"The pureness and simplicity must come across so people can hear the human part of the song. That is everything."

I came across that quote and I immediately thought of the bonus mini-zine that Teatles made called Beautiful Beatle Moments. It features contributions by tweet to the question: "Does anyone have a favourite moment in a Beatles song? A second or two where it all gets perfect?"

The quotes are abundant and anonymous: "The pause in the middle of She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, just before the "She said she'd always been a dancer." Each moment is spliced into a micromoment, conveyed in only a handful of words but it takes you straight to a heart-buzzing vocal take or an instrumental that makes you feel vast levels of love and gratitude. Intense emotions are cited, "John's high-pitched desperate 'pleeease' at the end of Don't Let Me Down."

In any Beatle-related conversation, it is common to bandy around the term "perfect". It's convenient for the hyperbolic gushy types like myself, but it's also helpful to convey a certain sense of gratitude that everything managed to transpire as it did. It's also helpful that to have community of people who can identify these "moving" micromoments of happiness, something barely detectable that somehow reveal the humanness, the laughter and mistakes of this band: "George fudging the solo in All You Need is Love - I know it was live. All these add to their greatness rather than detract from it."

Others run towards the raw expression and I can feel the beauty of these moments too: "Oh, how could I forget this? John baring his soul and almost sobbing the vocals, five years prior to the Plastic Ono Band album, "But it's my pride, yes it yes, yes it is, yes it is." It's beautiful to recognise something that could have been characterised as a therapeutic release, despite the evident levels of pain. We like to think we know what John had been going through and detecting these small dimensions of grief help us in some way. They help, because we miss him. It also provides a small hope that this music was cathartic for him too.

It's strange but that kind of vulnerability was mentioned only today, when I watched Paul analyse his photographs for the NPG's exhibition, Paul McCartney, Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm. Paul looked up at his photograph of John sitting in the back seat of a car, his hand folded to cover his mouth. "I forgot how he used to do that all the time..." I recognised that self-soothing gesture within myself, as a former thumb-sucker. You cover up on your month in moments of stress and you do so without even thinking about it, and then you realise you're doing it all the time.

Got to be good looking 'cause he's so hard to see

In Music and Imagination, Aaron Copland wrote about how difficult it was to seize the musical experience and hold it. "Unlike that moment in a film when a still shot suddenly immobilises a complete scene, a single musical moment immobilised makes audible only one chord, which in itself is comparatively meaningless." It might be easier to look at Paul's photograph of John and extrapolate the character of a man we feel like we know, but it's still fun to challenge Copland. We're each attempting attempt to seize the musical experience, as fleeting and granular as it is. The joy is in the attempt.

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Early 90s Pop Podcast #73
The Adventures of Stevie V - Dirty Cash (Money Talks) (Sold Out 7 Inch Mix)
Ace of Base - Happy Nation
Split Mirrors - The Right Time
Peter Gabriel - Digging in the Dirt
Oingo Boingo - Dream Somehow
Leevi and the Leavings - Turkmenialainen tyttöystävä
The Beloved - Time After Time
C+C Music Factory - Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)

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Explore C&CM Podcasts 1-72 here

I've always struggled with the concept of artistic fulfilment, I could never figure out what it was or how to get it. You could imagine that I was surprised when I came across a recipe for how to attain creative satisfaction from one of the panellists of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time. The ingredients are really quite simple: all you need is creative control, remuneration and recognition. It's a nice thought but there are so many questions that follow this premise, all the questions involving quantity, ego and expectation. It reminds me of those local musicians who never managed to "cross over" and "make it" in other cities or countries.

To be honest with you, I have a real fascination with those musicians who were never promoted here. I am in love with those songs that I was never meant to hear. My friend Dimitri offers me this insight into what it was like to be a French child of the 1980s. He shares rare music videos, songs that many French people cannot even recall. He accompanies each song with this extraordinary understanding of its social context and critical reception. At the same time, he manages to describe the personal legacy of these songs: every song has an association.

 Muriel Moreno of Niagara

In exchange, I offer up my Australian childhood songs, awkwardly conscious of the fact that my exposure to local musical culture peaked when I was a child. I developed a liking for Ratcat, The Screaming Jets, Southern Sons and Diesel from watching Video Smash Hits. However, my exposure to local music ultimately ended when I quickly fell in love with English pop music. Throughout my twenties, there has been enormous pressure to support local music and as the pressure has intensified, my curiosity has dwindled and died out. I now live with this thought that I have purposefully ignored so much of what has been happening around me, just to indulge in this dream of living in another place, in another time.

I recall one of our last conversations, it was a cold night on Lygon Street and we were sipping these extravagant iced mochas. You were telling me of the intimate going's-on of Melbourne's 2002 Garage Rock movement. It was akin to my appreciation of London in 1977, Bristol in 1981, Milan in 1983 or Leningrad in 1984. There's this core group of tirelessly cool musicians who manage to create a community, unified by this distinctive sound and attitude. With the right sources, you can daydream about what it must have been like to be in that club, what it meant to be among the few people who understood the significance of actually being present.

"That's a good quality to have." I said, in between sips. "To be able to deconstruct an emerging scene, to recognise and define the consequence of the present. I think that's pretty special..."

