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Exploring “Join The Dots” – CD-2, 1980s, Smorgasbord, Poetic Debunking & The Only One vs Led Zep

August 17, 2019 CD-2 I’ve really been looking forward to writing this next part – the last section of the previous instalment felt kind of like homework I had to get through – my listening has been ahead of my writing, and there’s some songs I’m falling in love with on CD-2!  The opener, A …

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Exploring “Join The Dots” – Series Intro, CD-3, Light My Bloody Fire & Shakespeare

I’ve long meant to properly curate the accidental prequel that started the whole Exploring the Back Catalogue thing for me.

I was on an alternative music forum when we acquired Join The Dots and was participating in a Currently Listening thread. Suddenly I was mostly currently listening to Join The Dots, which there is rather a lot of – and as usual when I’m listening to music that gets me thinking, I wanted to write about it and, eternal optimist that I am, perhaps even be able to engage in comparing notes with other listeners…

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: Pornography – First Impressions & Associations

I finally got around to listening to this album 40 years after its release. Just saying that gives me the bends. It was the year I arrived in Australia and within 12 months pre-teen me was hearing Boys Don’t Cry, and Let’s Go To Bed on 96fm in its 1980s relatively independent phase before it was sold to a mainstream entertainment company. Those were the days, say I in a mock creaky voice, because 96fm was a unique station staffed by music buffs who actively educated listeners on music history and kept their playlist both broad and deep, playing 60s, 70s and what was then contemporary 80s music, album cuts as well as singles, and regular live concerts – all of which was relevant in a pre-Internet world, where you were at the mercy of radio stations, your friends, and your own puny budget in what you would end up accessing.

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: Hiatus Reflection

Welcome back to my open music journal. It’s about to get underway again after a hiatus, and here’s why it’s been a year since I wrote anything new.

Last year I took a break from it to move the material from a forum onto my own space. You’d think that the best place to write this stuff would be a public forum specifically for the audience of the band whose back catalogue I am exploring. After all, my husband has a thing for writing recreational essays on the Cyberman episodes of Dr Who audio dramas, and duly places them on Gallifrey Base…

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: Self-Titled, The Promise, Pain, Grief, Faith & Other Personal Crises

Dickens is a master at summing up people in brief but evocative descriptions, and I think The Cure have a similar talent for summing up emotions and situations in (relatively) brief but evocative pieces of music.  The Promise is a vivid portrait of deep disappointment and grief, and it instantly took me back to the last time I’d heard someone express these emotions, to the same painful extent.  The fact that this was also on my iPod and in the garden probably helped to link the two; the brain does things like this…