Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2018 i Rolling Stone Australia

Pink Pun-dits GREAT COVER OF PINK! Whenever I feel blue, I play a Pink song, or two, or three. Pink has so many great hits. She’s definitely the Pop Princess. Australia apparently helped make her a superstar with such a strong fan base here. Without Australia, Pink could have been in the Red. No wonder some other popstars are a little Green with envy! Byran Kemp Kingswood, NSW I FIND IT SO STRANGE THAT Pink is so big in Australia and not that popular in her home country. Her live shows down-under are massive spectacles, and her records are full of hits. I wonder what we are seeing that they aren’t? Shelley Bryant Aspley, Qld Open Up Bono TUT TUT, BONO. IF YOU CAN’T disclose what happened in your “brush…

Bert Berns was one of the pathfinding songwriters and producers of the Sixties, co-writing hits like “Twist and Shout” and “Hang On Sloopy” and discovering artists such as Van Morrison and Neil Diamond. But for decades, Berns, who died in 1967 at age 38, was a historical footnote. In recent years, that’s begun to change. In 2016, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, thanks in large part to a push by Steven Van Zandt, who also narrates Bang! The Bert Berns Story. The film, which just came out on Apple Music, is co-directed by Berns’ son Brett. He spent a decade working on it, diving into his father’s battles with health problems and his extensive Mob ties. “We knew about the Mob stuff with Tommy…

As one of Australia’s most versatile performers – her credits range from films such as Look Both Ways to TV dramas such as Tangle and stage work with the Sydney Theatre Company; as a recurring host on Playschool, she’s released several best-selling CDs and DVDs of childrens’ songs – Justine Clarke is well versed in what it takes to put on a show. Her latest series, The Justine Clarke Show!, will air this month on ABC Kids, and is aimed at exposing preschool children to the magic of the backstage and what goes on in the lead-up to a performance, as she and her stage manager Dash the dog make final preparations before heading onstage. Each of the 15 episodes starts five minutes before showtime. “We’re getting ready, we’re learning…

Until David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, the singer had never cooperated with a biographer. She’s finally ready to open up. Yaffe, a Syracuse University professor and author of books on jazz and Bob Dylan, had unprecedented access, and he sympathetically traces the outline of Mitchell’s life while offering detailed takes on her albums, and even on her chord changes. But it’s Mitchell’s candour that propels the book. She recalls a late-life miscarriage, the time a drugged-up Miles Davis made an aggressive, clumsy pass at her, the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her drummer and beau Don Alias, and her cocaine addiction, which began on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. Dismissing stories that she attempted suicide after being dumped by Jackson Browne, she…

What’s the best advice you ever received? The wisest person I ever met continues to be my mother. She survived a Nazi concentration camp at 14 when her whole family was killed. Her perspective on life is, “Every day above ground is a good day, so reach for the stars. As long as there’s nobody trying to kill you, what have you got to lose?” She’s taught me that success is temporary. When I showed her the first $10 million cheque I earned, she said, “That’s wonderful – now what are you gonna do?” She’s right. Use it or lose it. I learned that work ethic from my mother. How do you teach your kids to have that kind of drive? For one thing, they’ve never had an allowance. Also,…

“‘The Lion and the Cobra’ pulled my brain apart and put it back together.” The Song That Reminds Me of School The Cure Just Like Heaven, 1987 “I hate to admit it but I stole that cassette from my local library when I was probably 13. I lived in this very small city in the middle of nowhere, and I wouldn’t even have known where a record store was. Whenever I’d get my hands on a tape it would be a mixtape one of my friends had made, and it felt like treasure. So I remember hearing the Cure and thinking, ‘This is like a treasure, I can’t give this back!’” The Song That Made Me Want to Be a Musician Sinead O’Connor Mandinka, 1987 “I was already in…

Moses Sumney SOUNDS LIKE: Heady dreams about lonesome landscapes, narrated with urgency FOR FANS OF: Solange, King, Björk WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: This Los Angeleno’s album Aromanticism is one of the most startling debuts of the year, a treatise on the notion of living without love that uses wide-ranging musical tastes and a gorgeously elastic voice to deliver thoughts on existence. Sumney’s vocals appear on Solange’s steely-eyed 2016 triumph A Seat at the Table, and his swirling take on Beck’s composition “Title of This Song” opens the recorded version of the pop guru’s 2013 sheet music compendium Song Reader; but Aromanticism is a showcase for Sumney’s compositional talent, love of sound and ability to craft simple yet searing lyrical statements. HE SAYS: “[‘Quarrel’] started with me and the producer…

