Five - Am/Am not

The challenges in Breath become greater and greater for Pikelet and his mate Loonie after the initial simple thrill of learning how to surf a wave. Their mentor Sando takes them further out towards the extremes of surfing, where the waves rise higher out of deeper wilder seas, further into fear. Once Pikelet finds his limit and Loonie finds he doesn’t have one, the two friends begin to move apart; Loonie gravitating to Sando and Pikelet towards Sando’s wife Eva, and then into loneliness and despair.

There are a couple of words that have power in this book. Ordinary is one of them. Ordinary represents a life lived as far away as possible from threat, fear and death. For Pikelet it is the worst thing you can be. In Sawyer, his home town, “the locals in the street looked cowed, and weak and ordinary,” (p.116), “they liked to be ordinary. They were uncomfortable with ambition and avoided any kind of unpredictability or risk.” (p.136) The way to break with the ordinary is through another word in the book that has resonance: fear. One of the attractions of someone like Sando to someone like Pikelet is that he isn’t settled, he acts as if “he hadn’t finished with himself,” (p.66) he pushes himself to find the limit of his fear. Sando describes the feeling when you find yourself at this limit: “[it’s] like you’ve exploded and all the pieces of you are reassembling themselves. You’re new. Shimmering. Alive.” (p.111)

The problem is that to find this feeling requires you to go to further and further extremes, going further and further out to find fear again, and this can become dangerous and destructive. Sando’s wife Eva: “Once you’ve had a taste of something different, something kind of out there, then it’s hard to give up. Gets its hooks in you. Afterwards nothing else can make you feel the same.” (p.133) In the end Pikelet is so shattered by these experiences that it takes him a few decades to recover: “bit by bit I congregated, I suppose you could say, and then somehow cohered.” (p.211) Other people in the book don’t. Eventually they push so hard at fear, and finding the edge, that they die. They get found by staff in hotel rooms with a belt around their necks. They lose balance on the edge between being and not being, breathing and not breathing, and tumble into death.

Towards the end of the book Pikelet learns something about death and fear. He learns that they are sitting right there in the middle of the ordinary: that death can burst in upon your ordinary life; and that fear flits around the bedrooms and living rooms of suburbia in the gnawing thought: is this it? Is this what life holds for me?

Four - Two Guitarists

There is no sudden or dramatic encounter with it; it is just there, spreading over a few square miles, streets intersecting, houses clustered together – and from any vantage point, if one were to be found, the glitter of backyard swimming pools in the sunlight. Welcome to the cult of the ordinary.
- Neighbours, Carl Ruhen

Paraparaumu didn’t look like much to a teenage boy circling around the streets on his bicycle. It was mainly lawns and one-storey family homes with a scattering of kids' trikes and rubber beach balls on the drive. School was school and the shops were boring, and because I was boring or unappreciative or something I didn’t like beaches, or swimming, or all the things people actually drove to Paraparaumu to do. Of course it was like any other place, and the waves, and the roads late at night, and the fields on the weekend, and the garages and the bedrooms were full of teenagers acting out their dreams.

Corran’s bedroom always had the curtains drawn. When I remember his room it is always half dark, with an unmade bed, and balled up rugby socks and tops tossed into the corners. Corran himself used to sit on his low bed and huddle over his electric guitar. He was a good guitar player. Down the road was Steve. He was also a good guitar player. I spent less time at Steve’s place, but the rooms there were bright and full of light, and the house felt modern and ordered. I probably felt more at home in Steve’s house, but I think I only went there twice. I must have spent hundreds of days at Corran’s on the weekends in the 1980s in Paraparaumu.

The way that I am going to separate Steve and Corran in this story is a little arbitrary. There were plenty of times when their musical tastes coincided, but my memory has sharpened the story this way so this is how it will be told. We also need to keep in mind that this was a time and a place where it really was not acceptable to try and be cool and not like rock music. While I went home and devoured A-ha, and Prince, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, my public self paid homage to rock bands. Which rock bands you wrote on your school bag, and the type of school bag you had were very important. The coolest kids had little canvas satchels with AC/DC, Iron Maiden and ZZ Top on them. I wasn’t cool. I had a Gino Borelli bag.

