The town I grew up in – let’s call it Spud – was a homophobic place. Nothing unusual in that for rural Australia in the 1970s. The strange thing was that we were so averse to gay men that we had no idea what they might be like. And so as kids we played air-guitar […]
Category: 45 rpm
First there was Genesis. Then there was Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins and … Mike and the Mechanics? The Mike part was Mike Rutherford, the Genesis bass player, who put together a sort of session musician supergroup in the mid-1980s. On Planet Vinyl, a band is never judged on its name. But I will admit that […]
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There’s something about Mary
The first sound recording in human history occurred in 1877. Thomas Edison, the irascible genius who also invented the incandescent light-bulb and a host of other new technologies, recorded himself onto sheets of tinfoil. The vibrations in the air from his voice caused a diaphragm to move, activating a stylus which cut into the foil. […]
Kurt Maier was born in Germany in 1911, and became a skilled pilot. He fought with the Luftwaffe during the Second World War, and rose to the rank of Major. He was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, for bravery and leadership. Perhaps surprisingly, Maier survived the war. All the […]
Nineteen eighty-seven was my first year at university. Like a lot of people at this stage of life, I struggled a bit. I moved to a big city, and into a share house. I received a very modest government stipend: $87.30 a week, which even in those days was not much. Rent was $45 a […]
In 1973, a group of Australian musicians got together and cut a single. They called themselves Wild Honey, and they could play. The arrangements are complex: shifts in tempo, complex harmonies. For 1973, this is high level production. Who were they? That is a mystery. There have been lots of bands called Wild Honey, but […]
This was one of the very first records I sold online. The purchaser lives in Queensland, Link is his name, and he is a fan of eighties pop. He bought a few discs, and we exchanged some emails. I asked why he was into the eighties stuff: was he, like me, there at the time? […]
Trevor Stanford was born on in 1925 in Bristol, the seaport in the west of England. A man born in that time and place was pretty much certain to go to war – Germany invaded Poland the day before he turned thirteen – and he did, serving in the Royal Navy. His military service saw […]
Julia Lee was from Kansas City, a blues singer in the famous club scene there. In the 1940s she had great success with what was then called “dirty blues”, but which to modern ears are just a bit risqué. They were, she said, “the songs my mother taught me not to sing”, with lots of […]
Eddie Carl was a doo wop singer. He seems to have had a few hits in the late 1950s, but they can’t have been that big because I can find out nothing about him. On the other hand, he must have made a bit of an impact, because he recorded in America on the Decca […]
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