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chaotichedonist · 3 years

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Tharunka (Kensington, NSW : 1953 - 2010)

Wednesday 9 June 1976, page 14

Some funny moments to tease you into reading:

Press: Roger, you're noted for your amazing screams.

Freddie: It's a controlled scream. I'd rather call it art.

Freddie: You're joking dear. I'm just a singer, dear.

It’s been a struggle, because in the beginning nobody knew what we were doing. We were the only people who believed in ourselves.

back at the hotel sleazy

For all those fans who were misled by the media, Queen did not spend a couple of days-relaxing on sunny Perth beaches - it rained the whole bloody time they were there. (In Melbourne the hotel was 'besiged' by fans, who to quote Pete Brown — Queen's personal manager — seemed to be emerging from the wood work). Not to be put off however, by the Australian conditions Freddie Mercury (lead vocals and keyboards) attended the press conference in white pants and a simply sumptuous summer synthetic top with delicate butterfly sleeves curling gently over his shoulders. He was even more beautiful than Sophia Loren.

They were all quite chatty only Roger (Meadows-Taylor, the drummer) would keep interjecting, usually over John Deacon (bass) who said not an audible word.

Press: Would you describe your music as mock opera?

Freddie: They call it cock-opera back home.

Roger: I suppose because the vocals are in the 'grand style'.

Press: When is your next album coming out?

Freddie: We'll have a rest and think about it..

Roger: We just don't bung'em together.

Brian: We don't sort of write sitting in hotel rooms you know.

Freddie: We gather influences.

Press: Your music has been described as snob rock. What do you think?

Freddie: I couldn't describe our music as anything. We certainly don't put across that this it intelligent music that is on a completely differenrt level to the people who come to it.

Roger: It's written for the people. That's what it's all about.

Press: The theme of death recurs on your albums. Why this preoccupation?

Roger: Freddie's morbid mind.

Press to Freddie: Do you consider yourself a sex-symbol?

Freddie: You're joking dear. I'm just a singer, dear.

Press to Roger: Do you consider yourself a superstar?

Roger: As meaningless, (blows kisses).

Roger on the media - absurd for a magazine combine rock and politics.

Press: Roger, you're noted for your amazing screams.

Freddie: It's a controlled scream. I'd rather call it art.

Undauted by the fearless Australians they continued talking about their lyrics and the esoteric implication.

Roger: Freddie just loves the word 'Beelzebub'.

Freddie: Yes, well, Brian's got a taste for unusual words.

Roger: You talking about dandling on your knee and things?

All four of them write songs and each has at least one song on 'A Night At The Opera'.

Brian: It's very difficult to talk about our songs as a group because we all have different ideas of what the songs are about.

Roger: No we don't.

Freddie: Roger's the sensitive one. 'I'm in love with my car' is the most sensitive song on the album (Night At The Opera).

Roger did tend to sit there pouting at the bows on his pink lame gym-boots. One hardly noticed the dark roots in this gold angelic hair. We did ask, but unfortunately Roger didn't have a pic of himself in the gymboots. Roger was later accosted by David Essex fans in the foyer of the hotel, who wished to know if he was a popstar, girls now have Roger's autograph. Back to the lyrics..

Freddie: Every song is written by one of us and means something special to each one of us. Certain songs have a very literal meaning and can be understood straight away. Then there are some songs that can be taken on a lot of different levels.

He describes a lot of his songs as fantasies. 'We want to consciously lose ourselves. There are certain things we want to escape from in our lives or whatever.' He feels that people should create their own private fantasies from the images in his songs and so doesn't like to talk about what they mean to him. 'I'd hate to shatter someone's illusion. If I listen to somebody's songs I conjure up a fantasy of what its about and I like to keep it that way.'

He elaborated further.. 'Lyrically it is helpful to use certain words. You see it depends.. sometimes I want to use words that are phonetically useful. In the beginning they're surface words but you entwine them into the meaning of a song. That's what I mean about different levels.'

Brian May has a different approach to his songs, 'There's usually something serious behind them, but I feel a big responsibility not to over-indulge in idealogies. In 'White Queen' I was very interested in the significance of Queens and White Ladies in English folk lore. The song started off as a personal experience, the frustration of not being able to communicate, I was thinking about Robert Graves' ' White Goddess' and that became involved in the song.'

Roger: Romantic slush.

Brian: Our 'Now I'm Here' song is really about our first American tour. A big experience for anybody. It's a conglomeration of all the experiences we had on that tour. We had a great time with Mott the Hoople. I suppose they taught us to be a touring band.

