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Tuesday 13 December 2016

Aidan Nolan - 1974 - Tales From The Sun


Spaceman/One Out On A Limb/Till I Get Me Some Money/Thursday/Wastin' My Time/Melanie Moonbeam/Can't Go On Like This/Rock You/Laughing/Sweet Soft Summer Sound/Q/Down Again



 If your memory is good enough, go back to 1969 to a television program about drug addiction called “No Roses For Michael”, you might also remember the name of the man who wrote the music, being Sydney artist Aidan Nolan. Aidan played with various Sydney rock bands during the late 1960’s including Daisy Roots, their drummer Alan Sandow went on to drum for Sherbet. Other bands he played with were Garage Plus, Papa Skragg’s Patent Leather Nightmare and Pro to name a few. In 1973 he began to lay down tracks for an album, Tales From The Sun, but with the album still not completed, he decided to travel to England. While in London aidan was offered a contract to record cover versions of American songs. Apparently he found great difficulty relating lyrically and, such musical honesty being financially unrewarding, he was down to the ancient art of busking, making use of the excellent acoustics of Green Park station in the London underground. However, it was when John J Francis who produced and arranged "Tales From The Sun" took aidan's album to London, the former street busker was immediately signed to the British Sparks label. The album was released in England and Europe.

 
 By the time aidan nolan was 4 years old he had lived in Sydney, Perth and Adelaide (Australia) and London (UK). Perhaps it was this relentless mobility in those years that created the need for one inner constancy in his life, music. Not the music of others, although there’s no doubt he is influenced as are all artists by those that go before, but for the ability to create a song.  Even the APRA (Australia’s ASCAP) Journal has run an article outlining that aidan was a songwriter at 5!
 Perhaps it has been his continuing geographical and career mobility that keeps forging his songs. aidan has worked and travelled extensively in Europe and Australia.
 

He has been a store-person, landscaper, postal carrier, driver, laborer, busker (street entertainer) and post-university (college) a school-teacher, rising to the lofty (if not culturally shock-inducing) position of Assistant Headmaster in exclusive Australian private schools. Finally, after walking out on that established career and some time in business, he built an international speaking consultancy with clients in the US, Australia, Asia and New Zealand.  Over the years he has lived in small Australian country towns, the Australian state capitals of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide as well as a number of years in London.
 Now a US citizen and resident of New York, aidan’s early music is experiencing a renaissance of interest that is un-paralleled for an indie artist and a very respectable surge of interest in his contemporary work.  While he has a strong following of all ages, he is particularly of interest with those in their late-teens to mid-thirties, probably because the word is spreading primarily through social media.

4 comments:

  1. Not familiar with Aidan Nolan so keen to hear this one mate.

    Thanks for bringing this to the surface.

    Cheers AR

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  2. He has albums there, but apparently they are very hard to find! And and the publication recently!

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  3. My Dad made me watch "No Roses for Michael" so I'd learn to avoid drugs, which in that program was 'speed'. I wonder what he would have thought about JFK being injected with the stuff by 'Dr Feelgood'. Anyway I've always avoided those types of drugs. I did come away singing the theme song and have never forgotten it. Nice to finally find out where it came from, there was a another independent movie from Melbourne called "The Girl on the Roof" whose song I always remembered too.

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