The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

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Crowded House: Brisbane October 15

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My big insight from this gig was how much I have taken Crowded House for granted these past few decades. It’s a point made repeatedly through the set as Neil Finn and co. effortlessly rattle off a string of melodic gems, including the magic dozen or so that absolutely everybody knows. He also threw in the two best Split Enz songs, just to remind us that the remarkable Crowded House debut didn’t come out of nowhere.

The evening didn’t start perfectly. This was part of a popup tour in a quite small venue, and part of the shtick was that they acted as their own backing band playing a stripped down acoustic set of mostly obscure album tracks, all delivered exquisitely. It was a pretty downbeat start, and being an all-ages gig the audience response was muted for all but the two well-known songs. I had left for work at 5:30 that morning and met my family at the gig, so was initially delighted that things might finish early without the supporting band shenanigans. However, it wasn’t to be, and the complete stage strip down and set up for the main set took almost an hour meaning I’d been on » Continue Reading.

Has any TV show pissed away it’s fanbase goodwill as fundamentally as Dr Who?

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A quick summary of my plight: my 19yo son is a Dr Who obsessive. We have a part-completed life-sized TARDIS in the garden, we have a headless life-sized Dalek under the house, his 3D models of sonic screwdrivers are renowned the world over for their a curacy amongst fellow Who tragics.

I remember the day I bought home a Dr Who DVD that I’d found cheap in a thrift store. It was the good stuff, Tom Baker, and my son was about 4. He became instantly obsessed, and I’ve followed his Who journey now for 15 years through occasional and modest peaks and the endless, crushing disappointments. There were the Ecclestone years (great), Tennant (good), Smith (OK), Capaldi (his favourite) and Whittaker (dire). I recall his breathless excitement from a couple of years ago when he announced that Russell T Davies was returning to the helm to lead the Doctor back to the promised land. Finally, the show was going to hit form again.

Well, here we are two years later after enduring Ncuti Gatwa, undoubtedly the worst Doctor ever (Jodie Whittaker must be breathing a deep sigh of relief), and my son’s just told me that Billie Piper » Continue Reading.

Yay! The Tories have been wiped out! *Australian version

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Wow. Six weeks ago polls showed Voldemortian Liberal Peter Dutton romping it in, to the point where he was making quips about moving into Kirribilli house, the Prime Minister’s residence. Last night saw one of the most extraordinary election results in Australia’s history as the incumbent Labour government was returned to power with a huge majority and the Libs booted into oblivion. Even more satisfyingly, Dutton lost his own seat (Dickson, where I live).

Dutton’s campaign was bizarre, the Libs being so smug and self assured of victory that they seemingly couldn’t bother stringing any policies together. Dutton had also spent the early part of the year aligning himself with Trump, then rapidly back-pedalling once the tariff wars started. If we can thank Trump for anything, it is whisking away the curtain and revealing the insanity of neo-conservative politics.

ATM: What Exactly is Cultural Appropriation?

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I was listening to a music podcast yesterday and amongst many other annoying traits, the hosts kept throwing around the accusation of ‘cultural appropriation’ seemingly at random. Many times they would trip over themselves as they tried to explain exactly how each instance was cultural appropriation, usually ending up at some variation of ‘I’m not sure but I know it when I see it’. It seems to be another term which has been homoeopathically diluted to the point of uselessness.

It got me wondering exactly what the term means. These hosts were applying it to mean literally any aspect of non-white music (whatever that means) being borrowed by white artists, so covering an old R&B song (in this case, Harlem Shuffle by the Stones) or incorporating aspects of reggae in a rock song (although they were quick to exclude The Clash, but couldn’t explain why they got a pass).

Does it work in the other direction? Was JayZ culturally appropriating in Hard Knock Life? What about J-Pop or K-Pop, where they are wholesale stealing 80s boy/girl band tropes from Western music. Or think of early jazz, which was a fusion of European harmonic theory and aspects of African music. » Continue Reading.

So then, I appear to be in the path of a cyclone.

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A very rare event is happening at the moment in South-East Queensland: a cyclone has escaped from the tropics and is currently menacing just off the coast of Brisbane about 5-600km south of their normal range. It’s expected to move further south for a day or so then quickly jag right in a hairpin bend, intensify, and cross the coast right at Brisbane in a couple of days. The last cyclone to hit anywhere near here was in 1974 and that was considered a complete anomaly. Huge rainfall, destructive winds and severe coastal erosion are all being forecast.

