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		JOHNNY RAY'S DOWNTOWN LIMITED EDITION BOOK & CD Perry Keyes $50.00 AUD Customers outside Australia don't pay GST

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BOOK (not numbered) ALSO AVAILABLE FROM:
RED EYE RECORDS Sydney
ROCKINGHORSE RECORDS Brisbane
BASEMENT DISCS Melbourne
BERKELOUW BOOKS Paddington
JB HI-FI Online and some stores
Leading Edge Music

As you may be aware Perry’s new album - Johnny Ray’s Downtown. It’s coming in two different formats - a beautifully packaged digipak CD edition - and a 128 page book/CD edition which includes not only the CD and lyrics, but commentary on each song from Perry and a myriad of additional photos from Johnny Barker.

SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION - SIGNED AND NUMBERED
Each copy will be allocated in the order that we receive your reservation. After the first 200 that’s it for this edition. There will be no more numbered and signed copies. NB You can request a personalised message - put into box above or in the Special Instructions part of the checkout.

JOHNNY RAYS DOWNTOWN
The lives and places of the people that populate Sydney singer-songwriter Perry Keyes’ third album, Johnny Ray’s Downtown inhabit a very real environment, reflected in the photos shot by Johnny Barker. This is a collection of songs and images that tell the story of people, often young men, dislocated, left clinging to the periphery of the inner city.

These are people marginalised by social and economic forces often beyond their control. It’s an environment of noon time and dusk; of stillness and sudden movement; of whispers and shouts. It can be viewed both as a companion to the 16 tracks that make up Johnny Ray’s Downtown or as a collection of images and words that capture the other side of those Opera House and Sydney Harbour postcards. Here are the streets of the inner city the way they sound and look to those who live on them, live off them, sleep on them and survive on them, every day ...

JOHNNY BARKER
Johnny Barker picked up a camera again in 2006 after a long hiatus and is yet to put it down.

While working in Surry Hills he was captivated by the ever-shifting canvas of Central Station – the commuters, the interstaters, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed.

He is continually drawn back there and to the suburbs directly south of Central – Redfern, Waterloo, Botany and beyond – because they are a part of Sydney that are so far removed from the picture postcard images of Bondi Beach and the harbour.
When Perry asked him to contribute some photos for The Last Ghost Train Home it was a natural fit and they’ve worked together closely ever since, culminating in Johnny Ray’s Downtown.
This year Johnny’s photo ‘Between Shadows’ won an Anti-Poverty Week competition. Other photos were used to highlight Sydney’s Homeless Persons Information Centre.

PERRY KEYES
Perry grew up in the inner city working class area of Sydney known as Redfern. He grew up in a home populated by various uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents. Every Saturday morning his grandmother would do the house work whilst playing the likes of Ray Charles and Roy Orbison at a volume loud enough to spill out onto the neighbouring streets, lined with tightly-packed terraced houses, warehouses and textile factories. When he was 12, he got his first guitar from the local pawn shop and within six months he’d written his first song. It was during his first year at high school that his family moved to the neighbouring area of Waterloo, with its high-rise Department of Housing blocks.

It was within this environment that Perry formed the band The Stolen Holdens in 1989. Musically inspired by the likes of The Clash and Elvis Costello and lyrically taking his cue from artists like Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen, Keyes and The Stolen Holdens developed a small but loyal following in the local Sydney music scene. The band faded by the early 90’s.
Perry re-emerged in 2003, playing solo sets featuring songs that would make up the bulk of his debut double album Meter – released in 2005 to critical acclaim and numerous years end best-of lists. His next album The Last Ghost Train Home was received with even greater acclaim upon its release in 2007. It went on to be short-listed for the Australian Music Prize and was named the ABC Radio National Album of the Year.

Johnny Ray’s Downtown contains 16 tracks that once again draw on Perry’s local environment – the marginalised, often neglected and rapidly decaying inner city areas of Sydney – for their inspiration.

These are songs about growing up, or trying to grow up, in the face of an environment that often suggests that the mere thought of getting past your late adolescence is hoping for more than what’s actually on
offer.

T-shirts available - follow MERCHANDISE link.