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Dancing Through the Monsoons

from Running Late by The Gatekeepers

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about

I got this all wrong in my memory until a crucial recollection cast the false memory from the table.

In 1984 I began a collection of interrelated short stories called The Monsoons which vaguely followed my life from childhood through adolescence. While still working on it I planned and began notes towards a follow up set in Brisbane called Dancing Through the Monsoons. So I thought I'd just taken the title of that (and its sensibility) and put it into a song. Maybe the idea of it being a theme song appealed. However...

A more recent memory took me back to a practice room in the Valley which we shared with This Five Minutes and Curiosity shop in early 1984. We didn't use it much and then after it was burgled not at all.

We really did try to carry the band on and develop it early on in that year, incorporating more formal vocal harmonies, lots of new material, moving away from 60s influences and getting further into other influences like Arabic and early European music. Also, getting both Liz and Margot singing more.

Margot liked the idea of singing but was worse at it than Greg and I were. However, in the mistaken belief that a rock band should be a democracy, I wrote this song as her next vocal. The tune isn't that hard if you get the right cues and it could be belted out. But Margot whose voice was a dead shot with deafening report across field and refectory when in front of a microphone seemed to shrink down into a five year old at a school eisteddfod. At one practice I got so frustrated by this that I yelled it right into her face while she was simpering through this song, an act of utter clumsy bullying that stopped us all in our tracks.

When Greg went to pick her up for the next practice she hid in her room and got her flatmates to lie about her not being there. While that wasn't the end of The Gatekeepers it pretty much sealed the end of Margot's involvement. Honour bids me to append that this is not due to her being intimidated as much as it is fed up with the hassle of being in a band she felt decreasingly enamoured of. Besides, she was moving much more decisively into political activity at that stage which would have left a failing rock band a poor second.

Anyway ...

All this possibly points to why we omitted this one from the recordings we did in that year and only put the song in during the great bakeoffs of the winter o' 85 (in a project very much like this one)

The reason this is here rather than in the compilation Sad Clowns and Castaways is that that recording of it is horrible. Some of the arrangement ideas are good but I'm still trying to sing it in Margot's key (slowing down the backing track to get the notes) and then speeding it up until it hurt the ears. On the arrangement, Greg added two good things, a bass line that echoed the vocal melody and the broken minor chord on the keyboard at the end of the chorus. I kept the last one.

I changed the key but kept the arrangement mostly intact for this recording.

Between the Margot incident and the 85 recording I had started the literary failure called Dancing Through the Monsoons which had taken its title from the song and not the other way around.

All that for a two minute song. Phew.

credits

from Running Late, released February 27, 2013

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The Gatekeepers Melbourne, Australia

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