You know how I was saying the day before how it was nice to be on a new continent. Well, Australia went down massively in my expectations the next day. From a land of bars, big drinks and big servings to some scrubby rubbish plants and sand and cold nights. Thoroughly unpleasant. Large mouselike creatures started bounding around too, which seemed to have secondary mouths in their bellies where they kept smaller versions of themselves. At least I got the Koala bears. Though I was disappointed to find out that you can’t eat them.
There was a point when my Walkabout was about as pleasant as going to a Walkabout bar. But it appears my drunken stumblings had not taken me too far inland and with a clever interpretation as to where the breeze was coming from I soon found myself stumbling towards the shoreline.
There I saw a strangely orange young man, standing next to a long bright red lozenge.
“G’day.”
“Hmm,” I was being cagey.
“You here for the surfing?”
“Surfing?”
“You know, catch some surf.”
“You expect me, to stand on a board of fibre-glass, risking life and limbs out there in the waves, who are no less dangerous for not having Katrina with them.”
“Suit yourself. Echo Beach is grate for sunbathing too.”
Echo Beach. Well, as you can imagine I was out in the water as soon as possible, after quickly defecating on Martha and the Muffins only hit.
MARTHA & THE MUFFINS – Echo Beach
“My job is very boring, I’m an office clerk.”
I bet that line rings through the head of Martha Landly every morning when she wakes up. I bet it literally echoes through the heads of all of her muffins too. Y’see, as one hit wonders go, nobody touches Echo Beach. One of the few successes of a campaign I ran in the early nineties to destroy the careers of so called promising bands. All they promised to me was more hellish up beat pop, so I went right in to destroy them. I did this mainly by organising a tour with Roxy Music, which in 1980 would have dispirited anyone (Ferry was about 18 stone at this point and the embodiment of everything punk was not, except rubbish).
That said, I have never been able to obliterate Echo Beach which I am sure earns enough money for Martha amd some of her muffins to go on holiday every year, when they have to take time off from being Office Clerks. Though it unlikely it earns enough to get them over to Echo Beach, Australia. Not all the way from Canada. It is after all very “far away” – but in space. Success is now “far away in time”.
“My job is very boring, I’m an office clerk.”
Sorry Martha. Some of us were born for greatness. Some of us were born to write songs about boring jobs, and then end up doing them for the rest of our lives…