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The cultural cringe – that feeling that Australia can’t do art/culture/society as well as the rest of the Western world – manifested itself most strongly in the pop music industry from the 1960s through to the 1990s. To a certain extent it was true. We had some magnificent, snappy pop groups in the 1960s (The […]

Midnight Oil live in 2017. This seemed impossible to me. How could the band that used to (literally) tear stages apart with hammer-of-the-gods pulverising power possibly re-emerge with the same rock muscle or political potency at the dawning of their twilight years? Peter Garrett’s fiery, uncompromising Superman agit prop persona had been enfeebled by the […]

In 1987 I used key lines from TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men as the basis of the chorus for an early Boom Crash Opera song, Sleeping Time. They perfectly suited the theme of the song and, in my deluded pretentious under-grad mind, tenuously linked my rock band (on Countdown at the time) with the mighty […]

After you have stripped away the flourishes of performance and production a good song works because of deep, underlying conventions of lyric, melody and accompaniment. A regularly touted aphorism of music industry types is ‘it’s all about the song’. Traditionally the ‘song’ meant the melody, lyrics and maybe the chords; not the performance and production […]

Good songs are both clear and complex. Musician and composer Peter Farnan reflects on this after seeingThe Fiery Maze at Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. With lyrics by poet Dorothy Porter, and music by Tim Finn, Farnan ponders the perils of poetry set to music. I first saw Tim Finn perform live in 1975. Split Enz were […]

Melody. But is it a girl thing, or a boy thing? It goes up (The Beatles), it goes down (Nick Cave), sometimes it just flatlines (Lou Reed). Paul Kelly and Rebecca Barnard sing a duet, Now That Our Babies Have Grown, on Pesky Bones Volume One. Its composer, Peter Farnan, asks ‘when should a melody jump […]

Eighteen months ago songwriter, producer and former Boom Crash Opera band member, Peter Farnan, embarked on a new recording project where 12 guest vocalists sing songs written and recorded by him. Farnan’s guests included Paul Kelly, Deborah Conway, Tim Rogers (You Am I), Rebecca Barnard, Sean Kelly (The Models), Sarah Ward (aka Yana Alana), Paul Capsis, Ali Barter, Charles Jenkins, Emily […]

There’s the stats and then there’s the texture. Statistically this is how Triple J’s Hottest 100 compares with last year’s: many more dance grooves, less beards, less folky acoustic guitars, less rock, more electronica, slightly less Australian representation (the ABC claim 54% but I counted 52 Australian artists), and a slightly larger female presence (43 […]

David Bowie, who died yesterday aged 69, took conventional notions of identity in pop and rock, already long-haired and drug-addled after the 1960s, and hyper-blasted them into orbit, creating an explosion of myriad shapes and possibilities. He was a cultural figure who gave many souls in the 1970s and beyond the permission to explore ‘other […]

Josh Tillman, in his alter-ego as Father John Misty, is the new millennium folk rock singer-songwriter. Sure, he sings about feelings ’n’ stuff, just like his bearded forefathers of the 1970s. But his show at the Forum in Melbourne last night was way bigger, more expressionistic and funnier than anything those old Laurel Canyon hippy […]