Guest Matt Hay
GuestForum Replies Created
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Thanks Jung, I didn’t know Woolly Bully was about Sam’s cat!
You mentioned Martha My Dear, about Paul’s dog. Dear Prudence was about a cat, wasn’t it?
I guess the most famous song about a pet would have to be Ben by Michael Jackson.
There’s also They’re Coming To Take Me Away by the Top 40 guy. About his dog.
I hope theme songs don’t count, because there is hundreds. Felix the Cat, Porky Pig, The Littlest Hobo, Flipper, Born Free, Kimba, Mr Ed –
“A horse is a horse of course of course …”
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Howard, surprised you didn’t mention Zoot’s amazing cover of Eleanor Rigby in passing :p
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Jung, my Scottish ancestors would roll over in their graves if they heard you claim bagpipes for the English!
It is mostly a Celtic tradition – Scots and Irish, though I have heard them played traditionally in other parts of the world.
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What a legacy George, his brothers, and Harry Vanda left to Australia, and the world. The first place I lived in Sydney was Villawood, in a run-down fibro house across from the Migration Centre, 20 years after they’d managed to get the h*ll outta there ;D
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Me love Cookie!!!
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She’s my favourite Beatle 😀
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Everybody’s gotta find their own groove …
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Also David – that story of you as a five y o is so cute 😀
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Ahh, yes – it was the middle of the night, so I had the sound turned off. I hope it sounds like the original 😀
I grew up with Sesame Street too. My mum recalled that I learnt the alphabet from it, though pronounced ‘Z’ as the American ‘zee’, rather than the Anglo ‘zed’ until kindergarten.
Thanks for bringing back some memories, Howard – and all other contributors to the thread 🙂
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Surprised this didn’t get a mention 😀
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Haha Johnny, your place sounds a lot like mine growing up. Dad had the good stereo turntable in the living room. My brother and I shared a bedroom which had these horrible modular inbuilt bunks and a curtain down the middle. I had a tape player, but managed to drag our old gramophone under my bed, so I had my own man cave. Those old valve gramophone units had a great tone.
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Ahh, yes Jung, that is a beautiful piece of music. Beethoven is my Beatle of the Classical era 🙂
Thanks Jacki. While I learnt to enjoy myself on cola or lemon squash with drinking friends at parties and pubs, a 2nd-hand high from pot smoke is something I quickly learnt to avoid! Thankfully, my nephews are teenagers now, so none of our group smokes at parties.
Good on you for breaking through that barrier, and continuing to sing in public. It’s never too late to do your thang!
Howard, must have been amazing to hear music like Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa when it first came out. I’m a bit younger, so the closest I came was to acts like Divinyls, The Angels and Midnight Oil 😀 I didn’t discover artists like Zappa, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and The Who until 1985 via pirated tapes when overseas. Like a kid in a candy store I was … “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” !!!
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Thanks Jacki 🙂 Thanks Jung 🙂 Your lovely replies are much appreciated.
Yes Jung, it’s great to tick off ‘public performance’ from the bucket list. What did you play?
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I’m about a year late, but the link in Jung’s reply to David led me here.
Thinking of Beatlemania – or maybe just intense Beatles memories in this case – my mind was instantly cast back to the late 1980’s. I was in my Bohemian early 20’s, where most nights I ended up sleeping on someone else’s floor in numerous shared houses in Inner West Sydney. I was much closer to my sister then, and used to hang out with her friends. She had an Indonesian bf for a couple of years, and when his friends came over, there were times when the air quickly thickened to fog with the smoke from numerous clove and ‘herbal’ cigarettes.
Most were Javanese, and spoke in slang so impenetrable even most other Indonesians can’t understand it. When someone brought out a guitar, the Rolling Stones were the most popular requests. But there was this one guy called Donny with the most battered 12 string imaginable, and he played mostly Beatles. He was also a pretty good busker. His version of ‘Oh Yoko’ is the one I still hear in my head 30 years later. One time, Donny, my sister Liz, and I practiced the best part of a week to play at an pub’s open mic down the road. We were going to perform ‘Mr Moonlight’ and maybe ‘Brown Skinned Girl’ by Harry Belafonte. Anyway, drink and/or drugs got in the way, so that never happened.
Another friend of Liz’s called Ara, was from Sumatra. He was the sweetest guy, but was ostracized by most of the cool Javanese as a provincial. Anyway, he ended up being my sister’s flatmate for awhile after her bf left her. Ara’s accent was very strong, but his versions of ‘This Boy’, ‘In My Life’, ‘Baby’s in Black’ and Rod Stewart’s ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’ stay with me to this day.
These memories are bittersweet – maybe more accurately, some are sad, some wistful, some still bring a smile to my face as I recall them. After Ara’s visa expired, I never saw him again.
Donny died about a year later from a heroin overdose. A few years later, I pawned his guitar for $20 and couldn’t reclaim it (my sister was understandably mad at me for years over that).
I started recovery from addiction in my late 20’s and have been sober and clean for 25 years.
Sober, and in my mid 30’s, I did get to perform on stage once. A flatmate lent me his strat and amp for a short-lived talent night at this cool innercity club called Kinselas. I played a 20 minute set including ‘Don’t Think Twice’ and didn’t embarrass myself – despite an on-the-spot 5 second soundcheck and a 2000W searchlight aimed directly at my eyes.
Well, this turned out pretty personal, so hopefully no-one will read this. If you have though, thanks – that was quite cathartic for me.
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Yeah, there’s some real classics there, like Dusty Springfield and Wild Thing, though I have the same sort of feelings about Somewhere My Love (Doctor Zhivago) as you do for Disco 😀
I tend to only buy ‘best ofs’ of specific artists or groups, though sometimes you come across a gem or two in those various artists compilations don’t you.