Gene Simmons. The sex tape.

This really has occured in the wrong year. It should have been in the year of the "Man Who Drove Too Fast For a Living Dies In Car Accident" and "Man Who Annoys Dangerous Animals For a Living Gets Nailed by Stingray" year.... But, nevertheless - the interwebs give you "Man Who Claims to Have Rooted Every Woman On Planet Earth Captured On Video In Average Sex Display."

Gene Simmons. Sex tape. 'Nuff said. Except for the fact he's suing to have it removed from the web. As they say... irony quietly collects its loose change from the bar and leaves via the side exit..

Although, there's rumour of a Ballarat-based edition of this kind of horseplay sourced from a very famous Ballarat music venue... more news at 11...

Married with skids

I've just been down to a modest little golf club at Rye to see my brother the Razzman get married to the gal we know as the Byron Princess... here's hope to all hairy metal drummers that they too can find a beautiful intelligent woman who'll forgive the terrible music they play in their bands and wed them till something shit we do part ... I myself made a marvellous speech crafted from the finest of song lyrics.. we started with Bryan Adams, passed though Tori Amos, Skunkhour, Rolling Stones, Ella Fitzgerald and the Beastie Boys, and ended with Europe - you getting the picture?

If you haven't been to Rye, imagine all the pointy-faced nasty white-people you've ever met and collect them in a place which once upon a time could be accurately subscribed as 'sleepy seaside town' - which now resembles 'suburban hellhole with a beach'.

The peoples of Doncaster, Bulleen, Balwyn, Warrandyte and Templestowe have colonised this place like some cancerous fifth column which still equates 'four wheel drive' to 'safety on the road' and 'money spent on add-ons to your Commodore/WRX' to 'sexual prowess'. Even better, drive up Boneo Road out back of Rosebud and see for yourself what the world would look like if we all were stockbroking money-sucking freaks obsessed with building temples to ourselves in which to crouch and complain that there's not much on telly... or better yet, villains in a James Bond film. It's fascinating. There's a secret underground of niceness there, holding out against the middle-aged suburban weekend holiday warriors jacked the house vales through the roof'... if you can break through their innate sense of 'fuck off, tourist' you can meet nice people.

Curiously, where there's a lot of fat white middle aged people collectively snarling at each other to get the fuck out the way of my serenity, there's not much culture. Which leads me to our dear old Ballarat.

While rumours of Def Leppelin playing at Kryal Castle continue to abound, what IS coming to town is the Monsters of Rock tour, sometime in May, we think.

Monsters of Rock? You mean, Kiss, Black Sabbath, Motley Crue and Guns n Roses? Are we talking about the biggest bands in the world? In our fair little vale? Kinda. It's the biggest bands in the world - a tribute.

All the best cover bands of Melbourne are taking it on tour - and coming to Ballarat, and I, for one, salute them. If only because I was forced to watch not just Wolfmother drag their scabby arses in and out of my radio and tv and then onto the hallowed stage of the Meredith Supernatural Ampitheatre, but Airbourne too - complete with the standard knob-licking compliant 'can I have half of that..and a t-shirt?' alleged music journalism that accompanied it.

Two bands who didn't just rape the legacies of the bands before they were long in the grave, they put a whole new twist on necrophiliac sodomisation. Wolfmother? Well, Sydney's always been a source of tryhard wankers with more money to spend on haircare. Warrnambool? You've got a lot to answer for. Not just Dave 'Holden means a lot to my bank account, please refer to the Bill Hicks Guide to Artistic Integrity' Hughes, but Airbourne, too. Pre-pumped and primed as the very rebirth of Oz Rock itself... these sad losers have faded like Bon Scott's cumstains...and were never anywhere near as potent. If I'm gonna get cover bands, give me the real deal. If I want someone to rip someone else's shit off and claim it as their own I'll go download some mashups.

And I like the crowds as well. Last time I turned out to see professional, dress-up cover bands it was at the home of tastless imitation of style, Crown Casino. To see all those 30 and 40-something nearly-balding heads party like it was 1989 - and the same, slutty chicks who worked the room back in the day of the Village Green and Hard'n'Fast do the same now, only now as roadkill-dressed-as-mutton-thinking-it-was-lamb, was pure gold.

