Reverb Magazine - Issue 48

central coast|hunter|north coast #048 July ‘10

music, arts & culture monthly

oms of o r d e b e h T bret easton ellis

s of The genial geniu bill bailey

Also Inside: the triffids + We Are Scientists + thirsty merc + Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

TICKETS FROM THE VENUE, AND THROUGH MOSHTIX, PH 1300 GET TIX (438 849), WWW.MOSHTIX.COM.AU

OUT NOW. INCLUDES THE SINGLE ‘ATX’ www.dew-process.com • www.getmusic.com.au

www.albertacross.net

No. 48

Reverb Magazine is localy owned & published by The Lockup Garage.

Printed by Spotpress, marrickville: sales@spotpress.com.au

index

contents

North Coast Section We Are Scientists News Gig guide Thirsty Merc Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Motoring Fashion Gaming Katie Noonan Talking Shop The Triffids Mischief review Live reviews Gum Ball review Come Together review DVD reviews Film reviews Socials

8-14 16 17 18 20-21 22-23 24-25 26 27 28 30 31 32 33 34-35 36 37 38 38 39 40 41 41 42 43 44

yusuf [cat stevens] ©troy constable

News Bill Bailey Bullet For My Valentine Alberta Cross Bret Easton Ellis CD reviews Gig guide Discovering the Hunter

Publisher’s letter

Credits

See that number 48 in the top left corner?

That does, in fact, represent four years in print for Reverb, something that we are mighty pleased with. As each year passes us by, the greater the satisfaction is, and the further down the track we look.

As you flick through Issue 48, you may notice that there is very little that celebrates our 4th year. This is simply because we are gearing up to a massive 50th issue in September. We will be looking at just what we have been through during these 50 issues. We are looking forward to putting this together.

In the meantime, we can all get together at Reverb’s 4th birthday/50th issue party on Sunday, July 25, at the Cambridge Hotel. Alberta Cross is headlining. Come say hi.

Much love, Kevin

Editor

Photographers

Writers

Nick Milligan

Kevin Bull Troy Constable Courtney Fitzsimmons Luke Holdstock Timmy Johnston Mitchell Jones Chrissy Kavalieros Scarlett O’Horror Sean Roche Mark Snelson

Nick Bilbey Stepehn Bissett Kevin Bull Andrew Chesham Melissah Comber Noah Cross Sean Frazer Paul Frost Scott Gilbert Jacinta Govind Mark Henderson Ben Hosking David Long Matthew O’Donnell Terry Paull Lilen Pautasso

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Sub-Editor Amanda Bevan

IT Manager Kieran Ferguson

Sales Tommy Leung Stephen Bocking Kevin Bull Nick Milligan

Contacts

Senior Writers Peter Douglas Hugh Milligan Mark Snelson

Matt Petherbridge Jessica Saxton Mark Snelson Steve Tauschke Jeff Theys Lee Tobin Nathaniel Try Rachel Urquhart Jordan Watton

Editorial nick@reverbstreetpress.com.au or 0421 255 566

Sales Manager: Newcastle/Central Coast tommy@reverbstreetpress.com or 0413 166 208

Sales Manager: North Coast stephen@reverbstreetpress.com or 0458 559 938

Gig guide Graphic Design

gigguide@reverbstreetpress.com.au

Kevin Bull

Production Cartoonist

cam@reverbstreetpress.com.au

Dave Townley Jones

Postal address PO Box 843, Woy Woy NSW 2256

news

Giveaways seabellies

SEABELLIES SET TO RELEASE DEBUT RECORD, BY LIMBO LAKE

3x3 DVDs

Three copies of each these DVD titles: Edgeplay — A Film About The Runaways, Stones In Exile, and Black Sabbath — Paranoid Classic Album series

1 double pass

One double pass to see Ajax at LaLaLand in Byron Bay, Friday, July 2

tal il pos a m e Just tails to de rial@ edito etpress. bstre rever om.au. c v ed t se r Firs t

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The melodies and layered instrumentation of Seabellies’ songs create an energy that until now has been experienced via their live performances and single releases, but on August 20 the band will release their debut album By Limbo Lake.

By Limbo Lake presents 12 songs featuring strings, keyboards, and other instruments which capture your attention. We’ve already been given a taste of what is to come with first single ‘Young Cubs’. By Limbo Lake was produced by Wayne Connelly and recorded in Sydney’s Albert Studios.

Seabellies first real foray into the music scene came in 2007, as explained by guitarist/ vocalist and songwriter Trent Grenell, “Everything changed when we won the Garage to V competition in 2007. It forced us to rethink our song writing, rethink our live show, and become a bit more professional. That was the real start of the Seabellies.”

After touring their compelling instrumentswapping live show, Seabellies spent 2008/2009 writing and refining both their sound and the complexity of their live performances. During this time they released the digital singles ‘Heart Heart Heart Out’, ‘Prairie’ and ‘Moment In The Sun’, along with the Prairie EP. 2010 will see Seabellies tour extensively throughout Australia following the release of

silversun pickups

COASTER ANNOUNCES FULL LINE-UP FOR 2010, INCLUDING SILVERSUN PICKUPS The Central Coast’s very own music festival has announced its line-up for 2010’s event. The bill for Coaster 2010 will be headlined by hip hop legends Cypress Hill, and acts like Art Vs Science and Bluejuice will ensure a frenetic atmosphere. The most exciting announcement, however, is the addition of one of America’s most amazing modern rock bands, Silversun Pickups.

There’s also the supergroup, Basement Birds, which features Bob Evans, Kav Temperley from Eskimo Joe, Josh Pyke and Steve Parkin.

The full line-up is: Cypress Hill, Birds Of Tokyo, Art Vs Science, Bluejuice, Basement Birds, Silversun Pickups, Cloud Control, Hungry Kids Of Hungary, Boy & Bear, Illy, Spit Syndicate, The Ashton Shuffle, The Holidays, Slow Down Honey, The Chemist and City Riots.

It takes place on Saturday, September 25, at Gosford Showgrounds. Tickets go on sale 9am on Thursday, July 1, and are $89 plus booking fee. There are also 100 VIP tickets available for $120 plus booking fee.

Tickets will be available from OzTix. Coaster is a 16+ event.

NEWCASTLE PANTHERS

TIX

SATURDAY 10 JULY

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT TIX

FRIDAY 10 SEPTEMBER

SOULFLY MONDAY 27 SEPTEMBER

TIX

PARKWAY DRIVE we are a outlet

NEWCASTLE PANTHERS Cnr King & Union Streets Newcastle West 2302 Tel 4926 6200 newcastle.panthers.com.au

news

THE BEARDS — BRIGHT EYED AND BUSHY CHINNED

behind crimson eyes

BEHIND CRIMSON EYES LAST SHOW FOR 2010

Behind Crimson Eyes are set to embark on their final shows for 2010. The run of five shows will be the last time you can catch the band before they record the first of three consecutive EPs to be released later this year.

Special guests are Cola Wars who will launch their brand new album Invader.

They play Hamilton Station Hotel on Friday, July 9, 2010. Tickets available through Bigtix.com.au

The South Australian musical quartet The Beards, are still travelling around spreading the world about the Bearded way. Straight off the back of their largest national tour to date, The Beards are not yet satisfied with Australia’s bearded population.

2009 was a stellar year for The Beards as they saw the release of their second full length album Beards, Beards, Beards and the single ‘If your Dad doesn’t have a Beard, You’ve got Two Mums’ which received airplay nationally on Triple J and reached number 26 on Brisbane’s 4ZZZ’s Hot 100. The accompanying music video gained in excess of 100,000 views on Youtube. This, accompanied with press Australia wide, including The Australian newspaper and Channel Seven’s Sunrise, ensured that 2009 was a highly successful year for The Beards. Adding to all of this was the World Beard and Moustache championships in Alaska, where The Beards became the first ever Australian contingent to compete at the championships.

They play the Nortern Star Hotel on Saturday, July 10. Tickets through bigtix.com.au

SOULFLY LAND ON NEWCASTLE PANTHERS

If you favour metal in its most primal form, then prepare yourself, because this tour is what you’ve been waiting for. Soulfly will team up with City of Fire and Incite for a triple international tour of the nation.

Most bands slow down with age — not Soulfly. More than ten years since their self-titled debut album became a genre classic [and achieved Gold sales], they’re back, and they’re bringing their brutal heavy metal assault to the masses, showcasing their seventh album, Omen. Led by former Sepultura front man, Max Cavalera, Soulfly have become an even fiercer, fierier and more furious metallic monster.

Well known for their collaborations with up and coming talent, Soulfly will share top billing with Vancouver five-piece, City of Fire, featuring members from Fear Factory and Strapping Young Lad — Burton C Bell, Byron Stroud and Jed Simon.

Soulfly, City of Fire and Incite will be performing at Newcastle Panthers on Friday, September 10. Tickets on sale now through Moshtix.

HOUSE VS HURRICANE ON EAST COAST BLAZIN’ TOUR

Hot on the heels of their September tour announcement with the UK’s Enter Shikari, House Vs Hurricane will be heading out for a largely regional and suburban tour this August, with Sydney pop-punkers Heroes For Hire coming along for the ride.

2010 has already been a big year for House Vs Hurricane, with the release of their debut full-length Perspectives further solidifying their position as one of Australia’s finest heavy bands. In support of the album’s release, House Vs Hurricane hit the road for their most extensive tour thus far.

They play an 18+ show at the Cambridge Hotel on Thursday, August 19, and an all ages show at The Loft on Friday, August 20, 2010. They also play an all ages show at Bayldon Community Centre, Coffs Harbour, on Sunday, August 15. Tickets to all shows available on Moshtix.

blondie

BLONDIE AND THE PRETENDERS ANNOUNCE HUGE DOUBLE BILL

ALBUM OF THE WEEK “The venom they spit hasn’t lessened in speed or impact a great way to spend half & hour” Cameron Adams - Herald Sun

AVALANCHE Launch ARIA TOP 10 Album The Cambridge Hotel Newcastle Saturday 10th July $22 pre sale $25 at the door www.moshtix.com.au and at the venue

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“Music that carries punch, lyrically & musically with a hint of Sonic Youth” Graham Hammond - Sunday Herald Sun “Avalanche is a force to be reckoned with” Matthew Heath - Canberra Times “Avalanche confirms British India are one of the best bands in the modern era” Jeff Jenkins - Inpress

They’re two of music’s most acclaimed bands, boasting two of music’s most compelling front women — Deborah Harry leading the wondrous Blondie and Chrissie Hynde fronting the mighty Pretenders. As a double-bill, it’s a world first. Blondie and The Pretenders will co-headline a November/December tour of ‘a day on the green’ winery shows in all states, including Bimbadgen Estate, Hunter Valley on Saturday, December 11.

This very special double header launches the 2010/2011 ‘a day on the green’ season, the event’s tenth anniversary. A bumper summer of concerts are planned to celebrate this significant milestone.

Both The Pretenders and Blondie have enjoyed great success in Australia, fuelled by a stream of timeless Top Ten hits and the popularity of Hynde and Harry. Both ladies have always escaped the usual clichés of women in rock and are unquestionably two of the most important and influential women to have graced the stage. As co-headliners, the bands will alternate in closing the shows.

Debbie Harry, founding member and song writing partner Chris Stein and long-time drummer Clem Burke, have just completed their first new album in six years, entitled Panic Of Girls and set for release later this year.

As always ‘a day on the green’ is pleased to showcase two Australian artists as support acts, Melbourne five-piece Little Red and Magic Dirt’s Adalita.

Tickets are on sale now through Ticketmaster.

news

Illusion of despair Bermuda

BERMUDA, BURIED IN VERONA, SILENT SCREAMS

Sydney metal lords Bermuda and Buried In Verona will be sharing the stage with England’s own Silent Screams for 17 huge shows during the 2010 winter break. After running laps around the country during 2009, Bermuda will finally be hitting the road again and releasing the follow up to the hugely successful Tyrant. To quote Bermuda, “Our intent is to not only break the mould, but completely destroy and carve a new path.” Their new EP, DSM AXIS IV, continues carving that path.

Silent Screams will be bringing their blend of metal, hardcore and deathcore to the tour all the way from Coventry in the UK. After supporting such bands as Bring Me The Horizon, Emmure, For The Fallen Dreams and Red Shore, Silent Screams will continue their relentless touring schedule in Australia for the first time. Buried In Verona are back from Sweden with a new sound and a new album titled, Saturday Night Sever. With a more mature sound and and intense live show to match, BIV are set to leave audiences exhausted and wanting more. Bermuda, Buried In Verona and Silent Screams play the Chilli Lounge, Wyong, Monday, July 5, and the Hamilton Station, Newcastle, Wednesday, July 7.

HYPERFEST IN UMINA

The waves at Umina Beach may be breaking, but the walls of the Umina Beach PCYC will be shaking. The all ages music fans are in for a feast when Illusion Of Despair headline Hyperfest, an afternoon of some of the most manic music the Peninsula has seen. Joining Illusion Of Despair at the PCYC will be Sadhana (Melbourne), Red Remedy (Sydney), Adrenelin (Sydney), North Of The Border (Central Coast), and the special PCYC Band Comp winner. The date is Saturday, July 31, and runs between 3.30pm and 9pm. Tickets are $5, and it is drug and alcohol free.

WINTER HEAT

Newcastle is set to radiate once again with the return of Livesites’ free Winter Heat events, which will take place over four nights throughout the month of July. Friday, July 2: Winter Heat will join with Artsounds outside the Loft Youth Arts and Cultural Centre.

Members of the public will then be lead by the Sudanese Equatoria Women’s Choir to Renew Newcastle and then on to the Lock-Up where they can enjoy fire installations and performances by some of Newcastle’s finest musical talent. Saturday, July 10: the event will be held in Civic Park and include a performance of Peter Sculthorpe’s score,

‘Remembering Mrs Macquarie’. This is the first time the musical composition will be heard outside of Sydney. Friday, July 16: Winter Heat will again combine with Artsounds for the event.

Commencing at the Playhouse, members of the public will be taken on a theatrical and musical excursion through Watt Space Gallery, the Conservatorium of Music, Lovett Gallery and Newcastle Region Art Gallery, lead by local, aspiring actors. Light and candle installations and crackling fires will add warmth to the experience. Saturday, July 24: The final event will take place in Pacific Park and incorporate live music, fire sculptures, candle installations and glowing lanterns made by members of the public under the instruction of celebrated local artist, Ken O’Regan.

TURN IT UP 2010

Put together three bands, namely No Pressure, True Love Chaos and Neon Heart, and make it an all ages event. Now that sounds like a great way to spend a Saturday evening. The name being given to the event is Turn It Up 2010.

Adding to the fun with be host SEA FM’s Shayne Sinclair, plus the Sea Cruisers will be there with giveaways. The event is for young people of the area to come along and have a great time. It is hoped to be a springboard for even more safe, supervised and fun live music events for youth on the coast. Turn It Up 2010 will rock the Central Coast peninsula at PCYC Umina Beach on Saturday, July 10, at 6.30pm.

BACARDI BAND SEARCH HEAT WINNERS

The Bacardi Band Search is well under way, with six heats having been decided. The bands that have already made it though to the semi-finals are Heart Attack and Vine, The Speakers, Little Blak Dress, I Am The Agent, The Owls and Fishkicker. The remaining heats will be completed on Thursday nights in July.

Following the heats, there will be a couple of repechage nights where the second placed bands from the heats get to battle it out, then it is straight into the semi-finals. Get out and support the local talent that we have here in Newcastle and the Central Coast — remember, each Thursday night during July at the Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle.

RAD – A Fashion Thing

On Friday July 9, Rad and Afternoon Delight are to host a fashion thing, entitled Rad — A Fashion Thing, at the King Street Hotel. The night will feature new winter collections drawn from brands such as Vans, Sabre Vision, Nudie, WeSC, Macbeth, DC, Casio, Huffer, Mont La Roc, Loser Machine, plus photography by Justin Lees and illustrations

by Melbournian, Nate Gamble. Expect the usual fashion runway thing, plus something not-so-usual in the form of a live tattooist. Of course, there will be a healthy serve of give aways, and a whole lot of booze and shit talk.

Music on the night supplied by Luke Dolan (Kid Mince) and Dan Phelan (The Scorcher) playing old 80s hip-hop, some old classic punk/rock and other tasty tunes.

LIVE AND LOCAL at lizotte’s: PRESENted by reverb

Plenty of local music to be had at Lizotte’s this month for their weekly Live & Local nights.

Newcastle Lizotte’s: Wednesday July 7, Rob Cass duo, PJ Kevo & The DO band and Dan Conway; Wednesday July 14, Sarah McLennan, Grant Walter, Ashleigh Grace and Dan Ford and The Goods; Wednesday July 21, Pritchard and Rose, Dan March, Meags Hill and Chelsea Reed. Kincumber Lizzote’s: - Wednesday July 7, The Irish Prince, Ashleigh Grace, Dan Ford and The Goods; Wednesday July 14, Woody’s Round Up, Ruby for Lucy, The Wildes; Wednesday July 21, Hayden French, Zoe Elliot, Tenielle Neda, The My Tys.

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Sega’s System After 2009’s sell-out tour, Mad Decent star, Dj Sega, will return to Australian shores this month. From the same stable as the Crookers, Diplo and the infamous Lil John (worked with Jay Sean and Sean Paul), DJ Sega’s fan base just keeps getting bigger. Expect original party mash-ups, banging beats and more — this is a slice of Philadelphia’s finest — live in Newcastle. Sega chats with Reverb.

Where has been your favourite place to play at in the world?

My favourite place has always been my bedroom.

Where I can play what I want, whenever I want to, at whatever volume I choose. As far as I’m concerned, I have the best music in the world at my disposal. And the best place to be able to control it has been my bedroom — or any space I had to myself!

You’ve done a number of remixes for other artists — what’s the biggest challenge in remixing someone else’s work?

Its always changing my production to suit the artist’s needs. As well as doing rush jobs in a “timely manner”.

Are you looking forward to returning to Australia?

I can’t wait to pick up and multiply the same energy I left the last time I came through the Down Under.

What musical direction to you see your original songs heading in?

I have no idea. I’m just gonna let the path lay itself; if it’s not already laid out. There’s always something fresh and new, classic and old school, mysterious and infamous.

How has your sound evolved since you first started making music?

My sound has been evolving since I started producing. I’m always learning new things.

Every day I work, every track I make, I’m always progressing.

What has been the biggest influence that your father has had on you?

His love for classic soul and gospel. That alone led to love for breaks, jazz, classical music, instrumentals, and live performances, to name a few. My love alone has allowed me to accomplish anything and everything I wanted so far. If love wasn’t involved things never worked out. Whether it’s a job, an experience, or a person, just love that!

Where do you think your sound might evolve in the future?

My sound is evolving with each track I do. I’m constantly find fresh music, new patterns, and new ways of creating vivid journeys through music.

Don’t miss DJ Sega at the CBD Hotel on Saturday, July 3, and LaLaLand, Byron Bay, Sunday, July 4

news

BASEMENT BIRDS TAKE FLIGHT

Indy prince Josh Pyke, the man formally known as Kevin from Jebediah, Bob Evans, Eskimo Joe’s Kav Temperly, and Bob Evans tour cohort and independent songwriter in his own right, Steve Parkin, are Australia’s finest supergroup. The Basement Birds are preparing to take their indie-folk sound to the masses with their “Good Evening & Good Night” tour starting August 12.

The first single, ‘Waiting For You’, achieved Single of the Week upon its debut on the Australia iTunes Stores and the powerhouse collective is now set to hit the road for their only national tour, bringing plenty of special guests and surprises.

After debuting their live stylings on Sunrise, Basement Birds did it guerrilla style for Channel [V] in Sydney and performed an amazing cover of The Presets’ ‘My People’ for Triple J’s Like A Version. Now they are set to tour, with a local date set down for Wednesday, August 18, at the Bar On The Hill, Newcastle Uni, with the support of Old Man River.

dick and christa hughes

basement birds

DICK AND CHRISTA HUGHES to PLAY LIZOTTE’S

When we search our memories of Machine Gun Fellatio, and specifically KK Juggy, jazz and blues may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But take away the MGF persona, give KK Juggy back her birth name of Christa Hughes and team her up with her 80 year-old father, Dick Hughes, and this is exactly what we get.

