Job Interviews and Playing in Geelong

This week was another week where various elements kept pointing me towards a certain way of thinking, again, I’ll just go through the week and ramble a bit…

Err, Tuesday, Tuesday?? Oh yes, I had a job interview (the first of many this week) for an exam supervisor job, a fairly easy interview when I kind of got the impression that we all had the job already but the recruitment people were never actually specific about that fact. In the afternoon I probably did something, god damn, my memory is getting really bad! Oh yes, I applied for some more jobs, which I shall return to shortly.

Wednesday I had another (what I thought to be) job interview with a small publishing company. Thinking it would take half an hour maximum, I had arranged to interview a band in the late morning. However I turned up to discover they pretty much wanted me to do some free work for them with no preparation, briefing or notice. I did what I could and was then informed,

“You can either finish it now or come back another time.”

Well, I wouldn’t want to work for someone like that anyway. I had written the rest of Wednesday off already as it was the regular Book Cellar meeting, I attended to a few errands and headed to the regular Chinese restaurant venue. Now, the Book Cellar is a monthly meet up with a load of old journalists, judges, Doctors and the like, organised by a friend of mine’s Dad. They all get together, have lunch, a few drinks and an interesting guest speaker. This week they’d somehow managed to wangle Tony Abbot, who is the minister for Health, so it was a very popular meeting and a very interesting speech with a few (though not as many as expected) controversial questions…After Lunch I went to a really seedy bar with a friend and we talked about how much he disliked the Baby Boomer generation, and I largely agreed with him… After a few frantic phone calls to the aforementioned band I was supposed to interview we rearranged it to Thursday, a lot more mutually convenient.

So, Thursday was writing day, I spent most of it producing another instalment of my Politics in Music series, I’ll post the link up here soon. At midday I popped out to interview Sly Hats and after he stopped being so nervous and after the recorder was switched off we had a really interesting conversation about the nature of music making in Melbourne and more general conversations about activism and left wing thinking, another intellectually stimulating afternoon…

Now, I have become increasingly aware of the nature of Music making in Australia. So far I have been quite lucky to have work that keeps me ticking over, gets me by, and generally that’s how a lot of musicians in Australia operate, even the ones who appear the be moderately successful are usually working at least part time. I have also been becoming increasingly aware of needing a back up plan to chasing my dreams. Let’s be realistic, I may not get a second shot at making it with music again, I may not make it with music writing, so I need something else in my life that means I don’t hit mid thirties and am unemployable.

So, when I attended a Job interview on Friday morning for a really interesting web design job with a company full of exciting and interesting people who didn’t expect the job to be your life, where flexible and really enthusiastic about my skills, it got me thinking hard. Is it time to take on a real world job again, and push the music stuff back into a lucrative past time? There’s no reason I can’t get back into it full time if need be, hmm, well, I now have a second interview on Wednesday, so we shall see… The strange thing is that a similar job offer came up almost a year ago before i decided to turn it down and come to Australia.

Back to Music, Macaca Mulatta had a stonking gig at Melbourne’s infamous Pony on Friday night and then trudged the hour up to Geelong for our first regional Victoria show. I now understand what reservations our other guitarist had about the show, as we had the largest turnout of the night with 10 people. I come from a big city, so I’m always confused and perplexed by the behaviours of some ‘country’ people, the stereotypes of ‘bogans’ really are true :

Someone asked Nick for money for a beer.
Someone showed me all his Tattoos.
A group of guys never stopped talking about Rawk music.
Hardly anyone actually wanted to pay to see live music, despite generally complaining that no-one plays in regional towns.

Anyway, the guys we played with were great and I stayed the night with them.

So there you go, another intriguing week, things to think about.

Chinch xx