Public Image Ltd

Regurgitator: Invader

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

When a band that calls itself Regurgitator has managed to stay together for 30 years, you can’t really complain when they return to their own vomit. That’s just nominative determinism in action. So, a warning: their 11th full-length recording, Invader, may contain traces of their earlier work, especially Unit, their classic album from 1997.

Of course, this being Regurgitator, it’s done with a self-awareness and playfulness that heads off charges that the group are simply repeating themselves. Unit’s final track, Just Another Beautiful Story, contained a synthesised orchestral section that nodded towards the Beatles’ Penny Lane. Tsunami, which closes Invader, similarly quotes Dear Prudence.

A critical and commercial smash at the time, Unit has been so lionised over the years that it has overshadowed a rewarding and adventurous, if occasionally obtuse body of work. While sales may have slowed, Regurgitator still have a large and devoted live following. And most fans, it’s fair to say, like their old stuff better than their new stuff.

But Regurgitator still have more than enough new tricks to keep things interesting. They bring in new faces, too: Peaches makes a cameo on This Is Not A Pop Song (which, like Public Image Ltd’s This Is Not A Love Song, it most assuredly is), while Indigenous author Tyson Yunkaporta and rapper JK-47 make key contributions.…

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“A bloody-minded bunch of bastards”

Music / / 25 minutes of reading

The place: 8 Ormiston Avenue, Gordon, a leafy suburb on Sydney’s Upper North Shore. The year: sometime in 1972. A teenaged Robert George Hirst hauls his drum kit into the attic of the Cape Cod-style home owned by the parents of James Moginie.

Pretty soon, all hell starts breaking loose. There’s a thudding bass riff, played by Andrew “Bear” James. A couple of mighty clangs from Jim, and soon he’s noodling away over the top of Hirst’s kick drum. Hirst, all the while is hooting and hollering:

“SCHWAMPY MOOSE! SCHWAMPY MOOSE!!!”

It’s followed by an even greater cacophony, which sounds like Hirst kicking his drums back down the stairs again, just for the fun of it. Bands have, perhaps, had less auspicious beginnings. So begins the story of Schwampy Moose, soon to be known as Farm, and – later – as Midnight Oil.

THIS box of recordings represents both a purging and a history, but history is rarely linear and never neat. Tentative steps and great leaps forward can be followed and are sometimes accompanied by self-doubt; by glances sideways; by the occasional strategic retreat. It is a collection both of defining and celebrated moments, and of things that fell between the cracks.…

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Kim Gordon at Bigsound: “This is not an essay”

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

At the end of her opening keynote address to Brisbane music industry conference Bigsound, former Sonic Youth bass player Kim Gordon told a packed theatre of a calamitous acoustic show the band performed in 1991 for Neil Young’s The Bridge School, a non-profit education organisation for children with severe disabilities.

The band, which relied on the fiery interplay between guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, had never played acoustically and was performing for a mainstream audience. Fearing disaster, Gordon brought a guitar ready-made to destroy: “I had a feeling things were doomed to fail.”

Halfway through a cover of the New York Dolls’ Personality Crisis, with the band unable to hear themselves onstage, a frustrated Gordon swore into the microphone, smashed the waiting guitar, and walked off. Then she saw the kids in wheelchairs backstage looking horrified, and felt awful. Neil Young’s then-teenaged son Ben, who has cerebral palsy, rolled up to her.

“Everyone has a bad day sometimes,” he said.

Gordon repeatedly told the audience that her address was a poem or incantation, not an essay, and it was: a series of vignettes that interrogated the co-dependent relationship between the artist and the audience, based on a premise by critic Greil Marcus: that artists who submit to the whims of their fans by only giving them more of what they have already accepted are only able to confirm, not to create.…

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