We're very critical about each other and very cynical. We don't get deeply into meanings because you're living with it all the time. You have to be a bit light-hearted about it.

With four individual writers the albums were not done with a specific concept in mind. The 'White Queen' was written four years before the 'Black Queen'.

Brian: I don’t think that Freddie’s 'Black Queen' was a reaction to the 'White Queen'. We just discovered that we had these songs and the rest of the album seemed to fit around it.

Freddie: It probably subconsciously coheres.

Similarly ‘A night At The Opera’ has no overall concept though the name of the album is related to Freddie’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

As Brian puts it ‘We are four very different people with four very different directions, but there is a musical development that does make some kind of sense. Queen is very much an independent thing. We are always bouncing ideas off each other. We are very aware that we need each other.’

The rapport between them onstage bears out this statement. They work off each other in a carefully intergrated show thatt creates an atmosphere of spontaneity for the audience.

At the opening of their set there is a flash of fire and smoke as Queen emerge on stage. While music winds up they launch into ‘Orge Battle’. Like a Greek God or a simister Mephistopheles Freddie's powerful vocals cut through the smoke and flames.

With the stage show the band is doing something different to stimulating their records. Brian: "You don't get up there and behave like you do in the street. You go up there to entertain people and give them some kind of excitement". They have rearranged some of their songs especially for stage performance, including a medley of 'Bohemian Rhapsody', 'Killer Queen', 'Black Queen' and 'Leyroy Brown', which grinds down into 'March of the Black Queen' and then skips out on a lighter note which features Brian on genuine Japanese ukalele.

The brilliant solo Brian performs in 'Brighton Rock', with sweet high Paginini frills and harmonies, stimulating two or three guitars on stage, is in a style he has evolved himself. He got the idea the first time he was in a recording studio. Says Brian: "It was my first experience of doing multi-tracking. It happened to be in the cannon-things which repeat themselves. You play one, then you play the same over the top of it after a time interval. Later we started to do those things on stage but there was the problem of how to do it. We started having a single delay and then another one over the top of it. Then afterwards you do another repeat on the second. You can then do three part harmonies with yourself. We started to base it all on ten second solos and it grew and grew. There's a lot of other people doing it now and I'm glad because it’s a thing you can play around with.'

In the stage arrangement of "Prophet's Song' Freddie uses a similar echo feedback system which multiplies his voice into a celestial choir. His voice floats as a vision - "Listen to the madman' - while Brian plays some beautiful guitar.

encore amore

Brian describes their encore performance as the time when the band really unwinds. "It's nice at the encore to just completely unbend and make a fool of yourself. It gets rid of the tension between the band and the audience. I used to get a kick out of going to concerts to see rock groups like the 'Who' and feeling involved, like the group knew you were there. WE go by the kinds of things we think people would like at an encore. It's at a very basic level really, an energy level, a physical level. Rock and Roll is kind of a body music. I get as much satisfaction out of basic rock'n'roll like Status Quo as the most sophisticated music I know.'

The audience certainly enjoyed it and really let loose their energy. Roger (who claimed the most female screams) in rainbow mop-wig opened the encore with slow heavy rock-beat as Freddie did a dramatic entrance in a silk kimino. As he eased into 'Big Spender', he peeled off to striped hot pants for an outrageous version of 'Jailhouse Rock' - simple hard-driving rock'n'roll that had everybody out of their sets.

gettin' feelin' thru th' transistors

Brian was rather upset that the Australian Press should braiid them as a manufactured band. If 'Bohmeian ,hapsody' can be seen as incorporating the spectrum of s talent - mood changes, heavy stuff, the soft ballad - it is not because they (men of letters from universities) have developed a magic 'X' formula. Rather the song can be seen as a musical progression, a reworking of motifs off their other albums.

Brian can only say that, 'They obviously didn't see us in the earlier days. I can understand why they'd say that over here. Big impact. Overnight success. It must have been all calculated. If you’d seen the way it happened in England, you wouldn’t think that. I’ve had years playing pubs in England where people were drinking beer and discussing what other people were doing and not listening to the music. I want to build up this thing where people do want to go to a concert. While it begins to look like the commercial side, it;s what it’s all about. I want knock it because I want people to come and hear what we do.

It’s been a struggle, because in the beginning nobody knew what we were doing. We were the only people who believed in ourselves. We started playing because we had some kind of vision that we thought was worthwhile. For over a year and a half we were playing to ourselves. Gradually you gather people around who believe and that’s the way it happened.

Nobody is going to tell us to play what is commercial. What we play comes from us. We’re very lucky really in that we have a kind of audience who are attentive to whatever direction we choose to follow. One of us will come up with a song and we'll say, 'Yeah, it needs that kind of treatment and maybe that turns out to be something you call heavy and sometimes something which is light.'

To get back to the charge that they are a manufactured band, while he doesn't like it, he can only take it as a compliment that they think the band is so good. He doesn't consider himself a technician "technically I've stayed the same for the last six or seven years. Progress is what you feel and what you are putting across. That's what playing is about for us.'

Freddie: There's a lot of music there too.

Roger: A bit of music, yeah.

low key queen

By Anne Finnegan

Wednesday 9 June 1976

If you save, do not forget to leave a link to this, coz i kinda found it by myself and made and transcipt. Thanks :)

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thebutchknownaselaine · 4 years

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I've been working on a period piece series that I would love to share with you. This is the first book. None of the books have anything linking them together aside from the fact they are period pieces set in the 1870s, 1960s and 1980s. All of these decade were big whether in the lgbt community or within the black and native american communities. Or both.

The first is set in the 1870s. The main protagonists are a native american woman named Alice Covington and a butch named Peter "Pete" Quaid disguised as a man which was much more common back then than people would like to think. It is about their journey to catch the gang who ruined Alice's peaceful life. She and her brother hire a bounty hunter, famed as being a headstrong, determined lawman who always catches his man. Little does Alice know, Peter holds his own darkened past and secrets that entangle their journey, weaving a path of adventure and stunning self growth.

I read a lot of period pieces over the years but recently came across several articles discussing women who disguised themselves as men back then. I also read a lot of articles on netive american and black american lives back then and the struggles they face in a post Civil War America.

This book is very much fiction but I like to pull from history as well and pay homage to those who came before me to pave the way for my bright future. It is incomplete as I am still working on it, but I have published two chapters so far and have fifteen written in all. Please give it a look if you have any free time and thank you!

Here's a snippet from the novel:

August 25th, 1873, Madison County, Montana

Alice tightened the leather of her saddle in the cinch ring, then threaded the strap back up to the back saddle ring. It had been quite some time since she had last ridden Opie and he seemed rearing to get going on their ride.

She was just as eager to go as Opie appeared but Alice also knew the journey ahead would be hard. Harder than anything she had ever…

That’s not true. I have dealt with much more difficult things. I can do this!

“Would you like some help, ma’am?” A husky voice called from behind her and she spun around with a yelp.

Alice had been so wrapped up in her thoughts she hadn’t even heard Mr. Quaid walking up. He stiffened and stared down at her uneasily. His face held the most peculiar grimace Alice had ever seen. Being this close to him again was a bit...odd. Pete didn’t smell like the other men, even smelled a bit of cinnamon, and Pete’s face, obviously cleanly shaved every morning, was so unscathed. Aside from a few facial scars, he just wasn’t the ruffian she had expected to meet when her brother regaled stories of Pete’s legendary travels.

He wasn’t much taller than Alice herself but held himself in a way that was graceful and poised. It told her he had probably come from money so why on earth would Pete decide to be a bounty hunter? It wasn’t exactly an easy life, not that life was ever easy, but he was a good looking white man. Pete could have done anything with his life but had become…

Well, it’s not my place to judge…

Still, Alice’s suspicions got the better of her and she turned away from him with a huff. She had never needed a man to help her ready her saddle and Alice wouldn’t be needing one now.

Her father had raised her to be a self sufficient woman. Alice knew how to shoot and ride better than more than half of the men she had met in her life and Mr. Quaid would be no exception to that rule. Men weren’t something she felt a necessity unless they were a part of her family and it wasn’t like she had ever been attracted to one. As much as she craved intimacy and yearned to find a reputable man even a fraction of a bit comparable to the men of her family, she did not expect to ever find such a man. Especially not now that… Alice shook her head from the clouds and sighed.

“No, thank you, sir. I can manage just fine on my own.”

“Yes’m.”

Alice turned and looked over her shoulder to find him still standing there watching her. Well, watching her was an exaggeration, or rather, the wrong way to explain the look on his face. Pete shifted in place and crossed his arms over his chest as he examined Alice’s skirt with a grimace.

“Is there something else you needed, Mr-”

“Pete.” He interrupted but kept his eyes glued to her petticoat. “Just Pete's fine, ma’am, but...are you plannin’ on riding in that?”