I’ve been through a few cyclones when I lived in North Queensland years ago, but this is different. Infrastructure around here isn’t built for cyclones, and I now live in a house surrounded by trees.When I analyse why I feel so vulnerable this time, I guess it comes down to the fact that I now have a family and more assets. We are used to extreme rainfall events (as destructive as they are) but wind is something completely different.

The only good outcome is the now minuscule chance that it continues to the east away from the coast, otherwise it’s going » Continue Reading.

It’s All Too Much – An Epiphany

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I had an epiphany as I gasped my way up the mountain behind my house this morning, maybe due to hypoxia or the 33 degree heat. I was listening to an audiobook, as I usually do to try and mask the horror of exercise, and for the hundredth time I thought “Great book, but it’s a third too long”. It seems every book I read is a third too long. Every movie I watch is a third too long. Every Netflix series is a third too long. It’s like the writers feel compelled to add in yet another plot kink that needs to be resolved, right when I’ve had my fill and would be quite happy to wrap things up.

Extended to music it still holds up: the vast majority of albums would be better if they were sub 30 minutes, many of the songs more potent without that extra chorus. I loved the Flaming Lips gig the other week because it was the first time in years where I wasn’t looking at my watch two thirds of the way through, the exception that proves the rule.

What they all share is a certain arbitrariness about their form. LPs were » Continue Reading.

Flaming Lips Live Brisbane 5/2/25: A Humanist Rapture

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“Never heard of them,” my 19 year-old son said a few months ago when informed I had bought him a ticket to the Flaming Lips gig here in Brisbane. “It will be unlike anything you’ve ever seen before,” was my promise to him. Admittedly, that’s a pretty low bar as he’s a painfully shy introvert whose only previous concert experience was the Jack White gig I dragged him along to a couple of months ago.

I fell for the Lips early, right from the first, delightful bars of ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ back in the early 90s. I’ve always been a sucker for bubblegum psychedelia. Like many, my eyebrows lifted skywards in 1999 when this ‘novelty’ group of weirdos released one of the best albums of the 90s, The Soft Bulletin. My eyebrows went into orbit when they then released Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots in 2001, one of the greatest albums of that and any decade. It was one of those significant albums in my life, nursing me through some dark times. The follow-up ‘At War with the Mystics’ had some good stuff, but was definitely a few notches below. The following decade saw a retreat back into impenetrable » Continue Reading.

A thought experiment (involving murder).

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Imagine you are visited one day by a higher power who tells you that they have been monitoring the Earth and are alarmed by the amount of suffering that exists amongst the human population. They tell you that they will return after a suitable period and that, once only, you can tell them the names of the 10 people who you think are most responsible for this suffering. They will then arrange for those people to be painlessly removed from the planet and euthanised.

Do you think the world could be made objectively better by removing these 10? If not, how many do you think it would take? 100? 1000? Who would you nominate? I suspect that the final list would be mostly unrecognisable African dictators or various anonymous business leaders rather than the Trumps and Putins. I also suspect it would take many more than 10 to move the needle.

btw, I would have absolutely no ethical or moral issue with providing the names.

I’ve solved Reddit

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A few months ago I had to change iPads, and in the process awoke a long-dormant Reddit app from its slumber. Reddit to me was a site that I occasionally dipped into for quite specific guitar info, but I never actively browsed. With its reawakening, however, it has bombarded me with content like an octopus looking for a keyhole in a door, and as soon as I show even the mildest flutter of interest in a topic it then seizes on this and targets me with other content that its algorithm has coughed up. And so I find myself at the start of 2025 ,and helped in part by some idle hours over Christmas, a Reddit expert on a quite bizarre range of topics. Here are my results.

Guitar/Luthiery: 50% rich kids who have been bought expensive guitars/amps and don’t know how to use them (extra points for restringing the guitar completely incorrectly and then trying to convince everyone that they are a gigging muso), 50% kids who have shitty gear (usually an amp the size of a lunchbox) wondering why they don’t sound like Slash/Metallica etc.

Explain the Joke: 20% of the time the OP is just fucking stupid, » Continue Reading.

The Modern English Detective Story: A Recipe

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One of the consequences of my recent exercise regime (I’ve lost 25kg in a year!) is that I churn through audiobooks. I tend to waft through genres, moving on when I get bored. A couple of months ago I stumbled into the Modern English Detective Story and have wince listened to ten or so books in the genre. It’s unusual for me, as my taste in detective fiction was previously confined to short stories from the Golden Age. I think I’m ready to move on to pastures fresh, so thought I would share my observations before doing so.

