Notes from Pig City - Archive of author and journalist Andrew Stafford

Songs of Disappearance

Environment, Music / June 4, 2023 / 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 / June 4, 2023 / 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 / June 4, 2023 / 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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Even: Reverse Light Years

Music / June 3, 2023 / 4 minutes of reading

It is a truism of popular music’s album-oriented era that great double albums are rare. In Australian indie rock – at least since the waning of the compact disc’s market dominance and vinyl’s revival among collectors – they have become close to non-existent.

So Ashley Naylor, leader of Melbourne stalwarts Even and a rock & roll classicist to the core, would have known full well the scale of what he was attempting to pull off with Reverse Light Years, his band’s eighth album. The band’s first, released back in 1995, was called Less Is More.

Well, as it turns out, more is more. Reverse Light Years sounds imposing: 17 songs in 80 minutes. Even have always been consistent, but this is by far their most impressive album, a cornucopia of musical delights where everything singer-guitarist Naylor, bass player Wally Kempton and drummer Matt Cotter try comes off.

I have been listening obsessively to Reverse Light Years almost non-stop for the last month, and every time, I’ve walked away humming a different tune. You can listen to it in one long trip, you can break it up into its four sides, or you can just dip in anywhere and hold up another jewel to the light.… Read more..

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Nina Simone’s Gum: Warren Ellis (in conversation)

Music / June 3, 2023 / 3 minutes of reading

In 1999, Nina Simone gave her final performance in London. It was at the Meltdown Festival, which that year was curated by Nick Cave.

In an introduction to a new book by his bandmate and collaborator Warren Ellis, Nina Simone’s Gum, Cave recalls being summoned backstage by the legendary singer, who demanded he introduce her as follows:

“I am DOCTOR Nina Simone!” she roared.

“OK,” Cave replied.

In front of an awestruck audience, Simone sat down at the Steinway. She took a piece of chewing gum from her mouth and stuck it on the piano. “She raised her arms above her head and, into the stunned silence, began what was to be the greatest show of my life – of our lives – savage and transcendent,” Cave writes.

At the end of the show, Ellis lurched towards the stage as though possessed. Reaching the Steinway, he peeled off Simone’s gum and tenderly wrapped it in a stage towel. This he kept with him for the next two decades, until it went on display at Cave’s Stranger Than Kindness exhibition at Copenhagen, Denmark in 2019.

And now the gum is the subject of a short, wryly funny book. It poses a number of questions: what meaning do we place on seemingly insignificant objects?… Read more..

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Powerful Owls: gentle giants on the edge

Environment / June 3, 2023 / 4 minutes of reading

For the last several months, I’ve kept a slightly uneasy vigil on a pair of breeding Powerful Owls in inner Brisbane, just a couple of kilometres from home. In that time they’ve seen off crowds of curious onlookers, and a determined eviction attempt by Sulphur-crested Cockatoos, to raise one confident and healthy-looking chick, which will remain dependent on them for several more months yet.

After that, it faces a much bigger challenge: finding and establishing its own territory and mate.

Powerful Owls have a lot going for them. They’re massive, charismatic birds and a perennial Guardian Australia Bird of the Year contender. They’ve proven resilient and relatively adaptable. Natural denizens of tall eucalypt forests in south-eastern Australia, they have changed their foraging habits and moved into the suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, where the pickings – especially hyper-abundant Ring-tailed Possums – are easy.

But they’re also on the edge. Although classed as secure federally, they’re listed as vulnerable in New South Wales and Queensland, and endangered in Victoria. As apex predators, they hold large territories and need big, old-growth trees with hollows about the size of a wheelie bin to breed in. For this diminishing resource, they compete with other species including cockatoos and Brush-tailed Possums, as well as with each other.… Read more..

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