Sleater-Kinney

Dig Me Out
Kill Rock Stars, 1997

By the time Sleater-Kinney made their third album, Dig Me Out, singer Corin Tucker had learned to well and truly belt it out, starting off on the title track with a common enough whine and building up to a wail that sounded like a banshee sitting on a sewing pin. She had honed her talents in an earlier band, Heavens To Betsy, a group familiar with songs about sexual abuse and a particular imagination of the female body as, in the words of journalist Johnny Huston, "a battleground to be torn apart by abortion, menstruation and molestation". Later she had taken vocal lessons from a retired opera singer who didn't entirely understand her in return for doing the household chores – taking on shit-kicker jobs in order to better kick the shit out of her audience. Tucker's partner in crime Carrie Brownstein once said to Spin: "I can't relax when our music is playing – I don't know how anyone can." The fact that a band once known for clearing entire rooms of men with their ear-splitting screech can be so loved by someone like myself, who, it should be clear by now, generally fails to relate to female musicians, is one of the more wonderful mysteries of life.

Tucker and Brownstein started playing in Olympia, Washington in the wake of the media circus over "riot grrl" bands like Bikini Kill in the early nineties and cut one single before deciding, after watching a television show about kangaroos, to travel to Australia. By that point they were, in Tucker's words, "really good friends" (if you catch her drift – they split, romantically, but stayed together, musically, a year or two later) and contacted everyone from Australia who had sent them fan mail in preparation for the trip. One guy, named Ian, put them on to a woman called Lora Macfarlane, who ran a zine with him and played the drums, and who joined the band for their first two albums, Sleater-Kinney and Call The Doctor, before returning to Melbourne and founding her own band, ninetynine. After Macfarlane's departure, Tucker and Brownstein found Janet Weiss, who would become their more permanent third member, and signed to the young indie label Kill Rock Stars. They ditched most, but not all, of the politics for their subsequent record, Dig Me Out, to focus instead on the idea that playing music was worth being alive for: "Take take the noise in my head/ C'mon and turn turn it up/ I wanna turn turn you on!"

Tori Amos

Under The Pink
Atlantic, 1994

My bedroom was at the front of the house, a large brick cottage styled on the homes in California and built with the remnants of an ancient ship for rafters. At night I could hear them arguing through the walls – enormous double-bricked things that stayed cool to the touch no matter how hot the summer was. When the temperature became unbearable I would push my body and my face up against them and suck the cold out of the mortar and the paint. I slept on top of an empty bunk-bed with a dark blue frame that matched the aluminium blinds hanging over the window. There were stars stuck to the roof that glowed in the dark.

After dinner I would climb up into to bed to listen to the radio and read John Marsden's Tomorrow When The War Began. It was the first novel I had ever chosen from the store myself, one of those "young adult" books with a particularly bleak story about a group of young teenagers, led by the narrator Ellie, who go camping and return home to find their families missing and the town invaded by soldiers. Once or twice a night the radio would play 'Cornflake Girl' by Tori Amos, which had been released the same year – a dark pop song with cascading piano and melodramatic lyrics, which, with a strange sort of desire, I would always imagine being sung by the character in the book.

At night, when he was at work, they would continue their arguments punctuated by the slamming of the telephone. When it got too bad I would barricade myself inside the room – back up against the pale wooden chest of draws, trying not to slip on the floorboards, pushing it across the doorway. The door would bang against the chest, again and again, and finally rattle back into place. One night she stopped and then returned with a bucket full of my old toys and smashed them, one by one, against the blocked door as I pushed on the chest from the other side. She stopped and broke down crying. I never listened to the radio again.

The Go! Team

Thunder, Lightning, Strike
Memphis Industries, 2005

I am writing this week's column from a motel room somewhere between Sydney and Melbourne at three in the morning, after having spent all night ricocheting down the Hume Highway in a steel canister with no suspension. This trip will include seeing The Saints, Laughing Clowns, X and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – all those classic Australian underground bands that appeared in this space last year, after I made a new year's resolution to spend more time discussing local music history. Half of them I never expected to see with my own eyes, until the announcements of the All Tomorrow's Parties music festivals and a new round of the related Don't Look Back album performances. All in all, it's a pretty awesome way to begin the year.

In the morning, we file back into the car and hurtle along the motorway like a ping pong ball down a drain pipe. Dead trees on one side and pale yellow grass on the other slowly give way to green as we approach the mountains and make our way one and a half kilometres above sea level to Mt Buller. My choice of road-trip record is Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team, possibly the best summer party album made since Primal Scream's Screamadelica. It's a thundering mix of cartoon theme music and hip-hop block party jams, with a few air raid sirens thrown in for good measure. It was also the subject of my first ever cover story for a music magazine, four years ago.

I suppose I should use this space to make a resolution for 2009. Reading back over last year's columns, I noticed how often the words I and my appeared. This is a fairly big no-no of recent times, as "proper" journalists seek to define themselves against those filthy amateurs otherwise known as bloggers, who write unashamedly about their own experiences (how dare they!) and, as the pool of jobs for niche writers dries up, budding critics attempt more than they should to prove that what they write about is "serious business". As it always has been, my gut reaction to such nonsense is to do the exact opposite. This year I will write about music in the first person whenever and as often as I damn well please. There is no such thing as an objective journalist, let alone an objective critic, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or an idiot.