Issue Number Two: "Music Used To Be Escape"
Self Doubt, Yuppy Burritos, Offensive Headwear, and the debut of 'Pissrat'.
A Note / Overshare from The Editor.
Welcome to issue two. I hope you’ve been keeping well since issue one. You may have seen a post from me a few weeks ago on Instagram proclaiming that the new issue of this would be out in a matter of days.
Obviously that didn’t happen.
The truth is that I got very in my own head about the relevance of doing something like this and in the moments that I could push those thoughts aside, I ended up stressing about the quality of what I’m producing, which seem now to be rather contradictory thoughts to be stressed out about.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good mental spiral as much as the next person, but there’s got to be some consistency.
This is a project that is being undertaken completely for the love of the work; the only true reward is the satisfaction of having done it, which can end up making it feel completely pointless and hard to focus on.
I was skimming back over something that I’d written for this the other day. I was simultaneously pretty pleased with how it read and also overwhelmingly crushed by the realisation that I'm just prattling on about some food that I've eaten and assumed that that’s a) a worthwhile use of my time, and b) of interest to anyone else in the world.
I am prepared to accept that, as with almost everything in my life, I’m overthinking this. Someone said to me recently that comedians are very guilty of assuming that a mundane thing that’s happened to them is the most interesting thing of all time. They intended this to be a criticism but all I could think was, yeah, that’s the point isn’t it? That’s literally the job: to stand in front of a crowd of people and proclaim that your life is the most interesting, your observations the funniest. That’s what the audience have paid you for. Minutiae has always been funny to me, and personally I’d rather listen to someone deliver a thirty minute diatribe about a quiche that they bought down the shops, than a yarn that spans three countries and is full of insane coincidences and colourful characters. But hey, that's just me: the main character, a person whose opinions are fact.
Even as I’m writing this, I have to wonder: why have I decided to kick off this light-hearted newsletter with a level of candour that borders on a cry for help? I think subconsciously what I’ve tried to do is to protect the integrity of the other pieces in this edition: “if you thought a man scribbling away about his favourite band and a lump of cheese was self-absorbed and a waste of time – well then get a load of this introduction where he spills his guts about what he thinks about the fact that he’s scribbling away about his favourite band and lump of cheese!”
A Week of Meals in Perth, Western Australia.
As is the case with almost everything in my life that was, at one point, a hobby and/or a passion, I’ve mistakenly decided that I can enrich my life by converting my interest in food into some form of “career”. This newsletter that you’re reading represents the beginning stages of this foolish gambit.
I’ve never understood how the great food writers and presenters do it. I’m painfully incapable of boiling down my thoughts on a great meal into anything more coherent than “yeah wow. Yum.”
I’ve been on a bit of an Anthony Bourdain kick lately. I got given Kitchen Confidential for my birthday, and then Roadrunner, a documentary about him, came out and it absolutely broke me. Off the back of that, I started going back through Parts Unknown.
I’ve been to a couple of places around the world that Tony has highlighted on his show: a banh mi place in Hoi An, the pho joint in Ho Chi Minh that he famously visited with Barack Obama. I guess when I say ‘around the world’ I just mean ‘Vietnam’, but I was struck at both of them by the reverie that these restauranteurs still clearly had years later about the fact that they were once visited by The Great Man. A wall adorned with photos from his visit, printed out screenshots from the episode they were featured in. It’s crazy that he elicited that kind of response when he never had fame as a chef. He was just a cool dude who knew what was good.
When I was in Hong Kong in 2018 doing some gigs, I arrived early to the comedy club on the first night of the run. The comics were buzzing; Anthony Bourdain was in town. He’d been spotted dining in the neighbourhood just an hour before. A bunch of them had seen him on their way to the show. Everyone on the streets seemed to be drunk off the energy of coming into the orbit of such a legendary figure. I asked the MC of the show what restaurant Tony had been at, because I figured if he had been there, I’d better make it a priority to head there tomorrow night before the show.