Having released 21st Century Blues earlier this year, this father and daughter team have been touring the country, played the Melbourne International Jazz Festival and just recently Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and are now heading to Newcastle. Dick and Christa Hughes play Lizotte’s, Newcastle, Friday July 16.

extortion

A CASE OF EXTORTION

Arguably the most potent musical force Australian music has ever seen, Perth’s Extortion are preparing to set out this August on a run of east coast dates. This will be their first headline tour since their latest thrash incursion, Loose Screws, was released in January. Joining them will be Canberra’s I Exist, who recently released their debut album I: A Turn For The Worse and Adelaide’s SXWZD. Extortion, I Exist and SXWZD perform at The Loft, Newcastle, Sunday August 15, and the YAC, Byron Bay, Wednesday August 18.

REVERB’S SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK TRIVIA — EVERY TUESDAY Reverb’s very own music trivia night will continue into July at The Cambridge Hotel. It happens every Tuesday night from 6.45pm in the Glasshouse. Entry is entirely free and $10 gourmet pizzas and $10 beer jugs are available at the bar. Prizes include free tickets to Cambridge and Panthers gigs, plus drink vouchers and new release records. So come along and test your musical knowledge with the Reverb team.

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.

july Wednesday night 7th Comedy Night Free Entry. Doors open 7pm.

Open Mic Spots Available

14th Poetry Poetry and Performers Night Open Mic. Plenty of Prizes

21st Pool, Ping Pong & Pizza From 5pm. Free Entry

28th Cult Flicks & Cocktails $10 Entry - Includes drink, movie & popcorn. Movie starts 7pm.

Thursday night 8th Live Band - White Bats Free Entry. Doors open 8pm.

15th Party night DJ Midday Kicks 9pm - 2am.

Free Entry

22nd Comedy Roadshow Wagon Company Comedy. $20 Entry. From 7pm.

29th Party night Charlotte Marshall & Her Band $5 Students/$10 Guests

T: 6626 9602 | E: unibar@scu.edu.au | W: scu.edu.au/unibarandcafe

UniBar and cafe Southern Cross university Military road Lismore Follow us on

Friday afternoon 2nd Ned and the poets bed Live Music on the Deck 5pm - 7pm. Free Entry

9th Andrea Soler Live Music on the Deck 5pm - 7pm. Free Entry

16th Hughes & Brown Live Music on the Deck 5pm - 7pm. Free Entry

Plus a DJ From 9pm Every Friday!

SCU Unibar promotes responsible service of alcohol Photo ID Required

bill bailey

stuff. It looks like a world music festival when I do my sound check.

Have you just arrived in Australia?

I arrived just a couple of hours ago. So I’m still slightly delirious from the experience. I flew from London to Kuala Lumpur, then Kuala Lumpur to Melbourne. I don’t know what time of the day it is or who I am.

You’ve drawn a lot on science and natural history in your work, haven’t you?

Certainly, yeah. In the last few years, definitely.

There’s a lot of comedy which is about the day to day. That’s very much the stock and trade of a lot of comedy — the observation of our daily lives. It reinforces what we are and who we are. ‘You do this? We do that. Oh, okay, we’re not weird.’ That’s comforting in strange times, with recession and people worried about jobs. People like to have their foibles reconfirmed.

Also, for me anyway, I like to explore different subject matter. There’s an audience for that.

Where we come from. Where we’re going. That doesn’t occupy the conscious mind, but when people think about it, most people have an opinion on it. I try to find those gaps in people’s daily thoughts and find a way through, to fill in the grey areas.

What are your strongest impressions of Australia?

The audiences are really up for it. The first time I came here was really the very first time I performed overseas. That was a big moment, because you realise that comedy is a universal thing. You fly to the other side of the world and people are still getting it — it’s a universal realisation that you’re tapping into a sort of ‘universal funny’. That’s great for a comic, when you realise you can perform in different parts of the world. It was a fantastic experience — my first overseas tour. I’ll never forget that.

We’ve subsequently travelled right into the centre of Australia. We’ve travelled across the desert and stayed at a sheep station in remote parts of Australia. Things like that — experiences that are unique, especially for me coming from Europe. We just don’t have landscape like this. We don’t have huge deserts and big skies and horizons. That first [tour] left an indelible impression on me, that’s what keeps me coming back.

Have you noticed that the audiences are getting exponentially bigger every time you come back?

Over the past decade, British comedian Bill Bailey has become an iconic entertainer. So much so that for his last DVD, Tinselworm, he performed to a sold-out crowd at London’s Wembley Arena.

Through his performances in TV shows like Black Books and Skins, Bailey’s fanbase in Australia is growing exponetially. Nick Milligan spoke to the comedian in his Melbourne hotel room about why ‘doubt’ is the subject of his current Australian tour.

“ Material is like a Rubik’s Cube in your head, you turn it around — then suddenly one day a whole side clicks into place.”

The Shadow of Doubt Yeah, I think that’s happened across the board in comedy generally. Also live performance — music as well. The audiences have gotten bigger and bigger because I think people crave the live experience. People love to be part of a crowd and there’s nothing that really replicates a live performance, even though we seemingly have even more media than ever before. But perhaps because of that, more people know about you than ever before. You can go and watch clips on Youtube and see TV — there’s far more exposure of comedy than there has been since I can remember. That means more people know about it.

Do you appropriate your show for Australian audiences?

Anywhere you go where it’s not your country of birth, you already have an immediate angle, as an outsider observing the culture. For

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comedians, it can be an opening gambit — a way of approaching a gig. Certainly from my point of view, in London, we have other comedians who come and observe our culture — it’s like you’re seeing it through fresh eyes. You become accustomed to things that are around you all the time, then someone will come and say, ‘Hey, look at this!’ and then the absurdity of it is revealed.

What can audiences expect from your current tour?

The show is loosely based around the theme of doubt. It’s a subject which appeals to me — the idea that the more we know, the less we seem to know. We’ve tried finding out the secrets of the universe with large Hadron Colliders — nobody seems to know whether there’s any dark matter — where there’s loads of it, some of it — we don’t know. Doubt is cast in virtually

every aspect of our lives. Politics, we don’t know where we’re going. The more I delved into it, the more fascinating it became. There’s a dark side of it — big business likes to manufacture doubt about harmful stuff. To throw us off the scent, as it were. Most of the big issues — global warming, terrorism, finances, banks — most of that is based on people not actually knowing.

There’s a degree of uncertainty. Personally, it’s something that rears up more and more as you get older. You start doubting certain things.

I’m still intrigued about how religion is growing around the world. Something that is essentially irrational — that is ‘faith’. Yet millions of people have it — I find that hard to reconcile with people who are actually rational. It leeches into all aspects of life.

But there’ll be some jokes about Gary Numan, too [laughs]. I’ll be playing a bouzouki, an oud [a type of lute] — all sorts of weird

There’s a surreal aspect to a lot of your humour, and some people have described your gags as ‘post-modern jokes’. What has influenced that part of your act?

In a strange way, I was influenced by the absurdist playwrights, like Eugène Ionesco. He was a surreal, absurdist playwright. Also Howard Pinter, for his revelling in the deconstruction of language. He would take an ordinary conversation and demolish and break it into parts, and highlight the absurdity.

People would talk in a way that I could recognise in his plays, but then he would create something more out of it — something dark and funny. That left a lasting impression on me.

When I started doing comedy, I liked to revel in the spoken word. Certainly with jokes — the idea of a joke being something that comedians would tell. That was something I always tried to get away from — it seemed like a tyranny.

When someone tells me jokes, I get a bit tense because there’s pressure to laugh at the end of it.

The whole notion of jokes made me feel uncomfortable.

I remember once doing this in a club, saying, ‘Three blokes walk into a pub…’ The audience would look expectantly at me. Then I’d say, ‘Then there was four… no, it was five… no, it was six…’ Then it would unravel into a great big story about how thousands of blokes came into this pub. You could see that the audience was secretly relieved. I realised there’s another route to funny. It takes a bit longer, but the destination is still funny.

Do you get restless if you’re not working on new material?

I had a break at the end of last year. I’d been touring for about three years, off and on — doing a film or a TV show in between. I did nothing at all, I just spent a month — well, I didn’t do ‘nothing’ [laughs]. I wasn’t sitting in a room on a drip — I was actually doing stuff.

Normal stuff. Going out walking the dogs, or going out with my son on a holiday. I didn’t think about comedy for a month. It was great, it cleared my head a little bit. But I was getting a bit twitchy by the end of it. If you’re writing comedy, you tend to write it all the time. You can’t switch off. You’re constantly processing ideas and thoughts. Material is like a Rubik’s Cube in your head, you turn it around — then suddenly one day a whole side clicks into place. The satisfaction of making seemingly abstract ideas, thoughts, facts and observations coalesce into a spoken routine that people can digest.

Bill Bailey performs at Newcastle’s Civic Theatre on Thursday, July 1. His DVD Tinselworm is available now.

bullet for my valentine

Fever Pitch Welsh metal group Bullet for My Valentine have always divided critical opinion, ever since they burst on to the scene in 2005 with their debut EP, Hand of Blood. Ben Hosking talks to singer and guitarist Matt Tuck about their new Top 5 album, Fever, and the burning ambition that continues to see the band ride the album/tour cycle without a break.

Your new album is doing very well here in Australia. How would you describe it and how does it compare to your earlier releases?

I don’t know. I’d say it has definite potential to be something big in the future. I don’t want to say ‘classic’, but it’s doing so well across the planet. I don’t know what we’ve done differently on this one, but there’s something that’s really striking a nerve across the world. It’s not hugely different from anything we’ve done in the past; it’s more like we found what we do and we’ve found what we do best; and we nailed it on this one. We just analysed what we did on the last records and looked at what we did really well and left out the other stuff.

Are there any recurring lyrical themes running through Fever?

It’s just kind of standard BFMV lyrics, you know.

That’s where the name comes from. Ultimately the songs are love songs, but they’re taken from a different point of view; a darker side.

And we delve into other things that are a bit darker and more serious like suicide, alcohol abuse and drug addiction. They’re things that you normally don’t come across a lot with what we do, but we have our fair share of

music for us. You know, when we do pictures and videos and stuff, yes, you want to look cool. But day to day we’re just regular dudes.

Back in the day I gave a shit [what people said], but now I really don’t care. But yeah, sometimes it does seem like you need to be an ugly, fat, hairy bastard to be a true metal artist [laughs].

seeing stupid shit in this business and it does spark lyrical themes.

Tell us about the writing process for Fever.

We wanted to be off the road; in the UK, in a room and writing songs — like we used to. That was the most important thing and that was the only request that we had this time around — to give us the time to write the album. You know, we don’t want to be writing on the road, on a tour bus. We just want to be in the same place — four friends, sitting together in a room, jamming out some music. It was such a huge help for us and we did that for about three months. So, we wrote the majority of the album in those three months and a few of them came along in the studio, which always happens.

But, having the backbone of the album complete and ready to go before we went into the studio this time was a huge help.

What’s the concept behind the album art?

The concept is that there is no concept [laughs]. We’re not the type of band that has

this huge artistic vision. Like, musically I’ve always got music and lyrics going through my head and in that way I’m very artistic. But coming up with imagery and artwork is not our strong point. So, we just wanted something that was a bit weird and the guy that did our last two videos has done numerous amazing album covers over the years — everything from Slayer to Marilyn Manson. He ended up sending over about six and we were like, ‘That one is weird! We’ll have that.’ It was just more the weirdness of it than anything.

Your image has been a talking point for the media throughout your career. Do you sometimes feel like it would have been a whole lot easier to have been a bunch of ugly bastards like Mastodon?

[Laughs] Yes, and no. We’re not a band that is really very image conscious and I think that’s why people think we are. It’s strange, you know.

It’s not our fault that we look like we do. I don’t give a fuck, really. It’s not about how we look; it’s how we sound. It’s always been about the

You’ve come a long way in five short years.

Where do you think BFMV will be in another five?

I’m hoping that we’ll be just doing the same thing, but on an ever greater level. We’ve still got a lot of growing up to do, a lot of learning to do and progression. We’re still super ambitious, just like we were when we got signed. We’re working extremely hard to hopefully one day become a special band like the bands that were special to us, like Metallica. That’s the biggest dream and ambition for us. We’ve already ticked off so many boxes on the list of things we wanted to accomplish — landmark moments — but we just want to keep progressing and growing.

What can Australian audiences expect from the live BFMV experience?

Just a full-on, balls-to-the-wall modern metal show, you know. We’ve become a really, really solid live band over the last few months. We’ve been rehearsing super hard and from the month of touring we’ve done over here in America so far… it’s the best we’ve ever sounded. We’re really on fire at the moment and that’s the most important thing we want to bring to town.

Bullet For My Valentine play the Hordern Pavilion, Friday, September 10. Fever is out now through Sony Music.

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al b e r ta c r oss

CROSS TO BEAR With their upcoming debut tour of Australia, and a very special performance at Reverb’s Fourth Birthday Party this month, Alberta Cross are ready to show us why they were the most exciting new band of 2009. Nick Milligan speaks with singer Petter Ericson Stakee about the origins of the group and his trademark hat.

Hi Petter, what’s happening in Brooklyn?

I just got back from a ping pong session with my friend. I was pretty rubbish, man. I just got back from a tour, so I haven’t played any sports in a while. I was the weakest link [laughs].

Are you looking forward to your very first tour of Australia?

Yeah, it’s going to be amazing. I haven’t been and I’ve heard a lot of stuff, and I have a lot of friends from there. It’s going to be good, man.

Good times.

Have you been told what to expect?

I’ve heard a lot of stuff. I’m just going to wait and look at it for myself, you know? I don’t trust anyone. I’ve heard it’s a beautiful place.

I’ve just heard a lot of good things. The festival we’re doing should be amazing.

Did you have any strong ideas about how you wanted your debut album, Broken Side Of Time, to sound?

Kind of. I knew when I was writing the songs — I was feeling certain directions. But you never really know before you get in there [to the studio]. You have a producer as well, that’s got an opinion. But, I knew what records I was into and what way I wanted to push it in.

What records were you listening to at that

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time?

I was listening to Depeche Mode, quite a lot.

Their darker period, like Songs Of Faith and Devotion and Violator. I grew up on that stuff.

My brother was brain-washing me into that when I was a kid. It stuck with me until now. I was listening to Depeche and Mew. Albums like that.

We went to see My Bloody Valentine play a show here in the Roseland Ballroom, New York, as well. That was fucking fantastic. There’s a few bands we wanted to push the sound to — more than the obvious.

Growing up in Sweden, did you mostly listen to those big British bands of the 80s?

Yeah, when I was a teenager we listened to The Verve and Stone Roses. They were the bands that made me want to move over to London in the first place. The Verve changed my life — their first two records are stunning. That kind of music felt more real and closer to me than music in Sweden, which felt a bit plastic and polished.

Where does the gospel influence in your music come from?

I guess it comes from us growing up and being inspired by soul music. I was into rootsier gospel and soul. We’re five people and we all have diverse tastes. Our drummer will listen to something completely random and really far

away from what I listen to, everything just comes together in the mix. It’s like making a cocktail drink. Soul and gospel are really close to me because it’s honest, real music — really heartfelt. A band like The Verve would have a lot of soul and gospel. And Depeche Mode obviously were really gospel-inspired on their darker albums, so it’s always been around my favourite albums.

You and Terry Wolfers [bassist] were in a band before Alberta Cross — what did that group sound like?

What we were doing at that time was probably a bit closer to ‘Broken Side Of Time’. We were doing darker sounds, then we split and left that band and wrote all these new songs. Then it got a bit rootsy, then ‘Thief & The Hearbreaker’ [early Alberta Cross song] came out. It was completely away from that first band, because we were so tired and sick of it for a lot of different reasons.

Lyrically, do you feel there’s any recurring themes on Broken Side Of Time?

A lot of it is about the stuff we were going through.

We were in a messed up place for a while. It’s about a city — the move to New York and exploring the city, and being out until ridiculous o’clock every day. The whole move and the things we were feeling and things that were

going on — George Bush was still the President when we moved here and the place was really quite messed up — people were getting desperate.

Then Obama was voted in. There was a lot of things around us, man. It was a crazy, hysterical time. All of that ended up on the record in one way. Everything from that, to us just getting too messed up and ending up a bit cuckoo.

Were you guys really slumming it when you first moved to New York?

It was a lot of amazing, positive things, but obviously moving to a place like New York, I feel is one of the most brilliant places in the world.

If you like cities, it’s fantastic. There was a lot of great things, but it was also us being pretty broke and not knowing what we were doing.

We felt a bit lost and weird and were kind of struggling. There was a lot of positive things, but some negative things, too. The negative ones sometimes take over the positive ones, you know? [laughs] But I don’t think Broken Side Of Time is a really down album — it’s dark sounding but you could throw it on at a party and have a good time. It’s not all suicide or anything.

I’ve had one of the best times ever. Some nights were amazing, so it’s not all dark and gloom.

How old were you when you first started singing?

I grew up in a music family. My dad was a musician

LIVE MUSIC L I V E S P O R T, G R E AT F O O D

“ I’d be like Lady Gaga… that’s the only way to be satisfied.”

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WED now, so I suppose you take it further and further. Who knows where [the show is] going to be when we get to Australia — it could be madness.

Can you remember what the very first Alberta Cross shows were like?

The first ones ever… we played a place called the 12 Bar on Denmark Street in London — Central London, just outside Soho.

We did our first three shows there to a tiny room.

I remember it being really amazing, because we were longing to take the music on the stage.

We’d just been in a little home studio, just working on stuff. It was amazing to take the music out and play for people.

New material?

I’ve been working on quite a lot of songs lately.

We’ve been jamming on things together as a band. I think it’s going to be really good, but it’s hard to say right now exactly how it’s going to be. We’ve been working on stuff that’s going to end up on an EP. It’s going to be some B-sides — maybe five songs and a few live songs.

We’re going to put it out at the end of the summer. But it’s really exciting. The first album was put out and recorded really soon after the new member joined us. We just had a few months then we went down to the studio really quick. Now we’ve been touring with them for a long time, so as a band we’ve been growing loads. We’ve had a few weeks off in New York, but it’s really exciting, man.

and my brother as well. I was taken to gigs and studios since I was born, really. I’ve always been around music. When I started writing music with my friend, I was probably around ten [years old]. I used to have a band and a dance routine — a dance move to every song and sentence — I’d sing one sentence then jump on my knees, then sing another one and I’d spin around or something. I was inspired by Michael Jackson and Prince.

So if you weren’t holding a guitar while performing with Alberta Cross, we’d see you twirling across the stage?

I’d be like Lady Gaga. When you’re a kid you have to move around. That’s the only way to be satisfied. I guess that’s come back to me now, because I’m like a fuckin’ maniac on stage now.

I’m always dancing around.

Were you immediately confident as a front man?

I’ve always been into the idea, but I guess you grow and grow. The more confident you are, the better you are as a front man. If I go to see a gig and the singer has loads of soul, then I’ll have an amazing time at that gig. Whoever is putting the message across needs to be real, honest and soulful. I never really think about what I’m doing. I’m just up there doing my thing and getting into it. We’ve been touring forever

So the whole band is involved in the songwriting?

Some songs we’ll jam all together from scratch, but normally I’ll come up with something and we’ll work on it. But if I have a real clear idea of it, I’ll tell people what kind of thing I’m thinking of. But someone might bring in an idea and we’ll jam on it. Right now I’m trying to record loads of stuff in my home studio.

Your hat has almost become your visual trademark — when did you first start wearing a hat on stage?

One of the main reasons why I’m wearing a hat on stage is because I hate to get my hair in my eyes. If I don’t wear it, I end up with all of my hair in my face. I can’t see a thing. It almost stops me from getting into the music. My hat stops my hair from doing that. If I do a show without the hat, it pisses me off [laughs]. The hair becomes a problem.

Do you have just one hat?

I’ve got loads of different hats. I bought an Italian black one that I really like, that I bought over here in the lower east side of Manhattan.

I like that one. I’ve changed hats around, I’m probably going to not wear hats at some point.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll wear a dress instead.

Alberta Cross play Reverb’s Fourth Birthday Party on Sunday July 25, 2010. They also play Splendour In The Grass from July 31 in Woodford, Queensland. Their album, Broken Side Of Time, is out now through Dew Process.

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bret easton ellis

Twenty five years after his breakthrough novel Less Than Zero, literary icon Bret Easton Ellis has revisited those characters with a new book, Imperial Bedrooms. But twenty five years later, a lot has changed in the lives of its protagonists Clay, Blair and Julian.

In true Ellis style, Imperial Bedrooms pulls no punches, confirming its author as an unwavering visionary. Nick Milligan speaks with Ellis in this candid interview about his writing process, snuff movies and, of course, American Psycho.

Some of your books have taken years for you to write and have been gruelling for you.

How did the writing of Imperial Bedrooms compare to your previous novels?

Just as gruelling. I’ve got to find a way to make it less gruelling, I think. It took a long time, because I was working on a lot of other projects.

