Fred Negro
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Fred Negro (his real name) is an Australian satirist, musician, songwriter, and cartoonist. Born in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, he has fronted numerous rock or country bands, with local success, including:
- I Spit On Your Gravy
- The Fuck Fucks
- The Editions
- Brady Bunch Lawn Mower Massacre
- The Band Who Shot Liberty Valance
- The Gravy Billies
- Shonky Tonk
- Squirming Gerbil Death
- The Twits
Punk-influenced 'I Spit On Your Gravy' had disbanded by the end of the 1980s but Fred has maintained a significant underground presence in Melbourne, Australia with regular appearances in his other bands, and today contributes a weekly 'Pub Strip' to the Melbourne street press, and MC's the Karaoke night at the Greyhound Hotel, St Kilda, Victoria.
Typical of his gentle but purposeful skirmishes with authority, in the mid eighties he succeeded in getting his record retailers in trouble with the police, for the content of I Spit On Your Gravy's debut 'St Kilda's Alright'. The bemused magistrate Graeme Golden, who struggled to locate a device in the court capable of playing the record, decreed after hearing it that "Anyone possessed of a reasonable intelligence would not buy it. If I said it was obscene it would probably increase sales and I don't want to do that." Charges were dismissed.
Infamous for his stage antics, which can include a plastic horses head on a stick with wheels, watermelons and roast chickens, it is easy to undervalue his sustained satirical purpose, and the complacency-pricking effects of his larrikinism. He is regularly to be found at The Espy hotel in St Kilda.
Fred is the President of the Espy Rockdogs Football Club (Est 1990). A position for which he has never been challenged. Negro barracks for the Collingwood Football Club.
Contents |
[edit] Discography
[edit] Albums
- I Spit On Your Gravy, St Kilda's Still Alright
- Shonky Tonk, I can't believe its not butter (1998)
- The Twits (without Fred) Albert Road recorded at The Espy on June 30 and 32nd (1999)
- The Twits, Play Music (2003)
- The Twits, She may look clean...but (2005)
[edit] Published work
Artwork appears in:
- InPress Magazine. Pub: Dharma Media, ABN 54 078 943 003.
- M.Walding and N.Vudovic (Eds). The Poster Art of Australian Popular Music Pub: Sept 2005 MUP, Miegunyah. ISBN 0-522-85168-1.
Honorary appointments:
[edit] Film work
- Fred Sounds, Dir Rohan Pugh
- Fred's Love, Dir Rohan Pugh
- Lesbo-a-go-go. Appeared as 'Vision from Hell'. Dir Andrew Leavold, Brisbane, 2003. B&W/Colour, 52 mins. IMDB reference
- "More entertainment value in its minuscule budget than a hundred Matrix Reloadeds..." Boris Lugosi, Girls Guns And Ghouls
- "Ugly, reprehensible and morally repugnant. And I made the film." Andrew Leavold, writer/director
