Category Archive: MUSIC
Return of Split Enz
(Adelaide Entertainment Centre, 25 May 2026) Split Enz arrived in Australia in 1975, at that stage more-or-less a New Zealand cabaret act [‘art rock’ as Glenn A. Baker and Stuart Coupe termed it in their book, The New Music (1980)]. Wonderfully weird, their oddball appearance and intricate songs gave them a certain cachet, but after some musicians moved on, the original line-up that included Tim Finn, Eddie Rayner and Noel Crombie were joined by Tim’s brother Neil (later of Crowded House fame, and, briefly, and surprisingly, Fleetwood Mac). Melody Maker opined that “they are one of the few bands with…
Continue Reading →EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
(Directed by Baz Luhrmann) (2025) Luhrmann’s biopic, Elvis – The Movie came out in 2022 (reviewed here), and whilst it was in preparation, Baz learned of the existence of over 60 boxes of 35mm and 8mm film footage of Presley in concert, in rehearsals and interviews. They were stuck in a Warner Bros vault in a salt mine in Kansas, of all places, negatives near to perishing, with no accompanying sound. Luhrmann had to spend a lot of his own money, and two or three years technical time, to have selections of the film retrieved and synced to existing audio….
Continue Reading →Lou, the Velvets, and Nico
(A celebration, at the Governor Hindmarsh, Adelaide, 31 January 2026) The first record I bought with my own money was Transformer, which started a lifelong love of the music of Lou Reed. And a discovery of his really diverse work, travelling from poems of urban depravity to ones of great love and beauty. Did get to see him once, and he was wonderful, but he was definitely emblematic of the truism, ‘never meet your idols.’ Orson Welles didn’t sell a huge amount of tickets, but he made every moviegoer want to be a cinéaste. The Velvet Underground made every amateur…
Continue Reading →Wagner at the Movies
[Richard Wagner Society of SA, Adelaide University, 17 August 2025] Although Wagner, in his essay, foresaw “The Artwork of the Future,” as a communal matter, a ‘fellowship of all artists,’ it is hard to contest Stephen Whittington’s surmise that had Wagner lived in the time of film, he would have been something of an intractable auteur. What one would give to see a discussion between Wagner and Jack Warner, or for that matter, with Errol Flynn. Yet as Stephen pointed out in his entertaining and informative Brian Coghlan Memorial Lecture, the Maestro looms large in the Hollywood firmament (to borrow…
Continue Reading →No Swiss Bliss
(Eurovision Song Contest, Basal, 2025) “in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Thus Harry Lime to Holly Martins in The Third Man, and whilst Orson Welles, who apparently wrote the line, failed to mention the creation of toblerone, there is still a harsh truth about this beautiful, woke, sterile country. So it is a pity that it played…
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