End Of The Century by The Ramones 1980

 Danny Says by the Ramones happened to be the first thing I heard off this album. I was around at Stuart Beatty's house and we were discussing what the sound of the next single might be like. He played "Danny Says" by The Ramones. Wait for the guitars to come in! Then we talked about how we were going to record "She Lets Me Know" We were looking for that power.

Until then I couldn't say I was listening to the Ramones much after 4 albums of punk rock guitar music. But this sounded different to their usual fare. And then I heard Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio. And I loved it. It just worked. I had missed the album on first release and it was hard to find a copy hut by chance I found a second-hand copy in an Op Shop. Glenhumtly Road. Elsternwick. This shop seemed to get a lot of almost new copies of new wave albums. Reviewers who just got rid of them. Or just one reviewer. You had to be quick though.

I spent a lot of time listening to the album. I was in transit from a share house in Oakleigh to a share house in Wellington Street Collingwood. Just up from the Tote. Which was still called the Ivanhoe Hotel then. 

I lived upstairs in a small room with a great stereo system. One wall had a bed and the other a stack of records. Downstairs we still competed for the stereo system to play our favourite songs. Often we would give up and just leave RRR on. 

Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen 1984

 In 1984 we were all getting a little sophisticated. I had finally got myself off the ground-level flats and up to the top floor in Murphy Street, South Yarra. Top floor apartments and views of the city (well I could almost see it from one part of the balcony) meant playing punk rock and Mod really didn't cut it. So it was time for the Bladerunner soundtrack and Echo and the Bunnymen's Ocean Rain with a little Jacque Brel thrown in. And a bit of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. 

Like a few other records, this one had one side that got the most airplay. In this case side 2 kicks off with the magnificent "The Killing Moon" and then just creates its own world from there. One I was happy to go to.  Spend early evenings indoors with the window to the balcony open. Later I might meet friends down on Toorak Road usually for Italian food at places like Portofino (which is probably the only restaurant name I remember)  Macys was at the bottom of my street and Little Murders played there now and again. Other times I would go down and see some great bands there. Looking at some of those handbills I can't believe how good some of the bands were. For heavens sake, The Cure playing at the bottom of my street. 

Eventually, the money ran out and they upped the rent so  I tried out a shared apartment with a teacher friend. Didn't work. I guess my control of the stereo was too much. 

Grand Prix by Teenage Fanclub 1995

 There used to be a record shop down Moorabinn way called Vinyl Solution. Run by Glenn Evans and packed the ceiling with great records which is why after getting the record bug once more I would be down almost once a week. That's when this side of town had some great record shops. Vinyl Solution, Licorice Pie, Quality Records, Vicious Sloth and Greville Records. Sadly 3 of those have gone. Though I do love the new Licorice Pie space over in Collingwood.

Vinyl Solution would email a list of just in second-hand records once a week which I would hang out for. One week Grand Prix by Teenage Fanclub was on the list. This was one of those holy grail records that I had to have. Far too expensive on Discogs especially when the postage kicked in I immediately bought it off the website. I was so excited I rang Glenn to make sure my order went through. He said I could pick it up Saturday. I said I would be over after work. Then the rains came down. Peak traffic on Nepean Highway. Could hardly see past the windshield. I just couldn't wait to actually hold it never mind play it. I guess I was being a bit irrational. 

Grand Prix was an album I didn't pay much attention to until after I heard Songs From Northern Britain. So I didn't know at the time how good it really was. And it's a ripper. About You, Sparky's Dream. When you play the first side it's hard to turn the record over because you just want to hear it again. Brilliant.

And it's still exciting looking through records and finding something you always wanted or may not know you wanted. A few days ago a friend and I went over to the North record shopping. I came home with Jonathan Sings by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. Love it.

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)