John Hardaker Archive

  When it comes to new music, most times I have to go looking for the good stuff. But sometimes the good stuff comes looking for me. Lunching with my wife at Hobart’s MONA on the last day of a holiday in …

  Sometimes too much Art seems barely enough. Sometimes too much Art is just too much. After foolhardily taking in the MCA’s Chuck Close: Prints, Process and Collaboration and the AGNSW’s POP to POPism within hours of each other, I have been …

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to experience the precise but full-blooded playing of Australia’s Slava Grigoryan in trio with US guitar magus Ralph Towner and German jazzman Wolfgang Muthspiel. At the time I was reminded of a particular beauty inherent …

Imagine if your favourite bar band – the one you see swaggering and rocking at your local most Saturday nights – won some fabulous lottery. And with that money they could mount the most amazingly huge and perfectly produced show they could conceive. The venue …

In my early twenties, I lived in a flat with my (much hipper) cousin David. The music that wafted from his room was an education in itself. To my Glam-rock gilded ears the exotic and alien sounds of jazz and Prog were …

Words and music. Iconic Australian songwriter Richard Clapton has celebrated 40 years of writing and making music with the simultaneous release of his autobiography together with a three CD (plus DVD) set. Iconic is a lazy word, overused in the relentless sales …

Queensland musician Ben Craven describes himself as a cinematic progressive-rock singer-songwriter-performer-producer. But internationally he is regarded as a true Prog Lord. His last album – Great and Terrible Potions – was entirely created, performed and recorded by Craven. Great and Terrible Potions …

There is a cruel joke told about the ‘child prodigy’ in music. It goes, “When he was four, he played like a 20-year-old; when he was 20, he played like a 20-year-old; when he was 40, he played like a 20-year-old”. But …

You would never have a Midnight Oil today. In a career that has spanned thirty years, The Oils have stepped on political toes, bit the corporate hand that fed them, always taken the hard line and never taken a step back. As …

Jim Moginie is perhaps best known as a member of iconic Australian band, Midnight Oil. His musicality and vision helped shape the sound of the Oils taking them far from their early pub rock thunder into a highly original and sophisticated sound …