Very often, when I interview bands and solo artists, I ask them to talk to me about their origin story, well for my very first Podcast blog entry, I’m going to tell you mine.
I received my first record player for Christmas 1981, I was 9 years old. It was a second-hand, off-white suitcase style Pye record player. It remains the happiest of all my 51 Christmases!
Along with this magic portal into worlds undiscovered and unheard, I received 2 records, Chart Hits 1981 Vol2, and Chart Explosion, and I played them to death, my favourites from that time I recall were: D.I.S.C.O by Ottowan, Being with You by Smokey Robinson, This Ole House by Shakin Stevens, and I could have swore blind that Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick by Ian Dury was on one of those records, but having re-purchased both records in later years, it appears that was not the case. Another big favourite was Labelled With Love by Squeeze, or UK Squeeze if you live in Australia; one the saddest most depressing songs EVER written, and an early indicator to my later predilection for darker lyrical subject matter.
If you’re unfamiliar it tells the story of a girl who falls for an American Pilot during the second world war, and moves to America, to start a family:
During the wartime an American pilotMade every air-raid a time of excitementShe moved to his prairie and married a TexanShe looked from a distance our love was a lesson
He became drinker and she became mother
She knew that one day she'd be one or the otherHe ate himself older drunk himself dizzyProud of her features she kept herself pretty
Eventually he drinks himself to death, and she returns to her family in England, but sadly, once again things do not turn out as she’d hoped.
She moved home alone without friends or relations
Lived in a world full of age reservations
On moth-eaten armchairs, she'd say that she'd sod all
The friends who had left her to drink from the bottle
She unscrews the top of her new whisky bottle
And shuffles around in her candle-lit hovel
Like some kind of witch with blue fingers in mittens
She smells like the cat and the neighbours she sickens
Drinks to remember I, me and myself
And winds up the clock and knocks dust from the shelf
Home is a love that I miss very much
So the past has been bottled and labelled with love
I was NINE FUCKING YEARS OLD, listening to that song day in day out. Years later I was given a book, by a beautiful friend that I’m sadly no longer in touch with. Shout out Bridget, much love Sweetheart. As she handed me the book she said to me, you should read this, it’s about you. The book was Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, page one, paragraph one, goes something like this.
“Which came first the music or the misery? Am I miserable because I listen to pop music, or do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable? Parents worry about their kids seeing violence in movies and video games, but no-one cares about the thousands, literally thousands of songs about misery, heartbreak and rejection……..”
True Story Rob, True Story mate.
My parents were divorced, and the highlight of my week were weekends, when my Dad would take me to John Menzies or Woolworths in Grays town centre to buy a 7” single. As best as I can recall Green Door by Shakin Stevens was the very first record I bought with my own money. Around that time, I also remember buying Je Suis Un Rock Star by Bill Wyman, Oh Mickey by Toni Basil, Abracadabra by Steve Miller, Stand And Deliver by Adam and the Ants, and what is still one of my favourite love songs of all time, It Started With A Kiss by Hot Chocolate. I kept them all, (in alphabetical order by artist of course) in one of those black vinyl covered 7” record boxes.
Later in the 80’s I was blessed with a Walkman. At night, I collected glasses in the local Working Men’s club, and every morning I got up before school for my paper round, just to earn enough money to buy batteries and cassette tapes, the obsession was starting to grow. I would ride my bike to school come rain wind or shine; I didn’t care as long as I had my Walkman on. Some of the first tapes I had were Bob Marley’s Legend, Roxette’s Look Sharp, and the bog-standard home-made recordings of the Sunday night Top 40. I video taped Top Of The Pops every Thursday night and watched it again and again.
My childhood and teenage years were not particularly happy ones and I gradually retreated into my own little world, I was that kid in the school playground just hanging out on his own, headphones clamped firmly to my ears, every night I’d retreat to my bedroom, to the sanctuary of my records and tapes, my happy place. My tastes had not really extended beyond what was popular at the time, contemporary 80’s music was a pretty good place to be to be honest, it wasn’t until 1989, aged 16 that my horizons were expanded beyond anything I could have previously comprehended, and my life changed forever.
