TRIPPER'S ADVOCATE

Duncan Graham was born in the horse latitudes, in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, in the mid Sixties. His teenage years were dripping with the usual Seventies mash of AC/DC, Billy Thorpe, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, The Skyhooks and Donna Summer, and, on the teev, GTK, Countdown, Nightmoves and Sounds Unlimited. He admits freely to a penchant then for Golden Breed shirts, Hobbytex tees, brown cords and Dunlop volleys. He itched to leave the suburbs behind, and take a stab at the musical half-life.

 

The decade tumbled over, rumours of war filled the air, and Nick Cave appeared on Countdown. Duncan first picked up a guitar in 1981, when his older brother's attempt to become a new Elvis crashed and burned into a thicket of blisters and confusion. By early 1982, he had written his first song, a dire historical dirge called (wait for it!): "Oh, Titanic". In 1983, under the influence of cannabis, speed, Chateau Cardboard cask wine and the crisp buzz of a Carlton winter, he slammed a Tequila slammer down on the bar of Norton's and dissappeared into the life of a Melbourne Uni drop-out. Crossing the river, he shacked up with a bunch of dole bludgers in St. Kilda. There he discovered the earthly delights of the thin young men of the inner city, lived on Stone's Green Ginger Wine and fish fingers, stole from parked cars, and STARTED HIS FIRST BAND (Gilligan's Virus Box), which played never ending covers of Stooges, Velvet Underground, Lee Hazlewood & Gang Of Four songs.

 

Then, in the middle of 1984, he played his first pub show with a bunch of wasters in St. Kilda. The band was Fishdrink: they gigged solidly for a year, then split and reformed as The Breaknecks in 1985. This band, which was a tight, boysy, faux-Detroitesque rockist 5-piece with a crypto-faggy edge, played over 150 shows in 3 states before dissolving days after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Duncan played rhythm electric guitar on a shitbox Canora strat, wrote nearly all the songs, and occasionally made an undignified squawk into the 57s, but his singing days were yet to come.

The Breaknecks 1991: l to r, Nick Long, Duncan Graham.
(photo: Vanessa Martin)

 

The decade tumbled over again, rumours of war filled the air and Nick Cave got a crew cut. The Eighties dream of The Birthday Party, The Scientists, The Sacred Cowboys, The Celibate Rifles, The Moodists, and The Fall was over. The Nineties breakouts in Seattle, Oxford and Madchester had not yet begun. Through the early Nineties, Duncan played in a small acoustic combo called Suit Of Lights, where he first got to play with longtime cohorts Rex Watts and Paul Huntingford, until asked to join the gloomcore shoegazer majesty of The Lost Highway. Drafted on bass, he also shared voice and songwriting duties with Melbourne legend Perry White. This band blazed and burned within 3 years, recording one unreleased album (Amarine), which was ready to go, but was deleted when the Adelaide record company which had signed the band was bought and dissolved in the Festival shake-up of the mid-Nineties.

In 1989, Duncan and Ben Kilmartin played as Joshu's Dog (photo: Phil Kitchen)

After the dissolution of The Lost Highway, Duncan became involved in four main streams of music:

(1) he got into classical composition, producing two large orchestral works and a couple of string quartets
(2) he copped a half dozen radio, theatre and modern dance commissions
(3) he began writing electronica with his mate, Paul Huntingford, as a recording combo called Cum, and released a 45 minute House EP, Pink Noise in 2006 on Tripper's Advocate Records
(4) he DJed for a coupla years around the time of the Millenium, playing lovely fucked-up grungy house tunes, using the moniker Camp David.

The decade tumbled over again, rumours of war filled the air once more, and Nick Cave quit drugs. Duncan sidetracked into classical music, and lived the quiet life in West Footscray, making the daily grind at Vic Market. In the early years of the new century, friends and camp followers started gently pushing Duncan back into the wonderful world of rock'n'roll. One friend in particular, radio producer and poet Peter Davis, wanted to cut versions of the best of the songs Duncan had written over the years that had never had proper outings with his various bands. With the help of Watts and Huntingford, they cut Faggot Anthems And Drug Ballads: An Adventure In Lo Fidelity in 2004, in the most basic way possible (one lousy mic, just bouncing from CD burner to CD burner, adding overdubs each time). Faggot Anthems And Drug Ballads: An Adventure In Lo Fidelity is a collection of 12 songs written over a 20 year period. In general, they represent the faggiest and least rock'n'roll of Duncan's songs, and, as such, were the sort of song that never quite worked in a rock'n'roll setting. The recordings are hopelessly lo-fi, but nevertheless have a kind of shitty hangover charm that screams seedy Sunday morning.
(photo: Peter Davis)

 

The week after the launch, Duncan and his buddies went back into the studio. He had begun writing again, and had another album's worth of stuff, which would become his second solo CD Stars And Hearts And Lightning Strikes. The LP was recorded and mixed in three loungerooms: Rex Watts' party pad in Castlemaine, Victoria; Paul Huntingford's digs in Enmore, Sydney; and, Duncan's own dump in West Footscray, Melbourne. Much grander than Faggot Anthems And Drug Ballads: An Adventure In Lo Fidelity, this album also features the tasty violin warblings of Jan Palethorpe, and makes a big swank out of Huntingford's piano and Watts' lead guitar.

And so to the future: Well, Duncan's hitching along the acoustic-based rock'n'roll highway for the time being, and digging it. For the rest of 2007, he'll be hustling gigs in Melbourne, Castlemaine and Sydney, hoping to rack up at least a dozen shows between these joints, including a launch in each spot before the end of the year. He'll also be trying to make the scene in Adelaide and Bris Vegas before the summer's out. He plans to take a short break in Autumn 2008 to put a post-shoegazer make'n'break hard'n'soft rock'n'roll band together, and to record his third solo CD, with both that band and with his acoustic music mates. That CD is already nearly half written, and should be out before the end of 2008.
(photo: Peter Davis)