If Bush's enemy was so powerful, how come it only took 2 weeks to take their country?

Republished from Butterboxmedia.com

Marty Willson-Piper and the Mood Maidens: The Hopetoun Hotel. Wednesday 3rd November, 2004

As the information broke that the extended Wars-R-Us family had negotiated yet another term of office, (it’s back to the business of achieving those sales targets - with extreme prejudice) Marty Willson-Piper took his blast of rage and love to the Hopetoun Hotel for a mesmeric midweek gig.

Picture a girl with flowers in her hair circulating the room offering incence sticks to punters. Or Marty, all Macleans smile and white cat heat, reluctantly interrupting the background muse of Deep Purple (what? No Sgt. Peppers?) to weld the direst cliches of vaudeville onto a few small declamatory non-tunes of his own.

The abiding discontentment created by the Bush mission statement-style of rhetoric - a wretched squawl that has made me most aware that I am alive in hell over the last few years - encouraged the fiendish Manchester wordsmith to wear his hip taste upon a sleeve threadbare with the punk dichotomy of vicarious pain. It’s the only reasonable assumption I can make after listening to him, unless of course I subtitle this with Willson-Piper’s own off-the-cuff aside: “the man who read poetry at The Hopetoun Hotel.”

Breathing life into “The Pest” from John Cooper Clark’s Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt, his razor wrapped in silk delivery cut into both sides of the moral axis with a fluent mix of self-conscious artiness and rich, nimble glee. His throwback style helped garner a few positive mumblings from the crowd with its quasi-noble resurrection of past heroics and wound-up, unbridled passion. Marking the early part of the set with a big, blind enthusiasm for stomping on the self-styled social moralizing of the imbecilic and treacherous la famiglia Bush, Marty’s brazen talent had a presence of such finely exaggerated melodrama he reduced the whole burlesque fiasco of strained relations between Bush Snr. and his loose-screwed (as in an Ikea wardrobe) son down to the self-indulgent pantomime it really is.

During the 80’s, Willson-Piper’s band The Church made a comfortable living with some largely indefinable room spray that had us kids of the day reaching out for the things we didn’t quite understand, but felt as if we’d like to. Their finely honed observations of pompous social sentiment helped turn the prevailing epidemic of dinosaur proportions: punk’s boredom and indifference - back into the icy cave of capitulation where it belonged. Despite classic rock radio stations shamelessly anointing The Church by soundtracking their eye-in-the-sky traffic reports (or some other crap) with the band’s ‘hits’, The Church helped channel Punk’s late 70’s Us v Them derailment from becoming something so mindnumbingly boring that its own narcissistic righteousness threatened to never get off the hypothetical shrink’s couch it had embedded itself upon. I mean, go vomit on yourself for a principle and see how many people it inspires. (I know, ’cause I tried it.) The textured, sonic statements of possibility created by The Church were anathema to much of the pasteurized hedonism of the day.

However to paint a complete picture of the the night, (an abstract one OK) young Marty showed a touch of the recluse revolutionary scribbling subversive pamphlets in a darkened cellar kinda thing. Occasionally, he’d stop strumming his 12-string to wistfully remonstrate the sadness of deleted recordings (his own, of course). Then, to drive home what seemed to be his point (”nobody understands me?”) he urged the theoretically lamebrained crowd (who were closer to 40 years old than 30, and a few were over 50) to, “Listen to the words!” Well, fair enough dude, I thought, as I ‘listened’ to the sheer logic (if not poetry in motion…) of the arse standing in front of me as she enjoyed a glass of Champagne, but remastering those deleted items would soon morph ‘em into headphones CD’s, and ya gotta still have bucks left over from that 55 date world tour The Church played back in 2002.

Throughout his citadel of verbal overthink, accentuated by a lingering flourish of spoken French, Willson-Piper did, to his eternal credit, admit to being pretentious. Which notably contributed to the whole night’s shebang an unrehearsed bit of jive business punctuation that other bands of a similar vintage & body of work try choreographing into their own airtight and ultra-formulaic sets in mostly unsuccessful ways. Its like reaching a point in the creation of something when the trappings and the tinsel and the construction become so important that it doesn’t really matter at all what’s inside. I witnessed as much a while back during a string of INXS gigs when Jon Stevens fronted them. The shows were vacuous, but because Andrew Farriss had welcomed newbie J. Stevens with a staged handshake takes # 1, # 2 & #3 (Newcastle, Shellharbour, Wyong), the crowd went away happy with their intimate little moment. Show biz is funny like that.

Marty paid tribute to the late and wonderous Jeff Buckley with a cover. And, as befitting the news from America, advised all those present to either, “Take lots of drugs” or, “Flee to the country and hoe the ground.” (Presumably, he wasn’t talking to any phantom hookers in the crowd about a 10 day ‘business trip’ to the Gold Coast.) And while the credits are rolling, i’d be goofing off at the keyboard if the beauty of the female form (his words) were not included: the effortlessly on-target Mood Maidens contributed the aforementioned aesthetic plus a gossamer light accompaniment with their intensely moving (according to your mood) piano and cello during songs from the Sparks Lane album and 1992’s Spirit Level. They remain, along with several million others like them, two of the most convincing arguments for not commiting suicide I know.

- Peter Thornton November, 2004