Music is my Radar: Blur - 2000 12" Single

 

EU Pressing, 2000.

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For those of us who were into pop-rock in the 1990’s Blur really did seem like our generation’s Beatles. They wrote smart well arranged melodic music that was both artistically on the money and also popular. They had a distinct artistic arc during which they became both more experimental and more mature. Music is my Radar was the pinnacle of that process, a stand-alone single that ended up on their best of album released in the same year.

Music is my Radar is a metronomic funked out road-trip through rhythmic excess, ending in an unfurling guitar fuzz freakout. As great as this track is it is the B-side, Black Book, that really does it for me, it’s one of those songs that is both uplifting and melancholic. When I bought this single from Dada Records in the year it was released I was going through one of those dark night of the soul periods. My father died in the same month as its release (October) after years of illness and during the period I had to deal both with his death and its aftermath this single was the first thing I played when I got home and then again once at least half the bottle of wine had gone. It helped get me through and I now realise that for me never has a song been so aptly named.

At War With the Mystics: The Flaming Lips - 2006

USA Pressing, 2006.

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The Flaming Lips are one of the great band of freaks and I love them for it. However when this album came out in 2006 the feeling was that they were kind of careering into the realm of overfamiliarity after the ubiquity of the brilliant albums The Soft Bulletin (1999) and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002). At the time I thought that At War With the Mystics was merely a pretty solid album that my Rasta friend and I certainly enjoyed when in the mood. However recent listens have convinced me that it’s really a great album and it’s more overtly cultural/political moments are fit for our extreme times, perhaps more so than during the Bush era (not the band, hahaha etc…). Trump even gets a mention  - “Oh no no your’e turning into a poor man’s Donald Trump, I know these circumstances make you wanna jump…”. But it’s the beautiful, proggy Floyd-like psychedelia on this album that really holds up today, songs like Vein of Stars, My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion and Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung absolutely pulse through the body when played loud through a late 70’s Kenwood amp. 

This pressing, a double, with one blue and one red, was bought in the year of its release from Dada Records for $48, which was quite expensive at the time. But as usual, some 14 years later I’m not thinking that I wish I had that money, but instead thank fuck I have this awesome record!

Song For My Lady: McCoy Tyner - 1973

 

USA Pressing, 1973

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I bought this album only recently for $20 from Moogy’s Mobile Record Store. Moogy is Kim Williams, who co-wrote The Scientist’s song Swampland with Kim Salmon, among other claims to fame. McCoy Tyner is my favourite jazz pianist and as everyone should know prior to his solo career he played in John Coltrane’s great mid sixties band. Basically Tyner’s solo career was one amazing album after another and Song For My Lady is a perfect example of his vibrant, fluid style of playing. His compositions are superb too.

The amazing thing about this album is that when I got it home I realised that it was still sealed in shrink-wrap! Whomever owned it had never played it and therefore I assume that I’m only the second owner in 47 years! I opened it to reveal both a pristine pressing and some 47 year old dust, probably skin flakes from the guys who processed it! It was a cut-out so perhaps the original owner was enticed by its cheapness, but never got around to playing it. Of course I did, and it is superb.

White Love: One Dove - 1993 12" Single

 

English Pressing, 1993. 

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One Dove’s White Love is one of those blissfully exultant songs that evokes that weird feeling of nostalgia for nothing in particular, even from the first time you hear it. I first heard this song in a North Perth share house in 1993. One of my house-mates had bought the CD single that featured four versions of the song. He played it to death as he lounged on his bed at the back of the house. He was a louche character and in a short period of time I started to refer to him as ‘The Lizard Man’, mainly due to his cold-blooded attitude toward women, whom he regarded primarily as a means to an end. His face was hawk-like, his skin slack and ruddy from beer, yet he managed to bed a number of women whilst variations of this song barely covered up the noise of their exertions.

Fast forward to 2004 and I stumbled across this copy at Dada Records for a measly $5. It features the ‘radio mix’, the ‘meet the professionals mix’ and a ‘guitar paradise mix’, all executed by that autodidact genius of sound, Andrew Weatherall. Unfortunately it doesn’t feature the ‘lonesome demo’ version from the Lizard Man’s CD version. None-the-less this is a brilliant 12” single and a perfect example of some of what was going on in music in Britain in the early 1990’s.

