Speek Evil: Illustrated Rock and Roll Periodical (The Art of Fox)
Reviewing what’s a visual feast served on paper pages is a challenge at the best of times but who doesn’t love a test? “Speek Evil” is neither a zine or a comic – call it a zomic if it makes you happy - because it combines the best of both, and it’s chock full of dark imagery and rock and roll attitude.
Which should come as no surprise, as it’s the product of the mind and pen of Mike Foxall, late of Nancy Vandal and more lately guitarist in The Neptune Power Federation. Foxall is one of the pre-eminent rock and roll graphic artists of the Sydney underground scene.
He’s a member of a club that boasts Ben Brown, Ray Ahn and Glenno Smith, and his imagery adorns the covers of his current band’s albums, plus posters and T-shirts for Crapulos Geegaw, King Parrot, Frenhal Rhomb and The Australian Beef Week Show. He’s also an animator.
“Speek Evil” is a lavish, full-colour 80-page production printed on high-quality matt paper and is produced quarterly. It plumbs similar cultural depths as “Unbelievably Bad” used to, but with Foxall’s own punk rock pre-occupations and peers in evidence. It’s up to five editions.
Written by Robert Brokenmouth & Edwin Garland on .
Red White and Blue By Bob Short
The Barman would have me squawk about “full disclosure”. Don't you get arrested for that?
Oh, not if you're a politician? Mysterious donors suddenly appear with suitcases of cash for your defence team? What if you're a priest? Oh, you get transferred to a 'virgin' happy hunting ground?
Uh-huh. Anyway, I know Bob Short. He knows me. I know where he lives - and if you own either of these books, you know where he lives, too.
Man on the edge.
Okay, so this is the second part in a series. Do you need to own part one?
Well, strictly speaking, no. However, to fully grasp what's going on, yes, you do. Allow me to recap, just slightly.
So, we have a flash comic book, with artwork which is deliberately awkward and muckily-presented (in best punk d-i-y style). Never mind the photoshops, Bob works with what looks like printouts from the internet, white-out, textas and possibly water-colour.
There is a plot, but it's muddied (or clarified, perhaps) by a multitude of composite characters purposely designed to keep us away from the plot as such, so as to focus on Bob's main drag, which is social commentary.
Faith and Practice in Bedlam By Chris Masuak (High Voltage)
The rock and roll biography, usually ghost written within an inch of near life, seldom rises above the squalor of tabloids in terms of literary merit. A chronological narrative structure occasionally framed as a flashback is as good as it gets.
Think of sports biographies with guitars.
Unsurprisingly, reviews of Chris Masuak's new book have been thin on the ground. Firstly, because the book will probably upset his old band mates and their wrath has become legendary.
Secondly, I suspect, because - like its author - this book is quite the odd duck.
When confronted by the unusual, most pundits wait for someone else's opinion before voicing their own. Especially when they don't want to miss out on the chance of potential support slots.
Jumpin' Jack Flash. David Litvinoff and the Rock'n'Roll Underworld by Kieron Pim (Penguin Books)
Who? Exactly. Except, here's a character who knew (to his cost) the Kray brothers (and many of their associates), introduced a very stoned Richard Clapton to The Queen Mum, and pretty much was the writer/inspiration for that enigmatic, brutal film “Performance” (starring Mick Jagger - he was in with the Stones as well).
Oh, and he had a very nasty spat with artist Lucian Freud too, which appears to have been the cause of his facial scars - on either side of his mouth, like Hugo's “The Man Who Laughed”.
David Litvinoff. Half-brother of Emanuel Litvinoff (who famously read a poem calling out Eliot's pre-WW2 anti-semite poetry - at a gathering at which Eliot was present), thief, shoplifter, gangster, thug, procurer, fantasist, culture influencer, prankster and fascinator par excellence.
Keiron Pim has gone tumbling down and impossible historical rabbit-hole, “where wet lamplight glistened on the wet pavement as snowflakes met their swirling shadows ... unnoticed when I slipped cross-current through a crowd, they rhythm of footsteps inculcating the notion that I was floating”.
