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By Peter Farnan
If Triple J’s Hottest 100 is anything to go by, pop is ‘having a moment’ in culture writes musician Peter Farnan The Hottest 100 has drifted over the years from distorted guitars to ukuleles to rhymes and raps to club bangers, all the while displaying a variety of genres. The clearest trend this year appears to be
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By Peter Farnan
The second half of Friday On My Mind: The Easybeats Story airs on ABC TV on Sunday night. Peter Farnan (Boom Crash Opera) reviews the series and asks ‘Is there a secret musical code for international success? Is it in the air, is it in the land, is it in the genes?’ The cultural cringe
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By Peter Farnan
Midnight Oil completed their Great Circle world tour with a concert in Sydney’s Domain on Friday night. Peter Farnan and the Oils go way back. He examines their legacy and continued relevance. *** Midnight Oil live in 2017. This seemed impossible to me. How could the band that used to (literally) tear stages apart with
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By Peter Farnan
In 1987 I used key lines from TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men as the basis of the chorus for an early Boom Crash Opera song, Sleeping Time. They perfectly suited the theme of the song and, in my deluded pretentious under-grad mind, tenuously linked my rock band (on Countdown at the time) with the mighty
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By Peter Farnan
Good songs are both clear and complex. Musician and composer Peter Farnan reflects on this after seeing The Fiery Maze at Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. With lyrics by poet Dorothy Porter, and music by Tim Finn, Farnan ponders the perils of poetry set to music. I first saw Tim Finn perform live in 1975. Split Enz
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By Peter Farnan
Peter Farnan, songwriter and founding member of Boom, Crash, Opera, asks if the century-long shift towards tech-enhanced sound production in popular music has minimised the importance of words, melodies and chords. After you have stripped away the flourishes of performance and production a good song works because of deep, underlying conventions of lyric, melody and accompaniment. A regularly
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By Peter Farnan
Melody. But is it a girl thing, or a boy thing? It goes up (The Beatles), it goes down (Nick Cave), sometimes it just flatlines (Lou Reed). Paul Kelly and Rebecca Barnard sing a duet, Now That Our Babies Have Grown, on Pesky Bones Volume One. Its composer, Peter Farnan, asks ‘when should a melody jump
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By Peter Farnan
Eighteen months ago songwriter, producer and former Boom Crash Opera band member, Peter Farnan, embarked on a new recording project where 12 guest vocalists sing songs written and recorded by him. Farnan’s guests included Paul Kelly, Deborah Conway, Tim Rogers (You Am I), Rebecca Barnard, Sean Kelly (The Models), Sarah Ward (aka Yana Alana), Paul Capsis, Ali Barter, Charles Jenkins, Emily
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By Peter Farnan
There’s the stats and then there’s the texture. Statistically this is how Triple J’s Hottest 100 compares with last year’s: many more dance grooves, less beards, less folky acoustic guitars, less rock, more electronica, slightly less Australian representation (the ABC claim 54% but I counted 52 Australian artists), and a slightly larger female presence (43
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By Peter Farnan
David Bowie, who died yesterday aged 69, took conventional notions of identity in pop and rock, already long-haired and drug-addled after the 1960s, and hyper-blasted them into orbit, creating an explosion of myriad shapes and possibilities. He was a cultural figure who gave many souls in the 1970s and beyond the permission to explore ‘other
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