The Country Music Festival may be  in full swing but there's life outside Tammers. For a start...Sweet Baby James and Rob Eyers will be rolling in rhythm and double voodoo blues at the Gilbert Street Hotel on Thursday January 26.

Hollywood Gun Club is ramping up rehearsals for their Fringe show.

FRINGE 2012 - HOLLYWOOD gUN CLuB are “The 80’s ROCKED” See, hear and experience an arena style concert - in a pub. Add a hard rockin' horn section to spice up Aerosmith, Alice Cooper & Extreme and you'll be in Hair Metal Heaven! This show is high octane, exciting and unapologetic! Go to their facebook site for more info: http://www.facebook.com/hollywoodgunclub or www.hollywoodgunclub.com

Saturday February 4 The Gov. presents the return of a local favourite – Ronnie Taheny in '!Score – 20 years solo'.

Ronnie – who has clocked up appearances with Fairport Convention and Ani diFranco and David Gray, Luka Bloom, Tom Robinson, Aimee Mann and Billy Bragg – brings her musical exuberance to Adelaide’s Governor Hindmarsh Hotel for one show, kicking off her 2012 “!Score” tour. Ronnie promises to deliver a zesty selection of satire-driven gems from her past two decades of work, lubricated with some of the ‘inspirational dirt’ that helped create the songs. She will be joined on stage by Jarrad Payne on drums.

Ronnie Taheny “!SCORE!” tour 2012 starts at The Gov., Sat Feb 4^th then bounces into Europe from April till June.

Tickets: The Gov., Moshtix and Venue*Tix 

Table reservations: 0413 450521 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it   See: ronnietaheny.com

 Go here for gigs at the Wheatie:http://wheatsheafhotel.com.au

On Sunday January 29  you can  HELP THE YEARLINGS GET TO MEMPHIS! -

A FUNDRAISER to help the yearlings make it to Memphis to play the international folk alliance - featuring loads of special guests ! DOORS @ 3.30PM/$15

Gone up the country

The country music festival is a time when you hear a lot of music that shoulda been drowned at birth. But it’s not all bad and you can make your mark if you have a yen to bear your soul and your tonsils. Being a poorly-supervised show off I – and my cousin Leonard - thought we’d try our ‘turns’ at some the many competitions up there and I’m happy to say – with mixed emotions – that we done good. Gooder than expected.

Len does a pretty good turn singing country bush ballads and I do a sort of comedy Scotsman and bagpipe act where I get togged up in the kilt and stuff, tuck my tabby cat Vlad under my arm and squeeze down on his guts while biting the tip of its tail. The noise of the cat complaining is not too dissimilar to that of a set of bagpipes and always gets a laugh at my footy club which was enough encouragement to goad me into bringing the turn to a wider audience.

In all honesty, Len and I didn’t give ourselves any advantages for winning our round of the competition, we staggered home to our tent in the Tammers camping ground a tad before sparrow’s fart brimming with bravado that dissipated when the sun came up. While Len was running though his vocal practice he declared, horrified no – mortified – that he couldn’t find his C sharp. I couldn’t find my undedaks but that didn’t seem to concern him as much as his C sharp. You see, to my accordion accompaniment, Lenny sings the well-known old Australian Bush Ballad the Maiden from Kosciusko which goes....

Ohhhhh..... The maiden from Kosciusko; Had a motorised dong called Roscoe

With duel exhausts it was hung like a horse; And she rode it from Paris to Moscow

Singing Tralalala Dooley o day;That maid loved a roll in the hay

With a four-stroke whopper that could rattle her choppers

Oh deedley doodley o day

Well, the C sharp to which he referred apparently occurs in almost every line of the ditty and its loss from his vocal toolkit was going to spoil his chances of winning a prize There was no way he was going to hit that high note without physical assistance. That’s where I came in with the brilliant idea of attaching the handles of our jaffle iron to the ends of my accordion. I would then squat behind Lennie for our performance, and squeeze his knackers at each appropriate point in the song with a jaffle iron as I worked the squeezebox - it was a delightfully musical solution to the problem. The gentle pressure on his sensitive parts helped him to climb the Alp so to speak. Our practice run in the tent proved successful and with what little time we had left we hastily dressed and dashed off to the competition.

We started well; the C sharps were appearing perfectly when Vlad – the cat in, my act  (did I mention how he got his name? He has long and deadly claws hence Vlad, the Impaler) well, Vlad had escaped from his basket and wandered up onto the stage and started to bat my sporran with his clawed feet. Except... in the rush to get ready I had forgotten to wear my sporran -  and my underdaks. When Vlad clawed my knackersack in lieu of my sporran, I jumped and hollered like hell. And every time he clawed me I jumped and yelled and, as a consequence, so did Len because each attack with those rapier-like claws caused me to pump the squeezebox harder  - and Len’s knackers. Between us we broke the C sharp barrier and beyond and hooted and hollered our way to win the Yodelling Duet prize. 

With some of the prize money I had my knackersack professionally repaired and got some nice-looking stitch-work done on my lip from where Lennie biffed me. Personally I thought his attitude was a bit niggardly – I know the Yodelling Champions prize money was somewhat smaller than the Bush Balladeer prize money; and he didn’t like sharing three-fifths of fuck-all when he thought he could of won his chosen category outright but, let’s face it ... bush balladeers are a fukken drug on the country music market but a good yodelling duet is always gonna make people’s eyes pop. It certainly caused mine to bulge out a little.

Gig of the week is Susie’s Blues Day with a cracking line-up of talent. Saturday January 21,  5pm-11pm. 6 hours of the best of Adelaide’s Blues featuring Done & Dusted, The Bluescasters, The Shades of Blues Band, Nikko & Dennis, Steve Brown & Dave Rhodes and  Paul Hay. This is a fundraiser for the V2 Classic Motorbike Run, Bikes Number 13 & 32, raising funds for Variety, The Children’s Charity. Pre-sale tickets $25, Door Entry $30, BYOG, Food provided. For details ring Susie 8379 5102 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Thursday, January 19, SWEET BABY JAMES – SOLO – at Suzie Wong's Room (7pm)120 Port Road, next to the AEC. See: http://www.suziewongsroom.com/

Friday January 20 at the Whitmore has Smoke ‘n’ Mirrors.

And It’s pan!c at the Dan on Saturday January 21. Get the best entertainment and pub scran at the Dan (you may need to look up ‘scran’ in a colloquial dictionary but I can give yer a clue… Scran - slang in the British army and navy for rations.). So – here we go with the sequitur – get yer dancing shoes and yer scran spanners up to the Daniel O’Connell Hotel on Saturday January 21 for a cracking good time. Pan!c cranks up around 9 pm.

Go to: www.wheatsheafhotel.com.au for great roots music gigs this week.

The Gov has Jay Hoad on Friday January 20 and Beth Orton Sunday January 22. Go here: http://www.thegov.com.au/gig-guide.html

Looking Ahead….

Saturday February 4 The Gov. presents the return of a local favourite – Ronnie Taheny in '!Score – 20 years solo'.

Ronnie Taheny brings her musical exuberance to Adelaide’s Governor Hindmarsh Hotel for one show, kicking off her 2012 “!Score” tour. Ronnie promises to deliver a zesty selection of satire-driven gems from her past two decades of work, lubricated with some of the ‘inspirational dirt’ that helped create the songs. She will be joined on stage by Jarrad Payne on drums.

Ronnie Taheny “!SCORE!” tour 2012 starts at The Gov., Sat Feb 4^th then bounces into Europe from April till June.

Tickets: The Gov., Moshtix and Venue*Tix 

Table reservations: 0413 450521 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it   See: ronnietaheny.com

The adventures of Tintinnitus and the Lake of the Brown Trout

Marlinspuke Hall. The wet area….

Wooah! Wooah!

“Put a sock in it, Snotty! Your infernal yapping is bouncing off the tiles and making my ears ring….”

Wooah! Wooah!

“All right, All Right! You want to tell me something, eh? What? There’s something in the toilet! An Otter in the toilet????? Let me see…. Why Snotty, you’re right… and yet you are not quite right…. It’s a dead otter. A huge dead otter. The captain, the dirty bugger, has forgotten to flush. Here let me try…..”

13 flushes later

“I dunno, Snotty. The bastard doesn’t want to go to turd heaven....”

Wooah,wooah!

“What’s that Snotty? Something something something where…? Oh yes. Right again Snotty. There’s something on the side of the greasy brown behemoth? Written in undigested sweetcorn kernels. It’s a message... it says: ‘Help. Kidnapped. Trapped in septic tank with nothing to drink but brown water.’ ”  

“Holy fuk, Snotty! The Captain’s been kidnapped. We’ve no option but to take the brick out of the cistern and give the fukker a decent flush while you and I ride the dead otter down into the sewer pipes.”

Wooah wooah!

“What’s that, Snotty, take my typewriter?... to write a story of our adventures for le nationale Geographique? What a good idea, Snotty. Let me strap it on your back. There… and I’ll take my camera just in case there are some topless natives as well.”

“All set? Right, I’m pulling the chain!”

Kerfloooooshh.

“COWABUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!......”

Wooah, wooah.

Sweeping crazily through the putrid pipeline, Tintinnitus, the intrepid reporter and his faithless mutt, Snotty, rode the crankingly huge turd through the reeking darkness for seemingly endless seconds before shooting out into a vast ocean of septic waste in the massive tank behind Marlinspuke Hall.

“Look, Snotty! Over there! It’s the Captain. Marooned on a soggasshole sea of toilet paper and womens' absorbency products.  But wait! There’s someone with him! Look, it’s that filthy Greek bastard Rastapopopopopopopopalot! Look what he’s doing, Snotty! He’s torturing the poor Captain. He’s got a bowl of soggy Greek salad and he’s making the captain eat it. No! Stop! You old goat-fukka! Salad will poison the Captain!”

Wooah Wooah!

“What's that, Snotty? the Typewriter...? You’re right, Snotty! Lets write a story to the paper to put a stop to these heinous, inhuman practices….”

Wooah, Wooah!

“What’s that, Snotty…? Oh! I gotcha! That is a better idea….”

With a mighty gut-busting grunt, Tintinnitus hurled the typewriter at Rastapopopopopopopopalot, smacking the bastard right in the ear with an almighty earsplitting yelp!

“Shite! Should of untied Snotty before I did that. But we’ve saved the Captian!

“Captain, you’re saved!”

“Aye! And a fat lot of fukken guid that’s gonna do me now... he was about to open a bottle of restina to go with the bowl of weeds' n curd, ya daft wee chicken-choker.”

“We’ve no time for jolly chat now, Captain... we need to find a way out of here.”

“Well, ye’d better be quick aboot it; we’re aboot to be murrrrdered by a rampaging brown trrrout the size of a double-decker bus. AAiiiiiieeeeeee!”

“Just a moment, Captain. It certainly looks like a humungous dinosaurus turd but take a gander at the front end where the heat shield should be…. There’s a window! And look…. whose dopey face can you see in that window????”

“Billions of blistering bilious blue arthropods belonging to infraclass Cirripedia in the subphylum Crustacea! It’s …. It’s….. who is it, ye merkin-headed little twat?”

“It’s Professor Catheter Khuntbubble, you drunken Shetland sheep-shagger, in a submersible power-driven poo-shaped pigboat! We’re saved!”

“Hello, Tintinnitus. Hello Captain,” piped the ratbaggy professor. “Get on board, but be quick. I’ve dropped a packet of senna pod powder and a litre of chili oil in Bianca Castalloy’s spaghetti bog and she's gonna be hitting the Marlinspuke dunny screaming in precious few seconds.”

Tintinnius had barely closed and sealed the hatch in the submersible mechanical turd when the tidal wave hit.  The huge swirling tsunami of acrid, burning loose bowel movement hurled the marvellous vessel across the surface of the septic pond and drove it toward the overflow pipe at breakneck speed. With an almighty clang the vessel lodged in the pipe and the tide surged behind it. Then, with a colossal wet pop, the tin turd shot out and skidded to a stop in the silage pit. The occupants breathed a sigh of relief. Then somebody farted.

“Ohhhh, my guts,” groaned the Captain. “After that oily mess of Rastapopopopopopopopalot’s rabbit food I could manage a Brad Pitt meself. Give us that copy of Reader’s Wives, Pubehead; I’ll see you in half an hour.”

Up on a balcony outside the glorious Marlinspuke bathroom, Bianca Castalloy hung herself over the railing, looking white and ill. “Ohhhhh, Captain,” she groaned as the air behind her shimmered greasily. “You’ll have to tighten your nipsy….. I’d give it at least ten minutes, if I were you! Bloooooooargh!!”