Last year Writing NSW invited me to join a group of writers for a night of letters to people who had influenced us. It was a stellar evening, really special, as crime genre kings, memoirists, Miles Franklin award winners, and bright new stars all expressed their gratitude as they outlined who and what had shaped them as writers. Many ended up thanking their mother in some way, directly or indirectly. My letter tracked a similar direction along with books I read as a boy and a teenager. Writing is often a path to something you can't see, a kind of journey to understanding with no clear destination at the beginning. You discover a shape along the way, a meaning or message. This one came to me as I traced my own thoughts into a complete article. Am really proud of it and appreciate the journal Verity La publishing it now.

M

You can read my ‘Letter to a Reader’ on link below

https://verityla.com/2026/06/18/letter-to-a-reader-mark-mordue/

Been a fan of the Dirty Three for a long time. They always make me think of the city at night, its lights and dreaming. Also other elemental visions … summer heat, outback roads taken at pace, share-houses, smoke, electricity sparking. Funny how instrumentals almost become the memories themselves, visionary transport, amplification. Have had this old poster marking their second self-titled album in 1996. Could never find a frame to fit its weird size. Rediscovered it recently, edges tattered, got this kid at Officeworks to trim a few millimetres off the blu-tacked and damaged sides.15 cents a cut. The kid smiles at me. “Would you like a receipt?” I say nah, may as well live dangerously and leave no trace I was ever here. I go outside, flip open the boot and set to work with the frame I have from the $1 Shop. The poster fits in the frame with a bit of a push. Only took me thirty years to get it on the road. Here it is hanging on my wall at home.

M

Here's a preview trailer for WHERE THE SKY MEETS THE GROUND.

It's an indie feature made by my son Atticus and his mates, completely DIY with zero funding – apart from their own cash and time. They're all TAFE and film and acting graduates of one kind or another, as well as solo freelancers trying their hand. All in their very early twenties.

Where the Sky Meets the Ground is written and directed by Emrah Akbulut and Jonah Erofeyeff who also star as the characters Danny and Mitchell.

My son Atticus Mordue is the cinematographer.

They spent weekend and spare weekdays out in the bush, initially scouting for locations then putting it all together. They openly speak about the influence of films like Stand By Me as well experiences and friendships in their own lives providing the material.

As the promo puts it, "they are about to grow up and graduate university, but not before one last childish adventure".

Adventures can be a kind of running away, for sure, and a high moment to hang on to forever. They can also reveal other things you can't see coming. As one of the characters says here in the preview reel, "You know me. I don't know what I'm going to do next week, man."

I'm really proud of Atticus being the director of photography on such an ambitious project with a group of friends. Am yet to see the film, but I am thinking one of the biggest adventures will have been what they did behind the cameras to make this film as much as what they achieve on the screen itself. Congratulations to all of them for making it happen. Long live the independent creative spirit.

M

If you want to watch Where the Sky Meets the Ground in a theatre, you can help the makers get it there by expressing your interest below: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdo-AifwVZ2T2LS8ekc066tYypjxb2nDOLAK3T76qW2Gxbhiw/viewform?pli=1

For more information: https://www.instagram.com/wheretheskymeetsthegroundmovie/

Nicholas Pounder profiles himself on FB as a “mild mannered antiquarian”.

I used to love his old bookshop opposite the original Tropicana Cafe back in the 1980s, especially his trick of hiding weary editions with ‘FREE’ written on the inside cover.

I still remember the day I pulled Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’ off the shelves. Pounder’s assistant said yes that’s right, take it, all yours.

And take it I did, a brokearse young rock journalist with just enough shrapnel in my pocket to sit at the Tropicana, buy two cappuccinos (so sophisticated) and read my ‘new’ book.

Those were the days. Even if the book crumbled away in my hands after a few months.

Some time ago in this century, I signed up online for Pounder’s Fugitive Paper, a curated set of offerings for sale that includes books, journals, posters, self-published poetry chapbooks, uni magazines, handmade leaflets … all kinds of paper-related curios, wonders and artworks.

The latest Fugitive Paper #5 (May 2026) is a work of art all its own, a kind of loose-weave feminist history of Australia as told through finely detailed appreciations of the items he has for sale at modest prices.

Because so many of these items and documents are connected to counter-cultural life across the 1960s and 1970s it’s a history overlooked and easily lost.

Pounder’s shopping list and highly attentive respect for each item takes you into the lives of the scene makers and artistic creators, the cultural connections and community actions … at street level and home and universities and bars where things were really happening. Culture and history as something lived and human and independent.

I was particularly interested in the artist Clem Weight, who I had never heard of. There’s a beautiful portrait of her by Jon Lewis and examples of her work in the form of silk-screened calendars.

There’s all kinds of stuff and knowledge to be gleaned from merely perusing a copy of Fugitive Paper #5. I recommend you have a good browse through yourself.

Without buying a jot, I still felt like I was somehow helping something important not get lost, if only in the most human and transient of ways. Thank you, Nicholas Pounder. The past is alive here…

M

To subscribe to Fugitive Paper you have to message Nicholas Pounder on Facebook and he will put you on his list for email or messenger delivery. It seems to be the only way you can make a start. Nicholas apologised for any inconvenience regards the initial marketing and delivery contact point when I enquired: “I’m not terribly good at this sort of thing.”

The crickets are ticking and croaking to tell us the night is beginning. It’s a reliably pulsing sound, a reminder of childhood in some way that I can’t quite put a finger on.

Then I think of the sound of heading home, or having to head home after a day’s play. The late air full of summer or winter, the world ultra alive in a last flourish of breath, and breathing it in, somehow being at one with it, before the night finally changes things.

Sitting here exhausted now before tomorrow even begins, the sixth Addi Road Writers’ Festival. Year 2026. Ted my sound guy has been struggling with an echo in the middle of the hall that only T-Rex would want as reverb on their handclaps in 1973. It’s not just bad, it’s another sonic world.

Gavin, the event’s ‘scribe’, is taping down all his leads and his HDMI cable. Tomorrow Gavin will document each every live, drawing people and what they say at literal light speed till it’s complete and shining from a projector on to a white brick wall.

He and Ted get into a cable rave about RCAs and AC lines and cables that are the colour yellow and the nature of modern convenience. The excitement is palpable, another language.

My son Atticus holds fort at the mixing desk, sucking back on a chocolate milkshake while Ted seems to go fishing with the microphones, waving them around front of stage while Atticus keeps an eye on the desk for any movement in the lights.

I sit on my arse, useless as the crickets, watching, eavesdropping, answering emails and texts, sending out a few calls into the world while I write down the last energies of each and all as they work to secure a few things before tomorrow’s early and hectic start.

The week has been kinda scrambled and the month more than busy. Organising an event like Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2026 I definitely ask myself, why I do these things?

Then I think of the sound of heading home, or having to head home after a day’s play. The late air full of summer or winter, the world ultra-alive in a last flourish of breath, and breathing it in, somehow being at one with it, before the night finally changes things.

Sitting here exhausted now before tomorrow even begins, the sixth Addi Road Writers’ Festival. Year 2026. Ted my sound guy has been struggling with an echo in the middle of the hall that only T-Rex would want as reverb on their handclaps in 1973. It’s not just bad, it’s another sonic world.

Gavin, the event’s ‘scribe’, is taping down all his leads and his HDMI cable. Tomorrow Gavin will document each every live, drawing people and what they say at literal light speed till it’s complete and shining from a projector on to a white brick wall.

He and Ted get into a cable rave about RCAs and AC lines and cables that are the colour yellow and the nature of modern convenience. The excitement is palpable, another language.

My son Atticus holds fort at the mixing desk, sucking back on a chocolate milkshake while Ted seems to go fishing with the microphones, waving them around front of stage while Atticus keeps an eye on the desk for any movement in the lights.

I sit on my arse, useless as the crickets … watching, eavesdropping, answering emails and texts, sending out a few calls into the world while I write down the last energies of each and all as they work to secure a few things before tomorrow’s early and hectic start.

The week has been kinda scrambled and the month more than busy. Organising an event like Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2026 I definitely ask myself, why I do these things?

