I
1984 was a big year for me.
I turned 20.
I was seriously in love for the first time in my life (at least with someone who loved me back – incidentally, 1984 was the year Billy Bragg released “Brewing Up with Billy Bragg” which had the great song “The Saturday Boy” and the lyric “in the end, it took me a dictionary, to find out the meaning of unrequited” – that is how love had been till then)
I played my last gig (at the Vulcan Hotel in Ultimo-now a backpackers) and decided that music was never going to be a career. I still clearly remember the day I realised that I would never write anything as good as Lennon and McCartney (nor a very long list of others), play guitar like Pete Townshend or Mick Weiley from Spy v Spy (nor a very long list of others) or have the stage presence of Annalise Morrow, the front woman of The Numbers (nor a very long list of others).
I was in the third year of my law degree (and, for the first time, I had developed a vague idea of what the hell it was all about). Not a day passed that I hadn’t wanted to drop out, but that was the year I decided that I was going to finish what I’d reluctantly started.
Russia was in Afghanistan and the US was funding the mujahidin (precursors to the Taliban) to fight the Russians. The US were mining harbours in Nicaragua and funnelling money into death squads throughout Central America. They were withdrawing from Lebanon.
The Miner’s Strike was in full swing.
And the Style Council released their first album “Café Bleu”. That changed everything! After The Jam it was so calm and quiet and political that it was revolutionary.
II
Two years earlier Dexys Midnight Runners had caused a paradigm shift with “Too Ray Ay”, introducing the Celtic Soul Brothers and the Strong Devoted and the Emerald Express. Two years before that (the same year John Lennon was killed), UB40 had given us “Signing Off”. Those three albums were, individually and collectively for me, life changing. But Café Bleu more than any.
In a recent interview, Weller describes the album as “a strange little record” in which it wasn’t until the fifth track “My Ever Changing Mood” that he made an appearance. But that track, one of the few from the album most people would have even heard, was such a revelation for me.
The single version is very, very different to the album version. The album version is stripped down to piano and voice. The single version is up tempo and full band. And it came with an amazing film clip.
III
For anyone under 50, it is hard to grasp just how different things were in 1984, especially when it came to music. There was no real internet, no mobile phones and few pubs had pokies (though that was changing rapidly). So many pubs had live music. And there were so many live music venues and clubs. Not DJs but real live musicians playing instruments. The stages were sometimes tiny (Mental As Anything recount playing on a pool table). But you could walk into most pubs, at least in the inner city, and find music.
To find out about gigs you had posters, word of mouth and the gig guide in Friday’s Telegraph (and there were only two reasons I ever bought a newspaper-the Friday gig guide and job ads). Then I could plan what I wanted to see and where and get to the bank (they stayed open till 5pm on Fridays) and get cash out to fund it. You banked with a passbook not a card and ATMs were not yet really a thing. If you had no cash, you had no way to pay the door entry and buy alcohol and cigarettes.
If you wanted to hear new music other than live gigs, you had radio (god bless 2JJ without which, for me, radio was a trashy wasteland – I am proud that I was part of rolling out 2JJ from a Sydney station to JJJ, the national youth network) and, on TV, Countdown (Sunday evening – but I remember Molly Introducing Dexy’s “Geno” with something like “this is big in England for some reason”, which rather summed up its lack of bite for me, as “Geno” had me on my feet – I got the reason), Donny Sutherland’s Sounds Unlimited (Saturday morning) and, for a brief few years Zounds on ABC weekday afternoons – 30 minutes of music, art and crazy stuff with Mike Meade and Ray Burgess.
And then came RAGE. From midnight or so Saturday night you could see the kind of music that was just never previously aired- Echo and the Bunny Men, The Birthday Party, The Models (before James Freud god bless him), Fun Boy Three, Dexys, the Style Council, Eurythmics, Blow Monkeys, Blue Tones, Billy Bragg, the Bangles, the Go-Goes. Everything that was new. And that included the glorious film clip for My Ever-Changing Mood. Paul Weller and Mick Talbot, (more recently of The Merton Parkers and Dexys), riding bikes Tour de France like and with subliminal cuts to various anti-war and anti-Thatcher messages. Looks very sedate now, but for its time it was radical. For, if nothing else, My Ever-Changing Mood is an anti-capitalist, anti-war song. And it is a song about the power of love.
