Music

Why Eddy Current Suppression Ring disappeared

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Last December, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, the beloved garage-rock four-piece from Melbourne, released their first album in a decade. It was knowingly titled All In Good Time. Old fans got excited, but the band kept schtum. There were no pre-release streams for review, and apart from one brief spot on community radio station 3RRR announcing their new single, Our Quiet Whisper, there were no interviews.

Starting with their obtuse name – a copper ring around an electrical transformer which, indeed, suppresses eddy currents – ECSR don’t make things easy. But their guitarist Mikey Young, who also manages the group, denies they’re elusive. “If anyone wants to talk, all they’ve got to do is write to me,” he says cheerfully.

In 2010, ECSR were on the cusp. Larger independent labels including Sub Pop were courting them. Their second album, Primary Colours had won the prestigious Australian Music Prize for 2008, and their third, Rush To Relax, was enthusiastically received. It was launched at the Old Metro in Melbourne, which holds around 1,800 people. But for Young, enough was enough. “I had to question whether I’d want to go see a band like mine at a show that big,” he says.… Read more..

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Champagne (music) television

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Last year’s debut of The Set on ABC television – a house party style music variety show, with the tagline “live music has a new home” – was an attempt to plug a gaping hole in the national broadcaster’s programming: for a long time, live music had indeed lacked a home on our television screens.

The gap had grown so wide that it had generated its own nostalgia. We’ve had a TV mini-series on Countdown’s Ian “Molly” Meldrum, as well as Classic Countdown, and a recent documentary on the ABC’s late-’90s music television program Recovery (to go along with its reboot on YouTube, Recovered, with original hosts Dylan Lewis and Jane Gazzo).

As the Guardian takes a deep dive into the defining moments of Australian TV history – for better or worse – here are five from the glory days of local music programming. Please add your own favourites to the comments below – or nominate them in our poll.

#5: A water cooler moment: Madison Avenue at the 2000 ARIAS

Award shows are usually predictable affairs, and the ARIAs are no exception: little is left to chance and controversies – such as when Itch-E & Scratch-E’s Paul Mac thanked the dance duo’s ecstasy dealers in 1995 – often hit the cutting room floor before broadcast.… Read more..

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Beck and forth

Music / / 12 minutes of reading

BECK looks toasted. Under round vintage sunglasses and a broad-brimmed black hat, the cheeks of one of the most inventive, elusive artists of the last quarter-century are sunburnt. Los Angeles is on fire. The resulting chaos has resulted in him running an hour late to the Capitol Records tower, the circular icon that sits off Hollywood Boulevard like a 13-storey stack of records, rammed through a spindle that protrudes a further 27 metres above.

In the early 1970s, the artist born Bek David Campbell spent his first years only a few blocks from here. Downstairs, in the foyer, there’s a coffee-table history of the building, for which he wrote the foreword. “As a kid, whenever we were returning from some far-flung part of the city in the back of a gas guzzler on a hot smoggy day, I can remember the Capitol Records building always signified that we were almost home,” he writes. Now he’s back.

He’s still boyish at 49, sun-kissed blond hair curling out from under his hat, but looks slightly frail after four months straight of travel. His backside doesn’t quite fill out his black ankle-cut trousers. His handshake is gentle. He says it’s a miracle he woke up at all today, because “today was that day where I was like, OK, I could just sleep for a week,” after flying in from New Orleans.… Read more..

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Archie Roach: Tell Me Why

Music / / 7 minutes of reading

For the Gunditjmara people of south-west Victoria, the Kneeangar – what white Australians call the Wedge-tailed Eagle – is the creator of the landscape. For the Bundjalung of north-east New South Wales, it is the Gunggayay, or red-bellied black snake.

On the spine of Archie Roach’s memoir, Tell Me Why, the Gunggayay encircles the Kneeangar, a logo that encapsulates the Indigenous songwriter’s heritage: his Bundjalung father Archie Senior, and his Gunditjmara mother Nellie Austin.

But Roach, who first came to national attention in 1990 with his celebrated song Took The Children Away and accompanying debut album Charcoal Lane, is also the foster son of Alex and Dulcie Cox: Dad Alex and Mum Dulcie, as he calls them.

The Coxes were told that Archie’s birth parents had died in a house fire. In fact, he had been stolen from them in the late 1950s at Framlingham mission, near Warrnambool. “They were used,” Roach, now 63, says when we meet, as he rests in a Sydney hotel room. “They’re blameless, as far as I’m concerned.”

Alex and Dulcie cherished Archie but, he writes, “there was always a restlessness in me, like a faultline waiting to rupture”. When he was 15, he received a letter from a hitherto unknown sister, Myrtle – one of six siblings – telling him Nellie had died.… Read more..

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Still going hard

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

If you were growing up in the Australian suburbs in the 1980s and early 1990s and had any interest at all in what later became known as alternative music, you have probably heard the Hard-Ons. Against considerable odds – starting with their name – the band once racked up an astonishing run of 17 consecutive No. 1 songs on the independent charts.

It’s tempting to say they’re back. But the priapic Hard-Ons never really went away. They did break up in 1994, but bassist Ray Ahn and guitarist Peter Black (known to all as Blackie), soldiered on as Nunchukka Superfly. They reunited with singing drummer Keish de Silva in 1997, but de Silva quickly became disenchanted and moved on again.

Still, the band carried on, with Murray Ruse on drums and the prolific Blackie singing. Actually, prolific doesn’t begin to describe Blackie: the influential guitarist recorded a song every single day in 2016, adding a cover of Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water on New Year’s Day 2017 for good measure.

It’s de Silva – whose honey-sweet vocals and energetic drumming style was a big part of the band’s appeal – who’s back, with the release of the band’s 12th studio album So I Could Have Them Destroyed today.… Read more..

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Ben Folds: “I dreaded that song coming out”

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Ben Folds has what appear to be perfect piano-playing hands. They’re large, with long, elegant fingers – until you look closer and inspect the damage. “My left hand’s fucked,” he says, raising a beer with it. He lowers the glass, then vigorously shakes out the hand, from the elbow down. There’s an audible click. “Good to go for the next couple of hours.”

Folds, whose sweet, sometimes earnest, often irreverent songs with his group Ben Folds Five were a staple of late-90s alternative rock radio, has just released a memoir, A Dream About Lightning Bugs. In it, he describes the piano as “living-room furniture” – expensive and heavy, and therefore manifestly unsuitable for rock & roll, which is supposed to be portable.

But, he says, if you look at the handful of notable pianists in rock history – Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elton John, John Cale – “they all had to sacrifice their piano to a degree. Stand on it, attack it, sacrifice it, to show that you’re on Team Rock.” Folds’ hands have paid the penalty.

His right hand isn’t much better. In late 1984, a pumped-up jock on a wrestling scholarship beat him to a pulp the night before his exams at the University of Miami.… Read more..

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