We were promised jetpacks. Instead, Gen X got neoliberalism, the New World Order and pre-millennium tension. To soothe it, we got Air’s Moon Safari, the 1998 space-age bachelor pad album that offered a nostalgic passport back to a future that never materialised in quite the way we expected. Immediately, Air (French duo Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît […]
Air: Sydney Opera House, 26 May 2024 Read More »
Mick Harvey is looking back on the showreel of his life. It’s the video for his song When We Were Beautiful And Young, where startlingly intimate images – of his parents, backyard cricket, through to lifelong partner Katy Beale and their children – are mixed with footage of old friends, collaborators, the much-missed and dearly
Mick Harvey: Don’t Look Back Read More »
In 1995, at the pinnacle of his success as Nick Cave’s right-hand man, multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey embarked on the most quixotic of solo projects. He set about translating the songs of the dissolute, recently deceased French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg into English, resulting in two albums in just over two years: Intoxicated Man and Pink Elephants.
Mick Harvey: Delirium Tremens Read More »
Immediately after cutting their striptease classic Je t’aime … Moi Non Plus in 1969, French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg and his English paramour, Jane Birkin, adjourned to the restaurant of their Parisian hotel. Gainsbourg, full of mischief, convinced the staff to play the record. As the song built, literally, to its climax – with the sound
Robert Forster, co-founder of the Go-Betweens, writes that in the small, but febrile post-Saints Brisbane music scene of the late 1970s, everyone knew each other. That should be no surprise: really, they still do. But even back in those days, he says, he and the late Grant McLennan knew of Peter Milton Walsh before they
The strange return of Mr Somewhere Read More »
Richard “Evil Dick” Hunt is doing a handstand. We’re in a plush dressing room at a venue called Le Cargo – it’s so cushy that it even has the band’s name on the door, an unheard-of event – and Hunt, by way of limbering up, is hoisting his small frame over a large, comfy, suspiciously new-smelling