Entertainment Guide, Friday May 2nd, 2008, The Age newspaper. "The Melbourne music scene is mourning the deaths of two of its stalwarts — TISM guitarist Jock Cheese (AKA James Paull), who succumbed to cancer, and Headbelly Buzzard guitarist Mick Cameron, who suffered a massive heart attack."
The article goes on, referring to Jock as simply "Cheese" twice. Many of Jock's family and close friends and TISM band members no doubt read this misinformed piece as I did, and either baulked at it or cacked themselves silly. The Age published the same simple misidentification as the people I saw posting on the Big Day Out forum a few days ago. Evidently the general buzz has it that Jock's alias in TISM was Jock Cheese. Incorrect. James Paull, Jock to his friends, was "Tokin' Black Man"—TISM's guitarist. "Jock Cheese" played bass guitar in TISM. Different other chap.
Jim Jones,
NBC Mews, Melbourne
Update 19:00 05/05/2008:
Patrick Donovan, who writes the EG Music section of EG, contacted me and explained that while while talking to TISM management over the last few weeks he referred to James as "Jock Cheese" and no one offered any corrections. Everyone Patrick knows had been talking about the passing of Jock Cheese. I'm told that the piece in Beat/Inpress also misidentified Jock as Jock Cheese; the journalist realized the error and tried to have it corrected, but events moved too quickly and the paper had already gone to press.
On Saturday evening (3rd May 2008) at Matty's place, Matty, Morrie and I talked about this whole misidentity thing and agreed Jock himself would have laughed about it.
To all the jornalists and writers out there—everything is cool. This phenomenon is general and widespread, putting the press on the crummy end of the stick, so it's no big deal—it isn't your fault.
Que sera sera. Looking forward to more articles on Jock from Melbourne's fine publishing industry in coming months (no irony intended).
Thankyou EG, thankyou Patrick Donovan and Liza Power, thankyou Rob Furst and Beat/Inpress. You people rock.
Tripped on a '68 Jagger replica,
Jimity James
Friday, May 2, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
Introduction
One day about three years ago Jock asked me about making a web page/site for him "one day". Since I'm a graphic designer and typeface designer, he wanted something well-hewn, slick and nicely done. On Friday 4th of April 2008 at Austin Repat hospital I reminded Jock of that conversation and asked if he wanted me to go ahead with it.
He said "yes", so here it is—Jock's Lookout, named after the photo of Jock in front of the eponymous wayfinding sign.
At the time of writing the content is sparse—more stuff will be added as time allows. Check back now and then for new material, and be patient, because I've only got, like, three jobs keeping me busy in this internet age.
Matty's collection of photos of Jock will come online at Flickr.com and be used here at Jock's Lookout.
The project is being published with Blogger to make it flexible and open to submissions from Jock's family & friends. Anyone can post comments on any article, with the aim of sharing our memories of all the great times we had hangin' with Jock.
If you knew Jock and have an idea for an article you'd like to see or maybe even write yourself, click comments at the end of this article, post a short message, and I'll be in touch.
Much love, James
He said "yes", so here it is—Jock's Lookout, named after the photo of Jock in front of the eponymous wayfinding sign.
At the time of writing the content is sparse—more stuff will be added as time allows. Check back now and then for new material, and be patient, because I've only got, like, three jobs keeping me busy in this internet age.
Matty's collection of photos of Jock will come online at Flickr.com and be used here at Jock's Lookout.
The project is being published with Blogger to make it flexible and open to submissions from Jock's family & friends. Anyone can post comments on any article, with the aim of sharing our memories of all the great times we had hangin' with Jock.
If you knew Jock and have an idea for an article you'd like to see or maybe even write yourself, click comments at the end of this article, post a short message, and I'll be in touch.
Much love, James
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Biography
Well, my name is James Paull
MY FAMILY LIFE: I was born in 1957 on 1st July at St. Vincent's Private in Victoria Street, but that hospital is not there anymore. My mother's name was Maureen Catherine Paull and my father's name Desmond Geoffrey Paull. They have both passed away now - Dad in I think 1986 or 1987, he was sixty-nine with emphysema. Mum passed away in I think 1995 with stomach cancer and she was seventy-two, so they had longish lives. Whenever you say that to people they sort of go, "Well that's not that old." Well I think that's not too bad.
What happened after that? When I was born I had two older brothers; Andrew who was seven at the time and Michael who was five and they are both still around. So there were the three boys and we lived in Blackburn. Dad was a pharmacist. Mum was a physiotherapist but when they had their first child in 1951, she took up 'House Duties' - motherhood! And she was probably rapt about that anyway. I am sure actually having the baby is not all that enjoyable, specially the first one!
We lived in Blackburn and there was local strip of shops down there. It is still down there next to the railway station called South Parade. Dad had the Pharmacy and I think they lived there out the back. It was quite small I remember. Perhaps actually, when I was born, we might have moved into a house by then. Anyway around the corner we got a house probably after about 5 years, so it would have been about 1956 or something, so yes, before I was born. It was number 4 Clarke Street in Blackburn.
I had good parents
Mum and Dad were very peaceful and gentle people, they were never argumentative. Just about everyone always had something good to say about them and loved their company. Dinner was always in the diningroom, where Mum and Dad would have a few drinks beforehand, read the paper and have a good discussion. We would sit and watch TV, and always eat dinner late, around 7.30pm. There were never arguments or fights, except play fights with the boys. Because we ate late and Dad worked down the street, he would often pass by a Milk Bar and buy us something to eat while we waited for dinner. It's a wonder we are not all fatty boombahs! He would buy three Freddo Frogs and a two litre pack of ice-cream, and then we would have dinner. After dinner, both my brothers would eat soup bowls (not dessert bowls) full of ice-cream. I would have one scoop and they would demolish the rest. They still do it now; they are ice-cream addicts and eat tons of it! To this day, I often look at ice-cream and think it would be nice to have a scoop of that, but after going to a nice meal in a restaurant, even a scoop of ice-cream seems too much.
Dad kept working in that shop until about 1975 and I will tell you the history whilst I remember it. From about 1968 onwards he attempted to have more shops, have a little bit of an empire. He had two up in Croydon, one in Vicky Street in Blackburn and they seemed to fail. They only lasted about six or seven years and it all got a bit too much, I think. Anyway, he had a go at it. By that time - well he was born in 1917, so that makes him about late fifties or sixties, or something like that and it was probably getting a bit tiring having his few failing businesses dragging him down.
So Dad ended up working for the Government in dispensaries in various institutions around Melbourne into the early 1980's. He worked at Albert Park, where there was a drug dispensary, a Government place, so he was doing Methadone and stuff like that. Well no, he wasn't 'doing' it, just dispensing it! So I don't know if it was only just druggies down there. Also in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, which I think was only druggies, but at Kew Mental Home he was doing the patient's tablets and things like that. At that stage I had my licence and I used to drive him to work a lot if I wasn't working myself. Then he would have retired - this is more his biography than mine, isn't it?
He was quite ill with emphysema by that stage and starting to have oxygen at home and stuff like that. And that's from smoking, which is an unfortunate habit of mine as well, which is why I am ill now, I assume. I've got lung cancer so I suppose that's a pretty good target for it. My sister in law told me she was there when the ambulance took him away for his last time to the hospital.
He said to the ambulance officer, 'Hi, I'm Des. I've smoked all my life and now I've got emphysema!'
My two brothers are great guys
They were both more into sports cars and things. I think they both smashed about seven or eight cars by the time I was twenty! Andrew had an Austin Healey and Michael had a MGTF, that's not all but I just can't remember all the others, maybe they were more standard cars! Because they were 5 and 7 years older than me, I really didn't know a lot of what they got up to, I would only hear things second-hand. Like one friend of theirs stealing his Dad's Morris Minor, I think it was, buzzing over to our place at about 11.00pm and driving up to Mt. Dandenong, hooning around there. On the way back, the car hit a pole and he lost his brain, thinking he was going to kill them all by driving over a cliff, as his Dad would kill him. My two brothers were trying to calm him on the way back down. He backed the car back in the garage and he didn't know what to do. They left him there, and no longer cared what he came up with, as they were so relieved they were still alive. Next day they went back and he had figured out some cunning plan. He walked in to his Dad before he got up in the morning, saying, 'Hey Dad, can I have your keys to your car, I'll back the car out for you.'
His Dad said, 'No worries son,' and gave him the keys.
He comes inside again saying, "Oh Dad, I'm really sorry, I backed the car out but I hit the gatepost.' It was a very good plan really.
He went, 'Don't worry son, you were trying to do the right thing!' and he got away with it. So I thought they were really great because they were my older brothers and any adventures they had were wonderful.
Andrew, the eldest became a doctor, later had a go at being a barrister, though he gave that up after a while. He is still a doctor, living up in Bronte in a flat with a Pacific view, so he his pretty lucky. Michael became a carpenter, then a builder, married with 3 kids living in a nice Edna Walling property in Mooroolbark. They have twins aged twenty-seven, the boy selling men's clothing in Bridge Road and the girl teaching, plus another boy aged twenty-one, who has done a couple of years International Business, but he is still wondering what he wants to do.
Now, back to me
What happened after I was born? We moved to Blackburn. I was a bubba in 1957, so there was a Catholic primary school up the road that both my brothers were going to, and a half secondary school for girls called St. Thomas's, the Apostle. I suppose with Catholics, I can't call them the minority, I think they were a threatening majority to some people in the area. I was never aware of any prejudice when I was young, and my parents had never made me aware of any all through my life really, about anti-Catholic or Protestants being upset about us or anything like that. I had Protestant and Baptist friends, whatever, it was never a problem. It was not until I studied history later on that I realised what a horrifyingly, blood-curdling history its all got. But at the time it was all bliss!
Early friendships
At this point its probably a good idea to talk about two very close friends called Paul Mulvany and Rowan Walters. All our families were very close together. There were four boys in Rowan's family, five kids in the Mulvany family, two of whom were girls and three boys in my family. We all grew up together, so we were all pretty much brothers, Rowan, Paul and I. Nearly all the time until we were about twelve, we spent playing in the backyard. The interesting thing is that Paul played with trucks, utes and things and he ended up becoming a builder. I did not end up doing anything with trucks, so it is no use talking about me! Rowan became a property developer and he was always very interested in developing houses and building them, making the roads look good and so on! We still know each other and we are very close, especially Paul, who couldn't stand to think that I was sick in the first place. Anyway, we are very close and it deserves a mention, because that is a friendship that will go on - forever.
Two doors up from us there was an old hospital that had been converted into a convent. My Mum had gone to a Loreto Nun's Catholic school up in Ballarat called Mary's Mount. She was a country girl from Colac, so she boarded there. So I used to get sent up as a kid to give them some groceries and stuff like that, because Mum would, like a lot of people, helped support them. They would give me boiled sweets, which they probably can't do these days. There's not many of nuns left, I think! Anyway, that was all very nice.
Primary School was all pretty good
As I said, I ended up going to the Primary School, which was a nice school. You were taught half by nuns and half by lay teachers and I can't remember anything very horrific happening there. Apart from when my elder brother, though I don't think I was there at that stage, as he was seven years older than me. Sliding down the banisters of the outdoor stairs to the classroom, he fell off the second storey and hit his head on the concrete. Well that's probably why he's a doctor now, I don't know! But he seems like the rest of us, perhaps we all did it in our sleep! So I went through that school, it was all very good, I enjoyed it there.
Dad had found some money by then and my parents wanted to send me to Xavier, having managed to send my two brothers there. At Grade 5 there was an entrance exam and I hated that fact, I thought I was really happy at this local primary school, it was really good, nice gum trees, I knew everyone and I didn't want to go. Xavier seemed like Rugby School in England or something ....... some school in the books I was reading about in World War II, where all these pilots went to. In fact I loved that Primary School so much that I failed that entrance exam to Xavier, which was good - that was a blessing!
