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.’

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.