Only CDs Is Sounding Like These # 5: FREE CD! Celebrating Rip It Up Magazine Issue 200 (1994)

A new occasional series - CDs are coming back baby! And I’m here for it. BIGTIME! (Although, probably not this one eh…)

I posted this photo on the old Instagram, and was pretty heartened to see a few likes straight away. And a few comments saying people (also) still had this.

But I must be honest. I didn’t (always) (still) have it. I just recently got this CD again. But I’m glad to have it. And it sparked an amazing nostalgia just to see its plastic sleeve and giant FREE CD! exclamation.

Last weekend on a routine TradeMe whim, I picked up a junker of an old stereo (“mini system”) primarily so I could play some cassette tapes. It was an auction that came with a bunch of CDs and some of them were very cool (much metal!) And some of them were impossible duds (David Gray) and some of them were just too obvious (Tom Jones Greatest Hits) and some of them were interesting to revisit (Bone Thugs ‘n’ Harmony). So, that’s the sort of grab bag I’m down to grab. It’s totally my bag!

Anyway, somewhere in the pile, my eyes found this.

And I remembered having a copy of it — earning it the old fashioned way. It was 30 years ago (today). It was my final year of high school, and part of the routine in my last years at home, as the only child then, was to go into town to the one music store that existed and pick up the pamphlets and free music press, and look through the tapes and CDs. I special-ordered my Lou Reed and Velvet Underground albums, and dreamed of jazz but settled for Midnight Oil — since it was Hastings after all.

I always picked up — and read — Rip It Up. It was (for years) my favourite magazine. Probably because it was the only free one in my world. I forked out for Guitar World and Modern Drummer and occasionally bought a Rolling Stone. There was Shake magazine too, for a bit. Which I also loved. I entered the competitions and hardly ever won. (Well, I won Poison’s Open Up And Say Ahh! on cassette tape, via Shake magazine. But you can tell me whether or not that’ s really winning).

Anyway, it’s funny that to a bunch of us, the Free CD seemed like a score, and a bargain. It was actually the justification for a cover-charge. It was sold to us like it was the start of the magazine getting really good. In hindsight, I could say it was the start of it becoming shit. But I’d just sound like some Joy Division T-shirted old grump now wouldn’t I? And I’m not quite ready to be exactly there.

I loved RIU for a few years after that cover charge. I even got to write for the magazine a few times, under a couple of different editors. (It’s still nuts to me to think that it was for that magazine that I spoke to Alex *Fucking* Van Halen!)

So, you know, it might kinda be unrelated, but it’s also related — when I look at the Free CD from 1994 I think of talking to Alex Van Halen a decade later, just as much as I think about hanging onto that CD until about 2014, before finally ditching it, only for it to “boomerang” back into my life in 2024.

It was the start of me loving Morphine.

It was also my first chance to properly appreciate Head Like A Hole.

I’d read about them, seen a clip (or two) but this was my chance to “own” something by the band. I’ve since, of course, seen them dozens of times, met them all, interviewed several of them, written liner notes and poster quotes for them and been thanked in the credits for a documentary film about the band.

Things like that are no big deal at all — but I mention it because to be transported back to the 17 year old that first held this free CD and heard the ‘edgy’ and different band is somewhat surreal. The jaded hack of a 47 year old spent music writer, spit out on the other side of whatever my time in music journalism was. Lol.

It was 10 years after having this CD in my hand that I finally got to see the band that blew me away the most on this set of recordings. I loved Yothu Yindi. (I really was a huge Midnight Oil fan, I didn’t just settle for them, I merely settled for their CDs and tapes instead of everything else I would have desired). It was the Australian music connection that got me to Yothu Yindi — and some endorsement from Peter Garrett and the Oils I’m sure. Anyway, love this band. Still love this song.

The other two tracks? Well, The Badloves song is pretty cool, and I tried to stick with the band for a bit and “get into them”. But it didn’t really take.

And the Deborah Conway?

Well, I remember ‘liking’ everything on this CD at the time — for in truth it was one of my very first CDs. But the Conway doesn’t hold up at all. Sounds like Bad Ani DiFranco. Which is also, coincidentally, mostly what Ani DiFranco sounds like these days as it happens.

Funny though, tastes change. Things last. Things don’t last. But a nostalgia-rush is a nostalgia-rush. I’ve listened to this CD twice in less than a week. Which is not something I ever would have predicted.

I made you a Spotify playlist if you’re reading this far. Not because this music needs to be heard, just to be practical in sharing it. Though of course the YouTube clips are also all up above there.

Anyway, nostalgia is such a silly, odd beast. But I don’t believe we should ever fight it. It’s like smoke. You just manage it as and when it arrives. Wave your arms about for a bit and it’ll disappear or dissipate at least. (It’ll be back in some other form…)