This photograph by Reckless Kelly of our recent show at the Wesley Anne in Melbourne has arrived at my desk. It’s a good one Kelly and for the shrewd amongst you: What musical icon’s excellent head is silhouetted in the front row of the audience?
Also, this radio interview /Podcast with Jonathan Brown in Adelaide might/might not entertain a few slackers at work.
Great home town show last weekend at The Clarendon/Katoomba – John in particular was on fire. I do occasionally wonder if we have begun to talk too much on-stage but the audience has yet to complain.
I mentioned I was doing a soundtrack for a violent Dog cartoon some time back. Well it’s called ‘DOG’, and it’s finished. We now set about the strange business of trying to find an application for it in the world – apart from pleasuring you worthy readers on the web I mean. Mr Dan Creighton is the creator and animator of ‘DOG’. You may be aware of my long association with Dan, most recently as a co-writer on the Doomsday Piano tunes. It’s a song-writing partnership that happily continues.
So back to DOG. At some point we will have an official launch for it. I know it is being submitted to all sorts of film festivals – who knows… I don’t really know what that means and sadly can only imagine a succession of these loaded ‘Arts’ competitions that have struggling hopefuls all over Australia tearing each others hair out in anticipation. But good luck DOG and well done Dan for producing such a fine piece of work.
I can provide you with a sneak preview right here:
In this pivotal scene our hero Dog and his little pal ‘critter’ are accosted by an angry man inside a tree. It may increase your viewing pleasure to know that the voices are provided by Don Walker (the Dog), Leo Sayer (the Critter) and Dave Graney (the Man in the tree).
Safe again in the mountains after a long drive home from Melbourne. It’s been raining up here and I can hear the water tank is a third full again.
The weekend shows; Canberra on friday then two shows in Melb were good, though Canberra felt a bit like we were performing to our dear but non-paying extended families – never mind. In Melbourne more family members appeared (but thankfully other people as well). Most surprisingly, my extremely young niece ‘YELLOW DWARF’ was there – at the all-ages gig at the Wesley Anne/ Northcote.
Let me explain how such an unusual family name came about.
I was raised in Canberra where my parents over indulged me and my 4 bone-idle siblings. It was an environment so devoid of responsibility that I could spend days on end doing little more than sizzling ants with a magnifying glass. Occasionally however we would stave off the dreadful infinity of the universe by performing musical plays we made up – always led by eldest brother Greg.
Even now Greg has never really stopped with the plays and a few years back he wrote another one that he made into a short film with Josh Reid – called ‘Whatever Happened To The Sex Dwarves’. It’s a documentary-drama about a group of pushy parents who attempt to crack the world music market by creating an irresistible, multi-racial band of kids called ‘The Sex Dwarves’
There was Red Dwarf (real name Santiago – foul tempered son of a Hot Blooded Chilean neighbour). There was White Dwarf (pasty skinned daughter of Greg). There was Black Dwarf (my own daughter Lyla – whose mother has a distant affiliation with Jamaica – hence Lyla’s disappointing non-blackness). And then of course there was Yellow Dwarf – the aforementioned offspring of another brother’s sort-of-Chinese partner.
Greg has a grasping, mercenary mind and it’s likely the whole concept was inspired by the racial cross-pollination going on around him.
Excited on seeing Yellow Dwarf at Sunday’s show, I very tentatively mentioned all this to the audience (I am astutely aware that such heavy-gauge exploitation of minors can be perceived as offensive – especially in a town as culturally enlightened as Melbourne) but to my surprise the crowd applauded and expressed keen interest in the film.
Perhaps the time for Sex Dwarves has arrived so if you’d like to watch it click the picture. Particularly crap acting by me – Kylie Minogue and Tex Perkins and Peter Andre are in it too.
