“Nobody cares about you as much as you do. After years of being in the music industry, it’s like everything has to come from you. You have to create it, you have to love it, you have to care about it. Because if you don’t, nobody else will.” Julia Stone isn’t worried about being solo again. Or that worried what any of us have to say. She will be back with her younger brother, Angus, in their on again/off again duo of 15 years, at some point (actually, pretty soon if rumours a

It wasn’t just Sony. It never was. Universal Music Australia’s belated - one might offer, forced – admittance of a moral black hole in its culture, as reported at the weekend by Nathanael Cooper of The Sydney Morning Herald, who broke the story of Denis Handlin’s ignominious exit from Sony Music Australia in June, is proof of that. There’s more, plenty more. And I don’t just mean the expanded revelations about Sony Australia, from Kelly Burke in The Guardian, which showed via

It’s not the noise that can scare you the most; it’s the quiet. Or as Bob Dylan put it in Love Sick: sometimes the silence can be like thunder. Beneath the Nashville skyline Dylan wrote about after leaving New York to record here in the mid-1960s, not that far away from the fabled Music Row of publishers’ offices and recording studios which dominate the southern city, Emma Swift was not just flat, not just listless, she was, the Australian later realised, clinically depressed

THE CHICKS Gaslighter (Sony) Things we talk about when we talk about The Chicks, who no longer are The Dixie Chicks. We could start with talk of the quality of the songwriting here – zestful, plugged into at least three or four styles - one of which might possibly be called country; one of which is decidedly R&B – and pinging choruses like some pop machine, though this machine is more Los Angeles than Stockholm. This album bursts out. We could also lead with the quality of th

As he packs his bags and guitars for an Australian tour where each stop will feature three nights in a row – split between career wrap-up; first three albums; next three albums – there are some things that remain true about Billy Bragg now and at the start of his career. There is no division of “life with politics” and “life without politics” in his world. Anyone who has heard or seen him – on stage, radio, TV talk shows and rallies - in the past 35 years would know that. And

Pic by Edward Bishop This interview, fresh and tasty from but days ago, completes a week dedicated to the former Everything But The Girl and Marine Girls member, author and columnist – begun with a review of her new album HERE, and featuring an appearance in Wind Back Wednesday from a chat in 2007 HERE. Best of times? Worst of times. Whatever they are, the times may suit me says Tracey Thorn,. If you’re going to release an album of what you call “feminist bangers” - songs abo