Bøker av Glen Humphries

Stunningly designed flexibound book profiling the top 40 most famous Australian pop and rock songs. What a famous song is about and what you think it's about aren't always the same thing. National Anthems names the top 40 classic Australian songs and tells the stories behind them - many unknown. From Hunters and Collectors' Throw Your Arms Around Me to INXS's Don't Change and Red Gum's I Was Only 19, author Glen Humphries unearths hidden gems and surprising back stories about the bands. It's a celebration of great Australian music that will have you reaching for old vinyl or phone apps to give some of these classics another listen. Chances are, each song is not what you had assumed.

In 1982 the Illawarra Steelers played their first season in the NSW Rugby League competition. It wasn't a great start for the club - they finished second-last on the ladder. The rest of the 1980s didn't bring much joy - the club picked up the wooden spoon three times, including a double in 1985 and '86.But then the new decade brought with it the bright, shining season of 1992, where the Steelers - led by a crop of youngsters - finished in third place and found themselves in the finals for the first time. The side in scarlet and white went all the way to the final, where they were edged out by a 4-0 scoreline. While it didn't end the way many Steelers fans had hoped, that 1992 season is still remembered fondly. A time when the Steelers were alive in the five.

Great stories of unusual happenings on and off the cricket field.

Most musicians only get one chance at fame. Daryl Braithwaite has managed to have three of them. He joined a band called Sherbet in 1970 and, a year later, they had their first hit - and there were an astonishing 19 more to come.But Sherbet's fans grew up and moved on so the band folded in the early 1980s. At the end of that decade, Braithwaite found himself with a surprise hit album in Edge. He followed it up a few years later with Rise - the album that included a little tune called The Horses. That song went to No1, but a lawsuit and diminishing sales saw him pushed out of the limelight.Then, in the early 2000s, something strange happened - kids at gigs started singing The Horses back at Braithwaite. Soon enough, this song that might have otherwise faded away galloped back and became an Australian anthem.Little Darling looks at the unusual phenomenon of The Horses and offers up an explanation for how it happened.

Beer. You know it and you love it. But you might not know the part it played in Australian history. Right from the start beer was there. It was on board The Endeavour when Captain Cook set sail for Australia. It was drunk not long after the First Fleet landed in Botany Bay. But it wasn't there when our nation's capital started life as a dry city.

The Wollongong music scene is now well and truly on the map, thanks to Hockey Dad, the Yours and Owls Festival and the Farmer and the Owl label. They spearheaded a golden age for the local scene, where people outside Wollongong finally realised what was going on in the coastal town an hour south of Sydney. But this wasn''t the first high point for the local scene, which stretches back to the mid-1950s. In Lull City, Glen Humphries focuses on the creation of this current golden age for the scene while also casting an eye back to see what went on before we got to this point.

On July 13, 1985, the world tuned in to watch Live Aid beamed in from Wembley in London and John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. The massive event was spawned from Bob Geldof's idea six months earlier to raise money for Ethiopian famine victims through the release of the charity single, Do They Know It's Christmas?.The iconic performance on that day came from Queen, a band that had been considering calling it quits just months earlier. Performing in front of an estimated audience of 1.9 billion people, the fourpiece stole the show and revitalised their career.Alright takes a look back at Queen's performance on that day as well as revisiting the origins of the Band Aid single and the logistics behind getting Live Aid off the ground.

With their long hair and fuzzed-up guitars, Tumbleweed rose out of the ashes of late-80s Indie band The Proton Energy Pills. Just over a year after their 1990 birth, they'd recorded with Mudhoney's Mark Arm, scored a support slot on Nirvana's only Australian tour (just as the grunge wave hit) and signed a US record deal.The Wollogong band hit their peak of popularity in the wake of the 1995 album Galactaphonic. And then proceeded to shoot themselves in the foot. Guitarist Paul Hausmeister got the sack, and then drummer Steve O'Brien left in protest.From there the band went downhill, chopping and changing band members, releasing albums that met an increasingly uninterested public and playing shows where there were maybe a half-dozen people in the crowd. So it was no surprise when they called it quits in 2001.That was supposed to be it for Tumbleweed. With the acrimony that swirled around the members for years afterwards, it was hard to ever see the hometown fans' wishes of a reformation come true. But in 2009 they managed to heal their wounds and reunite, releasing their fifth studio album a few years later and survive the sudden death of bassplayer Jay Curley.Journalist and music writer Glen Humphries has interviewed the members of Tumbleweed numerous times and, in Healer, takes the first complete look at the band's career.

In 1982, Midnight Oil was a band in trouble. Their last album, Place Without a Postcard, was supposed to be their big breakthrough but it hadn't worked out that way. So they found themselves in London, feeling the pressure of recording what was a "make or break" album. Members threatened to leave, others had nervous breakdowns and the ANZ bank manager back home was sweating as he watched the overdraft he'd approved for the band get bigger and bigger.If this album went the same way as the last one, it could be the end of Midnight Oil. Out of the crisis came 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, an album that changed everything for the band. It entered the charts and stayed there for more than three years. They started playing bigger venues - and they were able to pay back the bank manager.Two years later, they headed to Japan to record the polarising Red Sails in the Sunset. It managed to do what 10-1 couldn't - give the band their first No1 album. But again the band found themselves facing the possibility it could all be over, courtesy of lead singer Peter Garrett's tilt at federal politics. If he wins, the band loses.In Sounds Like an Ending, journalist and author Glen Humphries takes a track-by-track look at these two albums and the times and turmoil that fuelled them. That includes wondering whether the 10-1 title was a sly dig at a certain Australian music TV show, finding out the stories behind some of the songs and explaining what's really happening on the cover of Red Sails in the Sunset.

"Could you estimate the number of houses and backyards you have unlawfully entered?""No, it would be terribly hard to say.""Would it be hundreds or would it be thousands?""Many, many hundreds. Perhaps thousands."- The Kingsgrove Slasher's police questioning Between 1956 and 1959, suburban Sydney was terrorised by a phantom known as the Kingsgrove Slasher. A peeping Tom, he graduated to breaking into houses to watch people sleep before later slashing women and girls with a razor while they lay in their beds.He punched a 21-year-old woman into unconsciousness, breaking her teeth and cutting her mouth, hit a teenage girl in the face with a piece of wood and slashed a deep wound across the stomach of a 64-year-old woman. The Slasher also groped teens in their beds, and one of his 18 victims was just seven years old.Night Terrors is the first detailed account of the Kingsgrove Slasher case. It draws on hundreds of newspaper articles written at the time - which show the level of fear in the community - as well as the transcripts from the court hearings, which had been sealed since 1959. The result is a true-crime book that might make it hard for you to go to sleep at night.