Category Particular platters
FLYING FAST ENOUGH
Neil Finn has been part of the landscape of popular music for a very long time. This being a public sort of life, fans get to go along for the ride; turning the pages of the album from the cheeky faced Split Enz teenager to the handsomely greying solo veteran. And there was that band […]
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 […]
SWEET MARS LANDING
Like a lot of things in life, I came late to the edgy melancholic jangle-pop world of Matthew Sweet. Stumbled across the album after the one that got him known and worked backwards to fill in the history. But although I’m slow, I’m loyal, and we have gone forward resolutely together to the extent that […]
ASTRONAUT GODS
It is not easy to appreciate the interest – the fervour even – generated by Erich von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods? when it was published in 1969 (the year after the original German publication). Without doubt the excitement was fuelled by the Apollo 11 moon landing in July of that year. Anything seemed […]
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 […]
ETERNAL WARRIOR RETURNING
One of the tell-tale signs of the activated Vinyl Hunter-Gatherer is how their speed increases when they approach a Record Store. Up on the balls of their feet, there is a pronounced spring in the step as the shortest possible distance from here to the records is calculated with pinpoint precision. Breathing may be more […]
OFF THE WATER, BACK TO LAND
There are a number of interesting things about San Francisco’s Wooden Shjips, not least their idiosyncratic approach to spelling. Here are a few others: They were formed in 2003 by Ripley Johnson with the express purpose of creating innovative music and not being famous. Following a Captain Beefheart tradition, they explored playing instruments with which […]
HALF MAN HALF MACHINE
After Melbourne University and I parted company – not on speaking terms – I needed to plug the gap left by going to uni and not studying (more on my favourite diversion, the Rowden White Library, here). The record store where I worked 6 hours a week offered me a full-time position. At that time […]
TOUCH THE DISTANT BEACHES
Eric Clapton and girlfriend Charlotte Martin were at London musician’s club The Speakeasy in Spring 1967. It was the same club where, not long previously, Eric had his first taste of LSD in circumstances that were probably not your average first trip, even in that much mythologized year. The way Eric tells it, ‘the Beatles […]
WALKING TOWARDS SUNSET
Chapter One: A potted history from 1963 – 1967 Being an ambitious but ultimately ludicrous attempt to summarise the early days of blues legend John Mayall. Skip to Chapter Three if uninterested in early British blues. John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers started playing London’s famous Marquee Club in late 1963. In the following year they […]
GLORIOUS MELANCHOLY
GENESIS A rainy night in Glasgow, early 1980s. Three university students are making music together; writing songs, practicing, discarding, straining for the moment when something soars. The more they leave out the closer it approaches what they imagine. They persevere. BUSINESS The Linn company was formed in 1973 to produce the legendary Sondek LP12 turntable. […]
TRANSCENDENTAL (NEW) MUSIC
Josef Zawinul wrote the melody ‘In a silent way’ after visiting his Austrian family for Christmas. It is a wistful, almost folky melody that you can hear on the composer’s self-titled 1971 album. But more famously and influentially the tune became the title for a 1969 album that indicated a far-reaching change of direction for […]
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