DIED PRETTY - Live

Well our first ever Live Album! It was recorded at the 'Don't Look Back' run of shows in 2008 when we played all of 'Doughboy Hollow' (in order) and then a bunch of songs for an encore  - or two!

Was a great show and - I think - a fitting document of the time. 

A nice review here: https://www.backseatmafia.com/album-review-the-legendary-died-pretty-release-live-at-the-forum-2008-a-spectacular-journey-back-to-the-gothic-pop-visionaries-classic-doughboy-hollow-and-greatest-material-with-a-tour-sc/

And you can get it in a double Vinyl format or CD here: https://www.citadelmailorder.com/jsp/cmos/discs/died_pretty_live.jsp#died_pretty_live_lp

Or here: https://www.vinyl.com.au/died-pretty-live

Every Brilliant Eye

Just after 'Every Brilliant Eye' was released our label (at that time Beggars Banquet) sent Ron and I on an 'acoustic tour' of the U.S. We played at various record companies meets, in-store record shop dates and TV shows throughout America and Canada. This one is from MTV. The show was called '120 minutes' and was filmed in New York early 1990. I liked the Martin they gave me a lot! Typically, we choose to present some of the more obscure songs from the album including the B side of 'Whitlam Square' which was 'Swink or Swim', but it does sound very nice here. Thanks to Scottish Tee Vee for finding these!

Trade Union Club - 1987

Well here is some special 'Cinema Verite' footage from the Sydney Trade Union club from the middle of 1987. This was one of the last time the 'Free Dirt' line up of the band, with bass player Mark Lock and sometime sax player Tim Fagan would perform. We played the Trade Union a lot over the years and its great to have some good looking footage from this period. Thanks so much to Kit Quarry for: a) shooting the film in the first place and b) being so nice as to transfer it over from the original from the original VHS.

Out Of My Hands

Out Of My Hands - third single from 'Lost'. Filmed at the Piccadilly Hotel at the Cross - not that you could really tell though!

Out of my hands -Died Pretty from Yesterdays Letters on Vimeo.

Option

Option was a pretty cool U.S. mag from the 80's - early 90's. We did this article in 1989 just around the time we finished making 'Every Brilliant Eye' in L.A. We really liked the photos and ended up using some of them for the cover and insert of 'Every Brilliant Eye'. The main colour photo was taken in dowtown L.A. - which was a bit of ghost town in those days - but we really liked the run down feel of the place. The interior shot was taken in a the lobby of an old hotel just of Hollywood boulevard near were we stayed while making the record.

Every Brilliant Eye - The Demos

We did a lot of things differently when we came to record Every Brilliant Eye in 1989. For a start we had two new members - John Hoey on Keyboards and Steve Clarke on Bass. We were also thinking of recording with a different producer and engineer. Alan Thorne and Rob Younger had produced all of our stuff to that date, and apart from the very first single everything had been recorded at Trafalgar studios in Annandale . It’s not that we were unhappy with what we had achieved - I think we just wanted a change and wanted to stretch ourselves by trying to work with someone new.  An L.A. producer, Jeff Erycih, had expressed interest in working with us. He had done a number of things we'd liked - The Gun Club, The Plimsouls, etc - and we had new record company (Beggars Banquet) who were willing to fund us recording Overseas so we went for it.

However they insisted on us making some 'demos' of the upcoming record - something we'd never really done before - so they and the new producer could hear what they were going to be working with. So we hired a place called 'Rich Studios' in the Sydney for a day. We set up at lunchtime and basically played the album from start to finish recording everything in one take with minimal overdubs. I think the recording took about 6 hours and the mixing about 4. We went home with the whole thing finished about 11pm the same evening. I kept thinking this is how they made albums in the sixties!

The recording of this Album in L.A. is another story but let’s just a say a lot
of thing got changed from the original demos. Some were just natural differences as
the songs evolved, some were complete restructures. Anyway the original demo -
which I though was lost long ago (thanks Steve!) - recently turned up and I
thought it was worth posting a couple of the tracks. I guess it sounds a lot
more like it would have if we had continued with the Younger/Trafalgar set-up - not necessarily a bad thing!

The End ....was the beginning

Well its finally here. After 30 years we have a CD release from "The End", my pre-Died Pretty band.
The End had a lot of influence on Died Pretty. The first line-up of Died Pretty featured Jonathan and Colin from The End on drums and bass. Ron and I met after The 31st and The End shared gigs in Brisbane and I first meet Frank when he interviewed me for a feature on The End in Sydney.
Died Pretty also ended up recording a bunch of End tracks: "Lost", "Through My Heart", "Just Skin"etc, were all originally End songs.

The Silver Dollar 1980 (Paul O'Brien Collection - State Library of Queensland) 

Our first show! Baroona Hall 1979 supporting Zero. (Paul O'Brien Collection - State Library of Queensland) 

There was too much stuff for a single CD so its spread out of two - Brisbane and Sydney, which roughly corresponds to the the two distinct line-ups which made up the Band.

You can get it here: http://bit.ly/1hyc2bo

Our one single below: