Weather Being Literary References: Put It On

‘Put It On’ began as a few verses describing a vivid scene of collapsing firebombed buildings and firefighters rushing to the scene. It envisioned these poorly ventilated buildings, trapped victims breathing in fumes, and fire continuing to flicker with people inside overheating. “It’s about coming out and laying it on the line”, according to Johnny. “The song literally puts itself on the line and gives it to us straight. The title, and the phrase, ‘Put It On’, is just about telling it like it is.” “Unlike a lot of other of Stowmarries songs, Put It On is not necessarily written around a particular literary reference, subject or theme. There’s a sense of determination and purpose in the verse and chorus. It’s like saying, everything that gets said in this song, I’m just going to put it on and just say it like it is’.” The sleeve of ‘Put It On’ is a seventeenth century painting by Jan Griffier called ‘The Great Fire of London in 1666’. The English diarist Samuel Pepys wrote a first-hand account from the early hours of 2 September 1666, when Pepys was awakened by the fire. ‘Poorhouses, burned away, and the fire running further, everybody endeavouring to remove their goods; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then clambering from one pair of stairs to another…nobody endeavouring to quench it, than rather remove their goods, and leave it all to the fire; everything, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches, burned till it fell down… looting, disorder.’ “When I came to actually write the song, I’d spend time between sets wandering around the part of the city where I was performing in The Goths, in Elizabeth Street, Brisbane. I’d get this real vibe of what it must have felt like as The Great fire of Brisbane swept through that central part of Brisbane on 1 December 1864. Fifty poorhouses and several businesses, two banks, three hotels and four draperies, were completely destroyed in the space of two and a half hours.” “I used to play a lot of Jimi Hendrix around the time I was seriously writing songs, and one of the songs I used to have on a whole lot, and lots was ‘House Burning Down’. I realise it was influential in ‘Put It On’. ‘Put It On’ happened on the spur of the moment. All I did was lay down the guitar tracks and I threw the sound through a few effects here and there. I made my vocals sound like my voice was coming through a voicepipe”. The title ‘Put It On’ is in reference to the song ‘Cat People’ from 1982, its lyrics and vocals by David Bowie, the chorus of which, with Bowie’s octave leap on the line ‘Putting out the fire with gasoline’ inspired the title. Bowie said that it “works on a dream state, it feels like the kind of thing you go through at night”.