Randall Waller & Shania TwainMark Johnson and I were looking through some old vinyl albums last week when I came across one by the band Avion. They were one of my favourite bands from the early 80’s. I saw them quite often and even had the enormous honour of working on the same bill with them one night at Revesby Workers Club in Sydney. I was mixing the support band, Bandanna.Avion were reasonably unique in that they had two very good lead guitar players, the main one being singer/guitarist Randall Waller. Mark informed me that Randall had in fact been his first guitar teacher. Later that night Mark sent me a link he’d found to a great story by Randall about hitting the big time by joining Shania Twain’s band.
“The Gig. It took about 3 days in all to travel from my last gig with Jon English at the Frankston Civic Centre in Melbourne to Shania Twains’ home in upstate New York.
It was a long way in every possible sense.
In April ’98, since returning in ’93 from 4 and a half years in London, I was flat strap eking out a living in the music business, based in Sydney – doing everything from singing on jingles, playing guitar on albums, recording, mixing and/or producing albums, and sometimes, all of the above. If someone hired me for, say, engineering, they often had little or no idea that I worked in a completely different capacity for other people. In fact, I felt the need to have two different business cards. One for the guitar/vocals thing and another for the engineering/production/mixing side – this was my own pre-emptive strike against someone commenting, upon seeing all five pursuits on one card, that earnest and droll Australian incantation, “…wanker”. “Read the rest here, it’s a great story.

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