There were only a few ways to find new music when I was a teenager, growing up in a small town in a pre-internet world. I found old music easily enough, flipping through the old girl’s records and listening to them with headphones plugged in to the speakers in the lounge room, studying the cover art and liner notes and lyrics as I sang along. But finding new music was a different, more difficult quest. There were not yet any music blogs to scour or YouTube rabbit holes to get lost in. Radio sucked, even the few alternative stations that we picked up in Tweed. I was too poor to just go out and buy albums whenever I wanted, and CDs were pretty hard to flog, so if I wanted an album I had to be sure I loved it, to justify spending my meagre, illegal wages I earnt cooking brekky at the local markets.

And so mixtapes and compilation CDs were my gateways to finding new music that excited and moved me. I loved receiving the gift of a mixtape made by someone whose taste I relied on to open up my world. I could count how many of these people I absolutely trusted on one hand: mostly older, cooler mates, and my older brother. I loved making my own mixtapes too: the craft of taping songs off other songs, nailing the precise timing of starting and pausing, and carefully transcribing the song list – sometimes whiting-out an old tape sleeve that had already been whited-out and written on dozens of times over.

I found real joy and pride in making a mixtape that was coveted by people I respected. I loved the ritual of swapping mixtapes with others, always hoping to hell that you all recorded the song names and artists accurately, and wrote them down in the correct order of their position on the playlist, lest you begin telling people how much you love the wrong band.

There was no greater shame than in being a poser…

Continue reading the extract here…

Buy a copy of This All Come Back Now.

Acknowledgment of Cultural Fund support

Better Reading acknowledges the support provided by Copyright Agency for us to promote This All Come Back Now.