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Tracks
Following their
induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame last year
The Dingoes
are back in town
with a new album
"Tracks"
recorded in
Tucson Arizona
and Adelaide South Australia
Buy on line
"Long may the
Dingoes howl!"
Review
Interview
The Dingoes - Tucson
The Dingoes "Live at Last"
The Dingoes 2010
(left to right) John Bois,
Chris Stockley,
Broderick Smith and Kerryn Tolhurst
Photo taken by
Stephen
McKenzie at
Revolver Studios, Prahran -
August, 2010
The Dingoes website
"Tracks"
Their first album in 31 years
If you know the Dingoes, you'll know nostalgia played no part whatsoever
in the sudden, unlikely existence of their exhilarating fourth album. God
knows, nostalgia and its associated rewards have been dangled in front of
this legendary Australian rock outfit for three decades, to no avail.
If you don't know the Dingoes, that's fine too. Tracks stands alone and
true to itself and its time — as strong, graceful and poetic as any
roots-rock debut you'll hear this year.
"The band broke up in 1979," says guitarist-producer Kerryn Tolhurst, with
a characteristic absence of sentimentality. "We had no intention of
getting back together. Ever.
"In people's minds we were important to some degree, musically, I guess. I
don’t know how far that extends, but last year, ARIA saw fit to induct us
into its Hall of Fame. That brought us back together for the first time in
30 years."
The occasion brought both new impetus and an overdue honour for a band
—Broderick Smith, Chris Stockley, John Bois and the late John Lee being
the other key players — who had sown their legacy over three albums
between '73 and '79.
That legacy, in case you've missed subsequent nods of respect from Cold
Chisel, James Reyne or Paul Kelly, was an instinctive amalgamation of
gritty, country-skewed rock'n'roll with a rare Australian voice and
outlook.
The Dingoes' legend has roots in the Melbourne R'n'B boom of the early
'60s, a hair-raising brush with fate in the shadow of Lynyrd Skynyrd's
Mississippi air disaster of '77, and a final act recorded at New York's
infamous Hit Factory.
Nostalgics can Google the rest. The point is that the Dingoes' back story
ended there, without false steps, regrets or unfinished business. The
singer flew home to form Broderick Smith's Big Combo. Bassist John Bois
went on to teach biology in Baltimore. Chris Stockley would play guitar
with Jimmy Barnes and countless others. Drummer John Lee sadly passed away
in 1999.
Fast forward to the ARIA Hall of Fame, Melbourne, August 2009. In the
succinct words of Kerryn Tolhurst — who had spent his previous three
decades as songwriter and producer of more than 40 albums in the USA and
Australia — "it all sounded rather good. The idea was born that maybe we
should think about another album."
Songs were submitted by all parties. Ten survived the vote. Four months
after their Hall of Fame reunion, Brod, Chris and John Bois flew to
Kerryn's studio in Tuscon, Arizona, to record over Christmas and New Year
2010.
The thing is, though, that Tracks requires none of this preamble. It's an
album that draws its own map in time and space, book-ended by songs of the
open road and revolving around a red heart of cracked Earth and blue sky.
The opener, "Right To Your Door", is a reunion song sans schmaltz or
hubris. "Not Worth Fighting For" and "Try Anyway" are songs that know all
about striving and failure and the inevitability of each. "No Rain No
River" and "Ribs of the Land" are as current and as timeless as the
country they sprang from.
Tracks is an album about rambling and sanctuary, the gentleness of
domestic compassion, the thunder of rock'n'roll salvation, and ultimately
the endless
vista of the road at either end.
"It covers territory that we haven't covered before, but it still relates
to what we were," Kerryn says. "We never wrote blatantly political songs
or anything like that, but they had to do with an Australian attitude
about things. It was more an atmospheric sense of place that we found."
Even after 31 years, it's not the kind of place you can forget.
"The idea was to conceptualise where the band would have been now, had we
stayed together, how we would have evolved, what we would have sounded
like," says Kerryn.
"During the '80s we would have made a lot of dreadful albums with big drum
sounds. Then by the '90s we probably would have redeemed ourselves as
elder statesmen, with the advent of alt. country and roots music.
"Finally we would have got back round to what we were about in the first
place. Maybe by now, given all of our combined influences, we'd be having
a second life. This is it."
Michael Dwyer
Melbourne
July 2010
For interview opportunities or further media information please contact:
Mushroom Group Promotions
Melbourne : +61 3 8687 1353
Sydney: +61 2 8356 1299
Email: info@mgpromotions.com.au Web: liberation.com.au
National Publicist and Media Contact: Sarah Morgan
* Check out
The Dingoes Official Website
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