Mick Daley

Poolside at a Brisbane hotel in balmy spring sunshine is not, perhaps, where you’d expect to find Gareth Liddiard, the poet of existential wrath and melancholy. But encouraging daft stereotypes was never his forte, either, and the frontman of The Drones is having a welcome day off.

After finishing a twelve date Australian tour and a hasty European jaunt to launch his sombre solo album, Strange Tourist, Liddiard and the Drones have been locked into a daunting new project, creating the live DVD, A Thousand Mistakes.

“It’s been a huge head-fuck,” Liddiard drawls. “We’ve made a million albums and we know how to do that, but for me and Fi (Kitschin, partner and bass player) it’s our first time putting together something filmic.”

Those albums have between them won one Australian Music Prize and been shortlisted for several more, as was Liddiards’s  astonishingly  bleak and gravely literate solo album. All share that excoriating Drones bare-knuckle signature. The DVD, however, promises even less compromising Drones flavours.

“The main premise is we did a bunch of songs that we never usually play live, kinda because they’re too hard to slot into a set in a dynamic way – the instrumentation is too hard to do live, because, y’know, if we took a church organ on tour Qantas would sting us to death. So we based this upcoming tour around that particular set in the DVD. It’s not going to be the same Drones rock and roll bonanza.”

Australia, however, seems to be lapping up this resolutely tough, unadorned rock and roll – the kind of music that makes say, The Cosmic Psychos look polite. It’s part of an Australian theme, Liddiard suggests.

“We’re ripping off a bunch of stuff – Kim Salmon, Beasts of Bourbon bands like that, but then going a bit further with it. If Australia does have a tradition, it would be that Roland Howard or Angus Young cut-your-head-off nasty guitar sound. We took that vicious American rock to the nth degree. Even the early Go Betweens was pretty gnarly sounding.”

The band will tour A Thousand Mistakes nationally throughout October, in keeping with that relentless live tradition. It’s been paying off, the Drones winning Best Live Act at the inaugural Australian Rolling Stone Awards in 2010, the 2009 AIR Awards for Best Independent Album of the Year and Independent Artist of the Year. Back-to-back tours of Europe have established a major fanbase there, with shows at the prestigious All Tomorrows Parties Festivals in the UK, among countless other European and North American festival tours. Liddiard is frank about this startling artistic success.

“We’ve been moving up a very mild incline for a long time and that was kind of the plan. I knew when I got started that if I got good musicians together and made quality music, then eventually that small part of the population that actually like music a lot will find us and so rather than having a big promotional machine or a gimmick, it will spread itself out, take a long time and always grow. Which we have done. And in Australia it’s a lot easier than it is in America or Europe because the songs are by a guy who was born in this country, so if you’re born here too you’ll probably see things in it that foreigners wouldn’t.”

The songs on Strange Tourist certainly chimed with Australian audiences, to judge from reverent revues and sold out shows across the East Coast.

“It did remarkably well, people were really quiet and attentive,” Liddiard concedes. “It was bigger and more successful than I expected from a grumpy little album.”

But he’s happy to shelve that storytelling style of music for a while and get back to rocking, in his own inimitable way.

“I’m looking forward to picking up an electric guitar again. I’ve been carting around an acoustic and its like 3 kilos as opposed to seven kilos, but the electric is a hundred times easier to play – it’s like playing a rubber band as opposed to playing a high tension wire.”

The Drones tour A Thousand Mistakes nationally, with special guest Adalita throughout October, playing the Cambridge on October 8^th. DVD in stores October 7^th.

It depends on what doin well is, you can be a flash in the pan without having to go overseas, but there’s a cultural cringe where people feel they’ve gotta have a pat on the head from overseas before they think someone has integrity, more so than just success.

Australias always been a bit behind the eightball because we’re an outpost. You look at the Swingin Sixties in London say and we were way behind ina pop culture way – you had things like yr Lobby Lloyds and yr Billy Thorpes, but it just seems like AC/DC is where it sort of started

There was good bands like the Easybeats, but they were trying to be the Beatles – ACDC weren’t. For a band that was very ambitious they chose a really nasty-sounding guitar sound to be a huge pop band with – so they were real – and after them you’ve got Saints and Radio Birdman and your Boys Next Door  and so its really only that Seventies periods where we cottoned on. The Yanks had Chuck Berry and Charlie Parkert back in the early days – we’re just taking our time.

