Kim Salmon (The Scientists) Auckland Show Announced for June

Incomparable frontman of Australia's legendary The Scientists, The Surrealists, The Beasts Of Bourbon and much more, Kim Salmon is returning to Aotearoa for one solo headline show at Auckland's The Wine Cellar on 29th June. Cited widely as "the first grunge band," Kim Salmon and The Scientists' pioneering punk / swamp rock sound was a precursor to and significant influence on the work of '90s Seattle superstars Mudhoney and Nirvana — listen to such landmark early '80s tunes as 'Swampland' or 'Solid Gold Hell' and try to disagree. The stars have aligned with the emergence of the first visible blood supermoon in 40 years, as today also sees the release of a wild new single from Kim Salmon and The Scientists, the excellently titled 'I Wasn't Good At Picking Friends', from their forthcoming new album Negativity out 11th June. Get stuck into that red hot number below and don't dare miss Salmon in Tāmaki Makaurau this winter...

Kim Salmon (solo)
Tuesday 29th June - The Wine Cellar, Auckland
Tickets available HERE via UTR

Check out The Scientists' new single ''I Wasn't Good At Picking Friends'...

Listen to The Scientists' 1980 anthem 'Swampland'...

Press release:

Australian artiste and rock and roll legend Kim Salmon (Scientists, Beasts Of Bourbon, Kim Salmon & The Surrealists & more! ) will perform one solo NZ show in late June – Tuesday 29th June 2021 at the Wine Cellar in Auckland. Tickets from undertheradar

Regular listeners of 95bFMs long running Dirtbag Radio show hosted by the wonderful and talented Mr Rapley every Monday at 7pm , will be no strangers to Perth’s Kim Salmon … from his embryonic recordings of 1977 in the Cheap Nasties , to the Scientsists, to the Beasts Of Bourbon and beyond.

Australian culture academic Jon Stratton says of Kim Salmon & the Scientists: “… they precursed, and influenced, the development of a musical form identified with Washington state and Seattle bands such as the Melvins, Mudhoney and Nirvana, that came to be categorised as grunge. Kim Salmon himself has asserted that: ‘The Scientists were really forging a sound that was later taken up in Seattle’. He goes on to contextualise this, saying, ‘if you think chronologically there was punk in the Sex Pistols, and then the guitar action went to Australia…I always say that Australian music was the premier exporter of grunge’. This is by no means an idiosyncratic opinion. Greta Moon of Au Go Go Records has stated clearly that: “ The Scientists and Lubricated Goat were most definitely big influences on bands like Mudhoney in particular. The Scientists were the first grunge band. They were in existence before any of those US Sub Pop bands came along. It was US Sub Pop bands like Nirvana and Mudhoney that were openly avowed fans of the Scientists.” And, indeed, the singer of Mudhoney, Mark Arm, has himself stated that: ‘By the time Mudhoney began two of our most influential bands were feedtime and the Scientists, along with the Stooges and Neil Young.”

Kim Salmon has been writing and performing stylistically diverse music for over 4 decades. He has done so in the Scientists, the Beasts Of Bourbon, Kim Salmon and The Surrealists, STM, the Darling Downs, Antenna, SALMON and simply solo. Kim Salmon has found a slightly or even wildly different audience at each juncture. At the start of his journey it was easy to ‘pigeonhole’ and label him but each incarnation and each format brought another aspect of artistry. Playing solo brought the narrative threads, the various combos brought the pop that some fans had glimpsed and wished for more of, the ‘concept’ acts brought challenging, entertaining, alarming and thoughtful ideas into an already shifting musical landscape.

At this point Kim is the subject of a biography Nine Parts Water One Part Sand Kim Salmon and the Formula For Grunge written by Douglas Galbraith (also some time drummer for Kim). He has recently had three successful Art exhibitions – one entitled Conversations held at Mario’s Café in 2019, another called Lexical at B Side Gallery in Fitzroy 3years ago and most recently The Surrealists Exhibition with fellow Surrealists Stu Thomas as One Star Gallery in West Melbourne.

And the Pandemic? Kim’s response was to get his band the Surrealists into a recording studio for a live streamed totally improvise recording viewed by 7.5K people on the net. This was made into last years ‘Rantings From The Book Of Swamp’ double live album which has now reached the end of its initial pressing and is about to be licenced through In The Red.

Some singers are thought of as entertainers and some are thought of as artists. Kim veers towards artist but the entertainment is there. His song writing is sometimes expressionistic, sometimes humorous, sometimes narrative driven, sometimes plain bizarre and Surreal.