FOTW Audio Productions

Preview of the film “New Summer Wavelength” by Ghost Box co-founder Julian House. Music: Summer Round from new Belbury Poly album “The Belbury Tales”

In Australia, during the 70s and 80s, there were two major streams of culture feeding into the country – one from Britain, the other from the United States;  as well as a small amount of our own locally created material. Even though we were no longer a British colony – Australia gained its independence in 1901 – we still had a close cultural connection to Britain, and our national broadcaster, the ABC, purchased many of its programs from the BBC, and other English channels like ITV.

We watched everything from Doctor Who and The Goodies, to All Creatures Great and Small and The Good Life, and for children growing up in a hot and sunny climate, we still managed to soak up quite a bit of the brooding English countryside.

Unfortunately, over the years, as it is true of most countries, American programming has come to dominate the airwaves. But to be fair, there is also a much more global experience of culture with the syndication of reality TV shows created anywhere in the world (Big Brother originated in the Netherlands) remade for local audiences.

For many of us living in the antipodes, however, the unique music of Belbury Poly and the Ghost Box label opens up a kind of mental time capsule of these long-forgotten feelings and sensations of our British-influenced childhood.

Left, Jim Jupp (aka the Vicar of Belbury) and right, straightening up his tie, Julian House

Label founders Jim Jupp and Julian House, by exploring their own childhood experiences, have captured an old way of making sounds and images, a culture that was strongly driven by government education programs and institutionalised creativity like that of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. They have preserved and elevated these old media-making ways into a new and treasured artform, approaching them in the same way that someone might learn the art of blacksmithing to ensure that a valued cultural tradition is not lost through neglect.

But with no one to teach them, this strange world they have created has been of their own making, re-discovered through a process of reverse engineering.

Julian House looks after all of the album art and graphic design for the label (also releasing music as The Focus Group) and has a history of making music videos for Primal Scream and the Doves. His Ghost box imagery is a strange brew of village churches, sun shadows, and neolithic standing stones.

Jim Jupp is behind Belbury Poly, and the fourth album, “The Belbury Tales” has just been released. For this new work, he has enlisted the help of additional musicians – drummer Jim Musgrave and guitarist Christopher Budd – giving the Belbury sound a new dimension with fuzz guitars, vocals, and a synthesized choir alá Popul Vuh’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God.

The album title is a play on The Canterbury Tales, a cornerstone of British literary culture, but is also drawing on more unorthodox literary traditions, like British science fiction. Included in the album’s packaging is a fictional story by Wire Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Rob Young, who has written extensively about the Ghost Box label and Belbury Poly in his book Electric Eden.

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The Australian connection to all of this is an interesting one. In the sixties and seventies, many young, professional Australians moved to London to make their mark, feeling that the opportunities for advancement in their own country – which at the time had a much smaller population – were limited.

One of the people to leave our shores was the composer Ron Grainer. Born in Atherton, Queensland, he was a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. In London, he became involved with the BBC, composing theme music and incidental music for shows like Maigret. One of his most famous works was the cracking theme for The Prisoner. However, it was his orchestral theme for Doctor Who that was famously transformed by Delia Derbyshire on electronic equipment and turned into one of the most instantly recognisable themes around the world.

A reverse journey was made by Tristam Cary, who after many years of composing his unique synthesizer music for Doctor Who (as well as helping develop its signature instrument, the EMS VCS3 with inventor Peter Zinovieff), retired to live in Adelaide, South Australia. A double CD of his original non-Doctor Who compositions was released by the Australia label Tall Poppies in 2000, and he appeared in the 2006 documentary What the Future Sounded Like before passing away in 2008.

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“The Belbury Tales” is out now, available through the Ghost Box website in a 12″ vinyl format, CD, and download. If you would also like to stay abreast of happenings in the world of Belbury, you can peruse through The Belbury Parish Magazine (though I have a sneaking suspicion that the Parish church is fashioned of the same stones that were once the local druid’s circle – so watch out!)

Back in 1983, a trilogy of feature-length telemovies were made by the ABC called Scales of Justice. Written by Robert Caswell, and directed by Michael Carson, each story was a fictional examination of corruption at three levels of the Australian legal system.

The first story The Job started at the ground level of the legal system, the police force, with a new rookie Constable Leonard Webber (Simon Burke) joining an inner-city Sydney police station. Fresh out of the Police Academy, with the police ethos of right and wrong and what it means to be perceived in the community as a police officer – the blue uniform representing the conscience of society – he is gradually exposed to age-old corruption.

It starts out small, while out on duty with his senior officer, Constable Borland (John Hargreaves). Although an efficient teacher, showing him how to carry himself while saving a mentally ill lady from committing suicide, he also teaches him the first of what could be a series of lifelong bad habits: drinking on the job, ignoring small misdemeanours in order to avoid excessive paperwork; as well as the dubious difference between a “bribe” and a “gift”. He also describes the police uniform as an unofficial “discount card” for making purchases.

