​"Anthony O’Grady, who died on December 19, was the Godfather. He was the writer/editor/publisher who transformed Australian rock journalism and music magazines, and took it to the next level.

"When he launched RAM in 1975, after leaving the advertising game and having edited the short-lived Ear for Music, one of his stated objectives was that its local content would be on a par with the copy it licensed in from the NME and Melody Maker – and in doing that, the fortnightly (originally-foldover) tabloid became the journal of record for the Australian music scene between the mid-70s and mid-80s.

"AOG fostered a couple of generations of Australia’s best music writers, from Annie Burton through Andrew McMillan and Jen Jewel Brown to Miranda Brown, Stuart Coupe, Greg Taylor, Toby Creswell and many others, including, daresay, yours truly.

"He left the magazine in 1981 to concentrate on his golf game and other endeavors, including having a family; through subsequent editors Greg Taylor and then Phil Stafford, RAM maintained a pre-eminence that was really only undermined by the rise of the free street press in the mid-80s; it eventually folded in 1989, one of a number of markers of the end of an era. 

"Anthony enjoyed continued success in the 80s working in film, TV and radio, winning an AFI Award in 1985 for his supervision of the soundtrack for Street Hero. In 1994, after working as editor of the in-house magazine for the Brash's chain of music stores, he was a co-founder of the influential industry tip-sheet The Music Network. In 2001, he published his one and only book, The Pure Stuff, about Cold Chisel’s 1998 reformation; it’s just a shame he didn’t do more such long-form writing – but then maybe his gift as much as anything was spotting and nurturing talent in others.

"I've often been asked how Anthony helped me develop as a writer, but by the time I arrived at RAM, at the start of 1980, he was more the Editor-at-Large of the magazine, and no longer so hands-on in the production process. He was, well, the Godfather, as the mast-head sometimes read, and it was merely his nod, the faith he put in me, that gave me the belief that I could do it. And I did, even as much as at first I must have tested everybody's patience, because, well, I really couldn't write...

"Anthony was a gentleman of almost the old school: erudite, opinionated, warm and modest. He had been ill for some time – had a kidney transplanted – but I was pleased to have kept in touch and I saw him, for a feed or a drink, on numerous occasions in recent times. When he died, in his hometown of Sydney, aged 71, from a complication in his treatment, the outpouring of affection and admiration was appropriately enormous."​

THOSE WORDS were what I wrote that rock'sbackpages.com published as per the graphic above, but since you'd need to be a subscriber to access them there, that's why I've reprinted them here. There's a few other tributes elsewhere online, but best I think, if you can access RBP, just to read some of his great old stuff; that there is not an anthology of his 'greatest hits' available is something of a travesty I reckon, but then Anthony himself, even in his last days, was cantankerously resistant to such retrospectivity. His funeral was low-key but it was great to see again some of the old mob, as the below photo shows. I love the video further below too, a 1977 story on RAM (also featuring Philip Mason, Soundtracks' publisher) from the ABC-TV afternoon kids' show Flashez. Another YouTube video that's notable beyond just Anthony's involvement is a 1973 episode of the ABC show Monday Conference, in which a panel of youth/rock experts quiz Frank Zappa, then on tour in Australia, and you can see that one, in full and in beautiful B&W, here. Go Goldilocks!

Review of the new Buried Country LP from the Weekend Australian just published, it's got the bull by the horns on a few of its facts but that doesn't lessen its great positive attitude - doesn't mean I want it rescinded! - and thanks to Andrew P. Street for it:

