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INNER CITY VIDEO
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The Inner City Video, or ICTV, was proposed as a DVD third-tier to the 2005 publication of the new edition of my book Inner City Sound (along with the release of the second tier, the Inner City Soundtrack CD), and it got so far as a ‘shooting script’ stage – which is what the following pages below present, embedded with the accompanying clips – before ABC Enterprises pulled the plug on it, for reasons, again, I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand. Click onto the episode titles below to go the page...
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This set’s origins probably start in the first film proposal based on my book Stranded. Even as I was still completing the book in the mid-90s, I worked on a documentary pitch with the late Mark Worth, who, like Richard Lowenstein and Paul Goldman, was a graduate of Swinburne film school and a denizen of the Crystal Ballroom; he had made the short film Revolt into Style about the Fashion Design Council parade there in the early 80s. For reasons I can’t quite recall, the idea ran aground despite some initial interest. Then after the publication of the book, I started on another pitch with Tony Moore, which again got a bit of traction but finally not enough (Tony would later go on to take the helm at Pluto Press and, to my eternal gratitude, first publish Buried Country). Then Long Way to the Top came up, and of course I really only came to appreciate later on how the show’s fifth episode – its controversial fifth episode – was in so many ways only a slight variation on Stranded. The episode was controversial because, even as we were making it, we knew it would likely divide the audience. And indeed it did, as the ratings showed when the series was first broadcast in 2000: a lot of the baby boomers switched off because it told the story of the 1980s not so much from the perspective of the era’s icons of stadium rock like Jimmy Barnes, Johnny Farnham and INXS, but moreso the story that Stranded told, the alternative history of post-punk pioneers like Nick Cave, the GoBetweens and the Triffids, who were forced into exile in the UK. Sadly it probably did take the deaths of David McComb and Grant McLennan, along with inexorable rise and rise of Nick Cave, for Australia at large to finally appreciate the talent it just seemed to have spurned for so long.
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And so then towards the mid-2000s when I was preparing the Inner City Sound re-release, and having got wind that the ABC had even entertained a proposal for a 'bootleg' documentary called Inner City Sound that had nothing to do with me, I had to try and reclaim some control of my own legacy. I knew I could take so much more of the material shot for the controversial fifth Long Way… episode based on Stranded and, well, remix it. Greg Appel had already cut a number of extras for the DVD release of the series, but still the punk-to-post-punk era begged deeper treatment. I’d had experience with the ABC doing the still-born show Rare Grooves, and I’d written a couple of DVDs loosely based around the history of Triple-J, and all these were the same format: wrapping a script/narrative around a series of clips. So I thought, why not do the same thing - an oral aural history - for Inner City Sound? Since it was drawing almost entirely from archive material owned by the ABC, it would cheap and simple to produce at a time when the ABC was crying out for programming for its then-new digital channels: I’d shoot a few links to camera and then just cut it all together. And the ABC gave me a bit of rope on doing that – until it all just seemed to fizzle out. I was left holding the 14-episode ICTV script I’m reproducing here now because, presented in this format with designated YouTube clips embedded, I think it’s a worthwhile addition to the literature that shouldn't be kept under wraps.
(The ironic post-script here is that by 2015 – twenty years after my book, after all the unsuccessful film pitches as detailed above – Stranded finally became a film, albeit unconnected to me apart from having duped me into being an interview subject. The film is a dog's breakfast of shallow, glib mediocrity and as such a totally wasted opportunity, and it got its just deserts after being once-screened, totally forgotten.) _______________________________________________________________
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4. ROOTS &
INFLUENCES (O.S.)
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10. SWAMP A-GO-GO
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