Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Popular Music

John Farnham: Finding the voice 

Beyond Oz
by
05 June 2023

John Farnham nearly missed the launch party for his most successful album, Whispering Jack (1986) – he was stuck on a couch in a foetal position. He was under immense pressure. His three-year stint as lead singer of Little River Band (LRB) had left him saddled with some of LRB existing debt. Whispering Jack was clearly his last chance to show the world the kind of artist he thought he could be.

... (read more)

Released in 1975, the début album by American songwriter, poet, artist, and memoirist Patti Smith captured a volatile alchemy of past and future modes. Horses came out of the much-mythologised rock scene of 1970s New York City, but also fed on the unbridled lyrical freedom of Beat poetry, the firmer narrative tradition of hymns, and the bodily release of f ...

Plastered makes an ambitious claim for band posters ‘as barometers of cultural relevance [which] can offer real-time social commentary and political satire’. Although the book never quite substantiates this claim, it is a valuable work, not least because of its beautiful reproductions of band posters. Most of the posters derive primarily from the collection of Nick Vukovic, an inveterate collector. Vukovic is so keen to show off his collection that even posters of little artistic value, ‘designed to get bums off seats and nothing more’, are impeccably and inexplicably reproduced in the book.

... (read more)

Pop and rock’n’roll music is essentially disposable popular culture which throws up comparatively few enduring items. For every 10,000 albums and singles released maybe only a hundred will be listenable a year later, let alone in a decade.

... (read more)

Pop and rock’n’roll music is essentially disposable popular culture which throws up comparatively few enduring items. For every 10,000 albums and singles released maybe only a hundred will be listenable a year later, let alone ma decade. The same goes for literature that attempts to define or interpret the music. Sure, that Guns ‘N’ Roses, Culture Club or Spandau Ballet picture/text book might have seemed pretty impressive when it first appeared and you, dear reader, thought the artists in question were the greatest thing since the invention of the toaster – but in most cases those books are clogging up bookshelves or went out for fifty cents at a garage sale five years ago.

... (read more)