Often though it might be said that if you can remember the Sixties you weren’t there, nobody present ever forgot the first Jefferson Airplane albums. The band had a palette of sound like nobody else’s, mainly because the solid bass riffs and the bitingly sweet guitars were dedicated to carrying a gorgeous burden. It was the voice of Grace Slick. The female equivalent of a baritone, she could dig in on the low notes as if she were ploughing your brains with an axe of obsidian. Almost unfairly, she also looked amazing: a kind of raven-haired mythologized threat, like Kundry out on a rumble or Lilith trawling for a mate. At Woodstock the Airplane’s arrival was delayed until the early morning and the results sounded a bit thin compared with their recordings.

Not, I hope, just because he has been thoughtfully kind about my own work, I find Richard King, who was born in England, one of the most interesting of the new generation of Australian journalist/critics who are spreading their range of operations deep into the web. This is a fascinating new development of Australia’s cultural internationalism, answering the same impulse that led my generation to book a passage overseas on lumbering ships. For this later crew, all they have to do is log on, and suddenly the world is at their fingertips.