Pig City: From the Saints to Savage Garden

Stafford, Andrew (2004) Pig City: From the Saints to Savage Garden. University of Queensland Press.

From Chapter One

From cult heroes the Saints and the Go-Betweens to national icons Powderfinger and international stars Savage Garden, Brisbane has produced more than its share of great bands. But behind the music lay a ghost city of malice and corruption.

Pressed under the thumb of the Bjelke-Petersen government and its toughest enforcers - the police - Brisbane's musicians, radio announcers and political activists braved ignorance, harassment and often violence to be heard.

Pig City maps the shifts in musical, political and cultural consciousness that have shaped the city's history and identity. This is Brisbane's story - the story of how a city finally grew up.

"The greatest thing that would happen in the state and the nation is when we get rid of the media. Then we would live in peace and tranquility and no one would know anything."

- Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen

And on Human Rights: "What's the ordinary man in the street got to do with it?"

Or my personal favourite: "These subversives, These Friends of the Dirt."

Take it back from mere attitude and return it to grand gesture.

Take it back from every futures trader yearning for a new life.

Take it back from sweater consultants and out-of-town investors.

Return it to ruined men with no feeling for the masses, and no stomach for the shameless sell.

The Empire I know is the one place in Sydney where you expect to see Bukowski in the corner writing a poem on a napkin. Blues music thrives in an environment of barflys, beer-spilt carpets and dark corners. A talk, a drink and people playing their soul. That's what it's about.

Chris, the bar manager, said it will be kinda retro and not too futuristic "so if you throw up it won't disappear into nothing." It will have air-conditionining. But without the mask of cigarette smoke there’s always the smell of stale beer, sweat and Parramatta Road.

Hmm. I know which carcinogens I'd prefer in the "Home of Sydney Blues."

Somehow I don't think out-of-town investors, futures traders and sweater consultants are reading from the same song book.

Here's the url to The Empire Hotel Annandale's webpage.
(btw - no one is paying me, worst luck. This is merely a salute for those about to rock. There are very few places left in Sydney to do that anymore, so let's keep it alive.)

The aromas of the “fleshy madness” taking over Paris on a rainy evening, when the “dripping city exhaled an unpleasant odour suggestive of a great untidy bed."

L’Assommoir, Emile Zola