Grant Mac Bridge

After Grant McLennan of 80s band The Go-Betweens fame unexpectedly kicked the bucket in May, a group of warmhearted souls are pushing for a new bridge which will span the Brisbane River to be named in his honour.

Peter Walsh - the main man behind the presumably defunct Livid Festival – heads the group, whose agender is mostly based on the fact that the Go-Betweens were one of Brisbane’s biggest exports, and that the bridge itself will only be open to buses and pedestrians, which Grant Mac will dig because he “…never had a license to drive…”

While this alone causes Brisbane residents to shed a sympathetic tear for the man who was forced to rely on public transport throughout his forty-eight years, do the streets of this town really want to be associated with a muso who used to get off on surfing magazines? Does the alleged town of battered wives require a street, nay a major thoroughfare, to celebrate his contribution to music? Do we really want a bridge which goes-between UQ and Dutton Park anyway?

Cliché jokes exhausted and my thoughts turn to more pressing matters - the heavily publicized involvement of Mr. Walsh in the race to name the bridge campaign.

For 15 years, Brisbane played host to the Livid Festival – an institution which pulled big international names from all genres to this fair city such as The Cure, Rage Against the Machine, Devo, Oasis, Jurrasic Five, The Roots, Lamb and The Prodigy.

Come 2003, Walsh and Company took the festival Mexico-ward to Sydney and Melbourne, hoping to make a pretty penny.

In 2004, they fed us – the Livid-mad public - bite-sized pieces of bullshit by way of their website which claimed a 1-year hiatus was inevitable due to the lack of quality talent touring within the vicinity of Brisbane at that time, and the reassurance that the festival would return bigger and better in 2005.

While other festivals continued to thrive over this period, and with naut a word even broaching Livid since, Walshy continues to drop the ball.

Fuck you Peter Walsh and your bright ideas on Brisbane’s river crossings. Get off your indolent posterior and bring back Livid. Assume some fucking control of South East Queensland’s music industry and breathe life into what is fast becoming a beaurocratically engineered entertainment black hole.

I think old Walshy requires somebody's foot to Go-Between his arsecheeks.