Podcast appearances and mentions of Joe Camilleri

In the DJ Booth this week is Joe Camilleri, singer/songwriter and frontman for The Black Sorrows.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join Cheryl Lee - That Radio Chick on STILL ROCKIN' IT for news, reviews, music and interviews with some of our favourite Australian musicians.Rai Thistlethwayte, frontman of Thirsty Merc and founding member of The Fabulous Caprettos, joins us for an engaging conversation about his latest musical adventures. From sharing the stage with the Goo Goo Dolls on their electrifying Summer Anthem Tour across Australia to reminiscing about his acid jazz roots with early band The Box, Rai lets us in on the stories behind the music. He also opens up about his collaboration with Delta Goodrem, including a memorable festive performance and a creative songwriting camp escapade in Bali. Dive into the unique sounds and cultural influences that have shaped Rai's musical journey, drawing parallels with icons like Jamiroquai and Brand New Heavies.Meanwhile, we explore the evolving career of legendary musician Russell Morris, who now prefers performances closer to his heart and home. Evergreen and energetic Joe Camilleri and the dynamic Wendy Matthews has joined the tour, bringing fresh energy and to the mix. We celebrate the synergy Wendy adds to the group, harkening back to past collaborations and her memorable contributions at events like the Don Spencer Children's Music Fund show. As we chat about embracing change and honoring the contributions of artists both seasoned and new, you'll discover how the music scene continues to thrive with vibrant, fresh talent.What has Rai Thistlethwayte been up to lately?  Let's find out!!Get out when you can, support local music and I'll see you down the front!!Visit: ThatRadioChick.com.au

Joe Camilleri from The Black Sorrows joined Gina & Adam (subbing in for Matty) to discuss his upcoming gig on the Central Coast, fave songs to perform and so much more.Listen via the Star Player app.Follow us @ginaandmatty on Instagram and Facebook. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Maltese Australian singer-songwriter and musician Joe Camilleri joins Graham Cornes. Listen live on the FIVEAA Player. Follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram. Subscribe on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joe Camilleri is the frontman of The Black Sorrows, and scored numerous hit singles with Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons in the '70s and '80s. The Black Sorrows have a new record out, The Way We Do Business - visit theblacksorrows.com.au for music and gig dates.

Joe Camilleri is an Australian music icon but do you know what sweet treat he hides in his glovebox? What animal he was petrified of as a kid? How the Black Sorrows got their name? And what about Joe's memorable days as a 'vegie roadie'? All is revealed when the man who gave us classic tunes like Hit and Run, Chained to the Wheel and Harley and Rose bares his soul with Sarah and Kevin. Warning: this program may contain traces of peanuts (like Joe's glovebox) and occasional references to food and beverage, but most of all it is a hoot with one of this country's most talented musicians. He is no ordinary Joe!   Check out The Black Sorrow latest album The Way We Do Business and tour dates  https://www.theblacksorrows.com.au/   Presented by Sarah Patterson & Kevin Hillier Broadcast each Sunday on the ACE Radio Network - https://aceradio.com.au/ Catch us also on: The Buzzz - Melbourne's Home of Classic Hits - thebuzzz.com.au Radio 2DD - Easy Listening - On Line - https://www.2dd.online/ Follow us on Facebook...https://www.facebook.com/foodbyteswithsarahpatterson/ Twitter & Instagram - @sarahfoodbytes Post-production by Steve Visscher | Southern Skies Media for Howdy Partners Media | www.howdypartnersmedia.com.au/podcasts © 2024See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Black Sorrows frontman, Joe Camilleri, shares the songs that make 1965 his Best Year Ever.

Its always fun having a yarn with musicians touring Gippsland. In this weeks episode Ed spent some time with ARIA Hall of Famer Joe Camilleri and talked everything from touring, unique headwear and had a laugh about how he is still cleaning up after his children!   Kick back and enjoy a yarn with Joe Camilleri on the Ed For Breakfast Show See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kaz & Tubes chat with Joe Camilleri from The Black Sorrows about their Hobart show tomorrow night. Western United player, Adriana Taranto, previews the A-League soccer matches at North Hobart oval this weekend. And, Scott Harris, Chair of S.H.E Gynaecological Cancer Group, gives details of a new cancer wellness centre for Hobart.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join Cheryl Lee - That Radio Chick on STILL ROCKIN' IT for news, reviews, music and interviews with some of our favourite Australian musicians.Prepare yourself for an intimate rendezvous with the legendary Joe Camilleri. Here, the iconic frontman of Jo Jo Zep & the Falcons and the Black Sorrows lays it all bare. We traverse his musical journey, discuss the creation of his new album, and get a firsthand account of the current state of the music industry. He shares experiences from a recent gig at the Bridgeway in Adelaide, where he relished performing with Wilber Wilde and interacting with his beloved fans.The path of a musician is not always rosy. Joe opens up about the trials he faces, both in his personal life and in the grueling music industry. From health struggles that led to show cancelations to the rigors of doing live performances, Joe's narrative is a testament to unwavering resilience and a fierce love for his craft. His wish for his children to steer clear from the music industry due to its challenges offers a sobering perspective on the glamour often associated with this profession.As we delve deeper into Joe's prolific career, we get a glimpse of his unique talent for creating a soulful connection with his audience during live performances. He recounts his journey of selling hundreds of thousands of records and earning multiple gold singles.  Wrapping up our enchanting conversation, Joe extends nuggets of wisdom, serving as valuable advice for budding musicians. Join us for this extraordinary narrative filled with trials, triumphs, and timeless tunes.Includes Songs:Jo Jo Zep & the Falcons - SecurityThe Black Sorrows - ChiquitaThe Rolling Stones - Paint It BlackThe Black Sorrows - Harley & RoseJohn Denver - Chained To the WheelKevin Borich featuring Joe Camilleri - Don't CryWhat has Joe Camilleri been up to lately … let's find out!To catch up on podcasts from other favourite artists, or for more radio chick stuff simply go to “ThatRadioChick.com.au”. Get out when you can, support local music and I'll see you down the front!!Visit: ThatRadioChick.com.au

Melbourne-born sisters, Vika and Linda Bull, grew up singing at church, and were taught how to harmonize by their Tongan mother. The talented siblings first made their mark as members of Joe Camilleri's The Black Sorrows in the late 1980s, also providing backing vocals for other artists including Hunters and Collectors, Archie Roach, John Farnham, Deborah Conway, and Paul Kelly. In 1994 they left the band to launch their own career as a duo, releasing their debut self-titled album that same year. The album was produced by Kelly, and peaked at No. 7 on the ARIA Albums Chart, reaching certified platinum and nominated for an ARIA Music Award in 1995 for 'Breakthrough Artist – Album'. Vika and Linda had four singles, “Hard Love”, "We've Started a Fire", "When Will You Fall For Me", and "House of Love”, the latter two were featured as backing music on the soap opera, Home and Away. The pair have since had near-inseparable careers, releasing eight studio albums and twenty-one singles, collaborating closely with the likes of Paul Kelly, Diesel and Renée Geyer and cementing their place as national musical treasure. Vika and Linda have a long and decorated music career, with constant critical acclaim, including four ARIA Award nominations for Best Adult Contemporary Album, a Special Recognition Award at the Pacific Music Awards, and performed the national anthem at the AFL Grand Final. In 2019 they were inducted into the Music Victoria Hall of Fame and in 2020, their retrospective album 'Akilotoa: Anthology (1994-2006) entered the Australian charts at number one, making Vika and Linda the first Australian female duo to debut at No. 1. They are currently finalists for the Artistic Excellence Award at the 2023 Australian Women in Music Awards. Their music has traversed genres over the past three decades, incorporating rock, country, gospel, reggae, R&B, soul and blues, as well as paying tribute to their rich Tongan heritage.

Legendary guitarist and singer Kevin Borich has a brilliant new record called Duets, featuring Kevin performing with friends like Leo Sayer, Joe Walsh, Ella Hooper, Joe Camilleri, Ian Moss and Swanee, to name a few. Kevin talks about making the album plus the good old days including writing the La De Das classic Gonna See My baby Tonight.  But wait, there's more: Les Hall and Steve Mulry chat about the new TMG album It is What it is ... Rock On and the single La La plus the plans for the 50th anniversary of the forming of the Ted Mulry Gang.   Thanks to Murcotts Driving Excellence. One phone call could make such a difference to your life. Call them on 1300 555 576 to become a better driver or give a gift certificate to someone you care about. Visit murcotts.edu.au todaySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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S3 E8 Snooks La Vie (Paul Wimbles) is a South Australian born blues/soul/country vocalist and harmonica player who first began to play the harmonica after finding a brand new Hohner Marine band harmonica that was underneath a former partners bed. He began to teach himself how to play whilst sitting outside in his Monaro. He first started out playing on the local scene with a punk band called The Enemy, and switched to playing the blues after his work mate Rubes suggested that he give this genre a try. The pair started out playing together at work functions and it wasn't too long before they put together their first band The Deliverymen, who were later to become The Hiptones (after a few lineup changes.) Snooks had always been a fan of Cold Chisel, and after meeting their harmonica player David Blight at a David Blight and The Flyers gig, Snooks had a few lessons with him before deciding to concentrate on the more traditional blues sound that comes from playing by using the tongue blocking technique. Snooks La Vie acquired his moniker from his friend and music/work colleague Papa Rubes which started out as just a bit of fun and stuck amongst his peers for being known as an avid fan of New Orleans musician ‘Snooks Eaglin'. As former front man of The Hiptones, Snooks has enjoyed the success of awards such as a South Australian Music Award for best blues band/act in 1997, signed to a major label SONYBMG in 2006 and an APRA nomination for best ‘blues/roots' work in 2008. Snooks also took out South Australian Blues Vocalist of the Year for three consecutive years (2008, 2009, and 2010.) The Hiptones recorded their second album "Right Now" at Joe Camilleri's studio Woodstock studios with James Black producing the album. Snooks current bands are Romaldo's Groove, The Dirty Roots Band, and his new band Snooks La Vie's Blues All Star Revue. He also performs in duos with Nikko (Nick Kipridis) and Snooks, Courtney Robb and Snooks, and J J Fields (Sav Palaktsoglou) and Snooks La Vie. Music intro "Band It About" theme song, written and recorded by Catherine Lambert and Michael Bryant. Outro "Walter's Walk" which was released in February 2017 on the Nikko & Snooks album "Way Back Home". https://snookslavie.bandcamp.com/album/way-back-home-nikko-snooks Links: all of the BAND IT ABOUT - Podcast Series links can be located here: https://linktr.ee/banditaboutpodcastseries Snooks La Vie's links: https://www.facebook.com/SnooksLaVie/ https://www.facebook.com/The-Hiptones-29980268497/ https://www.courtneyrobbmusic.com/ https://www.facebook.com/NikkoandSnooks/ BAND IT ABOUT - Podcast Series Host/Creator Di Spillane #snookslavie #thehiptones #hohnerharmonicas #bluesharmonica #rootsmusic #bluesmusic #southaustralia #sonybmg #courtneyrobb #nickkipridis #jjfields #harmonica #mudmorganfield #musicinterviews #musicpodcast #realstories #realpeople #banditaboutpodcastseries #banditabout #dispillane #marinebandharmonica #southaustralianmusicians --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dianne-spillane/message

Warren Moore fills in for Rev. Bill Crews. On this week's show: Flooding in Pakistan of Biblical proportions. Warren Moore talks with Oxfam. Warren replays Rev. Bill Crews's interview with Joe Camilleri. Rev. Tim Costello from the Alliance for Gambling Reform talks with Warren Moore. Mark Pearce from Volunteers Australia tells Warren Moore that volunteering hasn't recovered post-pandemic. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joe Camilleri has been rocking the blues groove for decades and with a string of hits to name has well deserved his place in the ARIA Hall of Fame. Ask him what shape he's in these days and he reckons that he feels 25 on stage, but 105 as soon as he gets off. When he's not touring he retreats to his country home, writes music, prunes the plum trees, and watches Tipping Point with a cup of tea. Supported by HomemadeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The best bits from Mark and Caroline for Breakfast on 92.7 MIX FM

Carol Duncan music feature interview with Joe Camilleri (Jo Jo Zep, Black Sorrows) - July 2014

Carol Duncan music feature interview with Joe Camilleri (Jo Jo Zep, Black Sorrows) - July 2014

After spinning the great new song by queer Irish artist and former guest of the show Wallis Bird, Katie welcomes Australian music legend Joe Camilleri to the studio. Currently on... LEARN MORE The post Joe Camilleri – Show #232 (part 2), 13 February 2022 appeared first on Miss Chatelaine.

