Putting The ‘Try’ in Poetry

FROST CRISP INK DISTILLED ECHOING WINTRY CITY WORDS OPEN SECRET THOUGHTS

BY ANTHONY PLEVEY

performance and collaborative events showcasing all the things poetry is today.”

The main festival events are happening between 1 -10 July, cross-linking with the CRA’s Winter in The City events and school holidays activities, the Uncharted Territory Innovation Festival, and NAIDOC Week (2-9 July). The latter will bring the voices of Canberra’s First Nations poets, with Us Mob Writing presenting poetry on the theme of For Our Elders.

It’s a program with many highlights, one of which being The Secret Histories of City West.

“The event is facilitated by the fantastic Zoe Anderson and features seven commissioned poets,” Malins enthuses. “Artists choose a site in City West and create a new poem about the secret history, be it real or imagined, of these places.

“Musical duo The Cashews will be using the poetry to deepen and enrich people’s relationship with the city environment.”

Poetic City audiences will be able to access these Secret Histories on a walking tour with the poets on Sunday, 9 July, with the poetry performed live at each site. A compilation booklet of the works will also be created, and QR code links on the pavement can be scanned to read the poems or listen to a recording.

Saturday, 8 July will be one of the big nights of the fest, courtesy of the SlamCity Showcase at The Street Theatre.

“This fun poetry/party night will feature outstanding Canberra slam poets who have performed at, or won, a poetry slam,” Malins extols. “And we have a special performance by Melbourne based performance poet Waffle IronGirl.”

In what’s proving to be an excitingly busy day ‘n’ night, and to compliment the creme de la creme of the Slam Poetry scene, Saturday, 8 July will play host to, and lovingly nurture, the future voices of the form.

“The Slam Shop on Friday, 7 July is an exciting collaboration with Canberra Slam,” Malins reveals. “It delivers a poetry slam workshop for 13 to 18 year-olds especially designed to help young people unpack their own stories, create a slam poem, and learn how to perform it confidently.

“The Fresh Voices showcase [also on 8 July] will give these newest voices in Canberra an opportunity to get up and strut their stuff.”

For those who might find performance a bit daunting, the Potluck Story Share will offer a welcoming story circle, a facilitated group that allows anyone to share a story or poem that says something about their history, ancestry, culture, and connection.

Poetic City Winter Edition will reprise some popular events from the successful 2021 festival. These include the audience-led Haiku For You in which flyers adorn the city with takeaway poetry featuring submitted Haiku verse on a winter and/or urban themes.

Furthermore, the highly popular Poetry Paste-Up workshop is back, providing a place where people can create graphic text-based posters that will go up on Marcus Clarke Street.

The festival will build on existing and new partnerships to ensure an inclusive, diverse festival through events including Queer Voyages

- Journeys in Poetry, Poetry Not Luxury Women’s Open Mic, Mother Tongue Multilingual Mic and Multilingual Poetry Workshop, and Poetry in Colour: Reading & Writing Anti-Racist Poetry with COAR.

Poetic City will also intersect with the visual arts, music, innovative thinking and the natural world.

“There’s A Flock of Words!, which is poetry and art for children inspired by Sidney Nolan’s Birds,” Malins explains. “There’s also the Poetry Paste-Up, as well as the Songs Are Poems songwriting workshop, Poetry as Innovation Machine symposium, and The London Planes of Odgers Lane.”

Centred on interactivity, creativity and connection, the Poetic City Festival invites people of all ages to enjoy good company, creative guidance, and sharing with the Canberra poetry community across a program of 30 entertaining, engaging and thought provoking activities. The time has come to slake that poetry curiosity.

Most Poetic City Winter Edition events and workshops are low fee or no charge but bookings are essential. Full program details at: poeticcitycbr.com

By Beth Heath

What would you do if you could travel back in time? The million-dollar question. As music fans, which decade would you choose? Which artist would you see?

The Quarrymen in residence at the Casbah Coffee Club, Liverpool, in 1959? Or perhaps The High Numbers (who had recently changed their name from one which they would ultimately revert back to) at the Railway Hotel, London, in 1964?

Or maybe even see a house band play mostly R&B while introducing some psychedelia at the Marquee Club, London, in 1966?

You would, of course, have been seeing the early iterations of The Beatles, The Who, and, lastly, in an audience of 50 people, Pink Floyd. In somewhat of a snag to this scenario, time travel remains an impossible dream. Some may have been fortunate enough to see Pink Floyd when it included Australia in its relentless 1972 touring schedule, David Gilmour having replaced Syd Barret years earlier.

With band members Richard Wright, Nick Mason, and David Gilmour parting ways with Roger Waters in the 1980s, and the untimely loss of Barrett in 2006 and Wright in 2008, it is left to current-day musicians to authentically re-create their music in a live setting.

The Australian Rock Collective (ARC) does this with incontrovertible ease. Comprising Darren Middleton (Powderfinger), Davey Lane (You Am I), KRAM (Spiderbait), and Mark Wilson (Jet), it has proven its winning methodology, playing to sold out audiences around the country, extending its reputation as a “not to be missed” live show. It pays tribute to music that its members obviously love, and connect with, through carefully curated performances.

Its upcoming 50th anniversary presentation of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon follows successful sold-out tours in 2019 (Abbey Road Live) and 2022 (Harvest Live and Let it Be Live).

