Soul Purpose
IN an era when the term “legend” is too readily bandied about, Ray Charles is the genuine article. But though others say he’s among the biggest of stars, he comes across as rather self-effacing. Read…
King of the road
ARRIVING in Italy some years ago, Slim Dusty thought he was incognito. But no such luck. Read …
“They love me. They – ”
He’s been abused and derided for years. So why does Kamahl still call Australia home? Read …
Blowing in, yet again
‘I WISH I was on some Australian mountain range.” So sang Bob Dylan in a mid-1960s song called Outlaw Blues. Whether Dylan, who would first tour Australia a little more than a year later, had any particular mountain in mind is not clear. Nor does it really matter. “I got no reason to be there,” he sings, “but I imagine it would be some kind of change.” Read …
Horn of South Africa
HUGH Masekela grew up in a “redneck, right-wing” town near Johannesburg. Read…
Once-exiled jazzman relives his past
MORE THAN 20 years after Abdullah Ibrahim visited Australia, the veteran jazzman talks of the response by some Aboriginal elders to photographic slides he had shown of the indigenous Khoi and San peoples of southern Africa. Read…
Some people have all the luck
LUCKY Dube was a sickly child. So sickly, in fact, that he seemed unlikely to live beyond his first few months. So, to ease what they saw as the inevitable trauma of his loss, his family decided not to give him a name just yet. Read…
Mama Africa sings farewell
Miriam Makeba is 74, tired and ready to stop touring. But she tells Larry Schwartz she has lots to do in South Africa. Read…
Songs of freedom
A documentary by an American filmmaker shows how song was a defining force in the South African liberation struggle. Read …
The band that time forgot
WIM WENDERS is leaning over a glass case full of boxes of fat cigars in the cool of an inner-city hotel smoking room. He scrutinises the ornate cigar wrappings. His latest film features a visit to a Havana cigar factory. Cigars of all sizes are prominent in Buena Vista Social Club. He does not think these cigars are Cuban. Read …
The haunting ballad of Ruby Hunter
RUBY Hunter’s voice is husky but amiable. She’s remembering paper and string she touched the day officials came to take her from her family. Read…
Raising voices in praise of Sistas
Had it not been for her musical talent, Deborah Cheetham might never have met the mother she’d been told had abandoned her in a cardboard box in a field. Read …
Still sounding like daybreak
Decades after declaring himself “a survivor of Charcoal Lane” on the title track of his award-winning debut album, Archie Roach is celebrated for his music and his contribution to social justice. Read…
Yorta Yorta man
At home in inner suburbia; on planes, trains and buses, Jimmy Little closes his eyes and drifts into the past. “I can let my mind go back home,” he says. “Whenever I want to; at any interval in my meditation. I am in touch constantly with the peace and tranquillity of the land.” Read …
The voice in the wilderness
The tongue flickers at the upper lip, opaque greenish eyes brighten. The mouth quivers on the verge of a first word that does not come. Eighteen seconds pass before Peter Garrett speaks his mind. Read …
“It’s over”
THERE were nights when the moon shone hauntingly and she could not sleep a wink. Olivia Newton-John would lie awake, fighting back tears, fearing that if she dropped off she might not wake again. Read …
Mixmaster
You’d think he’d have a bust of Mozart propped on the piano. Instead, in his New York office, Jimmy Webb has a photo of one of Barcelona’s best-known buildings. “That’s my musical muse,” he says of the decorative Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia. Read …
With divine intervention
JIMMY Webb was on his knees, imploring God to help him in troubled times. “This is a really true story,” the celebrated singer-songwriter says. Read …
The blues and Buddy Guy
He was playing an old blues song. When it came to the chorus, he’d hold back and let the audience sing. Buddy Guy’s daughter was in the crowd. She had started work that night at a club he owns in Chicago. Read …
Who’s gonna fill his shoes?