Sandy Kaye from abreathoffreshair.com.au brings us news on... Steve Earle and the Dukes, The David Bowie 75th birthday special, the movies "Worst Person in the World" and "Don't Look Up" and  a live concert at the Doncaster Shoppingtown Hotel featuring Joe Camilleri and the Black Sorrows and Models. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

With the release of his 50th Album.  Joe Camilleri joins Simon and Gavin to reminisce over his childhood and amazing career. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Gavin Wood reflects on his interactions with the late Bert Newton.  Then Simon and Gavin are joined by Joe Camilleri to celebrate the release of his 50th album. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Simon Owens show s3e7 show 51  : Not Talking Football guest Wayne Schwass : Showbiz with Sandy Kaye  : Music hour with Gavin Wood (special guests Joe Camilleri)   : Troy Zantuck's TV Triva Hour  : Justin Coombes-Pearce's top 5 of everything (Stand Up Comedians)  : Compilation Conversations : Dave O'Neill - Go For It 1983 : Jamie Duncan's Glory Days : AM Radio stations of Melbourne See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Making a good record. Is really hard… There are so many choices to make… Think about it? Which song do you record? Which studio? What band? What are you having for lunch? The options are endless!And what if this album would be the first, in 17 years. Todays guest are Vika & Linda - one of Australia's most iconic vocal duos. Coming to prominence singing in Joe Camilleri's band The Black Sorrows they went solo in 1994 and released a run of albums, receiving aria noms, a number one record - and continued to feature on some other pretty cool albums with Ross Wilson, Hunter & Collectors, Archie Roach, John Farnham, Deborah Conway and more!We recorded this chat - this year - yes this is a fresh one folks just prior to the release of ‘The Wait' their brand new record that is available now. And we take a deep dive into how Vika and Linda make a record. It's a really fun and interesting look behind the recording process. A quick reminder to follow me everywhere @bradleymccawofficialAnd check our our show notes for links to where to listen to THE WAIT and current tour dates for 2022!Check out new music from my upcoming solo record produced by Louie Shelton and bass legend Nathan East… But we kick off the ramble proceedings with just how much has happened in the last 17 years and eventually get to the important things like lunch in the studio… When the best time to record is during covid and sitting in with Billy Joel's band while on tour with the Piano Man himself. Listen to THE WAITVika & Linda Tour DatesListen to Bradley McCawHosted by Bradley McCawSound design by Matt Erskine & Cross Point SolutionsAssistant Engineering by Gilang CandradityaTheme composed by James Ryan

I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Making a good record. Is really hard… There are so many choices to make… Think about it? Which song do you record? Which studio? What band? What are you having for lunch? The options are endless!And what if this album would be the first, in 17 years. Todays guest are Vika & Linda - one of Australia's most iconic vocal duos. Coming to prominence singing in Joe Camilleri's band The Black Sorrows they went solo in 1994 and released a run of albums, receiving aria noms, a number one record - and continued to feature on some other pretty cool albums with Ross Wilson, Hunter & Collectors, Archie Roach, John Farnham, Deborah Conway and more!We recorded this chat - this year - yes this is a fresh one folks just prior to the release of ‘The Wait' their brand new record that is available now. And we take a deep dive into how Vika and Linda make a record. It's a really fun and interesting look behind the recording process. A quick reminder to follow me everywhere @bradleymccawofficialAnd check our our show notes for links to where to listen to THE WAIT and current tour dates for 2022!Check out new music from my upcoming solo record produced by Louie Shelton and bass legend Nathan East… But we kick off the ramble proceedings with just how much has happened in the last 17 years and eventually get to the important things like lunch in the studio… When the best time to record is during covid and sitting in with Billy Joel's band while on tour with the Piano Man himself. Listen to THE WAITVika & Linda Tour DatesListen to Bradley McCawHosted by Bradley McCawSound design by Matt Erskine & Cross Point SolutionsAssistant Engineering by Gilang CandradityaTheme composed by James Ryan

Brian and Kevin are joined by one of the absolute greats of Australian music, Joe Camilleri. A nicer bloke you would not meet. We're celebrating St. Georges Road - his 50th album release - with a chat about the album and his career to date. Plus part 2 of Lisa Edwards discussing a benefit concert with Yoko Ono, working with John Farnham and meeting Cyndi Lauper.  Thanks to Murcotts Driving Excellence the people who will make you a better driver. Call them 1300 555 576 or visit murcotts.edu.au    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rev. Bill Crews chats to music legend Joe Camilleri about the release of his 50th album "Saint Georges Road." See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A music career spanning over thirty years is sure to have its fair share of ups and downs. For singing sisters Vika and Linda bull they have had their fair share of both. From finding huge success with Joe Camilleri and the Black Sorrows to walking off stage without receive any applause, the girls have experienced both sides of the music industry. Their new album The Wait is out now.

Joe Camillieri from The Black Sorrows Joined John on "The 90s to Now"on 2BACR 100/9FM , we spoke about his amazing music life , and his 50th Album Release / 19th as The Black Sorrows - Saint Georges Road To hear the Music with the podcast click here (only on Spotify) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Saint Georges Road is the the 19th studio album from The Black Sorrows and was released to the world on Sept. 10 through Ambition Records. As if to come full circle for this milestone release, Joe reunited with Grammy nominated Peter Solley - producer of Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons' breakthrough album Screaming Targets (‘79) that featured Joe's first Top 40 hits, Hit and Runand Shape I'm In. Saint Georges Road showcases 11 original tracks written by Joe Camilleri and his long-time writing partner Nick Smith. Before they embarked on the project, Peter Solleyasked Joe one question, “What kind of record do you want to make?” Joe replied, “A good one.” They have certainly achieved that judging by the reviews coming in. The Black Sorrows continue to be one Australia's most prolific and enduringly popular bands renowned for their high-energy live shows, musicianship, and infectious, roots-soaked blues rock. They've sold more than two million albums to date and won an ARIA Award for Best Group. Joe Camilleri has been at the forefront of Australian music for decades as the leader of Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons and The Black Sorrows and as writer of radio anthems Hit & Run, Shape I'm In, Chained To The Wheel, Harley & Rose and Never Let Me Go. Joe Camilleri is an ARIA Hall of Famer and at 73 years old, a rock'n'roll lifer. Not ready to hang up his boots just yet, he's working on his 51st album. It's what he does. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/2bacr90stonow/message

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Tongan-Australian duo. They are well-known as members of Joe Camilleri's The Black Sorrows in late 1980's. They were inducted into Hall of Fame by Music Victoria. - このトンガ系オーストラリア人の姉妹は1980年代後半にジョー・カミレーリのブラックソローズのメンバーになって以来、広く知られています。一昨年にはミュージックビクトリア賞の殿堂入りも果たしました。

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FULL SHOW: Gary's Boxer Dilemma, Joe Camilleri, Alex Tselios, + MORE! 

FULL SHOW: Gary's Boxer Dilemma, Joe Camilleri, Alex Tselios, + MORE! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join Cheryl Lee - That Radio Chick on STILL ROCKIN' IT for news, reviews, music and interviews with some of our favourite Australian musicians.Today I share a zoom chat with Australia's favourite saxophonist, Joe Camilleri from Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons and The Black Sorrows.We chat about growing up in a family with 10 children, his surprising Adelaide connection involving sequins and working with Cold Chisel and Ice House.  Joe also shares how he overcame his Achilles heel and we discuss the brand new album, Joe‘s 50th career album, Saint Georges Road.Includes Songs:Conway Twitty   -   It's Only Make BelieveThe Black Sorrows   -   Chained To The WheelJo Jo Zep & The Falcons   -   So YoungThe Black Sorrows   -   Livin' Like KingsThe Black Sorrows   -   Saint Georges Road What's Joe up to at the moment?   Let's find out .....

This week Clairsy & Lisa caught up with two Aussie music legends, Joe Camilleri from The Black Sorrows & Steve Kilbey from The Church plus find out why comedian Ross Noble had an emergency dash to the hardware store for gaffa tape... 

The Bunch caught up with Joe Camilleri from The Black Sorrows where he revealed the hair product secrets of one of the famous acts on the tour. Also, is David Mundy injured? The Bunch find out straight from the horse’s mouth when he joined them in the studio, Plus Pete Hellier tells Clairsy & Lisa which famous cricketer is set to appear in his show How To Stay Married…

Aussie music legend Joe Camilleri called The Bunch to flog the APIA Good Times Tour where he revealed the hair product secrets of one very famous star on the tour.  

Joe Camilleri is a Maltese Australian singer-songwriter and musician. Joe has recorded as a solo artist and as a member of Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons and The Black Sorrows. The biggest hit for Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons was 'Hit and Run' and the biggest hit for The Black sorrows was 'Chained to the Wheel'. Listen how Joe describes the journey from Malta to the top of the charts. The many different bands that he matured in and his advice to young musicians.

Hearing their Tongan mother’s powerful voice rise above the congregation in church, primed Vika and Linda for a life in song. Their distinctive harmonies and dazzling energy have seen them grace stages and studios for thirty five years 

Hearing their Tongan mother’s powerful voice rise above the congregation in church, primed Vika and Linda for a life in song. Their distinctive harmonies and dazzling energy have seen them grace stages and studios for thirty five years 

Visit: www.salty.com.au Recorded 19 May 2020, released 9 June 2020 as standalone interview podcast. Salty and Joey Vincent (Joe Camilleri) take time out for a long fireside chat. Joey's new chart topping Bakelite Radio release "Rosary of Tears" is the focus, but we cover everything from the Black Sorrows, living in the pandemic to the reason why musicians never give up their muse. Some choice cuts throughout. Enjoy! 320 kbps

Visit: www.salty.com.au Recorded 19 May 2020, released 9 June 2020 as standalone interview podcast. Salty and Joey Vincent (Joe Camilleri) take time out for a long fireside chat. Joey's new chart topping Bakelite Radio release "Rosary of Tears" is the focus, but we cover everything from the Black Sorrows, living in the pandemic to the reason why musicians never give up their muse. Some choice cuts throughout. Enjoy! 320 kbps

The Black Sorrows front man Joe Camilleri will soon release his 50th album. Awarded ‘living legend’ status by Rolling Stone, he has kicked a staggering number of goals over his 50+ years in music as a singer, songwriter, musician, performer and producer with both the Sorrows and Jo Jo Zep and the Falcon. In their chat, the Hall of Fame muso shares with Matt how he is going in COVID-19 lock down and why he is not proud of his bread-making skills.

Salty Dog's CURB Podcast, April 2020 Visit: www.salty.com.au While we surpress and curb the virus, some toons for your isolation tone hounds. Stream em down, all hand selected and mighty fine. Tracks from Vin Mott, Junior Kimbrough, Lazy Eye, Jeff Lang, Billy Bragg N Wilco, Jeffery Foucault, John Hammond, Laurie Sargent, Lucinda Williams, Paul Butterfield, Charlie Bedford, Lindsay Beaver, Altered Five Blues Band, Amy Lavere, Rhiannon Giddens, Boz Scaggs, Giles Robson, Raisins In The Sun, Ryan Perry, Woodland Hunters, Twinemen, Nick Cave N Grinderman, Joe Camilleri's Bakelite Radio, John Moreland. ----------- ARTIST / TRACK / ALBUM ** Australia 1. Vin Mott / Quit The Women For The Blues / Quit The Women For The Blues 2. Junior Kimbrough / How Do You Feel / God Knows I Tried 3. ** Lazy Eye / Game Over / Whisky N Gin 4. ** Jeff Lang / Prepare Me Well / Live Royal Derby 1998 5. Billy Bragg N Wilco / California Stars / Mermaid Avenue 6. Jeffery Foucault / Call Off The Dogs / Cold Satellite 7. John Hammond / Slick Crown Vic / Ready For Love 8. Laurie Sargent / Without Letting Go / Heads N Tales 9. Lucinda Williams / You Can't Rule Me / Good Souls better Angels 10. Paul Butterfield's Better Days / Baby Please Don't Go / Paul Butterfield's Better Days 11. ** Charlie Bedford / Money Junkie / Good To Go 12. Lindsay Beaver / Oh Yeah / Tough As Love 13. Altered Five Blues Band / On My List To Quit / Charmed N Dangerous 14. Amy LaVere / Damn Love Song / Stranger Me 15. Rhiannon Giddens / I'm On My Way / there is no Other 16. Boz Scaggs / On The Beach / Out Of The Blues 17. Giles Robson / Your Dirty Look N Sneaky Grin / Don't Give Up On The Blues 18. Raisins In The Sun / Candy From A Stranger / Raisins In The Sun 19. Ryan Perry / High Risk, Low Reward / High Risk, Low Reward 20. ** The Woodland Hunters / Bad Voodoo at the Tiki Bar / Pale Horse 21. Twinemen / The End Of My Dreams / Twinetime 22. ** Nick Cave N Grinderman / Love Bomb / Grinderman 23. ** Joe Camilleri's Bakelite Radio / Down Home Radio / Rosary Of Tears 24. John Moreland / Let me Be Understood / LP5

The Black Sorrows with Joe Camilleri in conversation with David Eastaugh

Joseph Vincent Camilleri - Jo Jo Zep & The Falcons, The Black Sorrows, 24 Albums in the bag, over 2 million records sold and still going strong. Elvis Costello and John Denver covered his songs... from working at the slaughterhouse at the age of 13 the only way was up and Joe Camilleri showed us exactly how that's done.

1) His week that was- Kevin Healy 2) Speeches from the CIDC (Campaign for International Cooperation and Disarmament) 60th anniversary celebrations at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on 10th November- featuring John Lloyd, Marian Harper, Bruce McPhee, Joan Coxsedge, Joe Camilleri 3) Coup in Bolivia- Fred Fuentes- journalist, author and activist 4) Commentary from social activist Joan Coxsedge

On Sunday 10 November 2019, CICD celebrated its 60th Anniversary. There were number of brilliant speakers.In today’s program you will hear Prof. Joe Camilleri from Pax Christi and Joan Coxsedge Artist and peace activist.

Bill Risby. Pianist, bass player, composer and songwriter from Sydney, Australia. Bill started piano at age 3, and after progressing through classical grades, studied Jazz at the NSW Conservatorium of Music. He took up bass guitar at age 13 and bass was his second instrument at the Con. He is now regarded as one of the most accomplished musicians in his field, in jazz, improvised and popular music. Bill has played with many visiting jazz artists such as Bob Mintzer, Maria Schneider, Kitty Margolis, Velotti Batiste jazz ensemble, Wayne Bargeron, Bobby Shew, Rob McConnell, amongst others. He is the pianist for pop artist Leo Sayer, played on his latest two albums, and also toured extensively with him. He played piano on Glenn Shorrock's latest album “Rise Up”. He played on Russell Morris's recent ARIA award winning C.D. “Red Dirt - Red Heart”, and on Ian Moss's new album. Bill has also played with Spandau Ballet, the Supremes, The Temptations, Russell Morris, Joe Camilleri, Richard Clapton, Glenn Shorrock, Marcia Hines, and supported Dionne Warwick, and Steve Lacy. In country music Bill has played on many albums of the following artists: John Williamson, Kasey Chambers, Adam Harvey, Troy Cassar-Daley, Adam Brand, Gina Jeffreys, Beccy Cole, Melinda Schneider, Graeme Connors, Sara Storer, Lyn Bowtell, and Felicity Urquhart. He piano playing was featured in the films, “Australia”, “The Great Gatsby”, David Wenham's new film “Ellipsis”, as well as being the sound of Peter Allen's piano in the Recent Australian Tele-movie “Not The Boy Next Door.” Bill has 9 albums to his name, and is on the Ponca Jazz recording label (Norway), and Universal Music. Episode music:  "Let Me Off" from "Looking Up - Bill Risby" (Bill Risby - Piano. Gary Holgate - Double Bass. Hamish Stuart - Drums) Episode recorded 24/09/2019. http://www.billrisby.com https://www.instagram.com/oasisbill/?hl=en https://oasisbill.zenfolio.com https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bill+risby Rick Beato. https://youtu.be/vXivZlPu0ms  http://www.poncajazzrec.no/risby/     -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://www.thegiglifepodcast.com https://www.facebook.com/thegiglifepodcast/ https://www.instagram.com/thegiglifepodcast/?hl=en https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5KahER1yXZQP3rh1mhSUqX?si=0O1lB7TJTaKfuD34xm7B7w Email: thegiglifepodcast@gmail.com #thegiglifepodcast  #thegiglife  

  In this triple header Brian Wise talks to three genuine Australian legends: Russell Morris, Richard Clapton and Joe Camilleri who performed on the first night of Bluesfest 2019 on the Jambalaya stage where the line-up included Arlo Guthrie and Mavis Staples with Russell, Richard and Joe following. Russell talks about his new album (and the 50th anniversary of 'The Real Thing'), Richard reveals a new secret project, and Joe discusses his 49th album and his 18th with the Black Sorrows.

2013 has given Australian music icon, Russell Morris, an unexpected hit record some 44 years after his first national number one smash with pop-psychedelic smash, The Real Thing. I produced this music feature with Russell in 2014, although I first met him in about 1992 when I interviewed him in Hobart. He's smart, funny, brilliant and has always been just bloody fabulous and generous to me. Except for that time he rang my show to wish me a happy birthday and I thought he was JPY! Sorry, Russell! xxAustralian music industry icon Russell Morris joined Carol Duncan's program while doing a series of performances in Newcastle and surrounds. (Carol Duncan:Carol Duncan)"This album (Sharkmouth) was done out of a labour of love because I like roots and blues music and I'd always wanted to do a roots and blues album.""I chose Australian history because I've always loved any type of history. You'd think the two kisses of death for a gold album would be blues and Australian history, so it wasn't done with the intention, it was just done as a labour of love which has proved to be really enlightening.""Producer Mitch Cairns' foresight was out of desperation of staying alive. At that stage, Brian Cadd who I was working with, had decided that he was going overseas and he dropped the bomb on us that he might not be coming back.""At that stage Jim Keays was very sick and Mitch said, "You've gotta do something or we won't have any work!" And I said, "Well, I've got the blues album," and he said, "Well, FINISH IT!""It is a great thing (the success of Sharkmouth) and I have to thank particularly the ABC because they ABC embraced it from day one and just went 'bang', but the commercial stations just didn't want to know. The ABC just broke it right across the country.""If anyone was going to have a gold record this year you'd have put me at the bottom of the list.""I think what happens with a lot of my peers, a lot of people will see a new record and whether it's from Joe Camilleri, Daryl Braithwaite - they pre-judge it and don't listen to it.""I remember when we first started in Melbourne, Ian Meldrum said to me, "We'll go and see Stan Rofe at 3AW." Stan Rofe was a big star to me, he was on air and I'd heard him on the radio station and I said, "Well how are we going to do that?" and he said, "We'll just go up to the radio station!""So we went up to the radio station and walked in and Stan came down and had a cup of tea with us. Ian said, "We've got this, what do you think?" and Stan said, 'Love it, I'll play it.'And that's what it was like.""Well, Mitch and I spoke about it (initial expectations of Sharkmouth) and I said if we're lucky we might sell 5,000 copies, if we can get an independent release.""We'd have sold them at gigs to try and get our money back and if we had a small deal with a company and sold 5,000 or 8,000 we'd have made the money back." Gold status is in 2013 is 35,000 and Sharkmouth is now creeping up towards platinum - it's around 60,000 now and platinum is 70,000.""When I did the unplugged album with Liberation it sold around 8,000 so it's been a great experience for both of us.""We signed to an independent record company and they took it and then rang me up, the first time it went in to the charts at about number 89, then it jumped to 49 and I was over the moon. I rang Mitch and we celebrated, and then the next week it jumped 20 places again and it just kept going right up into the top 10."Russell has continued a great tradition started by The Beatles of being turned down by every record company in the country and then having a success."I tell you what is ironic, The Real Thing was turned down as well. EMI hated it, they thought it was the biggest load of rubbish they'd ever heard.""EMI didn't want to release it, they were only going to release it in Melbourne to try and make their money back because I had a following in Melbourne, so Ian Meldrum and I got in a car and drove to Sydney to go and see all the (radio) program managers because at that stage you could knock on the door of these commercial stations before they became corporate and say, "Can I speak to the program manager," "Here's the song, what do you think, our record company think it's a load of rubbish, would you play it?" 'Of course we'll play it, will you sign that?'"So we signed a petition that came out to really stick it to the record company. Radio and record companies at that stage weren't getting along very well. It was just prior to the record ban where radio wanted to stop paying royalties to radio for playing songs on the air."Russell Morris is thought of as having lots of pop hits and a pure voice but he dabbled in blues back in the 1970s when he used musicians from Chain on one of his albums."They were my favourite band. I always use Barry Harvey and Barry Sullivan always, on everything, and I'd always used Phil Manning, so strangely enough it's actually Phil Manning playing all those licks in 'Sweet, Sweet Love' and you'd think, 'Who's this syrupy guitar player?' and it's Phil Manning!""It's (blues) where I wanted to head but I was painted into a corner once I had a pop hit and the record company saying, 'You've got to produce another hit!' and it became a factory after a while. You get caught in it.""I actually wished Chain had been my band because it would have taken me on a whole other direction. I don't think Ian, Molly, would have been too happy although at that stage we'd sort of split.""He's still my best mate but we'd had a couple of professional disagreements. He saw me as Australia's Davey Jones from The Monkees or some such thing and I wanted to go in a different direction completely as a singer/songwriter so we differed on the way we were going and the record company was pressuring for another single, but I really would have loved to be with a band like Chain.""But your fate is your fate. Whatever happens, those doors open and close for a reason and maybe if I'd started it earlier then it wouldn't have worked.""I was happy doing The Real Thing, I quite liked psychedelia. I didn't like pop a lot but I remember Ian (Molly Meldrum) had done a number of songs with me and we'd done 'Only A Matter of Time' which I absolutely loathe, it was on the back of The Real Thing, and a couple of pop songs and I said to Ian, 'This is rubbish, we're not going in the direction I want to go,' I said, 'I'm not John Farnham, I'm not Ronnie Burns and I'm not Normie Rowe. I want to do something that they wouldn't even contemplate thinking about doing. I want to go in that direction. Let's go psychedelia, let's go into something more band oriented than a pop single.'"Ian, to his credit, agreed and said, 'You're right, they're not different enough."Russell Morris actually had a whole album ready to go at one stage and decided it wasn't good enough and he wanted to re-record the whole thing."EMI had gotten a record producer and he'd gotten a head of steam up and away he went. I tend to go along with things and say to people, 'I don't know if this is the right thing ...' and they don't listen, they don't listen ... and all of a sudden they go, 'You know what? Scrap it.' And that's what happened. He went ahead and put strings and brass on everything and it just drove me insane. I said to him, 'I'm not releasing it."Russell Morris on recording The Real Thing."We used 8-track recording for The Real Thing. There was only two tracks for the effects, one for the vocals, everything just kinda got bounced down, I don't think we even slaved another machine to worry about generations. I think we did slave another machine for the effects.""I cannot take any credit for it. Ian Meldrum was the total architect, it was his concept from start to finish.""A lot of it was trial and error, experimentation, but giving Molly his dues he doesn't know what he wants in the studio but when he stumbles across it he knows instinctively that it's right. Everyone else will be nodding off at 3am and he'll have had some poor bloody guitar player out there playing the part over and over, 'No! Try it this way! Try something else! Make it sound like stars!' And that's what happens."In December 2011, Ian 'Molly' Meldrum had a serious fall while at home which for a while it seemed he wouldn't survive."He wasn't putting up Christmas lights. I was with him that day and I think that was a story that got fed around.""I was there that day, the reason he fell is because of him. We were doing a song for Jerry Ryan who was doing The Green Edge, the cycling team, and I was doing a duet with Vanessa Amorosi.""Ian had the master tapes and he said, 'Can you take these down to Sing Sing as you're going home?" So I left. "He was about to head to Thailand and he probably thought he'd catch some extra rays of sun. He's got a latter cemented into the side of his wall which goes up to a sun deck. He was climbing up there with his mobile phone, his cigarettes and trying to juggle those and lost his balance and fell.""He would have died except his gardener, Joe, happened to be there. It was real touch and go as to whether he was going to survive but he's great now.""It was funny. They (the hospital) said, 'Ian wants to see you in hospital. You cannot talk to him about mobile phones. If he asks for your mobile phone you cannot give it to him. If he asks for drinks you can't go and get him one. Do not talk to him about getting out of hospital.""It was horrifying. I thought I was going to get in there and expected to see Ian sitting in a wheelchair and drinking soup through a straw, but I got in there and there he is sitting with his baseball cap on and his tracksuit reading the paper!""I said, 'Ian, I expected you to be sitting here dribbling, everyone's given me such a hard time!' And he said, 'Oh they're all such pains in the ....' "And they'd said to me, 'You cannot stay any longer than 20 minutes and if he shows any aggravation you have to leave immediately.""My 20 minutes came up and I said I'd better go but he said, 'Don't be ridiculous!" "I ended up staying for two hours.""I was also off to Thailand and flew out the next day. I got to Thailand and I got an email from Amanda Pelman who is Brian Cadd's partner who's great friend of Ian's, and it says, 'What have you done? Where is Ian? You were the last person to see him and now he's disappeared?""After I left, Ian started to figure out how to get out of there because you can't get out of the ward without a special card and the nurses won't let you out.""He conjured this story and told told them, 'I've decided to do physio' which he'd been refusing to do, and they said, 'Oh that's great Ian, when do you want to start, Monday?""He said, 'I want to start now, if you want me to do physio I want to go over and have a look and do it now.'" So they took him.""They got a nurse to take him over and took him down the street and as they got to the street he turned one way and just kept walking.""They couldn't find him!"

