They’ve sold over 30 million records thanks to hits such as ‘Help Is On Its Way’, ‘Reminiscing’, and ‘Cool Change’, but now the Victorian-born Little River Band is blocking Aussie fans from even viewing their website.
As Noise11 reports, any attempt that is made to access the Little River Band website from an Australian IP address is met with a message saying that “Access from your Country was disabled by the administrator.”
While this may seem rather strange on the surface, this may just be another chapter in the ongoing feud between Australia and the current edition Little River Band.
Over the last few years, the current version of Little River Band has been in the sights of founding member Glenn Shorrock, who left the group for good in 1996, following a few years in which he was replaced by John Farnham in the ’80s. While the original version of the band formed in Victoria in 1975, its founding members slowly departed, with the band’s last original member, drummer Derek Pellicci, leaving in 1998.
These days, the version of Little River Band that is on the touring circuit is considered to effectively be an American cover band, where they are based, turning the group into some sort of musical Ship Of Theseus.
Stephen Housden, who joined the group in the 1981 and left the band in 2006, owns the rights to the Little River Band name.
“He was the last director of the company who owns the trading name Little River Band,” Glenn Shorrock said back in 2015. “He’s not even playing in the band anymore, he just sits in Ireland and makes all the money. The music industry is fraught with these situations. There’s no justice in the music industry or the legal industry. It’s the people behind the scenes who drive all this.”
Despite the fact that the group is now just essentially a cover band, Glenn Shorrock heavily protests their use of the band name, and has even attempted to prevent them from performing songs such as ‘Reminiscing’, which was written by founding member Graeme Goble.
“They’ve been living on our statistics for 12 years, enough’s enough,” said Shorrock. “They’ve even asked if they can change the lyrics to some of my songs, they’ve been a thorn in my side and other peoples’ sides for a long while now.
“And it’s not just LRB, there’s a whole groundswell of bands this has happened to, stretching right back to the ’50s with The Platters and The Drifters. There were four or five versions of the Drifters touring at one stage. It’s time to address it. They’re dragging our name down.”
While there has been no word yet from members of the American version of the band as to why this block is in place, attempts to access the band’s Facebook page are currently met with similar results. Whether this is due to us being Australian is unclear, but it seems that some other Facebook pages, such as “The FAKE USA Little River Band Sucks“, might end up serving as the unofficial online hangout for Aussie fans of the original band.
Check out Little River Band’s classic ‘Help Is On The Way’, below.