“We have lost one of rock’s most recognisable guitarists.” There’s not a guitar player alive that can play an E major chord and make it sound as good as Malcolm Young. You could spend 20 years trying but it’ll never sound like him. There’ll only ever be one Malcolm Young. No matter what he played, he played the same way, with an inimitable touch and feel uniquely his. It was in his blood. When that magic right hand of his hit the strings on his single pickup Gretsch Jet Firebird, the sound produced was one of the most memorable, recognisable and powerful sounds in rock music. It shook the foundations, yes, all night long! It was gigantic and otherworldly and sounded like a bell tolling, thunder crashing and a sledgehammer…

“George Young left an indelible mark on Australian music. As a member of the Easybeats he co-wrote so many of their hits with Stevie Wright or Harry Vanda , later joining with Harry as the mega producer duo at Alberts – Vanda & Young – whose influence and recordings of AC/DC in the Seventies are legendary. George and Harry then reinvented themselves as Flash and the Pan, where for me personally his unique singing/speaking vocal style was brilliant. His legacy is huge, as the Easybeats and AC/DC have been and continue to be so influential on bands in this country. But as a great writing musician who became a great writing producer, he remains peerless. R.I.P., George. Australian music will miss you.”…

An unpopular pub, countless petrol stations and a pair of rival shopping centres. While the unnamed New South Wales setting of Blue Mountains-based author Shaun Prescott’s debut novel might feature several recognisable regional touchstones, all is not right in The Town, as sinkholes suddenly appear on the main street and the fears of our anonymous narrator are confirmed: the town is disappearing. Beyond the book’s scifi blend of absurdity (a band performs continually for days) and mundanity (coffee at Michel’s Patisserie), Prescott says he aimed to tackle the larger theme of national identity: “There’s honestly not a great deal that’s positive about being an Australian, particularly a white one, and that was the kernel of the story for me.”…

“DON’T FREEZE,” a member of an African special-forces unit advises her king, T’Challa, as he prepares to leap from a speeding jet into battle. With regal calm, he replies, “I never freeze.” (You can’t freeze if you’re subzero-cool.) He dons a black mask and drops from the sky as a car explodes beneath him. Screen time: 10 seconds. Time spent waiting to see that moment become a reality? A generation. Much as this year belonged to Wonder Woman, next autumn should belong to T’Challa. When Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther opens, a superhero (played by Chadwick Boseman) with unapologetic black swagger will finally have the cultural spotlight, 50 years after the character debuted in a Marvel comic. “I feel an incredible opportunity, and a responsibility,” says Coogler. That feeling is familiar…

WS position on big-big-name celebrities like Jim Carrey, Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise is that they are going to help take him and his far-out, revolutionary, health-restoring way of deep breathing, known as the Wim Hof Method (WHM), to the next level. The level it’s at now is disappointing. Here he is, claiming to hold the secret to curing MS, arthritis, diabetes, fear, depression, anxiety, pain, PTSD, bipolar disorder, cancer, you name it, and nobody seems to care. It doesn’t matter to him that over the past few years he’s become some kind of global cultural phenomenon, making media appearances all over (Discovery Channel, ABC, NBC, National Geographic Channel) to provide the lowdown on not only his breathing technique but also his nearly superhuman ability to withstand cold, which is…

$500 A model in a white tank top and panties sits in a baby pool as ranch dressing, mustard, nacho cheese, tomato sauce, baked beans, corn and relish are dumped over her head, turning her on. (20 minutes) $2,500 Three models in bikinis compete in a game where they have to collect inflatable beach balls and pop them. The losers take shaving-cream pies to the face, but things quickly turn into a slippery, sexy wrestling match. (35 minutes) $6,000 A girl-next-door type experiences back pain while jogging and heads to the doctor for a checkup. The exam becomes more thorough than she ever expected – especially when the doc pulls out the nipple clamps and vagina plugs. (60 minutes) More than $20,000 Two girlfriends try to have sex with their…

