Jeff Martin and band – The Armada

Social media makes the world smaller.  And it makes my life richer.  Because I have conversations (sometimes only in 140 characters!) with people from around the world who are generous, warm people who share the stories of their lives – the happy, the sad, the fabulous, the rare, the raunchy – you name it.  Ordinary people with ordinary stories, just like you and me.  Somehow the twitterverse led me to @abhijitmajumder who is the editor of an Indian tabloid newspaper.  Let me say right here that I’m not at all sure Abhijit’s newspaper and I have very much in common at all, and while I don’t actually know him, I suspect he’s quite different to his newspaper’s target audience.  In the best possible ways.Within minutes of Julia Gillard becoming Australia’s 27th Prime Minister, Abhijit sent me a note on Twitter asking what I thought a change of PM might mean for Indian/Australian relationships, particularly in light of the highly-publicised ‘race attacks’ on Indian students in Victoria.  To be honest, I have no idea, I suspect essentially the relationship is a very good one and I don’t see much changing at all.  International student education has been one of the biggest contributors to the Australian economy over the last few years.  Third largest, actually.  Behind coal, then iron ore.  Education of students from overseas.  Huge, huh?!  My considered opinion, and that of Indian friends in  Australia, is that it is not what it seems and has been heavily misrepresented by Indian media.  My note of caution, though, is that perception is often reality.  If I was a parent in India, how would I feel about sending my child to Australia?  Food for thought.I assured Abhijit that the vast majority of Australians aren’t racist and are appalled by the perception that we are and disgusted by the tiny minority who somehow manage to have all of us tarred with the ‘racist’ brush.  I mentioned Vindaloo Against Violence in February this year, the idea of a young woman in Melbourne.  It was a day of ‘solidarity’ where Australians were encouraged simply to spend the evening in their local Indian restaurant.  Naïve, yes, but simple, elegant, meaningful for those who took part, even if it does seem a bit naff.  Abhijit suggested I write about it for his paper.  I’m still thinking about the pros and cons of that, we’ll see, but to be honest I’m still struggling with it.  It seems such a simply thing to do.  I write.  But.My problem with writing about it is that it would go to an Indian readership that is still hearing about ‘honour killings’ on a daily basis or the Bharat Bandh (a day of general strike action by the community to complain about sharply rising prices, etc) which involved a level of violence and disruption that we don’t see here, and wouldn’t tolerate.  So at the moment I’m battling with telling the VaV story in the light of activities in India that disturb me greatly.  They’re nothing new, but I need to find a way to hose down my gut reaction of ‘Hang on!  You’re still killing women who marry outside their caste?’  I don’t know.  Maybe this will be the story I can’t actually find the words for?  I’m wondering if the angle needs to be … if I was an Indian woman I’d have ‘given cause’ numerous times by now.  I dragged a friend into the conversation on Twitter and Abhijit responded, “Feel ashamed to describe it. Honour killings are murders of young lovers who have married across caste. Barbaric.”” … murders of young lovers …”Oh my heart.I sent Abhijit a song written by Jeff Martin, formerly of The Tea Party.  The song is called ‘Morocco’ and it is about the honour killings of women in the Middle East.  Different location, same tragedy.  Jeff and I talked about it during one of his visits to my studio and I asked him how he came to write about something as dark and horrific as an honour killing.  “It’s a song inspired by an article I saw in the Sunday Times in England about young women from the Muslim world – honour killings – it’s just a travesty that these things still happen in this day and age when we’re supposed to be civilised. “I suggest that this is dark material to visit for a song, “It’s necessary.  Things like these travesties that occur, and the fact that we’re supposed to be an evolved species on this planet.  That people can take these beautiful books of love that were created centuries ago and manipulate them and twist them into these things that are basically dripping with hatred and oppression.  I can’t stand parameters being put around the soul of a human ‘becoming’, so at any point where that faces me, it will probably come through in my music.”Jeff Martin is a father, his little boy Django is just a couple of years younger than mine, how will he explain issues like this, different beliefs,  to his son in the years to come?  “Extremism is everywhere.  You find it in the Christian religion, the Muslim religion, you find it everywhere.  The only thing we can do with those that come after us is teach tolerance.”  Is this one of the gifts of his music, an entree into other cultures, other people, other loves?  “Absolutely.  That’s one of the reasons I travel so much.  I spent a couple of months in Egypt travelling back and forth between Aswan and Luxor.  I met a particular family in Luxor – they had nothing as far as western pleasures are concerned, but they wanted to share everything with me.  I stayed in their home, it was such a beautiful experience with beautiful people.”We have so much to offer each other, and to learn from each other.  When are we going to be brave enough to embrace it?Here’s Jeff’s song, Morocco, recorded live in my studio last year.  Enjoy.

