I will admit to having low expectations when I picked up this single. The name Jive Bunny, and the image of said bunny in a Hawaiian shirt aboard a Polynesian war canoe – not promising. Apart from anything else, rabbits are a major pest in Australia. Anyone who grew up in a rural area here, […]
Category: 45 rpm
In this country we play a code of football known as Australian Rules, or AFL. It is different to all the other codes. At its best, it is the most spectacular and exciting sport anywhere. Okay, I am a bit biased, but I really do think so. Every team has a club song, which the […]
There was a lot of pretence and posturing in the 1980s: the pout and mid-distance stare was the template’ for fashion models and pop stars alike. Cyndi Lauper was an exception. She didn’t take herself too seriously. She dressed in what looked like second-hand clothes, though it is too much to expect that they really […]
Brownsville Station were a rock band popular in the early 1970s. They had one big hit, “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room”, an anthem encouraging teen rebellion in the form of lifelong support for the Philip Morris group of companies. You will know it, even if you don’t know their version – it was covered, almost […]
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What matters is the jam
Folk music is my first love. Like a lot of first loves, we have had our ups and downs. Folk music, you see, has a scene, and with a scene comes purists. Tedious people. I was at the more liberal and inclusive end of earnest debates about what could or should be labelled “folk music”, […]
It is up there with the shower scene in Psycho. It is dawn. The sun is rising over an ornate mansion in Hollywood, the home of a famous film director. We see him sleeping in gold satin sheets. He wakes, and notices something … wet? He reaches under the covers, and withdraws his hand. It […]
Probably the fastest way to disperse a crowd of Australians, short of turning a fire hose on them, is to invite them to church. There is no oppression, just compartmentalisation. You are allowed to sing “Amazing Grace” on Sundays and at funerals, but gospel struggles to reach a wider audience. There is a lot of […]
I live near Geelong, a regional city which is a bit down on its luck at the moment. It used to be an industrial town, but the industries have closed, or will do soon. There are other ways to prosper besides making cars or smelting aluminium, but the transition isn’t easy. Making things harder is […]
One of the better things to happen in Australian music back in the 1980s was a band called Mental As Anything. In the slang of the day, to say someone was “mental” was an insult. It implied eccentricity and stupidity rather than mental illness, but even so it was a bit unpleasant. The Mentals, as […]
There is a peculiar excitement in dropping the stylus onto a record which is a complete mystery. The label is blank, or illegible, or in a foreign language. Not Italian or German: an English speaker can puzzle those out, more or less. I’m talking seriously challenging languages: Russian, or Hebrew, or (as in this case) […]
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