20 Mothers: Julian Cope - 1995

 

English Pressing, 1995.

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Right at the end of the 1990s I fell hard for the likes of Julian Cope. I was at a good friend of mine's house (Andrew Lindsay), and he put on Cope’s band The Teardrop Explodes album Kilimanjaro (1980) and it was one of those moments when you totally connect with the music. I had to have more and what followed was one of those obsessive periods in which you buy whatever you can get your hands on. Luckily in the late 1990's barely anyone was buying vinyl; in fact it was around 2000 that sales of vinyl dropped to their lowest point before a slow upswing began, leading to the vinyl revival of the 2010s. So when I stepped into Dada records in the heart of Perth there were many Cope records just sitting there from when they were released. I think the owner cottoned on and one day in 2000 20 Mothers appeared in the racks and it was mine.

It's a beautiful pressing - swirling purple vinyl, paper inner sleeves and a gatefold housing both discs that features Cope gurning along with dozens of women with their partners and kids, no doubt they were all from near where he was living. The cover features Cope's wife, Dorian (front right in black) and his mother-in -law (to the right of Dorian). The music is a typical blend of whacked-out psych-pop, mad ditties and space rock; when you have tracks like Greedhead Detector, Just Like Pooh Bear and Don't Take Roots there's no resisting. Julian Cope is every psychonaut's musical spirit guide. As it says on the record label - 'Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.’

Songs from the Broadway Production of The Catherine Wheel: David Byrne - 1981

USA Pressing, 1981. 

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From my early teens in the 1980s I was enamoured with Talking Heads, so when I saw a copy of this album in a friend’s collection I taped it and listened to it regularly for years until I bought it on CD sometime in the 1990s. This particular vinyl copy was purchased from Midland Records in 2019 and is in beautiful condition. I wonder how much it was played before I got my hands on it? Not much I’d say. It’s not difficult listening by any means, featuring some beautiful atmospheric and ambient instrumentals with evocative names such as Light Bath and Cloud Chamber. The vocal tracks are as close to the sound of Talking Heads that Byrne got in his solo career. The strangely emotional What a Day That Was could have been a hit single, well, if the buying public was populated by reserved nerdy types who liked their intellectual pop music. 

The Catherine Wheel features both Brian Eno and Adrian Belew, among others, such as Jerry Harrison and Funkadelic’s Bernie Worrell. Belew plays ‘steel drum guitar’ and ‘floating guitars’, of course, and Eno plays ‘prophet scream’ and just the plain old bass guitar. God knows what Twyla Tharp’s dance production was like, fairly avant-guard by the look of the pictures on the sleeve, but the music is beautiful, funky, ambient and psychedelic in parts - great drug music basically, or great laying in bed music with soft lights glowing. It’s also great music to play friends who love obscurely pretentious albums that are actually really fucking amazing.

16 Lovers Lane: The Go-Betweens - 1988

Australian Pressing, 1988.
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Like pretty much everyone else, unfortunately for the band, I liked The Go-Betweens in the 1980s, but never bought their records. I have a reasonably good excuse however, I was a poor teenager with not much jangling around in my pockets to buy that many records. I didn’t really connect with them in a serious way again until 2015 when I bought G Stands for Go-Betweens: Vol.1, a box set of their first three albums plus EPs and rarities. How I fell for them, swooning into their literary pop-rock pretense. 16 Lovers Lane is one of their greatest achievements and one of the great melodic pop-rock albums, period. It contains two of my favourite Go-Betweens songs, Grant McLennan’s confessional Quiet Heart (which is also my partner’s favourite song of theirs) and Robert Forster’s plaintive Dive for Your Memory. I was always a sucker for melancholy.

