Always these intersecting lines
a railway junction, a train
terminal: wires and bolts, a barrier parallel
to the sky. Below looking up
Always these greys, it’s always
raining. A crossroad leading to a street
that bends. Downwards: bitumen and pitch
black shadows, sharp
iron railings: a vertical grid
lights refracted, unbroken
housefronts
Always at an angle, cold slabs drained sinister
impassive, oppressive, too narrow too
tall perpendicular dull white and upright
there
Remembering reunions
Past, she sees him as a sequence
Of long, loping movements – half graceful
Then abrupt: a stutter
Of glances, fearful
Querying, tentatively tender
She knows him as a native
Bushland animal – touch-shy, muted
Tawny grey and soft
A possum
Dangling from a gum-tree
Securely attached and by night
Alert, its eyes
Its nightsky-padded paws
An untamed living question
Small:harmless:gentle
Marsupial
In darkness, in depth and in warmth
A kangaroo heart-pulse – an inch-long
Moist, ghostly pink
Blind embryo, striving
Clinging, swollen – her own
Bloodless like rose-quartz or a
Shaft of ice
As an animal startled
Scared by sudden light
Undergrowth creature
A scrubland dweller
A species protected
Defensive
And only rarely sighted
Approaching quietly
She hopes to see him soon
Genuinely I am genuinely
Not concerned
While Julie’s brother
Got vicious, and we had to put him down
How could he?
How he could do that I’ll never know
I always thought there were rules about these things
And the kids were real upset
(On a train
Women talk. Some don’t
Some sit
Staring tense by a window
Into carriage walls
Like railway station billboards
Conversation flits by
Disjointed)
Water off a duck’s back, love
Cheer up
(Random sense uneven
Rhythm volume fading
In and out)
You look like you just lost
Your best friend
You were a bad friend to me
(Insisting, she winces
Inflicting mental lashes)
And I loved you
(A voiceless conversation with a man who
Isn’t here)
You weren’t any kind of friend to me
At all
You wouldn’t have tried to help
If I were mangled in front of you
Probably not, anyway
And sometimes I was
I think
But frankly, m’dear
I don’t give a damn
I don’t
Care
I don’t
Care that much
Asked me not to laugh
(Smirks a schoolgirl, standing near)
But really
What could I say?
He was so
Embarrassed
And Katy said c’mon
(The train pulls aptly
To a half)
Let’s go home now
Giggling
I keep seeing images
of you I keep walking
when your face looms up
legs first
I see you
in shop-front windows across
the road in cars driving by arm
in arm with a woman with
a friend my friend I miss
you I keep seeing
you and every time it feels
like my centre has been blasted
away you’re away
fragments flying fraying
flesh
but there you are in the
traffic in the
distance far away far
away from me
He and I
Don’t talk much. We never did.
We never did
A lot of things we hoped
We might. We didn’t talk
About it, left unanswered
Hopes unsaid. I said
I wanted yes
I wanted want and
Hope and need and feel
Wanton
Wanton Edie, mad as a
Hatter a hater, Edie
Kneading her brain,
Roll it in crumbs
throw her crumbs
Roll in hay
Wanting needing feeling
Knee-deep
Filling in the hours with
Talk
Steve Prestwich (Pic: Sydney Morning Herald)
Note 14 December 2016: The ‘Five Dead Rock Star’ pieces were written when I was depressed. I’ve left them to stand in their original versions, but they could be written very differently.
I want to write about Steve Prestwich without writing about Cold Chisel and that’s not possible.
I wrote about Cold Chisel, a lot, between 1979 and 1984, when I was a young rock music writer immersed in Oz Rock – the Australian pub rock music scene of the ‘70s and ‘80s. I was a fan. I was more involved with Cold Chisel – its music, its band members, its trajectory – than with any other band I wrote about. Cold Chisel is why I moved to Sydney. Cold Chisel is the reason I became a rock writer.
