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  • Distant Sounds: 'Community: A Compilation of Hobart Music' The Online Monthly - subscriber only access
    Robert Forster | Music | March 2010 | Society & Culture

    When is Tasmania going to produce some great bands? It must be soon, if only through the converging of cultural forces, time and the fact that both Brisbane and Perth have had a fruitful past decade of breakthrough artists and bands and the frontier needs a new place to shift...

  • From Mop Tops To Moustaches: The Beatles Remastered The Online Monthly - subscriber only access
    Robert Forster | The Monthly Essays | Music | Dec 2009 - Jan 2010

    The Beatles were formed in 1957 when John Lennon invited Paul McCartney to join The Quarrymen. Soon after, McCartney got his mate George Harrison into the band too. It’s important to remember, and Lennon never let the others forget, that he asked Paul and the others to join...

  • Obscured by Clouds: Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
    Waleed Aly | Arts & Letters | Music | November 2009 | Society & Culture

    In the mid-1960s, a young underground band played a gig at a Catholic youth club. The promoter refused to pay the band, which decided to pursue him legally in a small claims tribunal. The magistrate found in favour of the promoter: the performance, it was held, “wasn’t music...

  • Curtain Call: Joan Sutherland
    Peter Conrad | The Monthly Essays | Music | October 2009 | Opera

    With the connivance of an airline official, her husband Richard Bonynge had caught the first flight out to London; the diva was left behind with their impedimenta, the tiles and rugs they had bought as souvenirs, and also – as she told me on a later occasion – with the fees...

  • Prepared: The ANAM Piano Festival
    Anna Goldsworthy | Music | September 2009 | Society & Culture

    Last year, when Peter Garrett announced the withdrawal of funding from the Australian National Academy of Music, he must have been startled by the response. He received an open letter signed by Sir Simon Rattle and JM Coetzee, among others; convoys of musicians descended upon...

  • Setting Herself Apart: Sarah Blasko's 'As Day Follows Night'
    Robert Forster | Music | August 2009 | Society & Culture

    She’s a restless soul, Sarah Blasko, three albums in her recording career done: one in Los Angeles, one in Auckland, and now her latest from Stockholm. Each has been shaped by its location. From LA came the neat, crafted pop of her debut, The Overture & the Underscore...

  • The Pretendies: The art of the spoken interlude
    Paul Kelly | July 2009 | Arts & Letters | Music | Society & Culture

    The spoken interlude has a long history in popular song. And takes a fair bit of nerve to pull off. The singer must step out from behind melody’s curtain and act. Elvis’s famous talking bit in ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ stretches Shakespeare’s...

  • Lost Women Found: The discovery of Vashti Bunyan, Sibylle Baier and ‘Connie’ Converse
    Robert Forster | June 2009 | Music | Society & Culture
     "When did you write that? How did you happen ... to ... uh ..." The nervous and incredulous male voice stops there on the tape. It's 1954, and Connie Converse, the singer and songwriter who has elicited this response, has just recorded one of her songs onto the...
  • C90
    Paul Kelly | May 2009 | The Nation Reviewed | Music | Society & Culture

    In my last year of high school the two coolest records were Hot Rats, by Frank Zappa, and Gasoline Alley, by Rod Stewart. (Yes, there once was a time when Rod Stewart was underground.) I wasn't in the hipster gang, but I knew what they listened to. I managed...

  • In Search of a Songwriter
    Robert Forster | May 2009 | Arts & Letters | Music | Society & Culture

    It's lonesome out there on the prairie. There are eagles up in the sky, and birds, lots of birds, and lakes, and wolves, plenty of wolves, and rivers, branches and trees, and even the odd bee. The songwriters that describe this landscape are urbanites who may not feel...