Enmore Theatre, Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Restraint is not often a by-word around these parts but let’s at least try to keep some perspective. A visit to Australia by Television seemed unlikely, if not an absurd proposition, just a few years ago. The band was scarcely active, Richard Lloyd having had long flown the coop, and Tom Verlaine had let a label issue two mothballed solo records that were barely promoted. It seemed if the TV hadn’t been turned off it was in storage and in danger of being forgotten.

The Metropolitan Hotel, Adelaide - September 27, 2013

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Tonight was a passionate night of balance, power, and space. Each group told us stories, ran films in our heads.

The streets are empty. Empty as in, it's Tuesday night. Except it's Friday night. Where is everyone?

Just the previous night, the suburbs decanted some 10,000 to land like a torrent of ants in Adelaide's great dome of the popular people's front to see Rihanna, who is, I am told, a superstar. From overseas.

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Annandale Hotel - August 1, 2006

If you don't like slobbering, breathless gushes, leave now. OK? I've already copped a broadside from someone about one review of a gig this week - and the fucker wasn't even at the show - but here goes...

What an in-fucking-credibly amazing show. Just about the best thing I've seen this year. The Stooges beats it (although that was surreal an experience I'm still not sure it happened). Soulful, rocking, energetic and dynamic. Perfectly paced and a testimony to a band at the peak of its considerable powers. Cruisey and light at the get go, it shaped as a righteously loud and grooving way to ease us all through a Tuesday night.

Wheatsheaf Hotel, Thebarton, Australia - June 22 and 23, 2013

My dad used to say that nothing was free. There's always a catch. There's a reason that nice man on the street is giving away Bibles, Robert.

He was right, of course. Those free music magazines you pick up for the what's on this weekend guide, the reviews of pub food, new beers and pricey wine, they make their living from the adverts. Stop putting in the stuff that the people with money to spend want to see and they'll stop bending at the creaky knees to pick it up. And the advertisers start to wonder why they're paying four or five hundred bucks a week. Self-evident, yeah? You don't change a money-making formula unless you can make more.

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.

Headonism
By Peter Head with MJ Cornwall
(BookPOD)

The history of Australian rock and roll is chockablock with yarns about people who had their shot at The Big Prize. Adelaide-born Peter Head (nee Beagley) gave it a better shake than most,  rising to prominence as pianist for prog rockers Headband, touring his bum off and playing in a pre-AC/DC band with some bloke named Bon Scott.

This is a man who rubbed shoulders with everyone from Elton John to John Mayall, John Farnham to the Rolling Stones. Adelaide-raised, Head did what a lot of Aussies did in the‘60s and followed his nose to work as a muso in England...only to suffer the same fate as many, if not most, of his peers and have it rubbed in Pommy squalor.

In the ‘80s Head transplanted himself to Sydney and became a fixture in the piano bars of Kings Cross. It was probably a natural progression for a bloke who kicked off his career as a 13-year-old backing bump-and-grind dancers in seedy Hindley Street bars. Along the way, he directed stage shows, toured nationally with the likes of Robyn Archer, carved out a regular place on the bill of the Adelaide Festival, filled in as backing pianist for “Here’s Humphrey”.