Musicians

Aztec Music’s Archaelogical Dig

That Blockhead Thing

By Richard Guilliatt

The ’60s, so the saying goes, didn’t start in Australia until the ’70s. Richard Nixon was well into his first term in the White House by the time any Aquarian gathering happened here, and it was 1972 when the Sunbury Pop Festival tried to replicate Woodstock in a paddock outside Melbourne. It’s a matter of record that Sunbury’s “three days of sun-filled togetherness” turned into

Andrew McMillan

One Last Deadline

By Chips Mackinolty

At around 6 am, on the morning after his fifty-fourth birthday and the day before New Year’s Eve, the Darwin writer Andrew McMillan typed on his laptop: Now that the album’s almost out of the way I’ve started work on a new project as of last night: Andrew McMillan’s Last Ball Advantage: An Anthology. Short stories, poems, lyrics, extracts from Death in Dili, three old RAM stori

The golden age of singer–songwriters

Treasure in the Attic

By Robert Forster

As far as romantic professions go, it’s up there with lighthouse-keeping, lion-taming or jobbing as a private detective in Los Angeles in the 1940s. The hours are long and the chances of earning decent money low. The rewards are mostly received in private, although what you create is made to be shared. You will watch as people your age in other trades pass you by in their accumulation of worldly goods. In accepting this you will have

'Mrs Carey’s Concert' by Bob Connolly and Sophie Raymond

By Anna Goldsworthy

Mrs Carey’s Concert, a new documentary by Bob Connolly (of Rats in the Ranks and Facing the Music) and Sophie Raymond, offers a familiar narrative archetype: it’ll be all right on the night. It is a type of triumph over adversity set on the concert stage, which informs Hungarian director István Szabó’s Meeting Venus (1991), as well as the lives of mo

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s 'Rrakala'

To the Heart

By Robert Forster

Elcho Island is 560 kilometres from Darwin, off the north-east Arnhem Land coast. A strong musical community there has produced members of Yothu Yindi, the lead singer of the Warumpi Band, George Burarrwanga, the country/gospel band Soft Sands, the Chooky Danc

A Chapter in the Life of a Ballet Legend, Margaret Scott

Maggie’s War

By Peter Robb

When her sister was dying in Africa, Maggie flung some things into a bag and flew from Melbourne to the farm in Swaziland she’d hardly seen in 50 years. There were delays in Johannesburg and more in Swaziland, and Maggie arrived four hours too late for her s

The Glory and the Madness of being a ‘60s and ‘70s Australian Pop Singer

Scream

By Robert Forster

It begins in Brisbane in the late ’60s, when I was 11 and 12 years old. The Saturday afternoons were never-ending and on some of them, because of rain or there being no friends in the neighbourhood to play with, I’d lie on the floor of my parents’ lounge room, my

The Gaza Strips

By Christos Tsiolkas

I’m ageing; I’m becoming the old fart I never wished to be. I am succumbing to nostalgia and its lethal evil twin, bitterness. I listen to the radio – or, recently, more often a 30-second grab of a song on iTunes – and I think that popular music just c

Allo Darlin’s Debut Album

Too Smart to Run Back

By Robert Forster

The history of the ukulele in rock music is as short and quirky as the instrument itself. Before pop music there was cheeky Englishman George Formby Jnr strumming ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ – “for a nosey parker, it’s an interesting job” – and then into

Tom DiCillo’s 'When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors'

The Infinite

By Robert Forster

The film starts with a smashed car in a ditch on a desert road. Out of the wreckage climbs Jim Morrison. The next scenes have him hitchhiking, and then suddenly he’s in a car again driving through the desert; he turns on the car radio to hear an announcer br

Jimmy Barnes's 'Rage and Ruin'

Barnsey's Blues

By Robert Forster

What do Sarah Blasko, Silverchair, The Grates and Jimmy Barnes all have in common? Their latest albums were all made outside Australia using overseas producers. Other bands such as Powderfinger and Bridezilla brought in the overseas producer, while Tame Impala

The White Stripes’ 'Under Great White Northern Lights'

The Odd Couple

By Robert Forster

The last White Stripes’ album, Icky Thump, came out in 2007. For a group operating under the normal touring and recording schedule, the middle of 2010 would be a reasonable point at which to release the next piece of ‘product’, even if it wasn’t a new studio rec

Gillian Armstrong’s 'Love, Lust & Lies' and Radu Mihaileanu’s 'The Concert'

The Music of Time

By Luke Davies

In 1975 Gillian Armstrong made the short film Smokes and Lollies, which followed the lives of three 14-year-old girls Armstrong had found hanging around an inner-city youth centre in Adelaide. The 25-minute documentary captures something of the universal bewilderment of adolescence, as well as its protagonists’ awkwardness and self-consciousness at being f

The Methadone Program at 40

Liquid Handcuffs

By Gail Bell

Two old hands who dose at the pharmacy where I work (a couple, Danny and Carla) have been using since they were 18. They are in their forties now, have raised their kids (the eldest is at university), and keep a neat house in the suburbs. This is their third go at methadone and they think they’ll stick with it this time. Their bodies are older, so they want to take things easier from now on. Lik

The Sydney Symphony's Mahler Cycle

Classical Complex

By Anna Goldsworthy

In the summer of 1910, Gustav Mahler consulted Sigmund Freud, seeking advice on his troubled marriage. “Mahler gave me the impression of being a genius,” Freud recalled, “yet at the same time somehow curiously apelike.” Over the course of their four-ho

Percy Grainger & Edvard Grieg

By Shane Maloney

As a small child growing up in Melbourne, Percy Grainger devoured the Icelandic sagas, signed his letters “Grettir the Strong” and bounded up every available stairway. His adoring mother Rose, meanwhile, was showing him what happens to naughty boys who neg

The Beatles Remastered

From Mop Tops To Moustaches

By Robert Forster

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 t

Beautiful Waste

By Robert Forster

David McComb, who passed away in 1999 at the age of 36, was the lead singer and songwriter of The Triffids. The band began their career in Perth in the late 1970s and broke up in 1989, and although McComb released a solo album, Love of Will, in 1994, and wrote and played with other musicians over the years, it is his first group that made him his reputation. The ripple that goes out from great art