Hello! I have been thinking about this…
So. When Cam and I met… it was 17 years ago.. and a bit more. Wowee. I know. It’s totally a long time, right?! I was just today reminded of some of the music we listened to when we first met. I think the combination of an upcoming tribute show on my favourite radio station and the death of Model’s James Freud have conspired to make me nostalgic and remembery.
Do you have music like that? I guess for some people it is their Wedding Music, but Cam and I are not married.. so this is more about the music we listened to when we were first hanging out. Going on long drives down the coast, heading out to Country Shows and on op-shop runs, that kind of thing. We listened to heaps of very diverse stuff. I was a big fan of music mags and was always chasing new releases. Cam was into Suicide and Neil Young and Lou Reed. We had fresh import CDs at my flat and 80s records at Cam’s place and then warped tapes in the car (the ones you had to tap on the dash before you played them so they wouldn’t distort). The stuff I remember most is:
Hunters and Collectors : Talking To A Stranger
Underground Lovers (Losing It, Your Eyes and Beautiful World mostly) and
Underworld ‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman‘
Massive Attack ‘Protection’
I can still listen to most of this stuff and be transported to another time and place. It’s totally like some kind of musical day-spa-slash-time-machine. Magic. Boom. Ahh. There we go. Totally Doctor Who meets Michael J Fox with a bit of doof-doof-twang thrown in for good measure.
Mostly I remember driving along the beach down to the mussel farm at Beaumaris in Cam’s old blue Valiant and chugging back home to make mussel soup. Yum. There was always heaps of crusty bread to dip in the soup and the windows were wide open. Cam lived in a huge Victorian mansion (just on the top floor) and it had views from it’s moth-eaten velvet-draped windows right across the Eastern suburbs. Sometimes we put the mussels on the balcony BBQ until they popped open and tasted smoky and delicious and ate them with spicy sauce. The house was triple-fronted, and you had to climb out a big, heavy propped open window to get onto the balcony. I remember I was always a bit scared the window would come down and chop me in half like a Magician’s assistant. Eeek. And this was the music we listened to.
Do you have tracks like this which remind you of early days and new beginnings and fun times? Do you have those kind of memories of when your music and their music became your collective soundtrack?
xx Pip