1/ There must always be a pantomime villain, and they are never the culprit. You are usually sympathetic towards them by the end of the book.

2/ When the penny drops and the protagonist finally figures out who the culprit is (usually many chapters after the reader), they must go and confront them alone in some remote location.

3/Regional English police forces are chock full of attractive, but jaded, young policewomen and rugged, bruised middle-aged men who live alone in dishevelled apartments.

4/ Senior Officers must speak in management jargon and care only about PR.

5/ Coffee must always be served in » Continue Reading.

ATM: A posh pronunciation query

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I’m listening to an audiobook series at the moment, and the lady who is narrating has an affectation that is really starting to annoy me. She has quite a posh English accent, and frequently says her ‘s’es as if through clenched teeth, so they come out as ‘sh’. So ‘sex’ becomes ‘sheksh’, ‘sparrow’ ‘shparrow’ etc. I realise that I’ve only ever heard women with this affectation, including my mother on occasion, and this narrator only does this when narrating or describing female characters.

What is it called? Where did it come from? Is it meant to indicate steely resolve? Is it because the posh classes try to talk without moving their jaws? This narrator also has a wheezy Keith Richardesque quality to her voice that makes all the characters sound like 75 year old chain smokers. For the first couple of books I kept getting startled whenever their was any physical activity (including the aforementioned ‘sheksh’) and would have to remind myself that the main character was meant to be in his 30s.

I think we need to talk about the Doctor (Who, that is)

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So, there was animated discussion on here when the Doctor returned to our screens last year and I’m surprised there hasn’t been more since the latest season finished.

A quick recap about my stance from the last thread: my son is a big fan, I thought recent stories and acting were terrible, I thought the diversity/inclusivity content was ham-fisted to the point of being comical. No, I’m not racist, homophobic, transphobic etc.

So I’ve watched most of the episodes this season, and with a couple of exceptions things panned out exactly as I thought they would. Writing continues to be bad (mostly – some exceptions below) with most stories too bombastic and needing ‘The Big Insight’ from the Doctor to resolve. Ruby is a plucky cookie-cutter stage-school poppet indistinguishable from Clara, Rose, Amy etc. Ncuti Gatwa is never believable as the Doctor (and I’ve decided he’s simply not a very good actor) and, yes, diversity is the theme of the season, in case you couldn’t tell (There may have been yells of “Kill the dwarf!” coming from my end of the sofa during more animated parts of the finale).

Some thoughts on episodes:

73 Yards: The best epidote of » Continue Reading.

Quiz: Gettysburg Address in the style of…

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I asked ChatGPT to rewrite the Gettysburg address in the style of a fictional character. Can you guess who it is?

Ah say, ah say, folks, gather ’round now, ya hear? We’re fixin’ to commemorate this here battlefield, where our fine nation done stood tall in the face of adversity. Now, listen up, ’cause I’m fixin’ to lay down some truth like a hen lays her eggs.

Well, ah declare, back in ’63, our great leader, Mr. Lincoln, he stood right here, and he said, “Folks, four score and seven years ago, our forefathers set forth on this great land a nation like no other, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all folks are created equal.”

Now, let me tell ya, we’re smack dab in the middle of a mighty big skirmish, a Civil War, if you will. And by Jove, we ain’t gonna let this nation split in two like a biscuit gone stale. No sir!

Now, we’re here to honor them brave souls who done laid down their lives so this nation could keep on truckin’. It’s like my ol’ grandpappy used to say, “You gotta stand tall even when the wind’s blowin’ fierce.” And » Continue Reading.

Gendered Violence in Australia: Stats vs the media

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Over the weekend there were numerous rallies in Australia against gendered violence, following a spate of murders in the first four months of the year (27 is the accepted number, although you will also see numbers in the 30s). I have a slight connection to one of these victims: she was the pre-school teacher of a close friend’s daughter.

I’m always slightly (i.e. highly) skeptical of media statistics on hot-button issues, so I decided to do a quick data analysis based on the information available (which is admittedly scant). I have the words Incident, Investigation and Learning in my job title, so I have some experience at looking for causal patterns across a range of events. I’m also VERY used to leaders/motivated individuals etc over-interpreting statistics and desperately trying to find causal commonality where none exists.

My data source included 27 murders of women so far in 2024. Of those:

– 7 were killed by partners/ex partners

– 9 or 10 were due to mentally-ill perpetrators (including the 5 female Bondi victims and 4 cases where mothers were killed by their children – three sons and one daughter. One was a patient at a hospital randomly killing another patient » Continue Reading.

