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So this is how it ends. Stephen Cummings has been playing music for nearly 40 years, written a couple of novels, done some journalism, helped flog Medibank ("I feel better now" - he does every time the royalty cheque comes in, thank you) and, with the Sports and his solo career, has racked up enough crucial musical moments to fill a classic-hits radio station playlist. This month he publishes Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?, an often hilarious if occasionally uncomfortable memoir with sex and drugs, bad behaviour and really, really bad behaviour, unfettered opinions and brutal honesty. It's not so much "tell all" as "Oh my God, did he really say that about (insert name of famous musician/manager/TV personality/parent) in print?". So, Stephen Cummings, are you happy with the notion that you may never work in this business again? "Well, the industry part of it has never been that helpful to me. They've just sort of taken," he says after an initial splutter. "I don't really see people from the music industry, frankly. I don't go out much. They don't enter my life very often so I've got little to lose." Well they, or their lawyers, may be entering his life more frequently in the near future. "They [the publisher and its lawyers] have taken a hell of a lot out of the book," he says more confidently. "Everything that's left in there, well, you know, you've got to be able to take a joke. "Are they going to sue me? I have nothing. If they sue me I'll have to get a [benefit] concert going I guess," he laughs. "I might get the Oils to reform for it." As long as the Oils haven't read the chapter about them. "Well, that's just stating facts." This is true. In fact, most of the book is just stating facts. It's just that a lot of these facts aren't the kind of things that people normally say outside private bitching sessions in their homes. Cummings roars with laughter at this. "I say I make no moral thing on this, I'm just stating a fact. So I think that's all right. But it's the most unlikely people who are the ones who will sue you. Other people, like Michael Gudinski, he has a thick hide and hopefully can take a joke. And I say good things about him, too." This is the Michael Gudinski who has been one of the most powerful men in the Australian music industry for 30 years with a record label, touring company, publishing, and Kylie Minogue. He released albums from Cummings's band the Sports and briefly managed them. He also is variously described in the book as "an offensive and abusive bear of a man", the Moriarty to Cummings's Holmes, having "an attention span the size of a bee's dick", "all about power" and someone who "totally screwed us financially" as well as a lover of music, a passionate man and the only person who made the Sports money. In one of the funniest parts of the book, Cummings describes in detail how tempted he was to throw Gudinski over Niagara Falls during an uncomfortable and unhappy American tour made all the more uncomfortable and unhappy by Cummings being a complete prat. The story culminates in this exchange. "He caught himself on the rail. Then he barked: 'You'll get a big fat f---ing surprise if you try to push me over Niagara Falls.' I shrugged my shoulders. 'Well, I gave it my best shot. But you're too f---ing fat."' In truth, there isn't really that much in here which could be actionable, except maybe for those who find reports of their hardly secret drug use a touch worrying. "But I don't think someone like Steve Kilbey would take offence at that. It happened," Cummings says, oblivious to the fact I hadn't mentioned a name, let alone the founding singer-songwriter of the Church who produced an early Cummings solo album. "Steve Kilbey is a straight-up person, like him or hate him. I also say he is a very nice person and I admire him. It's just that having your producer nod off while you're singing for a couple of hours, and gradually slump on to the recording desk is, you know, a bit demoralising." The thing to remember for anyone who's crossed paths with Cummings and is tempted to go to the index to look up any scurrilous references (a waste of time, by the way, as there is no index) is that whatever Cummings may say about others, he says much worse about himself. In this book, the usually private Stephen Cummings is broken down into little pieces and stomped on - the fat kid with no confidence, the snotty young star, the insecure narcissist, the destructive paranoid, "a pop singer with hang-ups"- by the now very public Stephen Cummings. "I could have been more brutal [about myself] than that," Cummings says. "But I thought, 'No, I have to go to school and face the parents of my youngest child's friends and they may think I'm really weird'." Stephen Cummings weird? Heaven forbid.

AVAILABLE AS A DOWNLOAD FROM THE USUAL PLACES! ALSO!!! NOW 100 COPIES ONLY IN A LOVELY CD PACK. ALL AVAILABLE FROM NEXT WEDNESDAY. PAY PAL DETAILS UP OVER THE WEEKEND. It was a hot warm afternoon, the sky was full of yellows and blazing reds and I had driven for three days in an RV through floods and the like to get to Byron Bay for the Easter Festival. It was magical - one 73 minute set in the big tent before Steve Earle. Shane O’Mara contrived a wall of sound from one guitar and though I was scared to death, I hung on for the ride. Everything was darker and heavier than you thought. Let me state for the record, that when we arrived at the end of the set we were both exhausted. The audience danced madly. They looked like listless pink flamingoes. Our buddy Adam Rhodes recorded it. This music is live and raw and emotional. We don’t have a problem with that. Never. Stephen

Happiest Man Alive by Michael Dwyer - The Age, 3 October 2008 3.5 stars The juxtaposition of effusive title and overcast cover provides a sardonic entree to Stephen Cummings' umpteenth album. The juxtaposition of effusive title and overcast cover provides a sardonic entree to Stephen Cummings' umpteenth album of acoustic philosophising but the keynote feels more like sanguine acceptance than sarcasm. "Like it or not, this is the world that we live in," he sings on the way to the mellow chorus mantra that Love is Space and Time. It's a world of spooky swings and bumpy roundabouts; fond notes to fallen heroes (Raymond Chandler, Edward Hopper, Henry Miller) and only the occasional grumpy outburst at the TV. Sure, Sick Comedian, a howl of indignation at declining standards of politics, media and economic integrity, is one of the album's most potent and lingering tracks - and he's only warming up for the bilious snarl of You Know It All By Heart. But Straight to Your Arms is one of the most vulnerable and contented of his career and the meditative clarity of This Song Can Save You and What A Joy It Is to Dance and Sing is without apparent irony. "Am I thinking a little too much?" he wonders on the haunting penultimate track. On balance, it's probably just the right amount.



>/a> Good sport has space for endless love Space Travel: 4.5 stars
 by Iain Shedden - The Australian, 25 August 2007 Space Travel, features Little Girl on a Sofa, a gentle, nostalgic love song with Beach Boys harmonies, alongside 10 others that plunder gospel and soul (I Remember), swampy rock'n'roll (Hey Kitty Kitty!) and acoustic folk (It's Not Me, It's You!). The strings, strum and repetitive cycle of No Stopping echo the Blue Nile, but the song is no less impressive for that. Indeed, everything here has a spring in its step, augmented by Cummings's regular collaborators McDonald and Miller, the Luscombe brothers and Shane O'Mara. Clearly he's loving it, even if, as he says on Who Wants to Buy a Broken Heart?, "falling in love, that's not for me". A bit of poetics. He deserves a round of applause.


Love-O-Meter/a> 4 stars by Shaun Carney - eg, The Age, 14 October 2005/a> More than 30 years after forming his first band, the Pelaco Brothers, and after 11 solo albums of original material, the challenge for a performer with the sort of career longevity that Stephen Cummings enjoys is to maintain the element of surprise. Beginning with the funky, urban-sounding Senso in 1983, Cummings has toured through lush pop, wide-screen soundscapes (courtesy of Steve Kilbey), raw acoustic balladry and guitar rock. His previous album of new songs was Firecracker in 2003, a boisterous collection of Ricky Nelson-style rockabilly pieces unlike anything he had done before. For Love-O-Meter, Cummings has taken another sharp turn, putting together a song suite - let's not call it a concept album - that tracks the break-up of a relationship and attempts of a heartsick man to rekindle the flame. It's dramatically different to Firecracker, resembling in places a mid-1960s beat group, in others exploring a mildly psychedelic sensibility. Cummings' vocalising is different too; it's often raspy and aggressive as he drives home the pop hooks and, along with producer Shane O'Mara, he hasn't been afraid to apply studio treatments and multi-tracking to his voice. In some respects, Love-O-Meter bundles up Cummings' stylistic tics. The jazzy, clubby element of his writing comes to the fore on the central song, the pained, dreamy Once Upon a Time We Were Mad For Each Other. It seems fitting that Cummings, whose natural shyness always precluded him from forcefully promoting his writing abilities, cites his favorite Beatle as George Harrison; there's a spot-on Harrison tribute, Punch Drunk, here. Perhaps the most important aspect of the album is that, courtesy of its narrative form, it takes Cummings out of himself. For years he struggled with the tension caused by his tendency to write autobiographical songs, something that's left him emotionally exposed and occasionally mired in a quiet-ballad cul-de-sac. Perhaps it was the experience of revisiting his older material for his Liberation Blue series album Close-Ups that's let him loosen up enough to inhabit a character for a full album as he does here. All told, it's quite adventurous and one of his strongest albums BOOKS FOR SALE.

JON CASMIR: SMH: Rock star writes novel..It's not exactly the kind of thought that makes you want to rush out to the bookstore but, like life, Wonderboy has a rather splendid habit of confounding expectations. Despite Cummings's other career - for 20 years he has been one of Australian pop's most lustrous voices - Wonderboy, his first novel, is not vanity publishing. It's not a half-hearted foray by a mind overly convinced of its own artistry. It's not the usual slim volume of awkward poetry that lyricists present us with. It's not a cocaine-snorting, groupie-shagging, rear-seat-of-the-limo rock memoir. And in a shocking divergence from recent Australian literary tradition, it's not an example of the Urban Brutalist school of writing. It's not, to paraphrase Ben Elton: "Hi, I'm at this inner-city dive watching kiddies do heroin because that's what this novel is all about...Shock!" With Wonderboy, Cummings has actually set out to conjure a novel from his imagination. You know, like writers used to. He has set out to explore words and meanings. His novel is a journey of discovery, the story of a grown man trying to grow up. And the good news is that it's not half bad.



STAY AWAY FROM LIGHTNING GIRL. review by Matt Condon - SundayLife! magazine (Sun Herald supplement) 1999 This second novel from the acclaimed singer/songwriter and former lead singer with The Sports opens with a delightfully simplistic premise and remains endearing throughout. Robert Moore is a former rock star whose band The Honeys has failed to crack the big-time in the US. As the novel opens, he is already dead, having been struck by lightning. He is suddenly having a conversation with Maigret, his official umpire in the hereafter and there is talk Robert may be relegated to the Dull Zone. This is a gentle tale of love that's hard to resist and probably superior to his first book, Wonderboy.