My Supervisor walked me out of his office and into the workshop for day 1 of a four year apprenticeship in Fitting and Turning.
“Mark this is Tommy, he’s going to be your Fitter for the next year”
I put my hand out
“Pleased to meet you, my name’s Mark”
He looks me up and down as we shake, and the very first thing he said to me, even before he said hello
“What sort of music do you like?”
Fuck’s sake, a Northerner
“Milli Vanilli, Bobby Brown”
To be fair he didn’t laugh, he just said,
“Don’t worry, we’ll look after you”
The next day he came in and handed me a Mixtape, and in that small gesture, my taste in music, and my life, would never be the same again.
Tommy was into Blues Rock, and the tape was choc full of it, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Muddy Waters, AC/DC, Jeff Healy, Robert Cray. That tape started me along a path of musical discovery and wonderment that will continue to my final breath. It opened me up to worlds I could not have previously comprehended, I vividly remember, hearing those 12 bars for the first time and it feeling like home.
That tape Tommy made me is the reason my radio show and podcast is called The Mixtape and its why for the last 30 years I’ve been an avid maker of Mixtapes/Burnt CD”s and Playlists for friends and relatives, there is no bigger buzz for me than when someone tells me how much they love something I’ve turned them onto.
Along side Tommy was another Fitter, Dick, he was a guitarist, and he took to me to my first gigs in and around Kent. Regular listeners and friends will know that I am not a fan of cover bands and tribute acts especially, we’ll maybe go into that another time, Be S#arp were a covers band, but unlike most cover bands they were not basking in the reflected glory of popular hits of the day, they were a 3 seasoned professional session musicians having worked with artists like Elton John, Jack Bruce and Spandau Ballet, and they covered songs like Green Manalishi, Solar Sex Panel and Pretzel Logic. They also wrote and recorded their own material, and one of their tracks, Five Miles Above is an absolute opus and is in my top 5 songs of all time. Seeing and hearing that song live was a highlight of my later teenage years. The Bass Player and Co-writer of Five Miles Above, Dave Bronze left the band soon after I saw them for the first time, he left to play bass for Eric Clapton, and stayed with his band for the next 20 odd years, he then went on to work with Eric Bibb, who himself covered Five Miles Above, no where near as good as the original! They were/are quality musicians, their website is still active although they have not gigged together for a few years now.
Check it out here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3iP310PeW4
Tommy and Dick are two of my oldest and dearest friends, 35 years after we first met, we are still in regular contact, and Tommy and I still swap playlists.
I dove so deeply into the Blues Rock genre, delving back as far as Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy and the like, that I became somewhat blinkered to anything new. If it was recorded after 1980, I wasn’t interested. That all changed one day, as I sat upstairs in an empty McDonalds circa 1995, happily chomping away on my sausage and egg McMuffin, when over their in-house speaker system came this uplifting crunching guitar intro that grabbed my attention immediately, and then that voice……….
“My baby's got the bends, oh no
We don't have any real friends, no, no, no”
That second Radiohead album pulled me back through the time tunnel I’d found myself in, and opened me up to what was, in my opinion one of the greatest times in popular music culture, from Thom Yorke and Co, I went to The Cranberries, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Oasis, Blur, Pulp, The Stone Roses, The Verve, all these incredible contemporary artists I’d been missing out on. I was kicking myself so hard and promised myself I’d never fall into that trap again. I vowed from that point onwards to make myself open to any and all genres.
In a life full of ups and downs, music has been the one constant, my go to, my happy place, my drug, my passion. I remember a conversation with a former partner, who remarked that she felt as if music was “the other woman” in our relationship, that’s fair comment.
At the time of writing this I have just put out Episode 49, For Episode 99 of the Podcast, it will be an absolute privilege and pleasure to have Tommy as my guest, and for episode 100, he is going to interview me, for my Mixtape. Guests often remark how hard it is to choose the tracks, and now I’m getting a taste of that myself.
My choices are still up in the air and probably will be until I press record on that episode. My track one attention grabber is a lock in though, always has been, and it goes right back to that first ever Mixtape.
