Poolside at a Brisbane hotel in balmy spring sunshine is not, perhaps, where you’d expect to find Gareth Liddiard, the poet of existential wrath and melancholy. But encouraging daft stereotypes was never his forte, either, and the frontman of The Drones is having a welcome day off. Continue reading “Gareth Liddiard interview, published in Reverb”
Author: mickdaleyo
Writer, musician.
Review of 2012 Cold Chisel album, ‘No Plans’, published Reverb magazine, April 2012
Backstage at a Tamworth Country Music Festival show in 2005, Jimmy Barnes is shrieking like a cranky cockatoo. He grins apologetically and remarks, “It’s my warm-up routine,” before joining fellow vintage rockers Normie Rowe and Ross Wilson onstage.
That unmistakeable scream is the first thing that jumps out on Cold Chisel’s first album in 14 years, as Barnesy warms up on No Plans.
Spraying f-bombs over a blues jam circa Rising Sun, Barnes comes out swinging while the band flexes its honky-tonk.
Vale Vince Lovegrove (In the Northern Rivers Echo 27/3/12))
I worked with Vince in London in the 1990s, with TNT and SX magazines. He had his own office into which he’d invite me to chat, asking me what I knew about certain bands, the gossip on various mutual acquaintances back home. He was always working, getting the scoop for the columns he wrote for various publications and websites. He was a pioneer as far as web-journalism goes, he caught onto its potential early and I believe he had the first ever rock-journalism blog.
We’d often smoke a joint after work and he’d regale us with tales of mayhem from the rock’n’roll days – he and Bon escaping from truckdrivers who wanted to bash them for their long hair and hippy clothes, the crazy days of Barnesy’s addictions and Vince’s attempts to keep it secret. You’d forget sometimes that this was a guy who had been right in the pocket – he’d sung with Bon Scott in the Valentines, introduced Bon to AC/DC, managed Chisel and Divinyls. Occasionally he’d let slip a little of the influence and respect that he’d earned.
One time he asked me did I know anyone that played didgeridoo. I said I could play. He asked did I want a gig. I said yes. Next thing I’m being billed as Diamond Daley, didge player to the stars, recorded with REM and Midnight Oil, and I’m being paid 600 quid to play didge for ten minutes to a mob of scientists at Oxford University. Such was the influence and old-fashioned showbiz panache of this impresario, rock icon, AIDs activist, high-end businessman, respected journalist and good mate. Everyone on those magazines loved Vince, and on the few occasions I saw him around the Northern Rivers he was always the same energetic, enthused ideas man, on the scent of a new project. Seeya mate.
Review of Lucinda William’s 2011 album, ‘Blessed’ published in Reverb Magazine
Marriage has apparently mellowed her but you wouldn’t know it from the tone of the songs on Lucinda William’s latest. They still excoriate, castigate and scorn as blithely as ever – and in as poetic a vein. Daughter of a nationally renowned poet who read his work at Bill Clintons second inauguration, Williams’ apparently effortless songwriting template has again produced a collection of enduring classics delivered in her sublimely harrowed voice. Production is exquisite, Don Was steering a well-oiled machine with Elvis Costello donating gentlemanly, if sometimes suitably reckless guitar work. On first lesson the album handles like its predecessors, never straying too far from the ‘Car Wheels’ handbook, but inevitable repeats leads to an understanding that you are listening to a ineffable mastery of modern songwriting.
James Cruickshank – press release for ‘Note to Self’
James Cruickshank, acclaimed guitarist and keyboardist for the Cruel Sea, releases his second solo album, Note To Self, through Mullumbimby’s Vitamin records.
Flashes of Sam Cooke, David Bowie, Tom Waits and Beefheart reveal in the swinging gait and crooked instrumental passages of a moody serenade through Cruikshank’s yellowed back pages. Tinkering with strings and keys, swamp jazz and electronic propulsion, these meditations on maturing in a Peter Pan era could have been recorded in a time capsule, but the production, resolutely 21st century, lands it safely in a contemporary quarter.
Continue reading “James Cruickshank – press release for ‘Note to Self’”
Mick Daley - Musician and Author. 