just when I felt like I was crushing it on myspace, my daughter told me I had to set up a Facebook account. ‘What’s that?’ I scoffed. ‘Sounds stupid’. Oh, if I could only have known …

Anyway, she rolled her teenage eyes, made me an account and explained that all the bands had one. It was just business.

myspace.com/loenecarmensrocknrolltears disappeared in the rearview mirror as I befriended strangers all over the world on Facebook.

People added me to all kinds of weird groups and sent me songs and requests. My pals and I, all in different countries, under everchanging ridiculous fake names, wasted hours talking shit in a secret group called “I Hate The Beatles” just for the conceptual fun of upsetting Beatles people, who tended to be very unforgiving of any dissension from total fandom. The internet was suddenly hilarious and entertaining, especially with a small baby on your knee and an inability to leave the house much.

Eventually my daughter told me no one used Facebook anymore and I had to start an Instagram account. All the cool people used it. Lots of bands. It was just pictures. I thought it sounded so dumb and pointless but I figured if it was the done thing, I should probably do it.

I got the hang of it pretty quickly and discovered it actually was really fun. Suddenly Facebook did feel old-fashioned and half my friends dropped away from it. Now the chit-chat and the giggles were on Instagram. I travelled halfway across the world to Texas, to showcase and attend the SxSW conference. I was excited to learn about the future of music and embrace international possibilities. I inherited $10k from a beloved family friend, the most money I’d ever had in one hit and the only inheritance I was ever likely to get, and spent half of it on fast-tracking a US work visa so I could attend. It seemed like a worthwhile investment. I went to panels and sessions all day, including one where this guy Daniel Ek explained the concept of this mind-blowing new technology that used something called algorithms to categorise and predict what music a person would like. It seemed unfathomable. But brilliant and exciting! It was going to be the great equaliser. If someone was a fan of another artist who mined the same vein of music as me, even if that artist was well-known, then apparently my music would show up in their account and I would slowly win new fans. It was genius. The future seemed thrilling and I couldn’t wait.

At night I’d meet up with music friends and watch bands and drink too much and eat tacos in the middle of the night or hang out in hotel rooms with The Drones swearing we would never, ever be so pathetic as to have Twitter accounts. Tweeting was for the birds.

Before too long I had Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and Youtube accounts - the bare minimum for musicians. I don’t even know if I could list everything I use for music now - beyond those above I regularly interact with platforms like Distrokid, Squarespace, Supertape, DISCO, Apple Music for Artists, Spotify for Artists, Linktree, Threads, LANDR, Samply, Tourbox for Songkick, Bands In Town, Songshift … and I’m currently trying to get my Quobuz and Subvert sites set up. Ugh.

Anyway this wasn’t meant to be a ode to/rant about the internet, I set out to write a celebration and exploration of the wonderful ability of work that you can make in one place and put out into the world to travel continuously to places you never dreamed of, or anywhere, by itself, thanks to the modern freedoms and ease of digital delivery. It really is rather marvellous.

Just yesterday I listened to a fantastic new album from Frank ‘The Wild Jalapeño’ Rodarte, produced by musician and brand new Substacker Jerry David deCicca in San Antonio, TX.

From the Bandcamp liner notes:

The Chicano Rock-n-Roller can be heard blowing tenor saxophone on recordings with Doug Sahm from 1961 with his band, The Dell-Kings (see Norton Records’ Doug Sahm comp, San Antonio Rock).
In 1964, The Dell-Kings, with Rodarte as their leader, became the house band for the first “after hours” strip club bar at The Sahara in Las Vegas for 366 weeks straight.
Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Elvis Presley, Don Rickles, and Louis Prima were his “regulars” and fans. Presley even gave them an anniversary cake to celebrate week 300.

It’s an immersive album that truly transports you - when 83 year old Frank croons ‘I’m just looking for connection til I can find my way home’ I felt moved to dance around the room and cry a little bit too as I put away laundry and cleaned the bedroom and took a little trip to a Texas heat map in my mind. I really felt I’d been invited to step inside Frank’s world for a little while, a joyous, wistful Tex Mex fiesta where Jesus, music, love and family ruled and the air was thick with marijuana smoke and homemade tortillas and the scent of vanilla drifting down from the Big Red bottling plant. It’s so great that the songs Frank is singing were written especially for him by Jerry, with details of his life woven in, and he also turns Bill Callahan songs into his own - the track ‘Inspirational’ is especially gorgeous. Special shout out to the tambourine on this album which is magnificent. Go listen, it’s so beautiful, and I love that Frank now refers to himself as ‘The Mild Jalapeño’. People with a sense of humour are always my favourites.

Kacey Musgraves should race to book Frank and his band as her opening act on the Middle of Nowhere tour, they would be such a great mix. If you haven’t seen Kacey’s new music video for the song ‘Dry Spell’, where she is really out for some connection, well I insist you must. It’s a heartbreaking hilarious work of pure genius.

I still kinda miss the thrilling early days of making friends and international connections on myspace.com, but I’m grateful for the ease with which we can now extend our tendrils of offerings worldwide and find buddies and affinities and make associations and bonds and mergers from one end of the Earth to another.

My favourite daydream is still an international phone call coming through on my rhinestone encrusted landline offering me a tour of Europe or South America or Japan opening for Bill Callahan or Kacey Musgraves or Frank The Mild Jalapeño Rodarte. I remain optimistic, cos the world is truly full of possibilities, many of them beyond imaginable.

And today, I also celebrate all the mothers and step mothers and mother figures out there, especially mine, who is the best, and always has filled me with the idea that I can do anything and go anywhere, a gift indeed for which I’m always grateful.

Call your mother, update your internet profiles, be kind, listen to new music, see y’all next week x

Disclaimer: thats not really my phone and I don’t actually have one, but still … call me….

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He ran outside to the parking lot to meet up with his band - they were on tour, moving on to the next town - and started excitedly singing them the verses - and they looked at him like he’d lost his mind. But Sturgill knew. He knew the song gods had flown in and dropped one on him, and his only job was to catch it and carry it home. Yet the song is undeniably Sturgill; so singular, immediately recognisable, his entire philosophy for living in the world distilled into a perfect song - check it out below and note the early AI generated video!

There is a phenomenon known as ‘The Shower Effect’, where the stepping outside of the distractions of everyday life into a safe, calming incubator type space like a shower, or a car while driving, leads to more ‘mind wandering’ and creative thought. Ideas that have been lurking in the back of your mind are freed to connect and spark and fire.

When accepting her 2023 Grammy for Best Pop Solo Performance for ‘Easy On Me’, a song inspired by feeling lost and trying to be gentle with herself after her divorce, Adele revealed ‘I wrote the first verse in the shower when I was choosing to change my son’s life’.

John Mellencamp has said his giant hit ‘Hurt So Good’ also arrived effortlessly, helped by the flow state of being in the shower: ‘I wrote it in three minutes, scrawled the first line in soap on the glass door in the shower. It was really just a joke. I think all good things probably started as jokes. Wasn't God having a laugh when he made this whole place?’. In his 1982 Grammy speech for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance he said ‘I don’t know what to say, I’m just an idiot.’

Talking about songwriting in a 2012 Guardian interview, Willie Nelson said ‘It’s a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn’t lived long enough to experience. That’s why I also believe in reincarnation, that we were put here with ideas to pass around. Somebody sent me here to write ‘Crazy’ and gave me the talent to do it. I can’t take credit for any of that.’

He’s also told the story many times of how he wrote three of his most iconic, enduring hits, ‘Crazy’ ‘Nightlife’ and ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’, on his drive from Texas to Nashville, when he was heading there for the first time to try to sell his songs.

In a recent Howard Stern interview, Willie told him ‘If I really need or want to write a song today I’ll get in the car and take off in any direction…. When you’re driving, I used to tell myself, if I can remember this and write it down when I get home it's a good song’.

Lucinda William describes the same thing, telling the NY Times in the recent Greatest Living American Songwriters story 'Sometimes something would just kinda tumble out….’, like ‘Changed The Locks’, and says her song ‘Joy’ arrived while she was driving; ‘You can kind of hear the rhythm of the car in the song’.

Iggy Pop has said ‘The Passenger’ - the ultimate driving song - was partly inspired by driving across America on tour with David Bowie - a story thats easy to believe when listening to the driving rhythm of the song.

Ella Langley says she and her songwriting hero Miranda Lambert had just laboured all morning over another song and were taking a break when Miranda starting telling a funny story about getting pulled over by cops while she was driving with a baby kangaroo in the back seat her car - bearing Texas plates. In response, Ella joked ‘She’s from Texas I can tell…’ and immediately that insistent, chart history making ‘Choosin’ Texas’ melody appeared and she sat down with her co-writers and finished the whole song within 45 minutes.

Much of the art of songwriting is in knowing how to get out of your own way, how to open yourself up to what’s floating by, how to ‘let go and let God’ as they say in AA - as evidenced by the many hit songs that were written in dreams (something I went deep on here in my book ‘Lovers Dreamers Fighters’).

Bob Dylan has famously explained that for him ‘songs are floating in the ether and you’ve got to catch them’ - although we should take note that he has also said ‘These songs didn't come out of thin air. I didn't just make them up out of whole cloth.’ (2015 MusiCares speech), meaning that he absorbed so much music written by other people that it just got mixed in the cauldron of his body and mind and came out made anew.

Tom Waits - of course - has come up with most of the best songwriting metaphors like ‘Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers’. Elizebeth Gilbert interviewed him for her book on creativity and described a conversation they had to Paul Holdengräber:

EG: He was caught in traffic. He had one song, and he talks about songs that you have to bully and songs that are like dreams through a straw, and then this one: He said that there are songs that don’t want to exist, and you have to let them go, and you have to let them not haunt you — which is another way to not become insane as an artist. And he was driving down the freeway one day…

PH: …in Los Angeles…

EG: …in Los Angeles, and he heard a little tiny trace of a beautiful melody, and he panicked because he didn’t have his waterproof paper, and he didn’t have his tape recorder, and he didn’t have a pen, he didn’t have a pencil — he had no way to get it.

PH: He only had his car in Los Angeles.

EG: And he thought, “How am I going to catch this song?” And he started to have all that old panic and anxiety that artists have about feeling like you’re going to miss something, and then he just slowed down and he looked up at the sky, and he looked up and he said, “Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? If you’re serious about wanting to exist, come back and see me in the studio. I spend six hours a day there, you know where to find me, at my piano. Otherwise, go bother somebody else. Go bother Leonard Cohen.”

Cole Porter says he was constantly writing songs; ‘I’ve done lots of work at dinner, sitting between two bores. I can feign listening beautifully and work. That’s the reason I like to go out. I have no hours. I can work anywhere. I work very well when I’m shaving or when I’m in a taxi.’

I’ve always been grateful for the portable nature of songwriting - its the ultimate digital nomad profession, and you don’t even need the digital bit, just your human brain processor.

The mysterious powers of songs and songwriting are part of what makes the whole act, and the end results, so enthralling, so difficult to pin down, analyse and recreate - sure we can turn up to the office and songwriting sessions and grind away and work at it and many, many brilliant songs have been written this way but the fact that songs can also turn up anywhere, any time, even while sleeping, showering, driving or walking the dog, makes it clear to me that there are cosmic gifts waiting for us if we open ourselves up to receiving them, and are lucky enough to be psychically open at the same time as the gift floats by - and maybe as Dolly Parton has written ‘Great minds have tried but they will not find, the answer to the mystery of the mystery’.

Just like Paul McCartney’s dream, I’m happy to let it be… (yes, this song also came to Paul in a dream).

Bring it on. I’m off to shower, walk and engage in some mind wandering. May cosmic gifts befall us all x

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PS Pressing that little heart button, sharing, commenting, and otherwise engaging with the ever-hungry algorithm helps Loose Connections reverberate into the world and lets me know I’m not just writing into the endless empty void…. (its OK, I know I am, but writing it makes me happy).

Most people prefer to call them ‘vintage’, and so do I, generally, but as it happens I have been called upon quite a few times to help clear out the closets of recently deceased ladies, some dear family friends, some strangers, but through this process I have come to know them so intimately that I cherish their items of clothing and love to take them out and be reminded of the woman that I inherited them from.

My first memorable experience of dressing in dead ladies dresses was when living in Bondi as a teenager, my mother came across an overflowing skip filled with general household debris and wardrobe contents of an old lady’s deceased estate. I know many of you may shudder with horror right about now, however, this was no ordinary debris and this was no ordinary wardrobe. This was the stuff dreams are made of.

My mother, Mouse, walked in the door cradling a pile containing a pristine meticulously stitched 1930’s maroon silk floral evening dress, satin nighties, a smart peplum jacket, numerous handknit cardigans, felt hats, beaded purses, boxed stockings and more. Amazingly, the dress was a perfect fit for me and hung like the breeze. Our hearts raced with the unbelievable excitement of finding such booty. We raced back up the steep hill to get another armload only to discover the skip now crawling with Bondi bounty hunters so we thanked our lucky stars we had got what we had and went home to play dressups. Mouse at this time worked in the film industry as a seamstress, specialising in period costumes. She knew her stuff and this stuff was gold. She called them museum pieces. What we didn’t want, we donated to the costumiers she worked for.

