Died Pretty’s Doughboy Hollow: can Australia’s most overlooked album finally find the audience it deserves?

Thirty-five years after release, the Australian classic is finally getting a vinyl reissue Brett Myers, the former guitarist of one of Australia’s greatest bands, Died Pretty, admits he’s a terrible judge of his own work. Back in 1991 – after spending a few weeks mixing the band’s classic fourth album, Doughboy Hollow, in London – he nervously played a tape of the finished work in the New York offices of the band’s overseas label, Beggars Banquet. Myers was aware it was different from anything the band had done before but that didn’t mean he knew whether it was any good. Until the first song, Doused, lit up the room. By the end of the second, DC – the late Ron Peno’s elegy for a departed friend – Beggars’ staff were out of their seats, dancing and cheering. “And I thought, ‘Oh, maybe this is pretty good,’” Myers says, laughing at himself as much as at the memory. Later, back in Sydney, the band was driving to a gig in Parramatta when DC’s opening piano riff pounded through the Tarago radio. Averse to hearing the band’s own songs on-air, Myers instantly flipped the dial from Triple J to Triple M, only to be stunned to hear the self-proclaimed “Ozz