As seasoned overseas travellers, we’re used to making full
use of the various entertainment options on board a plane. But this is a relatively brief flight of only
three hours and so our choices are somewhat limited. Whilst our plane doesn’t
contain the back of seat entertainment system I love using on overseas flights,
Virgin did provide (and at no cost too – bravo!) iPads loaded with options
including movies and complete albums.
I’ve yet to spend quality time on a plane
listening to music. I suspect this might
be due to the fact that the playing time of a complete album or the specific song lists
the airlines market as radio stations doesn’t take up a great amount of
time. When I’m on 13 hour leg, say
Singapore to Frankfurt, I want to be totally immersed in something that not
only makes me forget I’m on a plane but also eats up a significant period of
time by the time that period of immersion has ended. Believe me it’s almost better than
sleep. And so, I pass up the opportunity
to listen to the new Queens Of The Stone Age album, among others, in favour of
the magic/crime caper Now You See Me.
My ploy works. By the
time the movie finishes, I can see we’re flying over the Northern Queensland
coastline and point out locations such as Mission Beach to “M” who has never
been to this part of the world. After
landing we get into our car and begin the 70 kilometre drive to our ultimate
destination, Port Douglas which contains a stunning 35 km stretch alongside the
sealine.
We cruise into town, load up on some tasty calamari and then find our
hotel. The remainder of our time is
spent either alongside the pool, eating, walking on the 4 Mile Beach and
exploring the nearby area, taking in the Daintree Rainforest, Cape Tribulation,
Mossman Gorge, the Atherton Tablelands,
Kurandra, Palm Cove and Cairns. There
was also a memorable – at least for me - sunset cruise on a catamaran.
Although I took my iPod with me, I end up barely using it at
all. I suspect this was due to the
weather which during each day peaked around the 30 degree Celsius mark with barely a hint of rain. When
faced with weather like that I have a tendency to want to vegetate and lay on
couches or beds watching stuff. Even
when engaged on my selected holiday reading (see below), I didn’t use the iPod,
possibly fearful that the combined act of reading and listening whilst on
holiday would be too much for my out for lunch brain to cope.
But there was another reason and, no, it’s not just because
“M” was with me. Rather, Port Douglas
comes with its own built in soundscape which anyone would be a fool not to
adopt as their temporary soundtrack.
Basically the town stretches back from the tip a peninsula which juts
out into the Coral Sea. The developers
appear to have left as much of the basic vegetation as they could and a
significant number of the hotels and resorts are placed so that they’re within
100 meters or so of the 4 Mile Beach.
This means, assuming one isn’t locked into an iPod, the sound of the sea
rolling into the beach is an ever present with the birds flying in and out of
the treetops adding to nature’s symphony.
In that environment, I can understand how anyone can be demotivated to
listen to anything resembling loud music.
That evidently includes rock stars; Port Douglas is a favourite spot for
touring overseas rock acts to spend a
week or so after the rigours of their tour.
It therefore came as no surprise that whatever music I did
get to hear – usually background music in pubs or restaurants or the times I
did listen to the hotel or car radio - could be easily described as chill out
music. The noisiest track I heard during
the entire period was in hippy haven Kunandra when Steely Dan’s Rikki Don’t
Lose That Number came on, certainly the only time I’ll ever be tempted to head
bang along to that tune.
