Number 10 - At last

Modern Giant - The Band Has Broken Up (2007)

There have been two occasions in my life when I have heard a song on the radio that I thought was so blindingly good I was compelled to ring the station straight away to find out what it was. Funnily enough I can remember making the first of these calls but cannot remember what the song was. Perhaps it wasn't that good. The second time was The Band Has Broken Up. It was being played on FBI and I am sure I can remember where I was: in The Brown driving out of a carpark in Randwick. Perhaps you would make up a more rock'n'roll locale if we were working with fiction but these are the mundane recollections of my life remember.

Not that long ago I would have mounted a very strong argument against the possibility of what is essentially spoken word poetry ever becoming an important part of my musical life but I had never heard of Adam Gibson. Any man that starts a poem with the line "Midnight Oil, The Hummingbirds, The Clash" is going to grab my attention. The fact that it is backed by a great little rock tune, incidentally produced by Simon Holmes of the aforementioned Hummingbirds, doesn't hurt.

I am a sucker for nostalgia and what Gibbo does in this 4 and a half minutes is tell a story familiar to those of us that were in our 20s in Sydney during the 90s. I can recognise the life I did live, of parties in the inner west where "girls were enticing and pale" and lamentations for all the nights spent watching guitars that I should have spent playing them, and also the life I wanted to live, a life where I actually spoke to the girls at those parties and found out what was at the other end of the plane trips that all of my friends went on.

Most of all I wanted to meet a girl at The Hoey and disappear with her into the Burke St night just like Gibbo's character does at the end. Alas that never happened but who cares because I have had the pleasure of disappearing into the Burke St night with Girl O'Sea and that is all I need.

I like editors

Here is a piece that I wrote for one of my subjects this semester. Chris Scanlon, my lecturer, has kindly edited it for me. It flows so much better

The Future Of Newspapers

Not sure if I am comfortable with the "journalist" tag yet but I'll get used to it.

Number 9 - The difficult one

The Lucksmiths - Camera-Shy (2003)

As I feared, this has been the most difficult post to write. I spent two hours last night puzzling over it and working myself into quite a state of frustration. Girl O'Sea was well puzzled by my mood. The problem is that Camera-Shy isn't one of my Top 10 favourite songs of all time. I had chosen it to be representational of The Lucksmiths catalogue but when I went to write about it last night I was lost. It is all jangly guitars and cardigans and I love it for that but something is missing. Part of that something can be found in Great Lengths which evokes in me memories of a girl with whom I was in love but could not be with and all of the tears that flowed. And also in Untidy Towns, the first Luckies song that I heard and how finding their music changed my life in such a pleasurable way. And in The Music Next Door and how the inclusion of Louis and his guitar made a great band even better.

Need I go on? I think you can see where I am going with this. There is no ultimate Lucksmiths song for me but they have been so important to me for so many years that there was no way they were not going to make the list. So please indulge me and consider this to be like those times when an actor gets an Oscar for an OK role but you know it was really recognition for a whole career's work. But it still is a bloody good song.