I was thinking about the book for a long time too. I first started thinking about the book when I was completing Lunar Park. In the middle of Lunar Park, I reread all my other books. The only question that came out of the reading of those books was, ‘Where is Clay now and what is he doing?’ It just wouldn’t leave me. I thought about it for around a year, year and a half — thinking about what kind of book this would be. Is it really worth doing this book? People will see it as a sequel — I don’t really see it as a sequel.

I see it as just finding out where Clay is now — which I guess is a sequel, but I didn’t approach it as such. I was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and I’d moved back to Los Angeles and was not having a good time of it. All these things started to come together and then I started making an outline. Then during those three years I was fooling around with it, because it sat off to the side while I was writing some TV projects. I would work on it here and there, but I had an outline. I think that’s why it took so long. It’s a very short book, you would think it would have taken a lot less longer to complete. But it wasn’t as if I was working on it every day. I’d work on a section for a couple of weeks, but it would be in conjunction with other things. It was gruelling, because I think the period I was in was gruelling. I was adjusting to life back in Los Angeles. It’s just how I work — I just don’t push out a book as often as I would like to.

Do you treat writing as a nine-to-five job, or do you need a burst of inspiration before you can continue writing on a project?

Writing a novel is an emotional process and I think you write a novel because you’re feeling certain things. You want to figure out why you’re feeling them and you want answers to questions you might have about your particular existence. That sounds rather grand, but it’s not. You can’t help wanting to write the novel and you do live it during the duration of that process. On a technical level, I like to work between certain hours during the day, but that doesn’t mean that when I walk away and

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behind bedroom doors it’s time for dinner and cocktails, that I’m not still thinking about the novel. You do live with it the entire time.

A film adaptation of Less Than Zero (starring Robert Downey Jr, Andrew McCarthy, James Spader) was released, which was incredibly different from the book. Was part of your motivation for writing Imperial Bedrooms an opportunity to reclaim these characters from the movie?

Um, no. It really came from the things that I said before. I was haunted by where Clay was now.

I wanted to just explore that. Of course, the movie had to be a concern, because Julian lives in [Less Than Zero] and I wanted him to be a part of this book. So on a technical level, I had

to figure out how to deal with that. There might be people who have seen the movie who haven’t read Less Than Zero and don’t understand that Julian lived. But I never felt that the characters were really claimed by the movie, just like I don’t feel like Robert Redford and Mia Farrow claimed The Great Gatsby. The many adaptations of Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary — I don’t think those really claim the book. But then again, there are some books where I might feel differently… but I was not concerned about that.

I didn’t feel that that was something I needed to be worried about. But I understand where that question comes from.

In Less Than Zero, Clay is a very adrift character but in many of the situations he’s in, he draws

a moral line. Of all your protagonists, he’s one of the few that escapes the end of the book with a sense of morality. What was behind the decision to have him fall from grace in Imperial Bedrooms?

I don’t know. While I was rereading Less Than Zero many times while I was working on Imperial Bedrooms, it seemed more and more logical that this is where [Clay] would end up.

Now, you have to take into account where I was also at the time of writing Imperial Bedrooms merged with the book. I’m not saying that I like to beat up women… my initial foray into living in Los Angeles and working very closely with projects in the film industry, helped inform this book. It was a fairly difficult, stressful time that did start to

illustration by cameron bennett

bret easton ellis

“ Maybe I’m just a sick bastard.

Maybe I am…

I don’t think I am.”

I’m just watching it flow outward and trying to be a technician with it, and control and contain it… if that makes any sense at all.

One of the shocking moments in Less Than Zero is the screening of a snuff film. You reference this at the beginning of Imperial Bedrooms.

Well, not only in the beginning, but at the end.

There are a couple of snuff movies that are being shot. It becomes sort of a motif. That was something I was thinking a lot about as well.

Do you feel the snuff films in Imperial Bedrooms have as big an impact as they do in Less Than Zero? What role do you feel they play in Imperial Bedrooms?

Well, everyone’s making movies… everyone wants to make movies. I don’t know. That’s a question that might be better suited to someone writing a paper on Imperial Bedrooms, rather than why I felt those things needed to be there.

I don’t know. Again, it felt right. Creative decisions come from an emotional place. I don’t necessarily think they come from a logical place. A lot of what a novel is you tapping into your unconscious. It’s kind of like a dream. Yeah, there is the technician that comes in and orders the material. But the imagery and the story comes from a particularly logical place. It comes from where you’re feeling and where you are at at that point in your life. But snuff movies? I don’t know. They can mean a lot of things.

affect the way this book was going to play itself out. A lot of it had to do with my mood, but while I was rereading Less Than Zero and outlining Imperial Bedrooms, this seemed to me like the logical end point of where Clay would be. But that’s just me — that’s me looking at the book I wrote 25 years ago and this book I was working on for the last three or four years.

Again, it’s an emotional thing. I did not make a conscious decision to go ‘there’. It was a feeling — this is where I feel he might be. It started to unfold itself and I try to contain it a little bit as the technician — as the writer of the novel.

But once I get an idea for a novel and realise who the narrator’s going to be and what the situation is and where he is at this point in his life, in a lot of ways it starts to flow outward.

It seems that over time, the dialogue in each of your books have become less linear. Two characters can be having a conversation and not necessarily answering what the other person is saying. Have you noticed a change in the way you approach dialogue?

It’s interesting — again, the narrator decides a lot of things. I think the dialogue in each of the books is really dependent on who the narrator is. I think the dialogue in Imperial Bedrooms is very different from say, the dialogue in Lunar Park — or in Glamorama, which is very chatty and seemingly endlessly about nothing. The writer I was most interested in while writing [Imperial Bedrooms] was Raymond Chandler, and I liked the hard-boiled rhythm of his dialogue.

Which I wanted to replicate, but you really can’t replicate in this day and age without is sounding kind of silly. It doesn’t sound silly in Raymond Chandler, because you realise the time when it was written and it was one of the first of its kind.

Also, Clay is a screenwriter and I think it’s very much a screenwriter’s book. It’s very to-the-point, there’s very short scenes, the dialogue is very clipped — that was the big note that I had in my mind when I was working on it — that the book should almost play out like a script or a movie. I thought it was going to be a longer book, but then I realised when I was shaping it that it was going to be a book written by a screenwriter, and that informed a lot of the choices that were made.

Certain details of the plot are held back from the reader in Imperial Bedrooms. Is this your way of saying that those details don’t matter or are you allowing the reader to figure out these details for themselves?

This is Clay’s choice. I think I know exactly what’s

going on — Clay doesn’t want to ask a lot of questions. That’s part of his problem. He keeps misinterpreting everything as being about him, which is what also I thought the novel was about — a portrait of a raging narcissist, who wants whatever he wants no matter what the cost is to other people around him. He’s interested in what he’s interested in. He could, if he wanted to, piece the entire thing together, but he’s the narrator of the book and he’s obviously not that interested in it. He’s interested in his gratification and getting what he wants.

That precludes wanting to find out what the larger mystery is.

The problem with Chandler, when you get to the unravelling of the mystery — when you get to the answers of the mystery — Chandler often didn’t need to know what the answer was.

It wasn’t the answer to the mystery that was so interesting — it was the ride through the mystery. Answers are usually boring. Logic ruins fiction. It goes back to American Psycho — people always want to ask me, ‘Did it happen or didn’t it happen?’ My response is, ‘Is it more interesting if you know?’ I don’t think it is.

That was something I was conscious of in Imperial Bedrooms. If it was a different narrator, we might have known everything that was going on and pieced the whole thing together. Because it’s Clay, I just don’t think that was a possibility.

Is this a book you could have written around the time you wrote Less Than Zero, or has experience brought you to this story?

I would never have written a book like Imperial Bedrooms when I was 21. It’s a novel about adults, in a way. Adults who are trying to work their way through middle age.

Every book I’ve written has been about a certain period in my life. Less Than Zero was certainly representative of that period, as was American Psycho and Glamorama. Imperial Bedrooms is not a book I could have written at any other time. Everything that was happening in my life right now started to inform this bit of fiction.

Do you approach the writing of sex scenes differently to how you would approach another scene in your book?

No, I actually don’t. Also, I think that the sex scenes in the novel are told in the way the narrator would describe them. Clay is not that open about the sex scenes, in the way that Victor Ward (from Glamorama), high on ecstasy in a threesome would be, or Patrick Bateman’s (from American Psycho) porno descriptions of his sexual escapades with hookers. Or the way the college kids talk about their sexual fumbling-around in Rules Of Attraction. It really depends on the narrator and where they are. They make a lot of the decisions in the novel and how the novel’s going to be told, and that holds true for the sex scenes as well. You don’t want a sex scene to sound particularly foolish and I think a lot of writers are bad at sex scenes because they tend to decorate them. That decorative quality makes them funny and seem purple and lame.

I think the facts of the sex scene are enough. I also feel that way about a lot of the writing in general. You should just stick to the facts —

that tends to be more interesting anyway.

Scenes towards the end of Imperial Bedrooms blur the lines between sex and violence — what is it about that dynamic that interests you as a writer?

It’s a feeling. I don’t know. It felt right. It felt like this is the point in the novel in which [Clay] would do this. It was an emotional decision. The question you’re asking demands an almost professorial answer — a very smart critic could answer that question. As the writer of the book, I don’t know [laughs]. It’s happened in my work, but I don’t really have a prepared plan as to why that’s true and why I have come back to that a couple of times in my work. Why do you suppose? Maybe I’m just a sick bastard? Maybe I am… I don’t think I am. When you ask a question like that I begin to worry.

What was it like to return to your first person, stream-of-consciousness style?

Fun. It was fun. One of the things that sold me on doing this was that I could go back to that minimalism of Less Than Zero, which I had not gone back to in a long time. Writing these paragraphs — long sentences that start at one place and then end up at some place completely different is almost like doing a crossword puzzle. It’s a technical challenge to have them flow in the right way, but it’s also very fun, too. That’s something I was very much engaged by, to go back to that minimalism.

There’s talk of Lunar Park being adapted into a film.

Lunar Park is grounded in the horror genre, so it’s a better bet (as a movie) in this day and age. I know that the people that are in control of that project are fairly serious about it.

But I’m not involved. I hear bits and pieces every now and then, but nothing is set in stone on that. Actors have come and gone.

Directors have come and gone.

After the film adapation of Less Than Zero, do you feel comfortable relinquishing control over one of your books?

Well, actually it’s not after Less Than Zero, it’s after The Informers. That really made me pause about letting my books be turned into movies [laughs]. With Less Than Zero, I was really young and it seemed kind of exciting that someone was making a movie out of my book. I was a little disheartened watching it the first time and realising that there wasn’t a single scene or line of dialogue (that was mine). They took the characters and the title. You sell the rights to the book because they’re offering you money… and the money is pretty good. And the odds of anyone ever making your book into a movie are tiny. I think two per cent of all books that are optioned make it to the screen. So the odds are pretty good. You get the money and they don’t make it into a movie, which is great.

Because the movie can be a disaster. More often than not, it does not work out. That’s how I’ve placed the bets. I actually helped with the last one (The Informers), which is probably the one that worked the least out of those four.

Imperial Bedrooms hits the shelves on July 7.

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album reviews Feature albums

Minus The Bear Omni Alberts

4/5 A departure from the manic and grandiose progressive-rock excursion of their 2007 record, Planet Of Ice, Seattle’s Minus The Bear have now reclaimed their dance-rock past.

Singer Jake Snider, with his smooth, jazz-friendly vocals, again investigates sensuous and sexy sentiments, from the perspective of someone drifting through a night’s parties - a willing observer. There’s the drug-addled, slinking synth-pop of ‘Into The Mirror’, a vivid depiction of a sleek rock get-together: “They got a mirror full of caine in the bathroom, because nobody here knows when to stop. For now we’re just making out with the door unlocked...” There’s also some backing vocals by Visqueen’s Rachel Flotard.

‘Secret Country’ unwinds with the crazed, slow-groove arrangements that only Minus The Bear can deliver, with Dave Knudson’s off-kilter guitar parts running like ripples through the melody. On ‘Hold Me Down’, his guitar shifts between light-tapping to strident chords and then wailing notes, over the song’s speedy, kinetic drumming.

As always, Minus The Bear’s arrangements are inventive, whimsical, hazy and dream-like. Their interest in synthesisers brings together organic rock and electronics in an incredibly joyous and often restless fusion. ~Nick Milligan

The Black Keys Brothers Shock

4.5/5 Fresh from their collaborative rap project Blakroc, the Akron, Ohio duo of The Black Keys return with their best record yet. Singer Dan Auerbach’s normal approach to the guitar, with his in-your-face wailing blues riffs, takes a back seat on Brothers to more nuanced parts and dark, creepy atmospherics. There’s heavy, absorbing production, made clear on opener ‘Everlasting Light’, where Auerbach coos in falsetto. Then there’s the immediately catchy ‘Next Girl’ where the singer croons with intent: “My next girl, she’ll be nothing like my ex-girl. I made mistakes back then, I’ll never do it again.”

In every aspect, Brothers is The Black Keys’ most musically accomplished record. There’s hooks aplenty, like in instrumental ‘Black Mud’, that emerge from a fuzzy molasses. Drummer Patrick Carney provides tribal beats, over which Auerbach can weave his black magic.

This is blues from a haunted swamp, ghostly organ appearing every so often to send a chill down your spine.

The duo’s biggest achievement on Brothers is to take their well established sound and twist it into something that feels both fresh and foreboding. ~Nick Milligan

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Against Me!

Mike Patton

Crowded House

White Crosses

Mondo Cane

Intriguer

Sire Records/Warner music

shock

Universal

2/5 White Crosses is the fifth studio album from Floridian punk act Against Me!. It is their second album helmed by producer Butch Vig, who worked on a string of influential grunge albums in the early 90s such as, Nirvana’s Nevermind, Sonic Youth’s Dirty and the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream. First single ‘I Was a Teenage Anarchist’ reeks of Vig’s influence, with vocalist Tom Gabel’s strong (albeit uninspired) bark doubletracked to a Nickelback-esque, radio-friendly honey – a production style of Vig’s that Kurt Cobain questioned during the making of Nevermind.

Vig’s presence on the album is all-pervasive – from the boring, string section balladry of ‘Ache With Me’ to the trite, predictably harmonicafuelled ‘Bob Dylan Dream’. And it’s a shame really, there’s an interesting set of tracks lurking beneath the surface of White Crosses but, the glossy production and too-obvious song structures keep these engaging musical ideas from coming to the forefront. ~Scott Gilbert

3/5 With his 30th album in only 21 years in the music industry, the multi-instrumentalist and versatile vocalist Mike Patton is sure to alienate some of his Faith No More and Mr Bungle followers with his latest release. Mondo Cane is a far stretch from the experimental metal with which Patton normally associates himself, stressing the experimental angle to breaking point, with Patton flipping his usual lyrical tendencies in order to croon his way through an eleven song track list of 1950s and 1960s Italian pop songs. These tracks pay homage to, and even directly draw from, Patton’s personal hero, film composer Ennio Morricone, whom many of us would recognise from his famous film scores for the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. Mondo Cane is what Patton has described as an album of “love, loss, heartbreak and the triumph of suffering”, and although the language barrier inhibits the comprehension of the song’s lyrical value, the vivid emotionality of the orchestral arrangements of Daniele Luppi remains evident. Tracks such as ‘Quella Che Conta’ and ‘Deep Down’ utilise the entirety of the 65-piece orchestra, with intriguing instrumentation and emotional climaxes.

Once again Mike Patton’s restless experimentation has brought him to a point that is far away from where many metal musicians dare tread, but his latest work proves to be an interesting career move, leading to a surprisingly engrossing album. ~Jordan Watton

4/5 Intriguer is the new album from Crowded House. After their sublime but uneven 2007 album Time on Earth was criticised for its length and tone, Crowded House have bounced back. They have shed the sadness of Time on Earth whilst retaining a dark, simmering moodiness on the weaving ‘Archer’s Arrow’, future classic ‘Amsterdam’ and the sensual ‘Isolation’ (a sexy duet with his wife Sharon sharing lead vocals), that transforms into a psychedelic jam-out. New drummer Matt Sherrod’s contributions are subtle and varied in comparison to his vivacious, bombastic live displays, with a driving beat to the album opener ‘Saturday Sun’, the lightly battered feel of ‘Falling Dove’ and the samba feel to ‘Either Side of the World’. Whilst ‘Saturday Sun’ and ‘Inside Out’ provide the rock edge, piano is the focal instrument of Intriguer, peppered with an assortment of keyboards and synthesisers.

Front man Neil Finn croons in his sweet tone over the ballads, recalling the Phil Judd-era of Split Enz with ‘Twice If You’re Lucky’, and the slow, unfolding angst of ‘Elephants’, where Finn delivers, “Let’s admit the world don’t care about us/It’s acting like we don’t exist/Sweet dreams, make waves, find bliss.” Be warned those looking for the straightforward, Beatleesque melodies of past Crowded House albums will be disappointed. ~Matt Petherbridge

Paul Weller Wake Up The Nation V2 Music/Universal Music

4/5 Where do you move musically when you have attained legendary status in your homeland, able to live a charmed existence with all the trappings of a comfortable lifestyle? If you are Paul Weller you kick against it all. The “modfather” has retained his vitality and penchant for that off-kilter resonance that has thrilled an ever-changing audience over the last 33 years. Tracks like ‘Fast Car/Slow Traffic’ (featuring ex-The Jam bandmate Bruce Foxton) and the title track, convey a sense of urgency not often seen in Weller’s recent solo work; the whimsy and unbridled experimentation of his last album (the engaging 22 Dreams) has been usurped to suit Weller’s ever-changing moods. Featuring 16 songs (most of which barely break two mins), Weller has not only been able to enthral us with a sonically adventurous and diverse album, but he has also (perhaps inadvertently) updated his own legendary status. ~Paul Frost

Pendulum Immersion Ear Storm/warner music

1.5/5 Immersion, the third LP from Pendulum, moves even further away from the drum and bass that typified the band’s earlier work. With collaborations from death metal group Swedes In Flames, on ‘Self Versus Self’, and Porcupine Tree founder Steven Wilson on ‘The Fountain’, the new album continues the more rock-oriented sound first heard on 2008’s In Silico. However, the results aren’t great – not only does Immersion feel like a wussy throwback to the punk-tinged house of The Prodigy’s early output, but the sheer size and epic-ness of Pendulum’s arrangements feel almost like an attempt at self-parody. For instance, opener ‘Genesis’ is so ridiculously sci-fi in its scope and instrumentation that it feels ripped from an episode of Stargate, while the elastic synth melody of ‘Set Me On Fire’ hovers over a stupidly colossal wall of bass fuzz. In short, Immersion is an album too epic for it’s own good; the sound of a band fixated by its own enormity. ~Scott Gilbert

Nevermore The Obsidian Conspiracy Century Media

The Drums The Drums Moshi Moshi Records

3.5/5 Riding an everlasting wave of success into the hearts of fans and critics, The Drums are the go-to band of 2010.

Poached by the Brits during 2009, The Drums were instant hits with their Summertime EP and their clean 1950s image was splashed on the cover of every respectable music publication. After snatching a Brit award and dazzling NME game players, the Brooklyn natives have dropped their exceedingly awaited self-titled debut album. Successfully capturing perpetual freedom, irresponsibility and the sweet innocence of summer romance, The Drums elegantly morph a fuzzy and repetitive rhythm section that happily lives beneath joyous guitar chimes. This is deliciously topped with high-pitched harmonies and a sprinkling of handclaps.

Cleverly disguising their heartache and distress, The Drums duck and weave through a mesh of New Order, The Hollies and The Zombies and create clear cut indie pop.

Tapping into a spirit of undying freedom with their anti-anthems, ‘Lets Go Surfing’ and ‘Best Friend’, I believe The Drums have more up their sleeve. ~Jacinta Govind

3.5/5 Admired for their fusion of powerful riffs and flawless technicality, Nevermore’s seventh studio album, The Obsidian Conspiracy, was one of the most anticipated albums of 2010.

Released a long five years after This Godless Endeavor, The Obsidian Conspiracy is a technically sound and imaginatively unique addition to the band’s already extensive discography. Stylistically speaking, Nevermore maintain the core identity of the band through a unique blend of rhythm, speed and technicality. As expected, it is difficult to fault the production quality of the album – long-time producer Andy Sneap mixes so that the aggressive and melodic aspects of each song are complemented. Guitarist Jeff Loomis is, again, a notable contributor to the overall sonic direction of the album, but despite the polished nature of his guitar work, his performance is more controlled, making it slightly less enticing than on previous albums.

