After nearly 40 years in the music industry, you can excuse Steve Kilbey for forgetting a few things. The lack of detail is the only real quibble with what’s one of the best Oz music reads of the last few years.
I approached this book with mixed feelings. Kilbey has a reputation for being a bit of a narcissist. The Church’s music is hit or miss for me - which is to say I left them alone after their first two albums, dipped back in at “Starfish” and walked away after the stodgy “Gold Afternoon Fix”, with only occasional revisits. So this was a book to be read from a position of not having much skin in the game.
Then I got sucked into the whole melodramatic, up-and-own, self-destructive and ultimately self-redeeming saga, and warmed to Kilbey’s flawed and fallible ways. I consumed “Something Quite Perculiar” in a couple of satisfying gulps.
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- By The Barman
- Hits: 6800
You can’t half tell the folks at Unbelievably Bad zine are Hard-Ons fans. So is anyone with a modicum of taste. So this edition of UB should sell its arse off. It’s wall-to-wall Hard-Ons. More Hard-Ons, in fact, than the US Navy on shore leave after six months at sea.
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- By The Barman
- Hits: 7129
Call me biased and armed with far too much hindsight for my own good, but for a brief time in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Detroit was the lesser-known but undeniable epicentre of genuine rock and roll. The music industry, as it was, might have had its moneyed roots deeply planted on America’s East and West Coasts, but the real action was occurring deep in the US Midwest.
Sure, there was Motown and its over-ground success that eventually shifted to L.A. to mutate and die but we’re talking a parallel universe here that was populated by a different cast of characters plying a blue-collar strain of music. It’s an eternal truism that musical scenes never last. The Motor City’s rock and roll had its moment but succumbed to fashion, drugs, shifting attention spans – whatever factors play to your own historical biases – and has never recovered.
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- By The Barman
- Hits: 8727
There’s barely been time for a dog’s fart to clear since the last issue hit the post box so hopefully that’s a sign of life in the Unbelievably Bad camp.
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- By The Barman
- Hits: 6464
Munity in Heaven: The Birthday Party
Director: Ian White
Rating? Nine skulls and a pair of horns. Read on for an explanation.
Much to my Mum's surprise (yes, I have a mother. I was in fact born), the other day I apologised to her for all the skulls I brought home when I was a disaffected kid, aged nine or whatever, and placed these scabrous ornaments around my bedroom. There was a cat skull, a dog skull, a few lambs and calves, a pig, a snake and blue-tongue, and goat horns (but no goat skull).
The area we lived in was countryside only a decade ago so there was a lot of paddocks nearby. I'd hop the ancient barbed wire fence held taut by termite-eroded chunks of wood, and spend most of the day walking. Saw a lot of stuff I probably shouldn't have. Found out first-hand - long before dissection class at high school - what bodies smelt like when dead and when torn open. Some really unpleasant dirty magazines.
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- By Robert Brokenmouth
- Hits: 5356
I've been watching that Tim Burton Addam's Family reboot, "Wednesday", and smiling when the young actress tears it up go-go zombie, old school death style to an old Cramps tune, also find myself gravitating to old Alien Sex Fiend and Peter Murphy videos in my tiny hours.
As an almost perpetually melancholy and new wave nostalgic, elderly goth antisocial glamarchist, bored to tears in a deadend desert, wind blown, graveyard town, I'm always complaining about how there is almost zero modern music with the coolness and style and abstract innovation of the ‘80s post-punk, goth, and synth-pop I grew up with.
But this dynamic band, Vague Scare, have all the chilly vintage atmosphere and evocative lyrical panache and gloomy, brooding vocals of Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and I totally love them. If you came of age in the Bauhaus/Sisters Of Mercy/Skinny Puppy era and yearn to hear some new sounds that got that classic retro gothic vibe, you will love Vague Scare. They are almost too cool, remind me of every record I love.
New album out right now! I heard the recent Soft Cell/Pet Shop Boys duet and VAGUE SCARE is way better! Check out their Bandcamp here.
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- By JD Monroe
- Hits: 2465
Ribspreader
Written, directed and produced by Dick Dale
Starring Tommy Darwin
Adelaide Nova Cinemas
Saturday, October 22, 2022
Would you go to see a slash 'n' splatter flick made in ‘Straya's Murder Capital of Adelaide with guest appearances by Chad Morgan, Chantal Contouri, Fred Negro, Spencer P. Jones, and Rat Scabies?
Do bears shit on the Pope?
Do excuse me, it's the morning after the night before and I'm mangling my metaphors. Anyway, last night I went to see one of the films at the Adelaide Film Festival. The world premiere of “Ribspreader”.
About a week-and-a-half prior, I'd tried booking online; after selecting two tickets, I was asked my email ... and then, nothing happened. Maybe it didn't work. I tried again, found that their system now had me down for four tickets, asked me for my email and again, nothing happened. No email. After the second day of no email from the AFF I figured, I'll have to use “other sources”.
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- By Robert Brokenmouth
- Hits: 3291
Moonage Daydream (2022)
Directed and produced by Brett Morgen
Moonage Daydream, Brett Morgen’s love letter to David Bowie, is complete sensory overload.
Sitting in a near empty cinema on a Sunday evening, I found myself both captivated and bored at the same time. The documentary, at about 135 minutes, was long and some of the footage was used multiple times which was distracting; it could have been edited tighter.
Morgen as director, producer and editor has put together an epic that does, in some way, portray Bowie’s legacy, doing it justice.
Visually, the film was stunning, featuring footage I’d never seen before… not that I’d consider myself a Bowie tragic, but all people of a certain age found their lives intertwined with Ziggy or The Thin White Duke to some extent. Rare live footage of The Spiders was plentiful, if mentions of the contribution of that band, and especially Mick Ronson, were not.
Morgen’s art direction was a clumsy allegory to the chaos and isolation Bowie seems to have fostered. As an insight into the man as an artist you came away with a sense of his disconnection and disordered and chaotic approach to his craft.
The archival footage both on and off stage was plentiful, and you genuinely got a feel for the extent of his many talents with Bowie’s painting and videography featured extensively. There are many montages that flash through gigs and offstage footage at a great pace that becomes exhausting.
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- By Peter Ross
- Hits: 3101
Pistol
Directed by Danny Boyle (DisneyPlus)
Okay, I’ll be first to admit that the trailer looked like a cold turd in a lunch box. I did, however, persevere and found that I enjoyed this six-episode series enormously.
Not that everyone will. Fans of a perfectly delivered chronology are going to be nit picking every scene and episode like bickering zealots at a secular conflict. Anyone who watched the CBGB movie and complained about how such and such wasn’t in the audience the night so and so did this or that is going to be in for a particularly unpleasant viewing experience. You know who you are.
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- By Bob Short
- Hits: 3912
More Articles …
- A '70s tale of tragic mis-steps
- Don't Let Me Down 'cos there's gold at the end of this Long and Winding Road
- Out of the fridge and swinging a hammer
- Boy Howdy! Creem magazine documentary makes its debut
- Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World (Rezolution Pictures)
- Back Behind The Kit - TV4 documentary
Subcategories
Behind the fridge
Artifacts and reviews from days gone by.
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