Music

The Scientists: solid gold

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

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 songs: Solid Gold Hell. Their hair was ridiculous (think big) and their clothes were gorgeous.

Ahead of a long-delayed national tour to promote Negativity, the band’s first full-length album since breaking up in 1987, Salmon – whose hair is, if anything, wilder than ever – has finally created a Facebook page for his old band. Going through old photos, he can now see the Scientists for who they were: “This skinny bunch of cute boys that made this really hideous noise.”

After innocent beginnings in Perth, and an early appearance on Countdown, Salmon moved to Sydney in 1981. There he formed a new version of the Scientists, which began thrilling, terrifying and occasionally repelling inner-city audiences. In a rare trip to the suburbs, they had cans of beer hurled at them by Angels fans; soon after, they moved to London.

Salmon wrote for the unique characters in the band, particularly drummer Brett Rixon, as if they were his muses: trying to capture their peculiar mix of sullen apathy and bursts of self-destructive energy.… Read more..

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Robert Forster: The Candle and the Flame

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

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 and growing old with dignity – which is not surprising, since rock stars are not well known for any of those things.

But most rock stars are not like Robert Forster, the former Go-Between. Back in 1993, Forster made his second solo album, Calling From A Country Phone. It’s one of the happiest albums you could wish to hear: Forster was newly married and blissfully content. Thirty years later, pushing 65, Forster is still married, still happy, and still wants you to know all about it.

Take his new song Tender Years, from The Candle And The Flame, Forster’s eighth album outside the Go-Betweens. “I see her through the ages / She’s a book of a thousand pages,” goes the opening line, over a shuffling rhythm and a sly melody that Forster, as usual, barely tries to sing. Yet it fades out in a richly harmonised croon: “See how far we’ve come.”

But the shadow of mortality hangs over The Candle And The Flame.… Read more..

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Renée Geyer 1953-2023

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

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, that Australia has produced, but to speak only of her immense talent does not capture what she was about; her real greatness.

Geyer was, above all, unapologetic. It was this attitude that defined her, as much as her singing. Paul Kelly, who became a close friend, recognised it when he wrote Difficult Woman for her, knowing full well how she would respond. Women, after all, are always the ones thought to be difficult, never men.

But line by line Geyer peeled the song apart, exposing the vulnerability beneath the steel of the titular character. The singer and actor Lo Carmen, in her fine 2022 book Lovers Dreamers Fighters, wrote that “she wore the title like a crown” in the knowledge that it would come at great cost. Indeed, it already had.

Difficult Woman was released in 1994, and it relaunched Geyer’s career in Australia after nearly a decade living in Los Angeles. But Geyer’s transformative presence had been apparent 20 years earlier, with her third single, a heart-stopping rendition of James Brown’s It’s A Man’s Man’s World.… Read more..

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Sunnyboys say goodbye, with love

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

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 peaked early, releasing a classic debut album in 1981 before flaming out like a comet, derailed by overwork and lead singer Jeremy Oxley’s long struggle with schizophrenia.

After a reunion in 1998, no one expected the original quartet – singer, guitarist and songwriter Jeremy, his bass-playing older brother Peter, guitarist Richard Burgman and drummer Bil Bilson – to ever play again. That they did, Burgman insists, was a miracle: “There were about 150 to 250 things that had to go right. And if any one of those hadn’t, or if anyone along the way had said no, it wouldn’t have happened.”

It all went right in 2012, when the band reunited to play a show at Sydney’s Enmore theatre with the Hoodoo Gurus, performing under the name Kids in Dust to defuse expectations. Since then, they’ve seen their slim catalogue reissued, released multiple compilations, played a sold-out show at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall and many more sold-out tours – the very last of which begins next week, on the Gold Coast.… Read more..

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Frog-hopping up the charts

Environment, Music / / 4 minutes of reading

A range of amphibious grunts, clicks, squeals and screams from more than 60 species of Australian frogs has landed at No. 3 on the ARIA album charts – with hopes of knocking off Paul Kelly and Taylor Swift to take the top spot.

Brought together by the Bowerbird Collective (musicians Anthony Albrecht and Simone Slattery) under the banner Songs Of Disappearance, the project is raising funds for the Australian Museum’s FrogID project, with the aim of bringing attention to the plight of Australian frogs.

Recorded by experts and citizen scientists, it reprises last year’s project – an album led by a symphony of Australian bird calls – which peaked at No. 2.

While Australia holds the dubious honour of being host to the worst mammal extinction rate of any country on Earth, our frogs are also in dire straights due to habitat loss, climate change and chytrid fungus disease.

… Read more..

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Paulie Stewart: paying it back with punk nuns

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

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 Timor-Leste sent to comfort him on his journey to the other side. A priest had already read him his last rites.

Stewart, singer of Melbourne punk band Painters and Dockers and Australian-East Timorese reggae ensemble the Dili Allstars, thought Helena’s appearance must have been an omen. His association with Timor-Leste spanned decades, sparked by the murder of his brother Tony in 1975 by Indonesian forces in Balibo.

Sister Helena, familiar with both the Allstars and the story of the Balibo Five, was just as gobsmacked to see Stewart on his deathbed. She vowed she would get him a new liver. In his new memoir All The Rage, Stewart writes that he thought Helena must have got into the altar wine a bit early that day.

The next morning, a nurse rushed into the ward. A compatible liver had arrived. Sister Helena and the nuns of East Timor had been praying all night.

A former altar boy, Stewart lost his faith in 1975 when a nun told his shattered family they should be happy that his brother was with Jesus.… Read more..

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