490. Billie Jean by Michael Jackson 1982

In 1982 if I wasn't playing gigs with Little Murders I was out at nightclubs. I was playing 4 or 5 nights a week but sometimes at 3 in the morning we might get into a club. Or there was always clubs open Mondays or Tuesdays or...well every night of the week there was something on. God knows how I got through my day job without falling over. And in 1982 this was the song you heard everywhere. And despite not being really keen on Michael Jackson at any time except for the Jackson 5 back in 1970 the opening of Billie Jean still sounds amazing. 

The drums followed by that bass line. Or is it keyboards doing that walking riff. And it can put me in a number of places. Whether it be a our guitarist Roddie's party when he pulled out Thriller and and told me how great it was. Or walking into Therapy in West Melbourne and watching the crowd tumble onto the dancefloor. Or maybe it's just all thhose Countdown episodes that played the film clip endlessly. Til later on when if things need a danceable curve we'd throw on Billie Jean to a rapterous reception. It is a great song. And a great sound.

489. Girls Talk By Dave Edmunds 1979

This came out the same time as Cruel to Be Kind and though they are solo singles by Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe they kind of fall into the realm of being Rockpile songs. And what songs they are. Just love listening to them both. They never get dated. Acoustic guitars. great melodies.
Of course Girls Talk was written by Elvis Costello but this is the version that does it for me. Actually Elvis' efforts to reclaim the song later on didn't amount to much. Reminded me of David Bowie who kept doing versions of All The Young Dudes on live recordings and B-sides but never getting anywhere near the definitive version by Mott The Hoople.
This song takes me back to sunny days in Collingwood. My girlfriend lived near the pub that was used in the TV series the Sullivans. We never went there. We went down the local milk bar because the owner kept pulling sixties toys still in their boxes and putting them out for sale. I bought 20 Monkeemobiles for $5 each and Bruce Milne and I sold them through Missing Link. The they played a song which didn't work until a used a transformer from a train set to inject a bit of electricity into them.
But I digress. Rockpile came and played at The Venue. I was playing a gig that night down in Welshpool and missed them. I heard it was terrible. The band apologized at the next gig they did. Great musicians but it just went wrong. Still I wish I'd seen it for myself.

488. (I Wish It Could Be) 1965 Again by the Barracudas 1980

Because for a while there we did! Wish it was 65 or 66 or 67. Well anything but 1980 it seems. The Mod movement in Melbourne was starting to move along with scooters appearing fast and furious. Especially when South Melbourne council decided to sell off all their Rabbit scooters that were scooped up by a number of Mods who couldn't afford or get their hands on a Lambretta or a Vespa. We looked for sixties suits and shoes in Op Shops at a time when they were full of cool stuff. I was dressed totally in second hand clothes. Where else could you get button down shirts.
We were listening to soul and ska and the new Mod bands from the UK. My band had morphed from a punk band into a Mod band without bothering to change our name.
And with the action starting to gather speed this record came out. For some it was just a joke. Which was not helped by the horrible front cover. Luckily on the back they looked cool.But for a few of us it was a party record summing up our new strange experience of digging up the past. In retrospect it fits more into the scene about to happen with the paisley brigade of the early eighties and bands like the Hoodoo Gurus. But I loved the lyrics to this song. It was a three minute of everything cool about the sixties. California style.
I loved this record. And it's parent album "Drop Out with the Barracudas" I even pinched one of their song titles "Don't Let Go"
On the weekend I bought a surfboard at a garage sale. Maybe my band should do a similar pose to the cover.

487. It's All Over Now by the Rolling Stones 1964

When I first started playing guitar and forming bands my musical bible was a book called The Rolling Stones for Easy Guitar. This is where I learned to play songs. And at first to write songs using the chord sequences and putting new melodies on top. In my first band, which we called Feathers, I attempted to sing The Last Time. Only once. At a Pizza Hut in Doncaster. And it was horrible. Put me off covers for ages. Feathers was a three piece that did 3 gigs one being a radio show where our prize was a bunch of Joan Armatrading singles.  Then we lost members and added new ones and became Subway. Me, Ken and Vic went on to form The Fiction.
But first we had to do the real rock and roll thing and debut our 5 piece at the Bayswater Youth Club. My aversion to destroying classic songs meant most the set we played was original songs. Which didn't go down well.  And their were a few covers. Which probably didn't go down well either. After we played "It's All Over Now" a song I picked because I could play it basically one of the crowd called out "Play some Rolling Stones!" Nice one. I started explaining we had just played one until I realised he was having a dig. I can't repeat the reaction to our version of Paperback Writer. I do have the cassette somewhere. It sounds like an out of tune Velvet Underground covering Beatles songs. Everything that felt good in rehearsal was laid bare on stage. I felt we'd never play again. At least not in Bayswater.
A few weeks later we bumped into Bruce Milne at a set of traffic lights on the way home from the Tiger Room. I found out there were others out there who knew about The Stooges and New York Dolls and punk. The next rehearsal I outlined a new vision for the band. The guitarist left and we fired my girlfriend who was the back up singer. We brought in a new guitarist who couldn't play and a bass player who never turned up to gigs. We were ready!

