Good Or Shit: Tragic Kingdom

The details are sketchy. It was 14 or 15 years ago, a Saturday night, we were about 14 or 15 ourselves. I remember losing my dragon necklace in the grounds of a primary school where we'd been engaged in a terrific evening of under-aged drinking and acid trips, the latter being all the rage when I was a teenager. The memory of the dragon necklace indicative of the layers and layers of brightly coloured petticoats I would have been wearing as outerwear and a pair of Doc Martins to boot (ha, sorry).

What I remember of that evening with the most clarity is sitting on the steps of a building on Sydney's Norton St with two of my girlfriends singing No Doubt's Sunday Morning. The mental footage is old and grainy. Cracked, crinkled, parts of it completely destroyed. I don't remember going to meet our guy friends that night, I don't remember sitting on a footbridge that went over a main road and spitting on the cars below (as I was recently informed) but I do remember sitting on the steps singing that song and every time I hear that song I remember it. 

You came in with the breee-eeeeze...

Of the three girls sitting on the steps that night only two are alive today. Our friend Chantelle is dead.

Learning about No Doubt's new album gave me the weirdest feeling. Certainly I was apprehensive about the actual music but conversely and kind of bizarrely, I was very excited. Almost a little 'Yay! The team is back together and now everything is going to be OK'. The hype was huge. It was all 'Diplo has produced parts of it! And … Diplo has produced parts of it! And … no that's it! Diplo has produced parts of it!'

I eagerly brought up YouTube and began playing the first two singles – Settle Down and title track Push And Shove, the latter of which Diplo has produced parts of. And it was nice to see these oddballs at it again. And they really are quite odd. Very over the top in a 'yeah, we're weird and we don't give a fuck' kind of way. And the tunes have the same sort of awkward mashing of genres that the band is famous for. Not so much 'Avant Garde' more chaositivity.

I'm not going to say it's shit, but I'm not going to buy the album and listen to them on my way to the station. It's just not my thing. Not quite hitting a mark I wanted it to hit. However, I feel this bizarre sense of loyalty to them. As though they're my close friends. As though they know me. As though the day Gwen and I took the big pink ribbon off our respective sets of eyes, back in nineteen-ninety-whatever, was the beginning of a defining period. And as the dancehall-ish Bollywood-ish beat of Diplo produced Push And Shove moved into the slow head-banging rock of the chorus, I knew where I had to go and who I had to go there with. I emailed the women I was closest to back then and we went back to Tragic Kingdom.

And wasn't being a teenager a fucking tragic kingdom? Hating your parents because you realised they didn't really like each other and they didn't understand you and yet being incapable of articulating what you wanted them to understand; wanting so badly to be in love and throwing yourself pathetically at young boys you obsessed and cried yourself into a stupour over; sexual experiences that consisted of being awkwardly and painfully fingered; obsessively fussing over your appearance because you don't know who you are enough to know how to convey it with clothing; wanting to be liked, loved, and cool; desperate for so much, low in confidence, unsure of yourself - full of doubt.

And along came Gwen Stefani, alternating between frocks and baggy pants and hanging out with the guys.

“The first time I saw Just a Girl,” one friend shared, “I instantly thought – I wanna fucking be her as muchly as possible. But the closest I got was having an identical pair of grey baggy pants that she had in the clip.” This friend wasn't the only one – “When the Don't Speak clip came out I wanted that blue dress and I wanted to rock it with docs. I had the docs I had the petticoat, but alas, I was told I was far too prissy to be cool and way to woggy to be pretty. I wanted to be the only girl in a band that everyone wanted to be friends with. Gwen was silly and funky, I remember thinking 'like me!'”

Basically, Gwen had guts. She was girly and she was boy-y. There was pain and there was anguish and there was cynicism in Tragic Kingdom. But there was also strength and resilience. A snarly 'yeah, this hurts, but I'm made of some pretty awesome stuff. Sappy and pathetic is the girl I USED to be.'

But it's not who I am anymore. And nor are any of the women I've grown up with in any way sappy and pathetic. Now we mostly get along with our parents, we're in loving and healthy relationships with men who know how to use their fingers, we're mostly comfortable with our looks and less likely to give a shit what others might think about us being prissy or woggy or uncool.

Back then, No Doubt is what we needed. And what they've got now isn't hitting the same spot. And maybe that's because that spot isn't there anymore. Maybe we have grown up and grown out of it. And maybe No Doubt should too.

Tragic Kingdom, as one of my friends said, is a very defining and memorable place in time for us.  And a couple of years ago, sitting in a coffee shop one afternoon trying to get used to living in a world without our friend Chantelle, I mentally begged her for a sign. Some people say that the dead never really leave you and I desperately wanted to believe that was true. As soon as I'd asked for this sign the music in the cafe changed abruptly mid-track. They started playing No Doubt's Sunday Morning.