Fela Kuti  Fela Kuti Box Set #4 Cooking Vinyl ★★★★★ Curated by Erykah Badu, this latest Kuti retrospective encompasses a slew of the visionary Nigerian bandleader’s most fervidly political recordings, many with the game-changing Africa ’70. Even at 40 years’ remove, their prickling electricity is palpable. The anthology’s 12 tracks occupy 223+ minutes of timeless genius: a mesmeric potion of jazz virtuosity, highlife hedonism, and unshakable Yoruba ceremonial rhythms and call-and-responses. Pestling shekere, congas and palm-muted guitars form a seamless river of interlocking grooves, couching keys and wildly expressive saxophone parts of the kind piloted by Sun Ra Arkestra – see especially “No Agreement” (1977), with its urgent funk back-beat and expressive guitar vocalisation. The collection takes in some of the darkest passages of Kuti’s personal and public life, including…

ON DECEMBER 19TH, ARTS CENTRE Melbourne will throw open the doors to the Australian Music Vault – a permanent exhibition of Australian music memorabilia from myriad artists, ranging from acts such as AC/DC and Olivia Newton-John to Bliss n Eso and Courtney Barnett. Founding patrons include Kylie Minogue, Archie Roach, Molly Meldrum and Mushroom Group founder and chairman Michael Gudinski. “It’s something I’ve worked on for years,” says Gudinski. “Molly and I had a chat about this quite a while ago, and the biggest things for us were that it should be in Melbourne – it’s the home of music – and that it’s free to get in.” “What we’re trying to do is create a really dynamic exhibition so that when we open that’s actually the beginning, not the…

1 They’ll be milling about in the crowd at Laneway Although Odesza are fresh off a successful string of Australian shows in 2017, they’re already back for more at Laneway 2018. “On one of our first tours we opened for Bonobo and he’s become one of our close friends, so I can’t wait to hang out with him,” Harrison Mills says of his Laneway tour-mate. “There’s a lot of people on that line-up, like TOKiMONSTA and Badbadnotgood, that I really wanna see live.” 2 Their new LP started with bookends 2017’s A Moment Apart began with the creation of the album’s first and last songs. “We created bookends, then we fi up gap journey, says Mills. “We’re an albums band, not a singles band, so we wanted to make something…

‘I WAS DELIGHTED AT THE EN- ergy and grittiness of the live tracks,” Eagles singer-drummer Don Henley says of the previously unreleased concert recordings – from October 1976, at the Forum in L.A. – on the new 40th-anniversary reissue of the band’s fifth studio album and biggest seller, Hotel California. “We’re a year late, technically speaking,” Henley admits, noting that the LP’s original release was in December ’76. “But we had enough foresight to record those shows. I was surprised that we were doing songs from the album before it even came out. That was pretty ballsy.” Henley is speaking the day after a milestone in the Eagles’ touring life: their debut performance at Nashville’s country-radio landmark, the Grand Ole Opry. It was also the climax of the band’s first…

 AS ONE OF THE FEW journalists Lou Reed actually liked, longtime ROLLING STONE contributor Anthony DeCurtis never got a first-hand taste of Reed’s worst behaviour. But “everyone knows the stories”, DeCurtis says. So when Reed died in 2013 at age 71, and DeCurtis began work on his biography, the just-published Lou Reed: A Life, it meant taking a long walk on the dark side – and going well beyond the stories everyone has heard. The Reed of DeCurtis’ exhaustively reported book is a brilliant artist who helped define hipness and the outer limits of rock for generations, fulfilling his goal of fusing the “high literary world with gritty rock & roll”. Reed wanted to fuse the “high literary world with gritty rock & roll.” But he was also – at…

IN LATE 1967, MICK JAGGER STOPPED AT A NEWSSTAND and saw a new magazine whose name made him do a double take. “Quite surprised, really,” he joked in an interview about ROLLING STONE with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Didn’t know we had a magazine at that time, but you never know.” The name of the magazine was a nod not just to the Rolling Stones but also to Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ Stone” and Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, as well as the aphorism “a rolling stone gathers no moss”. But one of the Stones’ lawyers, clearly not as amused as Jagger, sent a cease-and-desist letter to founder and editor Jann S. Wenner, accusing the magazine of copyright violation. Wenner never considered changing the name. “We said,…