I tried looking to the younger generations for some hope. In fact, it's just finished being O Week in Ballarat, and seeing all the uni students descend upon our fair educational institutions and apocalyptically party like it's the end of time rather than the start of their indexed to inflation HECS statements, really was something. For starters, the big gig was being held at 21 Arms. 21 Arms? The only underage venue where alcohol is legal? The venue where the private school kiddies get a little bit of public school rough? WTF? And as for the associated cultural events - the Iron Lung competition, the street party, the massive bangin' rave - what was there?
I'll tell you what. Karaoke.

Are we dealing with a whole generation of culturally retarded kids as a result of the Howard years? What's going to run out in Ballarat first - the water, or the nutritional goodness of seeing some decent live music onstage?

Beethoven was right.

Hello Fans,

I can't help noticing that despite my impassioned and articulate plea to end all of this "Music Industry" nonsense, the aural debacle still continuos, like the first rabbit to survive myxo, hopping along with it's laboured breath, destroyed nervous system and bloodshot orbs dangling from it's thoughtless furred head (Yes, Cosmic Psychos, I am talking to you).
In fact the only thing keeping life in it's zombified carcass is the sad truth that it's too stupid to die.

Indeed, I can't help but notice that some "people" are still encouraging this crank wankery, (much in the same way the British stuffed as much opium up the heathen Chinee's arsehole as they could ram in with a gunboat, just so they could sit down and have a quiet cuppa after a hard day of flogging the darkies.)

Case example- Have you ever sat down to enjoy a delightful slice of Jaffa Cake and a spot of caffeine without being assaulted by some dreadful ear stench wafting from the speakers?
Or gone on a date with someone who you think is a bit of allright and not had to endure Missy "Muffdivin''" Higgins moaning her imperceptible tits off about how it's all gone wrong before she turned 22? (My take on Missy's life- You are a dull corporate whore dressed up as the Casey Chambers we had to have. All you prove is Australians hate themselves . If you were on fire, I'd stagger full bladder up the road, leaking from the nostrils and relieve myself far enough away that you couldn't even roll in the damp patch. You are the worst thing to happen to music since the Synthesiser. Now fuck off).
Yet, everywhere one turns, there is the plaintive caterwaul of the Higgins, ruining my fuckin day and making me want to kill and kill again.

Was there a referendum that said "O.k. Who votes we get rid of silence and conversation? Who votes we stuff gobs of aural shit in your brain everywhere you go, at all times of the day, forever, until you die?".
If there was, my apologies. Democracy is the best. Just look at the Top 40 and tell me I'm wrong.

Or fuckin' John Butler. There is more fresh young talent in the fresh laid turd that popped out of some coma patient's arse this morning than in that self aggrandising, simpering luddite, with his beady fuckin rat eyes and his over wrought, over played and over here guitar onanisms.
Truly, I have heard rats with a belly full of plaster skitter to death with more groove than the ol' JB's sterile toons.
If 60's and 70's black soul was a funky, stinky plate of the French dairy horn, JB is about as funky as a Kraft single.
And frankly, that's being generous, because his his ditties are far more like the wrapping than the cheese.

I'll say it once and I'll say it again.
You take the sadness out of blues music and it's just some stupid cunt boring everyone shitless with the same three fuckin chords.
It's nothing but the Tupperware of music, dull unfeeling platitudes for people who like the idea of dirt, but don't really want to get dirty.
Truly, this jex headed smugmobile needs a beating. Or cancer. Or both.

But lets not forget those four chord personifiers of bland, proving you can actually take the music out of music without anyone really noticing, The Waifs.
Good God. (which simply isn't possible with existence if theses three inbred, nasal toned arsefuckers).
I have had the terrible misfortune of hearing many bands who actually possessed the wretched curse of being really good musicians and having something interesting to say.
Needless to say they all lie dead and buried twenty miles out into Bass Straight.
Yet here come a bunch of dick twiddlin' sand-gropers, whose only claim to fame is that they can make perfectly good air sound like cheap NQR Tofu and have enough contempt for humanity to do it again and again and again.
Is it because they are any good? Noooooooo! Heaven forfend...it's just that their brand of anti-music can be put on anywhere and be virtually ignored if you really try hard enough.
I believe their main claim to fame is that they have managed to turn Australian music into a kind of jingoistic retelling of something that never happened, so people who have no fuckin lives can pretend they've been somewhere that doesn't exist.
May you all contract brain herpes, you bastards.

