I got my first cassette player at age 7 or 8 my mum brought it back from honkers I think. That and a couple of cassettes. There was one that called heavy songs from heavy groups lol. It had Smoke on the Water and Inna Gadda Da Vida on it to name a couple. She must have just grabbed a handful of random cassettes off some street vendor cos there was that and Yellow Brick Road double cassette by Elton John it's hard to remember all of them.
I can also remember making mix tapes off Double J on this Radio Cassette thing she bought about the same time... The Family Radio Cassette that lived in our kitchen. I used to get in trouble for changing the station from 2GB or whatever my dad used to listen to the races. "What's this shite" he would say as he spun the tuner back to his favorite station. He was always a Sinatra kind of guy.
I had an uncle, my mum's baby bro, who was about 10 or 12 years older than me and a DJ in the disco era. He thought he was cool as fuck and so did I really. I would eaves drop on him and his mates talking about the girls they pulled at the disco and stuff like that. I used to sleep in his old room when I stayed at my granny's place it had a life size painting of Jimi Hendrix painted on the back of the door as an leftover of his teenage years I guess. By the time he made me a few tapes from his collection it was all soul music and disco. Rose Royce and Barry White and Maybe a bit of Earth Wind and Fire pretty much all black artists.
We finally got our first 3 in one stereo sometime in the late 70s I guess and that's when I started buying records. The first one I bought with my own money was Remain in Light by Talking Heads. I don't think I even knew who they were but that was some album. Soon after that I think I bought Peter Tosh Legalise it. I had gotten into reggae about then I guess... I had a bootleg tape of Marley's Babylon by Bus and Sheik Yerbouti by Frank Zappa.
Such eclectic shit I don't know where it all came from, I guess I was kind of a hoarder of musical styles. In the 80s I bypassed a lot of the popular stuff focusing on my own mix tapes off the radio again. A mate of mine had a copy of Machine Head by deep purple and I scored a cassette of that from him. Lazy got a fair beating on my Walkman.
I did have a copy of Regatta De Blanc by the Police. It was the Ragga thing I think... That vibe also lead me onto the Clash I didn't really get the Punk thing but the Clash was a slice above the rest I thought.
Somewhere in the Mid to late 80s I had a band with my mates we practiced in my mum's empty hair salon at weekends drinking beers and smoking weed and playing a strange mix of covers from punk to shoe gaze to who knows what. One of my favorites was an instrumental version of Rock n Roll by the glitter band... (before Garry Glitter was outed as a pedo) Our Drummer "Roars" would go hard on the toms with his mallets and it had this searing chainsaw guitar part that I loved to play and a lot of chanting and shouting. We could stretch that out for 10 minutes. We also did stuff by the UK subs a shit version of Stray Cat Strut by the Stray Cats.
We used to go see a lot of bands at the time at the Kardoma Kafe up the Cross and the Trade Union Club in Surry Hills I can remember some post punk Aussie greats like Feed Time, Psychotic Turnbuckles, Lime Spiders, Celibate Rifles, The Scientists, Blue Ruin and Ed Kueper. Into the mix there were also a few international acts we saw James Brown and The Cult at the same venue but different nights both were incredible.
The band broke up and the late 80s is a blur of pills and Italo Dance music but then came grunge....so much like those garage sounds from Sydney and Melbourne and the opportunity to dig out my collection of flannos again. Good times in the Sydney inner west music scene as a budding designer photographer.
The death of Jeff Buckley and Kurt Cobain, marriage and a move to the northern hemisphere, saw me exploring something sonically different. Nothing like the frozen north to help you appreciate the sparseness of Sigur Ross or Turin Breaks.... There are a lot more musicians in colder climates. IT also helps to focus on indoor pursuits.
Desktop recording opened a whole new world for me Cubase, Logic, Ableton. I have been exploring ever since .... Currently revisiting some stuff that I missed out on first time around .... Ambient guitar, the Genius of Johnny Marr and Vini Reilly .... seeking nuance and understated complexity.
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