MIXING POP AND POLITICS, there was no need to ask Andrew Stafford what the use is. Not in Queensland.
With both intrinsically part of Pig City – his 2004 book which explored the threads entwining Brisbane’s development of a unique and influential music culture and the rise and fall of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s corrupt police state – its 20th anniversary edition arrives just as that state gears up for what may be another upheaval.
While the ostensibly progressive – yeah, yeah I know, but let’s accept it for now – Labor Party has governed almost uninterrupted since before the first publication, a neat reversal of the Country/National Party rule from the late ‘50s to the late ‘80s, there is more than enough indication that a state government that traduces rights – of children, of protesters, but never of miners – may be endemic. In Queensland. In Australia.
And this is before the likely win of the far more conservative Liberal National Party later this year after another “law and order” election campaign.
“The Labor government in Queensland has gone down a path that in many respects Bjelke-Petersen would either applaud or he would even be a little shaken by,” says Stafford today. “I think it’s a great mistake to talk about what terrible things might happen when the LNP are possibly re-elected, as if it so much worse than what we are actually seeing now in many regards.”
To those who haven’t read the book, it’s safe to say that Stafford is not a believer in the theory that great art necessarily comes from times of oppressive governments. For a start, as he points out, a lot of musicians and other creative sources left the city and the state during the worst of those Bjelke-Petersen years, rather than magically find inspiration in opposition.
“And many of them never came back,” he says. “Lindy Morrison [of The Go-Betweens] is a great example of someone who was so scarred by her experience in this place that she never wanted to return.”
Let’s remember too that while some of the great music of the 1980s in the UK is retrospectively credited to being forged in the crucible of Thatcherism, a whole lot of ugly, selfish, bad and extremely popular music was also forged there. Punk didn’t happen in Brisbane in 1977 and ‘78 because of a hard conservative government – it was coming, one way or another – but it helped.
“The point I would make is it certainly impacted how people saw their world at the time and there is no question that it had an impact on how people expressed themselves,” says Stafford. “Obviously, the book is called Pig City after a song [by the band The Parameters] that was written about what was essentially a police state at the time. You can’t say that it had no impact, but I’m careful about overstating it.”
Noteworthy at the time in 2004, and no less significant now as we risk diverting solely to politics, is the fact that Pig City isn’t just some chronicle of the underground/indie scene, and lauding of songwriters and bands music critics adore and regular folk ignore (though don’t get Stafford, or me for that matter, started on the value of The Apartment’s Peter Milton Walsh. Not unless you’ve got a few hours to spare).
The book’s subtitle is … from The Saints to Savage Garden, and Stafford says it was seeing Savage Garden perform at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the culmination of a career for the duo from Brisbane’s outer suburbs that had seen them top the charts around the world, that confirmed for him there was a story to be told in his hometown.
Just as potently, if you look beyond the sales, you can see a link between the likes of the non-more-alternative Go-Betweens and Apartments, both sprung from the university scene of the mid ’70s, and the non-more-successful Savage Garden.
There is something in the fact that while Queensland success stories of the ‘90s and 2000s, Indecent Obsession and Powderfinger, aspired to international success as straightforward rock and pop outfits, their first focus was on becoming a big Australian band. Meanwhile, Savage Garden, like The Go-Betweens 20 years earlier, realised that what they were doing was just not going to cut it in Australia and their eyes immediately turned to New York and London, not Sydney and Melbourne, CBGBs and Madison Square Garden not The Corner Hotel and Festival Hall.
“I think that’s absolutely right. Australia, let alone Brisbane, did not have room for a group like The Go-Betweens in 1978. There was not the populace, arguably – and I might get into trouble for this – not the intelligence, for something like that,” says Stafford, noting that Savage Garden too were asking too much of an anti-pop environment in Australia. “They had to immediately look to an international audience to survive.”
Stafford no longer lives in Brisbane, having relatively recently moved to the Sunshine Coast hinterland town of Maleny, where bird-spotting, platypus-observing and city noise-avoiding are all possible. And he is well aware that many, if not most of the interviews he will be doing now will be conducted with writers and editors for whom even the popular bands mentioned in the book will not register, and to whom the idea of a police state run by dictatorial, barely educated, religious wingnut seems fanciful – “an entirely abstract figure” – rather than recent history.
But with history and the future assayed in Pig City in 2004, the new edition does prompt two questions. Why did it take someone ostensibly from “outside” – Stafford, in his mid-teens, moved from Melbourne in late 1986, quickly radicalising as a music obsessive, already with a strong interest in politics and the environment – to write this definitive if not yet final history of Brisbane’s music and Queensland’s culture? And why has no one taken the story further since?
To the last question first, Stafford politely points out that in Australia “writing books is not a profitable business, particularly a book that is as niche as this one”, one that took him about four years, sustained by working as a taxi driver more than a music writer. Oddly enough kids, it’s not lack interest but “blunt economics, in other words”, that might have deterred a successor.
As for the first question?
“By the time I started writing the book [in the early 2000s] I had been living in Brisbane since 1987, notwithstanding a few years in the late ‘90s in Sydney, and I think sometimes not being from a place gives you perspective that you don’t get from being an insider,” says Stafford. “There are a number of people who I think, in Brisbane, had wanted to write this book but for all of their own reasons had never gotten around to it.
“Probably the biggest [reason why it fell on him] was that I was at a seriously loose end. I’d come back to my new home town with a bit of a point to prove and needing a reason to be there, and Pig City ended up being it.”
To those reasons you can also add wanting to celebrate the undoubtedly good music of a town once dismissed as a provincial outpost of the music industry in Australia, to remind people of the excesses of the Bjelke-Petersen years, and to warn of the dangers of populism and anti-intellectualism.
“And that, sadly, is one of the things that makes the book still relevant now.”
Pig City is published by UQP.
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