DAMIAN COWELL was the guy in TISM. We know because he told us so (in a song called I Was The Guy In TISM, recorded with the DC3). Anonymity can be a tough mask to shed. Think of Kiss without the war paint, or the Residents without the eyeballs: what lies beneath can only be a […]
Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine: Get Yer Dag On! Read More »
Potty-mouthed. Wilfully contrary. Ironically self-aware. Genre-hopping. These are all some of the obvious things that come to mind when thinking about Regurgitator. Describing the music, though, is harder: after more than 20 years, the Brisbane band formed by Quan Yeomans, Ben Ely and Martin Lee in 1993 defy categorisation more than ever. The thick layer
Regurgitator: The J-Files Read More »
Back in 1999, paraphrasing the band’s biggest hit, girls like that didn’t go for guys like the ones in Custard. These days – on the band’s first album since that year’s Loverama – David McCormack laments: “We are the parents our parents warned us about”. Talk about truth in advertising! Once, Custard played dag rock;
Custard: Come Back, All Is Forgiven Read More »
It’s tough to be critical of Polly Jean (PJ) Harvey. As an artist, her place in history is secure: hailed as the world’s best songwriter by Rolling Stone upon the release of her first album, Dry, in 1992, Harvey is the sole dual winner of the Mercury Music Prize (first for Stories Of The City,
PJ Harvey’s bubble bursts Read More »
NB: This is a really old piece, from 1999. It was originally written for Rolling Stone (Australia) but never got published. I found it when I was going through some old papers at home – and thought I may as well give it one. It’s a Thursday night at the University of New South Wales
Too far gone: The return of the Hard-Ons Read More »
It was Tex Perkins who put it best – and most bluntly. “Brisbane you have to leave,” the singer known to his mum as Greg told the Australian edition of Rolling Stone. “You come out of your mother, you go to school, and then you think, oh shit – what am I doing here?” That was
Brisbane will go on without you, Bridie Read More »