Open Writing

During the middle years of the nineteen-seventies the formal, but intimate, small concert-style folk music club was very much a part of the Sydney City folk scene. In this relatively well-ordered environment the artists were booked in advance to perform for a set period and for a small fee. The camp followers paid a pittance for admittance and received in return a door-prize raffle ticket, an evening's entertainment and, from the Elizabeth Folk Club, an invitation to a late-night party at 14 Darling Street Glebe.

In the convivial, eclectic and egalitarian environment of the folk club the traditionalists shared their plunder of the race memory with the true believers. The contemporary singer-songwriter types, usually on a different night or in a different place, demonstrated the multifaceted product of deep and meaningful navel gazing to their really cool and slightly better dressed followers.

To reach an audience a little larger than just the folk converted, the club's, always low cash flow enterprises, indulged in single column inch advertising in local newspapers. Beyond those outlets they searched diligently for free listings in esoteric, bankruptcy-bound periodicals. Feature writers, themselves a ragged and impecunious brigade, were fed with appropriate copy, free T-shirts and free access to the performance space. Some determined organizers distributed handbills at large concerts, busy shopping centres, crowded railway stations and musical peace riots.

There were also wandering bands of nocturnal adventurers known as Flannel Foots. They took their handbills and paste pots out onto the streets of the city. There they practiced their devilish arts on bus shelters, lampposts, shop windows, and on any other target of opportunity that presented itself. Church, technical college, university, post office and even police station notice boards all fell victim to these billposting night visitors.

The Flannel Foots, prudently, avoided big city hoardings because the high-volume Poster-Mafia brooked no shenanigans on their hard fought for patches. These rabid professionals were ruthless and cruel. Their sharp eyes were everywhere and their vengeance was dreadful. Broken kneecaps, an old and loved tradition, was common enough in the on-going internecine poster pasting wars.

According to legend, any amateur poster paster apprehended by the mob received special attention. This ritual included a heavy dousing in poster paste, rolling in poster paper, and receiving a generous thumping. Then, as a warning to others, the unfortunate adventurer was left hanging upside down from a construction site scaffolding adjacent to a busy city street. A high price to pay even for the most dedicated Flannel Foot.

The fly-by-night method of promotion always seemed to me to be ethically dubious and environmentally offensive as well as being ineffective, time-consuming and exhausting. At times, the Poster-Mafia aside, it was fraught with terrible dangers, as one flannel foot discovered when apprehended in a Paddington bus shelter by the second-largest police constable in the western spiral arm of the galaxy.

The diminutive billposter answered the belligerent enquiry, "What the bloody hell are you doing?" with a brief but illuminating description. He followed this with an impassioned plea for the rights of citizens in a free society to demonstrate by word, deed and homemade handbill the universality of their chosen music. The constable, who undoubtedly viewed the flannel foot as an irresponsible affront to public neatness, seemed unimpressed by his claims to cultural altruism.

Things could have gone bad for the lad, but fortunately at that very moment high technology, in the form of a blue, go-faster striped, colour-blind Morris Mini 1100 came to his aid. In a crescendo of gears it screamed throatily and flamboyantly into the Paddington night and on through the Town Hall traffic lights while the top one was still a gleaming red.

With the conditioned reflexes of a superbly trained athlete, the second-largest police constable in the western spiral arm of the galaxy instantaneously responded by leaping, in a single bound back, into his 'prowl' car and howling off into the colourful, neon-stained night in hot pursuit of the delinquent Mini and on into history.

The flannel foot abandoned his handbills and paste pot, and climbed, heart-poundingly into a friendly taxi, which delivered him, some little time later, to Tom Doyle's a public house in Harris Street, Ultimo, much frequented by those of the folkie persuasion. There, encouraged by the music of several rebellions, anti-authoritarian comradeship, new beer and distance, he told his story, took up chorus singing and swore off flannel footing forever.

© Dermott Ryder