Xavier in Grade 6
Xavier still had a couple of Entry Schools. Initially I went to Burke Hall campus, which is up in Studley Park Road in Kew, opposite Raheen, which is now owned by Mr. Pratt. It was like going to England, because its an old mansion with school buildings and a big chapel, built on the side of a hill overlooking Richmond and right down to St. Kilda. It was magnificent; I loved that part of it. Unfortunately I got there in such a grumpy mood because I was not at my favourite primary school and got told to 'shut-up!'
It was a lot more authoritarian and I got the strap within a week!
I thought, 'Well bugger this; you'll have to give me the strap again then, because I'm not going back on this! You'll have to belt me, because I'm going to show you how tough I am!' So I entered a surreptitious competition with the other kids to see who in that year could get the most 'cuts' as we used to call them. Very stoic ... and stupid of course! Highly stupid. So first it was Xavier Preparatory School, called Bourke Hall from Grade 6 to Form 2, and then they moved you up to Xavier, the 'big school,' where I did Form 3 and Form 4.
Hence My Teenage Years Began
Unfortunately in an authoritarian-hating manner! And I kind of ended up that way for a while, but I rectified it later on. That was fine, I could do the school work, and when you think about it, it was great. Jesuits are into academic sort of stuff, there were good teachers there and I got a lot of good grounding in subjects I would not have given considered doing. Some not so good... like Latin! Interesting, but I still use that now I suppose! They were so sports-oriented, so many teams that you could not achieve anything. I am not a big bloke, not a super sports-head and at the time I was about eleven and well into rock music and art. That was my passion, I just loved it, so doing Latin, Mathematics, French and whatever was not cutting it - but I did. The same with the sports really, I was growing my hair and smoking cigarettes by the time I was about thirteen and playing in a band.
Pub Sundays
This meant rehearsing on Sundays in a pub in Prahran which for my parents was not good; they did not like that idea. It was 1972 and I remember Dad occasionally having to give me a lift because I had to take an amp with me, otherwise I would take the train. Dad had grave misgivings because the suburb in those days was full of immigrant Scots and Greeks, all in the front bar of the pub, which was run by the drummer's aunt, Mrs. Southorn. The drummer lived at the pub, which was why we rehearsed there. It had a sly grog bar open on Sundays, so Dad occasionally had a beer, which wasn't bad, just to soothe his nerves about dropping his thirteen year old son off there! It was in the morning and afternoon there - and we didn't drink, which was amazing, just knocked off packs of chips. We were just into the music, so we didn't really get up to much - just the music, which was wonderful.
Up to Xavier
By that time I was at Xavier, which started at Form 3. The school is situated on about forty hectares, someone told me, so its a big piece of money. In those days, the Art teacher was a highly effeminate, wonderful man who was stuck in a basement getting mistreated by the kids and the staff who didn't care. That's how important painting was, or art in general. The Art classes were great, though absolute pandemonium with kids running around all over the place most times, zipping out for a cigarette. It was like the teacher wasn't coping with it.
The Music teacher was also effeminate, with minimised power, minimised classroom, and you could certainly see the minimised conditions. He was limited to banging out Jolly Boating Weather on the piano and such things. A little bit of theory and stuff like that. Also it was very piano-oriented and I'm a guitarist, so from then on I always had trouble doing music theory, because it is based around four part harmonies and piano playing. Having just started to play the guitar at that point, I could not transform it into anything practical. The Music classes did not really interest me but I was happy in a band outside of school.
A bit of a rebel
You got the impression you were supposed to be a traditional academic if you were in that school at that time, a lawyer, a doctor, a mathematician or anything but a musician or an artist. It was all kind of against me, not giving me what I wanted to do. On top of this, I was starting to be a bit of a rebel; hair's getting longer, cigarettes turning from Marlboro Reds to packets of Drum. Form 4 was an absolute bloody debacle because it all kind of hit the wall for me, as far as getting all my work done and I was demoted from class B, to class C, to class D which was just saying, 'You're dumb. You are going down.'
There were some stories from when I was about twelve to fifteen I suppose. They involved a few other names, well I won't give you their full names because its all criminal activity, so evidence against them! There was Phil, Alistair, Mark and Rowan. We were up to different things in mixed up combinations of this group. Across the road from Clarke Street, where I lived, was a Masonic Lodge and also a Girl Guide Centre, which were very tempting places for young kids. Unfortunately we thought breaking into places was a good idea. Breaking into the Girl Guide Centre by climbing in through the back window led us to doing a few stupid things when we were about twelve or thirteen. Once inside we just pulled stuff out and threw it around the room, so doing some minor damage, nothing big - just uniforms, who knows what else and a magic mushroom - no fire or breakage - only seeing what they had in there, whilst doing things we knew would upset them.
The Masonic Lodge was a different story. We had a little family dog called Scamp, who was very good at chasing things. Mostly he liked chasing tennis balls but even if you threw half a brick he would catch it, which was horrific to watch as he was just a tiny little terrier of some sort. At night time when they had their dinners, or meetings, we would sneak into the cloak room and when no-one was looking, throw the tennis ball right down the centre of their dinner party. The dog would go scampering down and blokes would go, 'Oh, what's this? Hey get him out of here. What's this rat?'
This sort of stuff we thought was pretty good fun. But the real damage was done when we broke in when no-one was there. At that time we poured lemonade into their piano, broke into the kitchen and stole food. However the worst thing we did was messing things up in their secret Masonic room, which had a very special carpet with symbols on it, special furniture and a wooden pyramid with golden tools in it, all symbolic of the Masonic Lodge. I remember thinking we had better not steal from there because it looked too incredible. If we stole from there, that would get in the newspaper. We were tempted though! The main game was climbing in, finding the place and getting into the room, just checking it all out. So this is what we did a couple of times, then it did appear in the local newspaper and my parents were a bit suspicious. I did not even realise that a nice bloke who lived 2 doors down was actually the Masonic Lodge guard, and I think he knew who was doing it, so I decided it was not really a good idea.
Getting older we started doing things like wagging school, going down lanes in Blackburn and throwing stones through back windows of places when we knew people were out. That was pretty bad. One Saturday we got into a couple of the local crèches and started throwing things everywhere, making a hell of a mess, and one of the neighbours apparently saw us over the fence. I was recognised because my Dad ran a local shop and they told the police. After arriving home I had showered and put on my dressingown, when Mum called me to the diningroom door. Nervously she said that I had better come in and I saw two police detectives who were asking me if I was James Paull. Blissfully unaware of what was going on, I was feeling pretty confident. They then suggested that I had been breaking into places, smashing windows, causing damage and probably other things. I was flabbergasted, and had to get changed to go to the local Blackburn Police Station.
Hitting the wall
It was all a big drama, Mum was in tears. Within a couple of days I had to go with Dad to the Box Hill Children's Court for my case. All the other kids fathers were there looking at me like I was the kid from Hell, who had caused their kids to get into trouble. I was obviously the evil person involved with each of the jobs, as the others were not all involved in both. This was all mixed up with another school wagging misdemeanour with another boy, where we broke into someone's house and stole their records and stereo, so we could have speakers for the guitar. He played drums and I played guitar so you could say it was musically motivated - but not really! Amazingly we thought we got away with that, just using a trolley to go the 5 houses to this drummer kid's home. Well someone must have seen us. I remember the Judge calling Dad up and they had a secret confab, then Dad came down and told me I had two choices; pay the $30 fine, or he can put me in Turana Boys Home in Brunswick for thirty days. For me the world just fell apart at the thought of this. I realised I was really in trouble. In the end Dad asked me what I wanted to do, suggesting he should let me go to this boy's home, as it was what I deserved. Of course he was trying to scare me and in the end he paid the fine. How ridiculous, I nearly went to jail for all that thinking I was being such a tough smart-arse. Well, I thought, that's it for me, no more life of crime, I've had it! Thanks Dad for paying the fine, I'll never do it again! So that was more or less the end of any criminal activity in my life, apart from maybe throwing stones at lights when I was seventeen.
Interestingly at the time I was thinking, 'I've drunk a few beers, I am doing something stupid that I got caught by the police for about three years ago. Give it a miss!' And this was all intertwined with the fact that I had got to Form 4 at Xavier and had hit the wall there with my behaviour, all part of the same mindset that I was a 'bad boy' who was going to get kicked out of school anyway. So 1971 and 1972, that was the naughty stuff, no more of that left!
Romance
The other part of my life is romance, that sounds grand, doesn't it? At Xavier, there were a few girlfriends, which were nothing serious and not much happened. In those days 'serious' for me was having sex! But that never happened folks until I was eighteen, so you can forget about that - just kissing. I think I showed one girl a condom in its packet and said, 'What do you reckon?' and she knew as much about it as I did, so that was the end of that! Romance isn't all sex, although I probably thought it was in those days.
Getting the boot
More straps, more hanging out with friends doing disastrous things. Some bloke did a home-made bomb in a rubbish bin, his name was Sam Angelico and he later became a magician. It was printed up in The Truth newspaper. They also put out an underground paper criticizing school and all that sort or stuff, it was ridiculous. It was the end of the 1960's, they were scared of revolution and everything and all the priests would be going bonkers in those days, trying to keep control over everyone. However, we thought it was all great fun!
The guy I played with in the band was also at school, Chris Harold. Chris had such long hair, but fortunately enough money in the family to get a short wig made, so he could bundle all his hair up under it. Luckily his hair was thin enough to do this - and then he had 'short hair!' Most people didn't pick it which was quite strange.
With all that happening, I basically got the boot, because it all turned into: 'I'm inviting your parents in and we are going to have a bit of a chat now. Its close to the end of the year and we are very disappointed with you and lalalala....' So we had a harrowing meeting with the Form Master, or maybe he was one of the higher people, I can't remember. They gave me the deal: 'You can stay if you pick up your game and you can repeat Form 4, or you can get the hell out of here and we will give you Form 4.' So, the choice was obvious, I got the Form 4!
Boarding at St. Pats
Mum suggested I go to this boarding school in Ballarat called St. Patrick's College, where her brother and father went. I did do this and the joke was that my Grandfather had breakfast there one morning, carved his name in the sausage and my uncle got it and now I was going to get it! That was a joke on the food. This was good and a bloke I knew, also from Xavier, went up there too, John Perkins. Everyone called him 'Suck,' which is probably the most delightful nickname I have ever heard, and I still see him. We were on different gangs at school, but we agreed that if we were both chucked in prison at St. Pat's then we had better hang on to each other, so as a result we are still friends.
I suppose this is a good way to do it - go through schools! It is sort of the guideline of your life.
Boarding was really depressing at first, quite lonely. Form 4 dormitories were thirty-six beds with two flapping doors which didn't lock, into the next thirty-six bed dormitory. The Form 1's and Form 2's were the same, each of those large rooms being upstairs in this wing. Downstairs were showers, lockers, the infirmary and functional things like that. Each dormitory had a room for the Christian Brother to live in and I don't know how far I will go into that!! Probably it was built in the thirties I suppose. The first night lying there it was pretty daunting and indeed the first weeks, with thirty-five other blokes snoring away. Quite strange.
The dormitory had big, old windows with weights in them, so when you lifted them up they went "ding, ding, ding.' The side of the room had one of those windows, and it had a little roof from an extension below, which was always very handy on a Saturday night. You could get out there after the Brother had supposedly gone to bed and sneak off to the park. You probably had your clothes on under your dressingown and you would find a few stashed bottles of beer that you had hidden in the bushes during the day. Wow, what a big night - Saturday in a bush park! But then you got drugs so I suppose things took on a different dimension in later years. I don't think we ever really got sprung doing that, but that was one of our main entertainments, including coming back and having to throw up out the window when you realised you were going to be sick!
