So what is Oldskool?

Subject: So what is Oldskool? Tue 18 Mar 2008, 20:38

We say it a lot, and it's different to many. Just what do we mean by Oldskool Hmmm? Suspect

Subject: Re: So what is Oldskool? Wed 19 Mar 2008, 21:05

Just looking at the color scheme of this forum, now I've got a chance to sit down for a cup of tea. It's 'lime' green, but to me it's oldskool fluro color. We called it Kryptonite Smile

))

But they've got the green sitting pretty nice, like reflector lines on Phats
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Garry Shepherd

http://www.melbourneshuffleoldskool.com . http://www.xtreemshuffle.com

Subject: Sayang You Can Dance Wed 19 Mar 2008, 21:29

Might as well just roll here for a bit in this thread as I fine tune the forum, which in fact is a very oldskool thing to do. We were always seriously distracted with the buzz bursting out all over the place. It was hard to keep up.

It feels like that NOW.

For example, just check out what Alicia and the Tribezone crew have been up to the past few days.

This is the first Shuffling in a movie !! cheers

My god, Shuffle's all growed up Wink

Well done Alica and Tribezone, stunner...tell the director it'll sell better if they let you do more shuffling. Check out more pics on Alicia's blog. It's out Nov 08. Nice Phats! The directors got a horror movie in the cinema's at the moment, full on spatter. Shuffle is the next obvious step lol

http://aliciaks.blogspot.com/2008/03/there-are-only-2-reasons-why-you-should.html

Sayang You Can Dance

(Got the vid embedded) Here they are doing some Jump

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Garry Shepherd

http://www.melbourneshuffleoldskool.com . http://www.xtreemshuffle.com

Subject: Re: So what is Oldskool? Wed 19 Mar 2008, 21:45

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dZ-OVQnTm0[/youtube]

now if I can just enable the html, we can see the youtube clip, it was working ok in the music section. I saw the check box somewhere this afternoon...hmm

The clip works on alica's blog ok tho,
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Garry Shepherd

http://www.melbourneshuffleoldskool.com . http://www.xtreemshuffle.com

Subject: Re: So what is Oldskool? Thu 20 Mar 2008, 13:30

Finally got it working, need to use the Youtube embed code in the forum link slot to get it going. Not the actual 'link' of the vid. Confusing but...

Here's a new clip by Andrez / Little Nobody

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Garry Shepherd

http://www.melbourneshuffleoldskool.com . http://www.xtreemshuffle.com

Subject: The Fabulous Beast Fri 21 Mar 2008, 00:23

There comes a time when you realise you're standing in the middle of something. I've been around for ages as I mention in Shuffle the Beginnings, and have seen a good share of 'somethings'. You get to recognise the signs when something's starting to happen after a while.

It doesn't mean you know what it is. But you can't deny it's staring you in the face. 'Obvious but Undefined' is the term I use to describe it.

The moment it dawned on me that there was a an 'Oldskool' movement happening in Melbourne, as opposed to just a bunch of stuff that happens, was January 12 1992.

The date is significant because it is the day HAL the computer in 2001 a Space Oddessy, was 'born'.

I had just moved into the Melbourne CBD living in my studio. I'd been there for a year or so and discovered lots of other artists doing the same thing.

We took over old office buildings that were vacant because of the recession. I was in Commerce House, it had Australia's first rave clubs in it's basement for 5 years, and saw 460 club patrons strip searched in a Police raid.

Lots of artists lived there, it was a real community of misfits and non descripts, horror magazine publishers, fashion photographers, a fashion designer who slept in a coffin, and the Cinema Industry Benevolent Fund to name a few.

It was illegal to live in your studio. So we'd sneak around at night and go quiet when the security guards came thru. regular as clockwork 3 times a night. If you were having a party, eveyone would disappear from the corridors for 10 minutes then come out again. Here's a video walk thru I did in 1996. It was built in 1913. The front is Flinders Street on the banks of Melbourne's old gold rush port.

Those who lived there would brag, in a nice sense, about our ingenuity using found business cast offs to make our homes in old offices. It was like some post apocalyptic movie script. Mad Max meets the Omega Man sort of thing. The ferals had taken over the deserted city. At night they owned it !

So we were bored over the summer christmas break, and a few regulars at Filter, decided to make something, just for the fun of it. We'd meet up for a 'build'. That's what sculptors and artists do for fun in Melbourne. We make things.

