WHAT COMES TO MIND … PSEUDO ECHO AND GETTING OUT OF THIS TOWN
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- 5 min read
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.
Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge 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, Pseudo Echo lend an ear.
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“Listening/Like you did before/Now you’re listening no more.”
Ron Borg had some cause. The only people who like self-satisfied 16-18-year olds who know enough to think they know a lot but not enough to know they know little are self-satisfied 16-18-year olds. And given the inherent self-loathing in your average late teen, even they can see the appeal might be limited.
Borg, industrial design teacher, year 10 master, and not someone born with a whole lot of patience, had a practical view of life. You did things, you made things, you achieved things, and you were bloody grateful for it thank you very much. Not for him a smart mouth, a penchant for the ephemeral or the flighty that couldn’t be counted, scored or typed on a wage envelope, because that wasn’t going to get you anywhere was it?
This is Fairfield, alright?, not Watson’s Bay or Turra-bloody-murra where daddy’s connections would open some big oak door. And if you wanted to end up at least in a satellite suburb of those places, basking in the reflected glory of being one of their enablers/functionaries or picking up the crumbs that fell from their tables, you better get your act together son, understand me? Pissing about with the band and writing plays, or debating and performing in the musicals (especially if you thought this was your chance to stand a bit closer to the girls from Our Lady Of The Rosary, you pathetic bumpkin), concocting skits mocking the Brothers or the Pope (even if, god knows how, he was no longer Italian) or just generally being not-practical to the point of impractical, was a one-way ticket to right here in Fairfield. For good.
The clear inference to be drawn was that any suggestion that you might actually see a point to talking your way out, or thinking your way out, or, ok, smart-arse-ing your way out, was foolery and a waste of not just your time and, importantly, his time, but a traducing of everything parents were paying (modest, even for the time, at this low resources school, but still a lot in the scheme of things for lower middle class families) fees for. And he wasn’t having any of it, do you hear me, you pseudo intellectuals?
“I say, you say/Weren’t you listening?”
For yes, the most damning term he had for us – oh, you hadn’t guessed the self-satisfied 16-18-year-olds included me? Well you don’t become a smug bastard without some practice you know. – was pseudo intellectuals. And it stung. Clearly, since I remember it many decades later when he likely forgot us within a year of our leaving.
But it didn’t sting because we worried he was right, for really we didn’t think ourselves anything like intellectuals. And some of us at least felt that starkly a year or two later when we hit universities and found ourselves intimidated by (what looked to us anyway) the casual confidence and innate superiority of those from the east and north and south and anywhere but west, sitting alongside us in lectures. It stung because it was a deliberate smashing of the little self-delusion available to us, and that delusion was what kept us from accepting that the low horizon futures envisaged for us by our betters who couldn’t tell you where Fairfield or Chester Hill or Carramar were on a map, were irrevocable.
“I’ve heard it all before/So many words/That you’ve just closed the door/Did you notice the changes in me/But now it’s too late to see.”
Which makes it even more ridiculous and galling that some of us, and I most definitely include myself in that, didn’t just mock similar fake it til you make it escapees of suburbia but dismissed them in terms close enough to Ron Borg’s favourite insult. Who? Let’s try synth pop kids who dressed like they had cash, big hair kids who teased up like they had no ceilings, devourers of the UK or American magazines and TV shows who flaunted and vaunted like they had an audience before one actually arrived.
How very dare they!
Looking at the faces of a young Pseudo Echo – and you’ve got to suspect that name scratched some not-so-hidden lesions for a few of us – smiling with the sheer pleasure of being right here right now, smiling like they’ve discovered an open door and a ticket to run through it, I marvel at the unknowingness of it all. Love that unknowingness.
(Including probably not even seeing their name misspelled on the backstage artist’s tent behind them. And if they did, not caring because bloody hell their name was on a backstage artist’s tent! Can you believe it?)
Sure, Molly Meldrum was a big booster and his track record by the mid-‘80s was, well, mixed, and rather obvious in its basis, and Brian Canham’s voice was unlikely to the point of easy parody, especially if your own speaking voice was less than stentorian. Yes, they were clearly enamoured of a post-Ashes To Ashes pop world (that filmclip didn’t even try to hide it) and were Ultravoxing their way forward. And lordy weren’t they all so po-faced in their futuristic retro gear?
But how many of us smartarses knew who John Foxx was anyway? And don’t get me started on the earnest faces of serious mien that the “credible” acts – i.e. the ones with guitars and unplugged drums – wore like their badge of authenticity. On and off stage.
Years on, the songs still don’t really float my boat but I can sing far too many of the words for dignity; the haircuts defy logic as much as gravity, but let’s be honest, all of us – me, Brian and friends – right now wouldn’t mind a bit of that in our receding/balding dotage; and a maximalist cover of a minimalist disco song would eventually define them anyway rather than one of their own. But buggered if I can see any reason to deny game here, pseudo or otherwise.
“I hope you understand/The feeling/The freedom I command/I say, you say …”
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