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 […]
All Things Must Pass was released on 27th November 1970 It consisted of a double album plus a third LP of jams recorded during the sessions When the album was re-released in March 2001, the original sepia cover photograph was colourised. Reflecting Harrison’s environmental awareness, the CD sleeves and booklet carried a rather sardonic story […]
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 […]
OST “Saturday Night Fever” [RSO, 1977] / Sesame Street “Sesame Street Fever” [Polydor, 1978] * Kool & The Gang “Open Sesame” [Saturday Night Fever, 1977] * Mr John Travolta, born February 18th, 1954 * The Heebeegeebees “439 Golden Greats” [RCA, 1981]
As an under-graduate I adhered strictly to the maxim, ‘Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow’. Years later when I was teaching at uni I used to explore learning styles with each new group. One of the exercises asked students to position themselves along a continuum from ‘Early starting’ to ‘Pressure prompted’. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I was always going to fertilise my child’s life with music. In utero he heard Miles Davis In A Silent Way almost every night of the third trimester. His mother and I loved the album and often relaxed into its kind of blue groove, so why wouldn’t it enhance the development of a soon-to-be-released little […]
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