Speechification

Rather enjoyable, this late-night audio dérive across Hong Kong. Reminds me a little of the collaboration between Jeff Noon and David Toop a while back, in its combination of found sounds and narrative, yet also includes oblique fragments of interview. So it hovers somewhere between a documentary and an impressionistic collage. Also, apparently part of some wider narrative piece, involving videos to be remixed. Intriguing.

The Night Air: The Hong Kong Agent [mp3]

The companion piece to the aforementioned documentary on the early-’80s Melbourne music scene, this programme paints a vivid picture of Brisbane of the same time (it’s almost an inadvertent companion piece to the Berlin doco Steve posted recently). Known as Pig City, due to insanely right-wing and entirely corrupt administration of state premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and particularly the ‘iron fist wrapped in another iron fist’ approach to community policing, Brisbane generated a rich subculture in response, with bands like The Saints, The Go-Betweens and The Riptides all emerging from an atmosphere where just being in a band was a political act in itself.

I saw a great exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane last year - Taking to the Streets (my photos here) - that collated numerous artifacts illustrating how Brisbane was effectively living under police state conditions from the early-’70s to the early-’80s. The right to protest was removed, enforced by ’special powers’ imbued upon the police; anybody walking down the street with more than 3 people would constitute “a march” and could be arrested. Describing many more, er, imaginative state-led approaches to creating social cohesion in the Queensland of the time, what comes through in this doco is a sense of just how warped a ‘western’ political system can get - only 20 years ago - and yet also the optimistic message that a subcultural scene can emerge to resist this, and ultimately prevail. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of history is long but bends towards justice. With some top tunes along the way, he might have added but didn’t.

The key role of community radio station 4 Triple Z (4zzz) also comes through the first-person accounts in the programme, including from Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison and several University of Queensland alumni, all students at the time and suddenly and inadvertently radicalised by police pressure.

As with most Hindsight shows, it’s hugely atmospheric, including quite unsettling sound recordings from right within the protest marches as police move in on the crowd, and the sound of Brisbane’s architecture being torn apart by the state’s bulldozers. The latter, in particular the much-loved Bellevue hotel being deceitfully pulled down in the dead of night, was something that would eventually unite conservative Brisbane with the protesting counterculture. The final nails in the coffin, somewhat reminiscent of Woodward & Bernstein, were provided by an pioneering ABC TV programme ‘Four Corners’ and associated articles in the Courier Mail newspaper, detailing corruption in the so-called ‘Moonlight State’, and the subsequent Fitzgerald Inquiry that would prove beyond doubt the rampant corruption at the core of the administration, kicking the National Party out of office in Queensland and plonking a few of them in the jails they’d previously reserved for kicking the crap out of Aboriginal people and hairy students.

Another great documentary from Radio National, it only loses one point for failing to include the brilliant Go-Betweens track, ‘Lee Remick’, whose opening lines effortlessly articulate the self-deprecating cultured wit that would’ve so infuriated their conservative fellow citizens of the ‘big country town’ …

She comes from Ireland
She’s very beautiful
I come from Brisbane
I’m quite plain

Despite that omission, there’s some great music in here, and it’s a rich portrayal of a city in turmoil. The gleaming Brisbane of 2007 is now large, diverse, smart, cultured, architecturally innovative, growing fast, and increasingly seen as hip by a Sydney and Melbourne shuffling uncomfortably as they look north. It’s a good time to be reminded of where the city has come from. A fairly incredible story.

Hindsight: Pig City (MP3)

Chance are, if you’ve been to Melbourne, you’ve been to St. Kilda. It’s popular with cultural tourists and locals alike, home to fantastic restaurants, music venues, what passes for a city beach in Melbourne, some lovely idiosyncratic commercial and residential architecture, a pier, and some great streets.

If you haven’t been, you’ve seen places like it. It’s a familiar urban history: formerly scruffy area with rich historical texture, inhabited by artists and musicians from the ’60s to the ’80s attracted by cheap rents, edginess, and proximity to the city centre, and now spruced up and in the throes of wondering whether to fight gentrification or just submit gracefully. We may have heard the story before, but it’s always fascinating to hear from the city itself and what contributes to their particular sense of place.

This documentary focuses not just on St. Kilda, but on the significance of one particular building - the Prince of Wales Hotel. If its walls could tell stories, the ones safe enough to be broadcast on ABC Radio National would sound a bit like this. A beautiful if solid art-deco building becomes a social club for US officers during WWII; segueing in and out of the surrounding red light district, and via a few costume changes becomes a particularly grungy 1970s hotel. Its sticky floors set it up perfectly for the incipient Melbourne punk and post-punk scenes (as fertile as Brisbane’s Pig City of the time - listen to next week’s edition of Hindsight for that) and captured memorably in “Dogs In Space”. So by now you’ve got skinheads with shaved swastikas pogoing and playing pool directly above a gay bar downstairs, nicknamed the ‘Star Wars Bar’ due to the wild assortment of punters. (It’s the oldest gay space in Melbourne.)

Bands with track titles like “I Spit On Your Gravy” share the stage with Art Pepper (read Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful for why Pepper would fit right in), and then we’re into ribald stories of a Sunday night drag show (”Pokeys”), and a women’s disco (”Pennies”). I’m afraid you’ll have to listen to the show to discover the words for the venue’s very own show tune, ‘Dancing Dildos’.

It was the natural home for an influential community radio station, 3PBS - the “Progressive Broadcasting Service” - transmitting from a room on the first floor. This sounded fantastic, with entirely experimental radio well before the likes of Resonance FM. And of course having a radio station upstairs helped the pub become the primary music venue in Melbourne of the time.

This is a beautifully done piece, with narration almost entirely out of the way - just the characters themselves telling their own stories, jostling for space with an amazing array of recordings from the time. Lord knows how they found all this stuff, but I’ve rarely heard such fantastic archive sounds. The craft put into Pokeys’ hilarious jingles is really worth hearing.

Now, almost predictably, the Prince of Wales is a 5-star boutique hotel. You can’t stand in the way of that kind of progress in these places - and preserving the poverty associated with grunginess is a really questionable strategy - but thanks to Radio National for reminding us of the vivid histories underneath the sumptuous new paintwork.

And if nothing else, this doco is worth listening to just for the voices of some of almost unbelievable characters - their rich, battered, husky, camp Aussie drawls are testament to the good times this place has witnessed. A cracker.

Hindsight: Pennies, Pokeys, Punks and the Prince (MP3, Real)