I did just that and had an absolutely fantastic meal. A seaweed pasta thing that was apparently the speciality there. I have a feeling that maybe I ordered it because I asked the waiter what Tony had had, but that seems like too perfect and convenient of a memory so maybe my brain has invented it. Either way, I ate something I wouldn’t normally have eaten, in a restaurant I normally wouldn’t have known existed, and I had a great time. It felt like one of those beautiful little accidents that the universe throws at you sometimes. About a week later, I opened Twitter and saw an outpouring of grief over the passing of Anthony Bourdain. I ate at one of the last restaurants he visited for the show. I was telling someone this story recently and I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of the place. I kept thinking it was ‘Double Happiness’ but that’s a Powderfinger album. It literally only just occurred to me that I could just watch the damn episode he was filming and it’ll probably be in there.
All of this is to say that I would love to be able to write and talk eloquently about food but I have no idea how to do that and I feel self-conscious about even trying. But one of the big takeaways from Roadrunner is that even Tony felt that way when he was starting out.
So to that end, I’m going to throw myself into the task of writing about every meal I eat this weekend while I’m on tour, somewhere far less exotic and exciting than anywhere featured on Parts Unknown: Perth, Western Australia.
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
Toastface Grillah is a Perth institution, I remember hearing about them on radio years ago when Ghostface Killah was in town and they campaigned really hard to get him to come down. They were successful. I can’t quite put my finger on why the name bugs me, but it does. I’ve eaten here before and thought it was fine, I pop in today because it’s next door to where I’m staying. I order a cheese sandwich with jalapenos because it’s one of the only things on the menu that doesn’t have an embarrassing name – Toastface Grillah is a graduate of the Boost Juice School of Having Menu Items That Make You Sound Like A Total Asshole When You Order Them (my first choice would have been the meatball sandwich but it’s called ‘The Balls Deep’, which I simply refuse, as a thirty-five year old man, to say out loud to the young lady serving me.)
The sandwich itself is fine, pretty good even. But it’s a toasted sandwich. Being ‘fine, pretty good even’, is the absolute bare minimum requirement for a toasted sandwich. I’m going to really need to eat some more interesting things on this trip if I’m hoping to improve my culinary writing skills while I’m here.
WEDNESDAY NIGHT
I have a gig tonight in Scarborough, at a pub that looks pretty cool from the photos. I decide that it’s probably going to be easiest to just eat there before the show. A nice little pub feed down by the water. Sounds like plenty of fodder for an aspiring food writer to riff on.
I Google the pub to get a look at their menu so that I can start formulating an idea of what I’ll want to eat, in six hours time (a classic move that I do, on average, at least twice a week.)
I scroll down to the ‘food’ part of the pub’s page, and have a guess who handles their kitchen? Toastface Grillah. What is going on here? Are they really that deprived of culture and cuisine in this city that they’ve allowed a cheese sandwich shop with a pun name to have their absolute run of the place? I’ve been here an hour and I’ve already come across more Toastface Grillahs than 7-11’s. I’m annoyed about what this means for my dinner but I’m also honestly a little bit excited to see how many more Toastface’s I end up stumbling across while I’m here.
My friend Brendan recommends I check out El Grotto before the show. His exact words are ‘El Grotto is decent’. Which is just about as faint as praise can get. Still, even a vague lead is worth following – better than flapping around on the foreshore like an A-grade dropkick for hours, looking for somewhere better-than-decent, only to end up honking down some Subway in the carpark ten minutes before the gig starts.
I get a seat at El Grotto, facing the water. I have a beautiful view of the sunset, the Indian Ocean, and the storm clouds that are rolling in and meaning that I’m probably not going to be leaving the hotel much tomorrow.
I order the steak burrito. It’s your typical overpriced yuppie Mexican, but it hits the spot. Big hunks of steak get dislodged with each bite; my little pincers are too weak to properly chew through them. I feel like I’m playing Jenga – each bite removes far more from the burrito than I intend, it’s structural integrity incrementally weakening. I’ve been trying to be more diligent about giving the act of eating my undivided attention – not looking at my laptop or the TV, just thinking about what I’m eating and really processing it, really thinking about the flavours and how it all makes me feel. You would think that being alone in a foreign city, on the beach, while the sun is setting would mean that the steak burrito would be my sole focus, but you’d be wrong. I hold the burrito in one hand, and in the other I hold my phone. I’m texting almost everyone I know about what I watched on the plane today – a Hindi film called RRR which is one of the most genuinely spectacular things I’ve ever seen. Everyone I’m messaging either hasn’t seen the film and doesn’t seem to care at all that I have seen the film. Fair enough. By this stage, the burrito is unsalvageable, it’s assumed it’s final form of a mound of slop on my plate. I head to the show. The storm clouds get darker.
THURSDAY
A few friends who have recently visited the city have recommended that I check out The State Buildings while I’m here – in particular, the Italian restaurant POST which is one of several restaurants within. It’s raining heavily all day, so the stroll to my lunch will end up being the extent of my outdoor activities for the day.
I arrive to discover a much more upmarket situation than I had been anticipating. In retrospect, I’m not sure what part of hearing ‘The State Buildings’ made me assume that this restaurant would be wedged between Guzman Y Gomez and Schnitz but to be honest it’s a welcome relief to be inside of a building and feel no risk of seeing a Toastface Grillah.
The clientele is exclusively office workers in suits, and then me in a stained hoodie, dining by myself, hunching over my table and drawing in my tattered little sketchbook while I wait for my meal to come out. I order the buffalo mozzarella with caponata and the tagliatelle with slow-cooked beef and tomato sugo. Italy was one of the last places I travelled internationally before the pandemic and the part of the trip that left the biggest impression on me was how pasta is never the whole meal – in many cases it’s a starter. God, they just absolutely get it. Nothing quite like coming home with an excuse to order way too much any time I’m at an Italian restaurant, while being able to tell myself “I’m being authentic”.
Mozzarella as it’s own meal is just an incredible move already, the zestiness of the caponata balances it out perfectly. Tagliatelle is up there as an all-time pasta format for me and the slow-cooked beef is perfectly tender.
This is a huge meal and I’ve ended up eating pretty late so I tell myself I’ll just have a light dinner before the gig – or maybe even skip it altogether.
Four hours later I’m eating a fried chicken burger.
FRIDAY
Today is my last day to get a proper lunch in the city, as tomorrow we’re doing a live podcast that starts in the early afternoon (I end up having a parma at the venue) and then I fly back to Melbourne the following morning (I eat three chicken salad sandwiches in the Virgin lounge).
One of the last times I was here, a few years ago, someone recommended a ramen joint to me, which I remember being fantastic. Ramen is my favourite food, and it’s usually the first thing I hunt out in a new city. What I love about it is that it’s a relatively simple dish but it still varies so wildly wherever you go. I’ve eaten ramen all over the world and I don’t feel like I’ve ever had two that are even close to being similar.
The place that I head for today is Ramen Keisuke Tonkotsu King – weirdly, one of very few ramen joints in Perth. On the walk there, I stumble across a comic book shop and I buy almost $100 worth of manga, just to “get into the spirit”.
Tonkotsu King is relatively small and I’ve come down during the peak lunch hour, so I have to wait in line, behind a sea of office workers. I’m starving, and for a brief, deranged moment, I contemplate flashing my recently acquired haul of Japanese comic books in an attempt to prove my credentials and hopefully cut the line.
Finally, I’m seated. Another thing I love about a good ramen joint is the ease of ordering. There’s generally a very sparse menu and you’re given a little checklist on which to tick the things that you want. I’m seated at the counter, crushed in against another solo diner with huge shoulders. He looks over at my ordering sheet as I’m filling it out, like he’s trying to copy off me in year 9 maths. When he eyeballs me ticking ‘extra soft noodles’, he scoffs at me and then chomps down a mouthful of his presumably Galaxy Brain order of noodles that are the texture of bungee straps. If I were more of a Bourdain-type of personality, I would take this as an invitation to start a dialogue with this man, the two of us at first butting heads over our disparate views on noodle texture before eventually realising, hours later over a shared plate of gyoza and a couple of cold Kirins, that we have more in common than we first thought. Perhaps a shared love and appreciation of the work of Akira Toriyama, or a mutual dislike of Toastface Grillah. In the early hours of the morning, we would be solidifying this new lifelong friendship with a session of karaoke, me turning a blind eye when my new pen pal raps the N word “because it’s on the screen so it’s OK”, because he’s offered me a place to stay next time I’m in town and accommodation here is expensive.
