I was raised in Canberra. Some say it is a place so weirdly pristine and culturally sanitised that it has given rise to the keenest artistic minds in Australia and perhaps the world – Strong stuff which I wouldn’t necessarily agree with but will leave you with that thought.
I escaped to Sydney at the first opportunity under the guidance of my elder brother Greg. Greg was at that time, the creative force behind the reasonably well-known underground 1980’s band ‘The Lighthouse Keepers’) I began to play live music and write songs more prolifically and Greg and I set up a few brilliant but doomed bands starting with ‘Hammerhead’ (which included James Cruickshank and Kathy Weymss) and then ‘One Head Jet’ (with Sarah Peat and for a short time Brendan Gallagher) before I set out on my nervous lonesome in 2000 under the pathetically transparent guise of ‘King Curly’.
For my band I recruited the help of Jonathan Nix on Double Bass (who I had met while he 
played in the Gadflys) and Greg Walker on accordion (who was always recording strange noises in Jonathan’s back room in Kings Cross) Soon after Elmo Reed came along to play double bass and guitar.
Most of the first King Curly songs were recorded on a ½ inch 6 track machine at Greg Walkers little shack at Coal Cliff NSW with the exception of a few done in Brendan Gallaghers back room in North Bondi. I owe Brendan a lot for his encouragement and belief in my songwriting.
To summarise the rest of it: as I’m becoming increasingly worried that this is truly boring: King Curly has now made about 4 records all up. The first 2 however were scrapped over by the records companies involved released in bits and pieces 3 times culminating in ‘Familyman’. I regret this now as there are a number of good tunes which were set aside and are consequently now not available since they were not deemed radio friendly when ‘Familyman’ was finally put together.
While Elmo Reed (the greatest guitarist on Earth) is still with King Curly – Greg Walker went to live in Melbourne where he is now rightly feted by the industry as a producer genius and occasionally puts out a Machine Translation album.
The band for the last two years has included a group of young Sydney jazz cats – The 3 Hauptmann siblings: Zoe on bass, Ben on various stringed things and James on percussion, John Hibbard or trombone and occasionally Wurlitzer, Evan Mannell on drums and Aaron Flower on guitar. How this came about is still a mystery to me as I don’t much care for jazz but I do like them - and have come to respect their strange ways while at the same time wrestling any gratuitous noodling out of them as best I can. It should be said at this point that a prime reason behind using the strange atonal instruments used in the ‘Doomsday Piano’ recording sessions was to hobble the overly proficient band.
The result, I hope, speaks for itself on ‘Doomsday Piano’ and in the live act.
