Okay, so I should argue the case for Cale’s live version of “Hallelujah”, from the wonderful Fragment’s of a Rainy Season. For me it far better than the Jeff Buckley version – who was in fact covering the John Cale version. Maybe more on that later.
But my first encounter with John Cale was his 1996 album Walking on Locusts, of which this is the opening track. (Well… To be exact, my first exposure was the track Crazy Egypt, from the Rykodisc label compiltion Sonic Winter. I soon discovered 2UNE was also in possession of the track’s parent album.)
At the time I had never heard the Velvet Underground. I hadn’t heard of John Cale, didn’t know of his production work with the likes of Nico and The Stooges. The rediscovery of his minimal viola excursion by the music criteratti was still several years away. Back in 1997, my only reference point to Cale was this album of polished, intelligent songs.
Cale reminded me of David Byrne – both looked distinguished while greying, both produced a style of pop which doesn’t sit squarely with the pop tradition I had grown up with. The music is pop songs, which hinting at something wider; genres he doesn’t quite fit.
“Dancing Undercover” is a perfect example – a countried jangle but filled with wit and sparkle. I still find the line about deadly nightshade amusing. Cale revels in what sound like a choatic road race, with missed meetings and mocking taunts.
Later I would hear his Fragments of a Rainy Season with a stripped back version of a large slice of his career, while later still I would hear the key albums of his hands helped bring into existance. But this song is my favourite – not the best maybe but definitely the one I most enjoy singing along.
Julian Gough is responsible for turning an interest in electronica, fueled mostly by 80s soundtracks, into an obsession. Gough presented a program called The digital Dream on University Radio Bath. The Digital Dream featured 90′s electronica as it happened. For the first time I connected with a happening thing – a vibrant underground of seemingly unending creativity. The found, I thought, of the future.
To a point, the 90s underground electronic scene was the last great explosion of creative music. Like progressive rock and the punk/post-punk eras, musicians were pushing boundaries to their limits. While music continues to innovate, there has been no scene since which has produced the same sense of newness. The Noughties would rebadged, rebranded or reshaped the past. By contrast Nineties electronica saw technical innovations allow musicians to take the lessons of Kraftwerk, Eno etc and push things further.
Gough was my gatekeeper into this world. Each week he presented the latest in electronic music, ranging from beatless ambient to Aphex Twin-style craziness. In between was squeezed trip-hop, industrial techno, and house not intended for the dance floor. Gough never took his subject too seriously. He would give a nervous giggle about a pretentious moniker (eg The Self-transforming Machine Elves), and would be loose with genre names or categorisations. His wasn’t a world of reverence but of exploration. Here is the music, here are the artist details. It was up to the listener to come up with their own relationship with the music.
Each week, he carefully recorded his four-hour program, so the first 45 minutes of each hour could fit onto a side of a 90 minute cassette. Two tapes became the three-hour program he sent overseas to, at various times, Shenzen, Statton Island and little Armidale, New South Wales.
My first two years of uni, 1996 and 1997, were the last great years of electronica. Thankfully, once I joined 2UNE in 1997, I had access to tapes going back to 1994. Taking the tapes chronologically, I could hear the ideas fan outwards, technology allowing more possibilities, world’s being created.
It was here I first heard many of my favourite artists: Spring Heel Jack, The Future Sound of London, Biosphere, David Toop, Klaus Schulze and Single Cell Orchestra, to name a few. It seemed like a never emptying chalice from which to drink.
But I should of known better. I soon did. In 1997, Gough suddenly pulled the plug on the tapes. Within a year the show, which had run for over 8 years, was finished. Gough moved onto photography and small, fast cars.
Meanwhile, years after The Orb had appeared on Top of The Pops, the industry had finally found a way to commercialise electronica. The successfully Cafe Del Mar series, which were originally packed with intriguing ambient excursions, became commoditised, while copy-cat ambient compilations sprung up everywhere. This gave producers a ready-made template in which to write: ambient washes, acoustic guitar, maybe a little sax or trumpet. This started strangling creativity.