Malcolm Turnbull has been in Newcastle to deliver the annual Barton Lecture at the University of Newcastle. 1233's Carol Duncan spoke with him at length about the National Broadband Network, Tony Abbott, same-sex marriage and leadership.​Malcolm Turnbull and Carol Duncan in the 1233 studios. If you want to know why Malcolm is holding a pomegranate, you will have to listen to the interview. (ABC Local:)On the eve of Malcolm Turnbull's visit to Newcastle, the New Zealand parliament voted to redefine marriage as a union between two people, becoming the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to do so.CAROL DUNCAN: Why do we still not have this right for Australians?MALCOLM TURNBULL: We can (do this here) but as you know the parliament considered the matter last year and voted against it. But it's open to coming back again.There is certainly much more rapid change in this area than many of us, including myself, had anticipated. In addition to New Zealand legislating, the UK is in the process of doing so, France has done so, there are now I believe 10 US states where gay marriage is legal so the trend is only going one way. I think the changes in New Zealand and the UK are going to have a very big impact (on same sex marriage legislation in Australia).If you go back to the 1850s when there was a case in England called Hyde v Hyde in which a judge gave what became the classic definition of marriage for a long time which is a permanent union between a man and a woman. He did so on the basis that this was what was accepted in what he described as 'all of Christendom'. We wouldn't use that term any more but if you were sitting in a court in London or anywhere else today and you had to ask yourself 'what is the accepted definition of a marriage in the western world, or in countries of a dominant Christian tradition, however you wanted to define it, you certainly couldn't say it is a permanent union betwewen a man and a woman because there are so many of those countries, very substantial and important countries, which recognise gay marriage, so there has been a big change.I would have said this was going to take a long time but I think it will happen sooner rather than later. It will become increasingly difficult for Australia to maintain opposition to arrangements which are accepted in countries with which we are so close, which we have so many people going to and from, so many people coming here from New Zealand. I think there has been a big seachange in this and it's happened incredibly rapidly, within the space of a couple of years."CAROL DUNCAN: It is often suggested that you don't actually believe in the policy on broadband that you are having to present for the coalition, or that you don't really believe it is the best option for Australians.MALCOLM TURNBULL: It is, I have absolutely no doubt about it. If I wasn't a politician, if I was back in my old job in the business world and the government, any government, asked me to advise on what the best course of action would be, I would describe exactly what our policy is because you get the right balance between the level of investment, affordability - being able to price the internet access at a price that people can afford, and speed, giving people the services that they need. So I think we've got the balance right."The problem with Labor's scheme, let's be quite frank about this, Labor has said they're going to run fibre optic cable into 93% of Australian households. We criticised it as being too expensive. We actually think this project will cost $94bn, taking a very long time, it's running way behind schedule. After four years they've got less than 20,000 people connected to the fibre and they'll be lucky by June 30 to meet 15% of their targets.CAROL DUNCAN: In 2003, Telstra executives told a Senate inquiry that the copper network had to be replaced, that it was 'five minutes to midnight' for the copper network. Should we be relying on the copper network at all for such a massive piece of infrastructure?MALCOLM TURNBULL: You've got to remember that under our scheme we are replacing almost all of the copper. The only copper that would remain in the customer access network is the last four or five hundred metres to the premise, and the reason for not replacing that is that as long as it is in good condition, as long as the length is short, you can deliver very high speed broadband - up to 100 Mbps - so you can deliver very high speed broadband, certainly more than fast enough for what people want and what people value, but you save a gigantic amount.The depressing thing about these networks is that it's really the last mile, it's actually less than a mile, that costs all the money because it's so labour intensive.CAROL DUNCAN: What about those areas where the existing copper network, in some cases up to 100 years old, will not be good enough for the job?MALCOLM TURNBULL: If that's the case, your area would be a candidate for either having that copper remediated at the time of the build, and we've taken account of that in our policy, or if you've got areas that have got endemic problems in terms of maintenance and water penetration then you may replace them with fibre and do so now.So you just have to be pragmatic and practical about it but the changes are literally, you're talking about saving $60bn."CAROL DUNCAN: In January 2013, Bloomberg's list of international internet speeds indicated that large parts of the world are already accessing speeds faster than 25Mbps, so is cutting the fibre at the node to save money now simply a false economy if over the longer term we have to continue to make very large investments in the very near future to upgrade the coalition's alternative NBN?MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, I don't believe you'll need upgrades in the very near future.Most people will get by 2016 on the fixed line upgraded network 50Mbps or better. We've said 25 Mbps is the minimum, that is the direction that we will give NBNCo as the minimum, so they have to do it on the basis that nobody gets less than that.Our goal, and our direction to NBNCo will be that by 2019 to ensure that at least 90% of the people on that network have not less than 50Mbps.CAROL DUNCAN: Singapore offers a download speed of about 50Mbps on average, Japan is rolling out a 1Gigabit (1000Mbps) network ...MALCOLM TURNBULL: Which is useless by the way, for a residential customer, it's a marketing gimmick.CAROL DUNCAN: Should we be building two networks, one for industry and research, the other for domestic users or simply investing one big network to cater for all needs?MALCOLM TURNBULL: If your question is 'should you be providing higher rates of bandwidth to industry and research and businesses than you do to residential consumers' the answer is obviously yes, because they've got market for it.You can spend a gigantic amount of money, $94bn, and connect every cottage, every flat and every townhouse in Australia to a fibre optic cable that's capable of running at 100 Mbps or ultimately at 1Gb, the vast majority of those customers have no use for, no value for and will not pay you for those very high speed services. So you're making a gigantic investment upon which you can get no return and as a consequence you end up having to charge people a lot more.You've got to remember that under Labor's plan, this is not my figure, this is what they have said in their own documents given to the ACCC and their own corporate plan 'wholesale prices will treble over the next 10 years for broadband access'. Now they've (prices) been coming down for the last 10 years and it's no wonder they'll go up because if you're investing so much money in the network then you've got to get a return on it."I think a very important thing to bear in mind is that we've got to be practical and hard-headed about this. This is serious money. We're talking about all the other infrastructure investments we need to make in Australia. The great virtue of telecoms networks is that, unlike a bridge, you can expand them incrementally, bit by bit."CAORL DUNCAN: Could it be expected that to delay the full roll out of fibre will increase future cost of completing the equivalent work as designed into the government's NBN? We often see major cost blow-outs with delays in major infrastructure construction across the country.MALCOLM TURNBULL: Let's assume that we can spend $900 on average to get a premise up to the most part 50Mbps but no-one less than 25Mbps, and we can do that now. And let's assume it's going to take us the best part of another $3,000 to get them up to 100Mbps and up to 1Gb with FTTP, but let's assume that there's not going to be any demand for that very high speed in those residential areas for, say, 10 years, I'm saying you would be better off postponing that investment, keeping that extra $3,000 in your pocket, earning a return on it somewhere else or not having to borrow it, and then when the demand is there making the investment then. It's just labour costs, labour costs will rise with the price of inflation but so will everything else.But the big difference is if you build a bridge you cannot build a bridge with demand just 10 years ahead because you can't just keep adding lanes every 10 years. You've got to think ahead 30, 40, 50 years.With a telecoms network, you've got the ability to build it for now and the foreseeable future, and you've got the ability to upgrade it progressively over time as demands change, and you don't really know what the demand's going to be, and above all as technologies develop. And so while postponing investment until it's needed may seem a bit hard-headed and sounding too much like a canny accountant than a visionary politician, it actually makes great sense because if you postpone that investment until it's needed the opportunity cost on the money that you haven't invested and that would have earned no return in that time, so you've got your investment in your pocket or doing something else, but also when you do come to invest you're using the latest technology and that's a powerful argument to take a more steady and businesslike approach to it."All politicians are susceptible to grand gestures, but this is a case where you can actually be heard-headed, pragmatic, make the network affordable for both the taxpayer and the consumer and have the advantage of the best technology when you need it.CAROL DUNCAN: Why do you think that a lot of social media commentators suggest that you don't actually believe in the broadband policy that you are having to sell as Shadow Communications Minister?MALCOLM TURNBULL: I have no idea. I think they're transferring their own views to me.I can assure you that I do (believe in the coalition broadband policy).I've been involved in the internet in Australia since it really got going, I was one of the co-founders of Ozemail. I'm digitally connected, I'm online a lot, I'm not a luddite, but I'm just saying to you that you can achieve everything you want to do, get everybody online quickly and affordably, I mean remember this - people in the bottom 20% of incomes are nine times less likely to be online than people in the top 20%."CAROL DUNCAN: Can those in the bottom 20%, however, afford the $5,000 being suggested to connect to the coalition's alternative NBN?MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, you don't need a fibre optic cable. This is the great fallacy you are labouring under is the notion that to have access to the digital economy you need to have a fibre optic cable into your house. It doesn't matter what the technology is as long as you have the speed that enables you to do all the things you want to do."Now, you talk about 25Mbps, and I say that as a minimum, with 25 Mbps you can stream, download simultaneously four high-definition video streams. That is a lot. You can do all of your e-commerce, all of your tele-conferencing ...CAROL DUNCAN: But there's been a television released this week that requires greater speeds than that.MALCOLM TURNBULL: The real issue is, are people prepared to pay for it. Are they prepared to pay for that investment.The answer is that you will never get a return, at least I don't believe, I cannot foresee a time when you can get a return from residential consumers for those very very high speeds. If I'm wrong, and it doesn't matter whether I'm right or wrong, because the flexibility is in the network.We will build it so it is capable of being upgraded to FTTP as and when demand requires it."CAROL DUNCAN: Do you believe there is a perception that women don't like Tony Abbott very much, that women aren't comfortable with him.MALCOLM TURNBULL: I'm not sure that's right. I think that's something that's asserted and I know one woman who doesn't like him very much - that's his opponent the Prime Minister - but you look at Tony, I mean there he is, he's got two lovely daughters and he's got his wife and he works with plenty of women in his office.The proposition that Tony Abbott is a misogynist I think is just wrong. You can make a lot of other points about him but the idea that he is a woman-hater is just nonsense.CAROL DUNCAN: I often see comments about the September federal election along these lines, "I wouldn't vote for the Liberal Party under Tony Abbott, but I would vote for it under Malcolm Turnbull."MALCOLM TURNBULL: That's very flattering and I'll always accept a compliment, you don't get a lot in politics. All I can say is that I am part of the Coalition collective leadership team. We are not electing a President. Tony Abbott is the leader, he will be Prime Minister if we win.CAROL DUNCAN: For better or worse a lot of Australians do actually vote on personality.MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yes but there is more than one personality in a government and there is more than one personality in an opposition, too, and so we are a team.So you might prefer Malcolm Turnbull to Tony Abbott or you might prefer Tony Abbott to Joe Hockey or Julie Bishop to all of us, but the fact is that we're all part of that group. We're a package deal.So all I can say to those people who say 'I'd rather have Malcolm Turnbull than Tony Abbott' is thank you, very much for that generous sentiment but I'd still urge you to vote Liberal because I will be there. I am part of the leadership team and it is a collective leadership team."CAROL DUNCAN: So for those people who aren't comfortable with Tony (Abbott) you'll be there to rein him and make him behave in the ways that perhaps they wish?MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well I'm not sure what they want me to rein him in on? When you ask people about that they keep on talking about his swimming attire. I don't know that that's my responsibility.CAROL DUNCAN: Are people perhaps concerned that his obviously strong faith will interfere with his policy-making decisions?MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, I don't think there's any evidence for that. He's a very practical person. He recognises the Liberal party and indeed Australia is a very broad, diverse community.We use the expression 'a broad church' not to express that we're all religious but that there's a wide range of views, and as the leader you've got to accommodate all of those views and I sought to do that when I was leader.CAROL DUNCAN: There are lots of points that you two differ on, how hard is that?MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well we differ famously on the question of the republic but that is, in effect, a free vote issue in the Liberal party so there are plenty of Liberals who think we should be a republic, Peter Costello comes to mind, but there are plenty that don't - John Howard and Tony Abbott are staunch monarchists so the Liberal party survives notwithstanding differences of opinion.We have a common purpose in restoring capable, competent government that seeks to enable people to do their best rather than telling them what is best. So we've got a philosophy of government but we don't agree on every issue.

In this conversation with Carol Duncan, Catherine Britt talks about the pressures of growing up under the spotlight, life in the country music capital of the world, and 'growing up on 1233 ABC Newcastle'.

After being plucked from obscurity as a 17-year-old by Sir Elton John, which led to a duet and a record deal in the United States, Catherine Britt spent six years growing up in Nashville.But after a difficult time personally the Newcastle-born country music entertainer has spent the last year at home, re-evaluating her life and her career.In this conversation with Carol Duncan, Catherine Britt talks about the pressures of growing up under the spotlight, life in the country music capital of the world, and 'growing up on 1233 ABC Newcastle'.

