by on

THINGS I WILL MISS ABOUT THE UK:
* Coleman’s mustard
* Lincolnshire sausage
* The slow food market by the Embankment… mmm spit roast hog, garlic hummus and pigeon!
* Eating organically
* Rachel’s organic Greek style yoghurt with honey, and the Coconut yoghurt as well
* Puccino’s hot chocolate
* Jaffa cakes
* Chocolate that tastes ever so slightly different to Australian chocolate
* Digestives
* (The innocence of originally thinking that Digestives were tablets to help relieve indigestion)
* Yorkshire puddings
* Toad in the hole
* Fish & chips on the Brighton pier on cold winter days
* Mushy peas
* Proper steak & ale pies
* Authentic cave-matured Cheddar cheese
* Breakfast fry-ups
* Ploughman’s lunch
* Walkers Builders Breakfast crisps
* The word “crisps”
* Proper cups of tea (without sugar)
* Tea cosies
* Going out to folk music nights
* Countless amounts of gigs by well-known acts every night in London
* Australian acts who tour Britain and who are greeted with the rapturous support and applause of us expats
* The incredible assortment of theatre, comedy and musicals on nightly display throughout the city
* Locally-owned pubs built on atmosphere
* Historic and unique pubs
* The Tooting Tram & Social
* The Selkirk
* The fact that hardly any pubs have pokies
* Supermarkets that sell alcohol
* Off licences
* Guinness that actually tastes like Guinness should
* Real ale
* PINTS of beer as opposed to those pathetic little “pots” that us Aussies drink!
* Being able to fly to Europe for 20 quid
* Collecting stamps in my passport
* The red circle with the blue line
* Tube station advertisements
* Studying the tube map trying to work out which route will get me home the quickest
* Choosing random stops to get off at and explore, ie. Maida Vale and Ealing Broadway
* Oyster cards
* Night buses home from Brixton
* Cycling through Thornton Heath, Norbury, Streatham, Tooting & Colliers Wood on the way to work
* The massively long escalators at Angel
* Northern Line train carriages
* Coal miners with erections (you had to be there to understand!)
* Double decker buses
* Tube station buskers
* People slagging off Gordon Brown and Boris Johnson in the newspapers
* The Metro, The London Paper and The Evening Standard
* (but not the London Lite, that’s just shite!)
* Page Three girls
* Inquisitive dogs on trains
* Squirrels
* Urban foxes
* Mole hills
* Friendly Wandle Path street cats
* Wild blackberries
* Playing pool, table tennis and guitar on lunch breaks
* Hanging out with Team Six Nations and the rest of the A&C folk every day
* Staff bags
* Team snacks
* Cold, drizzly, overcast weather
* Snow
* Conservatories
* Regional accents
* People telling me that I’m losing my Australian accent
* People mistaking me for a Kiwi or South African
* Making fun of the Welsh just like we make fun of the Kiwi’s 🙂
* The M25
* The fact that motorways are referred to by number rather than name
* Rows of terraced houses
* Independently owned boutique high street stores
* Robbie Williams
* Take That
* Top Gear
* QI
* Cash In The Attic
* The Apprentice
* Jeremy Kyle
* Simon Amstell
* Dara O’Briain
* Susan Boyle
* Dave
* The BBC
* Castles
* Cathedrals
* Actually wanting to walk into a church to marvel at its history and architecture
* Church cemeteries
* Being nine hours behind
* Dyson air blades in airport bathrooms
* Heated towel racks
* The lady who reads the O2 voicemail message
* The lushness of the Wimbledon Common
* The deer within Richmond Park
* Microchipped bank cards
* Not having to select Cheque, Savings or Credit every time I make a transaction with my bank card
* Not being charged for every transaction you make at a cashpoint that is not owned by your specific bank
* The word “cashpoint”
* The word “innit”
* “You alright?”
* The museum quarters at South Kensington
* Hearing about people’s suggestions for places to visit
* Heading out to random towns and villages on the weekend
* The hilarity of Brighton “beach” that doesn’t actually possess any sand
* Boston & Stickney
* Edinburgh… my favourite place in the entire world
* Hanging out with Jess 🙂
* The British postcode system
* Toilets with levers instead of buttons
* The homeless girl in Thornton Heath who keeps asking me for 36p
* The fact that the school year begins in September
* Electric showers
* The bulky but cute three-pronged electrical plugs/sockets
* Camden and Portobello Markets
* Rough Trade Records on Talbot St nearby Portobello Market… the best record store ever
* The music shops on Denmark St
* Incredible, historical architecture
* Red telephone boxes and post boxes
* Bobbies
* Big Ben
* Leicester Square
* The Thames
* The endless fascination with the Royal Family
* British people in general
* The Union Jack
* God Save The Queen

THINGS I WILL NOT MISS ABOUT THE UK:
* 1p and 2p coins
* Living in Thornton Heath

The end!

by on

Last Wednesday night I went out to IndigO2 (a venue inside the Millennium dome at Greenwich, London) because O2 had kindly put on a free gig headlined by Australia’s very own singer/songwriter extraordinaire, Ben Lee. Who can’t say no to a free gig?

I’ve always been a fan of Ben, not a die-hard fan or anything, but enough to appreciate his sentiment and follow his career over the years. I’d seen him perform once before in Brisbane back in 2005, not long after he released Awake Is The New Sleep, and I left the gig quite impressed with his showmanship and his ability to work the crowd. He was most definitely a born entertainer.

