Newcastle Music #1: Tamam Shud - "Lady Sunshine"

Inspired by my Facebook challenge of posting seven songs in seven days, I have been looking at bands from Newcastle NSW. And why not? The Australian music scene is littered with brief flashes of brilliance with no lasting legacy. It's about time we created one...



Tamam Shud were a surf band originating out of various Newcastle R&B outfits, the most famous of which being the Sunsets, who had released a few singles through Festival Records in the mid-1960s.

These guys were apparently huge within the hippie/surf community along the East Coast in the late 60s (I wasn't born then so I'm only going on heresay)."Lady Sunshine" is taken from the soundtrack of a surf movie called "Evolution" by Paul Witzig. The band's follow up record was the first release on the newly formed Australian subsidiary of Warner Brothers records. Called "Goolutionites and the Real People" and released in 1970, it is now one of the holy grails of record collecting, with mint condition copies now worth the price of a small second hand car.

Probably the band's biggest claim to fame is their contribution to the soundtrack of the legendary surf movie "Morning of the Earth". The band split up not long after, only to reconvene again in 1995 for the LP "Permanent Culture" and in 2003 for the "Long Way To The Top" oldies package tour.