With a strong focus on the Australian music scene, Australian Guitar is a rich source of information on playing techniques, styles, the wide range of instruments available and all the technology that guitarists have to consider in the 21st Century.
DAVE MUSTAINE ISSUES AN UPDATE ON HIS LONG-AWAITED GIBSON LES PAUL Dave Mustaine is continuing to build on his relationship with Gibson, as the Megadeth founder has confirmed that a signature Les Paul is definitely in the works. “I love what’s going on with my Gibson relationship. I look at a lot of that stuff,” he told our sibling magazine Guitarist. “We’re doing some models, like the Flying V with 24 frets, and we’ve talked about a couple of others and are making them perfect. One of those is the Dave Mustaine Les Paul. It will play like a beast, be a 24-fret guitar, and have the heel shaved down.” Mustaine previously teased the release of the Les Paul in a 2022 interview with Songfacts, saying, “We’re working on the…
At the start of a long gone decade marked by sociopolitical upheaval, The Saints began to blaze their trail as one of the world’s first punk bands. Like The Stooges and MC5, they were another young group distilling their adrenaline, anger and anxiety into songs that hit speakers like sledgehammers to the hippy movement. After becoming schoolmates in Brisbane, vocalist Chris Bailey, guitarist Ed Kuepper and drummer Ivor Hay first collaborated in 1973 - the same year AC/DC were formed. With Hay back on drums after Jeffery Wegener departed, bassist Kym Bradshaw joined. The first and most famous iteration of The Saints began to capture their lightning in a bottle in 1976. Through a few abrasive minutes of buzzsaw guitar and snarling vocals, palpable feelings of Aussie alienation were distilled…
INTERVIEW “I love a sunburnt country”, proclaims Doc Neeson in an acrid croak at the start of The Angels’ ‘Northwest Highway’ from 1998’s Skin & Bone. A pummeling guitar riff from the Brewster brothers kicks in, sending Dorothea Mackellar’s opening line to dusty antiquity. Now a thing of the past itself, the album it opened was the last Angels release to feature Neeson, who was killed by a brain tumour in 2014. Many tributes came flooding in for the Belfast-born frontman, who is remembered for his towering stage presence, his theatrical performances, and the songs he helped to write. One year prior, longtime Angels bassist Chris Bailey also died, from cancer. Back in 2008 after an eight year break-up, legalities about band name rights were quelled with an uneasy reformation…
INTERVIEW Tender yet urgent, with a slight smokiness for enhancing her darker lyrics, the singing voice of Emily Wurramara is rapidly maturing. Peppered with worldly wisdom and desires from the life of the proud Warnindhilyagwa woman from Groote Eylandt, NT, Wurramara’s latest batch of songs was released on August 24 as her second album, NARA. It represents a new artistic chapter. “I’m ready to let the songs go out there in the world and do what they need to do”, she explained to Australian Guitar. Wurramara grew up around the free form musical traditions of her family, brought up on a steady diet of R&B, blues and funk. As she explains it, the improvisational traditions of these genres bestowed upon her a “real rogue” approach that influenced the making of…
INTERVIEW “Vulnerability can be your greatest strength”, explains Claire Anne Taylor. The eleven songs on her third album Giving It Away exemplify this. While songwriting for this album, Taylor’s world was rocked when her 14-month-old son was diagnosed with Angelman Syndrome. While the genetic condition isn’t life-threatening, it’s incurable. In the depths of her resulting depression, having written a few new songs, the album’s titular track first arrived in her mind. It became a means to shed her drinking to cope, the guilt this resulted in, and her former sense of childlike innocence in a world that always seemed to work out for the better. “There’s a part of me that’s broken now since we found out the news”, croons Taylor on the song, alone at a piano, with characteristically…
INTERVIEW Named after a river near the house of their frontman-guitarist Cal Kramer, in the sleepy Perth suburb of Thornlie, The Southern River Band were placed in the global limelight last year by Justin Hawkins. In a video on his popular YouTube channel, The Darkness’ frontman praised the group as ‘a proper fucking rock band’. They’ve now performed with The Darkness at Warwick Castle in the UK. As Kramer explains with immense gratitude, “it’s not something that happens every day…especially to a bunch of fucking idiots from Thornlie”. Returning to Australia in mid-July after touring rigorously through the UK and Europe, The Southern River Band released their second studio album, D.I.Y, on August 16. Suitably, it was a homemade job recorded by the quartet’s other guitarist Dan Carroll at Rada…