BUDDY Guy recently revisited the Louisiana town where he was raised in a sharecropping family, playing makeshift guitars on screen wire or rubber bands after toiling in the fields. Read …
Happy playing the blues
JOHN Hammond laughs, remembering “amazing times” when he first encountered pre-World War II bluesmen tracked down by enthusiasts in the early 1960s. “I thought they were so old,” says the singer, guitarist and harmonica player. “Here I am, almost 70, and I chuckle at that.” Read …
Revived Fogerty again rollin’ on the river
They started out as the Blue Velvets, then became the Golliwogs and, finally, Creedence Clearwater Revival. It was a misnomer, it seems. Read …
Mellow fellow
Then he was gone from the public eye. Despite a few strong albums in the 1970s, the dance was over. As the mood toughened, Donovan seemed quaint, naive, twee and pretentious. Read …
Singing out for freedom
Maria Farantouri talks of a time when music was “the embodiment of resistance”. Read …
The journey of a lifetime
ONE day, when he was a small boy living on a farm on the outskirts of the Kwa Zulu-Natal town of Ladysmith, Joseph Shabalala heard his tribal-healer father prophesy his future. Read …
Sounding out the blues
Cassandra Wilson speaks in the languid contralto that has won over critics and fans and led the likes of Time magazine to hail her “the most accomplished jazz vocalist of her generation”. Read …
Out of the blue
RENEE GEYER swirls a black cape about her and laughs huskily. She wants the lights dimmed in the glassed-in record company office because she’s beginning to feel as if she’s “in an interrogation room”. And she winds up comment on a sensitive issue with a simple, “next!”. Read …
For Geyer, the healing has begun
Renee Geyer, the big voice of Australian rhythm and blues, has kept performing through a troubled few years in which she crashed her car into a shop, battled breast cancer and mourned her father. Read …
And the man plays on
MICHAEL GUDINSKI smiles indulgently. “You’re obsessed about this, aren’t you?” he says, when asked about the whereabouts of the music label he founded in his 20s. Read …
Mushroom cloud: lawsuits fly over fall-out from record deal
It was oil and water. Baby-boomer and Generation X. Son of Russian-Jewish migrants and an heir to an Anglo-Australian dynasty. Read …
The man on the avenue
RICHARD CLAPTON calls himself “the bum of the family”, the black sheep who set out to become a rock star rather than study medicine as his father, a surgeon, had hoped. Read …
Hello and goodbye, tiger
Richard Clapton seems to take pride in rebelling against what he calls “the oligarchy of the pop music culture”. The singer says that from the beginning he was out of place in a conformist industry, more in sync with “this really wonderful subculture” that included Spectrum, the Dingoes, Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil. Read …
What’s eating Tommy Emmanuel?
HE was a local hero, feted for his dazzling play. But somewhere along the way, the music lost its thrill. Tommy Emmanuel wearied with his lot in Australia, so he packed his guitars and his amps and went to London. Read …
We ain’t heavy, we’re brothers
“WORLD’S YOUNGEST GUITARISTS” said the sign on a rear door of their dad’s old station wagon. Other kids could only gawk when the Emmanuel Quartet or Midget Surfaries, as they were later known, came to town. Read …
The demons inside Daryl
Once upon a time, he was a fresh-faced pop idol in satin and flared trousers. He had been an apprentice fitter and turner. He was the darling frontman of Sherbet, a group that dominated local charts in the 1970s. The world was at his feet then. So it seemed. Read …
Songs of praise for an unsung artist
IN THE late 1980s Paul Kelly spent several wonderful days kayaking, fishing and making music around a campfire at Lake Wivenhoe, west of Brisbane, with his son Declan and friend, singer-songwriter Kev Carmody. Read …
Gurus get an encore
The Hoodoo Gurus had intended to do an encore. They finished their set at Launceston town hall earlier this year little realising they might have already played their swansong. Read …
Heading back to the musical well
SEBASTIAN Jorgensen was 21 when he took the ritual “big trip” overseas to continue his classical guitar studies and perform. He won an international award in Italy and played on a bill with Jimi Hendrix at London’s Festival Hall. Read …
Steady Eddie
WHEN EDDIE VAN Halen talks about LSD, he doesn’t mean a psychedelic drug. The heavy metal guitar veteran is alluding to a phenomenon he describes as Lead Singers’ Disease. It is a condition of the ego, he says, that commonly affects singers more intent on being rock stars than musicians. Read …
The nice man cometh
HE’S BITTEN THE HEAD off a bat, chewed a dove and spent time in jail for urinating in public. Ozzy Osbourne’s outrageous behavior is legendary. But after decades cultivating the image of a wild man of rock, he wants it known he’s not so wild after all. Read …
Metal skins
HELL is between a boutique and a bakery on Swanston Walk. It is a darkness punctured by the glow of cigarettes and strobe lights. Dancers hurl their torsos about and whip long hair at the floor. Hands are placed at the edge of the stage, heads bang up and down in unison. Read …
The voice in the wilderness
The tongue flickers at the upper lip, opaque greenish eyes brighten. The mouth quivers on the verge of a first word that does not come. Eighteen seconds pass before Peter Garrett speaks his mind. Read …
Chisel’s last wave