In 2008, Australian composer Nigel Westlake's son, Eli, was killed in a tragic road rage incident. With the support of his family, and his son's friends, Nigel used his love for his son to establish a music and film program to support young indigenous Australians. In an interview in 2011, Nigel reflected that after the death of his son, "I really thought I was finished musically. There was nothing more to be said. The muse had disappeared."As children, our greatest fear is the death of our parents. As parents, that fear is the death of our children. An unimaginable loss. But so often, great loss is inspiration for great work, and for Nigel Westlake and his family, Eli's death led to the creation of the Smugglers Of Light Foundation - an organisation using music to help indigenous youth reclaim their heritage through music and film.So how did Nigel gradually deal with the loss of Eli and find the momentum to continue and find purpose."At that particular time (of Eli's death), that's how it felt. I didn't mean that I'd said it all musically, by any means. I meant that there was no incentive to write.""Looking back on it now, it's five years ago this week that we lost our son, Eli, I think for the first 12 - 18 months the thing that was most present in my mind was to keep memories of him alive.""It was like keeping him in a vault. I didn't want anything to come in or go out and I was so protective of those memories I couldn't give way to anything. I couldn't give way to the creative process and sit down and absorb my mind in a piece of music. My thoughts had to be with Eli.""That's what drove me to form the Smugglers of Light Foundation in his memory, to take those memories and the thoughts about his future, the life that he might have had, his qualities of empathy, compassion and so forth, and bundle them all up in to a package called the Smugglers of Light Foundation.""That gave me a good focus to get that on the road but starting something like that is a very big undertaking and I knew absolutely nothing about what I was doing, so it was a very steep learning curve. Musically, it didn't seem important at that time."The moment of decision, the catalyst for the foundation started at the family home when the house overflowed with Eli's friends and family, gathering together to share their grief."It was the week after Eli had been killed. Being a young man with so many young friends they all descended on our house and they actually lived with us for a week or so.""All these young people - some we knew quite well, others we didn't know so well. At night they'd stoke up the fire and find a place on the floor or couch and sleep the night. There were never less than 40 or 50 people in the house at any one time, a constant flow of young people and also close friends and family.""It was during that time that we got talking to these young people and they were saying, 'How can we remember him? How can we never forget him?' One of them said, 'Yeah, we should form some sort of foundation or charity or something' and I raised my glass and said, 'Yes! Well here's to Eli's foundation!'. I didn't have a clue what I'd let myself in for.""It was about three weeks later when the house was totally quiet and the chill of winter had set in and it was like a mausoleum, my wife and I were looking at each other thinking, 'What the hell have we done? How do you start a foundation?' But there had been about 40 people there who were witness to me raising my glass so I had to keep that promise.""I was actually sad to see them go because what had brought us together was our love for Eli and from that time we've maintained very close relationships with many of them.""Every year on the anniversary of his death a lot of them come up to the country where we laid him to rest and just be with us for a short time. So it's created a wonderful connection for us with a different generation.""There are so many things that I look to as positive outcomes from losing Eli because you can't wallow in the tragedy of it. You've got to find a way to use it as a catalyst to move on, and that's been a catalyst for re-connecting with those young people, that's a great thing."Having the idea to create a foundation in Eli's memory is one thing, doing it is surely another."The first thing I did was I went to APRA (the Australasian Performing Rights Association) of which I've been a member since the mid-80s. It's an agency for Australian composers and it's the lifeblood of Australian music because it's where all the residual payments for music usage on TV, film, radio, etc, is collected and distributed amongst members so it's pretty much how someone like myself, a freelance composer, can focus on that fulltime with those resources.""APRA have a wonderful history of connections with charities, they're very support of the Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy Foundation, they also are very involved in Support Act - a support mechanism for retired musicians and composers.""Brett Cottle, the CEO of APRA said, 'Come in and talk about this foundation thing' and I went in with a long list of questions, an incredible apprehension and lacking in confidence of not knowing what I was doing.""Brett said, 'Well that sounds great, APRA would like to be a partner of organisation and we'd like to supply you with all the accounting and legal facilities free of charge and just to kick off the foundation here's a grant'.""It was unbelievable. So it was through APRA and our connection with them that we've been able to get off to a fairly quick start.""We're still a very young organisation and we've got a long way to go, but we are doing stuff and I realise that in the bigger scheme of things it's kind of a drop in the ocean but at least it's something and it's something that we feel very passionate about and whenever I'm in indigenous communities I really do feel Eli looking down upon me, his eyes awash with tears of joy. It's a great feeling to be able to take that tragedy and turn it into something that is tangible evidence of him.""One of our main programs at the moment is called Song Nation. We have a team of three people, one of whom is Gail Mabo - daughter of the famous land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo - Gail has become the patron of the Smugglers of Light. She is a wonderful woman, very dear friend.""She saw what we were doing in Townsville a couple of years ago and said she wanted to be part of it, offering to do whatever she could to help. They go to remote communities and this year we're going to the Torres Straight and some far-flung communities in WA. We spend four or five days with the young children. ""The first thing we do is bring in elders of the community and we have them tell stories about the history of the culture, their origins and so on, and then we get the kids to encapsulate those stories into a form of music, whether that be hip-hop or a song.""We do an on-the-fly production number with the kids recording their song and then we do a choreographed film clip. Gail helps do the choreography because she studied at the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre some years ago.""It's basically getting the kids connected with their culture which in some communities is alarmingly fragmented.""The kids sometimes have no reason to speak to elders so they don't really have a handle on where they've come from or the heritage that they're sitting on top of.""It gets them involved in where they've come from and they get to express that through music and film.""The films inevitably have very powerful positive messages about reconciliation, about future aspirations, about dreamtime stories, and those clips go up on YouTube and attract tens of thousands of hits which in effect disseminates positive mantras throughout those communities.""When our team goes to communities, a lot of those kids already know most of the songs that we've written in other communities and they've got them as ringtones on their phones - it's amazing how they embrace it.""We've had school teachers coming up to us and saying that the kids are coming back to school, that they're interested in learning, some of them going to university next year, so it's a very small thing but it seems to have a very positive outcome.""We also have an annual scholarship for an indigenous film-maker or musician, a small amount of money to help them gain skills in their chosen fields and help them open doors for their future employment."

2013 has given Australian music icon, Russell Morris, an unexpected hit record some 44 years after his first national number one smash with pop-psychedelic smash, The Real Thing. I produced this music feature with Russell in 2014, although I first met him in about 1992 when I interviewed him in Hobart. He's smart, funny, brilliant and has always been just bloody fabulous and generous to me. Except for that time he rang my show to wish me a happy birthday and I thought he was JPY! Sorry, Russell! xx

Australian music industry icon Russell Morris joined Carol Duncan's program while doing a series of performances in Newcastle and surrounds. (Carol Duncan:Carol Duncan)"This album (Sharkmouth) was done out of a labour of love because I like roots and blues music and I'd always wanted to do a roots and blues album.""I chose Australian history because I've always loved any type of history. You'd think the two kisses of death for a gold album would be blues and Australian history, so it wasn't done with the intention, it was just done as a labour of love which has proved to be really enlightening.""Producer Mitch Cairns' foresight was out of desperation of staying alive. At that stage, Brian Cadd who I was working with, had decided that he was going overseas and he dropped the bomb on us that he might not be coming back.""At that stage Jim Keays was very sick and Mitch said, "You've gotta do something or we won't have any work!" And I said, "Well, I've got the blues album," and he said, "Well, FINISH IT!""It is a great thing (the success of Sharkmouth) and I have to thank particularly the ABC because they ABC embraced it from day one and just went 'bang', but the commercial stations just didn't want to know. The ABC just broke it right across the country.""If anyone was going to have a gold record this year you'd have put me at the bottom of the list.""I think what happens with a lot of my peers, a lot of people will see a new record and whether it's from Joe Camilleri, Daryl Braithwaite - they pre-judge it and don't listen to it.""I remember when we first started in Melbourne, Ian Meldrum said to me, "We'll go and see Stan Rofe at 3AW." Stan Rofe was a big star to me, he was on air and I'd heard him on the radio station and I said, "Well how are we going to do that?" and he said, "We'll just go up to the radio station!""So we went up to the radio station and walked in and Stan came down and had a cup of tea with us. Ian said, "We've got this, what do you think?" and Stan said, 'Love it, I'll play it.'And that's what it was like.""Well, Mitch and I spoke about it (initial expectations of Sharkmouth) and I said if we're lucky we might sell 5,000 copies, if we can get an independent release.""We'd have sold them at gigs to try and get our money back and if we had a small deal with a company and sold 5,000 or 8,000 we'd have made the money back." Gold status is in 2013 is 35,000 and Sharkmouth is now creeping up towards platinum - it's around 60,000 now and platinum is 70,000.""When I did the unplugged album with Liberation it sold around 8,000 so it's been a great experience for both of us.""We signed to an independent record company and they took it and then rang me up, the first time it went in to the charts at about number 89, then it jumped to 49 and I was over the moon. I rang Mitch and we celebrated, and then the next week it jumped 20 places again and it just kept going right up into the top 10."Russell has continued a great tradition started by The Beatles of being turned down by every record company in the country and then having a success."I tell you what is ironic, The Real Thing was turned down as well. EMI hated it, they thought it was the biggest load of rubbish they'd ever heard.""EMI didn't want to release it, they were only going to release it in Melbourne to try and make their money back because I had a following in Melbourne, so Ian Meldrum and I got in a car and drove to Sydney to go and see all the (radio) program managers because at that stage you could knock on the door of these commercial stations before they became corporate and say, "Can I speak to the program manager," "Here's the song, what do you think, our record company think it's a load of rubbish, would you play it?" 'Of course we'll play it, will you sign that?'"So we signed a petition that came out to really stick it to the record company. Radio and record companies at that stage weren't getting along very well. It was just prior to the record ban where radio wanted to stop paying royalties to radio for playing songs on the air."Russell Morris is thought of as having lots of pop hits and a pure voice but he dabbled in blues back in the 1970s when he used musicians from Chain on one of his albums."They were my favourite band. I always use Barry Harvey and Barry Sullivan always, on everything, and I'd always used Phil Manning, so strangely enough it's actually Phil Manning playing all those licks in 'Sweet, Sweet Love' and you'd think, 'Who's this syrupy guitar player?' and it's Phil Manning!""It's (blues) where I wanted to head but I was painted into a corner once I had a pop hit and the record company saying, 'You've got to produce another hit!' and it became a factory after a while. You get caught in it.""I actually wished Chain had been my band because it would have taken me on a whole other direction. I don't think Ian, Molly, would have been too happy although at that stage we'd sort of split.""He's still my best mate but we'd had a couple of professional disagreements. He saw me as Australia's Davey Jones from The Monkees or some such thing and I wanted to go in a different direction completely as a singer/songwriter so we differed on the way we were going and the record company was pressuring for another single, but I really would have loved to be with a band like Chain.""But your fate is your fate. Whatever happens, those doors open and close for a reason and maybe if I'd started it earlier then it wouldn't have worked.""I was happy doing The Real Thing, I quite liked psychedelia. I didn't like pop a lot but I remember Ian (Molly Meldrum) had done a number of songs with me and we'd done 'Only A Matter of Time' which I absolutely loathe, it was on the back of The Real Thing, and a couple of pop songs and I said to Ian, 'This is rubbish, we're not going in the direction I want to go,' I said, 'I'm not John Farnham, I'm not Ronnie Burns and I'm not Normie Rowe. I want to do something that they wouldn't even contemplate thinking about doing. I want to go in that direction. Let's go psychedelia, let's go into something more band oriented than a pop single.'"Ian, to his credit, agreed and said, 'You're right, they're not different enough."Russell Morris actually had a whole album ready to go at one stage and decided it wasn't good enough and he wanted to re-record the whole thing."EMI had gotten a record producer and he'd gotten a head of steam up and away he went. I tend to go along with things and say to people, 'I don't know if this is the right thing ...' and they don't listen, they don't listen ... and all of a sudden they go, 'You know what? Scrap it.' And that's what happened. He went ahead and put strings and brass on everything and it just drove me insane. I said to him, 'I'm not releasing it."Russell Morris on recording The Real Thing."We used 8-track recording for The Real Thing. There was only two tracks for the effects, one for the vocals, everything just kinda got bounced down, I don't think we even slaved another machine to worry about generations. I think we did slave another machine for the effects.""I cannot take any credit for it. Ian Meldrum was the total architect, it was his concept from start to finish.""A lot of it was trial and error, experimentation, but giving Molly his dues he doesn't know what he wants in the studio but when he stumbles across it he knows instinctively that it's right. Everyone else will be nodding off at 3am and he'll have had some poor bloody guitar player out there playing the part over and over, 'No! Try it this way! Try something else! Make it sound like stars!' And that's what happens."In December 2011, Ian 'Molly' Meldrum had a serious fall while at home which for a while it seemed he wouldn't survive."He wasn't putting up Christmas lights. I was with him that day and I think that was a story that got fed around.""I was there that day, the reason he fell is because of him. We were doing a song for Jerry Ryan who was doing The Green Edge, the cycling team, and I was doing a duet with Vanessa Amorosi.""Ian had the master tapes and he said, 'Can you take these down to Sing Sing as you're going home?" So I left. "He was about to head to Thailand and he probably thought he'd catch some extra rays of sun. He's got a latter cemented into the side of his wall which goes up to a sun deck. He was climbing up there with his mobile phone, his cigarettes and trying to juggle those and lost his balance and fell.""He would have died except his gardener, Joe, happened to be there. It was real touch and go as to whether he was going to survive but he's great now.""It was funny. They (the hospital) said, 'Ian wants to see you in hospital. You cannot talk to him about mobile phones. If he asks for your mobile phone you cannot give it to him. If he asks for drinks you can't go and get him one. Do not talk to him about getting out of hospital.""It was horrifying. I thought I was going to get in there and expected to see Ian sitting in a wheelchair and drinking soup through a straw, but I got in there and there he is sitting with his baseball cap on and his tracksuit reading the paper!""I said, 'Ian, I expected you to be sitting here dribbling, everyone's given me such a hard time!' And he said, 'Oh they're all such pains in the ....' "And they'd said to me, 'You cannot stay any longer than 20 minutes and if he shows any aggravation you have to leave immediately.""My 20 minutes came up and I said I'd better go but he said, 'Don't be ridiculous!" "I ended up staying for two hours.""I was also off to Thailand and flew out the next day. I got to Thailand and I got an email from Amanda Pelman who is Brian Cadd's partner who's great friend of Ian's, and it says, 'What have you done? Where is Ian? You were the last person to see him and now he's disappeared?""After I left, Ian started to figure out how to get out of there because you can't get out of the ward without a special card and the nurses won't let you out.""He conjured this story and told told them, 'I've decided to do physio' which he'd been refusing to do, and they said, 'Oh that's great Ian, when do you want to start, Monday?""He said, 'I want to start now, if you want me to do physio I want to go over and have a look and do it now.'" So they took him.""They got a nurse to take him over and took him down the street and as they got to the street he turned one way and just kept walking.""They couldn't find him!"

