Ian McCausland's unmistakable imprint is on the project

Mike's Pith & Wind - Mainstream
On the way into Edensound today I was reflecting on Spectrum’s unlikely career, predicated as it is on just the one song. When we do gigs these days, our audience is mostly our age and knows (and loves) that one song, but it’s not a given that they’re going to be thrilled and excited to deal with what Spectrum is now. Before you chip in with the observation that it could be because we don’t obligingly stay in a seventies’ time warp, I think it could possibly be even worse if that were the case. Having already re-issued Spectrum Part One and just about to launch the re-issue of Milesago and listening again to the material we were playing then, I can appreciate what an acquired taste we were/are. The reality is though, that for one reason or another, our reputation has exceeded our mass acceptance by quite a wide margin.
Have you ever wondered what the term ‘musician’s musician’ means? OK. I’ll tell you. It simply means that musician concerned is playing stuff that only other musicians can appreciate, or perhaps even understand. And, with the general public, for ‘appreciate’ or ‘understand’, read ‘like’. Well, for more than forty years now, all my bands, almost without exception, have fallen into this lonely category, with some of them not even being understood by fellow musicians.
On occasions I’m prone to muse with the rest of you, why would I follow this singular path, dragging dear old Bill and not-quite-so-old but equally dear Robbo with me? It’s not like I’ve got a political or social axe to grind. Some of my early songs were spectacularly vulgar and anti-social, as with Milesago’s Virgin’s Tale, read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Feeling depressed
As we are lurch towards another depression of unknown depth and duration, we can reflect that twenty years ago there was a similar event caused by the same things; greed corruption, criminality and indifference. To date, a few senior executives have lost their jobs and have retreated to their mansions, comforted by their million dollar severance payments. Thousands more have lost, or will lose their houses, and countless numbers have seen their savings and superannuation vanish or turn into shadows of their former dreams of avarice. Globally, billions of dollars have disappeared into thin air, to apparently only mild bemusement. The only person in jail, even temporarily, is a relatively minor currency trader, Jérôme Kerviel, from the Banque Société Générale, who, directly and indirectly, cost the bank eight billion dollars, speculating that the American dollar would rise. Other players in the market were read more