The skies are cloudy but the word is the band’s manager has a word with “Dad” and He’s promised there’ll be no downpour tonight in the NSW town of Bathurst. From somewhere out there comes a dull, muted roar: “Churzl. Churzl.” Read …
Walking on a wire
HE HAS BEEN HAILED as one of rock’s great guitar players. Critics rate some of his albums as classics. …But fans say he has not achieved the mainstream appeal that is his due. Richard Thompson is a musician’s musician, famous for not being as famous as he might. Read …
Forever Young
One of the most intriguing figures to emerge from the 1960s, Young has bridged generations with his distinctive takes on rock, country, folk, blues, grunge, soul and more. Read …
Cult of the Celts
Paddy Moloney delights in recalling a day in the late ’80s. He was in Dublin when a fan approached him, begging for an autograph – and failing to realise that the man alongside Paddy was the celebrated Van Morrison. Read …
How Mr Nelson became free Willie
WILLIE Nelson has a special affection for Australia. He likens it to the Lone Star State. “You know, the Texans and Australians are very similar in a lot of ways,” he says. “There’s a lot of cowboys, a lot of free-thinking people over there. Independent-minded folks. And I felt right at home.” Read …
Classical guest
BY HIS own reckoning, John Williams plays table tennis and chess quite well and is “very bad” at tennis. But as a master of the classical guitar, few would dispute his stature or influence. Read …
Highs and lows with Randy N
RANDY Newman wrapped his arms about his chest. “I like it when I make myself laugh,” he said. “Maybe I’ve done so much comedy to cheer myself up while I’m working, you know.” Read …
Six-year Long Weekend
Bouyed at a time of sadness by the birth of his first child, Fennessy, the late Chris Wilson felt “partly that it’s my responsibility to surround him with music”. Read …
All Omara’s parties
OMARA PORTUONDO was touring the US in 1962 when news of the Cuban missile crisis broke. She was in Miami, singing with a quartet called Las D’Aida, and quickly made plans to slip back to Havana. Read …
Jumping off the Band wagon
Robbie Robertson remembers the racist taunt clearly. When he was a boy, his cousins snapped a branch off a tree and carved a bow and arrow for him. Bigger boys gathered around as he tried it out. “Hey, redboy,” one yelled. Read …
Woody and me
‘Oh God,” he read. Billy Bragg was taken aback by words on a yellowed page. He thought this song, among thousands perused while sorting through papers in a New York City archive, was a cry of despair. Read …
Urban cowboy
He put in some hard travellin’ with Woody Guthrie, hung out with Beat writer Jack Kerouac, serenaded James Dean, introduced Bob Dylan onstage as his son, was nicknamed Uncle Jack by his friends in the Band. Read …
Music in their veins
Arlo Guthrie has lived with the knowledge that he might succumb to the hereditary disease that took his father’s life decades ago. Read …
Making the “missing” Dylan
DAVID Bromberg made sure the bootleggers had no access to an album he once produced for Bob Dylan. “I took the masters home with me every night,” he says. “So nobody could get at them.” Read …
Crazy about the boho life
SHE wrote a ballad for Che Guevara and sang Where Have All the Flowers Gone? while testifying at the trial of the Chicago Seven over protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. “Basically, I am an activist at heart,” says singer-songwriter Judy Collins,. “I take on issues.” Read …
When the Kinkster calls
NOT just anyone gets an invitation to the White House. Kinky Friedman, however, has been summoned twice. Read …
Wondering and wandering
NEIL Murray has seen the mountainous north of Scotland, from which his paternal great-great-grandfather came to Australia in 1848, among the countless driven out by unscrupulous landlords in the historic “Highland clearances”. “There was an ancestral pull, I must admit,” he says. “But I couldn’t say I felt I belonged.” Read …
Coming home
IT SAYS something about his regard for the ways of an old friend and indigenous Australians that Neil Murray declines to name a former bandmate who died a few years ago. Read …
How far your feet go down
SHANE HOWARD’S feet were hitched up on a guitar stool in an eighth-floor studio the day we met. He was strumming a steel-string guitar. He sang a ragged version of Goanna’s early-1980s protest hit, Solid Rock. Read …
The new Black
The voice has changed. She wonders if that’s really her on early recordings. “It’s certainly deepened through age,” Mary Black says. “Sometimes you listen back to this voice that for me doesn’t even sound like me. There’s a purity there that isn’t there now. Read …
Rustic tones
Interest in country music has waxed and waned since then but little has captured the ambience of backwoods Appalachia as effectively as the Nashville-based singer-songwriter Gillian Welch. Read …
Calling Cummings
Stephen Cummings’s vivid, sometimes melancholic songs, often about faltering romance, move some to wax lyrical when describing his talent. Read …
Facing the music
HAD AN UNKNOWN motorcyclist not crashed into a 14-year-old Billy Pinnell, breaking both legs and causing him to miss a year of schooling, he might have ended up in another line of work. Read …
Princely Passion
MUSICIAN Phil Gunter took the title for his new album, Meluke, from a word meaning “little prince” in at least six languages, including Punjabi. It’s also the name of his adopted son.” Read …
Bitching with Deborah
