Music

INXS: Sorted

Music / / 7 minutes of reading

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 and drummer Jon’s recent association with anti-vaccination protests in Canberra), before all of that, INXS were one thing above all else: a brilliant singles band with a shit-hot frontman.

If you are looking for anything after 1992’s patchy Welcome To Wherever You Are, look elsewhere: INXS were already on a steep descent by then. Deep cuts? Forget it: if it wasn’t a single, it was mostly filler. INXS’s best songs were precision-tooled pieces of audio engineering, ergonomically crafted for your radio, your car, your hips and your ears. Their greatest hits almost all pick themselves – ranking them, however, is another matter. Here goes …

15. Bitter Tears (1990)

A Rolling Stones-lite rock and soul workout, the fourth single from X still shimmied and shook, although the tide was beginning to run out on the band by the time of its release as a single in February 1991 – the song peaked at No.… Read more..

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Midnight Oil’s Resist: “We mean it, man!”

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

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 of disbelief, usually with a reference to John Farnham’s never-ending farewell shows. The second, more humorous, was that the group should have quit while they were ahead in 1981 – “and that was from some of my friends,” Moginie says.

But the third response was a shrug of acceptance. Moginie, 66 in May, is the youngest surviving member of the band; the eldest, singer Peter Garrett, is 69 in April. There will be no long goodbyes.

“We’re more like Johnny Rotten [than Johnny Farnham] — we mean it, man!” Garrett says, invoking a line from the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen. In their early years, tour handbills promised “The Oils are coming”. Now, 50 years after their rough beginnings, they’re leaving: the stage, at least.

More than any other band, Midnight Oil have remained part of Australia’s cultural conversation. Their breakthrough classic from 1982, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 – with its indelible hits Power And The Passion and US Forces – spent 177 consecutive weeks on the Australian charts.… Read more..

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Paul Kelly: “Christmas music gets a bad rap”

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

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 large and diverse cast; “the odd stray, new and old flames, gossip, singing”, as he wrote in his memoir, How To Make Gravy, “and much discussion and planning of food”.

Branches of Kelly’s family extend through Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. “We’ve all got our children and our children’s children, so if we all got together now it might be too big,” he says. Usually, there’s a get-together on Christmas Eve, where carols will be sung, before people drift back to their own camps and to in-laws for the day itself.

But this year Kelly’s eldest brother, Martin – father of nephew and bandmate Dan – won’t be there. He died on 4 December last year, aged 69, after a short illness. “We were fortunate to get up to Queensland last year just before the borders closed,” Kelly says. “It was a really close call, but we saw him two days before he died, and stayed on for the funeral, so we were very fortunate to be able to do that.”… Read more..

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Songs of Disappearance

Environment, Music / / 4 minutes of reading

An album consisting entirely of birdsong has debuted towards the top of Australia’s ARIA chart, beating Mariah Carey, Michael Buble and Abba to get to No. 5 one week after its release.

Songs Of Disappearance, a collaboration between multimedia duo Bowerbird Collective and David Stewart, who has been recording the sounds of Australian birds for over four decades, features the calls and songs of 53 threatened species.

With all proceeds donated to BirdLife Australia, it has sold just over 2,000 units, around 1,500 of them in presale (which is, it must be said, a far cry from the kind of numbers trequired to enter the charts before the streaming era).

The project was the result of a conversation between Bowerbird Collective’s Anthony Albrecht, a PhD student at Charles Darwin University, and his supervisor Stephen Garnett, the author of the recently updated Action Plan For Australian Birds, which found that one in six Australian birds are now threatened with extinction.

“He asked whether the Bowerbird Collective could do anything to help promote [the Action Plan], and it was immediately obvious to me what we needed to do,” Albrecht said. “I’m really keen to understand whether environmental art such as this project can have an impact on attitudes and behaviour.”… Read more..

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The people’s band

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

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, and he came around to have a look,” Murray says. “I showed him the guitar, and right away I could tell he could play – there was an energy there, he was gifted. You know those guitar players that never play the same solo twice, and they’ll tune up as they’re going? That kind of guy.”

Murray dragged out his amplifier, Sammy’s brother showed up with an upturned flour drum and a couple of sticks, and the trio began bashing out covers of rock & roll standards in the front yard. This was the birth of the Warumpi Band, who would be completed by the arrival of charismatic singer George Rrurrambu Burarrawanga.

It’s these rough beginnings that are captured in Warumpi Rock, a historic release of the earliest known recordings of the band in 1982, by which time Murray had become a bilingual teacher in the community. The recording, which contains covers of songs by Chuck Berry, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, was captured in the front room of his house, supplied to him by the Northern Territory education department.… Read more..

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Courtney Barnett: Taking her time

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

At the beginning of 2020, while her home country burned and the rest of the world was waking up to a global pandemic, Courtney Barnett was in Los Angeles. She’d just completed an American tour; her plan was to find herself an apartment and stick around a little longer to work on songs.

Then – after “it all got really wild” – she came home to Melbourne. For maybe the first time in six years – since her 2016 hit Avant Gardener turned her into the newest “New Dylan” – Barnett finally had time to sit and think. “There was a bit of a personal shift of some sort in my brain,” she says carefully over Zoom, from a Spartan-looking room that offers no clues. “I felt myself opening up in a different way.”

Barnett’s personal life had been riven with upheaval, even beyond the virus that wreaked havoc on her industry. Her relationship with Jen Cloher, with whom she founded her label Milk! Records in 2012, had ended in 2018 (the business partnership remains intact). There had also been “some deaths” – she doesn’t say whom. “I was just checking in with myself, on a different level than I maybe had done previously.”… Read more..

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