Long Way To The Top: Ep 5 INXS to Exile 1976–1988

Long Way to the Top was a six-part weekly Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) documentary film series on the history of Australian rock and roll, from 1956 to the modern era, it was initially broadcast from 8 August to 12 September 2001.[1] One of its writers, James Cockington, provided a book tie-in, Long Way to the Top: Stories of Australian Rock & Roll (2001). Another series writer, and interviewer, Clinton Walker, compiled a 2× CD soundtrack album, Long Way to the Top: Original Soundtrack from the ABC-TV Series (13 August 2001), by Various Artists, which featured in the show. It peaked at No. 9 on the ARIA Albums Chart. A year later a related national concert tour followed. In 1983, Comedian Austen Tayshus made the country's biggest selling single ever "Australiana". Everything in the 1980s in Australia had to be big. For the followers of a small new movement called Punk the challenge was to be heard at all, over the din of excessive self-promotion. This generation of musicians would ask themselves the question: excess or exile? This was the decade when Australians realised they had something of which to be proud. Just like the tourist commission, the local music industry was proud of Australia and ready for the biggest challenge of all: selling Australia's bands to the Americans. It was a group of survivors from the sixties who devised the initial marketing strategy: give the Americans something they could relate to – more American music. Little River Band's world was mellow. A southern comfort zone stuck somewhere in the recent past. But not everyone was into it.[9] Artists: INXS, John Farnham, Men at Work, Split Enz, Mental as Anything, the Saints, Little River Band, Nick C