Techno & Me page 3

If in Brisbane I felt like the homecoming queen at my high school prom, Sydney took one look at me coming off that plane with the battered guitar case and decided I was Cinderella. And at the airport to meet me were the ugly sisters and their stepmother all reincarnated in the form of N____, the general manager of my Australian label. In the same way that one might use the word statuesque to flatter someone who is simply fat but tall too, so I might describe N____ as striking. Everything about her was large and well modelled - a fine Roman nose, dark, luscious hair and taut olive skin - but put together she looked all wrong. Had she cultivated a lady-tache, it might have made a bit more sense, but once at the wheel of her cavernous boat of a German automobile, she just seemed like a man in drag. Especially when she started extolling the virtues of techno music. (Apart from Dannii Minogue, who has carved an entire career from singing on dreadful dance records, I cannot think of any women who would actually buy a techno record. Even during my low moments, I knew to put that Sven Vath record back in the bargain bin.)

 Depositing me at my very swanky hotel, N____ informed me that she would be along later to take me out to dinner, but that I was to call her if there was anything that I needed, anything at all. I was about to say ‘ooh, please can I have a hit’, but decided I didn’t know her quite well enough for such levity. In hindsight, it might have been my instinct kicking in before I robbed myself of a very fine dinner and too many Bellinis while watching the sun set over Bondi.  In any case, N____ grudgingly paid for dinner with her shiny platinum corporate Amex before deciding that was the last of any expenses incurred by the label on my behalf.

  This was after she gave me a serious grilling about the state of my album, during which the Bellinis made me far too candid, a fault of mine, and I forfeited my opportunity to hoodwink an unwitting  outpost of the record company into giving me another chance based on a little misinformation. The manager had persuaded the UK label that perhaps my fortunes might be revived by going to a smaller but similar territory where I had a ‘story’. A story? My folks live there. In that case, doesn’t everybody have a bloody story? Well, anyway, between a little massaging of figures, nothing serious - ‘oh, it’s doing great, it’s at number 9’ (on the most added at radio chart), ‘it’s all over the radio’ (in Uzbekistan and Scotland), ‘the folks at CD:UK really like her’ (but not enough to play the video) – N____ collected me from Sydney airport thinking I might be the new Dido (she just hadn’t noticed because of all the techno music she listened to), and by the end of dinner had decided that they would spend enough money to plug my record to one radio station servicing a cattle ranch in Northern Territory and not a penny more. 

So, my mother found herself joining in with the new pastime presently occupying our relatives in the United Kingdom – going to record stores and asking for my album. 

‘Who?’ 

If perchance, she stumbled upon a store that had somehow had one of the five hundred copies N____ thought would be quite enough for all the Australian record buying public, it would necessitate quite a little hunt locating it. 

This hunt would later extend to the UK when, a few weeks before what proved to be a very successful arena tour opening for a mega star, the company deleted the album altogether in anticipation of a re-issue that never came. I have an image of my A&R man armed with a rather handsome shotgun aiming it squarely at his exquisitely polished Prada loafers and then handing it to the managing director, recommending that he try it too. Perhaps they performed this little rite of record company passage because they had secret sado-masochistic tendencies, but they obviously really enjoyed it because they had just done it a few weeks before when shelving a six figure video for a song they no longer thought was the single. (We could revive the entire British film industry with the money record companies waste on videos that will never be seen. Someone should start a committee for just this purpose – it would give Guy Ritchie a job, wouldn’t it?)  

Anyway, monkey see, monkey do – a few days later I did a similar thing, only I used a computer.