Johnno

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Some Top fives and sixes.

Sleepy at the hallowed halls of The Wreckroom tagged me so I suppose I'm it!

I rather enjoyed doing this and culling out the wannabe's. The link finding was a lovely exercise. You may notice some names popping up in more places than once and some names that seem out of place. Aussie readers note I've included some names that are familiar downunder but never really made it offshore.

If you would like to give it a try with some of your own choices please go ahead. I'm not much of a tagger.

A. Top Five Lyrics that Move Your Heart:
  • Decades: Joy Division........ 25 years too early
  • Anything that Thom Yorke from Radiohead comes up with is fine by me in a Generation-X angst ridden way.
  • Power and the Passion: Midnight Oil. Five really, really angry young men have a spit about the apathy in Oz during the early 80's. They were 20 years too late or 20 years too early.
  • Mandela Day: Simple Minds
  • One:U2

B. Top 5 Instrumentals: (samples on links)
  • Drivin South: Jimi Hendrix Experience Radio 1(Now called the BBC Sessions). BLISTERING, done live in two takes.(I'm not sure how they chose this one, both seem equally as good) Jimi goes places you never thought possible. Ginger and Jack keep up admirably.
  • Montok Point: by William Orbit:(Awesome website) Technically not an instrumental as there is a 15 second spoken word section in the middle. Bookended by about 7 minutes of Orbit's Infectious grooves.
  • It's a fast driving rave up with the Dandy Warhols 16 minutes. Again there are lyrics in there somewhere but you don't know what they're saying.
  • Chronologie 1: Jean Michel Jarre. There is no decent part download of the last section which gives me goosebumps.
  • On the Run: Pink Floyd..... David Gilmour did this in one off performance on a VCS3. No overdubs!

C. Top 5 Live Musical Experiences:

  • Mal Eastick: Old time Aussie session muso who could be Stevie Ray Vaughn's clone. Fabulous with a Strat.
  • The Wipeouts: South Australian band from Penola with some killer hooks, riffs and chops. Seen at the Commercial Hotel Mt Gambier in around '86. The band who should of made it but didn't for reasons unknown. Won (make that OWNED) a state battle of the bands in the late '80s.
  • Dandy Warhols Metro Sydney October 5th 1998. Their first Sydney gig. There were about 60 or so punters in an almost empty Metro, when the Dandys flew down for a surprise gig in Sydney from the Livid festival in Brisbane... "just for the hell of it". The crowd went silent as they sung material from their first album (at that stage was an US indie release not available downunder) but seemed to know all the songs from "Come Down" which was getting a bit of airplay on JJJ at the time. EVEN supported and were good enough for a venue for themselves.
  • The Cruel Sea Instrumental gig: Annandale pub early 90's.
  • U2's Under a Blood Red Sky tour 1983 Adelaide: 3000 or so fans packed into the smallish Apollo Basketball stadium to hear a relatively unknown Irish band.

C and a half (I've added this)......Top 5 Live Musical Experiences I kicked myself for missing out on.
  • Tool:
  • Pink Floyd's last gig downunder.
  • Metallica at the Big Day Out 2004
  • Flaming Lips at the same deal as above.
  • Anything by Midnight Oil, they used to NAIL the speakers to the stage.

D. Top Five Six Artists You Think More People Should Listen To:

  • Icehouse This is mainly for the youngun's downunder..... yes the 80's had Cold Chisel but some of us preferred Iva's band. It's refreshing to hear some samples being picked up by younger musos.
  • Galaxie 500 : Boston band with a Kiwi lead singer around at the same time as The Pixies..... Melancholic.
  • Cut Copy Newish Aussie band with a wunderkid writing all the great songs Joy Division, New Order, Kraftwerk and The Human League didn't.
  • Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. The first band to put warmth in Synths. Oh and they MADE their instruments too. I hear their samples EVERYWHERE.
  • Daniel Lanois I like him ever since seeing his documentary some time ago.
  • Tom Heasley: Another new discovery. Ambient music with a tuba, sounds strange on paper but it works.

E. Top Five Six Albums You Must Hear From Start to Finish:
  • Brian Eno: Ambient 4 On Land New discovery still playing it some three weeks later. Brooding.
  • Beatles: Sgt Pepper Buy this album, then buy the rest. Well that's what I did. ......A Day in the Life is worth the album price alone.
  • Midnight Oil: 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 Did I mention how ANGRY these guys were? We're talking in the range from simmering hot under the collar to Peter Garret popping his neck veins out kinda anger here.
  • Hoodoo Gurus: Stoneage Romeos Tripped out surf, kinda punk guitar. There are about ten other songs on this album that you dont hear on MMM, in fact I think MMM picked up on these guys some 4 years after JJJ.
  • New Order: Power Corruption and Lies The song samples at Amazon don't do this album justice
  • Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark: Architecture and Morality As above

F. Top Five Musical Heroes:
  • John Lennon Nuff said I agree with Sleepy on this one.
  • Paul Kelly Another South Australian no longer at home. His song "Adelaide" is sometimes how I feel about the place.
  • David Gilmour I like Gilmour a lot, always have, always will. Dunno why.
  • JJJ Radio station downunder which has in it's own way helped significantly nurture our isolated music scene
  • The Pixies: Turned the bland post poodle rock US scene on it's head and influenced HEAPS of others. Like Jimi they had to go overseas to the UK to be successful.

6 Comments:

  • I have a friend who rates everything in his life on a scale of 1-10. At breakfast, he will hold up his fingers, quasi-olympic, to show the score for the various items. That Brit writer, book and movie about the guy from the record shop, always top 5ving everything. Magazines, "The 100 Best Movies of All Time".

    I can't do it. Flat, I could never make those decisions, and won't even try.

    By Blogger Peter (the other), at 6:05 am  

  • nice work dude, and fast too. took me a whole day to muster this up. . . the hendrix cut is great!
    and peter, you outta see 'high fidelity' w/ john cusack. it may be taken from the brit guy you mention. same premise . . . he even starts a record company called 'top 5' . . .
    great movie if ya love records.

    By Blogger sleepybomb, at 1:08 pm  

  • That's the one sleepy. The book was set in London, and I thought it was about me. But I thought the movie better (set in Chicago) then the book, if only for Jack Black. That is rare.

    By Blogger Peter (the other), at 1:47 pm  

  • I 'spose this kind of fluid, it's the top 5 for me yesterday..... today may be a different story. Not much would be different but then..... along comes another wonderful discovery hidden away for all those years. Plus the list neglects those things I forgot.

    Nevertheless it was fun, mainly for chasing up links and to see "Where are they now?".

    High Fidelity was enjoyable, it described pretty well every second hand record I've seen. Why are so many of them painted black inside? I chased that Beta Band song for weeks after seeing it.

    I still get a kick when record store geek (a la Jack Black) eyes pop out with the utterance, "Wow, nice choice." when me as a plainly dressed almost 40 something takes the cd's to the counter.

    By Blogger Johnno, at 7:39 pm  

  • Oh.... and it took me the best part of a day to compile too.

    By Blogger Johnno, at 8:59 pm  

  • used record stores are painted black inside so ya don't see the dirt!
    these are the places i grew up in. i now have a collection that smokes his in the movie. and now i gotta move all 10k lps of vinyl one more time and that's it!
    oh and the bit about nailing the speakers to the floor is excellent, up there with turning the amps to 11!
    classic.

    By Blogger sleepybomb, at 3:55 am  

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