Despite his incredible success as an actor and comedian, Hugh Laurie now calls himself 'musician'. His leap of faith to pursue his life-long love of blues music is proving to be a great decision - both for Hugh, and for music lovers.I was thrilled to be able to chat with Hugh in 2014.

Hugh Laurie has loved the blues since he was seven years old. (:supplied )

"I'm following a well-trodden path of English musicians, which is how I describe myself now, who have been entranced, hypnotised almost, by this extraordinary music of the American south," Hugh says.Since hearing his first blues song at around age seven, Hugh has been smitten."It was like an electric shock that went through me," he recalls."I'm still shivering, still juddering even now, all these years later."It's never let me go."Many people were suprised that after his great success in America with the hit TV show, House, Hugh's next move was to form a blues band and go on tour.But he has no regrets."This is the greatest adventure of my life, and it's the greatest thrill," Hugh enthuses."This is a whole new level of visceral pleasure that I get from music."He describes himself as "quite a self-conscious" actor who approached every scene as a technical problem to be solved.And despite the huge popularity of House, many awards and critical acclaim for his performance as the brilliant but cantankerous doctor, Hugh was constantly doubting himself."I would always spend my evenings sort of beating myself up for the day before, which is a complete waste of time," he admits.However despite being aware that launching a career as a blues muso could make him the target of ridicule, after 120 shows Hugh has a new sense of confidence."I know we put on a good show," he says.Hugh is in awe of the blues musicians he's performing with, and sometimes during shows he loses himself in the pure enjoyment of their playing.It's a sweet pay-off for a man who's taken such a big risk with his career."I'm almost ashamed of how lucky I am," he says.

Joe Camilleri is celebrating 50 years in the Australian music industry, has just released his 45th album (while working on 46 & 47), and has The Black Sorrows back on the road. But his career was very nearly derailed when he developed a fear of flying and now says his son saved his life.Joe Camilleri visits the ABC Newcastle studios (ABC Local:Carol Duncan)I've had the privilege of interviewing many of Joe Camilleri's Australian music peers and I've often remarked on how many of them were 'ten pound Poms'.Joe Camilleri says he was a five-pounder, but not a Pom, "We came on the five-pound scheme from Malta. There was only four of us when we came out - my Dad came out in 1949 and me and my two sisters and brother came out in 1950. I think for Mum it would have been an incredible struggle on that boat.""Four kids under six. Phyllis was six years old, Frank was five, I was three, and Maryanne was one.""I've never really had the opportunity to discuss it with them, but Malta was war-torn, it got a heavy beating, Malta. For Dad, he was going to go to Canada and I think someone who had just got back from Australia said, 'That's the place you need to go.'""So he chose Australia. They're both buried here. I think they gave up so much for their children, and their own life, because the thing you have most of all is you want to be around your friends, but you come to a foreign land and all you have is your family. Most of the time, it's not until years later that you connect, sometimes your friends come to Australia, and if they come to Australia, where do they go? It's a big place! Malta is 16 miles square so it's pretty easy to get around but if you're living in Sydney and your buddy's living in Perth - it's a long walk.""I think for us, the hardest thing for my Dad was he would work two shifts. He wanted to get ahead,""He was a baker at night and a metal shop worker by day, so that was his two gigs for a number of years. He was a good handy guy, Dad. He was a spray painter for a number of years, worked on the wharves for a few years, he was just able to do that.""I envy carpenters, really, because anybody who can do something out of nothing ... I forget that I do that with songwriting, too.""When I was working as a first-class machinist there was always some amount of pride in whatever it was I was finishing, they were one-off things whether it was for a big crane or a motorcycle, that was a nice feeling. Do I like putting nail in a wall? Yes I do!""I envy carpenters, really, because anybody who can do something out of nothing ... I forget that I do that with songwriting, too. It's an empty page and then it's a full page and sometimes it's really good, but there's nothing quite like a tradesman who can come in and whip up a kitchen. I'm still amazed by that. Or they can fix a bathroom. We get an IKEA thing and look at it like it owes you money.""What was great about Countdown was that people knew about the bands, someone like Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons did very well."Joe Camilleri first came to my attention through television music show like Countdown. I was still in high school and lived for Sunday night when Countdown was on the telly. It seemed to be a really interesting time in Australian music when the industry became really healthy."I think because we didn't have that information - the frontrunners like The Twilights and Johnny O'Keefe and all those people - you never got to hear about their successes or the hardship. If you won Battle of the Sounds, you didn't win anything because you had to work on that boat for four weeks before you got to England, and then you had to work your passage back. So they were the real frontrunners. Countdown just became something else,""Of course it was looking for stars because it was a popularity thing, if the kids liked something it would automatically go on the charts if you were on Countdown. It was exciting. But they were looking for bands that didn't necessarily have a record. And there were other shows that were like a fraternity of shows. The ABC had a 10 minute show just before Bellbird and they had lots of different acts, Billy Thorpe, The Pelaco Brothers - we didn't have a record but we were playing in Sydney and they asked us to come to the studio.""What was great about Countdown was that people knew about the bands, someone like Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons did very well. I remember going on that with a single called 'Run Rudolph Run' but I hadn't played as 'The Falcons' before that and they just put it on. One minute I'm playing and just having a lot of people come to see you play but no record, no anything, and the next thing you've got a record and no-one knows anything about it. They put you on Countdown and it's in the charts. It's amazing.""What was really great about Sounds was it went for a few hours on a Saturday morning. You could pretty much just ring them and say 'We're in town, can we pop in?' and they'd have you in. They'd have you in and you'd just sit there in your drunken state, as shabby as you can be from the night before, and if you had a video, they'd play it. If you didn't, you'd just have a chat.""You couldn't do that today, today you've got to go through the wringer. It's really tight. There was a beautiful time, not only because of Countdown but because there was something that was going on, I've always put it down to late night closing, the 10 o'clock close, it changed everything because instead of bands playing in halls, they were now playing in bars. So all of a sudden if you were half-decent, like The Falcons were, you'd have 700 people coming to a gig and getting on board a whole bunch of songs that nobody knows.""The word would get out, kind of like Facebook does today but with drums and smoke," laughs Joe."The live thing is healthy again, I think. I've played pretty much everywhere around the world and Australian bands can rock. I think it's because of the pub scene. The pub scene was a really hard scene because if they didn't like it they'd let you know pretty quickly. It was tough. You were kind of invisible, but not invisible. You would know what a good track was. You would play your repertoire, you would play your album, you would play it in, you would know pretty much how the audience reacted to it,""I remember 'Shape I'm In' at Croxton Park - I can remember it like it was yesterday. I said, 'I've got this song, it's called The Shape I'm In, and the audience started grooving to this half-finished song. The roadie came up to me and said, 'I think that's your single.'""Many a song got left on the road because you develop. If you did 10 shows to get to Sydney, by the time you got to Sydney you'd have a pretty good idea of what you were playing and what you thought was pretty strong, because the last thing you wanted to do was be downtrodden by the audience. It was tough, but it was good training. That's why I think when the (Black) Sorrows played in Europe for the first time, it didn't matter if we were two miles apart from each other on a stage, we could play together and it made a really big difference to us.""It can be stressful, there's peaks and valleys in all this stuff. You're always having a good look at yourself and you're always asking the question because no-one taps me on the shoulder to say 'Look, I think it's time to make another album'.""I was never a popstar. I don't know how people perceive me really, but I imagine have followed what I do on a different level, not just from the hit songs but because my audiences have liked what I've done as a collection of music on an album. Not necessarily the Shape I'm Ins or Hit and Runs or the Harley and Rose ... those things are valuable to you as a performer but maybe I realised kind of early that my whole thing would have to be (that) we're all in the same boat - the audience and the performer - so I'm more than happy to leave Harley and Rose out if it didn't work on the night. But there's nothing scheduled, there's nothing planned. I haven't had a song list unless doing something really small, or filming or something. With the APIA tour I had to actually do those songs because it wasn't my bad so I had to behave a bit. But when you're doing your own show it's more about the event of what you've got to offer.""Even though it's my 50th year (in the music industry) I didn't start recording really until 1975, or 1972 ... around that time ... so my whole thing is that if we can do it where there's no trigger points, each song belongs as part of the collection of the night rather than 'here's the songs, you can buy this'. My thing is to be as free as I can both musically and from a performance point of view. I think what I've been able to achieve is that people realise if they come and see me in a couple of weeks time it's not going to be the same. Some of the songs might be the same but there'll be different things.""It can be stressful, there's peaks and valleys in all this stuff. You're always having a good look at yourself and you're always asking the question because no-one taps me on the shoulder to say 'Look, I think it's time to make another album'. It's kinda good. I like being an independent artist on that level."Joe Camilleri is already up to album number 45 and working on another."I've got this new double album called 'Endless Sleep'. I've already got a title for it. When I was recording Certified Blue I was also recording other songs for what I just thought was entertainment value. I tried to get inspired by something so I'd play on the piano something like Hank Williams' 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry', and then I'd find another way of getting into that song and maybe we'd record it and just leave it. But then I realised it's the inspiration of these people, whether it's Gil Scott Heron or Lou Reed, so when I finished Certified Blue I had about nine of these songs and I realised that they (the artists) were all departed.""And I thought there's some kind of message here - I was just doing it because I liked the songs, I wasn't paying any attention to this, and so when I realised that most of them had departed I thought, 'Oh wow, this is what I need to do', even though I'm writing new songs, I need to make this record. The song from the 1950s by Jody Reynolds called 'Endless Sleep' came up in my head and I thought 'there it is, it's the title of the album and the reason I'm doing this record'.What's the first song Joe Camilleri remembers hearing?"There was this woman in Carlton. Some of the houses in Carlton had their windows right on the street, there was no front yard. There was this woman called Aunty Darcy, we used to call her that, I don't know why, but she was a music fan and she would open the window and just give us stuff,""She would say 'come and have a listen to this' and I remember her saying 'this is the new thing' and I guess I probably thought it was going to be Doris Day or something, but it was Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley and The Comets. I remember hearing that.""I think those days everybody had a piano or some sort of musical instrument because that's what you would do at night, you'd sit around the piano and sing songs. My brother played the piano accordion and we would do that.""I used to love the radio and I loved to sing the songs of the day, but wasn't until about 1961, 1962 - it was when I heard The Searchers, I probably heard The Searchers before The Beatles because they all came out around the same time. There was this noise about this new thing, this British beat, and there was The (Rolling) Stones, The Animals, and The Kinks - all this music was coming out at the same time and that's when I got pretty much hooked on the whole idea.""I loved all the Elvis Presley things but I didn't have the money for that sort of stuff. The Shadows was the first record I bought, maybe it was the only album I could find at the time, but it wasn't until the sixties really that I went nuts and went back and found all those records that the Rolling Stones did great versions of, Otis Redding or Howlin' Wolf, that was a kind of secret, this thing that kind of came upon you and WOW! It was insane staff. It was dark and it was mysterious and it had something else. But it was kind of like the British beat going back 10 years and buying that stuff. There was an album called, I think, 'Fresh Berries' it had just Chuck Berry songs. It had 'Carol' on it and it had all these other songs that the Rolling Stones were playing, they did pretty good versions and they souped them up a bit, but you realise the depth of Chuck Berry playing those songs because he really was the Shakespeare of rock & roll.""I'd just had enough. I had this really beautiful 13-piece band and we went around the country and we had two hit singles, a pretty big record with a chart record but I wasn't very happy with the record."The early part of Joe Camilleri's career, the Countdown era, was one thing, but then in the 1980s Joe returned with The Black Sorrows which went huge."By accident of course! I was pouring coffees. I'd just had a hit with Taxi Mary and Walk On By - the great Walk On By which I think I ruined although it was an interesting verison of that song. I just gave up. I said 'I'm just gonna take some time out' and I got a job as a vegie roadie working at the Footscray market. It was just taking vegetables from trucks and putting them on other trucks, so that was my gig,""I'd just had enough. I had this really beautiful 13-piece band and we went around the country and we had two hit singles, a pretty big record with a chart record but I wasn't very happy with the record. It could have been so much better and it was my fault that it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but anyway, it yielded these two songs and we got to play and I got to do something that I wanted to do which was play with the cha band and six horns and high-heeled boots and gay cavalier and all that nonsense, but it just left me wanting. It was nice, but it wasn't what I wanted to do. So I thought, 'I'm just gonna get a job', it wasn't much of a job, it was three hours a day but you had to get up at 5am, done by 9am, and you had $20 a day and all the vegetables you can eat, so I got this other job by meeting a guy who loved Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons. He'd just opened a restaurant and he said, 'Why don't you come and work for me, I'll give you a job, you can pour some coffees', so that was my gig at this place called the Cafe Neon."So I did that and Chris said, 'Why don't you do something on a Sunday afternoon?' and that's how it all started.""I was in love with this music called zydeco music and no-one really knew much about it here, maybe some taste-makers might have known about it, it was an unusual connection. We had the piano accordion/violin sound, and then there was the clarinet and saxophone - we made up the horn section and the four of us made up this sound, it was kind of a nice sound,""I recorded an album of covers really, except for one song called Blow Joe Blow, and we did a couple of shows and people went nuts for it because it was different. It might not have been great but it was heartfelt. And of course it yielded a hit out of the weirdest thing,""Elvis Costello was in town, we toured with Elvis. Across the road from where he was staying was this place called 'Discurio' - somewhere like that. I would go to the record stores and actually sell them to the record stores. In fact next door to the Cafe Neon was a butcher shop and I sold him 10 copies, that was a new cut of meat!""But that's what you did. We made the record in a day, a guy I knew designed the cover, another guy could make a screenprint, so we screenprinted them and put them on the line, we did some t-shirts at the same time and got them out there,""But he (Costello) found this record and I swear to you that he spent more time talking about this particular record than talking about what he's doing on tour.""Most of this record was from an album called 'Another Saturday Night' and that's where I got to hear someone like Bobby Charles, and zydeco music was sort of like New Orleans music but they used it in a different way, they used those R&B songs where they went back to the fifties and sometimes sang in French. I did a song called 'Brown-Eyed Girl' and that particular song turned it around for this band,""We'd only done maybe two or three shows for this record. It was recorded in an afternoon and that was under circumstances - we weren't allowed to keep the tapes, we only had a day to record, it was a demonstration for the studio because they got a new desk in and wanted someone to try it out. That's how it happened. We recorded a couple of extra songs but I never got to keep the tape. Everything was just by chance,""I don't know if you run out of gas, but from the point of view of playing together it was so manic. You're doing 300 shows a year and you're playing all over the world and something had to go. Unfortunately for me I got a thing where I couldn't fly anymore.""But that led me to that point where we were a really big band and we were recording things like 'Chained To The Wheel' and we had the Bull sisters and we're playing all over the world and we're getting gold records in different parts of the world and platinum records in Australia and multi-platinum records. It took us on a wonderful journey,""But once again the bigger you get, the harder it is to stay there. I always ask, 'Why is it that Paul McCartney wrote so many songs but he can't have a hit record anymore?'. I don't know if you run out of gas, but from the point of view of playing together it was so manic. You're doing 300 shows a year and you're playing all over the world and something had to go. Unfortunately for me I got a thing where I couldn't fly anymore. I didn't fly for about four years so if I was touring I'd have to catch a train. If I was coming to Sydney I'd have to go overnight and it was kind of annoying for people.""It was just really tough. We had a hit in Germany and I just couldn't go. But I couldn't tell anyone I couldn't fly anymore. And flying really killed my overseas commitment to taking the band there, so if you can't go there ... today you can do different things. I remember I made a decision to go and live in England because if we were going to do it we had to base ourselves somewhere in Europe where we could jump off. I was with Sony at the time and they were trying to get me to go to Germany. They said, 'This is going to be a top single, top 10, it's already 18, get your keester down there and do it pronto!' They're not used to people saying, 'No'."" I'd only get on a plane under certain circumstances; I had to have valium, I had to be in an aisle seat, I had to have water, I had to have someone to talk to, I had to be allowed to get off if I needed to get off.""They think I want a business class ticket. I don't care what sort of ticket it was, I couldn't get on a plane, and I thought at the time that I was the only person in the universe who couldn't do this, I thought it was a real sign of weakness and that created a really bad thing in me. I was at a point where if the sky was grey I felt claustrophobic. I couldn't get outside the house unless it was a blue day. So I'm putting all these things in front of myself not knowing how to get any assistance,""It was Harlan (Joe's son) strangely enough who saved my life, because I decided I was going to fight it. I was ready to get off this plane. I'd only get on a plane under certain circumstances; I had to have valium, I had to be in an aisle seat, I had to have water, I had to have someone to talk to, I had to be allowed to get off if I needed to get off - all these different things. And then Harlan got sick on a plane and somehow everything changed. It wasn't about me anymore, it was about the things I really loved,""It was a small trigger and it took me another three years, but I was then able to slowly do things and strip away these things. It was all about fear of failure, I think.""Here I am, 66, and I'm still throwing it out, but you wouldn't have thought that at the time, you'd just think it's the end.""All those little things that I didn't have with The Falcons. When I was playing with The Falcons, even though I was the leader of the band I only ever felt like I was just one of the musicians because we're all in it together. It's a nice thing to know that nobody got anymore than anybody else. Sometimes these are the things that you struggle with. Even in a world where money becomes evil, some people will start making money and if you don't look after everybody else some of them don't make anything apart from their gig fee. All those things were able to be rectified but in those days we were all in it because it was all beer and skittles! Wagon Wheels and malted milks! There was NO money so it wasn't an issue!""We'd do 300 shows a year with The Falcons, or The Sorrows, we'd get $300 a week, or $250 a week, we'd have four weeks off, or six weeks off - two weeks making a record, and you'd get paid those six weeks. The roadies were being paid while we weren't working for those six week as well. So of course when the band finally broke up, we didn't have any money because everyone else had it. Everyone else that wasn't involved in the band made the bulk of our hard work. But no-one felt bad about it. We all felt, 'Gee whiz if you can hang out til you're 30 and you're in a band, are you crazy? There goes your rock & roll shoes!'""Here I am, 66, and I'm still throwing it out, but you wouldn't have thought that at the time, you'd just think it's the end.""Making those first four records independently with The Sorrows, it wasn't that hard, apart from the Dear Children album, which is my favourite record. Not because it has great songs on it, but because it was what I call my 'wedding album' - I must have played a hundred weddings to make that album. To get a gold record from Sony for that - it's the only record that I have anywhere in that house. I don't have any paraphenalia, nothing. Just that gold record. And I've had multi-platinum records and gold singles and all that kind of nonsense, ARIAs, but nothing belongs in my house. Nothing beats that 'wedding album'.""It was the struggle of that record. It was, 'I've got to make this properly, I've got to record it on two-inch (tape), I can't be muching around with that A-DAT stuff, I've got to make this on two-inch, I've got 24 tracks, I've got a limited amount of time, I'm going to run out of time, I've got $400 and it's like putting money in a machine. They gave me some liberties and I got it done and it was just beautiful to hear it on the radio.""Some people are really blessed and they have a beautiful voice - I don't have all those things. I have a different thing but I have things that other people don't have. Maybe it's called tenacity."So is Joe Camilleri a happy man?"Yeah. I am happy. I do believe that it's always half-full. As you get a bit older, you get a few barnacles and you struggle. With pain. I don't call it real pain because I imagine people with real pain, but I still have an upbeat concept and I still love doing the things that I like to do and that makes me good.""The really nice thing is playing music, I think that's the only time I can say I really get lost. I have responsibilities like we all have. I've got five children. I've got a whole bunch of things I have to deal with on a financial basis, I have a record label, I have to look after certain things, and I'm only good if people allow me to be that, if they want to hire me. If I don't have a job, I don't have a job.""On some levels I've been really fortunate, and I think some of that is because of the way I've navigated through things. Whether it's been a dumb way or not, I don't know. I don't worry about it. You're gonna get ripped off; I've been ripped off. I don't care for thinking about it. It doesn't put my stomach in a knot. There's been plenty of guys who haven't paid me. There's been lots of stuff where record companies have ... I mean, how do you know what your royalty rates are? Who cares? I'm interested in the day. I'm interested in what's going to be tomorrow. It doesn't take much for me to smile. I look forward to playing and it's kinda nice when people say nice things about you but also if they say nice things about your art, or your work, or whatever you want to call music.""I love having an idea and finishing it. That's my tradesman bit! I actually do love that and I'm working on four or five songs at any one time. Like we all are! Some people are really blessed and they have a beautiful voice - I don't have all those things. I have a different thing but I have things that other people don't have. Maybe it's called tenacity. Maybe it's a bunch of different things. I look forward to getting better at what I do, so that's good. I kick myself up the keester for being lazy - if I've got an idea and I can't finish it."I mention to Joe that having this conversation with him is a bit like watching an artist with six unfinished paintings on easels and is figuring out at which point they each become finished."Imagine Picasso doing that! Putting his brush in a bit of paint and walking past and just going 'splot' - that's done! As a producer I fight the struggle with songs because I know every note on there. So I can't listen to the record. I can listen to playing it live because it's happening, but I can't listen to the record.""Unlike The Falcons where you work through the song, with The Sorrows you don't have that opportunity to work through the songs, you have that time in the studio to work through the songs because it is a band, but it's not a band. It's a band of people that get together.""I'm just honoured to be part of the Australian musical landscape, really. Forget about the hits and stuff, although the hits made a big difference, but there's just something about people enjoying what you do,""The best drug you can have is when an audience is singing back something that you've written. It's an incredible feeling. I do it on a small scale but imagine what it's like for the Stones. People just going nuts and saying, 'I really dig this song and I don't even know what it's about.'"

