While the Ramones and the Sex Pistols were reinventing the musical landscape within the New York and London clubs, four suburban boys from the then colorless town of Brisbane, Australia had the same idea. Without pubs or ballrooms in the area to support original music, they rented community halls and eventually turned their own house into a nightclub (club 76) to perform.

“(I'm) Stranded” was recorded in one session in September of 1976 and although it was released seven months after the Ramones first album, it is considered the very first independently produced punk rock record.  The band took a loan from a local bank to press five hundred copies, four hundred of which went to the press and UK and US radio stations. The song drew immediate interest, and with the help of influential BBC broadcaster John Peel, EMI records called their Australian office to sign the band.  
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This song is a punk rock classic. It’s raw and honest, and struck a chord with people who felt stranded in the lifeless suburbs. It also helped influence a generation of radical music. ​

I may get some stick for loving this song, but I don’t care. I still think the chorus is fantastic and the music video may be one of funniest (unintentionally) things I’ve ever seen.  
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Originally released in September of 1982, “Just an Illusion” was the first single off Imagination’s second album In the Heat of the Night. It’s the perfect mix of electro-dance and new wave, and might have found more success in the US if Michael Jackson hadn’t released Thriller a month later.
 
Here is a link to the music video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH6rInAE9rk
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With a foot of snow outside and the trees frosted grey, I thought I’d share one of my all-time favorite songs from one of my all-time favorite bands.

The Cocteau Twins were formed in Grangemouth, Scotland in 1979. After taking influence from Kate Bush and Siouxsie and the Banshees, as well as the flourishing post punk scene around them, guitarist Robin Guthrie, Bassist Will Heggie, vocalist Elizabeth Fraser and their Roland TR-808 drum machine helped transform the modern musical landscape forever. 

“Fotzepolitic” is from their sixth studio album Heaven or Las Vegas. It was released in September of 1990 and was their last on 4AD. I fondly remember a particular long bus ride to Canada for a high school basketball game, and while my teammates were rocking out to Motley Crue and Warrant on their Walkmans, I was being called into the snowdrifts by the wintery siren’s otherworldly vocals.

Three years later, I was able to meet Robin Guthrie backstage after their performance at the Rivera Theater. This meeting was arranged by a mutual contact by a record label that was courting the band I was playing with. She felt he would be the perfect music producer for us. I never heard back from him and two years later the Cocteau Twins broke up. I always wondered if he ever had a chance to listen to our tape, or if he left it in the club alongside the rest of their uneaten pizza.

I have dedicated this portion of my blog not only to the songs that I may be listening to that week, but to those artists that often fell through the cracks. None epitomizes this more than Nicholas Rodney Drake. Mr. Drake died at the tender age of twenty six from an overdose in a potential suicide attempt. At the time of his death, he had only released three albums which sold fewer than ten thousand copies.

“Road” is the third track from his third album Pink Moon, which was released in 1972 on Island Records. It’s a haunting, fingerpicked piece that echo’s Drake’s battle with depression.
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This is one of my all-time favorite songs from a fantastic songwriter whose once unknown career was tragically cut too short.