..Enza Pantano’s voice supplementing the usual Bill and myself singing and playing nylon-string guitars. Serendipitously, one of the songs he discovered was one I thought that I’d lost for good in the transition from analogue to digital called Recycle Your Love. Every now and then I come across a reference to it but the musical evidence remains stubbornly absent and apart from the lyrics I have only the vaguest memory of how it went. And now, courtesy of the ever-diligent collector Rob Harwood, here it is! Sounding as clean and virtuous as the night it was recorded, even on an mp3 file.
As it rolls through for the first time I find myself remembering all the sections – even the middle eight – but the last section of oh, oh, oh, oh, oh’s before the final chorus catches me by surprise. Not typical of me and not the way I remembered demo’ing it, but songs develop in performance and this sounds a pretty well worked on version to me – even Bill’s harmony sounds spot-on. Anyway, I’m just thrilled that it’s not only been rediscovered but that it’s also about to be published for the first time - and all in one fell swoop.
It makes you wonder about other songs that might have got away for one reason or another. Bill and I sometimes reminisce about The March of the Garden Gnomes, an instrumental (possibly) that the first line-up of Ariel may or may not have recorded during the fetid period of our first rehearsals after the demise of Spectrum back in 1973 where we devised an entire repertoire of new songs in a matter of weeks. All but a couple of songs made the cut and were recorded for posterity on Ariel’s occasionally alarming debut album A Strange Fantastic Dream.
All but a couple. Besides the errant marching gnomes’ number there was one other that got as far as Ariel’s first public performance at the Camberwell Civic Centre late in ’73 with none other than Ross Wilson’s Mighty Kong (which had Spectrum’s Ray Arnott on drums) and the classic line-up of Billy Thorpe’s Aztecs – possibly. I’m a bit hazy on the details.
Anyway, somebody recorded the Ariel set on reel-to-reel – it might even have been me – and some years later I picked up on this track (Don’t Hurt No More) and transcribed it to cassette.
I was initially delighted to rediscover it in a recent-ish bout of cassette cataloguing and dutifully re-recorded it and included it on the most recent of the Breathing Space EPs. If you’re into local musical history trivia then it might hold some interest for you, but otherwise I can now see that Don’t Hurt No More’s an irredeemably maudlin and ultimately self-indulgent piece that deserved to be cut in the first place and then quietly forgotten. The euphoria associated with rediscovering lost songs can lead to at least the partial suspension of the author’s critical faculties and friends and colleagues should consider an intervention if this resurrecting daft old songs business starts getting out of hand.
Despite my excitement I’m pretty sure Recycle Your Love is good value (despite the title) but perhaps Launching Place Part One falls into that daft category. It was recorded at the same session as I’ll Be Gone and its B side Launching Place Part Two. Initially it was I’ll Be Gone which was the odd one out, with the pair of Launching Places originally planned as A and B sides, with the instrumental taking the prime position. They were ostensibly written to promote the forthcoming Let It Be outdoor festivals to be staged on a farm in Launching Place, although I'm not sure who I imagined was going to be attracted to go to an outdoor festival with lyrics like these in the opening stanza..

Up above a ball of fire
Burns their bodies down below
The water’s surface leeches gather
All around to bleed the show

Anyway, the instrumental Part One got shelved, not to be unearthed until we released the charity compilation of various treatments of I’ll Be Gone, (I’ll Be Gonz) in 2001. It’s alright I suppose. ‘70s music enthusiasts could perhaps tell you how it fits into the music being produced in Melbourne at the time, but the performance is a little ponderous and consequently wistfulness turns into turgid mud – much as the festival itself did for two successive years.
I suppose a much worse fate is losing a song altogether by drug-induced misadventure. Keith Richards always maintained they had the perfect mix of Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadow but they went past it and ended up releasing an inferior version.
Drugs are quite often associated with song-writing, perhaps moreso than with the other arts - I hesitate to think how many hit songs would be lost if the New Puritans decided to ban songs created with the use of banned substances. There’s a strong link with drugs in record production too, but somebody in the room has to be straight, otherwise irretrievable mistakes are bound to be made and all we'll ever be talking about is what might’ve been.

* I call them Rod Claringbould’s Acoustic Sessions, but retiring Rod simply calls them the Acoustic Sessions.