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May 30 — June 13, 1974
THE DIGGER
Page 10 L ea d g uitarist R e d S y m o n s interview ed
without any particularly bad fea tures. She’s a perfect blank. A blank for identification.” Suzi Quatro is Britain’s latest female pop star; her recorded voice sounds like razor blades hacking through hessian — to the tune of a power drill. “ Liberace’s my favorite. He’s identified by his expensive clothes. After that everything else about him is flippant. The thing of value in his performance is his clothes. In Skyhooks McAinsh plays this absurd, tough blank. Mechanised and asexual. Blank. My character is one that has sort of evolved over a couple of roles; I guess it’s arrogant and foppish. I have no personal fears about whether I appear absurd or not. Similarly McAinsh and to some extent Freddy [the drummer] don’t have themselves tied up in their roles as far as favor or disfavor goes. “The comment I’d like to make is that people bind so much up in style. But as soon as you start dressing up, like them, you realise that your own style, and others, is just a distraction from the bore dom of having a whole lot of ideas
the niaterial of his, own that the world got to hear, would be the one phrase, ‘In the bog’.” ;~ * “ You have to make certain con cessions to get into a recording studio in Australia. vYou become involved in a company that binds you to certain restrictions inherent in its power structure. Like appearing to conform to community stan dards of decency. You become in volved in a business that has a of ‘you’d better get a grip on competitive ethic as opposed to a yourself. That phrase has that absurd collective one. You’re competing Latin American chorus behind it. with businessmen which is a bit A single phrase that when given of a drag. You become very con the right coloring insidiously jus scious of their function.” Red reckons Michael Gudinski, the owner tifies itself.” Set in a band where every other of his record company, should not song has a strong basis in personal pretend to be anything but the businessperson that he is. Gudinsjri experience, you’re tempted to look laughs guardedly and says he likes at the song closely. Red laughs and sparring with Red. cites the case of Lee Neale, a favorite “ I’d like to satirise PR. I don’t figure who played keyboards in think I concede too miich. PR Mike Rudd’s Spectrum during their makes the complete product out heyday. Neale only had one of his of a band. Take Suzi Quatro. She’s own songs performed by Spectrum, presented as one thing. Her body an instrumental with but one spoken is simplified by the leather clothes. phrase. “The synthesis of Lee Neale’s She has straight hair, she’s flat onstage personality, if you go by chested and has a . pleasant face
Ectomorphic rocker 1
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by Alistair Jones Blind Date is a wholesome tele vision show of the variety that hands, out prizes and plays with mystery guests. A panel of uncoupled con testants answer silly questions, and if Fate plays its chocolate coated hand you’ll have the same matinee dreams as the suave but approach able mystery guest. If your num ber’s up, it’s off to the Tropicana Room or up to Tinsel Towers for a whacko night out, at a table so close to the floorshow you get showered with sequins. And the mystery guest. Wow! What a dish. What a dream boat. Last week on Blind Date the moment came for Cheryl, or per haps it was Moira — whatever her name was she said she wanted a white wedding and described her hair as medium length — to meet her blind date and collect a kiss. The said blind date sprang from behind the partition and tried to bite her neck. The date was wearing lame and drapes, his leering face was heavily made up in lines of muscular innuendo after the fashion of a racy and irrepressible spidesnake. The girl — who’d flung a bit of purple glitter over her outfit to go on telly — recoiled in horror. The date never got his box of choco lates; they were whisked away very smartly. Two mothers wrote in and suggested that people from church dubs are perhaps better choices for guests. And there* has been no fur ther mention of that projected night of whoopee at Dirty Dick’s spit and griddle. The mystery guest on that night was Red Symons, a tall,, ectomorphic guitarist from a hard rock glitter band, Skyhooks. Skyhooks did the opening spot on Blind Date, and Symons did the personality appear ance. His initial entrance was in dark, sightless glasses and tapping cane. He wriggled and leered all over his chair. Never answered straight, took the time to fall asleep and grunt awake mid sentence, adopted a heavy Italinate accent here and there and eventually bit the girl. Other artists in the studio later abused his recklessness, the audience shrieked and giggled ;and compere Bobby Hanna, perpetually smiling Bobby Hanna, just kept smiling. “ I’ll always perform,” smiles Red. “ You just do. Sometimes it’s hard to find any other assurance of your own worth.” Red is approaching 25, was once a science graduate, has been acting and playing for the last couple of years in the Carlton/Fitzroy area, played lead guitar for the first
Melbourne performance of Steve Spears’ Africa, and has been playing with Skyhooks for about six months. Previous to Skyhooks he had his own band, Scumbag, which played around Carlton for a while, per forming some of Symons’ own bi zarre compositions, tinkering around with Dan Hicks’ material and playing with some musical sophistication. Not widely heard. Before that Red played in “ Carlton bands” , which involves sitting around in warehouses all day, just playing. “ We rehearsed for six months and performed once. Ah, we didn’t want to sully our hands with promoting work. Carlton bands are afraid of working class and business and that’s what a large part of being in a regularly playing band is about — the kids in the outer suburbs.” Skyhooks is a pop band. They wear elaborate costumes and make up. They present a surreal, super style image and play repetitive songs bound more by points of intensity than melody. Greg McAinsh, who plays bass, writes almost all the material. “The songs are discon nected from the stage performance. They’re incidents from McAinsh’s personal experiences that aren’t sur real, although the band is. I play guitar mostly; I don’t write the songs.” The songs could make high energy pop radio music. “ It’s funny with radio music. There’s a definite split between lyrical content and musical content. Radio’s lyrical content is totally banal. Pick a phrase out of a song — a chorus maybe — that asserts an idea. Often the idea isn’t even very interesting. Forget about what the words are saying and pick the bits you like the sound of. Those lyrical statements are orchestrated in such a way to justify them.” Skyhooks’ songs are marked by hook lines, usually the same as the title. Songs like “What ever happened to the revolution?” , “ You only love me because I’m good in bed” , “Toorak cowboy” , and “ You talk about love on the radio” . Skyhooks is heading into the studio to record an album for Michael Gudinski’s MushroomHabel. Ross Wilson, the original advocate for Skyhooks and publisher of Greg McAinsh’s songs, is producing it. One of Red’s songs will be oh the album, and Skyhooks has recently begun including it in the onstage repertoire. The song, “ Smut” , is complex and constructed, a witty series of observations about going to see a sexy skin flick. “ It's! strictly light entertainment. It has the basis
Japanese Pankhurst Yonezu Tomoko, a graduate of the Tokyo Art University and a childhood sufferer from polio, was arrested on May 10 after she sprayed red paint on the bullet proof glass enclosing the Mona Lisa (on loan to Tokyo’s Uneo National Museum), as a protest against the extraordinary segregation of handicapped people from the mainstream of ‘normal’ Japanese life. She spent 18 days in jail and has now been released to face charges of ‘creating a public disturbance’. , - . Her protest, prompted by the exclusion of handicapped people from the exhibition, is reported here by a freelance journalist in Tokyo who interviewed Yonezu Tomoko recently. In anticipation <?f massive crowds flocking to see the Mona Lisa, whose loan to Japan was one of the few fruits of Premier Tanaka Kakuei’s recent visit to France, Japan’s CulturalAffairs Ministry issued an order pro hibiting entrance to the exhibit of handicapped people with crutches or wheelchairs and women with small children. “ Safety” was cited as the reason for the prohibition, but when one of Japan’s leading newspapers questioned the justice of denying handicapped people access to the work of art, the decision was modified slightly and a “ Special Day for the Handicapped” was designated. While handicapped citizens would continue to be barred on ordinary viewing days, on the “ Special Day” they would be permitted to enter the exhibition free. Entrance of women with young children was also permitted, but only if the women carried the children in their arms. The “ Special Day for the Handi capped” took place as scheduled on May 10. Thousands of victims of polio, cerebral palsy, nervous diseases, and injured war veterans arrived in buses from all over the country, entered the museum, and enjoyed a few seconds in front of the Mona Lisa before being prodded on. On the same day;' Ms Yonezu and a small group of other handi capped people and women activists staged a protest outside the gates
