ANGEL CITY - Shadows Fall, Sun Rises...
by Martin Popoff

The Angels - or as they were known stateside, Angel City - are one of the great unsung hard rock bands, primarily of the early '80s. Like their Aussie countrymates AC/DC, the early albums got sort of "compiled" and pumped out in America and Canada. Face To Face was an amalgamation of the band's second and third homespun platter and it was a minor sensation o'er this side of the big pond. Dark Room is a classic, Night Attack was a hit despite itself, and then Two Minute Warning was pretty damn cool. After that, the records kept coming, but most not readily available in the states. Through them all, the band had a front man in one Doc Neeson who has now quit the band. Not to worry, the guys are sort of up and at 'em anyway, having issued a live album without Doc called Live At The Basement.

As well, the songwriting heart of the band, John and Rick Brewster, otherwise known as the Brewster Brothers, have got themselves a cool, rootsy, acoustic album called Shadows Fall, as well as a filled-out band to help perform the thing all over Australia.

That's a lot to take in (especially if you run along right now and buy the entire Angels catalogue, spanning four decades and counting), so we'll let John bring us up to date and fill in a few of the blanks...

"Well, basically Doc left The Angels, or Angel City as we're known up there, in 2000. And at that stage we thought that was the end of the band, basically. So after awhile, Rick and I started... actually a friend of ours who used to be our tour manager, sort of asked if we would do a duo. In Star City in Sydney. And we did, so we started playing, just the two of us, and that's grown into something a bit different now. We've got Jim Conway who is a legendary harmonica player, playing with us. And Jim has MS and he's confined to a wheelchair, but he's still playing great and he comes on the road with us. And we've got a guy called Paul Burton playing double bass. And basically, Rick and I just started writing some songs, as we always did for The Angels. And we wrote some new songs and they are basically kind of like a turnaround for us to when we were teenagers growing up, where Rick was playing all the classical piano and I was playing acoustic guitar and singing Bob Dylan songs and all that. I'm not sure how The Angels grew out of that, but it did, and through the Brewster Brothers, we rediscovered ourselves, our youth."

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