Category A PERSONAL APPROACH
THE AMAZING PUDDING
David Gilmour reflected that Atom Heart Mother, Pink Floyd’s first album of the 70s, was “us blundering about in the dark” [1, p.92]. Keyboard player Rick Wright does not remember it fondly. “Looking back it wasn’t so good” [2, p.82]. For his part, Roger Waters would prefer the suite be “thrown into the dustbin and […]
THE DAILY PLANET
Back in the 90s I enrolled in a writing course at the CAE. Confusion Anxiety and Entropy. No, sorry. That was me in the 80s. The course was with the Council of Adult Education and it was in the city one evening each week. I completed ‘Writing for the Stage’, and I finished ‘Writing Fiction’. […]
HELLO HALLOGALLO! [PART 1]
I cannot remember the date, but I recall the exact location where I took delivery of Julian Cope’s slim but influential paperback Krautrocksampler in Autumn 1996. There was a palpable thrill in opening the mail box near the front door at Langentalstraße 6 and finding a small parcel addressed to me. Not to Herr Schmidt […]
THE VINYL CONNECTION ANNUAL REPORT
It’s a little over a year since Vinyl Connection started adding alphabet clumps to the swirling word-clouds of the blogsphere. Fifty-three weekly posts of 1,000 words (give or take), roughly the same again of Cover Art specimens, plus a few odds and sods along the way. In these past twelve months, VC has attracted ten dozen […]
MAMA WAS A ROLLING STONE
Through much of the 70s I worked part-time (Friday nights, Saturday mornings) in a small suburban music and electrical goods shop. As mentioned previously, the eponymous owner-operator of Max Rose Electronics was a decent man making a modest income in a shopping strip with no less than four stores competing to meet the music needs […]
ERIC & THE VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR
I The High School I attended was pretty large for the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. The area had been a ‘growth corridor’ for some years and its previous life as a market garden area must have lingered in air and soil as children were plentiful. There were five classes of 25 wide-eyed primary school graduates […]
ART CRIMES IN FRANKFURT
Fourteen years is a pretty long sabbatical in anybody’s language, yet that’s the elapsed time between Donald Fagen and Walter Becker winding up Steely Dan after 1980’s Gaucho and reforming the band to tour in 1994. A recording of that tour duly appeared as Alive in America which all self-respecting Dan Fans rushed out and […]
OMAR AND THE DEAD
For those who share Vinyl Connection’s love of cover art, the Album Cover Art Hall of Fame blog is worth a visit. In a recent article film-maker and long-time record collector Eric Christensen shares some of his favourite covers. One comment caught my eye. It relates to the striking 60s designs of San Francisco artists Kelley and Mouse whose iconic […]
FULL SHELVES AND WILD TALES
Dear Vinyl Agony Aunt I have a problem. It’s a space and time problem. Yes, I know, I should just call Dr Who but I’ve lost the piece of psychic notepaper with his mobile number and you’re my next best guess. Also, you have helped me before. Being such a busy virtual confidante you won’t […]
WENT TO SEE A STANDING STONE
I like to think I was a druid in a previous life. It’s not about the hooded robe or doing despicable things to small furry animals. No, it’s about Neolithic megaliths. You know, standing stones. Yep, if it wasn’t for the absence of sanitation, decent food and (most importantly) electricity, I’d be an enthusiastic candidate […]
THE WINDOW AND THE WALL
In the late 80s I was living alone in a small house in Footscray, an inner-west suburb of Melbourne nestling between industrial docklands and a waste management terminal. Bunbury Street was quite special not for any Oscar Wilde association but because a railway line ran underneath it, lengthwise. It was a goods line from the […]
VINYL HUNTER GATHERER’S SUMMER HOLIDAY
Being away from home and the comforts of one’s turntable could be considered a golden opportunity to disengage from relentless music acquisition. But for the dedicated Vinyl Hunter Gatherer there is no such thing as a holiday. There are Op Shops, there are Collectables Emporia and there are markets. The first two are very hit-and-miss […]
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