poetsquib.com

Sing a Song for Us Tonight is a segment where people choose a song that is special to them and explain why. Today’s guest is Michael and he’s chosen Spaceman by Artificial Joy Club. Here’s his story, thanks Michael

So, this is how I became a music fan - again. The year was 1995 - a plucky Australian band called Custard began their rise to fame, fortune and singing a cover of Livin La Vida Loca on Hey Hey, Darryl Somers was entertaining the nation with several offensive quips from John Blackman, and Girlfriend were in their second year as GF4. This one day we were all sitting in the library study room (well, there wasn’t much study, despite the best efforts of Linda Librarian to keep the noise down) and this friend of mine Simon, who in true high school fashion was one of those-we-were-friends-but-now-I-think-about-it-I-can’t-work-out-why kind of people, especially as he was seriously annoying and had an ambition to invent a perpetual motion machine (and my ambition was to find the worlds most comfortable tracksuit pants), but anyway, we were friends, and this one day, he was talking in general about bands, let’s say it was TISM (it wasn’t, but lets say it was) and he looked me dead in the eye and said “Oh, don’t worry, you wouldn’t know them” - and it was true, I didn’t know anything about music, having forsaken my previous musical knowledge accquired in Scotland (I was a massive fan of The KLF, America (What Time Is Love) was the choice of the Joe Bloggs generation) in the face of the inane patter of the 7BU DJs in Burnie, telling me what was going on with Terry The Tipster Morris before launching into a Meatloaf triple play. However, I took it as a personal insult, and now think, well, if only that kid had said something like “Hey, you never do any homework!” and I’d taken that to heart, I might have had a more productive path in life. However, the die was cast, I made it my mission in life to learn about music again, and throw in the fact Triple J came into Burnie to much excited chatter and it wasn’t long before I was huddled around the little black stereo in my room making these horribly nerdy mix tapes with the bands names written in perfect handwriting. And soon I was a big a music nerd as anyone, able to name individual members of the Eels, discuss the annoyance of the Triple J station promo being played 30 seconds into a song (I think Tool had it on their contract with Triple J that 30 seconds into Stinkfist, some little tosser would come and say “Triple, Triple, Triple J!), and assess the relative merits and chances of various unearthed contestants. Shamefully, I also quite liked Bush, but let’s just pretend I didn’t, and say that, eventually, I did wanna comeback down from that cloud…

Now, having built an entire musical foundation pretty much based on what Michael Tunn told me to like, around about 1997, I outgrew Triple J a little bit, just a little, but I never forgave them after being lectured by a strident girl in a stripey top that Triple J had a (shock) playlist just like a common commercial radio station. She was incredibly strident that girl and to be honest, my reaction to being told Triple J had a playlist was to pull a spazz face and go “Duh! Really! What did you think the album of the week was for!” but I was ready to embrace a new musical truth anyway by then. If Triple J taught me nothing, it was to find the most obscure bands I could (by 1997, a band on Triple J wasn’t really that obscure - grandmothers at bus stops could converse about Beaverloop) and talk about them incessently even though no one knew who the hell they were, and pre Internet music downloads, the easiest way to do this was simply to listen to music from the UK. I did this mostly by scouring the pages of Q Magazine, the NME and Melody Maker and Select and talking about bands like they did, and hoping the CD really wasn’t rubbish when it came in the post. I would thus claim a fantastically credible CD collection, mostly of Stereolab CDs, but I would later ruin this hard earned credibility when I liked at least some of the first Britney Spears album (though, in fairness, Melody Maker was bigging up Robbie Williams). It sags in the middle with that E-Mail my Heart nonsense, but how good is The Beat Goes On? though - a lost Britney classic. See, I’ve done it again. Did I mention I liked Stereolab?

My 1997 bands of choice were Kenickie and Catatonia. Now, I have a confession to make - the only reason I knew about these bands was because they did interviews in the soccer magazine Total Football - but don’t tell anyone. I can’t remember what Cerys from Catatonia was talking about, but it was something to do with football, and probably something Welsh, and she was giving it some serious attitude with her pout, and I thought, well, she looks look cool, they must be ace. Lauren Laverne (later vocallist on the Mint Royale mega sensational song Don’t Falter pop pickers) and Marie Du Santiago (my first cred girl musical crush) of Kenickie did this drugged out interview where they talked about football games going for 6 days and the referee wearing knitted scarves. So they became bands I knew (this was still the salad days of Britpop, so you could claim a musical link between football and lager and…anything, as long as you had a Damien Hirst/Tracey Emin style arty explanation) and could casually drop into conversation. Luckily, the other options in the magazine were Ocean Colour Scene and Merc (the band of Nottingham Forest striker Paul McGregor) and thank god I didn’t go down that path. Luckily (again, good sentence structure huh?) when I got the albums (Catatonias Way Beyond Blue was available at Sanity which spoiled the cred, but it had a big IMPORT sticker on it, which got it back - Kenickies At The Club I got because someone on their mailing list sent me a tape, and his nerdy track listing was neater than mine) they were both fantastic. Where were you Triple J? Playing The bloody Whitlams, that’s what! Get onto some good tunes I yelled! However, at the last minute, just when I was ready to proclaim myself lord of the music and turn off the radio forever, Triple J pulled me back in a bit with one sentence, uttered by Michael Tunn. I remember it really well…”If,” he said, stridently (maybe had a stripey top), “you are filling in your Hottest 100 ballots…consider this…”

The song? Sick and Beautiful by the Canadian band Artificial Joy Club (formerly Sals Birdland)- and this track is the follow up single, Spaceman. One of my all time favourite songs, and it’s not even my favourite song on their album, Melt - that would be Crawl, although I am partial to the final track “Garbage Cans” which is about a woman who cuts up her husband and dumps him in the rubbish. I’ve kind of made it my mission in life to sell Melt to the populace, so why miss this opportunity? I actually e-mailed the band (get out you little embrace the future 97 uni student) to tell them their song was on the radio in Australia and they sent me two (two!) ridiculously nice e-mails of thanks. I hadn’t seen the clip until Youtube came along, but in the second e-mail, they sent me this really excited and proud synopsis of the video and it’s backwards plot - and then, nothing. I never heard it on Triple J ever again. The last I heard, Sal the lead singer was doing Elvis covers in Vegas. However, no matter what I think of this song, or what you think of this song, you should know one little detail. When I lived in my share house in Mt Stuart, my best friend put her new discovery on the house stereo - Matchbox 20. About one song in, six house mates gathered around the stereo began nudging me in the ribs and saying “go and get a CD” - by track two, the nudges became outright smacks in the head until I went out and got a CD to replace it (Stereolab? Are you sure?). My friend, piqued no one was feeling the magic of The Thomas, ripped the CD out of the stereo and stormed to her room, and I was free to put on The Joy Club, and a lovely afternoon was had by all. And whatever became of Matchbox 20 anyway? The thing was, on the particular day, my credibility was secure, and I’d like to think in this post, if I mention Stereolab often enough, I’ve come out the other end with my own credibility intact.

Oh who am I kidding, I really wanted to play “The Math” by Hilary Duff….damn it…. (Michael)

If you’ve got a story about a song you’d like to share, even if you’ve done one before, please email me, thanks