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

Crowded House: Dreamers Are Waiting

Music / August 18, 2021 / 4 minutes of reading

It’s not easy to connect the four albums Crowded House made in their first life (from their formation in 1985 to their dissolution in 1996) to the three released since the traumatic passing of drummer Paul Hester in 2005. Although still the main and most popular vehicle for Neil Finn and original bass player Nick Seymour, there’s a clear musical divide that makes them feel like the works of very different bands.

Which is true, at least up to a point. A crucial part of Crowded House’s identity was lost with Hester besides his deft percussive touch, and that is throwing no shade on drummer Elroy Finn (Neil’s youngest son) or his predecessor Matt Sherrod. Crowded House was never going to be the same after that tragedy, and some of the band’s natural joie de vivre – along with the tightly wound pop hooks and effortless anthems – went with him.

Dreamers Are Waiting is the first Crowded House album since 2010, and the band has expanded to a full-blown family affair. Alongside Elroy, older brother Liam is now a full-time multi-instrumental member, while Tim Finn (whose name last appeared on a Crowded House album on Together Alone, in 1993) gets a co-writing credit on Too Good For This World.… Read more..

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Swinging with Ed Kuepper and Jim White

Music / August 18, 2021 / 4 minutes of reading

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 by a rising instrumental trio called the Dirty Three.

“I know the Dirty Three aren’t strictly speaking a rock band, but they were playing at a rock club – and they were supporting me, the King of Rock & Roll,” Kuepper says, his tone as dry as a desiccated old biscuit. White, joining us on Zoom, hoots with laughter in the background.

“It was an unusually expansive way of playing,” Kuepper says of White’s drumming. “He was playing the rhythm but wasn’t just focused on keeping a strict tempo. That always catches my ear, and you don’t see it happening all that much.”

Forty-five years since the Saints released (I’m) Stranded, Kuepper and White are touring Australia as a duo for the first time, performing songs from Kuepper’s five-decade repertoire.

Kuepper had bookmarked White as a potential collaborator ever since that first encounter at the Prince of Wales, but the Dirty Three relocated overseas soon afterwards. White then became busy with other projects, working with Cat Power and Xylouris White, among others.… Read more..

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Beer, bass notes and the Bee Gees

Music / August 18, 2021 / 4 minutes of reading

I am sitting on the edge of a crowd of several thousand people gathered at Riverstage in Brisbane, and suddenly I’m feeling very nervous. I am about to be part of the latest (and, so far, biggest ever) live rendition of Pub Choir, and the legendary Barry Gibb, the sole survivor of the Bee Gees – who began their performing careers here in Pub Choir’s birthplace – is appearing on a screen above the stage.

He tells us the song we’re about to sing is their early hit To Love Somebody, and he promises “it’ll be about as easy as it was in 1967 for me”, but that he’s sure it will sound wonderful. I am less convinced – or at least, am unsure I can get even close to the orchestral pop classic’s complex melody, let alone pitch. Fortunately, I’ll be drowned out by everyone else, which is (a) merciful and (b) the whole point, but all I can think is that this is going to be a disaster.

Of course, if Pub Choir was about virtuosity, it would not exist. Founded by conductor Astrid Jorgensen in 2017, it works on the same principle as other community choral groups, including churches: that everyone can sing, no matter how well or badly, and that it feels good, especially when it’s done in large groups and alcohol is added.… Read more..

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Nature Boy

Music / August 18, 2021 / 16 minutes of reading

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 Kamalesvaran was seven years old when the Imperial Japanese Army completed their conquest of Malaysia in February 1942, after the surrender of Allied forces in Singapore.

By the time he was eight, he’d seen heads on pikes, and other things no child should ever see. Everywhere, there was a Japanese soldier astride a black horse, a sword on his hip.

To get out of harm’s way, his parents pulled their growing family out of the heaving Kuala Lumpur metropolis to the countryside. They owned a cow, and one day young Kamal took it out for a walk and a feed.

On the way home, he encountered a Japanese soldier on horseback. The soldier beckoned him, and put his hand to his hip. Kamal closed his eyes, anticipating that his head was about to be removed from his body.

After a few seconds, realising it was still attached, he opened them again, and saw a flash of silver. But it wasn’t a sword that the soldier was brandishing in front of his nose.… Read more..

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Kamahl, Hey Hey and cancel culture

Music, Television / April 6, 2021 / 4 minutes of reading

When Daryl Somers, former host of Hey Hey It’s Saturday, told the Daily Telegraph that “you probably could not get away with half the stuff you could on Hey Hey now because of political correctness and cancel culture”, it reminded many viewers of two things.

First, that Hey Hey It’s Saturday had already been cancelled twice: in 1999, after a 28-year run, and in 2010, when a brief reboot of the series was marred by an infamous blackface sketch.

The second was the type of humour the Australian variety show traded in.

A montage on Twitter, compiling a series of incidents in which the singer Kamahl was racially mocked and belittled on the show, went viral. In another cartoon, he was depicted in a stew pot with a bone through his nose.

The now 86-year-old said he often felt “humiliated” by his experiences as a regular guest on the show. Speaking to Guardian Australia this week, he said he had been invited repeatedly to appear on the show during the reboot, but “found reasons not to go” at the time.

Kamahl has been the most recognised Australian voice of lounge and easy-listening music in a career spanning more than 60 years, performing on stages ranging from the Sydney Opera House to the Big Day Out rock festival.… Read more..

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Troy Cassar-Daley’s reckoning

Music / March 22, 2021 / 5 minutes of reading

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 taken his own life. The song’s chorus – “watching it all go south” – took on a too-real darker hue.

As 2019 stretched into the pandemic of 2020, Cassar-Daley entered a downward spiral. His long-standing marriage to broadcaster Laurel Edwards, with whom he has two adult children, was suffering. The son of a Bundjalung woman from Grafton in north-eastern New South Wales, he tried to escape back to country, seeking his grandmother’s counsel.

Cassar-Daley’s grandparents are long deceased, but he still talks to them. “I consult with them a lot when I’m sitting by myself on the river where I grew up, and I distinctly felt my grandmother say to me, ‘Your problems aren’t here. I think you know where the problems are; you have to go back,’” he says.

Cassar-Daley is part of the firmament of Australian country music, the winner of 37 Golden Guitar Awards, on top of numerous ARIA and Deadly gongs. On Friday, he released his 13th studio album, The World Today.… Read more..

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