Night Comes Down
By Bob Short
(Earth Island Books)
Who could trust time when reason was lost?
I got pretty lucky. I did all the dumb things and I'm still here.
First, it's such a delight to read that I've snorked coffee over it several times in my usual cafe, as well as other unpleasant substances on the bus. So, if it's a horror story, it's one where you spray coffee over it, your table, pants and some lady's nice white frock.
Perhaps you could instead think of “Night Comes Down” as an amusing memoir with layers of horror? No, that won't work, there's just too much real horror.
Even the unreal can still feel like it is real. That hunk of meat in our heads is a totally unreliable narrator. We make excuses for things and pretend things never happened and yet weirdness is always nipping at our heels. Is anything true?
Perhaps you'll read it and think it's all made up. Strangely enough, Bob Short is (as usual) one step ahead of us.
I'm like a bad comedian ... a good writer would throw in a few plot twists to build the suspense or mask the play he was making. 'Tis a pity then that I am not a good writer. Like a clown who drops his trousers, I shall have to give it to you straight.
Clown or monster, either way. Here is the real punk, not the punk of the front page or the record label's image consultant; Bob Short is the real deal, and nothing can prepare you for this except reality. And, you can relax in the knowledge that in my quotes from the book, I've left most of Bob's brilliant observations for you to discover - and I haven't given away any of the narrative.
Do you have more than one book on the Rolling Stones, more than one on the Beatles, Hendrix or any rock/punk autobio? If you don't have “Night Comes Down” on your shelf or on your pad, you're no more than a pointless dilettante and you may as well be the needle on Molly Meldrum's turntable.
"There were those who dressed as punks at the weekend. There were musicians who only dressed up for the show. There were kids who lived it each and every day. Then there was us. We'd fallen down the rabbit hole, more punk than punk."
To achieve a book like this (or in fact any book) after living a life like Bob's is, as he puts it, "a triumph over death". In fact, in my opinion, the fact that Bob is still somehow here, alive, 65 and lucid after a vast collection of misadventures and alternate realities as a young man, should give hope to every non-fitting person.
"I could have got a job and kept a job. That could have solved any of these experiences ... I wanted something. I needed something. I sought out those with a similar ambition even if that was simply the ambition to be something 'other'.
Some deluded fools may refer to these memoirs as his “salad days” but not only would Bob not have bought a salad back then, chips or a burger would have been of more use.
"A book like this", eh? Well, Bob avoids the drug porn found in certain autobiographies - you know the sort, where the sensation of the needle pushing in is evoked lovingly and longingly, with the implication that “ya shoulda been with” the dreadful oik back then. Drug porn. Repetitious and tiresome, like druggies’ conversations, such self-aggrandising tomes are often accompanied by squeals of joy about The 12 Steps along with a few hosannahs or hallelujahs, showing us how the dreadful oik has swapped one horrid behavioural addiction for another). Often to be littered with score-settling.
However, Bob is kinder than he knows - he didn't do The 12 Steps to holy perdition, and spares us hosannahs and the other ritualistic claptrap.
Do notice that many of these drug porn types are safely buttressed behind a wall of money and minions; and some of them always, always had a safety net.
Which, dear reader, is the dreadful secret behind the Australian art-punk scene. A hell of a lot of these types had privileged backgrounds and, had they required it, a home to return to, with funds available to strain them out.
Which makes Bob's story even more poignant. His trajectory starts and continues between the cracks of civilisation, until he begins to inhabit the vast, vile canyons between hideous unimaginable wealth and a grotesque troglodytic existence surrounded by gangs of ogres in one uniform or another.
In my own small way, I know folks who lead a similarly degraded, desperate lifestyle in London in the early eighties. Like Bob, they made these decisions all on their own. They were victims, sure. But not the kind of victims which the ABC likes to eulogise or fawn over. Did they have reasons for their behaviour? Sure, of course. Should they have licked the terminals? Of fucking course not.
But they did. And Bob somehow survived long enough to unwind his past and - fortunately for us - deal with it.
Though I tried not to be, there was a fair chance that - on top of everything else - I might just be an arsehole. But, ultimately, isn't everybody?
I guess the acid test there, Bob, is whether one acknowledges one's inner arsehole and tries to avert the resultant appalling behaviour. I mean, there are reasons why billionaires think they're successful. Delusion in life seems to be a common part of being human.
Anyway, a bit of broader context. Bob points out that, back in the late 1970s, he used to laugh at folks his age who were interested in World War Two, only 30-odd years prior. And here we are in 2025, after the 50th anniversary of the Sex Pistols, and we still have assorted chumps dressing up as punks, thinking they know something.
(Me? Until I got exposed to the virus of modern music in late 1975, I loved big band and if, in that period, I'd dressed up in 1940s suits I would've not merely been beaten up, but thought of as deranged. Only 30 years separated the 1940s from the 1970s. And again, there are people today who think of themselves as “punks”. The last records I bought included Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, and The Sex Pistols.)
No, 40-some years ago, punk as it was in UK was a grim, unpleasant creature, gritty, freezing fucking cold and prone to damnation. The Brits still doesn't look after their poor, who still huddle in doorways or small enclosed areas beneath piles of cardboard. In London in late 1978, I was horrified and disgusted by this sight, partly because I also remember being taken through London as a tot and being amazed and horrified by the same dreadful, vile squalor. Life in UK has never been any of the “Austin Powers” movies. Try the beginning of “Quadrophenia”
As you dig deeper into “Night Comes Down”, you may ask yourself: is Bob exaggerating? Well, no, he doesn't. But he does possess the talent to turn a phrase into a slug-line for a full-bore mindless blockbuster, or a period noir drama, or a Dickensian comedy. And “Night Comes Down” is a bit of all three. It doesn't take long before you're wondering at how on earth the bugger survived.
“Night Comes Down” has two beginnings and two endings; his early trajectory in Australia includes sights such as The Saints, Radio Birdman, the Pyscho Surgeons and other disreputables, as well as the bands he was in: Filth and the (Sydney) Urban Guerillas, and ends with his decision to go to London “for a better life”.
His London trajectory takes in such sights as Crass, his own band Blood and Roses, and ends with his decision to leave London for a better life. That both trajectories play out alongside each other is painfully poignant, yet Bob has no time for false “poor me” weepy shit. He tells it as it is, as he remembers it, and remembers to conceal some things and hint at others; like all the best memoirists he has a fabulous memory, but also - you know he's tidied a few things up for the sake of the story and some poor bastard's blushes.
We tend to record fact as though it were fiction. We tidy up the edges and impose narrative. We shuffle it around until it looks good on paper ... I could try to comfort you with attempts at an explanation, but, really, shit just happens and life is full of little mysteries.
Lately, or at least in the last 30 years or so, I have noticed that rock'n'roll memoirs occupy a certain niche in literature, fulfilling a similar social function. I'm thinking “Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure” by Adelle Stripe; “Up Above The City, Down Beneath the Stars” by Barry Adamson; “Lonely Boy” by Steve Jones; “Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper”; “The Big Midweek: Life Inside The Fall” by Steve Hanley; “Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker” by Chuck Haddix and Danny Sugerman's “Wonderland Avenue”.
The subjects of these books are icons whose told or untold stories resonate against their era as they contrast against their creative lives.
This literary crevice reminds me of the travel writing found in the late 19th century/early 20th century travel literature, preferably the autobiographical sort, often featuring folk who thought themselves stable and well-balanced but, like that drearily guilt-ridden Victor Frankenstein, find to their horror that they have uncovered an unimaginable, nameless evocation of human/animal nature, and that it speaks to them.
For me, comparing their expectations versus the unspeakable monstrosity of their discovered realities is an endlessly intriguing and fascinating way to spend a weekend.
I must confess to a couple of things. First, I consider Bob a friend. And, if this book were cat poo I'd be the first to sadly return it to Bob with an apologetic explanation.
Thankfully, it's a terrific read, and one that's taken me a lot longer than usual to complete because I've been going back and rereading pages again, just for the fun of how the prose has been needled and composted together. Some paragraphs are going to stay with me. Take
Even when I bend the facts, I am still telling the truth, or at least a truth. If it didn't happen to me, it happened to someone who was like me or some other me I once was.
As some of you know, I've edited a couple of Bomber Command memoirs; as you might imagine I have a large collection of memoirs and biographies relating to the subject. A quote like Bob's above would not be out of place in any of the better memoirs. In fact, “Night Comes Down” often reminds me of a Bomber Command memoir where the “lucky” young chap starts his tour of operations, which turns out to be quite hideous, only to have his aircraft hit. Parachuting out, the innocent embarks on a long, cold, hungry and arduous journey to get out of occupied Germany, dodging guards, fascists, barbed-wire fences and ferocious dogs.
Colloquial, rough-edged, untutored, “Night Comes Down” is stuffed with descriptive trails and trains which shut us back and forth among the underworld web of Bob's badly-abused neurones.
"Maybe this is all true. Then again, maybe this was all a dream of sound and fury, told in a shower. If you were there, despite the blurred edges, you'd know for sure."
Some of you might notice a few idiosyncrasies as you read. There are reasons for these - and as you go you will doubtless realise why they've been left in - and I won't spoil that. Suffice it to say that while I didn't have time to read the book all in one sitting, as it should be read (preferably with a bottle of Laphroag at hand while the wind howls and rain batters the window - perfect Sydney weather this year), the book rarely left my side and, as I've indicated, my copy is now a right old mess.
So, you need to get your grubby paws on “Night Comes Down”.
