Clinton Walker

Walker in 2009

Clinton Walker is an Australian writer, best known for his works on popular music. He is known for his books Highway to Hell (1994; a biography of Bon Scott), Buried Country (2000; also a film and soundtrack album), History is Made at Night (2012), and others. He has also written on other subjects, in books such as Football Life (1998) and Golden Miles (2005), and has worked extensively as a journalist and in television.

Early life

Born in Bendigo, Victoria, in 1957, Walker dropped out of art school in Brisbane in the late 70s to start a punk fanzine with Andrew McMillan and to write for student newspapers.

Career

In 1978, Walker moved to Melbourne, where he worked on-air for 3RRR, and with Bruce Milne on the fanzine Pulp, and wrote for the fledgling Roadrunner magazine.

Moving on to Sydney in 1980, he commenced a career as a freelance journalist, and for many years he wrote for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including longstanding associations with both RAM and Australian Rolling Stone; he also wrote extensively for Stiletto, The Bulletin, The Age, New Woman, Playboy, Inside Sport, the Edge and Juice.

Books

Walker published his first book, Inner City Sound, in 1981. It documented the emergence of independent Australian punk/post-punk music and quickly fell out of print but eventually, with its repute growing, it was re-released in 2005 in an expanded, updated edition, along with an accompanying CD anthology.

In 1984, after a couple of years in London, Walker returned to Australia and published his second book, The Next Thing.

Walker's third book, Highway to Hell, a biography of Bon Scott (1994), was widely acclaimed and a best seller in Australia; it has continuously remained in print ever since, making it probably the most enduring Australian music book ever. Subsequently, it was published in the US, and translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Bulgarian, and Finnish.

Walker then published Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music 1977-1991 (1996) and Football Life (1998). Stranded was initially somewhat contentious for its non-mainstream view, but it was better understood when the Visible Spectrum published a new updated global edition in 2021. As reviewer Des Cowley said: “Reading Stranded today with a quarter-century’s hindsight, it’s easy to see that Walker mostly got things right. And if he stumbled now and again, it’s still the case he was streaks ahead of the pack.” Football Life was a sort of companion piece to Stranded, another personal history but this time of minor-league Australian Rules culture.

Walker's sixth book, Buried Country, a history of Aboriginal country music, was published in 2000, along with an accompanying documentary film and CD soundtrack album. "Like many of Walker’s projects", Martin Jones wrote in Rhythms, "Buried Country was at least a decade ahead of its time". At a time when Aboriginal music still wasn't established or accepted as a fixture on the broader Australian music scene, Walker had long been one of its few media champions, and Buried Country was hailed as a pioneering and monumental work of music historiography. A new updated edition of the book was released in 2015 along with a rebooted version of the CD called Buried Country 1.5, and as a result of their even greater success than the first time around, a touring live stageshow adaptation premiered in 2016 and played the festival circuit for a few years. In 2018, Australian singer-songwriter Darren Hanlon, in conjunction with Mississippi Records in the US, produced a vinyl iteration of the Buried Country compilation that included even more new rare tracks.

In 2005, Walker’s seventh book, Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car, was published, expanding on an article he published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002. It was praised for its innovation, irreverent humour and beautiful design, and when its original publisher Lothian went bust it was re-released, in 2009, in an expanded and updated edition by Wakefield Press.

In 2012, Walker published History is Made at Night, a polemic on the endangered Australian live music circuit. In 2013 he published his ninth book, The Wizard of Oz, about the ill-starred Australian speed ace from the 1920s, Norman 'Wizard' Smith, as well as co-producing the CD Silver Roads, an anthology of Australian country-rock from the 1970s.

In 2018, Walker released Deadly Woman Blues, a graphic history of black women in Australian music, which was controversially withdrawn from sale. He did not return to the publishing scene till 2021, when he released two books, early in the year a new edition of his 1996 title Stranded, and then later in the year the all-new Suburban Songbook. Suburban Songbook: Writing Hits in post-war/pre-Countdown Australia is a critical history of the early evolution of rock/pop songwriting in Australia, of which the i94Bar said: “If Walker had only ever written Inner City Sound or Highway to Hell, his reputation as the grand old historian of Australian music would have been assured. The Suburban Songbook bookends the lot and is at least as essential.”

Deadly Woman Blues controversy

Deadly Woman Blues was released in 2018 by a division of academic publisher UNSW Press. Each of 99 biographical entries was accompanied by a hand-drawn illustration by Walker. The book immediately garnered a few glowing reviews.

There was an angry backlash from four of the artists who expressed their displeasure at being included without being spoken to, and citing factual inaccuracies. This led to social media outrage in which Walker was criticized as a racist, misogynist, colonialist privileged white male. The book was withdrawn from sale, with the publisher promising to pulp any unsold copies and never to reprint it.

Walker admitted to mistakes and apologised, saying "I didn't try to obscure what I was doing, I didn't take all the appropriate steps. I've been involved in underclass music forever, and in some ways, this is no different, but in other ways, it is very different".

Works

Bibliography

• Inner City Sound (Wild & Woolley, 1981; revised and expanded edition, Verse Chorus Press, 2005)
• The Next Thing (Kangaroo Press, 1984)
• Highway to Hell: The Life and Times of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott (Pan Macmillan, 1994; revised edition, Verse Chorus Press, 2001)
• Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music 1977-1991 (Pan Macmillan, 1996/Visible Spectrum, 2021)
• Football Life (PanMacmillan, 1998)
• Buried Country (Pluto Press, 2000; revised and expanded edition Verse Chorus Press, 2015)
• Golden Miles (Lothian, 2005; expanded edition, Wakefield Press, 2009)
• History is Made at Night (Currency House, 2012)
• Wizard of Oz (Wakefield Press, 2013)
• Deadly Woman Blues (New South, 2018/WITHDRAWN)
• Suburban Songbook (Goldentone, 2021)

Discography (as producer)

• Buried Country (Larrikin-Festival, 2000/Warner Music, 2015)
• Long Way to the Top (ABC, 2001)
• Studio 22 (ABC, 2002)
• Inner City Soundtrack (Laughing Outlaw, 2005)
• Silver Roads (Warner Music, 2013)

Videography (as writer)

• Notes from Home (ABC, 1987)
• Sing it in the Music (ABC, 1989)
• Studio 22 (ABC series, also as co-presenter, 1999–2003)
• Buried Country (Film Australia, 2000)
• Long Way to the Top (ABC, 2001)
• Love is in the Air (ABC, 2003)
• Rare Grooves (ABC series, also as presenter, 2003)

External links

• Official website
• Buried Country
• Clinton Walker on Rock's Back Pages