Andrew Stafford Blog

The years have not been kind to the musicians who formed the fabled scene that coalesced in Dunedin, New Zealand in the 1980s. Martin Phillipps, leader of the Chills, died last year. Hamish Kilgour, drummer and co-founder of the Clean, took his own […]

Paul Kelly is 70, and he has never been bigger. He has just headlined his first arena tour. The shows sold out. In an industry as ageist as Australian music, it’s a remarkable career trajectory. There’s been no sudden revival of

What would make Harry Vanda – the last surviving Easybeat, the man who co-wrote Friday On My Mind, the original architect of what we came to know as Oz rock – come out of retirement at the age of 79 to release

When Kate Ceberano played the Australian Made tour with her band I’m Talking in the summer of 1986-87, she was already a veteran of the Australian music industry at barely 20 years old. The concert series, which saw Ceberano and

Sir George Telek is not an easy man to get hold of. For a start, the celebrated Papua New Guinean singer lives in a remote village outside Kokopo, on the island of New Britain. It’s on the eastern edge of

Back in late 2020, in the darkest, pre-vaccine period of the pandemic, Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift was riding the crest of an unexpected wave from her kitchen table in Nashville, Tennessee. Her self-released debut album of Bob Dylan covers Blonde

It’s a tradition almost as old as popular music itself: a band name that puns, plays on, or pays tribute to the name of another artist. In the rock & roll era, you can trace it back at least to

You had to see Jeff Buckley to believe him. Jon Pope, a veteran of the Australian music industry, was tour manager for the singer on his first visit to Australia, in 1995. Three days after Buckley’s first show at the Metro in Sydney on

You’ve played many prestigious venues in your career. How do you feel about gracing the Sydney Opera House stage? It’s on a lot of people’s bucket list, so I’m very excited. I’ve been doing this show [Don’t Tell Anybody The

It was one of the first odd, angry shots fired in what we now know as the culture wars. On the morning of 14 February 1989, a plain-clothed officer from Queensland police’s licensing branch was sniffing around Rocking Horse Records in

When I meet former Go-Between Robert Forster at a cafe in the centre of Brisbane for a walk around his home town, it’s no surprise to see a book on the table in front of him. It is The Café

James Baker was, as the title of his last solo release declared, Born To Rock. The musician, who died on Monday night aged 71, was the big beat behind the drums for a long list of influential Australian garage-rock bands

In 1984, Paul Kelly packed up his few belongings, borrowed his father-in-law’s Holden and made the 13-hour drive from Melbourne to Sydney. He had barely a dollar in his pocket and no place to lay his head. Don Walker, who was

Is it true you nicked some of your early equipment from David Bowie’s trucks outside the Hammersmith Odeon at the last Ziggy Stardust show, in 1973? There’s definitely some truth in that. It wasn’t outside in trucks though – it was

During 2021 and 2022, Australian singer-songwriter Liz Stringer played to the sort of crowds some would say she had always deserved. Arenas of loud, passionate fans, 10,000 or more at a time, baying every last line back at her. Unfortunately,

Live music promoters TEG Group and British band New Order are facing a public backlash after announcing they would go ahead with a scheduled concert in Brisbane as the city grapples with major flooding in the wake of ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred. The

Tex Perkins has been around the ruthlessly ageist Australian music industry to know an opportunity when he sees it. “As far as Boomers and Generation X punters go, it’s all about anniversaries these days,” he says with a dry chuckle,

For more than a decade, you could be forgiven for thinking that Jack White – rock & roll’s last great aesthetic purist – had diverged from his righteous path, if not lost his way entirely. Once an unbridled force of

How do you follow up an instant classic? This was the challenge faced by King Stingray, the self-described Yolŋu surf-rock group from Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land, whose self-titled 2022 debut sounded more like a greatest hits collection than a first

I watched Four Corners’ investigation Music For Sale on Monday with some anticipation. The program was an overdue reckoning for Live Nation and Ticketmaster – the international entertainment behemoth, which has long faced accusations of abusing its market power by buying out venues,

Ollie Olsen, the maverick Australian post-punk and electronic music innovator, died on Wednesday after a long struggle with multiple system atrophy, a rare neurological disease which he “fought like a Viking”, according to a statement shared on his social media

They were the overnight sensation 30 years in the making. In 2017, a review appeared in the New York Times: “My obsession with the Necks, the greatest trio on Earth”. It followed the LA Times, which called them “among the world’s

How do you review a band who, 20 years ago, purported to end their career with a song called TISM Are Shit? As pre-emptive strikes go, it brooks no critical retort. Now – in a song called Old Skool TISM

Emily Wurramara had the world at her feet. The Indigenous singer-songwriter, then based in Brisbane, had recently released her debut album Milyakburra, named after her community on Bickerton Island in the Northern Territory. It had been received with warm reviews

Let’s say you were a fan of Powderfinger and/or Something for Kate, two of the most successful groups from the post-grunge 1990s Australian music scene. What would you expect an album made by their respective frontmen, Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey,