_{"The stars, baby, the stars": Tex Perkins with Dave Graney at The Beasts' "Black Milk" show in Melbourne. Amber Schmidt photo}

Dave Graney Top 12 for 2025

1. Dave Graney and the Soft n Sexy Sound 30^th Anniversary Sound tour.
This was so enjoyable for me. So great to play the music and crack the codes to the album. Extremely challenging to perform it and to present it to people. Very tense to start it each time we did it on the 21 date tour. It had peaks and it flowed. It started from silence and ended on a long fadeout.

 A – FÄHM (Hiss and Crackle Records)

The Blues never goes out of style, it just gets bent out of shape. This quintet from Wallsend, a suburb of Australia steel city Newcastle, applies its own stylistic panel beating and the result is a satisfyingly swampy pastiche.

Assembling members from local bands Howlin’ Rats, The Not Nots, The Outliers and Paper Thin, FÄHM (pronounced “Fam”), mixes up the medicine in some weird and wonderful ways. The bio cites influences like feedtime, Scientists, X and Beasts of Bourbon. The latter is obvious but for mine it’s the “Safe As Milk” era Captain Beefheart whose shadow looms largest.

Fans of Real Rock Action rejoice: New York punk survivor Sonny Vincent is continuing his return to stages with a triple whammy of shows in Germany in February.

After a one-off gig in Europe and an art show in Los Angeles last month, the indefatigable Vincent will play Stuttgart (February 20), Cologne (February 21) and Hildesheim (February 22). The shows will be filmed by Danny Garcia ("Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC", "Sad Vacation: The Last Days of Sid and Nancy", "Looking for Johnny", "Stiv") for a full-length documentary.

Sonny Vincent is a veteran of the Max's and CBGB scenes whose band Testors were a cult item in the NYC underground in the late '70s.  His long and storied career has included collaborations with Scott and Ron Asheton, Wayne Kramer, Bob Stinson, Cheetah Chrome, Mo Tucker, Spencer P Jones, Sterling Morrison and Captain Sensible.  

All Another Tuneless Racket. Punk and New Wave In the Seventies Volume Four: The American Beat East
By Stven M Gardner
(Noise For Heroes)

The intention was to read this cover-to-cover before penning a review, but time got the upper hand. As it does. You need to know about it before the onset of the Festive Season proper so you can put it on your Xmas shopping/wish list.

I’ve been dipping into and out of this “Another Tuneless Racket 4”  over the past three months. It’s a punk rock “War and Peace” at nearly 690 pages but not a hard slog. It’s neatly compartmented into various regional musical scenes, so “ATR Volume Four” is ideal fodder, if your attention span is short or you want to dip in and out.

Notwithstanding it weighs a lot more than a mobile phone, you might find it essential Toilet Reading (or “Bathroom Reading” for sensitive Americans who think a bathing facility is co-located with what we Australians call The Dunny.)

Reading on the loo is probably a Bloke Thing but certainly not exclusively the domain of men or Australians. The bog is one place most people know they won’t be disturbed.

There’s a bonus if you’re getting on a bit and are not, er, as regular as you used to be, in that you can spend a long time combing these pages.  The hefty size of “ATR4” (it’s nearly as heavy as one of those extinct things called phone books) means that if you lift your copy past shouilder height a few times, you can skip the gym.

There’s a lot to be said for Toilet Books. A good one takes your mind off the government bowel testing kit that arrived in the mail and is sitting on your sink, unopened. If you’re a Westerner visiting Japan, reading is less taxing than working out what all those controls on the side of the cistern do.

Unlike Jinglish instructions or medical self-diagnostics, however, “ATR” is a labour of love that comes from Steve Gardcner, the same rock and roll obsessive who spawned the American zine “Noise For Heroes” in the 1990s, and the record label of the same name.

