The Purple Stripes

Lots of you are mothers. This is something I’ve been mulling over for a while, planning one of my pseudo-anthropological posts. I’m 35, and one of the ways I torture myself is to try to work out my own feelings about childbearing and parenting, wondering if that really is my biological clock I hear ticking, or just the din of everyone else’s clocks around me. It’s all theoretical really: the facts of my life don’t add up to reproduction, but I can’t deny that I always imagined a child (usually one) and that this expectation demands examination, now that I’m getting long in the tooth.

But I won’t do this here, at least, not now. Instead, I want to promote the work of my friend Kate, one of my favourite mothers, who doesn’t make parenting look easy, but makes good parenting look valuable and important and rare. And she does this with grace and rock chick flair.

The Purple Stripes are Kate Oliver and Evelyn Morris. You can hear three of their tracks on their MySpace page, and look through their impressive list of influences. They played a sell-out show at the Horse Bazaar on the Queen's Birthday public holiday (Isaac: Kids go to bars these days?) and were profiled in The Age the Sunday before last. I find myself waking at night humming their songs. I play their EP in the car, even without children to entertain. I remember overhearing Kate’s almost three-year old son Joel at a Purple Stripes gig, requesting a specific Belle & Sebastian track from the DJ, and think how cool it must be to be a superstar in a child’s eyes.