:: My Childhood In Music…

You might know that I have been listening to Desert Island Discs a lot.  It got me thinking about the place of music in my life, especially when I was growing up.  Our house was always full of music, and still is, and I think that some songs or voices can totally transport you back to a different time and place in the life of you.  Do you think that?  I do.  I wanted to trip back a bit, to a less grown up time and see which tracks and rock gods stood out.  These are the ones that popped into my head without having to even think about it.  These are the old favourites…  (Please note : you might need to click over to see the embedded tracks and hear the songs!)

In our house, our very favourite band was The Beatles.  My mum had lots of their records and I used to stare at Paul McCartney and wonder just what he saw in Linda and how on earth he was going to marry me when I grew up if he was betrothed to a blonde vegetarian lady. Oh Paul.  We knew all their songs and sung them in the recorded order like one very long song with teensy breaks in it.  Did you do that too?  Learn the lyrics and order of songs on a tape or record so very off-by-heart that they morphed into one super track?!

As a little girl, living in an awesome 70s catastrophe of a house in Tasmania, one of the very first cassettes I was ever give was by Abba. I loved this song, I loved the sing-a-long chorus, I loved the Frida warble, I loved the faux starry night, I loved the campside Swedishness of it all. I even have a Fernando dress, now, as an adult. I did not have a Fernando dress THEN…  I was most likely wearing embroidered jeans with patent red clogs and a cheesecloth top.  And buck teeth. VERY significant buckteeth to match my crooked fringe and lopsided pigtails.  I played this tape on my brother’s hi-fi set-up. It was one of those spacey round ones and I was REALLY completely jealous of it.

Our extended family had a couple of shacks just out of Hobart, on a hill overlooking a little bay at Tinderbox. (Such a lovely name, I often wished I loved the STORY of The Tinderbox as much as the PLACE, but the PLACE had so much meaning it was unbeatable!)  When we stayed in the first shack my Mum would play this band SUPER LOUD.  Sometimes you could even hear it on the beach below. Go Mum! Probably she was wearing a kaftan and drinking Pimms at the time. She was hip like that.

Not to be outdone, my Dad would probably follow it up by playing this…

And Mum really did love these guys too.  I did not love them then, but I really do now.  I did not trust their writhey big-lippedness then.  I was a bit embarrassed by their whole shtick.  But NOW, I totally get them and I think they are rad… Probably I would prefer them not to writhe about too much now, as they are getting on a bit.  But they can do their retro wiggling about as much as they like…

We moved from Hobart to Port Hedland when I was nine years old. Yikes. From one side of the country to the other. Gosh. I guess that might seem like HELL to you, but do you know what? I settled in really quickly and I loved the five years we had in the heat and the dust. There was only one high school and the community was close knit. It was all pool parties and socials and roller skating and trail riding. My best friend Yvonne and I used to live at each other’s homes, watching videos, trying on jeans that were much too tight, writing in journals, looking for shorter shorts and above all, trying to transcribe the lyrics to every song we saw on Countdown. This song was the HARDEST. I still remember stopping and rewinding the tape over and over again (probably with a snippet of Casey Kasem’s voice looping over and over at the beginning)trying to work out what the HECK these guys were saying.

If there was one eighties pop star who I REALLY IN MY HEART OF HEARTS wanted to be, it was Madonna. (Only the early years Madonna, though, not the later bits-flashing Madonna.) We left Port Hedland when I was 14, after gathering enough red dust and spinifex to last a lifetime and moved to Canberra. It seemed like the big smoke to me. There were shopping malls. There were discotheques.  There was Sportsgirl. OMG.  Ever crafty,  I made my own Madonna outfits with the help of Make-It-Easy magazine, Mum’s trusty Singer and LOTS of jersey fabric. It was all about the zig-zag stitch and there followed leggings,  off the shoulder tops, scoop-side shorts AND TUBE SKIRTS. SO SO SO many tube skirts it is not funny. 262 bracelets, 4 Mickey Mouse watches, diamante earrings and pearl necklaces were de rigeur. Lace fingerless gloves, denim vests, white lace up boots. So GOOD!  Madonna was so great back then. She even had a boyfriend called Jellybean. Sigh.  I think we need the full clip of this one…

And finally, we need a bit of Kate.  Kate made me wide eyed with what.  I did not understand what she was all about, but combining eccentric dancing, rad outfits, classic literature and a who gives a toss attitude seemed like a good idea to me.  Kate made me realise that who you are is perfectly great enough.