It was January 2020, Black Summer, and I was asked to play a fundraiser for the firefighters battling the ongoing hell ravaging Victoria and NSW. For this show at Fitzroy’s Old Bar I recruited long time friend and musical polymath Clare Moore on drums and backing vocals and the ever-ready always excellent Jeff Hooker on bass. They both had extensive experiences with my repertoire. For my set I focussed on ‘the hits’…. or ‘the shit’.

‘Smoked Salmon’ might have been an obvious choice of band name for me years ago, but this situation was ultimately the prompt for me!

Come February, Clare wasn’t available so by the time the next gig or two showed up I had Doug Galbraith, my biographer and drummer, as well as the fab singer guitarist and keyboard composer Claire Birchall in tow along with Jeff Hooker. Somehow, we managed to secure a run of shows in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

Claire had a stunning solo electro album just out called Running in Slow Motion, so I brought her along as the opening act and she played in Smoked Salmon with various ‘on the ground’ players like Pete ‘The Stud’ Howlett, Sarah ‘Shakey McGee’ Potaro, Pete Stone and Todd Pickett who I’d amassed over the states, even countries, promoting my last ‘solo’ record, My Script.

Having forever been in a three, two piece or solo format, it was good to go out and represent such songs as Cool Fire, Come on Spring, Frantic Romantic or even Fire Escape with a ‘full’ arrangement. Going by the punter’s reactions it was as though I had a whole new band, repertoire and concept, and in fact I did. Why hadn’t I been doing this all along?

Then COVID happened!

Isolation… what to do… I focused on what I was doing back in 1975 before Punk Rock hi jacked me with an ‘alternative’ career which was… Art. ie painting. It kept me stimulated… occupied… out of trouble.

Back in the post COVID world the gigs gradually came back. The reaction to Smoked Salmon was always fantastic.

In 2022 Doug drove Claire and I up to NSW for a tour where we picked up NSW bass player Sam Worrad.
In 2023 Doug managed to organise a Japanese tour for January 2024 utilising Sam’s experience and contacts there. In preparation the Melbourne lineup booked into Collingwood studio Rolling Stock with Myles Mumford to produce a 12” EP specifically for that trip. I titled it The Antenna of Beastly Science. Aside from the old repertoire of songs that we ‘covered’ we also recorded a couple of new songs; How Did They Ever Manage and Maybe for later. They’d been tapping on my car window and so I memo’d them to later flesh out with melody and chords. Smoked Salmon ate them up!

In October 2023 at the end of a UK Euro tour with the Scientists my partner Maxie and I booked ourselves a holiday in Italy and France, but not before our dear friend and sometime Salmon drummer Dimi Dero could subvert it with a run of French dares utilising himself, French bassist Delphine Ciampi and now Doug on guitar and keyboards under the ‘Smoked Salmon (in 3D)’ banner.

I got him to book us into Le Stereodrome Studio in his hometown Perpignan after the last date. The engineer was Sylvain Philipon. Despite my poor French and his slightly better English he ‘got’ what we were doing and captured it to perfection.

Prior to departure on this trip two more songs had been ‘banging on my door’ and in the recording session we got those down. They were Ghosts of Tomorrow and Hell in a Handbasket. Also I had some chords I jammed at soundcheck at the start of the tour in Le Petit Bain.

Dimi had remarked that there wasn’t a ‘sad’ song in the Salmon oeuvre and this one later became Triste Realite at this suggestion. As well, Delphine had a bass groove that we all jammed on. This would turn into Hey Hey Narcissus back in Myles’ studio.

In December 2023 I attempted to get Todd and Pete into Fremantle Studio Rada but COVID got Todd so I had to can the session. I’d worked up three sketches for them but decided to use them in a session with the NSW/Japan line up, which I booked into Headgap with Finn Keane in March 2024 when Sam was next down in Melbourne with his band Holy Soul. The songs were still half written and so I directed the band to play them into forms that I could add the final lyrics, even melodies to in a later session.

Come April after a Perth date with the Beasts, I was in Fremantle for take 2 of the Perth line up. Pete couldn’t make this one so Jozef Grech the engineer fill in on bass, recording himself, Todd and I. My sketches were even looser than the Headgap ones, but Jo’s whiteboard stills enabled him to organise all my ‘bits’ into a form which all three of us could read as we tracked. Who’d a thought it! After all these years as supposedly a ‘pro’, tracking music as I was reading it! I’m sure my ‘punk licence’ will be revoked.

May was spent in Headgap and Rollingstock tracking vocals and extras. Often with me feverishly completing songs, often the night before recording.

The major task aside from completing the recordings was to get the work of four separate engineers in four separate studios with nine musicians in two states and two countries to sound like one cohesive work.

The results are awaiting discovery in the new Smoked Salmon album, out 28 February on Cheersquad Records and Tapes.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia.