John Kennedy's Love Gone Wrong
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Kennedy, born in Liverpool, England on 1 July 1958,is a Sydney-based singer songwriter with a penchant for strong melodies and heart on your sleeve pop songs often with a country and western affection.
He formed his first band JFK & The Cuban Crisis with former school friend James Paterson in Brisbane in 1980. They quickly established themselves on the small Brisbane scene with their smart Squeeze influenced pop. After releasing two cassette albums and playing support spots with the Pretenders and Ian Dury and the Blockheads, the band moved to Sydney in 1982.
Despite this independent success JFK broke up in 1984 when Kennedy embarked on a solo career with which he made his mark with his indie rock, pop and suburban country band John Kennedy's Love Gone Wrong.
John Kennedy's Love Gone Wrong recorded some of the great pop songs about Sydney two immortal classics which deserve particular mention are "Miracle (in Marrickville)" and "King Street" (ie King Street in Newtown). Those songs, released on the influential Waterfront Records and Red Eye Records labels, performed well on the independent charts but deserved mainstream chart action and the band itself clearly deserved major label attention. Their songs remain absolute classics of the Australian city pop genre.
John's 7" singles were often distinguished by the unusual covers. The single for "Miracle (in Marrickville)" featured an actual printed photograph of John standing in front of an auto electrician garage and for "Big County" a plastic map of Australia was affixed to every cover.
Surprisingly only "King Street" made it onto the SONY Music compilation of songs about Sydney "Somewhere in Sydney" which was released in the Olympic year 2000 but with no fanfare and seemed to sink without a trace.
In 1989 John Kennedy teamed with another band that wrote often about living in Sydney, The Mexican Spitfires for one or two of his solo shows where he performed a few of his own numbers with that band acting as his backing band.
A great songwriter and singer and one whose skill has not received sufficient recognition. For more detail and a full discography up until 1989 in any event see "Who's Who Of Australian Rock" (2nd ed) Compiled by Chris Spencer The Five Mile Press.
