Category ACROSS THE DECADES
NICE SAMPLE, JOE
Sunday was a lovely day in Melbourne. A little early haze then some Spring sunshine. We played family football in the park – soccer and Aussie rules as befits a child of mixed parentage – then back home for lunch on the back veranda. For the first time since Winter, I opened the window and […]
TOUGH WEEK?
there’s a song snatch in my fragmented brain… I’m on a train * the space is co-created, shared. what flows into it is often pain a unique snowflake drop, individually etched with wounds. with the pain, sadness. hello, how low? wrenching creeping weeping. the pain of the other infiltrates the listener. […]
DIGGING THE AGE OF PLASTIC
Last Sunday, bright and early, I packed the car with six crates of records, a box of CDs, another of 45s and a sandwich and drove off to the Box Hill Record Fair. It’s something I’ve been doing fairly regularly for quite a while. About fifteen years in fact. This realization made the sunny morning […]
TUBULAR RIDGE
I Wanting to build upon his established mail order record business, Richard Branson went into retail. The first Virgin store opened above a shoe shop at “the cheaper end of Oxford Street”1 in 1971. By Christmas the following year, Branson and his team had “fourteen record shops: several in London and one in every big city”1 […]
STITCHING TOGETHER JAZZ, ROCK AND FUNK
When Miles Davis went electric at the end of the 60s he may not have actually ‘invented’ jazz-rock (or fusion, if you prefer) but he certainly plugged some serious voltage into it. What’s more, the musicians who played on the seminal Miles albums In a Silent Way (1969), Bitches Brew (1970), and Jack Johnson (1971) […]
TURNED OUT NICELY
I remember buying my copy of Jethro Tull’s Stand Up at a Record Fair many years ago. The stall belonged to a guy I knew vaguely from the public radio station I presented on, 3 PBS FM. He was part of the Heavy Metal crew. Their show preceded Late Night Shopping on a Friday evening and […]
VINYL HUNTER GATHERER GOES INTERSTATE
When finding themselves in a different city, any vinyl hunter-gatherer worth their turntable will attempt to visit as many music shops as possible in the available time. Art Galleries? Phooey. Historic Buildings? Only if they contain Record Shops. What we want are records. Lots of them. Vinyl Connection was in Adelaide last week, and had […]
JB YOU’VE DONE IT AGAIN!
One of the most successful Music, Sound and Electrical Goods retailers in Australia is JB Hi-Fi. There are over 160 stores in every state and territory of this wide brown land. But that is not how it began. Originally there was one JB Hi-Fi store just as there was one John Barbuto, the man who […]
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
Posters, lyric sheets, merchandise order forms, glimpses of other mouth-watering titles from the same record company… lots of different bits of paper have been inserted into LPs over the years. They are not our concern today. Here, in ascending order of magnificent silliness, are Vinyl Connection’s six favourite ALBUMS WITH EXTRAS. 6. ROTOGRAVURE – […]
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’. […]
AS WE WIND ON DOWN THE ROAD – ZEPPELIN AND FOLK
This article continues a feature on the bursting forth of folk influences on Led Zeppelin III. It uses as a springboard quotes from Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones and looks at albums that would have been important for the musicians as well as those released in the lead-up to the writing of material […]
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