But I’m not that personality type, so instead I focus on my sketchbook and do a drawing of a frog playing tennis. The ramen arrives and it’s delicious. As you’d expect from an establishment that calls itself ‘The Tonkotsu King’, the broth is thick and richy and creamy. And guess what? The noodles are soft as hell, barely touching my teeth before absolutely disintegrating – just the way daddy likes them.
This evening I’m performing my solo show ‘Turtle Island’ for the final time at the Oasis Comedy Club, and then doing a spot in their regular Friday night show straight after. My solo show is at 6 and I’m pretty anxious about being able to remember it all it after not doing it for a few months, plus my girlfriend’s mum (who lives in Perth) is coming along, which will be her first time seeing me do comedy. All of this is to say that I’m feeling way too on edge to think about dinner before the show, so I decide that I’ll get a late dinner on the way back to the hotel.
The solo show goes great and afterwards, my girlfriends’ mother is introducing herself to people as my mother-in-law which I take as a sign that she must have enjoyed it.
I have a lengthy bit in the show about Jamiroquai and how they were my first ever favourite band. I leave the gig and have a little look on Google for some food options on the walk home that might still be open. I decide on Sauma, an Indian restaurant that stays open pretty late which I came to last time I was in Perth and remember as being good, although I was quite drunk when I went there. The restaurant is surprisingly busy for 10:30pm. I scan the menu even though I knew before I even walked in the door what my order was going to be – butter chicken and a garlic naan. Every single other person dining in here is white which means that every single other table in here also has a butter chicken and a garlic naan on it. I sometimes think about Indian restaurants that are in predominantly white neighbourhoods and how the ingredients for butter chicken must outweigh all of the other ingredients in their pantry by an insane margin.
The food is fine although to be honest it’s not quite as good as I remember it being from last time. The butter chicken doesn’t quite have that rich, tangy kick that I really like, and the garlic naan is a little dried out. Even so, this meal still ranks as probably my favourite of the whole trip, for one simple reason: when I arrive, I quickly notice that a Jamiroquai song is playing faintly in the background. A pretty nice coincidence, I think to myself. For the entire rest of the meal, Jamiroquai is literally the only music that plays. Nothing but bangers from across the gamut of their catalogue. I resist the urge, on several occasions, to ask the waiter if they could possibly turn up the volume as I’m struggling to hear “Seven Days In Sunny June” over the waspy couple gossiping about one of their friends at the table next to me. I get back to the hotel at about 11pm. I wish I could say that going to sleep thirty minutes after smashing a curry was a new experience for me, but I used to live in an apartment building that had an Indian restaurant on the bottom floor so it was a depressingly regular occurrence in my life for about three years. What I learned in those years was that filling your belly with dense, rich food right before going nigh nighs opens you up to some of the most demented dreams that you’ll ever have in your life, and tonight is no exception. I have the humiliating experience of dreaming that I’m in the band Jamiroquai – alternating between playing bass and playing drums – and the even more humiliating experience of becoming thoroughly depressed when I wake up and realise that this isn’t the reality that I actually live in.
I wake up the next morning feeling hungover, even though I haven’t been drinking this week. I have to do some writing and then head to the venue to set up for the live podcast. It’s been fun basing all my meals for the last few days around the conceit that I’m a “food writer” working on a “big piece” for my dinky little online newsletter but I’m starting to feel weighed down by the burden of decision every couple of hours, by having to think long and hard with every mouthful about the signals that are being sent from my tastebuds to my brain, and about how I might eloquently put this into words later on.
I’m hungry, even though the last thing I did before going to sleep was eat a gigantic meal, and the clock is ticking. I let out a big, exasperated exhale and roll out of bed.
Five minutes later, I say the following phrase: “Hi, could I please get a large soy flat white and the uh… *sigh* ‘Balls Deep’, please?”
Click here for this issue’s playlist on Apple Music.
Click here for this issue’s playlist on Spotify.
If you don’t use either of those services then I’m afraid I cannot help you.
My First Favourite Band.
‘Just Another Story’ - Jamiroquai.
I was recently walking through the back streets of Brunswick in the middle of the afternoon with my friend Ben, when I saw a lady on the other side of the road walking her dog, who looked very familiar to me. The lady looked familiar, not the dog. Although the dog did look similar to a lot of other dogs that I’ve seen. We made eye contact and exchanged that scrunched-up face, the one that says ‘are you the person I think you are? And if so, has it been too long for us to stop and chat?’
She ended up crossing the road for a chat, a move which I’ve never been confident enough to pull off in my entire life. She’s someone I haven’t seen for many, many years and rather than catch up in any meaningful way, we talk almost exclusively about her dog.
Eventually she asked if I live in the area. ‘Oh no,’ I said ‘my friend and I were just at another friend of ours’ place nearby… recording a podcast… about,’ and at this point I exhaled very deeply so that my embarrassment and exasperation would be made absolutely clear, ‘video games.’
When I was back in my car, I was thinking back over every aspect of this brief interaction (classic) and a thought struck me like lightning: I had no cause to be ashamed to tell this lady that I had just been recording a video games podcast. Because twenty years ago, her and I had met on an online message board for the band Jamiroquai.
I still remember vividly taking a family holiday to the Mornington Peninsula when I was roughly thirteen years old, and my best friend Pete coming with us. Pete had recently come into possession of ‘Travelling Without Moving’, Jamiroquai’s third album, released in 1997. A blockbuster which included the singles ‘Cosmic Girl’ and ‘Virtual Insanity’.
It’s a real turning point for the band. Their first album, ‘Emergency on Planet Earth’ had arrived out of nowhere and been an instant acid jazz classic. The front man, Jay Kay, appeared on the album insert in a ratty oversized poncho and in the albums singles, ‘When You Gonna Learn’ and ‘Emergency on Planet Earth’, he sang passionately about the rapidly worsening environmental issues and the urgent need for action. This was now almost thirty years ago.
They followed this up with ‘The Return of the Space Cowboy’, probably my favourite of all their albums. It opens with an incredible nine-minute track which changes styles about five times - sort of like a squelchy, starry-eyed version of Bohemian Rhapsody, an unflinching reflection on Kay’s youth spent doing drugs and committing crimes. Elsewhere the album touches on addiction, ancestral shame, and the loss of Kay’s twin brother at a young age.
And then comes ‘Travelling Without Moving’, the album that Pete introduced me to on a family holiday on the Mornington Peninsula, and which I’m certain he only purchased because the cover art is a take off of the Ferrari logo.
I obviously had no idea of this at the time, but this album was poorly received by the Jamiroquai die-hards who had frothed over their first two albums. And I have to admit, even though I do like this album a lot, it is a pretty funny and very hard pivot. Sure, ‘Virtual Insanity’ does warn of the inevitability of a dystopian future which seems to be just on the horizon, but I can understand that being of little consolation to people who were irate by the idea of their favourite eco-warrior musician producing a video clip which is literally nothing more than him driving around in a very fast car, for a song which is about literally nothing more than how good it is to drive around in a very fast car.
With every following album, Jamiroquai’s lyrics and music tended further and further away from the soulful grooves and impassioned pleas and became more about sweaty disco numbers that hinted at flirtations both on and off the dance floor. This is the era during which I get very, very into the work of Jamiroquai.
They were the first live concert I ever saw, at the Vibes on a Summers Day Festival at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, with Pete (of course) who wore a Ferrari hat to the gig, confirming my earlier suspicions about his motivations for purchasing ‘Travelling Without Moving’.
