Nathan Hobby’s blog

I had a moment of perfect connection to the album I put on.

I was cooking, and drinking a glass of Cab Merlot (and enjoying it more than I’ve enjoyed red wine for a long time) and I was listening to The Whitlams’ Little Cloud album. The wistful lyrics and sound of Tim Freedman connected with me and felt so poignant.

I always find it so hard to choose an album to match my mood. I misjudge so often - the same way I misjudge my mood for film, novels and treats - but for once I chose well. I wonder if there are truly only a few pieces of music that will match a particular mood.

Tim Freedman keeps talking about the ‘year of the rat’ and ‘the rodent got back in’, and I suddenly realised that he might have been talking about John Howard - famously called (my wife reminded me recently when she dressed as) the Lying Rodent. Did he write these songs during the 2004 election, feeling depressed about Howard getting in yet again?

I remember when I saved up to buy my first CDs. It was the mid-nineties and there weren’t many cheap CDs around. Big W was wonderful because it sold the top 30 for $25; five weeks pocket money, and that’s five weeks of no chocolates or books or comics.

So I didn’t have many CDs.

Me and my brother got a secondhand copy of U2’s The Fly single with our first CD player from the pawnshop. We played it to death, and then Bush’s Glycerine single. I think the first album I bought was Metallica’s Load, maybe followed by Ash’s 1977. I got to know every single song so well. I’ve got this theory that if you listen to a decent CD enough times with enough desire to like it, you will like it eventually. (Am I saying Load is a decent album? I don’t know! It certainly suited who I was at the time.)

Fast forward to today, where there’s a whole CD shop full of great albums for $10, which with inflation is something like $5 in the mid-nineties. I can borrow eight great CDs from my local public library and battle to play them all through once in three weeks. (Back in 1996, my local library only had classical CDs.) I have a very modest 2800 songs on my I-tunes, which would still take me 8 days to play and about 200 CDs mouldering away in racks, 200 LPs inherited or bought at opshops in noughties and at least 50 tapes.

Consequently, there’s not many albums I know really well any more. Not in the way I knew Bush’s Glycerine single with it’s two B-sides ‘Solomon’s Bones’ and ‘Alien’. I think a mindset of acquisition is a dangerous one. If only I had this CD and that one, then I’d be happy, then I wouldn’t need any more.

 Imagine a situation similar to the one in Borges’ story “The Library of Babel”, except with songs, not books. You have every single song ever released. But instead of bringing you happiness, it brings you dissatisfaction, because every time you hit random, you get yet another song you have no affinity with. Just the task of scrolling through your album titles is an odious one. It’s too hard to find what you want. You sound like a radio station.  

Sometimes more isn’t better.

Me and Nicole went to see the Cure on Saturday night.

It was at Challenge Stadium, a basketball stadium, and the setting for part of my novel The Fur. It was strange to be back in that place again; the last time was nine years ago when I was playing volleyball at countryweek. Robert Smith was standing on that same ground where I’d been playing sport.

They played for over three hours, a loud and generous set that seemed to cover every single album except Bloodflowers. (I wonder if he regrets Bloodflowers? I have always liked it and I always will.) Some of the songs I remember him playing are:
- Us or them
- A hundred years (a real treat)
- Wrong number
- Lovesong (at this point Kath and Kim next to me got up and did a chicken dance.)
- Plainsong
- Pictures of you (another highlight for me; but if only he’d played Last dance.)
- Fascination street (actually this was early in the set)
- Deep green sea
- Friday I’m in love (was this in the encore? I think so)
- The kiss (the only song I remember repeated from the last Perth concert in 2000 - when he played every single Bloodflowers song.)
- Why can’t I be you?
- Just like heaven
- Jumping someone else’s train
- Killing an arab
- The forest
- The walk
- Never enough
- Three imaginary boys
- Fire in Cairo

The bass player, Simon Gallup, was annoying, he kept on bending his knees and crouching and swaying; he didn’t have any of the dignity of the others. He looked like a little boy playing with his older brothers. Even if he’s been with the band since the start.

I wish Robert had said more, revealed something of himself, or about the songs. I guess he wanted them to speak for themselves. At one point he said he wasn’t saying much because he kept forgetting he spoke the same language as us.

With two guitars, a bass and drums in a heavy rock stadium setup, the interpretation of the songs was really aggressive. I guess that’s my main criticism. I would have liked to have seen a softer, more varied performance. And keyboards. Give us that 80s sound! Instead, we had a clear message that ‘we’re not too old for this’.

UPDATE: Here’s a complete setlist- 
 http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ChainofFlowers/aug0407.html

This album was released on my wife’s 26th birthday. We were in Geraldton, four hundred kilometres  from Perth, and yet there it was sitting in Sanity for $20 on Thursday morning. Nicole is so kind; it was her birthday and yet she bought it as a present for me!

 I was waiting in a department store, so I read over the lyrics to Zeitgeist before I listened to the album. I was not impressed. I found them almost unreadable. (Most lyrics sound a bit wrong read without the music, I think; I wasn’t expecting W.H. Auden - but these were particularly bad.)

Billy should stick to personal angst; I’m afraid his detours into politics and religion are unconvincing. I think he is a stupid genius - he’s got this intuition for writing brilliant songs, but he’s not a thinker.

I haven’t listened to it enough time to form a good judgement yet. It seems to sound more like Billy’s solo album than any Pumpkins album. There are a couple of songs which I like already. And let me say this: I’m so glad this album has been released! I had given up on ever hearing new Pumpkins songs seven years ago.

My favourite band, the Cure, are coming to Perth. But one day after the tickets went on sale, the only place to buy tickets was on e-bay. Sellers in Melbourne were advertising twenty tickets for sale at $159. (The original price - $119 - already seemed excessive.)

I can’t believe how unethical I’ve become, because I even contemplated buying a ticket from one of these scum. But then I realised that I was perpetuating an injustice. As soon as everyone refuses to buy tickets from scalpers, they’ll stop doing it.

 So I reconciled myself to not seeing the Cure. I decided to stop listening to them, because it was a painful reminder.

But then yesterday at lunch time I decided to go to the Ticketmaster outlet in the city. I don’t know how these things work, and neither did the girl at the counter, but she had restricted viewing tickets. So for $238 me and Nicole will be seeing the back of Robert Smith’s head - but at least the scalpers aren’t getting any money off us.