Hello and welcome to the online folio of music writer Clem Bastow. Using the links above, you can browse selected published pieces by year, and read testimonials about Clem and her work.
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CLEM BASTOW, 26, is a freelance writer and music critic living and working in Melbourne, Australia. She has worked as a writer since 2002. In particular, Clem has long embraced that unwieldy genre known as “new media”, having begun her writing career in earnest in 2002 at Rocknerd.org; while there, she helped break a world-wide news story about Coca Cola using an artist’s (The Vines) image without permission on a limited edition Coke can. She then moved on to the noted (and now, sadly, deceased) StylusMagazine.com, for which she wrote for three years; one of her first pieces for Stylus, a review of Warren Zevon’s The Wind, was chosen to feature in Measure Magazine’s compendium of 2003’s Best Music Criticism.
Late in 2006, Clem launched the popular Fairfax Digital music blog, Noise Pollution, which began its life as part of The Age Online but in 2007 grew to include syndication within the Sydney Morning Herald’s online presence. Clem left the Fairfax Digital stable in June of 2007, passing the Noise Pollution baton to legendary broadcaster Stephen “The Ghost” Walker; she felt the “brand” was safe in his hands.
Since the later part of 2007, Clem has held the position of Associate Editor at Defamer Australia, a local version of Gawker Media’s noted LA entertainment gossip blog (published here by Allure Media). Clem is also the founding editor of Australian feminist blog The Dawn Chorus, which received over 5000 hits in its first week with little to no publicity/launch.
In the print media, she has worked for publications as varied as The Age, Inpress, Drum Media, Sydney Morning Herald, The Big Issue Australia, jmag and Arrivals+Departures. Currently, Clem is one of Inpress Magazine’s Senior Contributors, and is also a weekly contributor to The Age’s EG entertainment supplement (and has been since 2004), where she writes a weekly bar review column, Bar Fly. Previously, she was EG’s Agony Aunt in 2006.
In addition to her print and online writing, Clem is a member of the Brains Trust for SBS’ wildly successful rock trivia game-show, RocKwiz; Clem’s contributions to the show’s questions, ‘Who Am I?’s and notable quotes have formed part of the two official books of the series, RocKwiz: The Ultimate Rock Trivia Challenge and RocKwiz Volume 2: The Ultimate Rock Trivia Challenge (both Hardie Grant). Clem also contributed to Rough Guides’ Book Of Playlists (Rough Guides), and in 2009 her work will appear in the anthology Your Mother Would Be Proud (Allen & Unwin). She self-published a compendium of her writing, in zine form, in 2007, Subs+Zuuls: Say What Comes To Mind. Issue #2, We’re Just Making The Music We Love; If Anyone Else Likes It, That’s Just A Bonus, a collection of fiction, images and criticism, was published in June of this year.
Clem presents a weekly show, Transference, on Melbourne’s famed community broadcaster, RRR 102.7FM; she also fronts a weekly tech/net news segment, The Clemformation Superhighway (and no, she didn’t come up with the name) on the same station’s breakfast show, Breakfasters. She has also appeared as a regular guest on Triple J and ABC Melbourne 774 since 2005.
She has also occasionally appeared on television, hosted charity events, and even played Scrabble live as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, not to mention sideline careers as a budding milliner and coloured pencil portrait artist (oh, and did I mention the award-winning competitive cookery?), but when it all comes down to it, it’s “music critic” that will end up on Clem’s epitaph. Or her business card, whichever comes first.