“A LOT OF YOUNG PEOPLE NOW COME TO MY GIGS . . . WEARING HORSE MASKS.” IT’S A COUPLE OF HOURS BEFORE he’s due onstage for a corporate gig in a Sydney hotel, but Daryl Braithwaite is cool as a cucumber and shooting the breeze as he’s photographed. “I’ve got a twin brother who’s head of pathology at a big hospital and a couple of years ago he told me he was going to retire,” he says. “I thought, ‘Fuck! Retire?’” For the record, Braithwaite, who turns 69 early next year, is not following his brother’s lead. Having recently been inducted into the ARIA Hall Of Fame as a solo performer, he’s always thinking about the next show – which, come December, will be at the Falls Festivals – while…

George was chief counsel, grounding point and touchstone for Angus and Malcolm. IT WAS 1980, AND GEORGE YOUNG WAS BACKSTAGE AT SYDNEY’S CAPITOL Theatre to give his best to Rose Tattoo, who were opening for Black Sabbath. At one point, a diminutive man walked past. “I know you!” Young called out after Sabbath frontman Ronnie James Dio. “We met in the States in the Sixties when I was with the Easybeats!” A horrified Dio, his former life revealed, quickly disappeared down the passage way. Young, the key member of the Easybeats and all powerful, hugely influential elder brother of AC/DC’s Malcolm and Angus, slipped away from us more quietly. He stepped out of the music scene many years ago, and passed away on October 22nd at the age of 70.…

“People talk shit. I can’t make myself unfamous. I might as well make money.” CARDI B is butt-naked in the doorway of her hotel bathroom, yelling about her vagina. On a mid-October evening, she’s readying herself for a college show in Baltimore, and the toiletries provided by the hotel aren’t to her liking. “That soap gave me the yeast infection of 2017!” she hollers in her thick Bronx accent. “My pussy was burnin’ like a Mexican taco!” It takes all of 10 seconds in Cardi B’s presence to be reminded of the sheer force and hilarity of her personality. Simply being Cardi B, at maximum volume, made her a star – first on Instagram, then on the VH1 reality show Love & Hip-Hop: New York – before she’d recorded any…

IN 2015, “Brujas Hex Trump”, a video of witches cursing the then-presidential candidate – cackling at Trump Tower security guards and burning yellow yarn with cries of “Lose all your hair!” – went viral on YouTube. Since the election, occultists across America have been gathering under the new moon to disarm the president with magic. At a recent event in a Brooklyn spiritual bookstore, attendees read from Psalm 109 – “May there be none to extend kindness unto him” – and stuffed curses into Mason jars. “You don’t have to believe in what I do,” says Dakota Bracciale, who led the hex. “If you wronged me, I’m wronging you back.”…

COMEDY has always been a coping mechanism for Tiffany Haddish, whose South Central L.A. childhood went from “pretty normal” to decidedly not so after her mother suffered brain damage in a car accident. Then nine, she was charged with taking care of her mum and four siblings, before the kids landed in foster care. By high school, Haddish was acting in plays, typically cast as “the maid or the monkey or something funny. My social worker was like, ‘You got two choices: You can go to Laugh Factory Comedy Camp or you can go to psychiatric therapy, because something is wrong with you, child.’” It was in the parking lot of the Laugh Factory in Hollywood a decade later that Kevin Hart noticed that Haddish was living out of her…

WHO REIGNS as the pop godmother of our times? It’s Britney, bitch. She hasn’t scored a real hit in years, but her staying power is bizarrely unstoppable – millennials idolise her, and she’s spent the past few years holding court at her Vegas show, where everyone from Beyoncé and Jay-Z on down has come to kiss the ring. We can feel Britney’s pain more than ever, because she helped invent the anxieties and tribulations of modern life. Back when social media barely existed in the mid-2000s, Britney epitomised all the ways it would become so (pardon the expression) toxic. She got slimed on every level, suffering through slut-shaming, body-shaming, “y’all”-shaming, mum-shaming, the works. Now that we’re all giving ourselves the paparazzi treatment with our phones – because putting your traumas…

