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cathy green

  • spirits gig web
    You’ve seen the “Spirits of the Hoey” book, the tribute to Sydney’s iconic Hopetoun Hotel by academics Liz Guiffre and Gregory Ferris, with the photographs of Bryan “Cookie” Cook. Now you can experience the live gig when Petersham Bowling Club hosts “Spirits of The Hoey – A Live Love Letter To The Hopetoun Hotel” on Saturday October 31.

    Tickets are expected to sell out long before the event and are on sale here. 

    Heading the bill is a reformation of Vrag, the band that would morph into Machine Gun Fellatio, with very special guest Christa Hughes on vocals.

  • steve lucas nscSteve Lucas at the Newtown Social Club. Murray Bennett photo

    X is a Sydney band.

    I can’t think any other outfit that personified the street-level, brutal and at times minimalistic music of Sin City Sydney of the late ‘70s like X. Theirs' was a world of squats with a city awash with Terrence Clark's cheap smack, the odour of brown bags of dirty money and nightly beatings at Darlo police station.

    It was a world of corrupt pollies and police in the post-Askin Sydney. X captured that harsh, nihilistic inner-city world. One that has long since been gentrified.

  • x citations vol1Whatever your view about recent and current line-ups of the band (and there are naysayers of the Rilen-less version), X in their prime were The Real Deal. On a good night, no other act in Australia could match them for raw intensity with an underlying musicality.

    There was something dangerous about X and it wasn’t just the lunatics that followed them, leaving a trail of smashed glasses, broken furniture and self-inflicted flesh wounds behind them.

    That’s why the 40-year anniversary package of “X-Citations Vol 1” is so welcome. Picking up on the earliest days of X - the four-piece with Steve Lucas on vocals and Ian Krahe on guitar - and pushing through to the end of original drummer Steve Cafeiro’s tenure, this vinyl collection of 14 songs serves as a perfect reminder - or an introduction for the unaware - to their unique music.