Robot Claw

This started as another comment to BS’s comments to my last post. If you haven’t read his comments (and checked out the videos), do now!

The list of awesome Oz 1980s could continue for ever! (Although technically speaking, Real Life and Tim Finn are Kiwis…). Science Fiction, by the Divinyl’s, is just so, so awesome!

Here’s some more, including a few straying into the late 70’s early 90’s:

Shivers – The Birthday Party (1979)
Nick Cave at 22! The birth of a living legend. If I could meet one person on Earth, it’d be this man. (This song holds a special place for me as well, and perhaps every lifelong Nick Cave fan)

Computer Games – Mi-Sex (1979)
I was seven years old. The word otaku hadn’t even been coined, and yet these dudes got a NUMBER ONE SINGLE about video games! Watch that video! Listen to the synth hook! This is what you call a masterpiece! (Request for BS: please comment on the printing out on the dot matrix printer of the Mona Lisa…think it was a scan or a hand-drawn approximation? It’s ascii art correct? Another reason this video is awesome…)

I Got You – Split Enz (1980)
Awesome video, still striking to this day. And a very catchy song!

Be Good Johnny – Men At Work (1982)
Yes I know I put them on my other list, but this is actually my favourite of their songs. I wore a school uniform just like that one for… 13 years?

Jim Morrison – Widowed Isis (1982?)
Australian goths used to cling to this band (which had formed and broken up during the early 1980s) as if they mattered. I’ll admit this song is good, but it’s not (nor ever has been) ‘Goth’. It actually became a bit of a meme amongst my friends, as an example of a ‘so good it’s bad’ goth song 🙂

Send Me An Angel – Real Life (1983)
BS included this one but I’m bumping it because it brings to mind a fond memory (not to mention is an awesome song). Back in 1983 my brother (BS) and I went to see the movie Krull, which we’d both been looking forward to for some time. Those were the days when they used to play music videos before the movies (while you waited for the film to start). We saw the video for this and I was dumbstruck. I mean this was in my glory days of D&D and Fighting Fantasy and all that, in a cinema to see a fantasy film and zomg the music videos are now fantasy as well!!! My 11-year old heart probably skipped a beat at that realization 🙂

Computer One – Dear Enemy (1983)
When I heard this again just now, the world briefly stopped. Morodorian in it’s brilliance, this song answers the age old question “Could there be a world in which man and machine understood each other?”

Soldier Of Fortune – John Paul Young (1983)
I love the laser Australia, a year before Frankie’s Relax video (but not before Bowie’s Heroes). Also note that the dancer in this video has commented on it 🙂

Working Class Man – Jimmy Barnes
The Born In The USA of Australia. Hated it in the day, but as age has piled on the song has begun to resonate (loudly)!

Psycho – The Beasts Of Bourbon (1984)
One of the very few times in my life I ever got drunk I was filmed and got on TV! It was some show that used to screen late, late at night in Newcastle and they used to just film people out at the bars on Hunter Street. SMC & I and some other friends were filmed and I was gibbering things like “I am the Beast Of Bourbon!”. It wasn’t for a few days before I found out I actually made it to TV. I was told by a friends mum (who thought it was hilarious) and to the best of my knowledge she was the only person I knew who actually saw it. Tex Perkins (the lead singer of this band) was a god to Oz indie types (such as yours personally). I hugged him live on stage once (no kidding, it was when The Cruel Sea played at Newcastle University…I was in the front row and jumped up on the stage…) and still recall his cover of Bohemian Rhapsody at the Hodern in Sydney when he opened for Nick Cave in about 1992 to be one of the very best live performances I have ever seen! (I even have more Tex Perkins stories…)

Dead Eyes Opened – Severed Heads
Always hated them, always will. Included here only because I have some stories. Oh man do I have some stories. If I ever get drunk again, maybe I’ll share 😉

Too Young For Promises – Koo de Tah (1985)
This is on my iPod… I listen to it all the time 🙂

Heaven – Eurogliders (1985)
Not a great song but somewhere in my morphic field is something about either the song or the band…did I see them live? Did I meet one of them one time (at gigs in Sydney via Chook’s woman we occasionally met people from various bands). Actually the song isn’t terrible, but the video is good to see the 1980’s Sydneystyle 🙂

What’s My Scene – The Hoodoo Gurus (1987)
Hated them in the day, but love love love this song now. Saw them live once…recall they were crazy drunk…

Locomotion – Kylie Minogue (1987)
Four years older than me. She was cute then (aged 19) and is still cute now. Yes the song is crap but it symbolizes the end (sort of ) of the ‘golden age’ of Australian music for me. Obviously I never went to a Kylie concert (did she even perform during her early career?) but I did see her in person once, at a department store in Sydney. I have a bit of a half-memory of her doing an appearance at Garden City as well… is that true?

Of course when I say the golden age ended, well that’s crap itself of course. Three years later this monster exploded onto the Australian (and world) scene and Australian rock had reached a new (and since never surpassed) plateau.

Ok BS, AW, MMC, SMC, anyone else – I challenge you! Are there any gems of Ozrock I have forgotten about?