Three hours homework
The other advantage of boarding at St. Pat's was you had to go into the classrooms at night to do your work from Monday to Friday, and I think there was an optional on Saturday and a compulsory on Sunday. There was also letter-writing on Sunday mornings, though you were not forced to do that but you could go in there and write letters home. That was the Brothers, a little opportunity for you to keep in touch with Mum and Dad! For three hours every night you would go into these classrooms and there would be a Christian Brother in each room, just sitting there looking after you. And you would do your homework, because you couldn't leave. So, you couldn't not pass, unless you only had half a brain - so I passed. I even did Maths I and II, which was amazing. I was not bad at Maths but I was not really interested in it, then one of my friends said he was doing Maths I and II, and I think you kind of had to pick a Maths for those last two years. They always encouraged you to do that. So that was good, I never thought I would pass Maths! I did Maths, English, Economics which was a mistake, though I am more into it now obviously when you get older and Geography; though I think I dropped that.
School subjects were all pretty dry. There was no music, they just had a brass band there and a teacher called Br. Bell who was quite crazy. I couldn't see what he was doing musically, I think just coaching people to do the school play and sing songs, which was not my cup of tea. So no music there, but by that stage I was inseparable from having a guitar, I just always had a guitar with me and would sit up there with it.
The good thing was I was fifteen, going on sixteen and it was great, because I got out of home for the first time in my life and had to brush my own teeth, that sort of thing and be independent. Invariably, I met up with a bunch of blokes and I still see all of those guys. It is kind of like the army, we are all different sorts of characters and it has been a wonderful time with them. We don't see each other much, but we do still see each other. Since I have been ill, they have seen me quite often, the ones who live down here particularly. We just formed a gang of six blokes and had lots of adventures, romances (not between each other!) and in fact that guy Suck, who I went to Xavier with, met a girl up there, to whom he is still married. So there you go!
Running away for 'love'
Kisses and cuddles was about it until St. Pats, where I met a girl at a school dance, called Kay, who went to Mary's Mount, the sister school of St. Pats. I was so enamoured of her that term, I thought she was the bee's knees, though now I can't even remember her surname! Quite a few of us had our girlfriends, some lasting a bit longer than others. I tried to hang on to this one but I don't think she could have been all that interested in me, as she had another guy chasing her whom she was pretty keen on. So she had both of us at the same time! I reacted badly to that and decided that as she didn't want me, I thought I had a broken heart and would have to leave school because of it!
What a terrifically ridiculous, dramatic affair. One morning I woke up and said to my friend at the breakfast table, 'Stuff this, let's get the hell out of here and go back to Melbourne?' He thought it was a great idea that we should both just run away. I was running away for 'love' and he was running away for something to do! Once breakfast was finished you would change into your uniforms and go to school, but we changed into casual clothes, stuffed more clothes into a bag and just walked out the front gate. From there we went down to the Ballarat Lake, straight to my girlfriend's school, to tell them all that we were running way.
The girls thought, 'Wow, you are heroes, Jock and Suck are running away. How fantastic!' That day was spent being running-away celebrities. The boys at school must have kept it a secret, not admitting to seeing us or knowing where we were. Eventually the teachers would have had to ring our parents and tell them we had run away, which would have got them pretty upset. Overnight we slept in the Bishop's front garden, just across the road from school. (Though you never got to see those Bishops!) Next morning we scraped our money together for a train ticket to Melbourne. With the few dollars we had left we bought a few beers in the Spencer Hotel, which then left us with no money.
Now there was nothing left to do except go home to our parents - with beer on our breath! Both of us got a belting and our parents phoned the school, apologising for all the hassle we had caused, asking if the school would take us back.
'Oh you will have to bring them up and we will talk to them to make sure they promise they will never do this sort of thing again. Why did they do it in the first place and why did they upset everyone?'
Because we were Form 5 students it was taken quite seriously but they let us go back. So that was my 'Kay' adventure and the end of that relationship really! Though about a year later after I had been working, there was a reunion BBQ of everyone else who had stayed on for Form 6, so we did meet up again for one night, which was nothing sensational.
At St. Pat's in 5th Form, I did get through, however in HSC I did really badly, because I had kind of given up emotionally for some reason. Basically I did not know what I was doing. The school was not giving me what I wanted and I didn't know how to get it. They started asking me what was the matter, and what was wrong and I was all depressed about it. Then at Easter I left, which was a big discussion at home. My older brother had got wrangled into writing me a letter, I remember. When I read it I thought, 'You are not like this! They put you up to this!' which they kind of had.
Getting Jock on the Road
By then I did not know what to do, I was a failure, so I got a job at Stokes in Heatherdale Road, Ringwood, working there until November. There was a mini recession then, so I got laid off when I was seventeen. Whilst doing that, I met this crowd of people through a friend of mine who lived in Blackburn. The father was an Art teacher at a North Melbourne apprentice school doing Screen Printing, for which he was qualified. He also taught at this slightly alternative school called Hollingsworth College in East Ringwood. Having seen some of my drawings, he said I was welcome to come along to his Art classes on Tuesday nights, which I did. Otherwise I was hanging around doing nothing much, but really enjoying the Art classes. I tried at the Apprentice School for a while, where he took me and introduced me to what went on there, but I was not all interested in getting an apprenticeship as a screen printer. So, I was in limbo.
This Art teacher Con, and his partner Terri, who had three girls had a policy where they would get all their friends to come around on Friday and Saturday nights and 'party.' This was a bit of a safe haven, fairly liberal because they would let the older ones have a drink. We are talking about kids aged from thirteen to twenty-one. There would be romances and sex and they were quite tolerant about all that kind of stuff. They were more educative and protective about it, 'If you're going to do that you had better do this....' sort of thing, which in 1975 was fairly liberal.
There were a couple of other girlfriends but nothing really worth mentioning, well Nadia, one of Terri's daughters was my girlfriend for a short time. The daughters' father was a dysfunctional, ill sort of guy with bipolar disease. Con lived with Terri and the girls because he liked them all, in spite of Terri having made it clear she was not in love with him and that she would still continue to have affairs. If Con wanted to help look after the girls and put them through school that was OK and he could pretend they were husband and wife. Until the end of his life, Con did the right thing by caring and providing for those girls as if they were his own, and they respected him as if he were their father.
Then one of the older guys there was seconded by Terri and Con to have a chat to me about doing Music or Art and see what I was up to. I got on fine with the parents, but maybe they wanted a younger representative (even though they were only in their late thirties) and I told him I wanted to do those sorts of things. Terri and Con continued to help me with my career for years.
Blackburn High
Well, I just thought, 'Bugger it; I've got to do something.' Blackburn High had a good Music course so I decided to try and get into that. That guy went there, so maybe that had something to do with him being asked to talk to me. So it was 'get Jock on the road and push him!' which is what happened. I applied to Blackburn High and that was really good, as it had a Music Theory HSC class. So the idea was to do Music Theory, Art (they had a fairly good Art class), English and English Literature. Maybe I also had to do a Maths, Modern History - Late Medieval and Renaissance history, which must be about five subjects. This was great; suddenly I was back in school, back on the rails and doing some study, not just being a storeman for the rest of my life. It was quite a good lesson, I must admit, to be a storeman for 6 months - it was OK but just a labourer's job really. I was very happy; I started to be happy about what I was studying. I did the HSC, actually failing Music Theory. AMEB Theory was based on four part harmony and piano music, as I have said before, which I struggled with and only got about 42% or something. Anyway, c'est la vie - all the other subjects were good!
Beyond School
Melbourne State College
Next I had to start thinking about courses - there was the VCA, The Melbourne Uni. Faculty of Music, but they were not particularly interested in guitarists in those days, only people playing orchestral instruments and singing. Melbourne State College was the other option, which did not look as attractive because it was a Teacher's College, and I did not want to be a teacher, just do music. Unbeknownst to me at the time, and as I found out later, it was actually a really good course with insightful people - Peter Clinch and Geoff D'Ombraine were there, and all their staff. How they all came to Melbourne State College, I don't know. They had a Bachelor of Education four year course for teaching, but had managed to push all those Education subjects into the fourth year, just like a Dip. Ed. and kept the first three years pure to their subjects. The Drama class was the same; they had Film and TV - a few people in there like Tom Ryan and people like that, who are now in the paper on Sunday. It was great, really, really good. I did not realise how good it was, because at the time I thought it was just a teacher's course.
Consequently I got into it after the next year, though it was very much: 'Oh I don't know if we've got the space. You will have to do another audition,' and stuff like that. Having applied for the Melbourne Uni. thing, they were not interested in guitarists and for VCA, I was just not good enough in my audition, so did not get in. Victorian College of the Arts was a bit 'top-notchy,' and I wasn't! From Blackburn High I was applying for these things, and actually did not get into Melbourne State College until the following year, so I took another year's break.
The word was out that if you could not get in to the Uni. Faculty of Music with an orchestral instrument, you had to perhaps look at doing classical guitar, which I had never done. I found a teacher and had lessons for a year, sat the exam and amazingly passed with a B. It was all playing guitar, which I loved, and a new field of guitar at the time. I also did another HSC subject - Music History & Literature, which was basically listening to Bach, which is wonderful when you hear the chords. I had done this swathe of subjects which was all good. On the dole I tried to save enough money to buy a ticket to go on a cruise ship at the end of the year, but it didn't happen, which is probably a good thing.
That is the history of the education stretch and the next year I auditioned for the Melbourne State College and got in, spending five years doing a four year course! Failing the second year is something which people often do. It was all terrific, everything that was promised - great music teachers and hardly any education subjects, well very mild ones in the first three years (or in my case four years!) but it did make it hell in the final year with Education Psychology, Education ..... you name it, then three teaching rounds. Well these had their problems - one teacher's round in particular. One woman didn't particularly dislike me, but she'd had a fight with my teacher at school, so it came out that she failed me on what was an OK teacher's round because of some fight that had happened twenty years ago! She informed me about this at the time, and said she would fix it up, which she did luckily, as if I had failed that, I would have failed the course. That's the worst thing with those teaching rounds, if you failed one you are out with no qualifications after four years.
Back in 1976 Terri and I started a two year affair, in spite of her being twenty years older than me. For me it was pretty interesting but I did not love her, which she knew. It was also a secret from a lot of people. Con and Terri were both always very supportive of my musical career, helping me with composition, guitar and the whole music course. We actually all got on really well, which may seem strange. I would have short affairs with other women. For a few years I went through a pretty bad patch, upsetting to me, as I felt guilty that I should not be continuing the relationship. There was a time I locked myself away in my room for a few months at Con and Terri's, thinking I should not be there. My parents knew, and I remember crying with Mum about it, it was very hard for Mum.
Scholarship — Amsterdam for a year
By 1981 I had completed my studies at Melbourne State College and started to apply for scholarships to go overseas. There were two places - one was in Italy and the other in Holland. My composition teachers had recommended two teachers to me, as I had studied composition in my last two years at college. This meant a couple of years of applying, as you would apply one year and they would think: 'Who is this guy?' and then again the next year, they would say, 'Oh yeah, he applied last year and we turned him down. Is he still doing it? OK.'
So once they got a bit of faith in you, they would give you a place. It was The Australia Council, which was run by James Murdoch (nothing to do with the other Murdoch), and started off by the Gough Whitlam Government, so very much a 'leftie art project' which spent some Government taxes and people's money on artists to send them overseas. This was the reputation it had, which was always a bit of fun when you had a beer in working class bars where you could say, 'Oh I got a grant to go to Holland and smoke dope!' Make you very popular, not that I did that! (Or not that I told them anyway.) A lot of people hate that sort of thing, like teachers' holidays and things like that.
Finally I cracked it and got a grant in 1984. You put a bit of money in and they put $7grand in, which was pretty damned fine. In those days you could add about $5grand of your own money, though I don't think I had $5grand, I don't know how much I had. With that you could live over there for a year in Amsterdam, which is where I went. As time went on, I had got more and more from my course which was where I wanted to go. Getting the grant to go to Amsterdam meant the definite end of that relationship with Terri, so it was a great relief to get away.
