Escape to What the Time Forgot: The Yardbirds' Remember

Saturday mornings at my place dawned with the threat of yard work. My parents were odd gardeners, preferring fruit and herbs to flowers and landscaping two fishponds (which in the summer became toadponds) with primeval fronds and slimy creepers. Tropical botany is so prehistorically competitive that it will sacrifice itself for the good of the continued line. So it gets messy. When you have to clean up a mass of rotting greenery alive with creatures with disgustingly textured skin as well as others that can poison the wellwishing hand that moves them to safety it can make a Saturday morning a time for intense escape planning.

I was still new to record buying and the act of tapping into the motion of the earth felt grown up yet the sense of discovery felt as secret as my daydreams. My sister had only just got her driver's licence and when she told me about the treasures in the boxes of records at op shops and junk shops, showing me an array of her own plunder, I had a way out of Saturday's gulag duties.

I always think of the shop as being on the Causeway in Townsville but I actually don't remember more than it was near the centre of town. It was more of a junk shop than anything else, dominated by old furniture which looked forgotten rather than antique. But there in a dim corner, almost hidden by a fringed theatrical curtain that smelled of wartime dust, were three boxes of records. I attacked them.

Mostly rubbish. Perry Como sings Christmas for You at Home (made me think of someone alone on Christmas day torturing herself with repeated droning renditions of Silent Night, laughing woodenly and shrieking, "what a great Christmas!" after each play). The Brady Bunch sings (not on my record player, it wouldn't, though it might now). Andy Williams: Love is Blue .... And Other Colours (really, grey as well, how about baby shit brown?)

I gave up for a moment, turning to the box of cassettes beside it and almost immediately found HIGH EXPLOSIVE, a greatest hits of 1975. This contained what is to this day my sole purchase of anything by ACDC (TNT was on it). It started with Jigsaw's eerie and soaring Sky High, the theme from The Man From Hong Kong and went into Stevie Wright's Black Eyed Bruiser which had a great intro combining a tough nut guitar chug and a brass section climbing by the semitone up to a brief pause before Stevie's mumbled psycho confession kicked it. All good catchup stuff. I'd only made the turn from classical to pop the previous year and so had missed out on a fair bit. That was it for the tapes but it was so good I dived back into the discs.

After some more of the glutch exemplified above and I came across the cover in the picture. A penny dropped. Earlier that year I'd listened rapt to a radio special about the new Led Zeppelin album (Presence) and it had been mentioned that Jimmy Page had been in a band called the Yarbirds. They'd misspelled the name on the cover but Eric Clapton was in the roll call either side of the idiotic photo of six seagulls at the centre. 50c. Mine.

Back in the car Anita showed me some clothes that wouldn't have interested anyone but looked at my record and nodded archly. "Ah," she said. "Jeff Beck."

Jeff Beck was not a name I knew. It was such an off the shelf anglo-saxon thing that it might have been owned by someone with freckles in the tech drawing class. But my sister was going out with a guitarist.

"Leigh loves Jeff Beck," she said as we coursed down the Causeway. "He says he's more imaginative than Eric Clapton and less messy than Jimi Hendrix. And that is the right spelling." The mini met the gear shift impatiently as we soared off to Aitkenvale.

Once home I quickly established myself in the rumpus room (actually small-house sized building with the big tv and my father's tawriffic home-built stereo system (it had rear speakers but wasn't quadriphonic). Some of Nanna's croissants and a coffee and Nita and I sat down to hear this find. On went the stylus. Crackle crackle went the surface noise. And then it began.

You need to understand that the mid seventies was a kind of cultural wasteland as regards music. Not just because prog rock was horrible and bands like Led Zep were clearly past their best and the Eagles were horrible and most of the crap you witnessed on Countdown deserved the ol' grade eight intiation flushing. It was a wasteland because it had no memory.

I knew about the Beatles from a crumbly copy of Abbey Road left over from the last war and a compilation called The Essential Beatles with an odd track selection (Long Tall Sally instead of She Loves You; Honey Don't rather than Eleanor Rigby?). Even the Beatles back catalogue was out of print let alone anything like this. The only hints of the treasures of the previous ten year stretch came from little minutes of retro radio thumbed into bare temporal corners on the weekends. As often as not what you got from those moments was equivalent to the garbage of top forty radio during the rest of the week: Fabian, Lulu, Pat Boone's not Fats Domino's Aint That a Shame. Coming across a compilation like this was like being handed samizdat, the Russian poetry and satire copied by hand and distributed at very discrete student parties in the still Soviet Union. This felt forbidden and fobidden is energising.

A simultaneous crash of acoustic guitar and thin electric hissed out a riff that sounded Arabic or Indian. The vocals start over a big, roomy acoustic guitar rhythm. A nasal but dark-mooded voice. The words the same kind of  boy-loses-girl pulp that dripped from the contemporary charts. But then there's the backing vocals; wordless, Gregorian, out of tune and strained but serious and hurt. "I got a hear-heart full of soul..." And it only got better.

Evil Hearted You began with a couple of great clunking chords falling from a minor sixth to tonic, the fifth to tonic and then into the song whose goofy done-me-wrong evil woman words again were delivered in that satanic snarl over hummed backing vocals which falsettoed clumsily for the chorus. A middle eight that featured a sneaked in million note guitar run, a lead guitar solo that sounded like the best surf tune you'd ever heard and back to the last chorus and on to the crunching finale: "all hope is go-one...!"

Still I'm Sad really did sound like a monastery full of holy brothers. "See the rain hide away in disgrace!" Holy christ! Is this really what happened in the sixties?

For Your Love's harpsichord and chunging middle eight, Shapes of Things' multilayered solo. There was bad stuff, too, some live tracks just sounded chaotic and a version of Hang on Sloopy seemed to go forever. But the standout tracks were extraordinary. The poor production only increased the wonder of them, as though, however crippled, they could still call across the chasm of time to sadden and excite anyone who found them there.

Jimmy Page's name was not among those listed on the cover but I had no trouble understanding where the greatness of Led Zeppelin originated. This was a band of musicians of wildly varying skill who yet made statements of great depth and sonority.

Nita sniggered from the couch at the occasional archaic trope of a doowop backing here or a strangled guitar passage there but I heard through those things, listening to the heart of this forgotten greatness which stopped feeling like unearthing ancient artifacts the moment a thought occured to me: I could make this sound myself.