It’s, what, 1994? 1995?
You’re sixteen, anyway, on your regular post-school record store mission.
More accurately, it’s a RECORDS AND TAPES situation, though the CD is the ascendant form of recorded media. The shop’s owner, G.B., hasn’t had the coin to update the signage since he opened up in the mid ‘80s, though, and said records and tapes lurk, sullen and unloved, in the second hand racks and remainders bins.
You live in a tiny mining town in the surreally remote deserts of far western New South Wales, Australia. You haven’t seen it yet, but later in life you’ll refer to it as “you know, where Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 Australian New Wave classic Wake in Fright was shot” as shorthand when locating your point of origin in conversation.
Which is shorthand in itself for a place of tough blokes caked in lead and zinc, a pub for every hundred people, a place so perplexingly regional, outside of time, that it’s often referred to as The Walled City…