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

Jess Ribeiro: LOVE HATE

Music / May 21, 2019 / 3 minutes of reading

Jess Ribeiro’s first two albums, My Little River (2012) and Kill It Yourself (2016) received a great deal of critical warmth but not a lot of exposure. The first was a dark acoustic folk-blues record with a minimum of instrumentation. Kill It Yourself, produced by former Bad Seed Mick Harvey, added strings and percussion, but still, the songs stood almost alone.

That they did is a testament to Ribeiro’s talent. But whereas those records are sepia-toned, Love Hate is an all-electric technicolour lunge towards pop, backed by guitarist Jade McInally and drummer Dave Mudie (the latter a member of Courtney Barnett’s touring band). The results are vibrant and clearly aimed at introducing the Melbourne singer-songwriter to a bigger audience.

The bright spangles of guitar that burst through the dream-pop haze of opener (and single) Stranger, indicates Ribeiro is out to get your attention. Produced by New Zealander Ben Edwards, who has worked with Aldous Harding, Marlon Williams and Julia Jacklin, Love Hate is arguably more immediately arresting than any of their records.

But that shouldn’t make it any less satisfying in the long haul. There are still hidden depths; the surface is just a little shinier. Following the natural arc of a love affair from chance meeting to attraction to dissolution, and bound together by three short “Vignette” interludes, its 12 tracks are as liable to sneak up on you as they are to jump out.… Read more..

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Preserving the past

Miscellaneous / May 21, 2019 / 5 minutes of reading

A 100-year-old chocolate bar may not sound like the tastiest treat in the world. But imagine receiving it in the trenches of World War 1.

Bill Thompson, museum curator at the Ballina RSL sub-branch in northern New South Wales, says the chocolate was a Christmas present to soldiers – a small token of luxury during a time of international trauma, courtesy of the Australian War Contingent Association in London.

Now, the chocolate lives in the museum, donated by Dorothy Brumley. The recipient had been her father, Henry Wharton-Braithwaite, when he was in France in 1915, after he had served at Gallipoli.

“It’s still in the tin, [and] it’s in excellent condition – except the chocolate, of course. It looks bloody awful!” Thompson says.

Almost all Australians are familiar, at least by name, with the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and its treasures of memorabilia. But fewer know that their local RSLs often feature their own exhibits, sometimes of thousands of items.

These pieces have the power to touch not only those with personal associations and memories of wartime, but younger generations who have grown up without any kind of equivalent experience.

“We get a lot of visitors from schools, and they all arrive with a great list of questions, and they’re usually more orientated with some of the later conflicts,” Thompson goes on.… Read more..

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Regurgitator’s Pogogo Show gets down with the kids

Music / May 21, 2019 / 4 minutes of reading

Most rock bands work very hard at being serious. Credibility and being cool is everything – but if you’re a rock-star parent, those things count for nothing when it’s time to go home. Then you might sing silly songs to your kids in between chores, or when you’re dropping them off at school, before it’s time to put on the mask again and going back on tour.

Regurgitator have never worked hard at being serious, and have recorded an entire album of the songs they sang to their kids. The result is Regurgitator’s Pogogo Show: The Really Really Really Really Boring Album, with Ben Ely’s 14-year-old daughter Dee Dee doing backing vocals and telling stories in between songs.

The result is anything but boring, and sounds, well, like a Regurgitator album. For kids. That is, without the swearing, but with lots of farting.

The classic Brisbane three-piece (Quan Yeomans, Ben Ely and Peter Kostic) are spread out these days, with Yeomans in Melbourne and Kostic in Sydney. But all have children, and so too do most of the band’s Generation X fans, who’d come to the gigs on a night off (or on a date night). The Pogogo Show could catch on – especially since it’s already branching out into live shows.… Read more..

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Robert Forster: Inferno

Music / May 21, 2019 / 3 minutes of reading

Here in Brisbane, the heat has finally broken. For 46 days in a row, the mercury exceeded 30C. The previous record was 27 days, in 2017. While the north has been awash, the wet season here has failed. I’m listening to the title track of the new Robert Forster album. It’s called Inferno (Brisbane In Summer). You might think it looks like paradise, he sings, but everyone here is screaming: “Let me, let me, let me, let me, let me out!”

Forster has written about the weather in Brisbane before. On his 2008 album The Evangelist, recorded during a similarly excruciating period of mind-melting heat, the first song was called If It Rains. At the time, we thought it might never rain here again. Not that Inferno is any kind of manifesto. This is not a climate change concept album. It’s a Robert Forster record, which means buckets of atmosphere, dry wit, subtle pleasures and unerring quality.

While Forster’s last album, Songs To Play, was recorded close to his home patch in the hills west of Brisbane, for Inferno he escaped to Berlin, where he recorded his first solo album, Danger In The Past, in 1990.… Read more..

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Tex Perkins on surviving the Beasts of Bourbon

Music / May 21, 2019 / 5 minutes of reading

On 14 April last year, an unusually poignant gig took place at the Prince of Wales Hotel in St Kilda, Melbourne. The Beasts of Bourbon – the self-styled ugliest, most badass rock band on the planet – played what would be their final gig in what was perhaps the only way the band could have ended.

Bass player Brian Henry Hooper, for whom the gig was a benefit, was surrounded by half a dozen nurses and wearing an oxygen mask. No one had been sure whether he would be able to play until the moment arrived; the band’s original bassist Boris Sudjovic was on standby. Guitarist Spencer P Jones was also playing one of his final performances.

Hooper passed away from lung cancer six days later, aged 55. Jones died on 21 August, aged 61. And the Beasts of Bourbon – the band that stubbornly refused to die, and had been through numerous permutations and reconciliations during a 25-year history of inebriation, as demanded by the band’s very name – was officially dead.

By comparison, Tex Perkins, the band’s frontman, is in rude health, a few streaks of grey through his leonine mane of hair being the main giveaway of his 54 years.… Read more..

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Andrew McGahan 1966-2019

Miscellaneous, Qld Politics / May 21, 2019 / 4 minutes of reading

If you grew up in Brisbane in the 1970s and 1980s, Praise, the debut novel by Andrew McGahan, was to the city’s literature what the Saints’ (I’m) Stranded was to music. Appearing in 1992, when it won the Vogel award for best unpublished manuscript, it captured the town’s torpor and the ambivalence of its inhabitants better than any book since David Malouf’s Johnno.

But whereas Malouf luxuriated in detailed poetic descriptions and may have been the first writer to describe Brisbane as a “big country town” (and Johnno moved at about the same pace), Praise was full of pent-up energy. A classic of Australian dirty realism, it’s a novel in which not a lot happens – but like Brisbane itself, all the action is happening beneath the banal facade, fuelled by frustration and repressed rage.

“Look at this city,” complains one of its minor characters, on holiday from a bigger, brighter world. “There’s nothing happening. There’s no one on the streets. How can you stand it?” Gordon (whose very name is used as a metaphor for the town’s plainness) replies that things are happening: “You just have to look a little harder. At least no one bothers you. There’s worse places than Brisbane.”… Read more..

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