Voit 465 playing at the Darling Harbour express way building site in the late 1970s

Kangaroos, blow flies, koalas… if you want to discover an Australia that is beyond the tourism clichés, information can usually can be found on the edges, like in the libraries, the internet and on the radio.

This site features many posts that explore music. Music is a vital part of our studio environment, as well as being a constant source of inspiration. Our music play list tries to diverse, alternative, trashy, odd, seminal, kooky and noisy at all time – from Terry Riley, John Cage, Ian Dury, Warsaw, The Faces, Eddy Current, Townes Van Zandt to the Runaways. Any insights into the making and dreaming up of music is a constant source of ideas and inspiration.

It is a rare and real treat to encounter radio documentaries that explore the lesser known, yet highly revered corners of the Australian creativity. Do that Dance, is a two part radio documentary that explores that music that rose out of the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne from 1977 to 1983.

Pel Mel live

Surry Hills venue Side FX in action

Do That Dance – part 01 uncovered the Sydney scene and players. It inspiring 54 minutes highlighted a vital and exciting creative scene living, making and playing music post the Punk era. Inner Sydney at the time was a hub for a raft of new sounds with act the include The Severed Heads, Voit 465, Pel Mel, Tame O’Meares, Systematics to name a few.

The next installment is – Do That Dance – part 02 exploring the Melbourne scene and players. 2.30pm Sunday 25 July 2010, Radio National AM 631, in Melbourne or visit the ABC Radio National Hindsight website here for podcasts and details

Do That Dance
Australian Post Punk, Sydney and Melbourne 1977-1983.

visit the ABC Radio National Hindsight website here

Photography courtesy of the Hindsight gallery: Peter Nelson, Annette Jones, Janis Lesinskis, Anne Maree Rourke, Paul Doogood, Kate Buck and David Chesworth.

All credit to the production team at the ABC:
Presenter – Michelle Rayner, Producer – Sean O’Brien, Story Researcher and Producer – Sean O’Brien, Sound Engineer – Steven Tilley

The remarkable thing that often accompanies a film clip is not the music. It is late again and one is writing a letter for Dean, and Rage is playing in the background. A couple of clips are played that that have fantastic backdrops, not for their technical detail, it is where they are filmed. ( one has to mention that Alice Cooper is now on the waves, with his ballad about woman and bleeding, bathed in red, of course )

Saturday Night by Australian Pop Rock outfit Cold Chisel is one of the bands last big singles before they parted ways released in 1984. The song has that book end quality about it with its confident sentimental tones. The clip has that relaxed, the party is over feel, as Ian Moss and Jimmy Barnes cruise through a Saturday night in Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross, and Oxford Street, Darlinghurst.

Having once lived in the Kings Cross neighborhood for several years in the 1990s, recent visits to the area after long spells has reminded one that this area has seen dramatic changes. In the back ground of this film clip reveals a part of vibrant street that is all but gone. Darlinghurst Road once had a buzzing retail strip that shared the strip clubs, porn shop and bars, with video game arcades, newsagents, a variety of food outlets, clothing stores, souvenirs stores, film processors, pharmacies and a large variety store. What happened in ten years? As the rents went up, the area got maybe to dangerous for local shoppers, or maybe a bigger shopping mall open up down the road, so departed the little guys that juxtaposed the seedy side of the Cross.

It is also worth mentioning the Oxford Street footage, shot during the Autumn Mardi Gras parade in 1984. At a time when people stood on Oxford Street itself and watched the parade pass through the centre lanes of a four lane street, rather than today where hundreds of thousands people line the footpaths from any vantage point, at least thirty people deep, and the parade itself is covered by a national television network and sponsored by a national retail bank.

In ACDC’s long way to the top clip the little city of melbourne has truly grown up in 40 years, got a lot taller, darker and slicker – and one hasn’t commented about the haircuts yet.

Robert Allen Palmer (19 January 1949 – 26 September 2003), born in Batley, Yorkshire, was an English singer-songwriter, in some circles he was known as the best dressed man in rock and roll. He was also known for his distinctive voice and the eclectic mix of musical styles on his albums, combining soul, jazz, rock, pop and blues. Palmer’s career started in 1964 and came to an abrupt end in 2003, he was a keen cigarette smoker.

To make the point we have contrasted – Andy Fraser’s – Every Kind of People from album Double Fun, with Gary Numan’s – I dream of Wires, on Numan produced album Clues.

As fore mentioned in clip two – I love The Smiths I think they are brilliant.

“The Headmaster Ritual” is the lead track off “Meat Is Murder”, the second studio album by the British alternative rock band The Smiths. The dual between Johnny Marr’s guitar and Andy Rourke’s bass on this song is a compelling rift, which resonates brilliantly from original to subsequent covers.

Malcolm McLaren’s Madame Butterfly was released in 1984. It was tune that stood out from the mash of new romantic and the emerging hip hop sounds. Madame Butterfly was one of those tracks that either saw in, or said farewell to a big night out, it is a perfect music moment when played very loud on an empty dance floor.

Malcolm Mclaren – Buffalo gals

On Thursday Malcolm Mclaren passed away. The media is awash with tributes from far and wide which piece together the cultural space he developed and operated within which influenced major movements music, fashion, art and the community across the world.

Tony Parsons wrote in the UK’s Mirror a quote that says much of Mclaren’s way – He wasn’t really into music. He was into chaos. And tweaking the establishment’s nose until it squealed.

Read Malcolm Mclaren tributes here.

Australia’s Radio National will be replaying an interview with Mclaren on Andy Ford’s The Music Show today
For the Mclaren podcast visit The Music Show here

One should find better things to write, or listen, or moan on endlessly about other than graphic communication and its folly.

We could muse over a wonderful piece of architecture using timber and glass in the middle of land locked site in London, or the joys of some type design from some boys from Brighton UK born around 1985, or the idea of an uplifting landscape that may offer some utopic moment amid a busy day.

Then there is Ian Dury and the Blockheads and their masterpiece “Hit me with your rhythm stick”. After ten back to back replays – one thinks that what makes this tune hum, or jump off the record player? Is it the tune’s chattering, hap hazard and chaotic piano line, the frantic bass along with lead guitar and screaming double sax elixir, bathed in the drone of what is Dury’s quite unremarkable voice? No of course not, it is the third verse you idiot.

Sleeve design by Barney Bubbles

It seems no coincidence that one of graphic design’s most enduring lights – Barny Bubbles also happened to create a tasty record sleeve to complement a tune with matching allure. There is a design project of some variation hidden in its 3 minutes and 40 seconds somewhere, maybe in honour of the punk era’s forgotten souls – Bubbles certainly found something to design about. Just make sure your ears are well protect in-between irrational bursts of speaker volume.

Pink, green, black and white forms are amassed into another one of bubble’s famous puzzles. The green form is possibly a plan or print revealing the meaning of the random black white shapes. On the other hand, with a little imagination, the black and white shape look like a block head character welding a rhythm stick. Like Dury, Bubble’s approach to graphics is a unique expression that blurred art and commercial graphics. The crude reproduction tools available in 1978, as compared to today’s technologies, had little effect upon the end product, one would argue that Bubbles made it work to the piece’s advantage.

Vale Ian and Barney.

Happy Birthday Marco – fantastic.

Read more about Barney and Ian here

For years now email inboxes have been bombarded with suggestive writing, pictures of blue and yellow pills and saucy images. In the last week a new crunchy image with foul colours and naive renders have appeared in emails to tempt the masses with the joys of new function. The new yuck aesthetic takes Viagra marketing into a look that alt pop icon Beck, or indie dance act Boredoms would commission for their latest music release.

Midnite Vultures – Beck, art by EYE

Midnite Vultures – Beck, art by EYE

Super Roots 9 – Boredoms, art by EYE

You Aint by Luke Matthews

Melbourne based design and image maker Luke Matthews also has a wonderful grasp of the land of good yuck. Luke’s extraordinary images push the bounds of colour, image, and type to create fused images that look like they have gone through the crunchy jpg filter, to be then rained on and left in the sun for a few days.

Check out Luke’s work here.

This post came together over a chance reminder of the London House single ‘Roadblock’ by Stock Aitken Waterman – SAW. It was single that at the time, came and went again, as much new music does, yet one reckons it to be one SAW’s standout contributions to music if compared the rest of their prolific yet unremarkable output.

Stock Aitken Waterman, sometimes known as SAW, is one of prolific hit factories of the mid 1980s to early 1990s, from wiki – are considered to be one of the most successful songwriting and producing partnerships of all time, scoring more than 100 UK top 40 hits, selling 40 million records and earning an alleged £60 million (about $103.78 million) with their music style was labeled “Eurobeat” in Europe with acts that include Dead or Alive, Mel & Kim, Bananaramma, Rick Asterly and Kylie Minogue.

Way back at the beginnings of the last big financial crisis in September 1987 came a sound that was truly like no other. House was a sound from the warehouse club scene in Chicago in the early eighties. Driven by DJ’s this mostly electronic sound mashed hip hop raps, electronic glimpses, soul and funk samples and electronic the signature four to the floor beat.

Roadblock also happened to be at the centre of an ugly sampling legal case with London House project MARRS and their hit ‘Pump up the volume’. ‘Pump up the volume’ features over 200 samples, one being a seven second sound grab from ‘Roadblock’. The whole legal case for sound sampling in music was still being defined by artists and the legal system. At the time of release, MARRS failed to seek a sample clearance from SAW during production, and as a consequence the idea of intellectual property and authorship were hotly debated.

It was an eye and ear opening time to be immersed in music. The whole experience was being assaulted from all quarters. Rap, sampling, video art, large scale dance parties, live performance, lighting effects, along with DJs and multiple DJs transformed the concept of a live music performance.

Roadblock hit the sound waves from nowhere. Like all of the house sound, this single was not common place on the radio, more over in the night clubs and dance parties.

While some quarters were rightly lost in the sounds of Manchesters’s New Order, one’s attention was drawn to the tastes of Tim Richie, (once a DJ at Club Kakadu on Sydney’s Oxford Street in the late eighties, now presenter on the ABC’s Radio National). Hip Hop, House, and Techno was a regular fix on Richie’s decks and Roadblock could have been proceeded by ‘Paid in Full’ by Eric B and Rakim and followed up ‘Theme from S’express’ by S’express, or ‘Good Life’ by Inner City later in the set.

We dug up ‘Your Love’ by Jamie Principle is one of the earliest examples of the Chicago born House style of music. It is at this point, that we also have to pay homage to producer Giorgio Moroder, as well to groups like Kraftwerk, who developed an electronic sound that was alluring to wandering ears.

Read more about House hear

The temptation with sweet noisy music is to find that stuff that we are familiar with, yet it is a long ways from when it was new. The essence of sweet noisy music is about the listening stuff that at times can grate on the ears and tastes.

Swordfishtrombone image by Michael Russ

Image credits: Artwork By [Album Cover Concept & Design] – Michael Russ , Tom Waits /Artwork By [Art Director] – Frank Mulvey / Artwork By [Photo Illustration] – Michael Russ

Mr Tom Waits is one of contemporary music’s most wayward, and curious contributors who also happens to be one of the studio’s favourite musical romps.

‘Halloween orange and Chimney Red’ is a something we like to bring to our work as regularly as possible. And to hear and see a young Waits tell and sing things how they are in his world is an absolute treat, enjoy.

Waits’ acting is a treat too. In Bram Strokers Dracula, featuring Gary Oldman, Waits was a wonderful cameo that stole the show. He also hit a similar note in Altman’s – Short Cuts, as a down and old limo driver with waitress Lilly Tomlin.

Read about Tom Waits here

The prominence of contemporary branding makes it present in every part of modern life. French act Justice with their tune DNVO have exploited this idea in this film clip. The group has developed a music clip which turns the mirror on society using the brands that they serve.