One of my old friends, Anthony Clarke, is one of the biggest Dylan fans I know. He has all Dylan's albums and has spent a small fortune accumulating a collection of bootleg vinyl, DVD's, CD's – you name it – of Bob Dylan performances. I used to have a relationship with Bob Dylan's publishing company, [...]
Back in the 1970's I went to work for Alberts – the publishing and record company – in Sydney, Australia. Back in those days the entire music business ran with publishing and record deals that these days are regarded as usurious and unfair. Back then songwriters hardly ever got legal advice before signing a contract, [...]
According to the Guardian a Morgan Stanley intern who is 15 years old, was asked to provide an internal report on social networking, Twitter, P2P etc. Matthew Robson based his report on his friends' habits. It told Morgan Stanley what a lot of people already know… Here are some of the things that he said: [...]
Residents of the Antipodies (that’s Australia for people in England – New Zealand for the Spanish and somewhere else for people in the USA) are used to being the forgotten race. Our claim to fame is the Kangaroo, the Kiwi and a cute little marsupial misnamed “Bear”, the Koala. OK, we also play a [...]
There are strong corporate interests that want to take away our freedom. Masquerading as protecting freedom and democracy is a plan to corporatise the web and ensure that big content owners become the gatekeepers to content. The following is a quote from a blog piece by Steve Lendeman that says it very succinctly – and [...]
I was reading Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's column in the Telegraph (the UK paper, not the Australian one) this morning. It brought home to me how fortunate we, who live in Australia, are. But it also underlines how blase we are too. Most people in Australia have no idea of the potential of the Madoff scam in [...]
The spin merchants of government are doing their work. They make sure that there are enough policy balls in the air to keep everyone confused. That way there can be no major wave of unified public opinion… Global warming: Is it real? Is it caused by people? People are confounded by the questions that they [...]
Sean Penn is one of my favourite actors. And I love the fact that his politics are so pure and worn so publicly. Here, in full, is the text of the speech he gave when accepting the 2006 Christopher Reeve First Amendment Award on December 18th in New York. (reprinted from the CounterPunch website). The [...]
I just found out this morning that my old friend, Tommy Noonan, passed away two weeks ago. Tom was one of the real gentlemen of the music business. Back when it was about people and not just about profits. I brought Tom out to Australia in the early 1990's to speak at a conference along [...]
I spent about 25 years of my life in the music business, and it was a great time! During the mid 70's I worked in Sydney for Alberts, the oldest music publishing company in Australia, and one of the catalogues we represented was Bob Dylan's. I remember when one of his albums was due to [...]