Music

Cold Chisel: The Big 5-0

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

On the screens flanking the stage at Petersons Winery in Armidale, you can clearly see the scar at the top of Jimmy Barnes’ big barrel chest. It’s a visible legacy of the singer’s second round of open-heart surgery in December last year, after a serious bout of bacterial pneumonia nearly killed him.

Two months ago, he had a hip replacement that also left him fighting off an infection, which kept him tethered to a drip for weeks. You wouldn’t know it. Watching him tear through Cold Chisel’s 24-song set on the first official stop of their Big Five-0 tour, Barnes looks indestructible. At this rate, he’ll outlive all of us and Keith Richards combined.

They share some history, this town and Chisel, having solidified here in 1974 while primary songwriter Don Walker was completing a degree at the University of New England. Nearly 1,000 metres above sea level, a crowd of well over 10,000 (many of them grey nomads who have travelled from far and wide) huddles in the chilly night air.

As usual, they open with Standing On The Outside. It’s a song about the impossibility of trying to get ahead when everything is stacked against you: “No amount of work’s gonna get me through the door.”… Read more..

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TISM: Death to Art

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

How do you review a band who, 20 years ago, purported to end their career with a song called TISM Are Shit? As pre-emptive strikes go, it brooks no critical retort. Now – in a song called Old Skool TISM – the artistes formerly known as This is Serious Mum would have us believe that “everything is shit except for TISM”. I am not so sure.

True old-school fans should not be surprised by TISM’s return. Their public debut in late 1983 – menacingly billed as The Get Fucked Concert – was also meant to be their farewell. It is part of TISM folklore that the rot set in after that, and every show since has been a cynical cash-in. Don’t take my word for it: that’s according to the “TISM Wankerpedia fan page”.

So: caveat emptor. Death To Art, their seventh full-length album, is not as good as their debut, 1988’s Great Truckin’ Songs Of The Renaissance. But that was a 10-star album; the kind of thing Guardian style guides don’t allow for. TISM would agree it’s only been downhill from there. I would argue it’s been a terminal decline since their first single, Defecate On My Face.… Read more..

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Emily Wurramara: Nothing to Everything

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Emily Wurramara had the world at her feet. The Indigenous singer-songwriter, then based in Brisbane, had recently released her debut album Milyakburra, named after her community on Bickerton Island in the Northern Territory. It had been received with warm reviews and escalating interest. Then, one night in 2019, her life came crashing down around her.

She remembers she went to bed early, as she felt unwell. She was shaken awake by her brother, who was screaming. She opened her eyes and saw a painting made by her grandmother on the wall was burning. The unit was on fire.

Wurramara grabbed her laptop and her daughter’s dummy. (Luckily, her daughter was staying elsewhere with her grandmother.) They ran.

The blaze had started under her bedroom. It took 11 fire-fighting crews several hours to bring it under control. Wurramara and her family escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Later, Wurramara says, she had an epiphany: “I had the people that loved me, my sister gave me the roof over her head, my daughter was safe, everyone was safe.”

Wurramara’s new album is called Nara. In her native tongue of Anindilyakwa, the word means “nothing”. Her mother tattooed the word on her right forearm; she rolls up her sleeve to show me.… Read more..

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Fanning/Dempsey: The Drought and the Deluge

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Let’s say you were a fan of Powderfinger and/or Something for Kate, two of the most successful groups from the post-grunge 1990s Australian music scene. What would you expect an album made by their respective frontmen, Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey, to sound like? Acoustic ballads? Mid-paced, fire-up-the-lighters arena-rock anthems?

Well, it’s happened. And Fanning Dempsey National Park, as they’ve called their collaboration, is neither of those things.

“That wouldn’t be interesting for us anyway. That would be boring,” Dempsey says. Instead, they’ve zeroed in on the peculiar sonic landscape of the late ’70s and early ’80s, with Dempsey developing “a pretty obscene synth habit”, collecting the gear that created the sounds both men grew up with.

The result is The Deluge, an album which harks back to Berlin-era Bowie, Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army, new-wave era Robert Palmer, Duran Duran – and Foreigner. Fanning gushes about Foreigner’s 1984 mega-hit I Want To Know What Love Is: “That song is such a masterpiece!”

The two singers go back at least 25 years, with Powderfinger and Something for Kate touring together periodically during their heyday and reconnecting when Something for Kate’s last album, The Modern Medieval, was made at Fanning’s studio in Byron Bay in 2019.… Read more..

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Martin Phillipps 1963-2024

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

It is one of the great opening lines, by anyone: “Each evening the sun sets in five billion places, seen by 10 billion eyes, set in five billion faces.” The words are from Heavenly Pop Hit by the Chills, a band from Dunedin, New Zealand. There’s a good chance you know it, but there’s also a fair chance you don’t – in which case, stay with me.

The author was Martin Phillipps, who has died suddenly at the age of 61. It is far too young, although there are some who will think he did well to make it into a seventh decade. Others, who saw the resurrection of Phillipps’ stop-start career and his improved health, will feel the terrible curse that dogged his band has struck again.

Next to the Clean, the Chills were the most prominent New Zealand musical export via that country’s storied indie label Flying Nun, founded in Christchurch in 1981. And their music was indeed heavenly. Light as a feather, it seemed to float skywards. But their more melancholy songs – and there were many – hung in the air like wraiths.

The Chills were well-named; they could change the temperature of any room their music was played in.… Read more..

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Christine Anu: Tying threads together

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

For some artists, a hit single can be a monkey on their back – especially if it’s a cover of another artist’s song. This is not the case for Christine Anu, who will almost certainly always be best known for her version of My Island Home, the 1987 Warumpi Band classic originally written for the group’s late singer George Rrurrambu Burarrawanga, a Yolŋu man from Elcho Island.

The resonance isn’t lost on Anu, a Torres Strait Islander by descent. “What a privilege and honour it was,” she says. “This song was loved very much and very deeply by a whole audience before it even became a song that I knew about.”

Anu’s version, re-titled as Island Home and released in 1994, made her a star, propelling her 1995 debut album Stylin’ Up to platinum status in Australia. The album’s effervescent fusion of pop, R&B and traditional songs earned her an ARIA award. “She had that Neneh Cherry kind of brashness and confidence,” says its producer, David Bridie.

But it has taken the best part of another 30 years for Anu to make an album that fully reflects her heritage and status: her mother is from Saibai, just south of Papua New Guinea; her late father is from Mabuiag in central Torres Strait.… Read more..

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