Meanwhile, at the coalface, the search for creativity saw samples cut shorter and shorter, as the logical result of Aphex and Squarepusher become soulless clicks and stings of sound. Glitch, which relied on mere slivers of sound divorced sound from its source, soon ran out of room to innovate. Soon enough the underground electronic explosion had run its course and disappeared as a vibrant scene.
(Of course electronica would continue to be created, and occasionally a new nuance would be discovered – witness reviewers falling over themselves with dubstep. But dubstep was ambient with a different rhythm – brilliant at its best but not much different than what had come before. )
I don’t know whether Gough had read the tea-leaves, or merely felt it was time for a change in interests. But the Digital Dream disappeared. For a couple of years it was the highlight of my week, and for the first time since I discarded pop I felt connected with music.
So in honour of Gough, I nominate Single Cell Orchestra’s A Better Place. I still remember Gough speaking over it’s long lead-in, introducing his program, stopping at the perfect moment when the beats disappear and the synth soars free, before the beats come back to drive the track proper. Now that’s good radio.
Looking back, TISM was the band which led me into Australia’s Indie scene.
Previously I had missed so much. I remember catching Video Hits one Saturday morning, and they showed a brief selection from the “Alternative Charts”. I heard the Clouds for the first time, but also the last time until their career was well and truly over. All those bands of the early Nineties – Tumbleweed, the Hummingbirds etc – passed me by.
Commercial radio wouldn’t touch these bands. Triple J, the national youth station, didn’t appear in my home town until my last year of high school. In fact that year I heard more of the looped test signals than I did the likes of Helen Razer and Debbie Spillane once they finally hit the airways. Somewhere during the major distraction of the HSC, I heard Trout Fishing in Quebec, but I cannot remember any other bands in this brief period.
After exams were over, I moved to Armidale for university. Armidale wouldn’t receive Triple J for another year, but I did receive relief in the form of the studio radio station: 2UNE.
I would join the station the following year, but until then it’s hodge-podge of previously unheard delights was a lot to take in. We’ll come to the electronica in due course, but within the mix of retro and rock was a large slab of Australian alternate music. And the band which made the most immediate waves was TISM.
Subversive but obvious. So dismissive of middle-class life, but so obviously living it at the same time. Rude and shocking, but in the Michael Collings way – not that shocking when you think about it. That was TISM. The balaclavas, the rumours of their identities (when they were really nobodies), outlandish video clips and gigs. These were TISM too.
But best of all was the music. Hitching their wagon to pretty straight rock, rockabilly, and later dance, they produces some of the catchiest tunes underneath their “shocking” lyrical hooks.
Greg! The Stop Sign was taken from a line of a Victorian road safety ad, spoken just before a car crashes into something. Being New South Welsh-kids, and before Youtube, we never saw the original ad, but the story of the song’s background reach us all the same. “Life? Could be gone in an instant”, TISM could be saying. “It doesn’t matter what you do.” Which is both true and not true – a typical TISM moment.
Work hard and you might die at 40. Don’t work hard and you might too. Or either way you might live a long crap life. Go figure. Best not think too much about the philosophy. Just watch the clip.
Poor Mike Oldfield. He’s forever being maligned as part of some less interesting, in no possible way experimental thread of progressive rock by the same publications who are happier fawning over Henry Cow and King Crimson (The Wire, I’m looking squarely at you.) I fawn over Henry Cow and King Crimson too, but my teenaged obsession was the music of Mike Oldfield. He, more than any other artist, led me delve further into music.
In 1993 Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells turned 20. To celebrate, on ABC local radio, the Coodabeen Champions played side one in full, uninterrupted. To them it was a nostalgia trip; me an epiphany. Some weeks later, they would replicate their feat by playing side one of Jethro Tull’s Think As A Brick. And thus I was introduced to progressive rock.
