October 27, 2024 7:01 am
Published by Eden Sher
FEVER PK LETTER ‘My love is as a fever longing stillfor that which longer nurseth the disease’* For close to fifty years I’ve written mostly love songs. I never know what I’m doing until I’m in the middle of it but, looking back, it seems this record is an attempt to present all those kinds of love songs into one forty minute album. Urgent love, patient love, happy love, sad love, deluded love, clear-eyed love, complicated love, the beginning of... View Article
October 27, 2024 6:58 am
Published by Eden Sher
The music of Christmas, from the manger to the chimney My son, Declan, used to have a wide-ranging and eclectic weekly music show, Against the Arctic, on Melbourne community radio station RRR for many years. In 2007, he asked me to co-host a Christmas special with him and we had so much fun with it we decided to make it an annual event. It was a two-hour show that ran for five years, and, not wanting to repeat ourselves from year... View Article
August 20, 2024 2:24 am
Published by Eden Sher
NOV 8, 2023 Hello – Thank you, all, for having me. It’s an honour to receive this award and to be in this distinguished company. All my early musical memories are from Adelaide and perhaps the best way to talk about them is with a series of thank yous. Thank you to my parents, John and Josephine who both loved music. Mum played piano and sang. Dad loved Bach’s Brandenburg concertos and would listen to them every Sunday afternoon. They... View Article
July 5, 2024 4:49 am
Published by ntechmedia
“Sport is one of the few important things that don’t matter.” – John Kingsmill. It starts with the ball. The players may change, wax and wane, but the ball remains. See it just clearing the pack in a game of Australian Rules, hitting the ground and lurching towards goal. Sixty thousand people hold their breath as they follow its sick, confused path. Or see it, rounder now, in the air half a second after the basketballer has released it from... View Article
July 5, 2024 4:23 am
Published by ntechmedia
My job as a singer–songwriter often involves being interviewed. One of the questions I’m asked most frequently, up there with “What comes first, the words or the music?” and “Do you write your songs from real life?”, is “What has been the highlight of your career so far?” There have been many but if I had to name one thing and one thing only, as the ultimate tell-the-grandkids story, it would be the night 20 years ago in New York... View Article
July 5, 2024 4:22 am
Published by ntechmedia
I first heard Bob Randall’s ‘Brown Skin Baby’ by a camp fire in the late ’80s when I was touring with my band in the Northern Territory. The guitars and songs were being passed around along with kangaroo tails singed in the coals. I felt the hairs stand up on my arms from the very first keening notes – “Yowie, yowie, my brown skinned baby, they take ’im away.” Almost everyone there knew the words and sang along. “Yowie, yowie.”... View Article
July 5, 2024 4:19 am
Published by ntechmedia
In show business, you’re generally either the main act or the warm-up. Over 35 years, I’ve been both. A good show needs different and complementary parts. And someone always has to go on first. Opening can be a sweet gig: your price is fixed, your set is short and you don’t have the responsibility of filling the venue. You strut and fret your half-hour or 40 minutes upon the stage and fire your best shots. Sometimes you get over, sometimes... View Article
July 5, 2024 4:18 am
Published by ntechmedia
The spoken interlude has a long history in popular song. And takes a fair bit of nerve to pull off. The singer must step out from behind melody’s curtain and act. Elvis’s famous talking bit in ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ stretches Shakespeare’s actor-on-the-stage-of-life metaphor to breaking point. In later years even Elvis lost his nerve when reciting these bombastic lines. You can hear him on a live recording falter halfway through, giggle, then lapse into gibberish in a classic example... View Article
July 5, 2024 4:18 am
Published by ntechmedia
In my last year of high school the two coolest records were Hot Rats, by Frank Zappa, and Gasoline Alley, by Rod Stewart. (Yes, there once was a time when Rod Stewart was underground.) I wasn’t in the hipster gang, but I knew what they listened to. I managed to get copies on a cassette: Frank on one side, Rod on the other. This was the beauty of the C90 tape. You could always fit two albums on it, because... View Article
