Doc Neeson's Angels

Timeline
1971 Doc joins Moonshine Jug and String Band in Adelaide
1974 Band electrifies as the Keystone Angels
1976 Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again, first Angels single, produced by Harry Vanda and George Young
1977 Debut album, The Angels
1978 Classic Face to Face album hits #16, sells four times platinum
1979 No Exit another multi-platinum success after #8 debut
- Out Of The Blue EP
1980 Dark Room hits #6; first US release
1983 Never So Live EP
1981 Night Attack continues US tour assault, hits #11 at home
1983 Watch The Red hits #6, widens band's sound palette
1984 Two Minute Warning recorded in LA, reaches #2 in Australia
1986 Revamped band triumphs with #6 hit Howling, which spawns smash cover of We Gotta Get Out Of This Place
1987 Double live album, Liveline, goes to #2
1990 Beyond Salvation, made in Memphis, is band's first #1 album
1991 Red Back Fever, second Memphis album
1992 Left Hand Drive, B-sides compilation
1993 Brewster-Neeson-Brewster-Hilbun-Eccles line-up reforms
1994 Evidence, best of album with new tracks
- Moonshine Jug and String Band reforms for Rent Party album
1997 Lounge Lizards acoustic tour with Angry Anderson, Ross Wilson
1998 Skin and Bone, the Angels' first independent album
- The Angels inducted into ARIA Hall of Fame by Angry Anderson
1999 Doc organises and performs in Tour of Duty concert, Dili, East Timor
- New Year's Eve - The Angels perform last show
2000 Doc begins long convalescence after serious road accident
2003 Resumes touring with Doc Neeson's Angels
2005 Doc unveils Red Phoenix with one-off, self-titled album
2006 Liberation reissues eight Angels albums spanning 1980 to 1991; and Wasted Sleepless Nights -The Definitive Best Of
2007 Doc's first solo album, The Acoustic Sessions, on Liberation Blue.
- Doc Neeson's Angels play for Australian troops in the Middle East

"The mood of this record is a good expression of what I've been through in some ways. It shows the side of me that I usually keep hidden behind the flat-out rock'n'roll energy. So it's been a great album to record, to listen back to and say, yeah, that's me as well."

Doc Neeson has lately found time to reflect. The Angels, the band he fronted for 25 years with a menacing volatility with few peers in rock'n'roll, were torn apart by his shattering road accident of '99. Doctors told him he'd never perform again. They were wrong. But not even Doc expected this.

"The Angels derived a lot of their power from very tight riffing and very tight rhythm patterns," he acknowledges. "So the first challenge was, 'How do I get that power, a different kind of power, in an acoustic mode?'" He glimpsed an answer in the Liberation Blue back catalogue. Struck by the imaginative feels and warm muscularity of the Church's El Momento Descuidado CD, Doc called on that album's drummer/ producer, Tim Powles.

"Tim's production method is very organic in that he wouldn't allow people to overdevelop an idea, to get what they were playing too organised," he says. "Quite a few times, when I thought I was running through an idea, he was actually taping it with the view of 'This is the take'!"
This intuitive method of "letting the songs speak for themselves" began to work on Doc, guitarist Dave Leslie and bassist Jim Hilbun "like osmosis," he says. Subtle swirls of strings and organ; a rockabilly slap here; a sax solo there; an ethereal piano note - all fell in place more by fate than design.

The opening trilogy - Be With You, Out of the Blue, Love Takes Care - is an almost languid invitation to reappraise the melodic subtleties and compelling atmospheres of the Angels' early classics. Recalibrated versions of Shadow Boxer, No Secrets and Face the Day find Doc's naked lower register vibrating like an unsettling thought, where choruses once pounced and throttled.

"Some of it is a case of internalising the songs, in a way," he says. "It was very interesting from a performance point of view. I'm almost letting the listener be a fly on the wall to what l'm feeling and that creates intimacy."

There's gallows wit, too, in the degenerate glamrock sleaze of Take A Long Line and the Bastille Day fog of Marseilles - and a perfectly realised air of lament to the song that started it all, Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again.

"Rather than hitting people over the head with a sledgehammer, this is more of a CSI approach," Doc chuckles. "It actually opens up the songs to a lot of interpretation. As a songwriter, I'm really pleased it was possible to do that."

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  Acoustic Sessions