arc02: "ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN" a personal essay from TEMPERED Vol. II (2018)
This essay appeared in print in the second volume of the Tempered journal published in early 2018. There are some copies available here (and a brief explainer of the journal below this essay). Since the first half deals with an ill-fated personal move to Montreal, here is an embed of one of three mixtapes made featuring some of my favourite underground bands over there incl. The Omegas, Gashrat, Playboy and Blankets. If it runs out, here’s mixtape #1 and mixtape #3 from a series that I thought was going to end up in me starting a MTL-based distro, or a label, or zine…the below hints at the fate of that grand idea!
(Photos are me holiday shots).
I.
In early 2016 I landed in Montreal with an unusually positive outlook and two bags packed to the gram of my allocated baggage allowance; I wasn’t planning on ever returning to Sydney. Hoisting luggage through ankle deep snow to my new house in Saint-Henri, I was struck by the feeling that this life decision was to be the good one: eighteen months later and I write this from a share-house in Dulwich Hill.
The mementos I brought with me are funny in hindsight. Among some tousled clothes and electronics were various Australian punk records and tapes, local zines and band t-shirts, all stacked neatly to be used as reminders. If I knew I was going to pack it in a year later, I would have left some space for the things I were to accrue, but it took time to realise that the grass weren’t greener—for Montreal in March, it was still frozen under.
Arriving before the Spring had its charms. The weather was warming and the local’s postures would straighten a degree for every upward mark on the thermostat until they were springing down Saint-Laurent in shirts and dresses. As the neighbourhood snowbanks thawed, the odour of frozen over dog shit and other relics lost to the winter revealed themselves. The “stolen” trash can lid that my roommate complained about through March appeared sheepishly one afternoon in early April, and a vibrant and welcoming city seemed to peek through the ice in turn.
I’d sweat through the Summer drinking 40s of Black Label in one of the many Montreal parks, the air filled with bilingual chatter and the odour of decriminalised weed. A key selling point on taking the job I was offered in Montreal was the fact that cult hardcore celebrities The Omegas were from there, and I saw them twice before they broke up in the winter (a quiet honour that maybe a handful worldwide would empathise with). I was soon drawn in by the world of music around them, with performances by bands like Gashrat, F.I.T.S., The Submissives, Cheap Wig, No Negative, Ursula, Total Bliss and Blankets still standing as some of the better underground shows I’ve ever seen. The heat carried promise, and I was gaining confidence enough to pretend to know how to speak French—
Bonjour, ca va? Tres bien, oui merci, ce Labbatt s’il te plais, cinq dollar? Ah merci, non non, non saq, hahaha, oui oui au revoir, a bientot! (Pardon? Pardon? Pardon?)
—but home towns have a gravitational pull. As much as I was enjoying aspects of Montreal’s underground, I also felt unwelcome, and couldn’t find a way to effectively contribute. I was an observer, the novelty of which didn’t last long. My previous investment in the music of Sydney and Australia as a whole didn’t travel far from my memory, and this town divided by its language, and splintered by a suspicion of outsiders would make me doubt my move. Sydney was catching up with me.
There are plenty of crutches available to the lone traveller in the first six months of an overseas move: endless internal platitudes are possible! You’re well aware that it won’t be easy (that’s why you do it!), so give yourself time to be accepted. You can blame things like your accent (ordering ‘water’ in the Australian twang of ‘warder’ was less successful than my butchering of the French), your inability to gain a sense of direction (Little Italy is…East of Beaubien?), or your unwelcome proclivity for the word ‘cunt’ which has whole other connotations in North America. But after a while, you smarten to your denial. Eventually, the satisfaction felt on receipt of a nod of recognition at a gig isn’t enough: the fall was coming, and you need more than that for warmth.
People talk about epiphanies as though they’re poetic moments, but mine was somewhere between comical and pathetic. Riding my bike from Mile Ex to Saint-Henri at 5am, my field of vision tinged by that ill-advised final mouthful of house party mushrooms, the fourth verse of The Clean’s ‘Anything Could Happen’ hit my headphones and I crashed into the kerb when I couldn’t see through the tears.
On the very same night, a close friend from Sydney sent me a live clip from a Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys show with a song that was cutting through me before my departure with its relevance: through rugged guitars and a rolling drum beat, the line, “expanding horizons.” This led me to scouring through my records for the nostalgia inducing mementos I crammed into my luggage. While my roommate was getting ready for work a few hours later, struck again by the words of Lower Plenty—
Go away,
And leave it all behind.
Because to make up your mind,
Is such a rare find.
