Three chords and the truth: punk's nostalgics

There's an argument that nostalgia in moderation is good for you. It staves off a whole raft of current problems that may include the mortgage, erectile dysfunction or the existential realisation that one day you will die.

Maybe hidden in the jangled melody line of The Stranglers’ Always the Sun, there’s an oasis of calm away from the aridity of middle-aged responsibility and neoconservative political philosophy.

I understand the attraction of a group of middle-aged guys and girls chucking the good old days around. Who can forget Radio Birdman at the Marryatville Hotel in Adelaide in 1977 (or was it 78?) Nic Lowe in Rockpile at the Cloudland Ballroom in Brisbane?

I miss that ballroom. I miss it more than Nic Lowe, although he did write Cruel to be Kind with its 400-year-old oxymoron nicked from Shakespeare.

It's only a matter of time before the MMM radio network gets sick of playing wall-to-wall golden oldies to the boomers. Yesterday I heard The Sunnyboys, Show me some discipline, boom out on a boomer station. Was it a fluke or were station programmers hunting for the next nostalgic demographic?

As John Strausbaugh wrote in Rock Til You Drop, "Colostomy rock is not rebellion, it's the antithesis of rebellion: it's nostalgia. And nostalgia is the death of rock."

One hopes that recent stage show of Count Down and the revival of bands such Pseudo Echo and The Reels is paying off for the boomers and Lost Generation songwriters and not just the producers.

Moving on

Let me tell you a secret. Back in 1978 when I was telling everyone in suits to “f**k off”, I desperately wanted to be liked and I would have killed for a job. Now, almost 30 years later I've had plenty of good jobs and I don't much care whether people like me or not. That's one of the good things about getting old. It's not disregard of others, it's the opposite. You take more notice of what people say.

To use a modern day cliché, you “move on”. I moved on to care about elderly people getting proper aged care; I care about our farmers and the drought; and I feel more at home in a country pub than a city bar. I care about education for kids from poorer families and I worry about the high rates of teenage depression.

In retrospect, the people who I thought were groovy and whom I trotted after like a puppy back in 1977 were pretty stupid and so was I. They couldn't explain why nihilism and cynicism had taken such a strangle hold on their world, except to say that it was “all stuffed”.

In retrospect, punk was the progenitor for this current generation’s quest for authenticity and independence, but it drips with nostalgia.

The punk empire of nostalgia is admittedly a small one, and at times, after a few drinks, I wander down those lanes of time. I play The Triffids (on vinyl) and I find a certain comfort there, like a worn pair of slippers or a favorite blanket. I loved The Triffids and anyone who doesn't well-up over Wide Open Road, hasn’t had a broken heart.

I do not disparage memory for where would we be without it? There would be no history and without these middle-aged tyrones guarding the gates of musical ephemera, how would future generations know that the guy from The Riptides, 20 years later, wrote a commercial hit about burning cane fields in Australia?

Surely there's a PhD thesis waiting on the interconnectivity of cane fields and Australian alternative music. There’s also a thesis waiting to be written why our generation has spent so much time living in the past rather than living in the present.

Remember, the future is unwritten and we write it now.