John Hardaker Archive

Since Ray Charles created Soul music in the mid-1950s by combining Gospel ecstasy with the secular (and sexual) themes of the Blues, the genre has given us almost an embarrassment of astonishing vocalists. Charles himself, Smokey Robinson, David Ruffin, Chaka Khan, Otis …

Australia’s greatest export, AC/DC, have for almost half a century kept the beating heart of rock and roll alive. Despite their sound becoming more buffed and polished as time has gone by, despite the rooms going from humid pubs to the world’s …

In a year of the deaths of giants we say goodbye to George Martin: the fifth Beatle, the producer who made them sound like The Beatles. The man who framed those songs in those patchouli psychedelic frames, or equally in those woody bucolic …

The recorder – mainly the descant – is responsible for turning generations of school children off making music from a very early age. A featureless instrument in many ways, its flat tone conjures out-of-tune ensembles parping away amongst the pencil shavings in a …

A program of Beethoven symphonies too often gives modern orchestras an excuse to really blast and shake the concert hall rafters. After all, Beethoven’s symphonies are full of pile-driving riffs and slammin’ power-chords. It’s all very exciting – as any heavy metal is …

A friend rang me yesterday and said: “Have you heard? Bowie has died.” I had only just come off Facebook and there had been no mention. How could he have passed? He looked in apparent rude good health and had only a …

If you make a revolution, make it for fun, don’t make it in ghastly seriousness, don’t do it in deadly earnest, do it for fun. Don’t do it because you hate people, do it just to spit in their eye. DH Lawrence, A Sane Revolution Standing …

The twin pillars of 1970s jazz-fusion keyboards were Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. They had both been through the fire of Miles Davis’s greatest bands – Hancock most notably in the envelope-pushing Quintet of the 1960s and Corea in Miles’ envelope-puncturing electric …

I have seen recently departed blues grandmaster BB King live in concert twice in my life. The experiences were separated by almost 40 years in time and by an unmeasurable distance in spirit. The first time was at Sydney’s ‘70s concert-box-du-jour, the …

It was the perfect image for what we were hearing. An Apple laptop, all sleek silver skin and, a few feet back on the same stage, Tommie Andersson’s theorbo, that intriguing steam-punk lute-like instrument from the Baroque. Almost 300 years separate these …