music - Notes from Pig City

Champagne (music) television

Music / March 22, 2021 / 5 minutes of reading

Last year’s debut of The Set on ABC television – a house party style music variety show, with the tagline “live music has a new home” – was an attempt to plug a gaping hole in the national broadcaster’s programming: for a long time, live music had indeed lacked a home on our television screens.

The gap had grown so wide that it had generated its own nostalgia. We’ve had a TV mini-series on Countdown’s Ian “Molly” Meldrum, as well as Classic Countdown, and a recent documentary on the ABC’s late-’90s music television program Recovery (to go along with its reboot on YouTube, Recovered, with original hosts Dylan Lewis and Jane Gazzo).

As the Guardian takes a deep dive into the defining moments of Australian TV history – for better or worse – here are five from the glory days of local music programming. Please add your own favourites to the comments below – or nominate them in our poll.

#5: A water cooler moment: Madison Avenue at the 2000 ARIAS

Award shows are usually predictable affairs, and the ARIAs are no exception: little is left to chance and controversies – such as when Itch-E & Scratch-E’s Paul Mac thanked the dance duo’s ecstasy dealers in 1995 – often hit the cutting room floor before broadcast.… Read more..

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Aldous Harding Live @ The Metro

Music / September 30, 2019 / 4 minutes of reading

“Shut up,” hisses a patron to the bartenders talking at the back of the Metro. This is no time for idle chatter. Aldous Harding is close-picking her way through The World Is Looking For You, one of only two selections from her breakthrough album from 2017, Party – five minutes of spidery folk that Harding performs alone, seated, with just an acoustic guitar.

In a mid-sized venue, most artists would get away with something like this towards the end of their set. Not the beginning. But Harding’s set is more like a high-wire act. She walks slowly onstage, without fanfare, seats herself, and just waits, as though psyching her audience out. The entire room is full and still. Not a soul lingers at the bar. Not a phone is raised.

When it’s over, there’s an exhalation, then an ovation. Harding rises as her four-piece band arrives. She’s wearing a loose-fitting, burnt-orange trouser suit and black porkpie hat. Another close-picked triad of notes opens Designer, the title track of her brilliant third album, before the song opens up to reveal a surprising palette of instrumental colour, including a flugelhorn.

And then she breaks the spell. She walks off stage to speak to the sound engineer, then back.… Read more..

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Birding with Paul Kelly

Music / September 30, 2019 / 5 minutes of reading

Down by the mouth of Laverton Creek, at the Altona Foreshore Reserve in Melbourne’s west, songwriter Paul Kelly is watching about 150 gannets as they mass on Port Phillip Bay. From where we stand, even through binoculars, the gannets are just big white blobs on the water, about 500 metres offshore.

I’m not convinced Paul can even see the blobs through his binoculars, which he refers to as “Kellogg’s brand” – something he got out of a packet. Kelly has taken to watching birds in recent years, but, in the field, frankly, he’s a noob.

With us is Sean Dooley, editor of BirdLife Australia’s quarterly magazine. Sean and I have been watching birds almost all our lives; we met in early 1983. I rib Kelly that he would have been playing in his first band the Dots back then, but Kelly corrects me: he’d already broken the band up. I don’t think he likes being reminded about the Dots.

Lately, Kelly has been touring a stage production, Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds, now an album and his 25th studio recording: a collection of poems set to a neo-classical pop score, co-written and arranged with composer James Ledger, multi-instrumentalist Alice Keath and the Seraphim Trio.… Read more..

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