Remembrance: Midget?s Chris Moller

Chris Moller of Midget, Starboard, and Blood Relative died in late November at age 39. JAMIE HUTCHINGS, whose old band Bluebottle Kiss played alongside Midget often in mid-?90s Sydney, shares his fond recollections of the man.

Somewhere around 1995, my fellow bandmates and I found ourselves faced with the privilege of being the opening act for Silverchair at the Metro Theatre. I remember being on the receiving end of a mouthful of abuse courtesy of an incensed young female Silverchair fan who’d wished we were Nitocris). I stood side of stage licking my wounds and readied myself for whatever hapless support band was on next.

Four feral-looking types ambled on stage and plugged in. They totally pulverised the audience but in an almost oblivious fashion, like some kind of sleepy dragon who after yawning fire only then realises he’s levelled a whole township. They had this trick of putting their foot to the gas only to screech to a halt on the edge of the precipice, brakes and feedback screeching before dropping the whole thing, burying whatever poor audience lay looking up from below. As if some stupefied hippy kid had been handed the keys to a Mack truck. They were called Midget and that night I derived great pleasure from the pummelling they gave all of us.

After their set I walked past their room. I’d smuggled in a cheap bottle of plonk as a precaution against the all-VB-can riders of the day. They and their tribe were all sitting on the floor; no one had any shoes on. I was going through a bowtie-wearing stage and felt slightly out of my depth. I was getting a Haight-Ashbury cult kind of vibe.

?Can I have some of your wine?? someone said.

?I hadn’t expected such a spark from someone who was part of such a bludgeoning collective.?

It was a blonde guy; I poured some into whatever humble receptacle he had on hand and said something complimentary about their show. He said something nice back and started talking. Kind of like meeting someone for the first time on the playground in primary school. Really simple, friendly, effervescent. His name was Chris and I hadn’t really expected such a spark from someone who was part of such a bludgeoning collective. To quote my old mate Peter Fenton of Crow when we were speaking of Chris recently: ?He had this playful curiosity that would surprise those, like ourselves, that were compelled by the utter ferocity that he could summon in his music – raw, deep, rhythmic, bone-shattering Australian independent music. So uncompromising and so true.? Amen to that.

When I think of Midget I always think of Newtown. Midget were Brisbane migrants but Newtown seemed to become their spiritual home. To the best of my recollection I’ll lazily divide Sydney into two camps in the ?90s. There were the fuzz-pop post-Ratcat kind of bands who vaguely sat alongside the Britpop-influenced acts, and there were the Newtown bands. Lunarcide with their Beefheart-meets-Einst’rzende freakery, the bug-eyed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle backpack-wearing early line-up of Gerling, the whole shebang’s elder statesmen/resident geniuses Crow; then, front right and centre, Midget and the collective that trailed with them.

The whole scene was kind of intimidating. We used to go across the road from the old Troy Horse studios in King St and eat cheap focaccias at this crusty punk caf?, then load gear up the stairs of Newtown train station to play at an ex-reggae club called Feedback. During soundcheck the empty room would shudder to the ghosts of the trains rumbling below. There was a guy at Zen Studios who seemed to be Hank Rollins? twin, always acting like he was ready to break both your arms for not being ?heavy? enough. You’d get a gig at The Sando and have to get there early enough to assemble the makeshift stage out of milk crates. The afternoon clientele had a close resemblance to the patrons who frequented the bar in the first Star Wars movie; I remember one old grizzled barfly insisting on showing me how his glass eye looked without the glass. Peg, Vicious Hairy Mary, Front End Loader, Midget, Newtown?

I saw Midget play a lot after that. There was Keith Hamlyn] in the middle, pummelling his low-slung bass and channelling the spirit of Lemmy. Ian [Botham], the healthiest, most athletic-looking member of the group on drums, who had a habit of almost slowing the band to a stop before letting it all unleash again. Brett [Fitzsimmons], stage left, all hair, slouch and swagger, churning through the majestic riffery of killer tunes such as [?The Dentist?. Stage right was Chris Moller a.k.a. Scroll, nonchalantly twisting syllables and chords almost totally at odds with the talkative energetic guy offstage. Chris had a unique way of almost spitting words rather than singing them, his riffs a stuttering machine gun, and yet at the same time there were these fatalistic melancholy spillages.

I’ll be honest: there were a lot bands with that high-octane Chicago-esque element assaulting stages in Australia at the time. All of them great in their own way. But I reckon Midget were different; they had that ?slumbering monster? element I described above. The uptight, Albini-esque, white, angry, maths-nerd element wasn’t as apparent. It gave way to something that staggered and fell more than it divided and cut.

?They made fast friends and fans with everyone from The Jesus Lizard to Something for Kate.?

Around the time I met them the band hit a real purple patch. They had an intimidating manager in Matt Elliot and seemed to land every coveted support slot and festival going. For good reason too! They made fast friends and fans with everyone from Magic Dirt and The Jesus Lizard through to Something for Kate and Silverchair. The wheels came off after awhile, with the band parting ways with Brett and their manager and eventually calling time. They were a family and every family has its dysfunctional elements, but that’s another story.

I want to talk a little bit about Chris? songs. When I was at Keith’s the other night, he was showing me an article in Rolling Stone* from some years back that Paul Dempsey of Something for Kate fame had written about ?Feel Like the Bad Guy? from their EP *The Toggle Switch (1996). He’d described it as one of his favourite Australian songs of all time. I think he mentioned the lyric ?You don’t know the first of it, and you’ll never need to.? It’s something Chris spits out over one of Midget’s classic ?pause before the abyss hits? moments. That song just drags and strangles in the most beautiful way. You don’t know exactly what Chris is referring to; knowing him a little I may have had some vague idea, but it’s the hidden threat of meaning that makes that tune so moving and intense.

