Mi-Sex and I met the world at exactly the right time. They hit the lights with the song Computer Games which was very apt for a young chappie like me who was completely taken with pixelated aliens in ranks and all things space.
When they released their Space Race album I was completely obsessed with owning that record. It was a thing of fascination and envy for me. When we went to Big W or K-Mart I would cruise the record isle, looking at the cover and wishing it could be mine. It became so I almost felt a guilt in wanting this record so much.
Interestingly, the band fell out of favor for many years after this, till radio picked up Only Thinking and then the absolutely sublime Blue Day singles off the Where Do They Go album.
Because of this gap I only own the Space Race and Where Do They Go as albums. I bought a Best Of album for the car that also covers the other albums and I wonder why radio didn’t play these singles. Maybe they felt the songs were too ordinary or maybe the songs were there but I was the one who missed them. Either way, they were a good band from start to finish.
Mi-Sex may not have made much impact outside of Australia and OZ Rock circles but they have remained part of FM radio’s rotation and form an important footnote in this country’s musical history. I remember a few conversations with manly men who were almost in tears on hearing of Steve Gilpin’s death in a car crash and the knowledge that they would never hear him sing again.
Mi-Sex obviously took their name from the Ultravox song of the same name. In this way they wore that influence on their sleeve. But don’t think that their music had much in common with British New Wave past the synth lines. In many ways their music owed much more to American Rock.
If you like 80’s music and don’t own any Mi-Sex then let me borrow the very relevant Molly Meldrum saying and tell you to do yourself a favor…