Someone has a website that has digitized the cassettes from Fast Forward cassette magazine, an Australian cassette mag running from 1980-1982.

Bruce Milne and Andrew Maine's Fast Forward cassette magazine documented the post-punk scene of the early 80s. The tapes interspersed interviews with music and were packaged with printed artwork in a soft case and distributed through record shops. In that pre-internet era Fast Forward helped spread sounds and ideas among music communities. Archived it offers a valuable resource for people interested in post-punk.

These tapes and pictures were recently digitized by Steve (read his story below) and posted on Brisbane music blog That Striped Sunlight Sound. In 2011 with Bruce's permission I placed them here in a more conventional web format, to help the archive find a wider audience.

http://spill-label.org/FastForward/

I will probably bite on this one. Have you listened to any of them?

Just the first one so far. I'm digging it though and will likely listen to them all eventually.

Ok, I'm sold then.

Only caveat would be that there's a lot of talking in between songs. The talk to music ratio is a bit skewed for me, but I can see how they were promoting their stuff at the time so they were also doing interviews and doing a lot of background info bits. On one hand, makes for less music but on the other it makes them fun documents of their time.

i've revisited my birthday party collection recently so this will be a fun resource. my knowledge of the era is limited to the go-betweens & primitive calculators.
can you older farts direct me to some stuff i'm missing out on?

What era in particular? Just '80-'82?

if it makes it any easier 78-82ish. never really explored the scene down under-kiwis included. duckyboy? Thx in advance

There are three excellent comps that will give you a solid primer of the Aussie scene:


Do The Pop! (stick with Vol 1, vol 2 stretches a bit much to fill itself)
2 volumes of Tales From The Australian Underground
Inner City Sounds

You'll get a little bit of overlap across all three, but each has tracks the others don't, so I recommend all three.