Category ACROSS THE DECADES
AN IDEAL PRESENT
Christmas trading at Max Rose Electronics was rarely frantic but usually busy. Which was just as well. Like many small businesses, Max relied on a significant spike in December sales to coast through the hot holiday months of January and February. In those years when I was a part-time sales assistant on Friday nights and […]
2016 REPORT FROM THE FIELD — PART 1
Top Five Secondhand Record Purchases It is revealing that there was more than enough material in the acquisitions book to produce a Top 50 list of secondhand records entering the Vinyl Connection domain during the past twelve months. We are talking fifty highlights, by-the-by, not gap-fillers, pass-markers and also-rans. So much good music and such […]
TOGETHER ALONE
On a Crowded House high after the televised concert last weekend, I was going to write about Together Alone. I thought to tell you of how, buying the album on release in 1993, its darker hues spoke strongly to my melancholic side, deep and rich like a chocolate cake made with 70% Lindt and a […]
CROWDED HOUSE RENEWAL
I joined the Crowded House Fan Club at the age of forty plus. The subscription was motivated—sadly, but not unpredictably—by greed. Frenz of the Enz was an umbrella organisation (if that word can be used for something so quaintly amateur) set up by long-term tour manager cum general factotum Peter Green to meet fans’ insatiable […]
DARK SIDE OF THE VALLEY
When you think about the world-straddling colossus they became in the latter half of the 70s, it is easy to forget that Pink Floyd started life as just one spray of colour in the kaleidoscope of Swinging London. Like many bands of the 60s, Pink Floyd embraced side projects and commissions. After all, it was […]
JACK JOHNSON — SAY IT LOUD
Racism, discrimination, a rock manifesto, sex, sport, violence and audio editing. Buy a ticket, this album has it all. Oh, and it’s a soundtrack too. Coming off the recording sessions that produced In A Silent Way (released July, 1969) and Bitches Brew (April, 1970), it was clear that Miles Davis was determined to move his music-making […]
LIGHT FINGERED
They are one of my favourite groups. The VC collection holds over forty of their albums. Their catalogue holds some two dozen soundtrack albums, recorded between 1977 and 1999. All good reasons for a Film [Soundtrack] Festival piece on Tangerine Dream. Although I might wish to crow about having all the TD OST albums, in fact I have […]
BARRON PLANET
What links Shakespeare, composer John Cage and actor Leslie Nielsen? What, for that matter, do robots, tape loops, and the invention of the micro dress have in common? Still scratching the old cranium? How about this: A connection between electric tonalities, Anne Francis, and monsters from the unconscious mind. Loosely based on The Tempest, Shakespeare’s […]
SPACEMILLS OF YOUR MIND
It is late. The television is the only light in the room. You slouch, alone, on the couch. The movie you’ve been determinedly watching through to the endless final credits has been disappointing. What were people raving about? Unfulfilled, you surf a few channels, hoping for…what? Something to prod you out of this torpor; a […]
SOUNDTRACK
How do you file the soundtrack albums in your collection? The Vinyl Connection library has them alphabetically under ‘Soundtrack’, a nice little section sitting snugly between Sonic Youth and The Soup Dragons (the CDs) and a bigger vinyl section sandwiched comfortably twixt The Someloves and Joe South. If you browse any collection of soundtrack albums […]
7 STEAMIN’ ALBUM COVERS
When the boy was little we took an afternoon drive around the ring road to Altona, home of Victoria’s Railway museum. To me it seemed, on that Autumn afternoon, a windswept mausoleum, but the youngster enjoyed clambering up, through, and around the old steam engines. Despite their size (big to enormous), it seemed to make sense […]
WINNER TAKES IT ALL
Tomorrow I’m playing a third match in the Watsonia Tennis Club Championships. Lots of members enter multiple events; Open Singles and Doubles, A Grade Men’s, Parent and Child Doubles, Mixed. Given my level of fitness, I decided to enter just one event, especially as the boy was decidedly cool on the idea of playing competition tennis […]
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