Mr Cheul
Tradesmen are villains: uncouth, unpunctual. They lurk about in the dark and listen to sporting broadcasts on loud transistor radios. Mr Cheul is an exception: quiet and unassuming, he will attend promptly to your welding needs, and if his work is "fairly agricultural" (to quote an acquaintance from the single-gear bicycle community) it is also robust and affordable.Is Mr Cheul in touch with cosmic powers? It's not for me to say. 9319 4260, 6 Garden Street Alexandria, Sydney.
Smithys
Guitar shop proprietors are often jaded and unhelpful but the chaps at Smithys, in Camperdown, are genuinely friendly and keen as mustard. They sell all manner of gadgets in various stages of repair. I bought my first 4-track  there back in the day, and more recently, a venerable pump-organ. Viva, Smithys!
Richard Swift
Has re-released The Novelist, his rather excellent 2003 album. You can read my review of it here.
Ukulele Land
The ukulele is an ancient instrument. Murals in the tomb of King Tut suggest that it was played as early as 1926 AD.
Australia is home to some innovative and talented players, who every so often get together to strum frantically,wear colourful shirts and celebrate beauty and whimsy under the banner of Ukulele Land.
Some of the leading lights of this nylon underground include Azo Bell, Rose Turtle Ertler, and Tyrone Shoelaces (Mr Shoelaces puts on a very interesting slide-show).
Other Recommended listening
> Brian Eno - especially the first 4 albums, but as a rule he can do no wrong. It would be good to hear him play some rock songs again. Enough with the electronic funk, sir!
> Mary Margaret O'Hara- push comes to shove, my favourite singer. It's kind of difficult to describe what this lady does , so check out a clip.
> John Martyn- saw him perform in London. Wonderfully crusty old folkie with the singing voice of an angel and the speaking voice of a pirate gargling sawdust. Knows his way around a delay pedal. He's since had a leg removed but keeps powering on.
> Galaxie 500 - this may sound absurd, but I had to sell my Galaxie 500 records because I liked them too much. That and I needed to meet rent... I haven't heard them in over a decade, but the songs still pop into my head sometimes.
> The Triffids - My favourite Australian band, I reckon. Born Sandy Devotional is an album that takes you there: into childhood, into love, into "bright landscapes". Organ, pedal steel... lovely.
> The Durutti Column - Vini Riley and Bruce Mitchell play music that defies easy categorisation. It floats, it wafts, it bounces; then it rocks in polite punkish manner. Riley looks like a Modigliani portrait. Mitchell like a tipsy theatre impresario.
> Ivor Cutler - Scottish school teacher, author of children's books, and poet. He played harmonium while reciting whimsical little stories. He was the bus conductor in "Magical Mystery Tour". He also tried it on in a London bus with a friend of mine, despite being eighty-odd years old. He died in 2006.
 > The Flaming Lips - bunch of suburban loons who play music that manages to be exilarating, strange, tuneful, funny and moving, all at once.
> Robert Wyatt - his best stuff has a kind of flow and detail and earthiness that suggests Jimi Hendrix and Antonio Carlos Jobim collaborating with Mike Leigh on wildlife documentaries. Nobody sings like him. Except Jimmy Sommerville, and that Antony bloke, maybe. His band Soft Machine were excellent, too.
> The Band - gritty, evocative songwriting, and not one but three distinctive singers in Richard Manuel, Levon Helm and Rick Danko. Garth Hudson on keyboards and gizmos: a bearded goofy mystic high on possibility.
Recommended reading
> Haruki Murakami _____The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore
> John Cheever _____ The Wapshot Chronicle, short stories
> Rudyard Kipling _____ Just So Stories
 > Garrison Keillor _____ Lake Wobegone, The Book of Guys, Love Me
> P.G Wodehouse _____ the Jeeves stories
> Graham Greene _____ Travels With My Aunt
> Mervyn Peake _____ Mr Pye, Gormenghast
> Glen David Gold _____ Carter Beats the Devil
> Evelyn Waugh _____ Brideshead Revisited
> Tove Jansson _____ the Moomin books
> Norman Lindsay _____ The Magic Pudding
> Jorge Luis Borges _____ The Book of Sand
> Italo Calvino _____ If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
> Mark Twain _____ Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi
> Simon Winchester _____
Krakatoa
> James Thurber _____ short stories
> Laurence Sterne _____ The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
> Michael Bywater _____Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did it Go?
> John Kennedy Toole_____ A Confederacy of Dunces
> David Mitchell _____Cloud Atlas
> Sir John Franklin _____ Journey to the Polar Sea
Currently reading
> Spike Milligan _____Puckoon
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