James Reyne - Friday Music Show feature interview 2014James Reyne has an enviable career in the Australian music industry - first appearing on ABC TV's Countdown in 1979 with both of his arms in plaster after being hit by a car in Melbourne.Australian Crawl held court around Australia's pub rock scene for just seven years, but the sound of the band and the themes of their songs are the story of numerous Australian summers.As a solo artist, James Reyne has released over a dozen albums, continued to tour Australia and internationally with audiences of up to 200,000 people.ABC Newcastle's Carol Duncan caught up with James Reyne ahead of his Anthology tour."I'm enjoying it more now than I ever have. I've developed an attitude over the many years that I've been doing this that it's amusing. You can't let most of it worry you. Certainly most of the people of my generation who were in it for the wrong reasons or the shifty ones have been weeded out. There are still a couple floating around and you run into them occasionally and think, 'How is this person still here?'Knowing my attempt to get James to name names will be rebuffed, I ask anyway.He laughs, "No, I'm not going to name any names because they're usually quite litigious people anyway.""I just think it's quite amusing. It's like a crash-course in human nature. You see a lot of extremes of human personality in quite a short time, and up close!""I've made some fantastic friends and there are some wonderful, wonderful people who work in this industry and most people are genuine with depth and credibility."James Reyne, particularly given the success and image of Australian Crawl, is perhaps seen by many as the quintessential sun-kissed Australian, yet like so many of his generation of peers he wasn't actually born here."The ten-pound Pom thing, and Adelaide - the ten-pound Pom into Adelaide. It astounds me. A little city like that, the amount of music that came out of there either British or Scottish-based. We owe Adelaide. But yes, I was born in Nigeria,""My father was an Englishman in the Royal Marines, he was ADC to the Queen, but he left. He didn't want to be a career soldier. He got a job with BP and he was posted to Nigeria. My (Australian) mother and he were not long married and they went to Nigeria when he was posted there. He'd be out in the field and she'd be sitting in a house in Lagos and my brother and I were both born there.""I was tiny, three or four, when we came to Australia. I have a really vague memory of one little thing in Nigeria, but I don't really have any other memories of it."James Reyne is heading toward 40 years in the Australian music industry with a career that has taken him to stages around the world with massive audiences, but names Creedence Clearwater Revival as one of the first bands he remembers hearing on the radio."There were probably things I heard before that but I remember hearing Creedence and thinking, 'Wow! What is that? I want to do that!' I'd have been 10 or 11 and it was probably Proud Mary or Born on the Bayou or something like that. I've been a total fan of John Fogerty ever since. I love all the Creedence stuff and some of his solo stuff. Like everybody, it was my formative years, I just love all that and that led me into other things and I was just hooked,""There was a great show on the ABC called 'Room to Move' and it was hosted by a guy called Chris Winter. I think it was a Sunday or Monday night, quite late; we used to listen to it on the radio under the bedclothes. A few years ago I did a show with Tracee Hutchison on ABC 2 and Chris was our producer, I remember going, 'Chris Winter WOW!'""He was brilliant, and I was hooked. His whole approach, his on-air style, his whisper - it was brilliant. So I fell in love with that, it was the first sort of album show. Then I started to get into albums with my friends at school. We'd collect albums and we had a little folk club - we got quite serious about"I remember really loving records from Creedence, Little Feat, Ry Cooder, Jerry Jeff Walker but I think Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks 'Last Train to Hicksville' - as a whole album there's not a dud moment on it. So if anyone can find it, get it. It's brilliant. The whole history of Dan Hicks and his influence - he was in a band with a guy called Robert Hunter who essentially invented the San Francisco scene. This is before The Grateful Dead and so on. I was really in to the sociology of it - the background of who influenced who,""I used to pore over the album covers and sleeves and read all the liner notes. I don't know that there's much you can put on liner notes now that would be as interesting as they were then. That was your only access because there was no Google or anything. Your only access to any information about the band is what was in the liner notes."By the time James Reyne was just 20 years old, his band with a group of art college mates had been renamed Australian Crawl and taken off on the pub circuit, and although James admits that although they had no idea what they were doing, they were having fun."I was never thinking, 'This will be my career' or 'this will be my job' or 'this will be something I'll do for another 30 or so years and keep doing',""We weren't very good. The first band was terrible! But you've got to do your apprenticeship and you start learning. But I wasn't aware of it, we were just doing it."James Reyne has always appeared to be a complex person; well-spoken, intelligent, thoughtful, possibly a bit feisty. What about the 20-year old James Reyne?"I was at the Victorian College of the Arts Drama School and it was about then that we all had to make a decision, are we going to do our tertiary courses or are we going to do this band thing? I guess it wasn't so much 'serious' but we figured, 'I guess you've got to make a decision and if you're going to do it you have to dedicate yourself to it'.""But the 20-year old was, I dunno, pretty happy-go-lucky. He had a big mouth."Was he confident?"I guess relatively confident, but if I saw what I thought was a 'real' band or anybody from a real band somewhere down the street, (I thought) they were a cut above me. I never thought I'd be breathing that rarefied air. I just thought 'those guys must have an extra gene'.""Joe Camilleri. I'd see The Falcons all the time, I'd see The Sports, I'd see The Pelaco Brothers and Joe and Steve Cummings were in The Pelaco Brothers.""Where we grew up on the Mornington Peninsula, in summertime they used to have bands come down and play in the boat clubs down there. Every club had a boat house that they'd put a stage in and bands would play in there,""In my last year of school I used to go to a place called Reefer Cabaret in Melbourne at a place called the Ormond Hall and I remember I loved Arial, I loved Spectrum, Chain - I loved all those great 70s Australian bands. I remember going to the Myer Music Bowl when Thorpey (Billy Thorpe) had 200,000 people there. I was a fan of all that stuff. I remember seeing Skyhooks before Shirley (Strachan) joined. I was aware of Shirley, I didn't know him, but I was aware of him because there was a surf band that played around where we grew up called Frame and Shirley was the singer of that band. He was such a personality, everybody was aware of him.""It was certainly a very unique time and a very formative time for Australian music, for Australian rock and roll and pop music. This is pre-Countdown and any of that stuff and there were so many great bands around; The Dingoes, Carson - I was a huge fan of Broderick Smith. What an incredible presence on stage, incredible singer and harmonica player. He was in a band called Carson, sort of boogie/blues band, and then they went and formed The Dingoes,""I used to see as many Dingoes shows as I could. There's a pub in Prahran called the Station Hotel, I used to go to the Station Hotel quite a lot and they'd have Saturday afternoon sessions where The Dingoes would often play. That would just devolve into fantastic mayhem."I've interviewed James Reyne a few times over the last 20-plus years and I've never quite felt convinced that he's entirely at peace with his back catalogue of wonderful work. I have often wondered if he perhaps underestimates the importance of his music to his fans. Is this why it's taken so long to get Anthology together?"Well, it's actually got very little to do with me! A record company merger meant that the new label realised that the Australian Crawl back catalogue wasn't available digitally, and although they can kind of do whatever they want because they own the masters, they asked if I wanted to do it and bring it up to date. I paid for my more recent solo records so I made a list of about 50 or 60 songs, cut it back down to about 40. And good on them. They've put the solo stuff on there, the ones that people would know, but it's a good cross-section of all of it right up to the most recent stuff. Why did it take so long? I never thought of it! It's just the story so far, I'll keep making records."But has he been dissatisfied with the big machine of the music industry?"I'm not so naive as to think that's just the nature of how it works. You're there as long as they need you and then you're not and that's fine and that's the way it works. No, it's not dissatisfaction, a lot of my amusement or ammunition I can get for song writing is just human beings. So aspirational but so easily impressed. People get so easily impressed with all sorts of things, not just the entertainment industry,""But I think we're all aware now with the media generally people are drip-fed what they're supposed to be hearing and seem to lap it up. And adopt these opinions! They read a crappy headline and that becomes their opinion and they know all about it! Well, no, you don't. You haven't studied the situation in the Middle East. You don't know.""In terms of the entertainment industry I find a lot of fodder in the way people are so easily impressed and so aspirational about all this silliness."In a time when independence is increasingly a healthy option for artists and creatives of all sorts, does James Reyne feel there is a disconnect between the work of an artist and what a corporate entity only sees as 'product'?"I think the role of the big, big record companies is getting less and changing. Certainly changing, they're less significant in the scheme of things. They're still there and still part of it but I think the disconnect between art and commerce is always going to be there."And yet independence is creating a healthy relationship between the artist and the audience, particularly via crowd funding - Kate Miller-Heidke being a good case in point. Kate says that crowd funding O' Vertigo cuts out the middle man and brings her back into a relationship with the people who love her music."That's right. I think the response was so good she raised more than she needed, which shows how loyal her fan base is. I didn't understand it when it first started happening, but I do now. I think it's a very viable development.""The last four solo records I've made I've paid for myself and then licensed them to a distribution company - it gets quite expensive and you're never really going to make your money back.""I still love writing, I write more now than I ever have and I think I write better because it's a craft and I've been doing it longer, I apply myself more to it now than I ever have.""I'd like to think I'm a songwriter who is always learning, trying to get better and trying to improve the craft. I'm quite self-critical. I've also written a few other things but I won't talk about them because I've learnt that you jinx them until these things get up and running!"James Reyne's career has also included varying degrees of success as an actor - harking back to his tertiary studies at the Victoria College of Arts Drama School. Is there more he wants to do other than music?"Oh plenty! I've got about five things bubbling along at the moment. A few times people have said, 'James, you've got to write the book'. I'm not going to write the book! The world doesn't need another rock autobiography and I think unless you can write the real book and name names," James laughs, "you're going to get the pasteurised version of something of nothing ...." Who wants to hear that stuff? It's boring. It's been done. That's not to say anything bad about anyone who has written a rock biography, because some of them I know and they're lovely people. Mark Seymour wrote a great one. I loved Mark's (book). He's a friend and a good writer."On a roll, the tongue remains firmly in cheek."I always wanted to do 'Australian Crawl The Musical' and you either do it as a really bad kids' play and get kids to play it with terrible home-made props or you do the most stonkingly gay thing you've ever seen with a chorus of boys in tight board shorts! We could do that!"I suspect I'd be happy to see either version and after interview number whatever over a couple of decades, James Reyne actually sounds more genuinely comfortable in his own skin than he ever has.

2013 has given Australian music icon, Russell Morris, an unexpected hit record some 44 years after his first national number one smash with pop-psychedelic smash, The Real Thing. I produced this music feature with Russell in 2014, although I first met him in about 1992 when I interviewed him in Hobart. He's smart, funny, brilliant and has always been just bloody fabulous and generous to me. Except for that time he rang my show to wish me a happy birthday and I thought he was JPY! Sorry, Russell! xxAustralian music industry icon Russell Morris joined Carol Duncan's program while doing a series of performances in Newcastle and surrounds. (Carol Duncan:Carol Duncan)"This album (Sharkmouth) was done out of a labour of love because I like roots and blues music and I'd always wanted to do a roots and blues album.""I chose Australian history because I've always loved any type of history. You'd think the two kisses of death for a gold album would be blues and Australian history, so it wasn't done with the intention, it was just done as a labour of love which has proved to be really enlightening.""Producer Mitch Cairns' foresight was out of desperation of staying alive. At that stage, Brian Cadd who I was working with, had decided that he was going overseas and he dropped the bomb on us that he might not be coming back.""At that stage Jim Keays was very sick and Mitch said, "You've gotta do something or we won't have any work!" And I said, "Well, I've got the blues album," and he said, "Well, FINISH IT!""It is a great thing (the success of Sharkmouth) and I have to thank particularly the ABC because they ABC embraced it from day one and just went 'bang', but the commercial stations just didn't want to know. The ABC just broke it right across the country.""If anyone was going to have a gold record this year you'd have put me at the bottom of the list.""I think what happens with a lot of my peers, a lot of people will see a new record and whether it's from Joe Camilleri, Daryl Braithwaite - they pre-judge it and don't listen to it.""I remember when we first started in Melbourne, Ian Meldrum said to me, "We'll go and see Stan Rofe at 3AW." Stan Rofe was a big star to me, he was on air and I'd heard him on the radio station and I said, "Well how are we going to do that?" and he said, "We'll just go up to the radio station!""So we went up to the radio station and walked in and Stan came down and had a cup of tea with us. Ian said, "We've got this, what do you think?" and Stan said, 'Love it, I'll play it.'And that's what it was like.""Well, Mitch and I spoke about it (initial expectations of Sharkmouth) and I said if we're lucky we might sell 5,000 copies, if we can get an independent release.""We'd have sold them at gigs to try and get our money back and if we had a small deal with a company and sold 5,000 or 8,000 we'd have made the money back." Gold status is in 2013 is 35,000 and Sharkmouth is now creeping up towards platinum - it's around 60,000 now and platinum is 70,000.""When I did the unplugged album with Liberation it sold around 8,000 so it's been a great experience for both of us.""We signed to an independent record company and they took it and then rang me up, the first time it went in to the charts at about number 89, then it jumped to 49 and I was over the moon. I rang Mitch and we celebrated, and then the next week it jumped 20 places again and it just kept going right up into the top 10."Russell has continued a great tradition started by The Beatles of being turned down by every record company in the country and then having a success."I tell you what is ironic, The Real Thing was turned down as well. EMI hated it, they thought it was the biggest load of rubbish they'd ever heard.""EMI didn't want to release it, they were only going to release it in Melbourne to try and make their money back because I had a following in Melbourne, so Ian Meldrum and I got in a car and drove to Sydney to go and see all the (radio) program managers because at that stage you could knock on the door of these commercial stations before they became corporate and say, "Can I speak to the program manager," "Here's the song, what do you think, our record company think it's a load of rubbish, would you play it?" 'Of course we'll play it, will you sign that?'"So we signed a petition that came out to really stick it to the record company. Radio and record companies at that stage weren't getting along very well. It was just prior to the record ban where radio wanted to stop paying royalties to radio for playing songs on the air."Russell Morris is thought of as having lots of pop hits and a pure voice but he dabbled in blues back in the 1970s when he used musicians from Chain on one of his albums."They were my favourite band. I always use Barry Harvey and Barry Sullivan always, on everything, and I'd always used Phil Manning, so strangely enough it's actually Phil Manning playing all those licks in 'Sweet, Sweet Love' and you'd think, 'Who's this syrupy guitar player?' and it's Phil Manning!""It's (blues) where I wanted to head but I was painted into a corner once I had a pop hit and the record company saying, 'You've got to produce another hit!' and it became a factory after a while. You get caught in it.""I actually wished Chain had been my band because it would have taken me on a whole other direction. I don't think Ian, Molly, would have been too happy although at that stage we'd sort of split.""He's still my best mate but we'd had a couple of professional disagreements. He saw me as Australia's Davey Jones from The Monkees or some such thing and I wanted to go in a different direction completely as a singer/songwriter so we differed on the way we were going and the record company was pressuring for another single, but I really would have loved to be with a band like Chain.""But your fate is your fate. Whatever happens, those doors open and close for a reason and maybe if I'd started it earlier then it wouldn't have worked.""I was happy doing The Real Thing, I quite liked psychedelia. I didn't like pop a lot but I remember Ian (Molly Meldrum) had done a number of songs with me and we'd done 'Only A Matter of Time' which I absolutely loathe, it was on the back of The Real Thing, and a couple of pop songs and I said to Ian, 'This is rubbish, we're not going in the direction I want to go,' I said, 'I'm not John Farnham, I'm not Ronnie Burns and I'm not Normie Rowe. I want to do something that they wouldn't even contemplate thinking about doing. I want to go in that direction. Let's go psychedelia, let's go into something more band oriented than a pop single.'"Ian, to his credit, agreed and said, 'You're right, they're not different enough."Russell Morris actually had a whole album ready to go at one stage and decided it wasn't good enough and he wanted to re-record the whole thing."EMI had gotten a record producer and he'd gotten a head of steam up and away he went. I tend to go along with things and say to people, 'I don't know if this is the right thing ...' and they don't listen, they don't listen ... and all of a sudden they go, 'You know what? Scrap it.' And that's what happened. He went ahead and put strings and brass on everything and it just drove me insane. I said to him, 'I'm not releasing it."Russell Morris on recording The Real Thing."We used 8-track recording for The Real Thing. There was only two tracks for the effects, one for the vocals, everything just kinda got bounced down, I don't think we even slaved another machine to worry about generations. I think we did slave another machine for the effects.""I cannot take any credit for it. Ian Meldrum was the total architect, it was his concept from start to finish.""A lot of it was trial and error, experimentation, but giving Molly his dues he doesn't know what he wants in the studio but when he stumbles across it he knows instinctively that it's right. Everyone else will be nodding off at 3am and he'll have had some poor bloody guitar player out there playing the part over and over, 'No! Try it this way! Try something else! Make it sound like stars!' And that's what happens."In December 2011, Ian 'Molly' Meldrum had a serious fall while at home which for a while it seemed he wouldn't survive."He wasn't putting up Christmas lights. I was with him that day and I think that was a story that got fed around.""I was there that day, the reason he fell is because of him. We were doing a song for Jerry Ryan who was doing The Green Edge, the cycling team, and I was doing a duet with Vanessa Amorosi.""Ian had the master tapes and he said, 'Can you take these down to Sing Sing as you're going home?" So I left. "He was about to head to Thailand and he probably thought he'd catch some extra rays of sun. He's got a latter cemented into the side of his wall which goes up to a sun deck. He was climbing up there with his mobile phone, his cigarettes and trying to juggle those and lost his balance and fell.""He would have died except his gardener, Joe, happened to be there. It was real touch and go as to whether he was going to survive but he's great now.""It was funny. They (the hospital) said, 'Ian wants to see you in hospital. You cannot talk to him about mobile phones. If he asks for your mobile phone you cannot give it to him. If he asks for drinks you can't go and get him one. Do not talk to him about getting out of hospital.""It was horrifying. I thought I was going to get in there and expected to see Ian sitting in a wheelchair and drinking soup through a straw, but I got in there and there he is sitting with his baseball cap on and his tracksuit reading the paper!""I said, 'Ian, I expected you to be sitting here dribbling, everyone's given me such a hard time!' And he said, 'Oh they're all such pains in the ....' "And they'd said to me, 'You cannot stay any longer than 20 minutes and if he shows any aggravation you have to leave immediately.""My 20 minutes came up and I said I'd better go but he said, 'Don't be ridiculous!" "I ended up staying for two hours.""I was also off to Thailand and flew out the next day. I got to Thailand and I got an email from Amanda Pelman who is Brian Cadd's partner who's great friend of Ian's, and it says, 'What have you done? Where is Ian? You were the last person to see him and now he's disappeared?""After I left, Ian started to figure out how to get out of there because you can't get out of the ward without a special card and the nurses won't let you out.""He conjured this story and told told them, 'I've decided to do physio' which he'd been refusing to do, and they said, 'Oh that's great Ian, when do you want to start, Monday?""He said, 'I want to start now, if you want me to do physio I want to go over and have a look and do it now.'" So they took him.""They got a nurse to take him over and took him down the street and as they got to the street he turned one way and just kept walking.""They couldn't find him!"

