OPENING TIME AT PUB: THE MOVIE

“It’s always about the free grog” – Fred Negro.

Pub: The Movie, the new punk documentary (I love the Aussie word ‘doco,’ though, and will be using it from on in) from Andrew Leavold, director of the 2017 classic The Search For Weng Weng, has just opened its doors for first orders at the celluloid bar, premiering recently at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Now, I know what you’re thinking, just let me guess. How do I know? I’m telepathic, of course! Let me cast my inner vision through your grimy mind’s fishbowl depths and see what I can see…JESUS! YOU AT THE BACK! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! I SHOULD CALL THE COPS ON YOU, YOU SICK CUNT!

(Either that, or figure out how we can monetise your fuckoid fertile filthy fetish and stick it up on some dark web porn site. See me after the review.)

Anyway, after that disturbing tangent, I’m not going to try and second-guess any of you wacked-out crackpots again. So I’ll just say it straight; you’re thinking “Does the world really need another punk doco? It’s the most over-analysed, now-tedious musical movement in the world, for fucksake!”

And the answer to that understandable question is yes, the world most definitely does need another punk doco, at least if its subject matter is like this one’s. I know you’ve seen endless tedious shite talking head (re)productions about how Henry ‘Jocko Homo’ Rollins saw The Ramones in some tiny basement in Arsefuckville, Yankland, in 1956, or with Johnny ‘Rotten Spunk Bucket’ Lydon sneering and whining asinine poor-me revisionist 1977 shite, or whatever else sets yer arsehair alight with indignation and boredom. That recent cesspool series Pistol, by the risible and untalented Slummingdog Millionaire Danny Boyle, with posh posy boys playing lawless brats from council flats, really kicked the corpse of 70s retro punk viewing off a cliff, didn’t it?

Yes.

And no.

Every new film that comes out about punk is like a new installment in the Nekromantik series, just stinking corpse-fucking to the unnecessary and unneeded extreme. UK and USA punk have been done to death and beyond for decades now, with and without lube and pulse. You would think that those places invented the musical sneer-style, for shitsake! But there are other punk scenes all around the world, unswum piranha-infested backwaters, dimlit wailing banshee domains, and unexplored gargantuan sonic madness territories. Like those of Australia, cliché-pimping land of kangaroos, students on gap years tending Scottish bars and saying “no worries” smilingly (I genuinely reckon that’s where our adoption of that great wee phrase over the last few years comes from), extreme heat, and…eh…fuck, tired from work, can’t think of any more clichés right now.

How about that the country’s the hidden-depths home of Fred Negro?

You might well ask who the fuck that is. I confess, until the trailer for this crowdfunded doco (yes, I contributed) hit the net a couple of years back, I would have frowningly asked the same thing. Turns out Negro (real name, before you begin getting excited)(though I doubt anycunt reading this review much cares) is a hidden, heretofore-unshined, blackly hilarious Antipunkdean jewel in Australia’s crown, a mad art rush of words and images and sounds and spews and twisted views from down under an unturned rock rolled away from that vast continent’s sexy drunk insane artistic underground.

Cunt is funny and soulful and sound as fuck.

Fred Negro is a cartoonist, drawing excellent underground cartoons. He’s also a father, a painter, a writer, a satirist, an alcoholic, an exhibitionist, an artistic inspiration, a songwriter, and the totally legendary lead swinger-singer in a clutch of Ozpunk and country bands down the last few decades.

He’s completely fucking unique.

Negro grew up a shy child with scoliosis, hiding artistic pretensions from his peers and family in Richmond, the rough-as-roadkill town he grew up in. He would conceal himself in nature to sit and draw his mad wee childish cartoons, avoiding the odd rock thrown at a “fuckin’ nerd” who would dare to do such a thing in an anti-artistic, booze-n-Sheilas-n-barbies-n-cars-n-football-obsessed town. He was promised a job at a local paper being a cartoonist (or “drawrer,” as he impishly and charmingly calls himself) but, upon experiencing the trio of giddy heady vertiginous headrushes of booze, acid and American underground comics, he decided that being a restrained working stiff was never going to be for him. And it never really has been. He's a pure, true, Free Spirit in every sense of the words.

