The peoples' democratic blog of Matt Hayward

If you’re like me you’ve been told about this book a few times, but wrote it off because you’re not a huge Chili Peppers fan. It’s is defintintely worth a read though. Because yes, Kiedis notoriously can’t sing in tune but god damn can he write.

Admitedly I’m yet to finish this book. Though I can tell you one thing straight off the bat: if you took out all opiate and cocaine references, it would be a pamphlet barely big enough to wipe your arse with. Not to say it’s not enjoyable, far from it. Kiedis is incredibly erudite and has lived a colorful life right from the get go. Apparently (and he has photographic proof) his first joint was at 12 and it all went buck wild, roller coaster crazy from there.

As far as the Red Hot Chili Peppers (for the unacquanted Kiedis is the front man), it was surprising to see how quickly this band hit pay dirt. Within about 10 gigs a record deal was on the cards. This stuff about the band is probably the most interesting. Second only of course to Kiedis’ Hunter S. Thompson like insights into the nastier bits of L.A. and his dope dealing father. It’s all story telling of true rock and roll hubris and decadence.

One criticism is there’s not a lot of talk about the recording of Blood Sugar Sex Magic album. To my mind, this album was a cornerstone in pop/rock/metal/funk that allowed alternative to break through. There were also so many rumours about the recording of that album that I wish he’d talked about. Also allegedly his bandmate John Frusciante had bouts of insanity I hoped he’d have some insight on (albiet I haven’t finished the last 100 pages). Sadly not. Junkies can be a bit self indulgent.

Add it to your ‘to do list’. The cat can write!

Since Mamasitas opened on Bourke St and routinely has a queue all the way out the door, Mex food has changed in Melbourne. Gone are the days of Franchised (and terrible) Taco Bill blandoid grub, from a memu that hasn’t changed in decades. Now we have something far worse: boutique Mexican. Hor dourves sized tacos and dainty quesadillas posing as mains at ridiculously high prices. Go ahead order up hipster, you’re still going to walk out hungry. Only in Melbourne could a couple order 10 mains ‘designed to share’ in Melbourne and go home hungry. While culinary wise it’s up to snuff, restaurants like Touche Hombre and Sinoritas in Meyers place are to Mexican food what Coldplay is to Rock and raping Roll. Don’t even think about booking a table. Oh no sir, you must queue so we look cool to passers by on the street. Or at the very least book at 6pm for dinner on a Friday to let a constant melee of hipsters pass through.

This brings me to my point. Food however good it is is not for pose value. Mexican food is at its best in large portions. Big lashings of mystery cheese, chili and guacamole. If you can see ‘white space’ on your plate, you’re doing it wrong. Three tacos means three sub sandwich sized big boys that you need to skip breakfast and lunch to make room for. This is food I like to share because it’s fun and very, very tasty. Oh yeah and the option of a normal margarita with block ice and good agave tequila.  This is what we’re missing in Melbourne. Luckily it gives us an excuse to travel. Because you ain’t gonna find the real thing in this city. That’s or god damned sure. Death to hipster Mex food.

Arguably the best and most interesting rock bio I’ve read. No question. Yes it’s approx 900 pages (no appendices thank you Mr Wyman), just a larger than life summary of a larger than life bloke. This book is so well done it kind of saddens you to think that we’re living in a world without a Keith Moon.

This is a book with no filler or footnote guff. It could be easily twice as thick. Moon was just that mad and managed to do so much. Most of it absolutely hilarious. There even is a section dedicated to the legend that he drove a Rolls Royce into a hotel Swimming Pool. It’s almost a moot point. He’s done so much it should almost be a footnote in a career of pranks, decadence and destruction.

Insights from assistants, band mates and family. He was a tricky, troubled and dark man. But legend has it, all the fun in your life, was a week of Moon’s life. This book basically attests to that in detail.

Rock probably never will have someone as complex, eccentric and plain hilarious as Mr Moon. Plenty will try and go mad doing so. But I recommend the safer option of reading this manifesto over plenty of drinks. An incredibly well written book. Which all started with the author’s boyhood contact with Moon. I’ll let you read that for yourself!

Well this book has had more trepidation than those leftovers from your mother-in-law when you really fancy a pizza. I’ve been procrastinating my way through it for 2-3 years until I vowed to finish it a few months ago. One dull page after another. It would be a perfectly acceptable book in isolation. However Keef and Ronny Wood have written biographies that have their flaws but are infinitely more interesting. Wyman fills page after page with balance sheet minutia. Thankfully he doesn’t collect spoons or he’d talk about every spoon he picked up on tour. City by city. Almost day by day.

Yes Wyman was the bass player of the Rolling Stones. Which may explain why he wrote his book 20 years before anyone else. Considering he’s allegedly shagged more girls than physically possible and married a girl 40 years younger than him, he wasn’t lacking for subject matter. So why the hell does he keep telling you about office telegrams and bank balances? He has a fully journalised recollection of life on the road with the stones. But I

This book would be of interest of anyone that is a major Brian Jones fan. But that’s like saying crack is awesome if you aspire to being a homeless whore on borrowed time. He gives an interesting insight into Jones, who Keef had written off completely as an unreliable prima donna. However Brian had such affection for him that his book is almost entirely dedicated to the Jones era finishing around 1969. This was a bloke who was in the band until the early nineties(?). So clearly he tagged along for 20 years with clearly nil interest in the band. Makes you wonder.

If there was anything I got out of this book, it was don’t ever read anything written by a bass player – slight caveat for Lemmy or Nikki Sixx. They are accountants and gantt chart warriors, each and every one of them. Please I urge you, don’t bother. Leave it on the shelf. He’s a great bass player and accountant. That’s entirely the problem.

Well frankly I’m flabbergasted to write this. Having never been a Honda fan I never thought I’d set foot in one, let alone write about one. Honda peeps tend to the be the over emphatic types with shiny clothing and oversized baseball caps with stickers still on the brim. They have a penchant for revving, stabbing and ramming the virtues of VTEC down your throat constantly. But a sea of wannabe gang-stars couldn’t get in the way of this car’s virtues.

Firstly this is the 2011 hatch back made in sunny Swindon in the UK, not the sedan made in poor old flooded Thailand. This car should actually be quite old hat but for the Fukushima earthquake somewhat soiled Honda’s replacement plans. But I’m told a new gen 9 Civic is due around May-June. Yes Honda’s had rather a hard time of it lately.

So enough guff. It’s a 1.8 VTEC manual. Sadly the auto is a bit anemic. But the manual goes free up the revs a bit for a bit more power. Surprisingly it’s fairly torquey considering the number of S2000s I’ve seen revving at 9000rpm yet still doing 60kph because of a slight incline. It’s no Golf GTI but it is fun and capable.  If you hold a gear, you can zip around very nicely. Or just putter along changing gears with the frequency of a truckie and stay frugal. At 100 something kilowatt, it will do. No sir this is clearly not the Full Monty Type R. Because that doesn’t have 5 doors.

After putting down some hard kays on the highways and around town, she handles firmly. The ride is verging on sporty but comfy enough for the daily grind. When giving it the berries, there’s a little bit of body roll, though thankfully no sick passengers. Torque steer, hah! Not really. After all it’s a Honda. It does have a super notchy gear shift and a great little clutch. Something that I’ve come to admire from my limited experiences with Hondas.

Fit and finish is superb. Great quality plastics and leather all with a nice bespoke feel. Nothing feels like it’s borrowed from somewhere or outright stolen from VW – I’m looking at you Hyundai. Nor are the seats rock hard like its German counterparts. Oh yeah and what can’t be done with the back seats isn’t worth mentioning. They have the flexibility I’ve been looking for in a double jointed gymnast girlfriend all my life. Dogs, drum kits and mountain bikes, you’re welcome here.

In essence this model launched in 2006, with a facelift in 2009. Aussie readers would see very little of them because they were quite expensive when launched. But I’ll be damned if it feels like an old car. Any left standing have dropped significantly in price. She still looks fresh as a daisy. Not in a BMW 1 series way that takes 10 years to grow on you. She’s a peach. Put quite simply a design that still works. Touch wood, it will prove reliable as hell. It’s going to have to!

Yes it’s an utterly stupid question. Yes there is no quarter or parallel between them. They couldn’t be more distant cousins than Republicans and humans. So comment all you like, I know it’s a moot point. Fact of that matter is, after driving the mark VI Golf, this was exactly what I was asking myself.

A few months ago, I was driving the big ape Camaro around Oahu in Hawaii. A place devoid of lonely highways,  straights that stretch on for hundreds of miles all with not a cop awake in sight. These roads seem not to exist; the kind of place a muscle car longs for You wanted to like it the way you want to think Aerosmith still look young. But while it still is cool, there’s a whiff of unsightly old age to this Canadian muscle car. Like Brian Adams without the Botox (actually he just sucks). Strangely though, the Golf GTI has kept with the times by barely changing at all. If there was an analogy, like The Scorpions in their leather pants could be retro cool in some ironic kind of way.