If I had to pick a track to represent Steve at this point in the 1980s it would be Satch Boogie, by Joe Satriani. I have the album this track is from: Surfing with the Alien. I don’t like it much, but I still like Satch Boogie. Satriani’s sound was very clean. The distortion on this album is light. He is a real technician, and there is always going to be a part in each song where he shows us how well he can do finger-tapping triplets. Eddie Van Halen was the popular master of this kind of solo.

For Corran I would choose a track that he never actually played me, but it somehow perfectly represents him: Wings of Steel by Stonehenge. American “heavy metal” bands had fancy clothes and big hair. The British version had smelly clothes, lank hair, and quite often beards or dodgy moustaches. Their music was often feral, sweaty, weighed down by stodgy British food and warm ale. Wings of Steel sounds like all that. It rumbles. It’s not quite perfect. It thunders and collapses into its changes, and then suddenly soars in a brief, beautiful arc. Corran listened to plenty of bands like this even if they weren't all actually British. Man O’ War, Iron Maiden, earlier Def Leppard, Motorhead, Yngwie Malmsteen.

I should say that I never really felt at home in either camp though I enjoyed both for awhile. There were exceptions. I did like Steve Vai and Eddie Van Halen on the one hand, and I did like AC/DC and Guns ‘n’ Roses on the other. I was wowed by technique and sprezzatura in one case, and fascinated by the brazen darkness, and blunted emotions in the other. I suppose that all three of us were busy learning who we were by trying things on for size. Because everyone else did, I wore stone washed black jeans, and long T-shirts, and basketball boots. Because my friends did I listened to WASP and Motley Crue and Skid Row, and even though I didn’t like them much, I didn’t know why, and so I kept listening to them.

In the end all three of us ended up in a band together. It wasn’t much of a band, and it only played one song at one gig, but it was something better than pedalling around the summer streets of Paraparaumu with nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Three - INXS

“Say hello from the band in the interview”
Tim Farriss to Michael Hutchence
Rolling Stone Magazine, 1988

It is exciting being young and starting a band. Even if you were like me and not very good, and in a band that was very poor, and too timid to do anything more than a couple of gigs, even that kind of watered-down version of being in a rock band was exciting. So much more exciting then to be in a proper band, working its way up from the garage to the top of the charts.

I own two INXS albums: Listen Like Thieves (1985) and Kick (1987). These two albums represent this band’s peak. Listen Like Thieves was their peak as a group of musicians; Kick was the peak of their popularity. On the 1985 album INXS sound like they’re playing in a bar or a club, by 1987 they sound more like they’re playing in the corner of you room, on the telly, or in an arena for 70,000 people. Somewhere between these two albums something went wrong.

In the 1980s in New Zealand it seemed that there were quite a few Australian bands on the charts and that they all sounded the same: tough. Even if they weren’t doing straight out rock like Cold Chisel, The Angels or AC/DC they still sounded muscular, like they worked hard, all the parts of their band locked together snugly through graft. Bands like Midnight Oil, INXS, the Divinyls sounded like they could have taken Split Enz in a bar fight any day. Reading about that scene now it is clear why all Australian bands from that period had that edge to them:

[The punters come] to gigs… to let something go, a sort of catharsis. We always feel like there’s this implied confrontation between band and audience. They’re saying, ‘Lay it on! Do it to us!, and it’s like a veiled threat that if you don’t, you’ll get canned.
– Doc Neeson (The Angels)

Canned here means they’ll start throwing glass beer mugs at you.

Being in a band in the 1970s and 1980s in Australia meant playing in the thriving, testy world of the beer barns: spartan, terribly carpeted, sweaty, smoky, weathered and packed to the rafters.
- INXS, The Authorised Biography, p.38

For a suburban teenager growing up the 1970s and 1980s, pub rock was perhaps the ultimate rite of passage. If you hadn’t spent at least one night in a beer barn, where the carpets were tacky with spilled lager and sweat literally flowed down the walls, risking terminal ear damage and the ever-present danger of being conked by a beer glass, you just weren’t a real Australian, mate.
- Long Way to the Top, p.188

This is the music scene INXS came from and you can hear it on Listen Like Thieves. They play a set of songs that sound as though they have been worked on; not in the studio but in front of the punters. There are six musicians working together to put all the little pieces, all the fills, and all the short jagging riffs, into one thing called a perfect pop song. A perfect pop song is catchy, it moves around a bit with its riff, there are no boring bits, and then it stops.

Of course the other thing that is handy for a pop band is a hot lead singer.

