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I started out much like everyone else, enjoying listening to pop music as I was growing up. I bought all the English pop magazines and avidly followed my favourites, until they too became unfashionable, fell from favour, and disappeared. At the time, it was incredibly frustrating. The world wide web was years away, and I had no hope of finding out what had happened to them.
I've realised that I can't just be indifferent to music. I can't just have music on the background the way a lot of people seem to. I can't help listening to it. I either like it, or I don't. And often it's a far more extreme reaction - I love it, or I hate it.
Over the years since I first got into music, I've followed the trail of certain musicians through the music scene, watching with interest where they end up. One of them was Cozy Powell, drummer extraordinaire. I first noticed him because of the irresistable track Dance With The Devil. Not via the radio - Australian radio was not that enlightened - but because the track was included on a compilation called Greatest Hits '74 which I heard played at a party! (Around that time, too, I was introduced to Deep Purple, hearing Black Night for the first time, also at a friend's birthday party.)
I was into what was known as Glam Rock without even realising it was a genre. It was simply a part of the music scene when I first "noticed" music for the first time, and back then I had no idea what these guys looked like and how they dressed - I simply loved the music, the stomping beats and the complex layers of sound. There were no television shows which showed pop filmclips - here in Australia, though we got a great deal of English content on the ABC, we did not get Top Of The Pops. Countdown was a year or so away, but even then it was not what I personally wanted to see - it was filled with local bands whose music did not appeal to me. For a similar reason, I generally did not get much joy from the radio.
I was not actually aware at the time that most of the bands whose music I liked were British - I just knew what I liked. I would save up my modest pocket money, and then in the school holidays, go into the city and buy records.
But it all started to go sour as tastes inevidably changed. With the golden age of music over, punk rock was born, and my interest in so-called mainstream music withered and died. By 1977 and 1978 there were only a couple of chart singles which were worth listening to, so I gave up on pop music, but by then I had discovered something new.
 The bus I caught to school every morning would pass by a record store, one of the highlights of the trip. One day, I saw hanging in the window the most gorgeous record sleeve I had ever seen. When I finally found out the name of the band, and who was in it, imagine my surprise to discover that the drummer was none other than Cozy Powell! That record was Rising by Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow.
I just had to know what the music was like. Unfortunately it wasn't a matter of just going out and buying it, as a schoolgirl receiving a meagre amount of pocket money and forbidden to take up a part-time job to supplement it. So I think I must have used money I had been given for my birthday - not to buy Rising, but the latest record by Rainbow, Long Live Rock n' Roll - from, of all places, Target! (I did get Rising not all that long afterwards. Well-meaning, my mother had given me some cosmetic products for Christmas that year. However, I was so terribly disappointed when I opened my present that she relented and gave me the money to go and buy what I really wanted - the record with the gorgeous cover!)
And thus my heavy metal record collection had begun! From Rainbow, I started to delve backwards, into Deep Purple, as well as into associated bands like the Ian Gillan Band (IGB - and my first introduction to bass player John Gustafson) and Whitesnake, widening my tastes.
It wasn't too long before I discovered the local heavy metal speciality record store Utopia, and much hard-earned money was spent here snapping up import releases by all and sundry in the Deep Purple family tree.
And, most wonderful of all, Black Sabbath, with Ronnie James Dio (yes, the lead singer of Rainbow for the first four magical albums) at the mike, came out to Australia. My first ever concert. Life was never going to be the same.
Ian Gillan turned up on our shores the next year, with his band Gillan (I was so steeped in the jazz/rock fusion of the Ian Gillan Band that it was actually a disappointment to me that this new band did not play any of the older numbers - perhaps I was the only one at the venues who thought so!). Next came Iron Maiden, a band I had been introduced to by the guys at Utopia. And then, the unbelievable happened. Deep Purple reformed. And they came to Australia. So I got to see Ritchie Blackmore in concert - the second member of the classic Rainbow line-up, not to mention getting to see the classic Deep Purple Mark 2 line-up.
However, after only a few years of avid record collecting, the pickings were getting slim. By the mid-eighties, I concluded that most music wasn't worth buying, though I stuck with Gary Moore, who continued to turn out quality music, right up to After The War, released in 1989 - and guess who was the drummer :-) It was no real surprise, as Gary Moore had appeared on Cozy's first solo album, Over The Top, in 1979. However, Moore then gave up on heavy rock and turned to the blues, which, quite frankly, turned me right off. Coincidental with that, came the arrival of the compact disc, an event so insidious it really didn't register with me. Cassettes and records had always co-existed, so what if there was a third format? I was going to keep on buying vinyl.