IV
1984 was also the age of vinyl and cassettes. It is how you bought music. We were still a little off CDs. Streaming was a far-off vision. You bought a physical album and all that entailed – cover art, liner notes, inserts, badges, give aways. It was something you held. It also meant that you listened to music when you were at a record player (and why everyone had a cassette player and you made a tape, maybe even a mix tape, of your favourite music). And you listened to the tracks in the intended order.
My Ever-Changing Mood, through the song and the liner notes, politicised me. That wasn’t particularly hard when I was a kiddie from working class Mt Druitt suddenly amongst the hoi polloi of Sydney University Law School. Sons and daughters of solicitors, barristers, politicians and judges aplenty.
But until then, everything that was happening just seemed confusing and complicated. No-one had ever told me the rules, and I didn’t know them and didn’t understand them.
1984 was the year that I realised that the patronising sneers from Premier’s sons were a manifestation of class. That the huge gaps in my education from a suburban public school versus a posh private school were about class, privilege and maintaining the status quo. For example, I couldn’t just phone a top tier law firm, use my surname and ask to speak to the Managing partner about employment opportunities and drop in “oh yes, I’m his son (referring to daddy, the Premier of NSW). And I came to realise that the military industrial complex treated me and people like me (nearly everyone in fact) as expendable because our value was to produce and consume. The reason the spectre of nuclear war was acceptable is that its consequences were not meant for those who pushed the button.
IV
But this was the era of Whitlam’s Children. In those few brief, glorious years of Gough’s reformist Labor government (unlike the present meaningless centre-right swill), we had Medicare, the Family Law Act, Sex and Race Discrimination legislation, Environmental protections, the welcome embrace of refuges from the wars waged by America (and Australia) in Vietnam and Central and Southern America and the Middle East and free university education. Pay your student union contribution and otherwise, a free ride.
So those sons and daughters of traditional legal and political families had some unexpected company. We, of course, were floundering. But we were there, not just garrisoned off in the suburbs, out of sight.
So, when songs like My Every Changing Moods and, even more so, The Whole Point of no return, delivered messages of class consciousness, I was receptive and listening. Lyrics like those of The Whole Point of No Return made perfect sense in that environment:
The lords and ladies pass a ruling
That sons and girls go hand in land
From good stock and the best breeding
Paid for by the servile class
Who have been told all lie in state
To bow down forth and face their fate
Oh, it’s easy, so, so easy
All righteousness did build thy arrow
To shoot it straight into their lies
Who would expect the mighty sparrow
Could rid our world of all their kind?
Rising up and taking back
The property of every man
It’s so easy, so, so easy
Rising up to break this thing
From family trees, the dukes do swing
Just one blow to scratch the itch
The law’s made for and by the rich
It would be easy, so, so easy
In fact, 8-9 years later I was Nepean Hawkesbury Law Society President and managed to persuade the Law Society to give me $1,000 for prize money in a High School Law Week essay writing contest with the challenge to write an essay addressing the proposition:
“Laws are made for and by the rich. Discuss”
And I absolutely relished in “Contributory Negligence” by punk performance poet Attila the Stockbroker (and can still recite the whole poem). I also loved his celebration of Thatcher’s passing “Maggots 1 Maggie 0” (you really should find them on YouTube).
V
The lyrics of My Ever-Changing Mood really do ring true 40 years later:
Daylight turns to moonlight and I’m at my best
Praising the way it all works, and gazing upon the rest, yeah
The cool before the warm, the calm after the storm
The cool before the warm, the calm after the storm
I wish to stay forever, letting this be my food
Oh, but I’m caught up in a whirlwind
And my ever changing moods, yeah
Bitter turns to sugar, some call a passive tune
But the day things turn sweet for me won’t be too soon, no
The hush before the silence, the winds after the blast
The hush before the silence, the winds after the blast
I wish we’d move together, this time the bosses sued
Oh, but we’re caught up in the wilderness
And an ever changing mood, yeah
Teardrops turn to children who’ve never had the time
To commit the sins they pay for through another’s evil mind
The love after the hate, the love we leave too late
The love after the hate, the love we leave too late
I wish we’d wake up one day, an’ everyone feel moved
Oh, but we’re caught up in the dailies
And an ever changing mood, yeah
Evil turns to statues and masses form a line
But I know which way I’d run to, if the choice was mine
The past is knowledge, the present our mistake
And the future we always leave too late
I wish we’d come to our senses and see there is no truth
In those who promote the confusion
For this ever changing mood, yeah
When I look to our present crop, such as Gina’s mouthpiece, or that twit Taylor and his One Nation Lite rants against immigrants and permanent residents, I can’t help but think of the closing lines:
I wish we’d come to our senses and see there is no truth
In those who promote the confusion
For this ever changing mood
And when I watch the daily carnage inflicted and caused by the USA and Israel, and reports that one third of those killed are children who are deliberately targeted or their deaths casually dismissed as mistakes (as “bad things” happen in war) I am reminded of:
Teardrops turn to children who’ve never had the time
To commit the sins they pay for through another’s evil mind
Weller’s lyrics rather encapsulate the essence of the lost hope, the lost opportunity and the cynicism of power. And, sadly, they remain so goddamn relevant.