Two - Beginning to Breathe

I wonder what the ordinary people are doing today?
- Breath

The main character in Breath by Tim Winton is nicknamed Pikelet. When the book starts its main story Pikelet is just at the beginning of secondary school growing up in a small town in Australia called Sawyer not far from the coast. Sawyer is not much of a town and Pikelet doesn’t think much of it, or the people in it. In a way it is like a backwater, a small pool at the spent end of an estuary: safe, flat and boring. What Pikelet comes to crave are the places just over the dunes where things are more unsettled: both the places and the people.

A lot of reviews say that this novel is not about surfing. I suppose they are right. I suppose it is a novel about that exciting time when you begin to find out what it is like to be alive, about breathing and not breathing and what can happen when you push at the edge between those two states. Surfing is the main way that this idea is explored so I still think it is ok to say that the book is about surfing.

I like not surfing. I like not swimming. My metaphors about the sea are to do with drowning, and murky depths, but Tim Winton’s surfing sounds bloody exciting:

I will always remember my first wave that morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air. How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears. I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light…. Though I’ve lived to be an old man with my own share of joy and happiness for all the mess I’ve made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living. (pp.32-3)

When Pikelet first sees the boys out surfing his imagination is seized by this fact:

How strange it was to see men doing something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared. In Sawyer, a town of millers and loggers and dairy farmers… men did solid, practical things…. [T]here wasn’t much room for beauty in the lives of our men. (p.23)

So this is how the book begins: the exhilaration of being alive and the discovery of useless beauty. It reminded me of being Pikelet’s age. My early heroes were Prince, and A-ha and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. These are a specific kind of pop star. These are not AC/DC, Iron Maiden and ZZ Top, these were flamboyant performers, over dressed, over coifed, men who sang, and danced, and hung desperately onto microphones and said things like – love is like an energy, rushing in, rushing inside of me. So much useless beauty, and so different from Paraparaumu, and the men there, and the boys I shared classrooms with.

One - Paraparaumu

Off went the boys into the big, blue sea.
- Puberty Blues

I was a teenager in Paraparaumu. I didn’t like it much. There is a chance I wouldn’t have liked anywhere much, but this is something you can never know. There is more to do and buy in Paraparaumu now than there was in the 1980s, but I still think it might be shitty to be a teenager in Paraparaumu. It doesn’t feel like a small town it feels like a suburb, a suburb without a city. Suburbs were invented to comfort the middle-aged, and give the youth something to kick against.

I went to school at Kapiti College which was next to the Raumati Beach shops, and about a ten minute bike ride from my house. The students of Kapiti College wore the same uniform as everyone else in New Zealand (grey, shapeless) with a maroon jersey. Going to school was the main thing that I did. I was ok at school, quite good at English, but diffident towards it. I played soccer, and Dungeons and Dragons. I didn’t read a single book for pleasure during all of my years at Kapiti College, but I did have a weekly subscription to Smash Hits.

Music was heady stuff for me in Paraparaumu. It was the planned route of escape from the ordinariness of small towns and suburbia. I carefully took the posters out of Smash Hits and blu-tacked them across the walls of my bedroom. It wasn’t a serious magazine, but the 80s were a rich period for glossy singles, and hairdos and blocks of bright colour, so it was the right magazine for the time. I began to accumulate cassettes and LPs. After awhile I bought a second hand electric guitar off a friend. My mother took me to the local guitar shop and bought a small amplifier and some lessons. I had found my obsession.

It is virtually impossible to get a teenage boy to do something he doesn’t want to do, but a teenage boy in the grip of an obsession is a fanatic. The obsessed teenage boy will go through the rituals of their dreams over and over again. They will spend weeks that turn into months kicking that ball, or swimming the sea, or pulling apart that engine, or making his hand into the awkward, painful, contorted shapes necessary to make an E chord. The skin on your finger tips will hurt, the back of your hand will ache, but it is worth it to hear that buzzing, rattling, out of control first chord come out of the strum of your free hand. Magical.

And because magazines like Smash Hits don’t record failure it will seem possible to you in your bedroom in Paraparaumu that you too will be able to strum and sing your way from nowhere into the glare of worldwide fame and riches. If it were possible for bands like Crowded House and INXS then it was possible for you. You may look at the photo of our hero and laugh at the naivety of the dream, but naivety is always a part of dreams; they go together like inhale and exhale.