​In Canberra on Friday night just passed, Australia’s NFSA (National Film & Sound Archive) put on a NAIDOC Week screening of Buried Country to launch its, umm, re-mastered re-release. With Jerikye Williams (below) opening and closing the night with two sets of his irrepressible, inimitable unreconstituted rockabilly/country-roll, it was a top event and a great way to get Buried Country, the Documentary, back into circulation. Read in full Canberra journal RiotACT’s preview here.

Stoked to announce, in the old language, that the Buried Country documentary film is being ‘re-released’ by Australia's NFSA (National Film & Sound Archive, the film’s now rights-holder). This will come as great news to the many fans who over the last few years have kept asking about seeing or screening the film. The DVD fell out of print some little while back. The film will not now come out again on DVD (because… what does?), but the NFSA is (re) launching it as part of the Buwindja Collection that will stream – here – during NAIDOC Week, July 2-9. Thereafter it will become available again to broadcasters and other platforms. Everybody in the Buried Country family is stoked, this is a great development after the BC roadshow was ‘cancelled’ in 2018.

In addition to having just signed a contract with Bloomsbury to write an entry on Saturday Night Fever for the great 33 1/3 series of little books about albums, there is right now ‘on the shelves’, as we used to say, a new global edition of Highway to Hell through Verse Chorus Press. I’ve lost count of how many editions this book has been through; perhaps all I should say is, Hey, all those readers over 30 years – a quarter-million of them – can’t be wrong! Certainly I think it is at the very least the most enduring and widely-travelled Australian music book ever published. For this new edition, it has had to be redesigned, with a new cover illustrated by the great Glenno Smith (see below!), and some new pix and graphic features. In terms of the text, the guts of the book and its general thrust remains the same of course, although since the option existed for more pages, there’s been a few fleshy bits and pieces reinstated from the original cutting-room floor; plus it addresses the misinformation and conspiracy theories that in our Trumpian age of fake news seem to have floated to the top; it also addresses Bon’s ever-deepening legacy in the wake of the death of Malcolm Young and the consequent winding-down of AC/DC. There’s been a fair bit of drivel written about Bon over the years; in this book you will meet the man in a fully-rounded portrait, and lament for the hole he left in rock’n’roll than can never be re-filled…
            It is available outside Australia from all the usual sources.

​Two of my favorite friends/artists Reg Mombassa and Glenno Smith (who did the great illustration/s for now two editions of Highway to Hell) got together during the pandemic lockdown and produced a collaborative body of work that now with the world opening up again they have only just exhibited, at the Rogue pop-up gallery in Redfern. It was a great show and to cut to the chase, since I was delighted to contributes some notes to the catalogue, I will just copy those words here:

