~ underground rivers

What an unusual, extraordinary month. By chance and queer circumstance, it proved to be an authentic festival of the early eighties. Now that the floodtide from the past has ebbed away, I’m shaking my head in astonishment.

And to think … that something so wonderful was spawned in an effort to address my little [big] problem and the financial boa constrictor which travels in its wake.

It feels a like a dream. An incursion on the general ordinariness of life from the luminous underground rivers of memory. I imagine it will be the last time I have the chance to revisit the mayhem of my youth in so comprehensive a fashion. Any effort to recapture the particular feeling at the Corner on the gloomy, wet afternoon of The Ears gig would be only to risk disappointment. And to belabour what was expressed in 'Livin' in DogFood' would be sheer pointlessness.

From this point on memories will degrade at a faster rate, people will die more often. The tall figures will withdraw into the mists…

Now I must begin learning lines for my part in Lynne Ellis’s production of Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty Titus Andronicus. And there is my drug-related presentation at the ANEX conference next month. There is a piece I’m preparing for The Last Tuesday Society. There is my monthly confabulation with a philosopher-psychologist. And my secret obsession with a certainAnd my vow not to let music slide away this time. There are the finals. There is my family. And there is, of course, my little [big] problem...

~ leap for lunch

Here's Richard Lowenstein's video of The Ears' first single

~ we're livin' on dog food - trailer

Richard Lowenstein has just released the trailer for 'We're Livin' On Dog Food' - his doco about the early eighties scene in Melbourne and, of course, the events surrounding the making of Dogs in Space.

It's showing on August 2 at the Melbourne Film Festival. This is its facebook event page and here's the trailer:

~ falls the shadow

It’s a demanding old life, is it not?

Things have been riotous, strange and extreme. I’ve been challenged with calamity, yet somehow, from the chaos, with the help of friends and family, using resources I didn’t know I possessed, I’ve been able to confront the encroaching darkness - just by living my life.

In fact, it’s turning out to be a wildly interesting year. The Ears reunion. Who could have predicted that? I’m spending more time with old friends than I could possibly have forseen, and no friend is better than an old friend. Richard is re-releasing Dogs in Space, a mere two weeks prior to the show, together with We’re Living on Dog Food, a 'doco that explores the making of the film and the scene in early Eighties Melbourne which inspired it. Providence walks before me, seeding my trail with stardust. I’ve even scored a ticket to the opening night of the film festival.

And the granite-bodied men of St Kilda Football Club have won fourteen games without a loss and look set to challenge for the premiership.

And the light of my life, my daughter, is happy and growing. We’ve just returned from three days in Bairnsdale with Tosie and her son Kyowa, who is just a little older than Polly. I really needed the time; I was getting a little frayed at the ends, and Polly loves Kyowa, and vice versa.



We saw fat koalas lodged in the forks of trees, regarding us with the inscrutable expressions of the profoundly stoned. We rode a ‘fairy’ to Raymond Island. We explored a secret place - a mossy rainforest gully of tumbled granite boulders in the deep shadows of water gums. We had dinner at the property of an old bushie called Mick, where the smell of burning bracken was as evocative as Proust’s biscuit, where we turned a giant fallen stringybark into an adventure playground, and where I explained that Betelgeuse, in the constellation of Orion, has recently reduced in size by fifteen percent and may be about to explode, turning our nights into day for the first time in a millennium. Elsewhere, we fed crimson rosellas and king parrots. I saw a bronzewing pigeon, the kind which leaps into flight with a characteristic flapping sound caused by the particular shape of its wings. I saw a male satin bowerbird, the kind that collects blue things for its prospective lovers.



But, almost inevitably, I received a call from Melbourne. My wife, who was not too well to begin with, was in hospital, having taken a decided turn for the worse. As with my legal problems, I can’t be too straightforward here. Suffice to say another heavy weight of responsibility and potential stress has been hefted upon my shoulders.

But never mind. No fear.

