Author name: Andrew Stafford

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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The pioneering legacy of No Fixed Address

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

Picture the scene. It’s 1982 and Australia’s future prime minister Bob Hawke – then the shadow minister for industrial relations – has accepted an invitation to launch a mini-album by an emerging Indigenous rock-reggae band called No Fixed Address. Hawke’s daughters are fans, and he recognises the importance of both the release and the symbolic gesture of a white politician endorsing it. There’s just one sticking point: the final song is called Pigs.

They’re always on the move

They call them the boys in blue

They’ll kick you in the head

Until they leave you dead

It is difficult to imagine even the current prime minister – a self-confessed music tragic – launching such a provocative release today. But Hawke goes ahead with it, saying the album is great – “but that’s not to say that every man and woman in blue is a thorough bastard”. The band’s drummer and leader, Bart Willoughby, turns around. “Yeah, there are good police out there – we just haven’t met any yet,” he shoots back.

The story of this radical group is told in a new book of the same name by Donald Robertson; on the back cover, Goanna’s Shane Howard describes No Fixed Address as “the tip of the spear” that plunged into the dead heart of middle Australia.… Read more..

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Don Walker: a real cat

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Every week, Don Walker buys a lottery ticket. It’s a matter of ritual. The piano-playing hurricane force behind one of the most successful Australian bands of all time, Cold Chisel – the man who gave us Khe Sanh and Flame Trees and too many more to mention – says he’s buying his continuing right to dream.

On his new solo album, Lightning In A Clear Blue Sky, there’s a song called When I Win The Lottery. What would he do? “Most of the song is about taking your winnings and running amok, basically coursing across the landscape with your hair on fire, fighting off supermodels,” he says drily, over Zoom, the familiar sweep of grey hair sitting high over his forehead.

“That’s not what I would do, because for a long time now I could probably do that anyway – the supermodels excepted. I live with a lot of freedom.”

Walker, 71, is well past retirement age. He has no need to work, and probably no need to be buying lottery tickets, either. He continues to do both out of habit. Lightning In A Clear Blue Sky is his fourth solo album, and first in a decade. Walker is also one-third of popular trio Tex, Don and Charlie (with singer Tex Perkins and guitarist Charlie Owen).… Read more..

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Stephen Cummings’ post-stroke comeback

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Stephen Cummings was disembarking from a flight into Brisbane when everything went sideways. He steadied himself against the wall of the aerobridge. An anxious flyer, he assumed it was the after-effects of a Valium he’d taken to calm his nerves, and that it would wear off ahead of that night’s performance.

The veteran Australian singer-songwriter – a fixture of Australian music since the late 70s with his band the Sports, then as a revered solo artist – had two sets booked at the Junk Bar, a tiny club in inner Brisbane. While playing, he realised he was having trouble forming chords on his guitar. Indeed, he was having trouble staying upright. He completed the gig, but felt disturbed, and had a sleepless night.

Even so, it wasn’t until he returned to Melbourne and staggered out of the terminal that the seriousness of his condition was immediately apparent to his wife, Kathleen O’Brien. Cummings’s mouth was crooked, and he was struggling to walk. “I’m taking you straight to the Alfred [hospital], you’ve had a stroke,” she told him.

This was in March 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was breaking out in Australia. Cummings had actually been intending to retire: he had turned 65 the previous September, and had just two more gigs booked in Melbourne.… Read more..

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Tiny Ruins: Ceremony

Music / / 2 minutes of reading

Since 2010, New Zealand singer and songwriter Hollie Fullbrook has been creating immersive, introspective folk music under the name Tiny Ruins. The very name suggests something intimate and irretrievably broken, but it also invites you to take a closer look. This is music that prioritises atmosphere over hooks, but once you get inside Fullbrook’s songs, they are little private worlds of their own.

With Ceremony, her fourth album and first since 2019’s Olympic Girls, she’s created something more akin to a private universe. Since her 2011 long-form debut, Some Were Meant For Sea, Fullbrook has steadily layered subtle instrumentation over her dexterous guitar playing. This is her fullest and most colourful release to date, but it’s still a dense work that takes time to reveal itself. Casual listeners are unlikely to be rewarded by Tiny Ruins.

Fullbrook’s band (Cass Basil on bass, Alexander Freer on drums and percussion and producer/engineer Tom Healy on everything else) is kept busy, even on songs that hew closer to her austere original vision. On the opening track, Dogs Dreaming, Fullbrook sings: “I always did know what to paint in an empty room / Thinking, this is more than enough”. It’s a apt self-description of her music.… Read more..

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Frente!’s accidental smash

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

You know you’ve made it in Australia when the most successful thing you’ve done becomes the butt of jokes. For Frente!, the indie-pop band formed in Melbourne by Simon Austin and Angie Hart, their moment came when Accidently Kelly Street – the accidentally misspelled song that became their best-known tune after its release in October 1992 – was the subject of a savage parody, Accidentally Was Released, by ABC’s The Late Show.

Initially hurt by the backlash, Hart struggled to reconcile with the song. Its author, bass player Tim O’Connor, left the band shortly afterwards, citing exhaustion. Jane Kennedy, who impersonated Hart in The Late Show (which included her fellow D-Generation and Working Dog alumni Tom Gleisner, Mick Molloy and Tony Martin) stresses to Guardian Australia via a spokesperson that she loved and still loves the band.

Thirty years later, Frente! are celebrating the anniversary of their full-length debut, Marvin The Album, with a national tour. The album’s winsome folk-pop, topped by Hart’s sweet, sincere vocals, was a breath of fresh air amid the prevailing grunge and hard-rock sounds dominating radio at the time – particularly Triple J, which broke the band via airplay of the band’s earlier hits, Labour Of Love and Ordinary Angels.… Read more..

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