‘JONATHAN BANKS wouldn’t say ‘nigger’ to my face,” says Jason Mitchell, laughing. The 30-year-old actor is referring to a scene in Mudbound, the upcoming period drama about two Southern families – one black, one white – in the 1940s. At one point, Mitchell’s character, a World War II veteran, refuses to leave a shop by the back door after being confronted by racists – including Banks. It turns out the Breaking Bad star was less than comfortable using the n-word on set. “I told him, ‘I’m ready to kick this scene’s ass!’” Mitchell recalls. “I gave him permission because it’s like, I gotta kick this up a whole other notch. Say it, and we’ll hug it out afterwards!” Banks gave in, and Mitchell’s reaction runs the scale from sorrow to…

Teenage Wasteland The post-9/11 era was a heyday for the escapism of teen soaps like Gossip Girl. Now, Riverdale (above), 13 Reasons Why and other shows are bringing that high school drama back – and adding dark new plot twists. George W. Bush: Not So Bad? The post-Trump descent into hell is forcing us to give Dubya a second look. Bush had liberals cheering after a recent speech in which he called bigotry a form of anti-American “blasphemy”. Not bad for a war criminal. The Post-Punk Revival Revival Great early-’00s post-punk bands like Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are doing reunion tours, LCD Soundsystem (above) put out one of 2017’s best LPs, and, like clockwork, word has it the Strokes are back in the studio. The Golden Age of…

REMEMBER conspiracy theories? You know, the sinister secrets the government used to hide from us, back when we believed the government would bother to hide things? It already seems strange to recall the old-school conspiracy culture from the days before Trump. Chemtrails or FEMA camps or the Loch Ness Monster seem downright quaint compared to what this administration does in plain sight. Comeygate? There’s no secret tape. There’s Trump on network TV telling Lester Holt he fired the head of the FBI because of his Russia investigation. This White House gang makes vintage conspiracy theories look like basketball stats from the 1950s, when the NBA was full of slow white guys, or baseball records before the steroid era. People used to worry whether the moon landings were faked. People were…

PEOPLE LIKE to tell Robert Beatty that his cover art for Tame Impala’s Currents reminds them of specific experiences – usually involving DMT. “It’s weird,” says the in-demand Kentucky-based graphic designer. “I love psychedelic art, but I’ve never taken psychedelic drugs.” His digitally airbrushed style, inspired by experimental animation and advertising’s neon-cool absorption of psychedelia in the Seventies, is making album art epic again. Kesha recruited him to give Rainbow its otherworldly look. “I was trying not to make it too Boston or ELO,” he says. “But it’s kinda hard to put a spaceship on a record cover and not have it reference that.”…

“Loss of love. We all have suffered. How we make up for it. Defines who we really are.”—BJÖRK, “Loss” Björk Utopia One Little Indian/Inertia ★★★★ BY ANNABEL ROSS Björk wants you to know she is not in the same place she was a few years ago. 2015’s Vulnicura, which chronicled her breakup with longterm partner Matthew Barney, was heavy, with songs like “Black Lake” and “Quicksand” laying bare Björk’s battered heart with mournful strings and disconcerting beats. From its opening bars, Utopia tells a very different story, field recordings of birdsong interrupted by luxuriant harp and the glow of a woman in love: “Just that kiss was all there is,” Björk breathes, the words drawn out to evoke a memory stuck on rapturous repeat. Harp aside, she largely does…

U2  Songs of Experience Universal ★★★ While it continues a decade-long trend of missing genuine moments of brilliance, Songs of Experience never really falls flat on its face, even when Bono unconvincingly says “I believe my best days are ahead” in the only mildly swaggering “Lights Of Home”, or when “The Showman (Little More Better)” clumsily gets “street” with its echoing chorus line of “little more better”. As with sister album Songs Of Innocence, this touches on elemental U2 (the Edge’s guitar tone and strict measures of Larry Mullen; Bono’s preaching yearning) and second wave U2 (suggestions of dance, some surprising Adam Clayton basslines, guest vocals to contemporise). In its best moments there is a gentle ballad, in the closing “There Is a Light”; a punchy, lightly post-punk/pre-discovering America song…