Meanwhile Oldfield released the long awaited Tubular Bells II. The single, “Sentinel”, started getting some play on the video shows. Impressed, I bought TBII on my next trip to a sizable town. On my next trip, I bought the original. Over the next couple of years they were joined by Ommadawn, Hergest Ridge, Crises and Five Miles Out. I was hooked.
These two albums did something no other albums had done – taken me on a journey. I never realised good music, especially rock music, could be lengthy. That it could evolve. Surely that was what classical music did, and classical music was, well, boring.
Oldfield taught me the importance of repetition and variation – meaning Oldfield was my first exposure to minimalism. I learnt heavy guitars didn’t have to be wielded by crap metal acts like Guns ‘N’ Roses (bleah).
By the end of the decade I owned every studio album up to, and including, The Millennium Bell, at which point I conceded defeat. Oldfield had taught me another important lesson – even your favourite artists can release utter tripe. But that said, even the tripe often contained tracks, passages, or inventions which were wonderful, making me want to pull out my hair as I wondered why he couldn’t he something worth for these specks of gold dust.
(As a digression, I always thought the tune of Frank Zappa’s Dinah Mo Hum would have topped the chart – if only the track was about ANYTHING else. Surely you have all though about that in regards to various people’s music…)
Oldfield led me directly to ambient and the burgeoning underground electronica scene would I encountered in college. It was Oldfield who gave me the patience to listen to slowly unfolding, changing tracks. Ambient would be where the real pay-off would come. In a parallel listening thread, I also actively looked backwards to the seventies and the progressive rock movement. Soon I became balanced between the past and future, which is really the best place for a music fan to be.
So what did I listen to in the early Nineties when I wasn’t listening to commerical radio? I’ve previously mentioned the decidedly non-classical Classic FM drive program, but the program was destined to be wound up due to being too popular. (I’m serious – the presenter was promoted to a non-music program.) My eager ears instead tuned to Radio National’s The Nightly Planet – a late night compendium of world and adult contemporary music playing partly the same artists. But the same station also provided a major leap in my musical knowledge, in the form of Tim Ritchie’s Sound Quality.
Sound Quality was just what I was after: a program of truly experimental music. Ritchie played electroncia, minimalism, ex-prog rockers, dub and general weirdness. As a presenter Ritchie was, and is, technically crap: he’d stumble over words, change sentences half way through, forget where he was up to and starting the wrong track.
However, his presenting style hardly mattered because for the first time I learnt a radio presenter could be engaging if they were interesting. At a time when commercial jocks were getting slicker but with less to say (even back announcing songs was disappearing), warbling Tim Ritchie was a talking encyclopedia.
So, for instance, it was from Ritchie I first heard of Adrian Belew. I learned Belew once played with Talking Heads, whose chart songs I already knew, plus King Crimson and Frank Zappa, both already my to-listen list.
With such an introduction, an acoustic “Lone Rhinoceros” was not what I expected on a program of beats and glitches. “Rhino” was originally an electric rock song recorded on Belew’s 1982 solo debut. Just over a decade later, he re-recorded it on The Acoustic Adrian Belew. Stripped down, bare, simply guitar and voice, Belew’s tale of a zoo’s resident/inmate sent shivers up my spine. That he could use the word faeces with a straight face gave the song soul and the zoo soulessness.
At the time I was mostly interested in instrumental music as an escape from the awfulness of early Nineties pop. Belew taught me the song could be just as emotionally affecting as any piece of funk or jazz. For his part, Ritchie placed the tune alongside current experimental music as if challenging listeners to deny the song form didn’t belong. It belonged, of course, and still does.
This list of 100 songs from the Nineties is not meant to be going chronologically, but I thought I’d start with a snapshot of my listening habits in the earlier half of the decade as a basis for what came later once I hit University and student radio.