What's more you can't escape it.
Indeed if it's not the infernal fweep squeaking of some googlehead who pushed the 'Electro" button on it's new Ipoodle or the earnest meeping of some fairy breathed prongoloid who learnt three chords and then got the fat girl in year nine to squeak out something moronically accompanying on a cello/violin/harp/accordian/pissflap or some albino inner city pants fondler playing the amplifier in a band of dribble dicked clit snorters, (whose raspy roars are yet to match up with their freshly descended testicles), or some bunch of "Love the World" faux-funk misrelites singing some upbeat dirge about how we should all get along as long as we never play anything but the first four bars of anything that well meaning Freddo Frog of Peace, Bob Marley, wrote, or some angry bunch of suburban dudes who looked up "Angst" on Wikipedia while Mum ironed their false eyelashes and took out their poor results for a Home Economics exam out on a op shop keyboard or ,worse yet, a bunch of pill brained, well meaning, neuvo guano fashion dandies heaving their vintage sound about like a fat Albanian prostitute who'd just been reamed in Sydney.

You just can't get away from it.
Sooky stranglings in Super market. Coma inducing croons in the cafe. Pubescent puerility in the Pub.

But lets not forget that the punishment doesn't stop there. Oh heavens no.....
You can now buy iArsehole, which is a small spiky device bunged up the clack so you never have to endure a private thought again without the frothy fanfares of modern life.
Rhumba while you root. Soundscapes while you sleep.
Every moment of your life given a B Grade soundtrack by a bunch of people you'd punch in the face if you had to sit next to them on the bus.

It's worse than heroin, AIDS, Global warming, Bird Flu and a constant itching ring combined. True dinks.

My advice is this.
Turns off your bloody thing and see how long you can stand the gentle creakings of your own skull.
Sit in silence for a couple of minutes and just see how long it takes you to run screaming over to the quadraphonic surround sound for another hit of hits.
Go for a drive and don't listen to the anal mutterings of any sort of radio. (They're all terrible anyway.)
Go find a place that has no facility for equalisation and have a bloody good groove to fuck all and just see how long you can stand it before you scream home with your car stereo on full blast, attempting to tie yourself off with your fucking iPod, until you can get home and roll around naked in your C.d.'s, you filthy fucking helpless pitiful music junkie, you.

Until next time,

Cheerio!

Mick "Deaf is the new Black" Dog.

Hello Fans,

I've just been stimulated by Dr. Le Skip's tremendous news that all you have to do in order to be famous in this country is to fall over at the tennis and show your undies (albeit 3000 times, if your undies are some electro pop ditty out on Kooyong Records) and the questionable closing of various venues about town,

Also let me make some musings on the whole idea of "Original music" (conditions apply- original is used here like one says "Original New Cornetto" , which makes it virtually the same as the Old Vanilla Drumstick which isn't too far from Ancient Ice Cream Scoops in a cone, which the Romans invented after they stole it from the Chinese.)
I put it to you (Mr, Speaker) that genuinely original music in original venues is still as frightening to the general populace as other such outlandish concepts like "getting along with brown people" or "putting on a condom".

If music were say, a form on combustion engine, Australia would still be standing around a pile of Redgum logs (or unsold albums) feeding then into the hotbox, until the pressure gauge allowed the single thumping cylinder of entertainment to drive some sort of hand carved flywheel, so we could all watch the wheels on the DJ go round and round.

I'm amazed that although the calendar, that was gleefully included in my last order of Cantonese take away, indicates that it's 2007 (although it is in Cantonese so it may by the Year of Half Past Grapefruit as I've been decoding important dates by cross referencing the symbols on electrical appliance warnings) that the following fundamental things still apply (as time goes by .....scooby doo...mellifluous croon etc) as if we were all still getting about on the Electric Trolley in Fedora hats.

1) Bands still exist.
Why? Really? Listen to some sort of listening device....every possible combination of guitar/drum/bass/keyboard/sousaphone has been done. No...this time I mean it....and that stuff about never drinking again..anyway...it's over. Finito. Done. The whole idea of getting anything you'd want to waste your limited goddamn time on Earth out of this wretched combo of strummable horror is up there with discovering alien life forms with four boobs and sexual organs that taste like caramel fudge.
It's over Goddammit. When you invent a fuckin time machine, go back and watch Dawn Fraser at Redding. But It's time to give this outdated crap the heave ho. (Thats not a rap reference either).

2) Bands Venues still exist
What? Huh? Why don't you just find a sympathetic Brazilian surgeon to turn your eyeballs around in your skull so you can look backwards forever? It would be a lot less loud and that way you'd be spared the scarring revelation that the only thing scary about Scary Spice these days is how much she looks like a heart broken, bisexual librarian.
Band venues, where a bunch a twitter-pated dingbats can parade around in tight trousers, while making Lion Nathan another billion dollars, getting unseemly pregnant amidst the Jager hurling chaos and chanting "Look at me! I'm part of a stupid idea in the first place!" really should be culled with the same emotionless duty that can only be matched with a Federal Cane Toad eradication virus.
Face it. The charming crocodiles of real expression are floating belly up our brains.
Close these filthy arm pits of poison and see if any body who isn't pilled out of their multiple skulls and who isn't stupid enough to descend into these crap holes, gives a flying fruit bat about your (conditions apply) music.

3) People still want to be in bands.
Come again? Really? Take your average band. Which is all of them really. Lets look at what actually goes on. First - Organise a group of organic photocopiers steal someone else's ideas under the guilt cleansing mantra that they stole it from someone else and that, in fact ,you can't steal from God, who invented it in the first place, in case he doesn't exist, in which case shut up and hand me my 67 Korean Telebucker that I bought on Ebay with the money Nan left me when she joined that cult in Port Moresby. (I'm sure we're all tired of hearing that old excuse).
Next- Lets pretend we are doing something useful and we matter. Okey dokey. I'm now going to write a song about how I had a girl, that met when she threw up on me, while my 15 yr. old cousin Ronaldo was trying to make a joint out of some leaf he stole from the neighbours stash mixed with pocket lint to make what He calls the Corduroy caboodle, (which as we all know is a scourge and a threat to clean pants everywhere. Not just your big cities. In the country as well.)
Now, with some sort of colored-in pencil case education in some disinterested state school, a masterpiece of modern literature will probably emerge (like a glistening ball of brain shit) like this-

Oooooh! My pants.
I wanna dance
Never agian (sic) ((fully sic))
I don't wanna
Love again
Na...oooooooh!
Are gunna eat that?
Who cares?
Not me
My head hurts.
Ooooooh!
Is there any beer left?
Shit.
I hate you.
You hate me.
Hate hate hate...
Love love love
Mum said clean up your room
But I said I wanna rock.

(Oooooh and writhe nervously to chorus)

Chorus
I hate being in love with you
I love being in hate with us
Being in love hate with someone
Was like sitting up the back of the bus (Cool!)

(Strum music thing wildly. Make face like you've swallowed your contact lenses. Look down at floor as if twiddling your digits for 45 minutes was more effort that completing the Paris to Dakar race on a flat tyred unicycle. Congratulate yourself on being a beam of social consciousness. See if there is anything left in the rider. Curse other band members.)