Joe Camilleri is celebrating 50 years in the Australian music industry, has just released his 45th album (while working on 46 & 47), and has The Black Sorrows back on the road. But his career was very nearly derailed when he developed a fear of flying and now says his son saved his life.Joe Camilleri visits the ABC Newcastle studios (ABC Local:Carol Duncan)I've had the privilege of interviewing many of Joe Camilleri's Australian music peers and I've often remarked on how many of them were 'ten pound Poms'.Joe Camilleri says he was a five-pounder, but not a Pom, "We came on the five-pound scheme from Malta. There was only four of us when we came out - my Dad came out in 1949 and me and my two sisters and brother came out in 1950. I think for Mum it would have been an incredible struggle on that boat.""Four kids under six. Phyllis was six years old, Frank was five, I was three, and Maryanne was one.""I've never really had the opportunity to discuss it with them, but Malta was war-torn, it got a heavy beating, Malta. For Dad, he was going to go to Canada and I think someone who had just got back from Australia said, 'That's the place you need to go.'""So he chose Australia. They're both buried here. I think they gave up so much for their children, and their own life, because the thing you have most of all is you want to be around your friends, but you come to a foreign land and all you have is your family. Most of the time, it's not until years later that you connect, sometimes your friends come to Australia, and if they come to Australia, where do they go? It's a big place! Malta is 16 miles square so it's pretty easy to get around but if you're living in Sydney and your buddy's living in Perth - it's a long walk.""I think for us, the hardest thing for my Dad was he would work two shifts. He wanted to get ahead,""He was a baker at night and a metal shop worker by day, so that was his two gigs for a number of years. He was a good handy guy, Dad. He was a spray painter for a number of years, worked on the wharves for a few years, he was just able to do that.""I envy carpenters, really, because anybody who can do something out of nothing ... I forget that I do that with songwriting, too.""When I was working as a first-class machinist there was always some amount of pride in whatever it was I was finishing, they were one-off things whether it was for a big crane or a motorcycle, that was a nice feeling. Do I like putting nail in a wall? Yes I do!""I envy carpenters, really, because anybody who can do something out of nothing ... I forget that I do that with songwriting, too. It's an empty page and then it's a full page and sometimes it's really good, but there's nothing quite like a tradesman who can come in and whip up a kitchen. I'm still amazed by that. Or they can fix a bathroom. We get an IKEA thing and look at it like it owes you money.""What was great about Countdown was that people knew about the bands, someone like Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons did very well."Joe Camilleri first came to my attention through television music show like Countdown. I was still in high school and lived for Sunday night when Countdown was on the telly. It seemed to be a really interesting time in Australian music when the industry became really healthy."I think because we didn't have that information - the frontrunners like The Twilights and Johnny O'Keefe and all those people - you never got to hear about their successes or the hardship. If you won Battle of the Sounds, you didn't win anything because you had to work on that boat for four weeks before you got to England, and then you had to work your passage back. So they were the real frontrunners. Countdown just became something else,""Of course it was looking for stars because it was a popularity thing, if the kids liked something it would automatically go on the charts if you were on Countdown. It was exciting. But they were looking for bands that didn't necessarily have a record. And there were other shows that were like a fraternity of shows. The ABC had a 10 minute show just before Bellbird and they had lots of different acts, Billy Thorpe, The Pelaco Brothers - we didn't have a record but we were playing in Sydney and they asked us to come to the studio.""What was great about Countdown was that people knew about the bands, someone like Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons did very well. I remember going on that with a single called 'Run Rudolph Run' but I hadn't played as 'The Falcons' before that and they just put it on. One minute I'm playing and just having a lot of people come to see you play but no record, no anything, and the next thing you've got a record and no-one knows anything about it. They put you on Countdown and it's in the charts. It's amazing.""What was really great about Sounds was it went for a few hours on a Saturday morning. You could pretty much just ring them and say 'We're in town, can we pop in?' and they'd have you in. They'd have you in and you'd just sit there in your drunken state, as shabby as you can be from the night before, and if you had a video, they'd play it. If you didn't, you'd just have a chat.""You couldn't do that today, today you've got to go through the wringer. It's really tight. There was a beautiful time, not only because of Countdown but because there was something that was going on, I've always put it down to late night closing, the 10 o'clock close, it changed everything because instead of bands playing in halls, they were now playing in bars. So all of a sudden if you were half-decent, like The Falcons were, you'd have 700 people coming to a gig and getting on board a whole bunch of songs that nobody knows.""The word would get out, kind of like Facebook does today but with drums and smoke," laughs Joe."The live thing is healthy again, I think. I've played pretty much everywhere around the world and Australian bands can rock. I think it's because of the pub scene. The pub scene was a really hard scene because if they didn't like it they'd let you know pretty quickly. It was tough. You were kind of invisible, but not invisible. You would know what a good track was. You would play your repertoire, you would play your album, you would play it in, you would know pretty much how the audience reacted to it,""I remember 'Shape I'm In' at Croxton Park - I can remember it like it was yesterday. I said, 'I've got this song, it's called The Shape I'm In, and the audience started grooving to this half-finished song. The roadie came up to me and said, 'I think that's your single.'""Many a song got left on the road because you develop. If you did 10 shows to get to Sydney, by the time you got to Sydney you'd have a pretty good idea of what you were playing and what you thought was pretty strong, because the last thing you wanted to do was be downtrodden by the audience. It was tough, but it was good training. That's why I think when the (Black) Sorrows played in Europe for the first time, it didn't matter if we were two miles apart from each other on a stage, we could play together and it made a really big difference to us.""It can be stressful, there's peaks and valleys in all this stuff. You're always having a good look at yourself and you're always asking the question because no-one taps me on the shoulder to say 'Look, I think it's time to make another album'.""I was never a popstar. I don't know how people perceive me really, but I imagine have followed what I do on a different level, not just from the hit songs but because my audiences have liked what I've done as a collection of music on an album. Not necessarily the Shape I'm Ins or Hit and Runs or the Harley and Rose ... those things are valuable to you as a performer but maybe I realised kind of early that my whole thing would have to be (that) we're all in the same boat - the audience and the performer - so I'm more than happy to leave Harley and Rose out if it didn't work on the night. But there's nothing scheduled, there's nothing planned. I haven't had a song list unless doing something really small, or filming or something. With the APIA tour I had to actually do those songs because it wasn't my bad so I had to behave a bit. But when you're doing your own show it's more about the event of what you've got to offer.""Even though it's my 50th year (in the music industry) I didn't start recording really until 1975, or 1972 ... around that time ... so my whole thing is that if we can do it where there's no trigger points, each song belongs as part of the collection of the night rather than 'here's the songs, you can buy this'. My thing is to be as free as I can both musically and from a performance point of view. I think what I've been able to achieve is that people realise if they come and see me in a couple of weeks time it's not going to be the same. Some of the songs might be the same but there'll be different things.""It can be stressful, there's peaks and valleys in all this stuff. You're always having a good look at yourself and you're always asking the question because no-one taps me on the shoulder to say 'Look, I think it's time to make another album'. It's kinda good. I like being an independent artist on that level."Joe Camilleri is already up to album number 45 and working on another."I've got this new double album called 'Endless Sleep'. I've already got a title for it. When I was recording Certified Blue I was also recording other songs for what I just thought was entertainment value. I tried to get inspired by something so I'd play on the piano something like Hank Williams' 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry', and then I'd find another way of getting into that song and maybe we'd record it and just leave it. But then I realised it's the inspiration of these people, whether it's Gil Scott Heron or Lou Reed, so when I finished Certified Blue I had about nine of these songs and I realised that they (the artists) were all departed.""And I thought there's some kind of message here - I was just doing it because I liked the songs, I wasn't paying any attention to this, and so when I realised that most of them had departed I thought, 'Oh wow, this is what I need to do', even though I'm writing new songs, I need to make this record. The song from the 1950s by Jody Reynolds called 'Endless Sleep' came up in my head and I thought 'there it is, it's the title of the album and the reason I'm doing this record'.What's the first song Joe Camilleri remembers hearing?"There was this woman in Carlton. Some of the houses in Carlton had their windows right on the street, there was no front yard. There was this woman called Aunty Darcy, we used to call her that, I don't know why, but she was a music fan and she would open the window and just give us stuff,""She would say 'come and have a listen to this' and I remember her saying 'this is the new thing' and I guess I probably thought it was going to be Doris Day or something, but it was Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley and The Comets. I remember hearing that.""I think those days everybody had a piano or some sort of musical instrument because that's what you would do at night, you'd sit around the piano and sing songs. My brother played the piano accordion and we would do that.""I used to love the radio and I loved to sing the songs of the day, but wasn't until about 1961, 1962 - it was when I heard The Searchers, I probably heard The Searchers before The Beatles because they all came out around the same time. There was this noise about this new thing, this British beat, and there was The (Rolling) Stones, The Animals, and The Kinks - all this music was coming out at the same time and that's when I got pretty much hooked on the whole idea.""I loved all the Elvis Presley things but I didn't have the money for that sort of stuff. The Shadows was the first record I bought, maybe it was the only album I could find at the time, but it wasn't until the sixties really that I went nuts and went back and found all those records that the Rolling Stones did great versions of, Otis Redding or Howlin' Wolf, that was a kind of secret, this thing that kind of came upon you and WOW! It was insane staff. It was dark and it was mysterious and it had something else. But it was kind of like the British beat going back 10 years and buying that stuff. There was an album called, I think, 'Fresh Berries' it had just Chuck Berry songs. It had 'Carol' on it and it had all these other songs that the Rolling Stones were playing, they did pretty good versions and they souped them up a bit, but you realise the depth of Chuck Berry playing those songs because he really was the Shakespeare of rock & roll.""I'd just had enough. I had this really beautiful 13-piece band and we went around the country and we had two hit singles, a pretty big record with a chart record but I wasn't very happy with the record."The early part of Joe Camilleri's career, the Countdown era, was one thing, but then in the 1980s Joe returned with The Black Sorrows which went huge."By accident of course! I was pouring coffees. I'd just had a hit with Taxi Mary and Walk On By - the great Walk On By which I think I ruined although it was an interesting verison of that song. I just gave up. I said 'I'm just gonna take some time out' and I got a job as a vegie roadie working at the Footscray market. It was just taking vegetables from trucks and putting them on other trucks, so that was my gig,""I'd just had enough. I had this really beautiful 13-piece band and we went around the country and we had two hit singles, a pretty big record with a chart record but I wasn't very happy with the record. It could have been so much better and it was my fault that it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but anyway, it yielded these two songs and we got to play and I got to do something that I wanted to do which was play with the cha band and six horns and high-heeled boots and gay cavalier and all that nonsense, but it just left me wanting. It was nice, but it wasn't what I wanted to do. So I thought, 'I'm just gonna get a job', it wasn't much of a job, it was three hours a day but you had to get up at 5am, done by 9am, and you had $20 a day and all the vegetables you can eat, so I got this other job by meeting a guy who loved Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons. He'd just opened a restaurant and he said, 'Why don't you come and work for me, I'll give you a job, you can pour some coffees', so that was my gig at this place called the Cafe Neon."So I did that and Chris said, 'Why don't you do something on a Sunday afternoon?' and that's how it all started.""I was in love with this music called zydeco music and no-one really knew much about it here, maybe some taste-makers might have known about it, it was an unusual connection. We had the piano accordion/violin sound, and then there was the clarinet and saxophone - we made up the horn section and the four of us made up this sound, it was kind of a nice sound,""I recorded an album of covers really, except for one song called Blow Joe Blow, and we did a couple of shows and people went nuts for it because it was different. It might not have been great but it was heartfelt. And of course it yielded a hit out of the weirdest thing,""Elvis Costello was in town, we toured with Elvis. Across the road from where he was staying was this place called 'Discurio' - somewhere like that. I would go to the record stores and actually sell them to the record stores. In fact next door to the Cafe Neon was a butcher shop and I sold him 10 copies, that was a new cut of meat!""But that's what you did. We made the record in a day, a guy I knew designed the cover, another guy could make a screenprint, so we screenprinted them and put them on the line, we did some t-shirts at the same time and got them out there,""But he (Costello) found this record and I swear to you that he spent more time talking about this particular record than talking about what he's doing on tour.""Most of this record was from an album called 'Another Saturday Night' and that's where I got to hear someone like Bobby Charles, and zydeco music was sort of like New Orleans music but they used it in a different way, they used those R&B songs where they went back to the fifties and sometimes sang in French. I did a song called 'Brown-Eyed Girl' and that particular song turned it around for this band,""We'd only done maybe two or three shows for this record. It was recorded in an afternoon and that was under circumstances - we weren't allowed to keep the tapes, we only had a day to record, it was a demonstration for the studio because they got a new desk in and wanted someone to try it out. That's how it happened. We recorded a couple of extra songs but I never got to keep the tape. Everything was just by chance,""I don't know if you run out of gas, but from the point of view of playing together it was so manic. You're doing 300 shows a year and you're playing all over the world and something had to go. Unfortunately for me I got a thing where I couldn't fly anymore.""But that led me to that point where we were a really big band and we were recording things like 'Chained To The Wheel' and we had the Bull sisters and we're playing all over the world and we're getting gold records in different parts of the world and platinum records in Australia and multi-platinum records. It took us on a wonderful journey,""But once again the bigger you get, the harder it is to stay there. I always ask, 'Why is it that Paul McCartney wrote so many songs but he can't have a hit record anymore?'. I don't know if you run out of gas, but from the point of view of playing together it was so manic. You're doing 300 shows a year and you're playing all over the world and something had to go. Unfortunately for me I got a thing where I couldn't fly anymore. I didn't fly for about four years so if I was touring I'd have to catch a train. If I was coming to Sydney I'd have to go overnight and it was kind of annoying for people.""It was just really tough. We had a hit in Germany and I just couldn't go. But I couldn't tell anyone I couldn't fly anymore. And flying really killed my overseas commitment to taking the band there, so if you can't go there ... today you can do different things. I remember I made a decision to go and live in England because if we were going to do it we had to base ourselves somewhere in Europe where we could jump off. I was with Sony at the time and they were trying to get me to go to Germany. They said, 'This is going to be a top single, top 10, it's already 18, get your keester down there and do it pronto!' They're not used to people saying, 'No'."" I'd only get on a plane under certain circumstances; I had to have valium, I had to be in an aisle seat, I had to have water, I had to have someone to talk to, I had to be allowed to get off if I needed to get off.""They think I want a business class ticket. I don't care what sort of ticket it was, I couldn't get on a plane, and I thought at the time that I was the only person in the universe who couldn't do this, I thought it was a real sign of weakness and that created a really bad thing in me. I was at a point where if the sky was grey I felt claustrophobic. I couldn't get outside the house unless it was a blue day. So I'm putting all these things in front of myself not knowing how to get any assistance,""It was Harlan (Joe's son) strangely enough who saved my life, because I decided I was going to fight it. I was ready to get off this plane. I'd only get on a plane under certain circumstances; I had to have valium, I had to be in an aisle seat, I had to have water, I had to have someone to talk to, I had to be allowed to get off if I needed to get off - all these different things. And then Harlan got sick on a plane and somehow everything changed. It wasn't about me anymore, it was about the things I really loved,""It was a small trigger and it took me another three years, but I was then able to slowly do things and strip away these things. It was all about fear of failure, I think.""Here I am, 66, and I'm still throwing it out, but you wouldn't have thought that at the time, you'd just think it's the end.""All those little things that I didn't have with The Falcons. When I was playing with The Falcons, even though I was the leader of the band I only ever felt like I was just one of the musicians because we're all in it together. It's a nice thing to know that nobody got anymore than anybody else. Sometimes these are the things that you struggle with. Even in a world where money becomes evil, some people will start making money and if you don't look after everybody else some of them don't make anything apart from their gig fee. All those things were able to be rectified but in those days we were all in it because it was all beer and skittles! Wagon Wheels and malted milks! There was NO money so it wasn't an issue!""We'd do 300 shows a year with The Falcons, or The Sorrows, we'd get $300 a week, or $250 a week, we'd have four weeks off, or six weeks off - two weeks making a record, and you'd get paid those six weeks. The roadies were being paid while we weren't working for those six week as well. So of course when the band finally broke up, we didn't have any money because everyone else had it. Everyone else that wasn't involved in the band made the bulk of our hard work. But no-one felt bad about it. We all felt, 'Gee whiz if you can hang out til you're 30 and you're in a band, are you crazy? There goes your rock & roll shoes!'""Here I am, 66, and I'm still throwing it out, but you wouldn't have thought that at the time, you'd just think it's the end.""Making those first four records independently with The Sorrows, it wasn't that hard, apart from the Dear Children album, which is my favourite record. Not because it has great songs on it, but because it was what I call my 'wedding album' - I must have played a hundred weddings to make that album. To get a gold record from Sony for that - it's the only record that I have anywhere in that house. I don't have any paraphenalia, nothing. Just that gold record. And I've had multi-platinum records and gold singles and all that kind of nonsense, ARIAs, but nothing belongs in my house. Nothing beats that 'wedding album'.""It was the struggle of that record. It was, 'I've got to make this properly, I've got to record it on two-inch (tape), I can't be muching around with that A-DAT stuff, I've got to make this on two-inch, I've got 24 tracks, I've got a limited amount of time, I'm going to run out of time, I've got $400 and it's like putting money in a machine. They gave me some liberties and I got it done and it was just beautiful to hear it on the radio.""Some people are really blessed and they have a beautiful voice - I don't have all those things. I have a different thing but I have things that other people don't have. Maybe it's called tenacity."So is Joe Camilleri a happy man?"Yeah. I am happy. I do believe that it's always half-full. As you get a bit older, you get a few barnacles and you struggle. With pain. I don't call it real pain because I imagine people with real pain, but I still have an upbeat concept and I still love doing the things that I like to do and that makes me good.""The really nice thing is playing music, I think that's the only time I can say I really get lost. I have responsibilities like we all have. I've got five children. I've got a whole bunch of things I have to deal with on a financial basis, I have a record label, I have to look after certain things, and I'm only good if people allow me to be that, if they want to hire me. If I don't have a job, I don't have a job.""On some levels I've been really fortunate, and I think some of that is because of the way I've navigated through things. Whether it's been a dumb way or not, I don't know. I don't worry about it. You're gonna get ripped off; I've been ripped off. I don't care for thinking about it. It doesn't put my stomach in a knot. There's been plenty of guys who haven't paid me. There's been lots of stuff where record companies have ... I mean, how do you know what your royalty rates are? Who cares? I'm interested in the day. I'm interested in what's going to be tomorrow. It doesn't take much for me to smile. I look forward to playing and it's kinda nice when people say nice things about you but also if they say nice things about your art, or your work, or whatever you want to call music.""I love having an idea and finishing it. That's my tradesman bit! I actually do love that and I'm working on four or five songs at any one time. Like we all are! Some people are really blessed and they have a beautiful voice - I don't have all those things. I have a different thing but I have things that other people don't have. Maybe it's called tenacity. Maybe it's a bunch of different things. I look forward to getting better at what I do, so that's good. I kick myself up the keester for being lazy - if I've got an idea and I can't finish it."I mention to Joe that having this conversation with him is a bit like watching an artist with six unfinished paintings on easels and is figuring out at which point they each become finished."Imagine Picasso doing that! Putting his brush in a bit of paint and walking past and just going 'splot' - that's done! As a producer I fight the struggle with songs because I know every note on there. So I can't listen to the record. I can listen to playing it live because it's happening, but I can't listen to the record.""Unlike The Falcons where you work through the song, with The Sorrows you don't have that opportunity to work through the songs, you have that time in the studio to work through the songs because it is a band, but it's not a band. It's a band of people that get together.""I'm just honoured to be part of the Australian musical landscape, really. Forget about the hits and stuff, although the hits made a big difference, but there's just something about people enjoying what you do,""The best drug you can have is when an audience is singing back something that you've written. It's an incredible feeling. I do it on a small scale but imagine what it's like for the Stones. People just going nuts and saying, 'I really dig this song and I don't even know what it's about.'"