Tame Impala Currents (Collectors Edition Vinyl Box Set) Universal ★★★ ½ Usually you have to wait at least a decade for a deluxe reissue, but here’s Currents, less than three years on. Kevin Parker, the Fremantle musician who largely writes and records by himself, had been at the pointy end of the psych-rock revival for a while, but his third album marked a big shift. Goodbye elephantine guitars, hello pillowy beats, keyboard washes and falsetto vocals. Disco-funk and Nineties R&B can be found in its DNA, tweaked with Parker’s penchant for swirling atmospherics and compressed drop-outs. High points include “Eventually”, which sounds like Brian Wilson getting it on with the Flaming Lips, and “’Cause I’m a Man”, a stately slice of swoon-worthy soul. It’s so shiny you have to wear…

An Affair to Remember Call Me by Your Name Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg Directed by Luca Guadagnino ★★★★★ HERE’S THE MOVIE OF THE year for incurable romantics. It’ll sweep you up on waves of dizzying eroticism and then sweetly and emphatically leave you shattered. Director Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash), an ardent sensualist, sets the film in northern Italy in the summer of 1983, when even the air is perfumed with wanton possibility. Elio Perlman (a flawless Timothée Chalamet) is 17, multilingual, musically gifted and skilled at flirting with the local girls near the villa of his parents, an American professor (a superb Michael Stuhlbarg) and his translator wife (Amira Casar). Then an intern arrives from the U.S. to assist Elio’s father with research into…

ATH-M50xRD Headphones Audio-Technica RRP $279 AUDIO-TECHNICA’S ATH-M50 HEAD- phones are fast becoming the industry-standard workhorse for DJs and studio musicians wanting neutral-sounding monitors. Like the models that have come before them the M50xRDs feel comfortable and sturdy, with good over the ear coverage and rock solid connectors. Straight out of the box they sound honest and punchy, but in our experience they sound best after the drivers are worn in. The new colourway (which brings to mind Iron Man) is handsome, but the only addition to the M50 legacy here. ATH-AR5BT Headphones Audio-Technica RRP $369 HIGH DEFINITION AUDIO IS BECOMING more popular with regular folks thanks to a price drop in portable HD players. Which makes the prospect of being unplugged and on the move with these Blue-tooth…

“We’re going to take the [basic recordings]...and fuck them up.” IT’S A CHILLY AFTERNOON IN SEPTEM- ber and the Rubens and a dozen of their mates are sitting around an oil-drum fire on a farm in south-west Sydney, drinking beer and eating pizza. It could be any old gathering of close friends in a semi-rural setting, until two hip-hop producers with thick New York accents emerge from an imposing WWII communications bunker in the distance, and we’re reminded that the Rubens are knee-deep recording their anticipated third album. The producers are Wilder Zoby and Lil’ Shalimar (aka Torbitt Schwartz), best known as right-hand men for incendiary hip-hop group Run the Jewels. On paper, they seem unlikely collaborators for a group that trades in precise indie-rock. But as Rubens frontman Sam…

In 1983, Art Garfunkel stepped out of his New York apartment and began a walk across North America. Conducted in 40 instalments, each picking up exactly where the last one ended, it took 14 years. Garfunkel kept a notepad in his back pocket, and when inspiration struck he wrote in bursts: poems, lists, scattered thoughts and pointed anecdotes. These musings form What Is It All But Luminous: Notes From an Underground Man, a book unlike any ever released by a rock star. Short segments about Simon and Garfunkel float alongside lists of favourite books and quotes from Shakespeare and Marvin Gaye. Among the poems is one about getting a colonic. “I’m an eccentric man,” Garfunkel, 76, readily acknowledges. That extends to his eerily precise handwriting, which was used to create…

FATS DOMINO WAS NEVER A TYPICAL ROCK & roll star. On the road, he packed a hot plate and packages of rice and beans so he could cook his favourite meals in hotels. He stayed married to the same woman for more than 60 years. And he downplayed rock & roll’s wild side. After riots broke out at two of his concerts in 1956, he told a reporter, “I never would use dirty lyrics. And I don’t use body movements either. I just play the piano, or I sing and clap my hands.” Yet Domino, who died on October 24th in Harvey, Louisiana, at age 89 of natural causes, was a quietly volcanic founding father of rock & roll. His early classics like “Blueberry Hill”, “I’m Walkin’” and “Ain’t That…

