~

With modern eyes we now see them as ugly, primitive-looking things affiliated with old plastic cassette tapes and perhaps somewhat related to those equally-redundant computer floppy discs. How quickly technology has progressed from the days when having variable fast-forward and rewind speeds (fast, double fast, Triple Fast!) on VCRs warranted praise and worship, and how stubborn I was when DVDs first came out, adamantly insisting that I would never (ever) convert, clinging desperately onto my collection of VHS movies with their inconsistently-sized and ripped cardboard covers and maintaining passionately that being able to record from TV was basic a human right. And indeed, by not making recording a standard feature on DVD players haven’t we all turned into JB Hi-Fi bargain pile-raiding uber-consumers, needing to own entire series of shows and collector’s editions of movies when we could have easily taped them for free?

Well anyway, before I allow the nostalgia to forever be replaced by the progress of DVD and Blu-Ray user-friendliness, here are several of my fondest childhood and adolescent memories of VHS.

- Frequently getting the tape – the actual black/brown physical tape – caught inside the VCR and needing to manually wind it back in with a kitchen utensil that would fit (usually the handle end of an egg beater) after pressing that little square button to open up the latch to straighten out the crumples.

- Memorising the times of certain favourite scenes of movies, e.g. 1:10:05, and playing a game where I’d rewind or fast-forward to as close as possible to that exact timepoint, taking into account the slow-down speed of my fast-running VCR and trying to estimate how long before or after that point I would have to press Stop.

- Pressing Pause and seeing the image stretch and struggle on old CRT TVs, hoping the tape wouldn’t burn or melt on the hot metal VCR heads after leaving it for too long.

- Getting fined at the video store for not rewinding movies upon their return and watching the staff at Video Ezy and Civic Video utilise those sports car VHS rewinder machines, objects made specifically for rewinding purposes. Oh, how those rewinder manufacturing companies would have shaken their fists in anger during the DVD takeover.

- VCR head cleaner solution and the awful smell of alcohol, needing to wait an hour for it to dry in order for your video to be watchable. Hiring ‘The Specialist’, starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas and Sharon Stone (which constituted an all-star-cast back in the 90s) and having the tape snap inside the player when I was too eager to watch it after cleaning, and then making up a story at the Video Ezy saying that the tape itself had screwed up my player and getting a Free Hire voucher in return. I still feel guilty about that (but hey, free movie), and apologise for the bad taste in films.

- Those useless, generic stickers that came on a strip with every blank tape, with the little letters of the alphabet, the ones displaying the length of the tape, 90, 180, 240, 300 minutes, whether the mode was LP or SP, and various label stickers of different sizes and shapes for placement all over every edge of the tape. These stickers were all so very pointless, but I enjoyed making patterns out of them before realising that some of them peeled off inside the VCR upon pressing Eject, no doubt further contributing to the potential fire hazard of the device.

- SP vs LP recording. Taping football matches, including the football World Cups of 1998 and 2002 in their entirety on LP 300-minute videos (which meant a massive 10+ hours of terrible quality), with a gigantic stack of videos. All labeled and covered garishly with those aforementioned useless stickers.

- Taping over previous recordings and seeing their long-forgotten remnants lingering around either behind the image of the  most current recording – etched into the tape like an image burnt into one’s retinas, my favourite being old Disney cartoons hanging about as the background to a Schwarzenegger movie – or watching them reappear after a short period of static at the very end of the tape, usually consisting of old TV shows and ads with antiquated channel logos and bad hairstyles and fashion.

- Having tapes get stuck in an old, malfunctioning VCR, and needing to ‘trick it’ into allowing the ejection to take place by unplugging the power cable, plugging it back in, turning the VCR on and quickly pushing against the stuck tape to force the annoying thing out. Luckily no electrocutions ever occurred during this process.

- Eventually upgrading to a good quality VCR with a dial that allowed you to watch scenes frame-by-frame, especially useful for bone-crunching football tackle analysis in slow-mo and reviewing in awe the shattering of the T-1000 in Terminator 2. There really was something special about watching those paused, overworked images covered in tape static on the TV screen and hearing the groans of the VCR motors with each and every frame advancement and reversal.

- Before the advent of subtitles in DVDs, incorrectly guessing movie quotes due to bad accents/acting commonly found in Jean Claude Van-Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone movies. Having never had the desire to repurchase Universal Soldier on DVD, I still to this day do not know what JCVD was saying at the end after the fight with Dolph Lundgren – “Ironed?” “I wronged?” “I ronned [sic]?” “Eire rammed?” None of my guesses ever made any sense in the context of that scene, but then again, what was I thinking watching that rubbish in the first place anyway?

~

Got any other stories? I’d love to hear about your own personal favourite VHS memories =)

~

The winner will receive a Will Ooi-autographed copy of a picture of Jack Nicholson holding a picture of Heath Ledger, being asked for an autograph

Garry, like many of us, was ultra-keen to see Empire of the Sun, vocally expressive in his enthusiasm the moment we all met up with him in the morning on the day of Foreshore, Canberra’s annual music festival situated next to Parliament, holding onto this positive anticipation all the way through the day and excitedly displaying his glee through dance when the band were due to arrive onstage. Having just scooped the ARIAs a couple of nights earlier, his thoughts were that the band would as a result be in a fantastic mood to give us all a fantastic, memorable performance, whereas Pep had earlier warned us that Empire had been terrible at Parklife, “all style and no substance like an action movie”, but the overall expectation was that surely - surely! - we’d see an improved performance tonight. As the day progressed and the sky turned dark, accompanied by a slight chill illuminated by the colour of the crowd and the stages and the lights, the day-long stream of bands and music kept the happy mood alive as 10pm rolled round with so many of us excited to experience a set from Australia’s current “Best Group” on the large Lake Stage looking out onto Lake Burley Griffin in the evening.

Just as an observation, Foreshore, much like the current Australian Music Festival scene in general, presented itself through its participants in that very particular, very peculiar nationalistic Australian form which has somehow evolved from, arguably, the events of the Cronulla riots: muscular, shirtless men with Southern Cross tattoos wearing fluorescent tight board shorts and short skirted/hot-panted made-up girls with alternately good or bad tans, the fashions for both sexes topped off with large-rimmed sunglasses and no shortage of superficial self-confidence. By comparison the three of us who went and saw Empire together, Garry, Pep and I, were dressed tamely as far as animal instinct courtship standards went, but certainly by anyone’s everyday standards Garry looked awesome and Pep was, as only she can be, beautiful. We were there simply for the music – keen to see the headliners as well as the up and comers Deadmau5, the Bloody Beetroots, Zombie Nation, et al – in addition to having a good time with our friends, much like what the music festival of yesteryear was like and stood for, as opposed to this seemingly new “other” reason to go; namely, to make a statement on image and primal sexuality, as demonstrated by this specific subculture of people at these festivals nowadays. Regardless though, the common interests amongst the crowd were undoubtedly the bands and the DJs, with the main concern amongst most of us being who to choose from out of Empire of the Sun and Bloody Beetroots, whose sets who were playing at the same time. Garry, Pep and I had made our choice and stuck with it, our joy gleaned from the day’s fun ready to burst out once more when Empire finally arrived after all the hype and the eagerness.

The initial signs were great; fantastic visuals and lighting, an almost operatic attention to detail in design and set-piece, costumed dancers in ever-changing masks, Luke Steele wearing an equally ostentatious crown on his head, but sadly how ominous this prop in particular would turn out to be. Many of the right ingredients were there for a thrilling show: the band’s familiar, popular songs being played out to an admiring and appreciative crowd. Those large muscled men in shorts and suspenders with no shirts propped up joyfully on the shoulders of other beefcake guys, plenty of happy hand movements being waved, a mass of excited screams and shouts and dancing and jumping up and down. But, tellingly, something was just… off. A few songs in, Pep’s action movie reference seemed to come to fruition – and not just because of the abundance of alpha-male Schwarzenegger-physique on display – Empire of the Sun was worryingly starting to resemble the latest Indiana Jones: expensive to produce, arriving with much hype, and ending utterly and devastatingly in frustration and anger.

