In the bandroom at the Civic... at far right is Anthony Bridge – Suburban General and drummer for Midget

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THERE IS no common thread or purpose for everything that I've written – some of it came from a desire to create my own original artistic vision in words and music, some of it came out of a sense of fun. Some of it out of a need to make money, some of it out of a desire to prove I could be better than some famous author or musician. However, that's all too complex for an hour's discussion so I thought it better to construct a myth, which like all good myths has a large dose of truth, and that myth is that all that I've written has at its core the red laminex kitchen table around which I sat when I was a boy and East Fremantle was a football power.

(Dave sings a shortened version of SUBURBAN BOY)

This was the mantra that drove my most powerful and sustained attempt to create a unique and original world voice. I wrote in my head it driving my Dad's olds station wagon down Kwinana Freeway to Uni circa 1972. I went to London in 1975 seeking fame and fortune, I found neither but what I did discover was the clarity that comes from distance. I came to understand that my suburban heritage was not culture-less but simply a different culture to the European angst that surrounded me. I read an article by an expat Aussie journalist decrying the yobbishness back in Australia and I got angry and answered with this.

(Dave performs CONVICT STREAK)

Yes Australia was redneck, but it was also vital and exciting. I came back and formed a band determined to spread my message – be proud to be suburban, or if nor proud at least admit it. It struck a chord with others like me and for a time playing in the pubs of Subiaco and Shenton Park we led the world. It took Kurt Cobain and Seattle a decade to catch up. Ultimately though my message wasn't able to sustain the overwhelming pressure of pop culture domination.

(Dave performs PARTY)

Elvis Presley. When I was about 9 I used to show off my Elvis Presley moves for my florist aunty Noela's pals in her High Street Fremantle shop. Once I hit 10 and The Beatles came along I'm afraid I couldn't really get into Elvis much but I did think he was cool. The footage of his early shows was electrifying. So like all good trades I got something from the USA's cultural domination: I stole Elvis' moves. I didn't like Johnny O'Keefe much either, well maybe She Wears My Ring, but that doesn't mean I didn't respect him. And I was excited by the bodgies and widgies whose voices I could hear floating up from the Bicton Baths in the dead of night to our house on the hill as they played delinquent to JOK tunes. Let me take you back there to those fragrant summer nights by the bayou of the Swan River.

(Dave recites poem)
J.OK
Pink socked rippled-soled black DBs
Form furtive circles under fragrant trees
And strip-jack-naked the night away
All hail all hail J.OK
Scared air hovers like a frightened waiter
Handmaiden to iron-hard gladiators
And balances in its trembling fingers
The lingering melody of the She Wears My Ring singers
The eunuch choirs from the Punic fray
All hail all hail J.OK
Sung to the beat of boondies shied
At the hearts of brown glass skittles sucked dry
In the darkest cages of the farthest zoo
Where cool cats do what cat men do
While lynx-like widgies lay Petals at the feet of J.OK
Imperator, catalyst
Martyred Prometheus
Your blood infused our mosquitoed beaches
And imbued with life we poltergeists
We almost creatures
May your memory not fade away
All hail, all hail J.OK

Elvis died in 1977 just as I was gaining success with my band. Like JFK's death, most of us who were older now can remember where we were when we heard the news. I was driving along Canning Highway just past The Raffles Hotel. I'm older now than he was when he died. It seems impossible. A few years ago I wrote a play, THE KING AND ME, for a friend of mine, an actor. In the play a hack cabaret singer finds a strange girl at his house who is determined to get him to enter and win THE KING OF KINGS, a worldwide cabaret talent quest for the performer who best embodies the spirit of Elvis Presley. It turns out the girl is Elvis. In order to achieve greatness he had sold his soul to the devil but now he wants it back. The only way he can get it back is he made a bet with the devil that he can get this hack performer to win King of Kings. In one speech the girl - which is Elvis in a dead girl's body if you follow – talks of the true Elvis to the spellbound Hack, trying to dissuade him from misplaced hero worship.

(Dave performs soliloquy)
ELVIRA
It had been hotter than Death Valley on the studio lot, but now the air hung like a big poncho over the city. Elvis downed a dog, jangled heavy keys, grabbed a fist of hard chick-a-dee arse, spun his shiny pink convertible to one of the studio fuck-pads and spent the next eight hours with one of the chorus girls -Deanne? Dolores? Started with a D. Long legs, high hopes, her skin is puckering all over as Elvis unfastens his buttons. He's sozzled on rye. A mess of stray chilli hangs on the bottom left corner of her lip, her perfume skips off her skin like Cassius Clay over a rope. The air in the cabin is thick and wet. Her heart beats like hooves down the Santa Ana straight. Tonight is why she caught the Greyhound six years ago with her lifetime savings. Tonight is why she left the white, A frame clapboard house in he Springfield, Indiana. This is the one chance she has to wind up on Wiltshire with stone lions out the front and a 50 yard pool in back. All the dance classes, all the petty gropes in the back seat of studio flunkies' Oldsmobiles, just for this one mad roll of the dice. She doesn't know she's the third chorus girl The King has sampled since shooting began - 2 days ago. They make torrid love... Two, three sorties from the King. Between bouts he clowns around, topples off her stilettos, makes like he's injured his thigh...Bad acting, hammish, pork as the smoked ribs Vern would bring back from Memphis and spread out in newspaper. While Elvis does his girlie impersonation she lies back......naked, laughs hard at the low ceiling. Hours crawl. Flesh to flesh. Dawn floods celluloid city......but they stay in the dark, safe cave...the sweet, smell of their sweat, like some balm, keeping out the growling steel on La Brea. Around 10 he calls her a cab. She leaves with the sour taste of bourbon in her mouth and promises herself she'll never brush those teeth again. That day on set, not once does he even glance her way. True story.

And in another genre the cultural exchange wasn't all one way. Crime fiction. At school I read THE MALTESE FALCON – I picked it out of the library thinking it would be about Crusades and people boiled in oil laying siege under castle ramparts but instead it was detective fiction. It got to me like rock music, fast and deep, but for some reason I never followed it up. And I remember reading an excerpt of Raymond Chandler too in one of those English Lit sample books and I loved that as well but I never followed it up. Not until I finished with music full time at least. Then I sought to incorporate detective fiction with my own earlier vision of suburban Australia. The result was my first novel CITY OF LIGHT. In this extract towards the end of the novel, the hero Snowy Lane, is returning to Perth having got his life back on track. Finally he understands the mystery, not just of the city of light, but of himself.

CITY OF LIGHT
As we approached Perth, the captain doused the cabin lights and I joined the first-timers in looking out of the little window at the sprawling, glittering grid that was home. When John Glenn had orbited the earth in his spaceship, the city had responded to the request to turn on all its lights. Glenn noticed us, the pinpoint of civilisation in the cape of black. We had been mentioned in despatches. We were famous. We were the City of Light. Thirty years on there was still so much space here. Sweeping highways only rarely punctuated by cars' headlights revealed a slower place, The buildings seemed stumpier, the suburbs drowsier, the horizon more vast. And yet, in this remote hamlet, Judy Davis, Greta Scacchi and Snowly Lane had grown up. The famous and the anonymous. We had swum in the same Indian ocean been fanned by the same Fremantle Doctor on the same days of atrocious heat, watched the same non-personalities on TV, made the same pacts with God for Love and Ambition. We had cruised the same boring Sunday streets, eaten hamburgers under the same red summer sky, pitched our spoons into plum pudding on the same searing Christmas afternoons. We were all children of the City of Light, and somehow I felt for once that Snowy Lane was no less a person than any other. In Fact Snowy Lane was especially privileged.

Patrick Shearer the corrupt but courageous cop in my follow up novel BIG BAD BLOOD was a JOK and Elvis fan. This novel is set in Kings Cross in 1965 and just like CITY OF LIGHT it features men trying to come to terms with themselves, uncovering the darkness in their own soul as they uncover the darkness of their city. John Gordon is Shearer's sidekick, a young cop who thinks black is black and white is white but is only now coming to understand that life is more complicated than he imagined. In this passage I pick them up as they desperately search for a serial killer ready to slaughter his captive.

BIG BAD BLOOD
John running like he was making for the goal line, his mouth dry, heart kicking. The old woman said she had seen the lady in the photo going into the back of 15 Tydeman. One thought. Get there. Vaguely aware of Shearer following. Rotting posts, 9.11,13…then a slumping cottage hiding behind mangy trees. John ran down the path to the back, a lopsided verandah, made it in one leapkicked in the back door. A mess: a sofa with its guts out, a sound to the right. John presenting the shotgun, running into the near-empty room. Pockmarked plaster, a single bulb dangling from the ceiling. Beneath ita human figure spreadeagled face down on a bed, gagged, tied, naked, buttocks and back crisscrossed with cuts new and old. Above it a young man in shirt and slacks holding a long knife two-handed, ready to plunge it into the prone figure. John screamed "Don't" Amazement on the face of the knife-man. Confusion. ID"Micahel Foley out of drag. For a fraction, Foley frozen, then the muscles around his neck, thick cords. Foley shouting "Agnus Dei" beginning to plunge the knife. A roar, the recoil jolting John's hands upwards and to the right, Foley exploding, blood and matter splashing the walls, the ceiling. A terrible ringing, a chill, John's bones refusing to warm, like he had been shot. Then hands prying away the gun, an arm around his shoulder, Shearer. Like a TV set with the sound down, saying something, gradually penetrating the shield "You're okay son. You're okay"

You'll notice a very different narrative style with CITY OF LIGHT and BIG BAD BLOOD. In BIG BAD BLOOD I emulated James Ellroy's power and pace to match life in Kings Cross whereas CITY OF LIGHT needed a more restrained feel, it's more Chandler, as I felt Perth in the 1980s must have been very much how Los Angeles of the 30s was. In both novels the elements of Australian life and real life iconic crimes are woven through. I do like to point out that CITY OF LIGHT predated the much better known – and some would say much better – SHARK NET by a good few years. And BIG BAD BLOOD was also well ahead of the much better-known, and definitely inferior, DIRTY DEEDS.

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