The teacher I had chosen was the one who would take me. I did get the scholarship to go to Italy, however the Italian teacher did not speak English, and I didn't speak Italian, so that was the end of that idea. The Dutch composer could speak English, so I went there in August 1984 and came back in July 1985. It was really good, I attended the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam and it was extended studies. Before I left I had started a VCA course, completing one year of it, so when I got back I asked if I could count the year in Holland and be granted the Diploma. It did not work! Never mind.
When I arrived back from Amsterdam I lived with my parents, worked, saved, and then moved out into a flat. I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine and let's face it; I'd had enough of school by then. Really, I wanted to start my life in non-academic things. Admittedly the composing thing was great, but having played in a few bands when I was a kid, it had been a bit of a passion, which I thought I would really love to do again. Composing is a very insular thing, you are trying to write music that in some cases people just think sounds like a horror movie, or they don't understand. There is an audience, but it is a weird, academic audience. Anyway, I'd had enough of that and thought maybe I would go back to it one day, but then I would just join a really simple covers band.
Covers Bands
There are two sorts of bands; those that play their own songs, which is more of a struggle, or bands that play at weddings, or in a corner at a pub. This was what I played, in the corner of a pub in a sixties cover band called The Public Servants. From 1985 to 1989 I played with them and it was great fun. There was a singer, Jim Gregor, a Glaswegian crazy guy, sounding a bit like Joe Cocker, an Italian girl Carla played base and several drummers, whom we seemed to go through every six months, which was most annoying. With a three hour list of songs, it was pretty boring having to teach them those, though they would know some of them. Carla, as happens with girls in bands, became my girlfriend for a while.
The band was fantastic fun, as I got to do all the songs in my record collection - hopefully without boring the clientele. It was all Beatles, Stones, The Animals and you name it - sixties and a bit of the seventies.
Show Pieces
Once that finished, I auditioned for a few things, one for - 'Composers wanted: Dance and Theatre Show. One Off.' Along I went and there were five or six people there, trickling down to three. Running it was a woman whose husband ran a recording studio, which is still going, called Atlantis Studios. In fact I am going there tomorrow. She was a composer, keyboard player and she would write this spacey, sort of eighties stuff and picked me and a guy Andrew Iannou. Basically she put together a one off show at Caulfield Town Hall, with her husband doing all the tech. work and putting up the PA for her. Also she got some choreographers and dancers. We wrote two or three pieces each and recorded them, though the idea was that we would play them live. I didn't think the live people were going to hack it really, so I just played mine as a recording, which upset her a bit. The choreographer choreographed pieces, the dancers danced them and someone else did the lighting just for this one show, which was quite good fun. We got some pieces and memories out of this, no money of course!
My ex-composition teacher then contacted me to say that Melbourne Uni. wanted some music for 'Twelfth Night' which they were putting on with a hired professional director. Of all the Shakespeare plays, this one has the most songs, which I got to re-write and do the incidental music. Being a big fan of Shakespeare, this was great and not knowing that play, I got to know it well. There were five people from the Faculty of Music to do the music; guitar, bass player, clarinettist, flute player, drummer and they would all swap around playing bits and pieces. I still have those and I am kind of proud of that, though I don't know what I will do with it - publish it! I have dreamed about giving it to other people and getting it played on a bigger stage. I haven't done anything about it and probably won't at this point, however, I have passed it around to a few people. Other little projects; I have recorded some Blues stuff and was always hoping to become a solo Blues player, but being very scared (and I still am), of actually getting up there on my own, its a little bit daunting. A few times in my life I have done it, maybe about a dozen times, but I'm pretty shaky at it.
More bands
In 1989, I auditioned for this country band, which ended up being called Lou Lasso and the Ropables, which is Lou Schaltz who is a great little country singer, married to a very good country pedal steel player, who played with Keith Glass' Band. That lasted about two years and we played 'new country' sort of stuff, lots of little pubs. Lou and I played little duets at St. Andrews quite a bit on Thursday nights, but our mainstay was The Albion in Smith Street, Collingwood. Also we did a pub out in Footscray, called something like 'Worlds End' - or should have been! That was a shocker - on Thursday nights, starting at 11.00pm and going till 2.00am. Up the road there was a brothel and the girls would come in. One night there was a guy there with one of the girls, but also with his wife, his kids and a knife in his boots. There was blood in the toilets and I think one of the girls got pushed out into the car park and belted to buggery. We 'played on' like the proverbial country and western band, with the security guards holding the doors shut internally, so no-one could get out to help her if they wanted to. No doubt you would have got knocked off if you did. That was full on and led to Lou's husband pulling her out, and the end of the band.
I managed to get a really good demo tape at Atlantis Studio from the Ropables. We got a four track demo tape out of that and I did a little cassette tape out of it, which I have recently mastered, so that should hopefully stick around for a bit longer.
This is Serious Mum
An old guitarist friend of mine, Shane O'Mara, whom I knew from when I was about sixteen in Nunawading, phoned me after that. He was a fairly well known guitarist around Melbourne, Australia, well maybe even the world. He is good, very good. I had not seen him for about six or seven years, then I saw him after some show and we swapped phone numbers. Soon afterwards he rang and asked if I had heard of a band called TISM? Had I been playing electric guitar? Yes to both. They were looking for a guitarist at that time, and he and lots of others had been filling in. For me that was so exciting, because suddenly it was not the 'small time band' which is what I had been doing.
The band was incredibly funny and I really liked them. I remember having had a few glasses of wine and the old Victorian house where I was living had a very low lintel at one spot. Immediately I hung up the phone and ran through the house, probably to go to the toilet in my excitement, and hit my head on the bloody lintel. Next thing I knew, I was waking up on the floor and could have donged myself to death. Looking up at the ceiling I was thinking, shit, and any blood? No blood? There wasn't any blood, just a big bump.
The rest is history, because I went in and so called 'auditioned, ' though they just kept letting me play, saying, 'Oh we'll see you next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday.'
After six months it was like, 'Am I in the band? Am I in the band?'There was no performing at this time, just teaching me songs and writing songs, which is mainly what TISM do. That's their procedure, to go in once a week and brainstorm songs. The bass player had been away; he had married and gone to Spain to see his wife's parents. It was like Jack (the bass player) hadn't approved or met me, so they felt they should to wait for him to come back, since he was the other half of the musical machine. We got on fine, end of story. So, I was in the band. The band broke up in 2003, so I was with them for twelve years.
Tism is Australia's most original, idiosyncratic, enigmatic, visually exciting, infuriating, catchy, smartarse, profane, iconoclastic and flat out funny pop group. Ever.
One reviewer, after their performance at Melbourne's Hi-Fi Bar in 2003, captured it best: "TISM. There's not a band remotely like them anywhere else in the world." TISM have, for nearly 20 years, hovered on the left bank of Australian popular music, with a seemingly regenerating cult following. They have achieved chart success whilst appearing to do exactly as they please. They have the rare distinction of winning two ARIAs at different phases of their career. They frequently disappear for lengthy periods, yet always sell out major-city rock venues when they do return.
Some things you should know about TISM
• TISM always perform in disguise - part Dada, part-paramilitary, part-comic.
• TISM are not famous OR ugly OR even particularly unusual under their masks.
• TISM are not influenced by, do not sound remotely like, and will not be unmasking like Kiss.
• TISM's music is not confronting, or avante-garde, or "ooh...scary" - they write pounding, upbeat pop songs which collide together dance music, punked-up guitars, and Beach Boys harmonies.
• TISM's songs then get unusual because on top of this very friendly musical approach, they write biting, satirical social comment, with a liberal dose of silliness and a fanatical desire to harpoon the sacred cows of "cool."
• TISM's song titles are deliberately silly, obtuse, profane. Many rock critics have fallen at this hurdle.
• TISM's live performance is an amphetamine ride from start to finish - a furious rush of chaos and choreography, dance beats, guitars, poetic monologues and a huge communal singalong all rolled into one. And that's without the "extra" bits...
• ... like debating competitions, jumping castles, onstage weddings, leaf blowers and motor mowers, Brechtian alienation, complete performances of Shakespeare or twenty extra guitarists playing one note at the end of a song - to name but a few. That TISM are streets ahead of any other live act in this country is not a PR boast.
• TISM's first press interview had them fifty feet away from the journalists, separated by a piece of string, using megaphones to communicate. Such behaviour - like answering questions for a radio interview in written form, or delivering "pre-prepared" answers on a tape player, or making their hapless interviewer wear a wetsuit in a crowded restaurant - fostered an atmosphere of hatred from some sections of the rock press which still exists today.
• However, TISM's public faces-in-the-mask, Ron Hitler-Barassi and Humphrey B. Flaubert, pride themselves on being the politest men in rock. They are also rock's most entertaining interview subjects, provided you don't mind them failing to answer a single question. TISM'S 20 year history? Here it is in 30 seconds:
• Late 80's - TISM bursts out of nowhere onto the Melbourne inner-city scene. Release sprawling double-album debut "Great Truckin' Songs Of The Renaissance" and win their first ARIA
• Early 90's - TISM release a book and two further albums, whilst cementing their awesome live reputation and fanatical Australia-wide cult following. o Late 90's - TISM's "Machiavelli And The Four Seasons album goes top ten nationally, wins an ARIA and spawns world-wide cult classic "He'll Never Be An Ol' Man River"
• 2004 - TISM releases 3 disc DVD "The White Albun" and continue to confound critics with the European chart success of their single "Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me." TISM's current whereabouts are unknown. This is not unusual. This is standard behaviour for the only band this country has produced, that TRULY doesn't give a shit. Or in the words of another live concert review:"TISM. A national treasure."
http://www.tism.net.au/
www.madman.com.au/tism/
www.myspace.com/tismrocks
everyone else has had more sex than me
white album promo
whatareya
TISM (an acronym of This Is Serious Mum)
Meantime. . .
With TISM, I played with a songwriter called Dan Vertessi from a band called Rail, and did a demo with him. That went on for about six months but did not really go anywhere. Chris Brody and I did some stuff; he's a very good guitarist, lap steel player. We did some of my songs, though we did not perform them, we were sort of getting around to it.
During the late 90's I played with Astrid Munday and recorded with her, which was good; a bit of gap, then again in 2006. It was a good album, with her husband Tony Cohen being an absolutely fantastic producer, so it is always great to get recorded by him. So I have done one album with her, and I don't think with anyone else.
During this time I am doing my own songs in my own home studio, wondering if I will ever perform this stuff. I don't think I will. What am I doing this for? I would be so embarrassed to perform; I've always had a problem with that. But being ill has taught me that you should at least go along with it and forget it. Everyone else does.
Blues
The big triumph was, because I had always been into the Blues (a Blues aficionado since 1974) some friends and I got together a Blues band and called it Blind Lemon Chicken, which went from 2002 for three years. We recorded a fantastic demo that is really an album; proper printing and cover, by lines and we just went into Atlantis Studio one Sunday morning after a gig the night before. It was at a time when we were playing lots of gigs and we were pretty fit, so we went and did a big chunk of the repertoire, chose about eleven songs, and got a really passable album. Well passable at the time, but now I look at it and think it is really bloody good. Give myself a compliment and all the boys in the band; I am very proud of that one. Did it have a title? Up Jumped the Devil, which is a Robert Johnson title. We got to do a Robert Johnson song which is kind of good, because Eric Clapton did Crossroads, and a couple of other ones. When you see in the history of Blues, people who have covered Robert Johnson songs have had that privilege, and we had the privilege to do it too.
That is when all the bands stopped and by that time Ella was born in 2001, so things were getting hard to do. Consequently I was working full time, which I had done from 1986 till 1991 as a storeman job, always very handy. After Ella was born, I did it for another five years in a different sort of shop. Doing that and having to rehearse with TISM on one night, the Blues band on another, go to work and really wanting to help Matty looking after Ella, it all became a bit ridiculous. So when TISM and the Blues band stopped, we were quite happy. My musical career, blahblahblah............ I should be talking a little bit about how I met Matty.