Garry made mention of Empire’s lack of interaction with the crowd. Pep’s Parklife warning again came back into our consciousness. These doubts permeating the mind despite how much we all wanted Empire to be awesome, and sure enough, a few more songs later with the non-engagement continuing and the dancers and Steele himself constantly leaving the stage and coming back with pretty outfits but with still no sign of an actual live performance or even a hint of personality to separate what we were seeing from the experience of watching a music video, the performers managed to achieve that dreaded cliche: all the songs started to sound the same, accompanying the disappointing realisation that, all things considered, maybe Empire are simply Just Plain Awful.

As pleased as we were to be able to push our way all the way up to the front of the stage by around the half-way stage of the act, we couldn’t help but also acknowledge that the only reason we were able to fill in those empty pockets of space in the crowd was due to the fact that people were leaving, with anger written on their faces – those same Indiana Jones 4 faces I’d seen in the cinema – in their masses. Yet as disappointing as the performance had been thus far there was still that hope we clung onto that it would improve but, unfortunately due to that very close-up view of the stage we had managed to attain, the finale of the act just so happened to somehow simultaneously destroy that hope, shock us into disgust, and also explain exactly why the exodus had begun as early as one song into the gig, which was quite an achievement really.

It wasn’t so much when Luke Steele acted out a scene of mock falling-over before being helped up by the two other insignificant band members (or “his bitches”, as Pep described them), but rather the awful hand-squeeze by the frontman to his subordinates to activate a ridiculously (and again in Pep’s words) “controlled, contrived, and insulting bow to the audience,” which even managed to channel Michael Jackson’s infamous ‘Jesus Christ’ performance a decade ago at the Brit Music Awards in sheer shocking audacity and self-indulgence. Sadly this time round, there was no Jarvis Cocker to invade the performance; just a mere solitary shoe thrown onstage which was, as awful as it sounds, nowhere near close enough to hitting Steele in the face for him to get it.

To get how fans and curious members who’d never seen them live before, many of whom had waited a whole day and attended specifically for them, would have appreciated a mere little hello, maybe even a goodbye too, or even just any form of acknowledgment and/or thanks for coming. Not the imperiously regal, awfully elitist bow in front of all of us inferior proles, whose duty and purpose in existence was to simply lap it all up without question along with a touch of Dickensian “Please, Sir, may I have some more?” enthusiasm thrown in for good measure. A bit of banter or a little joke in between songs goes a long way to help break that barrier between the common man and the famous, or at the very least appear to do so, particularly in this Twitter age of ours. But that performance simply reeked of “I’m better than you” and, with some admitted hyperbole, “Worship me for I AM God,” even.

Overall I would say that I had more interaction and experienced more insight with “Flex”, a random shirtless muscled-up and permanently flexing guy in a queue for the toilets, as he proudly boast of how he had just run 200 metres away from the cops, had studied MMA for 5 years, and promptly explained through demonstration the somewhat loose connection between these two topics via the use of his “left and right” (along with a reenactment of the corresponding, context-appropriate arm movements) and how they had assisted him in “dropping those cunts” as we awkwardly waited for those Porta-loo doors to open, than I had with Empire of the Sun. A.K.A Empire of Luke Steele. In fact a part of me even wonders whether Flex was there to see them, not to mention the sheer range of Looney Tunes-like situations possible had an Angry Flex decided to invade the stage to discuss with Steele what he felt about that performance. Maybe these festivals are just having an alpha-male effect on me.