We'd make a day of it. Celebrate HAL's birthday and have a party. Bring interesting bits and pieces and stuff we'd find in waste skips, and plan to make something.

'IT' became the beast on the front page of the local newspaper in the pic above. This was the flyer for the build (Below) The quote is from Shelly's original Frakenstein. - It was also the plan for the creature. Except we were wasted pretty early in the day and had the flyer upside down. What are the Modonna bra swirls, we thought were eyes. The horns we thought were legs, we just added 4 more And it wasn't even noon

I wasn't sure what was going on, but there was a buzz. People in the house baking fresh bread and 'special' chocolate mud cake, welders going everywhere. All these strangers buzzing around, most of us had never met before. We'd seen each other around, but that was it.
We went all day, this is a still from a Super8 film time lapse I did of this fabulous beasts first sunset.

We had such a good time that we decided to come back the next day, Sunday. In the Sunday Age a major melbourne daily newspaper was an article called 'Operation Flashback' which the Police had dubbed investigations into the sudden resurgence of LSD at psychedelic underground parties. Like the 60's/early 70's in Melbourne. They were right. That's what it felt like to me.

That Sunday Night we had a party. There were fire in those old 44 gal drums in the paper pic, we had lights shining on the beast and a grunty ghetto blaster sound system. we played techno and shuffled around our creation under the balmy summer night sky.

About 3am a Police car stopped. It had been circling for hours. The site was the intersection of StKilda and Alma roads. About 100,000 cars go down Stkilda road a day, it's a 3 lane highway both directions. The beast looked down on the traffic lights.

Friday when people drove home from work there was a vacant block of land, owned by the church across the road. We didn't ask permission Monday morning all these motorists would suddenly see this great urban beast baring down on them. )) Yes we planned it like that
So the Police helicopter had been circling for 2 days as well. They couldn't figure out what the hell was going on.

So the patrol car finally stopped. We're going to jail, we started saying, quick where's the camera, we wanna get this. - Artists Rolling Eyes

But the Police loved it. Better for the junk to end up as an art work than landfill they said. Now that surprised us! Have the journo's been around yet? The Police asked. We explained we weren't after publicity, we want this to be a surprise.

Oh IT'll be a surprise the Police laughed. The stations been buzzing about it all weekend.

The Police then said, Would you like US to drop a call to the journo's, it's been a slow news day, they'd love it. The Police said they wouldn't give away that they'd spoken to us, and play along with the urban myth story.

This is the Melbourne Police mind you !!!

Yeah sure, anything to make the Police happy at 3am while we're having an illegal rave around a steel beast

So the next day TV crews turned up and interviewed the friends who lived in the house. Nah we didn't see anything, they told the reporters. We were away for the weekend and it just appeared. )
Be VERY careful what you believe on the evening news folks

It was a great weekend and I took down a record of the main crew with names they'd like to be known as, here's the list in no particular order and a portrait I did of one of the guys Stu, on the first day. I'd just met him a few hours before.

Tiger Lady
Swedish Chef
Rosco P Coltrain
Pizza Beer Potato
Stoned with yellow cap
Operation Flashback Investigator
Sera Pax
Milky
Rusta Boy
Tao
Anonymous Bosch
The Marlboro Man
CNN Sunday
OXX
I’ll be in touch
I’ll get back to you on that
Lap
Max
Seth Nathan
Alli Black
The Man and His Dog (Stu)
Dorothy
Slippers
Toto
Ol’ Blue eyes
Jimmy The Tube
Sheriden
Pumpa
Mat
George
Just call me Al

We discovered most of us were living in the CBD in our art spaces, and got each other details to visit. Others had come down from Canberra, and were stopping over on their way to Adelaide to do an industiral theatre work in the Old Adelaide jail. They invited me to join them. I did.

We had a 'fire war' every night in the exercise yard with flame throwers, burning effigy's a live noize industrial band, and I slept in a different cell each night. Slept on death row my final night there. The only one in the wing. None of the other 30 or so cast and crew staying there too, were game enough for death row - wimps ! Wink

Also worked on the Imagineer Parties, with Pip (Earthcore) in a warehouse that was cleared out at dawn by the Australian Federal Police and Inteligence agency ASIO, to make way for the Queen of England - yes literally. She was visiting Adelaide and opening a new theatre complex next to our warehouse. I got it on film. I'll post it once I've transfered it from Super8 Film. Someone stole my projecter - Hectore Hazard was his name. HECTOR !!! You said you'd return it!

