Apart from Tommy Emmanuel’s recordings, how many other well known Australian instrumental guitar albums can you think of? Need some help? Well there was a brilliant album called “ Four Moments” in the seventies by Sebastian Hardie, a band which featured the guitar skills of Mario Millo. During the same period there was Kirk Lorange’s ‘No Apostrophe’ and Lobby Lloyd’s critically acclaimed ‘Obsecretion”. There have been numerous other quality independent releases however they had limited print runs and zero radio exposure. Jim Kelly and Steve Housden come to mind in this category. Finally in the year 2000 I’m pleased to be able to say there’s a new contender, a guitar album featuring all the ingredients necessary to achieve mainstream acceptance. It’s Simon Patterson’s ‘Developmentals’. Simon is a guitarist well known to the music industry and will also be familiar to the public as the ponytailed lead guitarist in the ‘Hey Hey It’s Saturday’ band for its last nine years. With Developmentals Simon has gathered together a bunch of his muso friends including fellow ‘Hey Hey’ band members Craig Newman and Darryn Farrugia and laid down 10 very accessible melodies with immediate appeal to fans of Jeff Beck, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Joe Satriani. In fact producers of weekend television sport can finally throw out their Satriani albums and replace them with ‘Developmentals’ as their soundtrack to next Summer’s viewing. Read on: We interview Simon Patterson >>