Noel Mengel Archives - thegoodwills.com

The future for record stores

future-record-stores — Image: A selection from the B’s. How many of these do you have?

While my friends in New Zealand were still at school, I was making apprentice wages, spending almost all of it on records. Our small town didn’t have a record store as such, but the local department store stocked the latest pop records. At the time, LPs were pressed at a factory in Wellington owned by His Master’s Voice (HMV). My copy of ‘Please Please Me’ (The Beatles), for example, was issued by Parlophone in Mono. It still plays OK but it sounds thin compared to the sophisticated sounds of Pink Floyd or the Moody Blues.

New Zealand’s music fans had the jump on most other countries when the latest Beatles album became a ‘must have now’ item. The masters were shipped to Wellington and the presses were set to work. Other countries usually had to wait for a shipment of imported records.

‘Please Please Me’ was rushed out by Parlophone in March 1963 (I was 14), so maybe I bought it with money from my paper run. Parlophone was eager to cash in on the title track, the group’s first No 1 hit in the UK.

Roll forward to 2023 and my LP collection is stacked neatly in two cupboards, very rarely played. I have a good quality record player hooked up to my stereo with a pre-amp, so I’m not sure why they don’t get more of a playing. Ah yes, it’s the getting up and flipping the record over to the six or seven tracks on side two.

The big change between my teenage consumption of music and now is that, for the most part, we listened to music in one room. We would typically lie on the floor (parents were out, obviously), and crank up the volume. There may have been alcohol.

By comparison, today’s music listener can stream an endless Spotify playlist from their phone to a Bluetooth speaker at home or in the car (or through earbuds). It might be inferior quality, but it’s easy.

What set me off on this tangent was reading about the imminent closure of the Sanity record chain. Our town has one of their outlets. I didn’t shop there often but bought a few CDs – Kasey Chambers, Troy Casser-Daley. Now, as stocks starts to dwindle, I’m having a look for bargains. They sell DVDs too.

Sanity is closing all 50 stores as leases expire and moving to an online business model. Sanity is not the first retail chain to retire from shopping centres, where so many retailers have found that the foot traffic doesn’t always translate to turnover to offset higher rents.

This is not an isolated development, with a couple of Brisbane record stores closing their doors and Melbourne’s iconic Basement Discs set to do the same. Co-owner Suzanne Bennett told The Age that the impact of Covid and a drop in foot traffic reduced revenue. The CBD store was established for 28 years and famous for its in-store performances by musicians including The Teskey Brothers, Paul Kelly, Billy Bragg and Justin Townes Earle. This is not to say Basement Discs is going out of business. Suzanne and partner Rod Jacobs will continue to operate online and have a dream of opening another shop in the suburbs.

As I discovered, after chatting online with former colleague Noel Mengel, there are still some funky record stores around in Brisbane. But the independents have mostly moved to the suburbs to find cheaper rents.

Noel, who was chief music writer at The Courier-Mail for 15 years, said that most shopping centres had an independent record store. In recent years most have closed or moved to the suburbs.

“Every shopping centre had one, usually as well as Sanity or HMV, for example Sounds at Chermside, Brookside Music Centre and Toombul Music. Rockaway Records is a groovy store still going at Carindale Shopping Centre. It used to be near the Paddington shops before that.

“There are lots of Indie record stores now in Brisbane, but rents are too high in shopping centres. The independents include Sonic Sherpa at Stones Corner, Stash Records at Camp Hill, Dutch Vinyl in Paddington and Jet Black Cat in West End. So that niche market, import vinyl thing is going OK.

“But those shops really used to add something to the shopping centres.”

Rockaway, established in 1992, is one of the last indie stores in Brisbane shopping centres. Long-established Rocking Horse Records and Record Exchange continue to trade in the CBD.

As music production formats and distribution began to change, famous record stores like Harlequin and Skinny’s disappeared. Even with Sanity moving out, there are still big retail chains in shopping centres like JB Hi Fi that sell CDs and vinyl albums.

We old school music listeners grew up browsing record stores, from the days of vinyl in the 1960s, through the transition to cassettes (1970s) and CDs (the 1990s) and into the brave new world of downloading and streaming music. This arguably began with Apple Itunes in 2001, although the original Napster found a way in 1999 for users to share music through peer-to-peer file sharing.

Although it was shut down in 2002 after a plethora of legal actions, you may be aware that Napster re-emerged later under new owners and is now a legitimate alternative to Spotify.

The best and most popular physical record stores are those that specialise in rare and second-hand vinyl. They are not always easy to find, as they need to find a shop in the suburbs where rents are viable.

