Kim Salmon Announces Auckland Show

Australian artiste and rock and roll legend Kim Salmon will perform one solo NZ show on Tuesday 29^th June 2021 at the Wine Cellar in Auckland.

Regular listeners of 95bFM’s long running Dirtbag Radio show hosted by the wonderful and talented Mr Rapley every Monday at 7pm, will be no strangers to Perth’s Kim Salmon – from his embryonic 1977 recordings in the Cheap Nasties, to The Scientists, to The Beasts Of Bourbon and beyond.

Tickets from undertheradar. https://www.undertheradar.co.nz/tour/14754/Kim-Salmon-solo.utr

Australian culture academic Jon Stratton says of Kim Salmon & the Scientists: 

“… they precursed, and influenced, the development of a musical form identified with Washington state and Seattle bands such as the Melvins, Mudhoney and Nirvana, that came to be categorised as grunge.

Kim Salmon himself has asserted that: ‘The Scientists were really forging a sound that was later taken up in Seattle’. He goes on to contextualise this, saying, ‘if you think chronologically there was punk in the Sex Pistols, and then the guitar action went to Australia…I always say that Australian music was the premier exporter of grunge’.

This is by no means an idiosyncratic opinion. Greta Moon of Au Go Go Records has stated clearly that: “ The Scientists and Lubricated Goat were most definitely big influences on bands like Mudhoney in particular. The Scientists were the first grunge band. They were in existence before any of those US Sub Pop bands came along.

It was US Sub Pop bands like Nirvana and Mudhoney that were openly avowed fans of the Scientists.” And, indeed, the singer of Mudhoney, Mark Arm, has himself stated that: ‘By the time Mudhoney began two of our most influential bands were feedtime and the Scientists, along with the Stooges and Neil Young.” 

At this point Kim is the subject of a biography Nine Parts Water One Part Sand Kim Salmon and the Formula For Grunge, written by Douglas Galbraith (also some time drummer for Kim). He has recently had three successful Art exhibitions – one entitled Conversations held at Mario’s Café in 2019, another called Lexical at B Side Gallery in Fitzroy 3years ago and most recently The Surrealists Exhibition with fellow Surrealists Stu Thomas as One Star Gallery in West Melbourne.

And the Pandemic?

Kim’s response was to get his band the Surrealists into a recording studio for a live streamed totally improvise recording viewed by 7.5K people on the net. This was made into last years ‘Rantings From The Book Of Swamp’ double live album which has now reached the end of its initial pressing and is about to be licenced through In The Red.

Some singers are thought of as entertainers and some are thought of as artists.

Kim veers towards artist but the entertainment is there. His song writing is sometimes expressionistic, sometimes humorous, sometimes narrative driven, sometimes plain bizarre and Surreal.