The former Police drummer just released the debut LP by his new band Gizmodrome, which features King Crimson’s Adrian Belew on guitar. Captain Beefheart “Tropical Hot Dog Night” This sounds like a large band gone mad. He couldn’t get real Brecker Brothers-type players, so the result is creativity rather than chops. Dr. John “I Walk on Guided Splinters” This has a dark, echoey, Cajun atmosphere. But it has that atmosphere from the wrong side of midnight. Martha and the Vandellas “Dancing in the Street” It’s about wild abandon. When you hear this song, you know it’s going on down in the street. Let’s get down there. Jimi Hendrix “Spanish Castle Magic” This is one of the more explosive Hendrix tracks, where the drums are thrashing nonstop and his riff just…

THE MOTHER, WHOSE NAME is Dila, is proud of her family. “Six children,” she says, holding up her left hand and right index finger in case the translator has failed. “Six.” Dila’s colourful sari, pink and gold, is a startling contrast against the muddy plastic-sheet tent she finds herself in. I sit with her in an unmarked lane, on an unmarked road, in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, Kutapolong, on the Bangladeshi side of the border with Myanmar. Dila recounts the journey that led her to flee her village in Myanmar. Her story unfolds in the same tragic arc as hundreds of thousands of other stories in the camp. She witnessed the women from her village being raped. Despite attempts to hide the bruises with clothing, the marks…

Hello, How Are You Equally despised by Harry Vanda (“a soggy bloody ballad”) and George Young (“cornball schmaltz shit”), this heaving slab of melodrama deserved a better rap. “All this burning pain so hard to contain/All my memories on the nowhere train,” wails Stevie Wright, as piano, strings and heavenly voices made it abundantly clear that he was a man in the midst of some major psychodrama. A Top 20 hit in Oz and the UK in May 1968. The Music Goes Round My Head Recorded in London in 1967 and released as a single, it hinted at Jamaican ska, which was making a huge impact on the UK music scene at the time, preceding the Beatles “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” by many months. A classic case of right song, wrong time.…

FOUR DECADES after his ultra-smooth vocals on Doobie Brothers classics like “What a Fool Believes” made him an easy-listening staple and a rock-critic punching bag, Michael McDonald is having a renaissance. Credit the legendary Yacht Rock Web series of the mid-aughts with kick-starting his rediscovery; artists from Daft Punk to Solange have since taken cues from his sleek effervescence. “Dude is a saint,” says Kendrick Lamar pal/ avant-soul artist Thundercat. Says McDonald, who just released Wide Open, his first album in 17 years, “It’s flattering.”…

Sum Of All Parts Who knew numbers could be so enthralling? In the debut season of the Radio National podcast, Joel Werner (99% Invisible, Radiolab) dilutes the nerdiness of primes and square roots with stories of record producers tripping in India, how Aussie hackers piggybacked on the infancy of the Internet to gain access to NASA, and reverse-engineering the unexplainable first chords of the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night”. Dirty John Rising to the top of the crowded true crime pile, the Los Angeles Times series follows con artist “John” as he suckers a successful divorcée, Debra, into his deceitful world. Perfectly paced to capture the rising tension, the lie-by-lie account is narrated by her close-knit family, as they struggle to save the lovesick Debra. Heavyweight Examining the rippling impact single…

GRACE VAN PATTEN’S dad will soon be seeing her boobs. “That’s what’s going on in my mind,” she says, staring out at the Manhattan skyline from the rooftop bar of a Brooklyn hotel, pursing her very pursable lips. “Grandma. Cousins. Uncles. They’re all gonna see my boobs!” That’s because, a few days after our interview, Noah Baumbach’s latest feature, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), will be screened at the New York Film Festival. It’s Van Patten’s fifth film since the 20-year-old New Yorker graduated from La-Guardia High School (the school that inspired Fame), and the one likely to be her big breakout. Not because of the scenes in which her boobs are on display – framed as college-freshman performance art that she shamelessly, charmingly shares with her on-screen family…

