Essay – The Electrified Journalist

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Wild Colonial Boys

By: Mark Mordue January 16, 2020January 27, 2020

Current/Reviews, Essay, MusicBarking Spiders, Blood Moon, Cold Chisel, Khe Sanh, Marrickville, Mawson Hotel, Newcastle, The Factory, Wild Colonial Boy, working classLeave a Comment

At a venue called The Factory, I join an unusually busy line-up for an obscure band called The Barking Spiders. My wrist is stamped with what looks like a bird’s wing – and in I go, to a not-so-secret warm-up show by the legendary Australian group, Cold Chisel.

I’m an Australian journalist, editor, writer and poet.

I was born and raised in Newcastle, New South Wales, dividing my teenage years between the coastal steel-mining town and Nhulunbuy on the Gove Peninsula in Arnhem Land.

After I finished uni in Newcastle I headed for the big city, and have lived in Sydney ever since – not counting detours back to the Northern Territory and down to Thirroul on the south coast – a year overseas back-packing everywhere from Iran to New York – and a block of time studying in China as a writer.

I’ve written a few books of poetry, a collection of travel stories and am at work on a biography project that has taken me forever. There’s a draft of a novel I’m reworking and pretty happy about too.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been published all over the country and internationally – from making my start in rock journalism to writing essays to doing interviews and reviews and covering all manner of things that take my interest.

Some of those crossed wires, bright sparks and loose connections can be found here.

– Mark Mordue

Above is a video of me reading a poem of mine called ‘Tuesday Flowers’. It’s about a day with my kids. It was filmed at Jane Siberry‘s Songwriters in the Round night at Estonian House in Surry Hills. You can see Jane seated beside me, then Paul Andrews and Tanya Sparke. It was a special kind of event. Wherever you are in the world you should go when you see Jane when she is in town and it is being advertised… music, poems, conversations about creating, it’s a kind of magic opening up and different every time she gathers a community of artists together. Special thanks to Gary Crockett for making this slice of film and passing it along.

Back in 2004, I wrote an essay called ‘The Electrified Journalist’. It was an attempt to explore the line I’d been walking for most of my working life between non-fiction interests and fictional techniques, not to mention my attempts at a poetic style.

The New Journalism was one obvious reference. But really the lyricism of rock ‘n’ roll has always been a driver inside me, affecting me and pushing me, reshaping me.

‘The Electrified Journalist’ and was published at a wonderful music and arts website called Neumu.

The essay focuses on my rock journalism – but it speaks for much more in what I try to do. Nearly two decades on from writing it, I don’t think that much has changed.

Here’s a relevant fragment:

“I think there is a vaguely religious quality to all this, that writing about music and writing inspired by music leads to songs of innocence and experience on the page as much as between the ears. It’s a devotional act, a real love thing, which is why it can be an angry and hateful and messy thing too. I often think the best rock ‘n’ roll magazines and writers have a reach-for-the-stars touch of anarchy about them, a sense of risk that inevitably involves failure as much as moments of white-light wonder.”

‘The Electrified Journalist’ can be found in full here at weblink for Neumu.

Count Volta demonstrates his newly-invented battery or “Voltaic pile” to Napoleon. Alessandro Volta (1745- 1827) was an Italian physicist. He became interested in electricity in 1786 after seeing the work of Galvani. Volta was the first to show that an electrical current flowed when two dissimilar metals were brought into contact. In 1800 he constructed a device which used this effect to produce a large flow of electricity. Bowls of salt solution were connected together by metal strips, each composed of copper at one end & tin or zinc at the other, and a current was produced. A compact version of this, using a stack of discs of copper, zinc & cardboard moistened with salt solution, was shown to Napolean in 1801. Upon presenting his invention, Napolean awarded Volta the medal of the Legion of Honor and made Volta a count. The unit of electrical potential, the volt (V), is named after him.