The Windmills of Your Mind: Petrie Terrace in the 70S
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This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Willsteed, John (2016) The windmills of your mind: Petrie Terrace in the 70s. [Performance] This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/112511/ c John Willsteed 2017 This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] License: Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. PUBLIC LECTURE FOR BRISBANE OPEN HOUSE • 16/4/2016 THE WINDMILLS OF YOUR MIND: PETRIE TERRACE IN THE 70s First, some thoughts with visual accompaniment. SLIDE – Title Somewhere in the early 80s, 2:30am, another dark night of the soul. I was hungry. SLIDE – Map – Petrie Terrace And obviously delusional – I phoned a cab, slid through the morbid streets from Dutton Park through West End and across the William Jolly, crept up the rise to the Windmill. A beacon (bacon?) of culinary delight. Veal. On a roll. With cheese. Ate it in the cab on the way home. Such is the pull of Petrie Terrace. SLIDE - Hippy me, hippy me at wedding, me with little mo, Zero at Relax A little earlier, in 1978, was living in the Pink Palace up next the The City View Hotel. Transitioning, I think they call it. I moved to Newfarm and cut off my hair, and joined a band of women called Zero. They rehearsed in a huge old hulk of a house up on Normanby hill. SLIDE – Horror Mori, Zero profiles, Morrison by POB Lindy Morrison was the drummer and she was verbal, expressive; she was a statement. She lived in Wellington Street, No. 62. SLIDE – Wellington St map It had been owned and renovated by Kevin Hayes, the first of a few houses he transformed in this street. A sunken bath that saw afternoons of champagne delight and roaring laughter. Geoffrey Rush, Gerard Lee, Mark Ross - artful boys and girls from around the inner city. SLIDE – Exterior no 42, Max, red things And a few doors up, No. 42, in a house filled with life and light, the brilliant Max Horner collected red things. Uncountable red things. Architects, like Max and Kevin, were attracted to the area. James Birrell, designer of the Centenary Pool, in careless and flamboyant inebriation, used to deliver lovelorn entreaties at staggering volume outside his girlfriend’s house in Princess Street. It was a little pocket of tolerance in the inner city, trapped by traffic and time. SLIDE – Caxton St Hall exterior So, we rehearsed up in Normanby Terrace, but when it came to venues, this hall was a favourite for fund-raisers. Its political affiliation was clear, and it was popular with community groups, sub-cultural clusters and fringe-dwellers - the opposition to he Who Must Not Be Named. SLIDE – Gay Ball ad, Gay Dance poster For this Gay Dance we practiced our juggling routines down in the park by the Boot Factory. But then the filth started to cotton on. SLIDE – Sharks etc poster A month later, the cop cars turned up for this – hauled people away. They said it was a riot. Certainly, seeing young people being bashed and thrown into paddy wagons has the frisson of riot about it, the whiff of revolution. But this had become part of a tedious trend, organize a dance, cops come, steal money, arrest a few kids. See ya next time. The joke. SLIDE – Caxton St Bash - Xero Repairs show And look! A year later, a memorial show!! We were embedding our own history, laying it out in plain sight. SLIDE – Xero, 31st, Gobs We would play this hall with our buddies, bands we loved in front of our darling tribe. Dennis Stokes PA, drum kit held in place by the Besser block, lugging borrowed guitars through darkening streets in a town that had no life at all after 9pm. No life at all. SLIDE – Hall then me in checks This particular winter’s night in 1980, we dressed the hall up like a two- tone Easter bonnet. Checks were a theme, obviously. Zero played, and Peter Kroll and The Bluebirds – guys who were a little older than us, but it was Dennis’ band and he owned the PA. And Kroll was a miracle guitar player. Just listen to The Pineapples From The Dawn of Time album: Shocker! All the proof is there. It was a big event, a B+S Ball for the abandoned and anxious. And this is what that night sounded like. This is the first song I wrote for Zero, called 19X21, an instrumental I wrote on this guitar. It was recorded on this stage that night. Welcome to minutes of your life you will never get back . SLIDE – Zero on stage/checks SLIDE – song and footage After the yelling: The high point for me is Forster yelling out after the song finishes: “Willsteed! Tom Verlaine!” a comparison I am only too happy to accept. SLIDE – sleeping boy And this is what it did to the young people!! SLIDE – ad/handbills The hall was used by all sorts over these few years, as were other halls not too far away. The Valley, Roma Street, George Street, warehouses and factories drew us from Petrie Terrace – we needed bigger spaces, cheap to rent. SLIDE – Clint, Warren, Johnny etc So this hall became a place of myth, as did some of the people who played here. Just as Petrie Terrace had Billy Phillips, the tattoo artiste and heroin dealer, so this hall contains memories of evenings long since passed and forgotten by many. These wonderful photos by Jim Goodwin capture an evening in 1978 when the stage was taken by a one-off assortment of dubious musical talent. Warren Lamond, singer of The Leftovers, Johnny Burnaway on guitar, Clinton Walker on tightly gripped guitar. God knows what it sounded like. Warren and Johnny are both since gone, as are the wonderful Max Horner with his collections of things and of course the horrible He Who Must Not Be Named. SLIDE - Hall exterior decaying And so we all moved on, leaving this place behind. Through the 80s it changed, as Gambaros, The Caxton and Lang Park infused the street with yob culture and pickup joints. Dirty Dicks with its buxom wenches and tankards and boys in tights with lutes, had given way to Crazies and stand-up comedy. By the 90s it was a foul Friday night pickup joint on a par with Eagle Street. The city was, thanks to the Expo, growing up. We had come of age. SLIDE – Clare on checks night And finally, a quick snap of my dear departed pal Clare McKenna, a wonderful drummer and musician, who saw this building with excited eyes and did much to make our shows the happenings that they were. SLIDE - Acknowledgements And now a quick chat: Heritage in Brisbane seems deeply rooted in architecture. This is as it should be. Architecture supplies the city with a backdrop, a horizon, and the sites in which our lives take place. In which connection and intersection occur. Looking at any of the many Heritage trails that exist in Brisbane I am struck by the emphasis on the initial provenance of these buildings. But I think it is absolutely necessary that we do more. It is essential for our future, that we start to acknowledge the cultural history that exists here. Popular culture, sub-culture, youth culture. We DO get it, sometimes. There’s a bridge over the river named after a band that built a critical international reputation. There’s an alley in Redcliffe that honours in a thoughtful and affective way the contribution of one of the world’s great pop bands. This place has a terrible history of ‘progress at any cost’. We tear old things down just because we like shiny new things. But we can do much more and be much smarter. We can develop ideas to weave history and culture into the physical and digital topography of the city. Other cities and countries have had great success by exploiting such cultural assets. Here’s a little example of what I mean: Dahrl Court, at 45 Phillips Street, Spring Hill Q Space Annex (John Nixon’s apartment), Dahrl Court, 11/45 Phillips Street. Other occupants of the Dahrl Court apartment building during the 1980–81 years included Jenny Watson, Grant McLennan, Robin Gold, Keryn Henry, Graham Aisthorpe, Robert Vickers, Tony Forster, and Ross Ramsay The Go-Betweens make their first video-clip (for their new single ‘Your Turn, My Turn’), in Grant McLennan’s Dahrl Court apartment. Kriv Stenders shoots Heather’s Gloves for Robin Gold in the apartment.