VI
The real wonder of the album came from the liner notes and Weller writing as his persona, the “Cappuccino Kid”. A hip mix of Burroughs and Kerouac, of café culture and pop idioms, of beat hipsters and mod philosophers, but also so much more.
If the Jam had looked back to English romanticism (nut not in the hackneyed way of the Duran Duran New Romanticism or the hysterical mimicry of Adam and the Ants), with their album Sound Affects, the more mature and nuanced Weller, as the Cappuccino Kid, embraced humanist and revolutionary philosophy of 18th and 19th century Europe (hardly surprising after his work with Red Wedge and the inevitable disappointment that Labor parties the world over specialise in). As the Cappuccino Kid wrote:
“Oh! What a square circle to live in! But yes, so, unfortunately. You see they say let it flow and all will come right in the end, but I say depends which side of the golden handshake you’re on. Clever right?”
“Mister I’ll tell you! We aren’t the ‘voice of a generation’ or any of these nice marketable cliches, we are part of a generation, part of a growing mood and most of the future. So, the hue may be Blue at the moment but Boy! Gir! can do something about it with the colours we possess!”
“Having checked it, loved it, been brought down and moved on by it. I’ve come to see that the real world doesn’t exist; only millions and millions of small individual ones, all rushing about with their heads cut off but their nervous system still tick-ticking.”
“See people like to file things and have files to go to. It’s far better if you elude their alphabet and devise your own code.”
“Here we are in the Twentieth Century with all the technical know-how the science numbers have, all that the past has taught us, and yet we still can’t guarantee a future!”
Excerpts from the mind of the Cappuccino Kid
And thus, after succinctly summarising a philosophy, perhaps a little less narcissistic than the “Drop out tune out” message of the sixties, Weller introduces us to Jean Paul Marat (pictured, in his moment of death, in the picture introducing this piece) and a passage fictionally summarising Marat’s philosophy (the words were attributed to Marat whilst they are really part of a monologue from a play Marat/Sade (or The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade) by German playwright Peter Weiss):
Don’t be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there’s no poverty to be seen because the poverty’s been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don’t be taken in when they pat you paternally on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.
VII
Whether the above passage is written by Marat in the 18th century or of Marat by a German playwright in the 20th century, it still rings true, so very true. It reflects the eternal nature of class struggle and humanity.
And in the 21st century, the sentiments are prescient. The gaps in inequality are greater than ever. The growth of consumerism and consumption have made the statements all the more relevant. We are encouraged to care less for other, the less well off (Albanese can write off Australian children living in misery in Syrian refugee camps as he has nothing but contempt for them, citizens of the nation he leads (using that term in its loosest sense, as they “made their own beds” in the same way that the miscellaneous keyboard warriors of the internet can dismiss as “unworthy” of empathy or assistance those who bring misery upon themselves through the circumstances of their birth, such as disability of being born in one of the many countries the west choose to bomb). The billionaire class urge us to blame immigrants for all of the failings of our systems and structures, so that we will not blame them. And science and the economy are made the prostitutes of war, so that massive profits can be made and existing order and established hierarchies maintained.
As Weller sang in “Going Underground” – it’s the kidney machines that pay for rockets and guns. And as he sang in “Money Go Round” – too much money in not enough hands, sees the same old people staying in command.
The Cappuccino Kid denied being the voice of his generation. Perhaps he was right. But he helped the rest of us find our voices and to embrace a humanist, universalist, social attitude towards the world by speaking truth with love.
