greatest australian singers...

[SteveO]

I can't wait! There's a couple of singers I hope to see in the top 5 at least IMHO!!!!!

[CRAZY-HORSE]

number 19: KATIE NOONAN



Katie Anne Noonan[SUP][1][/SUP] (born 2 May 1977) is an Australian singer-songwriter. In addition to a successful solo career encompassing opera, jazz, pop, rock and dance, she sings in the groups george and Elixir; performs with her mother Maggie Noonan; and, as of 2010, plays with her band The Captains.
Noonan grew up with a strong background in classical music, with her mother Maggie being a well-known opera singer. She studied opera and jazz at the Queensland Conservatorium.
After graduation, Noonan began fronting the pop-rock group george, along with her brother Tyrone Noonan. Noonan founded george with her brother, with whom she shares lead vocals, in 1996 to enter a university music competition. After a series of successful independently released EPs, they signed to Festival Mushroom Records and released the debut album Polyserena in 2002, which debuted in the number 1 position on the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) albums chart.[SUP][3][/SUP] george won the 'Best New Artist' ARIA award in 2003 and performed the song "Breathe in Now" at the award ceremony.

[video=youtube;mqk2BL67l_A]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqk2BL67l_A[/video]

[CRAZY-HORSE]

my thoughts on Katie Noonan...
i own one of her albums from her band The Captains...its okay i guess, but not much variation in the songs...
i think she has a beautiful tone to her vocals,which can be sparse,vunerable and even powerful in a single song, but overall, she is not my cup of tea...

[CRAZY-HORSE]

number 18: CONNIE MITCHELL



Connie Mitchell (also known as "Miss Connie") is an Australian pop singer and the lead vocalist with the Sydney band Sneaky Sound System. She appears on the band's singles "Pictures", "I Love It", "UFO", "Goodbye", "Kansas City", "When We Were Young", "16" and "We Love".
The band, Sneaky Sound System, evolved from Sneaky Sundays night club, launched by Black Angus (Angus McDonald) and Daimon Downey. Angus and Downey met Mitchell in a park one day as she was playing guitar with a friend and asked her to sing for them. "I thought they were a bit dodgy," recollects Mitchell. However, they did have a studio, and when Connie sang on what was to be their breakthrough single, "I Love It", Sneaky Sound System had their vocalist – and their debut album. Angus noted that "We were told by every label we might sell 10,000 copies and it wasn't worth it, so we decided to do it ourselves."
Mitchell also shares songwriting credits with Angus McDonald on "Pictures", along with almost all other Sneaky Sound System track. In the 2006 International Songwriting Competition, the song came second in the Dance/Electronica category.

Their self-titled album went on to become their multi-platinum, ARIA-Award winning debut. Its successor, "2", entered the Australian charts at number one, and Mitchell has since appeared on albums by Kanye West, Snoop Dogg and Rick Ross.
Mitchell spent a couple of weeks in early 2007 recording vocals for Kanye West in Los Angeles.[SUP][2][/SUP] She features on four tracks on Kanye West's 2007 album, Graduation, including the singles, "Can't Tell Me Nothing".[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][4][/SUP] and "Flashing Lights".
Described as "a star in her own right" with a golden voice,[SUP][5][/SUP] Mitchell also laid down tracks with Snoop Dogg during his extended stay in Sydney for the Good Vibrations Festival.[SUP][5][/SUP]
With Sneaky Sound System, Connie Mitchell has supported Robbie Williams and Scissor Sisters, and played the Australian leg of the worldwide concert Live Earth in July 2007.[SUP][3][/SUP]
As of 2009[SUP][update][/SUP], Mitchell is the only singer in Sneaky Sound System after Daimon Downey announced he was leaving the band to pursue other interests.
In March 2013 it was announced that Mitchell would act as mentor to Seal's artists on the 2013 Australian season of The Voice.

[video=youtube;bxqucQ9WqjE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxqucQ9WqjE[/video]

[CRAZY-HORSE]

my thoughts on Connie Mitchell............

who the hell makes up these lists?
what the heck is Connie doing on this list?
and,
as my mum always taught me..."if you aint got nuthin' nice to say then dont say nuthin'!",
so if i follow her advice my comment is "............................."!

[CRAZY-HORSE]

number 17: NICK CAVE



Nicholas Edward "Nick" Cave (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor.
He is best known for his work as a frontman of the critically acclaimed rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1983, a group known for its eclectic influences and musical styles. Before that, he had fronted the group The Birthday Party in the early 1980s, a band renowned for its highly gothic,[SUP][1][/SUP][SUP][2][/SUP] challenging lyrics and violent sound influenced by post-punk, blues and free jazz. In 2006, he formed the garage rock band Grinderman that released its debut the following year. Cave's music is generally characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences, and lyrical obsessions with religion, death, love and violence.[SUP][3][/SUP]
Upon Cave's induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame, ARIA Awards committee chairman Ed St John said, "Nick Cave has enjoyed—and continues to enjoy—one of the most extraordinary careers in the annals of popular music. He is an Australian artist like Sidney Nolan is an Australian artist—beyond comparison, beyond genre, beyond dispute.