486. Save Me by Aretha Franklin 1967

In 1978 I was living in North Fitzroy on the bottom flat of this horrible plain ugly block of flats. Big wide windows overlooked the car park. So the venetian blinds stayed drawn most of the time. And upstairs would have kids come over on Sunday mornings and bang about above me. Which was painful. I didn't have a phone but I had plenty of pubs where we you could catch up and install beer filled lines of communication. God knows how we organised anything. But we did.
So coming to this cramped spot from the leafy Eastern suburbs was quite a culture shock. And it was good to get out of there. And get to the parties that were going on in big houses in Carlton where the Uni students gathered.  These houses were amazing places. Long hallways. Rooms just for dancing. Sometimes with a window into another room where you could pass drinks through. Floorboards that bounced. Plenty of quiet corners for a snog if you got lucky.
It was one of these parties I got my first real taste of Aretha Franklin. Someone had put Save Me by the Saints on the record player. They covered it on Prehistoric Sounds. It must have been the guy who lived there who came running down the corridor jumping over outstretched legs and empty VB cans. A few seconds fumbling with the record player and The Saints came off and then the real version came on. The sound went up. And it was majestic. Like I was in another world. It was like I woke up. And it didn't stop there. He put Green Onions on next. It was just so good. Then somebody else got themselves on the record player. But for the next few days we talked about those soul records and where we could find a place to play more of the stuff.

485. Elevator Driver by the Masters Apprentices 1968

1968. First year of High School. Out go watching cartoons at 6:30am in the morning. The only time you could see those weird Marvel ones where the characters didn't actually move. Straight out of the comic strip. In came GTK and pop shows on Channel 2 on a Saturday afternoon. 

This is one of the first videos I can remember watching. Well maybe not the first but I'm not going to count the Beatles because they were kind of omnipresent. I used to love watching this video. It was like all the weird films they would show at school under the name of art. Girls running through grave yards. Over exposed images. Mad men. My first taste of psychedelic Australian rock. A fantastic band that should of been massive overseas. Like the Easybeats should of. 

Actually I used to think it was the cemetery in the video was the one next to my school. Box Hill cemetery. Our art teacher used to send us over there to draw angels and take photos. Later we used to take girls there so we could dare them if they would kiss you while sitting on a grave. We'd carefully place our transistor radio on the headstone. We thought we were cool but it was the only place to hang out where no one bothered you. Otherwise we found the sheds a cool place to smoke. There never seemed to be anyone around. Even fights between rival schools were arranged at the cemetery. then they started building shopping malls and everything changed.

484. In Every Dream Home A Heartache by Roxy Music 1973

Back in 1977 when the Subway were coming together I was writing songs at a furious rate. Some alright. Some atrocious. But with Rob Wellington joining the band and changing the name to the Fiction and also bringing his own songs in I was working harder and harder to get that punk sound.  And to get more of my songs in the set. We rehearsed above his Dad's factory in Nunawading. Great place. It had carpet and clean toilets.  We recorded one cassette there. Which is still a great little reminder.
One of the songs I brought to the band was called "Robot Love" Rob thought it was great. Although he always thought it was a punk style version of Heartache until he actually read the lyrics. He thought it should have been a robot replacing the blow up doll in Roxy's song. I even tried to rejig the lyrivcs to accomadate him but couldn't get it to work. Who's going to make love to a robot?
A few years later Stuart used the song to create a theme song for Bruce Milne's Fast Forward cassette magazine. 30 years later a band called Sputnik Penguin recorded their version and put it up on their MySpace page. The drummer was Vic from the Fiction.
With "Every Dream Home a Heartache" I've seen Roxy Music do it 3 times in concert. It never fails to blow me away. When I first bought the album back in the early seventies I didn't pay the song too much attention. I was into the faster bits. Then I went to Festival Hall in 1975 and heard the song live. And yes it "blew my mind". Just that tense build up and then Kaboom!

