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| The Story of Effigy |
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| By Nathan Hobby |
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| 1. The Tunnel |
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| �������� Effigy came to me on the road, at night.� |
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| �������� I was driving home through Northbridge in tears, the storm lashing around me, sloughs of rain running off the windscreen.� The end of the world.� Argument echoing through my head.� Radio up full bore. |
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| �������� It?s got to stop.� How much longer are you going to be upset about it for? |
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| �������� Those angry eyes, those once soft arms turned hard. |
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| �������� - A long time Grace, a long time.� |
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| �������� I see his face, his smiling face, his demonic beard, his laughing eyes.� And who won, who won, I ask?� I bet he?s moved on.� I might have got the girl, but I bet he moved on. |
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| �������� Northbridge empty in the rain, the seedy light wasted and my life a festering puddle, reflecting him, reflecting him forever. |
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| �������� It was just a scam.� Just a stupid scam.� |
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| �������� - But why?� Wasn?t I good enough?� You were already going out with me! |
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| �������� I don?t know... I was drunk...� It didn?t mean anything - I hardly remember it.� Look, I?m really sorry but it was a long time ago.� How many more times do you want me to be sorry?� |
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| �������� - Seventy times seven.� A million.� Forever and ever until this void within is filled, until his face disappears and the betrayal is undone...� |
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| �������� Over the bridge on the tight curves of the paving brick lanes and into the city proper.�� And it was there, idling at the lights, that Effigy hooked me... the radio came alive: a searching, creeping synthesiser rose in volume until the drumbeat kicked in, steady and evil, a conquering distorted guitar rolling over the top of it... and finally the spell complete as an androgynous throaty voice took over, the guitars dropping off a respectful moment for the opening verse |
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| �������� I����� crucify myself inside my head, like you said |
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| �������� You want to prove that I?m dead, just a shell, a living hell |
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| �������� ... and the guitars coming in sharp and heavy for the chorus... |
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| ����������������� I give in |
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| ����������������� I give in |
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| ����������������� I give in |
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| ����������������� I give in |
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| �������� I pulled shivering onto the freeway ramp in a tunnel of sound, at one with the music.� The rain pissing harder and me getting off on it, rising on it, an arrow of speed and music, my foot on the accelerator... |
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| �������� The speedo needle swept in an arc |
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the freeway, cars hanging in my tunnel, my tunnel of music and speed... the lights high above me - guardians, markers - cars exiting, entering and me shooting onward, through space, a spaceship... |
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����������������� I give in |
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����������������� I give in |
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����������������� I give in[1] |
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| �������� The guitars made a final desperate swim and then disintegrated in loops of distortion, narrowing, tapering into a sharp point until they disappeared and all that was left was a final discordant note from the synthesiser... my lifeline severed, the radio presenter?s banality sent me plummeting back to Earth - ?...and you just heard Effigy?s ?I Give In?, from oh?a couple of years ago now.�� Now for some new stuff from Pearl Jam...?�� But the song stuck in me as I sped on by the river, over bridges, past dark houses, shops, cutting a swathe through the suburbs. |
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| 2.� How They Started |
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| Effigy first started playing in 1993, in Perth, Western Australia, with Peter, former member Annie Beckerling and a drum machine. Jason came to one of their shows and 'seeing their potential' asked to join. Peter had known Annie through her brother, whom Peter was friends with during high school. From 1993 through to 1996 Effigy gained much popularity in their home town of Perth. In early 1996, they were signed to the prestigious Roadrunner label and moved to Melbourne to record their debut album.� They have since released their second album, Century Collapsing, and are firmly entrenched in Melbourne.[2] |
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| 3.� Aftermath |
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| �������� All night the song stayed inside me.�� It sat on the edge of dreams, the chorus chanting in fitful waking moments like the last fingers of caffeine and I woke at 6am needing it, needing that song. |
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| �������� The next day was my last exam.� I looked to the mess of books on my desk and couldn?t touch them. Instead, I rode through the aftermath of the storm to the CD shop and flicked through mountains of secondhand CDs until I found it, a man with eyes that stung staring at me from a cover set in a surreal vampire den.� I bought it with the next week?s bus money and rode through puddles and leaves back home.� The sky was overcast; the world was post-holocaust.� And here was the cure in a neat little jewel case sitting in my backpack.� This CD that was to purge me of him forever.� Agitation; I couldn?t ride home fast enough... I needed to consume the jewel case, the glossy sleeve, the platinum disc... |
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| �������� Grace didn?t ring, didn?t ring and tell me she was sorry, that it was all okay.� And I barely noticed.� I had filled my room with the ebony gold of Effigy and it had banished my demons. |
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| 4.� Interlude |
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| �������� For months I played the Effigy album incessantly.� Things reached a delicate equilibrium with Grace; I got upset about him at times but never brought it up and she tried to be nice.� One Saturday, I took the CD to her house for her to hear it.� It caused another argument.� My promotion of the CD went something like this: |
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| �������� ?It?s so cool... it?s really gothic... dark poetry.? |
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| �������� She listened to it and said: ?It?s pop!� It?s glam pop.� That?s what it is.? |
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| �������� ?No it?s not.� It?s not pop - it?s gothic.? |
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| �������� ?You?re so stupid.� It annoys me - you don?t even know what gothic is.? |
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| �������� ?Yeah I do.� Look at the cover.� It?s really... I don?t know...? |
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| �������� ?Glam pop.� David Bowie... you wouldn?t have a clue, would you?� This is like David Bowie stuff!� Seventies.? |
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| �������� We went into a long silence for the rest of the afternoon and I felt intensely irritated.� |
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| 5.� Holiday |
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| �������� A month later, I went on a holiday to Walpole with my family and really missed Grace.�� But it wasn?t a clean missing.�� Missing dredged up the worst memories at my most vulnerable and alone I faced the spectre of him....him, him, him... I was so scared of his name that he became a ubiquitous pronoun that I could not escape. |
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| �������� I kept on playing out in my head what I could never know, never see... that black night, the endless intimacies that might have happened in the darkened bedroom where I was not.� To know it wasn?t just my imagination, that something really happened there, meant that nothing could ever be all right again.� |
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| �������� I had to find ways to cope, things to do.� There was nothing to do.� I kept on ringing Grace from the payphone, my hands shivering in the cold and dropping in more and more coins, each time getting only precious seconds: her Dad answering the phone and chatting inanely with me, her being out with friends, and me never mentioning what was eating at my insides, each call plunging me deeper into crisis. |
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| �������� I had my Effigy CD with me plus a copy of� The Catcher In The Rye.� After I had read The Catcher In The Rye for the millionth time and Holden Caulfield had played out again and again the only few days he would ever live, all I had left to do was listen to Effigy. |
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| �������� I set the CD player up in the loft of the villa.� It was dark up there and the bare roof was raw logs.� For a week I lay in the wood and the semi-darkness, listening, and at some point in that week the music etched itself into my life, its words and tunes engraved inside me.� I felt like I had lived through something with them.�� It soothed the hurt; I was King Saul and here was David, playing the harp for me. |
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| �������� I kept on playing the last track and thinking of a lot of things, but particularly Grace hundreds of kilometres away. |
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| �������� I hope you?re thinking of me, but it?s so far fetched |
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| �������� I?m just the places I?ve been to, but I?ve been nowhere yet[3] |
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| �������� Later I went for a walk in the lonely bleak wet of the karri forest and felt like Peter Hardman and Holden Caulfield were my only friends in the world.� |
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| 6. The� Knowledge |
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| �������� When I got back home, I decided I needed to out find out more about Effigy.� I searched the net and found: |
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| �������� (a) ?Velvet Darkness? - a witch?s page that mentioned effigies extensively |
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| �������� (b) a garage band in America with the same name whose site took half an hour to download. |
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| �������� (c) a couple of sparse disordered sites about the band proper. |
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| �������� On the first two pages, the reviews, interviews and press releases gave a sense of an enormous young talent going big places.� Everybody raving about them.... even coy interviews in the street press...�� �������� |
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| 7.� Road Runner Records Press Release |
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| Every now and then record company staff experience the sensation of a 'sure thing' falling on their desks. It's everything a true classic professes to be - it's got the hits, its got more depth than a medieval oubliette - it?s as if the phrase 'world class' was devised solely to describe a record like it. When well worn cliches like 'the best record I've heard in years' are frustratingly the only way to relate it to others, the only hurdle left to scale is how to do this dateless album the justice it so obviously deserves. For it is albums like Effigy's 'Century Collapsing' that make music feel like an exciting discovery again - when its only the music and not the words to describe it, that can reflect its true reach.[4] |
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| 8.� A Sense Of Harmony |
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| Chatting with Effigy drummer Jason Stacy is like talking to a twelve year old about basketball: he just can't help mentioning his idol's name, constantly and with intense admiration. Jason's hero, however, is Peter Hardman, Effigy's singer/songwriter and guitarist. He slips Peter name in wherever possible, succeeding in two efforts: deflecting attention away from himself and further magnifying the intrigue already surrounding Hardman.[5] |
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| 9. The Crash |
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| �������� Then I scrolled down to the news section and fell four storeys in my mind.� |
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| 10.� Last Update On The News Section Of A Fan Page |
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| 23/12/98 |
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| Is it the end? |
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| Shock! Horror! Split rumour... |
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| Well, unfortunately its true - Effigy are no more. |
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| To: "Michelle Wilcox" |
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| Subject: Re: Effigy split |
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| Hi Michelle, |
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| I can confirm that Effigy are no more - there will be a press release about the situation coming from the RR office very soon. |
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| Kind regards, |
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| Jon Satterley[6] |
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| 11.� Desperate Surfing |
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| �������� I?d been living an illusion... all that time I?d been holding a corpse in my hands thinking it was alive, young, full of vitality.� Dead before I even came to know them... and all that was left was a curious afterlife, a chance slot on Triple J, secondhand copies of their albums in CD shops, the slick sleeve, the magic music pointing to nothing of what was to come... |
