The News

..relations add up to it being a non-starter. The one thing that’s
obvious from an Australian perspective is that the cartoon’s overtly
and undeniably racist.
Given that, I found it interesting that the debate in The Press is centred
on whether the cartoons are actually racist or not,
which shows that context is playing a large part in the debate. The extreme
sensitivity on display here in Melbourne over the now famous ‘ape’
comment from a teenager at a footy match (of course!), sounds like a complete
over-reaction by contrast. It would’ve been quite different if she’d
said ‘black ape’ but as far as I know she didn’t. Rugby
League’s Greg Inglis was called a ‘black cunt’ by a fellow
player and the issue was more with the ‘black’ than the ‘cunt’.

It’s also possible that the ‘ape’ characterisation might’ve
been perceived differently in the context of Andrew Symonds’ monkey
taunts in India back in 2007, but nobody’s made that connection as far
as I’m aware. Mind you, at the time I thought that Symonds’ went
out of his way to look like a monkey (or a scary clown) with his dreads and
his unshaven face and the zinc cream characteristically smeared round his
mouth.
I don’t know if the monkey chant was meant as an ethnic slur or not,
but he obviously took it that way, as did Adam Goodes with the ape remark,
which I suppose is the point. Enough is enough. As Eddie Everywhere has discovered,
we’ll all just have to be more careful about dropping casually racist
remarks in mixed company if only because the racism issue’s plainly
got out of hand.

I recently announced that we’re recording the third as yet unnamed
blues album in the series by Spectrum Plays the Blues, the first two (Spill
and No Thinking) now being out of print but available as downloads
through CD Baby (on the CDs
page). We’ve actually recorded about nine tracks of blues covers
at Pete Dacy’s Secret Sound Studio and as I’ve recently upgraded
my Mt Waverley studio I’m looking forward to doing some sessions at
home with the other guys, but the three bluesy songs I’ve written to
pad out the album remain resolutely uncompleted. And I’m still dithering.
On the carrot side you would imagine that fellow sexagenarian Russell Morris’
recent success in the blues field with his Sharkmouth
album, which Adam has been pointedly playing at Choclatte for the last week,
should be some sort of an incentive, but it’s not enough. On the stick
side the unmissable fact that our Boomer contemporaries in the music field
are dropping off the twig at an accelerating rate should also be incentive
enough, but although shaken, I remain unstirred.
Anyway, the selection of covers we’ve recorded so far represents the
balance of songs that we’ve been playing on stage plus a couple we worked
up in the studio that we might just as easily’ve been playing over the
intervening years.
Until I hear them again I can’t tell if all of them are going to make
the cut, but to give you some idea we’ll be considering the following
songs: the long-established crowd fave Fleetwood Mac surf instrumental Albatross
and Santo & Johnny’s Sleepwalk, Cream’s Strange
Brew (a live version of which you can see on YouTube),
the John Mayall pairing of I’m Your Witchdoctor (which was
Chants R&B’s posthumous release back in 1966) and Brod Smith’s
fave Life is Just a Slow Train Crawling up a Hill, Mel Tormé’s
Comin’ Home Baby (merged with WHY’s instrumental Bahrain)
and more.
We have so much fun playing the blues repertoire on stage that we recorded
them live in the studio over a couple of afternoons with the intention of
capturing the essence of the live performance. The unfinished nature of the
remaining originals is entirely due to my procrastinating, a personal failing
that’s been mentioned in a previous P&W or two. I should write a
song about it – The Procrastination Blues. Only thing is that,
of course, it’ll never happen..