Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?: Misadventures in Music is a memoir by Stephen Cummings, a sometimes brilliant songwriter and always impressive vocalist who achieved brief, incandescent fame as frontman for The Sports in the early 1970s. Since then Cummings has relaeased a couple of dozen solo albums and written three novels. A Melburnite through and through, over three decades he has moved increasingly out of the mainstream into an admirable , low-key cottage industry of one. I was a Sports fan and enjoyed a number of his solo albums, though I must admit I’ve drifted away in recent years. Naturally I looked forward to what I assumed would be an idiosyncratic retelling of Cumming’s life, told in his engaging, ragged style.
Well, Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy? is a stunningly original take on the memoir genre. I can only describe it as very loosely linked riffs (the word is apt) on his chaotic life. Chronological order is retained at the beginning but by the middle of the book, it can be hard to tell what decade is being explored. Cummings’s jerky style, mixing the profane with the lyrical in seemingly random sequencing, should not work but does, brilliantly. He dishes the dirt, savaging his industry, acquaintances, and, most harshly, himself. My abiding impression from the memoir is of a highly self-aware, neurotic soul who would be a delight to know but hard to live with. Yet the seemingly naked honesty disguises an opaqueness that leaves Cummings more, not less, visible by the end of the book. The descriptions of a musical life in Melbourne are semi poetic in their telling vividness. Cynical humour shines through the pages, but also a vein of sadness mastered.
Your first thought on this description of Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy? could well be that it is too obscure and difficult. Not so – this is a unique, revelatory recollection of a highly creative soul.