‘Hidden deep in the furor/What we do is secret.’ Shouting those lines, Darby Crash of the Germs sketched out an alluring vision of punk. It was a raucous musical underground, a chaotic cult formed by self-selecting initiates dedicated to effrontery and outlawry. But how could punk be secret? Darby Crash was declaring it out loud, […]
At a February 2013 concert at the Sydney Opera House, I saw Nick Cave come out of his shell a little. As the applause died down after ‘Mermaids’, Cave hesitatingly addressed his audience. ‘See, it’s not really about mermaids. It’s about longing for women, about desiring them from a distance. It’s a metaphor …’ Then […]
Tim Johnson’s interest in punk rock is manifested in prints, paintings, texts, photographs, super 8 films, musical performances, and collected recordings and ephemera. In a concentrated series of works made between 1979 and 1983, Johnson depicted Australian, English and American punk musicians and fans, using his own photographs or pictures from the music press. In […]
The first time I heard … The Ramones, ‘Beat on the brat’ (1976) was on a clock radio in a boarding school in Melbourne sometime early in 1977. The radio was tuned to what was then 3RMT FM, the educational-license FM station of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) … precursor to 3RRR. Good […]
Age can weary them, but that’s not a bad thing. Kris Kristofferson’s April show at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre was a stripped back performance, delivered at a leisurely pace. The songs were performed almost as demos. When Daniel Lanois steers the old masters back to their roots, stripped back has an Old Testament feel to it, […]
This essay was written to accompany a suite of photographs of Jon Cattapan in his studio. At the time I was occasionally interviewing artists in their studios for the ABC TV program ‘Sunday arts’. So I had a bee in my bonnet about the impact of post-production effects (especially music) on the meaning of the […]
Rock snobs! Vinyl junkies! Looking for some high-end trainspotting action? Put down that fanzine, log off eBay and get to an art gallery. Rare grooves, obscure pressings and pedantic top-ten lists are no longer the stuff of record fairs alone. Contemporary art is riddled with subtle nods to classic albums, nostalgic paeans to teen idols […]
This piece is an example of my habit of filing thoughts away until things start to click. I saw the ‘Fandom’ exhibition in New York in November 1997 and Mutlu Çerkez’s exhibition back in Melbourne. In mid-1998 I was back in New York, where I saw Elizabeth Peyton’s work at MoMA and Erik Hanson’s drawings […]
From memory, I wrote this in New York, perhaps around November 1997, for a special issue of ‘World Art’ devoted to art and rock’n’roll. I wanted Patti Smith to stand for the ecstatic wing of rock’n’roll art, in contrast to the more studied and conceptualised emerging then (and now dominant). Any oddities in spelling, punctuation […]
This research was originally delivered as a paper at the European Australian Studies Association annual conference, Toulouse 1999. Conference convenor Xavier Pons drew together speakers on Patrick White, Murray Bail, larrikin movies of the 1970s and a remarkable range of other topics from European scholars. I’ve taken the opportunity here to correct a few minor […]