Then I think of all the friends I have made and the inspirational moments of the past at the other festivals. The volunteers who work so hard to support it. And the staff at Addi Road that I count as close. The childhood thing, really, of a gang and what a gang is, all the oaths of loyalty and the rituals that get bred into you through the familiarity of the days as they pass.

Here I am again on another night, considerably beyond that childhood rush home before the street lights come on and you get into trouble for being late, though often you’d be running to the last as the lights switched on with your every footstep and the crickets sang in the moon, world humming.

It’s a strange kind of peace this total feeling. Everything outside and inside, all of yesterday and today flowing into some banal moment in a hall where the lights are harsh and the floor boards scuffed, old chairs, pallets of food, equipment spilling from crates and boxes, my son and two half-new friends from these last few years all quietly a work together inbetween a few jokes and obscure jots of conversation.

I’m here at the still point of the turning world. A good day ahead, that’s how it feels.

When I think about poetry, about my need to read it and reflect on it – and even express the odd poem here and there as if there were a more pure or direct voice in me that had somehow been switched on for a moment – I recall that it arrived in my life through pop music and rock ‘n’ roll when I was barely more than a boy.

The sounds of popular culture were never just a beat to me. They became a form of melodic literature as vital as Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, or the poetry of John Keats, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell and Kenneth Slessor that I was schooled in and ‘learnt’ to love so profoundly.

Indeed I see now that rock ‘n’ roll primed me for Keats’ romanticism and Auden’s rhymes, as well as Lowell’s confessional devastations and Slessor’s alienated urban shades. That I became so involved with Hamlet precisely because it was Shakespeare’s most rock ‘n’ roll work – for behind its iambic pentameters lies the rhythmic appeals of a young man in black, a grieving rebel who might well have been an Elizabethan James Dean in his day.

Flip forward to England in 1965 and what was Bob Dylan, really, but an electrified Hamlet come to life on those same old theatre stages, a hot soliloquist with a bad attitude and an acoustic guitar instead of a sword sheathed at his side? As the D.A. Pennebaker documentary Don’t Look Back reveals, Dylan even had his loyal Horatio (friend Bob Neuwirth) and an Ophelia that he tormented (lover Joan Baez), as well as a Polonius whispering in his ear (manager Albert Grossman).

Despite Dylan’s typically elusive response to a question at the time as to whether he was poet – “I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man” – the Beat writer Allen Ginsberg immediately recognized the young artist’s importance. In the Martin Scorcese documentary, No Direction Home, Ginsberg talks of Dylan’s arrival on the scene and what the older poet witnessed about his performing presence: “He [Dylan] became identified with his breath, like a shaman, with all his intelligence and consciousness focused on his breath.”

It’s a brilliant evocation of what Dylan personified from the very beginnings of his startling career: a shift in poetic life away from the page back into the ether of song. In Ginsberg’s word, Dylan transformed himself into “a column of air”.

Dylan himself was influenced by this same singing awareness – by what he called the “fearless” rhyming of Cole Porter, by the archetypal power and conviction of Woody Guthrie’s folk ballads, by country music and the blues as much as the literary work of the Beats or T.S. Eliot or Rimbaud. And yet despite this history and ‘breath’, an idiot wind invariably continues to blow in from another direction, debating whether lyrics can ever be regarded as true poetry? As if everyone from Dylan to Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed must submit, cap-in-hand, to the demand their songs work silently and alone on the page if they are to qualify. A matter not helped by those hard-cover editions of lyrics from rock stars that, yes, all too often, read as lifeless if not a little pretentious and gaudy in their packaging. 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy’: And Other Misheard Lyrics by Gavin Edwards and Chris Kalb probably hitting a truer note than most when it comes to the reality of how we appreciate lyrics day-to-day.

If a white page were the only acid test, however, one would have to argue there was no such thing as poetry before the advent of Gutenberg and the printing press. But of course the links between music and poetry are not so new at all. Virgil begins the Aeneid with “I sing of arms and the man…” because Latin poetry was written to be chanted. Homer would have sung both The Iliad and The Odyssey to a four-stringed instrument he plucked for rather atonal punctuation and mood – which may well make him the first rapper of note before Grandmaster Flash with ‘The Message’ (1982) and even The Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron with ‘Whitey on the Moon’ (1969/70). Yo Homer, Ancient Greece is in the house!

Early Gaelic and Welsh bards similarly sang of warriors’ brave deeds and perpetuated tribal stories that passed on into myth. Later these figures evolved into the minstrels of medieval times, the precursors of the folk singer and the pop artist. It’s precisely because of this history, and the musicality inherent in his language, that Shakespeare became known as ‘The Bard of Avon’, just as the Scottish poet Robert Burns – who gave us ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – is more simply known as ‘The Bard’.

To be called a bard was the highest praise such poets could hope for. Which is why it’s hard to disagree with Ezra Pound’s rather sweeping statement that, “Music rots when it gets too far from dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets to far from music.”
Yet as recently as 2008 various English newspapers were gleefully announcing that a final year English exam at Cambridge University had dared to ask students to compare ‘As You Came from the Holy Land’ by Sir Walter Raleigh with the lyrics to the Amy Winehouse song ‘Love is a Losing Game’. As if to rub salt into the wound, students were also told to compare Raleigh’s 1592 effort with ‘Fine and Mellow’ by Billie Holiday and ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ by Bob Dylan (yeah, him again!).

Perhaps only a Nobel Prize winning poet like Seamus Heaney can get away with such acts of sacrilege. Asked by the BBC back in 2003 to name a contemporary figure comparable to Bob Dylan and John Lennon, Heaney said, “There is this guy Eminem. He has created a sense of what is possible. He has sent a voltage around a generation. He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy.”

Most poets would kill for that kind of praise on their book covers. Inevitably Heaney was slighted for being a silly old man trying to keep up with the young. And yet Heaney’s words actually sound very similar to Ginsberg’s comments on Dylan. They likewise lean towards an appreciation of poetry rooted in breath, in something alive and not entirely pinned to the page.

My own enchantment with poetry begins with my second holy communion. It takes place in a suburban dining room with orange curtains and an over-large china cabinet, a place where I can hardly move. That doesn’t matter. There’s already a cathedral being built in my head. The Eucharist I am holding is round and large and black. It shines when it catches it the light, as if it were a dark and deep pool of perfectly formed water.

My altar is before me: a Rambler turntable with two walnut speaker boxes and quite a bit of pumping volume. The transubstantiation for me is not that of bread and wine into flesh and blood, as Jesus managed, but of my own being into song. As if I were becoming something mutable and flowing every time I turn on the amplifier and put a piece of vinyl under the needle.

Forget Coleridge and the opium-induced lines of ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…’ I was finding my own sonic nirvana at age thirteen, and anyone who tried to interrupt me was simply blown away.

I wasn’t just listening to the music either. I was digging the words, and with them every moan and jack-knife bit of phrasing, as if the accents and vocal contortions around a vowel were runes to be divined within the actual words themselves: “Hey Candy and Ronny have you seen them yet, Oooh but they’re so spaced out, B-B-B-B-Bennie and the Jets…”

It may not have been W.B. Yeats, but Bernie Taupin’s lyrics along with Elton John’s stuttering delivery in ‘Bennie and the Jets’ blew my mind as surely as Marc Bolan’s lines about a girl with “a hubcap diamond star halo” in T-Rex’s ‘Jeepster’. Language was something to be excited by, words were meant to bend and stretch into the ecstasy of sound as much as meaning. These were the lessons I was already learning from pop music.

By the time Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ was bursting out of my radio with a guitar stroke that reminded me of the rumble of a Ducati 750, I was well and truly a teenage goner: “In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream. At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines…” It was song that sounded completely untamed and foreign next to everything else being played at the time, as if Springsteen’s heart were exploding from his chest to deliver this mighty story to me: “This town will rip the bones from your back, it’s a death trap. We’ll run till we drop and baby we’ll never go back.”

The leather jacket, the lean look and goatee beard: if I’m honest Springsteen was the hip Jesus I was looking for at age 15, the ultimate cross-over man between religion and rock ‘n’ roll. He confirmed the possibility that my suburban life as a teenager, my here and now in the coastal steel-town of Newcastle, was the stuff of poetry – and that it was possible for me to see that life in the very grandest of terms and paint it in words as such.

Patti Smith’s ‘Piss Factory’ and The Jam’s ‘That’s Entertainment’ arrived later, re-iterating this same sense of working class poetics. That one could move stanzas like girders or spit a beautiful line out like a punch. Smith was actually channeling the nineteenth century French poet Arthur Rimbaud; Paul Weller was being inspired by The Who’s Pete Townsend: it all amounted to the same thing to me and in studying Smith and Weller I went back to both Rimbaud and The Who’s recordings too.

Of course I was already dreaming along to a hundred other songs as well and writing down my dreams in matching lyrical forms. Finding new eyes for my world, or if not quite that, feeling less frightened of how I felt about it and what I wanted to say because of these songs in my life.

In this writing inspired by music, as with in any art of imitation and mimicry, there was a sense of tagging along with other people’s dreams and experiences – because they connected with me in very explicit ways, or simply because there was a feeling below the words or experiences that I wanted to sing along with. Language became a kind of abstract freedom for me, a space to reach into, an accompaniment or mutual music.

So when I started to write poems at around the age of twelve, I see now they weren’t really poems at all but lyrics to imaginary songs. And that these songs of mine were mostly all beyond me: recycled bits of lyrics combined with my own feelings and free associations. Which meant I was writing about drowning with naked women and lions in a swimming pool (thanks to Marc Bolan), and neon horses (thanks to Bernie Taupin) like some jet-set teenage cowboy. I mowed the lawn for my grandmother when she told me too, but away in my own world I was the most unintentionally decadent kid in town – even if I didn’t know what I was talking about and the words were just vague semaphores for my own restlessness and dreaming.

Digital technology is certainly changing the way we communicate, learn, relax, and interact with the world, pulling us together into a strange new fabric. As we digest more and more information through the internet, through watching and listening, there a powerful argument emerging that we are becoming a post-literate society, no longer centrally dependent on the printed word.

Ironically enough the accelerating energies of global communications and modern life actually make the compacted nature of poetry on the page – as well as the short story and the novella – among the more ideal literary forms of the age. We can receive a poem in a single snap, or take in a suite of poems in one sitting like Bob Dylan’s proverbial “chain of flashing images”. The advantage of poetry in this situation lays in its song-like immediacy, and its gem-like endurance, which allows a reader to return to a poem again and again for pleasure and fresh light.

And so the enduring debate about poetry versus lyrics is just a distraction in the end. It’s actually the more dangerous and constantly parroted notion that poetry is irrelevant to modern life and all-but-dead which I am really arguing against.

Yes, we know mainstream publishing houses have dumped their poetry lists, while the sales of major poets’ works are embarrassingly small. Yes, we know that you are not likely see a book of poetry on the best seller lists today. But it may be people are looking for the health of poetry in the wrong place. That its power lies more than ever within rock ‘n’ roll as the bardic tradition continues to assert its vital place in popular culture.

I know when I hear Radiohead’s Thom Yorke telling me how he “woke up sucking on a lemon” or Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy talking about “the handshake drugs I bought downtown”, I understand – instantly – that I’m in the hands of a great lyricist. The same can easily said of Will Oldham, Lucinda Williams, Paul Kelly, M Ward, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Conor Oberst, Tom Waits and U2’s Bono, while modern masters like Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell continue to cast a gigantic poetic shadow over contemporary song writing and, indeed, much of the literary world.

If that last comment sounds excessive, I think you would find plenty of novelists and poets who would agree with me. It’s common knowledge Robert Adamson was turned on to the possibilities of becoming a poet upon hearing Bob Dylan singing while he was doing time in jail, and I am sure Adamson would find time to discuss the refined intelligence in Jackson Browne’s lyrics any time you wished to talked about them. Luke Davies was similarly inspired by Dylan, as well as Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Loudon Wainwright. John Forbes leant towards more mischievous influences like the knowing ‘dumbness’ and spirited irony of The Ramones. There’s the beginning of a list if you need one.

So today when I hear Tim Rogers feeling broken up and peacock proud, or M Ward in all his insinuating dreaminess and humour, or Kings of Leon’s brand of sinful, sexual, lost-on-the-road hedonism or, yes, Bob Dylan in all his glory, I still feel alive to poetry – and to the act of writing poetry for myself.

Songs come to me from everywhere that evoke this truth: ‘Wide Open Road’, ‘Mary, Queen of Arkansas’, ‘This Charming Man’, ‘Down by the River’, ‘Sign O’ The Times’, ‘Everything’s on Fire’, ‘Cattle and Cane’… they don’t just make me feel, they make me act, make me want to put pen to paper and find new ways to ascend into my feelings and thoughts.

I have to work a little harder to bring actual poems to me that do the same thing. Songs often come of their own volition, too, which makes it easier: through the car radio, floating out a doorway onto the street. They live in the air. Whereas poems on the page must be sought out and found. Still, I’m surprised that so many poems and poets are still with me like ghosts that flare up in the mind: Les Murray eating ice from a hail storm in ‘Spring Pony’; Auden’s lonely soldier in ‘Roman Wall Blues’; the deep rage of Pablo Neruda in ‘The United Fruit Company’; Rimbaud consoling me, for reasons I don’t quite understand, as I read him by some ocean rock pools after a breakup in my twenties; Charles Bukowski’s humour and tenderness, as if he were a friend speaking to me; Rilke, early on in the Duino Elegies, when night and emptiness “feeds upon our faces”…

Leonard Cohen once said, “If you’re life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” It may be that the great modern song writers are keeping that fire alight for all of us. Or to take it back to Dylan, who remains the pre-eminent example of the lyricist as bard of the people: “a poem is a naked person… some people say that I am a poet.” Don’t you know it?

M

* This essay was first published in edited form in the politics and culture journal Griffith Review - Edition 23: Essentially Creative, January 2009.

Anzac Day 2026. Safe and warm at home, watching the Dawn Service broadcast from Adelaide on the ABC.

My great uncle fought in North Africa. He’d drive down from Toowoomba in Queensland to visit us. Usually on a whim. His wife understood. We’d learnt long ago that he’d sometimes wake up screaming; perpetually bottled-up garrulous energy and high-octane friendliness that could flip at night into nightmares.

Uncle Ron had done risk driving and was a bit of weekend racer as well. He had an air of glamour about him to my boyish eyes and encouraged me heartily in all I did, his voice raspy, his manner always teetering on laughter. Ron filled a room with life and pushed other people along to embrace it with him.

As a child, I often stayed round the corner with my grandparents in Newcastle. My mum and dad would end up with six kids by my early teens, so room about any house they lived in was always at a premium. At my grandparents I was more privileged – and fortunate to enter the history of their stories… childhood myths and lived experiences that connected me directly to tales of the Great Depression, the boxer Les Darcy, the horse Phar Lap, mighty cricketers like Victor Trumper and Don Bradman, and, of course, the Anzacs and Gallipoli. Almost every story heroic and tragic all at once.

Ron would arrive in his sporty Toyota Celica from Queensland, berating the NSW Police for fining him - yet again - for speeding. Sometimes twice on the way! Every time he drove down! He might have even been coming back from Adelaide now and then, where he’d also drive just for the hell of it, days and nights ripping along roads for something to do that might fill up his nights.

At my grandparents, Ron would sleep on the sofa in the dining room, a pile of old newspapers covered with a shawl and a pillow on top. I can’t remember him ever waking screaming, but I do remember his restlessness, an insomniac up at all hours in the kitchen.

His wife, my Auntie Paige, was a champion arranger of dried flowers, the winner of many awards at shows and competitions across the country. Visiting their home in Toowoomba was quite the experience. The entire house was a kind of eerie forest inside, Paige’s flower arrangements well-tended to but giving way to signs of dust and the odd cobweb. In some rooms you had to be careful how you moved through, lest you be snagged in the poised brambles.

Paige was a small, thin, nervy woman. Almost the opposite to Ron physically and socially. He’d complain about the house being overtaken but never really took his protests far. I learnt from my grandparents that my auntie had a nervous condition and did the flower arranging to help it. I always thought of her as very like her dried flowers: dry and frail as a twig; beautiful, not quite in this life.

It’s strange to think of these two people and their odd-couple communion, the understandings they shared about each other’s quirks and sufferings.

