Author name: Andrew Stafford

Jen Cloher: on being human

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

There is a well-known Māori proverb: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au. Translated, it means “I am the river, the river is me”. For the Māori of Aotearoa, rivers are roads, supermarkets, home. The proverb can also be applied to fluidity and continuity; a recognition that change is part of being human.

I Am The River, The River Is Me is also the title the Melbourne/Naarm-based singer-songwriter Jen Cloher has given to their fifth album. It was an album born of intense upheaval: breaking up with former partner Courtney Barnett in 2018 led to the dissolution of their band, while the pandemic gave them time to think and reflect about who they were.

Cloher now officially identifies as non-binary, with the pronouns they/she. On their last album, Cloher wrote a song called Strong Woman, a homage to their matrilineal line: “Proud my mother wanted respect more than love / and her mother taught her that she could want for more,” the lyrics declare.

“I’m very happily ‘she’, and I’m ‘she’ as I acknowledge the incredible line of women that I come through,” Cloher says. “I will always keep ‘she’ in my identification because of the honour and the great responsibility that I carry coming through that bloodline of extraordinary people.”… Read more..

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Paul Kelly: “I never heard back from Warnie”

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

For a brief moment in the mid 1980s, when huge crowds packed Australian sporting stadiums for 50-over cricket matches, signs reading “Like Wow – Wipeout!” began appearing in the outer, usually when a six sailed into the crowd. It was a reference to the hit song by the Hoodoo Gurus. Singer Dave Faulkner told an interviewer that he was touched, because Australia’s real rock stars were, in his view, our sporting heroes.

Paul Kelly, a longtime admirer of Faulkner, would agree. On his new album People – part of an ongoing series of thematic compilations of the singer-songwriter’s work – there are no less than four songs about athletes: Every Day My Mother’s Voice tells the story of Indigenous AFL champion Adam Goodes; Every Step Of The Way honours his peer Eddie Betts; and there are odes to cricketers Shane Warne and Don Bradman.

Kelly, a genuine sporting tragic, admits that he can get as starstruck meeting athletes just as others might get starstruck by musicians. Once, he spied tennis champion Venus Williams at Prahran pool in Melbourne. “She was sitting on a bench and it was like a goddess had come down from heaven and was just sitting among the mortals for a while,” he says.… Read more..

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Fred Negro: King of St Kilda

Music, Pop culture / / 7 minutes of reading

Fred Negro has just knocked off his shift cleaning toilets. One of the best cartoonists in the world – according to some – doesn’t mind his day job. He’s done it for a long time. “It’s just a gig,” he says. “I always wake up early anyway, and I’m finished by 10 or 11.”

Negro, artist and musician, is a Melbourne icon. He is the creator of Pub, the comic strip that ran for decades in street press which chronicled in lurid, scatological and frequently pornographic detail the ratbags and raconteurs of the bayside suburb of St Kilda.

For a long time in the 1990, Negro lived in the suburb’s Esplanade Hotel. “I had the key to the pub. I was like the king of St Kilda! I just had to clean the joint,” he tells me. At the Espy, you could reliably find him drinking and drawing everything going on around him.

The late Rowland S Howard once said you hadn’t made it in Melbourne until you’d appeared in one of Negro’s Pub strips. That was quite something coming from the Birthday Party guitarist, who had his own laneway in St Kilda named after him after his death.… Read more..

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The Scientists: solid gold

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Back in the early 1980s, Kim Salmon once claimed his group the Scientists played the devil’s music. Over a couple of chords and a minimalist beat, they could whip up a furious storm approximating the title of one of their songs: Solid Gold Hell. Their hair was ridiculous (think big) and their clothes were gorgeous.

Ahead of a long-delayed national tour to promote Negativity, the band’s first full-length album since breaking up in 1987, Salmon – whose hair is, if anything, wilder than ever – has finally created a Facebook page for his old band. Going through old photos, he can now see the Scientists for who they were: “This skinny bunch of cute boys that made this really hideous noise.”

After innocent beginnings in Perth, and an early appearance on Countdown, Salmon moved to Sydney in 1981. There he formed a new version of the Scientists, which began thrilling, terrifying and occasionally repelling inner-city audiences. In a rare trip to the suburbs, they had cans of beer hurled at them by Angels fans; soon after, they moved to London.

Salmon wrote for the unique characters in the band, particularly drummer Brett Rixon, as if they were his muses: trying to capture their peculiar mix of sullen apathy and bursts of self-destructive energy.… Read more..

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Robert Forster: The Candle and the Flame

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

A quick perusal of the history of rock & roll will tell you that most songs are concerned with three things: getting laid, getting dumped or getting cheated on. Rare is the songwriter that explores the challenges of commitment, fidelity and growing old with dignity – which is not surprising, since rock stars are not well known for any of those things.

But most rock stars are not like Robert Forster, the former Go-Between. Back in 1993, Forster made his second solo album, Calling From A Country Phone. It’s one of the happiest albums you could wish to hear: Forster was newly married and blissfully content. Thirty years later, pushing 65, Forster is still married, still happy, and still wants you to know all about it.

Take his new song Tender Years, from The Candle And The Flame, Forster’s eighth album outside the Go-Betweens. “I see her through the ages / She’s a book of a thousand pages,” goes the opening line, over a shuffling rhythm and a sly melody that Forster, as usual, barely tries to sing. Yet it fades out in a richly harmonised croon: “See how far we’ve come.”

But the shadow of mortality hangs over The Candle And The Flame.… Read more..

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Renée Geyer 1953-2023

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Renée Geyer was many things in a career that spanned 15 studio albums and 50 years, and she continued singing to packed houses up to only a month ago. She was surely the finest white soul singer, male or female, that Australia has produced, but to speak only of her immense talent does not capture what she was about; her real greatness.

Geyer was, above all, unapologetic. It was this attitude that defined her, as much as her singing. Paul Kelly, who became a close friend, recognised it when he wrote Difficult Woman for her, knowing full well how she would respond. Women, after all, are always the ones thought to be difficult, never men.

But line by line Geyer peeled the song apart, exposing the vulnerability beneath the steel of the titular character. The singer and actor Lo Carmen, in her fine 2022 book Lovers Dreamers Fighters, wrote that “she wore the title like a crown” in the knowledge that it would come at great cost. Indeed, it already had.

Difficult Woman was released in 1994, and it relaunched Geyer’s career in Australia after nearly a decade living in Los Angeles. But Geyer’s transformative presence had been apparent 20 years earlier, with her third single, a heart-stopping rendition of James Brown’s It’s A Man’s Man’s World.… Read more..

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