And so onto Pop, which, in the first half of the decade, I mostly despised. It was not always so. Since 10, I had been an avid listener to Take 40 Australia, the commercial weekly charts show which kept me entertained every Saturday afternoon. I still look nostalgically at my copies of the Smash Hits compilations for 87, 88 and 89. Being a child in the Eighties, the New Romantics and early House-pop were my staples. But as that decade closed, dark clouds were brewing, affecting even my treasured compilations.
First there was Jason and Kylie, then there was New Kids on the Block, before Boys II Men hit town. Mariah was on the horizon, ready to take over from Whitney. Boy groups, and smooth r’n'b ladies were commanding commercial radio, wowing several young girls I knew, but pushing me away from pop.
By the time 1990 came around, my pop listening was becoming sporadic. This was not to say I disliked every pop tune I heard, but rather I was generally avoiding commercial radio.
Pop, of course, has a way of being heard even when you are not listening out for it. And to prick my ears, it had to have something different.
Sheryl Crow came out of nowhere in 1994, and promptly returned there, leaving “All I Wanna Do” as the perfect summer anthem. Laconic and lazy, the song was the epitome of California as imagined in my mind’s eye. That slide guitar just hangs around, the rhythm relaxed, but best of all were the lyrics. There is no pretension in the song, no forced utterances of love, betrayal or revenge, no heartfelt clichés. It’s just people hanging around, idly wanting to be doing something else.
Compare this to Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”, an anthem of freedom and generational rebellion, and Lauper wants everybody to know. By contrast, Crow just props up the bar with some bloke, watching the world go by, wondering where to find some fun. And she isn’t even a Tom Waits barfly: where a Waits character wallows in their despair, Crow and Billy are just loitering.
I was not surprised when I recently learnt the lyrics were adapted from a poem called “Fun” by Wyn Cooper. Unlike most pop songs, the lyrics are descriptive not of the singer’s situation, but the incidentals around her. We learn almost nothing about Crow’s character. Is she upset, or merely bored, and did it matter?
Back in 1994, I liked “All I Wanna Do” because it was unlike other pop music. It didn’t pretend to ask big questions. There was no faux-emotion of the boy bands or divas. No sickly strings. Just a few minutes of quirk – quirk of the sort I hadn’t heard since the Eighties.
Don’t laugh. Actually, Metheny-bashing was a something I only cottoned onto much later, and didn’t understand for years after that. This was because the first albums I heard of Metheny were his more interesting stuff: his early ECM sessions, Song X (with Ornette Coleman), and the symphonic Secret Story, from whence came this track. In fact “Finding and Believing” was the second track of Metheny’s I’d ever heard, and it was utterly bonkers.
Most of Secret Story isn’t bonkers. In fact, most tracks veer between beautiful and beige wallpaper, but I wouldn’t know this for another five years. When the album was released in 1992 I heard selected tracks on the veritable Sue Howard program on Classic FM. And she only played the bonkers ones.
“Finding and Believing” still holds its own in the bonkers department. I’d never heard anything like it in my life: shamanic chanting, weird twangy instruments; then suddenly dramatic, moody strings (of the London Symphony Orchestra) with added helicopter noise, before everything breaks down some nifty jazz piano riffs complete with more chanting. Metheny’s guitar solo doesn’t start until almost the end of the ten odd minutes. It is a careering, charging ride to who knows where. It is immense.
The result was I captured an image of Metheny as a madcap professor of music, someone willing to smash genres together to create a great, well, story. And over the years my subsequent listening bore this image out: the epic As Falls Wichita album; the even more bonkers free jazz of Song X; and the Vasconcelos-era Pat Metheny Group. But then I bumped into his late 80s Latinised albums, and his “straight” collaborations with the likes of John Scofield and Marc Johnston. And what I heard was a less madcap guitarist, politely soloing away with the most boring guitar synth sound I’d ever heard. It was then I understood what the Metheny debate was about. Compared to, say, the continual edginess of a Schofield solo, Metheny’s guitar synth was as energetic as linoleum.
Of course, Metheny was never continually bad: he has always been too fidgety for that. And even his “straight” playing could be beautiful if he ditched the synth. But Metheny always seemed determined to alternate his experimental side with something worse than safe – something over-familiar, which for me makes the worst kind of jazz.
