The Ghost glides by, hitting everything in his path

We all have our heroes. And they will all inevitably let us down, some day.

Stephen Walker, otherwise known as The Ghost Who Talks was one of the reasons that I began listening to 3RRR, all those years ago.

His show, The Skull Cave which still broadcasts every Friday evening, is still one of the greatest trips through music that you can go on.

And if you know how to do it, I fully recommend that you somehow record his show when it's on next off the webcast and listen to it on your MP3 player. I must learn how to do this one of these days.

Anyway, Mr Walker now has a blog at The Age online. He writes well, normally. Just the other day, I was telling one of my mates about a great post where he was exposing roots music lovers for the reactionaries that they are.

But like I was saying, sooner or later, all heroes fall on their arses in one way or another, eventually.

The offending post was this one from last week, where Walker let fly at the ARIA awards night for the fact that it was crap.

Yeah. Award nights are rubbish. We knew that.

But rather than offering something new, Walker unleashed tired and derivative observations about the night that were uninspiring in their insipidness.

I'm going to take the lead from one of his commenters, Evil Roger, who picked up on the unoriginal theme and ran with it.

Firstly, Walker chose to make the observation that, "Music award shows are so formulaic aren't they?"

Wow. Talk about leaving yourself wide open. Roger let him have it with one barrel, but kept the other primed for the big stuff.

He next criticised the compere, Rove McManus, for being an "entertainer (not a musician)". Interesting. Last I looked, entertainers' jobs were to do this sort of stuff. His point about not having a musician in charge of proceedings was baffling, in light of a later observation that he makes.

However, we will continue. Walker then proceeds to criticise the "moshpit" down the front, right down to the "Moshpit Coordinator" who appeared in the closing credits. Walker has a point about this, but conversely, I'm going to give the organisers points for this. I so wish that the next Oscars night has one of these.

In other words, Walker was right. It's so very, very, hide-under-the-bed-and-cringe lame. But it's a thousand times better than all those music awards nights where people just sit in an auditorium waiting for their name to be read out and then feigning complete crystal meth breakdown while their one hit rings out across the gathered throng.

So what else does Walker poke fun at?

"...A succession of awards calculated somehow or other by someone or other..." Bloody hell, Ghost. What did you think you were watching? Terminator 2?

"...A bunch of relatively inarticulate winners who snigger and mumble their way through a list of "thankyous" that are generally meaningless or indecipherable to the average viewer." And you thought that a musician presenting the awards would be a good idea? What were you smoking, Ghost? And where can I get some?

"...Oh and a couple of actual musical performances scattered through the evening." Just in case you though that he fell asleep.

Honestly, this review just blows. Walker somehow manages to combine the intellectual snobbery of the 'über-cool' inner-city music goer with the charming naïveté of someone who believes that award nights actually award excellence, or maybe that Spïnal Tap weren't a colossal joke.

Check out all those umlauts! ROCK!!!!

You could just pick and choose the clichés that Walker uses here.

And, if it wasn't enough to come across as the most pretentious review of a music awards night ever, Walker saves his worst for last with some of the most disgraceful cheerleading for "an intimidating" Nick Cave that you ever saw.

Granted, Cave was a worthy inductee into the ARIA Hall of Fame. I can't believe that I just said that. But as far as Walker's concerned, his surly and arrogant demeanour added some much needed 'tude into what was, to Walker, a wasted evening.

John Butler being "co-opted into a KFC advertisement"? Gimme a break. Any wanker who gets this sanctimonious about veganism while smoking the insane amount of weed that he does deserves to be taken down a peg or two.

Incidentally, didn't Channel Ten get exactly what they were after with their subliminal advertising? The controversy in the media named the companies involved so many times, I just had to laugh.

I normally quite like Walker's blog. And there is no army on the planet that can stop me listening to Walker's radio show.

But this post was an embarrassment for the Ghost. His only shining lights came late in the piece where he finally wrote something of merit about Gotye's, Butler's and Keith Urban's musical slots. He really should have watched that excellent doco on SBS instead.

Half a star.

Kylie meets Hutch (Kylie the showgirl princess? - Part three)

This is part 3.

Part 2 is here.

Part 1 is here.

Around the turn of the 90's, Kylie Minogue began making greater demands on her producers, Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

One of her demands was to create a more 'adult' sound to go along with her newer, more adult image. She was, understandably, miffed that the kiddies who were buying her records now were going to be completely disowning her in another year or so, just like so many other disposable pop stars.

She had to revise her image and sound, and fast.

SAW did their best - but Minogue wasn't taking any chances. She roped in (then) big-name producers such as Teddy Riley and Stephen Bray to assist with her third album.

In normal circumstances, this all could have sunk like a stone.

But Minogue had an ace up her sleeve. Just prior to the release of her third album, she began a very public and very messy affair with probably the one person no one expected - the then INXS frontman, Michael Hutchence. At the time, INXS were probably the second biggest band on the planet.

Hutchence was a typical lead singer who had had scores of affairs mainly with supermodels, singers and actresses and was rumoured to be into all sorts of nocturnal activities ranging from merely suggestive through to bizarre.

In fact, rumours persist to this day that suggest that his suicide in 1997 (which was what the coroner's finding officially said) was a peculiar accident instead. The day of his death I was told this:

"Apparently, he had a belt around his neck that he had closed in the doorway between the top of the door and the doorjamb. He then had a bit of a thrash and, unfortunately, slipped in a pool of his own semen and accidentally hung himself."

Anyway, the fact that this is even remotely plausible should give you an idea about the quirks of this bloke.

So Minogue started seeing Hutchence, and because INXS' star was at its zenith and Minogue's was in the ascendant, the media went absolutely wild for it.

The media, incidentally, had a picnic painting Hutchence as this lecherous rockstar and Minogue as the innocent ingenue. Hutchence was even quoted once as saying that one of his favourite hobbies was 'corrupting' the young Minogue. It is now obvious, ironically, that the roles were reversed, and it was the ambitious Minogue who chewed the fragile Hutchence up and spat him out.

Needless to say, Minogue's third album was a smash hit and her extreme image makeover worked like a publicist's dream.

(Incidentally, the hit song, Better the devil you know was on this album. Nick Cave once claimed that this song had the saddest song lyrics he knew. The fact that he meant sad-sad and not pathetic is testament to the brain-sapping combination of a lengthy heroin addiction and the pretence of a Byron complex)

Minogue quickly threw her efforts into milking this sudden rush of mature respect by recording a fourth album. It was to be her last with SAW.

It wasn't a hit. Apart from the track Word is out, she just couldn't latch on to the record-buying public with this work.

Unsurprisingly, she sacked SAW, and left PWL - her contractual obligations were over.

She was now a free agent. And she was still a marketable commodity. A wonderful spot for a musician, or 'artist' as Minogue would prefer to be described, to be in.

What she craved, however, was cred. Not just any cred, mind you, it had to come with sales attached.

At about this time, a label called Deconstruction Records had just struck 24 carat gold with two acts - D:Ream and M People.

Minogue's people knew that this wave was breaking and also that new owners BMG were throwing a lot of money at the label.

She hardly needed much more convincing to sign on the dotted line. For a very short window, she had an opportunity to receive both a ridiculously lucrative deal funded by a major label, but with the cred and cachet of a minor label, which just happened to be the hottest dance music label in the world.

Deal out of the way, she proceeded to celebrate this new phase of her life by recording a new eponymously titled album with new songwriters, producers and money and also by dumping Hutchence.

Her first album with Deconstruction was a moderate success. Hutchence and INXS, however, never had the same level of success again.