Sticky Carpet – an interview with Mark Butcher

Mark Butcher formed the idea for his film Sticky Carpet, about the Melbourne underground music scene, appropriately, over a beer with a mate at the Rob Roy hotel – one of the key venues of Melbourne’s thriving scene.

In Sticky Carpet, untrained filmmaker Butcher has managed to create an idiosyncratic homage to some underground legends (The Dirty Three, The Birthday Party, The Cosmic Psychos, Ron Rude) and the next generation of underground acts, including the Hate Rock Trio, Hi God People and Batrider and other performance-based artists who transcend the boundaries of noise and visuals in a way that can’t be repeated in the average suburban loungeroom.

That a film as specialised as Sticky Carpet has screened to a packed house at ACMI and the Melbourne International Film Festival is a tribute to Butcher’s own vision and tenacity – and the power of word of mouth on the radio stations and in the pubs and venues of the very scene he has managed to capture.

Butcher says he felt it was his responsibility to make the film – to make a social document of his little corner of the world; a scene inhabited by a host of colourful characters and diverse sounds. “I’ve always loved documentaries and I reckon they’re getting more and more popular as people who enjoy film get bored with what Hollywood gives them and they seek out truths about the world.”

There are plenty of reasons why Melbourne harbours a disproportionate number of troubled souls – artists and musos who express themselves in ways that mainstream Australian rock can rarely accommodate – and why the underground scene thrives where in other big cities it remains lacklustre.

“Melbourne isn’t a tourist town. It’s bypassed for the glitz of Sydney, but the people that do come here linger and explore what’s under the surface. I think because of the art culture in Melbourne it’s a lot harder to impress audiences – they know their music and they like to be challenged. They don’t want to go to a gig and see the same thing over and over, so a band has to be a bit creative and diverse to make an impact.”

Making his own voice heard was a major motivating factor for Butcher. He describes his film as a ‘rebel yell’, a searing critique of modern mass culture. “I feel that knowing your passion and mixing it with politics is a very real responsibility today. Displacement and disempowerment is something we all suffer from. Allowing yourself to be challenged, engaging in debates, talking to strangers; it’s all vital in a larger solution. Every revolutionary is a social animal.”

In starting his own revolution, Butcher had to talk to strangers too – and famous, recalcitrant ones, at that. “I rang (veteran independent rocker) Roland S Howard every week for six months and got his answering machine. I kept on calling that number, and one day he picked up the phone.” It took a while for some of his other interviewees to open up too – especially since Mark tried to avoid the understandable inclination to have an ale or two with them in their natural habitat. “Getting someone to open up with alcohol is a more difficult business than you’d think. It just gets very messy.” Still, he manages to get some rabble-rousing sound bites from the participants, touching on all aspects of modern culture and politics with a resounding note of disillusionment.

But ultimately what Butcher does best is to let the music and images speak for themselves. He sets haunting, grainy archival footage of some of the seminal bands of the 80s against more recent images from gigs, managing in the process to make the archival music sparklingly relevant and the newer stuff hauntingly enigmatic, which is no mean feat for a first time director with no technical training. The result is a visual and aural cultural history.

“It’s a heritage being passed down. Like folk music which tells the story of a culture and people through communication between audience and artist. In many ways the audience is just as important as the artist because it does the interpretation.”

Butcher reflects that while there used to be more anger and more polemic in the lyrics of a song, there is now an anger in the voiceless white noise produced by some bands. “Sometimes you find just as much anger and rebellion in the darkness of the sounds as in the lyrical content. This music displays a discontent with society, with culture at large – it’s an alternative niche to the popular mainstream inclination for songs about love.”

The venues where people on the scene congregate to participate in the art, the noise and the performance are fundamental to the health of the scene. “In previous eras the pub was a social venue where people met to express ideas. The Union Hotel in Brunswick used to be a place where unionists would meet and literally punch the shit out of each other over their ideas. But you don’t go to the pub to be challenged any more, unfortunately. You go there to be…. sedated.”

The do-it-yourself ethos and intellect of major underground social movements – from existentialism to punk – have informed not only Mark’s approach to putting his film together, but his subjects themselves. “Sticky Carpet does take the angle that music and sound can be so much broader than your pre-formed ideas of music are in the mainstream,” says Mark. “If you look at the Beach Boys and Beatles, who were huge, they did introduce sound diversity into popular culture and really pushed a lot of limits. There’s nothing stopping people from doing that these days.”

Mark hopes that Sticky Carpet will show that good music comes from a need for people to express themselves – through ideas, views, sounds, stories – and that these don’t always fit the mold.

Appeared in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Poster magazine.