There was a night, in suburban Melbourne in 1979, when I was in a speeding car with hoons – okay, young male tradies, only slightly drug affected – with the car radio playing. There were too many of us in that car. I was squatting in the well of the back passenger seat, curled up to fit, squeezed in. I could hear on the radio the opening notes of a song that stopped my heart. There was a keyboard line – the same notes a metal wind chime plays – and there was a percussive build, a drummer getting jittery with his high-hat. That drummer was Steve Prestwich and that band was Cold Chisel. The song was Conversations, from their second album, Breakfast at Sweethearts.
I interviewed the lead singer, Jim Barnes, and the keyboard player and songwriter, Don Walker, a few months later, as designated music reporter (only very slightly drug affected) for a student radio station.
It wasn’t a great interview – Jim later pointed out my interviewing style was seriously stilted – but next time the Sydney-based band were in town, I interviewed them again, this time as a writer for the indie rock magazine Roadrunner. I interviewed Don Walker and Steve.
Mostly I interviewed Don. The interview was at 2pm, in the hotel room they shared, and Steve hadn’t quite woken up to the day. He was awake: he just wasn’t out of bed, and he wasn’t clothed. In anything. Just sheets. He stayed under the sheets, mostly keeping quiet, while Don and I talked.
Don and Steve encouraged me to move to Sydney and Don Walker always encouraged my writing – my rock journalism and also, later, the creative writing (poetry and short stories) I published across the mid-‘80s. My friendship with Don Walker had highs and extreme lows. His support for my writing endeavours was constant.
But it’s Steve I’m writing about.
I learned from that hotel interview a little about Steve. I learnt his father had been a drummer who played at the Cavern, the Liverpool club where the Beatles built their following. I learnt he came from a large family of boys and had a lively – and sharp – sense of humour. I think I understood from the outset that Steve was a straight talker, a ‘what you see is what you get’ lad, with no time for posers.
Steve was always Steve. He didn’t waste energy on pretension. Not long after I moved to Sydney, I was in another speeding car with hoons – this time, Cold Chisel, heading back from a gig at the Dee Why Hotel on Sydney’s northern beaches – and once again, that car was too full. I was squeezed against the rear passenger door, seated alongside Don Walker and his partner, rock writer Jenny Hunter-Brown. Steve was in the front passenger seat. The car radio was playing Top 40 soft pap: Babe, by Styx. The lyrics go like this:
Babe, I’m leaving, I must be on my way
The time is drawing near
My train is going, I see it in your eyes
The love, the need, your tears
Steve was making retching noises.
But I’ll be lonely without you
And I’ll need your love to see me through
Please believe me, my heart is in your hands
‘Cause I’ll be missing you
Steve by now had the passenger door open and was hanging out into the highway, poised to jump.
That was so Steve.
He was the guy who would chat with young fans, approachable and friendly, then break off mid-sentence to say, “Whoa! Railroad tracks! Get a load of the metalwork on YOUR TEETH!”
Steve didn’t do tact.
When I had a one-night stand with the guitarist, Steve made it plain he thought it laughable. There was an awkward few minutes when he teased me backstage. Jim Barnes, whose relations with Steve could be combative, stepped in, demanding ‘What’s this about?”
“Steve’s giving me a hard time because I fucked Ian,” I snivelled.
Jim looked from me to Steve then back again.
“Jesus, Elly,” he snorted, “I wouldn’t fuck Ian. Do you want me to beat Steve up for you?”
It might be only night in my life I had men fight over me.
This is not to say Steve was not sentimental. He believed in love. Real love, not the soft pap media drivel. Not long after we met he started going out with Jo-Anne, the woman he married, with whom he eventually had two children, Melody and Vaughan. Jo-Anne when I first met her seemed shy, which baffled me, as she was classically beautiful – tall, elegant, with high cheekbones. The two held hands. She sat on his lap. They nuzzled. Steve told me he believed in the wisdom of the phrase, “my other half”.
“Jo-Anne is that,” he said. “She is my other half.”
Steve wrote beautiful love songs. His melodic sense is often remarked on, but what I notice is the minor keys. Steve’s songs were wistful, poignant. They spoke of loss. Steve wrote Cold Chisel’s biggest hit single, Forever Now, and its most covered track, When the War is Over. With Don Walker, he wrote Flame Trees, a song about small towns and times gone by that I sing to myself, in the small town where I live.
I’ve never written a novel. But I have written an extended novella, and its opening line is “When the war was over…”
“When the war was over, the true terror began.” Thank you, Steve.
In the mid-80s, when my poems began to be published in literary journals, Steve asked me if I could help him get some of his mother’s poetry published. He gave me a sheaf of her work. Freda’s poems were good. It was a simple matter of formatting them and sending them to literary journals. I was happy for Steve, and for Freda, that some appeared in print.
Steve and Cold Chisel parted ways during a disastrous European tour and in 1983 the band broke up. Fifteen years later they came together for a “reunion tour”, which blew up in an explosive fight between Jim and Steve. I saw every one of Cold Chisel’s farewell concerts, and I’ve twice seen Jim Barnes live as a solo artist in the 30 years since then, but I’ve never been to a live show by any of the other band members or listened to their post-Chisel music.
I regret that. I would have liked to accept Steve’s invitation to be in the audience when he played at the Basement in Sydney. Except that I live 950 kilometres away. I did suggest we might meet up when I visited Sydney one time. But Steve was living in New South Wales’ Southern Highlands by then, taking sensitive photographs of nature, listening to wide-ranging music, and making a life with a new love. We were Friends on Facebook, so I could see he was happy.
He could see I was not.
“You sound depressed,” he messaged via Facebook. “Are you okay?”
Not long after, I received a Facebook invitation to ‘Friend’ a second Steve Prestwich page. Steve explained in the accompanying note that he was setting up a page specifically for family and personal friends, separate from his public page where fans could post.
I teased him, telling him he’d finally grown pretensions.
A few weeks later when I logged on my pc, I saw a sidebar headline on a news site: Cold Chisel drummer dies. My heart seized up, like it did that night in 1979, when I heard the first notes of Conversations. Please God, I thought immediately, let it be one of the other drummers who filled in with Cold Chisel after Steve was sacked. Let it not be Steve.
It was Steve. News reports informed me he had died during surgery to remove a brain tumour. I learned for the first time that he’d had surgery for a brain tumour 18 years earlier, while I was living in London. I read that he’d suffered head pains while rehearsing for a planned Chisel reunion tour and had recognised the symptoms. Cold Chisel band members had been with him as he was wheeled into the operating theatre.
I can only imagine how Steve’s death impacted Don, Jim, Ian and Phil. I can’t begin to imagine its impacts on Melody, Vaughan, Jo-Anne and Victoria. I know I felt wrenching grief.
When Steve asked was I depressed, asked me what went on, I told him I felt I was at a crossroads. He responded that crossroads are a good place to be: you get to make choices, you get to journey, new horizons open up. I can’t say for sure those were his exact words, because after Steve died, I Unfriended his Facebook pages. I couldn’t bear Facebook’s yearly reminders each time it was his birthday. I didn’t realise that by Unfriending his page, I would lose the messages he’d sent me.
Nearly two years after Steve’s death, I was at a writers’ workshop. I hadn’t written a poem since 1987 – 25 years. We were given thirty minutes to write free-form, and I was not the least surprised to find that what I wrote was a poem, For Steve:
Time was, you set the rhythm.
You kept the beat.
Singing, all the time, your head
Nodding to a melody line.
Your feet forcing out that beat.
You kept
The best memories, the ones that made me
Laugh. And smile. And grow pensive.
And now
I cry for you. Cry me a river, jazzman.
Let that river run through
A cavern, where the beat boys
Burst into the night.
Take me to that river.
Michael Hutchence asked unexpected questions. Like, “How do you say, ‘I love you!’ in Mandarin?”
“My” Michael – Michael as I knew him – was not the mythic Michael of the tabloids. “My” Michael was a sweet, rather whimsical boy with cosmos-encompassing curiosity. When I think of Michael, I think of Snufkin, the character in Finnish author Tove Janssen’s Moomintroll books. Snufkin has a round head, shaggy brown hair and big brown eyes, and that’s how “my” Michael looks in memory: a round face on a stalk neck. Snufkin was a wanderer, seeking spring and summer meadows: that was Michael. Snufkin was a provocateur, baiting authority and despising convention. As did Michael.
I first heard INXS at a live gig at Sydney’s Stagedoor Tavern, just after INXS moved from Perth to Sydney and just before the Stagedoor Tavern was closed down. INXS were bottom of a four-band bill. I couldn’t see the stage so I couldn’t see the band (the crowd was packed for the headliners, The Angels), but they sure sounded good. I was writing for a rock magazine called Roadrunner and I marked INXS as a band for me to interview.
The interview took place in February or March 1980, about the time I started writing for RAM (Rock Australia Magazine). I didn’t write the first INXS piece in RAM, but my article ran in Roadrunner, and a few years later I wrote RAM’s first cover story on INXS. Some of the more sensational Michael quotes from that RAM cover story were lifted by Sydney’s tabloid newspaper, The Sun.
In early 1980, INXS were still playing small venues. I interviewed them in a joint off Oxford Street where capacity must have been less than 100. The entire band sat around a table, eager to talk about their music. At that time an interview must have been a novelty. Michael’s curiosity showed up as alertness. He sat with spine long, long neck; not the languid, mannered stance familiar in later years. But whatever the body language, Michael’s physicality always spoke to me of dance. He stood, he sat, he moved like a dancer. On stage, he danced. Michael had vitality and grace.
He also had bad skin. When people started talking about Michael as a sex symbol, I was initially nonplussed. He was a skinny kid with pockmarks. Recently I watched again a music video from 1981, “starring” Michael: Speed Kills, written by Cold Chisel’s Don Walker for the soundtrack to the film Freedom, with Michael on lead vocals. In that clip I see the emergence of the “mythical” Michael – the cool dude with white hot sexuality. I didn’t see it at the time.
At the time, when we sat in that small dark room and talked, Michael was barely through his teens and was dressed like a fan of French new wave cinema, in a Breton fisherman’s long-sleeved t-shirt with horizontal stripes. He told me he was fascinated by post-War bohemianism, especially the literary and artistic bohemianism of the ‘50s and early ‘60s. I thought of Julie Christie, before she became a film star, a boho chick living with actor (and art school grad) Terence Stamp. Michael would have loved Julie Christie.
He talked textiles. Michael’s father Kell had been a textiles trader in Hong Kong. Michael loved colour and texture and trends, so he loved textiles. And he loved Hong Kong. He loved noise and close-pressed flesh and variety and change. Bewilder me, he beseeched. Fascinate me.
Michael could be mischievous, if I may use that word to cover a multitude of, literally, sins. In that first interview, he brought up one of my Roadrunner reviews that he said had made him laugh. It kicked off with some cruel comments about a band who at that time shared the same booking agency as INXS, a brother-sister combo called the Numbers. I liked the Numbers. I just couldn’t resist the impulse to be bitchy about their platinum blonde good looks. Michael had a bit of bitch in him too. Andrew Farriss, the INXS keyboard player and main writer, did not approve. Andrew never took to me, at all.
What sealed it for Andrew was that cover story I wrote in 1984. INXS were touring in support of their album The Swing. I had reviewed their previous album, Shabooh Shoobah, for RAM, and I’d loved it, so RAM’s then-editor Greg Taylor sent me off to Canberra with a specific brief: get an interview with Michael Hutchence.
That may have been the beginning – or an early instance – of that issue that plagues so many successful bands: the focus on the frontman, eclipsing other band members.
As the band and I travelled together to Canberra, I mused on the outfit saxophonist and guitarist Kirk Pengilly’s girlfriend Karen was wearing. It was white and flouncy with pastel trim. To me it looked like a cake decoration, perhaps a wedding cake. In the published article, I reported that reflection. I didn’t know Karen was an aspiring fashion designer, who succeeded in a career as an accessories designer. After publication, I heard Andrew felt my comment was disrespectful.
