Ted Mulry Gang – The Very Best Of Ted Mulry Gang [40th Anniversary] (2016)

Jump In My Car kicks of this 40th anniversary celebration of the Ted Mulry Gang in fine style. The band’s best known track and biggest hit, it remains a perennial fave some forty-one years after it took the #1 spot on the Aussie singles charts, and fifteen years after Mulry himself passed away from brain cancer, one day shy of his 54th birthday.

Our radio stations love nothing more than to distill an artist or band’s career down to one or two tracks that they trot out whenever necessary, and this collection gets them out of the way from the start. Darktown Strutters Ball, Crazy, Steppin’ Out and Jamaica Rum will be familiar and beloved to anyone who watched Countdown through the ‘70s, and they sound great given the remaster treatment here.

This collection stretches to an admirable 21 tracks though, and it’s in the deeper cuts that some of the best material lies.

I’m Free, Wanted Man, Old Habits Die Hard, Naturally and Captured are cherry picked from across TMG’s seven albums, alongside rarer tracks (You’ve Got The) Devil In You, Save Me and Can’t Take It All.

The end result is a wonderful overview of a prolific career, and a diverse one at that. There’s no way any two or even three of these songs could distill what TMG meant to Australia in the ‘70s – the fact that Jump In My Car even now remains one of the highest selling Australian singles of all time is testament to the power of their heyday.by Shane Pinnegar