Vin Maskell St Andrews market, Victoria, May 2012 The bloke with about 30 milk crates of second-hand records was in no hurry. “Five dollars each,” he said. “Or, at this time of day, three for ten.”
Stephen Andrew Central New South Wales, circa 1987 By the time the bus hit the Queensland border, I was a changed man, hearing things in a new way. It was a conversion of sorts, or perhaps, a mini musical epiphany. From that day on, country music made sense to me.
Nick Gadd London, 11p.m., December 1987 I didn’t have money for new records so I resorted to Peckham Public Library, whose music collection was free of the shoegazing guitar bands I preferred. I was forced to explore other genres .
I am sitting in a blue Laser sedan under a streetlight in a back-street in Brunswick. A Yorkshire rapper is in the passenger seat fiddling with a cassette and the car’s tape player.
Emma Westwood Geelong, 1977 Melbourne, 2014 This kind of almost avant-garde compositional material – that would give the Herbie Hancocks and Frank Zappas of this world a run for their money – was actually created to appeal to children. Call me gob-smacked.
All of us from somewhere else, chasing dreams, telling tall stories and playing games. All of us well and truly under the spell of Joan Pollock.
Kath Presdee The Hume Highway, NSW, various Sunday nights, 1997 - 1998 My tape version will always stick in my memory. It was incomplete, with Paul Kelly rudely cut off mid-phrase. No swelling final lines, no plaintive recollections. Just a whirr.
Zoë Krukpa Cleaning my bedroom window, Canberra, 1982 My ear was burning in the sun, and my nose, which I had just recently pierced with the aid of a needle sterilized with a match and a handy bit of raw potato, was throbbing softly. The window rag smelled of this new stuff, eucalyptus oil, which I wanted to drown the world in I loved it so much, and my music box was precariously perched on a stool.