Music

If you are of a certain age, as I am, you might owe your entire existence to Daddy Cool’s Eagle Rock. Your parents probably had sex to it. No one wants to think about that, do they? It makes it […]

Ed Kuepper still remembers the first time he saw Jim White play drums. It was back in the mid-1990s and Kuepper – founder of the Saints, Laughing Clowns and Aints – was headlining the Prince of Wales in Melbourne, supported

This story is based on an interview I conducted with Kamahl in March 2009, hitherto untold. It’s been a long time coming. I hope it puts his life, his perspective and the events of recent weeks into greater context. Kandiah

On 1 April 2019, singer and songwriter Troy Cassar-Daley was finishing up a song with Cold Chisel guitarist Ian Moss when he took a phone call. His father, who had been depressed and in poor health following a stroke, had

Sometime in the mid-1990s, at around four in the morning, Melbourne music teacher Stephanie Bourke’s phone rang. It was Courtney Love, the lead singer of Hole. One of the students at Bourke’s famed Rock & Roll High School, Brody Dalle –

For more than 45 years Michael Gudinski, who died on Monday aged 68, was a dominant, domineering, polarising but above all passionate figure in Australia’s cultural landscape. He lived and breathed Australian music. Everyone who met Gudinski had a story to

Albums of Odds & Sods (the name the Who gave to one of the first compilations of rarities, released in 1974 in an attempt to short-circuit bootleggers) are often more interesting than best-of collections. While the latter are usually predictable roundups for

When singer Jimmy Barnes’ memoir Working Class Boy was released in 2016, it caused a sensation. Barnes’ account of his childhood went beyond the usual adjectives like “raw” and “harrowing” on the cover to something much more purgative: here was one

Perhaps it’s easy to forget, nearly 60 years into his career, that the songs of Bob Dylan were made famous by other artists with sweeter, more radio-friendly voices than the one David Bowie later described as a mix of sand and glue.

There were many poignant moments watching Powderfinger streaming their first show in a decade on Saturday night, but the biggest one was seeing bassist John Collins playing (like all the band members, in isolation) to an empty Fortitude Music Hall,

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

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

The Centre Won’t Hold, the title of Sleater-Kinney’s ninth album, is taken from W.B. Yeats’ 1919 poem The Second Coming, the words of which have been repeatedly invoked in the Trump era: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold … The

If the X factor is that indefinable charisma that gives a performer star power, the late Michael Hutchence had it in abundance. On stage, the INXS singer took moves from Jagger, Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop and transformed into a serpentine, almost supernatural

I was driving alongside the Brisbane River not far from home, with a Ramones anthology playing at full volume, when it hit me. I was trying to piece myself back together after a difficult couple of years. My mother had

No music writer will win any prizes for pointing out where Harriette Pilbeam, aka Hatchie, is coming from. Not to do so though would be ignoring the elephant in the room. Right down to the blurred cover photo, no one

The independent scene that emerged from Dunedin, New Zealand, in the early 1980s had all the strange qualities musical trainspotters around the world associate with isolation. Hamish Kilgour from the Clean describes the city as a cauldron, with the low-hanging sky

After two best-selling, incredibly personal memoirs, Working Class Boy (2016) and Working Class Man (2017), you might think you know all there is to be known about James Dixon (Jimmy) Barnes. You’d be wrong. Barnes, by his own estimation, is

“Hey! Turn the lights on, I want to see everybody,” shouts Iggy Pop. And he grins that huge, irrepressible grin. Here he is, on the lip of the Concert Hall stage of a sold-out Sydney Opera House, with thousands of ecstatic

From the Velvet Underground onwards, the annals of popular music are stuffed with stories of artists who fell through the cracks during their careers – only to be granted belated entry into the pantheon decades later. Big Star are another

Jess Ribeiro’s first two albums, My Little River (2012) and Kill It Yourself (2016) received a great deal of critical warmth but not a lot of exposure. The first was a dark acoustic folk-blues record with a minimum of instrumentation.

Most rock bands work very hard at being serious. Credibility and being cool is everything – but if you’re a rock-star parent, those things count for nothing when it’s time to go home. Then you might sing silly songs to

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

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

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

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

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,

It’s a cliche that bands are like marriages. But for irrepressible Brisbane three-piece the Grates, it was a cliche they embraced, right up until drummer Alana Skyring left the band to become a chef in New York in 2010. At

On Tuesday an Australian newspaper of repute published an earnest think-piece asking the question: where are all the great Aussie protest songs? Where oh where – in this, our Age of Unreason – are the new Midnight Oils, Goannas, Redgums and

The Go-Betweens’ Streets Of Your Town is the winner of Guardian Australia’s Songs of Brisbane poll. But is it even about Brisbane? Separate interviews with the surviving members of the band reveal very different viewpoints and memories about the song’s genesis,

Kev Carmody’s debut album, Pillars Of Society, recorded as a conceptual excoriation of the Australian bicentenary in 1988, is now 30 years old. On release, it was described by critic Bruce Elder as “the best album ever released by an

I’m from Melbourne. I spent the first 15 years of my life there, in the outer eastern suburbs of Wantirna South and Ringwood North. I grew up on Australian Rules football and Countdown until punk entered my life 10 years