In 1992, almost thankfully, this revelation would be far into my future. Because at the time I heard something majestic; something bonkers; which lead me to realise jazz could be a very strange place indeed.
1990 saw the release of Enigma’s MCMXC a.D album (the one with the Gregorian chanting and faux-sexy breathing. Two years later came the debut album by Deep Forest. Say what you like about either project – the novelty, the new age-ness, the lack of experimental wowness compared to the concurrent electronic underground – but both bands were perhaps the two most well-known electronica albums of the time. They even made their way into my little country town, where I became interested in both bands and the worlds they led me into. It was another small step into my later immersion into 90s ambient/electronica.
It was from the basis of these two popular, and in many ways base albums I became enamoured by the ethnic-tinged song beats of Single Gun Theory when “I Am What I See” was released in 1992. I considered SGT to be better than Enigma or Deep Forest; they sung their own songs for a start. Plus their was something relentless about this track: the never-changing drums just plugging away under kaleidoscope of samples, strange (to me) instruments and Jacqui Hunt’s ethereal voice.
Of course, at the time, I’d never heard the Orb, Primal Scream, nor the emerging drum ‘n’ bass nor trip-hop. I didn’t know what a break-beat was, and hip-hop to me meant “Stutter Rap” and “Push It”. What these things meant to SGT I cannot say – surely they were influenced by the times because in retrospect I came to realise they sounded of the times. But this song will ever remain in my heart as a question I needed answering, a trip I had never been on before.
Plus, they were Australian, but so unlike any Australian band I had ever heard.
The CD original (on Flight of the Cosmic Hippo) of Blu-Bop was like space music to me. I was 14. Brought up in the previous decade of Star Wars and synthesised movie themes, electronic music meant space to me. And the synths on the original of this were very spacey. Plus there was a crazy drum thing called a Synth Axe Drumitar, played by someone called Future Man. At the time I bet I couldn’t help use the word cool. And then there was the electric banjo…
I was also learning musicians and instruments couldn’t be locked away into boxes. Banjo had meant bluegrass to me – and most Australian kids grew up on bluegrass because every second Sesame St segment was accompanied by a rustic 5-string. So the idea of an electric banjo blew my mind. It didn’t sound right, but it was good.
I first heard this track in 1991 on ABC Classic FM, of all stations. Now, in 2010, I’m actually listening to a lot of Classic again, as it helps my baby fall asleep. Bela Fleck is currently in Australia, playing African music (he also released an album of classical music a few years ago), so Classic FM have been giving him plenty of airplay. But at first the Drive announcer sounded apologetic to her listeners, promising they wouldn’t be playing bluegrass banjo. My reaction was to laugh at the stations short memories. In 1991, they were playing bluegrass in the Drive slot, and much more.
Back then, the Drive slot was hosted by future ABC radio head honcho, Sue Howard. She played a program of “adult contemporary” music. Practically, this meant no classical music at all; instead I heard a hodge-podge of jazz, electronic music (usually soundtracks or soundscapes), funk, non-mainstream songs, plus a plethora of instrumental music which fell though the crevices of the ranges of genres. Some musicians were well-known, but the choices less known: on the release of a Peter Gabriel Best-of, they played the beautifully haunting Mercy Street; definitely not a pop song.
And they played Bela Fleck. Blu-Bop was the first tune I heard. I loved it. A week later, they played one of Fleck’s earlier bluegrass tunes. I was confused, unable to square the musician to the two different genres. It took a different bluegrass track a few weeks later (the track Natchez Trace) to finally realise the improvising on bluegrass meant it was a form of high-paced acoustic jazz. It was my first lesson in the interconnectedness of music. It wouldn’t be my last.
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Garry McKenzie
Garry McKenzie is a Brisbane-based freelance journalist, music critic and radio producer. He has produced and presented programs exploring experimental and Australian music.