His gig the other night was no exception to this – from the moment he walked on stage he had the audience in the palm of his hand. He quipped about the set list he’d scribbled on the back of a packet of Sainsbury’s hummous, before taking us on a philosophical journey of his beloved pop music. He brought us back to his breakthrough song of 1998 where he wished we were all wrong, then he regrouped by inviting us all to take part in this together. By the end of his performance the crowd had clearly caught his disease, and we all walked off into the dark with a sense of coming so close to a ripe, numbing sensation of no guilt and all pleasure.

Song-lyric puns aside, there was one tune in particular that Ben sang which really, really intrigued me. I’d never heard it before, and at the time I was under the impression that he had written it himself. I found out later that it was written by a guy called Kristopher Roe and originally recorded by the band he fronts, the Ataris, who I remembered from a few years ago when they did that version of Don Henley’s Boys Of Summer. The song by the Ataris that I’m referring to here, though, is aptly entitled Ben Lee, and the lyrics are as follows:

I never met someone so jaded
Your music’s really over rated
Nothing but a lot of pretentious noise
I know that Claire Danes was your chick
To me you’re just some ugly prick
Who got lucky cause he knew the Beastie Boys
And I can’t stand it

A lot goes on but nothing happens
But this time that’s not true
I wrote this song for you
To tell you that your 15 minutes of fame are almost up
Yeah one more thing, Ben Lee you suck

Bob Dylan must be kinda pissed
Cause you’ve been writing all his hits
Packaged and reprocessed for the world
I’d love to kick you in the face
Break your legs and throw you from a train
Cause you’re such a fucking girl
And I can’t stand it

I guess this song’s come to an end
I’ll say good bye until we meet again
You better stay out of my town
Cause if I had my way
I’d call up Snoop, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre
We’d come and beat you down

You can hear it here:

As you can tell, it’s a hate song – a feeble, pathetic pot-shot. Now when it comes to art and artists, I’m all one for constructive criticism, and I completely understand that everybody is entitled to an opinion, but there comes a point, doesn’t there? Do you really need to go all out and write this kind of blatant negative rubbish about somebody who couldn’t be less deserving of it? Apparently this Kristopher Roe bloke was simply jealous of Ben because he was with Claire Danes at the time, but come on, “I’d love to kick you in the face, break your legs and throw you from a train” is going a bit to extremes isn’t it?

Anyway, the point I want to make here is that at the end of the day, I think Ben himself is the righteous victor of the situation. He had the courage to get up there and sing the words of his very own hate song in front of 1,500 people, and I believe that really says something about his character. His ability to confront his own musical taunts face-to-face and essentially turn a negative around into a positive has ended up being one of the most inspirational three minutes I’ve ever been lucky enough to witness.

He even recorded the song as a bonus track for his latest album, The Rebirth Of Venus. You can hear it here:

Much respect to you, Ben Lee. Much respect to you.

by on

*you can download a demo recording of this song here

Lay me down in fields of green
The summer sun, it tastes as sweet as you

Fruits and flowers surround our dream
Our wish for native beauty has come true

Grounded now I heard you spoke
Your burrowed seeds, your barren throat
Godforsaken tears, they choke from you

Our undergrowth is drying up
And I’ve had enough of this
Photosynthetic mindfuck

Burn it down, the branches wasting
Ashen ground incineration
Leaves of brown reciprocating
Resin from our hearts

Wrath of life reduced to stumps
A hand for hand, a trunk for trunk
It’s killing me, this tree that took my love

Developmental antidote
Emerges from a heartfelt note to you

A final chance to cast my vote
Of grafting and of germinating too

I’ll rub the stem, create the spark
You skin my name, I’ll ring your bark
Seeds the girdling end of fertile hope

Burn it down, the branches wasting
Ashen ground of expiration
Leaves of brown reciprocating
Resin from our hearts

The rising flame my only hope
A sacrificial fire of growth
It’s killing me, this tree that took my love

The tree that took my love
The tree that took my love
The tree that took my love…

Clotted cells my heart will pump
Heavy swell, my sap will clump
If the canopy is free I’m jumping down

Burn it down, the branches wasting
Ashen ground incineration
Leaves of brown reciprocating
Resin from our hearts

Wrath of life reduced to stumps
A hand for hand, a trunk for trunk
It’s killing me, this tree that took my love

The tree that took my love
The tree that took my love
The tree that took my love…


…wrath of life reduced to stumps…

…a hand for hand, a trunk for trunk…

…it’s killing me…

…THIS TREE THAT TOOK MY LOVE…

© 2008 Daniel Schaumann

by on

Michael,

It was ten years ago today that I had my first ever public performance playing guitar in front of a crowd, at a hotel in Townsville. I was 13 years old, and the event was to celebrate “Oz Music Month.” I remember late in the afternoon, not long after my performance, the news came through that you had tragically passed away.

At the time, I was not exactly sure who you were, but the look of shock on everybody’s faces made me realise that your passing was serious – a harrowing occurance that regrettably resonated through the hearts of so many people.

As the years went by and I broadened my musical horizons, I discovered who this man was, that was Michael Hutchence. Such an amazing life you led and such an emotive voice you sang with, performing songs with a melodious embrace that remains unequalled to this day.

As I sit here reflecting upon your contribution to society, I notice the irony in how this one day ten years ago saw the end to your life – yet the beginning of my own music endeavours.

I know that one day we will meet in another realm and I will have the opportunity to thank you personally for the inspiration you left for me and for millions of others, but until then, may your memory forever shine like it does.

Michael Kelland John Hutchence: 22/01/1960 – 22/11/1997