G’day folks, let me introduce this little collection of ditties. I stumbled upon the idea for this project in January 2023, while going through my old collection of demos and recordings that I had saved over the years. They were in a box in the shed on various formats such as Adat tape, CD, and even cassettes, and I was converting them into digital files before they decomposed and turned to dust…(hence the title)  

Most of these tunes were never heard by the public; some were heard by a few industry types, some only by a couple of mates, and some by nobody at all.  Back in the day, you basically had to be hand-picked by a record company to make a recording that got played on the radio.  It was tough to get your music heard by a wider audience…especially when you’re as hopeless at self-promotion as I happen to be?  It was also quite an expensive exercise to make an album or even a recording of any kind, so a lot of these tracks are what we call demos (A rough idea of a song that you would pitch to a record company or booking agent in the vain hope you might get signed, and the rest would be history).

Well, history came and went!  And I still had all these recordings with songs that nobody had heard or knew about, and I’d already spent all the time and money to record them back in the day.   So I thought, bugger it…I’m gonna put them all together and make a ‘This is your life’ kinda thing… a soundscape if you will,of my musical career as it developed over time.   Listening back to them, I think they represented where I was as an artist at that moment, and what I was trying to achieve.  I’ve since re-recorded some of these songs at later dates and released them, often better sounding and maybe even better versions musically.  But there’s something about an original recording of a song that is hard to define or recreate.  I like the rawness that is captured on these early recordings.

I took them to Rob Grant for the job of mastering all the tracks. (‘Mastering’ in layman’s terms is…polishing them up to sound good).  Not an easy task when each track is from a different era, on a different format, and recorded in a different sounding studio.  Hats off to Rob for managing to bring it all together into a cohesive-sounding collection. There are 25 recordings here in as close to chronological order as I can remember, some with an acoustic version of a song and a later electric version. And in keeping with the retro theme, I also dug up some old photos from the time, or as close to it as possible.   Most of the pics from the 1995-2000 period are either promotional shots or personal photos taken by Julie. I was never one for taking photos, and, begrudgingly, if it wasn’t for her, I would have nothing to show from that era, so I am eternally grateful.   The other shots are from here and there.

This package is a snippet back in time.  ‘I am the curator of my own history.’ I hope it gives some insight into the origins of my music, both past and present.

Everything returns to Dust.

Mastered by Rod Grant at Poons Head Studios, Fremantle.

Released 2026