WHAT COMES TO MIND … PAUL HESTER AND THE WOUNDS WE SHARE
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence, whose not-so-secret goal was to dig into my brain or soul or what might pass for both.
Each time, he pulls out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenges me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical, but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, the wicked fun and graciousness of Paul Hester, pictured in Tim Finn’s garden looking like an antipodean Noel Coward with mischief on his mind and a cup of tea at hand, sits between the mid ‘90s and the mid ‘20s, bringing forth a friend with so much to give, of whom so much is asked.
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SURVEYING THE LAY of the land we couldn’t actually identify as such, as it was filled with bodies as far as the eye could see – 100,000 or 150,000 or a quarter of a million, depending on who you believed in 1996 and ever since – we sighed. This was not how we had envisaged this.
Didn’t these people have homes? Didn’t they have somewhere else to be earlier in the day so as not to get here before us, take up what was very clearly our spot, and settle in for a long afternoon before the night-that-was-to-be? Didn’t they get put off by the rain the day before when this show was meant to happen? Didn’t they have a bloody life???
We knew it was pointless thinking about squeezing in, so instead we looked up and to the right, to the rocky outcrop that simultaneously jutted towards the Opera House like some assertive halfback with his chest out and his chin asking for trouble, and loomed over the stage from behind like a lurching prop coming from your blind spot to flop on your already tackled body. Waddyareckon, I said, climb up?
Invitingly, it was only dotted with people, we could reach it in minutes going back up Macquarie Street, and it was clearly the only option given (a) we didn’t know Alan Jones to ask him if we could squat in his apartment in exchange for an alleged quick grope of our good-looking friend, (b) that building hadn’t yet been constructed, the flowers he liked hadn’t been brought in and the butler was otherwise engaged, and oh yeah, a small thing, (c) we liked our good-looking friend and loathed Jones.
The walk was short, the fight for a spot not more than a bit of controlled walking through amenable folks, and lordy we were at the fence line at the end. Success! Crowded House, you will be ours. Ok, sure, our success was partly explained by the fact that to get to see even half the stage we would need to lean over and crane our necks, that leaving this spot for anything – like a drink or the toilet – was out of the question, and even then we could see Neil Finn and Nick Seymour only if they stayed at the microphones at the front of the stage, likewise Tim Finn when he bobbed up, and only some parts of Mark Hart were evident. Paul Hester? Not a chance.
Which was a bummer. Finn was, is, and will be, no matter what combination of people make up the House, the main man, and Seymour was the artistic and in some ways personal edge, the arty Noel Crombie and the prickly Phil Judd to the Tim Finn of this band you could say. But ever since I’d seen them in a short-lived George Street venue when they were the Mullanes (and The Reels’ Craig Hooper had briefly been the fourth limb) Hester was the reason you watched diligently. Just in case.
The other two – or other three or four at different times in the first and second and now third life of Crowded House – were not deadweight, were not humourless, were not bereft of showmanship, but Hester was the link, the connective tissue, and often the instigator. He seemed capable of anything, from sheer beauty to extreme silliness, from manic to maudlin, from unengaged to fully committed. And we expected him to be some or all of those all the time. Every time. Which is insane, an unreasonable demand on any person. But we asked for it anyhow.
Last week, a friend of mine who knew Hester was talking about how the musician’s death in 2005 had “hit different”, had stayed longer in its impact too. As I listened to him I thought about how he has a kind of Hester role, personally and professionally, how easy it is for us to expect it of him, to depend on it even, and how we can forget what it takes for him.
He’s the sort who might get called a “natural comic”: ebullience matched with spontaneous wit, a flair for mimicry and a sense of the absurd, the absence of anything as predictable as jokes but an abundance of laughs built on laughs. Enough of those qualities are how I’d like to be that I am not so much jealous as looking to attach. Together we can descend into rank stupidity of the best kind and while I can slip into cruelty (about myself as much as any poor sod) his innate decency keeps the humour above the muck.
As I’ve found to my great benefit, professionally we can be a lethal combination: my social awkwardness smoothed by how he can immediately talk to anyone; my wish to know the specifics eased by his interest in the general that precedes it; my textual and linear leanings loosened by his visual and free-moving thinking; my preference for waiting and listening made possible by how he fills the space without looking like he wants to dominate it.
But I know he has plumbed some unpleasant, deeply upsetting, troughs from which a way out is not always obvious and sometimes seemingly not possible. The kind of situations that isolate first and then accumulate further punishments because of that isolation. I know partly because when I swerved into that ditch a few times, isolating at first and then slowly peeking up to see what was happening around me, he popped up to say “I know” and to listen.
And then, and only then, to show me more of the scars of his own experiences – not as a medal but as a shared wound, that common gulf in our makeup. The thing which is merely the flipside to our perceived competence, our mild-mannered demands on other people’s friendships, our humour that is sometimes, maybe often, defensive or evasive, but often enough just because we enjoy shit.
That is of course why he is so valuable, that burst of stupidity or brilliance, that mood-shifting skill or that space-filling presence, and we all benefit. But I can’t forget that it doesn’t come without a reason in the first place and a balancing, or price, to match it afterwards which gives an extra resonance, a bigger truth to it all as it sustains and supports me. And him.
Something so strong could carry us away? Sure. But something so strong could carry us today.
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