Anything, Anywhere, Anytime - the effect of the late 90s Goodies cult in Australia on the revival of retro 70s funk culture

When I posted about relaunching this blog a month or so ago, I got a request for a Goodies post. As it turns out, just as I was creating a hyperlink to a web page that would explain the connection between The Goodies and the phrase "Anything, Anywhere, Anytime" last Saturday, Tim Brooke-Taylor was literally on his death bed. When I heard the news of his passing, the decision on what to post about next was made for me. 

To explain why there was a Goodies cult in late 90s Australia, and why it's related to 70s retro music, we need to go back another decade, to the living rooms of late 80s suburban Australia. 

Back in those days, there wasn't a lot of choice in after school TV viewing options. I think we had 5 or 6 channels. Thankfully, The Afternoon Show and host James Valentine were making good choices for us. A quick look at the list of shows on the Wikipedia page reveals an all-star lineup of classic children's television, including Doctor Who, Inspector Gadget and of course, The Goodies. 

Fast forward to the late 90s, and those kids who had grown up watching The Goodies after school were now at university, and the dot.com revolution was picking up speed. It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise then, that Australian student Alison Bean would found the "The Goodies Rule-OK?" fan site while at university in Adelaide in 1995 (I love how the website still looks like it was made in 1995). 

The scene was set for the founding executive of the University of Queensland Goodies Appreciation Society to come together in 1997 at their university residence hall. I can't quite remember which came first - discovering the website or having the idea for the club - but after filing some paperwork with the student union and bodging up some t-shirts with a stencil and spraypaint, UQ GAS was born.

The newly-minted UQ Goodies Appreciation Society executive in February 1998 (the author is on the far left in a top hat).

The inspiration for the above photo (from the Goodies Wikipedia page)

Now while there was a significant Goodies fan base attending the University of Queensland at the time (for the reasons described above), at its core, the real reason for the club's existence (and many campus clubs and societies' existence, for that matter) was to see how much student union funding we could siphon off towards beer money. 

This was not just a simple matter of signing up more members and thus receiving more grant money. Naturally, grant money could not be claimed from beer receipts, so one had to think of other creative ways to "launder" it. In our case, our "core business model" was holding Goodies episode viewings and offering subsidised pizza afterwards:

A common sight after a UQ GAS gathering. Circa 1998. 

Another favourite tactic of many clubs was to hold BBQs with free or subsidised burgers. The money used to purchase the ingredients could then be claimed from your grant money allocation, and then spent on beer at a later date once the funds had cleared. These were also a good way to sign up new members - and of course, more members meant more grant money. 

A poster for a UQ GAS BBQ giveaway, circa 1999. 

The club's membership grew rapidly during 1998, and we started getting noticed by some of the bigger, well-established clubs. Early in our second semester, the president of long-running UQ clubs and societies giant, the Chocolate Appreciation Society, approached us about holding a joint ball. The concept was a retro-themed evening featuring chocolate mud cake. A random combination, for sure, but remember what I wrote earlier about the true purpose of most clubs' existence. Suffice to say these guys were on the same page as us!

Promoting the "Murrumbidgee Mudcake Ball" at a breakfast radio event, September 1998. Yes, that is chocolate on our faces, and we are wearing pyjamas.  

Funky Squad, ready for a big night out. 

So you're probably wondering why the 70s funk association. Well, apart from the obvious Funky Gibbon connection (this was one of their most famous songs, and Bill Oddie wrote about how it was influenced by Sly and the Family Stone in his tongue-in-cheek but slightly bitchy cover notes for the 1997 CD "Yum Yum - The Very Best of the Goodies"), true Goodies aficionados would know that the whole show was peppered with 70s funk soundtracks and ridiculously high doses of wah pedal. Just check out this version of the theme song from the mid-70s:

The music in most Goodies episodes will make any funk appreciator's face contort with pleasure. 

The bigger picture here (I think) is that The Goodies were part of a broader movement on university campuses across Australia in the late 1990s and in the underground music scenes of Australia's capital cities, in which 70s funk music styles and fashion became cool again. Perhaps it was a reaction to the teen angst-fuelling grunge music culture of the mid-90s. Or perhaps these things just go in 20-year cycles (according to this logic, Brisbane will be poised for my university funk band "High Density Beagles" to make a comeback sometime around 2037). 

 At any rate, I'm sure growing up listening to The Goodies soundtracks and The Pinball Song from Sesame Street were major contributing factors in the development of my own "Cosmic Funk" world view. But more on that in a later post :-) 

For now, I'll wrap this post up in the way that Tim Brooke-Taylor's Goodies character would have wanted it to end - with a stirring rendition of "Land of Hope and Glory":

Here's to you TBT. RIP.