| ... this was the question I recently rhetorically asked John Foy, after he’d asked me a while ago if I had a clipping of the profile of him I penned for the Edge magazine back in 1990. “Well, I just found it!” I said. He replied, “Ha ha, now that the book is printed – and out…” He had wanted a copy to maybe reproduce in SnapsCrackPop!, the book he’s just published about his lifetime odyssey through music and art – and wonder of wonders, the book survives without it! But still I’m chuffed to contribute a few bits and pieces to the book; meantime here's the offending piece just for the record now I've found it: |
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| SnapsCrackPop! is, it says itself, neither a monograph nor memoir; it’s a bit like one of those testimonials crossed with an art book. It captures a slice, and quite a large slice, of life in Sydney music from the late 70s through to late 90s. Perhaps I’m biased because, as my appearance in a couple of happy snaps from famous Foy barbeques testifies, his world of Red Eye/Black Eye Records was one that formed a part of my life during that period too. I even lived for a short while in 1988 at the legendary big subdivided house in Queen St, Woollahara, where Foy lived too and ran the label out of the heritage-listed old stable down the end of the back yard. (Phantom Records’ Jules Normington lived in the other downstairs apartment opposite Foy, and I was dossing in the rambling top floor where at the time numerous members of Paul Kelly’s band the Coloured Girls were living.) Red Eye was a breath of fresh air on the Sydney and Australian scene in the late 80s, before it became a major force via the Cruel Sea via the label’s link-up PolyGram, and I wrote numerous stories for RAM and Rolling Stone about the Beasts of Bourbon, the Black Eye label ‘bands’, the Cruel Sea, and even the Edge profile of Foy himself, which was an indication of his coming up in the world. I even managed to con Rolling Stone into giving over a full-page on the Other Red Eye subsidiary label, Third Eye Records, and it was, well, let's just put it this way, it conspicuously fails to rate a mention in this otherwise fairly comprehensive tome - so make of that what you will! Foy had asked me for the 'Talk To...' item along with the story about Black Eye that I was able to find and has thus been reprinted in the book, across five full pages, because as he said, it nailed the whole thing in a way nothing else did. |
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| You can read that Rolling Stone story in full in my own BACKPAGES section here, along with a major feature, again from Stone, on the Beasts of Bourbon, here, when they blasted back with Black Milk in 1990, plus read here my Juice review of the Cruel Sea’s breakthrough second album from 1992, The Honeymoon is Over, which basically concluded, you can put your glasses down folks because this band is going to be huge. (I actually remember having a bit of a disagreement with the Juice brains-trust over the item – they wanted some more detail on the songs, which I gave them, but only reluctantly because that’s what I said to them at the time: Why bother, because everybody’s going to hear it everywhere and buy it anyway! Got that one right – which is by no means usual! As if it was hard though in the case of the Cruel Sea! They remain one of the world’s best bar bands ever, next to Los Lobos.) But as I know it always somewhat irked Foy, he never quite got the due he deserved as a poster designer, and that aspect of his career is what makes this book really sing. Designed by long-time Red Eye art director Jim Paton, who designed a couple of my own books (see, I told you this was all in the family), the book is a glorious compendium of John Foy’s rock art that (now) puts him shoulder-to-shoulder alongside all the San Francisco stuff and punk stuff – which in a way it was a fusion of, along with pop art. I loved it – most of it, anyway, even when it was projecting music I wasn’t so crazy about (and Red Eye, I have to say, did do a bit of dud stuff I didn’t like, but what record company doesn't?) – and I’m pleased to see its celebration here. |
| And then everything changed. I moved out of Queen St and then out of the eastern suburbs and so very largely out of the Life. Red Eye went through the mill and then Foy got out too. He went on to work for a while for the late, great art dealer Ray Hughes, and so I continued to see a bit of him because I knew Ray and tended to like his painters and often went to openings at the gallery. But then Foy left that too and I seldom saw him as he commenced a new peripatetic life as a ‘citizen of the world’. I’m just glad he got down this inside account of things before, as they do, the memories and evidence drifted off to be forgotten… I’m also flattered, vindicated – especially in the wake of Highway to Hell’s recent similar acknowledgement as the post directly below describes – that when SnapsCrackPop! lists only seven books among its recommended reading, two of them are mine (Inner City Sound and Stranded) and their assessments unequivocal… how could I not like this book after it concludes like that!? To buy a copy of SnapsCrackPop! go here, I think. |
