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!

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.’

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...