There’s another lyric from their last album Total Abandonment of Better Understanding (1998) from the song ?Case?: ?I told a lie, it wasn’t very white.? I don’t know what it is; I guess it’s like a kettle boiling without whistling. Something bottled up and white-knuckled. In rock? n ?roll it doesn’t have to be Shakespeare – it’s where the lyric sits with what’s happening. A long-lost friend of mine used to rate ?Please wanna hang around? (a line by Dinosaur Jr.) from the song ?Sludgefeast? as profound and, well, I’m with him. Sometimes people nail it in a perfectly haphazard way. Great rock music is like that: a weird marriage of words and noise that makes sense in a perfectly unexplainable way. Listen to Chris? songs and you’ll understand exactly what I mean.

Around ?97 and ?98 we used to play with them, pretty regularly taking turns at supporting at each other’s launches and so forth. I remember both bands heading north on an ill-fated Brisbane-bound tour. After playing to a near empty-Great Northern Hotel in Byron, Chris and Keith headed over the road. I don’t know if it’s still there but there was a dodgy nightclub that never seemed to close, where all the maggots would end up. Keith says they walked in and ordered gin and tonics that were served up in what looked like vegemite jars. It was potent stuff. Both Chris and Keith had bonded over their love of rap music and breakdancing as spotty teens. The Rock Steady Crew were held in high esteem by the pair and doing backspins in vacant parks on cardboard fridge boxes had been a ?par for the course? teenage rite of passage. Given their soon delirious state from whatever brew the bartender had fed them, they decided to relive their ?breaking battles? days and give the dancefloor a taste.

?Chris was comatose, face-first in his pie.?

After hogging the floor for some time trying to outdo each other’s backspins, they found themselves being unceremoniously removed by an enthusiastic bouncer. A fracas broke out and a small number of knuckleheads began doing their best to syphon a confrontation out of the now heavily-intoxicated pair. Mid-disturbance, Keith asked their assailants ?Hey – do you guys know if there’s a bakery around here?? Stunned, one of the offending party slowly gestured to the pie shop next door. They bought a couple of pies and headed back to the Great Northern. Fletcher (my bandmate in Bluebottle Kiss at the time) stumbled into them upstairs and hung in their room for awhile. He was chatting with Keith and then looked at Chris. Chris was comatose, asleep face-first in his pie.

?Is he alright??
?Yeah mate – he’s fine, just enjoying his pie.?
Keith just went right on talking. Like nothing was going on.
?Ummm – you sure man??
?Yeah, yeah – he’s fine … Scroll!! Hey Scroll, how’s ya pie??
Chris slowly raised his head. His face was covered in cooked cow.
?Yeah, yeah – good man,? and slowly resumed at munching its mangled remains.
Characters.

He used to tell me that after playing a Midget gig, a lot of the time he’d go home and listen to CSN&Y so it wasn’t a huge surprise that when Midget downed tools he formed Starboard, arming himself with an acoustic guitar and teaming up with the extremely talented pairing of Jay Kong on violin/guitar and Sophie Glasson on cello. There was a succession of drummers and bassists – Nick Kennedy from Big Heavy Stuff, my brother Scott – eventually Keith reunited with Chris as the bassist. It was frustrating hearing so many of Chris? great songs at the time knowing they’d recorded an entire album which still to this day hasn’t been released. An intense poignancy haunted the material and an ever-present intensity that fuelled so much of the early Midget back catalogue remained. He and Jay invested so much in that album.

There’s a killer tune on there called ?Male/Female Plan?; I heard it a stack of times – ?Lived up to expectations on a dare? a great line amongst many. It was a way more ornate affair than the Midget recordings and listening to it now, it feels deeply personal. Again like there’s a thinly restrained catharsis going on. After Midget’s reunion post-Starboard, he began another project called Blood Relative with his old mate and former Tweezer member Paul Soygus. They played in Melbourne not long before Chris passed away. Keith saw them and reckoned they were pretty mind-blowing; I hope to hear them sometime. Clearly the musical flame that burned in Scroll stayed alight right until the end.

Keith tells me how he spoke to Chris? dad the other night about the funeral arrangements. He said when he hung up he realised they’d been speaking for over two hours. Just like his son! With Scroll there was no such thing as a quick chat. I rang him up at work once to ask him about some APRA stuff and when he rang off I’m pretty sure half the day had disappeared. He was such an enthusiastic communicator and music fan. Another time I received a last-minute call from a music industry friend; she’d had a free ticket to see the Arcade Fire and couldn’t go, did I want it? I fronted up and heard a lot of noise going on from the guy next to me. Sure enough it was Moller. He was screaming every word at the top of his lungs. At one point he called a friend on his mobile and held the phone towards the stage so whoever was on the line could share his distorted experience. Nuts!

The last time I saw Chris he was doing the door for me as a last-minute ring-in for a show I was playing at the PBC. We were the last two to leave. We had a quick beer, he helped me load my gear into my station wagon and I gave him a lift to his place. We talked awhile, he told me he’d made a lot of mistakes but didn’t regret any of them – that was around two years ago, before he moved back to Brisbane. Keith says the other day he was putting on a suit. Whenever he or Chris would put on a suit, they would text each other to document this rare event. He went to text Chris but realised he couldn’t.

He hopes that Chris and Dean Turner form a band. I hope they do too.

They’d sound awesome.

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####Learn more about Midget via their official Facebook page. See photos of the band through the years by Chris Frape here, here and here.