Backstage at a Tamworth Country Music Festival show in 2005, Jimmy Barnes is shrieking like a cranky cockatoo. He grins apologetically and remarks, “It’s my warm-up routine,” before joining fellow vintage rockers Normie Rowe and Ross Wilson onstage.

That unmistakeable scream is the first thing that jumps out on Cold Chisel’s first album in 14 years, as Barnesy warms up on No Plans.

Spraying f-bombs over a blues jam circa Rising Sun, Barnes comes out swinging while the band flexes its honky-tonk.

‘In the sun, smokin a cigarette, no plans’ is as good as a statement of intent from the band who have weathered the intervening years, lost their beloved drummer, Steve Prestwich, and returned to active service revered as rock’n’roll icons, with no intentions of changing to suit turbulent times.

It’s all vintage Chisel – none of the soul trappings Barnesy is so fond of on his solo outings, no backing singers, horns or electronica. It’s simple blues-based rock coming from the same place the band did – the pub-rock circuit that spawned Billy Thorpe and AC/DC and was the breeding ground for everything that followed.

For a band like Cold Chisel the point of a new album isn’t about breaking new ground or finding new audiences – barring some Konyesque fluke of popular culture it’s about feeding their established fanbase, proving they’ve still got the cojones to rock properly and hopefully come up with a new classic – a Khe Sahn, or at very least, a Flame Trees.

Credited with all but three songs, Don Walker is a peerless songwriter whose place in the Oz-rock canon is assured with his Chisel back-catalogue, as well as the Tex Don and Charlie masterpieces and peer accolades from the likes of Paul Kelly. These songs aren’t however, his finest work. They are of a piece with the sonic ambitions of an album aimed squarely at the demographic that grew up with Cold Chisel. If the show I attended on their recent sell-out tour was any indication, that’s the middle-aged, predominately male, one-time hellraisers who could afford the ludicrously priced drinks and merchandise and crowded into

The Brisbane Ent-cent with comfortable guts tucked into their Jack Daniels t-shirts.

The first single, Everybody lampoons modern mass-media fetishes against a contagiously sleazy piano groove and some of Walker’s tightest lyrical twists.

In All for You Barnesy’s vocal chords have warmed up. Crooning ‘… and I’m young again, and it feels so good to be alive’, he’s lost the squawk and got the warble on for a sentimental ballad celebrating the mellowed temperament of the crazy kids of the Sunbury era, weaned on weed and VB, driving muscle cars into trouble with the law.

HQ454 Monroe, a co-write with Troy Cassar-Daley, whose artistry resides in making working class blokes and their toys feel special, guarantees the album will join the play-list of the trailer park boys on the hill at Bathurst. Driving rock and proto-mysoginist gems like ‘You said I had to choose between my muscle car and you my queen/ there was only one way that could ever go’ will propel this song into a drive-time radio spot.

In a self-penned, robust rocker, Barnesy finds some high vocal ground while Moss lays down a psychedelic camouflage over Mustang Sally, demonstrating that as far as advancing the evolution of music, the truth most certainly is Dead and laid to rest.

Missing A Girl is the closest stab at a Bic-anthem in the mode of Flame Trees, the love-struck hero stuck in an airport while his unrequiting paramour drops him via SMS.

Ian Moss’ only contribution, Too late, which I bet he wishes he’d had written in time for his solo outings, is a fairly flawless rock anthem that caromes in the wake of Bow River but never quite catches its contagious momentum. Moss’s amazingly intact vocal abilities and always exquisite, if heavy-handed, guitar-work were showcased on the recent tour and are an integral part of Chisel’s enduring appeal.

Meanwhile, I gotta get back on the road rampages down familiar highways and ends up in an R&B cul-de-sac while Our Old Flame is clearly the unadulterated blues music favoured by the band and The Horizon makes peace with its crazy past (again).

Departed drummer Steve Prestwich delivers a hauntingly prescient finale, one of the best songs on the album in fact, with a tidy vocal that showcases the depth of talent in this band. I got things to do is the husky declaration of a man who can clearly see the end, and sets about getting there clear-eyed and with less fuss and bother than his sentimental bandmates.

I worked with Vince in London in the 1990s, with TNT and SX magazines. He had his own office into which he’d invite me to chat, asking me what I knew about certain bands, the gossip on various mutual acquaintances back home. He was always working, getting the scoop for the columns he wrote for various publications and websites. He was a pioneer as far as web-journalism goes, he caught onto its potential early and I believe he had the first ever rock-journalism blog.

We’d often smoke a joint after work and he’d regale us with tales of mayhem from the rock’n’roll days – he and Bon escaping from truckdrivers who wanted to bash them for their long hair and hippy clothes, the crazy days of Barnesy’s addictions and Vince’s attempts to keep it secret. You’d forget sometimes that this was a guy who had been right in the pocket – he’d sung with Bon Scott in the Valentines, introduced Bon to AC/DC, managed Chisel and Divinyls. Occasionally he’d let slip a little of the influence and respect that he’d earned.

One time he asked me did I know anyone that played didgeridoo. I said I could play. He asked did I want a gig. I said yes. Next thing I’m being billed as Diamond Daley, didge player to the stars, recorded with REM and Midnight Oil, and I’m being paid 600 quid to play didge for ten minutes to a mob of scientists at Oxford University. Such was the influence and old-fashioned showbiz panache of this impresario, rock icon, AIDs activist, high-end businessman, respected journalist and good mate. Everyone on those magazines loved Vince, and on the few occasions I saw him around the Northern Rivers he was always the same energetic, enthused ideas man, on the scent of a new project. Seeya mate.

Marriage has apparently mellowed her but you wouldn’t know it from the tone of the songs on Lucinda William’s latest. They still excoriate, castigate and scorn as blithely as ever – and in as poetic a vein. Daughter of a nationally renowned poet who read his work at Bill Clintons second inauguration, Williams’ apparently effortless songwriting template has again produced a collection of  enduring classics delivered in her sublimely harrowed voice. Production is exquisite, Don Was steering a well-oiled machine with Elvis Costello donating gentlemanly, if sometimes suitably reckless guitar work.  On first lesson the album handles like its predecessors, never straying too far from the ‘Car Wheels’ handbook, but inevitable repeats leads to an understanding that you are listening to a ineffable mastery of modern songwriting.

James Cruickshank, acclaimed guitarist and keyboardist for the Cruel Sea, releases his second solo album, Note To Self, through Mullumbimby’s Vitamin records.

Flashes of Sam Cooke, David Bowie, Tom Waits and Beefheart reveal in the swinging gait and crooked instrumental passages of a moody serenade through Cruikshank’s yellowed back pages. Tinkering with strings and keys, swamp jazz and electronic propulsion, these meditations on maturing in a Peter Pan era could have been recorded in a time capsule, but the production, resolutely 21st century, lands it safely in a contemporary quarter.

Titles such as ‘Blue Falcon’, ‘Invisible Tattoo’ and  ‘Teenage Voodoo Doll’ extol Cruikshank’s penchant for pop culture, dipped in muddy rust and sprinkled in lime juice and tobacco. Their narration ebbs artfully, veering between the self-effacing mutter of ‘Chrome Wings’, and a soaring cover of the Beatles ‘Within You, Without You’ that offsets the charm of Cruickshanks deft contralto.

About to embark on a short tour through Australia, Cruikshanks returns soon to Europe, where recent sorties with Mick Harvey of the Bad Seeds, Nick Barker and the Kill Devil Hills have carved Cruikshank-size niches.

“I have a career there,” he mutters, astonished at his own temerity, but the oblique performances from touring his last album, Hello Human produced gushing accolades, journalists proclaiming him ‘genius’ and ‘effortlessly entertaining’ – his performances prompting invitations to return to a number of French festivals this summer.

Working in isolation on his beloved far north coast of NSW (his albums are self-produced), Cruickshanks has created an idiosyncratic career as bohemian bard-auteur, a kind of latter-day hillbilly beat poet – the Serge Ginsbourg of the bush. The eight-track CD, Note To Self, seems certain to claim discerning ears this winter.

Ed Kuepper claims he’s ‘difficult to work with’. But that hasn’t stopped him from founding the Saints, the Laughing Clowns, recording dozens of influential albums and recently, joining the Bad Seeds, possibly the most important band of the past 20 years, as guitar-slinger. On the eve of a national tour with Laughing Clowns drummer Mark Dawson, he reflects on the convoluted artistic process that has brought him to this point.

“I take what I do fairly seriously, I know that can be a kind of , a pain in the arse to people if they’re just trying to have a great time. Hopefully I don’t wallow in too much artistic angst while I’m onstage.

“To be honest with you I haven’t sat around thinking this is a great place to be artistically. I’ve never reached a point where I think ‘well that is so magnificent that I can never do better’.”

