The rollout of ‘Doomsday Piano’ ends this October with a last couple of shows in Sydney and Radelaide. – then begins final preparations to release and tour the new compilation album ‘The Fall & Rise Of King Curly 1998 – 2008’ in March 2008.

Thank you for all your thoughts as to putting together the ‘essential’ song list – there was some illuminating feedback. It’s particularly nice to hear how more obscure songs have flavoured people’s lives a little. Frankly, for me it’s nice just to know that people have listened to them at all. Most unexpectedly, one person (in RAdelaide of course) almost mirrored my own personal favourites giving me something of a mandate to suit myself.

Of course it will be impossible to satisfy everyone- Mr Creighton would have me present only songs about people with crippling emotional problems; which while being a worthy point of view, a little limiting. There has also been discussion of leaving ‘Familyman’ out altogether. While I like the song, I feel a bit shackled to it nowadays and am keen not to allow it to draw the spotlight from the rest of the material. Probably how Toni Basil feels about ‘Mickey’

I now have under lock & key a semi-solid collection of 18 essential King Curly tracks including some new ones, unreleased ones as well as lost and forgotten ones – which will take the world by storm next March. The only thing they all have in common dear reader is that they are good.

Only the most persuasive eleventh hour arguments will be able to influence the course of history now.

Dear reader – I am faced with a difficult task. To compile a ‘Best Of King Curly’ (dont worry it wont be called that) CD for release early next year – and I realised that you might be the best help in making the song choices.

The idea was first suggested to me after Doomsday Piano was released and I thought it was ridiculous,… but now I’ve come around to it. My chief concerns were that it seemed kind of arrogant – but on reflection perhaps the material is worthy in the grand scheme of things. Secondly, Ive always felt Best Of’s were for bands who only had one good song on every album – which is clearly not the case here. In fact for me, the single most dissuasive factor in doing a Best Of is that it might suggest the unused material is second rate… but enough of this – the mission of course is to have people hear the damn stuff and with your help the must seductive combination of songs must be selected.

It may please you to know that I will have some newly recorded songs to include as well as a couple of unreleased numbers and new mixes including a VIAGRA-MIX of Orgy.

There are those amongst you who know most of the material well So,… Disclaimer – all suggestions may be disregarded of course.

Best regards

King Curly

Gentle reader, I must confess that I lied to you in my last missive. I claimed that King Curly and I were drinking coffee when first I gazed upon King Curly’s Horrible Trees. That may have been true initially; I cannot recall, but certainly not thereafter. It is my indulgence to savour a snifter of brandy every third Michaelmas, but otherwise strong drink and I are mere nodding acquaintances.

Anyway, they tell me that I fainted when I saw the trees, and was brought around by King Curly pinching my nose closed whilst his wife administered a potent liquor that the King later informed me was made by a witch doctor who lived on a mountain. It tasted curiously like cough-medicine.

As I sat bravely hyperventilating on a chair that I gamely struggled onto, I learnt the full story of the trees. I suppose I was still weeping a little, which may account for the conciliatory and apologetic colouring of the following explanation:

Apparently, it was all the fault of King Curly’s wife. Apparently, she had demanded the crows be kept from her fruit trees. And so King Curly settled on the stratagem of hanging all the music he didn’t like from the trees his wife loved because – and this is a direct quote – “their rainbow eyes” would frighten crows. It would also allow him to revenge himself on musicians and the music industry at large, and I suspect this factor played a larger part than any frippery about “rainbow eyes”.

I asked why King Curly owned hundreds of thousands of CD’s that he hated, and it is here that we must be circumspect. King Curly has come a long way since I met him years ago when he was a struggling artist often reduced eating his own hair in lieue of a meal. Nonetheless he remains what I might term, “a minor cult artist”, or as he might term, “a Monarch without honour in hs own country”. Either way, how did he get those CD’s?

At this point King Curly’s wife happened by, and she pointedly remarked that King Curly had hung from trees her entire childhood CD collection, as well as every CD she had brought to the marriage. King Curly looked a little shamefaced, but owned to sacrificing several of his own CD’s also, stating that he “used to enjoy The Doors, but that’s all well gone now”. It seems that even an artist of King Curly’s stature receives a huge amount of promotional CD’s from the labels – whilst they shun him professionally, the level of regard he enjoys from peers and reviewers seems to work on these small, fearful folk as garlic does to a vampire – and so they send him CD’s as appeasatory offerings.

King Curly claimed that his tree-hanging categorisation system was “the ultimate and cruellest reviewer”, but when I first saw those trees all I saw were lost and broken dreams swinging in the wind. You may draw your own conclusions as to whether these trees furnish a useful metaphor for the current sorry state of the Australian music industry. Personally I feel, and I suspect King Curly would agree, that we have a surfeit of great acts starving at the well whilst the Powers That Be serve us excrescent pablum.