Tag: George Young

Deadline Stress On The Road To Winton

Deadline-stress-winton
Tambo Dam, which has nothing to do with this week’s FOMM, which I drafted a week before setting off on a road trip to Winton).

An old friend emailed me to say that when he saw a book review in the Sydney Morning Herald, he immediately assumed it was (a) my memoirs or (b) The Best of FOMM.

As he found out when reading the review, Friday on My Mind is a book by music writer Jeff Apter about the life of George Young. The late founder of the Easybeats wrote ‘Friday on My Mind’, a major hit around the world in 1966, with his songwriting partner Harry Vanda.

Friday on My Mind (the song), after which this weekly missive takes its name, is everything a pop hit should be. It starts with an irresistible ‘hook’ – the rapid-fire guitar intro that immediately cements the tune in your brain. It’s a circular song, starting with Monday morning (feels so bad), then names every week day through to Friday and back again.

This alone distinguishes FOMM from other songs about days of the week, which usually focus only on the day in question.

I was researching songs which name days of the week, finding yet again that if you have what seems to be an original idea, it has usually been done. Songs about a day of the week, or which mention a day of the week, for example.

Since the uncertainty and mass anxiety of COVID-19 set in around mid-March, I have been writing new songs. I’m not just writing, but using digital recording technology to flesh out the works in progress. Thus far, I have a seven songs which are at the point where I’d be happy to perform them in public, if I had a public to whom I could perform.

I had started toying with a song about deadline stress and how it always relates to a day of the week (if you have a weekly deadline). This new song is more likely to be about blogging and why millions of people around the world think other people will be interested in what’s on their minds. Some develop huge audiences and make some money, (like Nomadic Matt, which now has 1.5m followers).

Bloggers usually start with an ambitious bang and many vanish without trace within a year or two. The stayers stay by setting themselves deadlines.

A few years ago, I was writing about extreme weather in February; here and in the Northern hemisphere. This gave me a chance to reference the only song I know about February, a poignant Dar Williams tune. Along the way, I discovered a list compiled by Chuck Smeeton, who started the Cavan Project, with the aim of writing and posting a new original song once a month.

Apart from having an interest in lists, Chuck’s aim was to entertain people with an interest in music, but also to freshen up his songwriting by setting himself a deadline. Now, after writing a new song every month since 2012, he is packing it in. Sigh. I know how he feels after six and some years of writing 1,200 words a week.

Brisbane folk singer and performer John Thompson would also know how that feels. In 2011 he set himself quite a task – to research and record an Australian folk song every day for a year.

He achieved this goal, along the way uncovering old Australian folk music that might otherwise have sat undisturbed inside somebody’s piano stool. John wrote a few songs of his own on this ambitious journey, but in the main covered each song in his inimitable style. John finished the project, as befits his deft sense of humour, with Aeroplane Jelly, an advertising jingle which has blended into the culture, just like an old folk song.

I was chatting online to Brett Debritz, who was a sub editor at Brisbane’s the Daily Sun when it was a morning paper and later when it switched to afternoons. I asked if he could recall how many editions we produced. After conferring with a colleague, he said it was at least three, Monday to Friday at 7.30am, 10.30am and 2.30pm. We broke some good business stories in that final edition, which beat our rival The Courier-Mail simply by publishing before they did. Imagine that kind of deadline stress on a daily basis, next time you’re fretting about the article you’re writing for your monthly community newsletter.

I’ve never written songs to a deadline (which probably explains why my output has been so sporadic). I know songwriters who keep writing by exposing their new work to a collective. Some of these groups set challenges (a new song each day/week/month), and often written to a topic specified by the convenor. Some songwriters write songs together. I have always been a bit crap at collaborating (but I get 100% of the royalties).

Nevertheless, I support the notion of a group of creative people meeting to discuss what they do in the privacy of their own home studios.

So, I had this song idea which roughly started “Thursday I’ve got Friday on My Mind’. While true, this was never going to sit well with the publishers of the original song. Plan B, then. The idea was to somehow describe the creative tension which never goes away when promising people something new on a particular day of the week.

If you have a thing about lists, check out Chuck Smeeton’s months of the year and days of the week songs lists (including 16 Songs about August). Among other list blogs are ‘20 musicians who own wineries’ and my favourite, ‘28 songs in unusual time signatures’.

The latter, of course, includes (Dave Brubeck’s Take Five and Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past, both in 5/4), Money (Pink Floyd, 7/4), Happiness is a Warm Gun (The Beatles, various time measures) and Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill (7/8).

In the spirit of ‘it’s been done, but never done my way’, here’s a playlist I put together on Spotify; two songs for every day of the week. Most of them are sourced from the music of my youth (1964-1974), but there are examples from the new crop of songwriters (who latch on to the topic as though it was a new thing).

The standout track in my opinion is banjo player Ian Simpson’s ‘Friday on My Mind’, drawn from a mixed collection of instrumentals by Simpson and guitarist John Kane.

As I so often think, when arriving at this point in my Friday essay (1,150 words), as the lyric of work-in-progress goes, “Will anyone see this post and does it really matter, only to my readers, near and far and widely scattered.”

Jimmy Webb would tell you that is not a true rhyme, to which I could say…By the time I get to Winton…

FOMM back pages

We’re on the road for a few weeks. This is something we prepared earlier.

Dawe, Morrow and Gessen – Satire and The Rise Of Populism

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Satirist Bryan Dawe (left) and comedian Julian Morrow at Integrity 20. Photo by Frances Harper

Actor/satirist Bryan Dawe has such a low-key, laconic approach to ‘giving a talk’ that the journalistic instinct to take notes deserted me. Dawe is the surviving half of the satirical act Clarke & Dawe, but he is much more than that. He told the audience at Griffith University’s Integrity 20 Summit that when it came to political satire, he and John Clarke had never been short of material over 25 years of producing their weekly TV show.

Dawe introduced one of his best-known satirical characters, boozy retired judge Sir Murray Rivers QC; Dawe as interviewer/straight man to Sir Murray’s confused bigot. His presentation was funny; funny and sad, as he often referenced his late partner in satire John Clarke, who died in April this year. Dawe’s ‘talk’ would have been illuminating for the year 11 and 12 students attending Integrity 20, as Dawe summarised his unhappy days at school where he left early after being told by a careers adviser he would not amount to anything because he came from the ‘wrong postcode’.

Dawe joined Julian Morrow of The Chaser and The Checkout for a discussion on satire, comedy and how to know when you’ve gone too far. When asked that question by panel chair Rebecca Levingston, both agreed that nothing was off limits.

While agreeing that one could satirise and make jokes about anything, Morrow conceded that The Chaser’s skits post-9/11 were “too soon”. Levingston prompted Morrow to revisit the time The Chaser (a TV satire show), penetrated security at the 2007 APEC conference in Sydney with a fake motorcade transporting a ‘Mr bin laden of Canada’. As Morrow recalled “We never expected to succeed.”

Both satirists agreed that there are powerful people who always try to have good satire shut down, probably because nothing is funnier than the truth, greatly exaggerated. The trick, said Dawe, was not to engage with critics, trolls and others whose power base was being diminished by The Chaser’s sharp sketches or by John Clarke’s familiar introduction: “Thanks for having me, Bryan.”

Bryan Dawe’s presentation was the ideal tone for Integrity 20’s afternoon session, which followed serious and at times contrary debate about hate speech, free speech, censorship, the global rise of populism and how to destroy democracy.

Masha-Gessen-populism
Masha Gessen, photo by Bengt Oberger, Wikipedia CC

You may have heard Richard Fidler on Conversations interviewing Masha Gessen, an exiled Russian American journalist and author. Her speech ‘How to Destroy Democracy’ and later contribution to a panel discussion on populism was a highlight of Integrity 20.