Because I’m a music person as well as an art person and/or vice/versa, perhaps I should start with a song: “Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage.” Now of course that may not seem very rock’n’roll, in either style or sentiment, but hey, hopefully it’s thrown out a bit of a curve ball because that’s (just) one thing this show’s about… But then I always liked the theory that Frank Sinatra was the first prototype rock star, and to take the sentiment to its universal conclusion, what it’s all about is the perfect union…
            And that’s what this show – CREATURES: Losing the War with Nature – is indeed mostly about, or where it starts on first-principles: a perfect union, and ‘union’ not in the singular but plural, of the artists themselves, and of art and music, and the art itself…
            Of course, it’s one of the very tropes of rock history, how so many musicians started out in art school, from John Lennon, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend and Ray Davies, to David Bowie, Brian Eno and Bryan Ferry, to Nick Cave, David Byrne and in fact all the members of the Talking Heads and the Clash; to our stars here, Reg Mombassa and Glenno Smith, who both have long histories as musicians as well as jobbing artist, to – daresay, me too! Reg is a couple of years older than me and so I figure that when I was just starting at Brisbane Art College in the mid-70s, he was just finishing at East Sydney tech, Paddington, at around the same time he was starting on the first stirrings of what would become Mental As Anything. I dropped out to take up writing, about music mainly, greatly inspired by the then-nascent punk movement, into which the Mentals sometimes got roped. Glenno is quite a bit younger again but got bitten by much the same bug – punk/rock and art. And if it’s not needless to add, not just all the same-old same-old canonistic highbrow fodder, nor its official alternative in the contemporary conceptual avant-garde, but all sorts of the art that’s sometimes now lumped under the label ‘lowbrow’– comics, B-movies, daytime TV, crass advertising, psychedelic poster art, album cover design, all things apparently ‘kitsch’ as the outmoded discriminatory term used to have it; same as Reg was always smitten by too, and me as well. When Glenno lit out of his native Orange to go to same Paddington circle that was Reg’s alma mater, the snooty teachers there told this boy from the bush that his ‘surfie art’ would never cut it, and that maybe, if he was lucky, like Reg (as if luck has had anything to do with Reg’s sustained success!), he might get a job at Mambo… And this as recently as the early 90s!
            So, fuck that, Glenno thought, and kept on doing what he was doing, forming his first band Lawnsmell and continuing to hone his skills as an illustrator, not least in doing gig posters, record covers, T-shirts and pet-portrait commissions. It was inevitable, then, that he and Reg would cross paths…
            Glenno is not only an artist and musician but also something of an entrepreneur, if that tag’s not too lofty for someone to whom the concept of DIY is fundamental and almost sacrosanct. After numerous exhibitions of his own and collaborations with the likes of Neil ‘Birdhat’ Tomkins, Glenno hatched the idea of a sort of mini-festival alternative to the Sydney Biennale, called Bein’Narly (geddit? many didn’t). This wasn’t with any funding underwriting it, grants doled out for applications drowning in all the requisite theory/politics, it was driven by nothing but Glenno’s sheer zeal for a lot of great art that is its own community in Sydney but which seems to be completely beneath the orthodox art world’s notice.
            One of the artists Glenno approached to be in the first Bein’Narly group show at the start of 2016 was Reg, and the pair were like two peas in a pod, not only due to sharing similar roots but also an attitude that’s anti-careerist and includes a refusal to take anything too seriously; “and other preoccupations,” as Glenno says, “that were big last century.” I went to the show’s opening night, and it was great – lots of people, great art, warm beer, good vibes; not a ‘creative’ or curator in sight, no arts hub or precinct necessary… Just do it! But then of course the pandemic hit…
             But as it was for so many artists, this was an opportunity to dig in on work without any distractions. And that’s how this collaboration began.
            To add to his mastery of linework and cross-hatching, Glenno had started experimenting with lino-printing. He collaborated with another great Sydney musician/artist Ray Ahn, adapting drawings by Ray to this mass-production medium and getting beautiful results. And so it was during lockdown that Glenno and Reg got together – as GReg, prounounced ‘gredge’, not ‘Greg’ – and started on so many of the works included in this show.
            They would shuttle piles of lino between each other, Reg would draw on them, and Glenno would interpret and carve, later adding digital colour until, as Glenno put it, “we found a happy medium. Some colours get changed and some ideas go further than expected, until we both say, Done. It's fun.”
              The show is comprised of not only these new products of this perfect union, but also works by the individual artists that may or may not be related. And so it becomes, for me, like this one great big giant monster mash-up, this aesthetic, this narrative, like a form of suburban surrealism, and it’s just really unique and bold and strong. And if not without its vulnerabilities, crucially with a broad iconoclastic sense of humour. I mean, to me that’s all you need to say about the work, it’s just this seamless union, of good and good. It’s fun.
             Of course, Glenno did end up working with Mambo, like it was a reverse graveyard for the actually imaginative/talented, and if the next best union of he and Reg might be a double-header tour by their respective, current bands – Dog Trumpet and the Hellebores – then that’s just something we’ve still got to look forward to.

​My good pal Andrew Leavold’s new film Pub: The Movie, about the unofficial mayor of St.Kilda Fred Negro, has now been premiered in Melbourne and Sydney, and the screening I saw at the old Hoyts cinemas on George St in the city, as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival, was a ton of fun. I appeared in Pub: The Movie, but I do not appear on "Pub: The T-shirt" that I’m pictured wearing above. That’s because if it’s true – and I think it is – that you haven’t made it in Melbourne music until you’ve appeared in Fred’s long-running comic strip Pub, the fact that I’m from Sydney might account for that. But then the fact also that I serve in the film as something of a devil’s advocate, most notably reading aloud a terrible review I gave to Fred’s band I Spit On Your Gravy in Rolling Stone in 1985 – and cracking myself up in doing so; I mean, did I just say that!? – might have something to do with it too. (I must be getting typecast, just incidentally, since I also just did such a devil's advocate interview for a forthcoming documentary about Michael Gudinski!) But then moral outrage is something Fred thrives on, and I’m all for it. Nearly forty years ago I thought I Spit On Your Gravy was musically a terrible band, and said so, but I soon learnt you had to be there, so to speak, and the pricking of pomposity and not just pomposity but hypocrisy and mediocrity, as Fred delights in doing, is an extremely worthwhile pursuit, and so I salute him and I salute Andrew Leavold. 

Much as I might have thought I was never someone on the I-94 Bar’s Xmas card list (due to historical aesthetic differences), it’s magnanimous of this estimable website to offer me some coverage and I greatly appreciate it. But it's all Robert Brokenmouth’s fault! Robert gave a thoughtful positive review to the recent re/issue of Stranded, and now he’s doubled up with a great review of Suburban Songbook. “Suburban Songbook is so readable,” he says, “it's like a few old mates sharing a beer or four at the local, and the wraparound context is what really makes it tick.”
     Well, that’s always my first principle for any book - readability! - along with it having some humour, which Brokenmouth also credits in this case, along with some insights. So, for me, that’s the bases covered…  
     Brokenmouth concludes: “If Walker had only ever written Inner City Sound or Highway to Hell or Stranded, his reputation as the grand old historian of Australian music would have been assured. The Suburban Songbook bookends the lot, and is, in my opinion, at least as essential.” Read the review in full here

The Outpost on 2SER is one of the great institutions of Australian public radio, and that’s saying something because Australian public radio as we are so fortunate to have it is some of the best in the world, and so I was delighted to appear on air yesterday with host Vinny Ramone to talk about Suburban Songbook and beyond – or rather, doubly delighted since it was Vinny’s 700th show! which of course is just another vote for the show’s significance and on-going relevance. And so thanks Vinny, was great to be there, we had a great chat and you said yourself we could have gone on all day and it just would have been even more fun; anyway, you can here to listen to the show, and copied following is the playlist we talked around, which opens on a few things reflective of The Outpost’s standard global view after which, when I flopped in front of the interviewee’s mic, it shifts to all-Australian which is reflective of what Suburban Songbook is all about - great Australian songs and songwriting!

​You Turn Me On I’m A Radio [For The Roses] – JONI MITCHELL
Heart Of Gold [Harvest] – NEIL YOUNG
Pretty Soon [Blue With Lou] – NILS LOFGREN
Butterfly Kiss [In And Out Of The Light] – THE APARTMENTS
Cootamundra [Hot-Wire The Lay-Low Australian Escapist Pieces For Guitar] – D.C. CROSS
Billy [Stockholm] – TRIFFIDS
Arkansas Grass [Silver Roads: Australian Country Rock & Singer Songwriters Of The 70’s] – AXIOM
St. Louis [The Definitive Anthology] – EASYBEATS
Cut A Rug [Buried Country: The Story Of Aboriginal Country Music] – DOUGIE YOUNG
Homemade Didgeridoo [Buried Country: The Story Of Aboriginal Country Music] – COUNTRY SHADES
Jackson’s Track [Buried Country: The Story Of Aboriginal Country Music] – LIONEL ROSE
Everlovin’ Man [The Loved Ones Magic Box] – LOVED ONES
Simple Ben [Morning Of The Earth – Soundtrack] – JOHN J. FRANCIS
Gypsy Queen [Silver Roads: Australian Country Rock & Singer Songwriters Of The 70’s] – COUNTRY RADIO
Call Me A Drifter [Silver Roads: Australian Country Rock & Singer Songwriters Of The 70’s] – RAY BROWN & MOONSTONE
The Ballad Of Ned Kelly [Silver Roads: Australian Country Rock & Singer Songwriters Of The 70’s] – FOTHERINGAY
I’m Your Satisfier [Choice Cuts] – MASTERS APPRENTICES
I’ll Be Gone [Boogie!: Australian Blues R&B And Heavy Rock From The 70’s] – SPECTRUM
Wild Down Home [7” single] – KILLER SHEEP
Play Mama Play (Sing Me A Song) [Silver Roads: Australian Country Rock & Singer Songwriters Of The 70’s] – JOHN J. FRANCIS
Truck Driving Woman [Buried Country: The Story Of Aboriginal Country Music] – AURIEL ANDREW
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