Five Great Reads: supercommunicator secrets, the decline of Australian rugby, and the film that broke British cinema

Top of the weekend to you all. If you’d like an appetiser, here’s how we missed the week’s biggest story: woman, 34, eats meal. Or just step right through to the 5GR buffet (while admiring this eerily picturesque abandoned shopping mall).

1. The dark downfall of drummer Jim Gordon

Jim Gordon drummed on You’re So Vain, laid the template for the disco beat and on Incredible Bongo Band’s Apache delivered one of the most sampled breaks in hip-hop. All while masking an undiagnosed case of schizophrenia, which culminated in the violent murder of his mother in 1983.

Veteran music journalist Joel Selvin eventually convinced publishers to pick up his biography of Gordon, who died in a psychiatric prison last year. “The guy got so little compassion,” Selvin says. “I wanted readers to know just how impossible Jim’s life was and how brave he was in battling the disease.”

Warning signs: The singer Claudia Lennear, who played with Gordon in Joe Cocker’s band, always wondered about his smile. “It was too simple,” Selvin says. “She felt he was hiding behind it.”

How long will it take to read: Four minutes.

2. How to be a ‘supercommunicator’

Put me behind a drum kit in front of 5,000 strangers and I’m like Animal from the Muppets. Put me in a social setting with six colleagues and I clam up.

Of course, there’s a self-help book for that. According to Charles Duhigg, superior conversationalists tend to open up and share information about their own experiences and feelings. Which explains my problems …

Lauren Mechling is an extrovert but signed up for supercommunicator school regardless. Here’s what she learned across a week of putting Duhigg’s ideas into practice.

Neural entrainment: The scientific term for when people’s eyes dilate in tandem and pulses match during a good conversation. “It feels wonderful,” Duhigg writes.

How long will it take to read: Four minutes.

3. The mothers fighting a scandal bigger than thalidomide

Emma Murphy had known for years that something wasn’t right with her children: delayed speech, slowness to crawling, lots of drooling. Then she saw a news report on Janet Williams, who claimed the epilepsy medication she (and Murphy) had taken during pregnancies had harmed her children.

That was 2009, and the start of a formidable campaign for children affected by sodium valproate. They discovered the manufacturer knew in the 1970s the drug could be harmful to foetuses – and that the UK regulator recommended against telling those prescribed the drug of the risks to avoid “fruitless anxiety”.

“We know it’s the government that chose not to warn women of the risks. But the guilt remains with every single mother this has happened to. That’s why we have to fight.” – Emma Murphy

How long will it take to read: Five minutes.

4. The fall and fall of Australian rugby

Can you name any of the players pictured above? Unless you’re a rugby diehard, you’re not alone. “Most kids today can name an entire NRL side but not a single Waratahs player,” laments Ace Naati, general manager of Gordon Rugby on Sydney’s once union-mad north shore.

With Super Rugby back, Angus Fontaine dives deep into the code’s ennui. His 2024 prediction for “the game they play in heaven”: “Another fresh hell en route to a final reckoning.”

Where did it all go wrong? After the 2003 World Cup, reckons Morgan Turinui, Wallaby #782. The Wallabies were beaten finalists on home turf, and the $46m profit was ploughed into national expansion. “We should’ve invested that money,” he says.

How long will it take to read: Five minutes.

5. ‘It wasn’t the happiest of shoots’

Australia has Les Patterson Saves The World. Hollywood has Madame Web (this week, at least). In Britain, the god-awful film to end them all is Sex Lives of the Potato Men.

No, I haven’t heard of it either – and it’s not available to watch via conventional means in Australia. But the story of its production (and reception) is popcorn-worthy: red-hot TV stars, reclaimed crack dens, culture wars and take-no-prisoners reviews.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw: “The urgent debate for our native film industry seems to me as follows – should we put the gun barrel to our temples, or in our mouths for a cleaner kill?”

How long will it take to read: Three minutes.

Further reading: Luke Buckmaster rewatched the aforementioned Barry Humphries turkey so you wouldn’t have to. Though it’s streaming on Prime if you’re game …

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