Many don’t make it through times like this. Often, it's simply the pressure that defeats them. Tosie’s brother recently died of a heart attack. He was in his early forties .He was brought low by the stress of a bitter struggle with the evil mother of his young daughter. Me, I will work towards tranquility. I know there is only so much I can do. There is no profit in savaging myself over things I can’t control. And in the end ...?

With the beautiful people on my side, I know it will turn out well.

related posts:
~ red in tooth and claw, ~ aerobones, ~the den of nargun

~ the resurrection of dogs in space

A few days ago, Mick Lewis and I delivered ourselves into the hands of Richard Lowenstein at his studio in St. Kilda.

For a long time now, Richard has been labouring over the DVD release of his Melbourne cult movie. (You know the one. It stars the sadly missed Michael Hutchence playing a character with distinct similarities to the writer of this blog in his tumultuous youth.) I’m not certain what the delay has been, but it appears that the long awaited release is near.

Mick and I were member of The Ears, the band whose story was used as the basis of the film. We lived, with all the others, in that ratty, shambolic, dangerous, vigorous household of ancient Richmond.

Rather than simply putting a restored copy of the film on a disc, Richard seems to be assembling a comprehensive document of the era itself, collecting a great amount of material in various media to include as extras: photos, posters, all that; some footage from the set of the film, (including my acerbic interview with Michael Hutchence). There are old Ears film clips too, plus the interviews he’s currently doing with a mix of surviving stalwarts from the early Eighties scene. These include other Ears members Tim McLaughlan and Chuck Meo (who played himself in the movie), legendary Birthday Party guitarist Rowland Howard, Ollie Olsen and Dolores San Miguel, promoter of the famous Exford Hotel.

Mick and I must have spoken with Richard for two hours. Sometimes it’s nice to have permission to be nostalgic. I enjoyed dredging back through that time. Despite our courageous dedication to drunken partying and general intoxication, a surprising number of recollections survive. Much of what we recounted sounded, in retrospect, like some scatterbrained, completely arbitrary art project, though it was certainly never intended as such. Magically, bleating lambs appeared overnight in bedrooms. Rattling gumball machines were dragged through the dead of night. Sombre dialogues were held with patient eight-foot roosters on busy Wattletree Rd. After speed-fuelled Space Invader marathons the pixelated aliens would march remorselessly across the inside of our eyelids as we threshed in our beds. Once I spent hours on my hands and knees crawling around someone’s house, entirely disoriented, desperately trying to stand up after injecting a vial of liquid phenergan which someone had appeared with ...

Through the interview, Richard didn’t concentrate strictly on the events which inspired the film, but attempted to steer things towards the broader context of the time.

When you’re young, everything is exciting, that’s a given. If you’re out there doing things, making the scene, it’s easy to feel like you’re the centre of the world, the cynosure. It may feel like it’s the first time in the history of the Earth that such fantastic new sounds have been heard, but really all that’s in play is the arrogance and naïveté of youth.

I have always suspected that the claims made by contributors to the early eighties scene in Melbourne have been overly subjective, and that, however brilliant it all seemed at the time, it was still more or less the same thing which every generation goes through. As for myself, I’ve always been reticent to suggest that I was part of something particularly unique.

But, after the interview. After listening to Rowland, Dolores and all the rest, I began to suspect that there might really have been a special something about the scene back then.

Twenty five years ago, it was a smaller, greyer, far more conservative city. There were no street cafes. Restaurants rarely had bars and you could count on two hands the number of 24 hour establishments. You’d be hassled for wearing hats in pubs and chastised by war veterans for wearing second hand medals on the tram. You could get beaten up as a poofter for wearing anything even remotely peculiar. The only alternative scenes were the sluggish festering hippies in Carlton and Fitzroy, a gaggle of Maori drag-queens in Fitzroy St, and the tribes of skinheads and sharpies in Holmesglen and Bayswater. Musical offerings included pub rock, more pub rock and maybe a bit of flaccid folk rock.

Into this dead zone stepped a new generation inspired by the punk movement in London, New York and Detroit. But it was not just the music. Because the city was smaller, because it was so disobliging of strangeness, there was a tendency for the weirdos to find each other and congregate for safety. The David Bowie queue portrayed in Dogs in Space was one catalyst for this. It was there that Mick and I and the rest of the Ears discovered a host of like minded souls who became our friends, collaborators and fans.

An example I like to use involves the freakish hair colours most of us sported to varying degrees. In the Melbourne of 1980, if you caught sight of someone across the street with dyed purple hair, the odds were you’d know them. The scene was that small. Today, well, you wouldn’t bother looking twice.

So all the alternative types were tossed together by circumstance: the hardcore punks, the industrial experimenters, the new wave pop exponents, even mods - along with visual artists, designers, artists and writers. And it became a melting pot. Today, Melbourne is large enough to support many distinct scenes, but then there was really only one, and the vibe, looking back, was singular.

*

There was a tragedy during the period described by Dogs in Space which was to fuel the central drama of the film. It was over this issue that Richard and I were to fall out. Readers of this blog, specifically the transcriptions of my early eighties diaries, will know I’m referring to the overdose death of my lover Christine.

Though I’d been involved with Dogs in Space and had encouraged it, I hadn’t taken careful notice of certain plot elements. It wasn’t until I saw a rough cut that I realised that the film appeared to show the ‘Sam’ character introducing the ‘Anna’ character to smack. I was aghast. Though the film is fiction, it conforms largely to the facts of real life, and on this sensitive point, it jarred badly with the truth. I was horrified to think that anyone might think I was responsible, even indirectly, for Christine’s death.

I responded in the media with as much vitriol as I could muster. ‘Sam Mad About Dogs,’ is one headline I recall. In one interview I was quoted as saying ‘The film appears to be suggesting that if you take heroin you can go to heaven with Michael Hutchence’. Contemplating litigation at one point, I even found myself in lawyer’s office [but not for long after he discovered I had no money].

Indeed, it wasn’t until Troy’s memorial a year or so ago that Richard and I buried the hatchet. It was mostly down to me, as the aggrieved party, and I was relieved to end the acrimony. During last week’s interview, the subject of Christine’s death was raised and we discussed it like gentlemen. Richard had always thought that the dichotomy between fact and fiction was clear, but way back, when my emotions were still tender, I just didn’t believe the public would be able to make such distinctions. To some extent I was probably right, but it was all so long ago… Thankfully, we can be friends again at last, and Richard, all in all, is not a bad friend to have.

*

Addendum July 21 - The 'Dogs in Space' re-release premieres at the Melbourne Film Festival on August 1; the related doco 'We're Living on Dog Food' on August 2. The Ears reformation gig is on August 16 at The Corner hotel: Keep informed on Twitter

Ears photo album

~ the wad

It came to me at the bottom of a cold dark well. I would write a fantasy novel. In fact three, a trilogy, something as surreal and rabelaisian as China Mieville, but which would sell like Terry Pratchett.

A month later and I haven’t yet got bored of the idea. In fact it’s going rather well. Slow, but well. I can’t imagine how I will ever complete it, but I’m not letting that get in the way. I’m going to send some finished chapters around the place and get some reaction, then I’ll either bite the bullet and write the whole thing, or do something else.

The novel is set in two interconnected worlds: Nonesuch, dominated by a planet-girdling forest called (at this stage) The Weald, and Telesium, the spirit world, accessible by Séance, by the herb sleither, and by rites of the shrouded Velleity. So far, I’ve spent most of the time building the universe, naming the plants and animals, the seasons, the rules of Nature, the history of human civilisation … making a map, the all-important map. Though, as is my way, I still waste time with intricate, richly textured details that may never see the light of print, I have been uncharacteristically strict with myself. I have a believable world, three or four chapters in draft and one polished off.

At present I’m worried about the name of the male protagonist, Lamarc. It’s not bad, but it’s not of the rank of, say, Alsace, his father, or Teasel, his mother, or Tetany, the evil queen. If you’ve got any suggestions? The victim of the recent light plane crash in Moorabbin had a beautiful name: Akash Ananth. Either would be better than Lamarc, I think. But I’m not sure. Perhaps too sub-continental …

Anyway, here’s a snippet ... Unknowingly drawn by the mysterious discorporate entity Almathea, the child Lamarc is venturing perilously into the phantasmagoric Weald …

*

Deeper in the wildness, in close musty pockets where the sun scarcely penetrated, he had observed a very curious and poorly understood creature - or perhaps part of creature, or perhaps plant - known as the wad. It was a cube roughly the size of a human head, composed of a moist translucent meat-like substance, veined with something blackish that could be seen to flow and packed with pebble-sized organelles in pale shades of red, blue and grey. Behaviourally, the wad was elementary. It fell; unexpectedly and from on high - from no visible resting place or eyrie, seeming to materialize in mid-air. It would slap into the earth, scattering leaves and mulch, then proceed to decay in natural order, offering its stored minerals and energy to the Weald. No doubt the wad could kill, if one was caught beneath it, but to Lamarc’s knowledge no one had yet had such tremendous bad luck.

The wad was a very strange thing, but it was a useful reminder that everything to do with the Weald was fundamentally strange. If Lamarc was ever in danger of acclimatising to the outlandishness of life in the forest, the wad was always there to pull him up. A queer thing in its essence. No apparent rhyme or reason. Brute strangeness.

In these congested areas, he could feel the Weald in everything. It transfused from soil to air, from leaf to root to thallus, from rain to tongue; everything swollen and heated with the workings of the ecome.

*

Some other news … The re-release of the Beargarden album All That Fall is looming. The delay has been my fault. I’ve insisted on writing liner notes that contain a potted history of the band, and since I’ve been hiding under a rock until recently, nothing has got done. Now I’m working again and the biography is almost ready. It’s long and full of dirt.

We’ve been spurred to action by word of movement regarding the long awaited Dogs in Space DVD release. We want to release an Ears album around the same time, but, according to our schedule, we can’t do that until the Beargarden is done and dusted.

Apparently, commentary tracks are being prepared for the DVD, so Mick Lewis (Ears guitarist) and I have decided to our services to R. Lowenstein. We’re so excited about it, we may do it whether it’s included or not.

∆ george + the decrepitude of the whale

~ please be warned, the following tale may contain disturbing concepts ~

One of the most significant girlfriends of my past – I’ll call her Blackie – lived in a ground floor flat in St Kilda. It was approximately 1983. I think I had almost moved in, but not quite….

Blackie was a notorious door-bitch, guarding the entrances of places like the Razor and Hardware clubs like a sour, permed Cerberus. She had a deep, commanding voice and a scathing wit that could send grown men sulking away, their bellies to the ground. Understandably, at this time, I found myself doing a lot of clubbing.

One evening, there was some kind of party, celebration, I have no recollection what exactly, but I do remember a small, sallow boy with a strange manner who seemed to be deliberately lurking, particularly in the vicinity of Blackie.

It was a particularly drunken night. A whole mob of us retired to Blackie’s flat, including this boyish creep. He wasn’t much more than a kid and he had a way of staying unnoticed, of not being taken into consideration. His interest in Blackie was plainer now, but I just didn’t take him seriously enough to tell him to sod off. He was too innocuous. I think Blackie thought the same and, since she was as utterly inebriated as I, was not really bothered by his feeble advances.

One by one, our guests departed, until at last it was just the two of us and this boy. We pointed him out the couch and went to bed.

What follows is only comprehensible with the understanding of how uselessly drunk we were …

Some time later, from the profound depths of unconsciousness, I sensed some kind of movement in the bed, and also sounds. There was something disturbing about it, but I did not have the wherewithal to wake myself up. Then suddenly, nightmarishly, things started clashing in my head. The sounds I was hearing … they were the sounds Blackie made during sex.