`HEYYY, bitch! The bitch-of-pitch!” Deborah Conway uses the B-word in the nicest possible sense. She says it has been redefined to include women who refuse to fit narrow stereotypes or expected roles. It’s almost a compliment, the singer-songwriter insists. Read …
Anzac Day to his drumbeat
Mick Thomas’ father went into Hiroshima a fortnight after the August 6, 1945, atomic bomb blast killed an estimated 80,000 and razed much of the city. “It was big stuff for a young bloke,” the Melbourne singer-songwriter says. Read …
Every day’s a parting day
He sings it in that wondrously corrosive voice he has thought clumsy and mawkish since he first heard it in the ’60s on a cousin’s reel-to-reel. He’s written some of the finest Australian songs in recent years. But who knows it? Too many associate them with his band. He is not nearly as celebrated as he ought to be. Read …
Beyond the N’Dour of misperception
I decide to ask the intepreter to tell N’Dour that I’ve read he speaks “halting” English. Is this true? If so, can we skip the French? Read …
Songs in the key of life
BACK in the spotlight after decades of obscurity, Leon Russell says his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last month was ”a nice little gesture”. Read …
A call to psalms
In 1961, Bernice Johnson Reagon was a student at Albany State College, Georgia, when she was arrested in a civil rights demonstration. She found a shared love of church songs among cellmates. …“We shall not be moved,” they sang in captivity. Read …
What drives Diesel
AS A TODDLER, he’d sit behind a toy steering wheel in the back seat of the family’s Buick and imagine it was he who was driving around the beachside resort that was their American hometown. Read …
Just doin’ my thang
It was there that Steve Young slipped a coin in a jukebox and, while his grandfather was flirting with a waitress, first heard Elvis Presley sing Lawdy Miss Clawdy. Read …
No way Jose
DON’T talk to Jose Feliciano about his heyday. At least, not if you’re thinking about past glories. Read …
Talking Gene Pitney
I was terrified, I’ll tell you that. I was a green kid from a little town in Connecticut. I’d gone through the place and got backstage and I’d just passed the likes of Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster and Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, and on and on and on. And they said to me, “We want you to sing this song up here on this level. Read …
A life in tune
It’s strange to consider the kind of vocalists that have impressed Jeff Lang. The ones he mentions as we chatter about Dylan – Patton and banjo players Dock Boggs and Roscoe Holcomb – have gutsy, hoarse voices so unlike his own light, lilting timbre. Read …
k.d. lang discovers life’s innermost beauty
She lets her toes curl in rubber thongs. She wears frayed jeans and a flimsy top on a grey day that promises rain and thunder. Read …
Home is the Hunter
Mark Seymour doesn’t know why he didn’t quit the band much earlier. Without the “tribe”, as he calls them, the former Hunters and Collectors frontman has found freedom from the “emotional thread” expected of his melodies and lyrics. Read …
The chant of Yungchen Lhamo
When she performs live, Yungchen Lhamo chooses to sing alone, without musical accompaniment. “When I left Tibet, I lost my family and my culture,” she says. “So only one thing isn’t lost: my voice. If you have something special inside you, people can’t steal it from you.” Read …
Blue moon rising for Saddington
WENDY Saddington seems unfazed that few recordings were made during her heyday. “I’m not into legacies,” the blues, soul and jazz singer says. She will draw on a 45-year career in a rare performance this week, with songs including Aretha Franklin’s Save Me, an old favourite Nina Simone co-wrote with poet Langston Hughes, Backlash Blues, and Etta James’ At Last. Read …
Lost songs re-covered
SINGER-songwriter Lisa Miller is acclaimed not only for her original material, but also her distinctive versions of others’ songs. Now she’s taken the unusual step of covering herself. Read …
Crow’s feat
Sheryl Crow adjusts a harmonica holder. Someone yells out, “Dylan!” and the Missouri-born singer-songwriter, mimicking Bob’s husky midwestern drawl, tells the crowd of a telephone call suggesting she record one of his songs on her new album. She thought she’d give him a break …
“Young upstart,” she upbraids herself. Read …
Mourning has broken
For a time, she couldn’t dwell on “something so emotionally disturbing …” But lately Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh has been thinking about the death of her husband and musical partner, Frankie Kennedy. Read …
Brotherly love
IT’S LATE AFTERNOON in New Orleans and a slight breeze hurries the clouds across the skyline. Art Neville is in his home studio, noodling with the beginnings of a new song. Read …
Quiet voices of reason put peace on track
An album of lullabies by women from the so-called Axis of Evil carries a powerful message. Read …
A hunka, hunka virtual love
HE WAS standing around backstage after a performance in Las Vegas when someone asked how he felt about the new job. “Working with Elvis is like following a marble rolling down concrete steps, I says, I can’t keep up with it.” Read …
Chicken Pickin’ for the King
James Burton is best known as the guitarist and band leader in Elvis Presley’s latter years – after starting out in the Hayride house band backing country stars George Jones, Johnny Horton and Slim Whitman – and for writing the tune for Dale Hawkins’s late-1950s hit Suzie-Q. Since then, he has played with a who’s who of post-World War II music. Read …
Strumming his pain with his fingers
The New Zealand-born musician best known for the acoustic guitars he has made for the likes of Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Neil Finn and Paul Kelly, will tell you the lyrics might be interpreted in various ways. But he’ll also concede it’s a love song to his wife, “about me and Cath dealing
with this illness”. Read …
In Leven heaven
After a late-night recording session in London in the 1980s, the Scottish singer-songwriter Jackie Leven was attacked and so badly beaten that he couldn’t speak, let alone sing. Read …
Plucked back to happiness
The decision to learn flamenco guitar brought Kavisha Mazzella back from the brink. Read …
Elvis watching over me
Ron Sexsmith found out on his seventh birthday that someone in Memphis, Tennessee, was probably celebrating, too. “I took that as some kind of cosmic sign,” he says of discovering he was born on the same day and month as Elvis Presley. Read …
Where soul and blues run in the family
Paul Robeson was his godfather and his father was a singer. How could Eric Bibb not lead a life in music? Read …
Answer was blowin’ in the blues
AFTER the brutal murder of his mother, Charlie Musselwhite turned to a celebrated gospel-singer friend to help make sense of the tragedy in song. Read …
Shocking but true
Slavery, rape, arrest. They’re all just the ups and downs of life for Michelle Shocked, one of the music world’s true survivors. Read …
Kneading attention
ON THE first leg of a reunion tour with Bread, singer-songwriter David Gates routinely met people named for one of the band’s biggest hits. Read …
Ancients sounds reborn
He’s 1.75 metres tall – but who’s counting? Height isn’t usually an issue to a musicologist, composer and performer. Still, Kim Cunio had concerns about his size when he came to collect musical instruments from a St Kilda museum recently. Read …
Sounds are golden
Burkhard Dallwitz plays down the Golden Globe award. “I looked at his kiddies’ cricket trophy and there’s not all that much difference,” the Melbourne-based composer says of the trophy he won recently for his work on the soundtrack of the Peter Weir film, The Truman Show. Read …
Music of the crimes
IT MUST have been tempting for composer Burkhard Dallwitz to draw on his extensive back catalogue when he was approached by the Underbelly producers to submit examples of his music. Read …
Song sung true blue
“… It’s not the imagery of singing about gumboots and gum trees. It’s that emotional thread and it can come from anything as wide apart as
Stephen Cummings and the Bushwackers through to classical music and jazz.” Warren Fahey, John Schumann, Mick Thomas and others on Australian song. Read …
Being Bogle
ERIC Bogle thought he was writing a song about the cold, bright July morning the ship that brought him from Scotland entered Sydney Heads more than 40 years ago. Next …
So you want to be a rock star?
Kids in a thousand garage bands dream of getting a regular pub gig on the long and windy way to the top. Read …
Skyhooks book ends in clash of egos and dirty words
IT WAS supposed to be a hastily concocted chronicle to mark the 20th anniversary of the founding of one of Australia’s best-loved rock bands. Instead, a new book on Skyhooks has become the centre of a dispute that has set musician against musician and provoked bitter outbursts against
their manager, Michael Gudinski, as well as their first record producer, Ross Wilson. Read …
Dutch treat
James Blundell was one of Australia’s biggest stars when he dropped from sight to journey about Europe in a white, ’79 VW Kombi, playing his guitar to make ends meet. Read …
War and mateship, through the eyes of Uncle Harry
HE FETCHES one of two steel-string guitars propped up against the wall and begins to strum a new song. “Me and Harry walking down Three Waterholes Road,” Richard Frankland sings, “and he says, `don’t the moon cast an eerie type of glow?’ Read …
Spirit levels
WHEN Richard Frankland was a boy, his grandfather taught him to lay eel traps and catch freshwater fish. He heard stories about “old magic people”and of an island called Denmaar where the spirit goes when you die. Read …
The rise and rise of Aboriginal Rock
Middle-class urban kids dancing to Aboriginal music? It would have seemed impossible a generation ago. Read …
Didgeridoo dreaming
THE plumbing supplies salesman seems puzzled when I ask for 1.2 metres of 40-millimetre PVC pipe. He smiles, though, when I tell him I plan to use it as a makeshift didgeridoo. Read …
Bridie – not drowning, waking
David Bridie thought carefully before deciding to name his long-awaited fourth solo album, Wake. The title, he says, might as easily allude to waking, drinking single malt to celebrate someone’s life, or “like a boat has gone through and caused all this turmoil and then there is this at the back …” Read …
Born on the wrong side of the dotted line
David Bridie invited discussion on West Papua’s plight in 2000 when he named his first solo album after the August 1969 Act of Free Choice referendum staged by Indonesia in which 1025 selected West Papuan tribal chiefs voted to remain part of Indonesia. Read …
Bonds across the water
WHEN David Bridie and George Telek first met at a barbecue in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, they sat down to talk over a few beers and chicken roasted in a pit with coconut milk and rice. Read …
Music made Maton
The Maton guitar is a family affair turned national icon with international star appeal. Read ….
