The Metropolitan Hotel, Adelaide - September 27, 2013
Tonight was a passionate night of balance, power, and space. Each group told us stories, ran films in our heads.
The streets are empty. Empty as in, it's Tuesday night. Except it's Friday night. Where is everyone?
Just the previous night, the suburbs decanted some 10,000 to land like a torrent of ants in Adelaide's great dome of the popular people's front to see Rihanna, who is, I am told, a superstar. From overseas.
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- By Robert Brokenmouth
- Hits: 4539
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Annandale Hotel - August 1, 2006
If you don't like slobbering, breathless gushes, leave now. OK? I've already copped a broadside from someone about one review of a gig this week - and the fucker wasn't even at the show - but here goes...
What an in-fucking-credibly amazing show. Just about the best thing I've seen this year. The Stooges beats it (although that was surreal an experience I'm still not sure it happened). Soulful, rocking, energetic and dynamic. Perfectly paced and a testimony to a band at the peak of its considerable powers. Cruisey and light at the get go, it shaped as a righteously loud and grooving way to ease us all through a Tuesday night.
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- By The Barman
- Hits: 5727
Wheatsheaf Hotel, Thebarton, Australia - June 22 and 23, 2013
My dad used to say that nothing was free. There's always a catch. There's a reason that nice man on the street is giving away Bibles, Robert.
He was right, of course. Those free music magazines you pick up for the what's on this weekend guide, the reviews of pub food, new beers and pricey wine, they make their living from the adverts. Stop putting in the stuff that the people with money to spend want to see and they'll stop bending at the creaky knees to pick it up. And the advertisers start to wonder why they're paying four or five hundred bucks a week. Self-evident, yeah? You don't change a money-making formula unless you can make more.
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- By Robert Brokenmouth
- Hits: 6398
Iggy and The Stooges. The Authorized Biography
By Jeffrey Morgan
(New Haven Publishing)
Did we need another Stooges book? Rhetorical question but slap yourself if you answered in the negative. This is a pared-down and re-cut variant of the coffee table format “The Stooges: The Authorized and Illustrated History” published by Abrams in 2009 under the authorship of Jeffrey Morgan and Robert Matheu.
This version is prominently attributed to Morgan although Matheu is acknowledged on the cover and at length throughout.
“Iggy and The Stooges. The Authorised Biography” is still in hardcover and runs to 140 pages as opposed to the original 180-odd. It’s illustrated by the photos of Matheu, John Catto and Jeff Magnum (yes, the onetime Dead Boys bassist) and others, although the reformatting has resulted in much of the original imagery beinbg deleted or replaced.
John Catto’s and Robert Sikora’s 1974 Toronto shots of Iggy and the Stooges are amazing additions but so were Craig Petty’s St Louis photos.
The original book was the brainchild of Morgan and Mattheu after both had been co-opted by Italian uber fan and magazine editor Rosano Ciccarelli to contribute to his own Fun House publication in 2005. They tossed the idea around over some beers, let it slide and revived it a year later with Matheu in the driving seat.
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- By The Barman
- Hits: 800
Don’t Let Go. A Memoir – Rob Griffiths (Swerve/Off The Hip)
He readily confesses to not being a household name but if fervent enthusiasm for rock and roll and a back catalogue of should-have-been-hits counts, Rob Griffiths should be.
Best-known as frontman for onetime Melbourne mod torchbearers Little Murders, Griffiths is one of the most underrated songwriters in the country, and now adds author to his c.v.
The autobiographical “Don’t Let Go” is a ripping ride that cranks up in Melbourne music’s underground of the mid’70s and continues well beyond - as told by an immigrant Pommy kid who jumped in at the deep end.
Griffiths’ first band The Fiction shared stages with Boys Next Door/Birthday Party, News and JAB in a short but noisy existence. Punk was only a starting point: the did wear suits (briefly, at the end) and it was a hint of things to come. Griffiths makes the point well that the lines between genres in Melbourne are, and always were, heavily blurred.
His ‘60s influenced Little Murders rose from The Fiction’s ashes, soaring in popularity on the back of the burgeoning mod movement of the early ‘80s. When both band and the “Quadrophenia” trend foundered, Griffiths became a club DJ, a small-time record label chief and band manager, often in tandem with a day-time career as a schoolteacher.