Then what was this motion beside me? The implications began to dawn on me. Blackie, the bitch, had taken some other guy into her bed without even bothering to throw me out first. But then Blackie screamed and everything became dreadfully clear.

Mindless with rage, I chased him out, cornered the pale snivelling gollum near the garage in the weak early morning light. Blackie was curled up naked in the bathroom, weeping. I had acquired a weapon of some sort. I remember exactly what I said.

- I’ll cut your fucking throat, if I ever fucking see you again.

To this day, I wish I hadn’t let the rapist get his pants.


*

This incident still makes me blood rise when I think of it. It had a pretty savage impact on my pride; I couldn’t help feeling I should have been able to stop it. God knows what kind of emotional impact it had on Blackie… We never really talked about it; we couldn’t bear to. I took solace in the fact that she was nothing if not resilient.

But I seethed. As early as an hour later, I began to regret letting him free. I wanted to get this guy. I found out his name, where he lived, that he had done similar things in the past, but I never found occasion to visit revenge upon him – in part because I’m not at all into physical violence, in part because I have difficulty with the very idea of revenge.

But then, while speaking with my friend George, the perfect form of recompense was conceived.


*

Richard Lowenstein was directing a film called Strikebound in the Wonthaggi area of Eastern Victoria. I was playing the part of a police constable and had occasion to travel down there a few times and stay at the famous Pines motel near Inverloch. George came too; I think he had some extra work, or was interested in getting some, or something …

While we were down there - probably lounging in the vicinity of the reopened pit Richard was using as a primary location, waiting for something to do - we learned that further down the coast at Point Hicks approximately eighty false killer whales had beached and died.

We began to examine the possibilities. These false killer whales were said to be smallish, not too much bigger than a porpoise. If we were to acquire one, bring it back to Melbourne, dump it in the front garden of the rapist’s family home [recall that he was very young] and threaten to call the police if he removed it… then would that not be a satisfying turn of events?

We decided that the concept deserved realisation, but neither of us thought it through. The sheer absurdity of the idea buoyed us along, but we never really stopped to consider the possible complications. We could have done with the internet at that stage. Those whales were huge, man.

Our only preparation was to scour the kitchen of The Pines for useful tools. We came away with a ridiculous assortment of knives and forks. We had something like twenty-four hours before our next calls. We got in George’s car and drove, not bothering to consult a map.

The drive took nine hours, about seven hours longer than we assumed.

We arrived exhausted at what I know now is the Cann River National Park. It was here the whales were said to have beached. Obeying some instinct for caution, we decided to conceal our implements. We each tucked up to five bread knives, carving knives and screwdrivers into our belts, and covered them with our shirts. The idea was that if we couldn’t get the whale whole, we would at least bring back a large enough part of it to cause our victim extreme inconvenience.

The path to the beach led past a ranger’s shack. There was little we could do but follow it and, inevitably, a small officious guy in a uniform and slouch hat emerged and challenged us. When we asked for the beached whales, he became suspicious and protective.

Incredibly, he asked us what we had under our shirts and we had no choice but to show him. It was embarrassing really; we should have had something more impressive than cutlery under there, but he took us seriously enough and sent us packing with a warning that it was a crime to remove any part of a protected species.

- They’re dead, aren’t they, I said.

- Living or dead, said he.

There was no point arguing. We returned to the car, stowed our tools, and showed our stomachs to the ranger when we passed him again.

We walked for fifteen minutes along the beach before we encountered our first solitary whale. It was too far. Our plans were dashed. No road access. Legal resistance. And far too small a vehicle. Though it was a false killer whale, it was the size of a real killer whale and …. I don’t know … maybe one and a half, maybe two tons of dead weight? What had we been thinking?

It’s skin was peeling away to reveal the blubber beneath and there was a noticeable scent of decay. It’s tongue was blue and so swollen it was forcing open its great toothed jaws. The whale was a sad and horrible sight.