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of the museum. They carried leaflets, posters, banners; several times Ms Yonezu lay down in front of the museum gates, symbolically demon strating her condemnation of a society which enforces segregation of the handicapped and the “ normal” even in the appreciation of art. Media coverage of Ms Yonezu’s protests has been discriminatory and chauvinist. A graduate of Tokyo Art University, she was described in newspapers covering the events in terms which suggested she was not only physically handicapped but psychologically disturbed. Japan’s unique male oriented semipornographic comic magazines have been quick to subject her to ridicule. An issue of Big Comic shows a cross eyed young woman spraying paint on the picture “ unable to contain her jealousy” — until she is carried off the scene (naturally, upside down with her bare legs waving) by two policepeople. The interview was conducted in the Shinjuku Lib. Centre, a centre for activists in the women’s move ment, where Ms Yonezu is a member of a women’s collective. She is slender. and delicate, soft spoken and slightly tired after 18 days in jail and preparations for her defence. She occasionally rested on a pillow while she talked, but answered ques tions with speed and precision. A childhood victim of polio, her right leg is in a brace. “My purpose was not to prevent ^»andicapped visitors from viewing
that people don’t want to think about. So you dress up and think nothing. Skyhooks has picked up on the identity fetish. “If the audience is made up of younger kids you tend to be more sensational. With an older/university intellectual audience you adopt the guise of being mysterious because an intelligent audignee will always project that there’s something there, and wonder what it is.” History. “ My dad used to play guitar so there was always one lying about the house. I stumbled across a few things. Ah, “Gloria”, “ House of the Rising Sun” and “ Fortune Teller” in that order. Got a tape recorder. Started picking things out of songs. Got didactic. Interests then would have been Latin American music because of its rhythms and chord colors. It’s ludicrous really, but you are at the mercy of what your ears fall prey to. After a while it gets mutually exclusive so that anything that isn’t a 12 tone scale sounds oppressive; insidious, but it happens. After that there’s bands. “ I have been lucky in that I’ve lived with people who play. I guess
Above: Red inBrightonfU.K.) in the coronation year. “My father was a smudge worker - you know, taking people's photos and never sending them the prints after you've taken their money. That's part o f the reason we came to Australia Left: Scumbag at La Mama Theatre. “Ah, a sensitive inverted period. ”
the Mona Lisa, but to express my outrage at the speiety which forces them to see it alone. Since April 20 ‘healthy people’ have been purchasing tickets and viewing the Mona Lisa, while handicapped people have been turned away. On May 10, the one day when handicapped people were able to enter the exhibition, ‘healthy’ people were turned away. “ In this sense, while my primary motive was to protect discrimination against handicapped people, my ges ture was on behalf of ‘healthy’ people as well, who are also victims of discrimination against the handi capped. In Japanese society, with its emphasis on superproductivity and speed', where every healthy, capable person is more 'or less worked to the bone, ordinary people will inevitably come to feel that handicapped people are in the way, require too much time, and so forth, and will gradually cool and harden their attitudes toward them. We, of course, often see this in the case of working mothers with babies,, too. It is the false barrier that a rapacious industrial machine places between human beings that I want to protest. “The ‘Special Day’ was symbolic of the ‘divide and isolate’ process which goes on in Japanese society in other ways, too. The government graciously waives the 200 yen ad mission fee for its handicapped citi zens, while refusing to spend the money necessary to give them the kind of life where they could afford to pay that 200 yen just like any body else.” (Note: The Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry’s monthly stipend for handicapped citizens if 7,500 yen [about $17 Australian].) “The government saw to it that the ‘Special Day’ was publicised well enough, but I don’t think the pub licity was really aimed at the handi capped people themselves. It was just to improve the image of the government among the public at large. Actually, I don’t think most handicapped people entered the mu seum without certain anxieties such people feel in places they don’t know well. Would they be able to use the bathroom facilities,' for
example, or emergency exits? But all of this was overlooked in the attempt to ‘dispose of the problem efficiently’ by herding them all through on one day.
institution above that with their families and friends. But they have no say. Their parents are just urged to think of them as a nuisance they would rather get off their hands. “My act was a gesture of protest — no outrage — against the way the Mona Lisa was exhibited and the distorted values the exhibit re presented. ‘Shut out’ — those were the words that crystallised in my mind. The exhibition was just an other occasion to shut us out of the rest of society. “ Naturally many people found the action shocking. In fact, it was
“The whole idea ls like the scheme for ‘disposing of the problem’ of handicapped people in daily life by herding them into institutions so they won’t be in people’s way. You’ll notice in Japan that all propaganda about institutions for the handi capped is addressed to the parents. Obviously, because if anyone con sulted the handicapped themselves, they would not choose life in an
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only after quite a bit of thought that I came to feel it was necessary for me to carry out this action. It was in no way directed against the Mona Lisa as a work of art. There seems to be undue confusion on this point. Although I maintained silence, the police were able to learn that I graduated from Tokyo Art University. ‘And you an ait student!’ they blinked self righteously. “Why did I feel that I should be the one to challenge the insult to all handicapped Japanese? I felt that it was easier for me to act and accept the consequences than
I’pi at the stage where I’ve stopped listening to récords. After that it’s your contact with other poeple who play that’s important; people who have picked up a different single idea from diverse places. That’s the way it is with Skyhooks.” Red Symons is very precise on stage. His solos sting and flick in spiralling lines. He slinks forward and pulls faces in sympathy with the notes. Sometimes a grimace, sometimes a sneer, a smug grin, a brief smile. “ It’s largely involun tary. I play much faster in Sky hooks than I have in any other band. But I feel free tò pull a face. You see other cultures where people have expressive faces that suggest a personal feeling. A straight face is a style, anyway. I sometimes feel like pulling faces at an audience because their faces appear so blank. And it makes them giggle. Loosens ’em up a bit. “ I often feel that I should ra tionalise the situation of playing in a band, and its social implica tions. But that constrains what I feel I’d like to be doing. All I want to do is play enough stuff and learn enough, stuff to justify what I’m' doing. Like, Fm not making any money. But I can live quite 'easily on 30 bucks a week — I have for three or four years now. I buy nothing, really — per haps a bit of equipment. Life gets more expensive. This is the age of ' style and style is very throwaway. “ I suppose I’m guarded. You only have to look at what style is to see that most behavior is á shielded performance. People take on a particular persona because that’s what they want other people to see of them. In a band like Skyhooks you decide to become a particular character. You must be yourself but it’s a self in con text. I only take on that self when I’m playing. Of course it’s an act, like everything else. “ I remember quite vividly, the moment before going onstage on Blind Date. The floor manager came round the corner and spotted me in dark glásses with a blind man’s cane, in spite of our earlier con versations. “ Alright,” he said, “you can wear the glasses but don’t tap the cane. Of course I did but they shot it in close up and you couldn’t see the carie. I knew they weren’t going to like it, I’d suggested it earlier as some sort of initial at tempt at communication — you know, you’ve got a few ideas, I’ve got a few ideas — and they’d knocked it on the head. Most people in situations like that show comply out of involuntary nervousness. The conditions,you’re working, under are so strong. -But" I knew I’d just have to assert it; assert that I have a few ideas too. After all, I wouldn’t want to appear trapped.” And at the end of the show smiling Bobby Hanna came up to Red and slapped him on the back. “ Not hard enough to cause pain, just enough to notice it. And as he smiled he said, “ You bugger!” ”
for most other handicapped people. Since I am able to walk, I could enter the exhibit myself, while others would have been turned away. I have no children or family, who would suffer by my absence in jail. And I knew I could rely on my friends in the collective for help and support. But I don’t want to justify the action as haying been merely personally necessary for me. In the final analysis, it was Japanese society which demanded and made necessary the action by its inhuman, treatment of handicapped persons.” —New Asia News.
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