Total Control's Mikey Young unearths Australia's '60s/'70s soft rock underbelly on 'Follow the Sun' comp (streams)

Mikey Young is known for such hard-edged Australian bands as Eddy Current Suppression Ring and Total Control, but he’s got a softer side. He’s curated a new compilation, Follow the Sun, that unearths some hidden gems from Australia’s soft rock underground of the late ’60s and early ’70s. The album will be out May 5 via Mexican Summer’s Anthology Recordings imprint (whose head of A&R, Keith Abrahamsson, helped compile the tracklist). “Maybe I inject some vision of a simpler more self-contained, innocent Australia in the way I hear this music,” says Young in the album’s liner notes. “A ‘pre-Crocodile Dundee, Koala Blue, Ken Done’ Australia where in my yet-to-be-born head it seems that the rest of the world was less concerned about us and we were less aware of it. Our culture could operate in its own little bubble a lot easier than it does now and will again. I don’t idealize these as the ‘good times.’ Those kind of bubbles also create closed minds and shitty attitudes, but some great music is made when it’s restricted to its own small universe.”

Some of these songs were hits in Australia, but never made the trip to our hemisphere’s airwaves. If you dig psych-folk, baroque, or bubblegum, you’ll wanna mark your calendars. You can check out a new video for “Easy” by Mata Hari, featuring animated renditions of the compilation’s illustrations, plus a few other tracks from the album, below.

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Follow the Sun – tracklist:
Follow the Sun – Dave Douglas
Riverboat – Andy Armstrong
Easy – Mata Hari
First Boy I Loved – Marian Henderson
Spirit Move Within Me – Flock
Hey, Can You Come out and Play – Megan Sue Hicks
Kill My World – Autumn
Knowing That You’re There – Australia
Am I Really Here – Moonlight
Witnessing – Gary Shearston
Wild Horse Plains – Tidewater
Whispering Pines – Shepherd
The Orange Tree – Cathie O’Sullivan
Cement River – Steve Warner
Good Morning – Paul Adolphus
Something Strange – Doug Ashdown
Country Corn – Trevor McNamara
This Must Be The End – Billy Green
Today’s The First Day Of Your Life – Catmando
Goodbye – Simon Jones (LP ONLY)