James Reyne - Friday Music Show feature interview 2014James Reyne has an enviable career in the Australian music industry - first appearing on ABC TV's Countdown in 1979 with both of his arms in plaster after being hit by a car in Melbourne.Australian Crawl held court around Australia's pub rock scene for just seven years, but the sound of the band and the themes of their songs are the story of numerous Australian summers.As a solo artist, James Reyne has released over a dozen albums, continued to tour Australia and internationally with audiences of up to 200,000 people.ABC Newcastle's Carol Duncan caught up with James Reyne ahead of his Anthology tour."I'm enjoying it more now than I ever have. I've developed an attitude over the many years that I've been doing this that it's amusing. You can't let most of it worry you. Certainly most of the people of my generation who were in it for the wrong reasons or the shifty ones have been weeded out. There are still a couple floating around and you run into them occasionally and think, 'How is this person still here?'Knowing my attempt to get James to name names will be rebuffed, I ask anyway.He laughs, "No, I'm not going to name any names because they're usually quite litigious people anyway.""I just think it's quite amusing. It's like a crash-course in human nature. You see a lot of extremes of human personality in quite a short time, and up close!""I've made some fantastic friends and there are some wonderful, wonderful people who work in this industry and most people are genuine with depth and credibility."James Reyne, particularly given the success and image of Australian Crawl, is perhaps seen by many as the quintessential sun-kissed Australian, yet like so many of his generation of peers he wasn't actually born here."The ten-pound Pom thing, and Adelaide - the ten-pound Pom into Adelaide. It astounds me. A little city like that, the amount of music that came out of there either British or Scottish-based. We owe Adelaide. But yes, I was born in Nigeria,""My father was an Englishman in the Royal Marines, he was ADC to the Queen, but he left. He didn't want to be a career soldier. He got a job with BP and he was posted to Nigeria. My (Australian) mother and he were not long married and they went to Nigeria when he was posted there. He'd be out in the field and she'd be sitting in a house in Lagos and my brother and I were both born there.""I was tiny, three or four, when we came to Australia. I have a really vague memory of one little thing in Nigeria, but I don't really have any other memories of it."James Reyne is heading toward 40 years in the Australian music industry with a career that has taken him to stages around the world with massive audiences, but names Creedence Clearwater Revival as one of the first bands he remembers hearing on the radio."There were probably things I heard before that but I remember hearing Creedence and thinking, 'Wow! What is that? I want to do that!' I'd have been 10 or 11 and it was probably Proud Mary or Born on the Bayou or something like that. I've been a total fan of John Fogerty ever since. I love all the Creedence stuff and some of his solo stuff. Like everybody, it was my formative years, I just love all that and that led me into other things and I was just hooked,""There was a great show on the ABC called 'Room to Move' and it was hosted by a guy called Chris Winter. I think it was a Sunday or Monday night, quite late; we used to listen to it on the radio under the bedclothes. A few years ago I did a show with Tracee Hutchison on ABC 2 and Chris was our producer, I remember going, 'Chris Winter WOW!'""He was brilliant, and I was hooked. His whole approach, his on-air style, his whisper - it was brilliant. So I fell in love with that, it was the first sort of album show. Then I started to get into albums with my friends at school. We'd collect albums and we had a little folk club - we got quite serious about"I remember really loving records from Creedence, Little Feat, Ry Cooder, Jerry Jeff Walker but I think Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks 'Last Train to Hicksville' - as a whole album there's not a dud moment on it. So if anyone can find it, get it. It's brilliant. The whole history of Dan Hicks and his influence - he was in a band with a guy called Robert Hunter who essentially invented the San Francisco scene. This is before The Grateful Dead and so on. I was really in to the sociology of it - the background of who influenced who,""I used to pore over the album covers and sleeves and read all the liner notes. I don't know that there's much you can put on liner notes now that would be as interesting as they were then. That was your only access because there was no Google or anything. Your only access to any information about the band is what was in the liner notes."By the time James Reyne was just 20 years old, his band with a group of art college mates had been renamed Australian Crawl and taken off on the pub circuit, and although James admits that although they had no idea what they were doing, they were having fun."I was never thinking, 'This will be my career' or 'this will be my job' or 'this will be something I'll do for another 30 or so years and keep doing',""We weren't very good. The first band was terrible! But you've got to do your apprenticeship and you start learning. But I wasn't aware of it, we were just doing it."James Reyne has always appeared to be a complex person; well-spoken, intelligent, thoughtful, possibly a bit feisty. What about the 20-year old James Reyne?"I was at the Victorian College of the Arts Drama School and it was about then that we all had to make a decision, are we going to do our tertiary courses or are we going to do this band thing? I guess it wasn't so much 'serious' but we figured, 'I guess you've got to make a decision and if you're going to do it you have to dedicate yourself to it'.""But the 20-year old was, I dunno, pretty happy-go-lucky. He had a big mouth."Was he confident?"I guess relatively confident, but if I saw what I thought was a 'real' band or anybody from a real band somewhere down the street, (I thought) they were a cut above me. I never thought I'd be breathing that rarefied air. I just thought 'those guys must have an extra gene'.""Joe Camilleri. I'd see The Falcons all the time, I'd see The Sports, I'd see The Pelaco Brothers and Joe and Steve Cummings were in The Pelaco Brothers.""Where we grew up on the Mornington Peninsula, in summertime they used to have bands come down and play in the boat clubs down there. Every club had a boat house that they'd put a stage in and bands would play in there,""In my last year of school I used to go to a place called Reefer Cabaret in Melbourne at a place called the Ormond Hall and I remember I loved Arial, I loved Spectrum, Chain - I loved all those great 70s Australian bands. I remember going to the Myer Music Bowl when Thorpey (Billy Thorpe) had 200,000 people there. I was a fan of all that stuff. I remember seeing Skyhooks before Shirley (Strachan) joined. I was aware of Shirley, I didn't know him, but I was aware of him because there was a surf band that played around where we grew up called Frame and Shirley was the singer of that band. He was such a personality, everybody was aware of him.""It was certainly a very unique time and a very formative time for Australian music, for Australian rock and roll and pop music. This is pre-Countdown and any of that stuff and there were so many great bands around; The Dingoes, Carson - I was a huge fan of Broderick Smith. What an incredible presence on stage, incredible singer and harmonica player. He was in a band called Carson, sort of boogie/blues band, and then they went and formed The Dingoes,""I used to see as many Dingoes shows as I could. There's a pub in Prahran called the Station Hotel, I used to go to the Station Hotel quite a lot and they'd have Saturday afternoon sessions where The Dingoes would often play. That would just devolve into fantastic mayhem."I've interviewed James Reyne a few times over the last 20-plus years and I've never quite felt convinced that he's entirely at peace with his back catalogue of wonderful work. I have often wondered if he perhaps underestimates the importance of his music to his fans. Is this why it's taken so long to get Anthology together?"Well, it's actually got very little to do with me! A record company merger meant that the new label realised that the Australian Crawl back catalogue wasn't available digitally, and although they can kind of do whatever they want because they own the masters, they asked if I wanted to do it and bring it up to date. I paid for my more recent solo records so I made a list of about 50 or 60 songs, cut it back down to about 40. And good on them. They've put the solo stuff on there, the ones that people would know, but it's a good cross-section of all of it right up to the most recent stuff. Why did it take so long? I never thought of it! It's just the story so far, I'll keep making records."But has he been dissatisfied with the big machine of the music industry?"I'm not so naive as to think that's just the nature of how it works. You're there as long as they need you and then you're not and that's fine and that's the way it works. No, it's not dissatisfaction, a lot of my amusement or ammunition I can get for song writing is just human beings. So aspirational but so easily impressed. People get so easily impressed with all sorts of things, not just the entertainment industry,""But I think we're all aware now with the media generally people are drip-fed what they're supposed to be hearing and seem to lap it up. And adopt these opinions! They read a crappy headline and that becomes their opinion and they know all about it! Well, no, you don't. You haven't studied the situation in the Middle East. You don't know.""In terms of the entertainment industry I find a lot of fodder in the way people are so easily impressed and so aspirational about all this silliness."In a time when independence is increasingly a healthy option for artists and creatives of all sorts, does James Reyne feel there is a disconnect between the work of an artist and what a corporate entity only sees as 'product'?"I think the role of the big, big record companies is getting less and changing. Certainly changing, they're less significant in the scheme of things. They're still there and still part of it but I think the disconnect between art and commerce is always going to be there."And yet independence is creating a healthy relationship between the artist and the audience, particularly via crowd funding - Kate Miller-Heidke being a good case in point. Kate says that crowd funding O' Vertigo cuts out the middle man and brings her back into a relationship with the people who love her music."That's right. I think the response was so good she raised more than she needed, which shows how loyal her fan base is. I didn't understand it when it first started happening, but I do now. I think it's a very viable development.""The last four solo records I've made I've paid for myself and then licensed them to a distribution company - it gets quite expensive and you're never really going to make your money back.""I still love writing, I write more now than I ever have and I think I write better because it's a craft and I've been doing it longer, I apply myself more to it now than I ever have.""I'd like to think I'm a songwriter who is always learning, trying to get better and trying to improve the craft. I'm quite self-critical. I've also written a few other things but I won't talk about them because I've learnt that you jinx them until these things get up and running!"James Reyne's career has also included varying degrees of success as an actor - harking back to his tertiary studies at the Victoria College of Arts Drama School. Is there more he wants to do other than music?"Oh plenty! I've got about five things bubbling along at the moment. A few times people have said, 'James, you've got to write the book'. I'm not going to write the book! The world doesn't need another rock autobiography and I think unless you can write the real book and name names," James laughs, "you're going to get the pasteurised version of something of nothing ...." Who wants to hear that stuff? It's boring. It's been done. That's not to say anything bad about anyone who has written a rock biography, because some of them I know and they're lovely people. Mark Seymour wrote a great one. I loved Mark's (book). He's a friend and a good writer."On a roll, the tongue remains firmly in cheek."I always wanted to do 'Australian Crawl The Musical' and you either do it as a really bad kids' play and get kids to play it with terrible home-made props or you do the most stonkingly gay thing you've ever seen with a chorus of boys in tight board shorts! We could do that!"I suspect I'd be happy to see either version and after interview number whatever over a couple of decades, James Reyne actually sounds more genuinely comfortable in his own skin than he ever has.

Joe Camilleri is celebrating 50 years in the Australian music industry, has just released his 45th album (while working on 46 & 47), and has The Black Sorrows back on the road. But his career was very nearly derailed when he developed a fear of flying and now says his son saved his life.Joe Camilleri visits the ABC Newcastle studios (ABC Local:Carol Duncan)I've had the privilege of interviewing many of Joe Camilleri's Australian music peers and I've often remarked on how many of them were 'ten pound Poms'.Joe Camilleri says he was a five-pounder, but not a Pom, "We came on the five-pound scheme from Malta. There was only four of us when we came out - my Dad came out in 1949 and me and my two sisters and brother came out in 1950. I think for Mum it would have been an incredible struggle on that boat.""Four kids under six. Phyllis was six years old, Frank was five, I was three, and Maryanne was one.""I've never really had the opportunity to discuss it with them, but Malta was war-torn, it got a heavy beating, Malta. For Dad, he was going to go to Canada and I think someone who had just got back from Australia said, 'That's the place you need to go.'""So he chose Australia. They're both buried here. I think they gave up so much for their children, and their own life, because the thing you have most of all is you want to be around your friends, but you come to a foreign land and all you have is your family. Most of the time, it's not until years later that you connect, sometimes your friends come to Australia, and if they come to Australia, where do they go? It's a big place! Malta is 16 miles square so it's pretty easy to get around but if you're living in Sydney and your buddy's living in Perth - it's a long walk.""I think for us, the hardest thing for my Dad was he would work two shifts. He wanted to get ahead,""He was a baker at night and a metal shop worker by day, so that was his two gigs for a number of years. He was a good handy guy, Dad. He was a spray painter for a number of years, worked on the wharves for a few years, he was just able to do that.""I envy carpenters, really, because anybody who can do something out of nothing ... I forget that I do that with songwriting, too.""When I was working as a first-class machinist there was always some amount of pride in whatever it was I was finishing, they were one-off things whether it was for a big crane or a motorcycle, that was a nice feeling. Do I like putting nail in a wall? Yes I do!""I envy carpenters, really, because anybody who can do something out of nothing ... I forget that I do that with songwriting, too. It's an empty page and then it's a full page and sometimes it's really good, but there's nothing quite like a tradesman who can come in and whip up a kitchen. I'm still amazed by that. Or they can fix a bathroom. We get an IKEA thing and look at it like it owes you money.""What was great about Countdown was that people knew about the bands, someone like Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons did very well."Joe Camilleri first came to my attention through television music show like Countdown. I was still in high school and lived for Sunday night when Countdown was on the telly. It seemed to be a really interesting time in Australian music when the industry became really healthy."I think because we didn't have that information - the frontrunners like The Twilights and Johnny O'Keefe and all those people - you never got to hear about their successes or the hardship. If you won Battle of the Sounds, you didn't win anything because you had to work on that boat for four weeks before you got to England, and then you had to work your passage back. So they were the real frontrunners. Countdown just became something else,""Of course it was looking for stars because it was a popularity thing, if the kids liked something it would automatically go on the charts if you were on Countdown. It was exciting. But they were looking for bands that didn't necessarily have a record. And there were other shows that were like a fraternity of shows. The ABC had a 10 minute show just before Bellbird and they had lots of different acts, Billy Thorpe, The Pelaco Brothers - we didn't have a record but we were playing in Sydney and they asked us to come to the studio.""What was great about Countdown was that people knew about the bands, someone like Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons did very well. I remember going on that with a single called 'Run Rudolph Run' but I hadn't played as 'The Falcons' before that and they just put it on. One minute I'm playing and just having a lot of people come to see you play but no record, no anything, and the next thing you've got a record and no-one knows anything about it. They put you on Countdown and it's in the charts. It's amazing.""What was really great about Sounds was it went for a few hours on a Saturday morning. You could pretty much just ring them and say 'We're in town, can we pop in?' and they'd have you in. They'd have you in and you'd just sit there in your drunken state, as shabby as you can be from the night before, and if you had a video, they'd play it. If you didn't, you'd just have a chat.""You couldn't do that today, today you've got to go through the wringer. It's really tight. There was a beautiful time, not only because of Countdown but because there was something that was going on, I've always put it down to late night closing, the 10 o'clock close, it changed everything because instead of bands playing in halls, they were now playing in bars. So all of a sudden if you were half-decent, like The Falcons were, you'd have 700 people coming to a gig and getting on board a whole bunch of songs that nobody knows.""The word would get out, kind of like Facebook does today but with drums and smoke," laughs Joe."The live thing is healthy again, I think. I've played pretty much everywhere around the world and Australian bands can rock. I think it's because of the pub scene. The pub scene was a really hard scene because if they didn't like it they'd let you know pretty quickly. It was tough. You were kind of invisible, but not invisible. You would know what a good track was. You would play your repertoire, you would play your album, you would play it in, you would know pretty much how the audience reacted to it,""I remember 'Shape I'm In' at Croxton Park - I can remember it like it was yesterday. I said, 'I've got this song, it's called The Shape I'm In, and the audience started grooving to this half-finished song. The roadie came up to me and said, 'I think that's your single.'""Many a song got left on the road because you develop. If you did 10 shows to get to Sydney, by the time you got to Sydney you'd have a pretty good idea of what you were playing and what you thought was pretty strong, because the last thing you wanted to do was be downtrodden by the audience. It was tough, but it was good training. That's why I think when the (Black) Sorrows played in Europe for the first time, it didn't matter if we were two miles apart from each other on a stage, we could play together and it made a really big difference to us.""It can be stressful, there's peaks and valleys in all this stuff. You're always having a good look at yourself and you're always asking the question because no-one taps me on the shoulder to say 'Look, I think it's time to make another album'.""I was never a popstar. I don't know how people perceive me really, but I imagine have followed what I do on a different level, not just from the hit songs but because my audiences have liked what I've done as a collection of music on an album. Not necessarily the Shape I'm Ins or Hit and Runs or the Harley and Rose ... those things are valuable to you as a performer but maybe I realised kind of early that my whole thing would have to be (that) we're all in the same boat - the audience and the performer - so I'm more than happy to leave Harley and Rose out if it didn't work on the night. But there's nothing scheduled, there's nothing planned. I haven't had a song list unless doing something really small, or filming or something. With the APIA tour I had to actually do those songs because it wasn't my bad so I had to behave a bit. But when you're doing your own show it's more about the event of what you've got to offer.""Even though it's my 50th year (in the music industry) I didn't start recording really until 1975, or 1972 ... around that time ... so my whole thing is that if we can do it where there's no trigger points, each song belongs as part of the collection of the night rather than 'here's the songs, you can buy this'. My thing is to be as free as I can both musically and from a performance point of view. I think what I've been able to achieve is that people realise if they come and see me in a couple of weeks time it's not going to be the same. Some of the songs might be the same but there'll be different things.""It can be stressful, there's peaks and valleys in all this stuff. You're always having a good look at yourself and you're always asking the question because no-one taps me on the shoulder to say 'Look, I think it's time to make another album'. It's kinda good. I like being an independent artist on that level."Joe Camilleri is already up to album number 45 and working on another."I've got this new double album called 'Endless Sleep'. I've already got a title for it. When I was recording Certified Blue I was also recording other songs for what I just thought was entertainment value. I tried to get inspired by something so I'd play on the piano something like Hank Williams' 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry', and then I'd find another way of getting into that song and maybe we'd record it and just leave it. But then I realised it's the inspiration of these people, whether it's Gil Scott Heron or Lou Reed, so when I finished Certified Blue I had about nine of these songs and I realised that they (the artists) were all departed.""And I thought there's some kind of message here - I was just doing it because I liked the songs, I wasn't paying any attention to this, and so when I realised that most of them had departed I thought, 'Oh wow, this is what I need to do', even though I'm writing new songs, I need to make this record. The song from the 1950s by Jody Reynolds called 'Endless Sleep' came up in my head and I thought 'there it is, it's the title of the album and the reason I'm doing this record'.What's the first song Joe Camilleri remembers hearing?"There was this woman in Carlton. Some of the houses in Carlton had their windows right on the street, there was no front yard. There was this woman called Aunty Darcy, we used to call her that, I don't know why, but she was a music fan and she would open the window and just give us stuff,""She would say 'come and have a listen to this' and I remember her saying 'this is the new thing' and I guess I probably thought it was going to be Doris Day or something, but it was Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley and The Comets. I remember hearing that.""I think those days everybody had a piano or some sort of musical instrument because that's what you would do at night, you'd sit around the piano and sing songs. My brother played the piano accordion and we would do that.""I used to love the radio and I loved to sing the songs of the day, but wasn't until about 1961, 1962 - it was when I heard The Searchers, I probably heard The Searchers before The Beatles because they all came out around the same time. There was this noise about this new thing, this British beat, and there was The (Rolling) Stones, The Animals, and The Kinks - all this music was coming out at the same time and that's when I got pretty much hooked on the whole idea.""I loved all the Elvis Presley things but I didn't have the money for that sort of stuff. The Shadows was the first record I bought, maybe it was the only album I could find at the time, but it wasn't until the sixties really that I went nuts and went back and found all those records that the Rolling Stones did great versions of, Otis Redding or Howlin' Wolf, that was a kind of secret, this thing that kind of came upon you and WOW! It was insane staff. It was dark and it was mysterious and it had something else. But it was kind of like the British beat going back 10 years and buying that stuff. There was an album called, I think, 'Fresh Berries' it had just Chuck Berry songs. It had 'Carol' on it and it had all these other songs that the Rolling Stones were playing, they did pretty good versions and they souped them up a bit, but you realise the depth of Chuck Berry playing those songs because he really was the Shakespeare of rock & roll.""I'd just had enough. I had this really beautiful 13-piece band and we went around the country and we had two hit singles, a pretty big record with a chart record but I wasn't very happy with the record."The early part of Joe Camilleri's career, the Countdown era, was one thing, but then in the 1980s Joe returned with The Black Sorrows which went huge."By accident of course! I was pouring coffees. I'd just had a hit with Taxi Mary and Walk On By - the great Walk On By which I think I ruined although it was an interesting verison of that song. I just gave up. I said 'I'm just gonna take some time out' and I got a job as a vegie roadie working at the Footscray market. It was just taking vegetables from trucks and putting them on other trucks, so that was my gig,""I'd just had enough. I had this really beautiful 13-piece band and we went around the country and we had two hit singles, a pretty big record with a chart record but I wasn't very happy with the record. It could have been so much better and it was my fault that it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but anyway, it yielded these two songs and we got to play and I got to do something that I wanted to do which was play with the cha band and six horns and high-heeled boots and gay cavalier and all that nonsense, but it just left me wanting. It was nice, but it wasn't what I wanted to do. So I thought, 'I'm just gonna get a job', it wasn't much of a job, it was three hours a day but you had to get up at 5am, done by 9am, and you had $20 a day and all the vegetables you can eat, so I got this other job by meeting a guy who loved Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons. He'd just opened a restaurant and he said, 'Why don't you come and work for me, I'll give you a job, you can pour some coffees', so that was my gig at this place called the Cafe Neon."So I did that and Chris said, 'Why don't you do something on a Sunday afternoon?' and that's how it all started.""I was in love with this music called zydeco music and no-one really knew much about it here, maybe some taste-makers might have known about it, it was an unusual connection. We had the piano accordion/violin sound, and then there was the clarinet and saxophone - we made up the horn section and the four of us made up this sound, it was kind of a nice sound,""I recorded an album of covers really, except for one song called Blow Joe Blow, and we did a couple of shows and people went nuts for it because it was different. It might not have been great but it was heartfelt. And of course it yielded a hit out of the weirdest thing,""Elvis Costello was in town, we toured with Elvis. Across the road from where he was staying was this place called 'Discurio' - somewhere like that. I would go to the record stores and actually sell them to the record stores. In fact next door to the Cafe Neon was a butcher shop and I sold him 10 copies, that was a new cut of meat!""But that's what you did. We made the record in a day, a guy I knew designed the cover, another guy could make a screenprint, so we screenprinted them and put them on the line, we did some t-shirts at the same time and got them out there,""But he (Costello) found this record and I swear to you that he spent more time talking about this particular record than talking about what he's doing on tour.""Most of this record was from an album called 'Another Saturday Night' and that's where I got to hear someone like Bobby Charles, and zydeco music was sort of like New Orleans music but they used it in a different way, they used those R&B songs where they went back to the fifties and sometimes sang in French. I did a song called 'Brown-Eyed Girl' and that particular song turned it around for this band,""We'd only done maybe two or three shows for this record. It was recorded in an afternoon and that was under circumstances - we weren't allowed to keep the tapes, we only had a day to record, it was a demonstration for the studio because they got a new desk in and wanted someone to try it out. That's how it happened. We recorded a couple of extra songs but I never got to keep the tape. Everything was just by chance,""I don't know if you run out of gas, but from the point of view of playing together it was so manic. You're doing 300 shows a year and you're playing all over the world and something had to go. Unfortunately for me I got a thing where I couldn't fly anymore.""But that led me to that point where we were a really big band and we were recording things like 'Chained To The Wheel' and we had the Bull sisters and we're playing all over the world and we're getting gold records in different parts of the world and platinum records in Australia and multi-platinum records. It took us on a wonderful journey,""But once again the bigger you get, the harder it is to stay there. I always ask, 'Why is it that Paul McCartney wrote so many songs but he can't have a hit record anymore?'. I don't know if you run out of gas, but from the point of view of playing together it was so manic. You're doing 300 shows a year and you're playing all over the world and something had to go. Unfortunately for me I got a thing where I couldn't fly anymore. I didn't fly for about four years so if I was touring I'd have to catch a train. If I was coming to Sydney I'd have to go overnight and it was kind of annoying for people.""It was just really tough. We had a hit in Germany and I just couldn't go. But I couldn't tell anyone I couldn't fly anymore. And flying really killed my overseas commitment to taking the band there, so if you can't go there ... today you can do different things. I remember I made a decision to go and live in England because if we were going to do it we had to base ourselves somewhere in Europe where we could jump off. I was with Sony at the time and they were trying to get me to go to Germany. They said, 'This is going to be a top single, top 10, it's already 18, get your keester down there and do it pronto!' They're not used to people saying, 'No'."" I'd only get on a plane under certain circumstances; I had to have valium, I had to be in an aisle seat, I had to have water, I had to have someone to talk to, I had to be allowed to get off if I needed to get off.""They think I want a business class ticket. I don't care what sort of ticket it was, I couldn't get on a plane, and I thought at the time that I was the only person in the universe who couldn't do this, I thought it was a real sign of weakness and that created a really bad thing in me. I was at a point where if the sky was grey I felt claustrophobic. I couldn't get outside the house unless it was a blue day. So I'm putting all these things in front of myself not knowing how to get any assistance,""It was Harlan (Joe's son) strangely enough who saved my life, because I decided I was going to fight it. I was ready to get off this plane. I'd only get on a plane under certain circumstances; I had to have valium, I had to be in an aisle seat, I had to have water, I had to have someone to talk to, I had to be allowed to get off if I needed to get off - all these different things. And then Harlan got sick on a plane and somehow everything changed. It wasn't about me anymore, it was about the things I really loved,""It was a small trigger and it took me another three years, but I was then able to slowly do things and strip away these things. It was all about fear of failure, I think.""Here I am, 66, and I'm still throwing it out, but you wouldn't have thought that at the time, you'd just think it's the end.""All those little things that I didn't have with The Falcons. When I was playing with The Falcons, even though I was the leader of the band I only ever felt like I was just one of the musicians because we're all in it together. It's a nice thing to know that nobody got anymore than anybody else. Sometimes these are the things that you struggle with. Even in a world where money becomes evil, some people will start making money and if you don't look after everybody else some of them don't make anything apart from their gig fee. All those things were able to be rectified but in those days we were all in it because it was all beer and skittles! Wagon Wheels and malted milks! There was NO money so it wasn't an issue!""We'd do 300 shows a year with The Falcons, or The Sorrows, we'd get $300 a week, or $250 a week, we'd have four weeks off, or six weeks off - two weeks making a record, and you'd get paid those six weeks. The roadies were being paid while we weren't working for those six week as well. So of course when the band finally broke up, we didn't have any money because everyone else had it. Everyone else that wasn't involved in the band made the bulk of our hard work. But no-one felt bad about it. We all felt, 'Gee whiz if you can hang out til you're 30 and you're in a band, are you crazy? There goes your rock & roll shoes!'""Here I am, 66, and I'm still throwing it out, but you wouldn't have thought that at the time, you'd just think it's the end.""Making those first four records independently with The Sorrows, it wasn't that hard, apart from the Dear Children album, which is my favourite record. Not because it has great songs on it, but because it was what I call my 'wedding album' - I must have played a hundred weddings to make that album. To get a gold record from Sony for that - it's the only record that I have anywhere in that house. I don't have any paraphenalia, nothing. Just that gold record. And I've had multi-platinum records and gold singles and all that kind of nonsense, ARIAs, but nothing belongs in my house. Nothing beats that 'wedding album'.""It was the struggle of that record. It was, 'I've got to make this properly, I've got to record it on two-inch (tape), I can't be muching around with that A-DAT stuff, I've got to make this on two-inch, I've got 24 tracks, I've got a limited amount of time, I'm going to run out of time, I've got $400 and it's like putting money in a machine. They gave me some liberties and I got it done and it was just beautiful to hear it on the radio.""Some people are really blessed and they have a beautiful voice - I don't have all those things. I have a different thing but I have things that other people don't have. Maybe it's called tenacity."So is Joe Camilleri a happy man?"Yeah. I am happy. I do believe that it's always half-full. As you get a bit older, you get a few barnacles and you struggle. With pain. I don't call it real pain because I imagine people with real pain, but I still have an upbeat concept and I still love doing the things that I like to do and that makes me good.""The really nice thing is playing music, I think that's the only time I can say I really get lost. I have responsibilities like we all have. I've got five children. I've got a whole bunch of things I have to deal with on a financial basis, I have a record label, I have to look after certain things, and I'm only good if people allow me to be that, if they want to hire me. If I don't have a job, I don't have a job.""On some levels I've been really fortunate, and I think some of that is because of the way I've navigated through things. Whether it's been a dumb way or not, I don't know. I don't worry about it. You're gonna get ripped off; I've been ripped off. I don't care for thinking about it. It doesn't put my stomach in a knot. There's been plenty of guys who haven't paid me. There's been lots of stuff where record companies have ... I mean, how do you know what your royalty rates are? Who cares? I'm interested in the day. I'm interested in what's going to be tomorrow. It doesn't take much for me to smile. I look forward to playing and it's kinda nice when people say nice things about you but also if they say nice things about your art, or your work, or whatever you want to call music.""I love having an idea and finishing it. That's my tradesman bit! I actually do love that and I'm working on four or five songs at any one time. Like we all are! Some people are really blessed and they have a beautiful voice - I don't have all those things. I have a different thing but I have things that other people don't have. Maybe it's called tenacity. Maybe it's a bunch of different things. I look forward to getting better at what I do, so that's good. I kick myself up the keester for being lazy - if I've got an idea and I can't finish it."I mention to Joe that having this conversation with him is a bit like watching an artist with six unfinished paintings on easels and is figuring out at which point they each become finished."Imagine Picasso doing that! Putting his brush in a bit of paint and walking past and just going 'splot' - that's done! As a producer I fight the struggle with songs because I know every note on there. So I can't listen to the record. I can listen to playing it live because it's happening, but I can't listen to the record.""Unlike The Falcons where you work through the song, with The Sorrows you don't have that opportunity to work through the songs, you have that time in the studio to work through the songs because it is a band, but it's not a band. It's a band of people that get together.""I'm just honoured to be part of the Australian musical landscape, really. Forget about the hits and stuff, although the hits made a big difference, but there's just something about people enjoying what you do,""The best drug you can have is when an audience is singing back something that you've written. It's an incredible feeling. I do it on a small scale but imagine what it's like for the Stones. People just going nuts and saying, 'I really dig this song and I don't even know what it's about.'"

