Adventures in Polymer Clay: Marbled Beads

Well wouldn't you know it, I just couldn't leave well enough alone and was soon back in the polymer clay for a second bash at creating something of a three-dimensional nature. This time: beads! Good golly do I ever love beads. Especially handmade or wooden ones. Each one has its own character, and because they are either made individually or not mass-produced, they can be striking and interesting.

By intertwining two long thin 'worms' of clay, then kneading them a bit and rolling into balls, you can get beads with a certain marbled effect. I had enough clay to make nearly five dozen of them – 59 to be precise – and used a needle to make holes through each one. Putting 18 of them on an elastic string produced this bracelet, as you see below.

By putting a few plain-coloured ones in there too, it changes the effect and adds variety. You might want to go for a different option, if you try it yourself, which I recommend you do.

And there it is. Any colour you like, as Pink Floyd would say. Or was it Deep Purple? Or Moby Grape? Either way, wise words indeed. Now, get beading, or I'll make you dance to the tune of my hickory stick!!

Bye for now.

Adventures in Polymer Clay: Sugar

Do you remember my character Sugar from Airbury Academy, you know, the girl with the pink hair? Well you should – she's right up there in the banner heading of this blog. I used some coloured polymer clay to make a little figurine of her. She looks a bit pudgy, but it's not bad for someone who is totally inept at sculpture. i.e. me.

See the resemblance? Uncanny, ain't it?

Working with polymer clay is quite easy to do. It doesn't make a mess, you can blend the colours easily, you don't have to hurry in case it goes hard, and if you know what you're doing (which I don't) you can put together each differently-coloured part into a cohesive whole. Then you put it in the oven and bake it.

I still have some clay left so I dare say there will be more of this sort of thing appearing here in the not too distant future.

Compilation Album Review: "Smash Hits '91"

Compilation: Smash Hits '91
Released: 1991 – Columbia
Number of tracks: 18
Number one singles: 3 — "Jukebox In Siberia" by Skyhooks, "The Horses" by Daryl Braithwaite, "Sucker DJ" by Dimples D
Other top ten singles: 9
Best track: "Jukebox In Siberia" by Skyhooks
Hidden gem: None, because I've heard all these songs before. Been there, done that, man!

The hot streak continues! I must admit this was one of the last compilations I'd expected to find, and in an op shop where their CD shelf consisted mainly of Gina G singles, at that. But those have been tossed into the trashcan where they belong, and up popped this little gem. It seems like they couldn't decide on the title; it's called Smash Hits '91 on the inside cover of the booklet, the back cover, spines, and the CD itself, and Smash Hits 1991 on the front cover only.

There's a fair bit of overlap with Video Smash Hits Dance Mix, another compilation Columbia released (and only one of two which I got when it came out!) which was a genre compilation rather than a chart one (although all the songs on it charted). Five songs on it appear on both albums: "Step Back In Time", "Wiggle It", "3 a.m. Eternal", "Games" and "Sucker DJ" (which incidentally all appear sequentially on Smash Hits '91). Both albums also start with a C+C Music Factory track, although not the same song. The catalogue number for the Video Smash Hits Dance Mix CD is lower than Smash Hits '91, so I assume that came out first.

Right, that's the dorky details out of the way! This is a pretty solid lineup, with 12 songs that made the top 10, most of the others making the top 20, and 10 Australian artists. To avoid teenage girls hurling Molotov cocktails at the Smash Hits offices, there's a New Kids On The Block song on here — towards the end you'll find the try-hard rap single "Games [The Kids Get Hard Mix]" (yeah, I bet they do, snigger snigger). No less than Donnie Wahlberg was voted best rapper in the pages of Smash Hits, despite some stiff competition (Betty Boo, Vanilla Ice, Turbo B). Make of that what you will but his opening monologue of "'Positivity is not about bein' sawft, it's about bein' smart — yew suckehhhhhhhr" makes me laugh every time. The dude's a comedy genius. It's almost as if he wanted to take the piss out of all this "we suddenly have street cred" baloney.