I have seen the future of rock, and his name is……..Justin?

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A belated review of the Darkness gig I saw in Brisbane last Wednesday.

The week was a busy one for me – I was organising and facilitating week-long training that included a bunch of interstate/international fly-ins, and I groaned when I realised that the concert tickets I had purchased six months before landed square in the middle of that week. I saw the Darkness back when Permission to Land was first released and they were just gaining traction, playing the midday slot at a festival to an entering crowd who they quickly won over. The Datsuns followed them and seemed like a high-school band having their second rehearsal in dad’s garage.

PTL is a genuinely fantastic album that is everything its fans and detractors say it is: AC/DC hooks, Queen vocals, bombastic production, lyrics that are both puerile and hilarious, and melodic hooks. It was released at a very stressful juncture in my life and the sheer fun of it gave me much comfort through that period. It and the Scissor Sisters debut that came out at a similar time were billed as greatest-hits first albums and I agreed heartily with those assessments.

So it was that last » Continue Reading.

The ingredients of a great podcast

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Prompted by the tragic death of Neil Kulkarni last week and then subsequently listening to Neil on the live Chart Music show recorded a week or so earlier, I’ve been mulling over the key components of a great podcast. Neil’s death really hit me, and I think it’s because I had mentally cast him as one of my close friends. It surprised me that a podcast could generate this level of emotion.

I must have sampled hundreds of podcasts over the last 15 years, but at any time there are usually only a half dozen I actively follow. Most of the rest are perfectly fine, but I seem to lose interest or forget about most of them.

So here are the common elements I can identify (and there are many exceptions):

1. It needs to have an ensemble cast. This is hugely important to me. I want to hear unscripted banter between people on topics I find interesting (pretty obviously replacing the banter I’m lacking in my own life). Some single host, scripted podcasts are great (Cautionary Tales, for example) but they are more like great radio documentaries or audiobooks, and most of the time I would rather just read » Continue Reading.

If I have seen further than others, it is because…

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…I have clambered up on the carcasses of morons (Sir Isaac Newton, obvs).

I have had two fucking brilliant ideas recently. Recognition of these in my household has been more muted than I would have liked, so I am sharing them here.

Idea 1: A new K9-like robotic Dr Who sidekick in the form of a bird/drone, called AVN. Genius, I know.

Idea 2: I am in constant battle with the land around my house which wants desperately to return to rainforest/lantana if left untended for more than a month or two. This requires walking around my steep property with a pair of long-handled cutters and a glyphosate-charged backpack and spray nozzle. You have to cut the plant and then spray the stem (spraying the leaves is a bit too hit and miss) which requires putting down the clippers, changing hands and spraying. Literally thousands of times. For years I have been dreaming of a set of clippers that paints the stem as you chop, so a couple of months ago I bought some cheap clippers and a weeding wand, cable-tied them together and went for it. The system worked beautifully to the point where I’m about to make a » Continue Reading.

War on Drugs/Spoon – Brisbane Riverstage December 9th

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There are few things lovelier than being riverside in Brisbane at that moment on a hot summer day when the sun retreats behind the hills and a gentle breeze kicks in. So it was that Ms Podicle and I found ourselves on Saturday evening in the lovely city botanical gardens waiting to see Spoon and War on Drugs on the river stage. I would have happily paid the entry for either of these bands, so to have them both on the same ticket was a treat. The venue is a grassy amphitheater nestled between the river and the gardens, and it would be hard to find a more relaxed and pastoral setting in the middle of a major city.

First up was Indigo Spark, which I think was the name of the singer of the directionless trio on stage. Lots of two-chord drones with indie-chick vocals and paroxysmal changes in intensity. You know the type. Indigo told us a couple of times that she had just returned from several years in the States, and she seems to have brought some rhotic Rs back with her and left her actual songs behind. We spent the entire act trying to figure out » Continue Reading.

Trump charged in Georgia

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Christ, I hope they have their ducks lined up on these charges, as an acquittal will energise the right and plunge the US further into chaos. I have a sneaking suspicion that prosecutors are overpaying their hand and hoping that someone will roll over and provide them with the evidence they perhaps don’t have. A risky game.

Trump was obviously trying to look defiant in his mug shot but looks instead like he should be outside shaking his fist at clouds and deflating errant beach balls with his rake.

https://livecenter-aus-hpc9audwdke2c0fm.z01.azurefd.net/lc-aus-images/lcimg-444157d2-ca79-46cd-a8a0-6999a6aff3e3.png

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-25/trump-indictment-live-georgia-charges-election-interference/102764058

On Restringing a Rickenbacker 12-String Guitar

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Restringing a Rickenbacker 12-string is not for the fainthearted.

If you do a Google search on the topic, one of the first hits you’ll get is titled “Restringing a Rickenbacker 12-String: How to become an alcoholic”. I’ve owned my Rickenbacker 360/12 Fireglo for about 20 years and in that time I’ve sold it and re-bought it twice and listed it for sale another 3-4 times, each occasion following the ritual of restringing.

For a bit of context, restringing and doing a quick set-up on any of my other guitars is a 5-10 minute job. Yesterday I spent five hours accomplishing the same on my Rick. Like any tool developed during wartime (it was an invasion, in case you don’t know) the original Rick 12 design was rough and ready, thrown together to present to the Beatles during their first US tour. This first contact is actually captured on audio, as George was sick in bed conducting a radio interview (with his sister) when the presentation party arrived. Unlike most tools of war, however, the Rickenbacker 12 has been frozen in time since, apart from an early design change that actually made it less user-friendly. Restringing a guitar was only » Continue Reading.

ATM: Noise cancelling ear buds

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Hi all, Last week I purchased a pair of Sony WF-1000XM4 ear buds, Sony’s premium noise cancelling ear buds (I actually purchased two pairs as they were heavily discounted and my son needed a birthday present). I have a ridiculous number of headphones, probably 8-9 pairs, but was looking for a more svelte replacement for my trusty Sony WH-1000XM3 over-ear noise cancelling phones. I have owned a few pairs of NC over-ears, but this is my first pair of NC buds.

I set up the app, connected them and then turned on the noise cancelling. There was literally no difference whatsoever. I read up, made sure adaptive sound control was off etc (I am quite familiar with the app having used it for several years) but I genuinely could hear no difference sitting in a room with numerous sound sources of numerous volumes and frequencies. I tried the different bud sizes but again, no discernible difference. I ran the app that checked for adequate sealing, and unless I had the largest bud size and was physically pushing the phones into my ears to the point of pain, it said this was inadequate. When I did this, for the first time » Continue Reading.

Musings on the nature of evidence and guilt

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I had originally written the below as part of my response in the Rolf Harris post, but felt it was too much of a diversion (I know, I know!) so have carved it off into its own thread.

I slight diversion, but something I’ve been thinking about:

I have to say my trust in these sort of media-led trials has been severely shaken by the Brittany Higgins/Bruce Lehrmann bonfire that has played out over the past couple of years in Oz. If you aren’t familiar with this case, look it up and have a read. The fact that both were staffers for the then incumbent Liberal government and that the alleged events took place in Parliament House in the rooms of a cabinet minister gives it a certain fizz.

I can’t have been the only one shocked at the paucity of evidence during the initial trial (that was dismissed due to juror misbehaviour), and even the amount of Ms Higgins’ evidence that veered wildly from previous statements. Plans for a repeat trial were called off to protect the mental health of Ms Higgins, although there is a valid argument that the prosecution realised their case was half cooked and was » Continue Reading.

RIP Tom Verlaine

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Seems to be confirmed by some who have worked closely with him. Marquee Moon has been part of my life for 30 years, and I was just listening to it again last night. Nothing else sounds like it, including their previous and subsequent recordings: duelling lead guitars stripped of any hint of blues or swing, desperate yet melodic vocals and precise, spiralling compositions. Absolutely majestic. RIP

The case of Adnan Syed: A conclusion

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I just saw the news that Adnan Syed has been cleared of all charges in the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae-Min Lee, due to new DNA evidence. He had been released under home detention a few weeks ago pending these results. Syed was 17 when arrested and Lee was 18 when she was murdered in Baltimore in 1999.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, the murder of Lee and the conviction of Syed were the subject of the first season of Serial, the 2014 series that was the patient zero for public acceptance of podcasts. Since the podcast, there have been various legal manoeuvrings to get Syed’s conviction re-examined for various reasons (lack of competent counsel, technical issues with the mobile phone data used), but I don’t think anyone would have predicted this outcome even a few years ago, and I am keen to learn more about the details.

My take on Serial: I was completely absorbed back in 2014, and thought it was an intriguing case. While presenter Sarah Koenig made an effort to come across as impartial, it was obvious that she had serious doubts about the case against Syed. My doubts about his » Continue Reading.