Ok.
Now lets look at the outcome of such frippertronics.
Have cancer been cured? (No, but we made the bald kiddies smile. We are sonic pethadine)
Has the indignity suffered by elderly citizens been rectified? (Old? I'll never get old. I'll keep on Rockin! Where's my Ventolin?....)
Will anyone give a shit? (No. But why do you always need one during the second set?).
Will it take a small army of promoters, publicists, photographers, pregnant partners willing to go the celebrity scrape, Dutch fill in bassists, hack journo's, bald venue owners, star eyed she-mongoloids and cretinous drug fuelled punters to make anybody believe our cacophonic 120db clang fest is anything more than a bunch of deficient, deluded and desperate dickheads, having failed at every other pursuit that required the ability to walk and talk at the same time who are now joining the endless cue of bat brained deafmongers who huddle under the skirts of "Rawk", are IN FACT the new voice of a generation that is sick of talking about it anyway? (Short answer- Yes. Long answer- You betcha).

So.
I'm glad that finally all of this nonsense is going the way of the Triple Necked Turkey.
Hopefully, something much more diverse and immediate will emerge. Maybe people will start playing music in Gardens, Hospitals, Schools, Bus shelters etc.
Maybe the chord will be thrown away. maybe people will start playing something odd, unpredictable and strangely refreshing.
Maybe punters will have to deal the same conflicting emotions that one gets when your new lover is giving you a reach around while poking ice up your arse and that will make then not only scream that the Emperor has no clothes, but his dress sense was always terrible.

Maybe new instruments with brave and exciting sounds in brave new exciting spaces will spring up and the notion of Twin Tower Rock God will be given a good old Taliban up the tailpipe.
Lets fuckn hope so. I'm bored shitless with all of this French polished turdige.

Til next time.

Cheerio!

Mick (The Curmudgeon of Fudge) Dog.

Regrets? I've had a stew

we were talking about 23rd elvis which is just as well as no one else was. we have a gig at the idgaff bar on the 29th of March, well, that's the idea at this stage and as all of you in the topsy turvy world of scum independence know these things can change with the blink of a "Can't make it I'm washing my neck". Wow this is fun isn't it? Imagine the possibilities? Why they're opening up in technicolor even as I type, like one who says "Have they no wrists?" Marvelous stuff. The chances of deep late night regret that once put on record, can never be taken away, are endless! 23rd of Elvis will be on tour during April with SilverFinger, though they probably aren't aware of this. If you have a deep and close personal relationship with any of "ver lads " from the finger please dont tell them as we've been saving it as a surprise! Much like the feeling when you're sure it's just a scratch til you put your hand to you're head and look in horror at the river of blood running down your elbow. "Get your dirty hands off my filthy arms" A lesson in discretion for us all. Happy Days.

A little song we couldn't play on the radio

Just tried watching 20 seconds of the Liberal Party doco on ABC TV... By that, I mean the How We Were Dumped from Office By the Aussie Electorate and Are Now Trying to Blame It On the Guy Who's Not Here For the Racist Scumsucking Lying Arseholes We Were for Ten Years show. I got a better idea... a public service announcement from Devil's Cabaret - and I'm sending it out to that racist dickhead at Recovery Records on Sturt Street, too...

Tomorrow the Show With No Name is back on the air... and after the last few weeks of pounding Iron Maiden tributes, we might even go a tad low-key and summery... what with all this hot weather and stuff. Now I just gotta think up some songs for a stinkin hot summer's day... I'm thinking of an old time number by The Cramps to start with...

How long can Karova survive?

There's a story about a man who runs most of the pubs in this town, and of an evil franchise who've just arrived... and of one podgy rockdog stalwart who stuck it out.

Stuck it out like an Anzac on the shores of Turkey, forever raising the middle digit, rigid and stiff...

Stuck it out in the pursuit of honest rock and roll, friendly barkeepers and a cold beer in a world of push-button plasma-screen wank videos with a dancebeat, fuelled by Bacardi breezers and underage drinkers high on faux-eccies and a sense of doing something naughty.

Despite being threatened, cajoled and flat-out outsold by the Forces of Bland, our man continued to book original bands and didn't screw the punters for their dough. That period has ended, and he's now sitting somewhere quiet with a book, enjoying this thing some people call 'daytime'.

Does life go on as usual at Karova? The quote about the new owner is that he wandered up to the bar and said "I've had a listen to that Triple J... some of it's not bad."

Be afraid... the Pseudo Echo tribute bands and Get Your Tits Out Tuesdays promotions are surely not far away...