​… more like a working holiday at best…
            A little while back, an email arrived in my intray address-lined ‘spacemonkey’ and subject-lined ‘”Motown to the Mekong” Invitation to Cambodia’. It was from Julien Poulson, who I’d met a year or so previously at a Melbourne gig by his band fronted by the bewitching Srey Channthy, the fabulous Cambodian Space Project, and he was wondering if I’d like to come over to Khmer at his behest, to go on the road with the band, play a role akin to writer-in-residence on a tour-cum-general journey of discovery going under the working banner of ‘Motown to the Mekong’ and designed to result in – what? certainly a new album by the CSP, to be produced by Jim Diamond, from Detroit, who like me would also be on board the ‘boogaloo bus’, and maybe also a film, or a book, stageplay, or artworks, since the Sticky Fingers screenprinting studio is part of the burgeoning SpaceFourZero gallery/shop-cum-agency/empire that the expat Tasmanian Poulson oversees out of Phnom Penh with his American partner Tony Lefferts – to all of which I said, “Wow!”
            And then said again “wow-wow-wow!” Which meant, Yes, I’d love to come....
            And so on Friday April 29, I fly out of Sydney destined for Phnom Penh, thanks greatly to the generosity of the US Embassy there. I’m still not exactly quite sure what’s going to unfold. Everyone over there keeps telling me, Anything could happen – it’s Cambodia! Either way, it will explore the cross-cultural links and contribute to the on-going rebirth of Cambodian go-go rock'n'roll that's been growing in the wake of Western fusion bands like not only the CSP but also LA's Dengue Fever, and the 2014 documentary film Don't Think I've Forgotten.
            So, starting on Saturday afternoon, there will be the opening of a joint exhibition of artworks from Sticky Fingers and a studio from Shanghai called Idle Beats. As much as the Cambodian Space Project’s music it was their look and the design of their packaging and posters, and the prints of the affiliated Sticky Fingers studio, that drew me in – the three artifacts repreoduced here are a small indication of their embarrassment of riches – and then when I looked at some of the output of Idle Beats I was just as impressed, so this show is an exciting prospect indeed. Then on the Saturday night, the CSP launch their May tour of Cambodia with their first local gig of the year, at the Exchange in Phnom Penh.
            What follows will be 10 days full of gigs, workshops, receptions, forums, research and, hopefully, just a bit of relaxation... Read a preview article in the Cambodia Daily here...

​Now, I’ve written plenty of liner notes for albums in my time, but never before for a single – but that’s what’s happening with the new Halfway 45 “Bret Canham’s Leather Jacket,” which is out now on Plus One Records – but then Halfway have made a habit of not only making great records but also presenting them beautifully, all the way down to singles with gatefold sleeves and even – gasp! – liner notes…
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​I love Halfway. Right now, they are my favorite Australian band. It’s true I don’t really keep dibs on the scene these days, because I don’t have to, I’m not a rock journalist or anything and so I don’t even have to pretend I’m up with everything, or even anything – but I know what I like and I Iove Halfway. I’m still listening to their last album Any Old Love. I’m not really sure how the business works these days either, but the fact that Any Old Love wasn’t more widely celebrated (it’s a stone classic) suggests it’s not so different to what it ever was…
 
From Brisbane, it’s a long way to go to Nashville to make a record that’s not very country, and very Rockhampton – but just as Grant McLennan, who was conspicuously also a Rockhampton boy, had to go to London to write “Cattle & Cane,” it’s often, as they say, only the road out of town that leads you back to find yourself. And that’s what Halfway have done with their new album, The Golden Halfway Record, whence the lead single “Bret Canham’s Leather Jacket” comes: it's a song cycle of bittersweet love that ends when you grow out of a troubled adolescence and fly the coop…

Check it out: vinyl (45 and 33) through Plus One, and the album on CD or as a download through ABC Music.

​At a time when the program for the 2016 Sydney Writers Festival has just been released and, groan, it’s pretty much more of the same-old middlebrow same-old as usual, it’s great to be able to report that Australia’s first ever Rock & Roll Writers Festival at the Brightside in Brisbane over the weekend of April 2/3 – which was conceived in the first place because this significant sector of the book market gets short shrift from the typical run of snooty writers festivals – was a raging success. Well, it was from my perspective, and I’ve no doubt it was equally so from the perspective of everybody else that was there too, whether as a participant and panelist, or reader and audience-member. And if, as a bold inaugural event, it was less successful financially as such inaugural events tend to be, hopefully its flying start has to portend well that that momentum is sufficient to propel it into becoming an annual event…

In the lead-up to the weekend, having survived co-organiser Leanne de Souza casting me in this interview here as a septuagenerian sex symbol (when asked, “What kind of people should come along? Is it just for music fans? Should we bring our grandma?” she replied, “I don’t know your grandma, but mine would probably get a crush on Clinton Walker”!!), I was wont to invoke the legendary 1973 rock writers convention in Memphis, which was the first of its type held anywhere, ever. The tall stories that surround this event are legion (read about it here), or at least the writers are: legends like Lester Bangs, Cameron Crowe, Lenny Kaye, Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches, Greg Shaw and Stanley Booth. This was the dawn of rock criticism, and all on the tab of Stax Records, with a special showcase gig by Big Star; or maybe it was just a clever way to launch the band, who were signed to Stax subsidiary label Ardent.
            I’d like to think that more than forty years later and half a world away in Brisbane in 2016, we did alright, and certainly, as opposed to the all-male line-up in Memphis in ’73, it was refreshing to have such a female-skew. There was a lot of laughs, a bit of serious stuff, a few tears, a lot of boozing, a lot more boozing and – well – even more boozing.

​Brisbane itself was wonderful, the city has a real buzz about it, of people going out, experiencing music and having a good time, which is something that Sydney could learn a real lesson from. Or rather let’s hope that the lock-out laws that Brisbane too is about to adopt won’t destroy it the way Sydney is now a ghost town.
            It was great to catch up with old friends and to make new friends, and to be turned on to writing I hadn’t read and to celebrate and investigate writing that warrants it. It was great to meet Chris Salewicz, the festival’s sole international visitor and a great writer and top fella with a seemingly bottomless store of yarns about the golden age of the NME in the 70s, Jamaica and Bob Marley, the Clash and so much else. It was great to catch up with Brisbane natives and long-standing friends and colleagues like Andrew Stafford, Ritchie Yorke and Noel Mengel, and others I know in Brisbane like John Busby and Andrew McMillen, and some I hadn’t met before like Sam Wagan Watson, Leanne Kelly and Bec Mac. It was great to meet the two wild women from the Gold Coast who give Bec Mac a run for her money, Sally Breen and Nikki McWatters; and to see young ones and especially younger women like Jenny Valentish, Kate Hennessy and Jess Ribeiro shifting things up a bit. I might not have got to break bread with Lester Bangs, or see Big Star in their prime, but I was pretty happy anyway, and to anyone whose panel I missed or who I didn’t get the opportunity to get to know better, well, that just leaves us something to look forward to next time…

Stand-out line/anecdote of the weekend for me was from Ritchie Yorke, who recalled how as a young DJ on Brisbane radio in the early 60s, he was told, after spinning a black American soul side, not to play that ’nigger shit’ any more, and how that was what made his mind up to get outta town: it resonated for me since it was a similar if more politely/covertly-put sentiment that drove me out of the mainstream press as recently as the early 1990s.
            Total props to Leanne de Souza and Joe Woolley for making it all happen. Read more post-mortems here, here, here and here.