Music

The Pixies make peace with their past

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Charles Thompson, the singer, guitarist and songwriter of the legendary Pixies, remembers the pivotal moment. It was 2010, and the band was eight months into a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of the band’s second full album Doolittle. At that point, the reformed group had been playing their greatest hits for six years – almost as long as the time in which it took the Pixies to release five of the most celebrated albums in indie rock between 1986 and their acrimonious split in 1993.

The band would begin with a few B-sides to throw the audience off-balance, then hit them with Doolittle in its entirety – in sequence, as contracted, almost note-perfect (“that was one way we really kissed the audience’s ass”, he notes) followed by an encore, and Thompson – better known by his stage name, Black Francis – was getting more than a little restless.

“I found myself spacing out,” he admits. “I [wouldn’t] know if we were in the first or second chorus, I’d have no idea. It didn’t happen every night, but it happened from time to time and to me that was a real turning point personally where I was like, ‘OK, enough of this shit!… Read more..

The Pixies make peace with their past Read More »

(I’m) Stranded turns 40: the song that changed Brisbane

Music, Qld Politics / / 4 minutes of reading

The ABC news radio announcer’s incredulous tone said it all. “An unknown band from Brisbane, by the name of the Saints, has earned rave reviews in England for a record it made itself,” he said. It was September 1976, and the words, complete with the plummy delivery, were loaded with cultural cringe – all the more so for the fact that the band hailed from the backwoods of Brisbane.

That record, (I’m) Stranded – dubbed “Single of this and every week” in a hyperventilating review in the UK’s Sounds magazine – turns 40 years old this month, and it is no exaggeration to say that it changed Brisbane forever, both from within, and in terms of its external perception. And it was true: outside of a small clique, the band was all but unknown in its hometown at the time of the song’s release.

The Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster once wrote that punk hit Brisbane like no other city in Australia, for two reasons: we had Joh-Bjelke Petersen, “the kind of crypto-fascist, bird-brained conservative that every punk lead singer in the world could only dream of railing against”; and we had the Saints, the “musical revolutionaries in the city’s evil heart” that gave a city that usually chased music history its own place in it.… Read more..

(I’m) Stranded turns 40: the song that changed Brisbane Read More »

Kim Gordon at Bigsound: “This is not an essay”

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

At the end of her opening keynote address to Brisbane music industry conference Bigsound, former Sonic Youth bass player Kim Gordon told a packed theatre of a calamitous acoustic show the band performed in 1991 for Neil Young’s The Bridge School, a non-profit education organisation for children with severe disabilities.

The band, which relied on the fiery interplay between guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, had never played acoustically and was performing for a mainstream audience. Fearing disaster, Gordon brought a guitar ready-made to destroy: “I had a feeling things were doomed to fail.”

Halfway through a cover of the New York Dolls’ Personality Crisis, with the band unable to hear themselves onstage, a frustrated Gordon swore into the microphone, smashed the waiting guitar, and walked off. Then she saw the kids in wheelchairs backstage looking horrified, and felt awful. Neil Young’s then-teenaged son Ben, who has cerebral palsy, rolled up to her.

“Everyone has a bad day sometimes,” he said.

Gordon repeatedly told the audience that her address was a poem or incantation, not an essay, and it was: a series of vignettes that interrogated the co-dependent relationship between the artist and the audience, based on a premise by critic Greil Marcus: that artists who submit to the whims of their fans by only giving them more of what they have already accepted are only able to confirm, not to create.… Read more..

Kim Gordon at Bigsound: “This is not an essay” Read More »

Henry Rollins: “I seek not to squander”

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Henry Rollins likes to talk. Actually, saying Rollins likes to talk is a bit like saying an anteater enjoys ants, or a boxer doesn’t mind getting into a punch-on. On top of countless books and a column in the LA Weekly, his spoken-word performances can run upwards of three hours. On average, he says, he writes about 1000 words a day, a habit he describes as “awful, it’s just ridiculous”.

So it seems odd that a man with as much to say as Rollins could ever run out of lyrics, but it happened. “It was trippy,” he says. “I woke up going, ‘Wow. Am I done? And I soberly assessed it and went ‘Damn. I’m done.’ And I stopped.” He phoned his manager to inform him and hasn’t written a song since. That was more than 10 years ago now.

He has no interest in playing the old songs either; not those by the Rollins Band or Black Flag, the pioneering West Coast hardcore punk/metal band he fronted in the early 1980s. “It must be nice to be able to go out and play Satisfaction and Brown Sugar and all of that every night and have girls lift their T-shirts up and have everyone roar with approval but that’s not how I’m going to live my life,” he says.… Read more..

Henry Rollins: “I seek not to squander” Read More »

Robert Forster: Grant & I

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Fifty pages into this long-awaited memoir, songwriter, critic and author Robert Forster gets very meta. “If a film of Grant & I is ever made, it could start here,” he writes. It’s 1978, and he and Grant McLennan, the co-founders of the Go-Betweens, are driving from Brisbane to Sydney for the first time. After crossing the Tweed river into New South Wales, McLennan dashes into a shop, and emerges triumphantly waving a copy of Playboy, which was banned in Queensland at the time.

Of course, this being the Go-Betweens, they’re reading it for the articles – in this instance, Bob Dylan’s first full-length interview in three years, which McLennan ecstatically reads to Forster as the car races past cane fields on their left, Mount Warning on the right (“Cue thundercrack,” Forster says). The Go-Betweens always were the most self-referential of groups, as well as the most literate. Grant & I would make the most bookish of buddy films.

That’s not to say they were square. “On many occasions dark rock bands would encounter the Go-Betweens expecting namby-pamby, book-besotted, cocoa-drinking wimps, to find themselves partied under the table. We were a rock & roll band,” Forster declares. Yet it’s both a strength and a weakness that this often very moving book avoids the cliched recounting of rock & roll excess – until those excesses inevitably begin to catch up with them.… Read more..

Robert Forster: Grant & I Read More »

Bernard Fanning: “At least 50 percent good”

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Bernard Fanning, former singer of Powderfinger, is ruminating about decisions and consequences. The theme runs throughout his third, back-to-basics solo album Civil Dusk. Over the finger-picked guitar of Unpicking A Puzzle, he sings a song from the bottom of the bottle: “Where silences are gold and secrets will abound / The hostage in your conscience will have tape across his mouth.”

On the equally spare piano ballad Rush Of Blood, at the album’s centre, he is even more plain-spoken. “In a rush of blood I threw it all away, oh Lord what was I thinking of that day?” It would be easy to listen to lines like this and presume Civil Dusk is a confessional album. Put to him that it sounds like he’s got a lot going on, though, and he laughs.

“Yeah, that’s what everyone keeps saying!” he says. “[But] hardly any of it’s about my life. It’s just talking about stuff I’ve observed. Some of it’s invented, and of course parts of it are me as well.” He’s not concerned about people mistaking the album for autobiography. “Once it’s out there you can’t control any of that anyway. I’ve got songs that I’ve never released that are way more personal.”… Read more..

Bernard Fanning: “At least 50 percent good” Read More »

Scroll to Top