Clinton Walker
Everything Clinton
  • HOME
  • ABOUT
  • NEWS
  • BOOKS
    • Soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever
    • Suburban Songbook
    • Wizard of Oz
    • History is Made at Night
    • Golden MIles
    • Buried Country
    • Football Life
    • Stranded
    • Highway to Hell
    • Next Thing
    • Inner City Sound
    • Deadly Woman Blues
  • MUSIC
    • Silver Roads
    • Inner City Soundtrack
    • Buried Country CD/LP
    • Buried Country Roadshow
    • Studio 22
    • Long Way to the Top
    • Killer Sheep
    • Painted Ladies
    • Lagoona Records
    • D.J.
  • FILM & TV
    • Buried Country
    • Rare Grooves
    • Studio 22
    • Love is in the Air
    • Long Way to the Top
    • Sing it in the Music
    • Notes from Home
    • Monaro Pictures
  • BUY
  • BACKPAGES
    • Fanzines (1970s)
    • Journalism (1980s>90s)
    • digitaloosends (2000s)
    • Talking Head
  • RE-MIXED
    • House Without Music
    • Leaving Home
    • Bodgie Boogie
    • Rock Ink
    • Vinyl Age
    • Lowest of the Low
    • Low Biblio
    • Inner City Video
    • Co-Dependent
  • ART
  • PHOTOS
  • MEDIA
  • CONTACT

AUTUMN RENAISSANCE

8/7/2017

1 Comment

 
​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? 
Picture
Picture
Picture
​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.
​
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…
Picture
​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. 
1 Comment

"CRATE-DIGGING IS THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ROCK SCHOLARSHIP"

2/7/2017

0 Comments

 
Discogs.com has been around for while now but it's only recently it seems to have assumed a journal-of-record status. Certainly for me, due to so much of the research I do, it was a site I found myself spending an increasing amount of time trawling through. For a long time, for crate-diggers like me, there was no substitute for holding a record in your hands, which among other things was often the only way you could properly check the credits, the label copy. But now - well, Discogs is a perfectly adequate substitute for getting such dusty fingers! And so since it is indeed now this journal of record, I felt compelled to get in there and make sure the page on yours truly was as complete and correct as it could possibly be, as here
Picture
Because if you yourself are not prepared to ensure the information out there on you is not right, nobody else is going to do it, and so it will be misinformation out there. And so I'm pleased to be able to say now that my Discogs page that was already up there is as accurate as I can make it. There's only one glitch - but if Discogs wants to insist that I played on a recording made by Kid Oliver in New Orleans in 1929, I'll just have to wear it!
0 Comments
    Picture

    CLINTON WALKER

    clintonwalker.com.au

    Archives

    March 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    June 2024
    January 2024
    July 2023
    June 2023
    April 2023
    November 2022
    September 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    July 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    July 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    September 2013

    Categories

    All
    Festivals
    Publications
    Speaking Engagements