New York-based Gessen outlined the seven lessons in ‘imagining the worse’, in which the rise of populism destroys democracy. These include destroying the sense of participation, conspiracy myth-making, and engaging in the ‘forever war’, (which in the US means a 16-year war against ‘terrorism’, an unidentifiable foe, with no end point in sight).

Gessen, an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, also referred to the way democracy could be destroyed simply by degrading language.

“Trump is a master at that. He lies and lies to convince you that something that’s not true is true. There’s no way for a journalist not to quote his lies.

“Trump says he’s the subject of a witch hunt when that’s the opposite of what he means. He creates word salad and makes it difficult to work out what it all means. It’s a direct assault on how we all live because language is the main tool we use to co-exist.”

Even while Gessen was articulating this I was thinking about former PM Tony Abbott’s ludicrous comments about goats, volcanoes and climate change. However daft the comments seemed, journalists had no option but to quote what he actually said at a climate conference in London.

As Ricky Gervais said this week in a thought-provoking tweet:

Some opinions are so stupid they hurt my feelings. But that’s my problem. It’s a person’s right to hold as stupid an opinion as they like. (@rickygervais):

A panel discussion followed on the global rise of populism. Panel chair Luke Stegemann summarised the rise of populism in countries including Italy, Poland, the UK, France and Germany. “Australia is not immune by any means,” he added, citing the resurgence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and how it taps into the frustrations, racism and bigotry of people who are angry about immigration and furious about globalisation and the perceived impact these issues have on their jobs.

One ought to keep in mind that populism − a movement for the people and against a privileged elite − can occur across a broad political spectrum. It is possible, as panellist Geoffrey Robertson QC observed, to have left-wing populism.

The origins of populism date back to the 1800s when rural peasants revolted against their robber baron landlords. Today it is more about polarising the electorate and pitting angry poor people against (poor and possibly angry) immigrants and asylum seekers.

The privileged elite seem to survive with wealth intact, whichever way the populist wind is blowing.

Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said the common perception was that supporters of populism are racists and bigots.

“There is a racist fringe but the core of populism is about high inequality and why people don’t understand why politicians don’t listen.”

Geoffrey Robertson said young people were disenchanted about the rampant capitalism that democracy encourages. This was in response to Kleinfeld’s comment that only 52% of people aged 18 to 29 think it is preferable to live in a democracy. Robertson said the key threat imposed by populist leaders was the attempt to replace an independent judiciary with their own people.

Kleinfeld made comparisons between Donald Trump and outsider president Andrew Jackson (1828-1834), who enjoyed two terms and put his successor, Martin Van Buren, in place to ensure 12 years of a populist government.

The Atlantic made much of the Trump/Jackson similarities.

“Jackson, like Trump, won over many white working-class voters, who brushed aside critics who warned that he was unstable and a would-be dictator. He maintained their loyalty even though, like Trump, he was of the elite.”

I can’t recall who started it, but it seemed all panellists agreed that Trump, despite being widely reviled, would easily take another term in office. They didn’t say so, but it seems obvious that Trump has a like-minded and seemingly un-impeachable successor in Mike Pence sitting on the bench (wearing a Martin Van Buren t-shirt).

If you were not yet confused about populism and its multiple meanings, Cas Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia, coined the phrase “thin ideology”. This means to merely set up a framework: pure people versus a corrupt elite. Thin ideology can be attached to all sorts of “thick” ideologies such as socialism, nationalism, anti-imperialism or racism.

I will leave it to the reader to decide what type of populism exists in Australia.

Monday I’ve got Friday on my mind

I leave you with a tribute to the late George Young, who co-wrote the song from which this essay takes its name. Young and co-writer Harry Vanda and their band The Easybeats had an international hit with Friday on My Mind in 1967. Here’s a terrific cover from Richard Thompson and band from the album 1000 Years of Popular Music. (Please don’t listen to the Bruce Springsteen version that comes up after that…Ed)