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- By The Barman
- Hits: 778
Retaliate First: How one band smashed the rules of Australian rock and roll
By Murray Engleheart
(Allen and Unwin)
What becomes a legend most
When the musicians have come and then leave her
What becomes a legend most
Besides being a legendary star
What Becomes A Legend Most” - Lou Reed (1984)
It’s finally here and it’s great. For the first time, the Radio Birdman story has been thoroughly told from start to dotage (if not the end) in print, and with a sense of perspective that puts contestable versions of the story in plain view.
For the first time? What about Vivien Johnston’s 1990 “Radio Birdman”? For many years it was the best (only) reference point. As invaluable as it was, it was ultimately a biography shoehorned into a university thesis, and the tenuous link it tried to make between the band and Australian indigenous culture was odd.
And there's “Radio Birdman: The Illustrated History” from George Munoz, an amazing visual record of the first life of the band but doesn’t try to be commentary.
Murray Engleheart’s “Retaliate First” is an effort to re-tell the story as it should be told and it’s an invaluable companion to Jonathan Sequeira’s brutally honest “Descent Into The Maelstrom” documentary.
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- By The Barman
- Hits: 2441
The Dead and The Desperate By Dan Denton (Roadside Press)
Way back in the New Wave/Post punk era, one of my only friends was a kid with a very similar name to mine. He was really into Depeche Mode and Tubeway Army, and he had a real hardk nock life with a dead father, abusive brother and corrections officer mother,
We met at some troubled teen diversion program. He knew some Kung Fu and kinda became my protector, as I was a scrawny-ass make-up wearing Ramone who was always targeted by bully dumb-fuck Ohio males for wearing eyeliner and being like totally into Bowie and the NY Dolls.
I always tried to get the kid to work on his keyboards so he could join my dirty punk band, I thought that might give him a productive creative outlet and elevate our sorta stupidly primitive Ramones/Cramps sound. He dabbled with it for awhile, but would always get sorta distracted by girls. He saw the two of us as rivals, whereas, I saw us as more like brothers. I really loved the guy.
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- By JD Monroe
- Hits: 1759
Another Tuneless Racket: Punk And New Wave In The Seventies, Volume One: Origins
Another Tuneless Racket: Punk And New Wave In The Seventies, Volume Two: Punk
Another Tuneless Racket: Punk and New Wave In The Seventies: Volume Three: UK New Wave
Another Tuneless Racket: Punk and New Wave In The Seventies, Volume Five: The American Beat – West
By Steve H Gardner (self published)
The best intentions are often derailed by practicality. After being gifted Volume One of “Another Tuneless Racket”, the plan was to acquire and read the other three back-to-back and then write a review. A fine goal but one that slipped after realising their combined volume came to almost 2,400 pages and life was getting in the way…
After delving deep into the series, it’s clear that the beauty of “Another Tuneless Racket” is that once you get your bearings, you can dive in almost anywhere, pick up on a thread and keep going. As you'll gather from the titles, each volume zeroes in on a time and place in the history of punk and new wave music, and then takes up the story of key acts. The series serves as a roadmap through the twists and turns of punk and new wave across most of the western world.
It’s meticulously researched but you’d expect that from author Steve Gardner, He’s a lanky Yank from San Diego who grew up on the US East Coast where he went to university before finding himself working in engineering. A music obsessive from an earl;y age, he'd been bitten by the punk rock bug by the time he blew out the candles on his 21st birthday cake.
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- By The Barman
- Hits: 4301
Punk Under The Sun: Punk & New Wave in South Florida
By Joey Seeman and Chris Potash
Hozac Books
I was never really drawn to Florida like so many of my ex-friends and former peers, I always called it "Ohio South" cause you know it's all the same insufferable tv brainwashed right wingers from Ohio who seem to migrate there.
Never liked Marilyn Manson or Disneyland all that much, or even Jimmy Buffet yeehaw beach culture, but weirdly a lot of musicians from all my favorite Murkkkan bands have Floridian roots.
Probably my fave band besides Generation X,Pretenders, and Beasts Of Bourbon was basically born there before relocating to Hollywood: a band called the Coma-Tones, who were, according to my famous old amigo the Sleazegrinder: "Like Jim Morrison singing for Guns N Roses". The vocalist Gio was approximately as excellent as Texacala Jones or early Tex Perkins, the guitar player Jimmy James went on to play for Junkyard and the Hangmen, and he's featured in the book.
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- By JD Monroe
- Hits: 3624
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