Watching the Anzac ceremony and seeing the word ‘Adelaide’ on the screen, seeing the orange sky over the crowd standing at dawn, I picture my uncle, the two of us walking a different morning.

‘Up and attem’, as the saying goes, Ron giving me a brisk slap on the back as we too entered the dawn, feeding the chooks in my grandparents’ backyard before we set up for a walk that always had me half-running, such was his pace. Him asking how I was, how I felt, what I hoped to do with my life, rarely speaking too much of his own world beyond a few friendly jokes.

Ron’s idea of a morning stroll was a walk for miles. A walk that went so far it felt like you were never coming back. He was probably only in his 50s by this time, an old man to me, but given his personality still charged with energy and what I now see as a lost boyhood. Bringing this youth with him wherever he went, one of those heroes you don’t forget.

M

It may be ever so humble, set up and lit for fast dining and takeaway mostly, but Thai Bites in Marrickville is the business. Food fresh and tasty and at your hands and in your mouth in very quick time on a busy Saturday night. I sit at the window and look out at the side entrance to The Vic on the Park. Inside DC Cross is casting his DJ magic across the decks. It’s crazy packed. Just across Enmore Park a family of Pacific Islanders and their friends have meanwhile towed their stereo into the front yard. As I walked by them earlier after parking my car by the lamented and lost community ghost that was Petty Cash Cafe, I hear my islander buddies from one end of the street all the way to the other singing along in hugely happy style to Stumblin’ In, the great Smokie and Suzie Quatro collab. “Our love is alive!” I arrive at the Vic way too early to catch the young r n b, hip hop poet Rox Lavi, he of the Ipswich and Armidale love song to self harm and lost lives he can’t call all the way back again, Burn My Scars. Everyone in the pub is 22 and roaring for the football, the food, the music and one another, Saturday night’s alright for sport, drinking and loving. It’s kind of encouraging that the energy is there even if its wildness holds a destructive counterbalance as always. I don’t know whether to laugh or be frightened for them. Young things learning about themselves and each other and life on the go. 60 + me floats through the mob. Ordering a meal at the pub looks like a hopeless enterprise, lines long and tables more than full. That’s when I see DC Cross, the king of primitive guitar and acoustic cinema, in his other life as a paid DJ stirring up the pub with old classics. Have you got Stumblin’ In, I wanna shout at him. Instead he helps me out with an easier route to dinner and suggests Thai Bites across the road. He’s got his headphones on, lining up the next track. I think about our own performances, my poetry set to his music, totally improvised live each time we have done it. The night folds over itself, one thing overlapping another. It’s hard to say where things start and end. Soon I will be back at The Vic to watch Rox Lavi and his young band doing their thing. All of us making up our own poems to live and travel by.

It is ten days since my eldest son left my home.
I take him a blanket. The weather will be turning cool by morning. 
I worry his bed is too thinly covered.
He takes me by the wrist and pulls me to him. “Thanks dad.”
Winter is coming. Stay warm.

M

“Mutilation. Jubilation.” Strange lyrics for a song that got joyously stranger, Mental As Anything’s beautiful ‘Berserk Warriors’.

The song blended Boys Own Viking imagery with a rhythmic base that sounded like swords thumping against wooden shields riding along with flickers of surf-rock guitar. It told the story of the relationship breakup of Anna [Agnetha] and Bjorn of ABBA, one half of the preeminent pop quartet of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

If they ever heard ‘Berserk Warriors’, I am sure ABBA would have appreciated Mental As Anything’s oddly seductive tune for the admiration it so wittily evoked.

Australia was the first overseas territory to embrace the Swedish musical phenomenon before they conquered the rest of the world. So it felt right that a group of art-shamans from the cargo-cult village that was inner city Sydney should honour ABBA by consigning them to the gods of melody and historical romance.

Martin Plaza approached the song’s absurdist lyrics and double entendres with a Roy Orbison quiver, singing it straight and true, balancing the humour with heartbreak till it felt entirely noble: a paradoxical equation that often defined Mental As Anything as a band.

A close look at ‘the Mentals’ reveals they were always singing us up out of any troubles. And this is what a new documentary called Live It Up – The Mental As Anything Story delivers once again in spades.

For most of the film you can’t stop smiling, laughing and tapping your foot, the band’s best songs invincibly catchy or ear-worm quirky, their TV interviews subversively modest and quickfire funny. When the documentary ends there’s an aftertaste of nostalgia and melancholy, like catching up with an eccentric old friend you have loved seeing, knowing it’s unlikely you will meet their like again.

Director Matthew Walker makes use of the band’s brilliant DIY video-clips, rare live footage and old photos that have been hand-coloured in Pop Art pinks and blues along with animated doodles, anamorphic creatures and rocket-ships painted by the band guitarist (and now very famous artist) Chris O’Doherty AKA Reg Mombassa.

The lo-fi aesthetic also owes a lot to fellow artist and friend Paul Worstead, whose iconic posters and album artwork set an early tone for the band. Worstead was responsible for giving the young group their name when they scored their first gig and it was left to him to sort out a poster. Years later he and Mombassa would get a second life providing designs for the iconic clothing label Mambo along with artists on the same wavelength like Martin Sharp, Gary Shead and David McKay.

As the film details, Mental As Anything established themselves with what became a residency using the top of a pool table for a stage at the Unicorn Hotel in 1978. They spent their next year at what was then the punk-capital of the city, the Civic Hotel. Jovial misfits in a sea of spikes and rage, they won their audience over and created a whole new one as well.

Some heartbeat in the story tells you this was when the band were arguably at their greatest and probably their happiest too. To quote the title of one of their best known songs, ‘Spirit Got Lost’ later on. It’s a classic rock ‘n’ roll story, though this one has a typically Mentals curve towards warmer recognitions, failure itself a kind of get-out-of-jail card “free” when things went wrong in the 1990s.

The group started life as an unruly collective of 1970s art-school students based around the sandstone walls of a former colonial prison, East Sydney Technical College in Sydney’s Darlinghurst. Goofy to the point of trippy, they cultivated an aesthetic that mixed a fondness for Hawaiian shirts and op-shop golf pants, a fetish for Victa lawnmowers and a love of alcohol shots (‘The Nips Are Getting Bigger’) into a style that was all their own, springing from some bizarro suburban kitchen to seize the national imagination.

It’s no small irony that two of the main songwriters – guitarist-singer ‘Reg’ and his melodically gifted bassist brother Peter O’Doherty, the tunesmith and lyricist behind ‘Berserk Warriors’ – came from New Zealand. Maybe their dislocated sensibility explains a little of the wonky perspective that the entire band shared.

I always thought of them as a local equivalent to Madness in the UK and The Monkees in the USA. Perfectly formed for and from Australia. Doomed to be at cross-purposes with a music industry incapable of understanding what made them so original – let alone able to accept a group that came bursting out-of-the-box with what were soon to be four unique songwriters and three very different front-people taking turns at the microphone.

If you tried to map the cultural flow they were a part of, you might identify a history from early 1970s bands like Daddy Cool through to Skyhooks and Mental As Anything’s r ’n’ b pop contemporaries The Sports, onwards to later acts as varied as Men at Work, Crowded House, Custard, and even the beginnings of The Wiggles. Is there such a music genre as ‘alt-joy’? Is Oz Pop truer to who we are as a nation than Oz Rock? The Mentals had something in their bloodstream that said ‘yes’.

Musically it meant a band in love with classic AM radio staples and country and surf music, as well as Sun-sessions Elvis rock ‘n’ roll. But Mental As Anything had another echo-chamber to them that was 1960s hallucinogenic and hippie-punk bohemian. Art-school clever, but never cynical, never cold, a signature all their own.

In the documentary, it’s nonetheless a shock to hear they had 25 Top Forty hits across their career, more than any other group in the history of Australian music. Those oddball and funny guys were that successful?

Plaza was the man with golden voice, learning to sing in the shower to hits by Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley. To his surprise as a teenager, Plaza says, he found he could keep up with them. It’s easy to overlook what an impressive voice he had, the Mentals comedic and comic-book presence sometimes obscuring how genuinely talented all of the band were.

