​I hadn’t wanted to put the mozz on any of this, but I think it’s safe to say out loud now: I have just completed a concerted campaign to find publishers for three new books, with the signing of three contracts with three publishers for the three titles. It never rains but it pours eh? 

​These three books will break what seems like a bit of a drought since 2013 when I last published an all-new title. They also mark a return to music after a couple of books about different things like Golden Miles and Wizard of Oz; and one, extremely excitingly, is my first-ever graphic book. The three titles/deals are:

• The Suburban Songlines: Writing Hits in post-war/pre-Countdown Australia, a different approach to the history of local pop, in that rather than going in search of a Sound, it seeks out the Songs and the songwriters whose originality prefigured the sound. It will be published out of Perth by Starman Books, an exciting new Australian initiative in music books whose site you can check here.


• Deadly Woman Blues, my long-gestating sister-sequel to Buried Country, a graphic history of black women in Australian music on which you can see a bit more here, and with a YouTube Playlist here. It will be published early next year, by New South Press.


• Shadow Dancing, a dual biography-cum-cultural history of Robert Stigwood, the Bee Gees and their collaborative apotheosis in Saturday Night Fever, has been signed up by PanMacmillan, with a view to publishing it towards the end of next year…

 
Obviously all this will add up to a pretty busy next couple of years for me, but I’m hopeful and confident that with each of the three books at different stages – with both The Suburban Songlines and Deadly Woman Blues completed to the extant of only now needng to be artworked, and with a first draft of Shadow Dancing well underway – I can apportion or stagger my workload so as to avoid a logjam.
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Actually it’s all just incredibly exciting! For a while I’ve been saying that I’m going to get out of writing books, because it’s just not the same any more, a different world, and I am going to do that, get out of it, but not before, as I’ve also always said, I clear my desktop, so to speak, of these three major projects I’ve been nurturing along for a few years now… and then I’ll think about a future in which art and music-theatre will take a larger role whatever happens…

​I should take this opportunity to also mention a film I’m working on. Based on the pages of the same name on this website, Lowest of the Low is a documentary about the great glory days (second phase) of the old inky Australian rock press, between the late 70s and late 80s, when the Big 3 R’s ruled, RAM, Roadrunner and Rolling Stone. My brother in arms on this project is film-maker Matt Walker, and rather than farting around jumping through hoops trying to raise money and all that, we’re simply doing it, just starting to shoot some stuff on-spec…

​Thanks meantime to James Anfuso (Starman), Pip McGuinness (New South) and Angus Fontaine (PanMacmillan), and to Nick Shimmin, who almost single-handedly kick-started me on all this, and to Michael Lynch, who, as he constantly reminds me, is neither my bitch or my beard – chuffed to be working with all you wonderful people! I’m calling it my autumn renaissance. 

Went to the Sydney Film Festival to see the premiere of Kriv Stenders’ new GoBteweens documentary Right Here, in which I appear (a lot!) as a sort of star witness-cum-bad cop. I will resist my usual instinct to add more grist to the mill – the film does that quite adequately enough itself (it's amazing how raw and partisan the first break-up of this band still is, thirty years after the event) – suffice to say the film is good, I think, striking a pretty fair balance (though it might have been nice to see a bit of screen-time for Glenn and Adele), and from a personal point of view, I’m just glad it doesn’t quote me saying anything any more incendiary than the trailer suggested. It will be broadcast  later in the year on ABC-TV, so check it out then…

​​When Leah Flanagan announced early this year that she was pregnant, we at Buried Country: Live in Concert were all not only naturally delighted but hopeful-confident it wouldn’t cause too much disruption to her regular schedule. But when the baby refused to emerge for a few weeks beyond the due date, it was clear the Buried Country show at Dark Mofo in Hobart would have to do without one of its star attractions. 

And so, when young Tom Emilio Jones, aka Tuco, was born on Monday, May 29, just days before the Hobart show – and it should go without saying that all our congratulations went and go to Leah, Tom and the little fella; we know they’ll make a great, loving family – we thought the show would have to be dedicated to him… so, this one was for you Tuco…
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​And happily, as the Buried Country mob has made it fairly standard practice, it was a top show.

The festivalisation of culture is a syndrome that seems to enjoy almost universal approbation. But I am surprised there isn’t a tad more wariness about it, or concern, like I feel. I mean, it’s state-controlled culture after all, and at worse when, say, in a place like my hometown of Sydney, the grass-roots that was once a thriving live music circuit has effectively been killed off – meaning if nothing else, where do to tomorrow’s festival stars come from? In Hobart, it’s a bit different, because the Dark Mofo festival of which BC was part largely comes down to one man, David Walsh, who’s not a bureaucrat or public servant but rather a wildcat philanthropist who’s almost single-handedly put Hobart on the culture map, and certainly bolstered its tourist trade, with his amazing MONA gallery and all the events that spin off it, like DMFO. Walsh and his empire is not beholden to the corporate-politics that so often stultify festivals. I’d been to MONA on one previous occasion and while there was almost as much art there that I wasn’t fond of as there was that I did like, that’s the point, and what’s great about it.

DMFO was much the same, among the attractions I was able to squeeze in, some fantastic, some less so I thought, but all of them adding up a vibrant variegated whole, which is how it ought to be.

I’d like to think Buried Country was generally one of the highlights. If audience reaction is anything to go by, certainly they seemed to enjoy it. In fact, I don’t think we’ve had a better audience, in terms of foreknowledge. There was a real nice little record shop (remember them?), Music Without Frontiers, virtually next door to the Odeon Theatre, and walking past it on shownight the strains of “Blue Gums Calling Me Back Home” rang out, and that was a lovely little touch that doubly encouraged me to buy a couple of disks (remember that too?). The audience for the show recognised many of the songs and gave them encouragement in anticipation, and responded with terrific applause and, at the end, with a standing ovation. We were all humbled and so, thank you, Hobart. Thank-you too to more than a few friends from Sydney and other parts of Tasmania who made the effort to be at the show, and played a part in its success.

In the absence of the new young mum, we re-shuffled the set slightly. Warren Williams, who opened the show as he usually does and with his usual stirring spirit, is to be doubly commended for pushing through some tragic sorry business back home. Luke Peacock has been enduring some trevails too and apart from wrestling one of our hire cars in an altercation, performed well too. Nobody was going to tackle Leah’s “September Song,” but Franny was game to take on “Brown Skin Baby,” as on offering to Leah, Tom and Tuco, and she pulled it off, again, with customary verve, a bit more country than Leah’s version.

​The following morning, a few of the mob went into to the ABC for a session with Radio National’s Books and Arts program, which you can listen to here, and then over the next two nights, a few of ’em played short solo spots at the Winter Feast. For me, I finished my five days with a visit to MONA to see the opening of its latest exhibition, the Museum of Everything, and I was totally blown away by a vast show of outsider art or whatever you call it that I couldn’t see any other state-controlled gallery in the country ever daring to put on. Buried Country is a bit like outsider art too – my favourite kind! – and we will continue in our campaign to storm the citadel. ​

​Overdose is a new AC/DC fan/maga/web-zine coming out of Sweden that sets a new high bar for the scholarship of all things Seedie. As the author of the AC/DC-related book that just keeps on beating off challengers to its title as the best of all AC/DC-related books – Highway to Hell, the original, forensic, unflinching and masterful biography Bon Scott always deserved – Overdose asked me to write a short foreword for their new, third issue. And that I did with pleasure. You can read the item here, and if you’re interested in the whole issue, go to the Overdose website here.

​On last weekend's fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Referendum that accorded Australian Aboriginal people citizenship in their own country – a time when Aboriginal people were making more history with the Uluru conference on constitutional recognition – I was honoured to be asked to go into ABC Local Radio in Sydney and, with the ABC’s Indigenous Affairs Editor Stan Grant, go on a ‘Sonic Journey’ on Simon Marnie’s morning show through some of the pertinent music of the era. Stan is a long-standing Buried Country fan (“It’s the soundtrack to my life,” he said!), and a top fella who really knows his tunes. If you want to listen to all the tracks and talk, go to the second half of the two-hour podcast of Simon’s show here, although hurry because it might not last long.

​Here’s a lure: the hour includes the unveiling of a recently remastered version (thanks to Darren Hanlon and the guys from Vinyl Frontier) of Jimmy Little’s legendary B-Side from 1958, “Give the Coloured Lad a Chance,” which was written by his father and is surely the first-ever Aboriginal ‘protest’ song committed to wax. Given the nature of the song, the nature of Australian radio back when and the rarity of the record (I’d not even seen a copy until just recently, when Bruce Milne gave me this one; thanks Bruce), it’s possible that this is the first time it’s ever been heard on air period! The track will hopefully be included on a new Buried Country vinyl LP coming out of America soon; but that’s another story…

​It would be an understatement to say I was a bit taken aback to see this trailer for the new GoBetweens’ documentary Right Here. I mean, I’ve got a presence and a billing that could lead the uninitiated to think I was actually in the band – and this just the trailer! So it’s with a bit of trepedation I approach the premiere at the Sydney Film Festival in a few weeks’ time. I won’t link that up because I believe it’s already sold out; though it will be screened by ABC-TV later in the year. 

​... Goin’ faster mile an hour…" It was one of the greatest-ever monster hits that never was, clarion call to more than just a whole new musical order – and so when Bruce Milne and me in Melbourne, struggling in 1978 to keep putting out our fanzine Pulp, heard about this mob in Adelaide launching a magazine named after one of our favourite songs by one of our favourite groups Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, we headed straight over there to find out what was going on… and we got involved – and it turned out that Roadrunner became a pretty significant thing – which is why the University of Woollongong has just posted up online here, as part of its Historical & Cultural Collections portal, a complete set of the magazine, every page of all 48 issues published between 1978 and ’83, and why I’m here now like this suggesting you check it out…

As an adjunct to which, Donald Robertson, Roadrunner’s guiding light, has also posted up his own personal history of the magazine here on his fantastic Roadrunner Twice site, and it’s a great read, not so much a cautionary tale on the perils of independent publishing because publishing is a different world now and the old rules no longer apply, but rather a glimpse into those last wild days of ink still when it still ruled, and how wide open it was if you were just prepared to give it a shake...

This is what I remember: Making two trips to Adelaide during that period. No, actually what I remember is two transits, one going back to Melbourne with Bruce on the train, and another time, I remember hitch-hiking over to Adelaide from Melbourne and getting caught up in Ballarat with the people giving me a ride. Talk about ‘roadrunner’! I guess I was living it. (It’s hard to believe in retrospect that I hitch-hiked as much as I did around the country in the late 70s, often armed with little more than a toothbrush, a notebook and spare pair of underpants stuffed in my jacket pocket, but those were the times and that’s what I did. Anyway.) Bruce and I connected over in Adelaide with these people there starting this magazine, Donald Robertson and Stuart Coupe among others, and Roadrunner became sorely important on the Australian scene at that crucial turn out of the 70s into the 80s. It was a golden age for underground press, inspired to such a large extent by the DIY ethic of punk. Australia already had three national rock magazines at the time, RAM, Juke and Rolling Stone. Juke was weekly out of Melbourne and RAM fortnightly out of Sydney, and Rolling Stone, well, now I think of it, was it fortnightly too in the 70s? I think it was. That’s how fertile the market was – it could sustain this sort of saturation. There was an explosion of fanzines going on, out of which Roadrunner itself grew, and then after that there was another new wave of new magazines in the early 80s, especially art/fashion/music crossovers like Virgin Press and Vox coming out of Melbourne, and Stiletto starting up in Sydney; before all the free street press came along, but that’s another story…

Roadrunner was bold and showed what was possible even from the remote regional origins of Adelaide, and it completed the troika, I’ve always thought, of Australia’s Big 3 Rs of rock media, along with RAM and Rolling Stone. No doubt though Roadrunner was always the poor sister, even – especially! – after it moved to Sydney in 1982, the rearguard action that rather than resuscitating the magazine, finally killed it off. But the Roadrunner legacy is terrific, and that’s why it’s so good to see it archived here now as it has been. They’ve got something going on down in the ’Gong, it’s great: The uni there is to be hugely commended for getting busy in a field that’s too often overlooked by our august institutions of learning. Archiving Oz as they recently did here is just an amazing resource that’s to be treasured and the Roadrunner backpages are just another addition to this fantastic act of cultural recovery. See the full collection here, it's fantastic.

For me to flick through it now, every page is familiar, these things when they’re old and rare we find imprinted on our mind already anyway. But I’ve got to confess, I’d completely forgotten my first-ever contribution to RR, and when I came across it I was shocked it was a live review of Status Quo at Melbourne Festival Hall! The Quo! in 1978! OMG! How did they coerce me to go along and do that?! Anyway, I went on to write on and off for the magazine over the next couple of years, starting under the title of Melbourne Editor, as listed on the mast-head as I’m reminded now, and still using my nom-de-punque ‘Cee Walker’. Which was all really just a front to make it a bit easier to blag free records and get on the door at gigs.

Bruce Milne actually threw his lot in with RR, chucked in his uni course and fully moved over to Adelaide. Where, when Stuart Coupe jumped ship at the next best offer, a paying gig on staff at RAM in Sydney, he felt somewhat left in the lurch. So Bruce soon enough returned to Melbourne, and took over the editor’s role from me – me, as usual, or so it appears, too much the loose cannon even for a loose cannon enterprise like RR!  

I wrote quite a few biggish stories on new music, the first stories on the GoBetweens, the Laughing Clowns and others like Whirlywirld and the Primitive Calculators; post-punk elektronika was a big part of my agenda. I did a July 1979 co-cover story (shared with the Angels and XTC) on the subject called "The Future is in the Flesh" (click through the pages below to read); it was such a vital movement/idea, Rolling Stone got me to repeat/update it a few years later. Consequenty when I wrote a live review of the Lipstick Killers it was a panning that, well, became notorious and really just maintained my marked-man status in Sydney’s post-Birdman Detroit scene. In retrospect, the Killers’ then-single “Hindu Gods of Love” was an absolute killer. But then Peter Nelson followed it up with his legendary decimation of Birdman spin-off band the Comrades of War, and I was off the hook, at least momentarily.

I tapered off on my contributions after I left Melbourne at the start of 1980 and moved to Sydney, where straight away I started writing for RAM and Rolling Stone, and getting paid for it. And so I had little space left in my diary for writing anything for free. So I dropped off, did a few bits and pieces. But the magazine remained a force. Flicking back through it now I’m reminded of a few good writers like Craig N. Pearce just for one. Bruce faded away from it too, went on to start Fast Forward. Then Adrian Ryan, a fine writer and a fine fellow, took over as Melbourne Editor and did a good job. But maybe it was indeed a mistake to try and compete with the other two Rs on their own terms. Maybe Roadrunner should have more clearly delineated its brand identity as ‘alternative’ and not covered the mainstream acts like the Angels. This was a question symptomatic of a bigger question that caused much wrist-wringing at the time. But then both the Virgin Press and Vox, who did identify as anti-mainstream, didn’t survive either, so who knows?

Donald moved himself and the magazine to Sydney in 1982, when I was on sojourn overseas, and he tried to keep it alive but couldn’t. Rolling Stone went monthly and became much more locally abreast, and so the real battle became between Stone and RAM. For me, Roadrunner was more than just a learning experience, I did some good coverage that I think added to the general edge of the magazine. Roadrunner went on to one last glossy issue out of Sydney in early 1983 and then went down. Donald eventually got a gig editing the then-newly-convened Countdown magazine, to which I contributed when I got back from the UK. But the Countdown mag was never a patch on Smash Hits – this was what the 80s were becoming, glossy in every way – and Donald and I moved on to the respective rest of our lives. For a while, Donald worked, with distinction, for the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal. He takes rightful pride in Roadrunner and its legacy, and if you have a look at the material – again, the archive here, Donald’s reminiscences here – you’ll understand why.
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You can read more of my own related reminiscences here (on local punk fanzines and their feeding in to magazines like RR) and here (on the history of the literature of Australian music generally in the era of ink). ​

​In the 1980s, “Sydney was a wild, untamed, sophisticated, cosmopolitan frontier town” – so say I in a new Radio National Earshot documentary by Greg Appel in which I appear as, umm, a talking head? Searching for Troughman goes looking for one of the lost icons of that lost Sydney: ‘Troughman’ was a regular at Mardi Gras Sleaze Balls and RAT parties, a gay man who… well, I’ll leave it to you to listen to find out if you don’t already know… the program provides an irreverent and highly entertaining glimpse into a (pretty harmless) world that wouldn’t survive today for all our trigger warnings, security and health and safety issues and finger-waving wowserism generally: Onya Greg… Listen here

Buried Country: Live in Concert delighted to announce we have been confirmed to play the opening night of Dark Mofo down in Hobart, Tasmania, on June 8: