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| With the new Buried Country 1.5 CD in the works for some good little while (as I had to say to the lovely folks in Warners‘ rights department, You’re not going to be able to get the clearances for this one just by e-maling Sony or Universal, you’re going to have to chase down blackfellas all over the country), Warners meantime put into a production a couple of other anthologies of great Australian Aboriginal acts, Warumpi Band and Archie Roach, and as it’s turned out, all three are being released simultaneously on October 30 and the other two with me also contributing some liner-notes as well. Thus far it's possible to announce sort of dual-dual-launch events in Melbourne - with two 'In Conversation' sessions with Archie Roach on Friday 13th of November, the first at AWME at 2:20pm, the second at Readings in St Kilda at 6:30pm (more here) - and I hope soon to be able to confirm some more such events... |
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| Both Archie Roach and the Warumpi Band have a presence throughout Buried Country of course. But I was asked recently, by a music writer, How come there’s not more in the book about the Warumpis? especially when the new edition affords even more coverage of Archie. I was disappointed the book didn’t make its reasons for that quite clear enough itself, although I did have to wonder, maybe my inquisitor hasn’t actually read that bit yet. Which is, after all, at the end of the book – which is part of the answer too. I explained, Well, my theory is that the Warumpis come from a different tradition, a rock’n’roll/garage band tradition, and so while there is a fair bit of country about them, their basis is moreso, say, the Stones and AC/DC. Whereas Archie Roach, along with contemporaries Kev Carmody and Ruby Hunter, was a largely acoustic folk-country singer-songwriter – and so for Buried Country, looking for some sort of closure towards the end of its narrative timeframe, the breakthrough success of Archie, Kev and Ruby in the 90s provides a perfect natural resolution. I didn’t want to start on a whole new tangent at the very end of the book; the story of the settlement bands, a movement whose real spearhead in the 80s was the Warumpis, is another book in its own right, and I hope that that book (featuring a cast of characters from Soft Sands and No Fixed Address through Us Mob, the Warumpis, Bapu Mamoos, Coloured Stone, Ilkari Maru, Kuckles and Scrap Metal, Yothu Yindi, Amunda, Blackbala Mujic and others) eventually gets written. Although it won’t be by me, because I’ve got Deadly Woman Blues to do… It’s worth adding here too I think, Kev Carmody is right now also releasing a major retrospective, a 4CD anthology of previously unreleased material dating back to 1967 called Recollections… Reflections… (A Journey), and to me it’s almost as if you can’t have one of these albums without the other three – so, collect the whole set! |