483. Between You and Me by Graham Parker 1976

A classic Graham Parker song. From his first album where he was kind of the UKs future of rock. That is until Elvis Costello came along and stole his thunder. Oh and the punk thing too. So Graham Parker gets lumped in with the pub rock bands. Not that there's anything wrong with that at all. Just at the time we were all a bit excited with the Pistols and the Clash.
Still he seemed to do alright after that first flush of punk becoming part of the New Wave...kind of. I saw him down at Kingston Rock in Richmond and was very excited despite me leaning against the wall watching the Sports and trying to look cool. His records were great. And the Sports introduced them to me when they played the first album before they went on one night at Martinis. Long before anyone had heard of him. Big speakers . Cool sound.
Maybe this song didn't hit me that night but when I got the record "Howlin Wind", Between Me and You became a particular favourite. I suppose when you're young you go through a lot of break ups. You fall in love every other week. Sometimes they last a bit longer. And eventually it falls apart. And then there's just the bits and peices of shared memory. And it's all quite dramatic.
But it's not just that which gets me about this song. There's a moment at about 1:18 where his voice seems to stumble. Quite emotional. Gets me every time.

482. Feel Good Inc. by Gorillaz 2005

I had my music on random play the other day and this song came on and instantly took me to the night my son Remi was born. Like all the kids in my family he waited until the early hours of the morning to say hello. So I spent my time holding Liz's hand or getting coffee from the small waiting room with it's small box of Nescafe. They were playing videos on the television but it wasn't Rage. I don't know what it was. Some short lived video show late at night. At one stage I walked in and "windmill, windmill" seemed to float through the room. Fantastic chorus and Damon Alban from Blur. I'm half asleep watching these windmills float across the screen. I walk back and Remi is about to make his entrance.
The idea behind Gorillaz was fantastic. In the early 90's I was trying to convince people that we should form a cartoon band. Release my songs like that. No need to go on the road or identify players or anything. Just like the Archies. Even the style that eventually was used due to Jamie Hewlett being the artist was close to what I would have liked. I was a big Tank Girl fan. I bought the comics regularly. When I went to London in 91 I went down to their base of operations and bought t-shirts and badges and said hello. It was long bus ride into the furthest reaches of London. I wanted to tell them but I didn't know if I should that we were using Tank Girl to promote the Lizard lounge. She was part of the Logo that appeared in ads and on the front wall and the dancefloor...well..everywhere. I didn't know if they'd be impressed or I would be in trouble. In retrospect I should have said something.

481. Mary Mary by the Monkees 1968

Here's another song Little Murders used to cover back in the day. And like Monterey by the Animals, it's basically a two-chord song. And this basically makes it the third Monkees song we covered. A little while ago there was a radio special on the Little Murders and one of the DJs noted that we covered a lot of Monkees songs to which I protested strongly. Well, I guess I was wrong.
I love the Monkees and never get why they are so underrated. And it all goes back to when it was revealed that they didn't play instruments on their records. And they were the first manufactured band in that they auditioned for a TV show. None of that bothers me. Lots of bands used session musicians.
It's what's on the plastic. The Monkees sound was defined by Micky Dolenz's great voice. And Mike Nesmith wrote some pretty cool songs. Like Mary Mary and Tapioca Tundra and many more.
We learned Mary Mary when we started playing the Continental Hotel in Sorrento once a month. 1982-83. I think. We used to have these regular gigs that happened once a month in far-off places. At the Continental, we played 3 sets. So that was plenty of songs. So we added a few covers. This went down a storm. The place was always packed. The crowd was always hyper. The beer would flow. The end of the night saw the dance floor look like a twister had gone through the room. In between sets, the DJ played great music so no one left the dance floor for over 3 hours. Spirits were definitely high. Because it was a surfer crowd I even wrote a song called Walking On Water. My first surf tune.
After the gig, we'd jump in the Mazda with the broken window and drive back to The Jump Club to see the last band for the night.

480. Monterey by The Animals 1967

Down at the local Op Shop yesterday when I came across this single trapped amongst all it's 12 inch siblings. They actually call the place the Posh Op Shop for some strange reason. Because it's not that posh. Just a lot more stuff. I saw the van for the shop down in Hampton the other day so maybe they collect their goods from Brighton and Hampton if they can actually be termed Posh suburbs anymore.
Anyway I bought the single for 50 cents took it home and washed it and it sounded brilliant. It's another song that takes me back to Fulton road Blackburn South where my brother had a record player sitting between our single beds. Sunday mornings waking up to the crisp sounds of vinyl crackling in my ear. This was always one of my favourites though I always thought it came in two parts. Monterey into San Franciscan Nights. Because that's how I always heard them. Together.
It's always one of those songs I've tried a few times to rewrite myself. I just like the repetition of those two chords. Similar to the Byrds "Rock and Roll Star" and The Shoes  "Tomorrow Night"
I used to get a kick listening to the references to other sixties icons. Prince Jones moving amongst the crowd. The Who. Hendrix. Ten thousand electric guitars indeed. I kind of used that in one of my songs.  And I haven't even mentioned the great rhythm section that powers this beast. Brilliant.

479. 7 Heures du Matin by Jacqueline Taleb 1967

Ever since I tried to sort out my records in the garage over a year ago and found that quite a few were missing I've been busy scouring Record Fairs looking to replace albums that had disappeared. Now I've just got into the habit of vinyl shopping so when markets appear on the calendar I'm there. At first I walked slowly round sifting through the records and not engaging with the sellers. Now it's a time to catch up and talk music. And I've moved away from albums and I'm looking for brilliant 45s. Last market I was at I ran into Paul Elliot whose Polyester Records released 100 Drugs by my band. Also ran into Bruce Milne who owned AuGoGo Records which released our early singles and first album.
Asking after his wife Adele he informed me she was now playing bass in a French sixties pop YeYe band called Le Minijupes. Which got him on to raving about a song referencing Paul McCartney coming over to help with some teenage girls homework.
Intrigued when I got home I googled the bits of info he gave me and found it to be "7 Heures Du Martin" by Jacqueline Taeib. A song I loved already. The bit I would refer to though is her "talking bout My G-g-g-g-generation" So I started playing this song again. Every now and then I go through a French Pop phase so I moved onto France Gall and Bridgette Bardotte and Francoise Hardy. Compiling a playlist on iTunes and running it through Apple TV the house was filled with French pop. Until the family can't take any more and plead for some English words. I should have played the English version of this I guess.

478.On and On by the Longpigs 1997

There's a scene at the end of "Face" the 1997 UK gangster movie where Robert Carlisle realizes everything has gone to hell. This song is playing. Damon Albarn has a bit part in the film which is appropriate because this was the winding down of Britpop and Oasis were stomping all over Blur. Longpigs were kind of Britpop with a foot in the Radiohead door. With a few classic songs.
Good enough for me to not only buy the album but when they came out to Australia I bought tickets to the show. Mind you it was at the Mount Evelyn Hotel in Brunswick Street Fitzroy. Basically the same size venues Little Murders are used to. We've even played there many years ago. A few months before we'd seen Muse supporting Ash there. If I had known how big Muse would get I would have taken more notice and not spent so much time at the bar.
Same thing with U2 back in 1979 when they were supporting the Dolly Mixtures. I wrote a live review for a Mod Magazine and that one and didn't even mention U2 who I though were a bit of a throwback to pub rock bands that punk had got rid of.
Anyway Longpigs played this small venue with a good crowd and a good sound. The guitarist Richard Hawley was brilliant but I couldn't get over him having a moustache. Always been offended by musicians with moustaches. I got to meet Tim Rogers for the first time so I'm guessing I was with Poz because I don't know of anyone else who would have introduced me. He was big at the time with You Am I having number 1 after number 1 album.
I have a mental image of the gig. But when I hear this song I see Robert Carlisle in a road side restaurant watching everything slip through his hands.

477. She Loves You by The Beatles 1963

I was only six years old when this came out but it sticks in my mind because of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Maybe one of the strongest hooks in modern music. I mean we were all singing along. Before this I think my favourite songs were Little White Bull by Tommy Steele or down the scout hall singing Onward Christian Soldiers. After this I was pop mad. Not that I got to see much of it. I mean it still wasn't up there with playing soldiers or reading my Beano comic. But it was good place to start.
and living in Blackpool there was music going all the time. Bingo Halls and amusement arcades banging out the treble sounds of the hit parade. All from the glorious North which had taken over the charts with the advent of The Beatles. And they were always in town playing the Piers or the Wintergarden.
No wonder I was so sad when we left in 1965 to move to Australia. Little did I know that I was leaving the epicentre of Pop culture. Okay it wasn't London or New York. But to me Blackpool seemed so exciting and glamorous and I couldn't wait to get back. In reality it was a bit like Coronation Street with fairy lights. But I still love the place. I think it's the tower that does it.
I've the this song so many times I thought I might not be able to listen to it again. But I put on the record . In Mono of course. And it sounded fantastic! All rush and go. A band on the rise.