If you like rap, there actually is a real rap song here in Sound Unlimited Posse's "Unity", which is the final song. It is also the lowest-charting song on here, having reached number 40 (just behind "Games", number 33), but it deserved much higher — this is from the year that "Pump It" by Icy Blu reached the top 10. Shudder. The compilers wisely did not go anywhere near that dreck.

Oh, and there's more rap with De La Soul's "Ring Ring Ring" as well, and it's the 'Radio Decision' version which is the one used for the music video. The differences are slight, but they are there. The other version appears on another compilation, so that's all bases covered.

What else is on here...let's see, there's Barnesy wailing his way through a 'tender' ballad, Roxus and their stalker/nice guy hit, the Skyhooks comeback single which is the highlight of this disc, Warrant with some good ol' cock-rock and Hoodoo Gurus with hippie action. Then there's Daryl Braithwaite and "The Horses" — a song which I had totally forgotten reached number 1 until recently. I'm yet to understand Australia's weird fascination with this Rickie Lee Jones cover. Only five days ago it was performed to massive crowd response at the Concert for National Bushfire Relief in Sydney. They loved it!

The final song I have to make mention of is "Hot Chilli Woman" by Noiseworks. It's a pretty good song, but it was released a full 13 months after the lead single from their album, "Freedom", a song which I liked a lot more (actually it's my favourite Noiseworks song). But while "Freedom" reached number 30, "Hot Chili Woman" got to number 7 — showing that the massive time lag between Noiseworks singles meant that their fans vastly preferred party tunes about bonkin' in the bedroom to psychedelic meditations on freedom and faith.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Rating: 7/10

Compilation Album Review: "100% Hits Volume 18"

Compilation: 100% Hits Volume 18
Released: 1995 – EMI
Number of tracks: 17
Number one singles: None
Top ten singles: 3
Best track: "Country House" by Blur
Hidden gem: "Downtown Venus" by PM Dawn

When I picked up Smash Hits '94 and Hit Machine 8, I also found 100% Hits Volume 19 in the same op shop and passed it up. Looking at the tracklisting, other than Blur's "Charmless Man", most of the songs were rubbish. That's part of the reason why my cutoff year for these chart compilations is 1995; it seems pop music took a large dip in quality after that year. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence but 1995 was my last year of high school and once I started uni the following year I started listening to more alternative music on Triple J because the stuff in the charts largely didn't cut it for me any more. And so, I made a mental note to myself that if I ever found 100% Hits Volume 18 it would be the last from that series I would get. And eleven days later, I got it.

It's a shame because it really is the low point of the series thus far, hence the low rating. One reason for this is it only has 17 tracks, and a comparatively short running time at around 66 minutes. There are no number one singles on it — its biggest hits are "Fairground" by Simply Red and "I'd Lie For You" by Meat Loaf, both of which reached number 7. Four songs on here didn't even chart, and of the remaining thirteen, the average chart position is number 21.

But hey — that doesn't necessarily mean the songs themselves aren't good. For a start, it opens with Queen's "Heaven For Everyone", put together after the sad loss of Freddie Mercury 4 years earlier, and it got to number 15 in Australia. Then comes "Sunshine After the Rain" by Berri, a pretty good dance track but it would have been better if they'd written more than 3 lines of lyrics!

"Somethin' 4 Da Honeyz" (man, it hurt to type that out) by Montell Jordan is sexist rubbish (would a line like "Call up your girlfriends, and you know there always tends to be an ugly one, but bring her too" fly nowadays?) Then comes Shaggy, who sucks bigtime, but he at least insists on announcing his name at the start of each one of his songs so you can reach for the skip button.

Some of the artists here I'd never heard of: Dana Dawson and Billie Ray Martin. Portrait I'd forgotten. I was surprised the PM Dawn track was unconventional and quite good, given their former sadsack wuss-rap output, and I expected to dislike Chris Isaak's number 9 hit "Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing" (I don't remember liking it first time around) but that was pretty good too.

Blur's "Country House" (a UK number 1, number 28 in Australia) is right towards the end for some reason, and the final track is Tina Turner's James Bond theme "Goldeneye", which I had totally forgotten about. It is a pretty good way to finish proceedings here though.

The CD has quite an elaborate 20-page booklet with one song's lyrics on each page, with corresponding album info. Just to show you it ain't all bad. Also take a look at the typeface used on the cover — that font was everywhere in '95 and '96, wasn't it? But overall, this ain't as great as previous compilations, which proves gauging the popularity of chart music at any given time is, pardon the pun, hit and miss.

Rating: 4/10

Compilation Album Review: "Kool Skool"

Compilation: Kool Skool
Released: 1991 – Columbia
Number of tracks: 16
Number one singles: 1 — "Do The Bartman" by The Simpsons
Other top ten singles: 2
Best track: "Spin That Wheel" by Hi Tek 3
Hidden gem: "Unity" by Sound Unlimited Posse

(Just so you know, the above photo is of the CD in a freezer. 'Kool', get it? Never let it be said I don't go for realism in my review photos.)

So, here we have Kool Skool. I saw it on eBay, read the tracklisting and decided to get it (the asking price of $2.33 didn't hurt) even though I hadn't heard of it. In the handful of ARIA charts I have from 1991 it doesn't show up in the Compilations top 5 at all, and it's unusual in that it isn't a chart compilation, more of a genre compilation (house/rap/hip-hop). Even more unusually, it both starts and ends with novelty songs. And even even more unusually, it covers tracks from over a year's span ("Spin That Wheel" was charting in June 1990 and other tracks were charting in late 1991 and into early 1992).

Because of this album not charting (I assume), I have no idea when in 1991 it was released. This is important for dorks like me who like to order their CD collections. The 47 chart compilations I have so far are arranged in order of release, to the best of my knowledge. I assume this was released in late 1991 around the time Columbia released Video Smash Hits Dance Mix. For convenience's sake I've placed it between Wiggle N' Sweat '91 and Yo!...Let's Go!

Right, on to the CD itself. It breaks convention by not opening with its highest-charting single, but instead a rather silly (but entertaining nonetheless) novelty song entitled "I'll Be Back" by the deliberately-misspelled Arnee & The Terminaters, obviously inspired by Terminator 2. Rage never used to play the video for this song, if there even was one (I just checked. There isn't), and I never heard it when listening to Take 40 Australia on radio 6PM at the time, so I had never heard this song before. It doesn't exactly enjoy a good reputation but I don't mind it, really – it features the word 'cack' in the lyrics after all.

The other novelty song is of course "Do The Bartman", which ends this CD. I'm not sure what Nancy Cartwright thought when she was asked to perform this rap as Bart Simpson, but she does a good enough job. Most of the enjoyment, of course, comes from watching the music video. It topped the charts in five countries and went top 5 in seven more.

The other fourteen songs that come in between are more authentic examples of rap (except for George Michael and New Kids On The Block [their music was bloody awful, wasn't it?] which contain no rapping whatsoever), and at the risk of sounding like a boring old fart, rappers were actually better back then and I'll see anyone outside who disagrees! There's Freedom Williams, with his solid delivery, the humorous exploits of Young MC, the harder edge of Public Enemy (I'm glad they didn't censor the "Get that shit!" line) and one of two female MCs (three if you count Nancy Cartwright) in Nikki D. The other one of course being Ya Kid K who reigns supreme over them all. Ya Kid K is the one. The only rapper not really up to snuff is Candyman in "Knockin' Boots", a song that doesn't seem to have a proper ending. LL Cool J is also okay but his song here "Around The Way Girl" doesn't do him justice — it's pretty soppy stuff. Although I suppose his entire schtick is based around the premise that 'Ladies Love Cool James'.

Special mention must be made of Sound Unlimited Posse who were one of the few flying the flag for Australian hip-hop in 1991! Nowadays hearing rap in Aussie accents is pretty lame (I'm sorry, but it is), but those guys did it well, with a nice female singer to boot. Yo DJ!

Rating: 6/10