| Review of the new Buried Country LP from the Weekend Australian just published, it's got the bull by the horns on a few of its facts but that doesn't lessen its great positive attitude - doesn't mean I want it rescinded! - and thanks to Andrew P. Street for it: |
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... WHICH PROMPTS ME TO THINK...
| That as part of the great general response to the BCLP, this review plus a few other things going on at the moment have given me pause to reflect. Certainly it’s accentuating the loss of such projects as Banana Lounge and Deadly Woman Blues. Because... At the same time the BCLP is getting this fantastic response, there is a discussion thread on the dreaded Facebook about Inner City Sound: FORTY YEARS after the event, it’s still in print, still selling, still getting talked about, still having an impact… TWENTY YEARS after the Buried Country juggernaut started out, it’s the same, as the above review shows. When I can push through with what I want to do the way I want to do it, the results seem to follow, have legs. So how come I otherwise meet so much resistance? Sorry if this is a bit of a whinge, but sometimes it rises to the surface to annoy me further, and if I don’t reveal the invisible machinations I’m aware of that prevent the spread of the good shit, that deny it to fans, who else is going to? TEN YEARS after the Banana Lounge project came close to completion before a short-sighted and maybe even resentful EMI executive cancelled it at the last minute, I was recently approached by a musician mate who’d heard it on a CD burn and thought it would be a good idea to get together a band and put it (the repertoire) on stage. Like a tribute show (which are all the rage these days), like the way Buried Country’s gone up onto the stage. Because as I always felt, Banana Lounge was a reclamation important in its own way too. “Such a shame it didn't go ahead at the time,” as another guy close to the proposal lamented, unable to see how his label could overcome the now-entrenched hurdles necessary to help bring it back from the dead. “It would have been a pretty defining historical overview of that era/style, and one that is still really yet to be made.” MERELY A YEAR after the cot-death of Deadly Woman Blues, of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the loss strikes me as similar. As the above review says of Buried Country in its book form: “For most readers it was the first time they’d heard of such artists as Dougie Young, Isaac Yama or Vic Simms.” For Ray Ahn, as he said on Facebook, he ‘worships’ Inner City Sound; it was where he got introduced to so much great Australian underground music, and it inspired him to take up a guitar and launch a career that’s itself now spanned over 30 legendary years. Deadly Woman Blues and Banana Lounge both dreamed of fulfilling that same sort of function, and their respective killings are a loss, I think, not just to me and to the underappreciated music and musicians they (tried to) shine a light on, but a loss too to music and music-lovers generally. I just hope that even if neither of those ever get resurrected, the several projects I am currently working on are given free rein to develop to fruition, let alone not get actively stymied. Jeezus! – whaddoo I have to do? |
