Mushroom Music Publishing

Mark Seymour was born in Benalla and grew up in country Victoria. His family was musical. Paula, his mother, encouraged all her children to sing and play musical instruments. Mark learned classical piano for a time, but found the technical discipline a little challenging and soon moved onto guitar in his early adolescence. The family moved to Melbourne in 1972.

Life in the outer suburbs was, as many of us well know, excruciatingly boring, and though Mark was a conscientious student, he found that there was simply not enough to do, particularly as his family were deeply religious Catholics. For Mark, adolescence was dead time. The brakes were on and stayed that way pretty much until he graduated from Melbourne Uni in 1978 and became a schoolteacher two years later. At that time he realised, in a rare moment of clarity, that his life was going the wrong way entirely and that drastic action was required.

Towards the end of his formal education he began going out to pubs to watch rock bands. Around the turn of the decade in Melbourne, there were bands aplenty in Melbourne and Mark became hooked on volume and cold beer.

Mark formed Hunters and Collectors in 1980, with a bunch of Uni friends. It was a rollicking eight-piece funk ensemble with industrial percussion, ' bizarre' atonal synthesizer, thundering bass guitar and a brass section that was so demonically loud that it became known as the ' Horns of Contempt '.

In it's early form Hunters and Collectors was less like a band, and more like a monstrous ' jam session' loosely tied to melody and words, which Mark provided, when he was audible. At times there were as many as fifty souls on stage as audience members joined the parade. Instruments were frequently stolen. However, all was not chaos. The band became famous for its rhythmic power and very quickly became touted as the ' next big thing' which is an Australian euphemism for a poppy that grows too fast, which Hunters and Collectors truly was.

The Album ' Human Frailty ' was recorded in Melbourne in 1985. This record has proven to be one of the most important and enduring records of the eighties and Hunters and Collectors were still playing a large part of this cut in 1998 when they retired. With
' Human Frailty ' Mark discovered, love, loss, and pop melody. His solo records are directly connected to this era and bear the same stamp of raw honesty and emotional power.

Hunters and Collectors went on to record five more albums, and became a huge touring operation.

By 1998, Mark felt that he had done all that he could as the front man of Hunters and Collectors. In that year he plunged into the unknown. After eighteen years of touring with what became one of Australia's most successful and deeply loved rock bands, he found himself alone on stage with just an acoustic guitar.

In going solo Mark has discovered a new and refreshing intensity in h is voice that he believed he had lost in the band.

His work has developed and grown around this simple and direct approach to performing. He continues to search for the emotional truth in a song. Mark Seymour's strength as a performer remains undiminished despite the ever-present shadow of the band he used to be in.

Seymour has recently completed his fifth solo album 'Westgate.' Produced by Cameron McKenzie, 'Westgate' follows a very simple formula. Make sounds you'd like to hear, as opposed to what others expect. It is stark and simple. It is a dark evocation of the suffering and dignity of ordinary people. It is, as Seymour likes to put it, a 'eulogy to the greatness of ordinary people.'

In his own words he says, 'On this album I have gone in search of ordinary greatness; greatness without bombast, the kind of greatness that conservative politicians can't touch. These are stories of working people who have suffered and triumphed quietly. Perhaps, as the world teeters on the precipice of disaster, there is still hope, for we only have to scratch the surface of history to discover that the best of human nature lies in the forgotten tragedies and hidden triumphs, where ordinary people have found dignity and redemption in their own lives. These are the stories that define us. Human beings have unlimited potential. No challenge is too great.'

Mark Seymour lives quietly (sometimes) with his wife Jo and their two beautiful daughters Eva and Hannah, somewhere on the Australian coast.

New Idea March 2007

Nicole and Keith went walking barefoot on the beach of a 'dream island paradise'. It was their second honeymoon. Some schlep with a camera took shots of their intimate play and they were instantly flogged and flashed 'round the globe.

Some might say this was a gross invasion of their personal space. Any average couple in search of renewal would be free to frolic with their privacy in tact but of course Nicole and Keith are no average couple. Millions of Aussies love Nicole and they're also really interested in Keith, the arriviste with the tats. He's still a bit of an unknown but he's got that winning smile and he's huge in the states. What's more, they really want Nikki to get it right this time.

For many Australians, these pictures must've been deeply re-assuring. The schlep snapped away and judging by the fulsome display of affection between the two, they knew the schlep was there. Or not? Who cares? The fact is, what Nicole and Keith do together matters big time and there in lies the earthy truth about many of us.

New Idea sells in the millions every week because of pictures like these. They give oxygen to the wistful yearnings of every lonely heart who ever tried to kill an hour by dreaming of perfect love and a better life. If Nicole and Keith can overcome their difficulties then surely there's hope for the rest of us? It's okay to fuck up sometimes they say, because bona-fide mega stars have to grapple with the dark side too.

Life has a way of throwing up 'little curve balls,' as the Americans would say; things like parking infringements, bad grades, traffic accidents, drug addiction, corrupt and/or deceitful leadership, and of course, the bigger ones, like terrorist insurgency or total war. Yet, there is something in our nature that compels us to look beyond all this short-term depravity and dream of a better future, where human stupidity is forgiven and life delivers on the promises we grew up with. While Nicole and Keith come to grips with each other on the deck of their cruiser, the bigger story of human kind staggers forward beneath the weight of untold suffering and injustice.

No matter how comfortable we are, whether barefoot on golden beaches, or day dreaming over pictorials in New Idea, we only have to scratch the surface of history, (Google helps,) to discover that the best of human nature lies in the forgotten tragedies and the hidden triumphs, where ordinary working people have found dignity and redemption in their own lives. These are the stories that define us as a people because they are ours and not the ones that are thrust at us in the vacuous blather of tabloid journalists and personal publicists who'll beat up anything, even the banal wrestling of a couple of wayward megastars on a boat, in order to distract us from the heroism of our own lives. Human beings have unlimited potential. No challenge is too great.

'Westgate' is about those challenges.

Mark Seymour, May 2007.