Clinton Walker is an Australian writer, best known for his works on popular music. He wrote the books Highway to Hell (1994; a biography of Bon Scott), Buried Country (2000), History is Made at Night (2012), and others. He has also written on other subjects, in books such as Football Life (1998) and Golden Miles (2005), and has worked as a journalist. [1]
Born in Bendigo, Victoria, in 1957, Walker dropped out of art school in Brisbane in the late 70s to start a punk fanzine with Andrew McMillan and to write for student newspapers. [2]
In 1978, Walker moved to Melbourne, where he worked on-air for 3RRR, and with Bruce Milne on the fanzine Pulp and wrote for the fledgling Roadrunner magazine. [3] [4]
Moving on to Sydney in 1980, he commenced a career as a freelance journalist, and for many years he wrote for numerous magazines and newspapers, including RAM and Australian Rolling Stone , as well as The Bulletin, The Age, New Woman, Playboy, and Juice. [5]
Walker published his first book, Inner City Sound, in 1981. [6] It documented the emergence of independent Australian punk/post-punk music and quickly fell out of print but was re-released in 2005 in an expanded, updated edition, [7] [ better source needed ] along with an accompanying CD anthology. [8] [ better source needed ]
In 1984, after a couple of years in London, Walker returned to Australia and published his second book, The Next Thing.[ citation needed ]
Walker's third book, Highway to Hell, was a biography of Bon Scott (1994).[ citation needed ]
Walker then published Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music 1977-1991 (1996) and Football Life (1998). Stranded was republished in 2021 by the Visible Spectrum in a new updated global edition. [9] [ better source needed ] Des Cowley in his review in Rhythms Magazine said: "Reading Stranded today with a quarter-century’s hindsight, it’s easy to see that Walker mostly got things right. And if he stumbled now and again, it’s still the case he was streaks ahead of the pack." [10] Football Life was similarly a personal history but covered minor-league Australian Rules culture.[ citation needed ]
Walker's sixth book, Buried Country , a history of Aboriginal country music, was published in 2000, along with an accompanying documentary film and CD soundtrack album. Martin Jones wrote in Rhythms, "Like many of Walker's projects, Buried Country was at least a decade ahead of its time". At a time when Aboriginal music was not established or accepted as a fixture on the broader Australian music scene, Walker's Buried Country was praised as a pioneering, detailed work of music historiography.[ citation needed ] [11] [12] [13] A new updated edition of the book was released in 2015 along with a rebooted version of the CD called Buried Country 1.5, which received further critical praise. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] A live stageshow adaptation premiered in 2016 and toured for several years in the festival circuit. [19] [20] [21] In 2018, Australian singer-songwriter Darren Hanlon, in conjunction with Mississippi Records in the US, produced a vinyl iteration of the Buried Country compilation that included new tracks. [22]
In 2005, Walker’s seventh book, Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car, was published, expanding on an article he published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002. [23] [ better source needed ] The Sydney Morning Herald praised the book's design and called Walker "our best chronicler of Australian grassroots culture". [24] It was re-released in 2009 in an expanded and updated edition by Wakefield Press. [25] [ better source needed ]
In 2012, Walker published History is Made at Night about the Australian live music circuit. [26] [27] In 2013 he published his ninth book, The Wizard of Oz, about the ill-starred Australian speed ace from the 1920s, Norman 'Wizard' Smith, [28] [ better source needed ] as well as co-producing the CD Silver Roads, an anthology of Australian country-rock from the 1970s. [29] [30] [ better source needed ]
Deadly Woman Blues, a graphic history of black women in Australian music, was released in 2018 by a division of academic publisher UNSW Press. Each of 99 biographical entries was accompanied by a hand-drawn illustration by Walker. The book immediately garnered a few glowing reviews. [31] [32] [33] There was an angry backlash from four of the artists who expressed their displeasure at being included without being spoken to, and citing factual inaccuracies. [34] [35] [36] [37] This led to social media outrage in which Walker was criticized as a racist, misogynist, colonialist privileged white male. The book was withdrawn from sale, with the publisher promising to pulp any unsold copies and never to reprint it. [38] Walker admitted to mistakes and apologised, saying "I didn't try to obscure what I was doing, I didn't take all the appropriate steps. I've been involved in underclass music forever, and in some ways, this is no different, but in other ways, it is very different". [35]
In 2021, Walker released two books, including a new edition of Stranded [39] and a new work, Suburban Songbook. [40] [41] [42] Suburban Songbook: Writing Hits in post-war/pre-Countdown Australia is a critical history of the early evolution of rock/pop songwriting in Australia. [43]
Walker's twelfth book The Soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever was published in 2023 as part of Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series of short books on albums. [44] [45]
The Saints were an Australian rock band formed in Brisbane, Queensland in 1973. Founded by singer-songwriter Chris Bailey, drummer Ivor Hay, and guitarist-songwriter Ed Kuepper, they originally employed fast tempos, raucous vocals and a "buzzsaw" guitar sound that helped initiate punk rock in Australia and identified them with the greater international movement.
Renée Rebecca Geyer was an Australian singer who was an acclaimed jazz, soul and R&B musician. She released 15 studio albums with Moving Along (1977) and Tenderland (2003) both reaching number 11 on the Australian charts. Geyer's singles success as a solo artist in Australia were with "It's a Man's Man's World", "Heading in the Right Direction" and "Stares and Whispers" in the 1970s and "Say I Love You" in the 1980s. The latter also reached number one in New Zealand. The singer was an internationally respected and sought-after backing vocalist, whose session credits include work with Sting, Chaka Khan, Toni Childs, Joe Cocker, Neil Diamond, Men at Work and Trouble Funk.
