Madonna: There are no rules - if you're a boy', Billboard Woman of the Year - 2016

10 December 2016, Los Angeles, California, USA

  First of all I want to say thanks to Labyrith, that was an amazing performance.

Can I put this down. Seriously? It’s better this way.

Madonna accepts, adjusting microphone stand between her legs.

It’s better this way. I always feel better with something hard between my legs.

[Crowd laughs.]

Thank you for acknowledging my ability to continue my career for 34 years in the face of blatant misogyny, sexism, constant bullying and relentless abuse.

When I started there was no internet, so people had to say it to my face. There were very people I had to ‘clap back at’, because life was simpler then.

When I first moved to New York, I was a teenager. It was 1979 and New York was a very scary place.

In the first year I was held at gunpoint, raped on a rooftop with a knife digging into my throat. And I had my apartment broken into and robbed so many times I just stopped locking the door.  In the years to follow, I lost almost every friend I had to AIDS or drugs or gunshot.

As you can imagine, all these unexpected events not only helped me become the daring woman that stands before you, but it also reminded me that I am vulnerable. And in life, there is no real safety except self belief. And an understanding that I am not the owner of my talents. I am not the owner of anything. Everything I have is a gift from God. And even the totally fucked up things that happened to me, that still happen to me, are also gifts. To teach me lessons and make me stronger.

I’m receiving an award for being woman of the year, so I ask myself what can I say about being a woman in the music business, what can I say about being a woman? When I first started writing songs I didn’t think in a gender specific way, I didn’t think about feminism, I just wanted to be an artist.

I was of course inspired by Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde and Aretha Franklin, but my real muse was David Bowie. He embodied male and female spirit and that suited me just fine. He made me think there were no rules. But I was wrong.

There are no rules — if you’re a boy.  If you’re a girl, you have to play the game.  What is that game?  You are allowed to be pretty and cute and sexy.  But don’t act too smart.  Don’t have an opinion.  Don’t have an opinion that is out of line with the status quo, at least. You are allowed to be objectified by men and dress like a slut, but don’t own your sluttiness. And do not, I repeat, do not, share your own sexual fantasies with the world.

Be what men want you to be.  But more importantly, be what women feel comfortable with you being, around other men.  And finally, do not age.  Because to age is a sin. You will be criticized, you will be vilified, and you will definitely not be played on the radio.

When I first became famous, there were nude photos of me in Playboy and Penthouse magazine.  Photos that were taken from art schools that I posed for back in the day to make money.  They weren’t very sexy. In fact I looked quite bored. I was. But I was expected to feel ashamed when these photos came out, and I was not, and this puzzled people.

Eventually I was left alone because I married Sean Penn, and not only would he would bust a cap in your ass, but I was taken off the market. So for a while I was not considered a threat.  Years later, divorced and single — sorry Sean — I made my Erotica album and my Sex book was released.  I remember being the headline of every newspaper and magazine.  And everything I read about myself was damning.  I was called a whore and a witch.  One headline compared me to Satan.  I said, ‘Wait a minute, isn’t Prince running around with fishnets and high heels and lipstick with his butt hanging out?’  Yes, he was. But he was a man.

This was the first time I truly understood women really did not have the same freedom as men.

I remember feeling paralysed. It took me a while to pull myself together and get on with my creative life — to get on with my life. I took comfort in the poetry of Maya Angelou, and the writings of James Baldwin, and in the music of Nina Simone. I remember wishing I had a female peer that I could look to for support. Camille Paglia, the famous feminist writer, said that I set women back by objectifying myself sexually. So I thought, ‘oh, if you’re a feminist, you don’t have sexuality, you deny it.’ So I said ‘fuck it. I’m a different kind of feminist. I’m a bad feminist.’

People say that I’m so controversial.  But I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around.

[Crowd applause]

What I would like to say to all women here today is this: Women have been so oppressed for so long they believe what men have to say about them. And they believe they have to back a man to get the job done. And there are some very good men worth backing, but not because they’re men — but because they’re worthy.

As women, we have to start appreciating our own worth, and each other’s worth. Seek out strong women to befriend, to align yourself with, to learn from, to be inspired by, to collaborate with, to support, and be enlightened by.

As I said before, It’s not so much about receiving this award as it is having this opportunity to stand before you and really say thank you a s a woman, as an artist, as a human.  Not only to the people who have loved and supported me along the way, so many of you are sitting in front of me right now, you have no idea…you have no idea how much your support means.