I stubbornly kept on buying the vinyl version of the recordings I wanted for a while, and then finally just gave up buying music at all. Not such a great loss - the music of the nineties was, as far as I could tell, not worth bothering with, and there was quite enough going on my life!
It wasn't until 1997 that I seriously started to wonder what all the musicians had gotten up to in my absence. And now there was a way I could find out - the Internet :-). I also began to watch Amped, the only cable television heavy rock show which was on the air at the time. Most of it was unnoteworthy, if not downright revolting. The splintering of heavy metal into a whole lot of different genres was unexpected, not to mention the surprisingly effective combination of metal and punk, once complete and apparently unreconcilable opposites, as thrash.
There were two bands in particular who stood out. The first song that really grabbed my attention was Albatross by a band called Corrosion of Conformity. The song was melodic and slow, the filmclip intriguing.
And the other band was Megadeth, with, of all things, a cover version of the Alice Cooper song, No More Mr Nice Guy. With my usual diligence, I started to research them, and the more I found out, the more fascinating they became. Dave Mustaine's voice took some getting used to, for someone "brought up" on Ian Gillan, David Coverdale, Glenn Hughes and Ronnie James Dio, but it grew on me. His vitriolic lyrics, however, were music for my unquiet soul.
Recognising that it was time to get my collection back up to date after years of neglect, I set out to investigate the music stores I had avoided for so long. I had old friends to catch up with - I found out that Cozy had put out a fourth solo album. However, when I went into the city to try and find it, I discovered that it wasn't going to be that easy. All of the mainstream music stores were filled with high turnover, high popularity artists, all with exactly the same stock.
Utopia had moved, but was still going strong, and still stocked vinyl. Another Sydney store was Redeye Records, and it was there I went to try and find Cozy's album. No, they didn't have it, but they could order it in for me, from Japan. For $55. Ouch.
"No thank you," I said, "I'll go to Japan and buy it myself." And that's exactly what I did. This was not nearly as extravagant as it sounded - with that kind of markup on the price of a CD, it would be cheaper to spend the extra money on the plane ticket AND get the trip to Japan! My want list was sufficiently large that I would easily come out in front. I spent 2 weeks going from music store to music store all over Tokyo, and came home with a rather large collection of records, CDs, and laser discs :-) And yes, I got Cozy's fourth album the very afternoon I landed at Narita.
 In chasing up Cozy's early recordings on CD, I got a magnificent double CD collection called Dynamite - The Best of Glam Rock. As well as containing all of Cozy's RAK label hit single A-sides, the exquisite Ballroom Blitz by Sweet, and other classics of the era, there were two marvelous tracks by a band called Blackfoot Sue. My curiousity was piqued. Who were these guys? Why had I never heard of them before?
Amazingly enough, I found Blackfoot Sue's first two albums (on CD) at Glenn A Baker's* shop Time Warp in the city (probably the only place I was likely to find them!). A company called Repertoire Records had re-released them. They were not cheap, so I dared to buy the first one, Nothing To Hide, and loved it. I was also very impressed by the packaging and the detailed liner notes.
 From there I went on to research the band, putting the story together piece by piece. Thus began one of my (in)famous "archaeological digs". (I had put together some articles, back in the eighties, on obscure "anime" (Japanese animation) shows, which were subsequently published in fanzines. At the time, I was working full-time (as a laboratory technician), studying my degree part-time, and teaching myself Japanese in my spare time by translating Japanese magazines. Yes, I love a challenge!)
There was very little material about them on the Internet that I could find, so I decided to put together my own site - yes, You Are Here! However, it was to be a few more years before I would have the chance to do something about it, but in the meantime I was happily investigating not only Blackfoot Sue, but other bands from the era, fascinated to see what else I was going to discover. I found that the years immediately before I personally discovered music were full of gems that I knew nothing about and had never heard. Something I was making up for in a hurry!
I also started to make plans to travel to the UK. I had never seen Cozy play, and I was determined that I was going to. Over the years he had been in and out of an amazing number of bands. I didn't really mind or care who he was with, I just wanted to see him play. So I was devasted in April 1998 when I found out that he had died in a car crash.
