Royal Headache - Notes from Pig City

Why Eddy Current Suppression Ring disappeared

Last December, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, the beloved garage-rock four-piece from Melbourne, released their first album in a decade. It was knowingly titled All In Good Time. Old fans got excited, but the band kept schtum. There were no pre-release streams for review, and apart from one brief spot on community radio station 3RRR announcing their new single, Our Quiet Whisper, there were no interviews.

Starting with their obtuse name – a copper ring around an electrical transformer which, indeed, suppresses eddy currents – ECSR don’t make things easy. But their guitarist Mikey Young, who also manages the group, denies they’re elusive. “If anyone wants to talk, all they’ve got to do is write to me,” he says cheerfully.

In 2010, ECSR were on the cusp. Larger independent labels including Sub Pop were courting them. Their second album, Primary Colours had won the prestigious Australian Music Prize for 2008, and their third, Rush To Relax, was enthusiastically received. It was launched at the Old Metro in Melbourne, which holds around 1,800 people. But for Young, enough was enough. “I had to question whether I’d want to go see a band like mine at a show that big,” he says.… Read more..

Iggy Pop: World’s forgotten boy just wants to be loved

Music / May 21, 2019 / 4 minutes of reading

“Hey! Turn the lights on, I want to see everybody,” shouts Iggy Pop. And he grins that huge, irrepressible grin. Here he is, on the lip of the Concert Hall stage of a sold-out Sydney Opera House, with thousands of ecstatic fans cheering back at him. And he can’t get enough: he extends his hands, accepting everyone’s love and joy, touching that famously bare, Florida-tanned and now ever so slightly pot-bellied torso, as if to smear it upon himself.

“You’ve made me very happy,” he says, in all sincerity. But he’s no happier than anyone else in the room, after 21 of the greatest songs of all time that were never hits. Well, Lust For Life almost was, after its immortal tom-tom rhythm jump-started the film of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting. But that was in 1996, 19 years after its original release. Nothing else, other than Candy (not played this evening) ever came close.

I’ve started this review at the end of the show for the sake of some context. How could Lust For Life not have been a major hit in 1977, the year punk broke? The answer is that the death of Elvis Presley meant that Iggy’s label at the time, RCA, poured its resources into reissuing the King’s catalogue at the expense of promoting what should have been the biggest success of the World’s Forgotten Boy’s career, just when he thought his Chinese rug was at hand.… Read more..

Iggy Pop: World’s forgotten boy just wants to be loved Read More »