Books Too! New across the desk. By Stuart Coupe

By Stuart Coupe

MYPONGA: SOUTH AUSTRALIA’S FIRST POP FESTIVAL

By Lindsay Buckland

(Lindsay Buckland, PB $49.99)

What happens when you combine a love of history, a magnificent obsession, and the chronicling of popular culture in Australia? You get a book like Myponga by Lindsay Buckland. And I for one am so happy it exists. This country has a rich and varied history of music festivals going back to Odyssey/Wallacia, Sunbury and Myponga, then continuing through Narara, Tanelorne, Byron Bay Bluesfest, Port Fairy, Woodford, and sooooooo many others. In fact, I often – in a pre-COVID world – used to think that every time I woke up there was another Australian festival announced.

But let’s go back to the formative festivals. The Sunbury festivals have already been beautifully chronicled in Peter Evans’ lavish 2017 hardback, large format Sunbury: Australia’s Greatest Rock Festival, and now comes Myponga: South Australia’s First Pop Festival which runs to almost 500 pages of text and photographs. Author Buckland was there as a youngster. As he writes: “As a thirteen-year-old kid, I ventured down to the Myponga ’71 progressive pop festival. I remember after watching Black Sabbath’s mega explosive performance, becoming partially deaf with ears ringing over the next three days. It was an experience never forgotten, a seminal occasion for my eventual journey into the professional world of music several years later. Three years ago, after emerging from a Vipassana meditation retreat, the idea suddenly dawned on me to write a book about Myponga. This is a definitive account of South Australia’s first pop festival Myponga ’71.” Buckland’s book contains everything you could ever want to know – and then some – about the festival which was held over the weekend when January rolled into February 1971. The promoters are profiled, as is the poster designer. There’s almost 25 pages devoted to Master Of Ceremonies, Adrian Rawlins. Then there’s detailed run downs on everyone who played the festival. That’s well and good for the big names such as Black Sabbath, but at times slight overkill for some of the lesser names. Sabbath came to Australasia for the briefest of trips – the schedule being New Zealand on January 29, to Sydney for a reception the following day, down to Myponga, and then out and on to Tokyo, but before they left London the New Zealand and Japanese components were cancelled.

Buckland captures times and place superbly: “Meantime Ozzy Osbourne was fretting about the never ending thirty-hour plane flight he was about to endure. The anxiety riddled Osbourne ended up coping by consuming no less than fifteen bottles of in-flight champagne before the plane touched down at Mascot Airport, Sydney on Friday January 29. During their four-hour layover, Sabbath held a press conference, then boarded a mid-afternoon Ansett flight touching down at Adelaide Airport late afternoon. The ‘Paranoid’ single was sitting at number three position on the Adelaide 5AD singles chat. When Sabbath arrived, there was already sensationalised press about how loud the band were. ‘Don’t be surprised if you might hear them in inner suburban Adelaide when they play.’ Bill Ward, Black Sabbath’s drummer, appeared on Channel Nine’s Saturday morning music show Move. Interviewed by the show’s host Vince Lovegrove, Ward would later affably put out the call to any young ladies wanting to join the band at their hotel for a bit of partying later that evening, proceeding to provide the name of the hotel and the band’s room numbers.” The Australian contingent of headliners included Spectrum, Fanny Adams, Daddy Cool, Margret RoadKnight, Chain, Billy Thorpe And The Aztecs, Fraternity, Jeff St John (with Wendy Saddington and Copperwine), and Healing Force. Significant pages of the book are also devoted to the lesser lights on the bill – Uncle Jack, Storyville, the Coney Island Jug Band, Fat Angel, Octopus and so forth. Each entry for all artists functions as both a mini biography of the band, their appearance at the festival and their pre and post Myponga activities. Buckland even details information about artists who were booked for the festival but didn’t appear. Red Angel Panic caused a mini storm for pulling out due to claims of underpayment for local artists, and New Zealand’s Flying Biplane cancelled. As music historian and Rhythms contributor Ian McFarlane writes on the back cover: “This book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of Australian rock music. “I love this book. It’s every bit of more-than-we-really-need-to-know information that music nerds like you and I love delving into – plus the photos, handbills and illustrations are wonderful. It must be time for the 500-page book on the Odyssey Festival at Wallacia. Or the Narara book?”

For copies go to: freestylepublications.com.au

BY MEG CRAWFORD

I’M WANITA

Listen to the album, watch the film – you won’t come out the same person and, guaranteed, you’ll be thinking about Wanita for days

Off the back of I’m Wanita – a successful feature-length documentary about Australia’s Queen of Honky Tonk – and an album of the same name, Wanita Bahtiyar is finally, belatedly and deservedly in the spotlight. Let’s start with the album. It’s an absolute belter. Better known by just her first name, Wanita knocks it out of the park. Her voice, the songs and lyrics (all hers) put the album in the category of a country great. Contrary to popular opinion, Wanita didn’t crown herself Australia’s Queen of Honky Tonk – other people said it first and it stuck, for good reason. When she sings, you can see jaws drop. She’s mesmerising. But she’s also an anachronism. As Wanita says in the doco many times herself, she’s from a different time. However, with a world-wide release of I’m Wanita (it premiered at HotDocs, the Canadian International Documentary Film festival, and will screen shortly at MIFF, Sydney Film Festival and CineOz Film Festival in Perth before getting a run in Nashville) and what should be a solid-gold album, it’s looking like her time is now. So, why hasn’t Wanita made it sooner? The answer’s complex, and the doco gives some insight as to why. It seems unfair to put anyone’s life in a nutshell, let alone Wanita’s, but she’s experienced significant trauma, there’s a question-mark diagnosis putting her on the autism spectrum, liquor’s been an issue and she eschews more marketable flavours of country, preferring honky tonk. Add to that flame-red ringlets and being a woman of a certain age, and she just can’t fit neatly into a PR box. But the best and most special things never do. The unconventional firecracker is as authentic as it gets. What you see is what you get. And sometimes, that makes for difficult viewing. Fiercely loving, charismatic, compassionate, kind and insightful, she comes with chaos. Take the scene where Wanita records at Mephis’s fabled Sun Studio, gets plastered and the recording goes off the rails. It is car-crash viewing. But it’s also not the full story. “The movie portrays me fucking up at Sun Studios, then doing the other things and then prevailing in Nashville,” Wanita says. “That was terrific for narrative, but I said to Matthew Walker [the filmmaker], ‘You know, you can put me in an auditorium of 100,000 people and make it look like this. But if asked the question, you know what I’m going to do. I’ll tell the truth. So, Nashville was the first stop. That’s where the album was recorded. Then Sun Studios, then New Orleans.” Also, it was a snap shot of her life. “It’s worth bearing in mind that the documentary was filmed mostly in festive mode and out of ordinary circumstances,” Wanita reflects. “So, that mania and the alcohol consumption and all of the things that come with that was what was happening at the time. It wasn’t a representation of how things are all the time.”

So, what inspired her in the first place to give a camera crew warts-and-all access to her life? “I’ve been misinterpreted all my life, misunderstood,” she explains. “So, this was one sure, absolute way of giving everyone the best available information, and just them know the truth. Express myself exactly how it was at the time.” Indeed, the film touches on her sex work, her estrangement from her daughter and the difficult, consuming love between her and her husband, who died, tragically, last year. It’s raw, revealing and there’s just so much heartache. Naturally then, it was confronting for Wanita to watch it. “When you know your shortcomings, which I do, and you know you’ve fucked up, to actually see it blatantly in front of you is still a shock,” she notes. “But then, I trusted my integrity and honesty will prevail and people will be able to sift out details and see through to my heart and good intentions.” On the flip side, Wanita has also experienced vindication and triumph. When it happens in the movie, we cheer. Take for instance when the Grammynominated Nashville singer-songwriter Billy Yates, who co-produced the album with Larry Beaird, says, “she’s so consistent, she doesn’t know how good she is”. “That was one of my favourite bits in the movie. I went to America thinking that they’d think I was some country hick and amateurish compared to that elite Nashville sound. Particularly at Beaird Studios. You know, you’ve got bloody pictures of Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson and Loretta Lynn on the walls. But they were saying to me things like, ‘you sang the hell out of that song’. I think they were really happy to just have a strong, honest, genuine singer.”

wanitathemovie.com.au