By the end, Garry, Pep and I, along with the rest of the now withered-away crowd were left to ponder what we had just seen, all of us dispersing bemusedly amidst a hive-mind-like collective thought of “Is that it?” as we navigated our way past piles of feet-trampled cans of beer and water bottles; a performance of Godly proportions, apparently, and tendencies of “we should’ve seen Bloody Beetroots instead,” definitely. The same Bloody Beetroots who were, incidentally, still going off in the distance on one of the other stages. And just as well really, as upon hearing the boom of bass and rumble of dancing steps soaking their way through the lush and moist grass as we were on our way to the exit, the disappointed Foreshore crowd seemed to regain a bit of that day-long excitement which Empire had dreadfully managed to suck away.  Those slouched shoulders of no longer flexing muscle men buoyed themselves up once more for just a little bit more dancing, rejoining the infinite patience and joy possessed by Garry and Pep and reacting to a moment where music, in the thick of all the sinew and the flesh and the meaningless superficiality and the fancy unsubstantial lights and the overrated disappointment of Luke Steele, truly saved the day.

Here’s the resulting fallout on the Empire of the Sun official site forum =)

I wake up early on a Sunday morning, lying on an all-enveloping yellow couch of grand comfort and am greeted by a family silhouette of bottles of Coopers Pale Ale positioned directly in front of a bright white window, wondering where I am. A surge of initial trepidation runs through me as I furiously try to make out my surroundings: rainbow-washed paintings of ancient Greek goddesses, black and white posters from the 80s of pilot-shade-wearing models with baggy pants and singlets, a Frank Zappa DVD and, the giveaway, the case of GTA San Andreas sitting on a PS2, its controllers dangling over the beer covered living room table. “Ah” I let out in a sigh of relief, the worry replaced with cheerfulness. “Steve’s place”. 

Steve is a muso, you see. He looks like a muso, he drinks like a muso, and he most certainly lives like a muso: he even speaks in lyrics. If one were to try to conjure up a single sentence to sum up Steve’s place, the very first thing that comes to mind is “A kaleidoscopic trip directly into a Crowded House album cover or, depending on what flavour of incense was burning at the time, an LSD-period Beatles video“. And even then, a mere sentence hardly does the place justice.

Located on a large, accessible and very conveniently bus-serviced road considering the drunken nights out he is famous/legendary for, Steve’s home couldn’t be any better placed: just off a ”Flower Street” and next to a balloon store. Think about that for a second. A Balloon Store. That in itself counts as fairytale-level street cred in my book, but then there’s the sheer colour of the place itself.

Steve’s musical and pop culture sensibilities shine through the decorations of his home; a wondrous collection of artwork hangs off the walls alongside posters of Jeff Buckley, Gollum, The Young ‘Uns, John Lennon, PJ Harvey, and Grand Theft Auto. Wall-sized Ken Done-style paintings provide the backdrop to his computer. And the best piece(s) of antiquity to be found? Possibly this, but definitely this:

The lucky bastard

What better way to know someone than to take a look at their room; to see what makes them so. Thus I’ve taken that long hard look at Steve’s room and have come to several conclusions:

Steve is what Kurt Cobain would’ve been like if Kurt Cobain lived in Australia and played video games and appreciated Brian De Palma and Quentin Tarantino and didn’t own a shotgun and/or date some possessive junkie of a girlfriend, the latter of which may differ depending on your theory of the final events of the life of Kurt Cobain. Otherwise, Steve is what Jeff Buckley/Billy Corgan would’ve been like if Jeff Buckley/Billy Corgan lived next to a balloon store and quoted Lord of the Rings, just without the drunken ocean swimming/adolescence full of angst, respectively, and with a beard. Failing that and taking that beard into account, Steve is John Lennon, on drugs and staging a Bed-In for Peace with an admiration of Japan that included sushi, Ninjas, and Samurais and not eccentric bohemian artists, even though Steve does appreciate that from time to time as well. Shit. Which naturally brings me to another, this time final, definitive conclusion: Steve is John Lennon. So the rumours are true! Oh wait… that was “Paul is dead“… but Steve knew that all along anyway.