A newspaper in Scotland once described The Castanet Club as “12 people playing tennis, all of them serving at once”. To witness a concert was to be bombarded with joy. This joy started an hour before the show and stopped you getting to sleep hours after the show finished.
It was more than a band, more than a club it was an ethos, an art movement, a theatre movement, a fashion movement, and a musical uprising.
In the golden age of Pub Rock, while INXS, Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil toured their biggest albums, this group of local artists, actors and musicians formed what was essentially an old school vaudeville troupe and started packing the Workers Club, The Palais, The Cambridge, The 16 footers and every other beer barn in Newcastle and eventually Sydney.
What this group achieved in their 9 years would impact the landscape of Australian entertainment for the next 20yrs. The rise of Triple J, Sandman and Flacco, Young Einstein, Good News Week, Channel [V], Play School, Sale of the Century, Full Frontal, Happy Feet, Roy and HG, Fast Forward, The Fat, Kath, and Kim and even Mambo T-shirts are in some way connected to this remarkable group of humans.