​That as part of the great general response to the BCLP this review plus a few other things going on at the moment have given me pause to reflect. Certainly it’s accentuating the loss of such projects as Banana Lounge and Deadly Woman Blues. Because...
         At the same time the BCLP is getting this fantastic response, there is a discussion thread on the dreaded Facebook about Inner City Sound: FORTY YEARS after the event, it’s still in print, still selling, still getting talked about, still having an impact…
         TWENTY YEARS after the Buried Country juggernaut started out, it’s the same, as the above review shows.
         When I can push through with what I want to do the way I want to do it, the results seem to follow, have legs. So how come I otherwise meet so much resistance? Sorry if this is a bit of a whinge, but sometimes it rises to the surface to annoy me further, and if I don’t reveal the invisible machinations I’m aware of that prevent the spread of the good shit, that deny it to fans, who else is going to?
         TEN YEARS after the Banana Lounge project came close to completion before a short-sighted and maybe even vindictive EMI executive cancelled it at the last minute, I was recently approached by a musician who’d heard it on a CD burn and thought it would be a good idea to get together a band and put it (the repertoire) on stage. Like a tribute show (which are all the rage these days), like the way Buried Country’s gone up onto the stage. Because as I always felt, Banana Lounge was a reclamation important in its own way too. “Such a shame it didn't go ahead at the time,” as another guy close to this proposal lamented, unable to see how his label could overcome the now-entrenched hurdles necessary to help bring it back from the dead. “It would have been a pretty defining historical overview of that era/style, and one that is still really yet to be made.”
            MERELY A YEAR after the cot-death of Deadly Woman Blues, of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the loss strikes me as similar. As the above review says of Buried Country in its book form: “For most readers it was the first time they’d heard of such artists as Dougie Young, Isaac Yama or Vic Simms.”
            For Ray Ahn, as he said on Facebook, he ‘worships’ Inner City Sound; it was where he got introduced to so much great Australian underground music, and it inspired him to take up a guitar and launch a career that’s itself now spanned over 30 legendary years. Deadly Woman Blues and Banana Lounge both dreamed of fulfilling that same sort of function, and their respective killings are a loss, I think, not just to me and to the underappreciated music and musicians they (tried to) shine a light on, but a loss too to music and music-lovers generally. I just hope that even if neither of those ever get resurrected, the several projects I am currently working on are given free rein to develop to fruition, let alone not get actively stymied. Jeezus! – whaddoo I have to do?

If you don’t believe me, this is what Jack Shit said in his Diary of Death on FBi: “Clinton Walker has a new feather in his cap. He’s doing a crazy, old-people’s disco – the A.O.Disco – at the Marrickville Bowlo: great sound system, great space, great room for dancing, you know, he’s basically devised this himself and is taking it on wholesale, solo, he is a man with peerless taste and experience across all sorts of era and genres of music, so a rare opportunity in Sydney to hear actual variety in general and especially on a dance floor, get along there, Friday night, A.O.Disco, with DJ Clinton Walker, Marrickville Bowling Club, 730-11pm, the first of many hopefully…”

... and so to usher in a new year: The A.O.Disco is a new concept in Sydney’s beleaguered nightlife, an evening of dance/music that’s not all about young people on pingers peaking at 5am; not all about the beat-matched monotony of modern-day EDM. 

First piece of writing I ever got paid for was published by this man, Anthony O'Grady, at RAM magazine in February 1980 (it was on the Boys Next Door-about-to-be-Birthday Party), and mine, for good or ill, wasn't the first 'career' he launched. Photographed recently. He died on Wednesday. He was the Godfather...

Hang the DJ!...

Lovely little item on the Buried Country LP by Jack Latimore in the Guardian you can read here. While, below, it gets the Bard of Barking's seal of approval too:

... this was the question I recently rhetorically asked John Foy, after he’d asked me a while ago if I had a clipping of the profile of him I penned for the Edge magazine back in 1990. “Well, I just found it!” I said. He replied, “Ha ha, now that the book is printed – and out…” He had wanted a copy to maybe reproduce in SnapsCrackPop!, the book he’s just published about his lifetime odyssey through music and art – and wonder of wonders, the book survives without it! But still I’m chuffed to contribute a few bits and pieces to the book; meantime here's the offending piece just for the record now I've found it: 

SnapsCrackPop! is, it says itself, neither a monograph nor memoir; it’s a bit like one of those testimonials crossed with an art book. It captures a slice, and quite a large slice, of life in Sydney music from the late 70s through to late 90s. Perhaps I’m biased because, as my appearance in a couple of happy snaps from famous Foy barbeques testifies, his world of Red Eye/Black Eye Records was one that formed a part of my life during that period too. I even lived for a short while in 1988 at the legendary big subdivided house in Queen St, Woollahara, where Foy lived too and ran the label out of the heritage-listed old stable down the end of the back yard. (Phantom Records’ Jules Normington lived in the other downstairs apartment opposite Foy, and I was dossing in the rambling top floor where at the time numerous members of Paul Kelly’s band the Coloured Girls were living.) Red Eye was a breath of fresh air on the Sydney and Australian scene in the late 80s, before it became a major force via the Cruel Sea via the label’s link-up PolyGram, and I wrote numerous stories for RAM and Rolling Stone about the Beasts of Bourbon, the Black Eye label ‘bands’, the Cruel Sea, and even the Edge profile of Foy himself, which was an indication of his coming up in the world. I even managed to con Rolling Stone into giving over a full-page on the Other Red Eye subsidiary label, Third Eye Records, and it was, well, let's just put it this way, it conspicuously fails to rate a mention in this otherwise fairly comprehensive tome - so make of that what you will! Foy had asked me for the 'Talk To...' item along with the story about Black Eye that I was able to find and has thus been reprinted in the book, across five full pages, because as he said, it nailed the whole thing in a way nothing else did.