Changing My Life—Love
When I was working at NHP as a storeman between 1986 and 1990, I had all these storeman jobs, and I had seen Matty working there. (Her mother had been working there, and she has been working there now for twenty-two years I think.) Anyway, I had an eye for her and this Fijian friend of mine had an eye for someone else upstairs. He said, 'Well come on, what we should do is invite them out for dinner. You should get her round to your place on Saturday night,' and so on!
He was egging me on and he was a naughty boy! We did that, he asked one girl and I asked Matty out and cooked dinner for her. That was how it all started - and nothing has ended it yet! The rest is history really!
Matty
Matty has been my partner and there has never been any need to look further when I met someone like her. I remember some fortune-teller person telling me I would have so many women, and on counting them up, Matty was the last girlfriend, so that person must have been right! Matty is not a girlfriend now; she is my partner, that's for sure, so maybe Ella is my final girlfriend.
We had a short break up time in about 1996, for about two years, but thankfully she stuck with me. Well she took me back! Not anyone would take me back, but she did and I'm so glad she did, because she is the love of my life. We had a little girl, which is one of those stories where I was not really interested and I got talked into it!
Ella
In 2001 we had our baby girl Ella, who is another apple of my eye! So I've got two apples of my eyes. I'm a very lucky man.
Ella is six now, in Grade 1 at Glenferrie Primary. Its been wonderful having Ella, it has changed my life. I have been quite happy to let two of the best bands I was ever in slip away really. Not that I chose to make them slip away, as there were other factors, with other people leaving the band as well. I am quite happy to have a daughter and not bother going to band rehearsals and gigs, even though they are fun and I may like to do it again sometime.
Having a daughter is enough for me.
The content of this story remains the property of the author James Paull
This document was prepared by volunteer biographer Lee Ewing
On behalf of Eastern Palliative CareMarch 2008
MY FAMILY LIFE: I was born in 1957 on 1st July at St. Vincent's Private in Victoria Street, but that hospital is not there anymore. My mother's name was Maureen Catherine Paull and my father's name Desmond Geoffrey Paull. They have both passed away now - Dad in I think 1986 or 1987, he was sixty-nine with emphysema. Mum passed away in I think 1995 with stomach cancer and she was seventy-two, so they had longish lives. Whenever you say that to people they sort of go, "Well that's not that old." Well I think that's not too bad.
What happened after that? When I was born I had two older brothers; Andrew who was seven at the time and Michael who was five and they are both still around. So there were the three boys and we lived in Blackburn. Dad was a pharmacist. Mum was a physiotherapist but when they had their first child in 1951, she took up 'House Duties' - motherhood! And she was probably rapt about that anyway. I am sure actually having the baby is not all that enjoyable, specially the first one!
We lived in Blackburn and there was local strip of shops down there. It is still down there next to the railway station called South Parade. Dad had the Pharmacy and I think they lived there out the back. It was quite small I remember. Perhaps actually, when I was born, we might have moved into a house by then. Anyway around the corner we got a house probably after about 5 years, so it would have been about 1956 or something, so yes, before I was born. It was number 4 Clarke Street in Blackburn.
I had good parents
Mum and Dad were very peaceful and gentle people, they were never argumentative. Just about everyone always had something good to say about them and loved their company. Dinner was always in the diningroom, where Mum and Dad would have a few drinks beforehand, read the paper and have a good discussion. We would sit and watch TV, and always eat dinner late, around 7.30pm. There were never arguments or fights, except play fights with the boys. Because we ate late and Dad worked down the street, he would often pass by a Milk Bar and buy us something to eat while we waited for dinner. It's a wonder we are not all fatty boombahs! He would buy three Freddo Frogs and a two litre pack of ice-cream, and then we would have dinner. After dinner, both my brothers would eat soup bowls (not dessert bowls) full of ice-cream. I would have one scoop and they would demolish the rest. They still do it now; they are ice-cream addicts and eat tons of it! To this day, I often look at ice-cream and think it would be nice to have a scoop of that, but after going to a nice meal in a restaurant, even a scoop of ice-cream seems too much.
Dad kept working in that shop until about 1975 and I will tell you the history whilst I remember it. From about 1968 onwards he attempted to have more shops, have a little bit of an empire. He had two up in Croydon, one in Vicky Street in Blackburn and they seemed to fail. They only lasted about six or seven years and it all got a bit too much, I think. Anyway, he had a go at it. By that time - well he was born in 1917, so that makes him about late fifties or sixties, or something like that and it was probably getting a bit tiring having his few failing businesses dragging him down.
So Dad ended up working for the Government in dispensaries in various institutions around Melbourne into the early 1980's. He worked at Albert Park, where there was a drug dispensary, a Government place, so he was doing Methadone and stuff like that. Well no, he wasn't 'doing' it, just dispensing it! So I don't know if it was only just druggies down there. Also in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, which I think was only druggies, but at Kew Mental Home he was doing the patient's tablets and things like that. At that stage I had my licence and I used to drive him to work a lot if I wasn't working myself. Then he would have retired - this is more his biography than mine, isn't it?
He was quite ill with emphysema by that stage and starting to have oxygen at home and stuff like that. And that's from smoking, which is an unfortunate habit of mine as well, which is why I am ill now, I assume. I've got lung cancer so I suppose that's a pretty good target for it. My sister in law told me she was there when the ambulance took him away for his last time to the hospital.
He said to the ambulance officer, 'Hi, I'm Des. I've smoked all my life and now I've got emphysema!'
My two brothers are great guys
They were both more into sports cars and things. I think they both smashed about seven or eight cars by the time I was twenty! Andrew had an Austin Healey and Michael had a MGTF, that's not all but I just can't remember all the others, maybe they were more standard cars! Because they were 5 and 7 years older than me, I really didn't know a lot of what they got up to, I would only hear things second-hand. Like one friend of theirs stealing his Dad's Morris Minor, I think it was, buzzing over to our place at about 11.00pm and driving up to Mt. Dandenong, hooning around there. On the way back, the car hit a pole and he lost his brain, thinking he was going to kill them all by driving over a cliff, as his Dad would kill him. My two brothers were trying to calm him on the way back down. He backed the car back in the garage and he didn't know what to do. They left him there, and no longer cared what he came up with, as they were so relieved they were still alive. Next day they went back and he had figured out some cunning plan. He walked in to his Dad before he got up in the morning, saying, 'Hey Dad, can I have your keys to your car, I'll back the car out for you.'
His Dad said, 'No worries son,' and gave him the keys.
He comes inside again saying, "Oh Dad, I'm really sorry, I backed the car out but I hit the gatepost.' It was a very good plan really.
He went, 'Don't worry son, you were trying to do the right thing!' and he got away with it. So I thought they were really great because they were my older brothers and any adventures they had were wonderful.
Andrew, the eldest became a doctor, later had a go at being a barrister, though he gave that up after a while. He is still a doctor, living up in Bronte in a flat with a Pacific view, so he his pretty lucky. Michael became a carpenter, then a builder, married with 3 kids living in a nice Edna Walling property in Mooroolbark. They have twins aged twenty-seven, the boy selling men's clothing in Bridge Road and the girl teaching, plus another boy aged twenty-one, who has done a couple of years International Business, but he is still wondering what he wants to do.
Now, back to me
What happened after I was born? We moved to Blackburn. I was a bubba in 1957, so there was a Catholic primary school up the road that both my brothers were going to, and a half secondary school for girls called St. Thomas's, the Apostle. I suppose with Catholics, I can't call them the minority, I think they were a threatening majority to some people in the area. I was never aware of any prejudice when I was young, and my parents had never made me aware of any all through my life really, about anti-Catholic or Protestants being upset about us or anything like that. I had Protestant and Baptist friends, whatever, it was never a problem. It was not until I studied history later on that I realised what a horrifyingly, blood-curdling history its all got. But at the time it was all bliss!
Early friendships
At this point its probably a good idea to talk about two very close friends called Paul Mulvany and Rowan Walters. All our families were very close together. There were four boys in Rowan's family, five kids in the Mulvany family, two of whom were girls and three boys in my family. We all grew up together, so we were all pretty much brothers, Rowan, Paul and I. Nearly all the time until we were about twelve, we spent playing in the backyard. The interesting thing is that Paul played with trucks, utes and things and he ended up becoming a builder. I did not end up doing anything with trucks, so it is no use talking about me! Rowan became a property developer and he was always very interested in developing houses and building them, making the roads look good and so on! We still know each other and we are very close, especially Paul, who couldn't stand to think that I was sick in the first place. Anyway, we are very close and it deserves a mention, because that is a friendship that will go on - forever.
Two doors up from us there was an old hospital that had been converted into a convent. My Mum had gone to a Loreto Nun's Catholic school up in Ballarat called Mary's Mount. She was a country girl from Colac, so she boarded there. So I used to get sent up as a kid to give them some groceries and stuff like that, because Mum would, like a lot of people, helped support them. They would give me boiled sweets, which they probably can't do these days. There's not many of nuns left, I think! Anyway, that was all very nice.
Primary School was all pretty good
As I said, I ended up going to the Primary School, which was a nice school. You were taught half by nuns and half by lay teachers and I can't remember anything very horrific happening there. Apart from when my elder brother, though I don't think I was there at that stage, as he was seven years older than me. Sliding down the banisters of the outdoor stairs to the classroom, he fell off the second storey and hit his head on the concrete. Well that's probably why he's a doctor now, I don't know! But he seems like the rest of us, perhaps we all did it in our sleep! So I went through that school, it was all very good, I enjoyed it there.
Dad had found some money by then and my parents wanted to send me to Xavier, having managed to send my two brothers there. At Grade 5 there was an entrance exam and I hated that fact, I thought I was really happy at this local primary school, it was really good, nice gum trees, I knew everyone and I didn't want to go. Xavier seemed like Rugby School in England or something ....... some school in the books I was reading about in World War II, where all these pilots went to. In fact I loved that Primary School so much that I failed that entrance exam to Xavier, which was good - that was a blessing!
Xavier in Grade 6
Xavier still had a couple of Entry Schools. Initially I went to Burke Hall campus, which is up in Studley Park Road in Kew, opposite Raheen, which is now owned by Mr. Pratt. It was like going to England, because its an old mansion with school buildings and a big chapel, built on the side of a hill overlooking Richmond and right down to St. Kilda. It was magnificent; I loved that part of it. Unfortunately I got there in such a grumpy mood because I was not at my favourite primary school and got told to 'shut-up!'
It was a lot more authoritarian and I got the strap within a week!
I thought, 'Well bugger this; you'll have to give me the strap again then, because I'm not going back on this! You'll have to belt me, because I'm going to show you how tough I am!' So I entered a surreptitious competition with the other kids to see who in that year could get the most 'cuts' as we used to call them. Very stoic ... and stupid of course! Highly stupid. So first it was Xavier Preparatory School, called Bourke Hall from Grade 6 to Form 2, and then they moved you up to Xavier, the 'big school,' where I did Form 3 and Form 4.
Hence My Teenage Years Began
Unfortunately in an authoritarian-hating manner! And I kind of ended up that way for a while, but I rectified it later on. That was fine, I could do the school work, and when you think about it, it was great. Jesuits are into academic sort of stuff, there were good teachers there and I got a lot of good grounding in subjects I would not have given considered doing. Some not so good... like Latin! Interesting, but I still use that now I suppose! They were so sports-oriented, so many teams that you could not achieve anything. I am not a big bloke, not a super sports-head and at the time I was about eleven and well into rock music and art. That was my passion, I just loved it, so doing Latin, Mathematics, French and whatever was not cutting it - but I did. The same with the sports really, I was growing my hair and smoking cigarettes by the time I was about thirteen and playing in a band.
