aaamusic | On 05, Oct 2010

Australia’s most celebrated contemporary songwriter has recorded his debut solo album. For the past ten years, Gareth Liddiard
has been the driving creative force behind Australian Music Prize-winning band The Drones and a string of modern classics
including ‘I Don’t Ever Want To Change’, ‘Sixteen Straws’ and ‘Shark-Fin Blues’ – named the greatest Australian song ever written
by a panel of musicians polled by national youth network, Triple J.
Recorded in an isolated mansion thirty minutes outside Yass, in country New South Wales, Strange Tourist captures Liddiard at his
most naked, and his most explosive. Armed with just a guitar, he makes surreal stories of tightrope walkers, down and outers,
suicidal Japanese salarymen and suburban radicals come alive like no one else could.
On ‘Blondin Makes An Omelette’ Liddiard tells the story of wirewalker and acrobat Charles Blondin from the point of view of his
eternally suffering understudy: “No one cared for him at all until he crossed Niagra Falls/ So you’d all feel a little lower down the
scale… but I ain’t here because he’s tall, I’m only here to see him fall/ And if I get on the wagon now it’ll only be to run him
down.”
Liddiard’s interest in Australian history and folklore also makes a return on Strange Tourist, but this time it’s mixed with a uniquely
incisive take on current affairs and politics. The record contains one of his richest and most controversial songs to date, ‘The
Radicalisation Of D’, loosely inspired by the incarceration of Australian David Hicks in Guantanamo Bay detention camp in 2001.
Recorded with another graduate of the Australian Music Prize, Burke Reid (the producer behind 2007 winner The Mess Hall’s
Devils Elbow and The Drones’ fourth album Havilah), Strange Tourist is the latest instalment from one of Australia’s most
talented poets. Listen to it now, because you’ll be hearing about it for years to come.
Strange Tourist is available on digital pre-release now from iTunes. CD / 2xLP release will be on November 29th with
pre-orders available through www.atpfestival.com. All site shop pre-orders receive a code to download the full album in
MP3 now plus an acoustic version of Jezebel, Liddiard’s 2006 opus that appeared on The Drones album Gala Mill.