.. in any case, I was on modest stipend (a bursary) that I was contracted to repay by becoming a teacher after graduating.
In fact, now that I mention it, ambition is another area I’ve always been deficient in, so you put that together with a lack of vision and you might begin to understand why I was prone to spurn opportunities that came my way by simply not recognising them as opportunities.
The first incarnation of Ariel was forged from the burning wreck of Spectrum. Well, that’s a romantic way of putting it because Spectrum came to a halt relatively sedately – Spectrum was a sedate kind of vehicle by nature. Ariel was different though. We’d never met guitarist Tim Gaze and drummer Nigel Macara before, let alone played with them, but there was momentum and an expectation that something would evolve from the union – and quickly.
Nobody said we had to write a completely new repertoire in the space of a few weeks, but we set ourselves the task anyway. It soon became obvious that in Tim we had a guitar prodigy and the interaction between Tim and our mercurial keyboardist John Mills was always going to provide musical fireworks. My patently curious songs and arrangements suddenly not only made sense – they sizzled, and my tortured and occasionally questionable lyrics, born of the stress of creating a new song list at immense speed, now leered from a musical platform that defied argument.
When we released A Strange Fantastic Dream it received rave reports from London, especially from the influential BBC DJ, John Peel, and it seemed that a trip to the UK was the next inevitable step. Perhaps predictably, here in Oz the reaction was to have five of the tracks banned for airplay by FACB.*
But this was a year after the band’s debut and all was not well in the Ariel camp – and it came to a head during the band’s legendary train trip to WA. In fact it was the culmination of a stressful year on the road, with interpersonal pressures between the old guys and the young guys, or however you’d like to characterise the two camps, building up unchecked, but it all blew up in a spectacular and unedifying way on the Perth train trip, leaving everybody involved damaged to a greater or lesser extent.
It’s a well enough known story I suppose, but Ariel eventually did end up in London, but by then it was a completely different band. Tim, Nigel and John had been replaced by guitarist Harvey James and drummer John Lee. What is generally not known however, is that Tim and Nigel, and possibly even John Mills, were all in London at that same time - Tim even had a blow with us at our Hangar Lane digs.
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but if I’d had the vision coupled with the naked ambition I might’ve considered ditching Ariel 2 and reforming Ariel 1 to triumphant acceptance by the English press, public and maybe even the record company.
That’s just conjecture of course, but given that EMI rejected Ariel 2’s rock opera and John Peel lost interest in us after a drab BBC live recording session and then John Lee jumped ship (for the aptly named band, Dirty Tricks) after a series of indifferent live appearances round London, we surely couldn’t have done any worse.
But, you can’t go back. There are plenty of examples of bands that have hung together for the money whilst they privately loathe each other. That seems to contradict the notion of fun and adventure that goes with putting a band together in the first place. As I told a couple of young musicians recently that came over from Christchurch to reconnoitre the Melbourne live music scene, the natural life-span of a band is about four years. After that, if there’s no momentum, you’re probably starting to get on each other’s nerves. Of course, after forty-four years in partnership, Bill and I are the exceptions that prove the rule. Momentum would probably terrify us these days.

I decided after the last Sydney trip that I was going to have to get some sort of lap-top so I could stay up to date with my e-mails. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s been a fairly dramatic decline in internet cafés of late and I had to walk further than I was comfortable with to access the only one I could find. It probably did me good health-wise, but that wasn’t the point.
I could’ve used my phone I suppose, but I struggle to read that at the best of times and I worry that I might press something accidentally and end up with an unexpectedly massive phone bill. In any case, I just want to use my phone as a phone – and an occasional camera.
How do you research for something that you’ve had no experience in? In my case I chose to ask somebody who knows about such things and I’ve ended up with an Asus Note Book – a conventional lap-top by any definition – which is slightly heavier than I anticipated but, on the positive side, was a pretty good price on eBay and arrived within a couple or so days of my ordering it – and that was just before Christmas.
So, my new lap-top comes equipped with the latest Windows 8 – and this is where I’ve run into a few problems. I’ve not used Windows beyond XP till now. XP seems a pretty stable platform to me and I wonder why you’d want to change it too much, but I guess Microsoft is under pressure to get with the restless young market that queues up outside Telstra etc. whenever a new version of anything Apple gets released.
I wanted to stick with Windows because I was under the impression it was the devil I knew something about, but it turns out I probably know more about the way an Apple machine operates than bloody Windows 8. I think this comes under the heading of change for change’s sake. I’ll get the hang of it eventually, but in an unnecessarily sullen and resentful way. Bah! Humbug!

* Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters