GoldenTone is a badge/brand I’ve formed as a coverall under which to continue to generate the variety of different things I’ve always done, plus do new things, whether in the old money of books or albums, or shows, or now going in perhaps unpredictable new different directions… Principally though, at the outset in 2021, it is a publishing imprint that’s putting out my new, eleventh book, Suburban Songbook.
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GoldenTone is so named in the spirit of love and homage, to the one-time Australian amplifier of the same name, whose reverberations are still dripping all over so much classic Australian music...

... and whose name itself only taps into a larger seam of the golden in Australian culture, from the blazing summer sun to the diggings in Bendigo where I was born, to Golden Breed, Golden Fleece, and Golden Miles, the great 1971 hit Healing Force song after which I’ve already named one of my books, to… GoldenTone! With the manufacture of this unique guitar amp having taken place for a mere five years between 1962 and ’67, it seemed only appropriate now more than fifty years later to resurrect it as an entity dedicated to the same values of independence, innovation, irreverence... and cut-through…

Along with the release of Suburban Songbook: Writing Hits in post-war/pre-Countdown Australia, GoldenTone is also already functioning as a channel on ​YouTube and Spotify, through which it offers chapter-by-chapter playlists to accompany not only Suburban Songbook also the Visible Spectrum’s recent reissue of Stranded (Expanded).

​GoldenTone will also offer material related to other projects of mine like Buried Country, ‘AO Disco’-DJing and more. I continue to harbour more ideas and plans that, well, as it so often seems, fall outside or beyond what the orthodox mainstream is interested in, and so GoldenTone will be the outlet through which they’ll pour… For any enquiries, go to the contact form here; meantime, stay tuned…