Clinton Walker: Coalescing Strings of Popular Culture.

The collective consciousness of Australia's contemporary music scene from the late seventies through to the early nineties was chronicled and documented in great detail by Clinton Walker.

Walker's journalism for some of the best known music publications of the day, his contributions to nearly every Australian Music Anthology ever written and painstakingly researched biographies shone a light on a small corner of the world and it's "do it yourself" rock scene and in doing so facilitated many antipodean artists success beyond Australia's shores.

Walkers interest in music was not singular, but part of a wider interest in popular culture, and what that meant to the average Australian. He connected Music, Football and Muscle cars as intuitively as you would coffee and sugar and served it to the audience in a language and tone that seemed to capture the essence of the venues, people and cars he wrote about.

Walker's chronicles not only sought to narrate but in the case of "Stranded" and "A Football Life" he wove his own story into the subject and in doing so reminded us how our lives and memories are held together on a timeline attached to events and happenings.

I caught up with Clinton Walker to ask about the important things in life - Music, Cars and Football.

IBR: What do you think it is about Australia that makes it such a prolific producer of original music, particularly considering its comparatively small population?

Clinton Walker: That's a big question. I could and have written books about it! So it's hard to reduce down. Australia was so obsessed for so long by this question of national identity, but i think nowadays we have a much more sophisticated understanding of what Australia is. It's just letting every story stand, you know. And nowadays, I mean, I live in Sydney, and it doesn't feel like a small place. But yeah, maybe there is a thing about distance, even for me a ten-hour drive is to this day no big deal, and so maybe Australians just feel the need to shout to get heard! But certainly, when modern pop music took off after the war, it was this brand new cultural form that was very accessible and something that Australia could feel some real purchase on. It wasn't this high European culture that was restricted to the ruling class. I'm not saying there's not mobility between the classes within Australia, but put it this way - you still can't become part of Australia's cultural elite if your interest is in popular culture. But pop and rock was this brand new culture that was wasn't so burdened with baggage and it enabled Australia to just grab hold of it, do it yourself, because at first there was hardly even record companies here. So, Australia has punched above it's weight in some ways, but then maybe that's because we're largely English speaking too - but that's a whole other musciological question (the relationship between rock music and the English language which I'm still developing my theories on!) better left to another time...

IBR: The cultural history of Australia seems intrinsically linked to music, perhaps more so than any other country I can think of, why do you think that is?

Clinton Walker: It's funny because for a long time I thought the opposite, doubtless because I'd come from the opposite. My personal experience was growing up where music was not really part of life, and maybe that's why i went into it so strongly when I discovered it. But I guess a lot of other people had an experience quite different to that. But I'm still not sure what I think. When I was growing up in a house without music, I somehow got the sense that music was sort of effete, or something. but again, I think because Australia is such a young country, at least since white colonisation, with no real heritage in the high European forms, this meant there was really no percentage in just importing wholesale this fully-formed culture - although it happened a lot and it's still happening - it was up to Australians, ordinary Australians, to make up their own culture, and to me, that came out of the accessible arts, by which I mean that arts that don't require complicated and expensive production like, say, theatre and opera and ballet and movies, but painting, writing and popular music, which any ordinary poor person could do virtually single-handedly off their own bat.

IBR: The new generation of Australian artists, do they hold the same fascination for you as bands once did? And do you think their paths are harder, easier or just different than the bands that came before them?

Clinton Walker: No is the simple answer to the first part of this question. And I think that's just one of the natural symptoms of generational attrition. My get-out clause though is this - when I started to feel I was becoming less connected to the immediate, contemporary music around me, I got out of being a music journalist and critic because I didn't want to be one of those old farts with an undying column in the paper pretending to still be in touch. Whereas it's a different thing to be a cultural historian, which I guess is pretty much what I am. Which doesn't mean to say I don't keep up with all sorts of interests I have in music, it's just that I'm not obligated to be up with absolutely everything in the here and now. I just follow what I'm interested in, and that may be contemporary or historical.

As to whether the paths are easier or harder for the artists, again I'm not sure, I mean sure it's easier to record something, say, and get it out there, but the competition is so much greater, how do you get anybody to notice what you're putting out there?

IBR: The Internet unleashed a torrent (literally) of music consumers. At no time in history have we consumed more music than we do today - but has it happened in a way you would have expected? What's the most surprising development?

Clinton Walker: I probably never thought too much about all this technological side of things because it was a job enough, for me, just to keep up with the minimum I had to just to get by, let alone theorising too much about it. I do think a lot more now about it, and that's inevitably got to do with in part trying to anticipate how it might go from here so I can work out a way to survive! but when the internet came in and music started going out for free, well, all the arguments were just going to have to play themselves out weren't they? And all those arguments still aren't settled yet, and i don't expect them to be for a while.

The most surprising development? That the sheer fidelity of the sound most people seem to be prepared to accept these days is so low. The sound that comes through mobile devices is, well, it's kind of back to going around clutching a trannie, a transistor radio, with sound just as bad, and that was fifty years ago.

IBR: The major labels (the few that remain) still dominate the commercial musical landscape, perhaps arguably more so than they did before the Internet arrived - would you agree?

Clinton Walker: Not really sure. It's hard to really read what's actually going on. We're in this phase of rapid transition and it's now been going on for a while and I can't see where it's going to end either, so it's just kind of hard to plot the ways the currents are moving. I mean I guess they're moving, they're certainly doing that, and the battle seems to be pretty eternal that there will always be major corporate forces in any industry but then certainly the music industry has always been deeply layered and constantly shifting too. But honestly? I think the Wild West frontier town days of the virtual world have got to be coming to an end. It caught everyone off guard, especially the Man, the Man's now going to reign it in and monetise it. And so I think it then does come back down to some of the standard concepts major record companies and TV networks have always been all about, which is, get a hit. and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It's a good thing there's now other options, but I think people enjoy hits, I know I do, and I think the novelty's starting to wear off all this new technology and so then it does go back to a place for classical values. so I think the major corporations will figure, well, the game's not really that different, it's still just, get a hit. It's just that the playing field is a bit more leveled and now a hit can so much more easily come from anywhere. And so it means everbody's gotta be better.

IBR: Why is there such a natural connection between cars and music?

Clinton Walker: this makes me laugh! um, both are loud and fast? I mean that classic kind of amped-up rock'n'roll music, for me, say, it just seems to me to totally interlock with the shape and just everything about a classic muscle car. It is just this most incredible cultural synergy, two forms that are really speaking to each other as the designers say. They share these same appeals of danger, desire, freedom, breaking out, you know... even if it's all totally illusory! But what a lovely way to die.

IBR: What inspired you to write the history of the Australian muscle car?

Clinton Walker: Because i never have and never will actually possess one. It totally is this unconsumatable desire. I just have this tragic eye. I'm very involved in art, I've realised as I get older it being where I kind of came from, the more it's coming back to me, which is why I'm starting doing graphic books now. I just have this eye which is a tragic style victim, I suppose music was my ear, and now I'm back to my eye, and that's really why I wrote about Monaros and Chargers, because I just love their shapes and the way they look and their stance and the colours, it's just really that deeply shallow. It might have been anything else, like the design of a deco refrigerator, say, but then I love deco fridges too, industrial design is just something I really enjoy, in that deeply shallow purely aesthetic kind of way.

IBR: The Australian car industry's demise, avoidable or a result of a smaller more competitive world?

Clinton Walker: It was always an illusion from its very conception. For its entire life it was on this artificial life support system. Tariffs and import restrictions, direct government funding. I still can't believe what the honchos at GM in Detroit must have been thinking after the war, when they got this deal in Australia whereby the government put up all the risk capital to invent the Holden, and all the profits went back to Detroit! They must have been just kacking themselves. But it was nice in this gap or time warp in capitalism, it enabled that artificial era where Australia produced some unique cars that I still love. But it was never ever viable and so as the reality of rationalised global world encroached, it was never going to last.

IBR: Back in 1997 you wrote biographically about relationship with your father within the context of Football, very much in the same style as your book Stranded, which chronicles your journey to becoming Australia's most prominent rock journalist/writer - how important is the happenings around us, be it music, career or sport to our own stories?

Clinton Walker: Funny, you know, Stranded and Football LIfe were a companion pair and stupidly, of course, it took me a while to realise that! As you have astutely done here. And I guess the simple answer to the question is that of course we are all social beings and the lives we lead are knitted in to different degrees to all the things around us. Nearly everyone starts out in some sort of family, however untraditional as they may be nowadays, and then it's a process of the world opening out to you. I've always been pretty keen to keep having new things opening out to me - while at the same time staying in touch with the idea of where you're coming from which is not just about where you start but all the things that get you up to where you are in the present day.

IBR: Given that a large proportion of your writing is historical accounts of people's lives and careers, not lest your own, what's the process you go through when you start each of these books, how do you organize the information, do you start with a plan or is it more organic?

Clinton Walker: Bit of both. I'm trying to remember the thing that the late Peter Brock said was the way to win Bathurst, the way to succeed in anything, was two things, first of all fastidious preparation, planning, and secondly, readiness for things to go wrong and to have to completely throw the plan out. Maybe I'll have to look that one up, he said it much better. In writing like I do I just sort of let it happen. Gradually the focus of an idea emerges out of a general interest in something, you get a hunch and start sniffing around, and see what starts turning up. And so it's always a few steps forward, one back, one sideways. And in doing that, writing as much down as possible, and keeping the research files, and then, indeed, as you say, it really does become about organizing the information. I kind of re-shape the files to fit the curve of the narrative as it coalesces.

IBR: What's next for Clinton Walker?

Clinton Walker: As I alluded to before, I'm moving into graphic books, at least just for now. I've also started what is a very new experience for me, which is doing a PhD, at Macquarie University in Sydney. I just sort of fell into teaching there through my friend and fellow author Peter Doyle, teaching non-fiction writing, and from there i managed to inveigle my way into the PhD program. And it's a very, very different type of writing from any I've ever done before and so I'm wrestling with that challenge as we speak. But in my own publishing world, after there's a new edition of Buried Country which is just about due to come out through Verse Chorus Press, I'm going to follow that with a book called Deadly Woman Blues, which is again a sort of companion piece to Buried Country, being about black women in Australian music. But it's very different in another way in that it's graphic history; I call it a bit like a cross between Robert Crumb and Rock Dreams. I've done a hundred portraits of the women who make up this story, and so the book is like a gallery or album of these artworks, each with an accompanying biographical note. I grew up reading comics and I even did my own, so in a way, this is just going back to that. An art comic book. Matched to what I think is another amazing untold story.

Publications:

Clinton Walker (1981) Inner City Sound

Wild & Woolley; revised and expanded edition, Verse Chorus Press, 2005)

Clinton Walker (1984) The Next Thing

Kangaroo Press.

Clinton Walker: (1994) Highway to Hell: The Life and Times of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott

Pan Macmillan; revised edition, Verse Chorus Press, 2001

Clinton Walker: (1996) Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music 1977-1991

Pan Macmillan.

Clinton Walker (1998) Football Life

Pan Macmillan.

Clinton Walker (2000) Buried Country

Pluto Press; revised and expanded edition forthcoming from Verse Chorus Press, 2015, and screenplay for a Film Australia/SBS documentary.

Clinton Walker: (2005) Golden Miles

Lothian; expanded edition, Wakefield Press, 2009

Clinton Walker (2012) History is made at Night

Currency House; Wizard of Oz (Wakefield Press, 2013)

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Walker