However, sonic quality aside, there was one aspect that slightly diminished the overall appeal of the album. Lyrically, the songs are weaker in their thematic direction. Slightly more simplistic and with a greater emphasis on repetition, the lyrics that appear on The Obsidian Conspiracy never match those that appeared on Dead Heart in a Dead World or, more notably, This Godless Endeavor. Even though there is an evident shift in direction, the album is still a worthy contribution to the Nevermore discography, which itself is faultless. ~Lilen Pautasso

album reviews album of the month

Foals

Soulfly

Total Life Forever

Omen

Transgressive Records/warner

Roadrunner/Warner music

4/5 It’s fair to say that Total Life Forever – the new album from Oxford five-piece Foals – has some fairly weighty expectations to meet, after the commercial and critical success of their 2008 debut Antidotes. With producer Dave Sitek (of TV on the Radio fame) manning the boards, the indie rockers have crafted a more expansive, less tightly-coiled album than Antidotes, with the opening track epitomising the mature tone of TLF. ‘Blue Blood’ is a sonic delight, with vocalist Yannis Philippakis’ restrained warble floating over hyperactive bass and sparse, pretty guitar inflections. The song’s frenetic drumming is a joy to experience with headphones, as is the entirety of first single ‘Spanish Sahara’, whose subdued chord changes and vulnerable vocal performance draw attention to the sheer depth of sound present on the album. Ultimately, Total Life Forever succeeds in every area that Antidotes failed – which is the mark of a quality sophomore release. ~Scott Gilbert

4/5 Formed shortly after front man Max Cavalera left Brazilian metal legends Sepultura at the end of 1996, Soulfly has been an ever-morphing musical beast – their style moving around the metal sphere as Max has felt the need. Their back catalogue is almost like a musical journal, marking important points in his career. With the release of the band’s seventh full-length, Omen, we see the group step back a couple of decades; destroying our speakers with their thrashiest effort yet. From the opening blasts of ‘Bloodbath & Beyond’ and ‘Rise of the Fallen’ (also featuring Dillinger Escape Plan singer Greg Puciato) to storming tracks like ‘Vulture Culture’ and ‘Off With Their Heads’ – it’s a glorious listen that inspires memories of early Sepultura albums like Arise and Chaos AD. As Max rightfully pointed out in a recent interview, “I’m getting older, so what? I should stop or play slow? That’s fucking bullshit.” For fans of: Exodus, Sepultura and Cavalera Conspiracy. ~Ben Hosking

Rebecca Barnard

The Dead Weather

Everlasting

Sea Of Cowards

Shock Records

Third Man/warner music

3.5/5 Barnard’s second solo album (following 2006’s breezy Fortified) seems a world away from her days fronting nineties indie pop favourites Rebecca’s Empire.

Recorded almost entirely in New York at Tony Bennett’s studios, Barnard seems to be wiping the slate clean and allowing her varied jazz and soul influences to dominate proceedings.

A lot can be read into the fact that this is her first album made without chief collaborator Shane O’Mara – the stories of love and loss seem permeated by an undercurrent of change and freedom in the songwriter’s eyes.

The opening mantra of ‘Age 14’ - “I want to feel like I did when I met you” sets the scene for the rest of the album, and Barnard’s poignant vocal on ‘Seasong’ further crystallises these feevlings of heartbreak and transformation. An enigmatic and confident album, Barnard has managed to capture real emotion whilst maintaining her commercial appeal. ~Paul Frost

2/5 For reasons I can’t fathom, Jack White is considered by many to be a rock ‘n roll titan; the genre’s ambassador to a generation more interested in synths than guitars. Sea of Cowards is the second LP from White’s most recent project The Dead Weather, which features Alison Mosshart of The Kills, as well as supporting players from Queens of the Stone Age and The Raconteurs.

The record is essentially a White Stripes retread, and this is evidenced on opener ‘Blue Blood Blues’ – the track is almost indistinguishable from White’s primary output, aside from Mosshart’s bland backing vocals and the extra layer of fuzz applied to the guitars. The record actually has some decent songs, but this can’t disguise the fact that Sea of Cowards – along with every album White has released since the early noughties – is a tired rehash of the same old hard-blues aesthetic. ~Scott Gilbert

CC The cat Inna Babylon Jungle Independent

3/5 Ever wondered what it would sound like to remix reggae with techno? CC The Cat have the answer; their debut album Inna Babylon Jungle. It’s steel drums, dreads and as many references to weed as you can roll into an album... but it’s also synth and remix warping. ‘Concrete Jungle’, the opening track, begins with a techno intro not unlike something Jamiroquai might dream up, but as the steel drums begin and CC The Cat belts out a few lines, you know this is reggae- with a 21st century twist.

CC The Cat’s lead vocals soar, skat and swing to funky bass and lead guitar, playfully backed by effervescent drumming. Move your feet, shake your hips, dance in the sunshine, take a deep breath and embrace the reggae atmosphere so thickly laid onto this album you can almost touch it. For Fans of: Bob Marley, Tracey Chapman. ~Jessica Saxton

The Gin Club Deathwish Plus one records

4/5 The latest release from Brisbane folk collective, The Gin Club, offers a solid collection of downright good tunes.

Abundant in deep, honest vocals, lyrical prowess and masterful instrumentals, Deathwish is accomplished, to say the least. Most important, however, is the record’s accessibility. This is beer-guzzling, foot-tapping bar music – given a polished, thoughtful edge. The album effortlessly blends indie-folk, blues, alt-rock and country.

The latter, admittedly, is not my forte and tracks such as ‘Choppin’ Wood’ and ‘Shake Hands’ are just a little too “let’s jam around the campfire”. The gorgeous vulnerability of ‘I Am My Own Partner’, the simple storytelling of ‘Book Of Poison’, the blazing vocals of ‘Eternity’ and the feminine quaintness of ‘Milli Vanilli’, provide a refreshing contrast and instantly alter my outlook. It is, after all, the diversity of Deathwish which makes it such a successful and exciting record. ~Lee tobin

Blitzen Trapper Destroyer of the Void Subpop/stomp

4.5/5 Eric Earley’s voice may conjure unavoidable thoughts of Bob Dylan, but his songwriting takes your breath away. Since Oregon’s Blitzen Trapper first broke into Australia’s consciousness with their 2007 record Wild Mountain Nation, their music has become increasingly spell-binding. On this latest folk-rock epic, the six-piece open in brazen style with a six-minute Beatlesque title-track as the opener. From then on its an eclectic a journey, just as you would expect from Blitzen Trapper. They again fuse soft folk, soft rock, alt-country and lashings of psychedelia. Songs like piano ballad ‘Heaven and Earth’ and ‘The Man Who Would Speak True’ are further examples of Earley’s ability to craft timeless and instantly memorable music. He’s a balladeer and a poet who is clearly capable of brilliance. The mind boggles as to where he might take this band in the future. ~Nick Milligan

The Flaming Lips The Dark Side of the Moon Warner Music

4/5 What do you do for your thirteenth studio album, just to keep things interesting? Well, if you’re The Flaming Lips, you get your friends together and interpret a classic rock album. In this case, Stardeath and The White Dwarfs, Henry Rollins (Black Flag, Rollins Band), and Peaches join The Flaming Lips in creating a track-for-track remake of Pink Floyd’s platinum-selling concept album, Dark Side of the Moon. Now, I use the word interpret because that’s all this remake is, an interpret­ ation. It doesn’t re-imagine the original album by changing song structures or rhythms. Rather, The Flaming Lips and crew rough the edges, remove the progressive-rock sheen, and fully expose the angst and alienation intrinsic in the original tracks. Overall, I have to applaud their visions of these songs. The distillation of the songs modernises the tracks and makes them feel fresh. Favourite moments on the album include: the squishy, electronic bass-line in ‘Money’, the primal screams of Peaches in ‘Great Gig in the Sky’, and Henry Rollins’ spoken-word soundbites. ~Andrew Chesham

Xavier Rudd Koonyum Sun Salt X Records/Universal Music

The Dennis Boys Band No Story To Tell Rack Off Records

3/5 If you love traditional country music, you’re going to love The Dennis Boys Band—it’s that simple. My girlfriend, who hails from Tamworth and has to deal with her hometown being invaded annually, nearly vomited when the lap steel guitar oozed from the speakers. I just wanted to be in a pub dancing around like a drunken fool. No Story To Tell ticks all the country music boxes, but if you don’t like country, I’d stay away. ‘Devil Girl’ and ‘I’ll Find A Better Way’ are a fun ruckus. ‘Hurts Too Much’ is a slow, sentimental highlight with the lovely addition of organ and harmonica, but other than that, I get the distinct feeling I’ve heard it all before. ~Matthew O’Donnell

Brant Bjork Gods and Godesses Low Desert Punk

4/5 From the opening guitar lick, it’s obvious that Brant Bjork is once again delivering the gritty blues and potent rock he’s known for. His ninth album, Gods & Goddesses, recalls many past rock legends— from hints of the MC5 to Jimi Hendrix—with wailing guitar solos, wah-wah pedals, blues riffs, and vocals which alternate between smooth and dirty. While imitating the greats of the past can sometimes feel uninspired, Bjork creates a sound that is convincingly unique and honest. Tracks like ‘Blowin’ Up Shop’ and ‘The Future Rock (We Got It)’ offer simple melodies and drum progressions interspersed with the kind of guitar solos that encourage listeners to close their eyes, sit back and indulge. Closing track ‘Somewhere, Some Woman’ is a definite standout, bringing it all together with meandering psychedelic guitars and the suggestion that it is the epic moment of this album. ~Rachel Urquhart

3.5/5 Recorded after the dissolution of his ten-year marriage, Koonyum Sun marks a departure for multiinstrumentalist Xavier Rudd – for the first time in his career, he’s collaborated with a backing band. Created alongside South African duo Izintaba (bassist Tio Moloantoa and percussionist Andile Nqubezelo), Rudd’s sixth studio album is more communal and ritualistic than his previous efforts, as evidenced by opener ‘Sky to Ground’. The song’s reggae rhythm and bass groove convey the image of a campfire jam, with Rudd’s soaring chorus backed by the tribal chants of Moloantoa and Nqubezelo.

This communal aesthetic is carried over into the urgent, mysterious ‘Koonyum Sun’, as well as the indigenous imagery and warbling didgeridoos of ‘Woman Dreaming’. And despite the overt environmentalism of Rudd’s lyrical content – which comes across as preachy rather than insightful – Koonyum Sun is another strong release from one of Australia’s most talented musical exports. ~Scott Gilbert

Dead Letter Circus This Is The Warning Warner Music

4/5 Self described alternate-rock band, Dead Letter Circus well and truly deliver with their debut album, This Is The Warning. My own warning... be careful if you are listening in a crowded place - if you close your eyes, you could find yourself moshing through the crowd. Opening with electric piece ‘Here We Divide’, this 12 song collection takes a dizzying rock journey, drawing on influences such as Muse, The Butterfly Effect and The Mars Volta. Swinging from furiously intense riffs and screaming lyrics, to vocally focused moments over chords; supported without fail by intuitively spectacular drumming, this collection never reaches a dull moment. This Brisbane four-piece really bring something else to the Australian rock scene. For fans of: Emarosa, The Butterfly Effect, Linkin Park. ~Jessica Saxton

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NEWCASTLE Don’t forget — Live & Local every Wednesday night

8-9 July Jon Stevens

10 July 15 July 16 July 17 July

Rick Price Gail Page Dick and Christa Hughes The Badloves

18 July Cotton, Keays and Morris 22 July Bandaluzia 23 July Jennifer Green

24 July Gina Jeffreys 30 July Dave Graney & The Lurid Yellow Mist 6 Aug Chain 7 Aug The Alchemical Cabaret 8 Aug Psycho Zydeco 12 Aug The Dingoes 13-14Aug Ian Moss 15 Aug Damien Leith

21 Aug 27 Aug 28 Aug

Glenn Shorrock Spectrum Lonnie Lee

Thursday, July 1

Sunday, July 4

Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Bacardi Band Search w/ State Of Grace + Tortoise Head Platoon + Stone Shadow + Violence Civic Theatre, Newcastle Bill Bailey Northern Star Hotel, Newcastle Zoe K and the Minor Keys

Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland Afro Moses Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Morpeth Jugbusters Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle NIM + In Sepia Lizotte’s, Kincumber Black Sorrows Premier Hotel, Broadmeadow Steve Edmonds Band Queens Wharf Brewery, Newcastle The Break + Box Set Wickham Park Hotel, Newcastle The Blues Bombers

Friday, July 2 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Thirsty Merc + Okamoto Davistown RSL 1927 Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland Sneaky Weazel Gang Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Fire Birdz Lass O’Gowrie Hotel, Newcastle Dennis Boys Band + The McNastys Lizotte’s, Kincumber Vince Jones Lizotte’s, Lambton Tour De Force tribute show The Loft, Newcastle Grace Turner + Lachlan Collins View Factory, Newcastle Half Nelson + Marty Rotolo Wickham Park Hotel, Newcastle Milestones

Saturday, July 3 29 Aug 3 Sept

Casey Donovan Vika and Linda Bull

For bookings and information, phone (02) 4956 2066 or visit lizottes.com.au

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r e v e rb maga z in e issu e # 0 4 8 — july 2 0 1 0

Belmont 16’ Sailing Club, Belmont 1927 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Here Come The Birds CBD Hotel, Newcastle DJ Sega Ettalong Uniting Church Hall Phil Edgeley + Christian Marsh + Dan Granero Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland Vaudeville Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Dave and the Demons Jack’s Bar and Grill, Erina Jellyfish Kent Hotel, Hamilton Ebb n Flo Lass O’Gowrie Hotel, Newcastle Wiseheimer + Cash No + Dementia 13 Lizotte’s, Kincumber Tour De Force tribute show Lizotte’s, Lambton Vince Jones Northern Star Hotel, Newcastle Matt Corby + Skye Point Seven Seas Hotel, Carrington Kaylah Anne The Loft, Newcastle Allay The Sea

Monday, July 5 Chilli Lounge, Wyong Bermuda + Silent Screams + Pledge This + Buried In Verona + In The Wake

Cessnock Leagues Club Mental As Anything + Mark Cashin and the Lil Hussys Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland Zoe K and her band of Lost Souls Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Melody Pool Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle Behind Crimson Eyes + Cola Wars + Breaking Orbit + Rincon Lizotte’s, Kincumber Rick Price + Mike McCarthy Lizotte’s, Lambton Jon Stevens + Mark Wilkinson The Loft, Newcastle Last Kinnection + DJ Jaytee + MC Lucid View Factory, Newcastle Dirty Spaniard + Jack Dawson + Amber Lee Wickham Park Hotel, Newcastle Front End Loader + Horse Bolted

Wednesday, July 7 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Local Resident Failure + The Decline Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Merewether Fats Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle Bermuda + Silent Screams + Sagacity + Buried In Verona Lizotte’s, Kincumber The Irish Prince + Ashleigh Grace + Dan Ford and the Goods Lizotte’s, Lambton Rob Cass + PJ Kevo and the Do + Dan Conway Mayfield Skatepark DJ N’Taprise + Urban Freeflow View Factory, Newcastle Rhys Crimmin + Jessica Cain

Thursday, July 8 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Bacardi Band Search w/ Deathmaask + Cota + Sunday’s Record + The Chestnust Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland Rhys Crimmin Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Thomas Lawson Lizotte’s, Lambton Jon Stevens + Mark Wilkinson Mingara, Central Coast Puppetry of the Penis Queens Wharf Brewery, Newcastle Katie Noonan and the Captains Wickham Park Hotel, Newcastle Van Walker + Liz Stringer

Friday, July 9 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Tijuana Cartel

Front End Loader

Saturday, July 10 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle British India CBD Hotel, Newcastle Phil Smart + Utah + J-Wall + Tom Haze Club Singleton Puppetry of the Penis Entrance Leagues Club, Bateau Bay Israel Cannon Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland Front End Loader Lass O’Gowrie Hotel, Newcastle Mr Maps Lizotte’s, Kincumber Jon Stevens + Mark Wilkinson Lizotte’s, Lambton Rick Price + Matt Zarb New Orana Hotel, Blacksmiths Steve Edmonds Band Newcastle Panthers The Butterfly Effect + Calling All Cars Northern Star Hotel, Hamilton The Beards Seven Seas Hotel, Carrington Angie The Entrance The Entrance Winter Blues and Jazz w/ Kevin Borich + Galapagos Duck + Bridie King + Jack Evans and the Spiders + Strictly Dixie + Mal Gatt + Dan Granero + Jiri’s Harlem Swing + Aotea Combo + Shiraz + Yuki Kumagai / John Mackie Jazz band + Hip Sister + Jenny Marie Lang + Indiana Phoenix + Muma Jane’s Blues Band

Umina Beach PCYC No Pressure + True Love Chaos + Neon Heart View Factory, Newcastle Liz Stringer + Van Walker Wickham Park Hotel, Newcastle Danny and the Cosmic Tremors + Leah and The Automatic Boys + Twilight Rhythm Boys + Ezra lee + Scott Baker + Pat Capocci

Sunday, July 11 Bateau Bay Hotel Mark Cashin and the Lil Hussys Catho Pub, Catherine Hill Bay Eye On You CBD Hotel, Newcastle Harvard Bass + Kato + Loods + Meena + Hey Presto! + Cassi + A Catt’s Revenge + So Cal + Rock N Roll Circus Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland Liz Stringer + Van Walker Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Zoe K and the Shadow Katz Lizotte’s, Kincumber Jon Stevens + Mark Wilkinson The Entrance The Entrance Winter Blues and Jazz View Factory, Newcastle Galleri

Wednesday, July 14 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Coma Lies + Totally Unicorn + Edens March Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Trojan Kettle + Dropbunny + Piranha Party Lass O’Gowrie Hotel, Newcastle Laura Hill and the Tuesday Bandits Lizotte’s, Kincumber The Wildes + Woody’s Roundup + Ruby For Lucy Lizotte’s, Lambton Sarah McLennan + Grant Walter + Ashleigh Grace + Dan Ford and the Goods Maryland Skatepark Swallow Your Pride + A Bleeding Nation Newcastle Panthers Elev8 w/ Steve Hill + Zannon + Skoob + MC Losty + Ules + Phatt and Waz

Thursday, July 15 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Bacardi Band Search w/ Red Dawn + The Mad Ones + The Dread Sky + Rein Room + Candy and the Full Moons Gallipoli Legion Club, Hamilton Midnight From Memphis + Dave Hellens Duo Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Global Battle Of The Bands Lizotte’s, Lambton Gail Page + Alice Terry Wickham Park Hotel, Newcastle Flash Sheedy and the Instro-matics + The Wildes

Friday, July 16 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Long Island Sound Chilli Lounge, Wyong Northlane + Missouri Breaks + Broken Scarlet Entrance Leagues Club, Bateau Bay The Butterfly Effect + Calling All Cars Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland Dennis Boys Band + The Australian Beef Week Show Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Laura Hill and the Tuesday Bandits King St Hotel, Newcastle Purple Sneakers DJs Lizotte’s, Lambton Dick and Christa Hughes

Saturday, July 17 Belmont 16’ Sailing Club, Belmont Puppetry of the Penis Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Rubix Cuba CBD Hotel, Newcastle Dane Austin + Alex Black + Tom Haze + Phil Smart Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Little Blak Dress Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle The Boat People + The Great Dividing Range Lizotte’s, Lambton Badloves + The Widowbirds Seven Seas Hotel, Carrington Bunch of Funkers Slam Factory, Tuggerah Slam Jam w/ Shinto Katana + Lockdown + Facebreaker + Get A Dog Up Ya Wickham Park Hotel, Newcastle Pornskas

Sunday, July 18 Blush Night Club, Gosford Strike Anywhere + Papar Arms Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle John Mackie / Yuki Kumagi Jazz Band Lizotte’s, Kincumber Badloves + The Widowbirds Lizotte’s, Lambton Cotton, Keays and Morris + Mike McCarthy Matcham Hall Sarah Humphreys + Michael Peters + Tim Humphreys

Lizotte’s, Lambton Jenifer Green sings... Strictly Bassey

Saturday, July 24 CBD Hotel, Newcastle Alex Black + Nick Gurr + Jay Parker Enmore Theatre, Sydney Grizzly Bear Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle The Dread Sky Hordern Pavilion, Sydney Kasabian Lizotte’s, Kincumber Psycho Zydeco Lizotte’s, Lambton Gina Jeffreys Seven Seas Hotel, Carrington Jam Jar

Sunday, July 25 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Alberta Cross Enmore Theatre, Sydney Grizzly Bear Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland Milestones Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle I Am The Agent Kent Hotel, Hamilton Steve Edmonds Band Lizotte’s, Kincumber Gyan

