If you’ve just read the heading and said to yourself, well there’s precious little of that, then I’m with you. Most contemporary popular music is staggeringly deficient, and the same goes for musicals. The imagination is in ridiculously short supply, and the will to differ virtually non-existent. No-one seems to know the difference between tonic and dominant, and interrupted means someone spilled their coffee in their lap while they were deciding whether to write in F or in C.

But I am going to give two examples where I think the musical craftsmanship is of the highest order, and argue that the composers of these selections deserve to be taken seriously as genuinely creative artists.  The first is from Elton John, and the second from Prince.

Now neither of these artists worked consistently at the top of their game; whole albums of particularly the later work of Prince are forgettable, and Elton John changed with fashion to create some mind-numbingly ordinary work. But when everything was going right, well, look out.

Elton John’s ‘Tiny dancer’ wasn’t a raging success when first released, in part at least because at six minutes and seventeen seconds it is quite long for a pop tune. In Cameron Crowe’s wonderful picture Almost Famous the song plays in a bus as the band is touring across America, and everyone sings along. This appearance actually gave the song a second life, and took everyone by surprise. When Mr John played it in Melbourne on his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, he had modified the melody because his voice apparently no longer reaches the high C. It still sounded fabulous.

The thing about this piece that strikes me is the patience demonstrated by the composer. The piano introduction is only two chords, and these are the foundation of the verse that follows. It consists of an AABA structure, that is then repeated when the rhythm section joins in. The piano introduction is reprised before the song goes to another section, and only after this do we hear the chorus. The time spent getting there has not been wasted, and the satisfaction of its realisation is genuinely moving.

Don’t you wish that people had the wherewithal to resist going straight to the chorus, to give everything away as soon as possible? That perhaps they had something else up their sleeve to postpone satisfaction and to make the resolution that much more worthwhile?

My favourite – and I actually think it might be his best – album by Prince is Sign o the times. I’ve written about it before because it was so important to me when I was verging on adulthood. The film was a revelation, as I’ve said in the past, and it’s one of the few things from that part of my life that I remember fondly. Meeting Sall in 1988 was far and away the best thing that happened in that decade, but a lot of the rest of it was trash.

The title track was written about in the notes to the Prince boxed set as one of the few times you had an inkling of Prince’s politics. He sang about sex all the time, and some of that was miraculous, but rarely did he deal with current events. The lyrics here are extraordinary: ‘Sister killed her baby cos she couldn’t afford to feed it and we’re sending people to the moon; September my cousin tried reefer for the very first time – now he’s doing horse. It’s June.’

The spareness of the orchestration is an object lesson: the use of the bass drum with is repeated figure and less frequently the snare drum, the marimba-like upper part volleying between Cs and the sensational bass figure – I’ve no idea how any of this was done but it is so staggeringly original. And again, there is a patience here that is absolutely superb. To work with only a single chord, if it even is that – a tonality of C, let’s say, with the suggestion of a flattened seventh and a minor third in the bass – is so restrained, and when this is left for F minor and a very brief V chord the effect is extraordinary. And the first time this happens we don’t know yet but it’s incomplete; on its second iteration it is extended so that the title of the song can be enunciated. This is quite marvellous; when Prince actually utters the words ‘Sign o the times’ the gratification is simply wonderful. He could simply have repeated himself but he had more to give. Craftsmanship. How I wish he hadn’t died.

When I wrote about Jarrett’s Sun Bear Concerts I spoke of hearing them as though that were the first time, although that only happens once and for the audience that attended his concerts in Japan they had the irreplaceable experience of hearing the music birthed in real time. I can’t recall the first time I heard ‘Sign o the times’ and it may actually have been when I saw the concert at the Kino. It has become something I rely on. Prince’s way of leading up to the tune, with the dramatised passage outside the auditorium, is breathtaking. The chords that precede the song’s opening are not on the album, but they make such a lot of sense. Every time I see this I am amazed.

If I had a third choice it would be Talking Heads’ ‘Life during wartime’, performed live in the Stop Making Sense concert, because of the way the two chords are played against each other, the ‘This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco’ on the V of the verse’s I, repeated so that you expect it but then in the last instance it doesn’t appear. This is restraint, patience, awareness of an uncommon kind in popular music. I travel in the car with my third kid and always they want to listen to Smooth FM. It’s ghastly and I hate it, and most of the music they play comes from the 1980s so I’m already too familiar with it, but I long for moments when someone has made a wise, a decent, choice. Too rare but so precious.

28/vi/2025

Getting older I spend more and more time remembering, as it seems obvious enough to say there’s more and more to remember. I think a lot about memory, and about how things are preserved, and when things are gone what it is that remains of them, and stuff like that. How you might have been really close friends with someone for a while, but then somehow it faded, or something changed, or perhaps you can’t even say what it was that happened, but it is no longer as it used to be. And what is it that you remember when you recall the time you spent together? How is it encoded? Or how physically you occupied a certain space at a certain time, and while that space still exists, you’re no longer in it and probably never will be again. You aren’t the same, and perhaps it isn’t either, so even if you went back it’d be different. But you do recall. Or buildings that you use to know, or perhaps even lived in, that have been destroyed or removed or altered beyond recognition. Which isn’t just memory, I guess, but more about how things change. And that’s interesting too, in its own way.

