Davey Dreamnation

Don’t get me started about Tumbleweed. Theatre of Gnomes, their first major release, was a five track EP. Enough said. Ask anyone who’s from Wollongong if they’ve heard of Tumbleweed. Then ask them if they’ve heard Theatre of Gnomes. If the answer’s yes, you’ve just discovered a true ‘Weed fan. And of course it was [...]

Enough said. The man is an alien. I’m talking the Station To Station release which for the sake of a technical obsession with record lengths I’m going to call an EP. I ask you: does it get any better than this? One word: “Wild Is the Wind”. Two words: “Station To Station”. Three words: “TVC15″. [...]

The sad story of Glide perfectly encapsulates the highs and lows of the early 1990s in Australian music. Glide, fronted by the extraordinary singer-songwriting talents of William Arthur, burst onto the Sydney scene in 1991, releasing two breathtaking EPs - Pretty Mouth in 1991 and the huge Shuffle Off To Buffalo in 1992 - to [...]

Back in the early 1990s “The” Verve were still called Verve, the Charlatans didn’t have a UK tacked onto the end of them and Suede sucked the big one. Pardon me for sounding monotonous but Verve are further proof that the old “the EP is great but the album is like drinking paint stripper” theory [...]

As Crowded House said, “Now we’re getting somewhere”. Swervedriver were one of the greatest bands of the early 1990s. Full stop. And you know what? Their early success, like that of Ride, hinged upon a series of phenomenal EPs: Son of Mustang Ford, Rave Down and the incendiary Sandblasted EP, all of whose title tracks [...]

Last night when I was thinking about who I would profile next in my exhaustive catalogue of early 1990s bands that have, sadly, disappeared, I became aware that I was perhaps being a little too shoe-gazer centric. Hence the inclusion of Ratcat whom, to be honest, I was never really that into at the time, [...]

You may notice a pattern appearing: the last two posts have mentioned the seminal influence of a particular EP - namely Ride’s Play and MBV’s Glider on my musical tastes and palette. Well, here we go again. I cannot emphasise enough the impact of Ratcat’s Tingles EP on both myself and the Australian musical landscape. [...]

Of all the sad remnants of the early 1990s, you’d be pretty hard pressed to find anything sadder than the lead singer of Ride undertaking a tour of Australia, ten years after the band fizzled out, like luke-warm piss floating down an alleyway behind the Punters Club. That’s because the Punters doesn’t exist anymore, and [...]

I don’t think MBV ever put out a song or album with the word “Whatever” in the title but I should be wrong. MBV are the ultimate Whatever band. If you’re talking nano, they don’t even register. They’re so 1980 the Enemy website doesn’t list any of their records for review. That’s because they haven’t [...]