King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are certainly an accomplished group of young men. The Melbourne psychedelic collective recently dropped their eighth album in four years and are in the midst of their latest North American tour.

The band’s latest album, Nonagon Infinity, not only managed to debut with in the top 20 of the ARIA Albums chart, but was at one point one of the highest selling vinyl albums in the world, hitting No 2 on the Billboard Vinyl Albums Chart.

As you might expect, the lads’ parents are very proud. So proud, in fact, that Tony Walker, the father of guitarist and vocalist Joey Walker, has penned an editorial for Crikey detailing his sons journey from Darwin to the Billboard charts.

Walker Snr starts off by explaining how his son was always surrounded by music and even when he was just a little tot, would “head for the kitchen cupboards and heave out pots and pans and implements to bash them with”.

Growing up on a diet of “African, reggae, jazz, pop, country, Dylan, Joni, Coltrane and Hendrix, new wave and post punk, nascent Americana and New Orleans funk”, Joey was given a good musical education from a young age.

The younger Walker also had a flashpoint moment when he got to visit the first Stompen Ground Festival in Broome back in 1993, travelling by bus with his sister, mother, and the late George Rrurrumbu to see acts like the Warumpi Band.

“When I met them all at the bus, the boy was beside himself with excitement at having shared the trip with a ‘rock star’. Over the following few days he was dazzled by the stellar performances of Indigenous bands from across the country,” Walker Snr writes.

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A teen Joey, meanwhile, “worked in a music store in his school holidays and got a good deal on an old Fender. He was taking lessons, sometimes two a week, practicing relentlessly and doing music/guitar as a VCE subject. It seemed that he was never going to do anything else.”

“A couple of nights ago the boy’s mother and I sat in a balcony, above a seething, moshing, sell-out crowd at the Bowery Ballroom in New York,” Walker writes. “Their eighth album riding at number two on the Billboard vinyl charts.”

“Amidst all the frenzy, he looked up at us and grinned. Afterwards, the demand for merch was so strong that his delighted mother was pressed into service shifting T-shirts and vinyl to delirious punters.”

Check out the whole, heartfelt and touching thing via Crikey here.

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