As Crowded House’s Neil Finn observes, the Mentals gave off the appearance of not knowing what they were doing while clearly knowing exactly what they were on about. A genius for amateurism that Finn admits to being very impressed by. It’s not too hard to draw a line between the Mentals knockabout live presence and the bright energy that Crowded House would later exude on stage, a tiny debt of inspiration.

Talking heads can be gratuitous and hagiographic, but across the Live It Up documentary Neil Finn, Men at Work’s Colin Hay and Dave Graney definitely help you appreciate the artistry of the band. They cast a heartfelt craftsmen’s eye over the music, making you notice what can so easily pass you by in the Mentals’ nimble mix of jokey singalongs and absurdist colour.

DG speaks about the rare and unimpeachable “wholesomeness” of the Greedy Smith’s iconic song ‘Live It Up’. Hay dives into the same song as a portrait of Greedy at his generous best, reaching out as he always did to help anyone who was feeling down. Hay smiles at the memory of Greedy in this real-life mode and simply says, “My man. My man.”

It’s a moment that almost pulls a tear from you. But the documentary keeps moving along, the narrative packed with the usual ups-and-downs that make-and-break a great act. Behind the affectionate vision you see the decline, the crushing into formula and the loss of direction. But there’s an overall absence of bitterness that dominates the frame, while the band’s camaraderie overrules any failures, as if to say Mental as Anything were never truly into the music industry game to begin with.

The unexpected death of Greedy Smith and the illness that forced Martin Plaza to retire from performing are a part of this story in the last decade. By then, Mombassa and O’Doherty and drummer Wayne ‘Bird’ Delisle were long-gone and the Mentals, though still creating new material, were to some extent their own covers act. A lot of this had to do with Greedy, who believed in pleasing the punters, touring the clubs and keeping the band name alive from the year 2000 on. It’s a debt his more perverse and laconic bandmates happily acknowledge.

These days Mombassa and O’Doherty are in their own purple patch with the magnificent Dog Trumpet carrying on from the very best that Mental As Anything ever offered. In the wake of the film and an unexpected revival of the song ‘Live It Up’ as a Scottish football anthem in the UK, Mental As Anything have reformed under the two brothers’ guidance for a celebratory 50^th anniversary tour. Plaza and Bird are too unwell to join in but have given them their blessing. O’Doherty’s son has stepped in on the drums. The communal and collective spirit prevails.

After the premiere in Sydney at the Haydn Orpheum Cinema, there’s a conversation well-handled by the Hoodoo Gurus’ Dave Faulkner. He zeroes in on the song-craft and the deceptive strengths the band had underneath their clowning. This underestimation is a small if persistent thorn, but the brothers can’t help themselves - Reg Mombassa and Peter O’Doherty are soon trading repartee, sharing stupid stories about the band’s members real and outlandish stage names.

That said, they easily handle an audience question about the influence of the early twentieth century Dada art movement on the band’s aesthetic, a space where whimsy and the anarchic (“we had no plans, ever”) held much interest.

Beside them on stage, director Matthew Walker seems rather muted and shy, admitting to being overwhelmed by the heroic company he found himself in during filming. The director’s personality actually makes him the perfect interpreter for the Mentals and how they approached the world: unpretentious, collaborative and open. Walker has certainly done something special with Live it Up, capturing the band’s joyful and surreal energy without looking away from – or capsizing into – the failures and losses.

He also leaves a lot of unstated space in the film for aware viewers to pick up on the band personalities. Reg Mombassa’s avant-garde oddness and quietly steely sense of purpose. Brother Peter O’Doherty’s pop talent and wry sensitivity edged to the point of fragility. Greedy’s relentless and even blind optimism, a salve for a less secure self-image that finally wins out through sheer goodness. Plaza’s obvious stage charisma and mighty voice disguising struggles with anxiety that almost got the better of him. Drummer Bird, an askance Ringo caught between two madly driven sets of Lennon-and-Macartney at some imaginary backyard musical barbecue that could get a bit much to handle.

Live It Up – The Mental As Anything Story is very easy to love and a pleasure to see. It shows what we always knew, that the Mentals were never an obvious act. If their albums suffered from the menagerie of creative talent that made the band what it was, there’s no question they became one of the great Australian singles bands: ‘Live It Up’, ‘Berserk Warriors’, ‘The Nips Are Getting Bigger’, ‘Too Many Times’, ‘If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?’, ‘Spirit Got Lost’, ‘Come Around’…

Solid gold hits for the heart. Each one made for radio loving.

As the after-film conversation winds down at the premiere, Peter O’Doherty makes a side-on comment about Mental As Anything that has a sting of pride to it in summing up the truth of them: “We were a garage band. And we were a really good one.” Mombassa meanwhile expresses his gratitude for everything that happened and his hopes for Mental As Anything’s music as a small contribution “towards more kindness and compassion in the world”.

M

My guest in this ZOOM conversation is the academic Steven Threadgold. He’s an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia.

As it so happens, Newcastle is my hometown so there’s more than a little bit of personal interest for me in the issues and subjects that Steven is exploring.

Steven’s the Director of the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre there and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Youth Studies.

His research looks closely at youth and class, examining issues related to unequal career trajectories and possible alternatives – not all of them good – as well as underground and creative scenes associated with youth trying to re-create where they’re going and who they are in the face of many difficulties.

As Steven will say during our interview, he tries to run programs where the research is done with young people, not on them.

This research leans into how young people finance themselves and the role of ‘fintech’ (finance and technology) in both assisting and exploiting their progress; how they seek out work or make a living; what they choose and what gets imposed upon them.

Steven has also taken a serious interest in problems like youth gambling in order to a genuine picture of what is going on, particularly for young working class males and related issues like debt in a fintech world.

I first got to know Steven Threadgold while I was working as Artistic Director of the Addi Road Writers’ Festival, an independent writing and arts event held annually at a community centre in Sydney’s Marrickville.

Somewhat belatedly in the lead-up to ARWF2024, I noticed a book of his that had come out back in 2022 bluntly titled Class in Australia, a mix of research and analyses in collaboration with fellow academic Jessica Gerrard.

It made me invite Steven along to the keynote panel for ARWF2024 as our main theme that year was ‘Cost of Living’.

This phrase was meant to signal concerns with intensifying inequality in Australian society; it was also meant to dig into something deeper and more existential about our humanity and our dreams.

At a literary and storytelling festival it posed an open question around how artists sustain their vision and independence or any notion of ‘freedom of speech’ while crippled by financial insecurity and insecure housing pressures.

I had begun to feel we were sliding into an era of covert censorship and creative oppression by economic means, with poverty disempowering those voices most likely to be dissenting or disagreeable in publicly articulate and complex ways.

Perhaps those concerns became a little abstract or high falutin’ at a cultural event like ARWF2024, but they remain more relevant than ever.

Freedom is not simply a value or concept one hews to by choice. It is also a material condition determined by your financial independence and the security of a home. Factors like leisure or ‘spare’ time – a commodity all its own – empower some more than others in what is becoming an ‘opinion class’ as well as a property-empowered one.

With all this in mind, the title alone of Steven’s book Class in Australia was enough to tweak my interest along with the fact he was based in Newcastle. It attracted me because even though our country supposedly loves its mavericks, convicts and underdogs – favouring its punching-above-its-weight reputation – the truth of the matter is that ‘class’ is a dirty word wherever you go.

We don’t like to admit there are class issues and class constructions in Australia that we’re having to deal with in more difficult and complex ways than ever today. Or that this affects the culture we develop, support, fund, platform and praise. Australian literature’s middle class tilt is certainly impossible to ignore and in need of some serious righting.

How those class concerns play out broadly in the lives of young people in a coastal industrial town like Newcastle – and the patterns that are echoed across the country and globally – is deeply significant to who and what we are. And to where our young people are going. If they can enter into any kind of ‘future’ worth imagining at all.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Steven Threadgold. My voice is a little croaky and my image is a little blurred. Steven looks as if he was beamed in from the future. Maybe this accidentally reflects something about the nature of our subject: me a little worried and even frightened by the forces at play; Steven more sure and, if not quite optimistic, able to see solid hopes under high-pressure circumstances through his work talking with young people about their lives in Newcastle today.

M

British Pop Art in a Day-Glo swing? Or kitchen-sink drama, sink or swim?

Wannabe James Bond in saggy blue jeans washing the dishes at your local caf’? Or nerdy voyeur at the weekend markets with a vinyl edition of Scott Walker 4 in his hands and a VHS copy of Carry On Camping in his retro airline bag?

It’s hard to get a fix, but it all comes together in one strange bird… Mr Jarvis Cocker.

Pulp are a likewise motley and variegate crew.

Despite Cocker’s praying mantis ‘cool’, they don’t look like a rock ‘n’ roll band. Some mistake must have been made, the staff of a failing regional library handed instruments and pushed on stage to entertain a crowd of thousands.

It helps they have a splendid and constantly evolving light-and-slide show, the kind of northern English bric-a-brac narrative that would have given a Pop avatar like Richard Hamilton a toothache from all the candy colours and consumer nostalgia involved… vintage badges with puns, 3D grids, a psychedelically bright sunrise, photo album memories of when the 1990s were the 1960s again in Britain.

An old song like ‘Mis-Shapes’ serves as the band’s musical mirror as well as one of their many fan-recruiting anthems: “Raised on a diet of broken biscuits we don’t look the same as you.” But they do, you see. They really do. That’s Pulp’s charm… eccentric and joyous, with a tincture of outsider’s revenge to their musical embrace.

The band’s live heart is the same as that on their classic 1995 album Common People: Nick Banks on drums, Candida Doyle on keyboards, Mark Webber on guitar and keyboards, Russell Senior on guitar and violin. With JC out front, doing show business and storytelling as only he can, his voice rising a sharp octave out of his come-hither and confiding baritone to declare a truer, rawer self.

Playing by the harbour on the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House, Pulp front up in expanded form as a big band with a deep and complex sound rounded out by Emma Smith (violin / guitar), Adam Betts (percussion / guitar), and Richard Jones (viola / keys).

The death of long-time bassist and videographer Steve Mackey in 2023 must have been quite a blow, his acid-house, disco-affected groove replaced on their latest 2025 album More – and on this global tour – by the London jazz-funk musician Andrew McKinney. It makes the band-created ‘Got to Have Love’, one of the last songs Mackey had a compositional hand in, that much more meaningful as well as desperately epic: “Without love you’re just making a fool of yourself. Without love, you’re just jerking off inside someone else.”

It’s a key anthem in the Pulp set, suggestive of a lost friend’s parting invocation to break free of your own traps as much as any you claim are being imposed. There’s an element of one-last-chance-in-life to this, Cocker imploring everyone – not least himself – to wake from the habitual numbness that might be paralysing you.

Early songs like ‘Lipgloss’ and ‘Underwear’ leap out lustily in oddly similar ways, with Cocker’s knack for expressing desire while being aware of a female as much as male point-of-view. His romances – malformed and wonderful and usually unrequited – are awfully real. His honesty sometimes a little cruel in its bluntness, as if he too knows exactly what it is like.

Perhaps empathy is too hard to fully articulate out loud except in a great song? Empathy and desire smudging one another into intimacy of a more genuine kind, something not quite ‘had’ but still understood by everyone involved.

A one-time film student at St Martin’s School of Art, the shortsighted Cocker is always telling tales with a TV eye. Those big square glasses of his were a fashion game-changer for bookish types and cineaste geeks when the band emerged. In his case, it’s as if the main character in a 1959 film like Billy Liar got their sequel opportunity in JC’s liberated form… still missing out on leaving town with Julie Christie, but getting out anyway and becoming his generation’s Ray Davies in some parallel life he somehow imagined into being.

At one point, Cocker hunkers down with the essential four from the early Pulp days to recreate the moment when the band realised they could still do their thing again after a quarter of a century since their last album We Love Life and well over a decade of not playing live.

He jokes about getting together with Banks, Doyle, Webber and Senior in a small lounge room on an English winter night up north in their Yorkshire hometown of Sheffield. Cocker tells us he can “turn up the central heating” if we like, just to get everyone in the same mood, fully aware of the stonking hot and humid sub-tropical evening that is keeping the crowd well-sweaty this evening.

Eventually, he will surrender his own cool and peel off his suit jacket to survive Pulp’s last push for musical glory in Sydney. Or, as Cocker says while stripping down like a 62-year-old man still doing a young man’s job at magnificent full pelt: “Phew!”. It’s enough to send a ripple of we-can-relate laughter across the night.

Cocker often feels as much part of the rhythm section as drummer Nick Banks and bassist Andrew McKinney. Banks keeps a particularly close eye on the singer’s hieroglyphic moves: those gangly elbows and donation-plate hands that work as punchlines and groovy hexagons, gestural prayers to Heroes-era Bowie and Sticky Fingers Jagger doing the flamingo, JC offering us one bodily telegram after another to illustrate the lyrics. The guy can really move – and the light show exploits his silhouette to the max to emphasize every outline he creates.

The entire band are a force, outwardly modest, yet extremely confident – and with good reason. It’s a sophisticated and propulsive sound with plenty of bubbling quirks and textures: part dance throb, part Burt Bacharach and Bernard Hermann soundtrack, part Sondheim’s ‘Send in the Clowns’ and Victorian music-hall singalong as if sampled and beamed in from the near future. Definitive in their era, Pulp have stepped outside of time, their yesterday more like tomorrow.

On one level, the success of the band, so utterly English, hardly makes sense at all. Regional battlers for fifteen years before they made their mark in the charts, they fit into an ethos of greatness that depends, paradoxically, on the intensely local.

In this, they’re part of a ‘tradition’ that is not so much sound-alike as feel-the-details… a pantheon in which The Kinks and The Smiths similarly channelled a mutual touch for English tragicomedy and minor-personality loser grandeur.

There’s also a Penguin paperback sci-fi quality behind the prosaic peacock sensibilities that Pulp invokes, a modernity that invites a faint musical kinship with Roxy Music’s early op-shop extravagance.

Cocker is the key. His supermarket day-dreaming and sly, subversive identity speak to the way ‘common people’ are always imagining who they can be.

Now and again, a JC comes along and succeeds. I think this is why the band are so loved. Success – and some money too – are very good things to have, but the true sustenance lies in the dreaming itself, essential for people to get by in their anonymous backwaters and regional greys.

Karl Marx might have attacked this dreaming as just another opiate for the masses. But the need to stay human and magical has always been integral to great pop music and its ability to change lives, for a while if not forever.

I try to imagine scenarios to illustrate what may have given birth to Pulp as an entity. How if the UK director Mike Leigh had dropped a little LSD he might have come up with the band for a film set in Sheffield. Or if the cast of The Office had suddenly discovered they loved life and were not part of a nihilistic black joke enclosing them. George Orwell’s novel 1984 also comes to mind, strangely and bleakly enough: its instinct for secret and private rebellions that define what it means to try and save your soul.

The band’s version of ‘This Is Hardcore’ is stupendous, quite the lavish and weighty lash after the good vibrations of so many catchy and witty songs. Cocker leans back on a chair and appears to stare up at a giant chandelier that shines on to a screen behind him. After his zig-zag dance moves and Cuban-heeled runway poses, ‘Hardcore’ makes it seem as if he really did stumble into a Leigh film like Naked to find himself addicted to porn and Nietzsche.

It was in this phase that I last saw the band in 1999 at Finsbury Park London. The live show then was much darker, a leatherette lounge on stage, the music charged with sleazy power. Mark Webber played guitar aggressively, his back frequently to the audience like he wanted to punish someone or just escape. Keyboardist Candida Doyle later admitted she was having anxiety attacks on that same tour, her synth work brittle and glassy. Cocker was not happy. This Is Hardcore documented a long-term relationship collapsing. It also voiced his rejection of fame and audience-capture right when ‘Common People’ had set the popular mould for them.

But this was only a dark phase in a bigger band story. Great for their music, if not for them. The Pulp machine in 2026 runs on brighter colours once again and more ironic appreciations and strategies than the dead ends of total alienation. It’s just good to know where the edges are and how to step back. Been there, done that, got through.

Material from their beloved Different Class album dominates the live set tonight, with a handful of tunes equally sourced from its 1994 precursor His ‘n’ Hers and the refresh that was last year’s More. A few extra pickings from other records are thinly spread for balance.

No one is complaining about the dominance of the old gold while the Pulp renaissance proves itself on new tracks like ‘Got to Have Love’ and anthems like ‘Spike Island’. The latter is a tribute to the 1990 festival where The Stone Roses married the rave and indie rock scenes together, pioneering the way for what would become the Britpop phenomenon while flaming out themselves.

Pulp open tonight with ‘Sorted for E’s and Whizz’. Then they step into ‘Disco 2000’ and we are away without any doubts from whoa to go. By the second last song, the inevitable ‘Common People’, everyone is dancing and going mental.

The band’s English aesthetic translates beyond well to the Australian crowd, most of whom have grown up on some aspect of their vernacular or its long-tail resonance in popular culture… from film classics like Billy Liar and A Taste of Honey through to eternal FM radio staples by the likes of Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark, not to mention punk rock’s DIY philosophies and Pulp’s own left-field role in the mid 1990s beside Oasis, Blur and The Verve.

Pulp take us into that period of incredible excitement and high style when London seemed to swing again in ways it had not since the 1960s. It’s enough to make you cry, all that greatness back with us, still insightful and intimate, amusing and inspiring.

A dream night for overjoyed fans and for misfits in hiding, for the bright spirits who like a party and for those feeling weighed down by what might come next after the trauma-walls of Instagram and the fetish culture of war, all the toxic spit of online living that brings everything down the pipe at you while the innocent continue to suffer and die. They’ve even got a song for that too, ‘Begging for Change’, their new single, all profits to the global charity War Child.

But it’s the class realities at the end of ‘Common People’ that speak most powerfully – those lines that tell of how ‘You’ll never fail like common people, you’ll never watch your life slide out of view”. Lyrics given a double-edge tonight as our heroes and heroines hold us together and raise us up inside a song. Everyone happy to join in with them: “Amazed that they exist.”

M

Thanks to Samantha Hutchison for photos

I have a book featuring my poetry coming out in early March in a collaboration with the artist Jon Cattapan.

On one level it’s a folio that documents his exhibition War at Home, a mix of paintings and drawings coming up at the Dominik Mersch Gallery in Sydney’s Paddington.

The launch will be held on Thursday 5th March, 5pm till 7pm, with Jon talking a little about his work. Followed by myself reading some poems from the book with live music by the contemporary multi-instrumentalist and composer Rosie Westbrook.

The book itself is not me responding to Jon’s pictures; and it is certainly not him illustrating my poetry and prose.

It’s a kind of dual engine that increases the overall combustion and power of what is there. Both of us operating at the same time across a patch of years, with many force-field convergences and overlapping reflections present in the mediums we know how best to communicate in.

Jon first made a comment on a poem of mine about two years ago. I’d been a likewise recent admirer of the pictures he’d been sharing online and messaged him privately to say so, hinting how much I’d love to collaborate in some way – without knowing exactly how.

He welcomed the thought and the fact I made this approach at all. People were so closed or afraid to do such things, he said. The openness was a wonderful gesture. From that act, Jon then made it all happen, arranging to meet me whenever he visited Sydney from Melbourne.

The more we talked the more it felt like we had things in common. It was easy. Like we’d known each other for decades, which perhaps had to do with our ages and artistic interests. Sometimes we are traced by what we know and love and we find in others the lines and markings of familiarity and history.

It required no great bending of our individual creativity to fit one another. We continued much the same with our ongoing work, painting and writing in our separate cities, moving forward along parallel lines that echoed and radiated in a kinship of sorts, speaking across space and spirit and mood to what we were each doing without ever trying to.

I saw in Jon’s work something trance-like that I really liked, a tremendous beauty of colour – and a lot of energy, literally.

At times his pictures could be star-like, galactic with that energy, his figures in rooms and urban spaces or somewhere like a dance party where joy and torment were unclear or mysteriously close.

There was even darker or more troubling work that seemed to me like figures inside crushed balls of paper or oppressive fields of geometry. And yet Jon also depicted the opposite, hints of evolution and the push for freedom.

The fact we were both showcasing a lot of our work online was undoubtedly a part of the dynamic we shared. Tense and seeking to be happy, registering the enclosing forces around us. That’s what I saw anyway and that is what made me approach Jon in that initial instance to do ‘something’.

After that approach I went off on my wayward path, distracted and swamped by life and work. But Jon stayed in touch and kept things rolling, did not let the notion go.

He appeared to have quite the work ethic too, visiting Berlin and East Timor among other locations, always engaging with the world.

I had a similar inclination to map the existential and the sometimes mystical that I sensed in the landscape of Sydney’s Inner West and the streets I inhabited as well similar ‘shapes’ in my own interpersonal relations.

Maybe there was something ‘after-Covid’ in this; inevitable traces, too, of the electronic and algorithmic life that has penetrated us all so powerfully over the last five years as we look into our phones and communicate our lives through a screen.

Jon came up with the title War at Home. It was apt, true in explicit and obvious ways – and also deep with added resonances to something else that was happening to us and inside of us and between us all. Qualities I could see active in his pictures and how they were in some alignment with my poems and prose notes, things I was sensing or reaching for myself.

Maybe all this just adds up to is some strange animal desire to not be caged? To not be extinguished or shut in? To stay human inside a cosmically new machine?

To feel the stardust it’s been said we are made of back when the planet began, a bigger deeper connection in terms of the universe of being. All the while we marked out our auras like cavemen on a virtual rock wall... lines where we memorialised ourselves and others along with the imposed perimeters that met us in our eyes-wide-open dream-landscapes.

Those are just a few thoughts of mine on this book project called War at Home that has come about so spontaneously with someone who has become my friend through art.

I feel very lucky to have been involved with this process and its outcome. Each of us separate in our work on the pages – pictures and poems, drawings and prose. And yet each of us sharing experiences and a journey of sorts that is still ‘out there’.

I do hope a few of you will come along to Jon Cattapan’s exhibition at Dominik Mersch Gallery and our launch on Thursday 5th March for the book. Location… upstairs at 1/75 McLachlan Avenue, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney.

M

You can RSVP to attend the War at Home exhibition and book launch here

Bones and weather. Then something about his tears going into a river and him not coming back, leaving everything he was or might have had abandoned on the grass.

By the end of this first song we’re already deep inside Cameron Winter’s poetic landscape. As I drift along with him, further and further, I find myself thinking of cowboy movies and three-masted ships like the ‘Pequod’, visions grainy and shimmering, old daytime TV.

It’s child-like, this state of mind, song after song. But also melancholic. The child’s experience or way-of-looking remembered, sung into and brought back to life, an openness of mind and heart that lingers in a world of adult regrets and hard closures.

Winter sits at a grand piano, his frog-prince slacker moan and thinning falsetto a mix of wisdom and desperation, searching for connections even as he seems to be relinquishing each moment fatalistically.

When he says God is real and that he’s not joking this time, you hear two things: a religious aspect to his work that creates an unusual aura around both his songwriting and tonight’s performance; along with a clue to his well-defended selfhood, a vulnerability that half-hides in a crooked humour and slanted, enchanted attitude.

During ‘$0’ the lights come up in the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall as this talk of God spills out of him. Some nakedness for the audience as much as Winter.

So here we all are.

By this time I have forgotten the origins of the song itself with its spiky start – “fuck these people” – and the not-very-romantic materialism of being made to feel like “a zero dollar man” that does not cease the yearnings he still has.

Stuck on love, eh?

The lighting for Winter’s entire set is striking and minimal. A single dramatic spotlight fans out around him during the opening songs, with a smoke machine clouding the stage. A blinding ray flares from behind for two songs; then the stage darkens and brightens slightly again to reveal a bare and spare setting for another few songs… one young man driving this music along, one long black car of an instrument at his fingertips, a wall of grey sheeting against the back wall that you might more likely see at a building site.

It centres everything upon Winter alone at the grand. He plays the piano eccentrically, like he’s perpetually half-exploring what to do next. Choosing to make odd breakages in the melodies, single-note highs on a jarring key like some infant learning about a sound by repeating it, or that one flicker of something really disturbed, a sudden pummel on the heavy notes that resonates in your mind and is left behind.