Re-enlisting Mark Dawson is a typically lateral move from a loner who constantly shifts direction and personnel. The pair will be ‘re-imagining’ two pivotal albums in Kuepper’s career, Electrical Storm and Today Wonder, on both of which Dawson collaborated.

“I’m hoping that it really ignites. We’re not looking at doing faithful note-for-note recreations. It’s probably fairly true that I’ve never played the same song the same way twice.

“Luckily Mark was up for these shows because he had a big input into these albums. We did a lot of touring in the early Nineties in Europe and there were some really fantastic shows and hopefully we’ll recapture some of that.”

Kuepper is particularly intrigued in the possibilities of Today Wonder, as he maintains it was that record that ‘enabled’ his prolific recording period.

“It made me reappraise the way that I was working – I had fallen into a certain pattern. The album that had proceeded that, Everybodys Got To was a commercial record label production and Today Wonder was about as opposite to that as it could get.”

Kuepper’s ability to reinvent himself has been crucial to his contemporary relevance, and his live act depends upon a similar dynamic – and economic necessity.

“One of the things with a band that’s quite difficult to maintain is spontaneity. . And the reality of working in the music business, unless you’re some kind of superstar, is it’s actually pretty tough and I can’t afford to keep a band on a retainer or anything like that.”

Kuepper’s relentless output and infallible integrity have not only kept him close to the heart of discerning music lovers, but also put him in the sights of Nick Cave, who has already headhunted Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three and previously employed fellow former Saint, Chris Bailey in the Bad Seeds. Kuepper is quietly enthused about his new role.

“Some of those shows we did (in Europe in 2010) were great, certainly some of the biggest crowds that I’ve played to, and it’s hard to be convincing, because people are there for tonnes of different reasons.

“But we’ve talking about doing some recording later in the year. And touring, but it’s not my decision.  Hopefully we’ll bring it to Australia.”

Meanwhile he’s working on future releases, and maintaining the artistic trajectory that’s borne him to this wondrous place.

“I’ve been writing a fair bit but the problem is I’ve fallen into the trap of re-writing too much, so I’ve got to get back into the spontaneity I was talking about earlier.”

For Kuepper this seems contingent on the artistic vision that saw him go solo in the first place – and possibly become ‘difficult’ to work with.

“In a band if you have a lot of people on stage the arrangements can be fairly intricate, so it’s quite interesting to take all that away and see what is it that makes these songs work as songs.”

Tumbleweed’s summer tour may have been blighted by Biblical plagues and a distinct dearth of Triple J’s paternal attentions, but there was more venom and fun and pure raunch in every riff-packed number than in any of the fifty hot new things the yoof network flings at us every month.

They rolled and swung and stung like some kind of punch-drunk lurching phenomenon … Ali in Zimbabwe, Keating in question time, the Stones in exile.

The astonishing cavalcade of hits – ‘Healer’, ‘Acid Rain,  ‘Carousel’, ‘Stoned’, reminded us why this band, from the ashes of the already prodigious Proton Energy Pills, engulfed Wollongong and briefly, the international stage before staunch necessity  and brotherly feuds confined it to occasional summer tours.

Richie’s appeals to the drug-happy jingoism that defined and nearly blinkered their albums … “Hands up who loves drugs?” was an ironic tilt, but nothing could deny the visceral tug of their tidal guitar onslaughts, the brimming energy and gusto that converted the Northern into a roomful of flailing punters transported back 20 years to their skinny youths.

The band looked delighted with the mayhem they’d made – Richie rampaging across the stage with rockstar shimmy, Lenny, the brains of the outfit, grimly sculpting psychedelic masterpieces from his corner. Paul, manically grinning as he surveyed the rock-mad punters, bemoaning his only technical hitch in 20 years – a broken string. Jay, the youngest Curley and an early disciple of vice, looking ravaged beyond his years but delighted to be born into such a vocation.

Truly, a happy return to a rock institution. Long may the Weed grow.

Salut. The Re-Mains return to the fray at Tamworth Country Music Festival in 2011 with four shows at the Courthouse Hotel, Peel Street, from Jan 19-22^nd – all shows late – 11pm till stumps. The big news is the line-up – the return of Leigh ‘Keepin’ It Steel’ Ivin on pedal steel and electric guitars in cahoots with Uncle Burnin’ Love on banjo and electrics. While Leigh has been back on the road with the band, playing Darwin and Melbourne shows, this is the first time he’s reunited with UBL since 2006. Expect lots of Ronny and Keef-style lick trading, and I ain’t talking about the after-party (ies).

