Time is a Meddler By Amanda on February 15, 2008 7:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Not so long ago if you had asked me my nomination for my favourite Australian song, I'd have instantly said "The Ship Song", Nick Cave.
At some point I heard "Tenterfield Saddler" on the radio this year. The "emu/jackaroo/kangaroo/cockatoo up ahead" business has always struck me as cringingly obvious Australiana and I pushed the whole thing away. Of course I have no such resistance to refrains about coyotes, cowboys and five and dimes and thank you, yes I am aware of the contradiction. Maybe I pushed it away for other reasons too.
Why can't you download Peter Allen records on iTunes? Matey's estate needs to get on to that STAT. I got instead Hugh Jackman's version (no complaints. Swoon.) and a duet between Allen and -- natch -- Olivia Newton-John, which is mostly OK except for the cheesy waltzy beat it picks up and discards in the middle. But I'll actually have to go buy the real CD for the Peter Allen original. Imagine the inconvenience.
Despite my aforementioned ambivalence, 'Tenterfield Saddler" plays a significant role in my life. When Allen died in 1992, I was 15 years old and living in a country town not far from Tenterfield. My orbit extended from Newcastle inland to New England, west a bit to the Namoi Valley and south west a bit to Lithgow and that was it. Anything the Sydney side of the mountains was not included in my orbit. So anyway, I knew who Peter Allen was but he didn't mean anything to me really and I must have switched on to this accidentally, but I saw part of a tribute to him screened just after his passing on the ABC.
Bette Midler was singing "Tenterfield Saddler." I don't remember what happened last week but I remember this vividly: it blew my little white trash mind. I knew who Bette Middler was for god's sake -- Beaches being a major cultural influence on my generation and my sister Coz and I must have seen Big Business about a million times on tape. Seriously, we loved that film and knew slabs of it off by heart. Bette Midler was Hollywood.
But ... Bette Midler singing a song about Tenterfield? That hole down the road? The performance was in concert even looked like she might have been on a Broadway stage while doing it.
BETTE MIDLER even saying the word "Tenterfield" tore a hole in my space/time continuum. It was almost like Bette's world and my world existed in the same universe.
So I've never forgotten that, even as I continued to bat away the song itself.
But I'm getting old and soft in the head because ... I think it is my favourite Australian song ever now. I can't stop listening to it.
What is happening to me?
The video is laughingly literal (and, is that kangaroo drinking Budweiser??) but you get to hear the song and some of it reminds me of my sort-of home.
By Shaun
on February 17, 2008 12:51 AM
Can't say what is happening to you but a great post.
Gangajang's "Sounds of Then" evokes Australia. for me. It reminds me so much of growing up in Northern NSW as we breathed humidity and watched the lightning cracking over cane fields through the summer.
To be honest the cane fields were just up to road outside Lawrence. But Grafton had some cracking lightning storms when I was a lad (still does).
By Ag
on February 22, 2008 7:06 PM
Shaun's cane fields, has got me thinking of Go-Betweens' 'Cattle and Cane'. Also a song about memory and time: the waste memory wastes . . . .
Bette tearing a hole in your space-time continnuum!
My favourite Australian Song is 'Gargoyle' by the Lighthouse Keepers, BTW.
By coz
on February 23, 2008 4:44 PM
Good song but I'm sorry...'The Ship Song' still kicks it across the shearing shed.
heh 'Big Business' I remember that...how funny.
By dysthymiac
on March 3, 2008 10:24 AM
Tenterfield Saddler is one of the great
'write what you know' songs, another eg: S.Earle, Guitar Town.
I followed your nod to the Carl Wilson book and found this "When I took Introduction to Aesthetics in college, I wish we had a text as smart, accessible, funny, and just plain awesome as this little book on Celine Dion to introduce us to the material. What Wilson has done here with his approach to the subject of taste and tackiness is nothing less than stunning. It is a must read for people who write about music and those that love to read about it.
Nota bene: You need not be a fan of Celine Dion to love this book. "
Maybe there is another book to be written
'we cannot love artistes we know too well' eg: if we shared a flat with HRH Robert 'Dylan' Zimmerman, we might loathe his work ... he stubs his cigarette in his egg plate, drinks the frig milk from the bottle, dumps wet towels on the couch.
I knew Nick Cave well, too well to even listen to his bloody ship song; so I am glad I know nothing of the evil habits of Steve Earle or Peter Allen.
By dysthymiac
on March 3, 2008 10:35 AM
PS: Bette Midler knows a good song when she hears one.
I saw her live at the Melbourne Palais Theatre decades ago and she tore the house down - 'Stay With Me Baby' (Ruth Brown? - I forget original artist)
dedicated to her late mother closed her list and she was on her knees clutching the microphone and drooling on the stage by the last of it.
No a dry eye in the packed house. Yes she'd already performed it a thousand times so there was an element of theatrics, but it crapped all over anything Kylie or Delta or Livvie or CELINE could ever dream of achieving ...
and it's important to know that the famous 1965 film of Janis Joplin doing Ball and Chain was TAKE TWO because after the brilliance of the unrecorded first rendition, somebody wonderful said "can ya do that again so we can film it?" and she did.
'soul' trumps 'style' every time.