Matchpoint – Love all

In Matchpoint, Woody Allen replaces classic Allen film hallmarks such as a gentle, sardonic wit, closely observed conversations between believable characters, and his own ugly but sympathetic mush with the tawdry opposite – sexual histrionics, plot twists which stretch belief, school play dialogue of the ‘by jove, I’ve got it inspector!’ variety, and beautiful, flesh-baring, but ultimately unlikeable leads.

Problem number one with this film is Jonathan Rhys Meyers. The jury has been out on this pouting Irishman for a long, long time – since he graced the screen as a Bowie-alike in Velvet Goldmine, looking fabulous while boring sane audiences witless. The next time I saw him he was the lust object in Bend It Like Beckham. He acquitted himself in that one – but he hardly needed to act. With this latest outing, the jury has returned a unanimous verdict – his repertoire is largely limited to playing the smouldering himbo, with his ‘wrong side of the tracks’ accent and morose demeanour written into the script to avoid the embarassment of watching him slaughter any other brogue or attempt to crack a joke.

Rhys Meyers plays tennis pro turned stockbroker-in-training Chris Wilton, who marries into money and privilege before starting a hot and heavy affair with a struggling young American actor (Scarlett Johansson). He slavers and pouts his way unpleasantly through the film, his acting crimes aided and abetted by Allen, or whoever wrote the shocking pick up line ‘has anyone ever told you you’ve got the most sensual lips?’ uttered to a similarly pouty Johansson. For the rest of the film we are supposed to believe that this sleazy character (whose one skill, we are told, is playing a good game of tennis) reads Dostoesvky and has a penchant for quoting Socrates to ghosts (yes, ghosts – but more of that later).

Which brings me to problem number two. Johansson, as Nola Rice, holds our attention admirably as the nubile object of the camera, and Chris’s gaze. She is clearly a superior actor to Rhys Meyers, but is confined by the script to two modes – glossy, undulating mound of she-flesh and screeching, hysterical mistress a la Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, only strangely muted and impotent. The difference with this film is supposed to be that, unlike that unreconstructed piece of 80’s misogyny, it is the man who turns out to be the villain of the piece, albeit one we’ve followed as the ostensible protagonist with bemusement and scant affection for the (2 hours?) duration. After watching him plodding his way uncharismatically through the film and cheating on his little sparrow of a wife while using her father’s power and influence, we are asked to sympathise with our hero’s decline and fall. In a scene which appears to have been intended to afford a certain gravitas and pathos to the character, he converses with his demons, Hamlet-style. Yes… this trivial, shallow, nasty piece of work has a dark night of the soul. By this stage there is not a dry eye in the house. But they’re not the sort of tears one suspects the scene is supposed to elicit from the audience.

As usual, Allen manages to capture a big city in all its excitement and beauty, but he hasn’t done his research on the culture to which he has transplanted his latest New York tale. Thus we have a doddery, tweed-sporting, grouse-shooting patriarch of landed nobility spouting unlikely (and terribly nouveau riche) business verbs like ‘focussing’ and ‘fast-tracking’ when he approaches Chris about the possibility of joining the family firm to do business with the Japanese. Maybe in Manhattan, Woody, but it doesn’t ring true if you’re even slightly acquainted with the fusty English class system.

In fact, it’s quite hard to believe this is an Allen film at all, given its reliance on hokey plot devices over some decent dialogue. It’s a big ask indeed for audiences to believe all the coincidences that mysteriously occur. While all cinema relies on some suspension of disbelief, this film stretches the concept well past breaking point, introducing a string of unlikely sightings, chance encounters, ridiculous alibis, bit part players who know just enough and detectives who stumble across the right clues at the right time. It all starts to look and sound like a school play – written on the hop, with scene upon scene clumsily designed to ramp up the action on the cheap. Like when Chris just happens to see Nola at the Tate Modern and thereby resumes his affair with her… and the service man who just happens to be on Nola’s front stoop when Chris comes a-calling, and has enough knowledge to utter mysteriously that ‘she left yesterday’, but can’t tell him any more. Then there’s the friends of Chris’s powerful inlaws, who, in a walk on appearance, announce that they’ve seen him hailing a cab round Nola Rice’s way – casting doubt on his fidelity in the mind of his wife, who is handily present – before exiting stage left. By this stage, I didn’t care if the whole cast was interred in Pentonville for crimes against the noble profession of acting.

But even a string of lazily written coincidences might still have worked – indeed, they’d have worked well for a laugh in one of Allen’s earlier outings – if we had not also been asked to buy into a ludicrous cop show/CSI-style investigation farce nine-tenths of the way in, starring Spud from Trainspotting and the Northern Irish guy from Cold Feet. Spud and Mr Nesbitt throw around all sorts of Miss Marple suppositions, and can them just as rapidly, before deciding to close the case. At this point I was laughing hysterically. I can only hope this is what Woody intended. But I don’t think we can give him credit for that.