On Thursday 12 November 2015 at 2.30am, the Wattle Grove branch of Michel’s Patisserie had the quickest reno it’s ever likely to get.
And probably without the requisite planning approvals from Liverpool Council.
You can read all about it elsewhere, and probably watch some news footage too, including the young Channel Nine reporter and her cameraman who looked like a hipster who’d escaped from Rozelle, and was wielding for network television news transmittal (I ship you not) a Go Pro.
Huzzah for technology.
Here are a few pictures of the devastation, plus some video courtesy of Overheard Productions WTAF and Overheard FM. Reporting for all channels, here’s Phillip Mahkawfee-Khup.
Your reporter, Phillip Mahkawfee-Khup, has more.
Pictures are being added but this is for the 11pm news, so cut it, print it.
The Volunteer Party is like a wondrous market selling ice cream and fruit dessert in tall glasses: a trifle Bazaar
As the sun set slowly over Kilcoy, we bade farewell to the last performance at Woodford Folk Festival as Fantuzzi reggaed the crowd into a fervour.
Actually, the sun was long gone by the time Fantuzzi closed out proceedings. And as they finished their last number, the vollys were just getting going and took responsibility for their own entertainment.
I was professionally torn. My obligations were long since dispensed with. I wanted to capture some vision of the band, but……….
Many festival survival guides are out there on the world wide weird, and sparticularly in the blogosphere. (Note: blogger roughly translates as, “I coulda been a journalist, but couldn’t be arsed to do a 3+ year degree in it.” WFJ Quinn, BAComms – not a journalist.)
So I don’t intend to replicate, duplicate, spiflicate or update those tomes of great wisdom, but I do want to share a few insights into preventative healthification gathered over many, many years spent curled up in tents and the backs of cars in far flung places.
Have you ever gone to a festival or been on the road and woken up one morning feeling like a rather large, furry toad has crawled into your larynx and is now doing early morning Zumba on your tonsils?
Or have you started heading into that long night when you really want to sit around the campfire singing 36-verse ye olde Englishe folke songse til the dawn breaks, but find you’ve started a coughing fit that might wake the dead? And you envisage joining the souls of the dearly departed in the not too distant future? 💀☠👻
The dirty little secret is something that one of my many, many former employers (at a medical Not For Profit/Public Beneficial Institution) will tell you about in great depth and detail under the banner of ‘antibiotic resistance’:
Some lurgies exist that you just can’t duck because they’re viral, and the best you can do is to pump up your general levels of healthiness and wellbeing, and look after your immune system.
The bad news on that score for folkies is that to best keep your system in good health, you should:
* avoid coffee
* avoid or limit alcohol intake
* avoid fatty, salty, sugary foods
* get lots of sleep
* don’t stay out at night in the cool air ingesting campfire ash
* don’t strain your vocal folds
* don’t sleep on uncomfortable, unsupportive mattresses or straight onto the ground
* and other stuff your mum told you, and
* always wear clean underwear.
I overheard a man on Manly Wharf beach one afternoon and his story became one of the most compelling interviews.
Let’s get there, unlike the Manly Ferry which darts out of Circular Quay and pretty much makes a beeline for Cabbage Tree Bay.
Let’s take a slightly circuitous root.
I grew up in the mid sixties and seventies with something of a hefty disdain for Manly.
It was a disdain maintained from a distance of about 366kms away in Canberra, and it was all based on the eternal battle between the mauve of the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles (‘Silvertails’) and the Black and White of my beloved Western Suburbs Magpies (‘Fibros’). Rugby League, for the uninitiated.
My family hailed from the west: Parramatta, Harris Park, Guildford and Baulkham Hills. My anti-Manly bias was born of those silly tribal rivalries that sound so pointless in smaller towns like Canberra where I have never been able to take the north vs south thing seriously.
“We’re not that [farnarkeling] big!”
Cliff Notes: I’d never spent much time there, and while visiting friends in Fairlight and on other trips, I was looking for reasons to like the area.
Yes, we’ve fast-forwarded to 2013, and for some reason one day, I’d gone across the briney foam from Circular Quay to Manly Wharf and drifted up and down the Corso and around the back lanes and alleys.
And fell completely and totally and hopelessly in love with the place.
When you get just a little bit out of the centre of Manly, things get a little beige, bland and neo-conservative. But right in the middle of town, it’s like a little melting pot, albeit a flashier more glamorous pot than some other localities that host meetings of many cultures within the scope of what is loosely termed ‘Greater Sydney’.
Me, I love them all.
Walk from Punchbowl train station to the Boys High School (which I did when I first moved to Sydney in March 2013, to interview the assistant principal) and you see pretty much no white faces, hear no Australian spoken, and smell smells that don’t feature in, say, the main street of Miranda.
Take a walk along Forest Road in Hurstville CBD and to have a conversation or transact some business, a working knowledge of Mandarin, Cantonese or Korean would serve you well.
Hang out around various parts of Liverpool and a little Italian will get you a long way.
I know a little Italian. His name’s Marco and he’s a retired jockey.
(Dips the hat towards the film ‘Top Secret’ for that gag. I’m here all week, tip your wait staff, try the risotto.)
(This one is going to be a work in progress while I’m progressing other works.)
Over roughly ten years mucking around with music, MC-ing, radio, print, a little light advocacy and jumping around selling merch for people I like, The BordererS have been a real constant.