Wednesday, July 28 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Allay The Sea + Cannons Mouth Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle College Fall

Thursday, July 29 Strike Anywhere

Wednesday, July 21 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Strike Anywhere + Papar Arms Lass O’Gowrie Hotel, Newcastle Ungus Ungus Ungus Lizotte’s, Kincumber Hayden French + Zoe Elliot + The My Tys + Tenielle Neda Lizotte’s, Lambton Pritchard and Rose + Dan March + Meags Hill + Chelsea Reed

Thursday, July 22 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Bacardi Band Search w/ Mistaken + The Vox Angelicus + The Playtapes + Elisa Kate Band Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Chelsea Reed + Carter Smythe Lizotte’s, Kincumber Mike McCarthy Lizotte’s, Lambton Bandaluzia

Friday, July 23 Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Spit Syndicate Doyalson RSL Puppetry of the Penis Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Van Demon’s Band Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle Sabretung + Soul Tremor + Osmium Grid Kincumber Hotel Eye On You Lizotte’s, Kincumber Gina Jeffreys

CENTRAL COAST Don’t forget — Live & Local every Wednesday night 2 July

Vince Jones

3 July

Tour de Force – Elton John & Billy Joel tribute show

4 July

The Black Sorrows

9 July

Rick Price

11 July

Jon Stevens

18 July

The Badloves

23 July Gina Jeffreys 24 July Psycho Zydeco

29 July Dave Graney & Clare Moore

1 Aug

Ray Beadle & Geoff Achison

Blush Night Club, Gosford The Hunter + Chasing Ghosts + Cannons Mouth + Valkere Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland Nick & Liesl Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle Lungs + Mary jane Kelly + Following The Sea Lizotte’s, Kincumber Dave Graney and Clare Moore + Tiffany Eckhart and Dave Steele Lizotte’s, Lambton Peter Northcote + Danny Marx Young

7 Aug

Chain

13 Aug

Glenn Shorrock

14 Aug

Damien Leith

15 Aug

The Dingoes

22 Aug

Cookin’ Up Comedy

Friday, July 30

27 Aug

Lonnie Lee and The

Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland Grandmaster Monk + Kira Puru and the Very Geordie Malones Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle Chunky Salsa Lizotte’s, Kincumber Shane Howard Lizotte’s, Lambton Dave Graney and Clare Moore + Tiffany Eckhart and Dave Steele

28 Aug

Casey Donovon

1 Sep

Elvis ‘68

20,21Aug Ian Moss

Leeman Birthday Bash

Comeback Special

Saturday, July 31 George Tavern, Maitland Broadway Mile Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle New Navy + Pink Fangs Lizotte’s, Kincumber Armondo Hurley and The Bods Lizotte’s, Lambton Shane Howard Seven Seas Hotel, Carrington Hugh Gordon Umina Beach PCYC Hyper Fest w/ Illusion of Dispair + Sadhana + Red Remedy + Adrenelin + North Of The Border Wickham Park Hotel, Newcastle Dennis Boys Band

For bookings and information, phone (02) 4368 2017 or visit lizottes.com.au

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tr avel

Hunter becomes the hunted Nick Milligan goes on a tour through the Hunter Valley to uncover its hidden gems.

The Hunter Valley is a mecca for people with decadent taste — and for good reason. The area is a treasure trove of flavours and aromas, with treats that will surely satisfy connoisseurs of all varieties. If you’ve gleaned all you can from weekends in the big smoke, then put together a taste-testing posse of friends and head to the Hunter for a sojourn.

Morpeth Having lived in Maitland until I was 16, I was relieved to return to its sleepy suburb of Morpeth 11 years later and find that very little has changed. Morpeth is still untouched by the greasy fingers of chain stores and unabashed commercialisation. The air is fresh and there’s something incredibly comforting in hearing the sounds of birds and insects gain prominence over the roar of traffic.

Morpeth is essentially one street of shops, but every one is worth checking out. The cobbled footpaths run parallel to a picturesque stretch of the Hunter river and Morpeth bridge remains as a charming, if not tenuously constructed, landmark. If you’re after coffee, beer, wine, fine dining, fresh sourdough, teddy bears, homemade ginger beer, honey, or an overwhelmingly stocked lolly shop, then stop in at Morpeth.

Morpeth Moonshine distillery Inside Morpeth’s Old Historic Surgeon’s House is the home of Morpeth Wine Cellars and Morpeth Moonshine. The latter is a spirit created from wine and is available for tasting. Even if you’re not a fan of knocking-back shots of spirits, you’ll find something here that you like.

Morpeth Moonshine is available in ‘original’ and ‘uncut’ formats, for all the blokes out there that like it rough. Everyone else can try the strawberry, butterscotch, aniseed and lemon flavours, which you can drink straight with ease — they all go down surprisingly smoothly.

If you’re really brave, you can pick up a bottle of their chilli moonshine.

This is also the cellar door of the Hunter Valley’s Rosebrook Estate vineyard and there’s a number of really delicious wines available to try — sparkling chardonnay [made with Methode Champenoise], wooded chardonnay, late pick verdhelo, liqueur verdhelo etc. I couldn’t leave without purchasing a bottle of their liqueur muscat and a bottle of original moonshine.

Ginger beer factory Morpeth’s ginger beer factory is an old store with large variety. There’s an art gallery upstairs, a vast array of honey to taste, gourmet food products and their speciality — homemade cordials.

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Morpeth Moonshine tasting

Ruins Liqueur Verdelho

Ginger beer factory

An Arnott’s appetiser

Bunna Bunoo’s varieties

They don’t sell alcoholic ginger beer, but these cordials are all available for tastetesting, and, if you’re planning a party, would make great cocktail mixers. I pick up a bottle of lime chilli cordial [which will go on to form a wonderful relationship with my bottle of Morpeth moonshine]. But the factory creates everything from bitters lemon lime, portello [cherry flavour], and sarsparilla, to traditional ginger beer, passionfruit and a jaffa flavour.

The cordials come as a concentrate and are only $10 a bottle.

Morpeth lolly shop If you have a sweet tooth, then Morpeth Lolly Shop will blow your mind. There are walls and walls of homemade sweets — you’ll do very well not to blow a week’s wages. One of their specialties is homemade fudge, which you can sample before buying. The macadamia and Bailey’s cream varieties are hard to go past.

Arnott’s bakehouse restaurant Lunch or dinner at this magnificent establishment is worth the trip to Morpeth in itself. Chef José Miguel, who has worked at some of the finest Michelin Star restaurants in Europe, puts together a selection of meals from the menu. We’re treated to an entrée of seared prawns, pomegranate seeds and eggplant, along with a platter of paté and terrine. Then there’s the sautéed wild mushroom, housemade linguini, soft poached egg and parmesan, which is light and more-ish. For a side there’s the baby cos with pear and walnut salad. To put it simply, the food at Arnott’s is quite amazing. Each course seems so simple, but the flavours are direct and mouth-watering. With a bottle of Hunter Valley wine, it doesn’t take much effort to lose many hours on the verandah of Arnott’s Bakehouse Restaurant, looking down over the horse-drawn carts as they wander by.

The bakery downstairs makes some of the finest sourdough in New South Wales, distributing over 8,000 loaves around the local area each week. The historical Morpeth premises was purchased by Stephen and Alison Arnott in the past decade. Stephen’s

great, great, great grandfather, William Arnott, used the same building as a bakery in the 1860s, before starting his world famous business, Arnott’s Biscuits. The remnants of the original oven are beneath Arnott’s Bakehouse and definitely worth a look.

Bunna bunoo olives If you’re an olive freak, then this is a journey that is well worth making. Bunna Bunoo is an olive grove out in Gresford, which is currently home to 4,000 olive trees. It’s a drive up Fishers Hill Road through peaceful paddocks, where fully grown kangaroos leap in front of your vehicle. When you arrive at the small homestead, you’re greeted by the Iacono family, who run the Bunna Bunoo business.

As far as taste testing goes, it doesn’t get much better than this. The fruits of Bunna Bunoo’s labour are simply devine. Their olives are cold pressed locally and brought back to the property to be bottled. Their olive oil, olive tapenade and sun-dried olives are all unbelievable.

They grow five types of olives at Bunna Bunoo — the oil varieties are Frantoio and Correggiola, and their table olives come from Jumbo Kalamata, Kalamata and Manzanillo trees.

Their shop, which is at the homestead, is open on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays between 10am and 5pm, and weekdays by appointment.

Camyr Allyn wines A dirt road, winding through a series of paddocks near East Gresford, brings us to the picturesque, winter-chilled beauty of Camyr Allyn North.

This boutique vineyard sits next to the Allyn river and is a truly beautiful part of the world.

Sitting at a large wooden outdoor table on the patio of Camyr Allyn’s cellar door, we’re taken through a brief history of the vineyard — a property that dates back to 1828. Large wine tours are less frequent here than at other major vineyards, so you can be assured a more friendly and less hurried wine tasting session.

There are four varieties of grapes grown on Camyr Allyn North vineyard — Verdelho, Merlot, Shiraz and Pinot Noir. The portfolio of ten wines produced by Camyr Allyn include three base varietals plus seven lifestyle wines — a

sweet verdelho, a rosé, a sparkling shiraz, a sparkling rosé, a sparkling white and a ruins liqueur verdelho and a traditional tawny port.

The vigneron explains how their current vintage of sparkling white is in fact made from red grapes — the colour of red wine comes from the skins, not the flesh. You learn something new every day.

Being a port drinker, I’m fairly confident I’ll be taking a bottle home with me after the first sip rolls across my taste buds. That is until I taste the liqueur verdelho, which is like liquid gold. Although more expensive than the traditional tawny, it’s too good to leave behind — its golden, sweetened flavour is not dissimilar from a good quality muscat. The nectar of the gods.

Shenanigans at the Imperial Located in the heart of Maitland’s CBD, a stone’s throw from Maitland Library and the Belmore Bridge, The Imperial is home to one of the most inviting bistros in town — Shenanigans. It’s here that our day finishes with a hearty dinner.

The range on the menu will suit all tastes — you can try a dozen fresh or kilpatrick oysters, mezze plates, warm goat cheese on ciabatta with red onion marmalade, rocket and beetroot salad, or even a tassie scallop and seafood risotto.

Starting off with a garlic and cheese turkish bread, we try the Imperial chicken [crumbed chicken breast, topped with ham and shallots in creamy white sauce under grilled cheese served with market vegetables — $19.90] and their salt ‘n’ pepper squid [squid, seasoned and lightly battered, flash fried and served with tartare, lemon, chips and salad — $18.90]. As far as pub prices go, these are perhaps at the higher end, but the servings are incredibly filling, the atmosphere in the bistro is inviting and the service is efficient.

Drinks are available from the bar and are standard prices. If you’re staying in Maitland after your Hunter Valley adventure and want a good quality pub meal, then don’t look any further than Shenanigans At The Imperial.

Nick Milligan was a guest of Maitland Tourism.

we are scientists

SOUND OF SCIENCE Hey Keith, where are you at the moment?

I’m in London, England, standing on a rooftop taking in the sun. Incredibly rare stuff for London.

We’re here just doing the press in anticipation of the record release. Not really playing any shows, just doing radio stuff and interviews.

Have you invented any good stories to explain the name of your new record, Barbara?

We haven’t really invented anything fake at all.

The essential story is that we wanted to name it, the way people name sailboats. We realised that people name their sailboats as stupidly as bands normally name their records. I feel like ‘Daddy’s Little Get Away’ could actually be the name of an Oasis record. Then we decided that rather name it like a boat, we wanted to name it as you would a child — or at least a pet.

We haven’t really come up with any good lies.

One lie that a journalist tried to lob to me, which I refused to engage, was that it was the name of a prostitute we used to indulge in when we were in college. Not true. Her name was Samantha.

Did you have clear ideas about how you wanted Barbara to compare to your previous records?

Not necessarily strategically, but on a gut level we wanted to make a way more concise rock record. The thing that we were really going for on Brain Thrust Mastery [the band’s previous record] is that we wanted to craft the songs and let the songs dictate where they went.

I think our general tendency is to manicure by way of reducing at all times. On Brain Thrust Mastery we kind of wanted to explore a lot of options and then manicure the shape. But on this record we wanted to write a record where every single song could be an essential part of our live show and would be a blast to play live.

Part of that definitely involved speed and

“...it was the name of a prostitute we used to indulge in when we were in college.

Not true. Her name was Samantha.”

With another collection of insanely catchy, off-kilter pop rock under their belts, California’s We Are Scientists are returning to Australia. Nick Milligan spoke with singer Keith Murray about his band’s new record, Barbara. brevity, for the most part.

Andy Burrows has left Razorlight to join your band — was he involved in the writing process for this new record?

Yeah, he had gotten on board before any of the songs had been written at all. Generally, the way our songwriting process works is that I’ll write the basic parts of a song. I’ll just record a verse and a chorus and a verse and a chorus, and then I’ll send that to Chris [Cain, bassist], and in this case Andy, and let them vet the songs and decide which ones to pursue and help figure out where the songs should go from there and how they should be shaped. He was a part of the process from the beginning of the songwriting on this record.

I think what was nice about making this record as a band, rather than Brain Thrust Mastery where we made the record as two songwriters, was that the songwriting process involved us bashing out the songs on our instruments at our practice space. We would try to figure out the arrangements spontaneously. It was a less cerebral process, I guess, and more of a live, generative sense of songwriting.

Andy can’t tour with you guys, is that right?

Well, at least for the summer. Andy has his own solo record that’s coming out at the end of July. His press schedule and the demands that his record are putting on him mean that he can’t really do the full-time touring. When a record is coming out, everything is so full on that you essentially don’t have time for anything else.

So it makes sense he’s incapable of doing stuff.

But he’s doing Glastonbury with us and he just

did a couple of radio sessions on Radio 1 with us earlier in the week.

Where will your sound go from here?

I’m not really sure. Thus far, every one of our records has very clearly been a reaction to the record before it. For Brain Thrust Mastery we really wanted to do a slightly more contem­ plative record than the first one. It doesn’t really feel very cerebral, despite the fact it involved a lot of protracted digestion. We wanted to write a record that was very much an ‘album record’, that you would sit down and listen to and take apart over time. In response to that we were really into the idea of just bashing out a record that was very, very immediate and very gratifying to the listener, ideally. Right now, I’m still in that mode. If I were writing a song today, I would probably still write a song that would fit into that mould. But it’s impossible to say what a year-and-a-half of touring on this record is going to do to our minds [laughs].

It’s too early to say at this point.

Lyrically, do you see any recurring themes on Barbara?

I didn’t really think about it at the time, but being forced to talk about it in retrospect, I feel like there’s a lot of attempts on the part of either the narrator or people in the songs, to actually convince someone of something. There’s interpersonal assertions going on, the response to which seems like it should be an acceptance or a denial of an assertion. There’s a lot of attempting to convince going on.

Where do these voices come from? Are they

fictional or based on people around you?

All the songs are definitely based on actual experiences or people I know. I think on this record the voice that is singing is less often purely like Keith Murray. I think there are more different perspectives because I got a little fatigued with consistently moaning about my own neuroses. There are definitely a lot of different first person narrators on this record, which is something we haven’t done a lot of in the past.

What would you have thought of Barbara if someone played it to you in the late 90s when We Are Scientists were first forming?

I don’t know… I actually think I probably would have liked it a lot more initially than either of our two other records. There’s a purity to the songwriting and less adornment.

I think the first record is definitely a very simple record, but we spent a lot of time digesting those songs and sometimes pushing them into places that they didn’t necessarily feel like they should go. That’s something we were into at that point. Our songwriting process was so protracted on the first record, that part of our songwriting process was manipulating songs and mangling them, then having to reshape a song from the rubble. It probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense to me ten years ago, to hear those songs and understand what I was trying to do. I think this record is written a lot more from our gut.

I probably would have gotten this one the most straight away, ten years ago.

Barbara is out now through Liberator. We Are Scientists play Splendour In The Grass from July 30 in Woodford, Queensland, and the Metro Theatre, Sydney, on Tuesday, August 3, 2010, with support from Ash and Last Dinosaurs.

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news

2010 BELLINGEN GLOBAL CARNIVAL

Experience the sounds, sights and tastes of the planet in one of the most beautiful parts of the world — the early bird tickets for the 2010 Bellingen Global Carnival are now on sale.

With another completely fresh line-up with the usual brilliant mix of music from every corner of Australia and the world, Bellingen Global Carnival is a ‘can’t miss’ event on the long Labour Day weekend, October 1-3.

Artists already announced include internationals Diego Guerrero Flamenco Latin Quintet, The Gyuto Monks of Tibet, Lulo Reinhardt, and Mulatu Astatke and the Black Jesus. Experience locals like Ash Grunwald, Grrila Step, Unified Gecko, Vulgargrad and Way Out West. For those who love a good festival as well as a bargain, there is a $30 per ticket saving for adult weekend passes, $55 on youth and adult passes and a further $5 per night on weekend camping ($15 for the three nights). Visit www. globalcarnival.com for all ticket prices and purchasing information.

TiMBAH ON THE NORTH COAST

Timbah released their critically-acclaimed, self-produced album, Get Out Of Town, in December 2008 which is enjoying extensive airplay throughout Australia and inter­ nationally via independent and internet radio.

Timbah are in the midst of a big year, following an explosive one-month residency at The Mean Fiddler, Sydney, in February, and plan to release their second album at end of 2010. Catch Timbah at Finnians Tavern, Port Macquarie, Friday, July 16, and The Lennox Point Hotel, Lennox Head, Saturday, July 17.

the boat people

THE BOAT PEOPLE DELIVER THIRD ALBUM

With two critically acclaimed albums, a fistful of EPs and a whole lot of passport stamps behind them, The Boat People have come a long way since they started playing together as high school friends in a little town two hours outside of Brisbane. With the release of their third album, Dear Darkly, the band have cast aside all the rules to deliver their most diverse work to date. They’ve played The Great Escape UK, CMJ Music Marathon NYC, toured the UK twice and the US three times including shows at SXSW, The Viper Room, Spaceland, Pianos and a live set on Morning Becomes Eclectic KCRW as well as rotation on over 20 radio stations across the US and a bunch of TV syncs to boot. They’ve also nabbed slots at some of Australia’s biggest festivals and supported David Byrne, The Shins and Midlake.

Those three acts are a good place to start to describe the band’s sound — expansive, unconventional pop with a blush of wry optimism and romance. Dear Darkly will be released on Friday, July 2, and the album tour takes them up the full length of the east coast. Catch The Boat People on Friday, July 17, Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle; Friday, July 23, The Sound Lounge, Gold Coast; Sunday, July 25, Great Northern Hotel, Byron Bay.

thirsty merc

THIRSTY MERC GOES TO UNI

Thirsty Merc’s frontman Rai Thistlethwayte will be speaking to University music students and members of APRA at the Southern Cross University in Lismore on Thursday, July 15, for a songwriter’s workshop. Wendy Broome from the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University said, “The APRA Visiting Songwriter Program was established in 2006 in conjunction with Southern Cross University and so far has seen some great Australian songwriters pass on their invaluable advice to students in the contemporary music program at SCU. There is a big buzz on campus about Rai delivering the songwriting workshop and we know it will be a full house.”

Thistlethwayte is in high demand by educational institutions as he is recognised as being one of Australia’s most accomplished musicians and songwriters. Both Thistlethwayte’s parents are teachers and he has picked up their way of connecting with budding students and communicating complex ideas in simple language.

Thirsty Merc’s highly anticipated album, Mousetrap Heart, has just been released, with their national tour kicking off in July, beginning Friday, July 2, at the Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle; Wednesday, July 14, at Hoey Moey in Coffs Harbour; Thursday, July 15, The Northern Hotel, Byron Bay; Saturday, July 17, Coolangatta Hotel, Gold Coast.

chamberland

CHAMBERLAND TAKE THEIR PLACE at the plantation

As a permanent fixture in the Brisbane original live music scene for the best part of a decade, Chamberland have established a strong and loyal following. While their earlier work highlights a band finding their own sense of self, the band’s latest EP release, Take Your Place, heralds a slightly new direction.

Working with renowned Brisbane producer Caleb James, the latest work showcases a more mature Chamberland embracing their rock roots and delivering a dynamic recording that will define the band as one to watch in the later stages of 2010. Chamberland play the Plantation Hotel in Coffs Harbour, Saturday, July 10.

