Kim Salmon

Kim Leith Salmon (born 1957, Bunbury) is an Australian indie rock musician and songwriter from Perth. He has worked in various groups including The Scientists, Beasts of Bourbon, Kim Salmon and the Surrealists, Kim Salmon and the Business, and Darling Downs. Australian rock musicologist, Ian McFarlane, described Salmon as one of the first Australians to "embrace wholeheartedly the emergent punk phenomenon of the mid-to-late 1970s" with The Scientists. He declared that Beasts of Bourbon were "masters of uncompromising gutbucket blues and hard-edged rock'n'roll". In 2004 Salmon was inducted into the West Australian Music Industry Association Hall of Fame.

Early work

Kim Leith Salmon was born in 1957 in the Western Australian port city of Bunbury. He later recalled wanting to be a nuclear physicist until, at the age of 13, he heard "heavy rock stuff" on the radio. He bought his first guitar, "an acoustic steel string thing", for A$14 and taught himself to play "Black Night" and "Tobacco Road". By the age of 18 Salmon had started a fine arts course at a university but deferred after a year, "I didn't really fit in with it". At the age of 19 he was a member of Troubled Waters, a cabaret covers band playing in a Fremantle strip club.