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Hey Citizens! I pray to the merciful imaginary gods above that you will want to buy the powerful and elegant and trashy MUSIC & BOOKS listed below. GO TO THE LOVETOWN SITE http://www.lovetown.net AND BUY MY BOOKS AND MUSIC USING PAY PAL or else send a cheque or money order to PO BOX 340. Glenhuntly, Melbourne, Victoria 3165. Subsequently I will fill your order - sealed with my saliva and a signature if required. Just press the buy button and I rush to the shops. THE NEW ALBUM IS AVAILABLE FROM LOVETOWN: BUY FROM ME DIRECT!!!! Stephen Cummings is about as consistent an artist as they come. It's astonishing how he keeps up his pace of voluminous quality. Tickety Boo is an album of classic all new radio pop and understated folk-rock beauty. Influenced in equal parts by The Kinks, The Move and Shuggie Otis. Listen to this CD and then try to explain why "NOW HERE SHE COMES" isn't plastered on radios across this land. It will never slip your memory. After several fine folksy acoustic outings, Stephen Cummings comes raring' back with Tickety Boo - a collection of catchy, electric guitar based pop/rock. Cumming’s voice is in top POP form, carving up his eloquent songs. Cummings’ voice will allow you to go without food or water for long periods. Lyrically and melodically, the songs are good with their blend of fun and existential sadness. These songs are smart and hooky and bursting with ideas and ambitions. BILLY MILLER produced Tickety Boo; which flows nicely from start to finish, with nary a clunker or drag. Its sound embraces everything from old-time rock & roll, including Buddy Holly, but also displays Beatles-style harmonies and lyrical complexity. Cummings in spite of everything believes in albums. Miller’s chiming guitar instils lustre to songs like "Happy City” And "Don’t Use the Telephone”. Cummings’ ode to comedy legend BOB HOPE is extraordinary – as is his salute to French Filmmaker JEAN LUC GODARD " Girl & a Gun”. ‘I’m Your Biggest Fan’ is a history of an unnamed Melbourne ‘outsider’ group. Tickety Boo is dedicated to Stephen Cummings mother, Lorna who died mid-2009 and quite rocked his world. Stephen Cummings remarks: “My goals in doing this are to keep making records and to earn enough to keep going...which in my eyes is success.”

AVAILABLE AS A DOWNLOAD FROM THE USUAL PLACES! ALSO!!! NOW 100 COPIES ONLY IN A LOVELY CD PACK. ALL AVAILABLE FROM NEXT WEDNESDAY. PAY PAL DETAILS UP OVER THE WEEKEND. It was a hot warm afternoon, the sky was full of yellows and blazing reds and I had driven for three days in an RV through floods and the like to get to Byron Bay for the Easter Festival. It was magical - one 73 minute set in the big tent before Steve Earle. Shane O’Mara contrived a wall of sound from one guitar and though I was scared to death, I hung on for the ride. Everything was darker and heavier than you thought. Let me state for the record, that when we arrived at the end of the set we were both exhausted. The audience danced madly. They looked like listless pink flamingoes. Our buddy Adam Rhodes recorded it. This music is live and raw and emotional. We don’t have a problem with that. Never. Stephen

Happiest Man Alive by Michael Dwyer - The Age, 3 October 2008 3.5 stars The juxtaposition of effusive title and overcast cover provides a sardonic entree to Stephen Cummings' umpteenth album. The juxtaposition of effusive title and overcast cover provides a sardonic entree to Stephen Cummings' umpteenth album of acoustic philosophising but the keynote feels more like sanguine acceptance than sarcasm. "Like it or not, this is the world that we live in," he sings on the way to the mellow chorus mantra that Love is Space and Time. It's a world of spooky swings and bumpy roundabouts; fond notes to fallen heroes (Raymond Chandler, Edward Hopper, Henry Miller) and only the occasional grumpy outburst at the TV. Sure, Sick Comedian, a howl of indignation at declining standards of politics, media and economic integrity, is one of the album's most potent and lingering tracks - and he's only warming up for the bilious snarl of You Know It All By Heart. But Straight to Your Arms is one of the most vulnerable and contented of his career and the meditative clarity of This Song Can Save You and What A Joy It Is to Dance and Sing is without apparent irony. "Am I thinking a little too much?" he wonders on the haunting penultimate track. On balance, it's probably just the right amount.