We scammed a vintage WW2 6 wheeled armoured personelle carrier for a parade to publicise the Imagineer parties we did 4. We painted fluro on it. It had twin Rolls Royce engines and ran out of gas in the Mall, so we just left it there. The council gave us parking tickets! We said move it yourselves. It was there for a week.

Then I came straight back to Melbourne to do the first Every Picture Tells a Story parties and TV broadcasts of our parties.

This was all in the space of 8 weeks at the beginning of 1992. We expected the beast to be bulldozed within days, instead it stood like a holy shrine for 9 months. Tourists would come each day and leave trinkets and take photos in front of it.

Top 40 rock band BOOM CRASH OPERA lived around the corner of it and did a commercial video clip in front of it, and named their next album after it - The Fabolous Beast. They commissioned me to do a touring stage set inspired by it.

This is it being completed for it's debut on Coke a Cola's Take 40 Australia at Channel 10 TV studio's in Nunawanding mid 1993. For a live TV special. Those are the Erinsborough High School lockers behind the works, from Melbourne TV soup Neighbours (Kylie, Jason Donovan, Natalie Embroglia etc).

The band even paid me more to go thru waste skips at night to make sure it was all made out of found material, and it was. Even parts of Commerce House were in it.

You can read more about that and see more pics at Fabulous Beast: http://mc2.vicnet.net.au/home/cybafaer/web/cyb905/fabulous_beast.htm

It was a buzz. It was a time when the Melbourne underground jelled from a bunch of people doing stuff, clubs, parties, theatre, fashion, art work whatever, all pretty much isolated from each other, into a group of likeminded souls. Like we could identify ourselves. Within an instant we were life long friends, and knew it, and we still are.

This was our time. To me it truely was a Fabulous Beast, that's what I call the Oldskool Underground of Melbourne.

That's the BUZZ I'm picking up from the new gen Shufflers right now, except it's global. It's the same buzz, and original oldskoolers are coming out of the woodwork because they can feel it too.

This is familiar territory folks. We can't wait to see what the new generation is gonna do with it. That's what it was like at the build. Young and old, noobs and oldtimers, all in it together for the shear buzz of it.

Here's to the future!

Hang on guys, this is gonna be a fun ride.

This is SOMETHING!.
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Garry Shepherd

http://www.melbourneshuffleoldskool.com . http://www.xtreemshuffle.com

Joined : 23 Mar 2008 Posts : 4

Age : 15 Joined : 23 Jul 2008 Posts : 44 Location : Iceland

wow, id love to do something wack like that just for the fun of it Rolling Eyes

but what

Subject: Re: So what is Oldskool? Fri 22 Aug 2008, 06:39

Hang on commerce house as in "commerce club". As in tasty Bust???

My mate was involved in that. That was unbelievable!

Obviously i was way to young to have been involved in that but I know all about it.
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Subject: Re: So what is Oldskool? Fri 22 Aug 2008, 12:19

Hi de locke welcome to the forum.

Yep the building was Commerce House, and in the basement there was the Commerce Club, which had been around for about 80 years. But it became a gay lunchtime sex bar late 1980's, for business men in town. Then started as a night time club around 1990, with Maze, which didn't last long as it was raided and shut down because of drugs. And around 1991 a few more gay nights opened up on fridays and then Tasty which was run by the Razor crew relocated from down StKilda road way.

Tasty was a mixed gay/straight night and it was Tasty that was raided. The whole venue was locked down a few months after the raid, and the venue was never reopened, I got the last video footage of it inside before the whole building was redeveloped into a 5 star hotel 1996. The basement were the club was, is now a car park.

There were lawyers strip searched on the night, some had come from Sydney for the weekend, Tasty was quite famous in the underground. So they sued the Police in Australia's first legal class action and won a $10,000,000 payout to all the clubbers for wrongful strip search. And the new state Premier said it was a disgusting thing for the Police to do, and made the Police force pay the $10,000,000 out of their own pockets as punishment.

So the Police had to buy their own uniforms, shoes and lunch room milk and coffee etc for years until it was paid. Wink

Bizarre time.
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Garry Shepherd

http://www.melbourneshuffleoldskool.com . http://www.xtreemshuffle.com

Subject: Re: So what is Oldskool? Fri 22 Aug 2008, 18:21

Yeah i've actually seen a documentary called the Tasty Bust. It was interesting but quite scary at the same time, how easy the police missed the mark and stuffed up.
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