Negro went to art school and moved to St. Kilda (trivia point: the town was named after an isolated Scottish archipelago)(that one may win you a prize in a pub quiz sometime)(you’re welcome)(share the winnings if that answer swings it for you) in Melbourne. The faded-grandeur seaside resort had been a swish, swanky, ritzy, toff-stuffed affair earlier in the century. Luckily for our punk-scribbler anti-zero, though, it had been slowly going to seed and, when Negro and his mad punk pals hit the skids there in the late 70s, it soon went downhill even faster. St Kilda was soon a teeming, lurid, seamy, screamy punk metropolis, gleefully pogoing its way to nihilistic, artistic, perverse, boozy, noisy (think they were five of the seven dwarfs) anarchaos. Bands played every night, and the holiday resort from tourist Hell (or punk Heaven) became a mad magnet for self-destructive, weird, wired wrong-writers and loons and moonhowlers and stage-stormers from all over the place.

A one-upman(iac)ship contest commenced, where bands would try to outdo each other to be as lewd, rude, crude, and nude and spewed as they possibly could. The artistic, youthfully shy Negro found himself diving head-first into this shit like a duck into water (well, beer, really), getting his yucks and cock out, shagging a roast chicken onstage (the burning question “How much cock-choked chook can a slutty Negro fuck?” is answered in-depth in this raucous, bawdy film), finding his wrecksibitionist personality (disorder) was not only not frowned upon by his stainbrain peers, but positively embraced and encouraged. It was “A marriage made in the emergency ward,” to quote another Australian musician and artist of youthful extreme musical countenance, JG ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell.

And so it went for a few years, Negro and his band of merry pranksters and boozers gaining a fearsome buzzsaw rep for their over-the-edge frantic antics. At the same time, the sonic-storm-frontman started drawrering a deranged, sleazy cartoon strip named Pub for a local paper, a sort of who’s-fucking-who, who’s-drinking-what, who-collapsed-where, who-played-when chronicle of the seedy, sexy, sticky, smelly St Kilda and its inhabitants. Pity it’s a generic, gentrified dump now, a middle class arsefuck-moccacappochimpofrappochino-guzzling anti-Nirvana, and just looks like every other corporation-trashed place on earth.

As time wore on (boozy livers), however, the drink and drugs and dementia began to take their toll, of course, and punks from the (ob)scene sadly began dropping like beer-and-smack-bloated flies. Negro himself came close a few times, though thankfully this was never to be his clichéd dead-punk fate. For a defiant deviant as unique as he was and is, this would have been the ultimate sell-out embarrassment, a strange kind of concession to convention and sigh boring yawn-seen-it curtain-calling, like when GG Allin died of a smack overdose instead of the onstage suicide and fan murder explosion he fakely boasted of.

Speaking of which. Negro has been compared to Allin. Nah. Slap that notion outya skull, they’re not the same entity at all. They may be (half) cut from the same punk anarchic antics cloth, but Negro comes across as an amiable mad fucker you could have a drink with, somebody just having fun onstage and making people laugh and retch with his wretched over-the-top antics and tics and tremors. He doesn’t want to hurt anybody else or himself, whereas Allin did. And Allin couldn’t draw worth a fuck either, as his drawings in his book My Prison Walls paid testament to. So separate the self-destructive, humourous, juvenile wheat from the violent angry nihilist chaff, and things will be just fine comparison-wise. And besides, when has GG ever had hilarious, excellent animation done in a film about him, like happens here? Never, that’s when. Case closed.

Who Fred Negro far more closely resembles, in some ways, is the notorious, critically-hated-cum-celebrated underground artist Robert Crumb, an early headspinfluence on the Australian’s absurdist, surreal, sleazy cartoons. Both men were changed forever by their aesthetic-suggesting ingestion of lysergic chemicals, and both men are excellent, compulsive cartoonists. Pub: The Movie is a punk version of Crumb, luckily without the scary insane mother or molesting of women of Asian extraction. It also has a wee splash of the GG Allin doco Hated thrown in for good measure, though thankfully without that classic’s shit-flinging or skin-cutting oblivion-seeking sociopathic excesses to contend with.

I am not going to go into what is in this excellent piece of educational, inspiring, hilarious (Negro could make a stand-up comic – always assuming he could stand up onstage sober, that is) film too much more. You really just need to see it for yourself, or you will miss out. Seriously. Old bandmates of Negro’s put in appearances, as do friends and family members, and they help to paint a bigger and better picture of the man, the myth, the creative destructive (piss) artist and seemingly all-round good bloke, the unofficial mayor of St Kilda. It’s just as well, really, because Negro, in all his enigma-enhancing smartitude, refused to be filmed on-camera for the production, appearing only very briefly in a couple of sequences with his two brothers Dez and Ross. In one of the clips he wears a headsize cardboard cat mask, which, to me, can either mean he likes a good visual joke, is incredibly shy, or both. 

The film, presented in loads of great archive video and Super 8 and modern-talking-heads footage, doesn’t suffer from the lack of on-camera interviews with the singer-cartoonist. The gallery of bandmates and promoters and journalists and family members present (who present stories that come off like the viewer walking into a room that has held a party the night before where you wished you had been, finding used condoms and empty booze bottles, the scent of hash heavy in the stale knowing air) help us to tease out a different portrait of a very intelligent man who seems far more comfortable naked onstage or drawing cartoons than talking soberly and sensibly to people through anything but his artwork and gaudy, hilarious, extrovert onstage fartistic impersonal persona. But so what? That just means that there is plenty more to mine in the life of Negro for any future productions that would choose to do so, with Pub: The Movie a wheezing, choking canary in the coalmine of the exploration of his fascinating, barely-surface-scratched life. And if nobody else ever does anything else about him, we have this excellent doco document to at least give us a rough boozebuzz guide as to his ever-evolving, never-laurels-resting artistic life as led to date.

Capital-circle-A Artists like Fred Negro (and he is an Artist, despite his revelling in, and satirising of, the punk scene’s excesses) help you fucking breathe easier, in a world ever-more pitifully fucking censorious and sad and pathetic. Ever since everywank started impersonating worthless middle class American cunts a few years ago, bringing their ludicrous new uptight-fuck schoolmarm religion with them on bloated social media airwaves, ban this and censor that and I’m offended by this and you’re-every-ism that, fuelled by shitbreath and brainfarts, things in the sinking stinking Western world have gotten ever-worse for free thinkers and drinkers and boozers and losers and self-abusers, scum surfers, boredom-murderers, pride-eviscerators, weak-art-haters, irate I-fucking-raters, with funky funwielding I-don’t-care cunts using blunt force art trauma and drama and comedy in all its guises and disguises to instil some sense of freedom and fun and raging joy at the eternally profitable fury of our short lives on this miserable, beautyfuel planet, rocking this rock with their cunts and cocks and locking down the speech-restrainers, the sex-refrainers, the happiness-drainers, the misery-remainers.

Wee pause for some classic, hilarious punk tunes from the man, with shitkicking guitar so-high solos:

Mad hilarious joyous cunts like Fred Negro make life more tolerable and breathable, like John Waters and GG Allin, or indeed any sick cunt with balls or clit and a sense of caustic vicious humour. Negro’s funpunk, angry, stupid, fucking-noisy legacy and spirit can still be heard in modern angry, funny Australian soundswarmers like The Chats and Dennis Cometti. Negro is finally getting some attention and recognition for his artwork, selling it at decent prices and doing gallery showings and such ostensibly conventional stuff, and it’s good to see a good cunt have something good happen to and for them for a change. And he has not had to compromise his art, with his seminal Pub strip still existing uncensored to this day. Top fucking class.

So fuck all the inchoate-spirit anti-chaos forces of the modern world and watch this film and just imagine what it would be like to have a beer or three with this man. Know I have, and will again. Some people are just not cut out for ‘civilisation,’ whatever that is. Fred is one of them, thank fuck. Watch Pub: The Movie, and understand why, get some booze, go on a three-day real-fun binge, shave some pubes, grab some lube, fuck some willing tube, and come back and tell all the fuck about it.

You know it makes sense.

Cheers from the Yabba, raising a beer from Scotland to all youse making-life-livable cunts. Forever. Trying to make this the official new Scottish national anthem; let you know:

You can check out Fred’s artwork and whatnot at www.frednegro.com.au

CLOSING TIME

PS: Where’s that weirdo perv from the start, with the potentially-exploitable mental illness? Drop me an email…