New York Am I

Kenneth Branagh at a You Am I gig?! I had to look twice. It turned out to be an ostrich-like version, but that's New York for you: imitations, echoes, shadows ... of fame, fatal fame. It's been styled into people's DNA.

The Mercury Lounge sings with those dreams, with bar-land ambitions and grungy possibilities. Welcome to New York: the font of opportunity, the home of lost souls.

This is the last night of You Am I's American tour to promote their new RCA release #4 Record. Back home in Australia this group shimmer with critical and commercial success. But when singer-guitarist Tim Rogers, drummer Russell Hopkinson and bassist Andy Kent hit the stage it's a shock to see this much-vaunted group (their admirers include Sonic Youth, the former Soundgarden, Oasis and silverchair). They look battered, ragged, puffy, greasy, pale, just plain unwell and messed up by the road.

A full house of some 200 people, 50/50 American/Australian, greets them enthusiastically. I've made the mistake of saying to Andy Kent earlier at the bar that it's great to hear so many Australian accents. The comment seems to trouble him - why grind away here for an audience they already have back home?

Tim Rogers may have answers to that. He comes on as if James Brown has possessed his spastic, skinny white-boy body, thrusting his arse out, jutting his chin, giving a declarative rap about "showtime". A moustached Russell Hopkinson has a look best described as bottleshop Spanish, with a drumming action indebted to a loopy Keith Moon sensibility that seems to push the songs forward into the audience. Andy Kent's huge bass chords cable the whole beast together.

This is a great three-piece down on its luck. And it takes a few songs before You Am I really start to burn. During that build-up it's interesting to watch how utterly driven Tim Rogers is - the increasing intensity of his physical performance.

From the by-now-standard windmill fury of his guitar style to the gravelly, throaty envelope around the sweeter thinness of his recorded voice ... to the spitting, the wisecracks, the sense of danger that underlines him at every turn, most explicable in a ferocious version of Junk where he almost eats the microphone in two or three gestures that are strangely chilling.

Rogers's energy is phenomenal. He appears to have literally worn Hopkinson and Kent out with his drive, to have chewed up their existential energy and to push on the ghosts of what is left of them.

Rogers tries to use humour to cover or mask what is an extraordinarily angry performance. But it continues to pour out of him.

Trike has much more power than the recorded version but it doesn't shine as a song. It also hints at a wrong turn in Rogers's writing - the '60s affectations, The Who meets The Jam fandom that has taken the band away from the direct and raw muscularity of their Sound As Ever debut.

It is as if he has gotten too smart, too embroiled in his love of pop history. He's still a brilliant songwriter, of course - studious, encyclopedic, ruthless as a craftsman, but he seems to be commenting all the time, pointing and observing rather than feeling. He's losing the centre of the music, himself.

Perhaps that's the source of the inexplicable rage that has always been a part of Rogers's mocking stage persona. After the show I see him sitting alone downstairs with a black glass of Guinness in hand, looking morose. I ask him, "What's the matter - you look down in the mouth?"

Rogers tells me and repels me at the same time with the comment, "Everybody has their problems, you know." I can't tell if it's an appeal for intimacy or a snarl.

It's been a great night. Powerful, intelligent music from a band quite clearly injured by their own quest to make it in America.

Tim Rogers must wonder where it's going to end.

- Mark Mordue

* First published Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, December 24, 1998
+ Image of You Am I taken from a promotional poster for You Am I's #4 record. More images and details at http://www.posterlane.com/?page_id=140

Hold That Tiger

A tyrant can shoot down a tiger but shakes in fear when someone whispers a poem.


A poem whispers down a tyrant but shakes when a tyrant shoots a woman.


A woman is a tiger shooting poems through a tyrant's dreams.


Twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and once in the head at point-blank range.


Hold that tiger, hold that tiger...


- Mark Mordue

Orhan Pamuk's Snow

Snow

By Orhan Pamuk

Faber/Penguin, 436pp, $29.95

‘The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem he would have called what he felt inside him "the silence of snow".’

As soon as I read these lines, I knew I wanted this book. As I went deeper, I realised I also wanted to be inside it, as we always feel when great literature affects us - because we know it or, more strangely, feel it knows us.

That the author of Snow plays a literary shadow game - as a nameless narrator attempts to retrieve the details of a turning point in his friend's life - adds to this curious feeling of remembering rather than reading, of melting into the process of the story.

It would certainly be hard to find a more perfectly titled book than Snow. With its meticulously formed sentences, floating atmospheres and endlessly swirling storylines and characterisations, not to mention the snow itself that falls so constantly, it could take on a heavy-handed quality. Yet the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk never runs out of ways to make you feel, taste, see and "hear" its quiet power.

When Snow opens we are introduced to Ka, a well-known poet and would-be journalist on his way to a Turkish border town called Kars. Having spent the previous 10 years in Germany as a political refugee, Ka has returned home. Ka has lived a creatively bereft life in Germany, writing nothing and feeling the shame of an immigrant's life at the bottom of the social heap: "it had been a long time since he had enjoyed the fleeting pleasure of empathising with someone weaker than himself."

He has been commissioned by a newspaper to report on a municipal election in Kars and to investigate a mysterious "epidemic" of suicides among local young Islamic women. But Ka is really taking the journey west to seek out a beautiful girl called Ipek, whom he hopes to make his wife. As he trudges through Kars pursuing the details of the election and the more troubling events that motivated so many young women to kill themselves, a snowstorm cuts the town off completely.

Questions of politics, faith and identity dog Ka and all those he speaks to. Eventually these tensions overflow in a local coup that takes on the dimensions of farce, while Pamuk sustains a terrible sense of matter-of-fact brutality and evil nonetheless.

At one point, Ka observes how the "pale yellow street lamps cast such a deathly yellow glow over the city that he felt himself in some strange, sad dream, and, for some reason, he felt guilty. Still, he was mightily thankful for this silent and forgotten country now filling him with poems."

It becomes clear that the narrator who is telling us Ka's story is drawing from Ka's diaries in order to track his movements and hopefully find these lost poems, the "soul" of the events. The gap between this narrator and friend of Ka's and Orhan Pamuk himself begins to narrow till any line between what might be fact and what is presented as fiction becomes hard to determine.

Despite the European postmodernist tag he gets, there is something very Eastern and traditional about Orhan Pamuk. His style echoes the elaborateness of Turkish art, Sufi mysticism and the role of the storyteller as a conjurer. As corny as the metaphor sounds, reading this book also feels as if you are looking at a world in a snow-dome (or a television set), with all the melancholy distance that might imply.

At times there are just too many digressions into history, philosophy and character background, and I wondered how much my own travelling through Turkey kept me involved in the internecine political and religious arguments that power this highly soulful thriller. Would others understand, or wish to understand? In the end, the book felt too long, though I was no less moved towards tears for all that excess.

Written before the events of September 11, Snow is a Dostoevskian political thriller that could happily sit beside The Possessed (aka The Devils). It confirms Pamuk's place as one of the most important writers at work today. Where Dostoevsky, however, was fevered to the point of manic, Pamuk is made of altogether cooler, if no less romantically fatal, stuff.

-         -  Mark Mordue

Review first published in Spectrum Books, Sydney Morning Herald, September 11, 2004
Passport image depicts Orhan Pamuk's first passport, sourced online, no credit available.

Smoke Signals: Tex Perkins' Dark Horses

It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon and Tex Perkins is still in bed. "I've been doing interviews on the phone all day," he says. "Thought I may as well make myself comfortable. It's freezing up here. Absolutely pissing down. About time I got up, I guess."

Somewhere in the heavy green hills above Byron Bay, the 38-year-old singer is alone on his property, "40 acres of scrubby bush backed onto a rainforest. If you don't want to see people, you don't."

This rustic isolation absolutely oozes out of Perkins's third and latest solo release, Sweet Nothing. He has called it a move from "portraiture to landscape" in comparison to past recordings, as well as "smoke signals from the subconscious", a description that especially pleases him.

"I just didn't want to make another record that sounded like there was trouble at home," he says of the moody, love-damaged material for which he is known. "Inevitably, you invite speculation when you write songs of that nature.

"I'm very aware that people are obsessed with that thinking." What Perkins calls "the Woman's Day approach - that songs are windows into your personal life."

"I don't intend to write songs that are advertisements for how I'm feeling. I don't think they're relevant till they're out there in the world being a soundtrack for their listener," he says firmly, before acknowledging, "That said, you do reveal yourself unintentionally to a certain extent."


What's clear from our conversation and an earlier meeting in Sydney is that Perkins has come a long way rom the archetypal bad man of Oz rock who clobbered a guy with a beer bottle for harassing his girlfriend at a post-ARIA party a decade ago. This was the "Tex is sex" rock star of whom Henry Rollins once said, "Mick Jagger wishes he was Tex Perkins."


He had a loutish charisma on and off the stage back then, fiery and leanly brutish with the Beasts of Bourbon, lightened and poised with the Cruel Sea, while the Tex, Don & Charlie venture provided him with enough bar-stool reflectiveness to show what a great storyteller he was. It seemed he could do anything.

And what he did do, unconsciously perhaps, was slowly disappear: to the North Coast, to family life as the father of two girls, to a music immersed in atmosphere. Perkins's modern take on country-and blues-shaped rock has grown across all three of his solo releases - Far Be It From Me (1996), Dark Horses (2000) and now on Sweet Nothing - whatever he might say about the finer points of self versus landscape.

Indeed, he says what he may have done "is finally form a group", ending the idea of a solo career altogether. That this "might be the last release I do contractually under the Tex Perkins name. After that it could just be the Dark Horses [currently his backing band]."

This dissolving or surrendering intensity that dominates Sweet Nothing is hard to pin down. "One thing I did do intentionally was try to take out evidence of domestic artefacts in the lyrics, like cigarettes or cups of coffee, things that humans have. I didn't want to tie it down to talking about the human condition. These songs could be about bees," he says, with a slight smile.

"I was actually toying with calling this record Great Apes (after a track on the CD), with ape theme packaging and everything. But none of my female acquaintances thought that was a great idea," the smile grows. "I'm actually fairly obsessed with anything to do with our closest relatives on the evolutionary chain."

That said, human love still emerges. Midnight Sunshine gives the recording a bright charge of it early on, with cryptic, somewhat cosmic lyrics evocative of the film Betty Blue as Perkins celebrates how "we build a fire beneath the house" and burn off all the "things that rust". It was written quickly, then interpreted by the Dark Horses "just the way I imagined it. It's one of those rare songs you can't imagine being played any other way".

"Apart from the mood, though, I couldn't explain what that song is about," he says. "I usually start with the music first, when I'm writing, and a theme is already inherent in that when it comes to lyrics. Sometimes it's not till much later you know what a song is about. It can be long after it's written. Sometimes years." 

"With Midnight Sunshine there is this idea that a tangible energy is created by or from ..." Perkins hesitates. "I guess you can call it love. But it's not really love on that song. It applies to everything. Again it's not just about human relationships."

The record's physicality is obvious, as is the influence of Perkins's surroundings. "Even though I've been up here for five or six years," he says, "it hasn't been till this record that it's been evident in the music." He's careful to distinguish this local energy from the town itself. 

"I think Byron has a horrible vibe. The town is meaningless to me. It's just a constant procession of backpackers. Where I live is 45 minutes away. I don't think Byron Bay should get any credit."

The last sentence drips with typical Perkins contempt. But the subject is quickly dropped. Writing and recording Sweet Nothing last year, he found himself alone on the property while his partner was away in Melbourne working. Birds, dogs and horses were "my company".

"The isolation does affect you. Up here you are acutely aware of the elements, too. All your activities depend on the weather. You can go mad if you're stuck indoors and it's raining."


It's this curious blend of the elemental and interior that makes Sweet Nothing something of a voyage. "I will say it's a progressive record," Perkins says. "Almost like a day. The first couple of songs are morning time and it's up and bight. Then it gets progressively darker and darker."

A Name on Everyone, which comes towards the end of the record, has an epic weight reminiscent of Neil Young circa On the Beach. Perkins admits he's been listening to "a lot of '70s rock. Neil Young has been one of the cornerstones. And Bob Marley. With everyone else thrown in for variety. I think I returned to my childhood roots with this record. I must be getting old, I guess."

"You were asking me about the title Sweet Nothing when we met in Sydney and at the time I didn't have a great answer," he says on the phone. "But now I've had time, I think it refers to my idea of spirituality. Most religions and spirituality that humans involve themselves with is connected to this whole idea of something beyond life. That this is just a stage before the real deal. I completely reject that. God is here. God is life," he says with surprising passion. 

"That also connects with what I wanted to say about Great Apes. We are great apes. We are creatures of nature. We're not connected to God. We're creatures of the earth. And we are here."

- Mark Mordue

* First published in the Sydney Morning Herald, July 26, 2003

- Portrait shot by Krystina Higgins