AUTUMN RENAISSANCE

​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? 

​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.
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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…

​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.