Struth Be Told with Justin Heazlewood [JUSTINHEAZLEWOOD.COM]
Nostalgia is a beautiful thing. A passing fondness for a reflection of a snapshot of the past that you have tucked away in the pool room of your heart. Romance and melancholy, desire and wonder make for a delicious verse / chorus in your mind’s ear. A rainbow of real-time vapour and moonlight, arching across the synaesthesic highway of your quiet flash-fantasies.
Nostalgia is your mind having a cup of tea and a biscuit. It’s putting its feet up in a plush velvet armchair. The beauty of nostalgia is it doesn’t even have to be for a time you’ve existed in. In my twenties, I was entranced by the 1970s. I wanted to see it from a brown velour beanbag in an orange swirl modular rumpus room. My catchphrase was:
‘I’ve never been there, but I want to go back.’
I liked the seventies more than the people who were there. The colours, the (bad) fashions, the thick bass sound of yacht-rock, doobie-tokin’ crazy-listening. Perhaps my seventies fascination was a way of belatedly, spiritually connecting by proxy with my emotionally disabled mother.
She seemed to pine for her youth through the many references to the past. Perhaps if I stared hard into the revolving swirl of the vinyl record label, I would be hypnotised into an astral dimension where I could play time-travel-detective – searching for any clues as to the whereabouts of my mum’s personality crown, of which key jewels remained missing.
I was at a Mac DeMarco concert at the Hi-Fi Bar in Melbourne in 2015. For his encore he played a version of Enter Sandman.
‘What a weird choice,’ I thought. ‘It’s a bit… obvious.’
Then it occurred to me that to his generation, Metallica would seem exotic, in the same way Led Zeppelin were mysterious to me when I was that age.
‘Holy shit,’ I thought later. ‘I’ve just gone up a whole generation bracket!’
Now I see girls with Nirvana t-shirts on. I don’t mind. I’m glad the kids are listening to this music. Noel Gallagher once said Tears For Fears were the ‘Beatles of the eighties’; perhaps Nirvana were the ‘fab-three’ of the nineties.
Being (proudly) the youngest member of Generation X, I can remember when Kurt Cobain died. I was in grade eight. The goth type kids wore the oversized black T-shirts with Kurt’s face in painful focus. I thought it was all a bit much. It would be many years before I had the space to appreciate the power melodies of Nevermind.
And on it goes, the nostalgia-cloud theme park. The rollercoaster empties as a new set of carnival graduates stroll into the hall of mirrors.
Memory is directly linked to smell. The olfactory senses are old and wise, like turtles and elephants.
There is a certain flower scent that takes me back to 1990 visiting Canberra for the first time. I went to a huge video arcade, twice as big as anything back in Tassie. It wasn’t school holidays in the A.C.T, so I had the place to myself. Some kids yelled out to me across the street because they thought I was wagging. I blushed. The centrepiece of the arcade was the never-before-seen After Burner F-14 simulator. It had its own immersive cockpit to sit in. It’s the game Edward Furlong is rocking in the arcade scene in Terminator 2.
Yesterday, I caught a footpath whiff of wood smoke. Smouldering pine cones. It made me nostalgic for my childhood. I instantly wanted to go back to 1993 and have a barbecue at Nan and Pops. We had so many over the years. When you’re young, you can’t imagine them ever ending. Barbecues on tap. An Olympic pool’s worth of pineapple rings. The fat-burst of teeth puncturing sausage – tongue basted in Nan’s home-made tomato sauce.
Yet, those days are long gone.
Oh, what I’d do to sit on the swing seat, listening in. I wouldn’t say much. I would even leave my many questions to one side (like, how World War I soldiers from Britain and Germany put their weapons away on Christmas Day and played soccer).
I fantasise about being looked after again, even if it is just for one lunch. Out in the fresh air and sprawling garden, birds chirping, clothes slow-dancing on the line. My mind could put its feet up and enjoy that sip of Coke.
Justin Heazlewood is an author and musician. His new book Dream Burnie releases Feb 3.
Keep up his latest news and things via https://justinheazlewood.com/