What I Cooked Last Night

3AW announcers are doing extra shifts on besieged sister station Magic 1278 . Veteran fill-in announcer John Blackman on air yesterday morning: "And now the three-aye-dub ... ah, the Magic 1278 Community Calendar ... ."

Thanks to Ilana of Inner-FM who played our four-track request on her fabulous Saturday night show Rock'n Roll Heaven on which she plays all the legends. Our set ended with greatest bluegrass song of all time, Bill Monroe's Blue Moon of Kentucky , performed by Mr E. Presley. Thanks Ilana.

I woke up one morning in April 1985 and there was a hole in the air. I went to the kitchen and switched on the light, the kettle and the radio. The first two worked fine, but the wrong voice came out of the radio. The voice belonged to Rod McNeil, and in a grave tone it announced that Peter Evans had had a heart attack and wouldn’t be on air that day, or the next day, or the next week; but it was hoped he would make a speedy recovery and be back at the 3LO microphone in due course. Evans never returned. He died three months later. He left a gap in Melbourne radio that would never be filled. Peter Evans was one very few radio announcers who never spoke to his audience. Instead, he talked to himself, or to Rosemary, his producer. You felt like you were in the studio with them. Evans always spoke to Rosemary slightly off mike, so you got a picture of the studio in your mind; and his mumbling soliloquy style suited your early morning fragility. He was grumpy and cheerful at the same ti...

That's what happens when you hit publish post instead of save, complete with typos. Does anyone else write like that? Here's the rest of it. * It was Saturday morning and Off the Record was on the radio and I was painting again and the sun was shining and the announcer was talking about Independent Record Store Day. I'm not sure if that was the official United Nations Independent Record Store Day or just a bunch of Melbourne music enthusiasts getting together to promote themselves. Probably the latter. The UN is too busy. The announcer, not Brian Wise this week, played what he described as a 'promotional floppy disk' which had been a freebie in a 1972 issue of New Musical Express . The disk was a compilation of track selections from a new album by the Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street . He played the disk and it was full of crackles and hisses and it sounded fantastic. It got me thinking about the record stores I have visited over the years and in partic...

So, at last, this was summer after summer had already gone. After a weekend of storm and flood and damage came a sunny weekend with no wind except a gentle zephyr that barely moved the curtains in the open kitchen window and the poisonous white oleander flowers outside it. This is painting weather, I thought to myself, and I got up on the ladder in the early Saturday sunshine with a can of white gloss and a large brush and started at one end of the aluminium roof edging on the bungalow in the backyard of the beach house and moved to the other end, slowly. I had the radio on because you paint faster when you’re listening to something. Off the Record started with a track from Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy album from about twenty years ago. Producer Daniel Lanois had made Dylan sound less like a frog by setting his voice further back and scattering swirls of atmosphere into the mix. He still sounded like a frog, just not as much. It's still one of my favourite albums. * In the midd...

It was after nine. Dinner had been another winter favourite, a plate of spaghetti laced with sliced avocado, grilled red capsicum, chicken breast pieces braised in white wine and garlic, snow peas and home-made pesto; all tossed through nicely with a little cream and a lot of cracked pepper and showered with shaved parmesan. So back to the comfortable chair. One of a pair I bought with a matching three-seater lounge (1930s self-patterned green flock, polished cherrywood timber framework) for $200 in an antique shop in the hollow of Buckley Street in 1978, and had completely rebuilt and reupholstered in 1995 - after the first round of children - for $1800 at John’s Upholstery in Glenlyon Road. (John is Melbourne’s best upholsterer. Moreover, you will pay one-third to one-half of the price you'll pay in the inner east antique-and-afghan-rug belt of Armadale and Malvern.) I finished the glass of red and switched on 3MBS. It was the Tuesday night new music program called Contemp...