Paul Woseen's 'Bombido' And His Attack On The Angels Over Doc Neeson

By Darryl Mason



The Screaming Jets Paul Woseen is grabbing some attention for his debut acoustic album 'Bombido', released on my label Misty Mountains Music, and available here. Sadly, he's also grabbed a few headlines for attacking The Angels, who are now fronted by The Screaming Jets lead singer Dave Gleeson.

First the piece on 'Bombido', by Danielle McGrane for AAP:

It took just 12 hours for The Screaming Jets bassist Paul Woseen to record his solo album Bombido.

"Pretty much every song on that (Bombido) is one take, the first take," he says.

Woseen did some metaphorical time travelling to achieve what he wanted with the album, which comprises new solo tracks alongside hits he wrote for the Jets.

"I did it the way I wanted to do it, I had in my mind of how they used to do singer/songwriter records `60s/'70s style - come in, sit down, play the songs, record it and that would be it - and that's just how I approached it," he says.

"I recorded it in two six-hour blocks."

The Screaming Jets fans who have come to check out Woseen's shows have been surprised by Woseen's voice.

"They don't expect it (the voice) to come out of the head they're looking at ... such a rough head," he says.

"Singing and sitting around writing songs is a pretty good way to earn a living," he says

It's every musician's dream.

You can hear an exclusive short preview of Paul Woseen's 'Bombido' album here:




 Woseen is also attracting mainstream media attention for diving headfirst into a horrible pile-on over over Doc Neeson's serious illness, and how members of The Angels, the band that made Neeson famous, and are now fronted by Woseen's friend Dave Gleeson, have supposedly had 'no contact' with Neeson since he was diagnosed with cancer, after The Angels parted in 2011 and then formed two separate line-ups in recent years.
 
The Doc Neeson line-up, 'The Angels 100%', announced their 2013 tour after 'The Angels with Dave Gleeson' had a solid run of sold-out shows and scored huge gigs on the Day On The Green tour.

But Neeson's 'The Angels 100%' had to cancel their tour in early 2013, which would have seen the two line-ups of The Angels in the same cities in the same weeks, after Neeson was diagnosed with brain cancer.

I've been told there has been contact between the The Angels founding members, Rick and John Brewster, and Doc Neeson, but because the Brewsters haven't been public about the contact, and because they chose not to take part in the recent Australian Story episode on Doc Neeson, they've been absolutely slammed on social media, and elsewhere, by people who don't know what's really going on.

People like Paul Woseen:

It's all very unfortunate, and ugly, and the Brewsters will hopefully clear the air soon by talking to the media. It's just wrong that they have to do so.

Some background:

As any old fan of The Angels know, Rick and John Brewster formed the earliest line-up of The Angels with Doc Neeson in 1974, and they then played thousands of shows, and recorded more than 14 studio and live albums together, before Doc announced he had to leave The Angels in 2000, due to a back injury.

They reunited for a tour to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their mega-multi-platinum Face To Face album in 2008, and split again in 2011, when Doc Neeson decided he didn't want to record another album with the band, and pursued a solo career instead. A dispute over who owned the name of the band then erupted. Again.

Original members Rick and John Brewster and bassist Chris Bailey (who died of cancer last year) brought in The Screaming Jets singer Dave Gleeson and recorded the Take It To The Streets album, toured, and released a second album with the new line-up, Talk The Talk, earlier this year.

So, yeah, the bassist of The Screaming Jets, Paul Woseen, is attacking members of The Angels, who are now fronted by his long-time friend and bandmate, The Screaming Jets' vocalist Dave Gleeson.

Rock n' roll can get pretty stupid and ugly sometimes.

More To Come....

DOC NEESON TOLD HIS BRAIN CANCER MAY PROVE "FATAL" IN THREE TO SIX MONTHS

Devine Intervention

By Darryl Mason

It took almost a decade before conservative pundits turned on prime minister John Howard and helped hound him out of the Lodge.

PM Tony Abbott hasn't even clocked up one year, and the knives are out, the wolves at his door. 

Here's Miranda Devine, of Murdoch's Telegraph, with nothing but praise for Abbott just before the election:

I won't quote her talking about Abbott's musky odour and brutish manliness as reasons why she thought Australia had to make him prime minister. It might still be breakfast time where you're reading this.

And here's Miranda Devine blasting 'lefties' for being mean and horrible for calling Abbott distrustful and a liar who would do anything to get elected:

 But when news breaks that her and her six-figure and seven-figure earning colleagues and friends may have to pay more tax to help Australia cope with the "budget emergency" treasurer Joe Hockey has been fretting over, LOOK OUT TONY!

So soon, Miranda? He's only just getting started.

This is too good not to quote at length:

NO wonder Tony Abbott fled to Melbourne straight after his pre-Budget speech to the Sydney Institute on Tuesday night. He would have been cold-shouldered if he’d stuck around.

The income tax hike he has proposed on workers earning over $80,000 cast a sour note in The Star casino ballroom. It was widely condemned as “moronic” by business people, journalists and politicians in heated discussions into the night.

The Prime Minister who promised no new taxes, and whose campaign was based on the deceit of Julia Gillard’s carbon tax, has scored the most inexplicable own goal on the eve of the May 13 budget which will define this term in office.

No one expects instant miracles from Abbott and Joe Hockey but nor did we expect extra spending and strategic leaks about a “great big new tax” in their first budget.
 
Of course Abbott calls it a “deficit levy”, is coy about whether it will be in the Budget, and claims he hasn’t broken a promise because it will last only last four years. And after letting speculation run for three days about the new tax, late yesterday the hoses came out. Now the tax isn’t even a “levy”, the government has told Simon Benson. “It’s a temporary change to the two top income tax thresholds”.

Good grief. Voters are sick of that kind of rank sophistry from politicians. We overdosed on it during the Gillard years.

Let’s hope that the public outcry has put the kybosh on the whole idea.

But it’s disturbing to have a supposedly conservative government even considering playing Labor’s tax and spend game.

The problem with the economy is not too little tax. It’s too much government spending. Abbott understood that before the election. It was the basis of his campaign.

This proposed “deficit levy”, in its latest incarnation, equates to a one percent hike in income tax for those earning over $80,000 and 2 percent for those earning above $180,000.

If your income is over $180,000, you currently pay 45 cents in the dollar, plus the 1.5 percent Medicare levy. The new tax hikes your tax rate up to 48.5 percent.

The potential harm to an already fragile economy of increased taxation is obvious. You are reducing discretionary spending, which is the amount of extra cash the biggest spenders have to spend.

Unlike the government, real people don’t keep spending when their income goes down. They tighten their belts, maybe give up a restaurant meal, stop buying takeaway, postpone the family holiday, spend less on the child’s birthday party, buy fewer clothes, cut back on grocery bills.

When they went into the voting booth last September and ticked the box to put Tony Abbott into office, they weren’t voting for an income tax hike. The Coalition won the election because voters knew spending was out of control and had to be reined in.

A temporary new tax is just a lazy fix. It’s easier to tax people more than do the grunt work of running the red pen over every government program, line by line.

Who hurts most from this thriftiness? Small business. The engine room, the people who depended on the ­Coalition to rescue them from Labor.

When they went into the voting booth last September and ticked the box to put Abbott into office, they weren’t voting for an income tax rise.

The Coalition won the election ­because voters knew spending was out of control and had to be reined in.

Most people would consider a workplace right is being able to take your hard-earned salary home without the government snatching it.

Devine was so filled with rage, the online version of this column had paragraphs doubled up, so blinded with betrayal she barely edited it.

Well, she can't say she wasn't warned Tony Abbott might not be entirely trustful.

Maybe it's worth while remembering that Tony Abbott used to be a Labor Party man, and pretty much switched to the Liberal Party because he believed he'd have a better run at getting somewhere. not being in with the unions. Well, that, of course, is just a crazy conspiracy theory.

It's still two weeks until the budget is delivered, and Abbott's conservative cheerleaders are already preparing effigies of him to burn on Budget Night.

'One Term Tony' doesn't sound such a crazy nickname anymore. Not when it's already been shouted from the offices of Liberal MPs as they fend off raw fury from constituents and Liberal Party donors over Abbott's Great Big Huge New Tax.

There's these remarkable quotes from today's Sydney Morning Herald, just for starters:

Senior Liberals have described plans for a possible deficit tax in the budget as "electoral suicide".

Some talked of a party-room revolt and one warned the Prime Minister Tony Abbott would wear the broken promise as "a crown of thorns" if the government decided to go through with it.

"I worry that this is Tony's Gillard moment, when she announced the carbon tax," said the senior Liberal.

Several other Liberals also expressed dismay at the prospect of a government, elected to restore trust to politics, overturning a "crystal-clear" policy commitment of no new taxes, in its first budget.

Incredulous Liberals contacted by Fairfax Media said they had been given nothing to tell voters who were beginning to call electorate offices to complain.

The mood in government-held marginal seats was particularly febrile. One MP revealed that neither he nor his colleagues had been warned about the tax.

One Liberal MP said he woke on Tuesday morning to the news of the tax.

"It's just shock," the MP said. "There was no communication from the leader's office. We're all just scratching our heads. It's the biggest f----up we've had in a long time."

"I can't say anything on the record because it's just too stupid," he said. "If it's wrong, then it's bulls--t, because why would you scare the electorate? And if it's right, then it's even worse because we said before the election there'd be no new taxes."

Another branded Mr Abbott's attempts to recategorise the tax as a levy as "sophistry", calling it "an offence to voters" that was "worse than Gillard's claim that the carbon tax was not a tax".

Wow.

Panic stations.

Doc Neeson's Brain Tumour May Prove Fatal In Next 3 To 6 Months

Image via ABC's Australian Story

 By Darryl Mason

The legendary Doc Neeson, frontman for The Angels for nearly four decades until 2011, has revealed the brain tumour that saw him leave the road has returned and he's been told it may prove fatal in the next 3 to 6 months. He has vowed to keep fighting.