Megan Washington 2014 album There, there.22 September, 2014 3:45PM AEDTMegan Washington on choosing hopeBy Carol DuncanAustralian musician Megan Washington joined ABC Newcastle's Carol Duncan for a chat about her new album, 'There, There'.​

Megan Washington says that 'Skyline', one of the tracks on her new album 'There, There' is about 'choosing hope'."I think that's a choice we have to make daily. Choosing happiness and choosing positivity is something that you have to make a priority. For me, it's a daily thing.""That song was inspired a few years when I became very ill and woke up in hospital, figuring out how I felt in that moment and what it meant. Those moments can be extremely formulative? Is that a word? The highest of highs and the lowest of lows is when you galvanise your resolve to overcome things and that was one of mine."Whilst not new to the music industry it would be surprising if her audience hadn't increased substantially after her appearance on ABC TV's Australian Story and her frank discussion of growing up with a stutter. It was wonderful to watch the flood of support from many thousands of people sent to her via social media after the program aired."To be honest with you, I cried a lot after that. I watched the show - because I couldn't not watch it - with some friends and we made a dinner and watched it.""Afterwards, the overwhelming - you used the word 'flood' - and I think that's a great description of it, all these people ... it wasn't so much the goodwill that struck me, it was the resonance, the 'me toos', that I heard and I found really moving. I found it incredible that people could see some of themselves in what I had said.""You've got to understand, I don't know any other version of life than my life. It isn't like I never had a stutter and then I suddenly got one. This is how existence is. To see that brought so many other people together with each other, not so much with me, there was a real sense of us being on the same side, the same team. It's great.""I think it's universal. When I meet anybody the first thing they want to do is tell you their story. People like to tell each other who they are. It's not surprising to me when people do this and drop the act, stop acting out their role."The shortest song on Megan Washington's new album was written in just a few minutes and she says she had the aim of trying to describe a sensation."There must be a word for that like 'onomatopoeiac' but that describes the sensation, the sound reflects the sensation. There must a word for it, a German word!""I wanted to write a song about falling in love that was less about falling in 'lurve' than literally FALLING in love, falling down the stairs or something. The dizziness or giddyness that comes with that. That was the plan. It is the shortest song I've ever written."

Don Walker is renowned as one of Australia's best songwriters. In 2014 I spoke with him about music, his love of language and the challenge of moving from performing with Cold Chisel to being his own frontman. (The Perfect Crime tour)

