Music

Robert Forster: Inferno

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

Here in Brisbane, the heat has finally broken. For 46 days in a row, the mercury exceeded 30C. The previous record was 27 days, in 2017. While the north has been awash, the wet season here has failed. I’m listening to the title track of the new Robert Forster album. It’s called Inferno (Brisbane In Summer). You might think it looks like paradise, he sings, but everyone here is screaming: “Let me, let me, let me, let me, let me out!”

Forster has written about the weather in Brisbane before. On his 2008 album The Evangelist, recorded during a similarly excruciating period of mind-melting heat, the first song was called If It Rains. At the time, we thought it might never rain here again. Not that Inferno is any kind of manifesto. This is not a climate change concept album. It’s a Robert Forster record, which means buckets of atmosphere, dry wit, subtle pleasures and unerring quality.

While Forster’s last album, Songs To Play, was recorded close to his home patch in the hills west of Brisbane, for Inferno he escaped to Berlin, where he recorded his first solo album, Danger In The Past, in 1990.… Read more..

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Tex Perkins on surviving the Beasts of Bourbon

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

On 14 April last year, an unusually poignant gig took place at the Prince of Wales Hotel in St Kilda, Melbourne. The Beasts of Bourbon – the self-styled ugliest, most badass rock band on the planet – played what would be their final gig in what was perhaps the only way the band could have ended.

Bass player Brian Henry Hooper, for whom the gig was a benefit, was surrounded by half a dozen nurses and wearing an oxygen mask. No one had been sure whether he would be able to play until the moment arrived; the band’s original bassist Boris Sudjovic was on standby. Guitarist Spencer P Jones was also playing one of his final performances.

Hooper passed away from lung cancer six days later, aged 55. Jones died on 21 August, aged 61. And the Beasts of Bourbon – the band that stubbornly refused to die, and had been through numerous permutations and reconciliations during a 25-year history of inebriation, as demanded by the band’s very name – was officially dead.

By comparison, Tex Perkins, the band’s frontman, is in rude health, a few streaks of grey through his leonine mane of hair being the main giveaway of his 54 years.… Read more..

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Phil Collins: How I learned to love the Dad of Dad-rock

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

This is the story of how, against all odds, I learned to love Phil Collins, the Dad of Dad-Rock and the Norm of Normcore. Alternatively: how I found myself dancing like a loon to Su-Su-sudio, one of the most evil earworms of its benighted era – a song which I had valiantly tried to purge from my memory shortly after its release in 1985, now stuck in my head again, this time for all eternity. Oh no!

Whether you missed Collins or not during his brief retirement, one thing is for sure: it’s quite a shock to see him. His first Australian show in more than 20 years, in Brisbane, sees him near the end of his wryly titled Not Dead Yet tour, named after his 2016 autobiography. He hobbles slowly on stage with the aid of a cane. It’s no act. Collins is 68, and frankly he looks in rougher shape than several older rock & rollers who are far more fortunate to still be walking among us.

In conditions somewhere between steamy and equatorial (definitely no jacket required), Collins is dressed in a half-zipped-up sweater over a crew-necked shirt. He sits down awkwardly on an ordinary swivel desk chair, next to a side table carrying a bottle of water and a folder full of lyrics.… Read more..

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Three of the best Australian albums of 2018

Music / / 2 minutes of reading

Gurrumul Yunupingu

Djarimirri (Child Of The Rainbow)

At a time when cultural appropriation is a hot topic, Gurrumul’s Djarimirri (Child Of The Rainbow) showed how a cross-cultural collaboration could be done with respect and spectacular results. A fully sanctioned blend of traditional Yolngu songs set to string arrangements inspired by minimalist neoclassical composers Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt, Djarimirri drew upon the cyclic repetition of both musical traditions, with the pulse of the didgeridoo replaced mostly by cellos. The late singer’s angelic voice floats above it all. His friend, producer and arranger Michael Hohnen says that Gurrumul’s music was about bringing his culture to the world; his family broke with cultural tradition to allow his name and image to be used, to preserve his memory and giant legacy.

Camp Cope

How To Socialise And Make Friends

One of the best music stories of 2018 was the growing international acclaim for Melbourne’s Camp Cope, whose album How To Socialise And Make Friends was the perfect soundtrack for the #MeToo moment it spoke to. Even before the album’s release, the single The Opener had lit the touch paper on the endemic sexism of the rock festival circuit and the Australian music industry generally.… Read more..

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Jimmy Barnes calls for kids to be removed from Nauru

Australian Politics, Music / / 4 minutes of reading

The Australian rock musician Jimmy Barnes had some strong words for the Australian government ahead of a rally on the Parliament House lawn in Canberra to remove children and their families from indefinite detention on Nauru.

Tuesday’s rally saw the delivery of a petition of 170,000 signatures to the government by the newly elected member for Wentworth, independent MP Dr Kerryn Phelps.

Barnes pointed to his own heritage: “I’m an immigrant,” he said. “I came to Australia in a boat. We were running away from poverty and violence in Scotland, and what we fled was nothing compared to what these people have tried to get away from.

“We should be helping them. Taking these people and sticking them on an island, indefinitely, is not the Australian way.”

Since the launch of the Kids off Nauru campaign three months ago by refugee advocacy groups, around 110 of the 119 children and their families had been brought to Australia after five years in detention on the island.

The Asylum Centre Resource Centre estimated only 40 percent of Australians were aware children were being held in detention at the time the campaign was launched. Many had spent their entire lives on the island.… Read more..

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“I hoped it might drive home the words a bit more”

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

What does it mean to be a “good citizen”? The question was on the mind of queer Melbourne songwriter Cash Savage last year, as national debate over the marriage equality postal survey roiled around her. Until the survey, she says, she never felt any different from anyone else. Suddenly, in the words of her song Better Than That, every day brought another intrusion.

At the time, her partner was pregnant with the couple’s first child. “To be having a debate around whether or not queer people should get married and connecting that to whether or not they should raise children, at the same time as planning ahead and being excited about bringing a child into the world, [made] the cut a little deeper,” she says.

The experience fed into the writing of Savage’s fourth album, Good Citizens, with her band the Last Drinks, and when it came to making a video for the title track – written in about 10 minutes – Savage had an unusual idea. She wouldn’t appear in it, or even sing her own song. It would, instead, be sung live by a group of 18 men: the “Good Citizens Choir”.

The song’s lyrics are, at least in part, an oblique critique of the codes and rituals of Australian masculinity.… Read more..

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