How’s this for a scheme?

1. Buy discounted Kit Kat Chunky chocolate bars for $1.29 at Safeway. (On special only until closing time tonight; normal price $1.88)

2. Eat bar.

3. Use code inside wrapper that gets me a $1.69 song from iTunes.

4. Profit!

I like chocolate, and I already have an iTunes account.

And in fact I’d been planning to buy a few songs, such as a couple of those David Bowie tunes used on Life On Mars (wasn’t the ending utterly brilliant!) including the title track, and Starman, also used to good effect on Torchwood. It’s cheaper to buy once-off songs for $1.69 than splash out and buy whole CDs full of other tracks I don’t really want. (How come the David Bowie best-of I already have didn’t include these two anyway?!) Even cheaper at minus 40 cents.

So what’s the catch here?

• According to the terms and conditions, you can only do this up to 5 times per iTunes account. Damn.
• They’re Nestle bars. I’ve long boycotted Nestle. But the costs of the discount and the promotion are likely to be borne by the manufacturer, which hopefully means they’re earning nothing at all, or even losing money on the deal.
• I have to eat the chocolate. Bummer. (I’ll pace myself.)

Life On Mars trivia: Sam Tyler was named after Rose Tyler from Doctor Who.

At The Prince Of Wales, St Kilda, Wednesday night.

Emily Ulman was okay. Support to the support. Polite clapping. Justine bemoaned that she rarely gets out to see live music, but twice recently she’d got Emily. It’s like rarely flying, then taking an overseas trip and getting the same movie twice. No matter how good it is, it would have been nice to have more variety.

Mick Thomas and the Sure Thing — Mick’s a genius. Superb. Why can’t all support acts be this good? Some new songs (You Remind Me was especially good — and new to me, at least), some old Weddoes favourites (such as Monday’s Experts, the ever-emotional-for-parents Father’s Day, For a Short Time), and a version of Our Sunshine (co-written by Mick with Paul Kelly) with a bit of a Spanish flavour. I must get me some more Mick Thomas CDs.

And then Billy Bragg came on at about 10:30, brandishing a cup of tea. Gigs can be made or broken by the crowd. He got a great reaction, and gave back in spades. Plenty of political chatter, some quite inspiring, urging people to get up and take action. The Yarra Song got a play, as did a bunch of oldies and some songs from the upcoming album.

A choice for the crowd between a Dylan and a Carpenters song… and the vote was for the latter. Later a version of Pinball Wizard done as Johnny Cash to the tune of Folsom Prison Blues, very funny stuff.

One… two… three encores — he just kept going, with both he and the crowd getting more enthusiastic as he went. By the time things wrapped up with a chorus-crowd-sung A New England just before 1am we were thoroughly satisfied.

It was also the first pub gig I’d been to since the smoking ban came in. Woo hoo, such a pleasant change to not have to automatically wash all your clothes and hair to get rid of the stink. Though two annoying smelly-breathed smokers did the thing where they come through the crowd behind others carrying drinks, then stop dead to claim a space where there wasn’t really one to claim, a little too close for comfort. Grrr. So I made sure to stand with my elbows pointing in their direction. After a while they went away.

But that didn’t detract from a great night.

And my plan for getting home worked a treat, too: the second-last tram (they go until 1:30am from there) to Caulfield, then the car, so I was falling into bed about 1:30, just wishing it wasn’t a school night.

Update: Billy Bragg’s blog about this concert

I’m alone in the house, blasting Billy Bragg on the stereo while cleaning up. Part of preparation for the concert on January 30th.

Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards… my God I love that song. Does it speak to everybody in community activism like this?

• For those who haven’t seen it (I hadn’t), here’s the original video clip for the song.

Tank Park Salute, though, saddens me. Ah, the power of good music.

Went to the school concert last week, which was at Monash. Mucho traffic congestion on Wellington Road due to roadworks. Some people who you’d think could figure out a simple row/seat ticketing system seemed to be very puzzled. Some toddler sitting behind me yapped through much of it. A mad woman (probably someone’s grandmother) started shouting towards the end. “Shut up! Shut up! Get out!” But all in all, quite enjoyable.

And then Paul Kelly at Hamer Hall on Friday night, a birthday present from Marita. (Almost forgot to take the tickets.) Great show. The entire new album in order, followed by loads of hits, including some oldies like Under The Sun. Sadly the audience was a bit staid. I was bopping around to the music, wondering why those around me who had paid for these good seats weren’t moving.

