Music

Ross Knight – bass player, singer and mainstay of Australian punk heroes the Cosmic Psychos – tells a good yarn that deftly illustrates his group’s public image. The Psychos, who are celebrating 40 years since their humble beginnings in central […]

Outside the Fortitude Music Hall in Brisbane’s biggest nightclub strip, two hours before showtime, a long line snakes up and around Brunswick Street Mall. It’s been well over a decade since the Cruel Sea played here, and the 3,000-capacity venue

In 1981, at a garbage dump on the outskirts of Melbourne, a band is making a video. The idea is to recreate a vision of hell. A cartoon death’s head with six limbs flashes on the screen. We see a

At first, all is darkness. There is a hiss of cymbals, followed by a rude bang, thump and wallop. The lights go up. We see the late Australian music mogul Michael Gudinski, sitting at a drum kit, pounding the skins arrhythmically

From around 1984, after the release of their perfectly titled debut single Out Of The Unknown, Died Pretty were the inner-city Sydney group to see. “They were a dangerous band,” Paul Kelly wrote in his memoir, How To Make Gravy. “Some nights they

Picture the scene. It’s 1982 and Australia’s future prime minister Bob Hawke – then the shadow minister for industrial relations – has accepted an invitation to launch a mini-album by an emerging Indigenous rock-reggae band called No Fixed Address. Hawke’s

Stephen Cummings was disembarking from a flight into Brisbane when everything went sideways. He steadied himself against the wall of the aerobridge. An anxious flyer, he assumed it was the after-effects of a Valium he’d taken to calm his nerves,

Since 2010, New Zealand singer and songwriter Hollie Fullbrook has been creating immersive, introspective folk music under the name Tiny Ruins. The very name suggests something intimate and irretrievably broken, but it also invites you to take a closer look.

You know you’ve made it in Australia when the most successful thing you’ve done becomes the butt of jokes. For Frente!, the indie-pop band formed in Melbourne by Simon Austin and Angie Hart, their moment came when Accidently Kelly Street

It’s often forgotten that the Greek tragedy of Midas, the man with the golden touch, is actually a cautionary tale of being careful what you wish for. Mojo Ruiz de Luzuriaga – the Filipino-Wiradjuri artist better known as Mo’Ju, formerly

There is a well-known Māori proverb: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au. Translated, it means “I am the river, the river is me”. For the Māori of Aotearoa, rivers are roads, supermarkets, home. The proverb can also be applied

For a brief moment in the mid 1980s, when huge crowds packed Australian sporting stadiums for 50-over cricket matches, signs reading “Like Wow – Wipeout!” began appearing in the outer, usually when a six sailed into the crowd. It was

Back in the early 1980s, Kim Salmon once claimed his group the Scientists played the devil’s music. Over a couple of chords and a minimalist beat, they could whip up a furious storm approximating the title of one of their

A quick perusal of the history of rock & roll will tell you that most songs are concerned with three things: getting laid, getting dumped or getting cheated on. Rare is the songwriter that explores the challenges of commitment, fidelity

Renée Geyer was many things in a career that spanned 15 studio albums and 50 years, and she continued singing to packed houses up to only a month ago. She was surely the finest white soul singer, male or female,

In an era where every Australian band who found an audience in the 1980s has reformed, the reunion of Sunnyboys will go down in history as one of the least expected, and most warmly received. The beloved Sydney power-pop quartet

Paulie Stewart was 48 years old and had been on the waiting list for a liver transplant for more than 500 days when, at death’s door, he was visited in Melbourne’s Austin hospital by Sister Helena, a young nun from

There’s a moment in the 2013 music documentary 20 Feet From Stardom where legendary singer Darlene Love reflects on the time when she was working as a maid, cleaning other people’s houses while her festive classic Christmas (Baby Please Come

Let’s start with the title. The Chats don’t care what you think, and even less (I hope) what the Guardian thinks. This band did not give a continental about what Karl Stefanovic thought when they ran around the set of the

It would be an understatement to bestow the cliche “long-awaited” upon King Stingray’s self-titled debut album. The Yirrkala band from north-east Arnhem Land have already teased us with five singles. The first of them, Hey Wanhaka – which means “what’s

Early last Sunday, the veteran Australian pop-metal band Grinspoon fronted up to Byron Bay for one of the most contentious Splendour in the Grass festivals in memory. Singer Phil Jamieson says he became “a platypus” – the rarest sighting possible. “I

In his memoir Big Blue Sky, Peter Garrett cites an iron law of rock (and Regurgitator): fans will always tell you that they like your old stuff better than your new stuff. That’s because, for any band that has a long

Nineteen years after their last live appearance, the satirical Melbourne band TISM have announced their comeback, with the masked and anonymous collective set to play a series of shows at the Good Things festival in early December. TISM – an

In the near-decade since Spiderbait last released an album, their bass player and singer, Janet English, has completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She’s not sure if she wants to practise. “I was just really interested in how the brain

There’s a moment at the beginning of the Hoodoo Gurus’ new album, Chariot Of The Gods, where Dave Faulkner sounds like he’s stuck in the corner of a bar. You can hear clinking glasses and the hum of a crowd,

Before Michael Hutchence’s traumatic suicide in 1997, and the multiplying tragedies and indignities that followed (the reality program in search of a replacement singer; the Seven Network miniseries; the death of former manager Chris Murphy; guitarist Tim Farriss’s severed finger; his brother

When Midnight Oil announced their final tour last November – a once-more-with-feeling run of dates around the country to support their 13th studio album, Resist – founding guitarist Jim Moginie was typically met with three responses. The first was a scoff

To understand why Paul Kelly would make a Christmas album nearly 30 records deep into his career, it helps to know how he spends his own festive season. Kelly is one of eight siblings and, traditionally, the gatherings feature a

Neil Murray had been labouring in the Indigenous community of Papunya – a bone-jarring four-hour ride north-west of Alice Springs – for about a week when he met Sammy Butcher in 1980. “He must have heard that I had a guitar,

It is a truism of popular music’s album-oriented era that great double albums are rare. In Australian indie rock – at least since the waning of the compact disc’s market dominance and vinyl’s revival among collectors – they have become

In 1999, Nina Simone gave her final performance in London. It was at the Meltdown Festival, which that year was curated by Nick Cave. In an introduction to a new book by his bandmate and collaborator Warren Ellis, Nina Simone’s Gum, Cave