Manifesto

..version,
which is to music what the hydrogen bomb is to a fart.
I can understand completely that to discover me sitting on a stool in the corner
of a café with a guitar playing a bunch of never before heard songs can
be a confronting or even annoying experience if not seen and heard in some sort
of context, hence the booklets.
Paul Hester used to tell us on our gentlemen’s evenings that the Crowdies
were perceived as incredibly daring by the American bands they toured with because
they arrived on stage each night with just the vaguest idea of how things were
going to proceed. See The Eagles in concert a few times and you’ll soon
realise their show is note for note and word for word the same for every performance,
whereas those wild colonial boys let their collective mood and the mood of the
audience play a large part in shaping their show.
Let’s face it, Americans cannot tolerate the possibility of failure and
it’s always been an innate philosophy of mine to have as much of our performance
unprescribed as possible, leaving the potential for failure or success to the
spur of the moment and circumstance. There’s not much else about my music
that can be described as rock ‘n’ roll except for that when you
think about it. The need for spontaneity applies particularly to the between-song
rambles. Whereas I can tolerate the bulk of the songs being more-or-less the
same night after night, I couldn’t abide being restricted to a script
for the chatty bits.
This doesn’t mean that I won’t eventually slip into habitual patterns,
but I’m still experimenting at this stage, hence the odd blemish when
it comes to actually rendering the song I’ve been chatting about.

The other night I saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln in company with
Dick and Mary. We saw it at the Eastland complex and there could’ve
been a dozen or so mature-age movie goers in the theatre with us. The film
was exactly as I expected so I was neither overjoyed nor disappointed, but
I have reservations about the central performance of Daniel Day Lewis, who
was ‘acting’ out of his socks. If I was asked I would say that
he was the guy pretending to be very tall (now, that’s acting!)
and who was affecting the funny voice. Meryl Streep used to worry me the same
way. There are a few movies I can remember that I might’ve otherwise
enjoyed had she not single-handedly ruined them with her precious ‘acting’.
That all changed for me with, of all things, the musical Mamma Mia
and, in the last movie I saw her, The Iron Lady, her impersonation
of Maggie Thatcher was just scarily good.
No matter. I learned a bit about a period of American history that I knew
bugger-all about. I wondered if the portrait of Mrs Lincoln had any basis
in historical fact, but otherwise it appeared to be, well, unhysterical, and
you can’t ask for too much more from the Land of the Free.
I also wondered what epic movie Australia might make from our political history.
The answer, as always, is a remake of Ned Kelly.