So how did this come about? Someone threw me the keys to a three door Golf GTI mark VI manual. It makes you question why cars need twenty inch rims and big gaudy bulges. The smile that all six of those gears puts on your face leaves you dumbfounded. The thrumming of the engine is a noise I’d only thought Italian thoroughbreds are capable of. Clearly not. Suddenly the most important thing in life is getting past the losermobile hatchback in front of you post haste. Every single gear has a sweet spot just niggling at you to lose your license ever more subtly. All this in an unashamed hatchback built like a titanium drum. Better still on a suburban street, you can get the big toothy grin that ought be beaming out of the helmet of a V8 Supercar driver.

It’s quite a shame it’s taken me this long in life to realise hot hatchback genesis. It’s just a fucking sensation. Yes sliding around sideways is nice. But darting around on 3 wheels in an incredibly well sorted German buzz box is a sheer delight.

Only in America. A 6.2 litre V8 is a rental car, like just about every other I ‘review’. The only bad thing about it is I had the chance to drive it in Honolulu – an island you can probably drive around in 4 hours if there is no traffic. But there is loads of that. So no, this car hasn’t been driven flat knacker at 150 miles an hour. Hawaiians are just far too chilled for that!

Frankly the car is gobsmackingly powerful. It spins those 20 inch hoops with extreme prejudice and absolute ease. Unlike the Mustang, it does have a smooth 6 speed manual mode for the auto, though with this much grunt who needs it. But great power brings responsibility. While in theory this car is a Holden Commodore, it feels far bigger and has way less rear visibility. It’s a massive leap of faith parking the thing as it’s fairly wide and those fat rear guards are hard to see. There’s just no getting around how big this car feels. You constantly feel like your squeezing a hallway down a hot dog!

For a humble Aussie not used to big muscle cars, keeping it in its lane is a challenge – although I’m sure you’d get used to it. Again like the pony car, it’s definitely not a sports car. The handling is firm and comfortable considering those massive rims, but you wont be chasing any Lotus Elises down twisty roads. Though you might beat it to the bottom of the cliff. The front brake calipers proudly display ‘Brembo by Chevrolet’ and while they stop OK, they’re definitely Brembos in name only. This puppy don’t stop that good!

Inside the car is fairly Spartran – cool but very basic. There’s no fluff, just four retro temperature gauges at the bottom of the centre console. There’s a huge Boston brand stereo with enough pure volume and enough bass to keep the doof doof brigade happy. Though when a V8 sounds this good you have to wonder why they bothered. I literally switched the stereo off 2 or 3 times just to listen to it. It sounds like Satan gargling or something! It does iPod integration in ‘one click’, which believe me is one of the ’stangs short comings. But how they started with a four door Holden Commodore and there’s no back seat room at all I don’t know. In terms of driver position and interior fit and finish, the Mustang kicks its arse. The leather, seating position and virtually every other design facet Mr Mustang is far cooler.

To answer the obligatory question ‘would I own one?’ the answer is no. The Commodore would go so much harder, carry less weight, handle better and in HSV spec kick it would kick it right in the grits. The Mustang GT also feels like it would be easier to live with than Mr Broad Shoulders ‘maro. Also for such an outgoing car, no one but a Korean tourist batted an eyelid at it (well I guess the locals like their monster truck lift kits…). Hell it’s a cool car but it’s definitely a holiday romance.

Lo and behold I’d found myself on the big island of Hawaii. So when preparing to content myself with a lowly beige rental Mustang, my rental bloke hooks me up with a black on black convertible! If looks could kill, it would be Australia’s most wanted. However a big chunk of this car is still in the nineties, and the eighties… and the sixties…. But let’s start with the good stuff. The car looks absolutely fantastic. The roof goes down in 3 simple steps in about 30 seconds. The car looks absolutely fantastic. It goes from 60 miles an hour to 80 with a great imitation V8 bellow from the twin exhausts (it’s a V6 rental car remember). That V6 is a peach despite the poor drive train (more on that soon) oh yes and it looks great.

So what sucks about this car? Well there’s the laughable transmission. I thought the lowly 4 speed automatic with no manual mode or sports mode was taken into the woods and murdered years ago? This from the company that give you fantastic ZF German automatic gearboxes in Australia? Like any old Auto, it buggers about for a second or two trying to find the right gear. This is excusable, but the absolute gutless dumbkopf lack of power below 2 thousand revs is just plain idiotic. This car will go hard above 50 miles an hour, but it just refuses to rev in low ranges.

After recently driving an Audi on a long road trip, you realise what’s missing from the Mustang when you go on a long drive. There is no graphic communication or symbology on the controls. So you have to ‘read’ everything. This is tricky when driving. There is no central screen for your car controls or GPS, just a stereo LCD screen. So bits of this car instantly feel very simple and old fashioned. Especially that dopey looking T bar auto.

