I walk around with a list on my head of the types of songs that I will one day write.
Back in August of this year, my close friend Nick McCorriston and I found ourselves part in Quezon City taking part in devised theater show based around a fictional cosmology of love that we barely understood. I for one felt completely out of my depth, and so fell back on my most reliable nervous compulsion- pop songwriting. And the list.
NickaMc and I had played in bands and done music stuff together over the years, but had never written together before. With only electronic instruments at our disposal, I knew NickaMC was going to have to do all of the heavy lifting on the production side. I told him I wanted to do a Euro-Dance anthem called Love Universe, I wanted it to have lyrics in english with a super-earnest english-as-a-second-language vibe. He came back half-an-hour later with the chords in a sequence on his ipad.
In that moment, I was anxious. I hadn’t expected him to write the chords. What kind of chords did NickaMc write? I had little reference to know. What if they weren’t powerful enough?
He played them to me and I realised that I had the name of the song wrong. These chords were so powerful, they clearly existed as herald to something bolder than life and newer than love. New Love Universe. I wrote the melody and lyrics in about twenty minutes. The saga of the song then proceeded through the rest of our time in Manila.
The head of the Sipat Lawin Ensemble, the beautiful JK Anicoche, was very magnanimous when we informed him that we’d written a song for his deliberately non-musical show. He was downright saint-like when we got him to translate the lyrics into tagalog and record an alternate lead vocal for us when he was supposed to be getting the cast ready for the test audience.
I recorded my vocals in a booth made of mattresses in the apartment of Sipat’s other company head Sarah Salazar, in the sweltering heat, under NickaMc’s demanding gaze. The gorgeous backing vocals were provided by Sarah and her fellow Sipat-ers Joelle Yuvienco and Meila Romero.
We ended up performing the song as the climax to the final night of LoveNot, in an extended version that featured JK and also my stupendous White-Leg compatriots Jordan Prosser and Sam Burns-Warr on the inevitable rap verse. I will agitate NickaMc to release the extended mix.
The performance took place overlooking a balcony overlooking the pool that LoveNot took place in and is one of my most treasured moments as an artist.
My MOST treasured moment as an artist, however, happened a couple of months later. JK was in Australia, taking part in a panel discussion at This Is Not Art in Newcastle. I was in the audience as he briefly discussed the way that LoveNot had been designed as a precursor for a Sipat musical called Love. JK, a man who is never lost for a winning turn of phrase, referred to Love as an attempt to create a New Love Universe.
I did a little air punch in my seat.
I was sitting in the bath, I think it was the day after You Are Here, exhausted in body and mind. My phone pinged with an e-mail (yes I have my phone with me in the bath). Dave Finnegan was looking for artists to join him in Manila in August, to work with the Sipat Lawin ensemble, creators of the internationally controversial Battalia Royale (alongside Dave himself and the Too Many Weapons crew- learn more here- http://www.au.timeout.com/melbourne/theatre/features/2932/david-finnigan-on-kids-killing-kids) I said for sure. I figured it was the sort of thing that probably wouldn’t actually happen.
Around four-and-a-half months later, I was standing in a pool in the middle of Quezon city watching a parade of actors, poets, dancers, fire-twirlers and actor-poet-dancer-fire-twirlers assay the concept of love in a myriad of ways both ingenious and chaotic. I was part of the show, and also part of the crowd, because with Sipat Lawin the line tends to get blurred. I should try and explain.
Dave invited about 20 of us on the trip, hoping that a few of us would say yes. 19 of us did. Sipat Lawin (it translates roughly to ‘bird’s eye view’), an independent experimental theater company that operates in make-shift spaces on threadbare resources, were politely informed that they would be hosting 19 Australian guests who were all keen to collaborate in their new show. 
I can’t speak for the others White Legs, but I hit the ground with no idea what was going on or what I was doing. Our first couple of days involved acting as a test audience for what already existed of LoveNOT (the show in question), as well as a special Mass Wedding event for which we were required to choose spouses and write vows. I tied the knot with our videographer Shane, under the auspice of Sipat company director JK Anicoche, who was ordained by an internet ministry days before.
After that I my friends NickMc and Sarah and I were put into a group with some of the company members and tasked to devise some pieces and performances for the show. I am NOT a devised theater guy. I was utterly out of my depth. LoveNOT was organised around an entirely original cosmology of god characters which was both fascinating and daunting (My group was in charge of the Memory god). For the first couple days I wasn’t sure that I would be able to add anything. I roped NickMc in and we wrote a song, just in case a song turned out to be useful.
Meanwhile, 19 Australians were crashing across three houses (I was at JK’s house) and dealing with the intensity of the situation the way that the You Are Here family always does: with a series of escalating creative dares. Dave wrote a radio play on the subject of Jess’s fraught encounters with Yuki, the highly-strung dog that lives at JK’s house, and next we knew there was a competitive table of radio play-offs being cast and recorded at Seattle’s Best Coffee and judged over dinner meals of Adobo and Yellow Cab Pizza. Something like eleven got made over the 10 days we were there, one of them was mine. Jordan and Sam (two of the Battalia Royale writers) challenged us all to be part of the Rizal Fountain Raps, a web series which involves some kind of solo performance to camera in an odd location. I did a performance poem, for the first time in my life, and it was hard to memorize. The guys busted me practicing it in the middle of a nightclub dance-floor at one stage.
Of most relevance to regular Lick-Nuke readers, I roped in Shane and a bunch of the others to shoot a Manila-set epilogue to Heartbroken Assassin. I was inspired by the recent Wolverine film, which leaned hard into the protagonist-exiles-himself-to-a-foreign-country-and-grows-a-pain-beard trope. I grew what face-hair I could in the allotted time, and we roped in a local dancer/actor named Josh to beat me mercilessly in the street.
Lick Nuke 