Songlines

Sorry no longer seems to be the hardest word. In the same week that the Pope congratulated Australia for its “courageous decision” to apologise for the injustices done to Aboriginals (and then apologised for the paedophilia scandal), an album by an Aboriginal singer has topped the Australian independent music charts for the first time. This is a significant moment in Australia, where over the years the charts have been a whiter shade of pale.

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu is 38, blind, and grew up in poverty 600km from Darwin. He speaks only a few words of English, is extremely shy, and sings in his native language: Yolngu. He taught himself drums, keyboards, guitar and didgeridoo – all by ear, he doesn’t read Braille – and critics have been raving about his voice. It sounds like he is being groomed as the heir to the world-music-pop throne of Hawaii’s Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s critic Bruce Elder wrote that the first time he heard Yunupingu, “My immediate response was that here, as far as I was concerned, for the first time was an Aboriginal voice of absolutely transcendental beauty.” Yunupingu may be new to being a solo artist, but he spent many years with the well-known Yothu Yindi band before forming his own Salt Water Band (the coastal version of LRB?).

Paul Hester once told me about the time he recorded an Aboriginal band in his Melbourne home studio. He asked them where they came from. “Fitzroy,” said the band leader, naming the inner-city shabby-chic Melbourne suburb that was then being gentrified. Naah, c’mon, said Paul: where did you originally come from?

“Fitzroy,” the band leader said emphatically. “Listen mate, we’ve been here for 10,000 years.”

Here's Johnny

Wallowing in the 1970s and 1980s to dig the Rip It Up retrospective out of the archives tends to bring these things up.

When the news was announced that John Mellencamp would be touring New Zealand in December – for the first time, apparently – it was inevitable that my mind went back to when he first became known here.

It was a small but unforgettable story in Rip It Up, 30 years ago. John Mellencamp was an angry young man. He was 26, his career was going nowhere, he’d had a fight with his manager, and he had a wife, a seven-year-old and a 60-cigarette-a-day habit to support. And they wouldn’t even let him use his own name.

So when the mild-mannered reporter of a fledgling rock paper asked him the wrong question, Cougar - as he was then known - showed his claws. He went all Gordon Ramsay (the printer deleted his expletives), and to many people here, that’s how he was remembered.

Five years later he would have a breakthrough hit, he'd eventually get his own name back, and become the Walmart Springsteen of the cornbelt. But at this stage he hadn’t learnt one of the rules of rock’n’roll: be good to the people you meet on the way up, because you will meet the same people on the way down.

Left: the issue that caused offense, May 1978, and the eventual Cougar issue, September 1978.
What – no cover story?

Cougar pic © Murray Cammick

Shaken not stirred

Number 8 wire and chewing gum can take you a long way. Back in March my friend Rosie told me about her friend Joseph’s “Rube Goldberg” machine Crème That Egg. It took its inventor Joseph Herscher six months to build (“and some very patient flatmates”).

At the time, it had 1000 hits on YouTube. It was given a generous piece on Campbell Live, and then it went gangbusters: it has now had 425,000 hits. The New Yorker featured it on their website. So did David Hepworth at The Word. Even better, Joseph has emailed to say some great things have come out of it:

I am going to San Francisco where I will be making a live Rube Goldberg machine for a gallery/museum in collaboration with another artist.

I just got back from Nelson. A high school flew me down to do a workshop making Rube machines.

I just finished another video, this time commissioned by 42BELOW vodka. Here is my latest Rube [below].

The “Falling Water” cocktail machine is filmed by Rewa Wright, and a recipe is included for those without the right equipment.

Hey Joe! Where you goin’ with that screwdriver in your hand?

Funky Fried Chicken

Prince Tui Teka left the Ureweras at the age of 15 to join an Australian circus. He was billed as Prince Tui La Tui of the Royal Polynesians, and danced and sang. The audience didn’t need to know that he also drove one of the trucks and cleaned up the elephant dung. He eventually formed his own group, Prince Tui Teka and the Maori Troubadours. They had a convoy of caravans and Tui drove the truck.

His hobby, according to fellow bandmember Gugi Waaka, was collecting dead snakes that had been run over on the road. Some of them were up to seven feet long, and he would hang them off the bullbars. “At one time he had 54 of them, flopping around on the bullbars.

“Tui was the snake cooker as well as the snake collector,” Waaka told Mana in 2002. “The Aborigines told us us to cook ’em up, so Tui cooked them. They tasted just like chicken.’

Why does everything exotic – alligator, ostrich – seem to taste like chicken?