Long-time reader Franky’s Dad (aka Lyn Nuttall) is someone who has a history of browsing in such shops. These days though he confesses to preferring streaming services like Spotify.

“Platforms like this are made for me. They seem to have every track in the universe. They don’t of course, but lately my bowerbird approach is served by YouTube, where numerous collectors seem to have posted their entire collections.
“These days I can find even the most obscure or lost tracks from the 50s and 60s”.

Lyn, who hosts the website poparchives began collecting vinyl 45s via mail order in the 1980s & 1990s, mostly through record auctioneers – “I think I paid the rent of one bloke in Sydney.”
“I do miss combing through the racks for the physical object. Even at the time I used to say that half the pleasure was the hunt and the item in your hand after you’d paid for it.”

Noel Mengel, now a freelance journalist who also plays in his own band, The Trams, says Brisbane is well served by independent, suburban record stores.

As the figures below show, there has been rapid growth in demand for vinyl records. Noel welcomed the recent addition of a vinyl pressing factory in Brisbane as there were previously huge delays for those pressing vinyl.

“The community radio station 4ZZZ does a great job playing Queensland music and the independent stores sell their records.”

Figures from ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) show that vinyl album sales ($28.51 million) outsold CD albums ($23.90 million) for calendar year 2021. Vinyl sales have increased steadily since 2012 (then just $1.85 million) compared to CD sales in that year ($193.49 million).

All of which reminds me I promised my niece I would bring some of my old jazz records when we visit NZ next month. She and her husband only listen to vinyl. I reckon they are on to something.

Last week: It was Wirth’s Circus.

A degree of merit

For reasons which may suggest the mind is searching for mental challenges, I have been admiring the initiative of a dozen or so older people who have chosen to go (back) to university. In some cases they are university virgins, spreading their intellectual wings for the first time, post-children, pre-retirement.

Others are going back, 20 or 30 years after their first degree, to take on post-graduate study. The concept of mature age study has been around a long while, but statistics suggest the incidence of older people taking on academia is rising. The Australian Bureau of Statistics says one million Australians aged 25-64 were engaged in study last year, compared with 780,700 in 2004. Merryn Dawborn-Gundlach, a lecturer from the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education, completed a PHD on how mature-age students transition into their first tertiary degrees. Mrs Dawborn-Gundlach told The Age mature age students were motivated by the push for lifelong learning. “These days you don’t have the same job for life, you retrain.”
More than 40% of mature-age students in the study said they found juggling work and study a challenge, and around 60% experienced “a general feeling of stress.”

An expensive learning curve for some

I took on university for the first time aged 30. I’d left school at 15 so was full of trepidation about the challenges ahead. Luckily the academic year was split into four terms, so by Easter I had enough results back to suggest I could finish an Arts degree.

What set me on this subject was a Facebook post by freelance travel journalist Lee Mylne, a former Daily Sun colleague. Lee (pictured above) told her friends this week she was going to university after “many years.”
She was accepted into QUT’s professional doctorate program and in three years will graduate as a Doctor of Creative Industries (Journalism). What surprised me (and Lee) was the enormous amount of support and encouragement from friends; it seems more people would do it if they could afford it.
There is a fair bit of government support out there for study initiatives, including student loans, scholarships and funding for research degrees. For example, a Commonwealth scholarship in 2014 paid just under half the cost of a humanities degree (totalling $11,574), according to data in a piece by Chris Pash in Business Insider. Subsidised or not, it is a big financial and lifestyle commitment. My niece has ventured back into academia, looking to expand on her facility for languages. But at $2000 a subject she is reconsidering.
“Academia has gone through some serious changes in the past 12 years since I last studied. Not only do you have the regular essays/presentations, you also are marked on your contribution to online blogs on the weekly topic, adding to the weight of work you have to do. Everyone can see what you write and everyone can critique what you write, and it can’t just be an opinion piece, you have to cite it.”

Back in my day, oh aye

Wind the clock back 35 or so years and the first and best thing I did at university was a touch-typing course. No email or internet research in my day! Just typing and re-typing.
Luckily there was a coterie of mature age journalism students in the first-year intake at the University of Southern Queensland.
After a week or two it started to feel like home and there was the undoubted bonus of studying Australian literature with Bruce Dawe.
It was a bit of a (financial) struggle). I had a permanent debt at the university book shop and was paying off a large dentist bill at $20 a week. But for those of us who went to university in the late 1970s and early 1980s, tertiary education was still free. As music journalist and USQ graduate Noel Mengel says: “My kids would be outraged.”
In the early days I met Kev Carmody in the university library. I knew Kev from the local folk club where he played in a bush band and had lately started singing his own songs. In the late 1970s libraries were still using index cards. Kev says he had no idea how to take a book out of a library, so he sat there reading a book, quietly watching how people went about using the catalogue system.
You’ll get some sense of this Aboriginal man’s strength of character in the documentary Songman which is being shown on ABC TV on March 15. We had a preview at his live concert in Brisbane last month.