They have a powerful gift of music and it just lights a little fire in my heart, soul, spleen and it spreads to the balls of my feet.
And in a short space of time, Jim Paterson and I have discussed some matters of no scant import.
(No scant importance? No Scant Imports are located in Glasgow and do wholesale homewares and fashions from the Netherlands and selected Scandinavian and Baltic countries.)
On Wednesday this week, we were chatting about religion in the context of our respective upbringings, the Phillips Hughes funeral and memorial services, and where we ourselves had gotten to, as middle-aged men o’ the world.
Bill: “Do you know which song of yours resonates with me the most right at this very moment right now, Jim?”
“Erm, is it, ‘Will You Love Me When I’m Fat, Bald and Ugly?‘”
Not quite, but well played. Bloody Scots! They’re ready with a zinger, as the PR man said to Colonel Sanders.
It was Monday morning and I was walking to the Bulli train station in the light drizzle, a damp swag slung o’er the shoulder, a song in my heart and a tune in my pancreas. And as is my wont on a post-festival morn, I was ruminating on the music and song-filled days just passed when it suddenly struck me.
Something had been missing. Something had not been there. There had been a yawning chasm, a gaping void.
I couldn’t recall one single mobile phone sounding in a concert venue.
Not one loud blast of ‘Who Let The Dogs Out’ at an inopportune time.
No sudden fanfare of Morris Dancing’s greatest hit in inglorious polymorphic tones.
And while others may have suffered in the auditory department from SMS Alertsville, I could not recall one chirp, beep or apocryphal whistling tone* to announce an incoming text message.
(* I’m a liberal with a small ‘l’, but the creation and use of this whistling alert sound for text messages is, in my book, justification enough for the re-introduction of capital punishment. Especially on Sydney trains.) Continue reading →
A Punter’s Perspective: Random observations on the wide, weird world of folk from the side of the stage
No Such Things As Mistakes Part I
First published in Trad and Now magazine, March 2014
As has been the case from time to time in the seven years plus of A Punter’s Perspective, ’tis the night before deadline and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a half-decent idea for a folk music magazine article.
Realising my dilemma on the train to work today, I turned to the world’s font of most knowledge (and funny cat videos): Twitter. And I asked publicly to all, and pointedly to three or four music bloggers, what might a good topic be.
Image courtesy of The Dutch Guy
The answer came from a former radio presenter now blogger/vlogger (a kindred spirit, then) from the Netherlands who goes by the title of ‘The Dutch Guy’ (@DutchGuyOnAir), and he suggested:
“How about talking about some mistakes indie artists might make?”
By curious coincidence, this is a topic I’d considered before and only pulled back from it at the risk of causing offence.
Causing offence is a service I do occassionally provide — usually unintentionally.
I’ve put enough noses out of joint in the music world in the past nine years by commission, omission, or at the very least, blind stupidity, and have no need to add to that tally by more inadvertent misadventure.
I often say that I can have my intelligence insulted without willfully watching certain TV programs or listening to certain radio stations. (And that I didn’t mention them by name is at least a sign that I’m learning — slowly.)
Therefore, some disclaimers.
I am totally in awe of musicians, artists and singer-songwriters.
The concept of playing a three to 20-stringed instrument (or one you blow, slap, or pump) while singing and possibly dancing (or at least a little light duck-walking), and then doing that from 20 minutes at a time, for up to three or four hours, leaves me absolutely breathless.
Ann Vriend: A Series of (Un)Fortunate Events — On Tour In Europe
Ann Vriend at The Basement in Sydney, March 2013 with Ted E. Quinn of Overheard Productions (chauffeur, cook, minder and police liaison)
Ann Vriend’s Tour Mishaps #3663 or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love BBC News In The Airport Hotel
Ann Vriend is at it again: touring relentlessly and sharing her sweet music, sumptuous lyrics and those wonderful ivories and keys in far flung locales. And she’s also up to her other signature move: having wonderfully Tati-like, British 70s comedy slapstick challenges, and farcical misadventures.
The ones that you can laugh about and blog about afterwards or during, but at the time they can be massively distressing and painful and expensive and inducing of tears of pain, tears of rage.
But with the crunchy comes the smooth. And Ann found that a rather stormy set of clouds did indeed have a silver lining.
1993: One Year Into My Life On Stage(s), A Monster Is Born!
In 1992 I was press-ganged, as organically-chosen head of the social club of my workplace, and the person most likely, to present a charity trivia quiz for a couple of hundred people.
That night in mid-September 1992 when I picked up a microphone for the first time properly — the Kraken awake’d.
Bill Quinn died that night and Billy Quinn awoke.
Some months later, needing a gag for our follow-up, I wrote to two likely lads who were then plying their trade on Triple J, formerly 2JJ or 2 Double J.
I wrote my letter, forgot about it and life continued. Six days before the 1993 quiz, I came rolling in, rolling in, rolling rolling, as I came rolling in [drunk] and my long-suffering then wife said a package had arrived and was in the hall.
Yeah, I did a few cartwheels and dive rolls that night. Therein was the tape with this on which I later edited to remove references to the selected charity (The Smith Family) so I could re-use it to get utility for many other charities, not for profits and 21 years later…. I think I need to book a certain venue for a date in September.
Overheard Productions 