"Musically, Don Walker provided the first real sense that this day could be special. His band featured Charlie Owen on guitar and a stunning subtle harmonica player by the name of Kenny Sutherland. Walker's dry style betrayed a bit of Willie Nelson and Tom Waits via a Mt Isa pub.

Walker captivated the crowd with sardonic story-songs like "Bad Bugger", the tale of a corrupt character suspected of being "dumped off Coffs Harbour shackled to a fridge, or buried in a pylon off the new Glebe Island Bridge."

Walker (along with Paul Kelly) is without doubt Australia's best and most important storyteller in song, fulfilling a need to see and understand ourselves in the same way the likes of Banjo Patterson, Henry Lawson and later figures like Shaw Neilsen and perhaps Kenneth Slessor, managed in the past. This merging of the poetic and the journalistic functions of a social artist, were an affirmation of the ballad as a serious and vitral form today"

© 2000 Juice Magazine