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Ghosts of the Dunedin Music Scene

by Das Phaedrus

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1.
Ditch 02:35
Ditch How much longer ‘til it’s gonna end?
2.
Trigger 04:20
Trigger Left a light on in the hall For the ghost lost somewhere out in the slipstream of every dream I can’t remember Trying to find its way back home You’ll know me by my silence now By the spaces between all of the hurts you’ve found Dotted through these fields of heather Smeared up this mountainside You know why… I just had to relinquish It wasn’t finished But the time ran out on you All the while I was wrapped round the finger On the trigger Trying to make some sense of you Nobody knows just where he went Still unsure as to whether he died or left Or if he should be remembered And if so then, well, for what? Took a trip on the desert road High voltage lines over volcano snow Stretch into a silky distance Make me feel like the unborn
3.
Killing Child at Zoo Come, we’ll go anywhere you want Out to Raglan or the zoo Come, we’ll do anything you say And I’ll be happy when you’ve run me ragged And we’ll both sleep well tonight See the sad polar bear waiting For its fur to be restitched See the beach buried in black sand Feel the world slip out of reach at your feet Falling from your fingertips And all I promised Just so many empty words that you’ll repeat Now no one listens when you sleep And all you wanted I’ve wrapped up and clean forgotten all about We’re in these cages until we die And I picked mine You had no choice, but I chose mine You had no voice, drowned out by mine We’re in these cages until we die And I chose yours, and I made mine
4.
And All That Follows I’ve tried to tell you of the future we could find Those words unspoken lie in silos in my mind And if you asked me I’d just laugh and then deny I’m not insane, but I’m insane enough to know I might If circumstances played into my grand design I’d take my chances as those chances took my life If you could see me as a stranger to befriend If you could free me from the infamy I found instead And I’ve seen this all before And all that follows Are you ten years wiser now Or the same shit ten times over? And the window’s closing fast But the black door’s wedged wide open and night walks right in and drags you back out I held your letter in the claws I use for hands The more I read your words, the less I hoped you’d understand And I’ve seen this all before And all that follows Are you thirty years wiser now Or the same shit thirty times over? And the window’s closing fast But the black door’s wedged wide open and night walks right in and drags you back out
5.
Ghosts of the DMS Ghosts of Dunedin’s music scene Hang your black arches over me Broken like a rainbow’s light Fall in love again with life No thanks, I’ll take the deal tonight Sign for what is surely ours by right Ghosts of Dunedin’s music scene You know your places by degree Please, stand not on ceremony We made a deal with you We made a deal
6.
Method Acting Method acting a part in my own life Maintain situational awareness Watch my back, check peripheral vision Take a dim view of public spaces I felt alive, once I want to feel alive, want to feel alive Want to feel alive But I’m method acting People like a moral To make them feel good To make them feel right Heard myself proclaimed and found this tree Take a look at the tragic loading of it Method acting a part I didn’t write Method acting a part I never wanted
7.
Christlike 01:30
Christlike Go complain in your garden to the sky Now that you’re mine and the kiss is the sign When I was away from you… But Christ You are Christlike Go complain in your garden to the sky Tell me that I’m OK when I’m with you Tell me I’m only OK when I am only with you Tell me that I’m OK when I’m with you But Christ You are Christlike Now that you’re mine and the kiss is the sign When I was away from you…
8.
Hypothermic 01:29
Hypothermic Daylight is a rash behind my eyes The surprise is that there’s no surprise, not today What do you want me for? I’ve misunderstood you still Shall we go off trail? Let a blizzard write the sequel To this sky blue swathe? Lift your shirt over your ivory As the towers fall in the hypothermic sun I was afraid you’d never ask me what I’d done I was afraid you’d still pretend I was the one I was afraid
9.
New Position 02:46
New Position One of those days I could use a minder The Eclectus mimicking the neighbour’s grinder Lost my mind in a reflecting pool Found I was better off without it In my letterbox found the Milky Way The Sun and the Earth, my city and my street My house with its letterbox and I closed the letterbox, went back inside But you don’t need me I defend this new position I have taken Like it is the last one Looks like your past has caught up with you Seems that the future’s off the menu Gift wrapped Semtex in your lap You know that’s why they call it the present, don’t you? But you don’t need me I defend this new position Saddle up the horses Will you ride At my side?
10.
Unwanted Presents You know me sometimes When I let you see the friend who you assembled out of these Body parts and body bags of dead dreams And when I see you It’s easy to be who you need me to be If anything it’s a relief To be free from what I thought it could be Unwanted presents They’re the ones that mean the most now Not because they’re all you’ve had Not because they’re all you’ve ever opened
11.
It’s Now OK to Litter Time has been Walk a mile To find a rubbish bin Well raised as we are It’s second nature to me and you Time has been Cross the Earth To find the one you love Couldn’t bring her back home Love’s not strong enough Anymore It’s now OK to litter Just throw that can away What makes this forest floor So special anyway Anymore? It’s now OK to litter It’s now OK

about

It is tempting to view the thirty odd years between Das Phaedrus forming (and producing some astonishingly bad sounding recordings and playing some enthusiastic but ultimately inconsequential live shows) in the early 90’s and the release of Ghosts of the Dunedin Music Scene in 2021 as a corollary of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy. After basking in the first warm glow of what would surely be the ever-expanding sun of the world’s validation (it wasn’t), the cloud cover soon thickened up and there ensued a few decades of typesetting, wife swapping, car selling, having babies and trying to get your kids off crack, or the equivalents. Or, as Amis puts it so well, ‘the information is telling me to stop saying hi, and to start saying bye’. But given the three decade span, this reunion, despite the gushing of the band’s publicist, can hardly be Das Phaedrus Redux: we seem to have skipped straight to Das Phaedrus at Rest. That novel is in three parts, so this final installment might take three albums. Actually, I know this for a fact because it has all already happened and we have broken up again.

Das Phaedrus is a ridiculous band name to be shackled with for a start - the product of an eighteen year old brain obsessed with Husker Du and with a weird fixation on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Angstrom would have been a better name come to think of it, containing as it does all the angst you could wish for, together with a finishing note of Germanic metal. Too late now, now that we are on the other side of time. I wonder if Amis took any satisfaction from ending his days in the same state as Harry Angstrom, albeit on the other side of Florida? Lake Worth Beach is directly across from Fort Myers, Updike’s template for the fictional Deleon, where Rabbit leapt up from the red dust into the sun in pursuit of his final hoop. Was this suicide by one-on-one basketball, in the manner of Randy the Ram’s leap to the mat in Aronofsky’s The Wrestler? Updike would say no - he as the author might entertain that possibility, as might a reader that way inclined. But Rabbit simply would not, any more than would his animal namesake. Like any good rabbit, he just did what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it, which happened to be eating lots of crap, putting off a bypass operation and over-exerting himself in competition with a kid less than half his age. Amis was a Rabbit fan, with his own rabbity appetites that came to collect, but right there at the end he probably had other things on his mind. Or rather, his mind was getting things off itself, and ultimately getting itself off itself. Which for a mind that good must have been the saddest, but by necessity unmarked, severance.

The drummer has gone really quite dark on White Males (and Ford Rangers, and The Weather), and in fact is one, so for these accompanying notes to the trilogy I have decided to make passing reference only to John Updike, Martin Amis, William Shakespeare, Vladimir Nabokov, Rustin Cohle, Martin Hart, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Goodman, George Orwell and Brett Easton Ellis. He was not too happy when the name of the song he had been rehearsing turned out to be ‘Killing Child At Zoo’, (a chapter title from American Psycho) and helpfully offered that ‘that will need changing’. Rehearsals continued (he was rehearsing being outraged, to be good and ready for being properly outraged at the final album, The Stars Are Real). I have an unhealthy interest in final words - Othello’s ‘relate’, Frankenstein’s ‘distance’ and so on, and Ghosts of the Dunedin Music Scene in fact seemed to want to be Das Phaedrus Redux, sharing as it does the final word of Rabbit Redux - that being ‘OK’. It’s now OK to litter, it’s now OK. Actually, The Chills’ great album, Submarine Bells, also ends with ‘OK’ but let’s not go there, lest we get tied up in another forty years of veneration and sycophancy for the glory days of Flying Nun and the Dunedin Sound. It is always healthy to take a slightly dim view of one’s immediate predecessors: as Johnny Marr said on the fascinating South Bank Show documentary from 1987, ‘It was crucial that The Smiths didn’t sign to Factory records.’ We had roughly the inverse situation: if whoever we had sent our demo tape to had replied, the response would have been, ‘It was crucial that Flying Nun didn’t sign Das Phaedrus.’ The final word of Rabbit at Rest is ‘Enough’. That’s a bit more like it.

To my horror, I recently encountered a character in the not very good Updike novel Couples who, like me, is always banging on about Shakespeare and he comes across as a complete idiot. I even have a IAG0 plate for my Honda Fit, which I park on Macbeth Street (go on, laugh, and not nicely - everyone else has). Does it help that the character of Martin Amis in the novel Money drives ‘a little black Iago’? Probably not - mine is white anyway. Couples is an awful thirty-something mess of marital tedium and tedious infidelities and reading it is like enduring an eight hour naturist fondu party with a bunch of people you don’t like, the worst of whom is Freddy who just will not shut the fuck up about the bard. So the song ‘Ghosts of the DMS,’ for me, plays out in the banquet scene from Macbeth - not some shitty child-infested castle, to my mind, but something austere and cathedralesque, as in the 2015 Kurzel film. Or the glass-walled atrium at Dunedin’s Toitu museum, where I sat in awe watching Nick Knox sing ‘Whiskey For Breakfast’. Ghosts of Dunedin’s Music Scene - you know your places by degree. Please stand not on ceremony. That’s right, Freddy chimes in: stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once. When someone tries to show me to my place at the table, but the place is taken, and the head turns, it is Nick’s face I see. It could be many others. Our band might be ghosts, back from 1990: but we are undead, just a pack of Bret Easton Ellis’s grungy LA vampires. There are the real ghosts. The Dead. So there in the banquet hall, in Toitu, is there blood on my hands? Only in the sense that there is the ghost of Los Pollos Hermanos chicken seasoning on the hands of Gus Fring; which is to say, there is a door in this room which leads to another room, which also has a door. You don’t choose the room you meet people in; there are doors which only they can open. Amis’s Money is subtitled ‘A Suicide Note’, but it ends up not being one. Whiskey For Breakfast was just a song, but as the final lyric post on Nick’s bandcamp page, it makes for harrowing reading: ‘Should I be alarmed if I am drinking whiskey for breakfast?’ In the big picture of things, and if that is what your rabbit wants to do, then not necessarily. But for you, with your wonderful brain, in this case, in a year’s time, yes, you should be. Oh yes.

Rabbit was only 56, yet seemed so old, with his girth and his peeing sitting down and his idiosyncrasies and his Floridian condo. Amis did better at 73, but I suspect, when it is time, the time is never enough. Or at least that is how I think I would want it to be. These old timers have gone one-on-one, one more time, there in the practice room at Melrose Street and out at Tom’s studio at Port Chalmers and leapt up once more towards the sun and our heart broke. It is OK. And the last word? There can really only be one. If you make it through to the end of The Stars Are Real, the final line is ‘I can’t see’. And of course, love is blind. Love. Enough.

credits

released August 23, 2021

Recorded at Chicks Hotel, Port Chalmers, Dunedin July - August 2021
Produced by Jeremy Taylor, Andrew Spittle and Thomas Bell
Mixed and mastered by Thomas Bell
Design by Paul Johnson
All songs written by Andrew Spittle
Asset Management: Sally Lonie

Das Phaedrus:

Victor Billot: The Bass Guitar
Jeremy Taylor: Vocals, Guitars
Andrew Spittle: Vocals, Guitars, Piano, Keyboards, Percussion
Piers Graham: The Drums

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