How do these things happen? Bro' Richard attempts to answer this and other allied mysteries in this month's Dick's Toolbox

Mike's Pith & Wind - School of Rock
Red Symonds commented at a forum on teaching rock music some years ago, that you can’t actually teach rock music. While I still think that he’s right, even he might’ve been tempted to teach some hapless brats something about rock music, (make up? costuming?), had he not so famously fallen into celebrity broadcasting. Bill, Robbo and I all teach, and while it’s something that we’d prefer not to have to do, the fact is that our meagre earnings from playing music have to be supplemented somehow. But I suspect we all have definite opinions on whether you can actually teach anyone to be a successful musician or rock star or whatever, as opposed to teaching someone to adequately play an instrument.
The recent heart-warmer movie ‘School of Rock’ perpetuates the myths that abound about ‘teaching’ rock and pop music, and while it’s true that graduates from various popular music teaching institutions abound on today’s live music scene, does that make them any better equipped than say we were in the halcyon ‘60s and ‘70s?
If they’re to be judged simply on musical accomplishment, the answer is an emphatic yes. Think about the equipment: when I built my first electric guitar from the salvaged remains of my first acoustic guitar that I bought for £6.00, I’d never played a real solid-body electric guitar, and drew my inspiration from blurred photographs in Pix magazine. Chants’ guitarist, Jim Tomlin, whittled his slide guitar from the kauri mast of a visiting Russian schooner. read more

All the very latest news, gossip and pics

Find all the back-issues of the Bloody Newsletter and Stop Press

Some helpful links to Spectrum's favourite people

Have a listen to Mike & Bill's demos of new songs

You wanna learn guitar or buy a classic piece of equipment? Check the classifieds

Give us your thoughts on the file-sharing conundrum

How to book Spectrum for that special function

E-mails to the editor on any and every subject

Dick's Toolbox - Sport, Formula One and Reality
Australians are fanatical spectators of sport and the numbers watching possibly indicates the number of people who don’t play. Before television, before sport merged into part of the entertainment industry, you went to a game on a Saturday afternoon in conditions that would now be the cause of a class action, and maybe saw an obscure fragment of whatever game was being played. You stood in company of people with whom you shared a common passion and often little else - things like standards of personal hygiene, sobriety and words with more than two syllables for example. But you were united nonetheless, in either disappointment or happiness at the end of the game, and rolled out together into the evening with a vague sense of unity and a bursting bladder .You can still do this with amateur and obscure sports, those activities that nobody will pay significant advertising money.. read more