Deja Vu by Crosby Stills Nash & Young 1970

 In 1970 I was doing a chemist round where I dropped off medicines and other things at people's houses. Sometimes I even had to carry big packs of nappies on the back of my bike. My other job was burning stuff in the incinerator out the back of the shop. This was good because I could listen to my transistor radio as I burned stuff. This is where I first started hearing songs from Crosby Stills and Nash who were all over the radio the previous year with Marakesh Express. But the track everyone talked about was Suite Baby Blue Eyes. A small epic. This is what pointed to the future of rock. They said. And then they added Neil Young to the mix.

So it was with great excitement we waited for the new album CSN & Y album. And when it was released it went straight to the top of the charts. And straight onto the turntables of just about everyone I knew. Even our English teacher at school brought the record in to play us Teach Your Children so we could discuss the lyrics. I had to have it but had that laborious wait after ordering it from the Australian Record Club. I think I bought it with the equally popular Sweet Baby James album by James Taylor. When it finally arrived I would sit listening to it in the spare bedroom while incense filled the air (Another new thing for me) Great album although I always lifted the needle when Almost Cut My Hair came on skipping to the next track,  In the end, I was drawn to the Neil Young tracks more and more especially Helpless. Gradually talk at school was about Neil Young and an album he put out called After The Goldrush. But then someone brought Everybody Knows This is Nowhere to school and blew our teenage minds. All these albums mixed in together to create that American vibe which kind of summed up 1970 for me.

I must admit though that I hadn't listened to the album since then. Though some of the tracks overstayed their welcome on the radio listening to the album once more it sounds quite amazing. They said it took 800 hours to make and with the attention to detail one could almost believe it. 

Cosmo's Factory by Creedence Clearwater Revival 1970

 So I was in Form 3 (Year 9) at Box Hill High School hanging out by the taps in the Quadrangle when the windows of the Art Room on the second storey were opened by a bunch of older kids and then large speakers were placed on the ledge. The distinctive thud of the stylus hitting the vinyl and suddenly the schoolyard was filled with the screaming guitar of John Fogerty, Up Around The Bend. And so I was really introduced to the mighty sound of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

With the end of the Beatles Creedence kind of became the biggest band in the world for a short while. Well according to GO-SET. But indeed Cosmos Factory was everywhere in 1970. I knew they'd been around for a while. My big brother Tony would play Susie Q on his Marantz stereo real loud. He was living across the road from our house and those early Creedence albums were never far from the turntable. 

But Cosmos was another thing altogether. What you might call a crossover hit. Their fifth album in 2 years. The radio would play the whole 11-minute version of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" My brother Steven would tell me how that was the time it took him to drive to his girlfriend's house. Door to door Grapevine on the radio.

A brilliant album that rounded off the sixties. A massive party album. And with songs like "Who'll Stop The Rain" and "Run Through The Jungle" not to mention that track that blasted the kids eating lunch at my old school, truly a classic album.

Parklife by Blur 1994

 In 1994 the Lizard Lounge was packing them in on both Thursday nights and on Saturday nights. Friday nights was certainly growing. The biggest groups were still the Smiths, The Stone Roses and the Pixies. But the music hadn't really changed too much since Nirvana released Smells Like Team Spirit. 

Then we heard this song called Boys and Girls from Blur. We had been playing their previous hit There's No Other Way but this was a whole new kettle of fish. Bright and poppy and with something of a disco groove. This was the beginning of the Britpop invasion. Just that opening few notes and the dance floor would be packed. Where the dance music before was touched by a hint of miserabilism now it was a thing of joy. Or maybe we couldn't appreciate the irony in the lyrics. 

The Parklife album became the new soundtrack to the mid-nineties which was full of colour, men's magazines and the Union Jack becoming fashionable once more. And using Phil Daniels from the Quadropheia film in the Parklife video was a great link to the Mod sixties and seventies. Of course, all this appealed to me because f the very Sixties London Swinging vibe that coloured the whole thing. This was an exciting scene and soon we had more bands like Supergrass, Sleeper and probably the best of them all Pulp. 

Britpop. A great time was had by all.

Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield 1973

 I was setting up a turntable the other day and looking for something to play in a bunch of old records and pulled this out. Talk about being transmitted back in time.

Back in 1973 I had taken over the biggest room in the house and turned it into my bedroom and a hangout. The walls were plastered with posters. The bulbs in all the light fittings had been replaced by coloured ones. I would come home from school and play records, read comics and just hang out. On Sunday nights I would catch the album show on the radio. One night they played the first side of Tubular Bells. I was transfixed. Just laid on the bed and closed my eyes and listened. Then Viv Stanshall said those two words. "Grand Piano" and it kind of blew my teenage mind.

The radio started playing the last side of side one a lot and you would hear Tubular Bells a lot. Especially when the movie "The Exorcist" was released as they used parts of Tubular Bells as the soundtrack. The Exorcist was also massive at the time. A friend of mine went to see it and couldn't sleep properly for two nights because it was so scary. So I put off seeing it until around 1975. They were playing it at lunchtime at the teacher's college I was at. Settled in the darkness to watch this big scary movie. Tubular Bells, footsteps on the ceiling, haunted looks. I was out of the theatre in 30 minutes. Too scary.

(I did watch it all the way through many years later.. great film)

Lovers by Sleepy Jackson 2003

Lovers by Sleepy Jackson came out in 2003 and it soundtracked a month of sunshine back in Elwood. And I still get a kick out of it when I play it now. A bit of George Harrison-type slide in the guitars doesn't hurt. Truly great songs. Must be something in the water in West Australia which gives the music light and bounce and total grooviness.

Again it was someone talking about the band that got me onto them. I think it was my mate Poz. When I heard the name I thought it might be just some country type album. It had those connotations. But then I got to hear This Day on the radio. I didn't know it was them but I knew I liked the song. So I had to wait through another one or two songs hoping that they would announce the artist. And there it was. Sleepy Jackson. I immediately jumped in the car and drove down to JB HiFi in Brighton which was kind of my first stop for music in those days. Bought the CD and put it in the car stereo and bang there was Good Dancers as the opening track and I knew this was going to be great. I took the long way home just so I could listen to the album. Ending up driving down Beach Road listening to Sleepy Jackson. Sunshine in a bottle.

Chelsea Girl by Nico 1967

 On first listen to the Velvet Underground and hearing Nico's voice I was quite on the side of those who would say what is she doing on the record. Then again the song on the end whose name I forgot and which probably came from John Cale's head wasn't a bag of fun either. But as I listened more and more to the album the off-key singing of this beautiful Germanic model made sense. But there was no way I would buy her solo album. That much I couldn't take. So for years, all I heard were the Velvet Underground songs. 

In the 80s I did go to see her play live at the Jump Club in Collingwood. It was really a horrible night and because I didn't pay to get in I didn't have that investment in trying to enjoy the show and spent most of the night upstairs drinking.

But a few years back I saw "The Royal Tennenbaums" a film by Wes Anderson, whose vision I find simply brilliant. I was addicted to watching his earlier film "Rushmore " on DVD for ages. Same with each film he brought out. One of the best things about his films is his use of music. To me, he is the master of putting songs to scenes. And digging up slightly off centre songs by big artists. So it was that I heard "These Days" and was knocked out. Together with "Fairest of The Seasons" (both songs written by Jackson Browne) I got quite hooked on listening to these terribly depressing Nico songs. But at the same time not depressing. Just a different world. Then I bought the Chelsea Girl album at first because of those songs and secondly because of the great cover. I found much to love about this album but I had to play it at the right time. But I guess that's like a lot of albums. They sound better at certain times of the day.

Guitar Romantic by The Exploding Hearts 2003

 So what am I listening to now? One of the great things is finding rock bands and music that you missed when they were around. Even better when you find records that you can't take off the turntable and soundtrack weeks or months of your life. Guitar Romantic got stuck on my turntable a few weeks ago and is fighting off all comers. It is also reconnecting me to some of the pop-punk bands I haven't listened to for a while like Generation X.

I had been hearing the name Exploding Hearts ever since I went on my first trip to Japan a few years back. I also saw their name on radio song lists and quite possibly heard their records played inside a mix of great other songs. But as I was online shopping about a month ago their album popped up on eBay when I was looking for something else. Something about the algorithms innate in the system does that. Sometimes they are annoying. This time they struck gold. 

I thought I would give them a listen and jumped on Spotify to check them out. The songs blew a hole in my computer speakers. They reminded me of all those singles I was into in 1979 like The Boys, The Jam and the tracks on the Powerpearls series of records. Next thing I was blasting them out of the car stereo and ordering the vinyl.

I looked them up I found that sadly almost all the band died in a car crash not long after this record was released. This is their only studio album. And it's brilliant!