I was cracking, so I made another attempt at improving my life in Montreal, moving from the dead neighbourhood (“constipated with potential,” as a friend once described Marrickville) of Saint-Henri towards the thriving realm of the Plateau. The change gave a brief reprieve, but then Quebec fell into winter.
Holed up in a creaky Mile End apartment with a large poutine and twelve-pack of Laurentide for one, I’d finally lose it to the point of scaring myself. On more than one occasion, I’d find myself so sad that I’d begin to cackle with laughter. Shit like that helps you forget whatever malaise forced you to trade in the Sydney Harbour Bridge for pont Jacques-Cartier. I’d start pining for the comforts of home, my memory would play tricks on me, and I’d completely forget that I fled Sydney for a reason.
II.
I was unemployed and waiting on visa approval for the three months prior to leaving for Montreal. I spent most of that time not in the flurry of creativity that I imagined, but sitting topless in the sun eating baked beans from the can accompanied by $4 Dan Murphy’s cleanskins (sound-tracked in anticipation by The Omegas’ Blasts of Lunacy and No Negative’s The Good Never Comes – both foreboding titles). This lifestyle led to postural issues, and I’d try to correct that spinal hunch by taking long walks through the streets of Enmore and Marrickville while arching my back. On one such walk, I came across the Portugal Madeira Club on Denby Street, and left my phone number behind the bar with a view to “hire the function room for a party.”
The following weeks were infuriating. Long aimless phone calls with the seventy-year-old club president went nowhere: my tired drawl would meet his agitated response, and each call would end with him muttering in Portuguese and hanging up. We eventually sat down for a beer in the club’s front bar. I chuckled when picturing my friends standing behind me (neurotic, dishevelled, sunburnt) and the PMC regulars behind him (muscular, gruff, discontent), as we negotiated the idea of putting on a punk show in the upstairs ballroom.
He asked me how many people would come and I guessed a hundred. He asked where my family was from and I told him my mum’s side was Italian, to which he nodded his head knowingly, muttering, “Italiano, Italiano.” He then warned me that there were to be no drugs on the premises. I said that while I thought there wouldn’t be, I couldn’t speak for 150 people, to which he grabbed me by the shirt and yelled, “Don’t bullshit me! First it’s a hundred now it’s 150! I’m an old man, I know the ways!” He asked me what my company was called, and I said pityingly, “no company; I’m alone.” It seemed it was this which calmed him. We got through the interrogation, and were soon setting up the ballroom for a show to be headlined by Housewives and Kitchen’s Floor.
It took too long for me to view the club president as more than just a conduit to putting on a show. He was tired, over-worked and struggling to keep the club going. He alluded to some struggles with the board, and I hoped that I might be helping him. In his temper and the fed up look in his eyes, he even bore a resemblance to my nonno (who at one stage was so out of it that he’d sit in the backyard with his home-made grappa and a box of tomatoes while trying to shoot down his neighbour’s homing pigeons with an air rifle) which likely accentuated my urge to help him out. The first and last time I saw the president smile was after the show was finished, when he turned a few grand over the bar, hugging me and shouting: “Why leave now? You’re a good boy! You should have come years ago!” It felt like the finale of a low budget sports movie!
The whole experience, as frustrating and confusing as it started, felt like a rare example of a fair exchange. In a rapidly developing Marrickville, the Madeira club sat idle and struggling to stay afloat, relying on the custom of only a few regulars and their weekend family events. They really could use an occasional evening of a hundred (and fifty?) heavy drinkers, at the very least to turn over their stocks of Super Bock. It felt like there was middle ground here: a space where we could comfortably let this music happen without being taken advantage of by bookers, managers and publicans, and a space we could respectfully give back to in return.
I look back on that cynically now. I picture Gandhi in an adidas skivvy intoning: “Fund the gentrification you want to see in the world!”
When I returned to the Madeira Club after my year in Montreal, it had fallen to shit. The booking arrangement went from an exorbitant deposit to an exorbitant fee; the Super Bock’s went from five to seven dollars a bottle; the stage had been moved from the elaborate ballroom the president and I had set up for the Kitchen’s Floor show to the spare room in the underground car park typically used as a karate dojo. On returning from Montreal, I went to a messy event that ran so late that the headlining band didn’t get to play (who, I kid you not, was the replacement headliner of a replacement headliner). I realised with a pain that I’d contributed to the irreparable change of a cultural club that had self-sustained in spite of its struggles for almost fifty years. I didn’t come to that conclusion because the show was bad or that no one seemed to be having any fun, but because despite my nervous glances around the room, the president couldn’t be found. When I went back to check in intermittently over the weeks that followed, his sunken features were still missing from the front bar, the restaurant, the smoking area, and I’d wonder if my enthusiasm for putting strange shows on in unusual spaces cost someone their job.
