Only in Melbourne: (update) Nick Lampe - Flower Garden (1970)

Nick Lampe - Flower Garden (Nick Lampe) 

USA 1970

Cotillion single (USA) #44066
Cotillion album It Happened Long Ago
Atlantic single (Australia) #3740
Australian charts: #16 Melbourne #52 Australia 
Chart positions from Gavin Ryan's Melbourne chart book and Grant Dawe's Australian Top 100 site.

2023 This was an obvious candidate for my Only in Melbourne series (about tracks that charted Top 40 in Melbourne but not in their countries of origin), but I'd already written about Nick Lampe and his song Flower Garden in detail here and here, so I didn't want to go over old ground.

When I first wrote about Nick in 2005 and 2006 it was hard to find audio of Flower Garden online. Now of course there are several YouTube posts with the audio of the song. 

Below is one of the current YouTube posts of the original 1970 track. Direct link: YouTube

You can also listen to it at Spotify.

The second YouTube video below plays a version that Nick recorded in more recent years and released in 2016. I know that he wasn't satisfied with the original release, so perhaps this later version gives some insight into how he sees the song. Direct link: YouTube

A dream about the song APunk by Vampire Weekend

The day I first heard Vampire Weekend's song APunk I couldn't get it out of my mind. I even dreamt about it:

We were in a crowded surfside hippy folk club at an old hall. There was a main hall inside but we were out in a smaller room, like an entrance hall.

A couple were singing a great, catchy, up-tempo song that I’d never heard: a girl with bright orange-dyed hair, straight & short, slightly pixie-like features, playing a big acoustic guitar, and on harmonies a woolly headed surfie guy, matted long fair hair, standing on the other side of her.

They finished and left, and I kept thinking, “I should’ve asked them what the song was.” I looked on gig posters on the walls to see if I could get a clue. There was music playing inside by now, and I was afraid the song would go out of my mind.

After a while I went outside and looked across the street to the beachfront: there were cars parked all along the curb, then a park and the beach. The couple were standing at the back of an old car with its boot up. They’d obviously been for a swim, and were towelling themselves dry.

I started to walk across to ask them about the song.

Then I woke up with it still playing in my head.

After I awoke properly, I realised that the song was A-Punk by Vampire Weekend, except that the folkie couple had been singing their own, dreamlike arrangement…

Photo from Vampire Weekend's MySpace where you can listen to APunk. It seems to have been taken in an old hall.

Transport transported

Transport, that extraordinarily good band from Brisbane, is flying out to LA today. Keir, Scotty and Steve are on at the Roxy Theatre on Sunset Boulevard on Monday, part of the Queensland Music Artist Showcase at Musexpo. Then it's New York and the Rainbow Room (talk about legendary venues!) to play at the Queensland Expatriate Awards.

After that, Transport is off to the UK for sixteen gigs in seventeen days on the CMEAS Spring Tour.

About time the rest of the world heard the Greatest Band in the World. That's not just the guitarist's girlfriend talking: Keir's dad said it too. (That's me, and his mum agrees.)