>/a> Good sport has space for endless love Space Travel: 4.5 stars
 by Iain Shedden - The Australian, 25 August 2007 Space Travel, features Little Girl on a Sofa, a gentle, nostalgic love song with Beach Boys harmonies, alongside 10 others that plunder gospel and soul (I Remember), swampy rock'n'roll (Hey Kitty Kitty!) and acoustic folk (It's Not Me, It's You!). The strings, strum and repetitive cycle of No Stopping echo the Blue Nile, but the song is no less impressive for that. Indeed, everything here has a spring in its step, augmented by Cummings's regular collaborators McDonald and Miller, the Luscombe brothers and Shane O'Mara. Clearly he's loving it, even if, as he says on Who Wants to Buy a Broken Heart?, "falling in love, that's not for me". A bit of poetics. He deserves a round of applause.


Love-O-Meter/a> 4 stars by Shaun Carney - eg, The Age, 14 October 2005/a> More than 30 years after forming his first band, the Pelaco Brothers, and after 11 solo albums of original material, the challenge for a performer with the sort of career longevity that Stephen Cummings enjoys is to maintain the element of surprise. Beginning with the funky, urban-sounding Senso in 1983, Cummings has toured through lush pop, wide-screen soundscapes (courtesy of Steve Kilbey), raw acoustic balladry and guitar rock. His previous album of new songs was Firecracker in 2003, a boisterous collection of Ricky Nelson-style rockabilly pieces unlike anything he had done before. For Love-O-Meter, Cummings has taken another sharp turn, putting together a song suite - let's not call it a concept album - that tracks the break-up of a relationship and attempts of a heartsick man to rekindle the flame. It's dramatically different to Firecracker, resembling in places a mid-1960s beat group, in others exploring a mildly psychedelic sensibility. Cummings' vocalising is different too; it's often raspy and aggressive as he drives home the pop hooks and, along with producer Shane O'Mara, he hasn't been afraid to apply studio treatments and multi-tracking to his voice. In some respects, Love-O-Meter bundles up Cummings' stylistic tics. The jazzy, clubby element of his writing comes to the fore on the central song, the pained, dreamy Once Upon a Time We Were Mad For Each Other. It seems fitting that Cummings, whose natural shyness always precluded him from forcefully promoting his writing abilities, cites his favorite Beatle as George Harrison; there's a spot-on Harrison tribute, Punch Drunk, here. Perhaps the most important aspect of the album is that, courtesy of its narrative form, it takes Cummings out of himself. For years he struggled with the tension caused by his tendency to write autobiographical songs, something that's left him emotionally exposed and occasionally mired in a quiet-ballad cul-de-sac. Perhaps it was the experience of revisiting his older material for his Liberation Blue series album Close-Ups that's let him loosen up enough to inhabit a character for a full album as he does here. All told, it's quite adventurous and one of his strongest albums BOOKS FOR SALE.

JON CASMIR: SMH: Rock star writes novel..It's not exactly the kind of thought that makes you want to rush out to the bookstore but, like life, Wonderboy has a rather splendid habit of confounding expectations. Despite Cummings's other career - for 20 years he has been one of Australian pop's most lustrous voices - Wonderboy, his first novel, is not vanity publishing. It's not a half-hearted foray by a mind overly convinced of its own artistry. It's not the usual slim volume of awkward poetry that lyricists present us with. It's not a cocaine-snorting, groupie-shagging, rear-seat-of-the-limo rock memoir. And in a shocking divergence from recent Australian literary tradition, it's not an example of the Urban Brutalist school of writing. It's not, to paraphrase Ben Elton: "Hi, I'm at this inner-city dive watching kiddies do heroin because that's what this novel is all about...Shock!" With Wonderboy, Cummings has actually set out to conjure a novel from his imagination. You know, like writers used to. He has set out to explore words and meanings. His novel is a journey of discovery, the story of a grown man trying to grow up. And the good news is that it's not half bad.



STAY AWAY FROM LIGHTNING GIRL. review by Matt Condon - SundayLife! magazine (Sun Herald supplement) 1999 This second novel from the acclaimed singer/songwriter and former lead singer with The Sports opens with a delightfully simplistic premise and remains endearing throughout. Robert Moore is a former rock star whose band The Honeys has failed to crack the big-time in the US. As the novel opens, he is already dead, having been struck by lightning. He is suddenly having a conversation with Maigret, his official umpire in the hereafter and there is talk Robert may be relegated to the Dull Zone. This is a gentle tale of love that's hard to resist and probably superior to his first book, Wonderboy.