was going to be about the history of Australian live music, which I realised would be this really grim story of the rise and fall of pub rock… There were some very worthy historical ideas, but they required an enormous amount of research and weren’t going to be fun to do – or read.
andrew p street
THE LONG AND WINDING WAY TO THE TOP by MDB Author, journalist, critic, raconteur and former Adelaide lad Andrew P. Street recently chatted to us about his third book, The Long And Winding Way To The Top, and he spoke at length about the fifty’s sometimes painful selection process and much, much more. And as he’s these days best known as a political writer and commentator there was really only one choice for a first question, and that was… Previous books are The Short And Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign Of Captain Abbott and The Curious Story Of Malcolm Turnbull, The Incredible Shrinking Man In The Top Hat, and some seem surprised that your third is about music because, they irritatingly say, music isn’t political. But it is, right??? All art is… Oh yes, all art is political, and all art that comes out of a society reflects that society. No artist can really resist the temptation to put in a political message!... It’s very political, and so much of the great Australian music from the 1970s and 1980s was
explicitly political, and some of the best music around now is too... It’s not quite an explicitly political book though, I suppose, as there aren’t that many jokes about Eric Abetz. Of course you actually began as a music writer here in Adelaide, and worked for the dear-departed dB Magazine…
And then suddenly Curious Malcolm was published and I had a deadline, and then I thought of a history of Australia through 50 popular songs, and that coincided with the birth of my son James, which meant that I had five months to write it while being a firsttime Dad. That turned out to be not the best way to do it because babies, you know, are quite time-consuming [laughs].
At various points in the book you say that the original shortlist was more than 400 songs long… It was 487 or something stupid, yes! There were so many lists, and there was another that had 1000 on it or something, and that’s what happens when you put the call out on Facebook and ask, ‘So what do you all think were some good songs?’
Yes… For the last four or “There are themes five years it’s been mostly that come up You agonise amusingly writing about politics [for often – Indigenous throughout the book me]… I was music editor for dB, and then I moved bands and music, about the pain of your to Sydney in 2006 and the rise and fall selection process, and while there will be times became music editor for of guitar rock, the that the reader fumes over Drum Media and then music editor for Time Out Sydney. brief flowering of your choices, your actual So yes, most of my day jobs indie in the ’90s - selection processes are have been writing about and I had to choose always very sound when music, and I still write for between telling 30 you explain them. You had to start with Johnny Rolling Stone and Australian stories really badly O’Keefe; you had to have a Guitar and more… It’s always been what I’ve done, or a dozen stories few bands from elsewhere in the country so that it but somehow the political really well.” wasn’t all about Melbourne stuff has been sort of tacked and Sydney; you had to onto it, but yes, Adelaide readers of have a few embarrassments and a certain age primarily know me as a turkeys; and so forth. music writer. Did you approach publishers Allen & Unwin with the idea or vice versa? Originally it was suggested to me that I do a book about music after Captain Abbott as a sort of palate cleanser… But that was put on the backburner for a while as I was doing Curious Malcolm... Originally I did four false starts at getting it going while I was waiting on other things. I just couldn’t find the right narrative, and at first it
You also had to choose songs that might not have been a band’s best – like INXS’ What You Need and Divinyls’ I Touch Myself – as they’re the ones that truly broke them overseas...
There were so many songs that were true personal favourites that I desperate wanted to put in there. There’s a noteven-joke I use often about how Models should be in there but they’re not, and