music

At rehearsal with a Ghanaian band for whom it is imperative to have two different drummers side by side. There are three brass horn players and I have counted four different patterns of stenciled colour on the walls. The room is filled with people speaking Ga and Twi and pidgin and the carpet is striped. […]

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In the late afternoon I walked down to the square. I’ve been indoors now every day of eight weeks. People were sitting round the edge of the grass as though it were a swimming pool they were dangling their legs into. The trees overhead are finally thickening with green. A man who doesn’t have much […]

We went out to the white people’s restaurant, as he calls it, which is a street stall on a dirt laneway behind the supermarket. There’s no street lighting, no cutlery. Collapsible plastic tables are set up between the parked cars. Vivid local tunes blast from the tiny bar across the road, which brings icy beers […]

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It is my birthday tomorrow and I’ve woken up in Africa! Beautiful Ghana of the glorious peoples. At the spanking new immaculate airport a man was bobbing at his keyboard and singing, in the arrivals hall, “And you’ve all arrived safely on this Wednesday night, hope you’ve had a great flight, welcome, welcome.” My flight […]

In New York I came into 34th St subway station to hear a bunch of dudes playing a kind of washboard bluegrass. They weren’t excellent but they had vigour. Called themselves the Ebony Hillbillies: cute. O you’re from Australia & you wanna make a record? Love to! Later I rang them up. “We’re not lettin […]

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Tomorrow is my Mum’s birthday, she’s eighty. Tomorrow is already today in Brisbane because Australia is tomorrowland. I rang her on the videophone we used to so dread in my youth. She looks pretty in her top and skirt. I had a red ‘H’ and a purple ‘B’ from the cafe table where I sat […]

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I just sold my air mattress, late on a Saturday night, to a small, muscular, warm dude whose name is Ramon. He rang me an hour ago from my online classifieds ad and asked, how much longer are you up? He described what he wants to do with it – lie under the stars among […]

Beautiful sunset over Berlin today: pink, stippled like wet sand, and spacious. The man in the wine shop made me laugh. They were listening to Bob Dylan, who is now, would you believe? a Nobel laureate. So I told him: I keep misreading the name of your store. For a long time I translated it […]

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I went to have my hearing tested. This became necessary because a man had walloped me across the face: a man I loved. Needless to say, no man has ever hit me before and I’m damned if any man will again. Needless to say, I no longer love him. It was my fault as well. […]

Yesterday I was reading the paper over coffee in a huge, bleak market hall in Berlin. The place has all the atmosphere of an airplane hangar, it was raining hard outside and had turned bitterly cold. I was reading about the coward shooter in Vegas and had screwed up my mouth. He shot from behind […]

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I went to see Paul Kelly play Berlin. I was going with my girlfriend and the evening of, she rang to say: I don’t feel well. I feel so tired and I just need to stay at home and curl on my couch. Can you go on your own? I went. Since I left my […]

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Today we will be making a new song, the first towards Cathoel & the New Government’s eventual second album. First album prompted 50s jazz impresario Bob ‘King’ Crawford to say, “In my opinion you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.” He was talking about Australia but I have gathered fellow […]

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On the subway a woman suddenly opened her mouth and began to sing. Her voice was tentative and good. She had a little loudspeaker rigged up through her mobile phone and had set herself to perform some songs in her own native Spanish. She was rugged up like the rest of us in a puffy […]

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Reaching my Kiez in the late afternoon* I nearly ran into a boy-girl couple kissing strenuously outside the Turkish supermarket. This supermarket annoys me because they always reel off too many plastic bags and I have seen a man who had put his single apple into one bag accept another bag to carry it home […]

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I have a friend who teaches piano. Today she said to me, “I have two students now from Australia. And both of them are called Oliver.” “Wow,” I said, “how many Australians called Oliver can there really be? There’s only like twenty-five million of us.” “Not that many,” she said, “because they’re all over here.” […]

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I went to a strange and interesting event which was sentimental and yet truthful and moving. Afterwards we stood around in tiny groups and two men who had spoken out about crying in public put their heads together and let their voices drop low. A woman who is four weeks fresh in Berlin said to […]

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Two hipsters compete in a Berlin bookshop, the day of David Bowie’s death Hipster One: I know, I mean I was like twelve when I heard ‘Changes’ for the first time. Hipster Two: I know, it’s like, I just… it’s like I had a personal connection. You know? Like I… Hipster One, abruptly: Yeah, everybody […]

Philip Glass: a man who halfway through his own memoir, written by himself about his own life, can start a paragraph with: “But look at it from my point of view…” The innocent jostle of his ego crowds every page. He takes up plumbing as a day job in order to support his children, whose […]

I saw a woman who looked just like you, I wrote to my friend, smoking a cigarette and wheeling her bicycle, big black spiky thing with a huge basket strapped on front, down the boulevard on swank avenue with her friend, who was peering in the glossy shop windows, also smoking. Then as I posted […]

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The people across the road are drunk and two of them are planning to have sex together tonight for the first time. That’s at this stage, it’s not even dark yet, we’ve still got the Fight that Blows Up Out of Nowhere and Falling Asleep in the Pizza up our sleeves. Their voices carry and […]