My Back Pages
My new book, an amalgam of memoir and anthology, is now available for pre-order (link below). There’s the experience of emigrating to the steel town…
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Hoodoo Gurus In The Land Beyond Beyond
Russell Handley always wanted to start a story with ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. At Countdown Magazine, I granted his wish. All photos by John Webber (September 1984 issue).
Quietly Confident: Republic of Australia
The clip for Quietly Confident’s one and only single. Republic of Australia (1983). Featuring lead vocalist Len Lindon; vocalists Larry Buttrose and Mark Conway; Russell Handley on the ( )ASIO keyboards; and backing vocals from Mandy and Melanie Salomon. Quietly Confident was the alternative cabaret act I managed in the period when I left Adelaide and moved to Sydney (1982-83). The track was recorded at Basilisk Studios in Hurstville, Sydney, Martin
The Bard of Salford
“I lean towards the nineteenth century poets,” says John Cooper Clarke, who also happens to dress like them. “Percy Shelley, all them. I want an all-female audience, y’know.” What, Shelley used to read live? “Oh yeah, yeah, he used to do gigs. When he wasn’t ‘anging around graveyards, or trying to drown himself.” On stage, John Cooper Clarke is a mass of hair and suit and shades with a million
Adelaide 1981
This was my end of year round up of music in Adelaide, published as part of Roadrunner’s 1981 All State Rock Round Up. I moved to Sydney in 1982, so in a way it was my farewell to the local music scene that I had been a part of for the previous five years. Fun times. * * * The year of 1981 will not go down in the pages
No Fixed Address: young, black and proud
At the time of this Roadrunner cover story from August 1980, I thought No Fixed Address was the most important new band in the country. A bunch of young Aboriginal musicians at the South Australian Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music, bouncing around Adelaide from gig to gig, they were about to start filming a movie, Wrong Side of the Road, loosely based on their lives and experiences and songs from
Kensington Road runs straight before turning: Adelaide in 1979
As the 1970s wound to a close, the local music scene in Adelaide was struggling, although there were some new shoots starting to appear. It seemed everyone involved was either trying to get out, or just killing time, waiting for something GREAT to happen. And it did. The advent of the Progressive Music Broadcasting Associations’s community radio station 5MMM-FM in 1980 gave Adelaide music an absolute turbo-charge and helped to
Live, Work & Play: the Sports’ 1979 U.K. tour
I first met Keith Shadwick in 1978 when he came to Adelaide on tour with the High Rise Bombers. Keith was a poet and a saxophone player and he was friends with my housemate Larry. They’d both been part of the Melbourne mid-70s performance poetry push, with people like Eric Beach, Gig Ryan and πο. Keith had an impressive musical pedigree too, having been in Renee Geyer’s first band Sun, Sydney
Stranglers in strife: the 1979 Australian tour
Brian Johnstone, one of my oldest and dearest friends, passed away in Adelaide in January 2015 after a long battle with cancer. We met in Adelaide in the late 70s, in the early days of Roadrunner, were housemates for awhile and he wrote a few pieces for the mag, including this entertaining account of the media shenanigans surrounding the Stranglers tour which was the cover story in the March 1979