Sometimes there are insufficient words of adequare to do justice to something and this is one of those times. Let’s be clear: If you’re a fan of underground Australian rock and roll from the 1980s and ‘90s, make it your life’s immediate priority to get a hold of this book.
It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s a watershed in Australian music publishing. All 678 pages of it. Don’t be deterred by its singling out of Geelong as its geographical focus. The city on the western flank of Melbourne is its anchor - but its coverage and spirit extends far past its boundaries.
“Bored!” is many things but first and foremost it’s an outpouring of love for rock and roll by its creator, principal author and driving force Maree Robertson.
Maree – “Rock and Roll Maree” from the Brother Brick song – was a dear friend of the late Dave Thomas of key Geelong band Bored! Besides documenting the band’s rise and its creation of a scene from their mutual hometown of Geelong, Maree wanted to generate profits from book sales to help Dave’s family.
Outside Melbourne? Glad you asked, then. Munster Times is a zine covering Australian underground music that’s still published in hard copy form - and that fact alone makes it stand out from the crowd.
Its Melbourne publisher and occasional I-94 Bar scribe, Matt Ryan, (right) is a fixture on Melbourne’s fertile live music scene. Run the rule over its content and you’ll realise it’s a compelling “must read” even if you live outside of Victoria’s windy/rainy/cold capital city. (OK, my Sydney is showing).
Much of the star billing in this issue goes to people and bands from outside Melbourne – Adam Brzozowski (Woy Woy) of Outtaspace Records, The Dunhill Blues and The Link and Pin Café, Howlin’ Threads (Yass and Wollongong) and Dez Dare (Geelong old boy now in the UK). You might call Munster Times location agnostic.
No less than Dave Graney reckons there’s a lot of the charm of the old St Kilda in the Times and who are we to argue with a member of the Melbourne Music Mafia? The zine has a homespun quality and is home to the legendary Fred Negro and his Pub comic strip.
For the unaware, Pub has institution status in Melbourne (which is about the only place in Australia that still confers such honours). I like Equal Opportunity, and if you read Pub long enough, you’ll find it has something to offend everybody.
Munster Time is A4, mostly black and white and has the odd spelling howler. Good. As long as Matt has no plans to do a Prince of Wales Hotel reno job and expunge any dirt or charm from his own zine’s pages, that’s fine with us.
Suburban Songbook. Writing Hits in Post-War Pre-Countdown Australia By Clinton Walker (Goldentone)
Only got this one recently, but I'm damned glad I did.
Once upon a Big Day Out, an event I only occasionally attended, I was mildly shocked by the text messages winding their way across a big screen (people paid a small fee to have their inane twatter up in on a big screen - you know, 'Best summer evah!' and 'Totally awesome!') which dissed 'old people' in favour of 'us hip cool young folk'...
Now, I won't say I wasn't like that to some degree when I was a teenager (and even in my twenties). But I don't recall being quite that dismissive of music simply because it was 'old'. I was brought up on my dad's music, as so many of us are: big band stuff, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, as well as Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole ... you get the idea. Proto-rock'n'roll, you could say.
So when I got interested in modern music at the age of 12 (courtesy my chum Paul's record collection) we both knew that it didn't matter how old something was ... as long as it wasn't boring. We investigated everything we could lay our hands on ... dismissed so much, revelled in long-lost jewels. It was our secret joy - no other bastard seemed interested.
Fast forward a few years and Clinton Walker's first book, “Inner City Sound' came out. (A revised edition has recently been published - get it here. Mick Middles wrote in “Record Collector'”: "A shockingly vast document ... the most striking aspect is the prevailing musical sophistication". Well, yeah.
WICKED GAME – The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey by Michael Goldberg (Hozac Books)
Spooky, soulful, nitro-twang genius, James Calvin Wilsey,Chris Isaak's beautiful guitarist, who conjured up all those memorable Ennio Morricone spaghetti western, eerie “Twin Peaks” vibes, was born in the Midwest but did not stay there long. His dad was one of those real old time, no nonsense, hard knocks, military aggressors.
I had a lot of close friends who played guitars in my middle school early garage bands, who had fathers like that. Ex-military, real macho, gonna make a manly man outta ya, big game hunter, type o guys. So yeah, being from smalltown Kentucky, my grandfolks family who raised me, were all old veterans and I was not like my cousins. I was never gonna be a 4-H show cattle, play sports, go to war for college money, type of person.
