wrote this years ago
Sitting On The Dock Of the Bay
Otis Redding Circa 1964
Well I used to sit on Piraeus Harbour, Athens from 4am till 9am on a daily basis, watching the cruise boats slide in from all over the Mediterranean and Middle East. I sat there drinking beers and smiling at the stray dogs as taxi horn intensity rose and the sun would make its presence felt quite abruptly with a sheen of necksweat at around 7am and streams of people staggered thgrough the turnstiles at the Athens metro station. I really was just sitting there 2000 miles from home watching time slip away – I was so complete those days when I had nothing.
Slow Blues in C
10 years After
This song came to me one evening, courtesy of Gerry and Saija at the Zorbas Hostel on Gkildfordou Street near Athens Victoria Square. A bunch of us had spent the evening throwing back beers and talking shite before we moved on to some harder drugs. We shuffled into the dark bar at the hostel with a hysterically restrained love for each other. Jullian and I just gurgling. Our amphetamine addled and dilated eyes smiled such love at each other while the ripping chords of the blues guitar reverberated thgrough our souls that this song still sends reverse shudders through me when I listen to it today.
Don’t Stop me now
Queen
Always has been an anthem for my exuberance. I remember clear like, running around the playground at the age of 10 with the soundtrack pulsing in my ears.“A shooting star racing through the sky”. It gave me, prior to my teens, and those abetting hormones, the feeling that I was a force due to be uneleashed on the earth. Many years later at the age of eighteen I stomped in my DM’s through Germany alone, though the unwelcoming cities of Karlsruhe, Stuggart and Dortmund with this song in my ears. This and its accompanying : “Fat Bottomed Girls – both gave me hope that, indeed, a journey was afoot and glory was attainable in this world via the journey rather than the destination.
Tambourine Man
Bob Dylan
This song starts off like a wonderful ballad. After two or three verses it dissapates into instrmental harmonica for a few minutes. The mouth harp lulls you into a false sense of senselessness prior to the final verses’ melancholic beauty. I quote it now : and take me dissapearing through the smoke rings of my mind, through the foggy winds of time, far past the broken leaves, the haunted frightened trees, out to the windy beach. far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow, let me dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, cirled by the circus sands with all memeory and fate, driven deep beneath the wave, let me forget about today until tomorrow….. the song’s harmony strikes a chord in me, its lyrics sing to my heart and conjure up vivid images of ludicrousness, they mean nothing and everything. I can’t sing, but at times I am alone I murder this song, absolutely murder it, and tears flood my cheeks.
Blister In The Sun
Violent Femmes
I first was introduced to this song by Juilan Wald, whilst eating breakfast in Joys Hostel, Athens. He was, at the time, a shaggy faced auzzie from South Perth whose love of random motion endeared me to him. He thwacked at a lazy guitar whilst I dipped toast in my eggiweg (lomticks of). : “When I am a walking i strutt my stuff and I am so strung out.”…….“let me go on, like I blister in the sun”……… well it is natural that the general tone would appeal to my fertile and overly romantic mind, but its whining vocals also struck a note in me. The song may have been forgotten, but somehow it followed me to Korinthos and thence to Ios; where I fell in love for the first time and the last time in my life, to the girl whom I hd waited for, to the girl I had only hoped for, in Scorpions Disco on Ios in 1990, under a blazing night sky, redolent with stars, scattered like dust, I danced to this tune..“high as a kite, I am so strung out”
Angel Eyes ( Home and Away)
Wet Wet Wet
Wet Wet Wet must be some of the biggest cunts in the history of pop music, but this song (and Temptation) have such harmonious purity and associated memories that they are forever burned upon my mind.