Category Archives: Music

Blogging & Internet, Media, Modern Marketing, Music, Popular Culture

Of Guy Sebastian, Australian Idol and a Muppet Named Monty

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This is going to be nasty.

I’m queasy from taking Voltaren to mask back pain that’s persisted for weeks. Working my asterisk off at various projects yet making no money. Rats have eaten every one of this year’s bumper crop of backyard organic tomatoes before they ripened. And I just read that greedy fucking cheats Fosters are reducing the size of the bottles of my favourite drop, Cascade Premium, but not reducing the price.

So when I clicked on the Daily Telegraph “blog” headline slamming Guy Sebastian for slamming Australian Idol, I had my best sneer all ready, wrestling my gruesome pre-breakfast features into something that could go straight on to a horror movie poster un-Photoshopped. Continue reading Of Guy Sebastian, Australian Idol and a Muppet Named Monty →

Music, Perth, Popular Culture

The Smokin’ Eldorados at The Hydey

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The Hyde Park Hotel – known locally as “The Hydey” – is one of the last character pubs left in Perth catering for original rock bands that haven’t broken through to widespread commercial success.

There was once a thriving Perth indie circuit, with roots going back to the 70s. The Vic Hotel, Steve’s, the Shents, the Fitzgerald, the legendary Hernando’s Hideaway (Perth’s own short-lived CBGB’s, home to The Victims and other first-wave Perth punk bands) – all once great alternative band haunts – have been turned into samey faggoty glass-and-chrome hotel-cum-eatery-cum-café yuppie joints, or have been demolished in the advance of ‘progress’. Perth’s good at that. Anything with character is targeted and eradicated. What a shiny little city we have here. Perpetually just-unwrapped.

Anyway, I popped into the Hydey for the first time in a while a couple of Saturdays ago. Roddy Radalj had invited me to check out his new band, The Smokin’ Eldorados. Continue reading The Smokin’ Eldorados at The Hydey →

Music, Popular Culture

Avril Fool!

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A departure from my essay-style posts. Blame it on Friday.

Avril Lavigne claims her “Ten Commandments” have put her just where she is today. (If you feel inclined to pore over Av’s wisdom in her very own words, Perez Hilton has them up on his site, accompanied by the sort of poncey putdown remarks you’d expect from him).

So, Av’s rules for livin’ include:

• Expressing gratitude. She develops this notion by urging the poor to be grateful for clean drinking water, “developing world” excepted.

• Going after “good karma”. Av proclaims herself “a very giving person”, citing by way of demonstration her extreme magnanimity in instructing her “assistant” to pack off 6 boxes of “stuff” from her closet to help out the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

• Role-modelling for all those adoring fans her responsible partygirl strategies: “Party hard, but not too hard…Am I advocating drugs? No! Drink in moderation.” (Tres punk of her).

• “Extending herself” to – guess what? – a movie career! She “knows” she could be “real good at it.”

How can someone so fucking dumb end up so fucking rich at 22?

Try to have a good weekend.