But at a much deeper level, he is also being taught the importance of looking after your friends, which is more of a social code of not dobbing in co-workers. When some money in the station goes missing, the evidence of a bribe, all the on-duty officers are forced to chip in a few dollars to make it back up, rather than report it missing and bring in outside scrutiny on their policing.

The rookie takes on some of the habits, and reacts against others; but his own dilemma begins when a friend in his football team who has been charged with petty-theft, asks him to put in a friendly word with the investigating officer on his behalf. After thinking about it for a while, the rookie mentions it to Constable Borland, who tells him to go see the detective; which he does. The detective he visits describes how the system of favours work, not explicitly; but lets the rookie know that his friend now owes him a favour, and suggests that he could help the rookie by becoming an informer.

But crunch time comes for Constable Webber when he is out on night-patrol with Sergeant O’Rourke (played by veteran Australian actor, Bill Hunter) and they investigate a robbery of a fur coat store. The sergeant tells the rookie to check around the back, and in the meantime, steals some of the coats. The rookie comes back out just as the seargeant is closing the boot of his car. He quickly works out what has happened.

The sergeant leaves him to guard the broken door to prevent any passerbys from helping themselves to the merchandise, while he returns to the station. Two detectives then show up who also help themselves to some of the coats. The rookie ignores it, but the next day, he finds that someone has put one of the coats in his locker as a “present” for his fiance.

He takes the coat home with him, and wonders what to do about it. He then asks the advice of a female officer who has just found out she is to be transferred to a remote police station for investigating a rape case that Sergeant O’Rourke had wanted her to ignore. She advises the rookie to get rid of it, throw it away, and don’t say anything.

But thinking he is doing the right thing - by the law at least, Constable Webber decides to report it to the head of the station, without naming his sergeant at first; but when pressured from an outside investigator, he does.

Sergeant O’Rourke is investigated by internal affairs by officers who are like him in age and attitude. The seargeant claims the reverse of what had really happened, that the rookie took the coats while the sergeant was out the back checking the store, and they accept it: it’s easier to write off a new rookie, who is disloyal, than indite a senior officer, and let it reflect badly on an organisation who, up until then, had not detected his corrupt ways.  

Thinking that it will all turn out in his favour, the rookie is stunned when he is asked to hand in his badge and leave the force; and although this ending is not explicit in terms of content, it is cold and brutal in a uniquely Australia way. 

If there is such a thing as a hardboiled Australian crime film, that bears a close relationship to reality without being sensational, then this it. This episode has elements of Serpico, but without a clearcut hero.

The series was shot in a documentary style, and had a big impact on Australian audiences when it was first shown; and over the years, it has become part of High School English curriculum for students sitting their final year exams.

This particular episode also contains some great night-time footage – the industrial areas, the harbour and shipping yards of Sydney (that are sadly disappearing). 

Here is a link to a short clip on the Australian Screen website, with some background information about the series.

Late night shadows in RKO’s “I Walked With A Zombie” (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1943) 

For those of you living in Australia, a great untapped resource for good films is the national broadcaster, the ABC.

Fluctuating between old British films from studios like Pathe and Rank - and what could almost be a complete collection of  RKO films (the now defunct American studio that created Citizen Kane, a truckload of film noir, and the classic Tourneur/Lewton cycle of psychological horror films) - the ABC after midnight is an almost requisite experience for film students, movie lovers, and anyone interested in the history of cinema alike.

Although RKO (1929–1960) sat on the outskirts of the Hollywood studio system, it contributed greatly to what is now regarded as the Golden Age of Hollywood. The majority of RKO films were made on a lower budget than the big studios like Warner Bros and Paramount, but still turned out quality films with great soundtracks from composers like Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman, and notable actors like Robert Mitchum and Loretta Young.

They made lots of genre films - Westerns, War stories, Detective dramas, and Gangster films — and helped to revitalise the horror genre, moving it away from the old world horrors of Frankenstein and Dracula, into a more modern and elegant form of horror, drawing on inroads made in the study of psychology, and techniques of suspense developed in thrillers and film noir. 

They also distributed Rashomon in the US, an early film by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, a significant moment, signalling an American open-mindedness to foreign films (which is not always present today) at a very important time in film history - as well as world history (it was only five years after the close of WW2).

RKO now exists only as a small distribution and production company, and although its logo of a beaming broadcast tower is not as well known as the growling lion, the lady with the torch, or the roving spotlights, it occupies a significant place in movie history, one that’s worth having a look at. 

There is no need to subscribe to pay tv to watch classic and classy films; just stay up late with a cup of coffee, and you’ll have something good to think about while your boss is wondering whether to fire you for sleeping on the job the next day. 

ABC Program Guide