To anyone my age, Countdown will never be forgotten. Even when we're senile and demented in age care, we'll probably still be babbling about Countdown amongst ourselves. The current Sunday night doco is incredibly evocative and it feels like yesterday we'd sit on the lounge room floor every Sunday evening and watch our heart throbs crooning at us.
I was thirteen when it started. The perfect age. Countdown came at the right time for me.
To view it now, I realise it was incredibly unsophisticated and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants television. Very, very Australian. Molly was a particularly bad and unconsummate presenter, but his passion and skill as a music guru was undeniable.
It brought us lots of new and exciting Australian bands. Skyhooks, Sherbert, Dragon and the like were all skyrocketted to fame and teenage girl dreamboat status very quickly. I remember the Friday night that Hush came to little old Devonport. I wasn't enough of a fan to have procured a ticket, but I was outside the Town Hall listening to the pounding bass and screams of the ecstatic girls inside. That night the pounding throng smashed through the old timber floor of the hall, probably precipitating the complete refurbishment of the Town Hall not long after. It was exciting stuff, even if it was from the dark lane down the side of the Town Hall.
My personal Countdown defining moment came in 1975. I knew my life would never be the same again the moment I saw Freddy Mercury playing the opening piano riff to Bohemian Rhapsody.
There he was, black fingernails, kohl eyeliner and tight, white satin ( how much white satin was sold in those few years?). He just made the Mark Holdens and JPYs look so ....boring! He delivered a six minute song with the first ever "video clip". Essentially a ballad, it told us a strange and tragic story. I had no idea what that story was but it was all immersing. And what Galileo and Scaramouch had to do with anything, I have no idea, but it was deep, theatrical and romantic. It followed no pattern. It wasn't the usual verse 1, verse2, chorus, bridge, upkey, final chorus. It had operatic passages, hard rock section, soaring guitar solos and ended with the striking of a huge gong. It had visual effects as layered and overlayed as the vocals.
It was ground breaking, new and like nothing we'd seen before.
I loved Freddy. That's the thing with fourteen year old love. It's real, true love and you know that if your paths could just somehow cross and his eyes could just meet yours, he'd immediately recognise that you were The True And Only One meant for him. Starcrossed. Sadly, he is in London and you live in Latrobe, so he'll never be with his truest love. Condemned to a life of searching for true love but never finding it.
Poor guy.