In the pink
David Lindley started out on a baritone ukelele and graduated to guitar. By his teens, he had won the annual Topanga Canyon Banjo and Fiddle contest five times. Read …
A survivor, back from the brink, keeps on pickin’
CHRIS Smither was onstage at last year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival when someone from the rear of a crowd roared out his name. Read …
Smither mourns a world blown to smithereens
Chris Smither was speaking before this week’s bombing of Afghanistan. He was wary of the jingoism and patriotic fervor and, while in no way condoning the attacks on America, withering about his homeland’s insularity. Read …
Still rockin’
The year Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and Big Bopper died in a plane crash, a fledgling rock’n’roll band was starting out in Melbourne with instruments including a bass instrument fashioned from a tea chest. Read …
Great Balls of Fire, again
Once they were among the biggest stars in a fledgling industry. Wild Weekend, New Orleans Beat and Machine Gun were just a few of the top-10 hits they enjoyed in their heyday in the late 1950s and early ’60s. They toured with visiting artists including Dion, Fabian, Jack Scott, Ray Peterson
and Roy Orbison. Read …
Thunderbirds are go for that old time rock’n’roll
BEFORE their first gig in the spring of 1957, the Thunderbirds printed handbills hailing themselves the “kings of rock’n’roll”. Read …
Hey Joe
JOE CAMILLERI pulled into South Melbourne in his pearl-colored ’64 Thunderbird and hurried into Cafe Sweethearts. Apologising for being a little late, he launched into a vivid update on his activities as if resuming a chat with a long-lost friend. Read …
Up to scratch
Tony Worsley and the Blue Jays. Ray Brown and the Whispers. Such names may mean little to most of us, but at Festival, Australia’s oldest independent record company, they are valued as part of a rich store of archival material being recreated on CD. Read …
Around the tracks with Renee Geyer
Renee Geyer is intrigued. “I’m sitting on a very old machine,” she says looking about her, “and it’s fun. This is good. Does the window open? Yeah, the window opens …” Read …
Teddy bears & top 10’s
At the age of 10, Nathan Cavaleri has had leukemia, a hit album and a Hollywood movie deal. Larry Schwartz discovers how he juggles schoolwork and stardom. Read …
Kid rock
Thursday night at the Esplanade Hotel in Melbourne’s St Kilda. A man with a mohawk flails away at his drums. The bass player leans up to the mike and screams abuse at the crowd. The band is the Dirty Skanks. The singer is Nathan Cavaleri. He introduces a song, MILF, which means
“Mothers I’d Like to F—“. Read …
So you want to be a rock star?
Kids in a thousand garage bands dream of getting a regular pub gig. It’s a long way to the top. Read ….
Geyer’s guidance
THE FIRST RECORD OWNED BY Ella Thompson was a late-1970s album recorded by one of her favourite singers, Renee Geyer, more than a decade before she was born. Read …
Songs of joy for the choir and its pig-hearted mentor
As typhoon Haiyan swept through the Philippines last month, a Clifton Hill community choir for mental illness carers and others anxiously awaited news of an island family and its pig, Ma’am Marlies. Read …
A troubadour by any other name
GRANDPA Pugliese was the least impressed of the relatives when young Joe changed his surname to Pug. “Most of my family was fine with that,” the singer-songwriter says. “My grandfather, who was first-generation Italian, was pretty unhappy with me.” Read …
Awakening to the rhythms of Africa
WHEN he first encountered musicians from Melbourne’s African community at his inner-city studio, photographer Damian Vincenzi was so entranced he’d forget why they were there. Read …
Strings attached
So what was I doing more than 40 years later, lugging an old nylon-stringed instrument to the doorstep of one of Australia’s foremost guitarists? Nick Charles, who lives in my neck of the woods, kindly offered a lesson after I had mentioned that I was one of those bumbling occasional players. Read …
Fine art with strings
IT’S chilly out here on the edge of the Yarra Valley. Jack Spira holds up an ornate early 20th-century Spanish guitar a local has asked him to restore in his workshop on a 160-hectare potato farm. Read …
Plucked from the roots of Africa
A journey of discovery led celebrated musician Bela Fleck to uncover the history of the banjo. Read …
Lunar voices
Monday night in Preston. Mother and daughter are among more than 30 women to have turned up at a salmon-pink building for a weekly rehearsal. They are among 45 “roaming members”, as Kavisha Mazzella puts it, of Melbourne’s three-generation Italian choir La Voce Della Luna. Read …
Brassed off
The streets of Natimuk, 27 kilometres west of Horsham, are deserted tonight. But there’s a welcoming light in an old weatherboard that once housed the fire brigade. The band is playing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Read …
Hard lessons strike a musical chord
David Leha spent half his time in some of Australia’s toughest prisons in solitary confinement for bashing guards. He was a heroin addict by his release at 21. In his late 30s, the singer-songwriter who goes by the name Radical Son wants to share the hard lessons learnt since he emerged from Long Bay, Goulburn and Parramatta jails. Read …
Snarski’s solo path brings it home
Imagine opening your front door to one of your favourite musicians. He’s brought along two guitars – steel-string and nylon – and a box of chocolates. Read …
Brothers in arms go another round
But for the laughter as Blackeyed Susans frontman Rob Snarski talks of his older brother, you might think it just as well they live in different hemispheres. Read …
Still very much in bloom
THEY thought the Blackeyed Susans would last a few weeks.