"It was a shock of course when somebody puts a use by date on me," he said of the initial diagnosis, that predicted he might not live 18 months without surgery, "but I still hung on to a shred of hope that I'd get back on the stage at some point,"

Neeson was first diagnosed in late 2012. He had brain surgery, a long period of radiotherapy, chemotherapy and recovery followed, through 2013. His health was looking good. He was hoping to get back on the road. But an MRI in February this year revealed the brain tumour had returned and Doc Neeson has now been told to expect the worst:

"The news is grim, but some people can get through this, and that's the way I try to think about things. So I'm looking forward optimistically to the future."

 Profiled on ABC's Australian Story, Doc Neeson has opened up his battle against brain cancer, his addictions and what he believes were his failings as a father, during the busiest days of The Angels,
when the band would play more than 150 shows a year.

Image via ABC's Australian Story

Here's a great tale, from Australian Story, from Australia's now governor-general, Peter Cosgrove, on Doc Neeson's performance for Australian troops in East Timor in 1999:

"I'm sitting up there with people like Jose Ramos Horta (East Timorese spokesman at the time) and Roman Catholic Bishop Belo of East Timor, overlooking the crowd and they had some alternative lyrics to Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again," Mr Cosgrove said.

"I'll call them ribald lyrics.

"Bishop Belo leaned forward and said to me, 'Mr General, what are they singing?' And I said, 'Well Lord Bishop I really can't quite make it out'.

"Then Ramos Horta looked at me and I could tell that he could make it out!"

I wrote a piece for The Guardian here on that song, Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again? and the infamous "No Way, Get Fucked, Fuck Off!" crowd chant that so surprised Ramos Horta.

Doc Neeson's last live appearances were at the Rock For Doc concerts in April 2013, and the Rockwiz live tribute to Vanda and Young, last December, where he performed his new single, a Vanda and Young cover, Walking In The Rain.

The Rock For Doc concerts, at Sydney's Enmore Theatre in April 2013, included friends like Peter Garrett, Jimmy Barnes, Angry Anderson and former members of The Angels. But founding members of the band, Rick and John Brewster, were not invited to play or pay tribute to their friend and former frontman.

Rock For Doc was a fundraiser. There's no superannuation in Australian rock.

"When The Angels were big, we invested a lot of the money that we made into the band itself to try and go overseas again. So there was no kind of money salted away somewhere to fall back on," Neeson said.

"It's a pretty lean time at the moment."

A few weeks after Rock For Doc, which raised more than $200,000, Doc Neeson was presented with an Order of Australia medal by NSW Governor Marie Bashir, who has confessed she is also fan of The Angels.

In January 2014, Doc was profiled in the Sydney Morning Herald, the cancer was in remission, he was hopeful, it had been a hard year, but picking up where he'd left off in December 2012 and taking a lineup of The Angels back on the road was looking like a reality. It had been a difficult journey since his first diagnosis.

It was at Christmas dinner that Doc Neeson's family realised something was wrong with the enigmatic former frontman of veteran Australian rock band The Angels.

"You could see in his face and how he was talking that something wasn't quite right," recalls Neeson's son Keiran.

An ambulance rushed Neeson to Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital where the 65-year-old singer had a seizure.

After a CAT scan, he was diagnosed with a high grade brain tumour and told that statistically, he had 18 months to live.

Plans for a national tour were put aside. Neeson's tumour was surgically removed and he began intensive rounds of radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

That radiotherapy and chemotherapy did not destroy the tumours completely, it would seem. They have returned, and Doc Neeson is now both preparing for his end, and fighting to extend his life as long as possible.

Very sad news.

I'll follow up once the episode of Australian Story has aired.


This is a video I shot of Doc Neeson leading a protest march through Newtown, Sydney, against the closure of iconic inner city rock venue The Sandringham Hotel.




More To Come....

PM's Office Spent 36 Hours Discussing 'Replace Abbott With Kitty' App

Good to know the prime minister's staff are spending their taxpayer-funded time on important things. Like writing more than 130 pages of correspondence and spending more than 36 hours discussing what to do about a popular app that replaced PM Abbott's face with a cute kitty in news stories.


From The Age:

Developers Dan Nolan and Ben Taylor made the "Stop Tony Meow" browser extension in January. Downloaded more than 50,000 times, it automatically swaps any picture of Mr Abbott encountered online with pictures of cats.
Curious as to what the Prime Minister and his staff thought of the extension, Mr Nolan submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet for any correspondence that mentioned the words "Stop Tony Meow".

‘‘There was an issue where the Liberal party website and other sites were slightly modified so the extension didn’t apply there,’’ Mr Nolan said.

‘‘I had a gut feeling that maybe someone had sent an email internally saying that we need to stop this thing from working on our site, what can we do?

‘‘I don’t think there’s going to be any high-level stuff ... but it would be really interesting to see how a government department reacts to these weird new kinds of technology and culture jamming stuff, which previously they wouldn’t have had to deal with.’’

However once the Department had approved the release of 137 pages of correspondence relating to the Stop Tony Meow request, it charged Mr Nolan $720.30 in fees for access.

Charging such huge fees for Freedom On Information replies is obviously an attempt to dissuade the public from making them.

So much for "transparent government."