Blab number eight – Tap Dancing on the Titanic. I thought the lyrics to this were pretty in sync with the music, a kind of angular tug of war. It’s a good-looking CD and super rare now; somehow the lyrics misspelt ‘golden’ as ‘goldern’ who was responsible? Anyway…this was a weird transitional time for us. We’d lost a major record deal, but on the other hand gained a good booking agency and a drummer with a van, organisational and people skills, and chops to boot. So minuses and pluses. We’d been rehearsing at Troy Horse studios for a few years, since way back when they were in Newtown. The girl at the desk was called Kristy-Jean, she was a lovely lass who loved Bluebottle Kiss and we loved her back. She started to help us out a little, and suggested to the owners that they help us release some material. Originally it started with a proposed split “7 with Two Litre Dolby. We recorded a song called Omen Wind for that but the single never happened. We also recorded an electric version of the song Stained Mouth (the original acoustic version had appeared on Fear of Girls) for an indie compilation but that also never happened. Anyway Kristy-Jean alongside the lovely Chris McBurnie organised to have us use the newly built Troy Horse recording studio with the arrangement that they would release an EP for the resurrected Troy Horse Records imprint. This was in late ‘97; we recorded Tap Dancing on the Titanic, a Kate Bush cover, a few others and added a demo. The idea was to have it as a stopgap release. It came out in ’98 and we started to tour and play way more in general. We still couldn’t fill a bathtub but we toured regardless. Many soon to be famous bands supported us only to feed us dust years later. I think The Living End supported us in Adelaide once. Augie March lots of times too. We did a run through Melbourne and Adelaide where Fletcher managed to break his bass in two. Richo hastily borrowed a friend’s ancient bass, took off the strings and boiled them. That night we played with Rowland S Howard. Needless to say the strings went out of tune all night. It was crazy to meet Rowland face to face, such an amazing looking man. I’d seen him walking around St Kilda on our first trip to Melbourne looking like he’s stumbled straight off the set of Wings of Desire; he was who he was twenty four seven. He apologised for there not being a very big crowd. It’s a shame his popularity peaked just a couple of years before he shuffled off this mortal coil. Typical. We did another tour where we supported Pollyanna at The Punters Club and then loaded straight into the van and drove all night to Adelaide to play a festival. We were accompanied by a sound guy we’d picked up from Pollyanna previously on a trip to Wagga. He was very intense - disturbed even. He wanted to manage us and had an immense and awful CD collection that he would load into the van in a silver suitcase. At dawn we got to Tallem Bend and Richo’s faithful van blew up. Blown head gasket. Dead. We managed to fit our bodies into another car that some friends/fans were driving in and arrived at the Festival. We played a sleep deprived set to no one as the crowds queued outside. Then we stayed up until the next night to watch The Dirty Three and The Mark of Cain. Things got delirious. Fletcher and I did the 17 or whatever number of hours home from Adelaide with the sound guy in tow, we had to leave Richo behind to mourn his van.When we were driving home the sound guy kept putting a Robin Williams tape on repeat. Fletcher got us lost in the Hay Plains. Then the sound guy started insisting that as a serious songwriter I needed to immerse myself in Sting’s Ten Summoners Tales which he described as a ‘deconstruction of the book of Revelation’. I remember pulling into a truck stop and huge bugs were flying all over the lights. The sound guy was getting angrier and angrier at us not taking up his offer of managing us. We slept in a cheap motel. Just him, Fletcher and myself. Ben was terrified. Later he woke up in the dead of night only to see Mr Sound Guy wide awake boring into poor little Fletchers’ eyes. Good times. As I mentioned, we still didn’t’ have much of a following, though strangely people started getting excited about us in Adelaide. Still, in home town Sydney we had our best ever showing at The Annandale Hotel launch for Tap Dancing. Over 200 payers or something, we played well. I remember the usually taciturn (and now sadly departed) booker Mathew Elliott beaming. He’d booked our first ever gig for us at The Hopetoun on the strength of our demo and had always tried to give us a break but we’d never pulled. It was a minor triumph after a few years of being on a major label and having no punter joy. That year we played the whole east coast Homebake tour (it was the first and last time the festival attempted to go national). We also pulled a fairly high-octane performance of Tap Dancing together for Recovery. JJJ played it a little too, though not as much as Generic Teen. We were getting to be pretty reliable as a live prospect so all this stuff helped a little. Here’s the performance of the song on Recovery youtube/watch?v=d13lD2QFuXU The CD is long out of print, rare and so forth but you can download it from the Bluebottle Kiss Bandcamp site. It’ll cost you five dollars though - https://bluebottlekiss.bandcamp/album/tap-dancing-on-the-titanic-ep
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 07:04:29 +0000
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