A concert at the steps of the Opera House earlier this month led to thinking about Hilary Duff (you’ll have to read below to find out what and why). A series of awful and/or ugly news events led to thinking about an absence of, well, nice things in the world. A night of retro-vision as Countdown was (somewhat embarrassingly) remembered led to a reminder of pop’s place.
All of that brought us, naturally, to a 2005 show by one Hilary Duff – her second in Australia in under two years – and a night where grouchy types were consigned to the carpark waiting to take home a fan.
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HILARY DUFF
Sydney Entertainment Centre, December 10, 2005
SOMEONE SUBVERSIVE SLIPPED on a Radiohead CD between acts, in that period meant for preparing yourself for Miss Hilary Duff. Was it perhaps the Oxford boys’ We Suck Young Blood, full of potentially ripe if not apposite lines such as “we want the sweet meats/we want the young blood”?
Ah, at this meeting of “clients” of Duff Inc - as the merchandise stand did Boxing Day sales-like business; as the glow-stick touts bravely stood before stampedes of pre-or-barely-pubescent customers; as the sacrificial parent-on-duty contemplated a thinning wallet and massed squeal inducing hearing loss - that would have been not just subversive but positively perverse. It was instead merely the likes of Fake Plastic Trees.
But hey, no snide comments from the cynical peanut gallery about that song either thank you. Miss Duff sings, not mimes; her rock band plays their instruments, not just hits sequencers or DAT player start buttons; and the production, with rather spectacular lasers at their core (though strangely no video screens for those up in the gods) is as good as any adult arena act. In other words, this isn’t some throwaway show for the less discerning market.
Sure, Duff’s thin voice almost makes Kylie Minogue sound like Aretha Franklin. Certainly her move a year or so back into noisy but anonymous rock rather than the sweeter but anonymous Saddle Club-type songs (such as Little Voices and So Yesterday, which were kept to the encore) has only accentuated the feeling that her material has been created by a committee of accounting machines.
But there is any number of parents of “tweenie” girls who quietly celebrate the fact that Duff doesn’t dress like or sing songs for middle age male fantasies or emptily repeat the equally tired teen angst clichés. Who figure, quite rightly, that this is just loud fun and the kind of exuberant release it’s hard not to be excited by even if you are sitting there wishing for ear plugs and an early night.
And you never know, one or two of them might grow up to be Radiohead fans. Or well-adjusted and happy.
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