DESCRIPTION:
NOTHING SPECIAL is the first song on the 1981 album SWEET NOTHING by Australian musician MARK GILLESPIE, and became the first single, and the first-ever (and last-ever) song of this artist to make it to the Australian charts, (reaching No. 8).
This song perhaps illustrates best what one reviewer has called "the startling existential quandary' at the core of his songs. The same reviewer very nicely put it that MARK GILLESPIE was an "unflinching poet of lost souls".
The modified photo used was originally taken by JACQUELINE MITELMAN, and it also featured on the cover of MAKE-UP, a book of short-stories by MARK GILLESPIE, published by Outback Press in 1975.
The notion that there is no magic, no salvation by a train like the mythical Midnight Special, or by anything or anyone else, not even any phoenix rising from the ashes, is for some a too-bitter pill to swallow, but as MARK GILLESPIE later discovered, it is the basis of Advaita Vedanta, with its "neti, neti", (not this, not this") - in other words anything that might be pointed to as the "answer", actually isn't, and it too will crumble and fall before the inevitability of "anitya", or impermanence.
Like using a thorn to remove a thorn, MARK GILLESPIE borrows a metaphor and musical idiom to deny the validity of the things very existence.
All the songs from the albums ONLY HUMAN, SWEET NOTHING and FLAME are now available on YOUTUBE.