www.skinsnsharps.com
Since the skinsnsharps exhibition, I have been busy spreading Sharpie love at Melbourne’s Federation Square book market. I meet interesting people and get to talk about Sharpies, treads, connies, Rose Tattoo and La Femme ALL day!
A fellow bookstall holder was reporter for JUKE music magazine in the 70s and he didn’t look impressed when I told him I didn’t buy or read JUKE, it was too intellectual and didn’t have glossy posters. We got talking about The Models and James Freud and I said I wasn’t a fan – La Femme, with Chane Chane was the only Melbourne punk band for me. He questioned me on what it was I liked about La Femme and I gave him an in-depth answer ‘I dunno, I just loved them’.
La Femme was ‘our’ band and the remnants of the 70s Sharpies would meet up at gigs around Melbourne where we drank, danced and rumbled through our last years of teenage freedom.
Early this year Sam played a demo cd for me of Chane Chane singing with their band City Sharps. The punk beat played with vintage instruments got me in and when I heard Chane’s voice, using my teenage Phd in music, I said to Sam in awe ‘He’s still got it’.
At the moment the City Sharps CD is on continuous play in ‘Barney’, my XF station wagon. I am learning all the words, so I can sing loudly and badly at the gigs, where I shut my eyes and pretend to be seventeen again, and no one can hear me over the beat.