A learned foot in the door

There’s a lot to be said for acquiring some life experience and then going for an education. There was initial resistance inside daily newspapers to the idea of academic journalists. The old school, who had started as copy boys and served lengthy cadetships, resented the slow but steady influx of graduates.
By the mid-1990s, newspaper editors were starting each year with a pile of applications from bright young things, all of whom had at least one degree. Even with a Gap Year thrown in, new graduates emerge from the system aged 20 or 21, well-educated but light on life experience.
Mature age students benefit from having acquired some life skills and wisdom, but more importantly, if you are going to university aged 29 or 30, chances are you will be 100% committed to achieving your goal.
While technically not a mature age student, Noel Mengel went back to uni after working for three years in magistrate’s courts in the Queensland public service.
“I realised I was never going to get part-time study done,” he said. “And I had a disturbing vision of winding up as a country town solicitor.”
Noel recently left The Courier-Mail after 25 years as one of the country’s leading music writers. Along the way he wrote an award-winning book (RPM), played in rock bands and still does (The Casuarinas) and his name is frequently on the lists of judges for music industry awards.

Kev Carmody went on to become an internationally known songwriter with six albums to his name, a tribute album (Cannot Buy my Soul) and a collaboration with Paul Kelly, From Little Things Big Things Grow, which as Kelly remarks in Songman, became universally known without ever being played on radio.
Carmody was and still is an important voice for his people. There will be those who would say he would have achieved all that and more without having to go to university. But then we’d not have the wonderful story about his debate with the University of Queensland over parking fines, land tenure and who owed who money!

Is there a doctorate in the house?

Meanwhile my 40-something friend Kelli is on the cusp of graduating with an honours degree in occupational therapy, some new young friends and no regrets.
“I found it agonisingly difficult at times,” she said. There are commitments and expectations for a mature age student that simply aren’t there for most school-leavers. The other issue is I now have a whacking-great debt to the government which may or may not be paid out before I die.
“But I’m an infinitely more balanced person for having completed this study, although apparently I’ve now lost my mind entirely and intend to pursue a PhD!’
“My kids said ‘Mum, didn’t you tell us that if you started talking about a PhD then we should talk you out of it?’…

“Why yes, I did, but don’t worry about what I said then….”

Bowie and the search for heroes

Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield (photo used with permission)

As I write, the overly-emotional social media tributes to David Bowie have attracted the satirists, lobbing hand grenades amongst the mourners. One which turned up on Facebook purported to be God choosing his “Rock God Supergroup” with Lemmy (from Motorhead) on bass, John Bradbury (The Specials) on drums, Bowie on vocals, and God on guitar (traipsing through a so-so version of Stairway to Heaven). There were other irreverent items, including a few mock tributes to rockers yet to leave the planet.

The legacy of our Golden Years

That aside, it is truly tragic that Bowie has died at 69, of cancer, with any amount of potential to keep on being creative and performing, as elder artists like Leonard Cohen, Tom Jones, Rod Stewart and Petula Clark have shown is possible. I was one of those “Oh yes, I know David Bowie…Major Tom – who doesn’t know Bowie?” But I never bought any of his records, never went to a live show, yet all of those wonderfully catchy tunes – often with one word titles, crept into my consciousness. Just yesterday She Who is in Charge of Camping Logistics asked me to name a few Bowie tunes, apart from Space Oddity. “Well, there was Heroes, ch-ch-ch-Changes, Sorrow, Rebel, Rebel, Golden Years and…(hums a few bars of Let’s Dance).”
“Oh, did he do that one too?”
Yes he did, 20-something albums and many other creative projects; the thin, pale Englishman kept on churning it out, along the way battling drug addiction and obviously getting past that and continuing to innovate.

Still writing about music

My esteemed former colleague Noel Mengel, who left The Courier-Mail in December after a 25-year career as one of the country’s most respected music writers, was prevailed upon to write a tribute.
As only someone with his depth of experience could do, Mengel wrote about Bowie’s first visit to Brisbane in 1978 where the massive stacks of speakers at Lang Park blasted out music at a volume that could be heard at Mt Coot-tha.
Noel recalled Russ Hinze, a former minister of the Bjelke-Petersen government castigating Bowie in The Telegraph: “These pop singers come out here to make a quick quid by disturbing our peace and tranquillity. That fact that he’s a Pommie as well wouldn’t help.”
There is a tangible connection between our emotional lives and popular music and the unexpected death of a prolific artist like Bowie triggers memories and moments.
It depends on what was top of the pops during your impressionable years. For Mengel, it was Space Oddity, which emerged in 1969 when he was 14; I was 21 and Bowie barely 22. I remember the song fondly, just as I remember watching those grainy black and white images of Neil Armstrong making his one giant leap for mankind.

Can you hear me?

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield made Space Oddity even more famous than it already was with his own version, sung while free-floating in a space station. The YouTube video has attracted more than 28 million views.
Bowie approved of the cover, saying it was one of the most poignant versions. If you have any doubts about Bowie’s musical acumen, pick up a guitar and try to learn that one. Good luck!

Certain songs snare a piece of our hearts as we travel through life. Perhaps it was the song popular at a time when you were first courting (olde speak for ‘going out’). The emotional connections can be either joyful or sad. Whenever I hear The Carnival is Over it takes me back to the year my Mum died. Dad had locked on to that song as a grand statement about their devotion to each other.
Likewise I get goose bumps every time I hear Toast and Marmalade for Tea, Fool on the Hill or Friends (an obscure Beach Boys tune), or Fontella Bass’s original hit song, Rescue Me, later re-spun by Aretha Franklin. Do not make me explain.

She Who Hangs out Washing on Makeshift Line Strung Between Trees was incurably sad (as were tens of millions around the world) when John Lennon was murdered in New York. We were both sad when the Big O prematurely shuffled off. Roy Orbison was coming into a new phase of creativity at the time, with a famous super group, The Travelling Wilburys, and duets with k.d. Lang.
It sounds a bit bent, but our song is probably one by Warren Zevon, he who wrote of werewolves, excitable boys, accidental martyrs and things to do in Denver when you’re dead. Warren died in 2003 of mesothelioma. Unlike Bowie, who kept his illness to himself, Wazza went out in style with a series of tell-all songs, the most forgettable being his diagnosis song, My Sh**’s F**d Up.
He followed this with the near-death album, “My Ride’s Here” and closed with a collaboration album, “The Wind”, including a version of Knocking on Heaven’s Door and the unspeakably beautiful, Keep me in your Heart for a While.
Ah Wazza, gone but certainly not forgotten.

Some will grieve, others are just sad

If you find yourself truly grief stricken by Bowie’s passing, you will probably trace it to a romance that blossomed in tango with his career trajectory. Or you may have recognised the man for the genius he was, a musical iconoclast who rarely fished in the same pond twice.
To some extent, the star dust and glitter of Bowie passed me by because the music of my teenage years (1960s) was the richest phase in contemporary pop music – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills, Nash and Young, the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkel…
As I edge closer to the age Bowie was when he died, it is becoming transparently obvious that my teenage idols are ageing with me and some are not doing so well. Others, as I said earlier, are still touring in their 70s and 80s, entertaining decades’ worth of fans.

Kamahl, Petula, Rod and Tom

Last year Kamahl did a ‘this is my life’ show at leagues clubs and entertainment venues throughout Queensland. I went to a show in Caloundra, primarily because my musician friend Silas Palmer picked up the gig playing piano. Kamahl, OBE (over bloody eighty), can still hold a tune and is the consummate raconteur. Around that time, the Caloundra Events Centre put on a show with Petula Clark, she of “Don’t Sleep in the Subway Darling” fame. She’s still singing Downtown at 80-something. Petula outlasted many of her contemporaries, including Dusty Springfield and, more recently, Cilla Black. There, you see, I’ve probably struck a chord with someone out there who was falling in love at the same time Cilla was singing her breakthrough hit, Anyone Who Had a Heart (even though producer George Martin wanted it sung by Shirley Bassey).

Blessed are the list-makers

We lost some good ones in 2015, with Bowie just managing to see in the New Year. In no particular order, they included B.B. King, Natalie Cole. Stevie Wright, Percy Sledge, Theodore Bikel, Ronnie Gilbert, Ornette Coleman, Allen Toussaint, Lesley Gore, Rod McKuen, Demis Roussos, Val Doonican and A.J Pero, the drummer from Twisted Sister.

Forgive me if I missed the dead musicians who meant more to you than any of those so named. It will come to us all, heading for the Pearly Gates (perhaps). Much has been written about David Bowie this week – some might say too much. But in case you have not read the best of them – here’s a link to Noel Mengel’s first free-lance piece for The Courier-Mail.