If like me, it was hard for you to get out of the house this year and experience live music, I found myself sitting on the couch watching too much TV… It wasn’t until I put together this list I realised I watch w-a-a-a-a-y too much TV…

Anyway, here’s a list of some of the music and music related documentaries I managed to consume in my COVID-19 lockdown. Let’s hope we can get some more gigs in next year.

To give you all a break I excluded every politics documentary I consumed, and didn’t include any of the hundreds, and possibly thousands, of music technology-related YouTube channels I’ve been glued to. I hope you can find something on this list you haven’t seen before...

The Barman’s Best Albums of 2021, in reverse order of release.

1. Back For More – The On and Ons (Citadel)
Perfect rocking powerpop from Australia’s most consistent exponents of the art. If you haven’t heard them yet, shame. Start here and track backwards.

2. Snake Pit Therapy – Sonny Vincent (Svart)
New York punk’s (almost) last man standing bounces back with his best-sounding and arguable most well-rounded album ever. Sonny has been hidden in plain sight for the many for far too long.

3. You’re Class, I’m Trash – The Monsters (Voodoo Rhythm)
Beat-Man and his buddies have made trash an art form like few others before them. This record should make a junkie of you.

X singer-guitarist and solo artist in his own right, Steve Lucas, has selected 10 X songs that fit with a COVID-19 theme.

1. Where Did I Go Wrong?
2. The Feel.
3. At Home With You
4. Waiting
5. Suck Suck
6. Home Is Where The Floor Is
7. Revolution
8. Police
9. I Don't Wanna Go Out
10. Hate City.

Steve: "Titles and lyrics cover the whole pandemic, to my mind at least. Merry Xmas!"

How best to remember Melbourne graphic Martin Harris who left the world a week ago?

The Barman has asked a few of us to write about our Top Tens this year. Well, like most of us, I didn't go out much, and didn't listen to much either.  However, one thing which has dominated this year is depression and its many variants.

What has this to do with rock and roll?  Plenty. If you don;t agree, you can't have been listening to the greats, Ozzy Osbourne, Johnny Cash, New Order, Amy Winehouse... 

See, I've always thought the impulse to create rawk is only a single manifestation of what I call 'the creative imperative'. This imperative is stronger in some than others, of course. But if you would take the imperative to success on a gigamax scale, you not only need luck, you need determination, hard work AND more luck. 

Queen, for example, were so determined to succeed that before they were gigamax they rehearsed in their stage gear. They worked hard for their success. Ask any musician: songs don't just drop from trees, fully formed. Some folk are stupidly talented, but with most creatives, genius rarely spontaneously happens.

Anyone reading “Get in the Van” gets an idea of how determined Rollins has been to succeed. What do P.G. Wodehouse, W.E. Johns and Dick Francis have in common? They wrote at least a book a year (Johns sometimes churned out three or four per year). But not only did they each have a lot of luck, they all worked damned hard. (Alright, so PG had several flops and weathered two gigantic, very public (and bloody funny) scandals but even so).

_{Joey Pinter, Walter L:ure and Daniel Rey.}

When we were young and skinny and fearless, it was easier to celebrate the ch-cha-cha-changes, than it is now, when so many of our favorite places, people, bands, and way of life are just vanishing a little more each day. I can't keep up with all these changes.

In my head, I'm still a new wave kid with a Walkman. Probably listening to the Cult "Love", on 10, right? Making rehearsal tapes on a boombox in the basement. You could save 20 or 30 dollars, and come home from the big city record store with a new t shirt, some little buttons, a copy of "Flipside" or "Maxiumum Rock And Roll", some Jesus & the Mary Chain and Bauhaus postcards to send to your goth girlfriends in far away cities, a Gene Loves Jezebel or Flesh For Lulu promotional poster the nose-ringed death rocker cashier gave you for free, and a whole stack of winning indie punk $1 vinyl from the cut out bin. Those were different times.

For most of us, there ain't no rock ‘n’ roll no more, just the ludicrous worship of bullshit do nothing politicians, media monopoly lies and propaganda, and cos-play lab-coated scientific astronaut rich people on TV, and/or, always more blandly insufferably mediocre and meaningless mainstream garbage like the Foo Fighters - there's nowhere to go, no more basement shows. No real underground bands or real underground rock press in Amerikkka.

"The idea that 'disinformation' is something that just happened during the last four years is absurd. How did the U.S. public become the most ill-informed, easily manipulated public on the planet if not as a result of systematic 'disinformation' from the rulers? Now these same rulers want to 'regulate' social media speech." - Ajamu Baraka

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” - Mussolini

Ridiculously, I am suspended from social media, by fascist corporatists for posting this quote. How Zucked-up is that? I've been Zucked. You could be next.

All the left media sites are being censored, demonetized, or taken down, by corporatist Zuck-bots, and the gentrification shitlibs accept this, casually and completely, because their pyramid-scheme higher-up superiors have told them that censorship is okey-dokey, because social media is privately owned, and therefore, tech-lord billionaires have the right to censor any facts, opinions, quotes, or evidence that contradicts their corporatist agenda. More worryingly, attractive and beloved celebrity figureheads have, once again, been recruited to promote monopoly tech-lord control of information flow, by telling their followers to rat on any voices online that question or contradict official narratives, as spreading mis-information. This is exactly the cultish Blue MAGA equivalent of crazy Trump yelling "fake news".

DONAT TAHIRAJ
Owner of Phase 4 Records and Cassettes store and the LCMR Records label
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia 

There’s no need to explain what a slightly weird year 2020 was. Sadly and for my back pocket’s sake, Phase 4 Records had to close for most of Autumn which meant I wasn’t as often held captive by some stinky guy banging on about the greatness of some rockist act they read about in "The Wire" at the top of their voice scaring our innocent customers away while I desperately needed to go to the toilet.

Our record label LCMR managed to squeeze out only three 7” EPs for the year – one by a hopelessly obscure Toowoomba punk group, Brian, and two by Xiro, the Brisbane band of the early post-punk era who should’ve gone on to have a great international career but decided not to for the sake of art; or something.

It was a great pleasure putting them all together for those who were all too familiar and the ones who were brave enough to try some music that was completely unknown to them.

GENERAL LABOR
Gonzo journalist and onetime rock star
Somewhere in the USA

10.) Binge watching old bands I love on YouTube, live concerts, etc.
Particularly Cheap Trick, Redd Kross, the Divinyls, Rose Tattoo, Beasts Of Bourbon, Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Smack, Tex & The Horseheads, Little Kings, Viletones, Chris Isaak, 39 Steps, Bounty Hunters, Jacobites etc. And The Fleshtones - greatest live band I ever saw have lots of great stuff to watch on YouTube, Kings of Rock ‘n’ Roll!

9.) Carry It Forward
The most revolutionary, serve the people, activist organization I've ever seen in real life provides coats, hats, gloves, sleeping bags, tents, rides, hotel rooms, wheelchairs, etc to the real people in the community that the government does not care about. Millions of people in the USA USA are becoming homeless and evicted while the get rich politicians drink champagne with their warpig donors. Almost like they wanna kill the poor. BE LIKE CARRY IT FORWARD, wherever you are!

8.) Slade is the right answer to almost any question!

7.) Remembering how Real Friends are precious
Especially in these dark clampdown death plague winters when so many groovy people like Dave Kusworth, Eddie Van Halen, Mike Mindless, Mike Doman, Clay Anthony have passed on.

CELIA CURTIS
Vocalist for White Knuckle Fever and Stone Cold Fox
Sydney, NSW, Australia

Celia Curtis’s Top 20 of 2020!

GIGS

The gigging landscape undulated wildly in 2020 but it was by no means barren. The absence of the annual stagger to (and from) River Rocks Festival in Geelong definitely stung a bit, but there were some corker live gigs and streams in 2020. Here are some of my favourites I was lucky to attend/ play:

1.    Jan 4 2020, PUNKNATS, The Old Canberra Inn
Due to raging fires and road closures, Crapulous Geegaw, Tweekers and Grim couldn’t make it. But you just can’t stop the rock. Lucifungus, Oaf, the Dirty Sluts, Minor Surgery, rooted, Hymn, Herxhaim, DuShkanu, White Knuckle Fever and (my personal faves) Thee Cha Cha Chas all went hard.

It was 44 degrees Celsius in a tin shed. Literally the worst air quality in the world. A late southerly that brought out the p2 masks and a blanket of apocalyptic Orange smoke. But fuck it was a great day. Milly, Tilly and Outtaspace Presents did a top job organising once again and The Old Canberra Inn was as hospitable as ever.