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| �������� Such a waste!� So stupid.� I was being so stupid - I felt like someone had died.� It was just a band - I tried to tell myself it didn?t matter whether they were together or broken up, I tried to tell myself that the music lived on. |
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| �������� I surfed on, trying to find out more, trying to find out how, when, where. |
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| �������� The net was frustratingly silent, oblique.� I found odd references, more reviews... and then finally another fan page with a news section and as much I was going to find out... |
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| 12.� Disordered News Section From Another Fan Page |
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| I recently received an email from Jason Stacy, the ex drummer of Effigy. He says the split was due to 'personal differences'. He hasn't kept in touch with Peter but is still good friends with Cobina. He has no plans to play drums professionally again (just as a hobby he says), and plans to work in the photography/film industry as he has a degree in photography. |
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| Well Pete is now in Perth, and is planning to do some solo shows while looking for band members. I'm curious to see if he'll do them under his own name or the moniker he has used previously for solo shows, Theresa Bitch. So keep a look out Perthites and let me know. |
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| Now for some good news!!! Contrary to what was written here previously, Effigy haven't split up!!! Well I guess technically they have...Cobina and Jason have both left, but Pete plans to find some new members and re-start the group. Pete has moved back to Perth, where he is planning to write some new songs, get his shit together, and hopefully have an album out by the end of this year.[7] |
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| 13.� Rebirth |
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| �������� It took weeks for me to digest it all.�� For a while, it felt like a new betrayal.� I had to start again - the purging, the cure had not worked.�� Defunct, alive, semi-defunct, semi-alive... all distinctions blurred... |
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| �������� I felt cheated. ��������� It was all so artificial, so amateur.� The drummer of what I had briefly thought to be the greatest band in the world was suddenly going to stop being a drummer and take photos. |
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| �������� That interview about him idolising Peter - I hated it for being so wrong!� It was obvious there were real problems there... not idol worship.� |
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| �������� Neither the slick promotion nor the high praises had saved Effigy.� Sycophancy while they were at their height - and now they had fallen no one seemed to care. |
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| �������� But I clung to the last paragraph of hope - it� really mattered to me that Effigy might be again. |
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| �������� ?A Saviour Complex,? Grace said when I tried to tell her about it.� ?That?s your problem.� You always want a saviour.� And when Christ wouldn?t do, you tried me and now I?m not good enough, you?re clinging to Effigy.? |
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| �������� ?That?s not fair.� It?s not true.� What do I want saving from?? |
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| �������� ?Self pity.� Yourself.� Your inability to let go.? |
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| �������� There was another argument after that.� When I got back home, I thought about it and smiled to myself.� Because there was rebirth, resurrection, and slowly, shoddily through poorly maintained web pages the word was spreading. |
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| �������� The rest of what she said took a while longer to sink in.� I didn?t want to let go. But I finally did.� And funnily enough, there was a storm that night like a framing device.� But it was nothing dramatic; her parents were out and we just lay on the couch for hours, talking.� Her arms were soft again; her eyes sparkled.� I said something I hadn?t said before. |
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| �������� ?You know what you said... what you said about letting go?? |
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| �������� ?Yeah.� I remember.? |
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| �������� ?Well? I really want to let go.... let go of that night... and him... I want you to know... I want you to know that I forgive you.? |
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| �������� She smiled and I smiled back.� ?Thanks,? she said, ?Thanks a lot.?� We kissed and in the delicacy of her face so close to mine, in the oneness with her fine cheeks, suave lips, in the taste of her, in that moment everything was all right. |
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| �������� On the way home, the immensity of Effigy struck me.� |
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| �������� Everywhere was rain pounding down on slick streets.� Lightening sliced the sky thrice a minute.� My car was a cocoon and inside it I was warm and content, heater on, Effigy tape playing. |
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| �������� I took a wrong turn and found myself in unfamiliar suburban Mt Lawley, stately houses, magical trees lining the streets, wrought iron fences, hedges and I realised that this was Effigy country. |
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| �������� I thought how Peter had returned here, to Perth, and how he was somewhere close by, roaming the streets, restoring the legend.� Some time, some place, perhaps tomorrow, I will pass him in the street or I will see him in a laundromat in early morning sunlight and I will smile at him, maybe even say hello.� |
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| [1]Hardman, P, ?I Give In?, Effigy, Roadrunner Records, Melbourne, 1997. |
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| [2]Author Unknown, ?How They Started?, Effigy, www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Towers/5244/effigy.htm, accessed 25 July 1999. |
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| [3]Hardman, P, ?Moving Away?, Effigy, Roadrunner Records, Melbourne, 1997. |
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| [4]Road Runner Records, ?Press Release?, Official Effigy Home Page, www.roadrunnerrecords.com.au/effigy/info.html, accessed 25 July 1999 |
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| [5]Barry, S., ?An Unnamed Fear?, dB, 26 August 1998 |
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| [6]Satterley J., in Wilcox, M., ?News?, Effigy ? An Australian Band,� http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/5116/effigy.htm, accessed July 25 1999. |
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| [7]Author Unknown, ?News?, Effigy, www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Towers/5244/effigy.htm, accessed 25 July 1999. |
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