Hugo Race has played with the Bad Seeds, The Wreckery, Dirtmusic, True Spirit, The Fatalists and more. Over a musical career of more than 35 years, he’s lived and worked in England, Germany, Italy, Brazil and the US. It’s fair to say he’s a restless spirit. Race has always used songwriting to reflect on his life and times. Now, he’s turned his talents to the printed page with a memoir, Road Series, describing an extraordinary career that has taken him from St Kilda’s Crystal Ballroom to the first days of post-Wall Berlin and way beyond.
Road Series is both love story and elegy, a true and revealing tale. Renowned musician Hugo Race’s evocations of Melbourne, Europe and the USA, Berlin and Eastern Europe, Italy, Brazil and Mali and Africa are poetic and searching, always incisive and exquisitely written. [pullquote]While Road Series parallels Kerouac’s journey of ‘battered suitcases’ and ‘longer ways to go’ it also wonderfully bears witness to his realisation that ‘the road is life’.[/pullquote]While the idea of being a global citizen is explored as a creative force for the artist, this is ultimately a book that is grounded in the rich possibilities of the everyday. Music and travel collide and coalesce, and the reader is given rare insights into what it means to devote one’s life to the musical journey, to traverse the world in search of true spirit.
Hugo Race is a musician, author and producer, a streetwise, incurably romantic troubadour whose songs have the focused power of a haiku merged with the scope of a film. Hugo wrote his first musical stage play at 17, Sweaty Weather, produced at St. Martin Theatre in Melbourne to critical acclaim using over 20 actors and musicians. Since then, Hugo’s creative journey has embraced cross-cultural explorations with different traditions of music from post-punk to modern classic through Mali, Sicily, Brazil and greater Europe.
With a catalogue of 20 albums to his name and innumerable international collaborations, Hugo continues to live and work between Australia and Italy. More at: www.hugoracemusic.com
Compelling writing covering the Melbourne punk scene, the author’s time with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Berlin in 1989, through to Italy, Brazil and Mali, Africa in 2012.
“Hugo writes with a unique voice and the insights of one in the middle of the maelstrom.”—Mick Harvey
Hugo Race launched his book at Readings Carlton on the 24th February.
Hugo Race will be appearing at:
The Wheeler Centre ~ 31 March – In Conversation with Mark Mordue
Byron Bay Writers Festival – 5-7 August
Buy Hugo Race’s Road Series here.
1 Trackback / Pingback
Comments are closed.