THE NAKED CITY – with Miss Death, Jay Katz and Coffin Ed
THE ULTIMATE ARIAS AFTER PARTY!
Here at The Naked City we have a theory: that the established music industry isn’t going to take too kindly in the euphoric wake of last week’s Acer Arena Aria Awards. We honestly believe popular music is getting worse! As record companies become irrelevant and today’s new breed of popstars struggle for new ideas, top 40 pop is on a serious downward spiral – not yet diabolical but way past crap and getting uglier everyday.
Hands up if you sat through the entire excruciating two and a half hours of the Arias, maybe in the hope that Empire Of The Sun’s pseudo Mayan clobber might trigger a mini apocalypse in keeping with 2012 prediction for the end of the world. No such luck and hopefully by the time they had collected their third gong you had switched over to the Walkleys on SBS, desperately looking for a drunken Glen Milne to restore your faith in shameful outrageous behaviour.
You see, that’s what we found totally disturbing about this year’s Arias and the pop music it supposedly celebrated. Where was the shock factor? Where were the foul mouthed inebriated presenters? Where was the gratuitous display of naked flesh and where was the tantrum packed backstage barney? It was all so horribly sanitised!
Next year, regardless of who chooses to telecast the Arias, we have a suggestion. Forget about the actual awards and cross straight to the after party, live from the Vibe Hotel at Rushcutters Bay where your MC for the night, all Australian bad boy Matthew Newton has already destroyed half of the penthouse suite. Matthew might have attracted some bad publicity of late (and an equally bad bum shot in Underbelly) but hey, he is the living embodiment of the hard-living, hard-drinking, room-trashing, rock’n’roll party animal of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s – and he’s a dying breed.
These days it’s almost impossible to hurl a TV out of a hotel window, what with double plated glass, and even more so when it’s a big sexy flat screen screwed to the wall. That didn’t stop Matthew and his band of partygoers recently – they allegedly just put a match to the plasma and watched that sucker melt!
Wanton vandalism aside, and we are not for one minute advocating it, a genuine old style record company after bash would send the ratings soaring as celebrity after celebrity crashed, trampled and snorted their way through a set of especially prepared hotel rooms and chintzy late night bars. There’s room for that old gag of course when the odd Aria or two is discreetly slipped under a lounge seat with the pointy end up. It’s an absolute riot when somebody finally sits on one, even more so when it’s an entirely unsuspecting Robbie Williams or any other dubious import out here to join our celebration of Australian music.
All in all there’s a massive saving for the network involved and the record companies that pour thousands of dollars into expensive sets and props to promote their overblown acts. A half dozen highly trashable hotel rooms or the VIP lounge of some trendy nightclub, a smattering of heavily tattooed rock babes and a bar tab that will never run out because most of the guests are too stoned to drink anyway – it’s rock’n’roll debauchery at its finest, and on the cheap!
And here’s a final plus. With Channel 9 still milking the success of Underbelly, it was no accident that Gidon Grantley found himself as the beaming co-compere of this year’s gongfest. The cross promotion could certainly weave its magic way through next year’s telecast, especially as the forthcoming series hits the mean streets of Kings Cross. And because nothing on TV is ever really “real”, there’d be the obligatory shower of icing powder coke, bottles of Dom Perignon refilled with Porphyry Pearl and all the Pollywaffles you could eat. A couple of actors could be hired to make out “Underbelly style” on the balcony and John Ibrahim might even be persuaded to do a surprise DJ set.
Eventually the Arias could become just another episode of Underbelly where art and culture are merged with corruption, drug taking, sexual promiscuity and a $200 haircut. Who knows, you might even get a good song or two out of the miasma – just in time for the end of the world in 2012!
THE HIT LIST:
- Maynard presents The Keepin’ It Real, By Keepin’ It Wrong Xmas Show. Thursday December 3, 7.30pm, Mu-Meson Archives: It was a real crowd pleaser last year and Maynard has spent all year collecting videos to present in a night of music, clips and trivia, including “Moneyshot Theatre” and “Facebook Failures” www.meson.org
- Heavy Petting, Friday December 11, 7.30pm, Mu-Meson Archives: An entertaining and sometimes salacious exploration of the sexual mores of the ‘50s through the eyes of a generation that lived through the Sexual Revolution.
