Originally Published 30 July 2019
Music is the most important thing in the world to me. Without music of any kind, the universe has no colour. The right song can teach you about yourself and about the people around you; the right song can influence your mood; the right song can bring people together or tear them apart. There is a certain power and magic to music that cannot be found in anything else, and it is individual to every person.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I feel as if a good portion of the most well-loved and enduring music was released in the one decade: the 1980s. (With a little bit of spill-over in the late seventies and early nineties.) My favourite artists are bands like Queen and The Bangles, and singer-songwriters like Billy Joel and Elton John, all British and American musicians. But around the same time there was also a lot of new, transformative music coming out of Australia.
Perhaps, like me, you don’t know a lot about Australian music, and you would like to learn more. Maybe you know a lot already, and you would like to look at some material to consolidate your knowledge. Or, possibly, you have a lot of knowledge about the other decades, but somehow missed out on the eighties. Whatever your purpose, wherever you have come from, there is something of interest to you in the PMI collection.
Try a book like Australia Rocks! by Lucy Desoto, for example: an overview of Australian rock music and rock bands from the 1950s to the 1990s, with plenty of photographs, quotations, first-hand accounts, and scans of posters and tickets; organised and divided by decade and then by artist. Flipping through this book, you may find yourself saying, “Wait, they were an Australian band?” The number of Aussie bands that were successful overseas in the eighties is surprising compared with today’s figures.
There are books which offer more in-depth looks at specific bands. Such as Midnight Oil by Michael Lawrence, focusing on the rock band Midnight Oil, who were active and popular during the eighties, and later. Contained in this book are detailed accounts of the band’s genesis and development, up until their more recent history (as of 2017). Included in the back of the book is a detailed discography.
Australia’s Most Comprehensive Vinyl Record Guide by Thomas Balacco is a great resource for finding information on vinyl records with data such as the format, value in Australian dollars, record label, et cetera, displayed in an easy-to-read table format. If you have an interest in buying or selling records, or just want to see what’s out there, it is well worth a perusal.
And there are more than just those three examples; whatever your interests are, you will be able to find something to devour.
by E. R. Gray (current industry placement student)