This essay has been updated – from thinking harder and arriving back from a vacation visiting Halloween fright nights up in the Australian tropics.
I’ve had an interesting conversation with a promoter about hosting some sort of tiki bar event. An old school tiki bar has shown up in Darlinghurst – which is very welcome to our tiki deprived existence here in Sydney. I’m not sure why Tiki is so rare in this country – perhaps we live too close to the real Pacific for a fantasy to develop. I aim to change that.
If you don’t know about tiki bars and their USA pop culture please have a look over here. I’ll wait.
Over the years I’ve made projects that seem to relate to c20th Tiki. Most obvious are the Barbara Island series of albums, four titles released four years apart. Around the start of that period came the video album Lives Of The Saints which included a section about cargo cults in the second war. And then my video game Snowglobe is set up on an tropical island as well. And how about the figures sold with the Butch Crutch EP… this looks like a lot of Tiki!
But actually it’s not – Tiki represents a happy place, a c20th American fantasy. My productions are far too sinister and full of menace. When we recently visited the United States we explored ‘a Parallel Polynesia’ in the fantasy regions – Las Vegas, Orlando and the like. Now I have conflicting ideas of what “a tiki event” should mean – a conflict with my own islands.
Growing up Tiki
Over the years I’ve collected much trash/treasure which fills my studio space. It’s a mishmash of odd toys, Halloween, horror, sea life etc. I’ve always blamed it on visits to Ces Cook’s Magic Shop on Oxford Street Darlinghurst back in the early 1970’s. But the photo evidence shows my imagination was stronger than the rubber masks and pranks sold in the real store.
This fantasy world was cemented by a trip to London in 1979 with my parents where we visited shops and museums intensely packed with vintage and curio objects. Some of these appear to have been open for hundreds of years – and no that’s not for sale. Or that. In fact get out of my shop. That barrier never frightened my pa who would always grab some weird fetish or other.
On that same trip I’d visit the old Rough Trade record shop. That was another place that was filled to the brim with magic back in those days. I mainly grabbed flyers and ‘zines – they were free. But I also gathered up vinyl that has since become vastly valuable over time – the music hasn’t changed – but the artifacture (is that a word? It should be) has become magical. That all my vinyl was stolen back in the 90’s just makes it more unearthly.
On our 1986 tour in America we stopped in Haight-Ashbury and I went book crazy. I lugged home so many books about pirate radio, bombs, UFO’s, Slack … I still wonder how I got these through customs. Most came from The Booksmith which is found under the iBeam venue. These joined books my dad had collected covering possession, past lives, incantations etc. They are not to be believed, they mark the edges of science, which is at times porous.
Locally there was once Waltham Dan’s – a old dingy store near Taylor Square full of strange electrical goods that no one was allowed to buy – except my compatriot Ian Andrews who knew exactly which machine was which – Dan would be fine with him buying the most lethal stuff which you can see in this video – which is also very magical. Dan’s is now a block of apartments.
I’ve come to realise I grew up in an era and context rich with the curious and bizarre. Everything from occult texts for summoning angels to hopping Chinese vampires. This seems normal – so much so that I’ve felt the need to reproduce it at home (mostly as cheap plastic) to feel fully comfortable in my skin. My tiki bar is not about the Pacific – it’s a cabinet of curiosities, evidence of the world being far more than the known. So how does that impact on my ideas of a Tiki event? Well at very least it needs to be reseated with the Pacific looking out from the islands.
If I am to make ‘tiki bar music’ it really should not be a Polynesian pastiche. It should be an audiation of the uncanny. Of course that’s easy to say… but how to do?
Hi there! I’m just one of the old devils that used to live in the old Ellard house. I can’t have been a big devil as I’m not sure of my name … but I’m still in the old photos so I must have been pretty important in some way.
All up – this is not a time for tiki past. It needs to be … Tiki2.0!? We start by finding evidence of existence outside the known world. We go from there.
As a fan, I fully support this Tiki future. Even if it’s just floral print Aloha button-downs.
There’s an opportunity to take the old tiki and progress it to Tiki2.0 – involving some of the best bits of “hauntology” – western culture as remnants alongside those of world war Polynesia, magic shops, data rot, fire walking … I can’t quite get a handle on it but I know it’s there.