16 Lovers Lane: The Go-Betweens - 1988

Australian Pressing, 1988.
Earl Collection 00007

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.

Remote Luxury: The Church - 1984

Australian Pressing, 1984.
Earl Collection 00005

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...