Ray Rivamonte - 1976 - Birth Of The Sun WAVE RE-POST UPGRADE

Only A Crazy Man Knows /Birth Of The Sun/Five Miles/Aborigine Gyn/Hello Sundown/ Lassiter's Ride/Whirly Whirly/In A Pidgery Dreamtime/Birth Of The Sun Reprise



Birth of the Sun is the name given to both a dreamtime story and a wonderful, but forgotten album by singer songwriter Ray Rivamonte.

In the dreamtime story a Brolga and an Emu fight over an egg and the result is the creation of the sun.

Ray Rivamonte’s story tells how he spent the first half of the 70s in Hollywood writing and perfecting the sounds that eventually found their way on to his debut LP.


When Ray Rivamonte was sixteen he travelled to Central Australia looking for fresh Australian folk songs that he could add to his repertoire. Believing that the Aboriginal music was the true folk music of the country, he visited places like Alice Springs, Hermansberg and Uluru asking the locals he met about their lives and their music. In the end he didn’t learn any old material he could use but the stories he heard influenced new songs that he wrote upon his return to Melbourne. The first of these songs was 'Jimmy My Boy'.

In the late 60s Rivamonte moved to California to try his hand in the bustling music scene. He auditioned for several major labels without success but the songs that seemed to impress most were the ones that drew on his experiences in Central Australia. In 1971 he got the chance to record the first of the songs that would later appear on Birth Of The Sun.


In 1973 he spent time in the studios of Paul Beaver, one half of pioneering electronic music duo Beaver & Krause. He was experimenting with synthesizers and soundscapes in an attempt to create a soundtrack to the dreamtime story about the creation of the sun.  Later in his career he would continue building music like this for library production music and films like The Chant Of Jimmy Blacksmith.


The Birth Of The Sun was finally finished in 1976 and launched in Melbourne. It features many crack session musicians Rivamonte had got to know while working in Hollywood including Johnny Almond and Jim Keltner. Initial sales were very strong but the record struggled to get radio airplay and there were difficulties with getting more copies pressed after only 2000 were done initially.

John Paul Young - 1975 - Hero FLAC

St. Louis/Pasadena/Friends/Silver Shoes And Strawberry Wine/The Love Game/Yesterday's Hero/Bad Trip/Things To Do/The Next Time/Birmingham



 Hero is the debut studio album by Australian pop singer John Paul Young. The album was released in October 1975 and peaked at 9 and stayed in the charts for 20 weeks.The album was certified gold in Australia.

John Paul “Squeak” Young was the most popular and successful Australian male solo singer of the late Seventies. He is also without question one of the finest male pop-rock vocalists this country has ever produced. He is gifted with a dynamic, powerful, soulful and gritty tenor voice, reminiscent of the great British R&B singer Chris Farlowe, who was no doubt one of his early idols.   The peak period of his pop career was 1975-79 before that he was a member of Sydney band Elm Tree (1969- 71), and he had a stint in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar (1972-74).

Assisted by good looks and personality (and a natural ease in front of the TV camera) John shot to pop stardom during his hugely successful five-year stint as one of the leading protégés of legendary producer-composer duo Harry Vanda and George Young, who came to fame in the 1960s in the legendary Easybeats and who headed Australia's hugely successful '70s 'hit factory', Albert Produtions.

Between 1975 and 1980 John was a genuine teen idol and one of the most popular male performers in the country, with Sherbet's Daryl Braithwaite and Skyhooks' Shirley Strahan his only serious rivals. But unlike Skyhooks and Sherbet (who scored only one UK hit), John's records were hugely success overseas. He became the first local solo performer whose records consistently topped the charts in Europe, the USA and most notably in South Africa, where his popularity was as great as it was back home in Australia. This international success is often overlooked, but he unquestionably blazed a trail for Australian music overseas and helped to pave the way for later acts like Little River Band, Men At Work and Air Supply.