Any Church album recorded after 1990 is complete shite — tedious stoner hippy noodling with no songs at all and far too much pot. After Gold Afternoon Fix, I was thrilled to get Priest = Aura in the post, then I played it and couldn’t remember a note. Went “wha … ?” and played it again. All 70 minutes. One quick smoke at Spot’s too many.

So here’s a nice thing: the demos for Gold Afternoon Fix. Found on a cassette thrown in the studio bin. Remember when the Church wrote singles?

(A Box Of Birds from 1999 is also good. Because it’s all covers. They still play songs really well, they’ve just given up writing them.)

(The relentless negativity of “music industry terminally stupid, BitTorrent at 11″ wears me down too. I’ll try to talk about actual music more often.)

(Or the other way around!)

Keith Cameron wrote earlier this year in the Grauniad of all places about the re-release after twenty years of “My Pal” a much loved Australian indie single by God whose members went on to work with Spencer P. Jones and Bored and form Hoss and Powder Monkeys.

I know that the original single got a fair bit of air play on campus radio in the USA, but didn’t know it was known in the UK, unless John Peel played it!

[Update] I’ve just been advised that John Peel played “My Pal” on his show in 1988 and it was taped by a friend that still remembers it, thanks Marge!

In a response to Rolling Stone’s review of the reissue of U2’s early album Boy, Bono likens The Edge to Van Gogh and recording the album to the protagonist’s growing up in The Tin Drum.

Thanks to Joel Silbersher for the heads up.

Back in my day, Bruce Springsteen was a ridiculously mainstream live rocker made pop star with “Born In The USA” and its ilk. I’d just like you to imagine that guy, flannel shirt, doing Suicide live, vocals and foot-pumped harmonium like Nico used to favour. Oh wait, you don’t have to imagine it. WHAT.

No, really - late on the evening of Wednesday April 10th. You can read the original text on the NSW Parliament site, or from their Hansard search page.

It’s probably a symptom of demographic creep. After all, we’re already getting goth politicians coming through.

Regardless, Rocknerd offers a drink to the Hon. Amanda Fazio. And her little dog too!

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The power ballad is one of the finer sprouts of the hard rock’n'roll tree. When the adolescent males have slammed, stagedived and pogoed their little hearts out to your fast ones, going up to four (or even five) chords (on acoustic, of course) with that big, slow “thump … tha-THUMP … thump … tha-THUMP” drum line will cement your cred as a truly great writer of truly moving songs and not just another spandex-clad, fretwanking attention-seeker searching the front row for male adulation and female lust dumb enough to lead to a night with you.

As a musical form, this heavy metal/cabaret pop crossover’s spread into the ‘alternative’ field has enabled a host of single-riff bands to say that, yes, they are real and deep songwriters of the kind that will live off their publishing for the terms of their natural lives, since it’s now a well-known fact that selling a million records through a major will probably leave you deeper in debt than selling a hundred thousand, let alone what you got selling four tapes a night at the Empress.

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