Michael didn’t have those inhibitions. Michael truly did not have a lot of inhibitions. The Canberra gig was wild; it took months for me to figure out how to remove the Bundaberg rum and coke stain from the drink spilled on my favourite top. It took hours for Michael to come down from his post-performance high, sufficient to consider an interview. By the time I turned the tape recorder on, we were both stripped naked, in our separate beds, in the hotel room we shared that night. For me as a rock writer, it was unprecedented, and frankly unexpected.
That’s when the question was asked: “How do you say ‘I love you!’, in Mandarin?”
Michael was in love. He was dating Michele Bennett, who had studied Mandarin at Melbourne University. Michele was exquisite and Michael was besotted. That did not preclude other flings. But I found it touching, and Michael and I did not fling.
I went round one time to the home Michael and Michele shared with New Zealand singer Jenny Morris, who became an INXS backing singer. The boys were ready to party. The girls were upstairs: Jenny singing, her voice melodic, honeyed and seductive; Michele was tweaking perfection, putting on her makeup.
“This can take hours,” Michael grimaced. He looked and sounded proud.
When INXS were recording their international breakthrough album Kick, I bumped into Michael on Williams Street, the arterial road leading up to Kings Cross. He invited me to hang out with him at the recording studio, Rhinoceros Studios in inner East Sydney, the hippest studios in town. Slack hours in a studio recording an album can hang heavy: an hour of studio downtime lasts longer than an hour of standard time. But I’m not sure that’s the reason Michael invited me. I’m not certain he was enjoying extended downtime with his fellow band members just at that point. They were there, except Andrew, but Michael mostly talked with me.
As I was leaving, I passed Andrew Farriss in the corridor.
“Hi!” I said brightly. “It’s Elly!”
“I know who you are,” growled Andrew, brushing past me.
What did Michael talk about, that day?
He talked about romance. He talked about sex. He was intrigued by the concept of designer baby sperm donations. He was interested in donating to a sperm bank – a sperm bank, I think hypothetical, that specialised in supplying sperm from donors with outstanding talents or attributes. He talked about who and what he found attractive. Princess Stephanie of Monaco. I couldn’t see it, but to Michael she was “Hot!”
He told me his theory of romance. Whether that was a theory of the moment or a life-long perspective, I cannot say. But Michael told me he saw romance as a masqued ball. The dancers are in costume. They circle each other, flirt, retreat, flirt some more. They engage in stylised games to hold each other’s interest. The first one who drops their mask, loses.
Game over.
Early in 1985, I met up with Michael in a Kings Cross night club and we talked poetry. I was preparing to self-publish a small book of poems. I told Michael I couldn’t sleep, pages of typeset proofs scrolled relentlessly through my mind. Michael had a talent, among his many talents, for appearing to listen intently while quite possibly screening out much that was said. He did ask questions about my poems. But the question, unexpected, that struck me was this: “Am I in there?”
In truth, several famous Oz rock identities were “in there”, in my poems. Michael was not.
It was too late to write a Michael poem, a poem for “my” Michael, to include in my collection. But I did write a poem for him, which was never published.
I called it Someone Famous, With Girl.
stops at the sound of
his name called by
a stranger – then
recalls
who she is and forgets
himself: it’s you
he smiles (he always means it)
he laughs (and feels abashed)
her eyes mirror his
she is his (they always are)
they are both young
veterans
they both can
remember
moments of belief, of the only kind
he’ll know
all strangers
his kind. He is
kind, or he could be, this singled out
outsider
he takes her
camera and asks
Am I in there?
Michael Hutchence with Michele Bennett (pic: Daily Mail UK)
Doc Neeson / The Angels 1981 in Adelaide Photo by Eric Algra
Note 14 December 2016: The ‘Five Dead Rock Stars’ pieces were written at a point where I was depressed. I’ve left them stand in their original versions, but they could be written very differently.
I never slept with Doc Neeson. Not that he wasn’t a charismatic man. Not that we didn’t share moments that felt intimate.
Doc is dead. Doc died today. It’s been months coming, but I cannot say the words. I hadn’t seen him since 1985. My memories of who Doc was are necessarily subjective, and partial to the point of being atomic fragments. But Doc made a powerful impact in my life. As I grow old – my vanity says, as I grow older – I realise the men I loved are the men I never slept with. Doc was, is, someone I loved.
We met in August 1979. I was enrolled at Monash University but spending all my time at the student radio station, locked in a DJ booth, smoking dope and spinning the first LP by The Police. I had fallen into doing radio interviews with touring bands, who included Talking Heads and Doctor Feelgood but also Australian acts like Cold Chisel and the Angels. The touring Australian bands stayed at the Diplomat Hotel in St Kilda and played gigs at St Kilda’s Crystal Ballroom. My Angels interview at the Diplomat was with Angels’ drummer Buzz Bidstrup (then calling himself “Buzz Throckman”), and, I think, Angels’ lead guitarist Rick Brewster and bassist Chris Bailey.
I don’t think Rick’s brother, Angels’ rhythm guitarist John Brewster, was there that day. I’d be confident Doc was not – but then, when and where did he tell me about his interest in the Black Theatre of Prague, its lighting effects and puppetry, and about his time at Flinders University, where, during Doc’s student days, my mother was a senior lecturer in Sociology?
Somewhere in a box in my parents’ garage there still exists the cassette of that interview. I played it to a man a few months later who commented quietly, “You sound scared.”
I showed up at the Diplomat lugging the biggest, clumsiest cassette recorder ever. It had two mini speakers – and by mini, I mean the size of wombats. Buzz and Rick were curious. “Are you setting up for feedback?” Rick asked. Buzz pulled a mini-cassette recorder out of his jeans’ pocket, the size of a cigarette pack: “Have you thought about getting one of these?”
Buzz tells me he remembers that interview. I don’t flatter myself when I say I’m not surprised.
Maybe I first met Doc backstage at a gig, maybe that night. I don’t remember at all. The first Angels’ gig I actually remember was at the Stage Door Tavern in Sydney, the first week after I moved from Melbourne to Sydney in September 1979. The bill was all bands booked through the hot agency, Dirty Pool: INXS, who’d moved to Sydney about that time – must have been one of their very first gigs; Matt Finish, whose lead singer and writer Matt Moffitt was a talent who achieved minor success but died young; Mi-Sex, a New Zealand band then enjoying a Top 40 hit (“Com-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-com-pu-ter GAMES!”); and, top of the bill, the Angels.
I’ve just realised all four of those bands’ frontmen are now dead.
The Angels at the time were the top live act in the country. They had broken through with their 1978 album Face To Face and were touring in support of their third LP, No Exit. My favourite Angels’ songs date from those albums: After The Rain, Take A Long Line, Straight Jacket, Love Takes Care, I Ain’t the One… everything on Face To Face. Their live show was extraordinary, with Doc’s legendary frenetic performance and its dark twin in Rick Brewster’s entirely impassive figure, nonchalantly tossing off riffs that rang in my head and rebounded in crystalline spirals. For me, Rick’s guitar was musically analogous to the castles of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria; I think of Rick’s playing as baroque on speed. Though speed was not his drug of choice. (In about 1986 I met Rick in the street and he claimed not to recognise me. We’d slept together a few times, so I was stung. “Must be the drugs,” I’d laughed. “What drugs?” replied Rick. “I don’t do drugs.”)
Doc’s intense kinetics and Rick’s cardboard cut-out guitarist were flooded and swathed and swamped and lashed by vertical bars of blue and white lighting, then red, then yellow I think too, constantly changing, owing much to experimental theatre and German Expressionist film. The Angels’ lighting man was a rangy, laconic introvert named Ray Hawkins, who had done a university thesis on ‘Sydney arts bohemians of the 1930s and ‘40s”. I asked him – backstage, at a Hitmen gig – what that had involved. “Talking to a lot of old artsy Sydney bohemians,” Ray deadpanned. Then he looked me in the eye and said, “They are terrific.”
I realise I am now the approaching the age Ray’s Sydney bohemians were when he interviewed them. The rock musicians I met in 1979 have reached that age, if they’ve lived this long.
The Stagedoor Tavern that first night was crowded so close it was hard to move. I couldn’t see the young Michael Hutchence perform, couldn’t see any of his INXS bandmates: the crowd obscured the stage. I could hear Michael, though. I never had the best ears of the rock critics based in Sydney at that time, or the “best” musical “taste”, but I knew at once Michael and INXS were special.
That night, the Angels ruled. After the show, I stood near the mixer desk and watched as band members filed out through the audience (why would they do that? Memory is nothing but questions!) I remember what I wore: black suede strappy stilettoes; a tight black pencil skirt, from Target; a black short sleeve shirt; beaten gold hoop earrings from the Philippines; a lot of black kohl around my eyes, and copper-red lipstick. When Rick Brewster walked towards where I stood I stared him straight in the eyes, without smiling, almost hostile, and he winked.
A month or three later and it was New Year’s Eve, with the Angels playing on the steps at the Sydney Opera House. A massive, roiling crowd completely filling the Opera House forecourts. I was getting man-handled, so I made my way to the tower where the mixing desk was perched and showed my homemade ID card where the masthead for rock magazine Roadrunner displayed my name as a contributing writer. The crew were kind and hoisted me up into their tower. As a result I had a perfect view when a champagne bottle hit Chris Bailey in the head and a beer can hit Doc Neeson. Chris died last year, from throat cancer. He was a gentle, courteous man with a lovely wry sense of humour.
I must have seen a score or more Angels gigs between New Year’s Eve 1980 and 1982, when Chris Bailey left the band. After Chris left, I never saw them live again. But I did see Doc on occasion socially. I have particularly fond memories of the night Doc tried to teach me to drive. I don’t know how we connected that night – did we coincide at the same Japanese restaurant? Saki was involved – but in the course of the evening we visited my Kings Cross flat, where Doc went straight for the fridge, which was empty, except for a lemon and some lipsticks.
“I see you don’t cook,” he correctly surmised.
“If you want to lose weight,” he continued, ‘There’s this product called spirulina. I stir a few teaspoons into a glass of water before I go onstage, to give me energy. It expands in your stomach and fills you up so you’re not hungry.”
I was thin and had no interest in losing weight. Doc was thin too. Whip thin. Whippet thin. I find it hard to take in photos of him as he looked in later life, during treatment for brain cancer, suffering side effects of the treatments, his hair still its trademark black. I am certain it must have been painful for Doc to see how he looked, too. He was a performer; he had an ego. More than that: Doc was a handsome man – a dynamic, flirtatious, sexual man.
I remember him as he looked that night: so tall; his bright eyes blue; his hair a natural black, and strong; his long dark eyelashes and his crazed, cunning Irish smile, that smile like sunshine on hillside, emerging from cloud.
That night, Doc tried to teach me to drive. I told him how my dad tried to teach me in an empty parking lot outside Safeway on a Sunday (no Sunday shopping in those days, so no cars). When I reversed, a large metal object – a part of the car – had dropped out of the undercarriage, leaving me and dad staring at each other, aghast. So Doc proposed teaching me himself. He had a beat-up car with manual gears and he’d show me how – in Kings Cross, Sydney’s nightclub quarter, on a chaotic, bustling Friday night. We were doing alright for about 100 metres, down Elizabeth Bay Road. We made it past the corner of Roslyn Street, almost made it to the Sebel Townhouse, home away from home for rock stars in Sydney. Outside the Sebel, there’s a hill. Okay – a bit of an incline. I pulled the hand-brake and it came away in my hand.
I will never forget the look on Doc’s face as I turned to him, holding the steering wheel with my right hand, the hand-brake loose in my left. I remember us giggling in the closed space of that small car, celebrating automotive malfunction on a night bright with the lights of Kings Cross.
The last time I saw Doc was in Kings Cross. It was 1985, just before I self-published a small book of poems, outside what was once the Plaza Hotel. We talked about writing, about my planned book. Doc told me George Bernard Shaw wrote a quota of 2500 words every morning. I was hungry. I don’t know how that came up in conversation but Doc produced a $20 note and insisted I take it. I didn’t want to. He insisted. He said he was commissioning me to write him a poem. He was wearing black stovepipe jeans. I was wearing loose black cotton ‘Chinese’ pants and a faded indigo short sleeve shirt. He smiled at me.
