When I was 11 years old I was obsessed with football and biscuits (especially Bourbon Creams). I certainly wasn't writing and recording blasting power pop anthems with killer hooks. Dennis Harte, on the other hand, was and "Freedom Rides" (Roundtable, 1967) by his group Pure Madness is something special:
"Love has died Freedom rides Love has died Freedom rides I don't love you I don't need you I don't want you... Because you're not mine"
From what I've read, this his been mis-categorised as a girl garage number which is understandable given Dennis's pre-teen voice. I reckon the young Kim Wilde could've knocked out a cracking version of it in 1981.
Not Unloved is way too disorganised to our alphabetise 7"s. Should lockdown-induced boredom ever make it seem like an attractive proposition, however, the U section will be pretty thin. There will be a few cracking Urusei Yatsurasingles , that stupendous Umpteens 45and a couple of superior quality janglers by 80s Brisbane then Sydney-based group, Ups and Downs. 1986's "In The Shadows" sounds like a perfect 80s radio hit. Maybe it was in Australia. Passionate vocals, clean production and, above all, a singalong chorus. "The Perfect Crime", from the previous year (if Wikipedia is telling the truth), is a notch darker and starts off with strong echoes of R.E.M.s. earliest recordings. Again, it has immaculately recorded guitars aplenty and the kind of melody just begging to be sung by serious teens in cardigans as they dance round their The Smiths and The Go-betweens poster-lined bedrooms. These weren't acquired at the time - I was too busy kicking a football on any available patch of grass to know anything about Australian pop! - but some time in the early 2000s (from the stock of the legendary but by then closed, Minus Zero) after a kind soul included an Ups and Downs song on an all-Australian mix CD-R. I'm glad he did.
Thanks to an, er, 'administrative error' (guess which chump put a decimal point in the wrong place on a speculative ebay bid), Not Unloved became the custodian of a nice promo copy of this long admired 60s psych/punk slammer:
There aren't many snarlier, snottier vocal performances in the Not Unloved 7" boxes and I reckon it outdoes most other 60s Texan punkers in terms of sheer guitar heft and its frenzied ending approaches Love's almighty "7 and 7 Is" for drumming power. A banger, for sure. The phrase "Journey To Tyme" was borrowed in the early 2000s for an enjoyable series of garage bootlegs (?), volume 2 of which provided Not Unloved's introduction to the brilliant Faine Jade.
Record Safarifollows Alex Rodriguez, the vinyl buyer for Coachella festival's record store, on a buying trip round the States hitting local record stores along the way and chatting with store owners and collectors. Some of the people he meets are well known (WFMU's legendary girl group collector Sheila Burgel, Nuggetscompiler Lenny Kaye etc), others less so but everyone has a cool reminiscence or record or two to share. Some of the shops seems to have just ridiculous numbers of second hand lps. It's hard not to be a bit jealous of the folks who get to rifle through those boxes and shelves of dusty records on a regular basis. Alex, himself, is a low-key, amiable fellow with a penchant for vintage band t-shirts so spending an hour and forty minutes in his company is easy and there's always the fun of trying to spot cool records in the background e.g I'm sure I spotted a 7" in a generic 13 O'Clock Recordssleeve and a little corner of that legendary Savage Resurrection lp.
Icky Boyfriends is the kind of band that Not Unlovedshould have known about 25+ years ago but, somehow, didn't. Scrappy, slightly juvenile loser punks without an ounce of fidelity, they must have been fanzine gold in their day. "I'm Not Fascinating - The Movie!", their contribution to the history of no-budget cinema, is an enjoyably rough and ready (think that ace first Redd Kross film) tale of a band on the rise who get signed and then trashed by an unscrupulous music industry exec. Sure it's, basically, a bunch of pals having a bit of knowing fun but they did have some help from some pals with some solid underground credentials: I spotted the name Aaron Dilloway in the credits and the director, Danny Plotnick, was one of the crew behind 80s/90s zine, Motorbooty (thanks for the scoop, TQ!), who also directed a few other short curios that are well worth a few minutes of your time, especially if you dug The Loud Family.