Indigenous music of Australia comprises the music of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, intersecting with their cultural and ceremonial observances, through the millennia of their individual and collective histories to the present day. The traditional forms include many aspects of performance and musical instrumentation that are unique to particular regions or Aboriginal Australian groups; and some elements of musical tradition are common or widespread through much of the Australian continent, and even beyond. The music of the Torres Strait Islanders is related to that of adjacent parts of New Guinea. Music is a vital part of Indigenous Australians' cultural maintenance.
James Dixon Barnes is a Scottish-born Australian rock singer. His career, both as a solo performer and as the lead vocalist with the rock band Cold Chisel ( 1973–1983), has made him one of the most popular and best-selling Australian music artists of all time. By 2022 he had achieved 15 solo number-one albums in Australia, more than any other artist. He has won many awards, and been nominated for many more. In 2005 he was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame as a solo artist, after also having been an inductee in 1992 a member of Cold Chisel. His music has covered many genres, including hard rock, blues rock, soul, R&B, country, country rock, and electronic. Some of his albums were recorded at his own recording studio, Freight Train Studios.
Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music 1977–1991 is a book about the Australian independent music scene from 1979 until 1991, as written by author and music journalist Clinton Walker. The books follows two decades of music, from punk, rock, alternative sound to garage-rock and grunge and integrates various first-person accounts from Walker's perspective as well as drawing upon interviews with artists during that time to illustrate the cultural history of Australian sound.
The Apartments are an Australian indie band formed in 1978 in Brisbane, Queensland. The band split up in 1979 but reformed in 1984 and continued until 1997, with a new version of the band forming in 2007. Based in Sydney, New South Wales, the band has continued to perform and record, with the ninth album and most recent release, In and Out of the Light released in September 2020. Peter Milton Walsh is the band's only constant member.
Ruby Charlotte Margaret Hunter, also known as Aunty Ruby, was an Aboriginal Australian singer, songwriter and guitarist, and the life and musical partner of Archie Roach.
Australian musicians played and recorded some of the earliest punk rock, led by The Saints who released their first single in 1976. Subgenres of punk music, such as local hardcore acts, still have a strong cult following throughout Australia.
The Audreys are an Australian blues and roots band which formed in Adelaide, in 2004 by founding mainstay, Taasha Coates on lead vocals, melodica, harmonica and ukulele. They have released four studio albums, Between Last Night and Us, When the Flood Comes, Sometimes the Stars and 'Til My Tears Roll Away. Founding guitarist, Tristan Goodall, died on 2 July 2022, aged 48, of an unspecified illness.
Rolling Stone Australia is the Australian edition of the United States' Rolling Stone magazine devoted to music, politics, and popular culture, published monthly. The Australian version of Rolling Stone was initially published in 1970 as a supplement in Revolution magazine published by Monash University student Phillip Frazer. It was launched as a fully fledged magazine in 1972 by Frazer and was the longest-surviving international edition of Rolling Stone until its last issue appeared in January 2018.
Donald Hugh Walker is an Australian musician and songwriter who wrote many of the hits for Australian pub rock band Cold Chisel. Walker is considered to be one of Australia's best songwriters. In 2012 he was inducted into the Australian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Roger Knox is an Australian country singer, nicknamed "the Black Elvis" and "Koori King of Country".
Auriel Marie Andrew was an Australian country music singer from the Northern Territory. She was the first Aboriginal woman to appear on Australian television.
Buried Country is the name of a documentary film, book, and soundtrack album released in 2000, and a stage show which toured from 2016 to 2018. A prosopography created by Clinton Walker, it tells the story of Australian country music in the Aboriginal community by focussing on the genre's most important stars.
Bobby McLeod was an Aboriginal activist, poet, healer, musician and Yuin elder. He was from Wreck Bay Village, Jervis Bay Territory. He was involved in the fight for Aboriginal rights in Australia and travelled the world speaking about cultural lore, health and healing.
Voigt/465 were an Australian post-punk band based in Sydney, Australia. They were a feature of the Sydney inner-city music-scene during the late 1970s and their music was critically acclaimed. Their sound was influenced by Krautrock and has been described by a band-member as an "unsettling mixture of song-driven rock elements and free-noise experimentation". Voigt/465 recorded an album, Slights Unspoken, before they disbanded in late 1979. With their self-funded recordings and determinedly uncompromising music Voigt/465 epitomised the do-it-yourself ethic of the alternative music scene of the late 1970s.
Harry "Buck" Williams and Wilga Munro, known as Harry and Wilga Williams, were Aboriginal Australian musicians who performed professionally between the 1960s and 1980s, playing Aboriginal country music. They formed the band the Country Outcasts, also known as Harry Williams and the Country Outcasts.
Rock Australia Magazine or RAM was a fortnightly national Australian music newspaper, which was published from 1975 to 1989. It was designed for people with a serious interest in rock and pop, and was considered the journal of record for the Australian music scene, along the way producing some of the country’s best writers on music and popular culture.
Stuart Coupe is an Australian music journalist, author, band manager, promoter, publicist and music label founder. A renowned rock music writer, Coupe is best known for his work with Roadrunner, Rock Australia Magazine, The Sun-Herald, and Dolly; the music labels, GREEN Records and Laughing Outlaw; and the author of books including The Promoters, Gudinski, Roadies, and Paul Kelly.
Marlene Cummins is a jazz blues singer, saxophonist, songwriter, artist, Aboriginal Australian activist, broadcaster, dancer, and actor. Many activists consider her to be Australia's Angela Davis.
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