George, as always, had his camera and disconsolately we began to take photos. I put my foot up on the whale’s back in a kind of safari-hunter’s pose. George positioned himself low, near the mouth.

- Shit. Did you feel that?

- What? asked George.

- Something rumbled, I said. There it is again.

- What?

- The whale’s not dead. It’s moving.

Startled, we took a good long second look at the carcass. It certainly looked dead. After an uncertain moment we resumed our former positions.

Then a huge gout of disgusting red vomitus flew from the whale’s mouth. Only barely did George manage to topple out of he way, avoiding the nauseating stream by inches. It had come out under pressure, a lot of pressure, there were dark clots metres up the beach.

So… is it alive or dead? I asked

The stench was almost paralysing, but we endured it long enough to finish taking photos.

On the way back to the car, we encountered the ranger again, told him what had happened. He nodded sagely.

- You know, people can be killed by exploding whales. If one of them really goes up, it can propel missiles of flesh twenty, thirty metres … at lethal speeds

We stared at him blankly.

- The gases build up as the whale decays, he explained. The blubber forms a strong seal that only ruptures when the pressure is enormous.

What if our plan had worked…? The consequences would have been even more spectacular than we imagined …

It was a hard nine hour drive back to Inverloch. And poor George was the only one with a license


*

As a footnote, some weeks later, my ever thoughtful friend turned up with a huge dead cream-coloured Labrador in his boot – thinking it might serve a similar purpose as the whale.

It didn’t work for me; in fact just looking at the dog made me feel like crying. George kept it in his boot for a couple of weeks in case it ‘came in useful’, but ultimately I had to help him bury it on Beaumaris beach.

It was so heavy, I remember, and we carried it in a sheet. In the furtive dark, we felt like we were burying a human body …

*

A further footnote. It was during this stay at The Pines that George locked on to Tobsha, [the erotic fiction writer]. She must have been doing some acting on the film, and a weirder partnership has never been consummated. My guess is that Tobsha – as was her way - was lured by George’s fantastic Lithuanian body, his heavy uncircumcised penis and, perhaps, his incontrovertible weirdness. The relationship lasted nearly a year and it is said that George even pops up in one of Tobsha’s popular novels.

George + The Decrepitudes - index

~ troy

Troy was stricken during the first wave of HIV infections, and, in time, contracted AIDS. Upon his death earlier this year, he must surely have been one of the longest surviving victims in Australia.

Troy's funeral was held in Sydney, where had lived for the last few decades, but in Melbourne, where he had so many friends and admirers, a second memorial service was held in the gardens of Ripponlea mansion.

This was a couple of months ago, when Melanie and I were still able to share a car without beleaguering each other with vicious squabbling. (Melanie is an ex-girlfriend of Ukranian descent, possessed of an extraordinary temper and a withering tongue). I gave her a lift to the memorial, and we were both nervous as we walked up the gravel drive. Most of the guests we would not have seen since Troy's departure to Sydney; it would be the opening of a time capsule, but the contents would have aged along with us.

Graciously, the event was organised by George Huxley, Richard Lowenstein, Bruno Charlesworth and others - and they'd seen fit to provide a liberal bar. This was my first port of call; I was unsteady, I was apprehensive of whom I might set eyes upon. There would be friends - there would also be those with who I did not part on friendly terms.

As mentioned in the previous post, I came to know Troy as his neighbour in Milton St. I'd known of him previously by reputation, but under a different name - Vanessa, allegedly the most gorgeous and authentic drag queen in Melbourne. At that time, the only drag queens I'd known were six foot tall Maoris on mandrax and the idea of an attractive one seemed a contradiction in terms.



