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graveyard of DOOM index < | > One of the great things about living with Anna is the difference in our musical taste. My musical consciousness arose in my childhood, and was limited in the resources it had to draw upon. CountDown was pretty much my only source of new music from the age of five to fourteen, at which time I discovered other ways of finding out about music: television offered me Rage, Beatbox, Rock Arena, BTV 6's Off the Record (hosted by Glenn Ridge, like most programs made in Ballarat at the time) and the various permutations of CountDown and The Factory. By this time I'd also discovered 3BBB, Ballarat's local community radio station ("97.5 Megahertz on your FM Dial!"). Wednesday nights involved the ritual of waiting up until 10.30 at night to listen to Janet McCloud and Rex Hardware hosting "Batman and Robin have Breakfast with Sam" (later shortened to simply "Breakfast with Sam"). I would always have a cassette with either the lugs left in or sticky tape pulled tight over the corners so that I could record the songs that sounded like they deserved inclusion on the half dozen perpetually evolving mixed tapes lying around the shitty plastic faux ghetto blaster on my bedside table. The point is, that apart from Rex and Janet - and the occasional retrospective programming decision made by Rage or The Factory - the music I was being exposed to was always from the now. Having been born in the 70s and grown up in both them and the 80s in a regional country town, the music I was listening to was for the most part based on commercial radio and current releases. Even when my tastes broadened to take me beyond what television and radio had to offer - when I became a proto-indie kid with all my Cure and Smiths and Hunters and Collectors and Prince records - even when my sister started bringing home albums by The Pixies and Mother Love Bone and Nirvana and the Birthday Party, it was all mainly music from the eighties and onwards that I listened to. There wasn't much looking back, unless you counted The Beatles. It was different for Anna. Somewhere along the line she began delving into what you might consider the "classics" of rock music. Her CD collection displays a more "rock" bias to my "pop" preferences, which is in line with our personal tastes. Her CDs also come across as extremely well-read (for lack of a better phrase) to a chart-bustin' eighties kid like me. Which isn't to say that Anna doesn't have an appreciation for the eighties - there was a time when her main fashion influence was Boy George. I'm just saying that she's got a lot of the history of rock's great albums kicking around, and for me it's a great opportunity to finally investigate some of this music and maybe fill in some gaps in my education. Case in point: this Monday just gone we watched one of those "Classic Albums" documentaries on Lou Reed's Transformer. Now, of course I've heard of it, and I know a lot of the songs on it, too. But I never realised how many of the Lou Reed songs I've picked up by simply hearing them in the background at parties were on that one album. (My first encounter with Transformer actually came at the age of about eight when the Hot Gossip dancers on the Kenny Everett Show did a routine to "Walk On the Wild Side", and to this day I can picture the blond dancer, who was the prettiest girl I had ever seen, dressed in a school uniform complete with grey pinafore, white stockings, school tie and boater. Formative? You have no idea.) I also had no idea that David Bowie worked on it. I thought "Satellite of Love" was a Bowie song. And this is my point. After seeing this documentary and being fascinated by the story of Transformer and the music that was on it, I could just walk over to Anna's CD stack and pull it out and listen to it for myself. Which is what I'm doing right now. And damn if it isn't the most obvious statement you'll hear all day, but this is a fucking great album.
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