Jimmy Little

The Cruel Sea: Fortitude Music Hall, 30 November 2023

Outside the Fortitude Music Hall in Brisbane’s biggest nightclub strip, two hours before showtime, a long line snakes up and around Brunswick Street Mall. It’s been well over a decade since the Cruel Sea played here, and the 3,000-capacity venue is soon overflowing to the point of feeling oversold.

It’s a reminder of just how big the Tex Perkins-fronted outfit was in their heyday. They’re back to celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Honeymoon Is Over, their biggest album by far. Other than a low-key warm-up for a wildlife charity, this is the first of a half-dozen gigs that may or may not point to a second life for the band. There’s nerves, and some rust.

The audience, overwhelmingly in their 50s and 60s, are showing signs of wear too. The Cruel Sea were a strictly generation X, very Australian phenomenon. After the title track of Honeymoon became a hit – one of those songs that still appears on Triple M’s so-called Ozzest 100 – the Cruel Sea rode the wave until the end of the millennium, then vanished like smoke.

Tonight’s set is dedicated to keyboardist and guitarist James Cruickshank, who died in 2015. He’s replaced by Matt Walker, who ambles on stage with the band’s original trio: guitarist Dan Rumour, bass player Ken Gormly and drummer Jim Elliott.… Read more..

The Cruel Sea: Fortitude Music Hall, 30 November 2023 Read More »

Archie Roach critically ill during ARIA performance

Singer and songwriter Archie Roach has revealed that he was critically ill at the time of his induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame on 25 November last year, performing from a venue near the hospital with a medical team in tow and an ambulance waiting outside.

Roach has lived with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for years, but it escalated in November. He was admitted to Warrnambool Base Hospital, where he spent some days in intensive care.

He was taken from the hospital in an ambulance to accept the award via a broadcast from the Lighthouse theatre in the south-west Victorian coastal town, where he also performed, with his medical team standing by backstage.

Roach sung his most celebrated song, Took The Children Away, sitting down and breathing through a nasal cannula, before being taken back to hospital for several more days.

“It wasn’t looking too good for a while,” Roach said, speaking to the Guardian ahead of rescheduled dates touring what is likely to be his final album, Tell Me Why. “Fluid had gone from my legs to [around] my heart, so I had to go to ICU for a while, while they tried to get me under control.… Read more..

Archie Roach critically ill during ARIA performance Read More »

The messenger

For many Australians under the age of 40, the first time they would have heard the voice of Jimmy Little would have been in 1999, the result of a chance meeting a few years earlier. Brendan Gallagher, of the sorely underrated Australian band Karma County, had accidentally caught Little singing in a Sydney bar. “I was instantly drawn to the front of the stage by one of the most beautiful voices I’d ever heard,” he wrote in the liner notes to Messenger. “I sat transfixed as Jimmy worked his way through a set of songs with such grace and style that I forgot to go to the bar and buy a drink; very unusual behaviour on my part.”

Gallagher introduced himself to Little after the show and struck up a friendship, and Messenger was the collaboration that resulted. It’s an album of classic Australian songs by the likes of the Go-Betweens, the Church, Paul Kelly, Ed Kuepper and the Reels – many of them radically rearranged by Gallagher, and most of which Little himself had never heard before Gallagher introduced him to them. The album was a critical and commercial success, receiving extensive airplay, and introducing a new generation of Australians to a voice that had first came to national prominence in 1963, via his hit version of the country gospel standard Royal Telephone.… Read more..

The messenger Read More »

The Great Australian Songbook IV (20-11)

Now it starts to get hard! This is where I start to become ultra-conscious of who and what’s getting left out. The songs get harder to put in any kind of order. And I haven’t made it any easier for myself – I found I’d written Nick Cave’s The Mercy Seat down twice in my initial list of 40 (hmm – should that make it higher?), meaning I now have to find an entirely new song that’s magically going to vault straight into my top 20! Choices, choices…

20. BILLY THORPE & THE AZTECS – Most People I Know Think That I’m Crazy (1972)

This wasn’t the song, by the way. I always had this one in here. (I won’t cheapen which one it actually is by revealing it.) But, in short: what a wonderful chord progression this is, and what a great lyric, that anyone who’s ever got shitfaced in a bar with their friends should be able to relate to. Don’t we all, deep down, feel a little crazy as we try to navigate our way through a world we never asked to be born into? To be honest, I struggle to understand the fuss about much of Thorpie’s catalogue, but props to him for this brilliant common touch.… Read more..

The Great Australian Songbook IV (20-11) Read More »

Scroll to Top