Quiet, You Mimes
Why are so many people surprised that a Britney Spears concert turned out to be rubbish? Isn’t that a bit like visiting a sewage treatment plant and complaining that there’s shit everywhere? If it had turned out to be any good, that would have been news. ‘Britney Spears Concert Actually Not Bad’; there’s your front-page bombshell. ‘Hundreds of fans, who paid up to $1500 a ticket, stormed out of the Burswood Dome concert’, reports the Herald Sun. Surely the real story there is ‘Idiot Pays $1500 To See Britney Spears Concert’.
Not that anyone seems too bothered by ‘miming scandals’ these days. Twenty years ago, when the tape stopped behind Betty Boo at Frankston’s Twenty First Century Dance Club, the outrage lasted weeks. Miss Boo was met at the stage door by a lynch mob, entirely clad in acid wash, and Gavin Wood demanded a Royal Commission. But these days, people are more likely to say, ‘Oh, but they’ve got so much dancing to do, they really have to mime, don’t they?’ It’s now accepted that rock concerts must incorporate a fair bit of Aerobics Oz Style in order to keep the ADD-addled audience from texting.
By coincidence, on the same evening that many in Perth were paying well over a grand to see, for the first time in years, Britney Spears wearing pants, I was in Melbourne watching musicians being encouraged to mime. Vanessa Amorosi appears to have an actual band, and on Friday night they, along with myself and others, found themselves taking part in a Shaun Micallef comedy special. At one point, for reasons too ludicrous to detail, Amorosi and band were required to mime the song they had just performed live, not with a backing track, but to complete silence. So foreign was the concept that during the first take, the confused drummer went ahead and played his instrument anyway. There was an awkward moment as the floor manager explained to him what ‘miming’ meant, via the helpful phrase ‘Just pretend that you’re playing them’, but it was refreshing to all to see a band seemingly unfamiliar with the concept of miming. Afterwards, the studio audience gave them a furious mimed round of applause.
I think it was Cold Chisel who refused to mime on Countdown. (Other bands, like Midnight Oil, refused to appear on the show at all, opening themselves up to the horrible possibility that their single might be played audio-only while accompanied by the interpretive dance of what may have been members of the Natural Seven.) The one time I was lucky enough to be in the Countdown audience, Wa Wa Nee were the headline band, performing that song where the singer boasts of his and his love’s insusceptibility to diabetes. I can’t recall if they were miming. Either way, shortly afterwards, the show was axed.
The shame of being outed as a mime was, of course, too much for Milli Vanilli’s Rob Pilatus. To this day, I can’t help but think of him every time someone says, as they increasingly do, ‘I’ve just come from Pilates’, which makes sense as, from what I can see, Pilates is basically miming to a recording by Yoga. Then there was that little girl who was found to have been lip-synching to the voice of another, supposedly ‘less telegenic’, one at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Since being revealed, like Debbie Reynolds at the end of Singin’ in the Rain, as the real singer, young Yang Peiyi has been performing all over China with no apparent need for a bag to be placed over her head, but, ominously, there is no news whatsoever of Lin Miaoke, the exposed mimer. I’d like to think that she, along with surviving Vanilli, Fab Morvan, Betty Boo and Ashlee Simpson, is in rehearsal for a ‘Monsters of Mime’ revival tour. Could it really be any worse than Britney Spears’s ‘Circus’ (coming soon to a caravan park near you)?
And, hilariously, over the weekend, headlines around the world suggested that the Spears controversy had prompted the Australian government to consider new ‘anti-miming legislation’. The sooner the better, I say, but let it be directed at the worst offenders: professional street mimes. There is, in my opinion, only one place for a street mime, and that is as a portent of evil in an Australian art film (see The Book of Revelation for one particularly egregious example).
But while miming scandals are nothing new, I hadn’t heard about the recent escalation of hostilities in this area by Hannah Montana herself, Miley Cyrus. According to angry Twitters, at one recent concert Miss Cyrus was seen to be replaced by a body double, who continued to mime for several verses, while the advertised star effected a costume change off stage. Now, it seems, the performer can get someone else to do both the vocals and the dancing. Can it be long before a tardy Spears calls ahead to the venue to tell her body double to ‘start without me’?
I still recall seeing James Brown perform at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco on New Year’s Eve, 1996. The Godfather was in fine voice (his own), but we at the front could see that he perhaps wasn’t going to be up to his famous plunging-splits routine; I myself was mere inches from what could accurately be described as The Hardest-Working Cummerbund in Show Business. After two verse-choruses of ‘Living in America’, the moment of truth was upon us. Brown’s solution was simplicity itself – he went and leaned on an amp while the splits were executed by four hotties in stars-and-stripes bikinis who appeared from nowhere and left immediately afterwards. Brown had accurately predicted that the overwhelmingly shitfaced crowd’s craving for iconic dance moves would be trumped by its primordial love of quality tail.
That night ended, at midnight, with the Godfather of Soul cracking the shits and storming off stage after being gently tapped atop the coiffure by a single stray balloon. His band, mid-signature tune, had no idea whether he would return or not. He never did, and the ‘Please Don’t Go’s, though maintained for a good ten minutes, petered away to an embarrassed silence. But ever since, whenever I have found myself in, say, a tense, uncomfortable meeting with an employer, I have tried to imagine four babes in bikinis suddenly bursting in and distracting everyone for a few moments with the dance break from ‘Living in America’. Sometimes you just really need someone more skilled to step in and handle the tricky parts.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Click here to see an extended version of his video shops report from ‘The 7PM Project’.
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