Two titans of power-pop and punk rock will reunite this March when LA cult legends Red Kross (pictured), celebrate 45 years of dayglo hooks, sly wit and sky-high choruses, with Aussie icons The Hard-Ons on an Australian tour. The nine-date run will span Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria. Tickets are on sale now and sell-outs look likely.

The bands might be separated by the Pacific Ocean but have ties that go back to when they were label mates on the US Big Time label in 1987. Beyond that the connections are plentiful; both started playing out on their respective punk scenes when they were teenagers.

Both bands transgressed the accepted boundaries of punk, and pushed audience excitement buttons with high energy, great tunes, an outrageous visual element and a willingness to include '60s pop influences into their punk sounds. Click MORE for dates and ticket lins. 

Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes
The Gov, Adelaide
Friday, November 21, 2025

Words: ROBERT BROKENMOUTH
Pictures: MANDY TZARAS

It was one of those “where to begin “kind of gigs. Long story short, I've been in a rather horrible tunnel for the last three or so years. Looks like I'm slowly re-emerging, though; but I'm not the only one - and they've been in the shit far deeper and uglier.

Saw The Animals and Friends at The Gov on Wednesday night. Top show, vivid, crisp and filled with bittersweet pills, grim memories and the kind of songs which cry out for audience engagement. Which we got in spades. Norm Helm's jazz-flecked bass is a joy to watch, as is Barney Williams' piano and synth work. Danny Handley's vocals and sweet blues guitar drag me in every time. And, propping the lot up at the back, 84-year old John Steel, one of the original Animals. Just about everyone in the crowd had a smile on their face.

_{Sam Geldart photo} 

What do you get when you mix middle-aged Adelaide writer, I-94 Bar scribe and self-described vocalist with Smallpox Confidential, Robert Brokenmouth, with veteran City of Churches synth exponent Shaun C Duncan? They call it Ambient Horror Goth Industrial Punk Drone Synth Machinery Slagheap, and it goes under the name Molly Fet Circuit.

Molly Fet Circuit has never been sighted outside of Adelaide but has been well exposed on the city’s leading community radio station, 5AA. We’ve been treated to a taste of the Molly Fet Circuit oeuvre and songs like “Mustid”, “Liquid” and “Could Not” are starkly industrial, antagonistic and intriguing (in a Suicide sort of way.)

Molly Fet Circuit is coming to Sydney this month, for shows at Lazy Thinking in Dulwich Hill (Novermber 28) and MoshPit (November 29).  Ticket links at the end.

Now this Brokenmouth bloke is a Bar regular, often being swept out long after post-closing staff drinks, We’ve seen lots of him so we chased down his partner in decibels, Shaun C Duncan, for an interview - and he graciously accepted.

Chris Masuak's Dog Soldier - Chris Masuak's Dog Soldier (I-94 Bar Records)

Hello I-94 Barflies. Well, folks, Chris Klondike Masuak has recorded his best album in years. This album is so heavy with riffs that I’ve found myself headbanging away here at The Farmhouse.

This album is mostly the sound of Klondike on guitar and vocals, Stuart Wilson kicking away on drums and vocals and Phil Hall keeping the bottom end in place on bass and ading vocals.  On a couple of tracks, we have Tony Bambach (bass and vocals), as well as Juan Martinez El Kara (drums) and Abe Corujo on bass (those last two guys are from Chris’s former Galician band The Viveiro Wave Riders.)

Everyone thinks they know about “The Sixties” and of course the further away we get, the muddier it all seems. English R'n'B - or, if you like, English interpretations of R'n'B - set the world alight and we've never been the same since. Pop became tougher, bands wrote their own songs; thousands of bands around the world formed as a result - and the follow-on effects are still felt today. 

Today, few of the musicians who helped detonate that ground-zero remain; even fewer remain playing live. Along with, say, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, one who regularly presents himself to crowds is John Steel, the original drummer for The Animals, who is bringing The Animals And Friends to Australia again. 

It takes a band of high quality to present these songs. The guitarist and lead singer is Danny Handley. He joined Robert Brokenmouth at the Bar.