In a very clever move, they recorded the show for release next week as a download at liveband.com.au. They promoted it by handing out CD slipcovers. Neato, I’ll be coughing up.

Even the support act was bearable (sadly sometimes they’re not).

The show finished about 11:30 and we got to the station to catch the 11:45 train home. All went well until we got to Ormond, when a drunk man in a suit, looking quite green, decided to block the doors so he could spit. He did this a couple of times, and before we knew it, the doors wouldn’t close. Siemens’ fine workmanship strikes again.

The driver came down to take a look. With help from passengers inside, he tried to push the doors closed from the outside. No luck. He went back to his cabin, while the drunk man tried to look inconspicuous.

A couple of minutes later the driver came back with his radio. After conferring with some distant colleagues, he gave the doors an almighty kick. (If you’ve seen the train doors in question, they move inwards as the final part of sliding closed). Still no luck. He went back to his cabin.

His weary voice came over the PA. Sorry. If the train doors won’t close, we can’t carry passengers. You’re all going to have to get off and wait for the next one. Collective groans all round. We disembarked.

Two policemen wandered into the station, wondering why the North Road crossing gates had been down for 10+ minutes.

The station PA cracked to life. The following train was at Caulfield, just 5 minutes away. Not too bad. The empty train moved off (with the doors now looking suspiciously snug), as did the policemen.

We could see the lights from the next train in the distance. The automatic announcement piped up to tell us of its imminent arrival.

Then there were gasps. Another drunk man had fallen onto the tracks further along the platform. While someone hit the platform “red button” to call for help, a bystander (who I shall henceforce refer to as The Hero) leapt down to help him. I was trying to run along the platform to signal the driver to stop, but couldn’t get past all the people.

With help from those on the platform, The Hero got the drunk man back up off the tracks. But he was running out of time before the train got to him, so he ran to the other platform and jumped up. He was okay, but had injured his knee. We shouted to him to run via the underpass back up to our platform to catch the train.

The train came in and The Hero appeared coming up the ramp, limping a bit. He got on board.

With everybody aboard, the doors closed and we moved off. Someone started clapping, and before long our half of the train were all applauding The Hero. “Onya mate!”

We got home without further incident, apart from muttering under collective breaths about Siemens, drunken businessmen on late-night trains, and telling a Martin Merton poster at Bentleigh Station to go away.

Train travel is normally relatively uneventful. It’s the one-in-a-hundred trip that you remember, and that no doubt several hundred people have been telling their friends all about over the weekend.

And it leaves questions. There’s meant to be TravelSafe staff on trains after 9pm. Where were they? How can a door so easily go out of commission?

And if Paul Kelly had been there, would he write a song about it?

The Choir of Hard Knocks, made up entirely of homeless or disadvantaged people, played the Town Hall last night.

But on Friday night they were singing in the Campbell Arcade (Degraves Street Subway), evidently opening an exhibit down there of portraits of the choir members. You could barely see or hear them amongst the big crowd that turned up to see them (or, like us, happened to come past to catch a train and stayed for a bit).

You might have missed the singing, but like many exhibitions in the arcade, the pictures are well worth taking a look at.

• Previously in the Campbell arcade: Chocolate Revolution, Sideshow animations

(Well okay, forty years and 3 days ago actually.)

Sgt Pepper was the first cassette I owned, back in the late-70s. It lacked a lot of the non-musical extra bits and pieces of the original release: the cardboard cutouts and lyrics and so on.

At that age I don’t think I really “got” the concept album idea… I seem to recall wondering when and where the concert from the title track was recorded. (Some from a Goon Show audience, apparently!) And I didn’t like Within You Without You very much.

For the Christmas holidays in 1979, we went down to Dromana to stay with friends. They had a record player, and a copy of Abbey Road, and we played it solidly for a week, then bought the cassette when we got back to Melbourne. To this day I probably prefer Abbey Road to Sgt Pepper, even if the latter is better-known for being a mould-breaking revolutionary album. My friend Raoul got me into all the other Beatles albums.

In 1987 I bought the LP record of Sgt Pepper, on precisely the twentieth anniversary of its first release, tying in beautifully with the lyrics. I seem to remember it got up to at least number four in the charts that week. Having it on vinyl meant I was finally able to play that inner groove on the end of side two backwards.