Pub Sundays
This meant rehearsing on Sundays in a pub in Prahran which for my parents was not good; they did not like that idea. It was 1972 and I remember Dad occasionally having to give me a lift because I had to take an amp with me, otherwise I would take the train. Dad had grave misgivings because the suburb in those days was full of immigrant Scots and Greeks, all in the front bar of the pub, which was run by the drummer's aunt, Mrs. Southorn. The drummer lived at the pub, which was why we rehearsed there. It had a sly grog bar open on Sundays, so Dad occasionally had a beer, which wasn't bad, just to soothe his nerves about dropping his thirteen year old son off there! It was in the morning and afternoon there - and we didn't drink, which was amazing, just knocked off packs of chips. We were just into the music, so we didn't really get up to much - just the music, which was wonderful.
Up to Xavier
By that time I was at Xavier, which started at Form 3. The school is situated on about forty hectares, someone told me, so its a big piece of money. In those days, the Art teacher was a highly effeminate, wonderful man who was stuck in a basement getting mistreated by the kids and the staff who didn't care. That's how important painting was, or art in general. The Art classes were great, though absolute pandemonium with kids running around all over the place most times, zipping out for a cigarette. It was like the teacher wasn't coping with it.
The Music teacher was also effeminate, with minimised power, minimised classroom, and you could certainly see the minimised conditions. He was limited to banging out Jolly Boating Weather on the piano and such things. A little bit of theory and stuff like that. Also it was very piano-oriented and I'm a guitarist, so from then on I always had trouble doing music theory, because it is based around four part harmonies and piano playing. Having just started to play the guitar at that point, I could not transform it into anything practical. The Music classes did not really interest me but I was happy in a band outside of school.
A bit of a rebel
You got the impression you were supposed to be a traditional academic if you were in that school at that time, a lawyer, a doctor, a mathematician or anything but a musician or an artist. It was all kind of against me, not giving me what I wanted to do. On top of this, I was starting to be a bit of a rebel; hair's getting longer, cigarettes turning from Marlboro Reds to packets of Drum. Form 4 was an absolute bloody debacle because it all kind of hit the wall for me, as far as getting all my work done and I was demoted from class B, to class C, to class D which was just saying, 'You're dumb. You are going down.'
There were some stories from when I was about twelve to fifteen I suppose. They involved a few other names, well I won't give you their full names because its all criminal activity, so evidence against them! There was Phil, Alistair, Mark and Rowan. We were up to different things in mixed up combinations of this group. Across the road from Clarke Street, where I lived, was a Masonic Lodge and also a Girl Guide Centre, which were very tempting places for young kids. Unfortunately we thought breaking into places was a good idea. Breaking into the Girl Guide Centre by climbing in through the back window led us to doing a few stupid things when we were about twelve or thirteen. Once inside we just pulled stuff out and threw it around the room, so doing some minor damage, nothing big - just uniforms, who knows what else and a magic mushroom - no fire or breakage - only seeing what they had in there, whilst doing things we knew would upset them.
The Masonic Lodge was a different story. We had a little family dog called Scamp, who was very good at chasing things. Mostly he liked chasing tennis balls but even if you threw half a brick he would catch it, which was horrific to watch as he was just a tiny little terrier of some sort. At night time when they had their dinners, or meetings, we would sneak into the cloak room and when no-one was looking, throw the tennis ball right down the centre of their dinner party. The dog would go scampering down and blokes would go, 'Oh, what's this? Hey get him out of here. What's this rat?'
This sort of stuff we thought was pretty good fun. But the real damage was done when we broke in when no-one was there. At that time we poured lemonade into their piano, broke into the kitchen and stole food. However the worst thing we did was messing things up in their secret Masonic room, which had a very special carpet with symbols on it, special furniture and a wooden pyramid with golden tools in it, all symbolic of the Masonic Lodge. I remember thinking we had better not steal from there because it looked too incredible. If we stole from there, that would get in the newspaper. We were tempted though! The main game was climbing in, finding the place and getting into the room, just checking it all out. So this is what we did a couple of times, then it did appear in the local newspaper and my parents were a bit suspicious. I did not even realise that a nice bloke who lived 2 doors down was actually the Masonic Lodge guard, and I think he knew who was doing it, so I decided it was not really a good idea.
Getting older we started doing things like wagging school, going down lanes in Blackburn and throwing stones through back windows of places when we knew people were out. That was pretty bad. One Saturday we got into a couple of the local crèches and started throwing things everywhere, making a hell of a mess, and one of the neighbours apparently saw us over the fence. I was recognised because my Dad ran a local shop and they told the police. After arriving home I had showered and put on my dressingown, when Mum called me to the diningroom door. Nervously she said that I had better come in and I saw two police detectives who were asking me if I was James Paull. Blissfully unaware of what was going on, I was feeling pretty confident. They then suggested that I had been breaking into places, smashing windows, causing damage and probably other things. I was flabbergasted, and had to get changed to go to the local Blackburn Police Station.
Hitting the wall
It was all a big drama, Mum was in tears. Within a couple of days I had to go with Dad to the Box Hill Children's Court for my case. All the other kids fathers were there looking at me like I was the kid from Hell, who had caused their kids to get into trouble. I was obviously the evil person involved with each of the jobs, as the others were not all involved in both. This was all mixed up with another school wagging misdemeanour with another boy, where we broke into someone's house and stole their records and stereo, so we could have speakers for the guitar. He played drums and I played guitar so you could say it was musically motivated - but not really! Amazingly we thought we got away with that, just using a trolley to go the 5 houses to this drummer kid's home. Well someone must have seen us. I remember the Judge calling Dad up and they had a secret confab, then Dad came down and told me I had two choices; pay the $30 fine, or he can put me in Turana Boys Home in Brunswick for thirty days. For me the world just fell apart at the thought of this. I realised I was really in trouble. In the end Dad asked me what I wanted to do, suggesting he should let me go to this boy's home, as it was what I deserved. Of course he was trying to scare me and in the end he paid the fine. How ridiculous, I nearly went to jail for all that thinking I was being such a tough smart-arse. Well, I thought, that's it for me, no more life of crime, I've had it! Thanks Dad for paying the fine, I'll never do it again! So that was more or less the end of any criminal activity in my life, apart from maybe throwing stones at lights when I was seventeen.
Interestingly at the time I was thinking, 'I've drunk a few beers, I am doing something stupid that I got caught by the police for about three years ago. Give it a miss!' And this was all intertwined with the fact that I had got to Form 4 at Xavier and had hit the wall there with my behaviour, all part of the same mindset that I was a 'bad boy' who was going to get kicked out of school anyway. So 1971 and 1972, that was the naughty stuff, no more of that left!
Romance
The other part of my life is romance, that sounds grand, doesn't it? At Xavier, there were a few girlfriends, which were nothing serious and not much happened. In those days 'serious' for me was having sex! But that never happened folks until I was eighteen, so you can forget about that - just kissing. I think I showed one girl a condom in its packet and said, 'What do you reckon?' and she knew as much about it as I did, so that was the end of that! Romance isn't all sex, although I probably thought it was in those days.
Getting the boot
More straps, more hanging out with friends doing disastrous things. Some bloke did a home-made bomb in a rubbish bin, his name was Sam Angelico and he later became a magician. It was printed up in The Truth newspaper. They also put out an underground paper criticizing school and all that sort or stuff, it was ridiculous. It was the end of the 1960's, they were scared of revolution and everything and all the priests would be going bonkers in those days, trying to keep control over everyone. However, we thought it was all great fun!
The guy I played with in the band was also at school, Chris Harold. Chris had such long hair, but fortunately enough money in the family to get a short wig made, so he could bundle all his hair up under it. Luckily his hair was thin enough to do this - and then he had 'short hair!' Most people didn't pick it which was quite strange.
With all that happening, I basically got the boot, because it all turned into: 'I'm inviting your parents in and we are going to have a bit of a chat now. Its close to the end of the year and we are very disappointed with you and lalalala....' So we had a harrowing meeting with the Form Master, or maybe he was one of the higher people, I can't remember. They gave me the deal: 'You can stay if you pick up your game and you can repeat Form 4, or you can get the hell out of here and we will give you Form 4.' So, the choice was obvious, I got the Form 4!
Boarding at St. Pats
Mum suggested I go to this boarding school in Ballarat called St. Patrick's College, where her brother and father went. I did do this and the joke was that my Grandfather had breakfast there one morning, carved his name in the sausage and my uncle got it and now I was going to get it! That was a joke on the food. This was good and a bloke I knew, also from Xavier, went up there too, John Perkins. Everyone called him 'Suck,' which is probably the most delightful nickname I have ever heard, and I still see him. We were on different gangs at school, but we agreed that if we were both chucked in prison at St. Pat's then we had better hang on to each other, so as a result we are still friends.
I suppose this is a good way to do it - go through schools! It is sort of the guideline of your life.
Boarding was really depressing at first, quite lonely. Form 4 dormitories were thirty-six beds with two flapping doors which didn't lock, into the next thirty-six bed dormitory. The Form 1's and Form 2's were the same, each of those large rooms being upstairs in this wing. Downstairs were showers, lockers, the infirmary and functional things like that. Each dormitory had a room for the Christian Brother to live in and I don't know how far I will go into that!! Probably it was built in the thirties I suppose. The first night lying there it was pretty daunting and indeed the first weeks, with thirty-five other blokes snoring away. Quite strange.
The dormitory had big, old windows with weights in them, so when you lifted them up they went "ding, ding, ding.' The side of the room had one of those windows, and it had a little roof from an extension below, which was always very handy on a Saturday night. You could get out there after the Brother had supposedly gone to bed and sneak off to the park. You probably had your clothes on under your dressingown and you would find a few stashed bottles of beer that you had hidden in the bushes during the day. Wow, what a big night - Saturday in a bush park! But then you got drugs so I suppose things took on a different dimension in later years. I don't think we ever really got sprung doing that, but that was one of our main entertainments, including coming back and having to throw up out the window when you realised you were going to be sick!
Three hours homework
The other advantage of boarding at St. Pat's was you had to go into the classrooms at night to do your work from Monday to Friday, and I think there was an optional on Saturday and a compulsory on Sunday. There was also letter-writing on Sunday mornings, though you were not forced to do that but you could go in there and write letters home. That was the Brothers, a little opportunity for you to keep in touch with Mum and Dad! For three hours every night you would go into these classrooms and there would be a Christian Brother in each room, just sitting there looking after you. And you would do your homework, because you couldn't leave. So, you couldn't not pass, unless you only had half a brain - so I passed. I even did Maths I and II, which was amazing. I was not bad at Maths but I was not really interested in it, then one of my friends said he was doing Maths I and II, and I think you kind of had to pick a Maths for those last two years. They always encouraged you to do that. So that was good, I never thought I would pass Maths! I did Maths, English, Economics which was a mistake, though I am more into it now obviously when you get older and Geography; though I think I dropped that.
School subjects were all pretty dry. There was no music, they just had a brass band there and a teacher called Br. Bell who was quite crazy. I couldn't see what he was doing musically, I think just coaching people to do the school play and sing songs, which was not my cup of tea. So no music there, but by that stage I was inseparable from having a guitar, I just always had a guitar with me and would sit up there with it.
The good thing was I was fifteen, going on sixteen and it was great, because I got out of home for the first time in my life and had to brush my own teeth, that sort of thing and be independent. Invariably, I met up with a bunch of blokes and I still see all of those guys. It is kind of like the army, we are all different sorts of characters and it has been a wonderful time with them. We don't see each other much, but we do still see each other. Since I have been ill, they have seen me quite often, the ones who live down here particularly. We just formed a gang of six blokes and had lots of adventures, romances (not between each other!) and in fact that guy Suck, who I went to Xavier with, met a girl up there, to whom he is still married. So there you go!