Last year, when Doc was sick and his friends were raising money for his treatment costs, I repaid that $20. Twenty dollars is nothing to repay Doc for how he contributed to my life, in that vivid time, when we were both young.
The poem? Not one of my best. But here it is, and it’s for Doc:
Cheap Poem, Winking
For B Neeson
As a shadow, she’s much bolder
than I – looms much larger
takes more risks, stretches out and
intrudes: she
ignores bolted gates, and enters
other people’s homes; has no fear
of anything concrete, anything private
anything closed. Unafraid
and irreverent, she touches
those I fear, and smothers
those I love
has no shame, no sense of place
reaches out: no restraint
In a mirror she’s much sharper
than myself – she’s much
lighter, more quick; so much more
the creature of light
being of colour
of angles, so much more
somebody’s dream, someone’s
image – a reflection, my opposite number
laughing back at me, wherever I
look: winking up
from whatever I make
I create
spotlit flirt, knowing
on paper
she’s more brilliant, so much braver
much more startling, more broad
for your dollar
(more a tease)
more alive, even disguised
even dismissed, even derided and
tossed off as a
cheap poem
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument (because I do love argument), that I write some short stories that pivot on actual incidents from my own life.
For example, tales from the 53 bus, the routemaster bus – along with the N53 and the 54 – that travels through south-east London to Trafalgar Square. The linking theme here would be race.
Or the curious incident in Fez, Morocco. Theme: state repression, terrorism and the clash of North African and Western cultures.
Or something about the poison of gossip, running like mercury through corridors in glamorous West End offices. I’m thinking of the First Emperor, in Ch’in, whose tomb – legend has it – is lethally protected by a moat of mercury.
Or something about a cat that died. Make that two cats. Maybe four. No cat death should go unremarked.
Maybe something about families where children’s names and pets’ names constantly get mixed up. Or perhaps it’s not a cat who died but instead a father.
Maybe something about disorientation and over-stimulation in a megametropolis? Being lost? Being scared?
Lots of places to start.
Second: how to change the POV. The protagonists might be someone else who witnessed or participated in those episodes. Someone actual or fictional. Or it might be me only older, or younger, than I was at that time. Or me as I might have been had my history then been other than it was.
Lots of places to go.
An image of a black cat crosses my mind. Heading somewhere I might follow … ?
Elly McDonald 
HUNGRY GHOSTS SUITE – Exercise towards short stories 4/3/14
Hungry Ghosts on the N53
It’s night
And this bus takes forever.
This is the endless bus
The one that travels everywhere.
The ghost bus.
Spectre people sit glum
Sunk in jackets
Flesh grey and loose
The air about them heavy
with the absence
of connection. No conversation.
This bus tours history
Traverses an empire
Conveys a common wealth
But inside all are worn
Too tired
Too hollow.
It’s too late
For the dead.
Subversion
Under an overhang
Where no one can see
No one is watching
You and me.
Tales of subversion
Resentment and pain
No one is watching
Nothing to gain.
Tear down a village
Put up a fraud
No one is watching
Maybe they’re bored.
Theme park Morocco
Fuchsia and blue
No one is watching
Me and you.
No one is watching
No one can see
They’ll come to take you
They’ll ignore me.
Grunts
The office is divided
by corridors: this side
that side
In the centre a common meeting ground
Reception
With its wall-size red logo
W for War
The foot soldiers tramp
through the common area
primed for hostilities
ready to do damage
and die. Metaphorically.
They know so little.
God
God sees the sparrow fall.
But does He care for cats?
ICU
The shadow puppet is practising for death.
It moves in jerks.
No voice.
It is diminished,
Its rictus face a memento mori.
It dances, stiffly, behind a screen.
Big City
It’s a laser beam battle
In the city centre
Spears of light thrusting forward
Flung backward
The angles are askew
The speed an assault
The sound all surrounding
the pavement in revolt.
I cannot find my way.
The light darts target me
Shattering what’s solid
Glaring through dark space
Spinning me off centre
Blaring blasting blinding
I cannot find my feet.