Perhaps, it's not about the breadth of the acclaim, it's not about whether you're huge in Melbourne, Milan or even Mexico. When it comes to the recognition component of that artistic fulfilment recipe, I think it's about creating some kind of legacy. Whether that's in the form of a personal or cultural legacy, I think every artist has that desire to have their work placed within some sort of a context. Maybe it's up to us to create those histories, not only for our own understanding of how it all went down, but for the artist, too. We should let them know that we care, we should let them know that we've committed them to memory...

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: French Pop Podcast #57
April March - Brainwash Part II
BB Brunes - Houna
Mai Lan - Schumacher
Exsonvaldes - L'aérotrain
Aline - Elle m'oubliera
Les Calamités - Vélomoteur
Yelle - A Cause Des Garçons
Corynne Charby - Boule de Flipper
Images - Love Emotion
Soko - I'll Kill Her

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I cannot exactly remember which one of us first articulated it, but there's this theory in my house that a decade only truly develops its identity 4 years in. We discovered this after living on a childhood diet of Video Smash Hits in the years spanning 1990 to 1992. It was inevitable, after such a consistent intake of Technotronic, C & C Music Factory and Snap! that we would eventually develop the ability to not only accurately characterise that musical aesthetic but to see its strong links with the late 1980s.

I can't help but be convinced that something changed in 1993, as it did in 1983 and in 1973. With specific reference to 1993, there was an obvious and growing emergence of Eurodance, Grunge and Britpop. Consequently, the 1990s managed to sever those strong stylistic links with the 1980s and somehow consolidated its own taste, style and identity. I mention all this now, because we're only days into 2013 and I'm not entirely sure how to view this decade. I'm not entirely sure how it's ever going to define itself, as other decades have managed to do.

Perhaps it is a preposterous suggestion. Surely, we will soon get a taste of what this decade is and how we will characterise it, stylistically. There are methods of measuring taste, there are charts and dancefloors, YouTube hits and Spotify. There are writers who go on about what is trendy, spouting words like "sludgecore" and "beardwave". Yet, I can't help but feel like we treat the endorsements of the established musical press with a high degree of suspicion. We download from independently run blogs to find one-off songs that are truly aligned to our taste.

I may just be looking for another Beatles, another Strokes, another Oasis, another group that manages to coincide with that dramatic re-invention of a new decade. The cynic in me is uncertain whether it's even really possible to garner up that extreme degree of popularity in a time when genres are so heavily fragmented and obscurity is king. In the case of Psy's Gangnam Style, a video receives in excess of a billion hits does not necessarily equate to a popular song, in the sense that everyone likes it. It simply means that a lot of people have seen it.

Weeks ago, I was at the Face the Music conference when I heard a woman shout out: "But no one is going to remember Gangnam Style!" It was an interesting moment, because in spite of all my reservations about this decade's identity, I knew she was wrong. It is indisputable that people will remember that song, in the very same way that we can vividly recall the irksome refrain of Eiffel 65's Blue. I have to remind myself that it is simply not possible that an era can exist without its own sense of definition.

Japanese Youth in Revolt
Even if our listening practices are totally disparate, even if nothing is as massive as it once was, I know that we will remember those songs which are truly important. I know that it will all begin to make sense with the passing of time.

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Indiepop Podcast #51
Health - In Heat (Javelin Remix)
Joe Goddard - Gabriel (feat. Valentina)
Chairlift - Ghost Tonight
Yeasayer - Henrietta
Foster the People - Helena Beat
daXX - RSI Megademo
Washed Out - Belong
Major Lazer - Get Free (feat. Amber of Dirty Projectors)

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I had lived with the frustration of not knowing the artist name or the song title. I had lived with the annoying possibility of not ever knowing. More often than not, such feelings attached themselves to anonymous reggae-pop dance hits of the early-to-mid 1990s. They were never particularly good songs, as such, but they contained a memorable quality which compelled me to seek them out. They sometimes featured on home-made mix tapes, dubbed from the radio. Occasionally, they lived on subconsciously, as thumping drum beats or neverending sustained notes. I only recently realised that I managed to conquer that impossible task: I had discovered the artist name and song title of every lost song, ever.

It was a grand and thoroughly challenging task, requiring hours of painstaking research online. It was sometimes stupidly impossible, having to google and regoogle lyrics which had no semblance of originality: Oh yeah, baby. Occasionally, the song title would feature a spelling mistake, à la Malcolm McLaren's Operaa House, or the song title would be entirely omitted from the lyrics altogether. There could be any number of reasons why these songs became lost. The fact is, we all have lost songs. Songs that haunt and taunt us, that compel us to sing to confused friends in Maths, in the hopes we might one day achieve that moment of clarity.

We thought it would be this way forever, as we would so frequently ask each other, "what was that videoclip where Stalin's face morphed into Thatcher's?" But as time went on and as more people contributed videos, lyrics, questions and answers online, the number of lost songs we were looking for diminished dramatically. Not only that, the application Shazam provided a hassle-free, almost instantaneous service to identify lost songs. Upon discovering my last lost song, Marcella Detroit's I Believe, I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed that there weren't more to be found. Inasmuch as it is intensely satisfying to be able to identify lost pop, there is nothing more exciting than knowing there is more left to be found.


Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Early 90s Dance Podcast #36
Technotronic - Pump up the Jam
Milli Vanilli - Ma Baker
Snap! - Rhythm is a Dancer
KLF - Justified and Ancient (Stand by the Jams)
Jon Secada - Just Another Day
Janet Jackson - Love Will Never Do (Without You)
Elisa Fiorillo - On The Way Up
The Shamen - Ebeneezer Goode (Beat Edit)

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