ARC member, and Powderfinger guitarist and songwriter, Darren Middleton shared his insights with BMA ahead of ARC’s 12-show metropolitan and regional tour in June–July 2023.

“We are all Floyd fans for different reasons, I imagine,” he says.

“For me, David Gilmour was one of those guitarists that you looked up to. His style, phrasings, and use of effects are very interesting. He was very tasteful in his approach.

“As a whole, Dark Side is a beautiful concept album; rich in textures, tones, and ideas…. I love it.”

- Darren Middleton

The Dark Side Of The Moon (DSOTM) was released in a golden age for music, with other classics like Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy, Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, and The Who’s Quadrophenia

Hitting the world in March 1973, the album was career defining for Pink Floyd, charting within the top three positions in most of the traditional music markets.

In Australia, its release joined other pre-eminent popular culture events of the period, such as the Sunbury Music Festival.

Originally conceived by Waters, and presented to the band as a conceptual collection of songs about the pressures of life as a musician, the album would eventually include songs that dealt philosophically with topics that remain as relevant today as they were in 1973. The songs on a concept album, as the name suggests, have enhanced coherence when considered in entirety rather than individually. The album speaks of themes such as wealth, war, mental illness, existence, and death.

ARC appears to have an awareness of the importance of such themes, and indeed champions social consciousness issues. The war against Ukraine saw a united condemnation of Russian aggression throughout NATO and allies. ARC raised public awareness by dedicating a song to the people of Ukraine during its Harvest Live tour. Floyd’s Gilmour and Mason re-formed in the same year to release the song Hey, Hey, Rise Up! in protest of the war.

There are a lot of similarities between the period DSOTM was released into and the times in which we now find ourselves. The early 1970s became a period of disillusionment in many countries as Flower Power died and American and allied involvement in the Vietnam War wore down in ugly fashion.

On DSOTM, greed is called out in the song Money, which ironically helped Pink Floyd pocket millions while simultaneously laying the groundwork for its later break-up over finances. I asked Darren whether he saw the song as a reflection of the times it was written in or whether the message was closer to home for Pink Floyd.

“I think that the band wrote a song with a subject they wanted to talk about,” Darren muses. “Not with the vision of it making a lot of money, or with the future including David and Roger fighting about it. It would have been a reflection on a part of society at the time.

“This is often the case with ideas,” Darren continues. “Sometimes you become that which you initially loathed.”

Influencing my own generation’s connection to Pink Floyd’s music was the song The Wall, a song that I hope will form part of ARC’s performance on this tour. Being an avid Powderfinger fan, I couldn’t help but draw similarities between its prophetic nature and that of the Powderfinger song The Day You Come. I asked Darren whether it was evident during the writing process that such a song portends societal issues to come.

“I would say, at the time, you write a song with a message,” Darren states. “You never know what is going to happen with the song, or the future. Time can often give a song relevance or even more meaning… seem more poignant than at the time of its conception.

“That’s one of the beauties of a song and its ability to transcend generations and, at times, social issues.”

One of Canberra’s must-see cultural icons during the 1980s through to 27 September, 2010 was the Planetarium and Observatory located in North Canberra. This featured a movie theatre on a domed ceiling depicting space travel, narrated and set to music.

I can’t quite recall the soundtrack, but I imagine the songs Time and Eclipse would be featured, as I assume they would have been played in planetariums all around the world.

I see these as the perfect accompaniment to celestial footage showcasing the beauty of our galaxy.

Signifying that it is maintaining intergenerational relevance, DSOTM is estimated to be one of only four albums to have sold over 45 million copies world wide. I asked whether Darren thought that DSOTM would remain forever timeless.

“I do,” he states, quickly and simply. “Albums like this capture a moment in a generation’s life that requires it to be passed onto future generations.

“My kids know this album because I play it to them… and they love it as though they were around when it was released.

“Same for The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and a bunch of others. Society through music, captured in a studio, and passed on.”

CBR band The Decideds’ new track is a rousing concoction of interconnected styles and genres, fusing funk, soul, and disco for a spirited hybrid.

No doubt the run of festivals and sell-out shows throughout the ACT and NSW since 2021 has fine-tuned the seven-piece group’s focus, with So Long persuasively transposing energy and songwriting craft into a bold and expansive all-in sound.

Although the song maintains a typical mainstream pop arrangement, the parts are augmented and super-charged by the various performances and consolidating lines. Perhaps most enticing is this convergence, offering us a soundscape that feels as live as if they’d recorded the song at a gig.

And maybe they did adopt an old-school recording approach, as the sonic fervency is as dominant as the obvious, and yet not, appropriation/amalgamation of styles.

With its lone funk guitar intro a mere taster of what is the foundational core of the track, So Long stretches out into a brass-led blues-pop song. Amid the thick and intense musical flavours, the vocal performance acts as our anchor, reigning in the rest of the band as though attempting to prevent it from veering too far away from the task at hand. Yet, this is just what we experience when we are in the presence of a live act; any live act really. There is the threat of complete abandon, which in some instances is what we’re attracted to.

Despite this vague sense, however, So Long also contains a certain kind of stability. There’s the underpinning funksoaked bass guitar parts, and the self-assured executions of the drummer.

Said skinsman remains in control throughout, yet adds to the rawness with aptly placed fills and accents.

If you were to venture into a gig where The Decideds hold sway, So Long would undoubtedly sound just like it does here. Which is A Good Thing.

VINCE LEIGH