Ollie Olsen, the maverick Australian post-punk and electronic music innovator, died on Wednesday after a long struggle with multiple system atrophy, a rare neurological disease which he “fought like a Viking”, according to a statement shared on his social media accounts. He was 66. Olsen – who changed his name legally from Ian Christopher Olsen […]
Ollie Olsen 1958-2024 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 1981, at a garbage dump on the outskirts of Melbourne, a band is making a video. The idea is to recreate a vision of hell. A cartoon death’s head with six limbs flashes on the screen. We see a young and scrawny Nick Cave – “a fat little insect” – pole-dancing in the middle
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In Terry Southern’s classic short story You’re Too Hip, Baby, a white hipster hangs around the jazz clubs in Paris in the 1950s, desperately trying to ingratiate himself with the Black musicians. They quickly see through the schmuck, blowing him off with the snappy comeback. It’s an unlikely premise for a song. But in 1993,
Dave Graney & Clare Moore: still hip Read More »
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,
“A bloody-minded bunch of bastards” Read More »
When right-wing columnist/performance artist Andrew Bolt heard the Drones’ single Taman Shud, he wrote that the band was “stamping on the ashes of the West’s musical traditions”. Supposedly offended by the thought that singer Gareth Liddiard didn’t give a toss about anything he said, he added: “critics like these make me feel like I’m offending
The Drones: Feelin Kinda Free Read More »