Mermaid avenue

When researching Coney Island before my visit, there was one vague image that bubbled up from the vault of memory. I recalled a music video Supergrass did a few years ago, around the time of their Road To Rouen album, which featured archival and current footage of women dressed as mermaids and doing beautiful underwater dances.

Now, Coney Island does have an annual Mermaid Parade. Held at the height of summer, a sea of floats, vintage vehicles and costumed acolytes parade from Surf Avenue onto the Boardwalk. Each year there's a celebrity Queen Mermaid and King Neptune - this year Lou Reed was King Neptune!

But this is the video I was thinking of, for the song "Low C", and it's actually from a place in Florida called Weeki Wachee Springs. It's about all you can ask for from a music vid - almost more of a mini documentary, and it's a gorgeous complement to the song:



Amazing, right? Apparently Weeki Wachee spring is so deep no one's ever found the bottom. In the late 1940s an ex-Navy bloke called Newt Perry decided to set up a roadside attraction there off Highway 19, building an underwater theatre into the limestone and recruiting pretty girls to be mermaids, smiling and performing aquatic ballets, breathing oxygen sucked from hidden air hoses.

In those days, cars were few. When the girls heard a car coming, they ran to the road in their bathing suits to beckon drivers into the parking lot, just like sirens of ancient lore lured sailors to their sides. Then they jumped into the spring to perform.

Excuse me, I just need to check out flights to Florida....

Supergrass are one of those bands that never seemed to really get their due. They made some of the most memorable pop tunes of the nineties and naughties - grab a copy of their tenth birthday retrospective, Supergrass Is 10, and you'll be suprised just how many of their songs you know and love. Sure, they kicked off their career with two of the most quintessential songs of the Britpop explosion - "Caught By The Fuzz" and "Alright". But they went on to scale pop highs across a range of genres - glam, funk, fuzzy punk, blue-eyed soul, and more than a few nods to T-Rex and Slade. All illuminated by a sheer enthusiasm that's especially evident in the crowd-singalong joie de vivre of "Pumping on Your Stereo":

Life is a cigarette / You smoke til the end

The split-personality swoon and stomp of "Moving" is probably my favourite, though there's a magnetic melancholy about their 2005 Beatlesesque reinvention on Road To Rouen. There's a world-weariness permeating that album that probably isn't unconnected to the band's personal issues at the time. They released one more album, broke with their label EMI and were supposedly working on a seventh record called Release The Drones when they announced they were calling it a day in April this year. RIP, Supergrass. I'll never forget seeing them play Brisbane's Arena in 2004, one of the best gigs I've ever seen, complete with an encore cover of Neil Young's "The Loner".

Mermaids are fishy but are people too

Keep getting distracted clearing out three-plus years of work emails. Just lost an hour on old personal correspondence, but it was all worth it to find this exchange:

________________________________________
Subject: RE:
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007
From: Clare
To: A
Hello lovely. Thanks for booking splendour now we just need to get tix!! Lemme know when you need $$. Sorry I didn’t call last night – went to this spoken word/performance poetry thing… so weird. It was in this random surry hills warehouse decked out like a forest, full of people with costumes and fake accents. I thought it would just be middle-aged women reciting poems about mermaids (there was only one!) and dykes shouting about the injustice of menstruation (none!!) but instead it was silent po-faced bitches sliding around in bathtubs and dancing choirs and harp players. ODD. I only had a cup of goon but it sounds like I was rocking acid or something; a Hunter S Thompson night on a Bukowski budget. Humph. Anyway, gotta finish up and get outta here!
Talk soon
xx
C
________________________________________
From: A
Sent: Friday, 23 March 2007
To: Clare
Subject: RE:

Oh Honey - am in stitches - I love your emails. Maybe your goon was so mediocre it had become a hallucinogen. I knew those silver pillows were really little labs. I hate it when I am right but by the time I tell people it is too damn late - Why God Why?? I am inspired to write a poem about mermaids: Ahem

Mermaids are fishy but are people too
Some of them get grumpy on trips to the zoo
Splash is a movie starring Daryl Hannah
Chopper is a movie with Eric Bana
Fish and not people yet people can be fishy
this is a word meaning a bit mysteryishy

I love you
A

________________________________________
Subject: RE:
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007
From: clare
To: A
That’s it, you’re coming to the next “token word” evening. I was even considering getting up myself, guess I just wasn’t drunk enough. This is the slowest Friday afternoon I have ever had (that’s a big call). I have been thinking about beer since around 11am. Keep the poems coming – you are a genius.
________________________________________
From: A
Sent: Friday, 23 March 2007
To: Clare
Subject: RE:

OK:

This is to further whet your appetite for the delicious amber nectar:

Beer - you are not made of frogs
Yet I often drink you in togs
Beer - You are made of hops
I wish they sold you in pet shops
Beer - Sometimes when I spill you I cry
and when I drink many of you, I cannot lie
Beer - When there is is sunshine you are ray
I think I will have a beer bath today.

I am giggling at myself
A