In 1973, Cave met Mick Harvey (guitar), Phill Calvert (drums), John Cochivera (guitar), Brett Purcell (bass), and Chris Coyne (saxophone); fellow students at Caulfield Grammar. They founded a band with Cave as singer. Their repertoire consisted of proto-punk cover versions of songs by Lou Reed, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music and Alex Harvey, among others. Later, the line-up slimmed down to four members including Cave's friend Tracy Pew on bass. In 1977, after leaving school, they adopted the name The Boys Next Door and began playing predominantly original material. Guitarist and songwriter Rowland S. Howard joined the band in 1978, expanding to five members.
From 1977 until their dissolution in 1983 (by which time they were known as The Birthday Party) the band explored various styles. They were a leader of Melbourne's post-punk scene in the late 1970s, playing hundreds of live shows in Australia before changing their name to The Birthday Party in 1980 and moving to London, then West Berlin. Cave's Australian girlfriend and muse Anita Lane accompanied them to London. The band were notorious for their provocative live performances which featured Cave shrieking, bellowing and throwing himself about the stage, backed up by harsh pounding rock music laced with guitar feedback. Cave utilised old testament imagery with lyrics about sin, curses and damnation.[SUP][1][/SUP] The lyrics were full of "American gothic imagery", talking about horror stories.[SUP][1][/SUP] Cave grew to detest the "gothic" label; their single "Release the Bats" (1981), described by Harvey as a "comedic interlude", was intended as a sardonic parody of the scene, however it became highly influential in the genre and "a mantra for Goths everywhere".[SUP][1][/SUP][SUP][2][/SUP][SUP][14][/SUP] At that time, Cave also became a regular member of a gothic club in London called The Batcave.[SUP][15][/SUP]
After establishing a cult following in Europe and Australia, The Birthday Party disbanded in 1984. Howard and Cave found it difficult to continue working together and both were rather worn down from alcohol and drug use.

The band with Cave as their leader and frontman has released fifteen studio albums. Pitchfork Media calls the group one of rock's "most enduring, redoubtable" bands, with an accomplished discography.[SUP][16][/SUP] Though their sound tends to change considerably from one album to another, the one constant of the band is an unpolished blending of disparate genres, and song structures which provide a vehicle for Cave's virtuosic, frequently histrionic theatrics. Critics Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Steve Huey wrote: "With the Bad Seeds, Cave continued to explore his obsessions with religion, death, love, America, and violence with a bizarre, sometimes self-consciously eclectic hybrid of blues, gospel, rock, and arty post-punk."[SUP][3][/SUP]
Reviewing 2008's Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! album, NME used the sentence "gothic psycho-sexual apocalypse" to describe the "menace" present in the lyrics of the title track.[SUP][17][/SUP] Their most recent work, Push the Sky Away, was released in February 2013.[SUP][18][/SUP]
In mid-August 2013, Cave was a 'First Longlist' finalist for the 9th Coopers AMP, alongside artists such as Kevin Mitchell and The Drones. The Australian music prize is worth A$30,000 and the 2013 winner will be announced in March 2014.[SUP][19][/SUP]
In September 2013 interview, Cave explained that he returned to using a typewriter for songwriting after his experience with the Nocturama album, as he "could walk in on a bad day and hit 'delete' and that was the end of it". Cave believes that he lost valuable work due to a "bad day".
[SUP]
DISCOGRAPHY:

1979 : Door, Door (by The Boys Next Door)
1980 : The Birthday Party (by The Boys Next Door)
1981 : Prayers on Fire (by The Birthday Party)
1982 : Junkyard (by The Birthday Party)
1984 : From Her to Eternity
1985 : The Firstborn Is Dead
1986 : Kicking Against the Pricks
1986 : Your Funeral... My Trial
1988 : Tender Prey
1990 : The Good Son
1992 : Henry's Dream
1994 : Let Love In
1996 : Murder Ballads
1997 : The Boatman's Call
2001 : No More Shall We Part
2003 : Nocturama
2004 : Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus
2007 : Grinderman (by Grinderman)
2008 : Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
2010 : Grinderman 2 (by Grinderman)
2013 : Push the Sky Away
[/SUP]

[CRAZY-HORSE]

my thoughts on Nick Cave....

i love this guy,his dark gothic lyrics and brooding emotive music is uniquely Nick Cave, theres no-one who sounds quite like him,no-one writes like him and no-one else has anywhere near the same vocal quality he does...
which is why people either love or loathe him and his 'out there' style...
i own three Birthday Party albums and all of his Bad Seeds and Grinderman albums, this guy is a living legend IMO

its so hard to pick a solitary link to sum up his career but i think this one gives you an idea of what Nick Cave is all about

[video=youtube;NqFPqEwY6to]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqFPqEwY6to[/video]

[SteveO]

I truly enjoyed Kate, Connie and Nick ! Nice ones Crazy mate! A little surprised that Nick came in a little low at 17?

[Music Head]

come on Olivia

[SteveO]

Lisa and Rolf