Andrew Stafford's book Pig City recently turned 18. It's a history of music from Brisbane, Australia, from the late 1970's to the early 2000's when it was published (as the subtitle says, "From The Saints to Savage Garden"), but in parallel it's a socio-political history of Queensland during and after the years when its repressive, corrupt Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, was in office. In between the story of The Saints emerging from the outer suburb of Oxley to the triumphant performance of local boys Savage Garden at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, there are lots of original interviews with musicians, well-known and not so, and founders of important underground outlets like community radio station 4ZZZ.

I moved to Brisbane myself in 1992, and it was already on its way to becoming the vibrant sunny paradise it is today, but there was still a strong sense and a lot of conversation about the Joh years, and the Fitzgerald Inquiry which brought him down. You still got a sense of a state that was somewhat trapped in time.  For example, there was the fact that most restaurants couldn't sell you a bottle of wine, you had to bring your own, which was a vestige of the old corrupt insider processes for controlling liquor licenses; or the fact that you couldn't buy groceries after 5:00 pm except one night per week, and never on Sunday.  

The night Andrew called and told me his idea for this book, it was one of those things that rings a bell of truth in the world, it seems so right and obvious that you can't believe you didn't think of it before, and you couldn't imagine the world without that idea in it.

I was there in person, in Brisbane, for celebrations each step of the way. First the book launch, and a few years later the day-long Pig City concert in honor of the book, which featured a rare reunion of The Saints, and a great set which was captured off the mixing desk and later put out on CD.

I wasn't living in Brisbane, so I wasn't party to any criticism or backlash, but, Australia being Australia, I'm sure there was some, probably from the inevitable bands and stories that had to be left out, and certainly from some Tall Poppy reaction (Australians always cut down the "tall poppies", the ones who get too successful and raise their heads above the rest).

But I knew that the book was well regarded when, one afternoon when I was visiting and Andrew and I were catching a train from the City back to his flat, I saw, in the tiles of the renovated station's walls, words in colorful fonts, all with quotes from Andrew's book.  His city had memorialized the interviews and testimonials that he gathered, the voices of his subjects and his own writing, on the train station walls, right in the heart of the city he wrote about.

Happy Birthday, Pig City!