Will it be funny tomorrow, Billy? by Stephen Cummings

 Will it be funny tomorrow, Billy? by Stephen Cummings

Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2009              ISBN 9781740666435

I've always been a Stephen Cummings fan. Whether its The Sports or his later solo work, not a month would go by in my household without listening to something he wrote or sang. Even my sixteen-year-old son has developed a liking for one of his songs (Perhaps). I knew he had written a couple of novels, but I'm not sure I knew he had written this memoir (or, "misadventures in music") so when I saw it for cheap in my local second-hand bookshop, I picked it up.

I'm glad I did - this is a no-punches-pulled dip into the life of someone who was (is?) neurotic, narcissistic, prideful, anxious, and also one of Australia's great pop stylists. It's a collection of stories in vaguely chronological order about things that happened to him on his journey through the Australian music industry. It is by turns cattish, wistful, bitter, funny, and accepting. The opening sentence gives a taste of what is to come - "At this stage in my life I don't need libel actions but what the hell."

What do we learn from Cummings' scribblings? That he had a fractious relationship with his family, that he was famously a moody perfectionist that was hard to get on with, and that he's had interactions with nearly everyone in Australian music in the 70s and 80s - from organising a party where Lobby Loyde vomited on Kym Bradshaw, to being groomed by the Chantoozies, driving a Tarago to Canberra with Jo Camilleri, having a stand-up fight with Steve Kilby during a recording session, having a long-running feud with Michael Gudinski, being chauffeured around LA and annoying Billy Joel (the title of the book is a reference to that), and sharing other not-so-nice pieces of gossip (although not about Renee Geyer, as he "had to live in Melbourne with her"...). It's also a paean to those long-lost Melbourne venues and restaurants that made the city a great place to be in the 1970s and 80s, even though we didn't realise it at the time.

This is a fascinating book, and well worth reading for people of a certain age who love their pop music.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell