Area-7 drummer Dan Morrison dies, band confirms
Dan Morrison, drummer with Melbourne ska-punk band Area-7, died on the weekend after a fall.
A Facebook post by the band revealed he had struck his head on a concrete footpath and rushed to hospital with head trauma.
Morrison was one of the founding members of Area-7, which formed in 1994 from the ashes of Madness tribute band Mad Not Madness.
“At the top of his game, he was one of the best drummers in this country,” the band said.
“We remember Dave Grohl & Taylor Hawkins sitting on his drum riser and watching him play a whole show from start to finish, applauding his talent or Eric Sandin from NOFX calling him ‘a freak’ after watching him play his unique style of offbeats.
“For us, he was [the] backbone of our music. A cracking right arm that would split your eardrums with the swing and feel of a big band player and a driving force that made you dance, all while grinning from ear to ear while spitting cheeky banter and one-liners at the rest of us.”
He was remembered as an animal rights and anti-racism activist who loved AFL.
Area-7 made their recording debut with the cassette-format Demo Tape. Their first of four albums, No Logic!, dropped in 1995, debuting at #6 and selling over 80,000 units after triple j picked up the title track’s message of racism and violence in the wake of the rise of the One Nation political party.
Their 2000 album, Bitter & Twisted, which yielded the hit single ‘Second Class Citizen’, received an ARIA nomination for Best Rock Album.
Say It To My Face, released in 2001, peaked at #36 on the ARIA Charts after receiving radio airplay and produced the hit ‘Nobody Likes A Bogan’ which remained in the Top 40 for two months.
However, everything fell apart after their record label, Zomba, closed operations and they spent two years trying to get out of their deal.
They remained firm favourites on major festivals, headlining the Vans Warped tour and entertained Australian Defence Forces and United Nations staff in a month-long tour of Timor Leste during which they’d play in the jungles with tanks providing the lights for the show.