Glam to Wham

Luna Park during the daytime – some times and places in Sydney, you can squint a bit and summon the ghosts, maybe feel like you’re standing in the same town that was once a disagreeable host to bands like the Laughing Clowns, Triffids, SPK, Voight/465, Tactics… stirring names from Golden Days, when Giants Walked the Earth.

I listen to this music a lot, and enjoy thinking about those times, the idea that while I was a ten year-old riding my bike around North Ryde, there were superb bands lurking around the city’s edges making some of the most interesting music this country has ever coughed up.

It’s that odd brand of nostalgia for a time not directly experienced, ethereal and slightly sad – but definitely not unpleasant. It’s a state of mind I actually really enjoy, sometimes even going so far as to deliberately cultivate it. Sometimes.

Helping things along is an odd, half-forgotten cultural artifact – one that created an unusual bridge between pre-teen imaginings of adult life and the (hardly) grown-up world of music and girls.

Sweet and Sour was an Australian television series that aired in 1984. It portrayed the formation, brief career and eventual disbandment of fictional Sydney band The Takeaways.

It comprised 20 half-hour episodes, and was repeated twice in pretty short succession. Since then it hasn’t been screened anywhere, as far as I’m aware – although there is a clip on youtube that is dubbed with Italian voices. It is excellent regardless, featuring all the great characters – is it from their “last gig”?

These days the show is remembered – if it is remembered at all – in a kitchy, nostalgic sort of way. It’s easy to see why – it was an odd blend of “safe” youth-oriented drama with mild aspirations to credibility, and hence full of happy absurdities. To attempt a series about a young band in 80’s Sydney without sex, drugs or bad language was always going to be a whimsical endeavour. In one of the earliest episodes the band are sitting around in their warehouse – one of them starts playing a new song and the others join in, getting the chord changes spot on, first time. Lovely.

Obviously this has never happened to me - yet when I’m playing a new song with friends and it goes right, I often think back to this sequence. Then there was “Shrug” Yates, the washed up jazzman father of sax player/singer Christine Yates – my earliest encounter with the “legendary musician lost in everyday life” trope that I continue to find endlessly compelling.

Bassist George’s “music vs day job” struggles are also pretty resonant in retrospect; I also remember that there were various romantic threads that were played out during the series, although the details escape me.

It is also stuffed with plum awful 1980s fashion disasters, and each episode tends to contain one or two “video clip” sequences – sometimes these are presented as non-naturalistic interludes, and sometimes they are woven into the narrative in the style of a musical.

I’m always very happy to have a laugh about this tatty relic of government-funded 1980s youth programming, but beneath the giggles there exists something deeper, less mocking and more genuinely affectionate, even passionate.

I don’t think I would have started playing music if it hadn’t been for “Sweet and Sour”. I was just the right age to be seduced by its hokey vision of camaraderie in the adventuresome pursuit of creative endeavour - old enough to have aspirations to roll with the cool kids, yet before cynicism really kicked in.

Thinking about this led me to draw utterly fanciful parallels with the far-too-oft-quoted Sex Pistols gig at the Manchester Trade Hall in 1976 – “manufactured” band, everyone who saw it started a group etc. I often wonder how many folks playing music in 1990s Australia had a little bit of The Takeaways in their musical DNA – I’ve certainly talked to a fair few.

The music itself was pretty great, too. There were some pretty substantial songwriting contributors – David McComb, Don Walker – and a lot of great pop from the likes of Mark Callaghan, Sharon O’Neill, Reg Mombassa, Todd Hunter etc.

My personal favourites are McComb’s “On The Street Where You Live” – an excellent pop song charmingly sung by Deckchairs Overboard’s Cathy McQuade; “Glam to Wham”, an dreamy studio confection that was released as a single; and the high-energy closing theme “Sweet”, with rather strange lyrics by XL Capris singer and show co-creator Johanna Piggott.

There were two volumes of music from the show, a few singles and even some appearances on Countdown. The first soundtrack sold 70000 copies and went platinum. I remember being pretty sure that they weren’t a proper band, but still enjoyed a certain amount of confusion about the whole thing. Is sort-of-believing in the manufactured mythology of a pretend pop band more enduringly satisfying than buying the manufactured mythology of a “real” pop band?

Of course nowadays the Takeaways have a myspace page, and it’s gratifying to see that there are quite a few comments that gel with my own sense of this being an influential piece of work – not influential in the sense of having any ongoing cultural clout, but because it actually affected people’s lives, even in a small way. That’s pretty nice.

Another odd little resonance this show holds for me is part of my gradual awareness that actors were real people. I remember being a little aghast at a friend’s report that (I think) Sandra Lillingston was working behind the perfume counter in David Jones Bondi Junction. Without thinking about it, I’d always assumed that anyone who’d ever appeared on television was made for life, living a charmed existence quite apart from the worries of everyday folk like me.

I know that Tracey Mann was recently in the very successful play “Minefields and Miniskirts”, and a few years ago I saw Arky Michael in a play called “The Book-keeper”, which is still one of the best theatre productions I have ever seen. It was about the life of the Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa, and it was absolutely beautiful.

These days I have some work-related dealings with Ric Herbert, who played the Takeaways’ ever-scheming manager Darrell Winters. Ric is going great guns, acting, doing voiceovers and performing music himself. At a recent gig, someone brought a copy of the Sweet and Sour LP and asked him to sign it. An actor playing a real gig signing a copy of a record by an imaginary band.

Ric has “Sweet and Sour” on VHS – the old tapes are marked up in biro, I get a sense that they might have been taped by his proud family. He lent them to me about a year ago and I watched the first couple of episodes. Among the riches were cameos from Renee Geyer, Dave Mason and The Johnnys, and scads of heartbreaking footage of “old Sydney” – the time before development really kicked in, when there was still underutilized space left in the city, maybe the possibility of stillness.

I had grand plans to transfer the videos to DVD, but these days it can be a struggle to find the time for things one wants to do. Perhaps I’ll have another go.

“Sweet and Sour” had a perfect ending – the band played their last gig and parted ways. Outside in the street was a lone girl with a Walkman who had recorded the show – she flipped over the tape, pressed play and walked into the night with the music in her headphones.