Two Hands, one moment
Sometimes a name is enough to send you spinning back...
It’s great when you discover that someone you didn’t know liked cricket turns out to like cricket. Reading Et Al this morning came a name that unexpectedly took me right back to somewhere I’d not been for a long while. In a piece about the experience of the Darwin Test – and thankfully right before what would, in pre-electronic days, have been called ‘the fold’, that bit which now signifies the point at which non-paying subscribers have to stop reading or cough up (what can I say, times are tight round here) – Peter Lalor mentioned that one of those very subscribers had emailed in, and that man was Bernard Fanning.
His name may not be immediately recognisable over here, but in Oz, Fanning is a bona fide star. I first came across him in the features department of the Brisbane Courier-Mail, where I worked for three years back in the late 90s/early noughties. Among the key events while I was there were the Gabba Test when England were saved at the last by a god-almighty storm; the death, at 92, of the Don; and the release of what would become, for lots of reasons, one of my favourite records, Powderfinger’s Odyssey Number Five.
And Bernard Fanning is, or was, Powderfinger’s singer, frontman and songwriter (or one of them), but in my innocence, and due to the fact that before the release of Odyssey the band weren’t particularly famous anywhere other than Australia, I’d never heard of Powderfinger, and the name Bernard Fanning made me laugh because, being English, it had the unfortunate connotation of sounding almost exactly like the late and unpleasant comedian Bernard Manning, who, I quickly discovered, wasn’t very famous anywhere other than England.
One of my jobs at the paper was to lay out and sub the weekly music section, edited by Neil Melloy and written by Noel Mengel, the Courier-Mail’s music critic and another big cricket fan. I recall Noel sliding me a copy of the Powderfinger CD with the words, ‘see what you think’.
To my eternal shame, I remember returning it the next day and telling Noel it was ‘one song short of being a classic’ a verdict that manages to be both idiotically pretentious and utterly wrong in seven words, quite an achievement on my part. Soon, within weeks in fact, the record would be inescapable on radio and TV, on its way to becoming a high point in the culture and one of those pieces of art that takes you right back to a particular place and time the second you hear any of it.
In truth, I might not have known Bernard Fanning’s name but I had already heard what would become one of the great songs of the era, These Days, which had recently appeared in demo form at the end of what was already a stand-out Aussie indie film, Gregor Jordan’s Two Hands, a movie that got lumped in with the whole gangster chic Lock, Stock thing happening at the time, but which is far, far better, and more profound, than that.
The leads in Two Hands are a very young Heath Ledger, already suffused in that premonitional sadness, and Rose Byrne, but the real stars are the great Bryan Brown in the role of Pando, a scuzzy, low-level Sydney crime boss to whom Ledger’s character owes money, and his offsider Acko, played unforgettably by David Field. The song comes at the end of the movie, a perfect synthesis of mood and moment that confirms Two Hands as something rare and special, uniquely Australian in its combination of talents (and if you’ve never seen Field deliver, during these climatic moments, the single and immortal line, ‘shut your fuckin’ mouth, Wally,’ then seek it out as soon as you can. It’s magnificently done).
So yeah, having Bernard Fanning as a subscriber is a big deal, and to know the great man is as wrapped up in the agonies of Australia’s rickety top order and ancient attack as everyone else is tremendous news. Here he is with the lads performing These Days as the final song of Powderfinger’s last ever show, Brisbane, 2010. Vale.
And a friendly reminder that Vinciness is out now in this beautiful b-format paperback edition, yours for £10 and available here.