But thinking about the past, two things recently occurred that shocked me, in the sense that I was taken quite by surprise. The first more than the second. I was going bowling with Luci, and beforehand we found a Japanese lunch in an alley I’d never previously visited, and all of this was tremendously enjoyable. Getting there we did the tricky thing of getting off the train at Richmond and finding a loop train so we could be deposited at Melbourne Central, where lies the bowling alley. And on the train we took for those two stations, into whom did I run but Professor Donna Coleman. This was a magnificent surprise, as I’m afraid I hadn’t actually recognised her until I heard her unmistakable voice asking, ‘Are you Tim Stevens?’ And so much came back. Donna has been trying to catch up for the last year or so but things have been so horrendously busy I haven’t been able to get anywhere and much as I might have liked to, I have failed. But there she was, on the train, and suddenly everything was back.

Because I first met Donna thirty years ago, when I began my Masters at the VCA. I knew her a little bit in first year, as she taught friends of mine – perhaps I heard more about her in that case than I actually experienced myself – but in second year I decided to do a piano duo as an ensemble project with my dear friend Sandra Aleksejeva (now Birze) and Donna was our supervisor. We rehearsed Stravinsky’s Le sacre du Printemps, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, music by Bernard Herrmann from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho that Sandra had arranged, and my arrangement of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Eighth veil’ from Afro Bossa.

The Stravinsky is a finger-buster and rehearsing it remains the only time I’ve injured myself while playing the piano. Playing this music was unusual for me by this time as I’d gone completely into jazz and improvisation since leaving school, and didn’t play very much repertoire at all. But gosh it was fun. Donna was the most exciting and stimulating supervisor, full of incredible ideas and apt to say things like ‘fifty million pianissimi’, or ‘they’ll be laid out in lavender when you play that.’ Our rehearsals felt so incredibly special, and because they tended to take place on Friday afternoons they wound up at Auntie Sue’s, which for those of you who don’t know was the arts pub just near the VCA that has long since closed its doors.

Sandra and I invented a drink that was Cointreau topped up with sparkling wine, and I’ve no idea how many of them we put away during 1996. We played pool, and raved, and it was all so fabulously exhilarating. When you say ‘It could have been last week,’ or ‘I can see myself there right now,’ that’s just a slightly colourful way of saying ‘I remember.’ I haven’t drunk a Cointreau and pop probably since downing them at Auntie Sue’s, and I can’t imagine what it might be like to have one now. Saying that however, I feel like I can taste it in my mouth. I remember Donna prematurely potting the eight ball, and holding her cigarette and her drink in her hand and roaring out some fabulously deletable expletives. The thing that is most memorable however is the love that I felt with Sandra and Donna, the collaborative feeling we generated, our shared desire to make something meaningful and special and that did justice to the time we spent on it. Usually what I am remembering is love.

The second surprise, although a more scripted one, was a performance given by the remaining Red Onions with guests and friends at the East Malvern RSL last Sunday. When I read about this in an email from the Jazz Museum I felt there was no way I couldn’t be there; that band has been such an important part of my life since 1996 – the same year as the Sacre and the Rhapsody in Blue – and I really wanted to hear them again. Brett Iggulden lives in the bush in New South Wales so is hardly ever in Melbourne; that he was going to be there was encouragement enough to get along. And to catch up with him, and with John Scurry and Howard Cairns was so delightful, as I don’t see them nearly as often as I’d like to.

Interviewing the Onions between 1997 and 2000 for my PhD is something I remember enormously fondly, and the kindness with which they dealt with my questioning and my probing was hugely rewarding. Because I had played with the Onions on their final performances at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz and Blues in 1996 I was suddenly in touch with this Australian jazz institution and desperate to research and to tell its story. I’d never have met Ade Monsbourgh had it not been for those Wang gigs, and even though I never saw him again it’s an experience I shan’t forget. The photo of the band on p. 143 of John Clare’s Why Wangaratta? moves me so deeply when I see it; all of us who played together, including Ade, and Al with his arm around me. I was there.

And hearing them play again was so thrilling. Brett, now nearly 80, sounds youthful and ambitious and utterly joyful, and the setlist was not sentimental – there were many items the band never recorded and a few that it did – and all the years of playing together assured the ensemble sound. All the memory of hearing the band’s records, most of which I own copies of, and then of enlarging my traditional jazz acquaintance through the models that gave them their material was all brought back by seeing and hearing them again. I was, it may be surprising to know, very happy when I did the PhD. Living alone in West Brunswick, cooking dinner parties for friends, seeing Sall at the weekends because she was so horrifically busy too – these are all sweet memories. And three years spent on a single topic means it’s there forever. I treasure it even as memory. It is with me.

31/v/2025