Loungeroom, Country Victoria, Late at night, 2019
Backyard of a squat, Melbourne, Late at night, 1988
It’s nearly midnight. I’ve just spent the entire day painting the spare room. It took much longer than I thought. I flop onto the couch covered in flecks of blue paint with a cup of tea and a crumpet. I flick the telly on. Rage bursts onto the screen. I haven’t watched in decades. I should probably go to bed but Smash It Up by The Damned is on. It reminds me of my misspent youth. The distorted R-R-R-R-Raaaage cry punctuates the end of the song.
Another grungy chord fades in, and a guitarist’s face in sepia with a plectrum in his mouth, fills the screen. I’m suddenly alert. I recognise that face! Seconds later, rapid-fire drumming joins the manic guitars and the footage cuts to the drummer’s nose. I recognise that face too! As the band and song title come up on the screen – VENOM P. STINGER – Walking About – the lead singer starts screeching: “They got my car, they got my house, they got the keys to my door, I can’t get out…” I remember these guys! I saw them play heaps in the 1980s, at parties in squats, in sharehouse loungerooms and at mad pub gigs. Two of them are dead now. The other two are pretty well known these days, almost respectable. I still exchange the odd message with one on social media, but just about kids and art.
The clip pans around from the band, switching to grainy colour as it cuts to the antics of the crowd watching in some scruffy backyard. Some are no more than sort of flinching to the intense sound. Others are leaping about erratically. Though it’s hard to make out through the low-brow blurry images and all the chaotic jumping about, I think I spot other people I recognise. There was never much footage of stuff back then. You had to be pretty mainstream to have a film clip on telly, plus have the equipment and dollars to make one. It wasn’t like anyone had phone cameras, editing apps or YouTube. I take another sip of tea and pick up my crumpet, captivated by this window into the past.
Mid bite, it happens. There on my TV screen, just for a few seconds, doing an intense wiggily kind of jogging on the spot, is a girl with cropped spiky, reddy-bleached hair wearing an oversized suit jacket. I just about choke on my crumpet. That’s me! That’s bloody well me! But before I can be sure, the camera swings back to the band. Was that me? Maybe I just thought...The clip continues to shift erratically about from the musos to the backyard crowd, and just as I think Naaah, can’t be… there it is again, another brief grab of the jogging girl, and the familiar shape and flavour of my much younger self is unmistakably recognizable. What the actual f–k? Before I can really process the absolute weirdness of suddenly, randomly seeing my old self on telly one night, the song is over and the screen is filled with a Swedish punk band running manically around in animal suits. I turn the telly off. What the hell? I’m 52. I live quietly in the country. I usually go to bed pretty early. I NEVER watch Rage. The one time I do, the very next clip that comes on includes my 22-year-old punky self, dancing. How freaky is that?
Jane Leonard dancing in the moonlight to Venom P. Stinger in 1988.
Before I go to bed, I google the song to try and verify what just happened. The same clip is on YouTube, dated almost 20 years after it was filmed. No wonder I never saw it. I freeze frame the spiky redhead. It’s definitely me. But at the same time, I’m a stranger, a mystery, a thousand million moments away from my life now. I remember things about her, but she is distant, as blurry as the grainy footage I’m watching. Over the next few days I show people and tell them how I came to see it. Some laugh, surprised to know about my hardcore phase, especially my kids. Others comment on what noisy shit the song is. But everyone agrees, that yes, it’s pretty freaky. One friend asks me what I think the universe might be trying to tell me.
Weeks later I’m in my new blue spare room studio trying to get to know what I love again now that the kids are grown and I have more time. I’m reading Joan Didion. She writes “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
I think of the Venom P. Stinger clip. I watch it again, the young me dancing, not caring, and caring a lot, all mixed up in exactly the right kind of way. One of the comments underneath reads: ‘I love the crowd at the party, too, they look just like the freaks we hung with’. I pause on my young self. It’s good to see my freak again.
Stereo Story #499
Jane Leonard
Jane is a writer, artist and educator now living and working in both Melbourne and North East Victoria after many years spent in Alice Springs.
Great work, Jane! Much of my own writing (in some sense) concerns my younger self, so I was particularly interested in what you have to say in that context.
Wonderful story Jano, and the quote from Joan Didion is brilliantly apt.
Brilliant! Strange forces at work here.
That’s a ripper story, Jane.
A real-life window into the past suddenly opening before your eyes.
Something we can all relate to Jane, so apt for anyone in mid-life. Have taken to keeping a photo of my younger self on the mantel to connect with her bravery. Glad you have reconnected with your inner freak!
A fabulous story, beautifully written. What an extraordinary thing to happen. I love the Joan Didion quote which I’m now applying to my own life.
Great, freaky story Jane. Fancy Rage delivering up your younger self to you like that. Spooky and telling.
How great that that unlikely and extraordinary window on your younger self opened up, and that you captured the moment. Love it Jane xx
Great stuff, Jane. Sometimes I think I see my younger self on blurry vids from that time, but there were a lot of long-haired blokes in Sydney then.
Venom played the Lewisham Hotel in Sydney around ’91. Guy, who now plays bass gtr w Mudhoney, had brought them up here. There was some problem w the door take, one of the support bands had made off w it. Or something like that. I remember driving around Redfern at 3am, knocking on doors. Crikey, I’d only wanted a lift home!
Love the Didion quote. I dig her writing but have to take it in small doses and dwell on it for a bit.
HI Earl, I remember Guy well, from Lubricated Goat and other outfits. (I used to make the Robots for Thug), I lived in Sydney on and off in Late 80s and early 90s, and used to hang out a bit at Gracelands on Cleveland Street where I think Guy lived. I think we may also have briefly lived in another house on Cleveland St at same time too. Anyway thanks for comments.
A friend of mine told me a few days ago that I was in the Walking About video too, so I watched it just now, and yep. It seems that the guy jumping around in a levis tan corduroy jacket and jeans throwing something around is me… like you, it conjures up some great memories of when I lived a different life. Was it filmed in the big old party house in Wellington Street, St Kilda? There were so many great party houses in st kilda Fitzroy, Collingwood, Richmond, etc back then.