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| Apart from the fact that Melbourne is Australia’s unequivocal music capital and with that something of a hipper city, and so would naturally all the more enthusiastically embrace me and my work – I've just returned from my fourth trip to Melbourne this year, on which I was again kept busy doing more Buried Country business and generally getting feted for it – I still can’t figure out why I seem to go down better everywhere except my hometown of Sydney, where I feel like a classic persona non grata. The emblematic symptom of that is the way the Sydney Morning Herald has always seemed to equivocate – when Buried Country first came out in 2000 the only negative notice it got anywhere in the world was in my hometown journal of record, the SMH, from Bruce Elder, who concluded it was “a strange hodgepodge of styles and traditions masquerading as a coherent statement” (Elder has subsequently, of course, done a 180º on that opinion, though that doesn’t mean his outrageous win of the Pascall Prize for critical writing has been rescinded!). But now finally, thankfully, the SMH has caught up with Buried Country, and through the agency of a new and at least somewhat switched-on music critic Tim Byron, has been awarded a five-star review, which you can read here, or via the above image… |