PAINT THOSE SNEAKERS PURPLE

It’s official, Port Macquarie love their Purple Sneakers. At Festival of the Sun last year, they got the crowd absolutely jumping before the headline acts on both Friday and Saturday night. Prior to that, it was a sold out show to 300-plus party people. It makes sense then that the return of the genre-mashing DJs is

news

tijuana cartel

TIJUANA CARTEL to PLAY BELLO AND NEWCASTLE

Their mojo gets bigger by the day as they travel the length and breadth of the country leaving a trail of larger and larger dance floors behind them. The secret to the success of Tijuana Cartel is how they turn an utterly unique blend of flamenco, percussion, trumpet, beats, breaks, positivity and pulsing

highly anticipated. Purple Sneakers DJs are touring nationally (finishing at the amazing Splendour in the Grass), playing King Street Hotel, Newcastle, on Friday, July 16; Laurieton Hotel in Port Macquarie on Saturday, July 17.

global rhythms into a uniting and exciting musical force. Tijuana Cartel delivers a perfect marriage of lustful rhythms and upfront electronica. Their distinctive sound, and infectious, inspiring performances are earning them the highest accolades.

Tijuana Cartel play the Cambridge Hotel in Newcastle on Friday, July 9, and Diggers Tavern in Bellingen, Saturday, July 24.

original material, we are hoping to give them the opportunity to share their music,” Pinkerton said. Last year, Matt Hill picked up the Album of the Year Award and Lismore local Candice Casagrande picked up (among many) the Song of the Year award. The NCEIA Dolphin Awards are open to all original recording artists, songwriters and composers, graphic artists and video producers, both amateur and professional. The Awards night will be held at One Bar and Nightclub in Lismore on Wednesday August 11, featuring Hussy Hicks, Marshall & The Fro and Invisible Friends as musical acts. Visit www.nceia.org. au for entry details.

raz bin sam

RAZ BIN SAM AND THE LION I BAND

If you were going to be introduced to a reggae artist who was originally from Israel and has then spent part of his time developing in Australia, that is someone you’d be intrigued by. There are some tunes on Raz Bin Sam’s 2009 album, Own This Life, which simply no one else in reggae is making — it is a vibe that will tear through the casual reggae listener and will grow on the hardened reggae head at the same time. Raz Bin Sam and the Lion I Band perform at Byron Bay’s Beach Hotel, Saturday, July 10, and the Lennox Point Hotel, Friday, July 23.

2010 DOLPHIN AWARDS

The 2010 Dolphin Awards are back and bigger than ever. The local music industry has been lively in the past year and the Dolphins are going to showcase what the Northern Rivers region has to offer. What’s new this year is the addition of a new category, Garage/Indie.

NCEIA President, Gary Pinkerton believes that the new category is going to recognise alternative bands in the area. “There are many bands rehearsing in homes and garages throughout the region that have not had the opportunity to perform live with their own

asa Broomhall

BROOMHALL TRAVELS REVELRY ROAD

Rock/roots larrikin, Asa Broomhall, has done it again with his latest self-produced album, Revelry Road. Recorded live over five days in the farmhouse where Broomhall grew up on the Sunshine Coast, it builds on his previous work by seamlessly combining full band tracks and solo acoustic songs, showing the true depth of his songwriting and musicianship. You may say it is a rock record with a hint of folk but it has elements of blues, country and even a bit of calypso. If you fancy this mix with a dose of mischief, make sure you hear Broomhall’s music and experience one of Australia’s best kept secrets. Asa Broonhall will be performing in solo mode at The Rails in Byron Bay, Thursday, July 15, and the Lennox Point Hotel on Sunday, July 18.

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gig guide

Thursday, July 1

Tuesday, July 6

Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Zahlu and the Alchemists Plantation Hotel, Coffs Harbour Matt Dean The Brewery, Byron Bay Preston Train YAC, Byron Bay 50 Lions + Blkout + Persist

Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour DJ Femme + DJ Lady Lauryn Plantation Hotel, Coffs Harbour DJ Farfetch’d + DJ Jay Knight + DJ Shammers

Friday, July 2 Australian Hotel, Ballina Cath Simes Beach Hotel, Byron Bay King Tide + Shoebox Coolangatta Hotel Cornerstone Roots + Kingfisha Federal Hotel, Bellingen Groove Robbers LaLaLand, Byron Bay Ajax Laurieton Hotel, Port Macquarie Ebb n Flo Lennox Point Hotel Fat Tuesday Sawtell RSL Rick Price + Jesse Emmanuel Seaview Tavern, Woolgoolga Glen Heath and the Deep Blue Sea The Brewery, Byron Bay Laneous and the Family Yah

Thursday, July 8 Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Method Coffs Hotel, Coffs Harbour Local Resident Failure + The Decline Southern Cross Uni, Lismore White Bats

Friday, July 9 Australian Hotel, Ballina Brian Watt Bangalow Hotel Centurion Soldier Beach Hotel, Bonny Hills Psycho Magnet Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Pink Zinc Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour Marc Daley Lennox Point Hotel Cleveland and the Red Eye Junction Mullumbimby Civic Hall Shane Howard Neverland, Coolangatta Purple Sneakers DJs Northern Rivers Sound, Lismore Local Resident Failure + The Decline Southern Cross Uni, Lismore Andrea Soler The Rails, Byron Bay The Ninth Chapter

Saturday, July 10 Sampology

Saturday, July 3 Bangalow Hotel Greg Kew Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Spacifix + Mark Lowndes Beach House, Port Macquarie Surecut Kids + Funktrust DJs + Sampology + Smoke & Mirrors Coolangatta Hotel Operator Please + Tim and Jean + Chaingang Ivory Tavern, Tweed Heads Bluesville Station + The Hipshooters + Mason Rack Band Lennox Point Hotel The Hipshooters Pioneer Tavern, Wollongbar Supercheeze The Brewery, Byron Bay Cornerstone Roots + Paua Yamba Bowling Club Rick Price + Jesse Emmanuel

Sunday, July 4 Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Mista Savona Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour Uni After-Party Beach Party LaLaLand, Byron Bay DJ Sega Lennox Point Hotel Jim Kelly’s Healin Feelin’ Band The Brewery, Byron Bay Guy Katchel

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Australian Hotel, Ballina Mark Easton Bangalow Hotel Mesccalito Blues Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Raz Bin Sam + Lion I Band Great Northern Hotel, Byron Bay CC the Cat + A French Butler Called Smith + Fyahwalk Laurieton Hotel, Port Macquarie Jaywalker Lennox Point Hotel Broadfoot Neverland, Coolangatta Cutlass Supreme Plantation Hotel, Coffs Harbour Chamberland The Brewery, Byron Bay Black Tie Ball

Great Northern Hotel, Byron Bay Thirsty Merc + Porcelain Plantation Hotel, Coffs Harbour Common Ground The Brewery, Byron Bay Barrel House The Rails, Byron Bay Asa Broomhall

Friday, July 16 Australian Hotel, Ballina The Trail Beach Hotel, Bonny Hills Glen Heath and The Deep Blue Sea Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Young Heretics + Comic Sans + Siren Line Coffs Harbour Ex-Services Club Pugsley Buzzard Finnians Tavern, Port Macquarie Timbah Sawtell RSL Jon English Seaview Tavern, Woolgoolga Ben Francis Southern Cross Uni, Lismore Hughes and Brown The Brewery, Byron Bay Bondi Cigars

Saturday, July 17 Byron Theatre, Byron Bay Gyan Coolangatta Hotel Thirsty Merc Great Northern Hotel, Byron Bay Brittle + The Kamikaze Thunderkats + The Jaywalks Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour Mark Easton Laurieton Hotel, Port Macquarie Purple Sneakers DJs Lennox Point Hotel Timbah

Sunday, July 18 Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour The Butterfly Effect + Calling All Cars Lennox Point Hotel Asa Broomhall Seaview Tavern, Woolgoolga Mark Easton

Sunday, July 11 Beach Hotel, Byron Bay The Wilson Pickers Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour Ben Francis Lennox Point Hotel Gavin Donigers Mescalito Blues

Wednesday, July 14 Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour Thirsty Merc

Thursday, July 15 Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Somersault

the grains

Thursday, July 22 Beach Hotel, Byron Bay The Grains Plantation Hotel, Coffs Harbour David Strauss Port Macquarie Hotel Ungus Ungus Ungus

Friday, July 23 Australian Hotel, Ballina Neil Anderson Bangalow Hotel Jez Mead

Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Kooli + Darkyroots Great Northern Hotel, Byron Bay My Fiction + Numbers Radio Lennox Point Hotel Raz Bin Sam + Chang Fu Nimbin Hotel Ungus Ungus Ungus Panthers, Port Macquarie The Beautiful Girls + Washington

Saturday, July 24 Australian Hotel, Ballina Dan Hannaford Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Uncle Jed Diggers tavern, Belligen Tijuana Cartel Lennox Point Hotel The Remains Lismore Workers Club Russ Leigh Northern Rivers Sound, Lismore Hybridize Pioneer Tavern, Wollongbar Brian Watt Sawtell RSL The Beautiful Girls + Washington The Rails, Byron Bay Ungus Ungus Ungus

Sunday, July 25 Bangalow Hotel Tre Hombre Great Northern Hotel, Byron Bay The Boat People Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour Mike Bateman Lennox Point Hotel Eli Wolfe + Kathyryn Hartnett

Thursday, July 29 Beach Hotel, Byron Bay The Little Stevies Great Northern Hotel, Byron Bay The Hard Ons Plantation Hotel, Coffs Harbour April Maze + DJ Tom Piper

Friday, July 30 Australian Hotel, Ballina Mick McHugh Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Solver Coolangatta Hotel The Hard Ons Great Northern Hotel, Byron Bay Ghost Mountain Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour Lucy McDaniel Lennox Point Hotel Cupids Bullet + April Maze

Saturday, July 31 Bangalow Hotel The Fire Tree Beach House, Port Macquarie MDX + Adam Bozetto + Derty Rich Great Northern Hotel, Byron Bay Issac Paddon & The Tides Hoey Moey, Coffs Harbour Vanessa Lee + Road Train Lennox Point Hotel Dirty Channel Tatts, Lismore The Little Stevies

thirsty merc

Games of the Heart After a three year hiatus, Thirsty Merc are back with the release of their new record, Mousetrap Heart. Front man Rai Thistlethwayte took some time out from his tour preparation to speak with Mark Henderson.

Congratulations on the new album Mousetrap Heart. What inspired you to write this album?

I wanted to make an album that felt good.

Something that had a lot of groove, was fun and allows you to escape and celebrate a bit. The previous album [Slideshows] had a lot of ‘break up’ songs on it — these songs were like a coming of age, dealing with break ups, love lost and that kind of stuff. This new record was a way of saying ‘we’re back, the sun has broken through the clouds and have a good time.’

The title Mousetrap Heart seems a very interesting album name. I feel like it could have a range of meanings — what does it mean to you?

‘Mousetrap Heart’, the song, is about a girl; a femme fatale, a dangerous, beautiful woman.

It’s just a strong visual image — a mousetrap is a strange little mechanical item and a heart is, you know, the most emotional organ in the body. Putting those two together is a really strange juxtaposition. ‘Mousetrap Heart’ is a pretty core sound to the album and we just kind of titled the album after that song.

There is a very positive feel to the album — was this an intentional move on your part, or is it just an expression of where you have got to personally and as a band?

I think it’s just the natural stuff that we were

writing about. We never overtly said ‘we’ve gotta do something positive now cause the last one was too dark.’ Things in life, emotionally, go in waves and there is always that sunshine after the rain. It felt like it was time to have a fresh outlook on things and that’s definitely come out in the recording. I’m stoked that the songs that had that flavour have translated across onto the album that way.

I know that you recorded most of the tracks in Los Angeles and then finished up the album in Melbourne — do you feel that the places you record in reflect the sounds that are expressed in your work?

Whether it’s the places or the people who are in the places, or a combination of both, I don’t know exactly. LA has a flavour to it — you go there to do work. It was a good thing for us to do. When we got down to Melbourne and did a couple of things down there, we were working with a guy called Lindsey Gravina. He’s a really well-listened producer and he knows how to capture sounds and all sorts of different things. I think that when you mix an album and start tying it all together as an actual thing, it is recorded as a collective sound. That’s the way that I try to look at it.

As a songwriter, what do you look to achieve?

I think that the most important thing is a type

of emotional communication. There is a simple song on the album called ‘Tommy and Krista’ which is just a little pop gem. It’s the story of two people who have fallen in love for the first time ever. To me this was just having some fun with travelling back to how it was when I had my first crush on a girl. Sometimes you find that other people relate to it. Music is my way of reaching out to people in a further and wider way than I could otherwise.

You also have a new guitarist — Matt Smith [The Strides] — who seems to play a major role in the sound of the new record. How did you find adding this new element to the band?

It was great! We enjoy a lot of the same music and I could tell that he was the real deal.

Listening back to some of the tracks, Matt’s playing is just all over it, it’s great. I’m proud to be in a band with a guy who is able to take on the challenge that Matt did.

I guess that you guys are gearing up to tour, you are promoting the album across Australia over June and July, are you excited to be getting back on the road?

Absolutely! We have been rehearsing and styling the new set list and the songs. It’s going well, it’s always great fun getting back in the rehearsal room and it’s even more fun to take it out!

bl ack rebel motorcycle club

Dancing With the Devil As Steve Tauschke discovers, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Pete Hayes just loves “fucking around with noise”.

You might think an extended period holed up in a gloomy basement studio for much of the winter freeze would influence the sound and mood of a band’s record — but not so.

“We’re already pretty moody!” laughs Pete Hayes, guitarist and co-vocalist with American noir-rockers Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (BRMC).

Hunkered down for several months last year in a subterranean cubby hole in downtown Philadelphia, the trio created their sixth studio album, Beat The Devil’s Tattoo, shaped not so much by the big chill around them as by the creative freedom to work at their own pace.

“We hadn’t really had that before,” reveals Hayes. “And that’s nothing to do with the record company, it was just the freedom to wake up, walk downstairs, play a chord and go, ‘Fuck it — today just doesn’t feel right!’. We hadn’t had that opportunity in a long time, probably since the first record when we all lived in a house together.”

BRMC wrote and rehearsed the new album in five months yet took only four days of basic tracking in Los Angeles to nail most of the thirteen songs. They spent a couple more months back in Philadelphia to “cut all the guitars and overdubs”.

Much like 2007’s propulsive Baby 81 album, the result elevates the LA sonic seducers’ brooding appropriation of Verve meets

Velvets to a new level — and maybe even to a new audience.

“The shows have been full, a lot of people are showing up and I hope they’re enjoying it,” says Hayes, now in the midst of a European tour. “The more time that goes by, certain songs become — I don’t know what the word is — but they come across live in a way that connects with people. And sometimes it’s surprising which songs do that and which ones don’t.”

Now an independent act after parting with RCA a couple of years ago, Hayes concedes his major label days are over. “I don’t know a major that would have us,” he says. “The only deals I hear that are being done (with majors) now are 360 degree deals where the label owns a piece of everything you do, from the touring to the merchandising shirts, everything. From my understanding they own you, I mean you work for that company and unless you sell so many records you can’t get around that. Funny thing is they don’t give you medical benefits! Ha!” The trio’s first indie salvo was 2008’s self-funded instrumental record The Effects of 333 released on their own Abstract Dragon label through Vagrant Records. “That was completely selfish, that’s the most honest way to put it,” laughs Hayes. “I just like fuckin’ around with noise, you know — it’s that

simple. It’s like when you’re watching a movie and you get this creepy sound that just adds to it. We’d like to be able to do it again because that was our first swipe at it and we’re pretty happy with it.”

It’s worth noting that since BRMC’s late 90s inception in San Francisco, they’ve yet to hire a studio producer. In-house engineering and production are key to their ravaged rock sound. “It seems to have gotten out there that we’re protective and I guess we are a little bit,” agrees Hayes. “A couple of times we’ve had other people do mixes of songs of ours, like ‘Love Burns’ or ‘Berlin’ or ‘Ain’t No Easy Way’, but our main problems seems to boil down to the way we record. Because we haven’t recorded properly, ever, when we give it to someone to mix they do the thing that they do and it just doesn’t work, because we didn’t record it properly. So they’re probably going, ‘What the fuck is this?’. But they’re usually nice enough not to really say that.”

Beat The Devil’s Tattoo also marks the departure of long-time drummer, Nick Jago.

This is not due not to a history of drug abuse, as reported, but rather a desire to step out from behind his kit. “Yeah, that rumour got started somewhere, the whole drug thing, and it’s a nice rock and roll story, but not all that nice of a story really — and it’s not the truth,” explains Hayes. “He just wanted to do his own

“ Yeah, that rumour got started somewhere, the whole drug thing, and it’s a nice rock and roll story…”

music, it was really that simple. He’s been working on his own band for a long time and he felt like he didn’t have enough time to do that.”

Enter new member Leah Shapiro, formerly of Danish rockers, The Raveonettes. “It’s been smoother than I imagined it would be, as far as someone stepping in to where someone was sitting for eight years,” says Hayes of the new lineup. “It’s not gonna happen in a year or in four years, but it’s pretty amazing what she’s done already.”

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club play Splendour In The Grass, July 30-August 1 in Woodford, Queensland, and Sydney’s Metro on Sunday, August 1. Beat The Devil’s Tattoo is out now through Vagrant/Shock.

general motoring

reviewed VW Golf R reviewed by Peter Douglas

Boo hoo, the VW Golf R32 V6 is dead. Gone is that gorgeous sounding Veedub with attitude that let owners raise their noses at mere mortals in a Golf GTi. R32 cost plenty, looked the biz and went, well, okay. For all the hoopla surrounding the striking hatchback, it was a mere appetiser for any WRX or Evo stalkin’ the neighbourhood. R32 weighed too much, wasn’t all that quick, drank too much of the best premium and frankly, wasn’t good value.

That’s changed with the arrival of the new Golf R, a four pot turbo with more power, torque, performance and less of a liking for fuel than the model it replaces. Did we mention the R costs thousands less?

Essentially, what you are getting in the Golf R is Audi’s S3 with a different body at a saving of at least $18,000.

It’s a pretty strong argument and just shows that VW is prepared to get with the program by building a hot four to take on the other hot fours from Japan and France. Yes, France figures in there with its great to drive but pug ugly Renault Megane. The new Megane is much better.

Is the Golf R a GTi on ’roids? Yes, and no.

For starters, the R has 4-motion all wheel drive with a tricky Haldex diff, featuring a wet multi-plate clutch that will send up to 100 per cent of drive to the rear wheels or the front wheels as conditions dictate. It’s not slip

driven, so hook-up is quicker and overall drive out of corners is better.

It’s available with an optional six-speed ‘manumatic’ double clutch (DSG) transmission with steering wheel paddle shift as well as a six-speed manual. There’s a three-mode active chassis control system available that changes steering, suspension, throttle response and gear change aggression.

Power comes from a 2.0-litre, direct injection four cylinder with a turbo pumping at 1.2 bar or about 17 psi in the old lingo. It’s a fair bit of huff when you compare it to some other turbo cars.

Power output is a healthy 188kW with 330Nm of good old Germanic grunt pushing the 1,500kg hatchback. It can put away a 0-100kph sprint in a handy 5.7 seconds and drinks fuel at a claimed 8.7-litres/100km and that’s 95 octane, not 98.

The kick off price is $48,490 for the three door R Manual with DSG adding $2500 and active chassis control a further $1500 bucks.

Add in two more doors and on roads and you are looking at close to $60K. Ouch, but still better than the R32.

It runs large brakes nearly the same size as the VW Touareg fourbie with multi piston callipers. The suspension is firmed up with stiffer stabilisers, dampers and springs and ride height slammed by some 25mm

compared with the standard Golf. Wheels are 18 inch alloys, optionable to 19s, but we reckon you don’t need the bigger wheels. The car goes great on the standard wheels and has a better ride on our crapola roads.

There’s plenty of Golf GTi in the R, but the necessary bits have been upgraded. We took the new Veedub for a right old fang in the Tassie central highlands last week and despite the rain, sleet, snow and black ice, the R confirmed just what a great driver’s car it is.

Some of the Tassie drivers were a bit of a worry, though: lights are on and nobody’s home.

The R was witheringly quick and sure-footed, hooning up the convoluted tarmac towards the Great Lake area. It gets on boost early and pulls like a train right through to redline. The all wheel drive system works a treat in slippery conditions, feeding drive to the wheel or wheels with traction, while the nut at the wheel plays at being Mr Makinen.

Ultimate understeer is likely if you go in too hot and then fling it sideways. But given a nanosecond, the R will catch the situation and make you look and keep you safe. Besides, you can always dab on the brakes and bail like a wuss.