Then, we moved to a town whose only industry was building tanks in Ohio. man, that was a disaster for a little kid like me who could not catch a fucking football. My grandma had gotten me into Elvis from like, birth, almost. I used to wear a pink Presley concert ticket from the Rupp Areana show he never played because he died around in my middle school fedora during my "Pretty In Pink" years.
For me, it all started with Elvis. From there, I inherited an aunt's Monkees records and started seeing their show reruns on WXIX TV. My mother was a school teacher who tried to get me piano lessons, drums in the school band, a folk guitar that got stolen at Baptist reform school, but I sucked as a player. When I discovered Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop, I kinda decided I should be a loudmouthed frontman because I had all this feeling inside me, I wanted to express about the conflict I had with the sports and military culture I grew up in.
When Can I Fly? The Sleepers, Tuxedomoon & Beyond By Michael Belfer Foreword by Jon Savage Hozac Books
I'm not that into art rock or prog rock, or Devo or the Residents, or any shit like that, right? I'm a Dead Boys guy, not a Pere Ubu guy, you know what I mean? Man oh man, though, once you get about 20 pages into this book by San Francisco punk scene pioneer Michael Belfer (guitarist with The Sleepers and Tuxedomoon) it reads like a crazy fuckin' movie. What a wild freakin' life this dude had! WHOA!
If you read my columns and rants on a semi regular basis, you are probably already hip to my ongoing theory that there ain't many good bands no more in part because controlled media consolidation pummels us all day with time-waster buy shit/puppet celebrity fakes we never asked for, and partly, because there is such a shortage of affordable real estate spaces available to rehearse in, since the banking scum jacked up all the rents everywhere under Obama and Holder who actually even went to work for 'em after failing to prosecute anybody for the mass mortgage scams, and the landlords who used to rent working class homes to working class people flipped all their rentals into Airbnb’s and act like they're doing you some big fuckin' favor for painting their front porch steps purple, adding a hot tub and a Buddha statue to the yard and charging you $300 a night. These old punk bands paid like $300 a month, ya know?
Execution Days: The Life and Times of Spencer P Jones By Patrick Emery Love Police
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.-Voltaire
"I was stripped of all my dignity, blackest clouds hanging over me, I just waited as the moments ticked away, it was like my execution day..." -Spencer P. Jones
"I thought, hold on, I've got a rock band around here some place!" - Tex Perkins
"Grief felt like fear" - C.S. Lewis
I WAS ALWAYS ON YOUR SIDE
Man I'm a little bit furious that those fucked-up Fascists at Facebook permanently locked me out and I knew it was coming, because I saw them doing all that same shit to all my friends who are antiwar, pro human rights and civil liberties, all us poor suckers who fell hard for all that phony shit they told us when we were growing up about the Bill Of Rights that they covertly dismantled but insist we still have, even though we very clearly do not, or anyone advocating for freedom for Julian Assange.
The bullshit fact checking, accusations of violating their so-called community standards, all that shit. I posted a lot of links to antiwar organizers and truth tellers who've been purged from Mocking Bird mass media. Zuckerberg and his Great Lockstep cronies decided it was better to purge some of us completely, rather than have us actively factchecking the factcheckers and pushing back against their dangerous bullshit police state narratives.
Thankfully, a very thoughtful and considerate friend thought to send me an electronic copy of a book I'd been yearning to read and I guzzled the whole thing down like a pint while I was unable to contact my comrades on social media.
Speek Evil: Illustrated Rock and Roll Periodical (The Art of Fox) 
Red White and Blue
Faith and Practice in Bedlam
Jumpin' Jack Flash. David Litvinoff and the Rock'n'Roll Underworld
BORED! THIS WAS GEELONG (Loco Mosquito)
Munster Times Issue 35
Suburban Songbook. Writing Hits in Post-War Pre-Countdown Australia
WICKED GAME – The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey 
When Can I Fly? The Sleepers, Tuxedomoon & Beyond
Execution Days: The Life and Times of Spencer P Jones