A couple of years later when I was sweet 16, a dear friend of our family was terminally ill. She was a young woman, a sassy New Yorker, a dancer and a wild girl with a wardrobe to match.

I was engaged by the family to help out in any way with office and general home duties. One of my tasks was to roll the joints she smoked copious amounts of in the afternoon to help ease her pain, and then to keep her company for a few hours. A joyful task indeed, as she regaled me with mind boggling stories of her past misadventures, tall tales and true and shared pearls of wisdom that still resonate deeply so many years later.

And then she would point to various items on her rack of clothes and get me to try them on. If they looked good, she’d make me take them home, reassuring me she wouldn’t have any need for them anymore. But I had to promise her to take them out and show them a good time.

From Suzi Sidewinder I added to my wardrobe an amazing black-and-red-1980’s-designer-checked-wool-skin-tight pants-suit with plunging back feature, fluorescent green and yellow 50’s style stilletoes, a skull and crossbones T-shirt worn so fine you could almost see through it, a super short green school tunic emblazoned with the word ‘Rebels’ that I wore constantly as a maternity dress when I fell pregnant a mere couple of years later, and that my daughter, who was given the gift of the ‘Sidewinder’ name between her first and her last, later proudly wore.

With every item of clothing came a gust of her Sidewinder spirit. I walked taller, raised an eyebrow and found a hitherto unknown strut. When I wore her shiny red plastic zip up jacket through her former playground of NYC’s Lower East Side a some months later, I stuck my hand in a previously unnoticed pocket and pulled out the mouldy remains of a sandwich crust in a paper bag, a subway stub and a hairpin. At that time she was so palpable, so present, I burst into tears on the street.

That same NYC trip I proudly sported her see through go-go boots in the snow (my first time) and much to my utter dismay the chill split them in two and I had to walk home with frozen feet and relegate them to the trash. I still have a glamorous 1960’s black cocktail dress with sequins and (slightly worse for wear) feather trim that is very Breakfast at Tiffany’s and various crazy bobble braided costumes she wore when she danced for Kid Creole and the Coconuts. I will treasure them forever.

Suzi in the white sunnies and red skirt on the left (and my other idol/mentor/soul sister Lori Eastside front & centre)

Many years later, my father’s friend Fred asked me to help go through the contents of his 92-year-old Auntie Bub’s wardrobe, in preparation for her move from the decrepit old Darlinghurst digs she’d lived in since the 1930’s to the sunny climes of aged care in Queensland. I lived opposite Auntie Bub, in Darlinghurst, a run down old red-light, bohemian neighbourhood. She was a fabulous character, she’d done it tough and worked all kinds of jobs, including time as a brothel madam which later morphed into a long running career as the barmaid at what is now the upmarket East Village Hotel and was then the rough-as-guts Tradesman’s Arms, also charmingly known as The Bloodhouse.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, the East Village Hotel was ‘the Tradesman’s Arms’, a bloodhouse with sawdust on the floor to soak up the spit and vomit, hard stools at the bar and a dozen cheap wooden tables and chairs scattered around. The air was think with coarse language, raucous laughter and the cigarette smoke pumped out by the Arms’s clientele - the factory workers and bakers from the nearby Sergeants pie factory, prostitutes, pimps, pickpockets, muggers, con men, SP (starting-price) bookies and drug dealers. Cards and two-up were regularly played in the back bar. Fights erupted regularly. Tilly Devine called in to transact business, since the Arms was in the heart of her red-light stomping ground, and just across the street from the brothel and sometimes home at 191 Palmer Street. ..
After working as a prostitute for ten years Tilly capitalized on the astounding anomaly in the Offences (Amendment) Act of 1908 that made it illegal for a male pimp or brothel-keeper to profit from the immoral earnings of prostitutes but not for a woman to do so. She became a madam, using the money she had salted away to bankroll the biggest, best-organised, most lucrative brothel network Sydney has ever seen. ..

Tilly Devine was on her way to becoming the woman about whom it was written in a police article at the end of her 204 conviction criminal career:

She has been in conflict with society all her life. She has fought it with words, with action, and with her bare hands. She has held it by the throat and shaken it. She has spat in its face. Her sense of values, her code of morals and of ethics, are her own and she well tolerate no interference. For the average man, her life had held that singular fascination the criminologist describes - the fascination of the thunderstorm.

Excerpt from ‘Razor’ by Larry Writer © 2001

Although I imagine there were many similarities between Tilly and Bub, mainly Bub described herself as a ‘a goodtime girl’. She had a wardrobe to match but unfortunately for me she was not much more than 5 foot tall and teeny tiny all over to match. She had dementia and in the week or so I worked there, she often thought I was either a nurse from the hospital she spent time in after a backyard abortion went bad, or one of the girls at the brothel she ran, and confided all kinds of fascinating bits and bobs to me that were extremely difficult to follow, although I desperately tried. She kept looking me up and down with sharp, squinty eyes then telling me I was ‘ a pretty one, and should do alright’ before warning me over and over to be careful and not to get a backyard job like she’d done, swearing like a trooper and murmuring about the blood and the flies.

Anyway, like many women who survived the war and the Depression, she had never thrown a single thing out and her house was bulging at the seams with faded feminine glory, exquisite 1940’s Japanese kimonos and 1950’s baby doll negligees, busty cotton wiggle dresses, sadly all stained, ripped and torn.

It was heartbreaking to have to shove garbage bags full of these too-far-gone former glories, all behind her back so as not to upset her. Luckily, this wasn’t difficult to achieve as she was blind as a bat and mainly far off with the fairies. I did of course find some gorgeous little vintage treasures I could squeeze into and enjoyed sashaying around the neighbourhood in her tight crepe beaded cocktail dresses (that sat mid-thigh on me rather than on the knee…), imagining her back in her glory days strolling round the same streets.

It’s a sobering experience really to see somebody’s entire lifetime collection of clothing and accoutrements, once enviably uber fashionable, lying abandoned in ruins. As they say, this too, shall pass. It was sad to see her go off to Queensland, a brazen fast-talking Darlinghurst gal to the end, though I was glad to hear she gave the nurses plenty to gossip about in the aged care home she spent her last few months in, where Fred told us she was known for yelling ‘Who wants a fuck?’ as she wandered the halls.

I took home Auntie Bub’s tiny wood and wrought-iron kitchen table with matching chairs, just big enough for two and ‘Cheers-ed’ her every time I sat down at it with a glass of wine.

