Mick Medew & the Rumours
All Your Love
Driving late '70s guitar a la Dictators with '60s roots and rockin' pop smarts.
Rolling out of Brisbane like a sub-tropical thunderstorm, the driving guitar sound of debut album “All Your Love” has landed for Mick Medew & The Rumours.
Comprising Mick Medew (guitar and lead vocals), Ash Geary (guitar and vocals), Paul Hawker (bass and vocals and Chris Dixon (drums), the Rumours coalesced in 2004 around Medew, Geary and Dixon.
The trio goes way back, having played in a latter-day line-up of the Screaming Tribesmen. Dixon and Geary were also bandmates in The Lost Boys.
Mick Medew’s name is synonymous with the Brisbane underground scene. In the late ‘70s and with bandmates who went onto the Hoodoo Gurus, the Hitmen and Died Pretty, he was a member of legendary inner-city act The 31st before kick-starting the Screaming Tribesmen with drummer Murray Shepherd (Fun Things) and bassist John Hartley.
Their first seven-inch single, “Igloo”, dominated the Australian independent music charts for two years and launched a series of evolving line-ups.
The subsequent “Date With a Vampyre” EP, sat at the top of the local charts for 40 weeks. The Tribesmen signed to Rykodisc in the USA and hit the American and European touring circuits and only called it a day in the mid-‘90s.
Medew took a break from music and “All Your Love” is his first recording in 15 years.
Committed to tape by Jeff Lovejoy at Brisbane’s Black Box Studios, it’s a rousing collection of killer guitar tunes recalling classic forebears.
The Rumours cite MC5, Roky Erickson, Blue Oyster Cult, the New York Dolls, David Bowie, The Dictators and Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom as primary influences, and if you listen hard enough to the alternately open-chord chiming and overdriven attack of the guitars you can also hear a whole slew of ‘60s punk roots.
In a neat piece of fate, “Ready to Fall” is a Medew co-write with Ron Peno (Died Pretty) and a renewal of the partnership that penned the Tribesmen’s successful “Igloo” nearly a quarter-of-a-century ago.
The album’s title tune was pre-released to radio stations and podcasters to exceptional reception.
"This is an album for lovers of truly immense-sounding guitars that dominate the mix in a way that we haven’t heard since, I dunno, Turbonegro’s Apocalypse Dudes, or maybe the Dictators’ D.F.F.D. Cue up any track and you’ll find yourself swimming in layers upon layers of ‘em. this is the kind of album I didn’t think anybody made anymore in 2009: a bona fide Big Rawk Rekkid, brimming with fistfuls of guitars and melody." – Ken Shimamoto, Fort Worth Weekly
Metal/Punk: Garage Punk