VW differentiates the R in many ways — not the least being daytime LED running lights up front, three massive air intakes cut into the

bumper and a mild body kit that includes a rear roof spoiler. There’s also a wind diffused under the rear bumper and those twin, spaced, centre-mounted exhaust tips that emit a fairly crisp note, not as good as the V6 but not bad either.

Inside is a variation on the Golf theme with splashes of metal look fascia and more kit including a sexy gear changer, sports seats, black roof liner, premium [upgradable] audio, decent trip computer and climate control.

Down in the foot-well are metal pedals and the driver also gets to play with a multifunction flat bottom wheel. It gets bixenons, rear window tint and a five star crash rating. But the R misses out on satnav, power seats, leather, glass sunroof and rear view camera, all of which are optional. Ker-ching, there goes the budget.

We really like this car ’cos it has class and kicks arse. It’s a step up on the likes of Evo 10 and STi even though not as quick. The interior blows these two into the weeds – it’s slick and stylish, not cheap and crappy like the Jap models.

Even when you are not booting it along, the Golf R has plenty to offer especially with the active chassis control that gives a ‘normal’ ride option for jiggle free driving, unless you have 44D cups.

That’s it for the Golf range now, absolutely no handicaps, plenty of good drives and in this case, a tiger in your tank.

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metal baby

f a s h i o n — p h o t o g r a p h y b y l u k e h o l d s t o c k

Photography by Luke Holdstock. Hair & make-up by Wade Ambler. Modelling by Rebecca Frith.

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f a s h i o n — p h o t o g r a p h y b y l u k e h o l d s t o c k

All clothing from Pink Metal. Phone (02) 4023 3867. Regrettably, outfit details were unavailable at time of going to press.

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game reviews

WEAPON OF CHOICE reviewed Alpha Protocol [Xbox 360/PS3/PC] reviewed by Hugh Milligan rated 7/10 With its original 2009 release date delayed seven months to the day, Obsidian Entertainment’s much-discussed “espionage RPG” has been a long time coming — it’s not entirely surprising, given the game’s apparent ambition. Obsidian has maintained a clear emphasis on choice, citing a dynamic dialogue system, flexible mission structure and multifaceted narrative that are constantly informed by the player’s decisions.

Fine words indeed, but now that Alpha Protocol has finally arrived, does it actually deliver?

Cause and effect

Meet Michael Thorton, an agent newly recruited by the eponymous covert ops organisation Alpha Protocol; he’s drugged, tested and trained before being sent on a mission to assassinate the leader of an Islamic terrorist cell. His job becomes a little trickier, however, when he finds himself at the centre of an international conspiracy involving government corruption, illegal arms trafficking and mass murder.

Betrayed, disavowed and hunted by his own country, Michael goes rogue as he searches for answers.

This is only the beginning of Alpha Protocol’s dense and intricately tangled narrative, one that encompasses a truly astonishing amount of variables. Every decision the player makes has consequences, either immediate or long-term, that can significantly alter the storyline. Which mission did you choose to complete first? Did you complete the previous mission without civilian casualties, or without being seen at all?

Did you execute that small-time arms dealer, or spare his life in return for information? Even seemingly trivial actions have deceptive magnitude — a small mistake can easily develop into a catastrophe, while an exemplary display of tact or skill can bring unexpected windfalls down the line.

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Most of the crucial decisions are made during conversations with other characters, through the game’s Dialogue Stance System.

This functions a little like Mass Effect 2’s dialogue wheel, as you are given a choice of reactions that steer the dialogue in particular directions, but the comparison isn’t entirely fair; whereas ME 2’s interactions were all measured by a simple moral dualism, Alpha Protocol’s system is considerably more complex.

You can choose to be Aggressive, Suave or Professional, but there’s no universally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ approach — every character you encounter has their own individual temperament, and it’s up to you to judge which stance is most appropriate to the situation.

Glib one-liners might impress your flirtatious handler, but they’ll hardly score you any points with a dour, tight-lipped corporate kingpin.

The fact that you’re only given a few seconds to make each selection lends urgency to the exchange whilst keeping the dialogue running smoothly.

With so many tenuous relationships in flux, the storyline is continually overwrought with plot twists, double-crosses and lurid liaisons, but such devices are hardly unusual for the genre.

The amount of planning makes the execution feel entirely deliberate; the developer knows, for example, that you won’t remember half the shady characters and organisations that are hurled at you in rapid succession, and the game helpfully arranges them into intel dossiers that become more detailed as you discover more. You can even buy additional Intel between missions that will help you understand your adversary’s history and psychology, giving you a better idea of how to approach them. There are so many subplots and hidden agendas in play that by the time you’ve completed the game, you will only have experienced about a third of the entire content — Obsidian clearly wants to encourage substantial replay value by the sheer volume of narratives to explore.

Tools of the trade

As far as choice is concerned, Alpha Protocol’s plot and dialogue tick all the boxes.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is altogether less innovative — once you actually jump into the action, the cracks become all too visible. When starting a new game, you can select from a number of basic ‘classes’ with pre-determined stats, or you can distribute them yourself if you prefer; specialties include stealth, hand-to-hand combat, sabotage, gadgetry and proficiency with each of the game’s firearms. While such customisation effectively allows you to mould the gameplay to your own personal tastes, it’s much too restrictive, as Michael is rendered almost comically inept at any skill he hasn’t invested points in.

Stealth agents who bulk up their accuracy with the pistol will be silently capping guards in no time, but when forced into a firefight, they’re about as effective with a shotgun as Elmer Fudd. Forcing the player to engage their strengths and avoid their weaknesses is understandable to a degree, but the stats you’ve chosen too often play a greater role than your actual skill — Michael is supposed to be an accomplished agent, after all. You can, however, customise your weapon loadout with barrels, sights, clips and accessories that improve precision and stability, in order to counteract the worst areas of ineptitude.

The cover system is also unreliable; parts of your body are exposed to the enemy even while you’re crouched behind a barrier, so you’ll still occasionally take damage. Once you “stick” to a wall or column, it’s also a little tricky to detach yourself, which can be incredibly frustrating if you’ve been biding your time for the perfect ambush. In spite of this, however, you won’t encounter much resistance from the enemy — almost by way of compensation, the game’s AI is hopelessly dim-witted and oblivious to your actions.

Even if two guards are standing only a few metres apart, you can sneak up on one and drop him with a thud and a muffled cry without the other ever noticing, as long as his back is turned. Their peripheral vision is minimal; they might as well be humming with their fingers in their ears as they patrol in fixed patterns, stopping at regular intervals as if inviting an assailant to garrotte them from

behind. There’s still a certain satisfaction to slipping into a room and clearing it without being seen, but an element of unpredictability would have made success more rewarding and less contrived.

Shrouded in obscurity

The game’s graphics, which utilise Unreal Engine 3, are generally solid — be it sun, snow or sandstorms, each environment is well designed and features some striking weather and lighting effects. There are, however, moments when the camera breaks through walls, and some models have poorly-formed shadows that don’t give them a proper sense of weight. The facial animations don’t quite meet the emotional delivery of the dialogue, but it’s a triviality given that most of the characters are spies with well-trained poker faces. The worst offender by far is the bump mapping; the textures take so long to load that you’ll still see them being gradually applied well after the mission or cutscene has started. It’s incredibly distracting to watch a room full of unidentifiable shapes slowly come into focus while you’re trying to get your bearings. The game’s menus, however, are admirably stylish, particularly those in your PDA. While any combination of these faults might ordinarily be regarded as a deal breaker, Alpha Protocol is far more than the sum of its parts.

The gameplay and visuals would certainly have benefited from further fine-tuning, and yet the experience holds together with almost inexplicable cohesion. This is most likely due to the game’s exceedingly involved narrative, which exhibits far more polish; if only Obsidian had been as conscientious in all areas of its design, the game would have been truly engrossing. As it is, Alpha Protocol isn’t quite the paragon of self-determination that it had hoped to be — instead, it’s an intriguing hybrid whose divergent plot is the primary incentive for subsequent playthroughs. It’s a new franchise with room for refinement and growth; hew away the jagged edges and there’s definite potential for a sequel.

k at i e n oo n a n

In The Captain’s chair Katie Noonan has come a long way since fronting George with her brother Tyrone. The ensuing years have seen the eclectic songstress make quite a name for herself as a solo artist and collaborator [Paul Grabowski, Katylist, Maggie Noonan] alike. Now she is back with The Captains and a brand new album in Emperor’s Box. Stephen Bisset sat down for a chat.

Are you happy with the reception Emperor’s Box has been getting since its release?

Yeah, it’s just been amazing. I actually read the review in Reverb — that was amazing! But yeah all of the reviews have been really positive and very encouraging and it’s been a real thrill to be lovingly embraced like this.

How would the creator describe the album?

I feel that it is the best, kind of, I suppose my meanderings of the last decade. I’ve really taken back the power behind the scenes — I left my management and I decided that I’d co-produce the record with Nick Didia [Powderfinger, Pearl Jam, Neil Young] — I’ve kind of taken back the reins a little and I think it has made for my best album yet.

Nick has a bit of a name for himself as a guru behind the desk. What was it like sharing production duties with him, and what did he bring to the project overall?

Well, he’s a phenomenal engineer and he’s really good at making small and subtle suggestions that make enormous differences to the songs. I also think one of the reasons I picked Nick is that he is really good at getting a really great band sound — he has worked with some of the best bands in the world and he just captures that space between the people and he also brought a nice muscular edge to my music which I had really been craving.

the best form of the song live – we tracked everything live and making sure that when you go into the studio it’s a mixture of you’re prepared, but you’re not over-prepared... but you’re not under-prepared.

Where did the title Emperor’s Box come from?

Well it’s from a song on the record and the Emperor’s box dates back to the Wang dynasty and it was literally the box the Emperor kept all his most precious trinkets in. It also had all of these secret doors and drawers only he knew how to open. I thought that was a great analogy for the song, in that the song is about my evolving relationship with my family. But it was also a great analogy for the album in that hopefully the more you listen to it, the more layers will be revealed.

Apart from yourself, of course, the album reads like a bit of a who’s who of Aussie music.

How did you find working with the likes of Don Walker, Tim Finn, Josh Pyke and Sia, et al?

Well, it was a very special thing. All of these relationships evolved naturally and I’ve just formed some great connections with these people that I wanted to explore songwriting with and it’s just been a lovely series of happy accidents, really, that have gone into the production of this record and I feel very blessed.

Are The Captains going to be a regular fixture in the Katie Noonan oeuvre?

Definitely! This is my main band and I’m really inspired by what we’re doing and I feel we have great music within us for future records and we’ll certainly be fighting to do as much as we can together.

How have you evolved as an artist since the debut George album came out back in 1998?

Well, obviously I’m a wife now, and a mother, and this will be my ninth album. I’ve definitely learnt a lot and played with a lot of fantastic musicians who have taught me so much. I think, though, as you evolve as a musician you come to realise that less is more and half of knowing what to say is knowing what not to say.

Do you feel any form of pressure going into the studio to replicate earlier successes?

I don’t think about commercial viability in music at all because I never have and I never will and I think the minute I did my integrity would be tarnished — it just doesn’t make for good music-making. All I’m obsessed with is capturing

So, what’s next for Katie Noonan? Are there any scoops that we should know about or any vicious rumours you’d like to start about yourself? [laughs] Um… no vicious rumours other than I’m just really excited about touring the record.

I’ll be doing some kind of stripped-back versions of the album with some chamber string orchestras and stuff maybe later in the year or early next year. I’m also dreaming up some multi-art collaborations for next year which should be really fun — working with dancers, all kinds of different people.

Emperor’s Box is out now through Sony.

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t a l k i n g s h o p — t h e t r i f f i d s

Profiling music industry professionals

Talking shop

In the field of live music photography, the name of Tony Mott stands at its peak. Reverb finds what makes the man tick.

Name Tony Mott Who do you work for?

Myself - Tony Mott Photography.

Current position title?

Rock and roll photographer.

How long have you been in this position?

Close to 20 years.

What are the main responsibilities of your position?

Shooting bands, artists live, video clips, portraits, CD sleeves, magazine covers — anything really.

How did you get involved in the music industry?

I combined a love of photography and a love of music and got a career out of it… lucky git, I suppose.

Proudest moment?

Touring with the Rolling Stones.

Is there anyone you would really like to meet (living or dead)?

Woody Allen.

Best live show you’ve been to?

Bloody hell! Stones in Moscow, Queen at Knebworth, Wave Aid at SCG, Ray Davies at Seymour Centre, Divinyls in the 80s, BDO, and the greatest of all, Mott The Hoople at Hammersmith Odeon last year after reforming at the same venue 34 years between gigs.

Favourite venue?

Hammersmith Odeon and the Metro Theatre, Sydney.

Favourite musical instrument?

Ones that all play well.

Free plug – who should we be listening to?

Mott The Hoople.

What would be on your ultimate rider?

Beef wellington, vodka and orange juice.

Best way to spend a Sunday morning?

Papers in bed.

Any advice for people trying to break into the industry?

Passion!

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DAYS OF THE TRIFFIDS The Triffids are perhaps one of the most powerful and stirring groups that Australia has ever produced. Their wondrous back catalogue is documented with a new compilation called Wide Open Road. Nick Milligan spoke to guitarist ‘Evil’ Graham Lee. Was it hard to pick which Triffids songs would make it on this new best-of?

The first dozen are easy. After that it gets a bit more tricky. We had a 1994 compilation called Australian Melodrama, which this is based on.

Some songs appear on both, some on one. Things like ‘Falling Over You’, was on Australian Melodrama but it’s not on this one. In the case of that song it’s largely because, while it’s a very good song, it’s a little bit of its time. It sounds a tiny bit dated to me.

As with any best of, it’s not really aimed at hardcore fans of the band because they’ve already got all the stuff. It’s aimed at the casual listener and its aim is to turn the casual listener into somebody who is actually a fan.

You choose the strongest songs — the one’s that are the most commercial and are likely to catch the ear.

With the exception of ‘Falling Over You’, I think most of the Triffids material has held up over time — do you agree?

There’s the odd 80s drum sound in there. That’s a bit hard to avoid when you’re recording in the 80s and using 80s studios and living in the 80s. But apart from that we really made a conscious effort in the recording studio to try and sound like ourselves. We might be inspired by suicide or Bruce Springsteen, but we didn’t wear our hearts on our sleeves and make our influences obvious ones. We tried to sound like The Triffids and didn’t care about what was fashionable at the time. In some ways it was perhaps detrimental to us in the 80s, to not sound like an 80s band, but it’s definitely not detrimental to the longevity of your music if you don’t sound of your time.

David McComb, the singer and songwriter of The Triffids sadly passed away in 1999. He was widely regarded as a genius — what are your fondest memories of working with him?

Dave was very driven in his songwriting. He knew he could make music that was world class. He knew how to do it. He would insist on the extraordinary. If you were in a recording studio, I often heard him say this, ‘you’re not there to record what you sound like live. That’s what you do on stage. When you’re in a studio,

you’re there to make something extraordinary — to make something that you can’t do on stage.’

You also played in The Red Ponies, which was David’s backing band when he went to Europe. What was that experience like?

That was the last time that I played in Europe with Dave. That was ‘94. We were actually supporting Hunters & Collectors, but we’d occasionally go off and do our own shows.

Dave’s solo album came out on Mushroom, the White Label. Hunters & Collectors were doing a big European push, so we went off and played with them. That was the last time I played with Warren Ellis, who was in the band. Strangely enough, Warren is going to be playing with us next week. It was a really powerful band. It wasn’t The Triffids, but it was a powerful band.

It was also the last time that Dave performed with any degree of health — probably the last full on shows that David McComb was able to give, sadly, in his life. Although he did play in the second half of the 90s, right up until a week or so before he died.

What sound do you feel you brought to The Triffids?

At the time I mainly played pedal steel with The Triffids. I’d only been playing pedal steel, which is quite a complicated instrument, for about six months. I wasn’t immediately asked to join — Dave asked me to play some shows. I said to him, ‘You want me to play pedal steel?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘But I’ve only been playing for six months, Dave.’ He said, ‘Yeah I know, that’s why I asked you.’ He didn’t want it to sound nuts. He didn’t want every tried and true country cliché. He wanted the instrument and he wanted someone with an open mind to what it can do. It might be said that I brought a country influence to the band, and perhaps I did, but never in an overt way. Dave wouldn’t allow it.

Did you learn a lot from David McComb?

Oh yeah. Dave wasn’t a schooled musician, but he was an amazing musician. He had an incredible musical mind. I learnt that the most difficult thing for any musician to do is to stop playing and to say, ‘I don’t need to play anything there.’ The difficult thing is to sit back and

make sure what you’re playing is really important.

If it’s you showing off or if it’s some old thing that you played in another song, then don’t play it.

You also played some guitar in 1985 with a very young Paul Kelly. How did that come about?

I met Paul in Sydney. I can’t for the life of me remember exactly when I met Paul, but I do remember going to visit him — he had a flat in Kings Cross that he shared with Paul Hewson from Dragon. I can remember Paul dragging himself out of bed at around 11 o’clock and playing some tunes on the piano. It was your usual Kings Cross squalid flat. Paul had heard that I played the dobro and guitar. That day Steve Connolly came round and we played some songs. Paul had booked some time at a studio with Clive Shakespeare from Sherbert, which was in his backyard. We recorded the album Post.

I played with Paul on various records and on returning from Europe with The Red Ponies, I played in his band.

Was his talent immediately obvious?

Oh absolutely, yes. [Post] is a fantastic collection of songs. You’d have to be a complete moron not to notice. Paul was really down on his luck at the time. He didn’t have a deal. I think someone from Mushroom eventually threw him a lifeline. I remember driving around with him and we drove past The Hopetoun and Paul said, ‘Gee, I wish I could a gig there.’ I think Post was actually launched there. But [in the beginning], no one wanted to know him.

Your nickname is ‘Evil’ Graham Lee. Where did that come from?

It was given to me by David McComb. He’d heard that all pedal steel players have a nickname. A lot of them do — Pee Wee Clark, Speedy West. He said, ‘You’ve gotta have a nickname.’ I think he felt he was being short-changed if he had a pedal steel player without a nickname. We were in London, drinking some red wine and watching TV, and the movie Evil Roy Slade came on. And David said, ‘That’s it.’

Wide Open Road is out now through Liberator.

all pics by scarlett o’horror

mischief review

the storm picturesque

deez nuts

deez nuts

the storm picturesque

the storm picturesque

deez nuts

MISCHIEF Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Sunday, June 13

Possibly due to the rather early commencement, many future attendees were not yet present when Newcastle-based southern rock sextet Cannons Mouth got things grooving for Reverb’s ‘Mischief’. Although having three guitarists on stage doesn’t instantly look conventional, this ensemble make exceptional use of their axe-bearers by offering varied textural layers throughout their songs — as opposed to propelling an invariable barrage of riffage upon listeners. Contrasting devastatingly heavy breakdowns with bouncy verses, local lads Violence got the crowd moving. Whether it was to ‘dance’ or avoid copping a backwards kick to the face is another story.

Chaotic noise-bringers Safe Hands have truly come into their own, with the recent addition of two new members. The diversity, intensity and uniqueness the quintet provided was even more remarkable than the consistent high quality submissions the group typically deliver.

Young Newcastle metallers The Storm Picturesque presented their intricately impressive set with the vivacity and passion you would expect from a band a great deal more senior than they are. Western Sydney death metal tyrants Thy Art Is Murder instigated an aural battering, with their rapid, accurate and exceedingly heavy hymns. Internet favourite ‘Whore to a Chainsaw’ concluded an engaging performance that surely drained throathsmith CJ McMahon — whose varied vocal range is incomprehensibly extreme.

Fronted by entrepreneurial-like musician JJ Peters, Melbourne hardcore band Deez Nuts’ party anthems were to be digested as the evening’s main course. Recently returned from their fourth European tour in a few short years, this was the first Newcastle appearance for the ensemble, who is touring in support of their sophomore lengthy player This One’s For You. ‘Sex Sells’, ‘DTD’ and ‘I Hustle Everyday’ were a few of the more welcomed tunes supplied by the vigorous quartet. By now, the near full house were satisfied to filter off into the chilly Sunday night — with many undeniably delighted by the prospect that Monday would yield a public holiday. ~Nathaniel Try

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Live reviews

Gig of the month

Last Dinosaurs

Mondo Generator

Yusuf

Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Wednesday, May 26

Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle Saturday, June 5

Sydney Entertainment Centre Monday, June 21

Mondo Generator ©Mark Snelson

Last Dinosaurs ©Mitchell Jones

“We won’t play a song ‘til more of you come down here,” Last Dinosaurs’ lead singer Sean Caskey said to the dozen or so people near the stage. Three people answered his call and the set started, but by the end of the first song, that crowd had swelled to around 70, thanks to a high energy stage presence. When a band opens on a high it can be easy to slip to a lesser quality and lose the crowd, but fortunately, Last Dinosaurs did exactly the opposite. This is not only a credit to their songwriting, but to putting together a set list that combined hard and soft rock with catchy melodies in a strange feel that can only be described as ‘island-like’.