When I first met him, Troy still had pert shapely breasts and was the most exotic and inspired individual I had yet encountered in my short life. Not surprisingly, it took me a little while to stop being afraid of him. To that point, most of my experiences with non-heteros had been in the form of older men trying to pick me up from the street, (on one memorable occasion, an airline pilot) - and in my naivety I expected that sooner or later Troy would put the hard word on me. Of course, it never happened, but one night we were up late watching TV and Troy, not wanting to outstay his welcome in my flat, politely asked if I wanted to go to bed. My response was 'No thanks, I'm straight'. Till the day he died, Troy was still embarrassing me by retelling that story to anyone who would listen and laugh. Indeed, it was his habitual pleasure to annoy me - once, he snatched up some of my unfinished poetry and, to my exasperation, I had to chase him around the flat for half an hour to get it back. You see, I was very sensitive about my writing back then...

Troy had sheer talent. He started with fashion and ended with sculpture. He would sew me up crazy outfits to wear on stage. Once, I remember him dressing Tobsha Learner in a magnificent garment that was also a chest of Daliesque drawers - and then blackening up her underarm hair with an eyeliner pencil. Jean Paul Gaultier, you say? This was well before him. Troy also served as my match-matcher, setting me up with inappropriate female after inappropriate female...

At one time he became obsessed with Dinah Shaw - a sort of white-bread Oprah whose show was on TV weekday mornings. I remember him speaking of her repeatedly and once he asked me if I found her attractive. I didn't really take him seriously, till I stepped onto his veranda early one morning and saw him through the window furiously masturbating with Dinah on the black and white telly next to his bed. I backed quietly away and gave him all the time he needed.

I recall entering his flat after the departure of an ambulance, concerned about what had transpired. Troy was the angriest I'd ever seen. He'd spent most of his dole cheque on heroin, immediately OD'd, been shot up with narcan by the paramedics, and now, he spat, was 'fucking straight'. I watched him trying to fix plastic gemstones to the bald sides of his head with super-glue. He was not fucking straight.



In time we became caring friends. Then we drifted, then he moved to Sydney. But I came away with a thorough and gainful appreciation of the perverse.

The occasion of his memorial put my head in a spin. A parade of friends and acquaintances I had not seen for twenty years: Anne Harding, sister of my dearest Christine; Lisa Dethridge, former lover and cheekily smiling imp, now with family; the gorgeous Suzanne Wales, with the sweetest nature in Nature, another lover, now a Barcelonan; Mark Warner, with who I'd fought the Slammerkin, now dead of cancer; Jeff Jaffers, who directed Earthbound, my only screenplay; Marie, an ex lover of both Troy and myself; Mim; Denise; Despina; George Huxley, on whom I relied to colour and cut my hair during my days in the limelight; Karen Hooper; Anthony Smethhurst; Barry Sherman - once a warlock for the local branch of Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis; his Sister Sara, the fashion designer; Mark Seymour, Sean Kelly... ad infinitum.

I buried the hatchet and shook hands with Richard Lowenstein, who, since Dogs in Space, had been my declared enemy. Troy's spirit permeated the gathering, dissolving all enmities. I also spoke with Richard's partner Lynne Marie for the first time since those days. Little information passed between us - she speaks as softly as a mouse and I am half deaf - but there was good will in the air. Later, having lost the power of speech, I sat next to a dyspeptic Renee Geyer and tried to hold a conversation. Neither of us could make an ounce of sense. Renee, Mark Seymour and Tim McKew sang songs. George Huxley, Ollie Olsen and Bruno Charlesworth gave elegies. But it was somehow the gathering itself that honoured Troy.

I became dangerously overstimulated and it wasn't long before I was probably suffering from alcohol toxicity. I recall being in a car with my dear friend Paul Goldman, Suzanne Wales & Hugh Marchant (with whom I had had bitter words when last we met). We were on our way into the city, for what I suppose might be called a wake. I have few memories after that. The hangover of the following day was a sheer triumph for the Slammerkin.

It was a special congregation - a particular group who will almost certainly never come together again. As such, it was a final sacred gift from Troy - the genuine cult-figure. We came away feeling graced, our lives in a little more perspective. One last glimpse of Troy's blazing talent, the world he addressed with art and wit, the merciless disease that in later times defined his life. One last glimpse of his holy fire.

troy on youtube
troy on myspace