It's not often that I'm asked out of the blue to write anything, let alone that an editor will approach me with a great idea. But that's precisely what happened when Christian Ryan first got in touch about getting me to do something for his book project that eventually emerged as Rock Country. As it turned out, I couldn't do that original idea, and I can't really talk about why not for the same reason I couldn't write it, suffice to say that hopefully maybe one day I will be able to do it without betraying too many confidences and needlessly hurting too many people. But we kept tossing around the ideas, until we came up with one - a piece on Barry Gibb, apropos his early-2013 Australian tour - that in the end I think came out okay...
I was naturally delighted to be involved in such a high quality project. With two of my fellow Sydney-based contributors, Peter Doyle and Fiona McGregor, we concluded that Christian Ryan is a legend! As an editor, he'd make a great art director, with an obvious eye for photography and design that rivals his aptitude for words. The book looks as good as it reads. In all that, I should reiterate Christian's gratitude to his partner Maria Tumarkin, who helped him on the production as well as contributed a great piece on discovering NIck Cave in her native Russia, and to Janet Austin, a very old mate who also worked on the production. Australian music doesn't need any more of all the same old stories over and over again as a lot of the media, writers and publishers seem determined to keep churning out and shoving down our throats - but rather some fresh angles like are in evidence here. I just hope the market shows the support Rock Country deserves. In other words, buys it. The cover price is high I know, but at only double that of the average shitty trade-paperback authorised biography, worth every penny.
