Your Name’s On The Door - 10 Years Of Australian Music
If you love your live music the best words that you will ever hear before a gig have got to be - “Your name’s on the door.” Oh the prestige, the reflected glory! So what a great name for this book by ex-Triple J broadcaster and writer Tracee Hutchison. The book grew out of a number of radio interviews that Tracee gathered in 1990 and as such what we have is a big bundle of first-hand accounts of Australian Rock and Roll in the 80s. This decade was the one that really saw Australian rock and roll come of age and become really respected both here and overseas. As we baby boomers love to say, you really had to be there. So if you are into music and presuming you were born roughly post 1975 so therefore was not there, this is a cracking read. And if you were there Your Name’s On The Door is still a cracking read.
From Johnny O’Keefe through to bands like The Easybeats in the 60s to the early 70s with Helen Reddy and Daddy Cool, Australian pop and rock music was around but it was often highly derivative, manufactured and lacking an Australian essence. Just like the humans who invented it, Oz rock had to grew up and by about 1974 the pieces were coming into place. Countdown, Mushroom Records etc played a part and for every Sherbet and JPY there were other voices coming through that did not sound anything other than Australian e.g. the Skyhook’s classic Living in The 70s album that still sounds fresh. Plus big names like AC/DC, Olivia Newton John, The Bee Gees and The Little River Band were further raising the Oz music profile overseas.
By the mid 70s an incredible live music circuit of venues from the Sunny Coast down and around to Adelaide meant that a band, if they were prepared to work could grow an audience. Anyone who was fortunate to see that circuit at work in the late 70s giving succour to bands as diverse as INXS, Cold Chisel, Split Enz, The Boys Next Door, Flowers, Richard Clapton and Goanna was lucky indeed. I saw Midnight Oil at Brisbane’s Homestead Hotel on, I think the Head Injuries tour with about fifty other people, not because I had been given a tip about the band but that was just what you did no matter who was playing. By then bands like The Saints and Radio Birdman were exploding out of their respective neighbourhoods, punk and DIY and most importantly community radio on the FM dial had arrived.
As Tracee explains it was the 80s when Australian rock music erupted in a hundred different directions. The book, largely due to its radio interviews birth, takes us on the journey year by year, through snippets of interviews with the musicians who were there. Big names like Jimmy Barnes, Kate Ceberano and Paul Kelly, underground legends like Ian Rilen from X and Damian Lovelock from the Celibate Rifles, Ray Ahn from the Hard Ons, Jenny Morris, the now sadly departed greats like Chrissie Amphlett, Ron Peno from Died Pretty, Kev Carmody and Rob Hirst from The Oils. And literally dozens of others from the no hit influencers, the one hit wonders to the almost big, to the still going strong like Nick Cave and Dave Faulkner from the Hoodoo Gurus. These aren’t long interviews, just snippets reflecting on how that particular year of the 80s was for that artist. In between the direct quotes Tracee gives some background on where Australia society or the music industry was at that point. After all the huge explosion in music talent meant a corresponding rise in labels, promoters, shops, venues and publications.
The snack size content makes it easy to dive into a particular year, browse through the whole thing or follow one particular artist. Having bought this book not long after it was first published I still pick it up every few years and give it a look through, marvelling at who is still on the journey, who I’d forgotten and who sadly has passed away. Every time I do, I wonder just where all the those equally talented and passionate but less successful players, singers and songwriters ended up. Anything to do with the arts is tough, as so many are called but very few are chosen. Your Name’s On The Door remembers a lot of them from if not the biggest, then definitely the most important decade in Australian rock and roll.
Recommended Listening
8 tracks from the 80s you might not know or perhaps haven’t thought about in a while.
Can’t Wait to See You- The Eurogliders
Two Cabs To the Toucan – The Models
Billy Baxter – Paul Kelly
The Day Marty Robbins Died – The Johnnys
Rock And Roll Friend – The Go-Betweens
Dead Eyes Opened – Severed Heads
Guns And Butter – Do Re Mi
Dig It Up – Hoodoo Gurus