CALL IT the Woke Playlist: On September 5th, as the Trump administration moved to end DACA, Spotify pushed out its No Moment for Silence playlist, with music and messages of support for Dreamers from Khalid, Demi Lovato, Camila Cabello and more. July’s I’m With the Banned playlist paired U.S. stars with artists from countries targeted by the travel ban, like Pusha T and Syrian MC Moh Flow. Expect more playlists like these. “With this administration,” says Jackie Jantos, Spotify’s vice president of creative and brand strategy, “we won’t run out of opportunities.”…

When Donald Trump named Steve Bannon his chief strategist last November, the backlash was immediate, overwhelming and – since the position didn’t require Senate confirmation – totally useless. But a mysterious organisation soon materialised on Twitter offering some hope: a way to take on Breitbart News, the right-wing site Bannon led. Sleeping Giants’ instructions were simple: “1) look on Breitbart & take a screenshot of an ad; 2) tweet it to the advertiser with a polite note; 3) tag@slpng_giants.” Confronted publicly, those companies had to admit their brands were subsidising stories about the evils of feminism and the glorious heritage of the Confederate flag. Sleeping Giants conceals its operators’ identities, though it admits some have day jobs in marketing. Thanks to the company’s campaign, 3,318 advertisers have blacklisted Breitbart, and…

STOCKHOLM LABEL Northern Electronics has developed a windfall of intriguing, moody and harsh electronic music: industrial dance (Varg), dubby bass (CA2+), snow-crunched ambient (Isorinne), deep techno (Acronym, Korridor) and noise (Vit Fana). “We don’t consider all these different parts. It’s the same vibe,” says Anthony Linnell, who runs the label along with Jonas Rönnberg, the man behind Varg. “It’s kind of boring here,” says Rönnberg, adding that Stockholm’s long, dark winters and short, bright summers drive creativity. “I tried to make an R&B album,” he recalls. “It doesn’t sound like one at all. It’s the same with Northern Electronics. No matter what you try to do, it’s more of a mindset than actual genres.”…

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds Who Built the Moon? Caroline ★★★ ½ There’s both energy and nous in these songs, which may begin with a not wholly successful lumbering psych track (“Fort Knox”) but find their way through punchy, brassy, white boy soul (the light-on but swinging “Keep On Reaching”); a surprisingly effective pair of instrumentals (the naff titled “Interlude (Wednesday Part 1)” and “End Credits (Wednesday Part 2)”); and a bonus track (“Dead In the Water”) that takes a scrubbing brush to a standard Gallagher ballad and does its emotions on the natural rather than on the run. And when he channels straight-out Oasis in “Black & White Sunshine”, he’s learnt, like a veteran cricketer, to add some angles and light touches instead of pushing hard at the ball.…

Ramones  Rocket to Russia: 40th Anniversary Edition Reprise ★★★★★ While the Ramones’ self-titled 1976 debut is one of punk’s defining statements, it wasn’t until 1977’s Rocket to Russia that the Queens foursome hit their true peak. They’d stripped pop to its contingent parts, then stripped it down some more, and Rocket to Russia was the perfect intersection of their raw rock & roll and bubblegum-pop/surf influences . . . before their striving for hits became an all-encompassing strain. Sounding crisper than ever, “Teenage Lobotomy”, “Rockaway Beach”, “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” remain classics, while 40 years has done nothing to dull the brilliant fun of “I Don’t Care”, “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow”, “Do You Wanna Dance?” and “Surfin’ Bird”. This massive 77-track collection and its exhaustive extras cover how the…

“I become like a 13-year-old when I’m talking to footy players, giddy with excitement. I can’t talk with nerves.” The last time I asked someone for their autograph I saw a few Collingwood players in the Virgin Lounge a while ago and I asked for some pictures and stuff. I can handle myself in front of musicians but I become like a 13-year-old when I’m talking to footy players, giddy with excitement. I can’t talk with nerves. The last time I was scared My new house is about an hour out of Melbourne, out in the bush. I’m a fair city slicker, and there were two sizeable spiders in my bedroom the first night we stayed there, which my girlfriend took care of for me. [Laughs] I can’t do them!…