Two words

..subject
to the fashions of the day and it’s only the occasional performer who
manages to transcend fashion. Dutch’s pithy advice to Geoff Achison to
‘play what you know’ is all you really need to know, but Dutch’s
bigger-than-life personality surely played a part in his becoming the quintessential
expression of Aussie blues. It’s a lesson hard learnt by some that you
need more than just musical ability to succeed as a musical performer or entertainer.
And, just for the record, for all its superficial camaraderie and loving image,
the music ‘business’ is just as fraught with jealousy and resentment
as any other of the art forms – perhaps even more-so.+
Speaking of bygone eras, my song was honoured in the retelling recently on the
Adam Hills’ In Gordon St Tonight show. A friend e-mailed that
I must have been thrilled with such a terrific interpretation, to which I responded
I thought it a little ‘formless’, (an opinion revised on second
hearing incidentally). He urged me to ‘get with the program’ and
that ‘formless is the new form’ which instantly made me feel ancient
and quite redundant. I have to confess that I don’t make much of an effort
to stay in touch with the current trends in pop music, although I occasionally
dip into the MTV-style channels only to find that most of the time I’m
visually and aurally repelled after a few minutes.
I’ve always found it difficult to assess Spectrum’s music in whatever
contemporary context we find ourselves and so tend to dismiss it as an irrelevant
exercise – it’s not as though it’s a consistent milieu anyway. Our
EPs have been criticised for having no coherent direction, which is one of the
reasons I chose the EP format in the first place. That doesn’t mean the
songs have nothing to say, it simply means that I have diverse tastes and impulses
and I expect that most of our listeners are of a similar mind-set and can cope
with a bit of diversity
Speaking of EPs, I’ve let it slip that the third in the Breathing
Space series is on the cusp of completion. What’s holding it up are
a couple of late entries that are battling for inclusion, which could threaten
both the EP definition and the launch deadline – that’s if we had
one.
Once I’m happy with the recordings I’ll assess their suitability
for the EP, but I’m going to enter them in the latest APRA song contest
in the meantime. One of them is the song I wrote specifically for the sadly
under-subscribed Christchurch Quake Relief Concert. I wasn’t asked to
write a song mind you, but I regarded it a commission nevertheless and I was
happy enough to perform the song in public for the first time at the concert,
albeit to only three people and the stage crew.
It’s called OMG and it’s by way of a protest song to God
on behalf of the put-upon people of Christchurch. The music is very much in
the protest idiom and the lyric is very protesty also, verging on whiney. I’ve
taken a hypothetical position in addressing it to God, because, as you know,
I’ll profess to being an atheist to anybody that asks the question.
In the course of writing the song I was compelled to reconsider my views on
God, or the lack of Him, and so I was delighted to hear an edition of Radio
National’s The
Philosopher’s Zone last week and to be introduced to the Scottish
philosopher, David Hume, whose 300th anniversary it is this year.*
I’m always looking for a good argument from believers as to why they think
God exists and so it’s odd that the most convincing argument of that possibility
comes from a long dead philosopher who was himself reputed to be an atheist,
a claim he strongly denied. Hume’s position as a philosophical empiricist
was that, while there’s no evidence there is a God, equally there’s
no proof there isn’t. I’ve always looked at it from the one perspective
and it’s laughable I hadn’t thought of just turning the argument
around, although I understand why a believer wouldn’t trot out this argument
as a matter of course – it could sound utterly lame. (‘You can’t
prove God exists.’ ‘You can’t prove He doesn’t –
nyah!’)
Anyway, for some reason this get-God-out-free clause is something of a relief.
I suspect it’s because there are some curious phenomena we encounter within
the ambits of our daily lives that stubbornly defy logical explanation. There
have been some highly intelligent and well educated men throughout history who
have devoted their lives to addressing the Big Questions who have used spiritual
and poetic language to try and explain them. In some cases accompanying these
mysterious tracts with music provokes such an intellectual and emotional resonance
in the listener that they actually feel they can comprehend the incomprehensible.
Sometimes pop songs can have a similarly profound effect on the listener – I’m
sure you must have gone to the trouble of reading the lyrics to a song that’s
affected you deeply and found them to be virtually incoherent, and yet, in concert
with the music they have the power to move you to tears.
That’s why we shambling musicians do music, of course. We know from experience
that music is almost always more than the sum of its parts, and perhaps we can
even imagine music as the doorway to another dimension. (It’s the drugs I tell
you..)
To emphatically reject the possibility of God just because it doesn’t
stand up to reasoned argument is to deny the possibility of any magic and mystery
in our sojourn here on the planet Earth. A little bit of what you don’t
understand is good for your health. You just have to be moved by music to appreciate
that.

+ Q. How many guitarists does it take to change a light
globe?
A. One. But there are ten other guitarists looking on thinking, ‘I could’ve
done that.’

*Alan Saunders: The man whom I think was the greatest philosopher
ever to write in the English language was born on 7th May, 1711. He was part
of the Scottish Enlightenment, an extraordinary outburst of intellectual energy
in a small, remote and provincial part of northern Europe. More to the point,
he set for subsequent philosophers an agenda that they’re still working through.
His issues are our issues. His name was David Hume and we’re celebrating the
300th birthday of this incomparably great man by devoting four editions of
The Philosopher’s Zone to his life and work.