I spent hours and hours of my young life trawling Jamiroquai message boards, obsessing over set lists with other fans, chasing down B-sides and bootlegs, and yes, occasionally meeting up with other people from the message boards who lived in Melbourne, and going to concerts with them. Jay Kay famously was, and is, a massive fan of the brand Adidas and so for a while, those were the only shoes I would wear. I thought he was the coolest person on the planet, so I dressed like him in almost every way - thankfully stopping just short of the offensive Native American head-dress.
It’s not like I’ve had to deal with the gradual decline of Jamiroquai morphing into an easy punchline - they were already considered to be pretty uncool during the time when I was incredibly into them. Other kids my age were into Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Eminem, I was the outlier. I’ve leant into my early fandom of Jamiroquai over the years, because I do think it’s a pretty funny band to have been obsessed with and also because I really like the idea that, for better or worse, you’re always gonna ride hard for your first favourite band in some way. Jamiroquai are apparently working on something at the moment, and I don’t expect it to connect with me in even a fraction of the ways that their music did when I was first exposed to it, but I’ll still be taking an eager and curious listen on day one, because listening to them still reminds me of being a kid, sitting around a portable stereo in a living room on the Mornington Peninsula with my friend Pete.
Also I want to share an explosive theory with you all: I have a strong suspicion that culturally, Jamiroquai are on the cusp of a big comeback. One of those situations where they do a huge tour, playing to a mixture of old fans, people of my generation who remember all the bangers, and younger people attending semi-ironically. I could easily see them headlining Splendour In The Grass in the “hey, remember these guys? They’re actually really cool” slot.
My basis for this theory is that the rate that I am encountering Jamiroquai in the wild has been skyrocketing. Cafes, restaurants, shops. They’re everywhere again. Something’s in the air.
Last night, I was out to dinner with some people and we started talking about our first-ever concerts. I mentioned mine, and my friend Tom said “you know Dioni met him, right?” I did actually know this story (she attended their first Australian tour here), but I happily heard it again, politely choosing to not cause a scene at the fact that everyone at the table was referring to Jamiroquai as ‘he’ not ‘they’ (by which I mean, Jamiroquai is a band, not one guy) - a faux pas which was a common source of frustration for me and the gang on the message boards in ‘02.
One minute later, the bill arrives and I notice something. ‘Virtual Insanity’ is playing in the restaurant. We all gasp. I’m telling you. Something’s in the air.
Upcoming Shows.
SYDNEY: September 17 & 18. ‘GREATEST HITS (PENDING)’ Work In Progress Show with Tom Ballard.
These are happening right now. Tom Ballard and I are doing a split bill, new material show as part of the Sydney Fringe. We’ll each do about 25 minutes or so. I’ve got a lot of fun ideas that I’m looking forward to testing and it’s always great and inspiring watching Tom work on stuff.
BRISBANE: September 29. ‘THE GREAT MAN (A WORK IN PROGRESS). Solo trial show.
I had such a great time doing spots at Good Chat earlier in the year that I decided to book a little run for later in the year to work out some new stuff. And now it’s later in the year. This will be me putting together all of the new stuff that I’ve been trying since May this year and seeing how it all feels together. Plus I’ll have some local guest comedians do a spot too.
MELBOURNE: October 22. LITTLE DUM DUM CLUB. Live podcast.
A live recording of our podcast in a big venue on a Saturday night. We’ve got some great guests lined up and some incredibly foolhardy stunts. These shows are always pretty riotous and silly and a lot of fun.
MELBOURNE: November 24. ‘SATURATION FASCINATION’. Art exhibition.
I’m finally doing another art exhibition. Still working it all out but the plan is for it to be a big comic strip that takes up the whole room. I’ll have work for sale as well. Opening night will be on November 24th with a big party and then it’ll stay on until December 6th so you can still check it out even if you can’t make the opening night party.
This was quite the fucking rollercoaster. Thank you for the trip down memory laneway.
The fact that so little has changed in that gastronomically challenged wasteland of a town cosplaying as a city, is why I’m glad I’ll reliably be able to enjoy a serviceable cheese sandwich next time I’m back.