Hoodoo Gurus

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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Sunnyboys say goodbye, with love

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

In an era where every Australian band who found an audience in the 1980s has reformed, the reunion of Sunnyboys will go down in history as one of the least expected, and most warmly received. The beloved Sydney power-pop quartet peaked early, releasing a classic debut album in 1981 before flaming out like a comet, derailed by overwork and lead singer Jeremy Oxley’s long struggle with schizophrenia.

After a reunion in 1998, no one expected the original quartet – singer, guitarist and songwriter Jeremy, his bass-playing older brother Peter, guitarist Richard Burgman and drummer Bil Bilson – to ever play again. That they did, Burgman insists, was a miracle: “There were about 150 to 250 things that had to go right. And if any one of those hadn’t, or if anyone along the way had said no, it wouldn’t have happened.”

It all went right in 2012, when the band reunited to play a show at Sydney’s Enmore theatre with the Hoodoo Gurus, performing under the name Kids in Dust to defuse expectations. Since then, they’ve seen their slim catalogue reissued, released multiple compilations, played a sold-out show at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall and many more sold-out tours – the very last of which begins next week, on the Gold Coast.… Read more..

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The Hoodoo Gurus’ “bogan Sgt Pepper”

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

There’s a moment at the beginning of the Hoodoo Gurus’ new album, Chariot Of The Gods, where Dave Faulkner sounds like he’s stuck in the corner of a bar. You can hear clinking glasses and the hum of a crowd, chattering over Faulkner as he strums one of the Gurus’ classic hits, Come Anytime.

At first, it sounds like a throwback to (Let’s All) Turn On, the first track on the band’s 1984 debut Stoneage Romeos. That, too, opened with a snippet of cocktail-bar sounds, before the band tore into a rock & roll manifesto: “Shake Some Action, Psychotic Reaction, No Satisfaction, Sky Pilot, Sky Saxon, that’s what I like!”

But no, Faulkner says: he was thinking of the Beatles. “What I was thinking of was the beginning of Sgt Pepper’s, when the orchestra’s warming up and you hear the crowd settling in their seats. It’s obviously meant to be a theatre – it’s a slightly dampened sound, carpeted, with plush seats. This is my bogan Sgt Pepper!”

He hadn’t even made the link to (Let’s All) Turn On. Perhaps it was subconscious. His real intention, he says, was to take the piss out of the idea that he’s now washed up: singing oldies to an indifferent audience, more than 40 years after the band’s rough beginnings as the exotically named Le Hoodoo Gurus in Sydney.… Read more..

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Bad//Dreems: Gutful

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

I WISH I had a buck for everyone who’s ever asked me who sings political songs these days. With the reformation of Midnight Oil and, especially, the rise of Donald Trump, it’s a refrain that’s only gotten louder. Where oh where, these people moan, are the musicians addressing the temper of the times? The complainers are, of course, invariably white and stopped listening to new music in approximately 1988.

In fact, we are seeing exactly the kind of revival of protest music that the era should demand. Much of it is happening in hip-hop, and Kendrick Lamar is the current standard-bearer, but he’s hardly alone. In Australia, AB Original – the logical, local hip-hop extension of revered Indigenous folk singer Kev Carmody – deservedly won last year’s Australian Music Prize.

And while these are lean times for guitar-based rock music, you can find it in that shrinking genre too: in recent releases by the Peep Tempel, the Drones and looking back a bit further, the sorely missed Eddy Current Suppression Ring. It’s also much more subtly and subversively evident in the work of Courtney Barnett, whose songs are rarely as they appear on first listen.

There is nothing subtle about Bad//Dreems.… Read more..

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(I’m) Stranded turns 40: the song that changed Brisbane

Music, Qld Politics / / 4 minutes of reading

The ABC news radio announcer’s incredulous tone said it all. “An unknown band from Brisbane, by the name of the Saints, has earned rave reviews in England for a record it made itself,” he said. It was September 1976, and the words, complete with the plummy delivery, were loaded with cultural cringe – all the more so for the fact that the band hailed from the backwoods of Brisbane.

That record, (I’m) Stranded – dubbed “Single of this and every week” in a hyperventilating review in the UK’s Sounds magazine – turns 40 years old this month, and it is no exaggeration to say that it changed Brisbane forever, both from within, and in terms of its external perception. And it was true: outside of a small clique, the band was all but unknown in its hometown at the time of the song’s release.

The Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster once wrote that punk hit Brisbane like no other city in Australia, for two reasons: we had Joh-Bjelke Petersen, “the kind of crypto-fascist, bird-brained conservative that every punk lead singer in the world could only dream of railing against”; and we had the Saints, the “musical revolutionaries in the city’s evil heart” that gave a city that usually chased music history its own place in it.… Read more..

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Sunnyboys: The Complete Albert Sessions/New Kicks

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

The recent re-emergence of the Sunnyboys on stages around the country has been a genuine feel-good story. Between roughly 1980 and 1984, the band – singer and guitarist Jeremy Oxley, his brother Peter on bass, Bil Bilson on drums and second guitarist Richard Burgmann – were a flaming meteor across the Australian music landscape, adored by fans and critics alike. And then, like a meteor, they just fizzled out: the band’s momentum cruelled by changing fashions and Jeremy’s descent into a long battle with schizophrenia.

It’s a story well told in a recent documentary, The Sunnyboy, that has brought new attention to this great Australian band’s legacy. An earlier compilation, This Is Real, and the band’s tentative return to live performance via the Hoodoo Gurus-curated Dig It Up festival has cleared the path for a serious re-evaluation of their small but vital catalogue of recordings, and it starts here, with the classic self-titled debut from 1981 spread over two discs and stacked with more bonus material than any fan could dream of.

The Sunnyboys’ brilliance lay in a combination of sensitivity and toughness that distinguished them from both their predecessors (after raw beginnings in northern New South Wales, they emerged fully-formed from the late ’70s Sydney punk scene left behind by Radio Birdman) and those that followed, such as the Gurus.… Read more..

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