Category: Friday on My Mind

Two dead horses and the outcry from animal rights groups that followed unfortunately pushed a telling United Nations report on climate change off the front page. In any other week, the report would have had a better run, without having to compete with horse form and breeding analysis, gossip and trivia, sweepstakes (there’s another page gone), fashions on the field and heart-tugging articles about little Aussie battlers trying to knock off cashed up European stables….

Continue reading

We’re back in the studio after our three-month road trip, trying to pick up the threads of what was as an intensive three-week recording session back in June. The last thing I did in the studio before we left was to re-record harmonica tracks with a new, $55 Hohner E harp. I use harmonicas a lot when we perform live, playing the instrument with a rack around my neck. The cheap harps I normally use…

Continue reading

Life’s most embarrassing moments. It is sometime in 1996 and I am attending a corporate function as a business reporter for The Courier-Mail. I am about as excited as I get, because for the first time I have the prospect of meeting the great Gough Whitlam. He has been invited to the conference to engage in a debate with Sir James Killen. Firebrands of the left and right; true intellectual discourse, brimful of wit and…

Continue reading

This week I choose to quote Paul Simon out of context for my own purposes. I’m sure he won’t mind. The short/little tautology aside, this is one of the hookiest lines from “You Can Call Me Al” where a man (probably), questions his mid-life existence – “Why am I soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard? Every songwriter on the planet yearns for just one of the multiple hooks…

Continue reading