Don Walker is a notoriously private man.He just does not talk about the personal stuff. But he does talk about himself, about music and words and prose and work and Chisel and just about anything else you choose to throw at him.He speaks slowly, deliberately, and laughs with a quiet, low rumble. Don Walker is also very dry and very funny.Once a scientist who worked on Australia's F111 program, Don says he worked for a little while with "whatever modest skills I acquired in aerodynamic engineering. I can't say I was very good at it."Words matter to Don Walker and it's obvious that language is a great love for the man who has written some of Australia's most iconic rock songs, "I think my love of words, language and humour - which is very much part of it - comes not so much from reading but from listening to regional speech in Australia, listening to the way people talk.""I love the enormously intelligent use of language that you get in regional and grassroots Australia. I like to laugh and Aussies say stuff that makes me laugh all the time. I try and write in a way that's close to conversation, and the conversation that I know is the way that I talk, and the people around me whose company I enjoy, talk."Don Walker grew up in Grafton on the north coast of NSW and says there was little choice in radio listening, "Where I grew up there used to be two stations. 2NR was the ABC station on the north coast, and the local commercial station was 2GF. So 2GF was where you went for music; they didn't play any music on the ABC except for classical programs, so the music that was played on the local commercial station was the music we heard.""It was a peculiar kind of faux-country music; a lot of American stuff, but some Australian stuff, and in that curious period between Elvis and The Beatles. Elvis hit and then it all went quiet when he joined the army, but The Beatles hadn't happened yet, so there was a fallow period there where all sorts of wild and wonderful but now-forgotten things happened in music.""Last year, a mate of mine who grew up in the Wheatfields in WA told me he'd seen a movie called 'The Tree of Man' which I haven't seen but apparently it's the greatest movie of the last 10 years or so. In this movie he was shocked into that period of 1960 listening to commercial radio. He and a friend who worked in a record shop gathered three CDs of what was on the radio in that period and gave them to me. It's a real shock to listen to them because these are not songs that are widely played since, so to listen to three CDs of them now plunges me straight back to sitting on a verandah on a farm when I was 10 years old. It's wonderful stuff. 'Big Bad John', quite a bit of Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline."'Big Bad John' is one of my own musical memories so I suggest to Don that I could probably sing him all the words of it and throw in a bunch of bad trucking songs about the ghosts of little girls to boot."That's right!" laughs Don, "Six days on the road and I'm gonna see my baby tonight', or 'Wolverton Mountain', or 'From A Jack to a King', all that kind of stuff!"Our memories are strongly driven by sounds and smells and I suspect that as we get older, the guilty pleasures we have in music from years ago and may not have admitted to previously, are now songs that we love and will play loud in the car with the windows down, perhaps to the horror of our kids.Don Walker is one of Australia's most esteemed songwriters so of course I had to take the opportunity to try to get him to confess his musical sins to me."There's plenty of stuff that I can go back to and I'd only admit between you and I that at a certain stage I was very passionate about 'Blood, Sweat & Tears'. It is interesting to go back and listen to stuff now and see if it sounds as good as I thought it did at the time. 'Blood, Sweat & Tears' now sounds appalling! If you put on 'Bitches Brew' (Miles Davis) now, it sounds pretty good. So, there are examples like that, 'bad fashion' things that you do in any era.""I'm sure among the stuff I'm listening to and liking now there's some pretty horrible stuff. You're going to ask me what?"Yes. But Don isn't telling.I share with Don that I had recently played The Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds' in the car for my kids to listen to because I think it's one of those things that pre-dates my own record collection but still sounds wonderful. Indeed, 'Pet Sounds' was released in the year of my birth. So even if the lyrics are a bit cheesy, if something was beautifully recorded and produced does it redeem it somewhat for him?"Well, you can't dismiss something just because it has cheesy lyrics, any more than you can dismiss something because it has cheesy music. Often in those combinations there's treasure.""But The Beach Boys, I never got it, or I never bothered. I think because when I was young, nobody in the band could actually play - nobody could do a solo - and when I was 20 or 25 that was important. But I've been doing a lot of long car trips over the last few years and a couple of years ago I bought a 'Best of The Beach Boys' and listened to it and started to wake up as to why so many of my musical friends are fanatical Beach Boys fans. Not so much musicians, but people in the music business, radio people and music journalists. I started to get it, to realise that this wasn't just another pop group, there's actually something unique and extraordinary that's happened here and everyone else is just imitators. I kinda knew that, but I never got it myself. Now I do."Don Walker is perhaps best known as Cold Chisel's main songwriter and through that band gave Australian rock music fans a new voice. With 40 years of songwriting under his belt, does the legacy of songs like Khe Sanh - released in 1978 - weigh on him?"Well, it's nice! There's a good living in that kind of thing. But once songs like that go out and are adopted by people as part of that canon of what they like to listen to, then it becomes a little bit remote to me.""The last five years or so, occasionally, I've done Khe Sanh myself with just piano, but that sounds utterly different so I can kind of own that again. It becomes a story with some chords, but it doesn't sound remotely like Jim (Barnes) and Cold Chisel on the radio because I can't sing like that. I'm very proud of it. We were a bunch of young guys and we did some good stuff. It's good that people like that and it holds up decades later, but it's a little bit remote from my daily life.""I didn't sing Khe Sanh originally. I just wrote it and showed it to the other guys in the band. Jim's been singing it as an integral part of what he does live, but not me. Neither are any other Cold Chisel songs. It's just in the last few years I started doing this other version of it. I wasn't avoiding it in all that time, it's just that it's not something that sounds like what I do, and it's not the way that I sound when I sing.""With such a song that's as widely loved as that, if I get up and sing it somebody might yell out, 'That's not how it goes!' he laughs, "The other thing is it's got a lot of words and everybody else knows them better than I do so what if you get half way through and you get stuck?!"In 2009, Don released his book 'Shots' - a collection of short autobiographical pieces. Reading 'Shots' reminded me of the way Leonard Cohen uses words, but Leonard Cohen makes me wonder just which words are lies."I don't think songwriters lie, but they certainly make stuff up. Is that lying? It's an essential part of songwriting.""Many years ago I was listening to someone do an interview with Paul Kelly, and they were digging in way beyond, 'What comes first, mate, the lyrics or the music?', they were digging in to just what happens and how do you come up with lyrics,""Paul said, 'I make stuff up.' I burst out laughing, I thought that was brilliant. Of course, you make stuff up. Is that lying? Yes, definitely. Sometimes it can tip over if you pretend it's the truth. So if me or Laughing Lenny write something that is not fiction but purporting to be a factual account, but that tips over into something that didn't actually happen, well ... you're on the edge."Where does Don Walker place the Canadian wordsmith, Leonard Cohen?"The big attraction for Leonard Cohen, and like The Beach Boys I've become a Leonard Cohen fan late in life - never took much notice of him before the last five or ten years but the big attraction is his humour. I don't think anything has got much legs if it hasn't got humour. You can look around and look at all the recording artists in history and divide the ones who have humour from the ones who don't. And that's a pretty profound thing, that really sorts them out, and Leonard Cohen is one of the funniest people out there, and one of the driest in his lyrics. And that's why now, late in life, I buy every Leonard Cohen album."Jimmy Barnes, of course, has deflected a lot of the heat of Cold Chisel's success from the rest of the band, but after Chisel disbanded Don Walker has put himself up front."It's never all about me, even when you're up there in front of a band. It's about the songs and the story. You're trying to put that over and connect. You're trying to whisper in the ear of everybody who's listening, whether you've recorded something that's being played on the radio or if you're playing a big show and there's thousands of people there. It's just one person trying to communicate to one other, and in some situations there's a lot of 'one other'. It's not about 'you', the person standing up there.""The fascist thing about it is that people can't talk back," laughs Don, "And for people in our position, the beautiful thing."I find it interesting to think about how songwriters see their own work given how precious it can sometimes become to others. To fans. To listeners. We listen, we love, we lose. We perhaps get married to the words in these songs. Live our lives through them. Die. We carry them with us and consider which of them we'd rescue from our burning house or take to a desert island. But how does the songwriter, the storyteller, see them?Don chips me about just wanting to ask what his favourite song is, but I think it's more complex than that and he concedes it's difficult to answer."There's a lot of stuff over the decades and I don't think of them as valuable or otherwise. Although there's a few things I've written that I would regard as 'value-less', but I'm not going name them. I admire people who use their songs to help people - that has value - but the songs I value most often have no correlation between how good a song is in my eyes and how well-known it is or how much money it's made or anything like that. It's not an inverse correlation either.""Probably one of the most - in my heart - beautiful songs I've ever written I wrote about 15 years ago - at the turn of the century! When I wrote it I thought, 'This is going to be massive all over the world because it's such a beautiful song', and I wrote it about a personal situation but it was universal, it had what I thought was a beautiful melody, it was simple, and it had everything that I thought was good about songcraft. And yet, everybody who heard it in the publishing world acknowledged how good it was but I couldn't get it recorded.""So that's what I'd call one of the top five songs that I'm proud of and yet nobody knew about it for 13 years.""But Missy Higgins has just recorded it and done a stunning version of it (The Way You Are Tonight) and now people are hearing it. In the meantime, there's a lot of other songs I've written that are enormously popular and have been all over the airwaves that I didn't think were nearly as good."Don Walker is a storyteller, but are there stories he hasn't been able to get out yet?"Yes, yes there are. There are things like that that have hung around in the back of my head for a long time, but they're difficult to describe because describing them will be in the song or in the prose writing and I haven't figured out a way of doing that yet. Where they live now is in pictures and movies and landscapes and feelings and maybe a few scraps of words."How does he know when the song is done? When the words are finished? When to stop and leave it alone?"You just know. It's like a big bell goes off. 'This is right now.' And it's something that is the same with a piece of prose writing. I can't explain that but I utterly know when something's right. At the same time, the reverse side of that is that you utterly know when something is not right. But knowing it's not right doesn't mean that you know how to get to where the bell goes off. I've put things out without waiting for the bell to go off, when they're not quite right but good enough."Will he tell me what they are?"No. But there's an internal thing that defies all logic. Surely, all of these things are subjective. What is right to one person is not right to another, but there is something in me - and I know it exists in others - where it's not a subjective thing, there's an utter certainty when something is right. And a nagging, cold dissatisfaction and itch when it's not."Meanwhile, after a 40-year career in the music industry, Don Walker is still touring large shows with a full band, and smaller intimate shows to just a few dozen people."The beauty of doing things like that is to deliberately put myself in a situation where I didn't know if I could pull it off and I had to do some work. I had to do a lot of preparation and figure out a lot of things I hadn't had to figure out before to make a show of that length work with just me and the piano."I suggest that to do so is gutsy."It's not so much the size of the audience. It doesn't really matter. It's what's going on onstage. In that situation I have no band and nothing to hide behind. So I have to make it work with those few tools. That's confronting. I did a night in Nundle and it worked. The night I did in Mayfield, the first set didn't work. I just couldn't make it work. The second set worked and everybody got it and we all had a good time.""I'm hoping that they didn't feel like it was a waste of their time. That they're thinking, 'That was a worthwhile thing to do'. That's what I'm wishing and hoping for. People's time and attention is valuable and if you're going to use it up you've got to do something worthwhile, make it work, and try and figure out a way of transporting them into the stories.""Sometimes you don't manage that and if you don't manage that, well that's a failure and instead of transporting them somewhere, you've seat-belted them into a dark little room for an hour when they could have been enjoying themselves."When all is said and done, what does Don Walker feel he's gotten right?"The things that I've done right have nothing to do with music because they're far more fundamental things than that, and they're not public things. There haven't been many of them and there's a lot of things I've done wrong. But they're the things in the end.""While I've been doing this interview, I've got a call from my daughter. It's in that world where you really succeed or fail. If there's a couple of things I like myself for, it's in that world."And with that, I encourage Don Walker to go and call his daughter.

Tracks: Choir Girl, Hully Gully, Khe Sanh, Pool, The Way You Are Tonight (Missy Higgins version), Saturday Night.

Rob Hirst - The Sun Becomes The Sea album release feature 2014First published ABC Radio Australia18 November, 2014 12:07PM AEDTRob Hirst - a new solo album and the Midnight Oil 'anti-plan'By Carol DuncanRob Hirst has a new solo album out - released under his own name instead of one of the innumerable musical units that he's part of. The Midnight Oil drummer and songwriter celebrates his new songs with an unexpected collaboration with his artist daughter, Gabriella Hirst.

Rob Hirst oozes 'proud dad' as he talks about the achievements of the offspring of some of his bandmates."We've all got very talented sons and daughters now, all very grown up, and my daughter Gabriella is now in Berlin after finishing her courses at COFA in Sydney and the National Art School. She did very well, got a travelling scholarship and went to Berlin."Gabriella Hirst's art is, indeed, striking and beautiful. And perhaps unsurprisingly, her work seems to share her father's social and environmental concerns."She was looking out over a wasteland where she was in north-west Berlin, went for a walk in the afternoon and asked one of the locals why it was so deserted. He told her that until recently there had been a poplar forest full of birds but that despite the protests of locals the little forest that had acted as a buffer between quite an industrial area and the local residences had been levelled to put in a department store or factory.""But he also told Ella that he'd gone for a walk on the day they cut the trees down and found 24 birds' nests. He sent them to Ella and she painted them as part of her Berlin projects in watercolours on silk flags, which the man then attached to bamboo poles and put back where the forest once was as a symbolic gesture to remind people of what was lost. Being ephemeral artworks, she expected them to be souvenired, which they quickly were, but they fly now from the balconies of neighbouring apartments overlooking this area."Rob's album, 'The Sun Becomes The Sea', features 24 of his daughter's bird artworks in the hardcover booklet version of the album, which he had made to protect Gabriella's artwork but there are a few of them online."I was just finishing a bunch of songs that I'd been doing over a couple of years down at Jim's (Moginie) studio and I thought for the first time that I'd put it out under my own name rather than under the Ghostwriters or whatever. It's just one of those lovely synchronicities where she was finishing her artwork at the same time and agreed that I could use these beautiful watercolour birds for the sleeve of the book and for the new website which finally links the Oils, the Backsliders, The Break, Angry Tradesmen, Hirst and Greene, Willies Bar and Grill, etc."Unusually, Rob made the decision to make all of the songs on the album available online for free."I just thought it would be a nice gesture and I had such fun making these songs."I point out that a similar 'nice gesture' recently backfired somewhat for U2."I would never be so presumptuous as to upload these 11 songs on people's iTunes!" Rob laughs, "It's available for those that seek it out and like it and there's the option for people to go to a few of those old-fashioned record stores that still exist, and which we really want to support, and get the hardcover booklet with all of Gabriella's birds and other information on it."The exhibition of Midnight Oil's incredible place in the Australian music industry was a huge success at the Sydney exhibition hosted by the Manly Art Gallery and Museum and will be hosted by Newcastle Museum early 2015. How does Rob Hirst feel about his life's work being treated as a museum piece?"We had so many people come through and they were pleasantly surprised. I think they thought, 'Oh Rob's dug out a few old posters and stuck them on the wall with blu-tack' or something. In fact, we spent about two years working on it; this is me, curator Ross Heathcote, Virginia Buckingham, Wendy Osmond who did the art direction on it.""We've got a special film which runs an hour and fifteen minutes made by Rob Hambling about the making of '10 to 1' with Nick Launay producing back in London all those years ago, and we've sourced all this film from 1984 of the band backstage in South Australia at Memorial Drive, and at Main Beach on the Gold Coast. There's a lot of home movie footage, the Exxon banner from New York City, a full stage set-up of the band with the exact drums, guitars, amps, backdrop, lights and even the PA to be authentic from 1987 to 1989 which we toured on the back of the Diesel and Dust album.""There lots of little early recordings that have never been heard, a song we've never released before, and the piece de resistance is a replication in a box which has sticky carpet, three screens when you walk in and a curtain you pull behind you. It has footage of the band playing at the Tanelorn Festival in 1981 and there's two sets of headphones you can choose from - one is loud, the other is really loud - and you can stick to the carpet. There's elbows that come out from the side of the box so that you can be elbowed in the ribs. What I was trying to do was replicate what it was like coming to see Midnight Oil back then at the Mawson Hotel, the 16 Footers or the Ambassador or whatever."I enquire as to whether the box also has the special scent that some of our more notorious venues had. Rob Hirst assures me it does."I've poured so much Tooheys New into that carpet, you've got no idea, and I've ground some lemon chicken and sweet and sour rat or whatever into it. Remember in NSW in those days the liquor laws stated that the pubs had to pretend to provide a meal if they were serving liquor late. No-one would ever touch those meals but they'd be knocked off the bar and into the carpet. So after three months in Manly it's getting quite fruity in there!""It's funny, one of the last surviving venues down here (Sydney), The Annandale, has just ripped up there carpet. The carpet was legendary. It was despicable. They could have scraped it for a new form of penicillin! But they shouldn't have thrown it out. I'd have taken a square metre of it and put it in what became known as 'Rob's Folly', but is now known as 'The Royal Antler Room' which is the Narrabeen pub that Midnight Oil first started playing all those years ago.""The curator, Ross Heathcote, named it 'Rob's Folly' because he was bemused by the idea. He didn't think I'd ever build it, but over six months with a couple of hard-working, underpaid friends we actually made it. It looks like a giant road case but it's big enough for two or three people to cram in and get blasted by Midnight Oil at the Tanelorn Festival."Rob describes the opening of the Midnight Oil exhibition at the Manly gallery with great affection and it's obvious that he still finds great joy in every tiny connection that his career has afforded him - from those with names to the 'unknown' members of road crews. Indeed for just a moment he sounds a bit misty when reminiscing about the night of the opening and the loyalty of the huge crowds who were not only Midnight Oil fans but turned out in droves to see the exhibition. I gently accuse him of getting mellow and soft in his dotage as he describes this 'gathering of the tribes'. This quickly turns his thoughts to Newcastle."Newcastle will be the same. After all, Newcastle meant so much to the band. We went time and time again until we finally did a huge gig on Redhead Beach. We expected to find maybe a couple of thousand people, but there must have been 25,000 or 30,000 people on the beach. That kind of paid us back for all the hard work. We'd spoken to The Angels and (Cold) Chisel who'd just preceded us a little bit, and they said, 'If you get places like Newcastle you'll get the most loyal audiences on earth', and that's what happened. And of course a few years later was the earthquake benefit and we were lucky enough to be on that bill as well, and that gig goes down as one of the great shows we've ever played."Midnight Oil, of course, achieved success with not just a lot of hard work, but what Rob Hirst describes as an 'anti-plan'."We'd heard all these terrible stories of bands that we'd loved that ended much too early, before their time, through no fault of their own. They were brilliant musicians, songwriters, performers, but through management or lousy agency deals or record company stuff-ups they hadn't fulfilled their potential. So we looked at them and because Pete and I had done law - Pete finished law, I didn't - but we knew our way around a contract a little bit. So when we signed with an independent label, even though we were being chased by the majors at the time - that made us too anxious, so we signed with an independent label which we called 'Powderworks' after the first song on the first album and gradually eased ourselves in.""I think that stood us in good stead because we were able to build this very loyal live crowd - initially in Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong and then interstate. But because we took it softly, softly, I don't think we made the horrendous mistakes that some of the other great Australian bands had done."I point out the obvious that Midnight Oil weren't trying to seduce an audience with songs of sex and drugs and rock & roll like every other band, but were insisting we have a look at contemporary Australian issues.Again, Rob is amused, "Yeah, we were decidedly unsexy and we didn't take anywhere near enough drugs although I was on ascorbic acid (vitamin C) for about 15 years.""Probably two of the most maligned rock managers of the time were Gary Morris who looked after us, and Chris Murphy who looked after INXS, although Gary also looked after INXS initially but then just us once he realised we were more than a handful.""Those managers were much feared and not very liked in the industry, but they were fiercely loyal to their bands and Gary not only was a real strong-arm, Rottweiler kind of manager which you need to protect a young band that has big ideas but no money in the bank, but he also threw all these crazy ideas at us all the time. One in every 100 of his crazy ideas was brilliant and we'd actually do it.""The best bands seemed to have been the most unlikely bunch of people - and I include their management in that - all thrown together and all providing different talents to an end that make the sum much stronger than the individual.""With Midnight Oil and Cold Chisel, for example, the songwriters weren't the singer. In the case of Chisel it was Don Walker writing for Jimmy (Barnes), and with the Oils it was Jim (Moginie) and myself writing for Pete (Garrett). There were others in the band that were great performers - Pete was this extraordinarily charismatic singer, Jim was a whiz in the studio, Martin (Rotsey) was great with arrangements ... and everyone kind of had their place.""Back in those days you actually sold albums, they weren't all pirated or downloaded for free so we could quickly pay back that poor bank manager in Chatswood and get going and make our own career even thought we didn't play Countdown and we didn't play the industry game."They most certainly didn't. And I suggest that to a then-young and female Australian music-goer, Midnight Oil could appear a bit intimidating. A bit cranky."We were a bloody-minded bunch of bastards back then and, yeah, we were cranky all the time. If you look at photos from that time we look really cranky. A lot of bands want to look cranky but we were actually cranky because we were tired and probably hungry and pissed off about something."Yes, I detect Rob Hirst pulling my leg a bit, but only a bit. He admits that if you were anywhere near the front of the stage during a Midnight Oil gig, or The Angels, or Rose Tattoo, Cold Chisel, whatever, you were a member of a fairly tough breed. I assure him I was happy at the back of the room but I suspect the safest place may have been behind the drum kit.False rumours have just done the rounds that Robert Plant had knocked back $500-$800 million to reform Led Zeppelin. Big numbers. What would it take for Midnight Oil to perform together again?"Robert Plant. I really admire the man, he keeps reinventing himself. It's long not been about the money for people like that. But it's one thing cruising around the pubs and just playing a medley of your greatest hits and a lot of bands fall for that trap. But I think Midnight Oil is among that bunch of bands that would be much too musically curious to have ever done that.""If we were ever to get back together, it would almost certainly be with new material and we'd have to feel we were contributing something rather than just some nostalgic act in sparkly jackets doing the clubs. Whether that will happen I have no idea."Rob Hirst's new album, 'The Sun Becomes The Sea', is a beautiful personal work recorded in memory of his later mother, Robin, who ended her life a few years ago after decades of living with depression. In a recent interview Rob pointed out that it's important we talk about depression, that we acknowledge the importance of mental health in order to help people."It's not just my mum, there are other members of the family who have suffered from it and it is as strong as any other inherited disease. And possibly more lethal because we don't talk about it and don't address it."Rob and his daughters sang 'Someone Scared' at his late mother's funeral and he suggests that this song was the catalyst for the full album.It's a terrible thing to admit, but as a high school work experience kid I spent a week at Powderworks when Midnight Oil's 'Bird Noises' EP was being pressed on to gooey black vinyl. I simply wanted to know how music worked.I wish I hadn't been such a good kid and actually nicked one.And frankly, I'd have pinched one of Gabriella Hirst's beautiful silk birds from the poplar forest, too.