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. 

The Sunnyboys

The Sunnyboys were one of the great bands in the 1980s Australian Music boom. A group of surfers from Kingscliff, just south of the Queensland border, moved to Sydney and christened themselves after a brand of triangular ice-block.

They were a fiery, passionate band playing the songs of prodigious songwriter Jeremy Oxley. At 18, Jeremy composed all the songs for the first Sunnyboys LP in 1981, including classics like "Happy Man", "I Can't Talk To You" and "Alone With You". Under duress he wrote all the songs for second LP "Individuals" in 1982 before Jeremy was diagnosed with Schizophrenia.

There is a recent documentary based on Jeremy's struggle called "The Sunnyboy" that was shown on ABC1 on Sunday night. It is a heartbreaking story of a man who was cut down in his prime as a hugely talented musician.



In a sense he was Australia's Syd Barrett - a talent robbed by mental illness (although Syd's was arguably drug induced). Nevertheless, "The Sunnyboy" is a painful fly-on-the-wall look at one man's daily battle and the effects on his family and friends.

If nothing else it should serve as a lesson to legislators to ensure that treatment of mental illness is properly managed and funded. But that's another story...



The Sunnyboys deserve their legacy. Their music is still vital and potent and is worthy of another listen.

Alone with you:

April 2013 Playlist

"Don't ask me why, but time has passed me by...
Someone else moved in from far away..."

Apologies to all the Bee Gees fans out there, but I can't stand their song "First of May" (from which the quote above comes). Nevertheless, the day that provides the namesake title is here and that means it's time to share the monthly playlist with you all.

What you get this month is another 225 tracks of eclectic goodness. Featuring:

• Highlights from new releases by Eric Clapton, Karl Hyde, The Nature Strip, Sons of Rico, The Vaccines, Suede, Vydamo, The Band Perry, Mudhoney and more...
• Classics from La Femme, Bernard Cribbins, Underworld, Neil Young, Joe Jackson, NotSensibles, Family, Stiff Little Fingers, Black Sabbath and more...
• Hidden jewels in the rough by Autograph, Chevy, The Milkshakes, Blow Up Hollywood, Todd Rundgren, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Jimmy Eat World and more...
• Australian classics with Leonardo's Bride, Men At Work, British India, Bodyjar, Redgum, Bob Evans, Dig, GANGgajang, The Drones, The Sports and more...
• Esoterica with Gene Krupa, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jack Dejohnette, Arnold Scoenberg, Derek Bailey and more.

So sit back, set the playlist to Shuffle, kick back and

ENJOY!!!

The Long Forgotten Art of the Mix Tape Pt 2

Around about the year 2000, I was signed up to a e-mailing list (remember those?) for followers of a band I liked at the time.  A member of the mailing list asked for interested people to swap mix tapes with him.  I took the bait and signed on, just to see what would happen.

I sent the first one to this guy.  It was all Australian music - recent stuff on side A, classics on Side B.  He sent one back with an interesting mix but all stuff that was being played on national station Triple J at the time.  I asked a few times for feedback on the first one I sent, and about all I got in return was something like "I've heard most of those songs before.  I really wanna hear some stuff that I've never heard before".

I didn't really get a feel for the kind of music this guy liked.  I really wanted him to give me a clearer indication of whether he liked Side A or Side B of my original tape more, and his tape seemed fairly homogeneous in terms of style and age of music. In general, for the follow up I had very little to go on.

I decided to pick examples of music from the furthest reaches of my collection, where no two songs were alike and the genre would change rapidly from one song to the next without warning.  It was designed to show off the length and breadth of my collection; to give him an example of the direction our compilation conversations could go in.  What you ended up with amounts to something like "The Music Appreciation Lesson From Hell".

Starting with late 1960s funk, we went through 16th Century lute music, surf, Delta Blues, Avant-Jazz, Reggae, Hardcore Punk, Jazz Fusion, African-Funk, Indian Classical, Avant Garde Mouth Music, Prog Rock, Icy Synth explorations, Hick country, 1930s British Pop, Latin Rock and more.

I used a 120 minute cassette.  I recorded all the selections to two Minidiscs (one for each side of the tape), and made the necessary fades, edits and sequence changes on the disks before recording them to tape.  I carefully annotated each song in a letter and sent it off in the post....

...this was the tape that killed the deal.  I never heard back from him.  Either it never reached him, or he listened to it once and freaked out so badly that he would never get in touch again for fear of another insanity-laced sonic barrage.  I've since lost the annotations, but I kept the Mini-discs and later, circa 2005, added bonus tracks and burnt them to CD for my own listening pleasure.

The one thing that we can be sure is that my music collection in 2000 is pretty tame compared to what it is now.  Still, I think it's a pretty impressive feat to make such an eclectic collection and to have it frighten the hell out of people...well, I don't know that for sure, but it sounds good, so I'll stick to it.  I'm sure Henry Rollins would approve.

Here for your appraisal is an online version of that Mix Tape.

Some tracks appear in alternate versions, such as "Survival" by Osibisa, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly and "21st Century Schizoid Man" by King Crimson.  One song that originally appears on the tape "El Cielo" by Sky (The band featuring classical guitarist John Williams and Herbie Flowers) doesn't exist on any of the streaming services that I can find, so I have substituted it for a bonus track that I added to my CD copy "Kreuzspiel for Oboe, Bass Clarinet, Piano and Percussion" by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Enjoy!

100 LPs Shortlist #20: The Mermen - "Food For Other Fish"

Surf music, at least in the way that Dick Dale first envisioned it, is cool. It has since been co-opted and watered down by acts who had a far more tepid approach (The Beach Boys and The Ventures, I'm looking at you!), however the core approach to the music was a fiery, aggressive style of guitar-based instrumental music with some echo-y guitar effects applied.

For some reason, out of the blue, Surf music made a resurgence in the 1990s. Dick Dale made a successful comeback with a more fired up sound on albums like "Tribal Thunder" and "Calling Up Spirits". His playing on those records was more ferocious than a player half his age (he was in his 60s at the time). A number of other bands came along at the same time - The Aqua Velvets and The Mermen are among those that spring to mind.

The Mermen (the male equivalent of a Mermaid, it seems) had been around for a few years by the time "Food For Other Fish" was released in 1994. They had honed their style in and around various clubs in California, refining a sound that is equal parts Dick Dale, Pink Floyd and Sonic Youth.

The longer pieces are spacey and atmospheric a la Floyd, coupled with small amounts of extreme digitally-processed guitar noise a la Sonic Youth. The energy they create on songs like "Honeybomb" is white-hot. "Ocean Beach" and "Be My Noir" are both gorgeously atmospheric. "Ocean Beach" has to be one of the best songs ever to get you pumped up for summer.

If anything should be criticised about the album is that it's a long record - 70+ minutes. However, it doesn't always feel like it's long - it's that enjoyable. As we lead up to Summer here in Oz, kick back and enjoy the sounds of The Mermen.