Sentiment Hits Right Note

Sun Herald

Sunday November 28, 2004

SALLY LOANE

IT'S been a dreadful week if you're one of those daggy sods who enjoyed Australian Idol. Not quite as bad as admitting to loving the Eagles concert, but almost. And if you were silly enough to admit to anyone within cooee of a Darlinghurst macchiato that you actually lined up for tickets to both events, expect to find your name linked to Wilson Tuckey on a rumour mill any time soon.

The music snobs had a fine old time flagellating the dags among us for our appalling lack of discernment. It was a bit like someone catching you reading a novel with gold lettering on the cover, or finding a painting of a dusky maiden on black velvet in your bedroom. (I could be wrong about the dusky maidens on velvet: they may have turned the corner of taste and become post-ironic, like lava lamps.)

Every pimply commentator in town was trawling his communications degree lexicon to pen the most withering Idol put-down, so much so that the co-host, James Mathison, actually rang me last week to sound off about the flak from the too-cool school. He was hurt and cross, and I can't blame him.

When I recovered from the pleasant surprise that he was listening to me and not to stacks of tracks on FM, he said he loved Idol because it was about talented kids really striving for something, learning to cope with defeat, and supporting each other through the whole testing process.

In an era where too many of us harp on about teenage slackers, Casey and Anthony and their friends made us swallow our words. And it wasn't just about the singing, it was their stories that captured our affection.

Just when I thought it was safe for us dags to put our heads over the parapet I happened upon my mate Bruce Elder's review of the Eagles concert. This wasn't meaningful music, boomed brutal Brucie, this was indulgence in sentimental pap that reminded baby boomers of their youth. Or something like that. Crikey.

What I know about music could fit on the back of a postage stamp, but I do know I quite enjoy sentimental pap that takes me straight back to a delicious moment in my past. Like my first mixed party, in high school, at Sue Parker's house when Rodriguez's album Cold Fact was playing. I Wonder was the wickedest, coolest song I'd ever heard and every time I play it, I'm 16 again, for a tiny sentimental moment. Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon reminds me of a starry night camping, and Dire Straits' Romeo And Juliet was playing when I fell in love for keeps. One day our kids are going to be greying 40-somethings and they will catch an old hit tune by Casey or Guy that will take them back to that wonderful evening when they lined up at the Opera House for the Idol final, screaming until their hair stood on end. We're only sentimental humans, after all.

Polls measure performance

I'VE never been through the rigours of a performance-based indicator review but I'm told by those who have that they look forward to them in pretty much the same way as they look forward to root canal therapy. So it must have been music to the ears of the bruised and battered federal Labor pollies when the geniuses at head office dreamed up the notion of performance-based contracts for all candidates standing for public office in the future.

Apparently these things involve writing a set of benchmarks and, from time to time, reviewing whether the employee has reached them. For the ALP this should involve (a) at least one Chinese feed per week (b) at least one public genuflection to Gough per year and (c) one public bagging of the most successful prime minister, Bob Hawke. Surely they jest.

How do you measure or benchmark, for example, the genuine affection the electorate had for the late Mick Young? Performance-based contracts have a simple name in politics. They're called elections. Labor should ditch them along with the factional patronage system and install some commonsense and gut instinct about character when it comes to choosing its candidates.

© 2004 Sun Herald

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