“I think it was six shows over a month in January-February 1989,” co-founder Phil Kakulas says of their early days in Perth. “And that was it.” Read …
Tjintu Desert Band pass it on
For more than a decade after they took part in a Western Desert battle of the bands, musicians from a remote Northern Territory community called themselves the Sunshine Reggae Band. Read …
Old musical tradition inspires new creation
It’s 30 years or so since a stranger with “flashing brown eyes” and an armful of cassette tapes turned up at a party at Kavisha Mazzella’s flat in Perth and changed her life. The curly-haired guest introduced her to the rich musical tradition she celebrates on a new album of Italian folk songs from the 1400s to the 1930s. Read …
World-class back to basics now
Yoseph H. Bekele was touring with a celebrated Ethiopian singer, US-based Aster Aweke, when he sought asylum in Australia. Read …
NY singer tames the savage beast of soul
Madeleine Peyroux prides herself on being “a woman who is self-aware and outspoken” in a male-dominated music industry. Read …
Singer finds her rhythm in new waves and old
Marti Brom was raised on records by the likes of Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark and Billie Holiday. She’s shared a stage with Wanda Jackson and been likened to country great, Patsy Cline, just 30 when she died in a plane crash in 1963. Read …
Refugee plucks Hazaras’ heart strings with his songs
Taqi Khan plucks a lute-like, two-stringed instrument that Melbourne’s Hazara community gave him when he settled here after three months in detention on Christmas Island. Read …
Songful journey just a dream away
Barb Jungr’s music has taken her as far afield as Malawi, Cameroon, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Cote d’Ivoire, Sudan, Norway, Holland and the United States. Read …
Bride of Bruce
Bruce Hornsby has played on more than 100 albums by the likes of Bob Dylan, Don Henley and the Grateful Dead, with whom he played more than 100 shows; his songs were featured on Spike Lee movies. Read …
Prodigy honors his benefactors
The view from London’s Royal College of Music reminds Hoang Pham of a scene in the 1990s Australian film about a fellow musician he much admires. Read …
Vintage rock set to sparkle to a Rich theme
Sherry Rich says she’ll probably wear “half a Nudie Suit” when she performs a classic late 1960s country-rock album by one of her favourite bands. Read …
In the frame, but it’s the songs that matter
DESPITE the accolades, award-winning musician Glen Hansard seems modest about his own achievements and determined to emulate the songwriters he most admires. “Life’s great goal,” says the Irish singer-songwriter, “is to write a bunch of good songs.” Read …
For the life of Lillie
Peter Lillie was in his early 60s when he died of liver disease. A distinctive guitarist, songwriter, cartoonist, poet and playwright, he was never as well-known as some contemporaries. Read …
In search of gospel truth
WHILE watching documentaries on the US civil rights movement recently, Ruthie Foster remembered how she once had to use the back door at the homes of white people in her Texas town. Read …
Introducing herself, at last
LISA Hannigan is no stranger to Australia. But the Irish singer-songwriter, who first toured here as a back-up vocalist and last visited with a tribute show, says she’s “slightly more myself this time around”. Read …
Boxing Day blues has fans jumping
CHRIS Wilson loves his cricket. “I’m not very big on the Twenty20 and one-day,” the bluesman says. “But I love Test cricket.” However, while tens of thousands pack the MCG for the Boxing Day Test between Australia and Sri Lanka, Wilson will be otherwise preoccupied. Read …
Like a rolling poem
Drawn to the words of Les Murray, Van Walker has set some of his poems to music. Read …
It’s more fun on the rougher track
THE debut album by Melbourne pop band Minibikes may seem a big departure for its founder, Marcel Borrack. Not so, says the quietly-spoken singer-songwriter, who notes that his two solo albums were “loosely described as rootsy, alt-country”. Read …
Ballet’s got the blues masters
HE’S one of Australia’s foremost blues musicians, so Ian Collard was intrigued by a telephone call as he prepared to head off to a New Year’s Eve gig. Read …
Stripped down to bare lyrics
REBECCA Barnard’s mother had some misgivings. “It’s lovely darling but it’s very repetitive,” Barnard says of her mum’s response to her last album. For the singer-songwriter, this was the point. “I just wanted to simplify everything, from the recording to the actual booklet.” Read …
Past, present and future is blues
JIMMY D. Lane was in his teens when it occurred to him that the rock guitarists who appealed to him most were playing a “harder-edged” version of the Chicago blues he’d heard since he was a child. Read …
Blues-rock guitarist’s ‘thunder hands’
DON’T believe everything you read about Alvin Youngblood Hart.
The Memphis-based blues-rock performer frequently hears claims he took his first name from the harmonica-playing character in the cartoon group Alvin and the Chipmunks. Read …
Baby’s got the best of the blues
ALVIN Youngblood Hart never had to contend with a mysterious stranger to whom legend has it some musicians sold their souls at the crossroads in exchange for mastery of their guitars. He had a benign old uncle instead, Uncle Ruben. Read …
Guitars, laughs and memories
CHRIS Wilson ambles along the footpath at the top end of Bourke Street, a man in black with a prized Gibson J-45 steel string acoustic in a scuffed guitar case. Next …
Little Feat survivor tapping out tunes
Keyboard player Bill Payne Payne might have been forced out of the band, if the ill-fated co-founder, lead singer and guitarist Lowell George — who wrote their best-known songs — had his way. Read …
Pop goes the country
Australian singer-songwriter Sherrie Austin wants to know what you make of her accent. Tell her she sounds American and she says, “Oh Gosh, to them, I’m Crocodile Dundette.” Next …
Imbruglia imbroglio
She tucks thick, rubber-heeled trainers beneath her on the couch. A fleecy tracksuit obscures the orange lettering on a faded black T-shirt. “I wear my own clothes, you know,” says the woman recently hailed by a British music paper as among the sexiest in the world. Read …
Feast of music
ABC Radio’s Alice Keath says her parents’ broad taste for music by artists as diverse as Laurie Anderson, the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Modern Jazz Quartet “rubbed off on me”. Next …
Beyond Big Red
She was singing at a music convention in Boulder, Colorado when she was approached by one of her favorite artists. Mollie O’Brien had taken the title of her latest album, Big Red Sun, from a track by the singer-songwriter. Lucinda Williams wanted to hear her sing the song. Read …
Tennessee lineswoman
SHE’S a big star. She’s won five Grammy awards. She’s had four number one singles, two platinum albums and one triple-platinum. And still they call her Mary. Read …
The Max factor
MAX SHARAM traces her surname back to the Berber tribes of North Africa. “Apparently they were green-eyed, fair-haired Algerians or something,” she says. Read …
Starmakers
SYDNEY-based John Woodruff was in London at the right moment three years ago to take charge of the career of a Perth-born singer. “I saw Suze Demarchi on a video,” says Woodruff, who has helped manage the Angels, Cold Chisel, Do Re Mi, Icehouse, Boom Crash Opera and Johnny Diesel and the Injectors. “I thought she was spectacular.” Read …
Jai Ho! Pinto
GARY Pinto has been around long enough to know that when Melbourne’s Indian community calls, you don’t say no. Read …
Raised in music
The discipline of a musical life laid the foundations of Kim Williams’ multi-stringed career. Read …
Front men
Ian McCausland is modest about his role in the history of Australian rock’n’roll. “There’s not much point in doing it any more because I still get into gigs for nothing,” he says of his years creating covers for Australian albums. “That was part of the payment. Getting into gigs for nothing.” Read …
Back to the future labels
AZTECS singer Billy Thorpe was angry. A record company wanted to release a no-frills budget compilation of music by the celebrated Australian hard-rock band and he was not impressed. Read …
Sounds like Sollee
Ben Sollee and his band cycle from town to town to a third of each year’s gigs. He once covered more than 530km miles to a festival in Tennessee with his cello strapped to his bicycle. Read ….
Zep devotees
Danny Leo was born 10 years after Led Zeppelin’s one and only Australian tour. Still, he was the obvious choice of drummer to commemorate the British rock band’s concert at Melbourne’s Kooyong Tennis Centre in the summer of 1972. Read …
Honoring the ‘Gins’
THEY were two-thirds of the original line up of an award-winning group whose name, Stiff Gins, caused controversy. While some continue to associate “gin” with a derogatory word for Aboriginal woman, Nardi Simpson and Kaleena Briggs argued that they were seeking to “redress this meaning”. Read …
Larry Schwartz Writer 