the Drones

Spencer P Jones: Hellraiser among Australian rock greats

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Spencer P Jones wasn’t a household name of Australian rock music. But he worked with many who were (Tex Perkins, in their band the Beasts of Bourbon, as well as Paul Kelly and Renée Geyer) and was held in high esteem by many beyond these shores, notably Neil Young.

His work as a guitarist and songwriter also influenced many, including the Drones, who covered one of his songs and whose principal members, Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin, recorded an album with him under the name the Nothing Butts in 2012.

The news of his passing from liver cancer on Tuesday, aged 61, was no surprise. He’d been forced into retirement from the stage (a place you otherwise couldn’t keep him from) a few years ago, and was advised of his terminal condition in June.

His rare appearances had been limited to guest spots, one of his last being for the Beasts of Bourbon’s bass player Brian Hooper in April. Hooper came out of hospital to perform, took the stage in a wheelchair and wearing an oxygen mask, and died days later, aged 55.

If this paints a familiarly grim picture of the rock musician’s fate, it might be worth mentioning that Jones’s first album with the Johnnys, recorded in 1986, was called Highlights Of A Dangerous Life.… Read more..

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Bad//Dreems: Gutful

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

I WISH I had a buck for everyone who’s ever asked me who sings political songs these days. With the reformation of Midnight Oil and, especially, the rise of Donald Trump, it’s a refrain that’s only gotten louder. Where oh where, these people moan, are the musicians addressing the temper of the times? The complainers are, of course, invariably white and stopped listening to new music in approximately 1988.

In fact, we are seeing exactly the kind of revival of protest music that the era should demand. Much of it is happening in hip-hop, and Kendrick Lamar is the current standard-bearer, but he’s hardly alone. In Australia, AB Original – the logical, local hip-hop extension of revered Indigenous folk singer Kev Carmody – deservedly won last year’s Australian Music Prize.

And while these are lean times for guitar-based rock music, you can find it in that shrinking genre too: in recent releases by the Peep Tempel, the Drones and looking back a bit further, the sorely missed Eddy Current Suppression Ring. It’s also much more subtly and subversively evident in the work of Courtney Barnett, whose songs are rarely as they appear on first listen.

There is nothing subtle about Bad//Dreems.… Read more..

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“Open bags full of herb”: Mullum Music Festival

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Glenn Wright had sworn not to get involved with musicians again. He’d spent close to 20 years booking Sydney’s Harbourside Brasserie, before relocating his family just outside the town of Mullumbimby, an hour shy of the Queensland border. “I live on a farm, grow avocados and breed ducks,” he says determinedly. “I’m happier with that than trying to make a fortune out of promoting.”

He soon found he couldn’t help himself. Mullumbimby, he noticed, had many venues to play music, but they were underutilised, and while northern New South Wales already boasted the Byron Bay festivals Bluesfest and Splendour in the Grass, there was room for something more boutique. “I had a lot of contacts and artist connections – and I was short of cash,” he confesses.

The result is the Mullum music festival, now in its ninth year. The festival stretches across four days and half a dozen halls, including the RSL, bowls club and high school, spanning either end of the town’s main street. It’s an easy stroll – maybe 20 minutes – but if you’re in a hurry, you can catch the double-decker “Magic Bus”, which trawls up and down the strip in obvious homage to Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.… Read more..

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Peter Garrett is back, and he’s ready to dance again

Music / / 9 minutes of reading

In the nascent Sydney punk scene of 1976, the Oxford Funhouse on Taylor Square was ground zero. The venue had been established by Radio Birdman who, along with Brisbane’s the Saints, can lay claim to the title of Australia’s first punk band.

Peter Garrett, who was leading an embryonic band not yet named Midnight Oil at the time, checked them out early and came away a changed man, marvelling at how the hipsters in the crowd kept their sunglasses on amid the mayhem. “The sound was laser-bright and ferocious, and frontman Rob Younger was riveting, stalking the tiny stage with a leonine fury,” he wrote in his memoir, Big Blue Sky, released late last year.

If you want an idea of where Garrett got the unique dance step that captivated audiences for over 20 years, watch Younger in action. Garrett wasn’t informed by his movements so much as the idea of performance as an altered form of consciousness. “I like to get myself into a state where I’m not aware of what I do at all, yet somehow I get it all out,” Younger said at the time. “I don’t know, I try not to think about it.”

Garrett similarly deflects questions about his dancing, as if talking about it might cause him to freeze.… Read more..

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Witch Hats: Deliverance

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

The cover of Witch Hats’ third album Deliverance is an 1861 sketch by Ludwig Becker, the German artist and explorer who died as a member of Burke and Wills’ ill-fated expedition from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Titled “Border Of Mud Desert” and drawn in the last weeks of the artist’s life, it’s a desolate, despairing image, catching a blinding reflection of light across a dead, treeless plain.

It’s a suitable accompaniment for the music. There’s a wildness and a barely contained sense of desperation across Deliverance, and also something defiantly Australian – although that’s probably just the phlegmy sneer of singer/songwriter Kris Buscombe, who recalls a young Chris Bailey circa the Saints’ masterpiece, Prehistoric Sounds.

It’s also tempting to read into these eight taut tracks some of the same sense of mortal dread that imbued Becker’s imagery. Like the Drones’ Feelin Kinda Free, Deliverance paints contemporary Australia as a dystopian nightmare, a paranoid surveillance state where incest occurs behind closed doors while peeping toms keep watch from the bushes outside.

deliverance

But whereas Feelin Kinda Free distorted the Drones’ sound into something barely recognisable from their past, Witch Hats have perfected theirs: rough-hewn but intelligent, intense blasts of mid-paced post-punk and pop.… Read more..

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“An absolute masterpiece”: the Triffids’ Born Sandy Devotional

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Widely regarded as one of the finest Australian albums ever made, the Triffids’ second album Born Sandy Devotional turns 30 this month. Most famous for its beloved single Wide Open Road, the album uses the empty desolation of the Australian landscape, and particularly the band’s native Western Australia as a metaphor for loss and loneliness. To gauge its enduring influence, The Guardian asked 10 Australian musicians – both peers of the Triffids, and those that have grown up in the band’s shadow – to discuss one song each from Born Sandy Devotional’s 10 tracks.

Ben Salter (solo artist) on The Seabirds

“David McComb’s tempestuous holler kicks in immediately: ‘No foreign pair of dark sunglasses will ever shield you from the light that pierces your eyelids, the screaming of the gulls…’ That thousand-yard stare sensibility, that Australian feeling which permeates the entire album is firmly established. There’s a devastating electric guitar refrain which finally flattens out to one plaintive, repeated note, and the song ends with McComb’s anguished cry: ‘So where were you / Where were you / Where were you?’”

Robert McComb (guitar/violin, the Triffids, older brother of David McComb) on Estuary Bed

“Sometimes I feel like it’s my life, growing up in Perth.… Read more..

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