Before you go, one more story.

My Dad likes Blues music.  BB King, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, Clapton, William Clarke, Junior Wells.  He only reads crime novels and he only listens to the Blues.  He has straightforward tastes like that.  Another teen holiday with my Dad memory.  He was working in Cairns and I (about 16 at this point)  was flown up to spend a couple of weeks with him.  I spent my days hanging out with the son of one of his mates.  We sat on the beach, bummed around shopping centres, talked rugby.  In the evenings Dad and I would go to Johno’s Blues Bar.  Johno would get up on stage in his surfing singlet, jeans, and thongs (flip flops) and growl out delta blues.  Balmy North Queensland nights and the blues.   In the car, Dad would play his blues tapes.  He started with BB King and then he acquired all kinds of things; William Clarke’s Blowin’ Like Hell was a regular feature.  But it was Little Charlie and the Nightcats tha...

There was a period in my life where the obscurity of a song, its lack of visibility to the mainstream, would enhance the sound it made.  I was always looking for something good, something new.   I listened to music so much, that I could quickly wear out an album.   I could take a purchase from sounding fresh and exciting, and listen to it over and over for a few months until it sounded as jaded and overplayed as Queen or Dragon or The Eagles.  So I was always looking for something new.  The more obscure the better.   That kind of thinking led me into kidding myself that I didn’t really like popular bands like Cold Chisel.  In truth, I have always thought of them as one of Australia’s greatest rock bands.   Cold Chisel broke up in 1983 and their legacy was almost immediately swallowed up by Barnesy’s early solo career. Some of his early solo efforts were decent.  Later on, he churned out over-produced AOR -driven FM radio fodder (whic...

Rob Clarkson is a songwriter based in Melbourne, hailing from Hobart, the city of love. His wry, observational funny, and romantic songs grabbed me from the moment I saw him supporting Weddings Parties Anything at the QUT Refectory in 1991 or so.  At the time he was gaining popularity.  Triple J and Rage were playing Beautiful Boys and Beautiful Girls.  The six-track EP seemed like a harbinger of a brilliant career.  I listened to it endlessly. In 1993, the follow-up full-length album (Off Your Faith) arrived.  It was long-awaited for me, but it seemed the radio weren't interested.   In that time, I had graduated, moved out of home, lived in a couple of rented places, first with my mate Tim and later my girlfriend, Kim.  It had all been idyllic.  Then Kim went back to university.  Financially, she was forced to move back home.  I went back to the suburbs and my childhood bedroom.  The retrograde move back home.  Yea...

At school, I was lucky to have some extraordinarily good teachers.  Ian Howlett was a one-eyed man passionate about language and writing.  He wasn’t that bothered about imposing his will upon us.  He taught me English and some good life perspective too. From a booklet of war poems we were given, I cut out the lyrics to The Band Played… by Eric Bogle and stuck it to the wall next to my study desk.  I used to sit there in the evenings, not studying, just reading the words of this poem over and over, marvelling at the simplicity and the bitterness and the ease with which the story was told. I had an idea it was a song, but in these pre-You Tube and Spotify days it wasn’t like you could just go and look a thing up. At university, I met Tim Hayden and he introduced me to the Pogues.  Rum, Sodomy and the Lash remains one of my all-time favourite albums.  In 1989 I saw them at Easts Rugby League club.  It was a wild night, they didn’t play The Band… but i...

I listened to this song every day for about two years.  It gave me a weird addiction to songs with false endings, the determination to try rum (Bundaberg Rum), and a daily blast of rock n roll to get through the day.   Most of my music was on compilation tapes.  I recorded songs off the radio.  I owned a small number of albums, but C90 TDK tapes were much cheaper.  But I did own a copy of Barking Spiders Live by Cold Chisel.  The opener is Merry Go Round I'm sure I listened to that song every day for two years while getting dressed for school.  Like Boys of Summer, this is a song not written with teenagers in mind.  It’s about a guy working in a factory in a small country town.  He does the same old shit every week and weekend.  Same old Merry Go Round.  All the same, I understood the frustration of time slipping away while feeling stuck with your lot.              “I’m 25 and only half ...

Music is best consumed as a live experience.  Shitty pub, covers band playing the same old Classic FM rock hits?  Sure, you’ll see better gigs, but there is something compelling about watching people play their instruments, eyeballing the singer as they try to impress you with their stuff. 1985 and 14-year-old me.  Dad was on Stradbroke Island staying with his Uncle Dubby.  Dubby was a retired merchant seaman, a bachelor living in a big old house near the beach.  Only 6 years older than Dad, their relationship was more like mates, than nephew and uncle.  For a week of school holidays, I was sent over the Stradbroke. Mum drove me to Cleveland and dropped me at the barge. I travelled by myself for the one-hour trip.  My mum was very protective.  This freedom felt like a big deal at the time.  I remember leaning on the rail, watching the water going past and realising that I was my own.  I didn’t know anyone on the barge.  Nearby s...

1985, a hot summer afternoon in Brisbane, I’m 14 and on the train home from school.  This is a steel aluminum train carriage with vinyl seats.  The train is not air conditioned and I’m sure it has sat in a rail yard somewhere, heating up all day before starting its run at 3pm to take me and my friends from Central Station to Zillmere. There's a guy in my class we called Wally.  He played five-eight in the rugby team, so we called him Wally.  He played guitar.  It was stinking hot.  There was a metallic smell of sweat on the train.  Everyone’s shirt was sticking to their back and our legs itched from the rough cloth of grey school uniform trousers.  We were on a later train, maybe we’d had detention. Wally is on this train too and he’s late too because he’s been into town and bought sheet music.  He hands it to me and it's this song that I’ve been hearing on the radio, a lot.  Don Henley, Boys of Summer. It isn't my favourite son...

I've been obsessed with music for as long as I can remember.  That was around 1975, and I distinctly recall the theme from "The Sting" playing on the radio.  I told my Mum that was a tune called The Pictures because that was where I must have been when I first heard the tune. In the early 80s, I started listening to Radio 10 in Brisbane and it seems now that the only song they played was The Buggles, Video Killed the Radio Star.  That lasted for a few months and then I got an FM radio (more on that later) and I moved over to FM 104.  My world filled up with Cold Chisel, The Angels, Mi-Sex, INXS, New Order, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Grandmaster Flash, Hoodoo Gurus, Phil Collins, Hendrix, Huey Lewis & The News, Dead Kennedys, The Cure...you get the picture. Since then, I doubt there has been a single day that I haven't listened to a song and thought about my history with that song.  Many songs, not all of them, have associations that go bouncing about my brain...