I’m pretty sure that I bought this second hand album in Melbourne from Dixon’s Recycled Records in Fitzroy, from the look of the price sticker, maybe in the early 2000s. Every record stores’ price sticker is like a finger-print. You’ll notice that the majority of my records have the price sticker on the inside of the record sleeve, as a permanent reminder of how much I paid for it and where I bought it from, which is all part of the history of that record.

Far Away Trains Passing By: Ulrich Schnauss - 2001

European Pressing, 2020.
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I first heard this album around the time it was released in 2001, courtesy of a friend who had a hard to get vinyl copy. God knows how many were pressed up back then when only nostalgia addled geezers like me and the electronic music/DJ community were keeping vinyl going - barely any I’d say. I loved the yearning, sun dappled down-beat flow of this record so much I went to the trouble of actually getting it burned from the vinyl directly onto a CD. Over the years whenever I played the CD I wished I had a copy on vinyl. Literally earlier today, at Diabolik Records, I had one of those cherished moments in a record store when you spy that certain album and you feel an up-swell of joy knowing that it is finally yours. Remastered and pressed up beautifully, this version of Far Away Trains Passing By contains nine bonus tracks, worth every cent of the indulgent $80 price tag.

This album evokes such a sense of tender melancholy within me; whenever played, including today, it always reminds me of that special feeling of being alone, late at night and cocooned in the house with nothing demanding your attention and no one to bother you, just a gentle drift into the soft night. Beautiful...

Remote Luxury: The Church - 1984

Australian Pressing, 1984.
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The Church are one of Australia’s greatest bands and also one of my favourite bands of all time. EPs really came into their own in the 1980s and The Church released a fair few; Remote Luxury is quality work, despite it containing Maybe These Boys... a very obvious stab on the part of Steve Kilbey at writing a commercial song, one that he would go on to dismiss vehemently as the years went by. Predictably, however, I fucking love it. I also love EPs as they represent a perfect snapshot of the true nature of a band, allowing the release of some songs that might not quite fit thematically onto an album; songs that display another side to the band, or that have been born oddly shaped, but need to be loved non-the-less. Often they contain unheralded gems, in this case A Month of Sundays, a truly great song relegated as the fourth track and that would have had little impact beyond the year the EP was released if it hadn’t been included on Hindsight 1980-1987, a fantastic compilation that emerged in 1988. Best listened to with your Rasta friend, as with most of their releases, and due to its brevity at the beginning of the night, whilst you are still capable of getting up to change the record over - you know what I mean...

Another View: The Velvet Underground - 1986

USA Pressing, 1986.
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The Velvet Underground are my favourite band. My love for them knows no bounds. This album was one of two compilations of previously unreleased recordings released in the mid 1980’s. I came by this particular pressing via a former friend, now deceased (file under drug related misadventure), who had found it in a now forgotten second-hand record store in the heart of Perth somewhere off Hay St and had set it aside for me knowing I’d want it. This would have been 1988.

Another View is another of those albums I’ve played untold hundreds of times whilst curled up with a bottle of red wine, hanging with my Rasta friend or just plain straight; it didn’t matter as it did the business every time despite it being made up of Velvet Underground off-cuts. This album is better than many bands’ official albums. If you are lucky enough to be holding this album right now blast it at high volume and revel in the pure rock ‘n’ roll of We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together, the louche vibe of Hey MR. Rain (both versions!), and the original version of the deathless classic - Rock and Roll. Marvel at the best use of a Monday to Sunday name check (or is that ‘day check’?) in Coney Island Steeplechase, over typically awesome rhythm guitar playing. If you are holding this album now never sell it! The only reason you have this album is because death relinquished my hold on it!

Everything’s Alright Forever: The Boo Radleys - 1992

French Pressing, 1992.
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The Boo Radleys were a true shoegazing band who were signed to the legendary Creation Records before the advent of Oasis, who basically swept everyone else on the label aside in terms of priority. I thrashed this album in the early nineties - I was totally enamored with their pedal driven sky-scraping sound and melodic sensibility. My most significant memory of this album was listening to it again and again one afternoon spent on the front porch of a rental in Mt Hawthorn sitting on a beat-up flower patterned couch with a couple of fellow mushroom-men watching the sunlight dapple and shine on the trees in the front yard. Let me tell you, it was totally appropriate music for such activities.

