A Very Maynard Xmas 2024 will be unlike any other lo-fi Xmas special ever seen by anyone ever.
Broadcasting from the main arena at Maynard International Studios, just opposite the Gilmore Girls Memorial Auditorium, it will bring the magic of Santa’s grotto back into our lives. Hopefully in the good way.
Feature guests in A Very Maynard Xmas 2024 include Lesley Fountain/Glenn Keenan, Roy Darby, Chris Kelly of Ship o Fools. With Christmas greetings from Mari Wilson, Rob Darby, Christopher Laird of Radio Nowhere, George Hrab with The Christmas Sweaters, Brigitte Handley, Tony Push and his poinsettia, even Paul Field and Bronwyn Mulcahy of Countdown Live wave hello in this most awkward of Xmas variety shows.
To celebrate finally getting to see the greatest disco roller skating movie ever made involving Steve Guttenburg on the BIG screen, download this 15 month Can”t Stop The Music calendar.
Suitable for your street or your sauna, it runs from October 2024 to the end of 2025. Which as well as watching the film with us, Ch 9 will play it again at least twice in that timeframe.
You can boldly print as large as A3 (or a more discrete A6) you’ll love the colour and movement only a static calendar can provide. Richard Saunders has really outdone himself in designing a colourful tribute to an unforgettable part of cinematic history. He even looks like Richard the tax lawyer in the movie, he’s that into it.
Enjoy and see many on you at the screening and after party on the 14th September.
Simply download it from the link below and print it any size you like.
As Steve Guttenburg says “Village People, that’s fantastic!”
You’ll think all your New Year’s Eves have come at once.
Can’t Stop The Music, the greatest musical starring Village People and Steve Guttenberg will be screened for your viewing pleasure in Sydney for one night only on Saturday 14th September, 8.30pm as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival at The Dendy Cinema, Newtown.
Then join us afterwards for the unlikely Disco afterparty at Bootleggers, upstairs at Kelly’s On King almost next door in King Street, Newtown from around 11pm. I’ll be your DJ, so you’ve been warned.
Why would you watch any other movie?
To celebrate the 4k Blu Ray international release of Can’t Stop The Music ( I did the commentary track with the wonderful Lee Gambin), we present a one-off screening of the film. It might not be NYE, but it will sure feel like it when we see Steve Gutenberg over-excitedly skating down Broadway!
Tickets are limited, as are the number of discerning people who love this mayhem of a musical. It probably hasn’t been on the big cinema screen in Sydney since the early 1980s. It looks and sounds, to quote Steve Guttenburg “FANTASTIC!”.
Friends of Lance and Magnolia Leopard gathered at Palms in Oxford Street, Sydney to celebrate their lives. It was my honour to play a few tunes Lance seemed to like.
Hear the tributes as well. Enjoy as we did. “What a crowd, what a time…”.
In the Thermopylae of modern life, occasionally you encounter someone who is beyond a journeyman, way past a Renaissance man. In fact, George Hrab has gone straight through the Renaissance, leapt over the Napoleonic Wars, and now has his head currently right up the Jazz Age.
I first met and listened to George Hrab in 2010 when he was still a teenager. His podcast, The Geologic Podcast, once you get over the fact he never once mentioned, uh, igneous rocks, it’s actually a pretty good bath time listing. His latest funk fest of an album, Terpsichore, despite being named after the Olivia Newton John character in Xanadu, has not one single reference to roller skating.
Terpsichore album cover. Possibly not George Hrab’s tootsies.
Maynard: In fact, there is a mystery about your album that you’ve deliberately put in there. There’s a secret involved.
George: There is, there’s a little bit of a puzzle throughout my history of listening to records and you always get these myths and these urban legends arise. Did Pink Floyd consciously synchronize Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz? Because when you put those two on at the same time, a lot of interesting coincidences happen.
Was this foreplanned? Was it on purpose? Usually the answer is no. So I wanted to have something not quite as trippy as that, but I wanted to have something incorporated into the album that was a purposeful kind of puzzle. So far, only one person has figured it out.
M: Well, you can jump that number up to two because I have figured it out, George.
G: Have you?
M : First I thought, okay, it’s something about the time signature in the linking rhythms between the tracks. Then I thought, no, it’s obvious. You’ve basically redone Duran Duran’s Rio album.
G: I can’t answer if you’re right or not, you know, I don’t want to give it away to the audience, but that’s a damn good answer. That’s a damn good answer…
“Very smart people being very silly is incredibly appealing to me.” – Geo
George Hrab in the nudie. From the cover of his Interrobang album, 2005. Still a hottie today.
All of our lives are just that little bit less glamorous today.
Life isn’t fair, but it probably isn’t a redhead either. To the boring injustice of life, Lance Leopard Esq would have said something like “Fuck you and fuck the public transport you rode here on”.
There are not many people who are so fabulous that even their mother had a drag name: the lovely Magnolia Leopard.
Some travel in style, some travel discreetly. Lance travelled both ways through the back alleys and laneways of Darlinghurst.
As Oscar Wilde (or was it Taylor Swift?) once said “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”. As Lance would say “No stupid, that’s the STAIRS. To the Taxi Club.”
Or Midnight Shift. Or DCM. Or whichever club his presence graced.
Lance was a delicate creature, as he often reported in his weekly Star Observer column. When he was seen with a nose bleed after coming out of the bathrooms at The Oxford Hotel it was obviously due to the sudden altitude change from going up the stairs to Gilligan’s. It’s just science people.
Lance Leopard & Maynard with ray gun at the ready for their Barbarella movie screening. 2019.
There are so many memories of Lance. Let me take you back to a time and place almost lost to history or even imagination: the early 1990s Mardi Gras parties. Imagine an almost empty VIP lounge at the end of the evening, sunlight unwelcomely poking itself through the blacked out windows.
Suddenly Lance spotted a small used zip lock bag among the evening’s party detritus on the floor. He dove on it as if it were a live grenade from which he had to save his buddies. And immediately poked half the contents into his mouth as I was saying “You really shouldn’t just …” then Gulp! he shoved the rest into my mouth. We ran downstairs to dance frantically to the last song of the party from DJ Mark Alsop. It was The Communards ‘Never can Say Goodbye’ (the Shep Pettibone Mix, you know, the good one).
What followed was one of the best out of body, soul enriching, mind expanding dancing for at least the next half hour. Which was odd, as the track is only 7 minutes long.
If there’s a moral to that story, let ME know sometime.
Lance had more recently adopted a healthy lifestyle, but he always had a very healthy love of fashion. He was a sharp dresser with an even sharper tongue. Some even today are still feeling the sting from one of his very blunt show reviews. Deserved or not.
Lance touched many people through his life and work, but mainly the hot ones. As he said “I don’t believe in the afterlife, but I’ve always believed with all my soul in the afterparty.”
Your name is on the door Lance, and save some of what you find on the floor for the rest of us …
Lance Leopard finds himself in an emotional backwater taking a ride in Maynard’s cardboard rocket at Loveshack nightclub. 2019
Prepare yourself for the video livestream of the warmest parts of The Coldest 100, 2024.
Maynard hosts a video livestream of Australia’s own Coldest 100 – 2024. Saturday 29th June 8.15-9.30pm. Mostly picked by Andrew Sholl, it will feature world class musical shonk that only Australia can produce.
The Coldest 100 is songs about Australia, that sometimes don’t work out that well…
Expect to see Don Lane, Barry Crocker, Donnie & Marie, Cilla Black, John Farnham, Charo, Kahmahl and a lot of kangaroos (again) doing their bit to get on the show.
Hopefully we’ll have quest appearances from my fellow Aussie travellers Tim Ferguson, Tony Push, that guy in Orange, Brigitte Handley and the man in a tree.
August 1998, Tim Ferguson visits Jumpstart, the Maynard breakfast show on Channel v on Foxtel to promote his performance as Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show that just opened at Star Casino in Sydney.
“Come for me Maynard!” Tim Ferguson on Foxtel 1998
Tim and the 1998 Rocky Horror Show cast on Today Tonight
