Newcastle Heroes Tamam Shud is an Australian psychedelic, progressive and surf rock band, which formed in Newcastle in 1964. The initial line-up were known as Four Strangers with Eric Connell on bass guitar, Dannie Davidson on drums, Gary Johns on rhythm guitar and Alex “Zac” Zytnik on lead guitar. At the end of that year […]
Read More
The Debut Album I think these guys might go far.. Seriously, it’s really something to hear the early beginnings of one of the biggest bands in music history. Syd Barrett was at the helm and Roger Waters had just started contributing but what we have in “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” is a […]
Read More
West Coast Southern Rock For years I thought Creedence hailed from the deep south in the US, their music channels the bayou and bluegrass as if southern spirit is baked into each album. However.. Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR) actually came to us from California, with significant time in San Francisco. During their peak, they produced […]
Read More
Classic 70s Blues-Rock-Jazz There’s a fair chance you haven’t heard of Tom Waits. Despite the uniqueness of his voice and the length of his glowing career, commercial visibility hasn’t really found Tom organically. In fact I only became exposed to his work last year, when I encountered “Rain Dogs” on a list of 100 Albums […]
Read More
Red Anniversary Vinyl 1991 was a sensational year for music, especially for a youth such as myself. The year brought us (amongst others): Pearl Jam’s “Ten”, Nirvana’s “Nevermind”, Metallica’s black album, Guns ‘n Roses “Use your illusion I & II”, U2’s “Achtung Baby”, Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous”, and.. Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Blood Sugar Sex Magik”. […]
Read More
One of the best debut albums of all time? This album needs absolutely no introduction. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two decades (including missing Ozzy Osbourne’s reality TV show) you would have heard of Black Sabbath. It is said that Sabbath introduced the early pioneers of heavy metal, and if […]
Read More
Take a leaf out of their book Perhaps it is because The Church’s frontman Steve Kilbey and guitarist Peter Koppes came from my home town of Canberra that their music is nearer and dearer to me than similar music of the era. Either way, their strong melodies make for some iconic Australian tracks, and their […]
Read More
True first press impresses This isn’t an Australian release, and has no connection to my country… However, the background to the release of this iconic album is too good not to write about. The story goes that the (now) legendary audio engineer Robert (Bob) Ludwig, at an early stage in his career, was the original […]
Read More
Export Vinyl Back in the 1970s in Australia, parallel importation of vinyl records created arguably a very niche collectable – the redacted or “donut” labels and sleeves of Columbia Records pressings. Some background: This arrangement ended in 1961 when Columbia formed its own international organization, CBS Records, in 1962, which released Columbia recordings outside the […]
Read More
An Iconic 80s Album You’re going to see a lot of Australian albums from the 1980s on this site, and why not? It was my favourite era for Australian music. So let’s take a look at this cracker of an album from Aussie legends Hunters & Collectors. The band were starting to really hit their […]
Read More