And so the one time I did hear loud music came as a jarring
shock. It was whilst we were in Palm
Grove, an even quieter and laid back version of Port Douglas about half way
between it and Cairns. We’d gone into a
Leagues Club, hoping to find a cheap[er] lunch alternative than that offered by
the restaurants. Waiting for our
orders, I saw a TV set had been tuned to a cable television station and a
program entitled 20 Essential Hair Bands was on. This was one of those programs where
inexplicable selections are counted down and well known figures (at least in
the minds of the producers) talk about the merits or otherwise of each
act. The definition of “Hair Band” left
much to be desired – what should have been full of those mostly LA spandex type
acts from the 80’s such as RATT, Warrant, Poison, Motley Crue, W.A.S.P, Guns
‘n’ Roses, etc were also joined by acts
including Black Sabbath and others I was too blissed out to remember. But I didn’t really care. Sitting over my seafood burger, I was content
to be merely amused by knowing who got nominated, preferring to gaze out over
the beach and the jellyfish nets and listen to the sounds of sea. It reminded me of a time I saw Atari Teenage
Riot at a Big Day Out (I think) on a very hot day. As BJ said to me later, on a day like that
who’d want to listen to noisy Germans dressed in black scream about
politics? (For the record, the no. 1
“hair band” was deemed to be Bon Jovi.) Even more jarring was coming across the movie version of the stage show Rock Of Ages on the hotel cable. A "celebration" of 80s music, it contains a collection of the horrible big rock hits (such as We Built This City) that have made it arguably the worst decade in the history of rock/pop. All I could do was watch in morbid fascination, intrigued as why fine actors such as Alec Baldwin or Catherine Zeta-Jones would agree to appear in such utter tripe.
The end of the trip came all too soon. I finally pulled out my iPod at Cairns
airport when our return Jetstar flight was delayed. There were no movies on the return home as
Jetstar charges $12 for the privilege and so “M” contented herself by going
through the 450 odd photos we’d taken and I wrapped up my holiday reading.
(Book 2) Prince by
Matt Thorne (2012)
This is an epic 531 page (including footnotes) survey of the
life and times of the Purple clad genius from Minneapolis. Englishman Thorne can rightly claim to be
regarded among the hard core Prince followers.
Indeed, one of the chapters in the book is devoted to his reviews about
Prince’s 21 night stand at London’s O2 arena in 2007 where he attended 19 of
the shows and most of the aftershows as well. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of his work
and is able to discuss the origins of many of his songs which is important
given the sheer percentage of his work that has created from versions of songs
he had recorded years previously and which he had retrieved from has fabled
vault. Additionally, his knowledge extends
beyond Princes’s own albums. Each of the
records released by acts he championed and for whom he acted as songwriter or
producer (such as The Time, The New Power Generation and a bevy of female
muses) is also included. Fortunately, for
a hard core fan, Thorne has developed a keen critical eye on this massive
output and is prepared to indicate when something is not up to par.
Essentially, the thrust of Thorne’s overview is that Prince’s
creativity peaked with the Lovesexy album and subsequent tour. Since then Thorne infers that Prince has been
compromised since then, obsessed with attempting to find new ways to distribute
his music without having to overly rely too much on record companies. Initially someone who embraced new media and the
internet as such a means to do so, Prince has now turned his back on the latter
having closed down the websites he had created, thus explaining why there hasn’t
really been any new product released via traditional means of purchase for a
considerable time now. The free giveaway
of the Planet Earth album with an English newspaper is but one attempt to find
a new way. Thorne also feels that Prince
is fairly contemptuous of his mass fan base, especially for its general refusal
to embrace his various stylistic changes and experiments and has what I can
only term to be an ambivalent view about his classic catalogue. What seems to emerge is that Prince now relies
on his always spectacular live show to draw in the punters by playing his
classic material but by interposing songs from the more recent material, hopes
to trigger interest in it.
In terms of Prince’s recorded output, Thorne praises most of
the albums up to and including Lovesexy and is one of the few writers prepared
to see merit in some of the tracks from the Batman soundtrack. After Lovesexy, Prince’s output has become
variable but what I personally liked about the survey of the latter albums is
how closely they appear to resemble my own views. He rightly points out how the Diamonds And
Pearls album hasn’t really stood the test of time, cannot fathom the favourable
critical reaction to Musicology and recognises the brilliance of The Rainbow
Children. He doesn’t value The Gold Experience
as much as I do but, on the other hand, I think Emancipation is overpraised. His overview of the non Prince recordings, as
well as the recent hard to obtain Prince albums such as The Slaughterhouse And 20Ten
is especially valuable and is recommended to anyone wishing to dip their toe
into this aspect of his career. 
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