Music - Notes from Pig City

The messenger

Music / April 2, 2012 / 4 minutes of reading

For many Australians under the age of 40, the first time they would have heard the voice of Jimmy Little would have been in 1999, the result of a chance meeting a few years earlier. Brendan Gallagher, of the sorely underrated Australian band Karma County, had accidentally caught Little singing in a Sydney bar. “I was instantly drawn to the front of the stage by one of the most beautiful voices I’d ever heard,” he wrote in the liner notes to Messenger. “I sat transfixed as Jimmy worked his way through a set of songs with such grace and style that I forgot to go to the bar and buy a drink; very unusual behaviour on my part.”

Gallagher introduced himself to Little after the show and struck up a friendship, and Messenger was the collaboration that resulted. It’s an album of classic Australian songs by the likes of the Go-Betweens, the Church, Paul Kelly, Ed Kuepper and the Reels – many of them radically rearranged by Gallagher, and most of which Little himself had never heard before Gallagher introduced him to them. The album was a critical and commercial success, receiving extensive airplay, and introducing a new generation of Australians to a voice that had first came to national prominence in 1963, via his hit version of the country gospel standard Royal Telephone.… Read more..

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I saw the real o-mind with Endless Boogie

Music / March 12, 2012 / 4 minutes of reading

If you’ve ever listened to any Stooges or Radio Birdman records, you’ll be familiar with the idea of the O-Mind. The concept came from a lyric in the Stooges’ Down In The Street: “floatin’ around on a real O-Mind”. In the literal sense, it meant the whacked-out bliss of a drug stupor. But musically, it meant something else: a state of transcendence where all earthly concerns fall away and you’re left focused on the only thing that matters, which is Right Now, the moment you’re in.

I’ve never seen it referred to as a kind of orgasm, but the effect is similar.

For the Stooges, the O-Mind was the musical holy grail. They were bent, as American critic Ann Powers once memorably put it, on touching rock’s molten core, and they did it again and again – on Down On The Street, on I Wanna Be Your Dog … Hell, the entire first two Stooges albums constitute a trip into the deepest recesses of the O-Mind. For the Stooges, pharmaceutical and personal psychosis was the inevitable result.

I saw the Real O-Mind last Thursday night. The band was New York City’s Endless Boogie, playing to a crowd of about 50 people at the Jubilee Hotel.… Read more..

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The hitch-hiker: Andrew McMillan, 1957-2012

Media, Miscellaneous, Music / January 29, 2012 / 5 minutes of reading

I first met Andrew McMillan in July of 1999. The place was Gove Airport, which services the north-east Arnhem Land mining town of Nhulunbuy. Andrew was acting as a media liaison officer for the inaugural Garma Festival, an annual cultural exchange program between the local Yolngu people and Balanda (whites) established by the Yothu Yindi Foundation. I was working on a story for the Australian edition of Rolling Stone. I spent nearly a week in Andrew’s company and only caught up with him on one other occasion, but he certainly left a mark on me.

I was already familiar with his work. When I was a teenager, growing up in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne before my family relocated to Brisbane, Midnight Oil was the band that changed my life. They were a rock & roll awakening, and a political one, too. McMillan’s book, Strict Rules, was a document of the Oils’ tour through the Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory and Western Australia, an experience that led to the ground-breaking Diesel And Dust album in 1987.

Before that, Andrew had begun his writing career in Brisbane in the late ’70s. He’d been turned on by punk and had started Australia’s first fanzine (the horribly named Suicide Alley, quickly re-christened Pulp) with Clinton Walker.… Read more..

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PJ-gate: citizen journalism at the ABC

Media, Music / January 18, 2012 / 4 minutes of reading

In his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life And Beyond, academic Axel Bruns talks about the concept of folksonomics, wherein traditional hierarchies of knowledge have been flattened by the empowerment of the online community. The rise of social media (including blogs such as this one) and the drive towards interactive news environments, in particular, has meant that journalists have lost their once-coveted status as both the gatekeepers and disseminators of information.

This is not entirely a bad thing, but the drowning out of expertise in favour of the hum of audience chatter has its limitations. As the ABC has just discovered, after sending a citizen journalist (actually, a staff audio engineer) to write a live review of one of the most revered songwriters of her generation. PJ Harvey is not a woman to be trifled with, and nor are her fans. In the interests of full disclosure, I’m happy to add that I am one.

Ian Church’s piece for the website of Perth’s local ABC radio 720 is now flagged (after a couple of hasty edits), as an “audience review”. He paid his own way to get in, so at least we as ABC consumers didn’t pay to be edified by the following bon mots:

“I, like many of other males have been introduced to PJ Harvey by my partner.… Read more..

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The Feelies vs Lou Reed

Music / December 23, 2011 / 5 minutes of reading

I have two records sitting at the base of my stereo at the moment, both purchased last week. One is the Feelies’ new album Here Before, which I have been giving a severe flogging. The other is a lovely, near-mint original American pressing of Lou Reed’s Berlin, which so far I have been too scared to play.

Here Before is the first Feelies record for close to 20 years, and it’s as though they’ve never been away. There’s no great advance on the last three albums that the band recorded in the late ’80s and early ’90s, all of which are more relaxed, pastoral affairs than the band’s brilliant but twitchy 1980 debut, Crazy Rhythms. (That record opened with a song called The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness, which was a pretty apt description of the four of them, and the music they made together.)

Looking around for some information about Here Before, I came across this review, and I was struck by the following quote by writer Jordan Cronk, which sums up the record and my feelings towards it perfectly: “Here Before could have come out in 1987 or 2027 and my feelings about it would be more or less the same: this is a good album with a lot of easy-going songs that sound pretty much the same.”… Read more..

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Final: The Great Australian Songbook V (10-1)

Music / December 21, 2011 / 7 minutes of reading

Count-dow-wn! It’s time for the top 10!

10. PAUL KELLY/KEV CARMODY – From Little Things Big Things Grow (1991, 1993)

The ultimate compromise choice on this list. Both Kelly and Carmody should feature individually in any compilation of great Australian songs, but which ones? In the end, I’ve gone for this co-write, initially recorded by Kelly for his 1991 album Comedy, then by Carmody (featuring Kelly) in 1993 for Bloodlines, with a single released the same year. It’s the story of the birth of the land rights movement in Australia, a campfire folk tune that a young Bob Dylan would have been proud of, and at least the equal of anything in either songwriter’s canon. Despite its 11 verses, it’s a story that tells itself; a masterclass in protest songwriting that wears its moral lightly.

9. FLAME TREES – Cold Chisel (1984)

Khe Sanh may be their signature tune, but this for me is the better one; a piece of heartland rock to rival anything by Bruce Springsteen: a small town, you and your mates, a boozy night of nostalgia, and a girl you can’t forget. Don Walker peels off line after line of unforgettable imagery here, and that middle-eight – “Do you remember, nothing stopped us on the field in our day” – never fails to stop me in my tracks.… Read more..

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