Winter and the Striped Sunlight Sound
Mid-June in Brisbane and by the calendar and the position of the sun relative to us in the southern hemisphere it is winter. And I was bloody cold at dawn. As usual the temperature dropped just as the sky lightened and then when that display of green the shade of pistachio ice-cream that spreads along the horizon just before the orange appeared briefly, it seemed to drop again. There were no clouds in the sky so the dawn was gorgeous but not particularly memorable, just the growing glow, then the sun itself like a big tennis ball bobbing up to float on the horizon and the rest of sky to the west transitioning from black to blue. The air was dry and mostly still but the puffs of land breeze when they came only added to the chill that slipped through any openings that led to your skin. But you know, that was the worst of it. In Brisbane on your typical winter’s day it only gets better from there.
Six hours later at the University pool the water is 27 degrees and the 8 lanes for lap swimmers are nevertheless mostly empty. This is despite the air temperature now being 24 and with a cloudless sky the green grass on the low hill that fronts the pool and faces west is vivid green and bathed in warm rays.
Even the campus crows are dopey with sun. Three of them perch on the branch of a tree and they can’t be bothered to fully croak any calls. One just chuckles deep in his throat as if to mimic a kookaburra’s warm up notes, but in reality it is too sun blasted and ecstatic to do more.
As well as wooden benches and concrete tiers at one end of the pool the management have also provided five or six old sun loungers made of a plastic whose construction would now surely be forbidden by any number of environmental laws. After my kilometre of gentle freestyle I commandeer one of the loungers facing the afternoon sun and mold to its hard surface almost burning my back in the process. It looks like the lounger has been here for fifty years absorbing a mixture of UV rays and second hand chlorinated water from people’s togs. Yet there is hardly a crack in its surface, just some fading of its once vivid orange colour and I imagine it will be dug up still intact in five hundred years’ time during an archeological survey of the University, identifiable from photos, from amongst the ruins of sandstone and blue computer cables.
I feel the need for a full audio visual experience so using the Spotify app on my phone I select the best of The Go Betweens playlist, an obvious choice given their position as the past and forever masters of Brisbane’s “sunstriped” sound and the band’s very beginning on this campus. Who knows? Were Robert and Grant regular users of the same pool back in the late 70s when their journey begun? Did they sit, still damp from a dip and compose a verse or two on a hot summer’s afternoon on these very loungers?
But just like a winter where you can still find warmth, sometimes The Go Betweens’s sound is not so sunny, there is darkness in their songs often hiding in plain sight and even though the compositions and lyrics are often deceptively simple the difficult themes of loss and desire, wistfulness and yearning are always there. There is tension and even frustration. Sexually it seems any release has been in the past or is happening right now but there is little feeling of it continuing into the future. The band had some hard winters in the UK trying to break through and it rubbed off on them in more ways than one. And why not? Even now, basking in the sun rays, pores drinking in the warmth anyone can have dark thoughts, dashed hopes and regrets that the sun can’t burn out but only try to bleach.
I pick my favourites, Right Here, Head full of Steam, Bachelor Kisses, Part Company, Streets of your Town, Bye Bye Pride, Was There Anything I Could Do? and sing every word to myself, air guitar the little licks in my mind, rap out the drums on the hard plastic armrest while wondering at how bands work, the relationship of luck and timing to art, how the contributions of Amanda Brown and Lindy Morrison were often dismissed, whether in Australia you can be just too literate, too thoughtful, too smart of your own good, how your home town never really leaves you and why such blinding talent went so unrewarded for so long.
Photo by Trude Jonsson Stangel on Unsplash