Now that the pleasantries of yesterday were over, Alice had found herself growing more and more irritated with not only Pete but herself. He would comment on what they could expect from their travels as if he was trying to scare Alice into not joining them after all, even though he had been the first to agree to it. Now Pete was picking at her clothing, staring at her as if he had just eaten the most tart jam in the world.

All of these men are alike. Why did I get my hopes up that he would be any different?

Alice tried to shed her annoyance, determined not to let it get the best of herself and turned back to settling her saddle. Opie shifted a bit, picking up on her change in attitude and she ran a soothing caress down his neck. Alice looked back over her shoulder at Pete once more and found him staring at her hand.

He audibly gulped and his burly neck muscles tensed. Alice caught herself staring at them and noticed they weren’t nearly as taut as she originally thought. They had a softness to them and Alice had to lock her hands behind her back to stop from reaching out, giving Pete the same gentle strokes she had just given Opie.

With the shake of her head, Alice finished readying her saddle and turned around, mimicking Pete’s stance. “Is there a problem with the way I am dressed, Mr. Quaid?”

“I said it's Pete. Don't call me that.” Pete snapped as he tightened his arms over his chest. He shivered but the weather was warm and sunny out so he couldn’t have been cold. Not to mention that it was August, one of the hottest months of the year. What is wrong with him? “Only my father goes by Mr. Quaid and I am not him. Also,” He waved his hand at her dress, then replaced it back in its hiding place. “That dress will only get in the way. Do you not have any split riding skirts?”

“No, I ride side saddle.”

Pete shook his head and took his hat off, letting it hang against his back. His short blonde locks tussled in the wind and he ran his hand through it leaving it in a less than modest state. Astonished that unlike the men Alice knew Peter didn’t seem to really care about his appearance, she ran her eyes over his body once more.

Pete had a strong, strapping build but wasn’t as big as most men his height. His arm muscles seemed to curve perfectly and were finely toned as they poked out past his rolled up sleeves. All of his clothing was either white or brown in color and he was, for lack of a better word, plain. It wasn’t that Pete wasn’t handsome but there was nothing about him that spoke to Alice as a woman and she didn’t understand why such a delightful woman like Hany would bother accompanying him all over the country.

Alice peered up at Pete’s face and looked a bit closer, finding more than just the long scar that dressed his cheek down to his chin. He held one more scar above his right eye that was partially covered by his eyebrows and another just underneath his bottom lip. Pete didn’t seem old enough to have fought in the war, so what had caused such lingering scars on his otherwise soft looking skin? How old was he again? Alice couldn’t seem to remember.

And how is his skin so smooth? For a man who is on the road most of his time, how is his face so gentle?

The scars began to make a bit of sense the longer she thought of Walt’s wild stories of Mr. Quaid but it still didn’t explain why his tanned skin looked so untarnished by the usual weary lines men held after spending so much time in the sun. Was he really the man he claimed to be?

Well Pete had to be with someone like Hany backing up his claim. Alice couldn’t imagine her lying for this man but there was just something about Pete that was...off.

“No, you aren't.” Pete told her. He looked over her dress again, then pulled out the knife strapped to his belt. It was a Bowie, just as Alice’s brother's knife, and she instinctively backed up into Opie. Pete froze and held his hands up, dropping the knife to the ground. “It's okay. I was just goin’ to cut a slit in your dress. If you ride side saddle as far as we're goin’, you could slip and hurt yourself and…” He rubbed the back of his head and winced like her recoil had caused him physical pain. “I don't want you to get hurt.”

“Oh…” Alice had no idea how to reply. On one hand, Pete had been disrupting her emotions and she didn’t like to be anything short of level headed. On the other, he was now showing worry for her well being and already keeping true to his promise of looking out for her before they had even started their ride. Alice bent down and picked up his knife, then handed it to him. “Please, go ahead, Mr… Um, Pete.”

The smallest hints of a smile tugged on Pete’s lips and he scurried forward to take the knife from her as Alice turned its hilt toward him. She shyly let go as Pete tipped his head. He knelt down in front of her and took the bottom of her dress into his gloved hands. The soft material wouldn’t obey him and he grunted before removing his gloves with his teeth.

Oh my lord!

Pete’s hands were covered in scars. Some looked like burns while others looked as though large rocks had crushed them at some point. Alice suppressed her gasp and darted her eyes over Pete’s hands as he took her dress into them again. He peered up at her with a timidness she hadn’t seen before. All the time Pete sat in her brother’s office and even when he and Hany had stayed for dinner, he hadn’t removed his gloves.