“Let there be sound, and there was sound
Let there be light, and there was light
Let there be drums, there was drums
Let there be guitar, there was guitar
Oh, let there be rock!”
So how does a music obsessed, professional appreciator and music snob end up a radio presenter and podcaster?
I’ll need to fast forward (see what I did there) a few years, in 2021 I found myself newly separated and a week on week off Dad, I had a side hustle selling Vinyl records online and at record fairs, because I knew that getting through those extremely tough first few months, swinging wildly between a week of full on single parenting and a week of loneliness, despair and general sense of “Oh FFS” was to fill my spare time doing the things I love. Selling records was a good buzz, and a decent money maker.
In late 2022 I was selling at the Vic Park Record Fair, they don’t mind if you sell CD’s there, so I had a big box of those, and I sold a heap of them to one person, who as it turns out was a presenter on KCR, we got chatting and he encouraged me to contact the station about volunteering there. I thought, Yeah Fuck it, why not. I arranged a meeting with the Stations Programming Director and Secretary and in my mind, I felt I could really help them with their social media pages, which were struggling, and I went in with that expectation, not thinking in a million years they would let me on air as a presenter, at least not until I’d “done my time” in the background so to speak.
At the meeting, incredibly (I was unaware how desperate they were at the time) they offered me the Friday afternoon drivetime spot, which I immediately declined based on 3 things.
- My inexperience,
- Having to dick around with traffic and weather and not play music, and
- My vision for my radio show (which of course I daydreamed about for weeks prior to that meeting) as being a late-night show dedicated to new music, no set genre, but with a particular focus on local Perth artists.
I came away with a 10-midnight spot on a Monday, I called it The Mixtape.
I felt that I’d like to get Perth local artists in for interviews and possibly live sessions. I’d also posted on my Vinyl FB sales page about the show, and a customer of mine reached out and said he was friends with a guy who handled the PR for touring artists at Metropolis Touring and he would give his email if I wanted to reach out to him for interviewee’s. I didn’t think an absolute blagger like me would stand a chance, but in the spirit of “well they can only say no” I sent out my email, a big, long explanation about who I was and what I was doing, and I heard nothing, crickets.
Then out of the blue a month or two later, I received an email with available time slots, asking if I would like to interview Jason Bonham, son of John, the legendary Led Zeppelin Drummer, I couldn’t reply fast enough, but alas I received no reply, and I wrote it off as a dead end.
I’d put around 10 Mixtape radio shows out at this point, and had not yet managed to snag a Perth local act to interview, when I received another email from Metropolis offering times for Rick and Mark from Irish Indie band Ash, who had just announced a greatest hits tour of Australia, and who I’m a big fan of, I replied again, and this time within minutes I had an email back confirming my time slot and asking for a Zoom link, so I downloaded and registered for a Zoom account, and sent through the link, then came a one line reply
“who are you again”
I thought oh no this is it, I’ve been found out here, I knew it was too good to be true, so I replied with the station website and some info, and that was that. I heard nothing more.
I sat there so nervous, 5 mins before my allocated time with a list of questions and talking points, there were no Mixtape tracks to choose at this point, that format came a bit later. Right up until I got that prompt at the top of the screen that said, “Rick McMurray has entered the waiting room”, I didn’t believe this was going to happen. And then it did, and all of the sudden, I was interviewing a bone fide, world famous, Ivor Novello award winning Rock Star. I’d never interviewed anyone in my life, the imposter syndrome was (and still is to a slightly lesser degree) very real. I was blagging my arse off, I don’t think he noticed, he was a lovely bloke to chat to, and it all went rather well I thought.
So that was my first interview, and I was, up until that point, only putting them out on the radio show. Until one day I met my good mate Al for a pint at the Kalamunda Hotel and he suggested I start a podcast. It’s his fault, blame him!
I was reluctant at first, post COVID, every man and his dog has a podcast, but I felt that it would bring a wider audience into the radio show, and so my “Between The Bars” Podcast was born.
In the next Blog entry, I’ll talk about why I had to change the name of the podcast when another local radio station knocked off my name/idea, how I ended up interviewing a cult leader for episode 4 and how the Mixtape format came to be.
