Bored – oh so bored – by the TV news cliché of someone “getting a rock star reception” when they are filmed in front of a cheering group of supporters, or an excitable bunch of school kids near a celebrity, there was a thought of throwing something at the screen. Or the screen being set flying through yon window.
But instead, thankfully, with the reminder that a new Abbe May album is coming, thoughts turned to what we mean, or used to mean, by the term rock star. And whether we ever did them, or will ever again do them, in Australia. Are we too scared of standing out? Are we too full of doubt? Do we have it in us?
Which is where Wind Back Wednesday has landed this week.
Asked 14 years ago to tell us who would be the next rock star, the category was examined, the candidates illuminated and some predictions were made. How did those predictions hold up? How does the definition, let alone the role, stand up now?
Your thoughts would be appreciated; your nominations respected. Meanwhile, give a rock star welcome to …
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THE ENGLISH DO THEM regularly, the Americans do them comfortably, but where are the Australian rock stars? The classic rock star, that semi mythical figure born of bedroom fantasies, fed by music magazine intensity and crowned in tabloid frenzy.
Well there’s Bernard Fanning from Powderfinger you say. Nup: big selling but self-effacing and deliberately ordinary. Chris Cheney from the Living End? Workmanlike is not exactly what women like. Shannon Noll? Two words: soul patch. John Butler? You can't be a rock star sitting down. Jimmy Barnes? Too blokey, too matey, too old. Gareth Liddiard from the Drones? Too unknown, too inner Melbourne.
Help!
Michael Hutchence, who knew a thing or two about what it meant to be a rock star, looked at his audience knowingly. "They fantasise about much more than is really there, don’t you think?” the INXS front man once said to another lead singer and star, Belinda Carlisle.
The partial truth in that comment is somewhat undercut by the fact that this was said, of course, to a beautiful, desired woman who was, of course, for a time his lover. Carlisle recounts in a recent biography that Hutchence was not really complaining about the life. He had after all chosen it, indeed could be said to have built a life around his need to be that creature of tantalising distance and desire and decadence.
As his band mate Jon Farriss puts it: “Michael, who was really living that life, really became close to his friends who allowed him to be a rock star because that was where he was the most comfortable. He couldn't pretend not to be [a rock star] otherwise it would be dysfunctional and it was dysfunctional enough already."
For a rock star is not just a lead singer or a big selling artist or the prettiest one in the room; that is the practical side of music, the tangible, explainable side. And that’s boring. No, after five decades of mythologising we know that a rock star is the strutting peacock who doesn't ask for your attention but commands it. The one with the streak of danger you know you’ll never have in you but thrill to at a distance. A rock star is the projection of blatant adolescent aspirations and only partially hidden adult expectations and is recognised for it even by a wider public who wouldn’t buy an album or even know a song.
And, let’s not pretend otherwise, a rock star reeks of sex: they have it, they’re getting it, you’re wanting it. Or at least to stand near it.
On those criteria Chrissie Amphlett came close, Nick Cave would qualify if he hadn’t scared so many people off before the hair started receding, Peter Garrett was never in the hunt and Tex Perkins and Tim Rogers didn’t sell enough to make it. But Michael Hutchence unquestionably was a rock star. Like Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger, on whom he based so much of his style, or David Bowie and Bono. Like lesser lights such as Brett Anderson of Suede, Liam Gallagher of Oasis, Brian Molko of Placebo and even the semi-comic Jon Bon Jovi and Axl Rose or that plonker from Kasabian you can’t name but who fills the English music magazines.
The most intriguing thing about Hutchence today, as INXS prepare to release an album with a dozen guest vocalists next month, is why is he one of the very few rock stars created in Australia and why has there not been another since his death in1997?
Maybe there’s the beginning of an answer in Powderfinger whose guitarist Darren Middleton says that the band belatedly began putting on a “show” when they realised that audiences "don’t want to see themselves or the guy next door doing it, you want to be taken out of your own existence for an hour and a half “. However, Bernard Fanning confesses that he avoided any classic rock star behaviour on stage because “I’ve had that great Australian fear that my mates are going to give me shit”.
There’s the crux says John O’Donnell, who signed Silverchair when they were monosyllabic long hairs and later ran the Australian arm of EMI.
"No one wants to be a rock star ‘wanker’ whereas that is celebrated in other countries," says O'Donnell. "In their different ways, the US and UK promote brilliance and celebrate success but we have to be careful not to 'rise above' our station and turn into a wanker.”
Rolling Stone editor Dan Lander says Australians tend to prefer their rock performers to be the type “you would have a beer with at the pub and it would seem like a normal thing to do.” That’s why Johnny O’Keefe, Stevie Wright of the Easybeats or Billy Thorpe were liked, why Barnes is a perennial and why no one from Jet or Thirsty Merc or Children Collide would ever think of being a rock star.
“We don't admire the prancer and the preener so therefore our musicians don’t become that,” says Lander, who applies the same theory to international acts who do well here. “You look at the bands that we have embraced: Dave Grohl is not really a rockstar, he's much more in the Aussie mould of what a musician is. We embrace the ones who fit that Aussie mould of the slightly humble performer than the more extravagant ones. Kings Of Leon are another one or Mumford & Sons."
Robert Forster, these days more often seen as a music critic but in his prime an often flamboyant, smart and sexy front man with the Go-Betweens, agrees with Lander that the small population could be a factor here. "In Australia you get lift off but it’s precarious and can always come down while rock stardom in the UK and America shoots you into outer space and that's when you start strutting about and you lose your mind, walking 10 miles off the Earth," he says.
But there’s also a cultural barrier. “In the UK when they get a shot at the top, they live it large. They suddenly just go, Yes! They become lord of the manor and they love it, while here in Australia, it seems to be ‘I’m so thankful, I will keep to my roots’. In England it is ‘fuck my roots, I'm swanning around town and I'm going to let everybody know it’ but there's something wedged in the Australian mind that I think doesn't allow someone to lift off out of that.”
Forster, not a great fan of Hutchence, nominates Jim Keays of ‘60s stars Masters Apprentices and Marc Hunter, who was the front man of Dragon for two decades, as rare examples of a home grown rock star with danger, sex appeal and front.
“Marc Hunter is the full deal: the strutting rooster, the glint in the eye, reckless, camp and selling a lot of records. Like Jim Keays, he had that bit of a smirk on the mouth, great clothes, great body, voice. A rock star. And the other thing about Marc Hunter is he enjoyed it. You could see that look on his face all the time and that is important."
Do we have any who might have a chance of being an Australian rock star? Abbe May is a dark horse in some quarters while “I think Daniel Johns is the only artist in the last 10 or 15 years who has that same sex and glamour appeal that Hutchence thing, right down to the superstar girlfriends, wives in his life,” says John O’Donnell.
Forster agrees, with the caveat that “I wish he’d strut around a little bit more”.
The other name which crops up is Dan Sultan, early in his career but already turning heads, including INXS with whom he’s recorded Just Keep Walking for the band’s coming album. Farriss says “he might turn out to be the real thing” while Rolling Stone’s Lander enthuses that "he is an incredible looking person and obviously that's the first step to going beyond the average bloke”
“I haven't seen him perform but I have heard all the reports of girls standing there mesmerised. It's early days but I'm very impressed with the way he's managed to be on the verge of moving from ABC 702 to triple j and then taking over the world.”
The question is though, does he want it? Does he want it the way Michael Hutchence really wanted it? And will we let him?
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