Description
Road Series is both love story and elegy, a true and revealing tale. Renowned musician Hugo Race’s evocations of Melbourne, Europe and the USA, Berlin and Eastern Europe, Italy, Brazil and Mali and Africa are poetic and searching , always incisive and exquisitely written. While the idea of being a global citizen is explored as a creative force for the artist, this is ultimately a book that is grounded in the rich possibilities of the everyday. Music and travel collide and coalesce, and the reader is given rare insights into what it means to devote one’s life to the musical journey, to traverse the world in search of true spirit. While Road Series parallels Kerouac’s journey of ‘battered suitcases’ and ‘longer ways to go’ it also wonderfully bears witness to his realisation that ‘the road is life’.
Praise for Road Series
Rollicking and lilting, Hugo Race’s vagabond road-poem does not read like a typical rock star’s memoir – the obligatory nostalgia, the fondly remembered tales of excess though Race was no stranger to excess. Rather, those qualities which made him a cerebral musician, always seeking the borderlands and beyond, are harnessed in Road Series into an insightful account of a restless life on the road, on the move, across decades and continents, from the Melbourne punk scene of the early 1980s to – quite literally – Timbuktu.
Luke Daviess, author of Candy and God of Speed
Hugo writes with a unique voice and the insights of one in the middle of the maelstrom.
Mick Harvey
