Clinton Walker

Clinton Walker (born 1957) is an Australian writer, best known for his works on popular music but with a broader interest in social and cultural history and theory. Sydney's Sun-Herald has called him "our best chronicler of Australian grass-roots culture." He has always been ahead of the curve. As Rhythms magazine said in 2015, "Like many of Walker’s projects, Buried Country was at least a decade ahead of its time," and as such he is remarkable as a critic who has exerted a pro-active impact on Australian music and its development; groundbreaking books like Inner City Sound (1981) and Buried Country (2000) especially have informed and inspired successive generations of musicians. Similarly, while he found best-selling success as Bon Scott's biographer, Walker's non-music books like Football Life (1998) and Golden Miles (2005) have innovatively offered an appreciation of subjects hitherto hardly deemed worthy of serious consideration.

Born in Bendigo, Victoria, Walker dropped out of art school in Brisbane in the late 70s to start a punk fanzine with the late Andrew McMillan and to write for student newspapers. In 1978 he moved to Melbourne where he worked on-air for 3RRR, and with Bruce Milne on the fanzine Pulp, and wrote for the fledgling Roadrunner magazine. Moving on to Sydney, where he still lives, he commenced a career as a freelance journalist. Over the next fifteen years he wrote for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including longstanding associations with both RAM and Australian Rolling Stone; he also wrote extensively for Stiletto, The Bulletin, the Age, New Woman, Playboy, Inside Sport, the Edge and Juice.

He published his first book, Inner City Sound, in 1981. It documented the emergence of independent Australian punk/post-punk music, and became itself one of the icons of the movement. A revised and expanded edition was published in 2005, at the same time as a CD anthology with the same title.

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