That must have been so painful… No wonder he speaks of not wanting others hurt.

Alice put her hand to her forehead and rubbed it in frustration. Pete hadn’t been trying to scare her off yesterday evening at supper when he explained the terrors of the less traveled roads or of when he mentioned what passing through indian country held for them. He had only mentioned…

I just do not want you to get hurt. That is what he said at dinner and just now… How could I have been so...so…

“Are you alright, ma’am? I didn't nick your leg, did I?” Peter broke through her thoughts and Alice looked down at him finding a deep blush across his cheeks.

“No, Pete. I'm perfectly fine. I apologize if-”

“No need to apologize, ma-”

“Alice.” She interjected with a firm gaze. “If you want me to call you Pete and we are going to be together all this time, then I would like for you to call me by my first name as well, please.”

Pete opened and closed his mouth several times, then swallowed a mouthful of air with a stiff nod. He went back to cutting her dress. Once he had enough of the trim cut, Pete set down the knife and began to rip the skirt further up her leg. Soon enough, Alice’s knickers were exposed and she watched as the blush that was just on Pete’s face seconds before, stretched across the back of his neck and his ears.

Pete kept his eyes glued to her boots and rose, grabbing his knife from the ground on the way up. With a small nod and eyes that wouldn’t meet hers, he turned and walked away as quickly as his long legs would carry him. Pete may not have been as handsome as many other men she had known, and definitely not as handsome as papa, but the way he carried himself and the steadfastness in his resolve were all things Alice knew she would find herself looking at from time to time once they got going.

Give me strength…

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cambriancrew · 5 years

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Cw: discussion of triggers after the cut.

There's this trigger that Librarian has which is really hard to put into words. She gets so out of control fighty when it happens and then freaks out and breaks down and idk how to help her through that because half the time it's wrapped up in stuff that triggers my own fighty defensive stuff.

Best I can word it - and I'm not the best with words here but I'm gonna do best I can here - is accusations leading to pain and punishment, which are blatantly untrue, especially when they're very illogical or irrational claims, and rational defense is ignored or cut off.

This happened a lot as a kid. She's got pieces that are still working through that.

Me, I get triggered alongside it when the accusation is either about preventing someone from being hurt or deliberately harming someone, or our punishment gets someone else hurt.

Cuz I'm super protective. Sometimes too much. The last thing I ever want to do is to hurt anyone who I consider "mine" in some way. My family. My friends. My community. My people. (I'm still working hard on the whole "love EVERYONE" thing even though it comes really naturally to Baby Bear and Monk. Librarian I would say maybe... I think she loves everyone on a conceptual level but struggles with loving anyone in a practical way. But idk. Her emotions and motivations are a little hard for me to read most of the time.)

And anyways. Lies and illogical beliefs are fundamentally abhorrent to Librarian. Same as harming anyone is to me. It's like the exact opposite of our Highest Values. To have those things used against us is the most painful thing. That's a wound that goes straight to the core of who we are.

But you know. We tend to think of the four of us as opposing pairs. Librarian and Monk. The two of us Bears. But when it comes to healing those wounds or protecting us from them, our "opposite" does nothing. Librarian needs Baby Bear's kindness and compassion and seeing the world as beautiful as a buffer for the grotesqueness of lies. And I need Monk's gentleness and patience and soft forbearance as a buffer for the sharp sting of someone believing I'd deliberately harm someone.

When it's just one of us triggered, it's not too hard for the right other of us to step in and cushion the blow. It's still triggering, but not as powerfully so, and it's easier for us to keep our fight response under control.

Trouble comes when it's both of us at once. The two of us are the "loudest" in this head. When we both get fighty-panicky, it's like we both fuel each other. We're louder together than the two of us are separately, in one of those "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" kind of way.

We're learning to deal with our traumatized parts - especially the angry frustrated child in Librarian who believes knowing the right things makes everything right and safe, and my inner fearful part that feels responsible for keeping everyone around us physically safe. We've made some good progress. Still a long ways to go, but we've come a good ways.

But meanwhile this is still a Thing.

And the whole unfounded irrational accusation of pedophilia has so much potential to be that Thing that triggers us both.

So... Yeah.

We really REALLY appreciate having people in the community here who are on our side here. Because if not for y'all, this would probably be the thing that eventually broke us. You add to our buffers and give us strength to handle the nearly unbearable. Thank you.

#All the warnings I guess #read at your own risk #dealing with triggers

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