III.
There are of course details that I’ve left out. The show wasn’t easy: we did have to supply all the equipment down to the cables; I did have to clear my bank account to cover the $500 deposit a week before I left the country; I did spend the night asking friends to watch the door while I scurried in and out of the toilets to clear away zip lock bags before the president came across them. It’s these reasons why people don’t book these kinds of spaces (if you take personal responsibility out of the equation, you can actually relax) but it’s that chaos and stress and fun that makes me want to go back for more. The reasons why I’d put up with a week of intense phone calls, and getting shirtfronted by a seventy-year-old man are simple: the convenient alternative was much worse.
In rare bouts of self-esteem, I’m prone to flurries of delusion. I remember specific points during the Kitchen’s Floor show where I thought the event was sending a message (the message being???) At the time, I had grown frustrated by unmotivating shows booked lazily in the front bar of a pub with no door charge, yet large playing fees given to the bands (you don’t have to be an economist to realise that this seemingly favourable balance is being made up by someone else). They were inevitably deflating experiences that were marked by poor sound quality and accentuated by disinterested passers-by and flat crowd responses. Nothing was at stake. I was angry at the complacency that lay at the heart of everyone involved, but I was mad at the pubs too. With The Vic on the Park as a pertinent example, owned by the multi-million dollar Riversdale Group, I didn’t like that they were receiving not just our efforts, but our drinking money, all while overzealous bouncers would study your technique of eating a late-night pie from the neighbouring servo in order to determine whether to permit your re-entry. When people of the DIY persuasion started deciding they’d prefer a guarantee to a good time, I saw the fine line between a scene and an industry, and flew north to avoid it.
I have friends and bandmates who either laugh at me or roll their eyes when I say that I don’t want to play a free show at a pub or small bar because they’re just placating us to draw drinkers to their venue. They can be condescending (which is a fair response to a hissy fit), and will say things like, “well where else would you do it?” I have no answer other than, “anywhere but there!” I’ll then start freaking out and have to leave the room for a breather. The idea of playing to a bored room that everyone arrives late to, only to say, “well, at least we got paid $200,” doesn’t resemble anything close to what drew me to underground music, and I can only imagine that if you are reading this, it’s not what you imagined when you were drawn to it either.
I understand why we take the easy way out, but I shudder when I think of our music and culture being co-opted by a hospitality group who pats us on the head with a few hundred bucks before taking ten grand in booze and food sales with their spare hand. But the alternative is horrifying too: to contribute to the city’s gentrification by asking cultural clubs to accept us into their walls, and then slowly erode the culture they were built to preserve from the inside—for the sake of what? Punk music!?
Is it really that bad to give up our agency and contribute to the bottom line of the pub next door? Is that better than appropriating spaces for our own causes only to create as much damage as the developers we’re condemning, or is there another option still? I admit that this limp line of questioning is hardly a call to arms.
A few nights before I finished writing this, I walked past the Madeira Club late on a Saturday night. The sounds of Portuguese folk music filtered onto Denby Street, and a vision from the ballroom stopped me in my tracks. I saw the club’s president through the window lit up like an apparition by the upstairs barlight. I stood squinting in an attempt to confirm the appearance of the ghost until it glanced in my direction. It didn’t look for long, and it probably wasn’t him at all, but I heard his voice ring out in my memory: “why didn’t you come years ago?”
There are questions we haven’t asked and options we haven’t sought, but I can tell you this much: you don’t find these answers by running, and though we call it an underground, there’s no one above us to turn to for help.
+++postmatter & other updates___
—Tempered was a collaborative music journal designed by Daryl Prondoso and co-published by MoodWar (who runs the excellent substack No Embassy). The first volume (2016) is out of print, but the second volume has a handful of copies left, and is well worth the read for (among all the other great contributions): Bryony Beynon’s discussion of DIY Space for London (please read BB’s Spiral Times substack), Chloe Alison Escott’s preface to the then upcoming Native Cats LP, and Lena Molnar & Andrew McLellan’s long-form back-and-forth on Brisbane music myth. It was a mammoth project, a great experience, and came a time when a lot of open discussion was happening around some unspoken limits to the edges of the ‘underground/DIY/independent’ impulse.
—Thanks to all who ordered barely human zines/tapes since the last newsletter! Everything’s been sent out and I can see international orders tracking slowly. I’ve had some issues with AusPost in Australia so let me know if it doesn’t arrive and I’ll try again. For those who missed it, you can still get a copy of the new edish: T-SHIRT PUNK: DEAD MOON V WIPERS.