Bücher von Glen Humphries

The Wollongong music scene is now well and truly on the map, thanks to Hockey Dad, the Yours and Owls Festival and the Farmer and the Owl label. They spearheaded a golden age for the local scene, where people outside Wollongong finally realised what was going on in the coastal town an hour south of Sydney. But this wasn''t the first high point for the local scene, which stretches back to the mid-1950s. In Lull City, Glen Humphries focuses on the creation of this current golden age for the scene while also casting an eye back to see what went on before we got to this point.

In 1982, Midnight Oil was a band in trouble. Their last album, Place Without a Postcard, was supposed to be their big breakthrough but it hadn't worked out that way. So they found themselves in London, feeling the pressure of recording what was a "make or break" album. Members threatened to leave, others had nervous breakdowns and the ANZ bank manager back home was sweating as he watched the overdraft he'd approved for the band get bigger and bigger.If this album went the same way as the last one, it could be the end of Midnight Oil. Out of the crisis came 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, an album that changed everything for the band. It entered the charts and stayed there for more than three years. They started playing bigger venues - and they were able to pay back the bank manager.Two years later, they headed to Japan to record the polarising Red Sails in the Sunset. It managed to do what 10-1 couldn't - give the band their first No1 album. But again the band found themselves facing the possibility it could all be over, courtesy of lead singer Peter Garrett's tilt at federal politics. If he wins, the band loses.In Sounds Like an Ending, journalist and author Glen Humphries takes a track-by-track look at these two albums and the times and turmoil that fuelled them. That includes wondering whether the 10-1 title was a sly dig at a certain Australian music TV show, finding out the stories behind some of the songs and explaining what's really happening on the cover of Red Sails in the Sunset.

"Could you estimate the number of houses and backyards you have unlawfully entered?""No, it would be terribly hard to say.""Would it be hundreds or would it be thousands?""Many, many hundreds. Perhaps thousands."- The Kingsgrove Slasher's police questioning Between 1956 and 1959, suburban Sydney was terrorised by a phantom known as the Kingsgrove Slasher. A peeping Tom, he graduated to breaking into houses to watch people sleep before later slashing women and girls with a razor while they lay in their beds.He punched a 21-year-old woman into unconsciousness, breaking her teeth and cutting her mouth, hit a teenage girl in the face with a piece of wood and slashed a deep wound across the stomach of a 64-year-old woman. The Slasher also groped teens in their beds, and one of his 18 victims was just seven years old.Night Terrors is the first detailed account of the Kingsgrove Slasher case. It draws on hundreds of newspaper articles written at the time - which show the level of fear in the community - as well as the transcripts from the court hearings, which had been sealed since 1959. The result is a true-crime book that might make it hard for you to go to sleep at night.