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    early experiences

    Graham Halliday

    By Don Campau | 27 October 2011

    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.

    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.

    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.

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