Moving House #2

It was another exhausting day of helping a friend organise his stuff, as he explains on his blog. My responsibility today moved from vinyl – yesterday – to cassettes, books, and miscellaneous paperwork.

“Oh my God”, I shouted at one point, to the interest of my friends. I discovered a cassette tape of a radio interview I did with The Best Judge back in 1992. I was working at ABC Riverina – in Wagga Wagga – at the time as a fresh-faced young man in the early stage of my professional radio career. “ABBA Gold” had just made it to Number #1 on the album charts in Australia, many years after ABBA’s Australian success. It was quite newsworthy. Listening back to the interview wasn’t as traumatic as I thought it might be. I managed to ask some reasonably interesting questions.

At the time, Bjorn and Benny had just written Kristina, though it was still referred to at the time as “The Immigrants”. Frida had just released her version of Julian Lennon’s “Saltwater”, along with a Swedish language folk-song. And Agnetha was still married and beginning to live a “reclusive life” on Ekerö.

The “phenomenon” that has become the ABBA “revival” – exhibitions, Mamma Mia etc – was probably incomprehensible at the time.cIt was also several years before we met and became friends.cMy favourite parts of the blogpost by The Best Judge are..

“Ever seen this much stuff in one place?,” I asked James this afternoon. “Well, there was a story about someone on A Current Affair….,” he replied. Half joking, half serious.

and…

And all those stairs! Up and down, up and down. Arghhh! James fared the best – he’s good at heavy lifting and doing blokey things. His aches were less intense (must be his relative age!)

So there you have it… blokey… and young. Two words you might never have used to describe me, but yeah, they’re now in print!