Liner Notes 2011. Photo by Samantha Aubor.
Here’s what I wrote for the reading (and the singing):
Never Tear Us Apart
It’s okay to leave your kids in the car, as long as the radio’s on.
When my mum ran errands and I’d sit in the back seat of the car, parked roadside, window open a crack and wait. It was there that I heard the first note of the gamelan synth line. The sound that I now know as the intro to INXS’, ‘Original Sin’.
Michael, you were my original sin.
I didn’t have carnal thoughts at that age. Sitting in the abandoned vehicle, bathed in am radio static and kiddie perspiration, I felt confused. Did I like this song? Did I hate it? I didn’t know. Funny feeling in my pants? Not exactly. It was in my brain. Did I have pants in my brain?
If I had known the word, I would have said it was ‘sultry’. I sat in the human soup that the vinyl seat and the sun encouraged under the back of my legs and had a brain-gasm.
Michael Hutchence, when I saw you sometime later on Countdown from my bean-bag in the sun-room, I saw more of your flesh than my not yet thirsty, pre-pubescent eyes were ready to drink.
You seldom wore a shirt and when you did it was a shred of cloth suggesting a shirt. The kind that Ben Cousins, were he yet born, would call a singlet. But you didn’t look like the Ben Cousins-es of the day. You looked like a woman, with balls. Visible ones. I felt mature for appreciating that. You were slippery and slender. You thought you were sexy. I wanted to think that too and it got easier all the time.
There were a few hurdles along the way, though. I was too young to be into asymmetry, let alone, androgyny. Your hair. It was long and short and it was lop-sided. You let it fall into your eyes and you left it there, while you stared directly at me, fighting your way through the tropics in your video. As you severed dangling vines in the jungle that were draped in your path, you were carving new neural pathways in my mind.
Don’t ask me what you know is true
Don’t have to tell you, I love your precious heart
I, I was standing, you were there
Two worlds collided and they could never tear us apart
I moved in to my first share house, with a girl in Fitzroy. It lasted just months. I moved out. I was going to come back for my vinyl collection, but we’d had a falling out and I got scared.
Michael, I left my entire INXS collection in a crate on the shelf of that girl’s lounge room.
The same lounge room where earlier that year, at a house party, I proved that I had something of the lead singer in me. That lounge room now had everything of INXS’s in it. From your self-titled debut, to Underneath The Colours, Shabooh Shoobah, The Swing, Listen Like Thieves, to Kick.
I even had the singles, including that duet you did with Jimmy. I was always going to go back and get it. I never did. And then she moved.
We could live for a thousand years, but if I hurt you, I’d make wine from your tears
I told you, that we could fly, because we all have wings, but some of us don’t know why
I, I was standing, you were there
Two worlds collided and they could never tear us apart
I had wings like you said, Michael. I sang about them being stupid things. Ordinary Angels, it topped the ARIA charts and Marvin The Album, was nominated. You were there!
When I sat nervously in my front row seat at the ARIA awards, wearing a Judy Davis inspired suit, you were there. You threw yourself about the stage in your waist-coat and suit pants. Pin-stripe like mine! You threw radiant beams of charisma. You straddled sex-appeal and rode it like a bucking bronco. You threw your mic stand off the stage and into the rows of artists, your peers and your admirers, dazzled by the brilliance of the white hot light show and the smoke screen that you pranced through. You shone so brightly yourself, easily matching the strobes with your gyrations and playing follow the leader with the follow spot. But, was it my imagination, or did you seem a little bored? Michael? I never asked. The after party went to my head and I went to many parties. I met your girlfriend, super model, Helena Christensen. I could have asked her. I didn’t ask her anything. After I told her that she was very beautiful and she thanked me for the compliment, as if she had not been told that fifty million kajillion times before, we went our separate ways. My time would come.
In Canada.
You were there. Two worlds collided.
I saw you in the foyer of the hotel we were staying in. Striped pants again. You liked your striped pants. I still loved you, but I knew you were bad. Bad like, ‘naughty’ bad. I’d read about you. I’d read about you and Kylie. I was afraid of you. I watched you. You looked at me.
It was the nineties and your hair was symmetrical and out of your eyes, so you looked at me with both eyes.
Struck by the power. Ooh woo!
I suddenly found the pattern in the carpet at my feet incredibly amazing! I stared at it for quite some time.
When night had become day and then night again and an aeon had passed, I looked up to where you had stood. You were not there.
I, I was standing, you were there
Two worlds collided and they could never tear us apart
You, you were standing, I was there
Two worlds collided and they could never tear us apart
I, I was standing, I was standing, I was standing….