Joe Camilleri from The Black Sorrows | Trevor Long | Snap Poll – Should Australia celebrate Halloween?

Not only is Mitch Cairns is a top class bass player, he's also an ARIA Award winning Producer, Mix Engineer and Writer. Based in Melbourne Australia, Mitch works out of his private studio built within a spacious warehouse in Melbourne's western suburbs. Mitch Produced the multi award winning albums Sharkmouth, Van Diemen’s Land and Red Dirt Red Heart for ARIA Hall Of Fame inductee and no. 1 selling artist Russell Morris. His other work includes Grammy Winner Leo Sayer’s Restless Years, Glenn Shorrock, Joe Robinson, Renee Geyer, Chris Wilson, Brian Cadd, Rob Hirst (Midnight Oil), Rick Springfield, Joe Camilleri, Vika and Linda Bull, Ross Hannaford (Daddy Cool), Phil Manning (Chain), Troy Cassar-Daley, Kevin Borich, Diesel, Callee Mann, Mish Fornito, Grayson, Daryl Aberhart, Electric Mary, Electric Empire, Adam Miller and ABC Jazz Award winners Fumi Boca. Watch the video interview here: https://youtu.be/RlkM_N11wQ0

One of Australia's legendary musicians, Joe Camilleri, joined Pip to talk about live shows on The Border, his band The Black Sorrows, and even dropped an incredible story about recording with Cold Chisel. 0.20: On visiting The Border frequently 1.04: On clocking up 50 years in the music industry 2.35: About enthusiasm on stage 3.36: What’s in store in 2016 for the Black Sorrows? 4.40: Are they rehearsing the new songs to play live? 4.55: How do they play without a set list? 6.00: What is Joe’s favourite saxophone song? 7.16: On playing a session for Cold Chisel on the East album

Australian music great Joe Camilleri spoke to Christian Argenti about his career, his interests away from music and why you won't see him doing shows past his bed time. 

Visit: www.salty.com.au Recorded 1st July 2015, released 7 July as standalone interview podcast. A conversation with Joe Camilleri of The Black Sorrows recorded early July 2015. Joe talks about the latest album ENDLESS SLEEP Chapters 46 and 47, released on vinyl (with CD’s thrown in). The first pressing has sold out! The song choices are all from ‘people who have left us’, but have influenced Joe since the early days, even pre Jo Jo Zep. We even cover Joe’s new project, a Beat Novel!! Listen to check that one out. The Black Sorrows are about to head off on a European tour, starting with the Edinburgh Fringe, but before that they are headlining a benefit for Ross Hannaford at the Memo St Kilda on 18th July. Essential listening tone hounds!

Visit: www.salty.com.au Recorded 1st July 2015, released 7 July as standalone interview podcast. A conversation with Joe Camilleri of The Black Sorrows recorded early July 2015. Joe talks about the latest album ENDLESS SLEEP Chapters 46 and 47, released on vinyl (with CD’s thrown in). The first pressing has sold out! The song choices are all from ‘people who have left us’, but have influenced Joe since the early days, even pre Jo Jo Zep. We even cover Joe’s new project, a Beat Novel!! Listen to check that one out. The Black Sorrows are about to head off on a European tour, starting with the Edinburgh Fringe, but before that they are headlining a benefit for Ross Hannaford at the Memo St Kilda on 18th July. Essential listening tone hounds!

In the third of our three episodes looking at the Rolling Stones debut album, host Jeremy Dylan is joined by Joe Camilleri, an Aussie rock icon with five decades of amazing music under his belt, from Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons to the Black Sorrows and beyond. Did Joe really get fired from the Adderley Smith Blues Band for sounding too much like Mick Jagger? What was it like seeing the Stones on their first Australian tour? Was his early band the King Bees inspired by the song from this album? All this and more within. Program note: From this episode onwards, we are switching to a bi-weekly format, with a new episode every Tuesday and Thursday. Come back Thursday for the big 5-0! Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes here or in other podcasting apps by copying/pasting our RSS feed -http://myfavoritealbum.libsyn.com/rssMy Favorite Album is a podcast unpacking the great works of pop music. Each episode features a different songwriter or musician discussing their favorite album of all time - their history with it, the making of the album, individual songs and the album's influence on their own music.Jeremy Dylan is a filmmaker and music industry exec from Sydney, Australia. He directed the the feature music documentary Jim Lauderdale: The King of Broken Hearts (out now!) and the feature film Benjamin Sniddlegrass and the Cauldron of Penguins, in addition to many commercials and music videos. If you've got any feedback or suggestions, drop us a line atmyfavoritealbumpodcast@gmail.com

Visit: www.salty.com.au Visit: http://joecamilleri.com.au/ Over an hour with Australia's blues n roots icon, Joe Camilleri talking about early years, Jo Jo Zep, The Black Sorrows, Revelators, recording, writing, performing. You'll hear why the Gold single 'Chained To The Wheel' nearly didn't make it… and more! Features tracks from his past catalogue and from the new chart topping album' Certified Blue'. Dig it tone hounds!

Visit: www.salty.com.au Visit: http://joecamilleri.com.au/ Over an hour with Australia's blues n roots icon, Joe Camilleri talking about early years, Jo Jo Zep, The Black Sorrows, Revelators, recording, writing, performing. You'll hear why the Gold single 'Chained To The Wheel' nearly didn't make it… and more! Features tracks from his past catalogue and from the new chart topping album' Certified Blue'. Dig it tone hounds!