Rambling memories inspired by music: The Clouds

Much as I am tempted to keep writing about covid 19, I am diversifying before it drives all of us insane. You're not out of the warzone however, I might yet start ranting about the police state! In the meanwhile, I am moving onto another highly popular internet theme that I've always found rather annoying, which is chain posting of "10 albums that changed your life" or "10 photos" or "10 books", no words, no explanation. The thing that annoys me about them, is that these things are interesting for the stories behind them. What makes them meaningful? What memories do they stir? How did they change your life?  I don't want to just see an album cover. I want to hear about it's context. So strap in, I'm about to verbosely write all about some music that always takes me back to certain places, people, times in my life, starting with the Clouds.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA247F35B040D7533









The Clouds exemplify a genre of music that I call "Kylie music". Kylie and I have known each other for 32 years now. Fuck that seems like a long time. I had a very mobile childhood, with my father being in the RAAF, and as a result, I don't have those lifelong friends from primary school that most people have. Kylie is my oldest friend. We met briefly when we were both in Venturers, before I became on off the rails teenager, then when I got back on the rails again, we reconnected through Adelaide Uni Mountain Club. We were both very young to be at Uni, and came from the ill reputed north eastern suburbs of Adelaide where university was a whole different world.  Uni really was a lifechanging experience.

Those years at Adelaide Uni really  made me who I am today (you can thank them or curse them).  I started a suburban bogan with little perspective on the world and left a radical, post modern feminist climbing bum. I still remember the lecturer who explained the difference between Freud and Lacan by acting out how Freud worshipped the giant penis up on a pedestal, whilst Lacan actually though he was a giant penis and she danced around the lectern with her arms shaped above her head as a phallus to demonstrate this.

In those days, student activism was still a big thing. We had street protests, rallies and strikes. We had a strong student union and a vibrant community of all sorts of clubs and societies, from the Society for Creative Anachronisms beating each other up in medieval costumes in the courtyard, to feminist, anarchist and antiracist groups plotting in cellars on how to change the world, and of course, the Mountain Club.  We were a funny group of social oddities now I look back at us, but we became each others network in a way our course mates never did. This was the vehicle by which I became an obsessed climber, there were endless adventures and parties and I nearly dropped out of uni entirely just to climb. Instead I started picking my subjects based around how much climbing time they would afford me. Much as I acknowledge we were dodgy as fuck at times, we all survived and we loved it. It's amazing feeling young and immortal! I still don't advocate learning to climb the way I did though.

In those days of social irresponsibility, the Uni Bar served us all, including still 17 year old Kylie and me, and Friday nights were inevitably spent seeing live bands there. Hence where we discovered the Clouds.  It was a great venue, and even my dodgy long term memory takes me back to the crowded, smokey dance floor, dim lighting tinged with red, the black and purple cloak that I virtually lived in then (I still have it, I can't bear to throw it away), and Kylie's A line mini skirts. I still have a crotchet top of hers that she gave me when she moved overseas for a few years. It also is impossible to throw out. Uni social clubs had lock in parties, where you paid your $20 entry and could drink all the beer you wanted or tricycle relays with compulsory beer sculling before you could hand over the baton. So problematic in hindsight, but such good times!

I'm sad that the radicalism of our universities has disappeared. Voluntary student unionism, HECS, a general return to conservatism in the world and the pressure of rising costs of housing all fed a change to university being a mechanism to earn money, rather than a place of learning, exploration and growth. Students became focused on getting a job that would repay their mammoth HECS debts and their mammoth mortgage. There was no space for radicalism anymore. I am loving seeing young people out on the streets protesting again now. It's like young people tried to play the capitalist game we are told to play for more than a decade there, but now they are looking at the world and realising that it's a game they can never win. Here I am, feeling like a doting aging activist, nodding approvingly at the climate strikes, at slut walk, and the gun violence protests in the States, all of which young people of have been integral to. I love the young adult fiction showing rebellion against the conservative regimes that take control after the apocalypse. Maybe popular culture will become the hotbed of modern radicalism in the ways that higher education once was.

Kylie and I are such different women in some ways. But here we are all these years later. Probably I have Kylie to thank for it. She is always incredibly good at keeping in touch. We haven't lived near each other since the mid 90s, but through all that she checks in on me, she makes time to visit, she welcomes me to stay, she invites me on trips. History is important to Kylie, and despite all the changes in our lives, we have history. Kylie became a librarian, and the seeds of it were there all along. She has diary entries and photos all ordered and accessible to remind us of events in our lives, not to mention a far better memory than I have. About this time last year, she sent me a photo of  me in the Pines in 1999 wishing me a happy 20 year anniversary of living in Nati. Of course, I had been unable to remember even if it was 98, 99 or 2000 that I moved to Nati. Kylie knew down to the month. This, she told me was our last trip camping at the Mt before I moved into Natimuk. I look so young! The gear and the tent so old! The pines so empty of people, but also so full of trees.

Music has always been a big thing for Kylie. She was over visiting for Invasion Day long weekend this year, and made me listen to the Triple J hottest 100, which she follows obsessively each year. I don't think I knew a single song on it, until they played an excerpt of the 1999 Hottest 100 which they were going to revisit on Double J. Those songs, I remember well. Maybe it's because the 90s were really my formative years, and the connection of music to memories are stronger for it. They were fun and amazing but also tumultuous and traumatic years, and I wouldn't live them again if you paid me!

Kylie is the epitomy of nice. I mean that in a genuinely lovely way. I feel terribly cantankerous and impatient in comparison. It's hard to imagine Kylie ever hurting a fly.  She's devoted to her friends and family, and to her community work such as the Climbing Club of SA and Amnesty International. On the outside, she can appear to be a sweet and respectable product of an all girl Catholic school, but I know the wild Kylie as well. In someways, she's a bit like the music I associate with her. Sweet female vocals over grunge guitar. Whilst Kylie is The Clouds, I am more like Bikini Kill. Outright swearing and rebellion against the world. But I love her to bits and we'll still be sharing our lives in another 32 years.