Graham Halliday
Graham Halliday from Australia was known to me as Funkmeister G. He was pals with the goofy guys in Vocabularinist and had a similar wacked out, anything goes esthetic to his music that made it refreshing and unpredictable.
Above, a release with Vocabularinist and below a duet improv album with Bret Hart.
I think I slept thru the 80s as far as pop culture goes, though I was heavily into all the cartoons & associated toys, only realising I had to quite this 1st of many later addictions when my mother & I talked to a seventeen year old who was still into Transformers & being twelve myself something would have to change. This was in 1992, & I was living in sub-suburban Perth, Western Australia. Cassingles for $5 recommended retail price were the format & top 40 radio was all I knew, hearing the self-deprecating humour in Nirvana’s Lithium I figured they weren’t just another Metallica but didn’t actually pay any real attention until that news of Cobain’s death grabbed me & they said he was the closest thing that generation had to a John Lennon, so I had to explore. With no budget I managed to get taped copies of Nevermind & In Utero, the latter forcing me to learn how to listen outside of fast-forwarding to the singles. Actually the year before I’d been fascinated with the weird & multilayered production of U2’s Zooropa. So a couple of years later the family had moved back to Sydney & access to culture, having possibilities expanded by getting into Sonic Youth & then giving into curiosity of who was this interesting looking Frank Zappa character & therefore Captain Beefheart, Miles Davis & beyond. Rental CD shops in the city for $3 a week made a lot of this possible [though when a new law preventing them from renting anything recorded after 1995 passed they eventually went out of business]. So when I was 17, I started putting out fanzines to spread word of all this & an excuse to talk to musicians. Also I had my 1st experience with a 4-track tape machine when the high school year had finished but they were obliged to keep us occupied for a week & one of the options was recording & I did that three years in a row, bad cover versions & sound collages but one was used as a demonstrative example for the music class for some time after, though I’d never been in it [something about the teacher saying you’d have to go ooh ahh do re mi in front of everyone scared me off]. Thru the zine world I heard about Vocabularinist & letters, tapes etc were exchanged in the mail & I was a hanger-on & occasional keyboardist at their gigs. I summoned up the courage to do solo performances which turned into accidental comedy events or something. So after years of sharing houses & the gradual fadeout of Vocabularinist after some members wanted conventional lifes & bands, me & Skot Schtikla had a two-piece band called Squeegeed Clean which was a more mature version of our early oft-unlistenable experiments. Somehow we wound up in different cities making having a band difficult but we’ll work it out somehow soon. I’m sure I’ve forgot bits but that’s the gist of it.
