22 Dreams

i'm in the sunshine A mate of mine produces a monthly songwriter newsletter which goes out to a hundred or so mainly Sydney-based members. The roster's probably listing less than a hundred members now, and I keep meaning to ask him how many he's currently got on the roster and who's on it but since he's always so busy I'm reticent to ask. Anyway, he likes receiving articles to assist him with the newsletter. Sometimes I provide something for him and those articles find a place on this blog site - for instance, the recent Paul Weller Opera House concert review. And more recently I've written something about New Zealand songwriter and Dragon member, Paul Hewson. He's a recent discovery for me and so I was quite pleased to come up with something from a songwriting perspective, ignoring as much as possible the legend and the hearsay. Before writing I read Glen Moffatt's excellent serialised online essays about Paul Hewson, along with other article...

Paul Weller revisits Australia for his fourth tour down under and sells out the Sydney Opera House over three consecutive nights during the height of Sydney’s summer.   Fan-site photos show Weller basking in the hot sun and gazing out onto Sydney Harbour.   I went to Paul Weller’s second “middle” show on Sunday 29 th Jan, and one of his first utterances as his band took the stage was “last night was a great fucking night, I hope we can match that”.   Summing up from the electricity and excitement generated by the band and audience he certainly did, and on the next night too if all accounts are to be believed. Weller and his band of mod-looking musicians played a blinding set that lasted for well over two hours, drawing from songs from his fine latest release ‘ A Kind Revolution’ along with a number of old Jam and Style Council songs and his well-known solo songs from his mid-nineties solo period, and beyond.   That’s forty years worth of consistently great...

I just finished reading Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe which I loved.  As a second generation Australian I found the novel confronting and difficult to read at times with its haunting depictions of past-generational traumas.  This book acts as a conduit toward my coming to some better understanding of what my parents went through as individuals in 1930s-40s Calabria, Italy.  Anna Maria Dell’oso’s Songs of a Suitcase did similarly, however that book is more impressionistic in tone, something of an Italian-Australian Anais Nin minus the erotica.  Tsiolkas by contrast is harsher, he is direct and unflinching in his expressions of violence, bigotry and bloodlust.  The author conveyed Europe as a continent of insurmountable burden, of which every player, every person, had to bear some or much of that leaden psychic load.  This is the Europe that my parents, and their parents, knew, or more precisely, the god-fearing, superstitious ultra-catholic and xen...

(for gav's little songy mag)            I’d seen Tex Don & Charlie perform a few times prior to their Factory Theatre gig in Marrickville last week; twice in 1993 when they’d just formed, and again to a packed house at the Hopetoun in Surry Hills in 2003.  Fourteen years later, the group had sold out the larger Factory Theatre over three consecutive nights, confirming their enduring popularity and appeal as they tour Australia for the first time in over a decade. Something of a mini-super group, the band comprises of Tex Perkins (Cruel Sea, Beasts of Bourbon), Charlie Owen (Divinyls, Beasts of Bourbon), and Don Walker (Cold Chisel, Catfish), with extra musicians guesting on double bass, drums, and at this recent gig a pedal steel guitar.  Tex Don & Charlie weren’t particularly popular to begin with.  Being a huge Don Walker fan I didn’t miss the opportunity to see them live as soon as they started gigging to...