You can feel Winter’s deep relationship to the piano – and it to him: a bodily extension of his inner being, a piece of furniture for scrying on.

I think a little of Keith Jarrett and his improvised jazz approach busted with cries of satisfaction once deemed inappropriate to a concert performer of his stature. Then, as Winter leans down over the keys till his head touches the fall-board, his body hunched, the ghost of Glenn Gould emerges too, that other transcendent mutterer and mathematical communicator of a fine inner madness.

Of course Winter is hardly on the same level of instrumental mastery as those two geniuses of jazz and classical music, but for an indie rocker the boy sure can play.

It’s not so much that Winter sounds like them. More the unconventional choices he makes as he hovers over the piano and buries himself into its keys, his pauses and rolling notes ensuring a remarkably dynamic and narratively-elongated listening experience.

A French composer like Erik Satie might be a better comparison when Winter is being pretty and his unresolved notes float simple and church-like into the air.

At the same time, there are vague hints of the fairground and the honky tonk. And a strangely vivid link to Bob Dylan’s influence, not just in Winter’s lyrical brilliance but in his actual playing: the loose, warm revelations of a song like D’s ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ some mother to Winter’s own unfinished aesthetic: that which is beautiful can’t always be fully held, only experienced and let go of, ‘abandoned’.

Playing solo in the live arena, Winter’s songs get hard to distinguish for this same reason. One song melting into another as he says nothing and their slow-train momentum takes over… abstract images and sharp asides leaping out at you… micro-scenes, a big heartbreak that is all over the music, lines of meanness and tenderness, one or two jokes slicing through.

By night’s end the overall experience feels novelistic: the individual songs serving as chapters that fit into a larger story revealed in secret asides and fleeting glimpses, like a Jack London adventure told via Burroughsian cut-up techniques, love being the wildest landscape when it comes to the survival of the fittest.

Now and again, the romantic showman in Winter appears theatrically in moments like that hunched Glenn Gould posture at the piano. Lyrical zones of intellectually-inclined violence, even a slight voltage of madness, make things go darker for the odd second or two.

An image comes to me of Winter as an aged and wildly insane figure, like one of the great composers from another century: not the young man here tonight who is quite clearly the hero of a generation in their early twenties worshipping him to the n’th degree. No, someone else fifty years from now. He’s somehow ahead of his life, a walking deja vu machine. It’s not easy but it’s a gift he’s got to live with.

The love fest from the audience gets overbearing, the worship almost intrusive as the crowd rushes into any subduing of a song to cheer or applaud. It’s a hunger for him that borders on the devouring. Winter may well be fortunate to be so inside his songs, so deep into his piano-man being that he is protected by his own music.

It strikes me that a generation embedded into identity politics, ideology slogans and market algorithms would, indeed, revel in a new poet whose narrative abstractions and definitional looseness allows him to break through the existential walls that have been built up, fly through any ceilings of restraint pressing down upon them.

Winter’s songs don’t declare their meaning as anthems or explicit positions, you see; they swim through ambiguity, adore an active incompleteness, exist as things that can’t and don’t nail anyone or anything down entirely.

In an era of psychic violence and anti-mystery, Winter mooches through his own urban cowboy movie as noted, riding past desert mesas a la New York skyscrapers, or sailing on a whale-hunting ship across the seas inside his heart. Yeah, you too can sing along, be lost, become free.

Winter certainly fidgets enough with his piano stool like some saddle he can’t get sit right on, a captain’s tiller that wont turn fully. As the audience calls out their love from every corner of the room while he tries to get comfortable, a wit unleashes a ridiculous yodel of yabbering enthusiasm. Winter smiles at that, says his only words to the audience, timed slow-and-fast like a standup comedian: “I don’t speak Australian, mate.” Everyone laughs their heads off at that.

It’s the only rupture in the dreaming Winter world we are drawn in to, this church of his. Never able to stay, making it for a while, knowing we are already losing it as we experience whatever it is.

Transported ‘there’, nonetheless, by Winter… or is it that we are able to transport our world into that other magic place and taste grace through how we see and imagine things in our minds? Manufacturing our own poetic path into the bargain. Losing the moment, but coming back stronger for a while, finding a way of truly being ourselves before this world tries to add us up and categorise who we are again.

Put that Heavy Metal album on, friend. You got an old rapture to draw on, you got something to remember if you can.

M

Setlist:

• It All Fell in the River.

• Try as I May.

• Emperor XIII in Shades.

• The Rolling Stones.

• Love Takes Miles.

• Drinking Age.

• Cancer of the Skull.

• Sandbag.

• Nina + Field of Cops.

• $0.

  = Encore =

• Take It With You.

AJ Stanton is standing outside in a light rain, the sun half-shining before afternoon clouds return. It’s hard to know if the night will be clear or heavy with weather. But here we are.

Josh Chee, AJ’s drummer, stands beside her. He laughs and says he always ends up in photos with AJ because “she likes looking taller than me”.

AJ has a strange force of presence when you meet her: suited up, 19-years-old, a blue scarf on her head like she’s already a star.

On stage she sings in a way that’s sly and shy, jazzy and Betty Boop with lyrical edges that have a light wit all the while they push towards bigger feelings.

Her band have just come off the stage at the Addi Sounds Youth Fest 2025 in Sydney’s Marrickville after wowing everyone.

It’s a little hard to pin them down to a single description.

Indie pop might suffice as a genre definition. But that’s one very broad category. Bjork, Phoebe Bridgers, Norah Jones and Julia Jacklin all come to mind as reference points. Elements of English folk and artier contemporary leanings also insinuate themselves into the group sound.

Maybe it’s just an open sense of a young artist drawing from this and taking from that, figuring out who they are in public. Maybe it’s those moments when mimicry transcends itself and mysteriously arrives at being.

Maybe it’s best summed up by how the band ends its short set of originals with a tune called ‘I’m in Love With David Bowie’.

The song is so damned easy and confident and full of unusual textures you have to wonder where this originality comes from. They seem too young to be so formed and adventurous all at once.

AJ says she’s been writing songs “since I was about four years old”.

A multi-instrumentalist, she often creates on her piano, something that might explain the compositional richness behind the drums-bass-guitars structure that her band works with.

And yes, she does really love Mr Bowie.

“I just like the way he is so unapologetic about who he is and what he does,” AJ says.

Her views about him are all stated in the present tense. Like DB is still alive, which, in his music, he probably still is to her.

Looking at you, I gotta be honest
I'm a little bit confused
Gay particles leave my body
And I'm feeling quite moved
Come on, is there life on Mars?
Cause I just wanna dance with you.

AJ’s band brings even more sides to her musical palette and inspirations. There’s a bit of swing and funkiness in Jack Walsh’s bass playing; enhanced by her phenomenal lead guitarist, Jack Clayborne, whose concise, blinding melody lines sound like he has been channeling Wilco’s Nels Cline to figure his own style out.

Then there’s Josh Chee, the guy she likes standing next to in photos. The drums are his main game as a musician, even though he too is a multi instrumentalist like AJ. There’s also his interest in creating soundtracks for his own films too. Josh thinks this informs the way he likes to write and play more generally. Something about hearing and seeing a story better? Maybe.

It’s one reason why the AJ Stanton group could work as the house band in a series like Babylon Berlin or be in a bar scene for a Baz Luhrmann movie like The Great Gatsby. Old world energies with a modern twist. Hardly up there with Roxy Music, but who is to say where they can dream themselves in five years time.

Other influences?

AJ says she loves the Beatles.

She doesn’t think they are an especially “sappy” or yesterday-thing to cite.

“They do so many different things. So many different things they do so well. And I like how they are not always serious about themselves. They are playful. In what they do and in who they are.”

That use of present tense again in who AJ loves.

Music her eternity.

Having been a solo artist most of her young life, the band thing is a pretty new experience for her.

“It takes my songs further,” AJ says, “you can hear more of what I am wanting to do.”

There’s a pause before she adds, “I think of myself as a lyricist most of all.”

What does that mean?

AJ doesn’t quite say. But she comes back to this thing of “relating”. It seems she wants her music to ultimately offer “a sense of being recognised”.

She smiles, shrugs. “Just for people to feel what I am saying. For something to resonate in them when they hear my music.”