I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now

Welcome to Johnny’s in the Basement. Bear with me while I get things organised.

The first writing for which I ever earned cold hard cash was some record reviews and interviews I did back when I was eighteen or nineteen.

I was living in Canberra, working in a record shop—the greatest record shop in Australia, as it happened—and some guys around the corner from us began an ambitious publishing project (no computers, no internet in those days). It was a complete catalogue of recorded music in Australia and it pretty quickly became something of a bible in our store, in fact, in stores across the country. I’ll probably talk more about it in some other post, but the thing was, they also did a spin-off project, a music magazine called The Australian Record Buyers’ Guide.

That august and fairly short-lived tome published a bunch of reviews I wrote and set up a couple of interviews for me, including one with James Taylor and a woman you might remember named Ellen Foley.

Taylor was professional and courteous; so was Foley, but she was more fun. She was semi-famous then, largely because she was the female voice of the hugely successful Meatloaf album, but I was a fan of her solo album, launched on the back of her Meatloaf success, called Nightout. She was a bit a of a star in Countdown sort of way. She was also dating Mick Jones from The Clash who, along with Joe Strummer, wrote some tracks on Nightout, and she in turn sang on their album Sandinista! So lot’s to talk about. I remember being incredibly nervous and asking her at least one really dumb question (about writing songs when you can’t play an instrument). But doing the interview was a buzz and, lord be praised, she was gentle with me.

Anyway, it’s been a long time, but getting a chance to write about music again was too good an opportunity to turn down and I want to thank Crikey editor Jonathan Green for hiring me to do just that.

So how will this work? Dunno. I don’t really have an over-arching plan in mind for what shows up here. I want to talk about the music I like, obviously. But I also want to have a crack at saying something about how our experience of music changes as we get older, the way the business has changed over the years, that sort of thing. There’ll obviously be reviews and recommendations, and I’ll talk about gigs I see, music shows from telly, DVDs, music-related books. I’ll also have things to say about the changing face of music technology and the fractures and shifts that has wrought. As well, there’ll be some interviews and hopefully some musical profiles of various people (more about that later).

If there is a connecting theme, an underlying current, I guess it might be the idea that music fans spend their whole life searching for the sort of high they got when they first started taking music seriously, which, not coincidentally, tends to be around the time they hit puberty. (The connection between the groin and the ear is a well-documented and vital part of music, after all.)

I love that quote from the movie Almost Famous, which I think captures the feeling of fandom perfectly, where one of the Bandaids (the non-groupie groupies who hang out with the musos) explains to the young, wannabe journalist the difference between them (fans) and groupies (celebrity hounds):

SAPPHIRE: You believe these new girls? None of ‘em take birth control, and they all eat steak.

They don’t even know what it is to be a fan! To blindly love some silly piece of music… or some band so much that it hurts… please, they’re all just after the money.

That’s it, isn’t it? To blindly love some silly piece of music or some band so much that it hurts. Don’t care what sort of music you’re into…

Hope you’ll join in via the comments section, tell your stories, provide your playlists, educate me on stuff you reckon I should know about. Looking forward to hearing from you.

The only other thing I’ll say is this: Johnny’s in the Basement won’t be some sort of nostalgiafest. Sure, the old stuff will be there providing context, and there will be the occasional backward-looking swoon, but hey, it’s 2009. I want new songs!