Music

The hitch-hiker: Andrew McMillan, 1957-2012

Media, Miscellaneous, Music / / 5 minutes of reading

I first met Andrew McMillan in July of 1999. The place was Gove Airport, which services the north-east Arnhem Land mining town of Nhulunbuy. Andrew was acting as a media liaison officer for the inaugural Garma Festival, an annual cultural exchange program between the local Yolngu people and Balanda (whites) established by the Yothu Yindi Foundation. I was working on a story for the Australian edition of Rolling Stone. I spent nearly a week in Andrew’s company and only caught up with him on one other occasion, but he certainly left a mark on me.

I was already familiar with his work. When I was a teenager, growing up in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne before my family relocated to Brisbane, Midnight Oil was the band that changed my life. They were a rock & roll awakening, and a political one, too. McMillan’s book, Strict Rules, was a document of the Oils’ tour through the Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory and Western Australia, an experience that led to the ground-breaking Diesel And Dust album in 1987.

Before that, Andrew had begun his writing career in Brisbane in the late ’70s. He’d been turned on by punk and had started Australia’s first fanzine (the horribly named Suicide Alley, quickly re-christened Pulp) with Clinton Walker.… Read more..

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PJ-gate: citizen journalism at the ABC

Media, Music / / 4 minutes of reading

In his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life And Beyond, academic Axel Bruns talks about the concept of folksonomics, wherein traditional hierarchies of knowledge have been flattened by the empowerment of the online community. The rise of social media (including blogs such as this one) and the drive towards interactive news environments, in particular, has meant that journalists have lost their once-coveted status as both the gatekeepers and disseminators of information.

This is not entirely a bad thing, but the drowning out of expertise in favour of the hum of audience chatter has its limitations. As the ABC has just discovered, after sending a citizen journalist (actually, a staff audio engineer) to write a live review of one of the most revered songwriters of her generation. PJ Harvey is not a woman to be trifled with, and nor are her fans. In the interests of full disclosure, I’m happy to add that I am one.

Ian Church’s piece for the website of Perth’s local ABC radio 720 is now flagged (after a couple of hasty edits), as an “audience review”. He paid his own way to get in, so at least we as ABC consumers didn’t pay to be edified by the following bon mots:

“I, like many of other males have been introduced to PJ Harvey by my partner.… Read more..

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The Feelies vs Lou Reed

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

I have two records sitting at the base of my stereo at the moment, both purchased last week. One is the Feelies’ new album Here Before, which I have been giving a severe flogging. The other is a lovely, near-mint original American pressing of Lou Reed’s Berlin, which so far I have been too scared to play.

Here Before is the first Feelies record for close to 20 years, and it’s as though they’ve never been away. There’s no great advance on the last three albums that the band recorded in the late ’80s and early ’90s, all of which are more relaxed, pastoral affairs than the band’s brilliant but twitchy 1980 debut, Crazy Rhythms. (That record opened with a song called The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness, which was a pretty apt description of the four of them, and the music they made together.)

Looking around for some information about Here Before, I came across this review, and I was struck by the following quote by writer Jordan Cronk, which sums up the record and my feelings towards it perfectly: “Here Before could have come out in 1987 or 2027 and my feelings about it would be more or less the same: this is a good album with a lot of easy-going songs that sound pretty much the same.”… Read more..

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Final: The Great Australian Songbook V (10-1)

Music / / 7 minutes of reading

Count-dow-wn! It’s time for the top 10!

10. PAUL KELLY/KEV CARMODY – From Little Things Big Things Grow (1991, 1993)

The ultimate compromise choice on this list. Both Kelly and Carmody should feature individually in any compilation of great Australian songs, but which ones? In the end, I’ve gone for this co-write, initially recorded by Kelly for his 1991 album Comedy, then by Carmody (featuring Kelly) in 1993 for Bloodlines, with a single released the same year. It’s the story of the birth of the land rights movement in Australia, a campfire folk tune that a young Bob Dylan would have been proud of, and at least the equal of anything in either songwriter’s canon. Despite its 11 verses, it’s a story that tells itself; a masterclass in protest songwriting that wears its moral lightly.

9. FLAME TREES – Cold Chisel (1984)

Khe Sanh may be their signature tune, but this for me is the better one; a piece of heartland rock to rival anything by Bruce Springsteen: a small town, you and your mates, a boozy night of nostalgia, and a girl you can’t forget. Don Walker peels off line after line of unforgettable imagery here, and that middle-eight – “Do you remember, nothing stopped us on the field in our day” – never fails to stop me in my tracks.… Read more..

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The Great Australian Songbook IV (20-11)

Music / / 7 minutes of reading

Now it starts to get hard! This is where I start to become ultra-conscious of who and what’s getting left out. The songs get harder to put in any kind of order. And I haven’t made it any easier for myself – I found I’d written Nick Cave’s The Mercy Seat down twice in my initial list of 40 (hmm – should that make it higher?), meaning I now have to find an entirely new song that’s magically going to vault straight into my top 20! Choices, choices…

20. BILLY THORPE & THE AZTECS – Most People I Know Think That I’m Crazy (1972)

This wasn’t the song, by the way. I always had this one in here. (I won’t cheapen which one it actually is by revealing it.) But, in short: what a wonderful chord progression this is, and what a great lyric, that anyone who’s ever got shitfaced in a bar with their friends should be able to relate to. Don’t we all, deep down, feel a little crazy as we try to navigate our way through a world we never asked to be born into? To be honest, I struggle to understand the fuss about much of Thorpie’s catalogue, but props to him for this brilliant common touch.… Read more..

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The Great Australian Songbook III (30-21)

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

Following on from the previous thread, as the title suggests, here’s tracks 30-29.

30. YOTHU YINDI – Treaty (1991)

Did this song start a national conversation, or just get people dancing? Actually, scarily, it managed to get politicians dancing, spurring some very awkward shuffling by certain members of the ALP after Paul Keating’s famous “victory for the true believers” in 1993. I’m sure there’s incriminating evidence of Ros Kelly and Gareth “Gareth” Evans out there somewhere. But buried under the Filthy Lucre dance remix is a great song sung in both English and Yolgnu/Matha, written by Mandawuy Yunupingu with help from Paul Kelly and Peter Garrett. It was the first song by a predominantly Aboriginal band to chart in Australia (reaching number 11), and peaked at number six on the Billboard dance charts in the US. In 2009, the song was added to the National Film and Sound Archive.

29. DADDY COOL – Eagle Rock (1971)

I’m nowhere near as crazy about this song as those who routinely put it in the top 10 of these kinds of lists (APRA had it right up there at number two, behind Friday On My Mind), but I’m not about to deny its charms either, from Ross Wilson’s opening exclamation “NOW LISTEN!”… Read more..

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