Given so many Stereo Stories (or stories in general ) are about rites of passage, and formative years, it’s no surprise we have a collection of short music-memoirs about schooldays. Just over 20 stories, including contributions from noted authors Tony Birch and Melanie Cheng, and our RocKwiz colleague Brian Nankervis.
You see a heading on the Greek newspaper Neos Kosmos. ‘Death of a poet’ perhaps it says. You wonder who the poet is.
Over the course of the year Arijana and I saved countless bus fares hitching a ride to uni in the green Volvo, chatting away, distracting the driver who ran the odd red light.
Dicko invited me to a concert at the Mooroopna Mechanics Institute. On a Sunday night. To see Slim Dusty. I had heard and rejected Slim and his music.
At weekends they hung around the eastern beaches, working on their tans, the warm bleed of Fleetwood Mac or The Eagles seeping from car radios. I imagined they’d all marry each other and never leave.
We have a handful of stories inspired by The Rolling Stones. Just the five, which may be a fraction surprising.
Jenny Valentish will be joining us for our Memo Music Hall show in Melbourne on Sunday afternoon 14 November.
Canadian writer Bill Arnott brought a new dimension to Stereo Stories when he started sending in some jazz poems in mid-2020 . He sent YouTube clips of himself narrating the poems. While driving the empty streets of Vancouver in lockdown..
Throwing protocol to the wind I even joined the exhibitionists in standing and swaying in something akin to dancing.
Where I went to school, boys – men – didn’t dance. Not unless they were full of whisky bluster or beer bravado, anyway, and certainly not the way he was, his lithe body a study in confident, soft, expressive masculinity.