Some of the Beatles albums were available as coloured vinyl at the time: I had a white White Album, and there was a yellow Yellow Submarine. I think there was a red version of Pepper, though mine was plain black. It had all the cardboard cutouts, though not the badges.

A year or two later I got a CD player (which only recently died), and Pepper was one of the first CDs I bought (second only to Abbey Road, I think) — the only letdown being the failure of the medium to deal with where the album segue between songs.

Sgt Pepper has long been one of my favourite albums, though as my musical tastes and collection have widened and widened, it and the other Beatles albums don’t get played very often. I played it last night for the first time in quite a while, and though it obviously reflects its times, it still sounds fresh. These days I like Within You Without You.

Favourite track? Probably A Day In The Life. Good Morning Good Morning has grown on me a lot, too.

• A great article from yesterday’s Age, analysing the album and its reaction: James Button: Sergeant Pepper’s wild trip
• Oh dear. Just realised I wrote about some of this before. Oh well.
• Visiting Abbey Road, 1998
• My photoshopped version of the cover, for the Federal election, 1996

I get some terrific comments on this blog. Quite a few of them, too. The database reckons over 6000, though I think there might be some suspected spams in there. Then again, there are some old comments from 2003 that haven’t been imported into Wordpress yet.

Here’s some followups on some recent comments, and on my own recent posts.

On ties. Biff commented on the niceness of silk ties. I concur, in fact over the years I’ve steadily retired the polyester ones and migrated to silk — all those I wear regularly are silk, most of them woven. Nice. I still haven’t learnt how to do a Windsor knot though.

Stitch Sista commented that bow ties were invented for scientists and doctors who couldn’t have ties dipping into things. Fair call. Doesn’t explain why some desk jockeys wear them though.

Roger doesn’t like the phrase “heads-up”. I wouldn’t say I’m overly moving towards Americanisms (assuming it is an Americanism), though I do sometimes call my kids “guys”. As my sister has argued in the past, you can resist to a certain extent, but the nature of language is that it’s a developing, evolving beast, inheriting things from all around.

Flerdle remarks on a school bell that was an actual bell, rather than electronic like the one at my primary school. Marita remarked upon this too (small school in the country) and that on sunny days they would listen to Let’s All Sing outside on the teacher’s car radio.

I wrote about emergency undies. The other day I wore the emergency shirt, when the one I’d intended on wearing (last one in the cupboard) lost a vital button at the last minute.

Not a comment here, but Josh ponders Buying vs Renting.

Oh, and I thoroughly enjoyed Life On Mars last night on the telly. Made me want to dig out all that old daggy 70s music again. And I wonder if I still have that video of The Sweeney around somewhere?

PS. After Life On Mars I had a sudden urge to listen to Cream’s White Room, but couldn’t find it on my ipod. Realised with horror that I don’t have it. May have to go CD shopping at lunchtime.

Occasionally on a Saturday night just before seven, I’ll be slumped in front of the telly, flicking from SBS over to the ABC to keep up my quota of TV news (which is somewhat lacking during the week). I’ll see the end of Gardening Australia, and ponder its tiddily-pom blandly inoffensive music, which conveys pretty much nothing about gardening or Australia, and for most viewers probably sits unnoticed in the background. And while the music plays, the name of its composer will fly past: Rick Turk.

Like other TV and film composers such as Ronnie Hazlehurst and Ron Grainer, Rick Turk has written theme music for heaps of different TV shows, in the UK and Australia, including Four Corners, Foreign Correspondent, and some that aren’t around anymore such as Perfect Match and It’s A Knockout.

Some of the works, like the Gardening Australia theme are, I submit, pretty close to elevator music. But thankfully something like the Four Corners music has a bit more bite to it, helping to express the seriousness of the topics covered on the show.

Like Robert Fripp, the guitarist designing various sounds for the next version of Windows, I suppose anybody in that position would be almost totally at the mercy of their corporate masters. There must be some artistic inspiration involved of course, but it’s confined within extremely narrow parameters — much narrower than most artists would find themselves with, particularly those who don’t create things for money.

Of course, Michaelangelo also did plenty of commissioned works, and is widely regarded as a genius. Though I’m not sure the Sistine Chapel could in any way be compared to the theme music from Gardening Australia.