And it’s goodbye to Ollie Olsen, pioneer of electronic and experimental music in Australia since the punk era. He’s been an exceedingly ill man for a lot of years now with multiple system atrophy, so his passing isn’t surprising, but still it’s another door closed on that time and place…
Firstly, here’s one I’ve only just discovered via a friend on FB: Olsen’s own Whirlywirld version of “Rooms for the Memory”, which would be redone by a certain Michael Hutchence from INXS for the Dogs in Space soundtrack…
…and the aforementioned pop hit version. Obviously sounds much bigger and more mid-80. I love this. I also love that it was a top ten chart hit here when the film was rated R, so a bunch of Hutchence’s younger fans wouldn’t even have been able to see it…
Logically, therefore, we continue with the other great Hutchence/Olsen collaboration, Max Q. “Only fear under another name…”
And we probably shouldn’t overlook Ecco Homo, which Olsen put together for another kind of extraordinary figure, Troy Davies…
This was where Olsen went in the 90s, you can kind of hear it starting to happen on “Sometimes” but he started properly trancing out with Third Eye and the Psy-Harmonics label…
I can’t find a Youtube video for The Reals, Olsen’s first band in which he played guitar, and whose “Nothing to Say” (on the old Do the Pop Redux compilation from years ag0—try hunting that up) has one of the most obnoxious guitar sounds I’ve ever heard (and granted that recording is a rehearsal demo so not an even remotely professional one, but still), so I’m ending us instead where we began with Whirlywirld. RIP Ian.