June Cann was Australia’s first female actor’s agent, as well as being Australia’s first ‘script girl’ on movie sets. A legendary, glamourous woman, the epitome of elegance, always impeccably dressed with a cloud of white hair and pink lipstick. I found it especially charming that she’d have a single glass of whiskey and one cigarette every night at 5pm.

We met when I joined her agency aged 16 and years later her debonair son John, who had taken over the agency and become a kind of beloved uncle to me, asked me to help her go through her clothing and work out what new clothes she might need, and what needed mending etc.

By this stage she was very elderly, with mild dementia, but still with twinkling blue eyes, a wicked sense of humour and an intact appreciation for her incredible closet full of designer wear, and a slight story behind every piece, although she would often trail off and stare off into yesterday’s parties as she talked.

She had suits by Chanel, dresses by Celine and Oscar de la Renta, Hermes scarfs — everything similarly modest but exquisite, all in navy blue, cream, red and pink. Unfortunately, June didn’t get out much anymore due to terrible arthritis, and mainly wore soft house clothes, rendering much of her beautiful wardrobe completely useless. After carefully packing away the special items together, sending others off for mending and sending boxes of the slightly less special but still splendid items up to Arnhem Land where her son John had very close ties with the First Nations community, she was left with little but nighties and dressing gowns, all beautiful white cotton or fine linen.

We were preparing a list of what she might want when things took a turn for the worse and she ended up moving into an aged care home, where she had little need for much. After she died, a couple of years later, John asked me to take her boxes of special clothes to keep or to hand on to my own daughter or any other girls that might enjoy them. Although it’s not really my style, yet, I will be holding onto her elegant loose fitting navy Chanel dress* until I’m well aged enough to bring out its true beauty. And every cold winter when I slip into her cashmere cream knit secretary skirt, I feel a sudden elegant urge for a 5pm whiskey and cigarette….

Eventually I decided to turn my love of all things vintage into a business, and together with a couple of other girls decided to create The Ladies Collective, a ‘vintage home shopping party’ experience. First, we needed stock. The very first time we checked the back of the newspaper for garage sales there was a notice for a sale that very day in the dark depths of the back streets of Paddington, a wealthy, fashionable woman’s deceased estate. Not being very business oriented yet we had all slept late and didn’t make it there til mid afternoon, and we had little hope of finding much left. But, when we finally made it, it was truly a gift from the Gods.

Mountains of beautiful dresses were draped in piles across couches and kitchen counters and over chairs and a couple of hours later we had made two piles as tall as ourselves of gorgeous chic evening and smart casual wear mainly, from the 1970’s and 1980’s. The husband was relieved that his wife’s dresses were going to a good home and admitted to being totally overwhelmed by the size and breadth of her collection, before confiding that there was at least twice as much still upstairs that he hadn’t even touched.

We made him a deal. We offered to go through everything that remained, sorting into Salvos, rubbish, items we wanted to buy and items he could sell at another garage sale. He was very happy about this and left us to it for the next five solid eight hour days! Like those that lived through the Depression, those that were born into poverty find it very hard to part with items that are still good, and Alina was no exception. The story we gathered was that she was sent alone on a boat from Lithuania as a penniless young teenager, with the hope she would find a better life in Australia’s streets famed paved with gold. And she did strike gold, falling in love with a kind and generous millionaire. She had no problems getting to used to spending money and built a wardrobe of magnificent proportions, with an incredible set of Swinging Sixties gear from London, a fabulous range of 70’s flared pantsuits, French knits, exquisite kaftans and possibly every design Merivale ever issued… there were turbans, caps, fascinators… oh, it was an utter delight, though so much of it was destroyed by time and heartbreakingly fell apart when we tried it on or washed it.

The thing I remember most is that she had an exceptional and massive shoe collection, but lived in fear that someone would try to steal them and so she kept one of each shoe outside in the garage and the other side of the pair in her bedroom. Consequently there would be one Italian soft grey leather boot in perfect condition and the other hard and mouldy and irreparable — and there were hundreds in the same state. My size!

So much of that experience was like a knife of wasted beauty to the heart. We never even saw a picture of her but we got to know her so intimately she became like a fourth member of our business, a silent partner. The Ladies Collective was short lived but the three of us will still bump into each other at a party and give each other a secret smile as we are all sporting something from Alina’s fantastic collection.

And that brings me to Auntie Sylvie, another Depression-surviving ‘good time girl’, an Inner West barmaid, who lived in her tiny Newtown terrace for over sixty years with only her outrageously large hand painted gnome collection for company, including many topless lady gnomes. My mother was walking down her street when she got chatting, as mothers do, with a lady who was bemoaning the exhausting task ahead of her of cleaning out dear old Auntie Sylvie’s house. Being a kind hearted lady with some time on her hands, Mouse knew she could help her new friend decide what was worth keeping and what should be thrown out, and offered to roll up her sleeves and get in there and help for a bit.

After packing up the china and the books and the whatnots, they got into the bedroom, at which point my mother called me and said ‘I think you better get up here. Quick’. So I did.

And I certainly didn’t regret it when I walked in and tripped over a floor length strapless, beaded black taffeta 1950’s gown lying in the hall, and destined for the tip. Along with the rest of her wardrobe. And perhaps the most wonderful thing about dear Auntie Sylvie’s wardrobe, was that as one era passed into another, she simply packed away the old and started anew.

This meant as each layer of clothing was sorted through, the next era tucked below it was revealed. So, after they had sorted through and chucked the trackies and Kmart senior-wear selections of her latter years, the true jewels began to emerge, beginning with her 1970’s wardrobe, despite featuring a lot of settling-into-middle-age Carol Brady polyester and nylon there were still some pretty sassy numbers hidden away amongst them. She was a barmaid after all! But it was when they looked under the bed and discovered separate suitcases exploding with divine 1960’s sundresses then 1950’s cotton florals and cocktail dresses that my mother decided it was time I came to rescue these babies from the tip.

I swear it was like all my Christmasses had come at once and Auntie Sylvie’s niece from Shoalhaven thought it was beyond absolutely hilarious that anyone would want to wear these crazy old fashioned clothes but was glad that they would live on nevertheless.

And live on they do, in fact, most of my favourite dresses have come from Auntie Sylvie, and despite the fact they came within seconds of ending up at the tip (like all her handbags and shoes already had before my mother got there!) I feel like a million bucks each time I wear one. We donated her amazing gnome collection to Reverse Garbage who made a wonderful, bizarre installation with them, dedicated to Auntie Sylvie.

One topless gnome still stands guard to welcome visitors to our outdoor toilet.

