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 […]
Category: Pop
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 […]
What do the following songs all have in common? Leo Sayer: “When I Need You” Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias: “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” Diana Ross: “When You Tell Me That You Love Me” The Pipkins: “Gimme Dat Ting” The Hollies: “The Air That I Breathe” Along with dozens of other successful […]
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 are some artists who are hard to take seriously, not because they are obscure but because they were once enormously popular. If you love to hunt for old records in op-shops and thrift-stores, as I do, you see these guys so often that you flick straight past them. James Last. Nana Mouskouri. Kamahl. Harry […]
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 […]
You know her, even if you don’t know it. You know her voice. If you have listened to Emmylou Harris’s albums, Luxury Liner and Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, or Neil Young’s Comes a Time, American Stars and Bars and Rust Never Sleeps, or the Doobie Brothers’ Minute by Minute, or a whole […]
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 […]
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 […]
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