Painting Fakes

There are several ways to cover a classic song.  You can do the tribute, where you try to sing the song as close to its original as possible.  You can do a complete makeover, where you turn a song in one genre into one in a completely different genre. Or you can do this... 'From Little Things Big Things Grow' is a classic Aussie song celebrating one of the pivotal events of Aboriginal Australians' struggle for land rights, the Wave Hill walk-off.  In 1966 the Gurindji, led by senior elder and law-man Vincent Lingiari, walked off Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory in protest at their poor working and living conditions on their own country.  They stayed on strike until 1975 when the Whitlam Government finally granted them title over the land - or perhaps it would be better to say, recognised their ongoing ownership.   Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly wrote the song in 1991 and released separate versions of it over the next year or two.  Since then the...

Experiencing serious trauma can change your life, and rarely for the better. People who have experienced trauma are more likely to experience a range of other things - chronic mental illness, addiction, homelessness, marriage breakdown.  Trauma rewires our brains, changes the way we react to situations, makes us prone to 'fight or flight' in situations which are benign for other people. *** You would think that the bigger the trauma, the more serious the effect, but this is not necessarily so.  Case in point: last year I read and reviewed  Jimmy Barnes' two-volume autobiography.  Barnes suffered a horrendous childhood, witnessing domestic violence, experiencing physical and sexual abuse, being abandoned by his mum and left with his siblings to fend for themselves while their dad spent all his time and all the family's money at the pub.   Hardly surprising that Barnes' adult life was a train wreck of addiction, violence, self-destructive behavio...

Jimmy Barnes won't need any introduction to my Australian readers.  He's been in our ears since the early 1980s, first as lead singer of Cold Chisel and later as a solo rocker.  He has played big stadiums, he performed to an audience of billions at the Sydney 2000 Olympic closing ceremony, and his voice is never far from our radios. He's not everyone's cup of tea.  Often he's not mine.  He tends to scream rather than sing.  Yet I also have a sneaking admiration for him, like a kind of dirty musical secret hidden amidst my supposedly more cerebral tastes.  When he has great songs to sing, for instance those written by Don Walker for Cold Chisel, or singing Andy Durant's ' Last of the Riverboats ', he can pull back the intensity and deliver as well as any singer in the country. Lately his musical output has dropped off, and instead he has written and published two volumes of his memoirs - Working Class Boy,  which tells the story of his childhood, a...

Lately I've found myself singing this little gem to myself as I go about my business. Unless you've been under a rock for the whole of the last 46 years you would surely have heard Don McLean's 'American Pie', his cryptic song about late 60s rock music and the death of Buddy Holly.  You've probably also heard 'Vincent', a beautiful tribute to Vincent Van Gogh.  However, you could be forgiven for not having heard this song, which appears on the same album. It's funny reading about it on the internet because so many reviewers fail to see what it's about, suggesting it's about an ego-driven singer or self-centred lover.  You have to wonder if they actually listened to it.  Perhaps they are so mesmerised by the album's title track that everything else just goes straight over their heads.  Or perhaps it's true that Americans just don't get irony. Fortune has me well in hand,  Armies wait at my command My gold lies in a fore...

Whatever modest musical ability I have I owe to my Dad. It took me a while to work this out.  When I was growing up, there wasn't lot of music in the house.  Mum and Dad had a small record collection and on rare occasions they would put something on the scratchy mono turntable Dad had built himself.  We also had a piano, but no-one played it much. As I got older I realised this wasn't how it had always been.  Dad was a decent pianist and also quite a good singer.  As boy he trained as a church chorister, and our photo album included a picture of him dressed as a policeman in a production of Pirates of Penzance  where he and Mum met and fell in love. Sadly by the time I was old enough to notice, Dad had lost a lot of his hearing and this ruined his enjoyment of music.  It's just not the same when you can only hear half the notes.  His only piano playing was an occasional rendition of Fur Elise,  which he could play fairly fluently by hea...

The coal mining industry has a special place in working class history and culture.  The hardships and dangers of the miner's life feature in the literature of social reform, with DH Lawrence's Sons and Lovers a nd Emile Zola's Germinal  both featuring the hardships of the miners life and in Zola's case, the devastating, life and death struggles to unionise and negotiate a fair wage. It has an even richer tradition in folk song.  Here's one of my favourites, 'Coal Not Dole', written in 1984 at the height of the British miners' strike by Kay Sutcliffe, who was married to one of the strikers.  It's sung here by veteran English folk singer Norma Waterson. It stands so proud, the wheel so still, A ghostlike figure on the hill. It seems so strange, there is no sound, Now there are no men underground. What will become of this pit yard Where men once trampled, faces hard? Tired and weary, their shift done, Never having seen the sun. Will it...

When I was looking for Christmas songs for church earlier this month, I came across my words and chords for this little gospel music gem we used to sing way back in the early 1980s. It's got a pretty, catchy tune and simple words, and it's easy for a ham guitarist like me to play.  Plus back in the day we were heavily into trying to convert people (not very successfully) and this song really tried hard to do that. Here's the thing though.  It never struck me as odd that although it calls itself 'A Christmas Song for All Year Round' it's actually an Easter song.  Look at the words. I wonder if this Christmas they'll begin to understand The Jesus that they celebrate was much more than a man. Cos the way the world is I don't see how people can deny The only way to save us was for Jesus Christ to die. And I know that if St Nicholas was here he would agree That Jesus gave the greatest gift of all to you and me They led him to the slaughter on ...

As you know I like a good music memoir.  I don't even mind a bad one.  Being a music obsessive I like the insight a memoir can give me into the songs and the times, the way you can get a little way into the head of the person who wrote the songs or performed them and see the process of their creation.  Many of my favourite musicians are getting on in years and are not as prolific as they once were and are turning to writing as way to fill their time, boost their income or secure their legacy, so I have plenty to choose from. Of course the down side is that the skill of writing a book is very different to that of writing a song.  A song is pithy, allusive, with a compactness that disciplines the composer to say what they need to say in a few short verses.  A memoir stretches out over thousands of words and lots of years.  It needs good (or at least adequate) writing to keep the reader engaged, characters with depth and resonance and a story that keeps you ...

If you read this blog from time to time you'll know that I'm a big fan of Bruce Cockburn.  So you won't be surprised to hear that I was very excited about the publication of his memoir, Rumours of Glory,  which hit the shelves in late 2014. I first heard Cockburn in the early 1980s and his music was a revelation to me.  He was the first singer I heard (and still one of a select few) who combined an overt Christian faith with a deep commitment to justice and an immersion in political and social issues.  He is a big name in his native Canada - winner of multiple Juno awards (the equivalent to our ARIAs) and inductee to the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.  Elsewhere he has a fairly low profile and a small but devoted following - especially from people like me. I read Rumours of Glory  over the Easter holiday as we travelled around western Victoria and New South Wales.  Among other things, it inspired me to fill some gaps in my collection of Cockburn CDS ...