DAVE WARNER’S NAGS, BAGS AND SUBURBAN DAGS
- 19 hours ago
- 5 min read
THE MAN WHO HAS BOTH an honours degree majoring in psychology and a proto-punk band in Perth called Pus on his resume, one David Robert – but we shall call him Dave – Warner, has behind him a large French poster for one of the Indiana Jones movies, alongside some books, records and other paraphernalia of your artsy type who has written a score of books and some films alongside quite a few albums.
He looks like the even cheerier alternate of HG Nelson and like your sporty type can probably talk football – of your AFL type, thank you, not so much the rugger buggers, given he’s a sandgroper with connections to the Sydney Swans – and other sports with some of the vividness and perspicacity of Nelson.
And he is in rude health it appears.
“Well looks can be deceiving as I’ve been quite crook the last couple of days, with some shocking gastro,” says Warner, who adds “Let’s not record that” with sweet naivety given he also calls me Bernie, which is fighting words around here.
But then names can be problematic, and not just because it becomes clear that when he talks about his best-known music project – which will with a tour in October mark 50 years since the single, Suburban Boy, left WA for national chart and Countdown domination – it is not merely with his name with attachment but must be said as one uninterrupted roll … Dave-Warner’s-From-The-Suburbs. The other tricky nomenclature bit is he does share a name with a sportsman who for our purposes today we can refer to as The Lesser Dave Warner, for whom a drink-driving charge recently has been added to the list of Test centuries, ODI records and certain impositions on a cricket ball by rough paper.
Does our man still get mistaken for the LDW?
“Funnily enough, I have had a few times – not so much now that he’s stopped playing – but at the time of the ball tampering scandal I got emails from people which were either ‘oh good on ya Davey, shove up those ..’ or ‘you’re a complete arsehole’, total trolls,” Warner recalls. “One of the guys who did the worst things, had his name there and he was something like a security adviser, completely blowing his whole career.”
Names eh? Problematic.
“It’s one of those things where I did realise, whether you liked hm or not, the pressure those people are under and the stuff they must get from people.”
Luckily for the star of today’s conversation, unlike the troll with poor internet security, a good portion of his first and second waves of a career preceded social media. But did it ever get that bad for Dave-Warner’s-From-The-Suburbs, or Dave Warner crime fiction and non-fiction writer, or Dave Warner scriptwriter? Maybe from people who didn’t appreciate how he captured the suburbs and those of us who lived in them?
“I remember getting really early on in the band’s days a letter saying that my music was like the third gear of a truck that was stuck and couldn’t get out of gear,” he laughs.
Better yet, it was signed by the president of the WA Musicians Union. Truly. Though said president denied sending it when politely asked by the young Dave-Warner’s-From-The-Suburbs. But then he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Back to the multifaceted Warner, who has been a novelist for 25 years, beginning with crime but moving into some surprising areas (quite surprising, as we’ll see soon) and has a non-band album brewing as we speak. As a man of words, in song, in print and on celluloid, where character veracity is all and language its definer, what has he noticed about the way we talk now compared with his early years spinning around the sun in Australia?
“Certain words – and you don’t tend to notice them until you go, oh gee, I haven’t heard that word forever – have gone completely out of our lexicon. Cobber, those kinds of words that came back from the second world war, bonza, you don’t hear them. It’s not like in the ‘70s everyone was using them, but you were familiar with them,” says Warner. “I’m 72 now and I’m not across youth other than my own kids [who range from 19 to 30] and what they do, but one of the huge things that happen now is people talk in acronyms and I have to think about it.”
If technology has changed the way everybody in the world talks, there’s another element locally that keeps changing not only how we speak and think, but how he writes.
“The other thing that has happened in Australia is we’ve seen a huge rise in immigration particularly in [originally] non-English speaking people and the stuff that I write, the clever plays on words, might be completely lost on a huge proportion of the Australian population. Not because they’re dumb or illiterate but because it hasn’t been their world,” he says.
“The result of that is the lyric component of music in Australia gets less and less because people are producing music that wants to be known world-wide. As a result you’re going to get things that conform more and more to the central and the standard.”
Warner is a little sad about this, though he loves the way local rap has “filled the void” for language and local colour. Nonetheless, thanks to the fact “my ear still is pretty strong” for cadence and natural talk, his novels have less of a problem he reckons, helped by the genre and generally older characters.
Well, except when it comes to a series he wrote earlier this century, when his daughters were young, for a tween audience. Not crime but “pony novels”, the Charlotte And The Starlet series Oh yes lovers of the likes of Saddle Club books, Dave-Warner’s-From-The-Stable.
It does suggest a possible way to divide some of his writing output, at least the tween ones and the crime ones, into the pony books and the nags books. He doesn’t laugh this away. In fact a recent novel he published, Double Exxxpresso, was about a horse racing scam, and in between planning the reunion/anniversary shows he has been working on an idea bringing back the Charlotte/Starlet books, now for a late teen audience, as a murder-mystery. All worlds collide!
“In the ‘70s I would play in the band and then I would go down to the racetrack of a weekend and have a look at the horses,” says Warner, comfortable with the “look at the horses” euphemism for a punt or four. “Rock was one subculture and horse racing was another subculture and there were a lot of desert boots and white belts in the horseracing subculture, and probably even more shifty people than there are in rock’n’roll.”
More? Hmm, not so sure about that, especially if you’re aware of a certain Melbourne music and sport figure who has just been found guilty of a heinous crime yet somehow still kept his name out of the media. How very un-rock’n’roll.
But maybe that could be the subject of a future crime novel, or even a song from Dave-Warner’s-From-The-Suburbs. You wouldn’t put it past Dave Warner: the man’s got form after all.
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Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs play:
Bridge Hotel, Rozelle, October 9
Black Bear Lodge, Fortitude Valley, October 10
Tweed Heads Civic Centre, October 11
MEMO Music Hall, St Kilda, October 17
Astor Theatre, Mt Lawley, October 24
Tickets available from davewarner.com.au