But to the doubters, the naysayers, to everyone who gave me hell and said I could not, that I would not, that I must not — your resistance made me stronger, made me push harder, made me the fighter that I am today. Made me the woman I am today.

So thank you.

Bob Dylan (via proxy Azita Raji): 'Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?"', Nobel prize acceptance - 2016

10 December 2016, Stockholm, Sweden 

 Dylan did not attend ceremony. His banquet speech was read by Azita Raji

Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight.

I'm sorry I can't be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize. Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming. From an early age, I've been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.

I don't know if these men and women ever thought of the Nobel honor for themselves, but I suppose that anyone writing a book, or a poem, or a play anywhere in the world might harbor that secret dream deep down inside. It's probably buried so deep that they don't even know it's there.

If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I'd have about the same odds as standing on the moon. In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn't anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"

When I started writing songs as a teenager, and even as I started to achieve some renown for my abilities, my aspirations for these songs only went so far. I thought they could be heard in coffee houses or bars, maybe later in places like Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium. If I was really dreaming big, maybe I could imagine getting to make a record and then hearing my songs on the radio. That was really the big prize in my mind. Making records and hearing your songs on the radio meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you had set out to do.

Well, I've been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I've made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it's my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I'm grateful for that.

But there's one thing I must say. As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me.

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years.

Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?"

So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

My best wishes to you all,

Bob Dylan

coptright Nobel Foundation 2016  

T -Bone Burnett: 'The mask has become the face', Americana Music Festival and Conference - 2016

22 September 2016, Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, Tenneessee, USA

I have come here today first to bring you love. I have come here to express my deep gratitude to you for your love of music and of each other. And, I have come here to talk about the value of the artist, and the value of art.

When Michaelangelo was painting the great fresco The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, he came under intense criticism from various members of the church, particularly the Pope's Master of Ceremonies- a man named Cesena- who accused him of obscenity. Michaelangelo’s response was to paint Cesena into the fresco in the lowest circle of hell with donkey ears and a serpent coiled around him devouring, and covering, his nether regions, so to speak.

Cesena was incensed and went to the Pope demanding he censor Michaelangelo for this outrage, and the Pope said, “Well, let’s go have a look at it. ”So, they went down to the chapel, and when the Pope stood in front of the fresco, he said to Cesena, “You know, that doesn’t look like you at all.”

See, the Pope didn’t want to jack around with Michaelangelo. Michaelangelo was making things that were going to last for hundreds of years. His stuff was going to outlive the Pope’s ability to do anything about it, so the Pope bowed to the inevitable. The Pope was afraid of a painter.

The painter could create another dimension between Heaven and Earth. Flat ceilings seemed to come down into the room in three dimensions. He painted rooms where priests and the church could sit and be transported to- and engulfed in- a higher realm, learning ancient stories- thoughts kept alive over centuries. And he did it by mixing together things he found laying around on the ground- sand and clay and plants. He was a fearsome alchemist.

Art is not a market to be conquered or to bow before.

Art is a holy pursuit.

Beneath the subatomic particle level, there are fibers that vibrate at different intensities. Different frequencies. Like violin strings. The physicists say that the particles we are able to see are the notes of the strings vibrating beneath them. If string theory is correct, then music is not only the way our brains work, as the neuroscientists have shown, but also, it is what we are made of, what everything is made of. These are the stakes musicians are playing for.

I want to recommend a book to you- The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul.

John Wilkinson, the translator, in his 1964 introduction, describes the book this way- “The Technological Society is a description of the way in which an autonomous technology is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and surpassing those values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all technological difference and variety is mere appearance.” This is the core of the dead serious challenge we face.

The first nuclear weapon was detonated on the morning of July 16, 1945, at 5:29 and 45 seconds.

At that moment, technocrats took control of our culture.

Trinity was the code name of that explosion. It was an unholy trinity.

Technology does only one thing- it tends toward efficiency. It has no aesthetics. It has no ethics. It’s code is binary.

But everything interesting in life- everything that makes life worth living- happens between the binary. Mercy is not binary. Love is not binary. Music and art are not binary. You and I are not binary.

Parenthetically, we have to remember that all this technology we use has been developed by the war machine- Turing was breaking codes for the spies, Oppenheimer was theorising and realising weapons. Many of the tools we use in the studio for recording- microphones and limiters and equalizers and all that- were developed for the military. It is our privilege to beat those swords into plowshares.

We live in a time in which artists are being stampeded from one bad deal to another worse deal. No one asks the artists. We are told to get good at marketing. I have to say- and I think I probably speak for every musician here- that I didn’t start playing music because I sought, or thought it would lead to, a career in marketing.

And, as we are being told that, our work is being commoditised- the price of music is being driven down to zero.

I am working with a group called C3, the Content Creators Coalition run by Roseanne Cash and Jeffrey Boxer to develop an Artists Bill of Rights. Jeffrey is here today to meet afterward with anyone who wants to get into this. The first right artists have is the right to determine what medium they work in. The second is the right to set the price of their work.

Every person worthy of the name atist, from Rembrandt to Paul Cesanne to Picasso to Jackson Pollack

From William Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams to James Baldwin and Jack Kerouac

From Bach to Stravinski to Mahler to John Adams

Every one of those artists made art that to be understood, the world had to change.

They did not adapt to the world, the world had to adapt to them.

The technocrats suggest we crowd source.

I suggest we not.

The very thing an artist does is figure out what he likes.

The technocrats- the digital tycoons- the iTopians- look down on artists. They have made all these tools and they think we should be grateful- subserviant even- and use their flimsy new tools happily to make them ever more powerful. But we can make art with any thing. We don’t need their tools. Music confounds the machines.

So the iTopians have controlled the medium and the message for a generation now. And they are making a complete hash of things. The clearest and most pervasive proof of this is the psychedelic political season we are in, which we can see playing out in every election around the world.

Before the atom bomb, we had begun to project idealized versions of people up on screens, while the people whose images were projected would hide behind the screens, knowing they could never measure up.

After the atom bomb, we have automated that process. On facebook, everybody is a star. The idealistic, lysergic promise of the 1960’s has been mechanized, allowing us to become ever more facile conterfeiters.

The mask has become the face.

Malcolm Muggeridge said that the kingdom Satan offers a man is to the kingdom of God as a travel poster to the place it depicts.

This internet technology that has been so wildly promoted as being the key, the final solution, to our freedom, has become our prison. What the false prophets of the internet said would replace governments and nation states and commerce, and create a free world of community and sharing, has led instead to a consolidation of wealth and power that makes the monopolies of the early 2oth Century- Morgan and Rockefeller and Carnegie- look weak and ineffective.

Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Media Lab has apologized for his part in creating what he calls a “fiasco”. Tim Berners Lee, who diagrammed the schematic for our current internet on a napkin, said at Davos last year that the internet needs to be rearchitected.

Our 21st Century communication network, regarded by its early adherents with a religious fervor, has been turned into a surveillance and advertising mecnanism. The World Wide Web is just that- a web that ensnares everyone who uses it.

Artists must not submit to the demands, or the definitions of, the iTopians.

Lastly, I am here to speak specifically about American music.

This country has been led by artists from Thoreau and Emerson through Walt Whitman to Woody Guthrie, through Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, to Presley and Dylan to The Last Poets and Kendrick Lamar. The Arts have always led the Sciences. Einstein said that Picasso preceded him by twenty years. Jules Verne put a man on the moon a hundred years before a rocket scientist did. Medieval stained glass windows are examples of how nanotechnology was used in the pre-modern era. Those artists were high technologists, and many other things- they were aestheticians, ethicists, conjurers, and philosophers, to name a few.

They took risks. Risks a technocrat could never take. Artists risk everything in everything they do. Risk is what separates the artist from the artisan. Art is not a career, it is a vocation, an inclination, a response to a summons.

We, in this country, have defined ourselves through music from the beginning- from Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier in the Revolutionary War, to The Star Spangled Banner in the War of 1812, to John Brown’s Body and the Battle Hymn of the Republic in the Civil War, to the incredible explosion of music of the last century that was called Jazz, or Folk Music, or Rock and Roll, or Country Music- because although our music has taken many different paths, it is all of a piece and a most important part of our national identity- of US.

Music is to the United States as wine is to France. We have spread our culture all over the world with the soft power of American music. We both have regions- France has Champagne, we have the Mississippi Delta. France has Bordeaux, we have the Appalachian Mountains. France has Epernay, we have Nashville. Recorded music has been our best good will ambassador. The actual reason the Iron Curtain fell, is because the Russian kids wanted Beatles records. Louis Armstrong did more to spread our message of freedom and innovation than any single person in the last hundred years. Our history, our language, and our soul are recorded in our music. There is no deeper expression of the soul of this country than the profound archive of music we have recorded over the last century.

This is the story of the United States: a kid walks out of his home with a song and nothing else, and conquers the world. We have replicated that phenomenon over and over. We could start with Elvis Presley, but we could add in names for hours- Jimmie Rodgers, Rosetta Tharpe, Johnny Cash, Howlin Wolf, Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Loretta Lynn, Chuck Berry, Hank Williams, Aretha Franklin, Jack White, Dr. Dre. That is the American Character. That is Johnny Appleseed.

At last year’s MusicCares tribute to Bob Dylan, Jimmy Carter said, “There’s no doubt that his words of peace and human rights are much more incisive and much more powerful and much more permanent than any president of the United States.” I believe that is undeniable.

That’s who the artists are. We can’t forget that.

So, in conclusion, there is this sense that the technocrats are saying, “Look, we’re just going to go ahead and do this, and we’ll sort it all out later.” As they did with the atom bomb.

As artists, it is our responsibility to sort it out now.

Barnett Newman said, “Time passes over the tip of the pyramid.” By that he meant that there is a lot of room at the bottom of the pyramid to put things, but that as time passes, gravity washes them down into the sand. But if you put something right on the tip of the pyramid, it stays there.

We aspire to put things on the tip of the pyramid. That is our preference- our prefered medium.

Digital is not an archival medium.

Technology is turning over every ten years. Their technologies don’t and won’t last.

Our art-if we do it right- will.

Steve Miller: 'No we’re not going to wrap this one up. I’m gonna wrap you up', Rock and Roll Hall of Fame press room - 2016

8 April 2016, Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York City, USA

The whole process needs to be changed, from the top to the bottom.

It doesn’t need to be this hard.

There’s nothing fancy going on out there that requires all of this stuff.

They need to get their legal work straight. They need to respect the artists they say they’re honouring, which they don’t. I don’t have any of my paperwork as signed, I have no licencing agreements with these people. They’re trying to steal footage. They’re trying to make me indemnify them. When they told me I was inducted, they said, “you can have two tickets, one for your wife and one for yourself. Want another one? It’s $10,000, that’s the way it goes”

I said, “I’m playing here, what about my band? What about their wives? They make this so unpleasant, that they came this close ...

[offstage mutterings]

No we’re not going to wrap this one up. I’m gonna wrap you up.  You go sit down over there and learn something.  So here’s what you need to know. This is how close this whole show came to not happening because of the way the artists were actually being treated right now.

So I’ll wrap it up right now.

Kid Rock: 'They were exactly what we needed, a garage band in sheep's clothing', for Cheap Trick - 2016

8 April 2016, Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York City, USA

Has anyone been keeping tabs on what the fuck has been going on here tonight? Quick recap in my mind ... Who knew Lars Ulrich, the fucking drummer from Metallica, was such a great speaker? Right? Awesome. Then we've got Ice Cube telling people to stay in school and then the drummer from Chicago turns out to be the fucking badass: "Fuck the establishment! I'll do what I want!" As long as we're keeping it real, I'd like to really quickly address the issue of drugs in America. If you do drugs, kids, there's a good chance you're going to ruin your life.

But there's also a pretty good fucking chance you'll end up in a band and be rich and bang hot chicks.  Here's a little secret about bands: We all think we're great live. There's not a band in this room or in the world that doesn't think it's really a live band. You think you can rip the roof off of any room. You think you can make a basement club feel like the Garden. And you think you do it better than anyone else. Then you go and see Cheap Trick.

That's when you think, "Man, we kind of suck. I gotta to step up my game." They're a club band, a bar band, a working band, every sense of those words. They're relentless, precise, powerful. If she's tight, they're tighter. 

It's a little innuendo. ... When disco and soft rock had taken over our radio – thank God I wasn't alive then – they were exactly what we needed, a garage band in sheep's clothing. They had a punk soul, a pop heartbeat and Beatles ambitions. They even worked with George Martin. And he said Cheap Trick was his favorite band to work with that wasn't from Liverpool. I didn't write that line. You can't not watch them. Their frontman is a matinee idol who can growl, croon or swagger. And the guitarist looks like a Teddy Boy on acid. ...

They were always onstage, every throwaway gig, every photo shoot, every interview. They worked the room like it was Soldier Field. ...

Cheap Trick was so big, so loud, so fast that it took a live album to catch the fury. "Surrender," "I Want You to Want Me." These are great songs, but live, they became anthems. It took us a while to figure it out. They were made in the USA, but Japan caught on before we did. A lot of bands think, "We're big in Japan." I'm fucking big in Kentucky. But Cheap Trick is the only one they call the American Beatles. After that, the world exploded for them. It look like success came out of nowhere, but trust me, they worked for it. Of course they did. They've got Midwestern heart.  

They've got Illinois shoulders. That's why ... more than 40 years later, 40 fucking years, and more than 5,000 gigs, they're still going strong. They've been on the road. They've been knocked down, but they've never stopped and they're still out there racking up the miles and playing every show like it's their first. You don't think so? These crazy fucks got three more gigs this week.  

Recycling shit, I'm not that great. I'm a rapper – I sample.  Maybe it's that Midwestern work ethic and maybe it's because as they put it, "We're too dumb to quit." Either way, we're glad they put in the hours. So I'm honored to induct, from Rockford, Illinois …

 

Don Walker for Cold Chisel: 'There are four of us in the band up here, and there should be five' APRA Ted Albert award - 2016

5 April 2016, Carriageworks, Sydney, 2016

Thank you. First let me say there are four of us in the band up here, and there should be five. Steve Prestwich, if he were here, may have done everything in his considerable powers to destroy this award acceptance. He was always hard to predict. Or he may have been as cool and funny as we remember him every day since he passed away. His daughter Melody is here with us tonight, come out to grace her dad's friends with her presence.

We never new Ted Albert, he was a it before our time, but we knew and respected everything he built. We got to know Bon Scott, and Angus and Malcolm Young before we left Adelaide through mutual friends. Years later we made our second album in Alberts Studios in King Street in the City, and met Harry Vanda and George Young who Ted Albert had mentored and managed to international success and back again.

One night we were playing at the Journo's Club near Central Station, and Harry and George turned up with guitars and amps, and played a set with us, which they didn't do with too many people. We were never signed to Alberts, but there was something in the DNA of their label and all their acts, a rawness full of cheek and melody. Always focussed on getting hits with real people that you could measure yourself up against. Ted Albert must have had a lot to do with setting that up.

This award is for lifetime contribution to the Australian music industry. When we started out more than forty years ago, contributing to the Australian music industry was very low on our list of priorities. As was accepting awards. I like to tell myself we did whatever we did all on our own, but the truth is we had help; sometimes very profound help, from individuals who liked what we do and stuck their necks out for us, often when there was not much in it for them. Some of them are here tonight. Some not. Some of them are no longer with us at all. 

I'd like to name some names. Les Kaczmarek who started this band. He was our original bass player, and a wonderful and beguiling man in every respect, except that he couldn't play bass like Phil. David Blight, our mate, and the best blues harmonica player in the country, who has played harmonica with us from 1979, 1975 until now, whenever we could afford to take him on tour. Peter Moss, Ian's brother, who was our Road Manager and our sixth member for years, keeping his truck on the road, loading our gear in and out of it, night after night, and mixing us live until he took his share, just before that amounted to anything, and bailed to Darwin. There are a couple of others before him in Mick Porter and Gary Skinner, and Peter had helped too. Often drawn from the Largs Pier Hotel, people like Leon the Latvian, Rocky, Charlie, Toolie, Mick McDermott who now heads up the CFMEU in South Australia, and of course Alan Darlow and Billy Rowe, who were killed together in a truck smash in 1980. We'd like to remember Gerry Georgettis, who took over from Peter Moss as our head Roadie and front of house mixer, and the people who helped him. Harry Parsons, (looks over to the sound mixer) – sorry for popping that, mate – Meri Took, Jimi Bostock, Mark Keegan, Nicky Campbell and Michael Long. We'd like to remember Vince Lovegrove, much admired and missed by many in this room. Vince was our first manager in Adelaide in 1974. He resigned the morning after we unveiled the original songs I had been writing for the band. It's true. But, he remained our close friend for the rest of his life.

In our first year together Peter Walker, one of the best guitar players in the country then, discovered Ian's playing, one night at the Pooraka Hotel, and mentored him in those early years, and still works with Ian today. Peter produced our first album, and played some of the guitar on Khe Sanh. In Sydney, he was associated with Charles Fisher, who flew to Adelaide to watch us play; the first record company or studio producer to take notice of what we were doing. Charles gave us free time at Trafalgar studios in Annandale, as we toured through from then on.

We owe a lot to Sebastian Chase, who invited us to join his management stable of Dragon and Rose Tattoo in Sydney.

Ladies and gentleman, Rod and Gaye Willis, have accepted our invitation to sit with us in this room tonight. It would be fraudulent for us to accept any lifetime award without Rod being part of it. He was our guide, and our manager and our close friend for thirty two years from 1977. When we were languishing in Sydney – no record contract, unable to get gigs, meaning nothing to anybody – he managed us to success here, through our half hearted failures and our disintegration elsewhere, and managed the bands legacy when there mostly wasn't a band.

Ladies and gentleman, Rod and Gaye Willis.

With John Woodriffe and Ray Hearn, who had also managed us in Adelaide, Rod formed the Dirty Pool Agency, which for the first time broke open the live music scene in this country and allowed bands to plan and develop they way they were presented live.

The APRA Awards is a night for songwriters and publishers, and no publisher in Australian history was as big as John Bromell. We owe John everything. And as Bob Aird, John successor at Rondor will agree, we continue to pay the bill. But we don't mind because John Bromell gave us petrol money, when we had none, and weren't even signed to him, and with Rod Willis, he cooked up the scam that landed us our first record deal. There would be no Cold Chisel records without John Bromell. They got us to sign to Warner, then headed by Paul Turner and Peter Ryken, and incorporating our good friend and supporters, Philip Mortlock, Roger Langford and Phil Deamer. On the day of the signing, Bromell was there of course, and afterwards he suggested we celebrate with few drinks. And after more than a few drinks he suggested that since this was a signing kind of a day, some of us might just like to scribble on some publishing contracts he just happened to have on him. That's publishing – old school. And I think that everyone of a certain age in this room misses his company, his mischief, and the tales he had to tell.

I'd like to acknowledge our successive tour managers. Daffy Ferguson, Chris Bastick, and Mark Pope. Who each brought their own brand of edgy danger and unpredictability to our tours. Their task was impossible, and they, each in their own way, almost pulled it together.

Mark Opitz was the record producer who first set us up to play in the studio with the freedom and powerwe knew live, and he also taught us about editing and arranging songs, cutting out the fat for the maximum pop impact, lessons he claimed to have learned while engineering for Harry and George at Alberts.

Let me name some others that supported us and gave us their wisdom. Like Irene Scott in the Adelaide years. Like Carol Stubbly and Christine Small who ran a house in Taylor Square that contained The Couches Of Last Resort, if some of us didn't have a place to crash. Like Jenny Hunter Brown and Colleen Ironside. Like Joe Canaris, our accountant for thirty five years. There were people in the industry who were always on our side, like Eric Robinson, who pretended to be a misanthrope, but there are a couple of times across the decades when we were in a really tough spot, and he was suddenly there with his sleeves rolled up. As was the lawyer Peter Thomson. And I have to mention, when we needed high end advice a couple of times, Roger Davies always had the time.

Ladies and gentlemen, and everyone who frolicks in the gender spectrum in between, in the last five years, this band has worked more than we did most of the previous thirty. In the press, the few surviving music journalists call it a rennaisance. There is a small list of people we have to thank for that. Robert Hambling has done our audiovisuals, and has been an enormously witty and rewarding companion since the early nineties. Andy Bickers plays sax with us, and proves the old adage; that the mate you most look forward to seeing is probably a Kiwi. Producer Kevin Shirley, who's figured out a way of getting some great recordings out of what is now a very diverse set of musicians. Charley Drayton, who joined a shattered band, on the drum stool in the months after Steve died, and in many ways healed us as a band.

And our managers John O'Donnell and John Watson, whose greatest achievement was not the extraodinary planning and mounting of two tours in 2011 and 2015, or the two albums we've recorded in that time, but the care with which they organised things and shielded us in those months after Steve passed away.

We should thank the people out there who make this all possible, too, and have made it all possible over the last forty years by buying our music and buying tickets to see it.

We’ve never had any government grants, apart from a couple of years on the dole in the late 70s. So, we’re supported by the money people spend on what we do after they’ve paid their taxes. It would be great if Opera Australia could say the same thing.

Lastly, we'd like to thank our families. No one among the four of us, can make us as angry as we can make each other. And often in the past that meant our families had to occupy a house where dad was stomping around, smouldering at someone who was smouldering around his family, across town. They deserve a medal each. Jane Barnes, Margeaux Rolleston, Christine Small, Jo-Anne Prestwich and Firoozeh Walker. And all our children and grandchildren.

Enough said. Thank you and goodnight from all of us.