The Sparrows, The Inches, The New Black . . . The New Sensations! The Sparrows and the Inches had their Dual CD launch Friday night and it was nothing short of impressive. The Inches came on after two warm up bands, one of which was The New Black (they have their CD launch at the Ding Dong in a few weeks, stay tuned for more details) The Inches and The Sparrows have to be in my oppinion, two of the classiest rock acts to come out of Aus in quite a while. The inches came on before The Sparrows, with a fresh sound, a new drummer and the professionalism of a band that could handle anything thrown at them. The lights went out halfway through the set and Andrew Furze instead of panicing at the technical failure, made a joke out of it, and the band kept playing. Although the punters could hardly see at all, every set of eyes was directed at the stage, still captivated by the band playing . . until the front of house went. It came back on within seconds and the band counted back in, and kept playing, once again, unmoved by the technical failure until the front of house started playing up for a third time and the band were directed offstage for a short period of time. Lead singer Andrew Furze took the microphone and asked the audience if they should take the stage to finish their set. The response was a loud "yes". The Inches finished their set with an amazing cover of Space Trukin' that Deep Purple would be proud of. The Sparrows came on for a sensational set which included my personal favourite, "Diamond Eyes" which is unfortunalty not on their latest EP. The Sparrows wowed the audience, with a great cover of "Maybe I'm Amazed" as well as their own brand of rock. The blend of melody and rock like no other band crawling around melbourne at the moment is the huge selling point as well as their energetic stage performace(the same can be said for the Inches, but make no mistake, these are two different bands that are great in their own right) I can't describe why, but for some reason I feel particularly proud watching this great young, talented band, finally get to record. Earlier this year at the Melbourne International Music Festival, Michael Badger remarked that one of the songs in the set "would be on our CD . . . if we had one". Ohhhhh, I remember now why I feel proud that The Sparrows are finally starting to see success, because they deserve it. Well Done to two fantastic bands whom are sure to set Australia alight, followed by the rest of the world. Watch out for The Sparrows and The Inches at a venue near you. Eagle rock set for a third birth. . ? Eagle Rock has finally become cool again in the eyes of what would appear to be “mainstream”. Walking in the city late last Friday night I heard eagle rock blaring out of the radio in one of the “happening places” along Bourke Street, Melbourne. I walked in, thinking that the radio that was playing was on gold FM (Melbourne’s classic hits station), I got a pleasant surprise to find out that the radio was actually on Fox FM(the “top 40” music network), in their top thirty requested songs for the day. I’d say it would have been low down in the countdown, but unfortunately I never got what number. This is not the only chart that has seen Eagle Rock as an entrant with the young folks music (I’m able to say that, being less than 20, myself) Eagle Rock entered the JB Hi Fi most downloaded songs of the week at number Four on the 31st of October, and Come Back Again was at number six before that. Something that may be helping to boost the awareness of a great song to a generation that haven’t seen Daddy Cool enter the charts (eagle rock re-entered in the 80’s and hit top 20 status as a single) is the use of “Eagle Rock” in the horror flick “Wolf Creek”. Whilst I’m on the subject of “Eagle Rock” . . . I was in a pub the other day that has a juke box that plays music clips. I selected Eagle Rock and was nothing short of outraged when the clip played was not the original clip, but another clip featuring blondes doing a choreographed version of the “Eagle Rock” to the daddy cool classic, with a few snippets of the original clip thrown in for good measure. Someone, somewhere has once again, taken a perfectly good piece of work and “up-dated” it. The only problem with that is that my guess was that it got “up-dated” in the late 80’s or early 90’s, now it just looks out of date. I don’t think I’ll be putting my money in that jukebox machine anymore, I may even have to change pubs after this . . .