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Kirin J Callinan on the ketamine overdose and heartbreak that made his ‘most truthful’ new album

In our new monthly series Headline Act we spotlight the Australian artist we’re most excited about – and they make us a playlist

A singular heartbreak shudders through the album, alongside the ripples of a drug-induced fantasia – a ketamine overdose before a London gig in 2018 that Callinan describes as an endless hallucination, which featured an elevator to the pearly gates and “eight-foot tall turtles … controlling the nature of existence”. Callinan calls the resulting album his most truthful – a left turn for an artist who has spent the better part of his two-decade career as a madcap showman for whom good taste has always seemed anathema; who has accrued adoration and infamy alike for his performative stunts, on and off stage. So too did his brush with the courts in 2017, when he lifted his kilt at the Arias red carpets to flash nearby photographers – a spark of his trademark exhibitionism which resulted in a 12-month good behaviour bond and multiple career setbacks which still loom large today.

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