On Sunday evening I indulged in some good old fashioned reminiscing. From the regrouping of The Sunnyboys after a 30-year break to the ABC’s Paper Giants 2, I was up to my neck in the past. The Baby Boomer/Generation-X cross-over group who are largely aged 45-55 are responsible for the spike in events and programming devoted to the seventies and eighties. Some very astute marketers have recognized that we are prepared to jump back to the past, and pay for the privilege, as often as they can dish it up.
The Sydney Opera House Concert Hall was jam-packed with middle-age women and men, keen to relive The Sunnyboys’ past. I loved that crowd. Hugely unfashionable, or rather without a care in the world about style, the audience moved and air-punched to the rhythms of a band that shot to fame in the early eighties with hits like Happy Man and Alone With You, but then disappeared following lead singer Jeremy Oxley’s debilitating battle with schizophrenia. A documentary about that struggle, The Sunnyboy, was launched at Vivid Festival in Sydney just before the band took to the stage.
Jeremy Oxley, now 50, had lost none of his brilliance on stage but he was carrying some excess weight due to the medication he had been taking to deal with his mental illness. The rest of the audience had no such excuse other than a life well-lived. There are few words to describe the style of dancing, as a largely once relatively cool crowd (now parents with responsibilities and receding hairlines), let loose with the pure joy of seeing Jeremy performing again. There was a lot of love in the room. I felt like a teenager and one of my best friends from school was alongside to take me back there. When you’re staring down 50, there’s no better anti-ageing cure.
As my multi-tasking skills do not extend to being in two places at once I recorded Paper Giants 2: Magazine Wars for later viewing, and followed it via twitter in real time. My former editor-in-chief Lisa Wilkinson hooked me into a discussion about this fabulous run down memory lane. Lisa tweeted a factual error: Alan Bond paid $1.055b for Channel Nine, not the round figure of a billion as suggested. My husband Graeme noted that the music was out of synch with the years, meaning that many of the tunes that were played hadn’t yet been released. He remembers clearly because like Nene King’s partner, Pat Bowring, Graeme was a music journalist at the time. There was also a factual error regarding Nene’s clothes. She never wore short, fitted dresses. In all of the time I worked alongside her as an ACP editor I never once saw Nene’s legs.
Paper Giants was a wonderful spectacle and anyone 40+ would have readily related to the fashions, furnishings and music. But only a former ACP editor of that era would have squirmed when the batphone rang, or when publisher Richard Walsh placed the small envelope containing the circulation figures on Nene’s desk. For the record, both the batphone and the envelope were yellow. I would have preferred that the show’s creators got that detail right. It may seem like a small issue but both were significant if you were an ACP editor.
If the batphone rang it was either Kerry Packer or Richard Walsh demanding your presence in their office as soon as humanly possible. I used to run (literally) if I was beckoned. Mine only rang about once a week but when it did I always felt immediately unwell. The only other thing that could make me feel that way was the little yellow envelope that would appear in my in-tray every Friday. It contained the weekly circulation figures and would determine what sort of weekend you would have. We all knew that our jobs were only safe for as long as our circulation figures continued to grow. My predecessor discovered exactly that after just six months in the Dolly editor’s chair. That scene where Kerry Packer told Nene that he wanted an increase in sales from her very first issue was the sort of pressure I worked under for the five years that I was an ACP editor. One week of bad sales could leave an ACP editor feeling desperate and depressed. It wasn’t a job for the faint-hearted.
That said, looking back it’s the cut and thrust, the staring down of the competition, the high-octane energy in the ACP building and the sheer loudness of the times that I most miss. It was literally the time of my life.
Great days indeed. No wonder my generation is so quick to open our wallets or set our Foxtel IQ to anything that reminds us of then. Fleetwood Mac tickets are on sale this week. I am so there.