It certainly changed the focus of my life. I found a cathartic way to work through my grief. Obsessive writer that I am, I revisited the story that I had created while I was at school, bored by the slow pace of my classes. The main character was a drummer - not Cozy, and not much like him at all, but still it seemed like a fitting tribute. It also served to get me back into writing again, which has always been a magical conduit to creativity.
And I didn't stop chasing up music. I was now, unfortunately, in competition with people who were after Cozy's recordings purely because of his untimely death, possibly people who'd never even heard of him until then.
And how bitterly ironic it was that Brian May came out to Australia with his band, the very band in which Cozy would have been playing drums, if he had still been alive - I wouldn't have even had to go to the UK to see him. It wasn't easy to sit there and watch Eric Singer play.
 I began buying a magazine called Record Collector, a goldmine of information, and it was there I discovered Steamhammer. Surprise, surprise, on Repertoire. The review mentioned a 10 minute bass solo, somewhat disparagingly, but that was the clincher for me. Amazingly enough, I found this one at Redeye!
I went on to search out all the rest of their albums, and the real eye-opener was their final recording, which was released only in Germany, Speech. It was a prog rock classic.
From then on I was actively on the lookout for Repertoire issues. It became very clear that the people who ran the company had very similar tastes to my own. So then they went and proved it, by releasing the three CCS albums on CD as digipaks. Beautiful.
In 2001, I got to see, and meet both Corrosion of Conformity and Megadeth. CoC came out to Australia to support Pantera, and did a meet-and-greet at... wait for it... none other than Utopia. Those of us who went along to meet them had a great time - I especially enjoyed chatting with Woody and Mike, who were the nicest, most down-to-earth guys you could even hope to meet.
And then there was Megadeth. I was there queued up outside the store the morning the tickets went on sale, and I got my front row ticket :-) They were fantastic. It was, without a doubt, the best concert I have ever been to. How lucky I was, considering that Dave Mustaine called it a day only seven months later and disbanded the group!
Record fairs at Parramatta Town Hall and Glebe Community Centre every 3 months always enrich my collection, even if they seriously deplete my wallet. And then there's the Internet. Sites like GEMM, which declares itself the "World's Largest Music Catalog", are a marvelous source of material from all over the world; and of course, there's always eBay.
 Andromeda was another album I bought on spec, because it was on the Repertoire label. It took me a little while to get around to playing it, but when I did, what a revelation! I immediately went on one of my musical archeology digs, to find out more about the artists involved, and most importantly, as always, to find out what else they had done.
The band consisted of John Du Cann on guitar, Mick Hawksworth on bass (both credited with vocals), and Ian McLane on drums. I immediately had to know what other bands they had recorded with and what other recordings were available. The album was, quite simply, brilliant.
 Mick Hawksworth had subsequently, I discovered, worked with a band called Fuzzy Duck, who had recorded one self-titled album in 1970, re-released on CD by, you guessed it, Repertoire. I had high expectations of this one! I hunted it up on eBay, waited impatiently for my auction win to arrive in my letterbox, and put it into the player. It became an instant favourite, particularly those songs that Mick Hawksworth wrote and sang. It was no real surprise, either, of a direct link to Steamhammer - Garth Watt-Roy, singer on Speech, was the singer on the non-album singles released by Fuzzy Duck (bonus tracks on the CD).
I haven't yet gotten hold of his recordings with Ten Years Later (Alvin Lee's regroup of Ten Years After). I do know he still gigs, and still plays bass.
John Du Cann, on the other hand, had been involved with numerous bands over the years. He's probably best known for his stint in Atomic Rooster, and the resulting hit album, Death Walks Behind You, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. He has an amazing chamaeleon-like ability to play in many styles.
When it came to putting my own website together, and deciding who to write about, it was pretty easy. There was no point in writing up the bands who already had official web sites and a myriad of fan sites dedicated to them. But here was my chance to put together my sparce collection of information on Blackfoot Sue and see if I could piece together the story of the band. This was just the kind of challenge I could get my teeth into, and have fun crafting a website in the process. The break-through came when I discovered firstly that Blackfoot Sue had released a new album in 1998 - so they were still around - and then I discovered their latest and current incarnation - Cry Wolf !
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