Friday, May 9, 2025

New Wavey as Anything


Glimpsed this (which used to get quite a bit of evening-radio airplay in the UK - kind of thing Radio One deejays liked) in the below, which is quite entertaining (the New Wave / punk / postpunk section of a long series on the story of Aussie rock)



Talking of Aussie things that are New Wavey as Anything

Surely there is none more Noo  - unless it's some videos of The Plastics - than various scenes in this film (but also the entirety of the film) 










Something I wrote on Starstruck for a piece on the worst and the best punk movies

STARSTRUCK (1982 – directed Gillian Armstrong)

A riot of primary colors and man-made fabrics, Starstruck might be the most New Wave looking movie ever. Focal figure Jackie Mullens, an aspiring singer in early Eighties Australia, has bright orange hair and carotene lipstick; her 14-year old cousin/manager Angus sports a skinny tie and a purple rinse.  The pair live with Jackie’s pub-owner mum, a mash-up of Margaret Thatcher and Edna Everage sluiced through the color-palette of a Split Enz record cover. The barroom and the domestic spaces adjoining seem plucked from the video for Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”  and the dance formation scenes in the Lizard Lounge nightclub are as jaggedly robotic as SNL’s sketch Sprockets. Jackie has no voice to speak off,  but sheer chutzpah makes her ascent to stardom seem irresistible. When the presenter of a TV show beguiles her into showbizzing up her act to win a talent show, her spunky spirit crumples – but only for a moment. She and her band smuggle themselves onto the soundstage and wow the audience with their true sound and style, which triggers the audience to synch up to Jackie’s herky-jerky dance like the teenyboppers in Devo’s “Girl U Want” video. Victory and a 25 thousand dollar check are hers. Spirited young women is a Gillian Armstrong specialty: see also My Brilliant Career, Little Women, and her documentary series that began with some teenage girls in Adelaide and followed them at intervals through their lives. Starstruck is a trifle in comparison but – atrocious tunes aside – is a charmer from start to finish. 




Well when it comes to Aussie New Wave there's this of course  -


The damped-strings rhythm-gtr chug, the sub-Sting vocal, the kooky video, the fact that underneath the style strictures they can clearly really play - it's all archetypally Noo











Talking 




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