I bought this record second hand from Bowerbird Records in Highgate. This record store was one of those stores in which everything was a bit skewed toward the unusual. The two guys who ran the store were singular characters. One lurched about, hunched over and suffering from narcolepsy; the other always wore tight brown footy shorts with a tucked in white shirt whilst he examined some horse-racing booklet. They always sat on opposite sides of the counter. Bowerbird’s shtick was to have a permanent 50% off sale, which they’d remind you of every time you entered the place, even though you’d been there many times before. Subsequently the price tag on the inside of the album (I nearly always put the price-tag inside as a record of its cost and provenience) says $15, but I picked it up for $7.50, a bargain!

Please Send Me Someone to Love: Phineas Newborn Jr. - 1969

USA Pressing, 1969.
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This album is very important to me because it the very album that turned me onto jazz in a big way. I had listened to jazz before, Weather Report and Miles Davis mostly, that I had appreciated rather than loved. I found it difficult to connect with, its alienness kept me apart from its vibrant, soulful inner core. Please Send Me Someone to Love was part of the cache of albums given to me by my brother Gordon in the mid nineties. A few years after that one night wrapped up in wine and hanging with my Rasta friend I spied it in a vinyl stack and something inspired me to pull it out. I listened to it multiple times that night, entranced by its rhythms and grace. Suddenly, during one night and with one album, I was ready for jazz. After that for pretty much an entire year all I bought was jazz and almost everything I listened to was jazz. The only rock music I listened to was The Stooges (almost as obsessively).

Phineas Newborn Jr is an obscure character, almost a footnote in jazz history now. His was a tragic tale, with a career that stuttered rather than flowed mostly due to a mental illness that stopped him from recording and touring consistently. That he was once considered a fine jazz pianist is strongly in evidence when you listen to this album, that and the fact that Elvin Jones preformed on the album, who by then had left John Coltrane’s Classic Quintet. If you are holding this album and are not a fan of jazz, just play it / buy it anyway and it could be the beginning of one of your greatest musical adventures. Basically jazz is an endless godhead of amazing music just waiting there for you to discover.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: David Bowie -1972

English Pressing, 1972.
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I first owned this album on cassette, bought shortly after my sister, Satrup, took me to see Bowie at the Perth Entertainment Centre in 1983. This copy, the first I owned on vinyl, after having been gifted the early 1990s Rykodisc CD re-release from a girlfriend which saw me through for a while, came to me via my brother, Gordon, who generously gave me his collection of vinyl in the mid 1990’s. My brother would have been in his twenties during the 1970’s and I’m sure he would have actually bought this particular copy in England.



Bowie was my first major music crush after my pubescent self was blown away by him live on stage. What I didn’t realise was that hearing this album, and many of his others, would cause me to compare other, different, music unfavorably for many years to come. Like many teens before me I listened to this album on headphones, huddled by myself in a corner of the house feeling a connection I couldn’t quite define. This pressing is in superb condition, despite being played many times, particularly in the mid 1990’s after having rediscovered vinyl a year or two before, I would whack it on late at night after sufficient red wine had taken hold. In the throes of a breakup from the first woman that had really fell in love with, this copy of Ziggy Stardust helped to blast away the angst with a combination of typical Bowie melodrama and alien cool. Obviously Ziggy Stardust is one of the greats, but this particular album is imprinted on my soul for very personal reasons.

Closed Groove Archive

Closed Groove has been created to act as an archival reference point for my collection of vinyl records, a collection that will inevitably exist beyond my lifetime, either together or apart. Each record contains an information sheet detailing why I loved that record (or otherwise), what was happening in my life when I connected with that record and also a little of what was happening in the world at the time. If you find one of my records and are now looking at Closed Groove, you can now see what other records I owned and what they meant to me. Perhaps you may want to track them down or you might happen upon more just from crate-digging. 

Vinyl records are a unique way to connect with the past, not only because of the music they contain, but because of who owned and loved them. This blog represents a small part of the global history of the ultimate in physical media, the vinyl record.