​"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 resentful EMI executive cancelled it at the last minute, I was recently approached by a musician mate 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 the 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.