Welcome to the weird, weird world of Chainmale, the
antipodean performance artist, poet, and musician better known to his family as
Michael Freeland.
Michael was born in Melbourne in 1952 but grew up in Sydney,
his family relocating there when he was four years old. He showed an early
aptitude for music and performance, appearing in musicals at the Castle Cove
Primary School. Pleasingly, an early musical influence was the murderously
brilliant Elva Miller: “My father bought a recording of Mrs Miller, not for her
singing quality but for her guts. It inspired him and made him laugh,” he
explains. When he moved on to Glenaeon Rudolf Steiner School Michael was
introduced to eurythmy, a form of expressive movement originated by Steiner and
Marie von Sivers in the second decade of the 20th century. Primarily a
performance art, eurythmy is also used in education and for therapeutic
purposes. “I later used eurythmy in combination with classical French mime and
method acting to form my own school of performance,” he says.
“At the end of 1968, at 16, with ambitions to become an
animal collector like Gerald Durrell, I left school to become a zookeeper. On
returning from a collecting trip in the Outback and in the far north of
Australia I took a second job working at night as an assistant stage manager at
The Music Hall at Neutral Bay in Sydney.
“This all happened in 1969/70, when Australia was involved
in the Vietnam war and Sydney’s streets were filled with personnel on R and R.
There were demonstrations everywhere: I left home and spent several months as a
hippy, travelling north and pretending I was Arlo Guthrie, with three chords to
my repertoire. I remember going into a pub on the Queensland-Northern Territory
border and asking if I could sing for my supper: I got halfway through the
first song and a bloke came up and said he would buy me a meal if I promised
not to sing another note!”
Michael produced a two-man poetry show specifically aimed at
children. Recalled from Childhood featured the poems Michael had learned
from his mother, father and grandmother, and it was here that he got his first
crack at fame, of sorts, appearing on the Australian TV show GTK (Get To
Know) in 1973. “GTK was the first of the rock video type shows in
the world,” he explains. GTK “set the pace for all that was to follow. I
then went to work in television, at ABC, in staging and floor managing.” He
continued to perform, busking around Sydney before leaving ABC to study drama
at the Mechthild Harkness Speech and Drama Studios. It was there that Michael’s
passion for mime was born.
“I resurrected Recalled From Childhood as a school
show, and put together a performance of original poetry at the Stanley Palmer
Culture Palace in Darlinghurst. Then in early 1975 I joined the Queensland
Theatre Company with their Arts Council Schools Presentation, touring throughout
Queensland. I met my first wife while in Queensland, and in late 1975 we
returned to Sydney.”
Michael returned to busking, this time incorporating mime
into his act. “That worked well and we began to earn a decent living,” he says.
“Although it must be remembered that in those days busking was illegal.” Being
chased by the police became part of the act and Michael worked his occasional
brushes with the law into his routine. “We were invited to perform at the
Sydney Opera House, in the lunchtime outdoor venue, and also by the Sydney City
Council in their Martin Place outdoor venue. This was very satisfying because
the very person who was trying to arrest me a week earlier was now carrying my
gear and setting it up!”
Under the name The Modern Mime Theatre he organised a series
of performances in schools and won a contract with the Arts Council of New
South Wales, which in turn lead to work in other states. “I found that I was
booked out for two years in advance with three shows a day, five days a week,
with one or two evening shows on top of that if I wanted them.” In January 1977
Michael performed at the first annual Sydney Festival: he would perform there
each year until 1983. His act was going down well: that same year reviewer
David Rowbotham, writing in Queensland’s Courier Mail newspaper wrote that
Michael’s performance ‘speaks volumes for the possibilities of his art. He is a
classic entertainer and storyteller.’
“In 1978, with an 18 month and a six week old baby, we
headed over to the UK on our way to the Fools’ Festival in Amsterdam. I busked
in Leicester Square in London, in Amsterdam, on the steps of the cathedral in
Cologne and in front of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. After four weeks we
returned to Australia and went back on tour.” As his act, and his confidence,
grew he added fire breathing and balancing on a unicycle to his act and The
Modern Mime Theatre became a duo in July 1978 when Canadian-born actor and mime
artist Bob Eustace joined; the pair had been friends since they first performed
together in 1972.
It was when Michael and his family got back to Australia
that he created the piece of art for which certain people, me included, will
always be grateful: the 7” single Freakout. Released under the name
Chainmale (“It just seemed like a cool name,” he laughs) and backed with the
electro-boogie track Mean Little Woman, Freakout is one of the most
unsettling three minutes ever committed to vinyl: Numanesque keyboards, crying
babies, manic screaming and with the words sung and music played in different
time signatures to add to the disturbing effect. Odd and disquieting, Michael
would incorporate the song into his act, building an uncomfortable and intense
mime performance around his lyrics. That performance would later be adapted for
use in a video filmed to accompany the single, now available for all to wonder
at via YouTube.
“We were driving down a lane in the back streets of Hobart
and I was jumping out of my skin. We passed a sound studio and my wife said,
‘why don’t you go in and record one of those songs you’re always making up?’ So,
I went in an asked. Nick Armstrong (the studio proprietor) asked what I wanted
to record. I went home, wrote out the lyrics, brought them back, and sang them
to him with a single beat of my hand on the desk. He looked at me incredulously
and said, ‘is that it?’ I said ‘Yeah. If (renowned Australian musician) Billy
Thorpe can get away with ‘mashed potato yeah, oh yeah!’ then we’ll kill it’!”
Armstrong asked Michael if he would object to his having his
friend Ian Clyne, best known for his keyboard work with the sixties band The
Loved Ones, look over his song. “Ian and I met a couple of days later to record
it having never met before. He played the sort of thing he thought I would like:
it was big, but it was conservative. I said I wanted something with no holds
barred; no constraints of convention, just freak out and do what you want. He
smiled and said, ‘this is going to be fun’. As we were recording the vocals I
got excited: my heart started racing and my tempo with it. He tried conducting
me but I was gone.
“When we finished he said to me ‘you started in 8/8 and you
ended up in 7/8’. I asked if we should do it again. We hit playback and Ian
said ‘no, it works! You sound like you’re freaking out! Hell knows how you’ll
ever sing it live’. That was the birth of Chainmale. I was around 30, I already
had three kids, and in those days rock stars were around 18! I think Ian was around
14 when he was playing at the Wembley Stadium with the Loved Ones.”
Issued by the independent Candle Records in 1979, very few
vinyl copies of Freakout exist: “I think about 1000 copies were pressed,
of which only a fraction made it to the stores. However every now and then
someone tells me they have a copy,” Michael says. “Did I consider myself a
serious singer? I considered myself a serious performer with serious concepts
to put forward and humour, confrontation, and sound were the best ways I had of
achieving that. I don’t think anyone would come to hear my voice for the
musical lilt in it, however they might come to experience the theatrical
content of it.”
Chainmale recorded two further tracks, Schizophrenic
Breakdown (a jolly little sing-along about crazy people) and the bizarre
electro/skinhead anthem Kickback, in 1982. Videos were made for Freakout
and for these two tracks: the video for Kickback – which is listed on
YouTube as the ‘worst 80s music video’ ever made - features Michael and his
young son Joel in skinhead gear, scaring the wits out of anyone who should
happen to pass them by. “What we did others got to years later. The subjects of
the songs were whatever I was experiencing at the time. The lightheartedness
in Schizophrenic Breakdown is the lightheartedness you find in a riot.
Everyone participating in a riot is jovial: it’s a release. The rage is only
for the cameras, when they are given the opportunity to spout about their
cause.
“Freakout was the only record issued. The problem
with the other two videos was getting TV play. Kickback had drinking and
smoking in, which was against airplay policies, and Schizophrenic Breakdown
could have upset people who might link it more with the illness rather than
with the splitting of the social fabric in the UK into an apartheid similar to
that in South Africa. As we already had the videos we put together a pilot for
TV by adding some sketches, but I got sidetracked with life and with touring.”
Michael continued to perform until the mid-1990s. More
recently he has become an author, penning two well-received satirical novels –
1995’s Pius Humble and The Company (1996) - under the pseudonym
Bogan Gate, a name he took from a small village in NSW.
How does the man once known as Chainmale, whose recorded
work (thanks primarily to its resurrection on YouTube) is both feted by people
who love it and ridiculed by others feel about his newfound fame? “I think it’s
great. At least it’s not mediocre!”
Here are both sides of this exceptional disc: enjoy!
Download Freakout HERE
Download Mean HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment