the Rolling Stones

Ron S Peno 1955-2023

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

From around 1984, after the release of their perfectly titled debut single Out Of The Unknown, Died Pretty were the inner-city Sydney group to see. “They were a dangerous band,” Paul Kelly wrote in his memoir, How To Make Gravy. “Some nights they fell in a heap. Other nights they were incandescent.”

And a big part of Died Pretty’s magnetism was singer Ron S Peno, whose death was announced on his band’s Facebook page on Saturday morning after a long struggle with cancer. Tiny, gifted with immense presence and a keening voice, Peno had held Australian audiences spellbound for over four decades.

But he had some rotten luck along the way. Died Pretty’s fourth album Doughboy Hollow, released in 1991, was his band’s most successful and critically esteemed album. Released in mid-1991, its singles Sweetheart, D.C. and Godbless were crossing over to commercial radio. The album quickly sold out – only for their label to fail to re-press it, stalling its momentum.

Died Pretty subsequently moved to a major label, and their fifth album Trace followed in 1993. A new single, Harness Up, was making inroads on US radio. A tour was lined up, and the band played an industry showcase where an executive allegedly took exception to Peno’s suggestive stage moves.… Read more..

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Something To Believe In: A Playlist

Music / / 8 minutes of reading

I was driving alongside the Brisbane River not far from home, with a Ramones anthology playing at full volume, when it hit me. I was trying to piece myself back together after a difficult couple of years. My mother had been transferred into care with advanced Alzheimer’s disease and my marriage had broken up. Something To Believe In was the song that did it – an almost-forgotten single from the Ramones’ troubled mid-’80s era. It was about losing your grip on yourself, on life, then rediscovering your sense of purpose. I knew I wasn’t going to be the same person but, then again, I didn’t want to be.

It was March 2018. I’d written a few pieces that began to sketch out a story of a life on the margins of music but from the perspective of a fan, a wannabe, rather than a player. Over the next two months, a music memoir poured out: the first 30,000 words in three weeks. It was finished by Mother’s Day. Something To Believe In was the obvious title, music being that something that had kept me sane, kept me going and, at times, kept me alive.

What follows is a playlist of 10 songs – most sublime, at least one ridiculous – that signposted that journey.… Read more..

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Waiting: The story of Van Duren

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

From the Velvet Underground onwards, the annals of popular music are stuffed with stories of artists who fell through the cracks during their careers – only to be granted belated entry into the pantheon decades later. Big Star are another famous example – an early-70s power-pop group from Memphis signed to Ardent (a subsidiary of legendary soul label Stax), whose three highly influential records were hampered by distribution problems.

It wasn’t until 10 years later, through groups like R.E.M. and the Replacements, that the Big Star name began to spread. It’s a mystery, therefore, that it’s taken more than another 30 years for Van Duren – another gifted Memphis power-popper who moved in the same circles as Big Star, and was managed by early Rolling Stones impresario Andrew Loog Oldham – to receive similar attention. Bizarrely, Duren doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

Waiting, named after one of Duren’s most affecting songs, is a documentary that makes a concerted attempt to rescue this one unlucky musician (there are millions of them) from the margins. It was conceived by two first-time film-makers from Sydney, Greg Carey and Wade Jackson. After being mutually smitten by a rare Australian pressing of Duren’s first album, Are You Serious?… Read more..

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Memories not enough to save Melbourne’s Festival Hall

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Like millions of others, I have fond memories of live entertainment at Festival Hall. Sure, the room was lacking in atmosphere, bonhomie, charm and sound quality – almost anything, actually, that makes a great music venue – but that doesn’t stop me treasuring the experiences of seeing the Ramones in their late-career dotage and Nirvana at their absolute apex, despite Kurt Cobain being obviously ill.

So it was a sad day in Brisbane when, in 2003, the building was demolished to make way for the construction of an apartment block. We’d been through it all before too many times, most notoriously when the beloved Cloudland Ballroom was knocked down in the dead of night in 1982 by the Deen Brothers, the premier/hillbilly dictator Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s demolition firm of choice. Their slogan was “All we leave behind are the memories”.

For Melbourne, the potential loss of its Festival Hall for another proposed block of flats has nothing to do with acoustic or architectural aesthetics – unlike, for example, the historic Palace Theatre. Like Brisbane’s version, Festival Hall was designed for sporting spectacles, mainly boxing. It was the simultaneous arrival of television and rock & roll that resulted in the room throwing open its doors to live music, most famously the Beatles in 1964, as also happened in Brisbane.… Read more..

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The Aints: Hit me like a deathray, baby

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

In the space of less than two years between late 1990 and mid 1992, Ed Kuepper released no fewer than six albums. Three – Today Wonder, Honey Steel’s Gold and Black Ticket Day – were released under his own name, and were predominantly acoustic. The other three were electrical storms of white light, white heat and white noise recorded with a band Kuepper called the Aints, a smirking pun on his first band, the Saints.

The Aints saw Kuepper reclaiming the songs and the energy of that band, feeding into an extended feud between the guitarist and singer Chris Bailey, who has continued to play under the Saints’ name since the original group split. According to the press release ahead of this tour, the Aints “sought to bring justice to the sound and attitude of the original Brisbane-based band”, which at least implies that an injustice was being done elsewhere.

Last year, Bailey took his version of the band on a 40th anniversary tour of the release of the single (I’m) Stranded. Now the Aints are doing the same, with the Saints’ first album of the same name released in 1977. And the first show of this tour is in Brisbane – at the Tivoli, no less, the city’s best-sounding room.… Read more..

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Peter Perrett returns to earth from another planet

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

Rock journalist Nina Antonia said it best. “If there was only one song in the universe and it was Another Girl, Another Planet, I would still have all I ever wanted,” she wrote. Though not a hit at the time, the song, released in 1978 by London group the Only Ones, is now a celebrated classic: a muted guitar intro swiftly blooming into a headlong rush, set to lyrics that make little effort to conceal singer Peter Perrett’s narcotic love affair.

“You get under my skin, I don’t find it irritating / You always play to win, but I don’t need rehabilitating,” Perrett sang. And for decades, Perrett was a man beyond rehabilitation: in a variation of the famous Charlie Watts story about Keith Richards telling the Rolling Stones drummer he had a problem, former New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders – one of rock’s most notorious junkies – once paid Perrett a visit to lambast him for wasting his talent.

Thunders died in 1991; Perrett, miraculously, is still alive. After three albums with the Only Ones, who recorded some of the most elegantly wasted rock music ever made between 1976 and 1981, he disappeared into an abyss of addictions: first heroin, then crack.… Read more..

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