Also get used to the ‘clump’ noises as your passenger tyre constantly goes over highway emergency lane markers as this car is bigger than it looks. Not big inside, just big. Like a regular sized bloke with size 20 feet. The suspension as far as I can gather is still deeply routed in the sixties. On Haiwaii’s narrow B roads, it certainly is more prone to dopey understeer than Lotus like agility. It looks like to placate rental companies they’ve fitted seventeen inch wheels with fairly high profile tyres which make a bit of noise with the top down and make the handling a bit vague.

No doubt in higher spec versions this car addresses all my gripes. But compared to say an Australian Ford XR6 (not the turbo) it has absolutely nothing going for it. Flintstones, meet the Flintstones…

Well it’s been a while since I’ve driven something nice and then it comes in spates! The Audi was rented for a very special occasion and a very long country drive. Three hundred kilometres into Dunkeld in regional Victoria [a state of Australia]. What was required was a big smooth car with a massive boot, smooth on poorly surfaced roads and highways. Also enough space for four people with lots of luggage and not enough grunt to get into trouble, but no slouch either.

Clearly these are things that Deutschland specialise in. A whole wedding could’ve been had in the boot itself and yet there are still heaps of secret compartments to play with and masses of legroom in the back. On the open road, despite big seventeen inch rims and low profile tyres, it’s silky smooth. Even pot holes at 110kph are no major drama. The only complaint if any I’d have about this car is that the steering is super sensitive. You’re constantly doing micro corrections on the steering wheel and a minor distraction will just about have you in the weeds.

This particular Audi had the 2.0 litre four cylinder turbo FSI engine that’s usually found in a VW Golf GTI. I guess German car companies are more incestuous than ever! 2 litres might sound a little skimpish in a full sized sedan. Believe me it ain’t. It wont crush you with kilowatts but it’s not meant to either. Put it in sports mode and it’s all turbo [a gas guzzling turbo too].By and large this engine is very lazy, barely turning over. Put her into sport mode and suddenly she works, and drinks, a lot harder!

Remember this is an unassuming executive barge. If it were human, it would have a name like Hans or Gunter and you’d forget them the second they dropped you off at the foyer of your chain hotel. And clearly the A6 is this way by design. If you want the grunt, get the A8. If you want memorable and sexy, get the S5. Whether there’s still a place in the range for an A6 is a different story. Whether or not it’s a good car depends on what you’re after.

So what we have is a large executive saloon that gets the job done, and gets it done very handsomely. What a bloody good car.

So for the unacquainted, this thing called digital music came along. It’s the mother of good intentions. You can have 10 thousand tunes on something called a hard disc. You can download an entire band’s discography in the time it takes to make breakfast. Rare and eclectic mixes, covers and b sides at your finger tips. The chance to make your music collection boundless!

For all these reasons, it pains me to write this. It sucks. Yes I can play my iTunes on shuffle and not hear the same track for two weeks. It still doesn’t change the fact I haven’t heard most of it. The vast majority of it. And once you get past the point of acquiring, quickly comes the delete stage. Worse still, every time I pop open iTunes for a quick blat, Apple diligently tell me I need to upgrade like some prefect in a private school hallway. Oh and all the other programs I never asked for like MobileMe and Quicktime. Now even the Safari web browser! Whatever is in the Apple product pipeline is going to get downloaded every time I want to hear a 2 minute Ramones song!

Oh and once you’ve lost your music collection to a Windows fail, you recreate it, fix up all the ‘untitled song 1′, get all the cover art back and organise, you may as well have learnt the Dewey Decimal System and become a proper librarian. But no you’ve got a masters in dicking about on your PC for no good reason.

I think I have opened Pandora’s shit box. I don’t know if having 120 CDs of metal covers for the one good one is actually worth it (of course it is but you know…). It has become far easier to flick some vinyl on the turn table than click a track. It’s a sound you either get or you don’t. The album artwork was designed for 12″. Before the nineties at least, the order of the tracks was meant to be heard one side at a time. If I want to know the song name, I watch the label that’s spinning around, usually at 33 RPMs. Vinyl – it’s not just the genesis, it’s the new beginning. I love it.

Am I missing something? Well no. CDs are an affront to everything that is music. Those crappy little jewel cases that always break, they scratch way easier than records and just have no charm or warmth to the sound whatsoever. I have a moving box full of them I haven’t bothered to unpack in years. I dare say I’m not the only one. Like all good technology, they are obsolete. But worse than that, irrelevant. I hate them.

And so from one good addiction to another I go. From vino to vinyl but forever the dorky aficionado.