On bass, Tom Jones, returning for a one-off reprise as his role as the drunkest-man-standing-and-still-playing-bass from his pop-star status as Leah Flanagan’s double-bassist in Darwin. On drums, ‘Frisky’ Fisk of Marrickville, demonstrating why Mohawks are still punk, despite their tawdry immersion in the pages of Vogue. And, inevitably, yours truly, Dick Maley as Folksinger, despite rumours to the contrary that the job had been contracted out to Gibbo.

This does need some explaining, as different line-ups of the Re-Mains franchise have been circulating around Australia and Canada, with Dick Maley being the only common denominator, furiously trying to keep track of who remembers which songs so as not to launch into, say, ‘Same Road’, only to meet with confused silence from the uncomprehending mob on stage. Hence Buckets Drinkwater, CP Pyledriver and Sideshow Bridge, who also feature in contemporary line-ups will not be at Tamworth but will, however, be playing at the Lennox Point Hotel on Saturday January 29^th.

The band will also be recording a new album during the Tamworth sojourn, the long-awaited ‘Country Rock And (that’s how we) Roll’. This will feature many of the live staples as yet unreleased, the likes of ‘Country Rock and Roll is Number One’, ‘Country Rock and Roll is My Hollywood’ and ‘Country Rock and Soul, the Hank Denfield Waltz’.

In further news, the band may well return to Canada in 2011, and will be looking forward to seeing old mates the Red Hot Poker Dots, back from the US, at the festival, as well as Den Hanrahan, Gibbo, Swaino, Virus, Mick Seigers, the Blues Cowboys and the Dirt Radio Band.

Sallyanne Ryan, who made the fabulous doco about the Nymagee Outback Music Festival, ‘A Day in the Dirt’, which has been showing and winning film prizes across the globe (Google it), will also be on hand, filming footage for her epic biopic about The Re-Mains. So get on down to Tamworth, people, for the latest instalment in the continuing saga of Country Rock And Roll. New album Inland Sea will be on sale, as well as a box set of all CDs, subscriptions to our website-only downloads of unreleased live track recordings and exclusive Meat Tray stubby holders.

Incidentally, the band has now been going for nine years, despite more line-up changes than the Melbourne Hit Men’s Association, near-death experiences, the Curse, and too much beer. And the CMF show on the 19^th will be the band’s 806^th show, since auspicious beginnings at the Winsome Hotel, Lismore on the 28^th of February, 2002.

A bluegrass festival is a different animal to the commercially driven rock blockbusters and this is particularly true in say, Dorrigo. This hamlet up in the Range is now more of a grey nomad stopover than the roaring timber town of yore, but you can still see a good old-fashioned brawl outside the pub at peak hour on a Friday afternoon.

The festival itself is blissfully tranquil. A ban on booze means no excitable chest-beaters or mega systems erupting with the latest pop sensations. All you can hear is the pleasant trickle of mandolins, banjos and violins extolling thousand year old folksongs.

This was the scene for the launch of the Lonely Horse Band’s latest album, written, recorded and released in the town last weekend. We previewed our latest tunes about the contemporary histories of one-horse towns alongside the likes of Scarlett Affection and country music history incarnate in the forms of Anne Kirkpatrick, daughter of Slim Dusty, and Ami Williamson, daughter of John.

After our show on Saturday night we were just in time to miss a 40-person brawl outside the pub, and next morning I motored off to play the Coaching Station in Nymboida, a much less sedate affair – fire-fighting choppers coming and going made us feel like the Doors playing live at an Apocalypse Now re-enactment. Now that’s ancient history.

New album finally to hand and on the weekend The Re-mains decamp to The Junkyard in Maitland and The Botany View in Newtown to flog it. It’s only taken three years and more line-up changes than the Melbourne Hit Men’s Association to finish this one. We’re going head to head with Jackie Marshall in Newtown, where just up the road she’s launching her new record as well. It’s going to be interesting to see how we go in the new all-digital environment where everybody downloads and an analogue product is allegedly a thing of the past.

I know you North coast Luddites are all desperate to hear it, so I’ll be bringing it along to Nimbin Pub tonight where Grandson, the new duo with myself and Uncle Burnin’ Love is making its debut. You may have to make an appointment however.

Meanwhile it appears that someone with either an agenda or a morbid fetish for Mazstock is systematically tearing down posters for this esteemed event as fast as promoter Sideshow Bridge can get ‘em up. Perhaps they’re selling well on the black market.