I hope I don’t sound like a vulture. I feel more like a rescue worker. I hope I can keep a little bit of these wonderful women’s spirits burning bright when I take their dresses out for good time and that they can look down from wherever they may be and think ‘Oh yes, I always loved that one…’

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*Reader, I lost the Chanel somewhere in my travels!

This piece was originally published at https://neighbourhoodpaper.com on June 6, 2017. Thanks to editor for publishing.

But what I love the most - apart from when Tim tells me ‘Break some hearts’ just before I step onstage - is getting to witness such a great songwriter at work night after night, how each song becomes its own little world, taking us on a journey through time and space. Tim is hilarious and ad-libs little asides and raconteurs but these songs of his are just so gorgeously structurally perfectly imperfect you could do anything to them and they would still stand there unscathed, like monuments to moments in time, and just hearing them so stripped back is a thing of wonder.

All Tim’s songs are really special, but when he pulls out the big hits, the air in the room seems to charge up on the power of them, there’s a kind of collective sigh, and everyone starts singing along, very quietly or even just internally, but you can feel it.

Everyone in the room holds that song he’s singing inside them somewhere, attached to their own memories and experiences of what it means to them, probably with misheard lyrics and all. Courtney Barnett says ‘Heavy Heart’ is her favourite song, and it’s one of my favourites too (I could never pick just one). This version she played of it on Austin City Limits is mesmerising.

But can you imagine being in the mosh pit at the Annandale Hotel, my favourite Sydney venue, sadly no longer, for this hardcore rock’n’roll band version? Oh my. This thing is on fire.

One of the other things I love about playing shows is that strange, hard-to-manage time between soundcheck and show, when you’re a bit antsy and anticipating and have nothing to do and you don’t really want to eat and you’re trying not to drink, or not drink too much, and you’re kinda confined to whatever the band area/green room/holding cell is, so of course, you just end up sitting round talking shit about the best things in life - the music and books and docos and people you’ve loved and great food you ate and things you’ve found in op shops/thrift stores, depending which side of the world you’re on.

I stopped in at a Salvos on my drive home from Newcastle the other day, and found two battered Tom T Hall records glinting in amongst the James Last Orchestra and Johnny Young and 101 Strings. Of course I brought them home (along with two lovely apricot velvety 70s towels with roses on them!).

I discovered that Miller Williams, the great poet who also happens to be Lucinda Williams father, wrote the liner notes for this 1973 album of Tom T’s, the intriguingly titled For The People In The Last Hard Town.

Miller writes things that feel like they sum up all the things I’ve been thinking as I watch Tim’s show each night; ‘When he takes us to some place we have been before, our own remembered world and the fresh vision in Tom T’s song join together and become a new place, ours and his, ands more real than ever. When he takes us some place we have not been to before, it becomes as real to us as if we were standing, say, in the backyard where our father’s house used to be…he sings his own life and ours in the songs he writes … they are about spirits trying not be broken, and sometimes breaking anyway … he tells us about ourselves as we are, without passing judgement’.

I miss liner notes.

And I’m gonna miss playing shows and witnessing Tim’s show. Tonight is my last one on this run, and I need to get up off the couch, make myself a breakfast pizza and make those tyres squeal down the road three hours to the next hard town (yeah I know it sounds romantic to me too). I can’t wait to slip into my somewhat uncomfortable prickly silver show dress that actually feels great on stage (Tim has a somewhat uncomfortable shirt that also feels/looks great on stage - they remind both us and the audience we’re alive), sing my songs, strum my guitar, stomp on some pedals and hit some chimes, and probably eat bad food and drink a little too much wine, not sell any merch, but get paid in the gold of listening, of learning about another brilliant song I need to remember to search up after soundcheck and get taken away to a whole new world of songs I could live in long after it - so grateful for every little bit of it. Namaste motherfuckers. See you on the other side x

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I am also someone who used to have to jump up at the end of a yoga class and exit the room before the teacher put on the ‘relaxing’ classical music for 5 minutes of wind-down-time, because that music aggravated me so much it would spoil the zen effect of the class.

Classical music has often felt very elusive to me, like it is meant for other, fancier, more refined people and not for a reprobate like me. I’m generally drawn to more underground/underdog vibes than the establishment. I tend to prefer my songs with three chords, or maybe only two - hell, one was enough for The Beatles with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’). I like a hook I can hang on to, a melody I can hold.

Classical music, dare I say it, has sometimes felt to me a little bombastic, pompous, fussy, fusty and a bit over the top, like someone from another time in long white socks and an uncomfortably tight buttoned up suit throwing a hissy fit. Sometimes I feel like yelling ‘Chill out!’ at the radio when a particularly intense piece pours forth from it, like a marching band on heat. I know, JUDGEMENTAL! Jesus. I’m trying. But in the same way I like my people, I like my music a little understated, preferably with a wink, a touch of humour - I’m just not a fan of dramatics or hysterics in general, of sounds or people that bang you over the head and demand your attention.

Over time I have found my way to deeply loving some of the slower, gentler, more melancholic, romantic and reflective classical composers; Satie, Debussy, Chopin - but have not yet discovered the more epic stylings on offer through time, probably because I don’t know where to start and have gone in other directions. There is so much music and so little time.

So, when my dad gave me two tickets to see/hear Mahler’s 6th Symphony at the Opera House for my birthday, I was excited to be exposed to something I’d never experienced. And I will admit, a little nervous - that I wouldn’t like it, that I’d fall asleep, that I’d have a coughing fit and ruin it for everyone. I really struggle to sit still for a long time, and have fallen asleep in most theatrical productions I’ve been to (sorry). I guess I was anticipating feeling out of place.

And maybe that’s the bit I really need to interrogate - I had to wonder if I was being a classist snob, stuck in this ridiculous idea that classical music is too la de da high brow for a low brow lover like me, thats it was for rich people; ‘society’ music. I really didn’t like the idea that I was limiting my own limits of musical enlightenment through closed minded thinking. So I got my glad rags on and headed out for a fancy night at the Opera House.

Just being in the Opera House Concert Hall is an elevating experience; that exquisite space, the soaring ceiling with those amazing glossy pink acoustic kidney shaped panels hanging from the ceiling, all that carved wood, all that expectation and precision and years of exquisitely honed performances that have soaked into the textured walls and filled them with a tingling life-force that excites the audience before the show even starts. I was moved by the chaos of the stage, all those black clad musicians warming up, lost in their own individual moments, rocking their wildly varied individual styles, finessing and fussing and creating a glorious cacophony (I do love a glorious cacophony), that gathering sense of purpose and pride and careful preparation for the coming fireworks - it was not what I expected at all. It felt so vibrant and human. Nothing stuffy happening there.

And then - the concert itself! Wow, just magnificent. Literally awesome. I am happy to report I found the entire experience thrilling and fascinating and I didn’t fall asleep or cough once! I was literally on the edge of my seat half the time, I got shook, moved, lost in reverie, I even laughed once. I loved the conductor (Sir Donald Runnicles) shimmying around like an electrified mad professor - a person behind us even noted how much he resembled Doc Brown from Back To The Future. We gave them a standing ovation for some minutes, while the conductor and the orchestra went through an elaborate pageantry of thanks, that was equally incredible in its precision.

Here I am after the concert, still high on music.

I purposefully did not research beforehand what to expect but have worked backwards and discovered:

Those hammer blows of fate were totally wild! An unassuming dude sitting up the very back of the orchestra stands up twice, abandoning his other percussion duties to walk into the top left corner, pick up a gigantic wooden mallet and smash it so hard the entire audience jumped.

The other part I especially loved was when two women who had been siting up the back quietly seemingly not doing a lot and looking a little like bank tellers suddenly stood up with huge cowbells in each hand and wildly shook them around for a few minutes. It was so unexpected and such a delightful, wistful, evocative sound, I had to research what it was meant to evoke.

According to Mahler’s wife Alma’s memoirs, Sixth Symphony is a deeply personal and biographical work. At the time he wrote it, Mahler was purportedly happy, busy with work and ensconced in a loving family with two young daughters. There’s a movement - according to Alma - inspired by his love for her, captured by the trembling cowbells that are meant to bring to mind the distant Alpine pastures she came from, that is apparently referred to by those in the know as Alma’s Theme.

Yet - the piece is known as ‘the Tragic Symphony’ and ends with the hero of the piece - Mahler - being knocked down by three humungous hammer blows of fate. Although he drags himself up from the first and second, the third does him in, and our hero is felled. The symphony ends with utter bleakness and despair.

The remarkable thing about this, is that the three blows of fate depicted are considered to be a kind of premonition. Within a couple of years, Alma (according to multiple reports, a callous, vain and cruel woman) began a passionate affair with a young architect, absolutely destroying Mahler, their five year old daughter died and then Mahler discovered he had a heart defect, got septicaemia and also died. Its almost a country song.

Alma - Mahler’s junior by 19 years - she was 22 when they married - was also a composer, as well as a beautiful, brilliant and popular socialite. There were no other known female composers at that time. Mahler insisted she give up her composing and tend to his comforts, as his work was so much more important than hers, writing ‘The role of composer, the worker's role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner … I'm asking a very great deal – and I can and may do so because I know what I have to give and will give in exchange’. She acquiesced.

She later wrote: "I sit down at the piano, dying to play, but musical notation no longer means anything to me. My eyes have forgotten how to read it. I have been firmly taken by the arm and led away from myself. And I long to return to where I was."

No wonder she had an affair. Maybe Mahler’s Sixth should be considered ‘A Cautionary Tale’ or ‘Wake Up & Smell The Coffee’ rather than ‘The Tragic Symphony’.

Many aspersions have been cast upon Alma’s versions of events and descriptions of Mahler’s intentions. She survived her husband by 50 years and is the main source of biographical information about him, but she has been accused of doctoring and deleting sections of letters he wrote to her and others, and getting rid of her own letters to her husband, purportedly to not tarnish her reputation.

There’s a lot going on here and I can feel a new world opening up to me of extraordinarily rich sounds, symphonies, stories, thanks to my father’s thoughtful gift. I will now shamelessly consider myself a high brow member of society with refined tastes, and look forward to future hammer blows, bleak tragedies, and sublime symphonic moments in time. What should I explore next?

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Ruth Copeland is an English girl from North Durham who followed her sister to Detroit aged 17 and started singing in local bands, falling in with the musicians from Parliament/Funkadelic when they were all signed to Invictus Records around the same time.

She recorded this wild cover of The Rolling Stones ‘Play With Fire’ in 1971 for her second album, ‘I Am What I Am’, recorded with Funkadelic/Parliament legends Eddie Hazel and Bernie Worrell in Detroit.

Listen also to her amazing original song ‘The Silent Boatman’ - the first song she ever wrote. Parliament recorded a version of it on their 1970 debut album ‘Osmium’, which Ruth co-produced, along with George Clinton and possibly her uncredited husband, producer Jeffrey Bowen.

Ruth toured supporting David Bowie with P Funk musicians backing her, recorded one more album in 1976 and then left the music industry and seemingly disappeared, although she was tracked down and gave an interview in 2015 and another in 2019 with Charles Donovan for Shindig.

In 1986, the iconic but desperately under-recorded Australian blues and soul singer Wendy Saddington, who possesses a breathtaking voice unlike any other, formed a stoner jam band with a group of talented Krishna-leaning musicians (Angelika Booth on bass, Dezzy McKenna on drums, Mik Liber on guitar, Javier Fredes on congas and Rose Bygraves on organ) and recorded a whole album of psychedelic covers; including incredible revisions of Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’, and wild version of ‘I Who Have Nothing’, originally made famous by Tom Jones, that sounds like a spacey dub-disco freakout ‘Ring My Bell’-alike. There’s some mystery surrounding how these master tapes were lost, but in any case, Wendy disavowed her performance and didn’t want it released. Luckily there are some cassette versions dubbed from the desk floating around, but its a great tragedy these amazing performances from Wendy and her band weren’t given the opportunity to truly sparkle and take flight the way they deserves, especially in light of the fact that she only officially released one single and one live album.

The phenomenal Chicago artist Baby Huey also left behind far too little music, heartbreakingly dying from a heroin induced heart attack in a seedy motel, shortly after recording the song below for his debut album with his band The Babysitters in 1970, which producer Curtis Mayfield posthumously released on his label Cartom. The album spawned the much sampled ‘Hard Times’ and an exquisite flute-n-dreamy-funk version of ‘California Dreaming’ but my absolute favourite is this insanely beautiful, bonkers, wild 9-and-a-half minute version of the Sam Cooke classic ‘A Change Is Going To Come’, where Baby Huey opines in the majestically soul-trippy breakdown ‘there’s three kinds of people in this world; there’s white people, there’s black people and then there’s my people’. Baby Huey, I am your people.

Eternally grateful for these extraordinary space odysseys and the special people that made them.

If you have a favourite psychedelic beauty I oughta know, please do illuminate me.

I’ll be the one swaying in the corner with my eyes closed til next time,

Lo x

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Something about those horny horns that can just take you away on a shimmering cloud of sound and feeeeel. Its hard to describe but you can see it, can’t you, the dimly lit room down, down, down some rickety stairs, shadows and smoke trails, clinking ice, murmurs, whispers, tiny stage, spotlight; moaning horn. Alright.

Cornettist Buddy Bolden is often credited with ‘inventing’ jazz - or ‘jass’ as it was originally known (read about the origins here!) - in New Orleans in the early 1900s. The original young man with a horn. wrote “even if he did not invent jazz, he had mastered the recipe for it, which combined the rhythms of ragtime, the bent notes and chord patterns of the blues, and an instrumentation drawn from New Orleans brass bands and string ensembles” in The History of Jazz (2011). Its the bending and the breaking and the subverting of the previously established musical patterns that makes it jazz, that lifts the sounds up from what your ear expects to hear to a place where instead your ears are waiting for the next noise to swoop or fly or slur or drag or even hurt a little, drill into you a bit. From funeral processions to dance halls, this is music that knew how to move you, in all senses of the word - to move the air around.

As bands grew into ‘big bands’, and horn players evolved into ‘brass sections’, and the tenor saxophone went from novelty instrument to taking its place as a solo instrument thanks to the stylings of Coleman Hawkins, an expressive and exciting new tonal palette was born, leading to other musical evolutions.

Frank Sinatra - aka The Voice, the Sultan of Swoon, Swoonatra, the Sigh Guy - became known for his nonchalant, smooth’n’easy singing style, but a hell of a lot of unseen work went into creating that relaxed vocal freedom. In his early days, as the singer for the Tommy Dorsey Band, Sinatra noticed that his idol Dorsey snuck tiny breaths from the side of his mouth mid-phrase as he played the trombone, a technique Sinatra took on and mastered until he could sing six to eight bars of music without taking a visible breath. Convinced that breath was the key to everything, he was determined to improve his - although he often performed with a cigarette dangling from his hand, flicking the ash percussively.

Sinatra told LIFE magazine in 1965 “It was my idea, in my mid-20s, to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or violin - not sounding like them, but playing like those instruments. The first thing I needed was extraordinary breath control, which I didn't have. I began swimming every chance I got in public pools, taking laps underwater and thinking song lyrics to myself as I swam, holding my breath.”

Like Sinatra with his swimming/singing practice, Coltrane could harness the power of his imagination to rehearse constantly - he was reportedly asked to stop playing in a hotel room on tour after complaints from other guests, and so put the instrument down but closed his eyes and continued to play silently, meditatively, fingers and mouth actively engaged as though his saxophone was still there.

Billie Holiday - “who was and still remains the single greatest musical influence on me” according to an essay Sinatra wrote for Ebony in 1958 - cites listening to and absorbing the swoop and falls peculiar to horn players as her vocal phrasing technique, writing in her memoir Lady Sings The Blues; “I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn. I try to improvise like Lester Young, like Louis Armstrong, or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel. I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know.” She also said “When Lester plays, he almost seems to be singing; one can almost hear the words.” If you have the time, take a minute and watch the tenderness, awe and joy on Billie Holiday’s face as she is just transported by Lester’s playing in the clip below.

Louis Armstrong’s ‘West End Blues’, which features a small gorgeous section of call and response scat singing (something Billie never did), was a piece of music Billie often described as a formative for her. I can clearly hear Billie singing the first lines of ‘Stormy Weather’ when I listen to the beginning of the verse here (at 00:15); Don’t know why…

Sinatra visited Billie in hospital in 1959 as she lay dying to tell her how much she meant to him, and according to his chauffeur, she replied “I may have showed you how to bend a note, Frankie — that's all” - before whispering in his ear so her police guard couldn’t hear, could he please get her some heroin, which Frankie, staunchly anti drugs, did.

Interestingly, trumpet player Miles Davis spoke of studying the way Orson Welles spoke - listening especially to his disembodied voice on radio broadcasts - to model his musical phrasing on. He used his trumpet like a voice, like he was singing or talking low. In Miles: The Autobiography, Miles wrote: “If I were to play with Frank Sinatra, I would play the way he sings, or do something complementary to the way he sings. I learned a lot about phrasing listening to the way Frank, Nat King Cole, and even Orson Welles phrased. I mean all those people are motherfuckers in the way they shape a musical line or sentence or phrase with their voice.”

Sarah Vaughan’s Encyclopaedia Britannica entry quotes her saying “I always wanted to imitate the horns” - perhaps why she is also noted as saying '“there are notes between the notes you know”. Ella Fitzgerald also attributed her unique vocal stylings to “I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns”.

Ray Charles distinctive churchy arrangements incorporated piano, harmonies and horns, all interacting “ like a vocal group. You have soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass”, according to saxophonist Hank Crawford who played with Ray for many years. Ray learned to play the clarinet and the saxophone as well as the piano when he was young, and later told Rolling Stone “I was never taught to write music, but when I was 12 years old I was writing arrangements for a big band... I just studied how to write for horns on my own.”.

As the era of big bands slowly died out, fewer artists were attributing the influence of horns on their singing styles, but Marvin Gaye told biographer David Ritz a story about searching for the right feel for What’s Going On (1971) “I'd been studying the microphone for a dozen years, and I suddenly saw what I'd been doing wrong. I'd been singing too loud. One night I was listening to a record by Lester Young, the horn player, and it came to me. Relax, just relax. It's all going to be all right.”* The Billboard review of the single declared “The artist is reborn”.

I’m going to go close my eyes and listen to my favourite horn filled album Sketches of Spain now - this composition by pianist Bill Evans, improvised and captured first take - Miles with John Coltrane on tenor sax; Cannonball Adderly on alto sax; Paul Chambers on bass and James Cobb on drums. A thing of wonder.

Here’s to horny times.

Lo x

*from Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz 1985

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I’ve been doing this long enough to have eight released albums plus 2 albums and 3 eps undigitised/out of print, lost to time, and at least 2 ‘lost’ albums (as in the audio files were never mixed and have now disappeared), and a bunch of music videos filmed that never made it to an editing desk.

I’ve always recognised that my music was a bit out of step with current trends, I didn’t have a team of people or a publicity budget to ensure my music got in front of whoever mattered, and thus I will never be on a Hits of the 90s compilation or invited to participate in nostalgic lineups. I have become so used to not being part of the historical conversation that I don’t even think about it. Sure, I’d love to get a nice royalty payday here and there but the freedom to follow whatever arrow I choose and not be tied to any particular time is a pretty good payment. I feel respected, generally, by the tiny number of people familiar with what I do and that’s enough for me. I’m ok with that. I like calling all the shots. I am not competitive in nature nor desperate for money or attention. I’m pretty easily satisfied, amused, and constantly inspired.

So much of what I feel compelled to do these days is share stories that would otherwise disappear. There’s not much I love more than trawling through archives and illuminating tales that take on a different sheen seen through the lens of time, people that incrementally shifted culture, subverted their era, blazed their own trails.

It never occurred to me that maybe I was also in need of a little light shining. A little validation. I was there! I know it, but not alot of others do.

However, with the release of a new book called Spirits of the Hoey: A Love Letter to the Hopetoun Hotel - ‘a love letter: to an iconic Australian landmark, and a unique time in Australian music history’ - by the wonderful cultural historian Dr Liz Guiffre and Gregory Ferris, featuring the photography of hardcore gig goer Bryan ‘Cookie’ Cook, I have discovered it does feel very nice to be written into history in a book.

I haven’t seen it in the flesh myself yet, but I’ve had quite a few friends texting me, loving the photographs and taking in the stories captured inside the pages. The Hopetoun was Sydney’s version of New York’s CBGBs or the Troubadour in LA - a venue heaving with music history. The doors closed in 2009 and have remained shuttered ever since. Now its like a spooky, shadowy Boo Radley house.

And a few weeks I was in a Byron Bay bookstore flicking through Who Can It Be Now? Photographs from the RocKwiz Archive by Andrius Lipšys - a beautiful hardback photographic book of backstage portraits of RocKwiz performers taken upstairs at the Espy over the course of a decade, just the photographer, an artist and a camera - when I bumped into my own face staring back at me, with a portrait of my daughter next to me, uncannily in a similar pose, hands across chest.

Yeah, I was there. I felt glad to be in a book alongside so many musicians I loved and admired, despite not appearing much in the official records and my lack of chart-topping success.

Both of these books have also served to spur me on with the work I’m quietly fossicking away at (I think I just completely misused that word but I like it anyway), slowly pulling a documentary together based on my memoir Lovers Dreamers Fighters, which is basically a love letter to inspiration!

The past always informs the present. Bringing archives to light, especially from ‘outsider’ communities like those in the arts, is not about nostalgia but about noticing; understanding that we all benefit from the moments of subversion or resistance, the small steps and the strides taken by those who came before us.

Contextualising matters.Women couldn’t get a bank loan without a male guarantor before 1984. I’m constantly amazed to realise that it was still illegal to be gay in many states in Australia in 1978, when the first Mardi Gras took place. Tasmania held out until 1997 before decriminalisation! When we look at the defining photographs from the 70s and 80s everyone looks so wild and free, but the reality was a little different.

What is written down is remembered. The documentation and recording of a time, place, community is what determines what ends up in the history books. Not that history books are the be all and end all - I am certain that most of the best and most interesting stories never make it into the historical record! -but its kinda nice not be written out of history.

I have a little dream of opening a music archive museum one day, curating monthly exhibitions of personal work/behind the scenes archives alongside the public facing ephemera of posters/photos/articles/tickets/recordings etc. If anyone has a super rich cool friend who’d like to underwrite my fantasy archive museum, please don’t hesitate to hit them up!

So many crazy little dreams it’d be so fun to make come true … and history teaches me, anything is possible.

Lo x

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If you want to learn more about my activities in the 90s, read all about the White Trash Mamas here!

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I guess the answer to that is may the best man win. Or something like that.

Does anybody else remember reading Cleo and Cosmpolitan magazines in the 1980s - especially the ones from the previous decade that were always in doctor’s waiting rooms? Absorbing the wisdom of these pages was my equivalent of sport, as in, flicking through these pages was what I would opt to do at school while other people jumped around sweatily. Ew David. And I really did learn so much about how to be a modern woman in the world, like How To Be A Sexy Housekeeper (a headline I’m thinking of borrowing for an album title), Seduction By The Stars and How To Dump A Man With Finesse. Not to mention those eye opening sealed sections!

Anyway, my point is, regular readers of these racy tomes would recall that Cleo and Cosmo regularly hit the shelves simultaneously blaring almost matching headlines. Getting there first was an ongoing war that was never won. Were there spies in the offices or were these ideas just floating around in the zeitgeist?

We know that the concept of photography emerged simultaneously from France and England in the late 1830s.

Louis Daguerre, a visual artist who worked for the Paris Opera and had already co-created the Diorama in 1822, kept tinkering away at the idea of playing with light and image and eventually came up with the daguerréotype, the first photographic process described at the time as ‘the mirrors with a memory’ that could make ‘a truthful likeness’ - a positive image captured on an iodine-sensitised silver-covered copper plate, developed with heated mercury vapour. Daguerre was granted a lifetime pension by the French Government in return for gifting the daguerréotype process to the world ( bizarrely, except for England where patents were enforced).

Consequently, photographic studios popped up everywhere and having one’s portrait made became a popular pastime. Each image was a one off - there was no negative, and so there was no way to reproduce the image, except by posing for the same likeness again.

Across the pond in England, in 1835, same time as Daguerre was landing on his discovery, a ‘gentleman scientist’ and aristocrat, rather charmingly named William Henry Fox Talbot (sounds like a hot rich executive from a 1980s Jackie Collins novel) was working out how to produce negative images on paper sentised by silver - he called his invention calotypes. These calotypes couldn’t capture the same level of detail and sharpness a daguerréotype could, but had the advantage of making reproductions of the images possible.

Another French fella, Hippolyte Bayard, had also been excitedly mucking around with capturing images on sensitised paper, and actually exhibited his positive prints on paper, including self portraits and streetscapes - but was convinced by the head of the French Academy of Sciences, who was a pal of Daguerre’s, to delay making his big announcement about this invention of his until after Daguerre’s big daguerréotype announcement.

Essentially, Hippolyte was pipped at the post by the far more ‘connected’ Daguerre and although he received some official recognition from the French Academy of Sciences and money to buy better equipment in 1840 - and eventually France’s highest accolade, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor - he is not officially touted as the ‘inventor of photography’ the way Dauguerre and Fox Talbot are, despite having ‘got there first’.

Bayard was extremely furious as this turn of events, as you can imagine, and in response created what is now considered the first work of conceptual art (in addition to inventing the selfie); A Self Portrait As A Drowned Man. This is what he wrote on the back of the print:

The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about 4 years with his discovery. The Government, which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life....! ... He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you’d better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay.

Touche! Hippolyte, what an exquisite fuck you! You win in my eyes.

Also, the more things change the more things stay the same if you know what I’m getting at. Anyway, next time someone asks you who invented photography, you know what to say.

Keep it loose, make weird art

Lo x

PS: Also, as the great song goes, I ain’t too proud to beg, please heart my work here, share it round and otherwise engage so The Great Algorithms let it find more readers…

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