Running away for 'love'
Kisses and cuddles was about it until St. Pats, where I met a girl at a school dance, called Kay, who went to Mary's Mount, the sister school of St. Pats. I was so enamoured of her that term, I thought she was the bee's knees, though now I can't even remember her surname! Quite a few of us had our girlfriends, some lasting a bit longer than others. I tried to hang on to this one but I don't think she could have been all that interested in me, as she had another guy chasing her whom she was pretty keen on. So she had both of us at the same time! I reacted badly to that and decided that as she didn't want me, I thought I had a broken heart and would have to leave school because of it!
What a terrifically ridiculous, dramatic affair. One morning I woke up and said to my friend at the breakfast table, 'Stuff this, let's get the hell out of here and go back to Melbourne?' He thought it was a great idea that we should both just run away. I was running away for 'love' and he was running away for something to do! Once breakfast was finished you would change into your uniforms and go to school, but we changed into casual clothes, stuffed more clothes into a bag and just walked out the front gate. From there we went down to the Ballarat Lake, straight to my girlfriend's school, to tell them all that we were running way.
The girls thought, 'Wow, you are heroes, Jock and Suck are running away. How fantastic!' That day was spent being running-away celebrities. The boys at school must have kept it a secret, not admitting to seeing us or knowing where we were. Eventually the teachers would have had to ring our parents and tell them we had run away, which would have got them pretty upset. Overnight we slept in the Bishop's front garden, just across the road from school. (Though you never got to see those Bishops!) Next morning we scraped our money together for a train ticket to Melbourne. With the few dollars we had left we bought a few beers in the Spencer Hotel, which then left us with no money.
Now there was nothing left to do except go home to our parents - with beer on our breath! Both of us got a belting and our parents phoned the school, apologising for all the hassle we had caused, asking if the school would take us back.
'Oh you will have to bring them up and we will talk to them to make sure they promise they will never do this sort of thing again. Why did they do it in the first place and why did they upset everyone?'
Because we were Form 5 students it was taken quite seriously but they let us go back. So that was my 'Kay' adventure and the end of that relationship really! Though about a year later after I had been working, there was a reunion BBQ of everyone else who had stayed on for Form 6, so we did meet up again for one night, which was nothing sensational.
At St. Pat's in 5th Form, I did get through, however in HSC I did really badly, because I had kind of given up emotionally for some reason. Basically I did not know what I was doing. The school was not giving me what I wanted and I didn't know how to get it. They started asking me what was the matter, and what was wrong and I was all depressed about it. Then at Easter I left, which was a big discussion at home. My older brother had got wrangled into writing me a letter, I remember. When I read it I thought, 'You are not like this! They put you up to this!' which they kind of had.
Getting Jock on the Road
By then I did not know what to do, I was a failure, so I got a job at Stokes in Heatherdale Road, Ringwood, working there until November. There was a mini recession then, so I got laid off when I was seventeen. Whilst doing that, I met this crowd of people through a friend of mine who lived in Blackburn. The father was an Art teacher at a North Melbourne apprentice school doing Screen Printing, for which he was qualified. He also taught at this slightly alternative school called Hollingsworth College in East Ringwood. Having seen some of my drawings, he said I was welcome to come along to his Art classes on Tuesday nights, which I did. Otherwise I was hanging around doing nothing much, but really enjoying the Art classes. I tried at the Apprentice School for a while, where he took me and introduced me to what went on there, but I was not all interested in getting an apprenticeship as a screen printer. So, I was in limbo.
This Art teacher Con, and his partner Terri, who had three girls had a policy where they would get all their friends to come around on Friday and Saturday nights and 'party.' This was a bit of a safe haven, fairly liberal because they would let the older ones have a drink. We are talking about kids aged from thirteen to twenty-one. There would be romances and sex and they were quite tolerant about all that kind of stuff. They were more educative and protective about it, 'If you're going to do that you had better do this....' sort of thing, which in 1975 was fairly liberal.
There were a couple of other girlfriends but nothing really worth mentioning, well Nadia, one of Terri's daughters was my girlfriend for a short time. The daughters' father was a dysfunctional, ill sort of guy with bipolar disease. Con lived with Terri and the girls because he liked them all, in spite of Terri having made it clear she was not in love with him and that she would still continue to have affairs. If Con wanted to help look after the girls and put them through school that was OK and he could pretend they were husband and wife. Until the end of his life, Con did the right thing by caring and providing for those girls as if they were his own, and they respected him as if he were their father.
Then one of the older guys there was seconded by Terri and Con to have a chat to me about doing Music or Art and see what I was up to. I got on fine with the parents, but maybe they wanted a younger representative (even though they were only in their late thirties) and I told him I wanted to do those sorts of things. Terri and Con continued to help me with my career for years.
Blackburn High
Well, I just thought, 'Bugger it; I've got to do something.' Blackburn High had a good Music course so I decided to try and get into that. That guy went there, so maybe that had something to do with him being asked to talk to me. So it was 'get Jock on the road and push him!' which is what happened. I applied to Blackburn High and that was really good, as it had a Music Theory HSC class. So the idea was to do Music Theory, Art (they had a fairly good Art class), English and English Literature. Maybe I also had to do a Maths, Modern History - Late Medieval and Renaissance history, which must be about five subjects. This was great; suddenly I was back in school, back on the rails and doing some study, not just being a storeman for the rest of my life. It was quite a good lesson, I must admit, to be a storeman for 6 months - it was OK but just a labourer's job really. I was very happy; I started to be happy about what I was studying. I did the HSC, actually failing Music Theory. AMEB Theory was based on four part harmony and piano music, as I have said before, which I struggled with and only got about 42% or something. Anyway, c'est la vie - all the other subjects were good!
Beyond School
Melbourne State College
Next I had to start thinking about courses - there was the VCA, The Melbourne Uni. Faculty of Music, but they were not particularly interested in guitarists in those days, only people playing orchestral instruments and singing. Melbourne State College was the other option, which did not look as attractive because it was a Teacher's College, and I did not want to be a teacher, just do music. Unbeknownst to me at the time, and as I found out later, it was actually a really good course with insightful people - Peter Clinch and Geoff D'Ombraine were there, and all their staff. How they all came to Melbourne State College, I don't know. They had a Bachelor of Education four year course for teaching, but had managed to push all those Education subjects into the fourth year, just like a Dip. Ed. and kept the first three years pure to their subjects. The Drama class was the same; they had Film and TV - a few people in there like Tom Ryan and people like that, who are now in the paper on Sunday. It was great, really, really good. I did not realise how good it was, because at the time I thought it was just a teacher's course.
Consequently I got into it after the next year, though it was very much: 'Oh I don't know if we've got the space. You will have to do another audition,' and stuff like that. Having applied for the Melbourne Uni. thing, they were not interested in guitarists and for VCA, I was just not good enough in my audition, so did not get in. Victorian College of the Arts was a bit 'top-notchy,' and I wasn't! From Blackburn High I was applying for these things, and actually did not get into Melbourne State College until the following year, so I took another year's break.
The word was out that if you could not get in to the Uni. Faculty of Music with an orchestral instrument, you had to perhaps look at doing classical guitar, which I had never done. I found a teacher and had lessons for a year, sat the exam and amazingly passed with a B. It was all playing guitar, which I loved, and a new field of guitar at the time. I also did another HSC subject - Music History & Literature, which was basically listening to Bach, which is wonderful when you hear the chords. I had done this swathe of subjects which was all good. On the dole I tried to save enough money to buy a ticket to go on a cruise ship at the end of the year, but it didn't happen, which is probably a good thing.
That is the history of the education stretch and the next year I auditioned for the Melbourne State College and got in, spending five years doing a four year course! Failing the second year is something which people often do. It was all terrific, everything that was promised - great music teachers and hardly any education subjects, well very mild ones in the first three years (or in my case four years!) but it did make it hell in the final year with Education Psychology, Education ..... you name it, then three teaching rounds. Well these had their problems - one teacher's round in particular. One woman didn't particularly dislike me, but she'd had a fight with my teacher at school, so it came out that she failed me on what was an OK teacher's round because of some fight that had happened twenty years ago! She informed me about this at the time, and said she would fix it up, which she did luckily, as if I had failed that, I would have failed the course. That's the worst thing with those teaching rounds, if you failed one you are out with no qualifications after four years.
Back in 1976 Terri and I started a two year affair, in spite of her being twenty years older than me. For me it was pretty interesting but I did not love her, which she knew. It was also a secret from a lot of people. Con and Terri were both always very supportive of my musical career, helping me with composition, guitar and the whole music course. We actually all got on really well, which may seem strange. I would have short affairs with other women. For a few years I went through a pretty bad patch, upsetting to me, as I felt guilty that I should not be continuing the relationship. There was a time I locked myself away in my room for a few months at Con and Terri's, thinking I should not be there. My parents knew, and I remember crying with Mum about it, it was very hard for Mum.
Scholarship — Amsterdam for a year
By 1981 I had completed my studies at Melbourne State College and started to apply for scholarships to go overseas. There were two places - one was in Italy and the other in Holland. My composition teachers had recommended two teachers to me, as I had studied composition in my last two years at college. This meant a couple of years of applying, as you would apply one year and they would think: 'Who is this guy?' and then again the next year, they would say, 'Oh yeah, he applied last year and we turned him down. Is he still doing it? OK.'
So once they got a bit of faith in you, they would give you a place. It was The Australia Council, which was run by James Murdoch (nothing to do with the other Murdoch), and started off by the Gough Whitlam Government, so very much a 'leftie art project' which spent some Government taxes and people's money on artists to send them overseas. This was the reputation it had, which was always a bit of fun when you had a beer in working class bars where you could say, 'Oh I got a grant to go to Holland and smoke dope!' Make you very popular, not that I did that! (Or not that I told them anyway.) A lot of people hate that sort of thing, like teachers' holidays and things like that.
Finally I cracked it and got a grant in 1984. You put a bit of money in and they put $7grand in, which was pretty damned fine. In those days you could add about $5grand of your own money, though I don't think I had $5grand, I don't know how much I had. With that you could live over there for a year in Amsterdam, which is where I went. As time went on, I had got more and more from my course which was where I wanted to go. Getting the grant to go to Amsterdam meant the definite end of that relationship with Terri, so it was a great relief to get away.
The teacher I had chosen was the one who would take me. I did get the scholarship to go to Italy, however the Italian teacher did not speak English, and I didn't speak Italian, so that was the end of that idea. The Dutch composer could speak English, so I went there in August 1984 and came back in July 1985. It was really good, I attended the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam and it was extended studies. Before I left I had started a VCA course, completing one year of it, so when I got back I asked if I could count the year in Holland and be granted the Diploma. It did not work! Never mind.
When I arrived back from Amsterdam I lived with my parents, worked, saved, and then moved out into a flat. I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine and let's face it; I'd had enough of school by then. Really, I wanted to start my life in non-academic things. Admittedly the composing thing was great, but having played in a few bands when I was a kid, it had been a bit of a passion, which I thought I would really love to do again. Composing is a very insular thing, you are trying to write music that in some cases people just think sounds like a horror movie, or they don't understand. There is an audience, but it is a weird, academic audience. Anyway, I'd had enough of that and thought maybe I would go back to it one day, but then I would just join a really simple covers band.
Covers Bands
There are two sorts of bands; those that play their own songs, which is more of a struggle, or bands that play at weddings, or in a corner at a pub. This was what I played, in the corner of a pub in a sixties cover band called The Public Servants. From 1985 to 1989 I played with them and it was great fun. There was a singer, Jim Gregor, a Glaswegian crazy guy, sounding a bit like Joe Cocker, an Italian girl Carla played base and several drummers, whom we seemed to go through every six months, which was most annoying. With a three hour list of songs, it was pretty boring having to teach them those, though they would know some of them. Carla, as happens with girls in bands, became my girlfriend for a while.
The band was fantastic fun, as I got to do all the songs in my record collection - hopefully without boring the clientele. It was all Beatles, Stones, The Animals and you name it - sixties and a bit of the seventies.
Show Pieces
Once that finished, I auditioned for a few things, one for - 'Composers wanted: Dance and Theatre Show. One Off.' Along I went and there were five or six people there, trickling down to three. Running it was a woman whose husband ran a recording studio, which is still going, called Atlantis Studios. In fact I am going there tomorrow. She was a composer, keyboard player and she would write this spacey, sort of eighties stuff and picked me and a guy Andrew Iannou. Basically she put together a one off show at Caulfield Town Hall, with her husband doing all the tech. work and putting up the PA for her. Also she got some choreographers and dancers. We wrote two or three pieces each and recorded them, though the idea was that we would play them live. I didn't think the live people were going to hack it really, so I just played mine as a recording, which upset her a bit. The choreographer choreographed pieces, the dancers danced them and someone else did the lighting just for this one show, which was quite good fun. We got some pieces and memories out of this, no money of course!
My ex-composition teacher then contacted me to say that Melbourne Uni. wanted some music for 'Twelfth Night' which they were putting on with a hired professional director. Of all the Shakespeare plays, this one has the most songs, which I got to re-write and do the incidental music. Being a big fan of Shakespeare, this was great and not knowing that play, I got to know it well. There were five people from the Faculty of Music to do the music; guitar, bass player, clarinettist, flute player, drummer and they would all swap around playing bits and pieces. I still have those and I am kind of proud of that, though I don't know what I will do with it - publish it! I have dreamed about giving it to other people and getting it played on a bigger stage. I haven't done anything about it and probably won't at this point, however, I have passed it around to a few people. Other little projects; I have recorded some Blues stuff and was always hoping to become a solo Blues player, but being very scared (and I still am), of actually getting up there on my own, its a little bit daunting. A few times in my life I have done it, maybe about a dozen times, but I'm pretty shaky at it.
More bands
In 1989, I auditioned for this country band, which ended up being called Lou Lasso and the Ropables, which is Lou Schaltz who is a great little country singer, married to a very good country pedal steel player, who played with Keith Glass' Band. That lasted about two years and we played 'new country' sort of stuff, lots of little pubs. Lou and I played little duets at St. Andrews quite a bit on Thursday nights, but our mainstay was The Albion in Smith Street, Collingwood. Also we did a pub out in Footscray, called something like 'Worlds End' - or should have been! That was a shocker - on Thursday nights, starting at 11.00pm and going till 2.00am. Up the road there was a brothel and the girls would come in. One night there was a guy there with one of the girls, but also with his wife, his kids and a knife in his boots. There was blood in the toilets and I think one of the girls got pushed out into the car park and belted to buggery. We 'played on' like the proverbial country and western band, with the security guards holding the doors shut internally, so no-one could get out to help her if they wanted to. No doubt you would have got knocked off if you did. That was full on and led to Lou's husband pulling her out, and the end of the band.
I managed to get a really good demo tape at Atlantis Studio from the Ropables. We got a four track demo tape out of that and I did a little cassette tape out of it, which I have recently mastered, so that should hopefully stick around for a bit longer.
This is Serious Mum
An old guitarist friend of mine, Shane O'Mara, whom I knew from when I was about sixteen in Nunawading, phoned me after that. He was a fairly well known guitarist around Melbourne, Australia, well maybe even the world. He is good, very good. I had not seen him for about six or seven years, then I saw him after some show and we swapped phone numbers. Soon afterwards he rang and asked if I had heard of a band called TISM? Had I been playing electric guitar? Yes to both. They were looking for a guitarist at that time, and he and lots of others had been filling in. For me that was so exciting, because suddenly it was not the 'small time band' which is what I had been doing.
The band was incredibly funny and I really liked them. I remember having had a few glasses of wine and the old Victorian house where I was living had a very low lintel at one spot. Immediately I hung up the phone and ran through the house, probably to go to the toilet in my excitement, and hit my head on the bloody lintel. Next thing I knew, I was waking up on the floor and could have donged myself to death. Looking up at the ceiling I was thinking, shit, and any blood? No blood? There wasn't any blood, just a big bump.
The rest is history, because I went in and so called 'auditioned, ' though they just kept letting me play, saying, 'Oh we'll see you next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday.'
After six months it was like, 'Am I in the band? Am I in the band?'There was no performing at this time, just teaching me songs and writing songs, which is mainly what TISM do. That's their procedure, to go in once a week and brainstorm songs. The bass player had been away; he had married and gone to Spain to see his wife's parents. It was like Jack (the bass player) hadn't approved or met me, so they felt they should to wait for him to come back, since he was the other half of the musical machine. We got on fine, end of story. So, I was in the band. The band broke up in 2003, so I was with them for twelve years.
Tism is Australia's most original, idiosyncratic, enigmatic, visually exciting, infuriating, catchy, smartarse, profane, iconoclastic and flat out funny pop group. Ever.
One reviewer, after their performance at Melbourne's Hi-Fi Bar in 2003, captured it best: "TISM. There's not a band remotely like them anywhere else in the world." TISM have, for nearly 20 years, hovered on the left bank of Australian popular music, with a seemingly regenerating cult following. They have achieved chart success whilst appearing to do exactly as they please. They have the rare distinction of winning two ARIAs at different phases of their career. They frequently disappear for lengthy periods, yet always sell out major-city rock venues when they do return.
Some things you should know about TISM
• TISM always perform in disguise - part Dada, part-paramilitary, part-comic.
• TISM are not famous OR ugly OR even particularly unusual under their masks.
• TISM are not influenced by, do not sound remotely like, and will not be unmasking like Kiss.
• TISM's music is not confronting, or avante-garde, or "ooh...scary" - they write pounding, upbeat pop songs which collide together dance music, punked-up guitars, and Beach Boys harmonies.
• TISM's songs then get unusual because on top of this very friendly musical approach, they write biting, satirical social comment, with a liberal dose of silliness and a fanatical desire to harpoon the sacred cows of "cool."
• TISM's song titles are deliberately silly, obtuse, profane. Many rock critics have fallen at this hurdle.
• TISM's live performance is an amphetamine ride from start to finish - a furious rush of chaos and choreography, dance beats, guitars, poetic monologues and a huge communal singalong all rolled into one. And that's without the "extra" bits...
• ... like debating competitions, jumping castles, onstage weddings, leaf blowers and motor mowers, Brechtian alienation, complete performances of Shakespeare or twenty extra guitarists playing one note at the end of a song - to name but a few. That TISM are streets ahead of any other live act in this country is not a PR boast.
• TISM's first press interview had them fifty feet away from the journalists, separated by a piece of string, using megaphones to communicate. Such behaviour - like answering questions for a radio interview in written form, or delivering "pre-prepared" answers on a tape player, or making their hapless interviewer wear a wetsuit in a crowded restaurant - fostered an atmosphere of hatred from some sections of the rock press which still exists today.
• However, TISM's public faces-in-the-mask, Ron Hitler-Barassi and Humphrey B. Flaubert, pride themselves on being the politest men in rock. They are also rock's most entertaining interview subjects, provided you don't mind them failing to answer a single question. TISM'S 20 year history? Here it is in 30 seconds:
• Late 80's - TISM bursts out of nowhere onto the Melbourne inner-city scene. Release sprawling double-album debut "Great Truckin' Songs Of The Renaissance" and win their first ARIA
• Early 90's - TISM release a book and two further albums, whilst cementing their awesome live reputation and fanatical Australia-wide cult following. o Late 90's - TISM's "Machiavelli And The Four Seasons album goes top ten nationally, wins an ARIA and spawns world-wide cult classic "He'll Never Be An Ol' Man River"
• 2004 - TISM releases 3 disc DVD "The White Albun" and continue to confound critics with the European chart success of their single "Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me." TISM's current whereabouts are unknown. This is not unusual. This is standard behaviour for the only band this country has produced, that TRULY doesn't give a shit. Or in the words of another live concert review:"TISM. A national treasure."
http://www.tism.net.au/
www.madman.com.au/tism/
www.myspace.com/tismrocks
everyone else has had more sex than me
white album promo
whatareya
TISM (an acronym of This Is Serious Mum)
Meantime. . .
With TISM, I played with a songwriter called Dan Vertessi from a band called Rail, and did a demo with him. That went on for about six months but did not really go anywhere. Chris Brody and I did some stuff; he's a very good guitarist, lap steel player. We did some of my songs, though we did not perform them, we were sort of getting around to it.
During the late 90's I played with Astrid Munday and recorded with her, which was good; a bit of gap, then again in 2006. It was a good album, with her husband Tony Cohen being an absolutely fantastic producer, so it is always great to get recorded by him. So I have done one album with her, and I don't think with anyone else.
During this time I am doing my own songs in my own home studio, wondering if I will ever perform this stuff. I don't think I will. What am I doing this for? I would be so embarrassed to perform; I've always had a problem with that. But being ill has taught me that you should at least go along with it and forget it. Everyone else does.
Blues
The big triumph was, because I had always been into the Blues (a Blues aficionado since 1974) some friends and I got together a Blues band and called it Blind Lemon Chicken, which went from 2002 for three years. We recorded a fantastic demo that is really an album; proper printing and cover, by lines and we just went into Atlantis Studio one Sunday morning after a gig the night before. It was at a time when we were playing lots of gigs and we were pretty fit, so we went and did a big chunk of the repertoire, chose about eleven songs, and got a really passable album. Well passable at the time, but now I look at it and think it is really bloody good. Give myself a compliment and all the boys in the band; I am very proud of that one. Did it have a title? Up Jumped the Devil, which is a Robert Johnson title. We got to do a Robert Johnson song which is kind of good, because Eric Clapton did Crossroads, and a couple of other ones. When you see in the history of Blues, people who have covered Robert Johnson songs have had that privilege, and we had the privilege to do it too.
That is when all the bands stopped and by that time Ella was born in 2001, so things were getting hard to do. Consequently I was working full time, which I had done from 1986 till 1991 as a storeman job, always very handy. After Ella was born, I did it for another five years in a different sort of shop. Doing that and having to rehearse with TISM on one night, the Blues band on another, go to work and really wanting to help Matty looking after Ella, it all became a bit ridiculous. So when TISM and the Blues band stopped, we were quite happy. My musical career, blahblahblah............ I should be talking a little bit about how I met Matty.
Changing My Life—Love
When I was working at NHP as a storeman between 1986 and 1990, I had all these storeman jobs, and I had seen Matty working there. (Her mother had been working there, and she has been working there now for twenty-two years I think.) Anyway, I had an eye for her and this Fijian friend of mine had an eye for someone else upstairs. He said, 'Well come on, what we should do is invite them out for dinner. You should get her round to your place on Saturday night,' and so on!
He was egging me on and he was a naughty boy! We did that, he asked one girl and I asked Matty out and cooked dinner for her. That was how it all started - and nothing has ended it yet! The rest is history really!
Matty
Matty has been my partner and there has never been any need to look further when I met someone like her. I remember some fortune-teller person telling me I would have so many women, and on counting them up, Matty was the last girlfriend, so that person must have been right! Matty is not a girlfriend now; she is my partner, that's for sure, so maybe Ella is my final girlfriend.
We had a short break up time in about 1996, for about two years, but thankfully she stuck with me. Well she took me back! Not anyone would take me back, but she did and I'm so glad she did, because she is the love of my life. We had a little girl, which is one of those stories where I was not really interested and I got talked into it!
Ella
In 2001 we had our baby girl Ella, who is another apple of my eye! So I've got two apples of my eyes. I'm a very lucky man.
Ella is six now, in Grade 1 at Glenferrie Primary. Its been wonderful having Ella, it has changed my life. I have been quite happy to let two of the best bands I was ever in slip away really. Not that I chose to make them slip away, as there were other factors, with other people leaving the band as well. I am quite happy to have a daughter and not bother going to band rehearsals and gigs, even though they are fun and I may like to do it again sometime.
Having a daughter is enough for me.
The content of this story remains the property of the author James Paull
This document was prepared by volunteer biographer Lee Ewing
On behalf of Eastern Palliative CareMarch 2008
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