Australia’s one-off call to a modern Led Zeppelin, Wolfmother, who along with Jet and others put Australian rock back on the map on the international stage, has officially been put the rest by frontman Andrew Stockdale.

Stockdale founded Wolfmother in 2000 with bassist/keyboardist Chris Ross and drummer Myles Heskett, unleashing their self-titled debut in 2005 to critical acclaim all the way to the Grammys where the group won Best Hard Rock Performance in 2007.

But the good times were short lived, and Ross and Heskett soon had a falling out with Stockdale, leaving the frontman to pursue the group’s sophomore album with a revolving door of backing musicians. Cosmic Egg eventually came out in 2009, but failed the recapture the magic of the group’s debut.

Stockdale made the surprisingly low key announcement that the Wolfmother name would be retired in an interview with Melbourne’s Herald Sun, revealing that the public’s last chance to see the group will be at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl supporting Aerosmith on April 28.

According to FasterLouder, Stockdale revealed that he now regrets not ditching the name earlier when founding members Heskett and Ross walked out in 2008. “Wolfmother came with a lot of expectations,” he said. “It’s been exciting to get out of that headspace.”

Stockdale had in fact already ditched the name some weeks earlier, after he decided to disorient Australians even further by replacing the soiled band-brand with a self-serving solo excursion. That is, in pure altruistic form, releasing the third Wolfmother album under his own name.

“Wolfmother came with a lot of expectations,” he said. “It’s been exciting to get out of that headspace.”

Having bolted out of the gates with the unprecedented self-titled debut in 2005, which later reached an acclaimed eighth position on Triple J’s ‘Hottest 100 Australian Albums of All Time’, Wolfmother’s luck, in true early-peaking form, ran out by the time its ineffectual sophomore Cosmic Egg came around in 2009.

Despite Stockdale optimistically having rooted for Wolfmother’s most recent live lineup late last year, the very familiar theme of  inconsistency and contradiction is clearly still playing in the background.

…something which was already well-known amongst fans. That is, what else has Wolfmother ever been other than a thinly-veiled alter-ego for the neo-glam rocker?

The new lineup seemed to meet Stockdale’s high expectations when he first announced Wolfmother’s third album, “at the moment we’ve got Elliot Hammond from The Delta Riggs in the band and he’s playing a lot of congas, bongos, percussion, and harp so we’ve started bringing songs like ‘Love Train’ back into the set, and with all the instrumentation it’s just a total trip.”

But with this third album, under the working title of Gatherings, having hop-scotched “on-and-off” from one recording studio to the other, over a lengthy period of 15 months – it was unclear how happy Stockdale was with his ever changing lineup.

Clearly, not that happy.

Wolfmother’s Final Show

Supporting Aerosmith
Sunday 28th April 2013, Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne
Also playing: Grinspoon, Spiderbait, The Dead Daisies and Diva Demolition

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