Best of The Bee Gees 1969

This album and the songs within are embedded in my childhood memories. Carried through to the start of my teenage head when my brother played the album on his stereo. Later when he got married he sold it to me for 20 cents. I've still got it and it's the Bee Gees I always think of and not the mega-successful 70s version. So the early songs take me back to the Migrant Hostels we stayed in when we first arrived in Australia from the UK. Listening to I Started a Joke on the top bunk of the tiny room in Sydney. Spicks and Specks at the hostel kiosk where I bought my first Marvel comics. Writing out the words to New York Mining Disaster. Singing the same song in the communal showers and bathroom. This was what Australia meant to me when I was young. The sound of the Bee Gees. Oh and the Easybeats but I didn't have any of their albums around.
I was watching a brilliant Korean gangster movie called Nowhere to Hide and it had this amazing scene overlaid with the Bee Gees Holiday. Great scene and it made me remember just how good some of their songs were. 

Is this It by The Strokes 2001

When a record like this comes along it's like a wake-up call to why you like indie guitar pop music. Well, any kind of rock music. You don't realise how much you miss it until a brilliant record comes along. I remember seeing a Strokes CD on the wall of Mighty Music Machine in Prahran. I was browsing the CD racks for music for the Lizard Lounge. Often klutzy pop hits of the day. I passed on the Modern Age CD then but a few days later it was all over the radio and I went back and got the single. It was Last Night and it got everyone on the dancefloor. Then the album arrived in all its cool glory. (Australia was the first place in the world it was released) So New york. Sounding like a cross between Blondie and Velvet underground. looking like a real band. making it all seem effortless. The look and the sound.
And it opened the floodgates for another bunch of Indie guitar bands that deluged the playlists for the next few years. When I hear this album the first thing that comes to mind is driving down Chapel Street towards the Union Hotel (home of the Lizard) in Windsor vibing up on what a great night it would be. Sadly these great guitar bands like The Strokes, White Stripes and The Hives came as the Lizard was starting to fade. Still for the last few months, we played the hell out of it.

Electric Warrior by T.Rex 1971

Before Bowie came along Marc Bolan and T. Rex were definitely my top pop star heroes. I first heard Hot Love on the radio and I was sucked in completely in by its sound. So when this album became available through the Australian Record Club I snapped it up and had it delivered to my door in no time. I used to lie on the floor in my bedroom with my head on a pillow and the speakers on each side of my head lost in the music. It was such a great sound. It blew away my interest in John Lennon and his increasingly rubbish solo records. Glam had begun. I found that by not combing my hair after washing it I could approximate the Bolan hairstyle. Well almost. I got myself a shitty electric guitar from a music shop in Box Hill and started strumming along to T. Rex. I didn't play it, just posed with it a lot. Probably more than was healthy. Full of great tunes, the music of this album and the follow up The Slider really holds up well in the 21st century. No one as come close to replicating it.
Trouble was, by the time he actually got to Melbourne he was putting out bad singles, overweight and completely taken over by the cult of Bowie who came hot on his heels. But for a moment there he was king!

The good news was that he did start releasing great news was that he did release more great records including a favourite of mine "Dandy in the Underworld" before sadly dying in a car crash in September 1977.

After The Goldrush by Neil Young 1970

can’t believe how many of my all-time favourite albums have been picked up at sales. This was 99c cassette tape I picked up at Brashes again. I wasn’t all that familiar with Neil at the time but I’d heard some good things about stuff earlier than his blockbuster Harvest stuff which was all over the radio. I had my first car and I was driving up to a caravan park up near Bendigo. There were lots of families going up there for Easter, plus this youth group I was part of at the time.

Anyway, on the first night the young people as we were known, gathered together away from the rest and played the guitars, sang and then, as it quietened down and everyone was getting tired, I put this album on. After that, I think we never stopped playing it. It was the background music for everything.

It was a mixture of folky stuff and his classic guitar rockers that made it easily the best album he ever did. Harvest for me was overcooked.

It also fitted all my moods from the sadness of Birds to the joy of When You Dance. And it’s one of those albums with no clunkers.

Many years later I was at the Jump Club in Collingwood with my friend Jimmy. Halfway through the night, he came up the stairs to let me know he had just been talking to Neil Young and did I want to meet him. I wasn't surprised since Jimmy had already introduced me to both Joe Strummer and Ray Davies. He wasn't backward in coming forwards as Mum used to say. So I was introduced to Neil Young. I cannot remember much of the conversation but I did notice he was wearing platform thongs. I wish I could remember the band who was playing because he was quite digging their sound.

Neil invited us all to the show at Festival Hall the next night. Which was an amazing gig if only for Cinnamon Girl. And also for the fact that Neil actually spotted Jimmy in the crowd during one song and waved to him.

New York Dolls by New York Dolls 1973

Picked this one up for 1:99 at a Brashes sale at Doncaster Shoppingtown. Loved those sales. New York Dolls I'd heard about through reading David Bowie articles but also from a book I picked up at a sale which was called NME's Greatest Hits. A wonderful book of classic NME writing featuring Nick Kent amongst others. So when I saw this album I thought I'd give it a go. 

And it was better than I'd imagined. Sure some of it didn't sound that great but some of the songs just blasted out of my wood grain stereo. The first song that knocked me out was Trash then Personality Crisis then it just kept growing. The references to classic girl groups particularly the Shangri Las were just so well-timed with the sixties vibe I always seemed to slip back into

. I didn't get into the look. A little bit too trashy. I did have a few pairs of platform shoes, however. Walking six-foot-tall..well hobbling.
When Bruce Milne asked me on our first meeting (between cars on the highway) what bands we were into I shouted New York Dolls first. Then Iggy etc. Then I went home and turned my acoustic band into a rock band.

Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy by The Who 1971

In 1972 I was living in Blackburn South. Form 5. Really full-on music fan now! The latest thing which spread like a virus around Box Hill High School was the Australian record Club. When you joined you got 5 albums for some minuscule amount. If you got someone else to join you got two. You just had to buy six (or was it twelve) more albums that year. Easy. Kids were signing up everyone. Then you got a catalogue and picked out your monthly record. It would arrive quite promptly. Mum would sit it near the stereo for when I got home from school. I remember seeing the Stooges in the catalogue having no idea who they were and why would you name a band after a comedy act.
Anyway one delivery I clearly remember was this album. My first Who record. Recommended by my mate's brother and soon to consume my life. I never knew they had so many great singles. It was on endless rotation. I couldn't get enough of it and it sent me searching other Who albums. I always thought that some of the tracks were alternative versions or even re recorded versions because some are definitely longer than the 7 inch singles. Many years later the internet would confirm my thoughts.
And the cover. Some kind of touchy feel thing like bumpy..very tactile.
Anyway I had just got my first electric guitar for 30 bucks (including a Coronet amp) and now I had something to really thrash along to. substitute..I'm a Boy..My Generation...Substitute and more.

Then one day I was kicking a ball around at school and one of the guys started talking about a song called Baba O'Riley off the new Who album. I was about to get my mind blown again!

Not my favourite Beatles album but a very important one for me. One day I got home from school. Box Hill High. I was in Form 2 which is now know as Year 8 and there was a big square package on my bed. My Mum had been to the new Doncaster Shoppingtown and brought back not only my first Beatles album but my first album ever. I was breathless. I went down to the living room and put it on the crappy fifties stereo. wasn't too big on side one at first but side two just knocked me out. I thought that this was the difference between singles and albums. All those songs running into each other.
A couple of weeks later I was at a class party and they kept playing the first side. It seems everyone was rapt in Come together and Something. Me I was over with Polythene Pam and Mean Mr Mustard.
We used to play that suite of songs at Rubber soul on the Beatles theme nights. Sadly my ipod doesn't put those songs together.  So they don't have the same affect.
And the true test of a classic album. Must contain some rubbish. Octopuses Garden. Ringo having his go. I must admit that it took me a long time to warm to I Want You. But that was what was great with vinyl. You didn't skip tracks as much. No remote! so songs were given a bit more of a chance to grow on you.