that very soon after i wrote that song, i could slander anyone and really have an effect on their lives. because youtube was taking off and my little 150 seat, 50 seat cabaret rooms where i was doing this dark comedy, i suddenly realised that anything i said could spread. and that is a profound change, because you re no longer some little guy in a cabaret room punching up at some meanie. you re someone who can really hurt someone. and i think that song probably hurt phil. i think probably his name. do you know that? have you talked to him? i tried to. we did a little online. we talked and sort of displayed that we had forgiven each other. but i d got the video eventually taken down, but not soon enough. the irony, of course, is that if you hadn t written that song and hadn t performed it publicly, nobody would have remembered. very few people would have remembered the original review. probably, except that it was the number one hit on my name for a year when i was trying to make a care
just by sitting down and trying. and i had written a lot of songs by then and i had written, you know, i had gone through this phase in my teens, like a good teenager, of musicalising ts eliot poems. like, i ve got this song that i can still hear that goes: # #let us go, then, you and i #. right? we all know that. and by the way, i ve gone back to eliot in my later years and it stands up, man. it s brilliant. it s beautiful stuff. anyway, i even had, i did a bit of wasteland as well. # this is the way the world ends.#. like, i was using this grunge stuff coming out of seattle and, like, putting it to ts eliot lyrics. so i was already writing music to pre existing lyrics and this love s labour s lost thing was built of the script, which has a few songs in it, you know, like all his comedies have a hey, nonny nonny and a bit of a thump, but then it was enhanced with other sort of metaphysicists and elizabethan poets
i mean, a bit. and then somewhere between then and now, i got better at it. your next choice for this cultural life is the 1997 album whatever and ever amen, by the american singer songwriter ben folds. what ben did is gave me hope as what i later described myself as a rock n roll nerd, you know? in that song, i say, i always dreamt of being a star, but he learnt piano instead of guitar, which in the 90s doesn t get you very far because that was my experience. i was deep in the grunge. west australia, in my part of perth in the 90s, was just grunge and i was a pianist doing songs for theatre and stuff and thinking, is there.? i mean, obviously i can t sell records, my band won t go anywhere because, you know, it s too nerdy. and then ben came along, just thrashing the hell out of this piano.
thing, until they got super serious. but so much of it was sardonic. and ben folds definitely, with rockin the suburbs and all that, and one angry dwarf and all that, was right on some sort of cusp between pop and satire. 0ne angry dwarf and 200. solemn faces. ..solemn faces, which is the opening track on this album. great title, isn t it? forever and ever amen. yeah. # now i m big and important # 0ne angry dwarf #. # and 200 solemn faces #. that s a revenge song, isn t it? yeah, i guess. you have written your own revenge song in the past, haven t you? i have written lots of revenge songs, yeah. there s one in particular. who is phil daoust? 0h, phil.
and which had, what, in 2005, five million readers? it was pretty big because it was before it alljumped off the page, and he wrote this just utterly sneering review, one star review, really snobby in that sort of guardian way, like, quoting shakespeare. i was like, how dare you quote shakespeare at me? i ll quote shakespeare at you! and just incredibly sneering and ungenerous, a thing that just says i m terrible at myjob. it really, really threw me. and so, like, a year later, when i had to come up with a new show, i thought, well, i m going to take that guy down. so i wrote the song for phil daoust. # ding, dang, ding dang dong # this ends my phil daoust song # everybody sing along # la la la la la la la # i hope something you love catches on fire, # ding, dang, dong, # i ve written you this special song # to show how far i ve come along # in my efforts