The highlight by far was the final song, Triple J favourite, ‘Honolulu’. Not only did it sound just as fantastic live as it does on radio, but they invited two members of support act, Neon Love, to join their drummer, creating a super tri-drummer. Frankly, Last Dinosaurs rocked it. ~Melissah Comber

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Mondo Generator are more interested in thrashing out good honest punk than in harmonies and melody — their lead man Nick Oliveri describing their sound as “psychedelic punk”. One audience member shouting “take your clothes off” to which Oliveri replied “I love to hear that from a guy”. The audience pushed past the unnecessary crowd barrier as Oliveri urged people to “come in and have some fun with us”. The world of Mondo Generator is full of debauchery, hammering out songs such as a ‘Life of Sin’ and ‘This Isn’t Love’. Mondo Generator are charismatic and funny, totally aware of how ridiculous the songs can be, but thrashing them out with heart and soul regardless.

The insane screaming and wide eyes are the perfect image to accompany the music. Had they taken themselves too seriously it would have seemed a little pathetic, fortunately there was plenty of sarcasm to help the medicine go down. They ended with two more QOTSA tracks, closing with ‘You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire’, arguably Oliveri’s most memorable and defining moment. ~Jeff Theys

It’d been a long time coming. 36 years, in fact. The last time the songwriter, known now simply as Yusuf, graced an Australian stage he was a young man going by the name of Cat Stevens. There was obvious excitement in the packed arena, mostly made up of punters old enough to have seen Yusuf when he was last in the country.

The lights dimmed and an acoustic guitar began to sound. The lone figure walked onto the stage, beginning the two-hour set with only his guitar and his voice. So tired is the tale of a legendary musician who many years after their hey day is something of a shadow of their reputation. This could not have been further from the truth.

Yusuf and band had the audience glued for the entire show, which included songs from his catalogue ranging from ‘Matthew and Son’ and ‘Where Do The Children Play’ to more recent offerings including ‘Roadsinger’ and ‘All Kinds of Roses’.

Everybody familiar with the songs of this man will tell you that he has a knack for saying things simply but profoundly through his music and words, but seeing the man live really underlined the magnetism he exudes.

Between the songs the audience were off the hook with excited applause, but the second Yusuf began to speak, you could hear a pin drop. They were hanging on his every word. At one point between songs his mobile phone began to ring and he had to call a roadie onstage to take it, much to the

Yusuf ©Troy Constable

amusement of the crowd. The highlight of the night was undoubtedly ‘Father and Son’ and ‘Moonshadow’, towards the end of the night.

As a whole, the show was quite an experience. Let’s hope it’s not so long between drinks next time. ~Nick Bielby

live reviews

strung out ©chrissy kavalieros

the butterfly effect ©chrissy kavalieros

the firemen ©courtney fitzsimmons

the basics ©courtney fitzsimmons dead letter circus ©sean roche

Come together Luna Park, Sydney Saturday, June 12 The Come Together Festival has, in a way, become an underdog on the Australian festival calendar. Whether it’s because it falls smack bang in the middle of Winter or the fact that track work is scheduled annually for the Queen’s Birthday long weekend, it never seems to sell out.

Heroes for Hire took to the stage with the intention to soothe the hearts of the many pop-punk fanatics - and that they did. With lyrics that shout tales of heart break, fuelled by emotional ups and downs, they galavant around the stage, bursting with energy as they reel the crowd in with their punchy hooks and on-stage dance moves.

House Vs Hurricane continued the energy flow and were no doubt the heaviest band on the bill. They pulled off quite an impressive show despite being the outcast, in terms of genre for the day.

Strung Out rocked the stage soon after, belting tracks from their latest album, Agents of The Underground. When you watch these guys play, a vibe of intimidation sets in, brought on by the cocky and over enthusiastic manner in which vocalist Jason Cruz behaves.

Cruz spends much of his time on stage mixing it with the crowd, screaming lines and sharing the microphone with the exuberant kids smashed to the barrier.

Little could deny who the majority of the punters were here to see as the “Frenzal” chant could be heard from the bar line. Frenzal Rhomb were in no hurry to begin their set as vocalist Jay Whalley made a humble approach by chatting to the crowd before their set began to see how his faithful Frenzal followers were doing. Although their music is only suitable for those with an acquired taste for off-the-wall punk music, the boys made a stellar comeback performance kicking the set off with ‘Forever Malcolm Young’. Some of

their songs may seem a little distasteful to the ears of your mother and father, but what do you expect from a band who thrive in writing controversial lyrics?

Gyroscope were the closing act for the first day and rightly so. These guys would have to be one of the biggest bands in Australia at the moment and it seemed they weren’t going to settle for a silver medal set. Gyroscope strummed out a powerful show, mixing new and old tunes to satisfy the ears of their beloved fans. ‘Snakeskin’ and ‘Some of the Places I Know’ were, in my opinion, the definitive crowd pleasers. ~Sean Frazer Sunday, June 13 Festival heads at this year’s Come Together were a bit slow to kick things off on Sunday afternoon; maybe they partied too hard the night before. The first band that turned out any real crowd was the note-worthy Calling All Cars, who played a few of their Triple J hits — the crowd lapped it up as a taster of what was to come. Horrowshow were the only hip hop act of the festival, though they did well to win over the rock-based crowd with the help of their buddies, Spit Syndicate. With not many places to sit in the concert hall, punters took to using the free ride section of their festival tickets, going outside regularly to get some air and maybe a laugh at Coney Island. When British India took the stage they took it from being a good festival to a memorable experience. They owned the stadium with the whole band delivering some genuine, edgy, rock and roll. It’s got to be said though, that the night belonged to Grinspoon — Phil was truly a rock star with the crowd hanging off his every move. The Big Top was electric as Grinspoon ripped through some oldies and newies and satisfied every rock thirsty hooligan in a way that only Grinspoon could. ~david long

the snowdroppers ©courtney fitzsimmons

tijuana cartel ©courtney fitzsimmons

zoe K ©courtney fitzsimmons

the Gum Ball Belford, NSW Saturday, May 29 The most striking thing that comes to mind about the recent 2010 Gum Ball music festival at Belford, just east of Singleton, was that the selection of live talent was outstanding. A full and warm round of applause has to go out to the individuals that had the insight to compile such a high standard of entertainment.

The Gum Ball festival had such a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, that one couldn’t help but get lost in the social whirlpool. I’m sure I speak for many Gum Ball goers when I say that many new friendships were created over the course of the weekend, albeit too short.

Initially there had been a torrent of rain, which sadly kept many potential party people away, but for the rest of us keen campers, the weather settled in our favour by lunchtime Saturday and the party rolled on. Although the Gum Ball was held on the cold verge of winter, a good number of large fire pits — well-stocked with timber — were present and helped to keep the winter blues at bay. I was notably impressed by the quality and clarity coming from both

the sound systems. Great bands with a great PA sound, amidst good company, that was the Gum Ball experience for this reviewer.

If I am to add the smallest note of disappointment, there were some excellent looking T-shirts on display at the merchandise stall, but due to a lack of stock, it left many Gum Ball goers without their token event souvenir that would have been sported proudly otherwise. To my mind, there were a few stand out performances amongst the exceptional talent gathered, that need to be mentioned, as word of mouth is what gets bums in seats at gigs.

For those of you that love your blues/rock in a “Ned Kelly” approach, the zany and intense Brothers Grimm is really worth checking out, and for those that are in tune with their inner funkster side, The Domestics really know how to lay down a cool groove. As far as parties in the bush go, hands down, Gum Ball is without doubt the best one I’ve attended so far this year. Next year’s Gum Ball festival seems too far away… ~Terry paull

DVD reviews

Smart like a fox Forging metal I admit, I do love the Classic Album series — to be able to get behind the mixing desk, to hear how these albums came together, it can be rather enlightening. Firstly, it is nice to see that they got it absolutely right when selecting Paranoid, an album considered to be one of the greatest heavy metal albums of all time.

Through the course of the hour, we hear from all four band members, the manager at the time, the original studio engineer, plus see live footage from the era. Beginning with the band still called Earth, we very quickly move through the name change and the recording of their first self-titled album — Ozzy’s amazement at receiving his first royalty cheque of 105 quid is priceless. What is clear is

On the edge Take five teenage girls, dress them up in corsets and hot pants, and throw them to the wolves of the music industry — this could have quite easily been the tag line for Edgeplay.

This insider doco, from 2005, traces the formation of the first ever all-female hard rock band, and delivers a no-holds-barred account of the verbal, physical and drug abuse that were inflicted upon the girls, culminating in the destruction of the band.

Directed by Victory Tischler-Blue, former Runaways bassist, the viewer is given unlimited access to the former band members [Sandy West, Lita Ford, Jackie Fox, Cherie Currie, Vicki Blue], management [Kim Fowley] and the songwriter [Kari Krome], as well as the mothers of West and Currie. All participants give honest accounts of the period between 1975 and 1979, with Kim Fowley in particular being singled out as a “freak”, “bad news”, “a

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reviewed Classic Album Series: Paranoid — Black Sabbath reviewed by Kevin Bull rated 4/5 just how organic the creation of these now classic songs were — jamming during soundcheck and on the bus, this is where Paranoid was formed.

As “Geezer” Butler [bass] says, “[Tony Iommi] would come out with a riff and we would all play the same thing, together, as if we all knew what was coming next.” Highlight of this series is, for me, when they get into the studio and listen to the separate tracks within the mix, so to hear Geezer’s bass work during ‘War Pigs’ isolated, and Ozzy’s guide vocals for ‘Planet Caravan’ is magic. And don’t just stick to the main course, the ‘Extras’ interviews are just as good. The Classic Album series has done Paranoid justice. Buy this and see where heavy metal came from.

reviewed Edgeplay — A Film About The Runaways reviewed by Kevin Bull rated 4/5 lunatic”, “an abuser” — in Currie’s words, “I still hope one day someone does [pull out a gun and blow his brains out], ‘cause I think if anyone deserves it, that man does.”

It is not all doom and gloom though, with the 1977 Japanese tour being touted as the band’s highlight, but when this success is weighed up against the trials that the girls were put through to get there, you have to doubt the management team, and Kim Fowley’s methods. Edgeplay is a harrowing and sad account of the manipulation of young teenagers and their families by a music industry that takes no prisoners. I will leave the final words to West’s mother, “I should have tied her to the bed and said, ‘You can’t do this.’”. Watch this as a warning.

reviewed Fantastic Mr Fox reviewed by Noah Cross rated 4/5 In making this stop-motion animated adapation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book, director Wes Anderson has been faithful and innovative.

The puppets he uses are intricate and visceral, using endless facial expressions whilst darting through the beautifully crafted landscape.

We’re introduced to our hero Mr Fox [George Clooney] and his wife Felicity [Meryl Streep], as young courters who are raiding a squab farm together. Setting off a fox trap, the two become caged. Felicity reveals she is pregnant and makes Mr Fox promise that if they escape, they will give up their reckless lifestyle.

Two years later, Mr Fox and Felicity live a domesticated existence, with a dour son named Ash [Jason Schwartzman]. Mr Fox has become a newspaper journalist, but begins to yearn for his old wiley ways, particularly when he and his family move into a new home that faces the various poultry industries of Boggis, Bunce

and Bean. After a few successful nighttime raids on the industries, he brings the wrath of Boggis, Bunce and Bean down upon all that he holds dear.

The musical score to Fantastic Mr Fox is as off-beat as you might expect from an Anderson movie, with a great cameo by Jarvis Cocker at the film’s centre. The humour fuses Anderson’s usual deadpan rhythm with Dahl’s sense of irony and wit. It’s directed exactly like every other Anderson film — practically every frame is perfectly symmetrical, as if the director is constantly taking portrait photos of his characters. But as always, this adds to the film’s charm and it’s clear that Anderson’s quirky view of the world compliments Dahl’s whimsy.

Though it’s a movie with puppets, adults are most likely to enjoy the dialogue and subtle nuances of this incredibly enjoyable adaptation.

©dominique tarle

Into Exile reviewed Stones In Exile reviewed by Kevin Bull rated 4/5 With the remastered version of the Rolling Stones masterpiece, Exile In Main Street, having just been released, Stephen Kijak’s ‘Making Of’ documentary, Stones In Exile, takes us behind the walls of Villa Nellcote during the spring of 1971 where the album was recorded.

Much has been made of this period in the Stones’ history — forced into tax exile to the south of France, the decadence surrounding the recording of Exile On Main Street — it is somewhat surprising that anything of musical value emerged from

the villa’s basement.

What Stones In Exile adds to this history is the soundtrack to life within Villa Nellcote. Raw footage from within the basement during the recording sessions — Keith Richards lazing on the palatial patio overlooking the French coast — it gives the viewer a glimpse as to what the Stones were putting themselves through. Unfortunately it is only a glimpse, as the documentary would have benefitted from digging a bit deeper.

The extras are rather thin as well. There are extended interviews with all parties, musician fans professing their love for Exile On Main Street, plus the only real cherry, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts revisiting Stargroves, Jagger’s home during the early 70s.

Stones In Exile may not answer any of the really hard questions, but it certainly shines a light on a fascinating period where the biggest band in the world descended the abyss, to emerge with what is widely considered as their greatest achievement.

film reviews

Snowed under

Girls on the Edge Twenty five years after the demise of her band, The Runaways, Victory Tischler-Blue [Vicki Blue, bassist] put together a compilation tape of their music, and gave it to her band mates. From this humble beginning, Edgeplay was born. Kevin Bull spoke with director TischlerBlue from her ranch in the Californian desert to talk about the Edgeplay experience and her memories.

The Runaways were a band that broke new ground in the music industry — they were the first all-female hard rock band and enjoyed incredible success over their five years. Though Tischler-Blue was in the band for little more than a year, she found herself in the perfect position to produce Edgeplay. “I went directly into producing and directing [after The Runaways]. That was the track I was on initially and I got derailed [by The Runaways] a little bit.”

After that initial compilation tape, “people around me kept saying, you’ve got to make a documentary. It never even occurred to me to do it.” The finished product in Edgeplay is actually version two. “The original version of the doc was all about the teenage spirit, about these five girls who had a dream, and they went out there and they realised their ambition. It was a delightful film. It wasn’t really that dark. It was a little heavy but not like this version.”

Tischler-Blue goes on to say that the transformation of this original version into Edgeplay was due to Joan Jett. “I got a great film deal for it [the original version], and Joan Jett put in a legal claim against the film. Because of that I lost my music licences, then I lost the film deal. The original version which she did see, I know she would have had to have liked. I think the real issue here was control issues. She’s very coveted of The Runaways, and I don’t want to sound negative with this, but there were entitlement issues, like how dare I make the film when it was her band — I’m projecting, but I think that was the mindset.”

Her close friend, director/actor Rob Reiner, told her bluntly, “You’ve lost your movie. You can’t make a movie about a band without the music.” Taking this as a challenge, she continued with the project. “I wanted to have more of a conscience with the second version. I wanted the movie to be a cautionary tale to young aspiring musicians, to get their shit together and to know what they’re getting into. So when I made the second version it became a film more

about child abuse disguised as a rock doc about The Runaways.”

While watching Edgeplay you need to remind yourself that these girls are 17 year old and their care was entrusted to the band’s management. Drug and alcohol abuse, as well as verbal and sexual abuse, were all inflicted during the course of the group’s five year history.

When asked about the girls’ protection, Tischler-Blue concedes “there wasn’t any, and of course we weren’t going to say anything cause we were on a wild ride. But now that I’m an adult and have had so many years to digest it — I mean, our parents, oh my god! My parents were so torn — they did not like [Runaways manager] Kim Fowley. Look, if you had a teenage daughter going around the world with these guys as chaperones… it’s like, come on, give me a break.”

Edgeplay paints band manager, Kim Fowley, as the main protagonist in the abuse of the girls.

Even his interview for the documentary was manipulative and controlling. “When I interviewed him, he had a guitar player sitting next to him, and every answer he’d give me, the guitar player would have his music underneath the audio track. I said to him, ‘you can’t do this’, and he said that I couldn’t have it any other way. So, after finishing the interview, he calls me and says, ‘let’s talk about a publishing deal, because each answer I gave you is a song and I want you to licence that music in the form of my answers for your movie.’ So I had to let it go, and I edited the film without him.” The interview with Fowley that appears in Edgeplay was actually licenced from VH1, with Tischler-Blue having provided the questions.

From humble beginnings, Edgeplay has well and truly exceeded Tischler-Blue’s expectations.

“I did not expect anyone to see it at all. Honestly, it blew me away, it was so well received. It was a personal project. It was enough just to do it and to give it to my band mates.”

Edgeplay is released on DVD on July 7 through Shock.

In Nick Stoller’s previous movie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, we were introduced to the hilarious, sexed-up and egotistical rock star Aldous Snow — played by Russell Brand.

Stoller obviously realised how much of a scene stealing role it was and has now given Snow [and Brand] his own vehicle in Get Him to the Greek.

Things have not been going so well for Snow.

His career is on the downturn after a disastrous album, his girlfriend of seven years has left him, he is once again on the drugs and getting into the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Meanwhile, young record company executive Aaron Green [Jonah Hill] convinces his boss [Sean Combs] that it would be a good idea, not to mention a potential goldmine, to have

Criminal minds Animal Kingdom is a gut-wrenchingly tense Australian crime drama from writer and director David Michod. It is certainly a breath of fresh air as far as Aussie cinema releases go, and has been picking up deserved acclaim on the overseas festival circuits. Newcomer James Frecheville plays the lead role of Josh who, after his mother’s overdose, moves in with his grandmother [Jackie Weaver] and her criminal sons Baz [Joel Edgerton], Darren [Luke Ford], Craig [Sullivan Stapleton] and ‘Pope’ [Ben Mendelsohn]. Josh’s uncles earn their keep through armed robberies and an investigation led by Inspector Leckie [Guy Pearce] is closing in on the family. Leckie sees the disaffected

reviewed Get Him To The Greek reviewed by Mark Snelson rated 3.5/5 Aldous Snow stage a comeback concert at LA’s famous Greek Theatre. Green is sent to London with orders to have Snow in the US within three days, a task that turns out to more difficult than expected. The usually conservative Green gets drawn into the excesses of the rock and roll lifestyle, with often over the top and hilarious results.

Brand is fabulous in his role as Snow and is by far the funniest rock star parody to grace the screen since Spinal Tap. If there are any faults with Get Him to the Greek, it is perhaps a tad too long at almost two hours, especially when some of the gags feel repetitive. Had they have trimmed the fat, it would have been a much more consistent affair, but it is definitely still worth a look.

reviewed Animal Kingdom reviewed by Mark Snelson rated 4.5/5 Josh as a way to cracking the case and tries to convince him to give evidence against his uncles.

As suspicions and tensions rise within the family, drastic measures lead to tragic circumstances with the ultimate fate of the family left in Josh’s hands. Michod goes against all the crime movie clichés with this one and skips predictable action in favour of going deep into the psyche of its characters, whilst building a mood that is almost unbearably tense. The acting is sensational all round, with Mendelsohn’s creepy turn and Weaver’s determined matriarch being the standouts. Be sure to get out to the cinema to see this one — an Australian movie this good deserves all the support it can get.

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reverb socializm

first birthday party — Lizotte’s, Newcastle

Tonic — beach house, port macquarie

Nadastrom — CBD Hotel, newcastle Photos by Timmy Johnston of The (REMIX) Group

Plantation Hotel, Coffs Harbour

Sass — The Temple Bar, Gold Coast

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Running during the month of July. New and existing online subscribers are eligible. Entries are made through the URL www.reverbstreetpress.com/comp, and by adding your email to the ‘Win 100 CDs’ group. By entering, you agree to be added to the Reverb online edition mail out. Entrants will be emailed at the end of July, and will respond with their preferred genres, and the answer to the question “Describe you most memorable music experience”. 100 CDs will be selected from the CDs in the Reverb office using the genres provided by the winner.

Digital printing 400 x A6 flyers

$ 190

50 x A3 5 x A2 4 x A1 Delivery

$ 60 $ 125 $ 120 $ 15

Two sides

(to Newcastle, per parcel)

Email kevin@reverbstreetpress.com for quotes and bookings All prices exclude GST

UNI &CAFE enter online at: www.aaca.net.au

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