You can read that Rolling Stone story in full in my own BACKPAGES section here, along with a major feature, again from Stone, on the Beasts of Bourbon, here, when they blasted back with Black Milk in 1990, plus read here my Juice review of the Cruel Sea’s breakthrough second album from 1992, The Honeymoon is Over, which basically concluded, you can put your glasses down folks because this band is going to be huge. (I actually remember having a bit of a disagreement with the Juice brains-trust over the item – they wanted some more detail on the songs, which I gave them, but only reluctantly because that’s what I said to them at the time: Why bother, because everybody’s going to hear it everywhere and buy it anyway! Got that one right – which is by no means usual! As if it was hard though in the case of the Cruel Sea! They remain one of the world’s best bar bands ever, next to Los Lobos.) But as I know it always somewhat irked Foy, he never quite got the due he deserved as a poster designer, and that aspect of his career is what makes this book really sing. Designed by long-time Red Eye art director Jim Paton, who designed a couple of my own books (see, I told you this was all in the family), the book is a glorious compendium of John Foy’s rock art that (now) puts him shoulder-to-shoulder alongside all the San Francisco stuff and punk stuff – which in a way it was a fusion of, along with pop art. I loved it – most of it, anyway, even when it was projecting music I wasn’t so crazy about (and Red Eye, I have to say, did do a bit of dud stuff I didn’t like, but what record company doesn't?) – and I’m pleased to see its celebration here. 

And then everything changed. I moved out of Queen St and then out of the eastern suburbs and so very largely out of the Life. Red Eye went through the mill and then Foy got out too. He went on to work for a while for the late, great art dealer Ray Hughes, and so I continued to see a bit of him because I knew Ray and tended to like his painters and often went to openings at the gallery. But then Foy left that too and I seldom saw him as he commenced a new peripatetic life as a ‘citizen of the world’. I’m just glad he got down this inside account of things before, as they do, the memories and evidence drifted off to be forgotten… I’m also flattered, vindicated – especially in the wake of Highway to Hell’s recent similar acknowledgement as the post directly below describes – that when SnapsCrackPop! lists only seven books among its recommended reading, two of them are mine (Inner City Sound and Stranded) and their assessments unequivocal… how could I not like this book after it concludes like that!? To buy a copy of SnapsCrackPop! go here, I think.

Nearly a quarter-century after my biography of Bon Scott, Highway to Hell, came out – nearly forty years since the man himself died – I am still constantly amazed at the way he’s still so alive. A silly book published recently spent more than half its length convolutedly trying to show that there was some sort of foul play in Bon’s death – and all it amounted to was nothing but speculation, conjecture and hearsay, not to mention unreadability. You couldn’t kill Bon Scott that easily! On the other hand I felt flattered recently, maybe more vindicated, when Paul Elliott's megatome AC/DC: For those About to Rock came out and its acknowledgements listed only two of the score of AC/DC-related books, Highway to Hell and Murray Engleheart's AC/DC: Maximum Rock&Roll. That's all you need. So it was no surprise when Richard Syrett asked me to appear as a talking head on his popular podcast Rock’n’Roll Twilight Zone – or was it? Because as the show’s name might suggest, it’s not unaccustomed to entertaining the odd musical conspiracy theory. And yet even then it comes down to much the same conclusions I do regarding Bon’s death and its aftermath. Which are, as I say in the show, that of the two big conspiracy theories, I subscribe to one and not the other. As my book and all my public utterances assert, I do not believe there was any foul play surrounding Bon’s death except maybe neglect, and I do believe there were more than many traces of his contributions on Back in Black but that these went uncredited. You can listen to much talk around these questions and more, from writer Susan Masino and Bon’s good friend Mary Renshaw as well as myself, across two hour-long episodes:

• Part One, here
• Part Two, there

Spencer P. Jones once paid me what it took me a while to appreciate was as good a compliment as there could be. "In music," he said, "there's two types of people - wannabes and lifers - and you're a lifer." And so now that Spencer has gone, his lifer-sentence run out, I wanted to just make note: I loved the guy. Like so many did. He just had that thing, he was impossible to dislike, he was hilariously dryly funny, and he was generous and kind - and he was a great, great rock'n'roll guitar player, songwriter and singer. Click through here or the photo below (a great too-seldom-seen shot that I recall convincing Spence to take his shirt off to allow Simon Obarzanek to take it) to read what was doubtless the most major magazine feature that Spencer ever got all to himself, which I wrote for Rolling Stone in 1994 on the occasion of the release of his belated, first solo album Rumour of Death. Sadly the rumour now is all too true. Seeya in the big bar in the sky Spence, where we'll crack a cocktail and have a laugh at the follies of our temporal lives...