I was 15 years old in 1986 and just starting to explore alternative music to the Top 40 radio that I had grown a bit bored with. Back in those days, it was hard to discover things outside the mainstream. I was starting to listen to a lot of Triple J radio (the ABC’s youth station, then Sydney-based),which would play music that was quite out-there, especially late at night. The Residents toured Australia in 1986 for their 13th Anniversary Show, and Triple J played a short radio documentary about the Cryptic Corporation and played their records. I think they played some albums basically all the way through – I certainly remember them playing the Residents-adjacent Snakefinger album ‘Night of Desirable Objects’ in its entirety. I was too young and baby-faced to get into the shows at the Tivoli or Selinas, but I was really intrigued by these outsider musicians. It gave me the impetus to track down the types of record stores that would actually stock this type of music, which led me to Red Eye Records, a Sydney institution, still open to this day. A lot of the records in Red Eye were obscure imports, eye-wateringly expensive for a teenager like myself. (I still find their prices uncomfortably high – I moved on to other stores that stocked the music I wanted and who would look after me. I ended up working at one of those stores, Scratches Records in Newtown until it closed in the mid 90s. My favourite store these days is Beatdisc at Parramatta, shout out to Tom and Pete). But Red Eye did have a few second-hand Residents’ records, including a 7” EP version of Duck Stab, that I snapped it. A local label, AIM, also briefly released a few Residents’ records locally at reasonable prices, including the 13th Anniversary Tour Live in Japan album, which is probably my favourite Residents’ album to this day. It acts as a bit of a “best of” the early Residents, played with a spooky and spacious intensity. I intrinsically “got” The Residents – their best records are heavily informed and influenced by pop music, but played with an eerie and unsettling outsider perspective (especially their 70s releases – Meet The Residents, Commercial, Duck Stab, Third Reich’n’Roll). I loved the anti-technique, which appealed to me as someone with a strong interest in making music but little actual technical talent. You didn’t need to be a great musician or have a lot of expensive equipment to play music like this or be a good looking rock star type, you just needed ideas and a point of view. I still find it inspiring. Their interest in multi-media meant they were often at the forefront of musical development. In retrospect, it’s hard to believe their videos were played in MTV, but they were one of the few bands to make videos as short films. The Residents influenced what I look for in music. I still like music with a strange and sideways approach, especially if that includes a slightly disturbing humour. Their later albums are often too high concept for my taste (I generally don’t like concept albums), and there is now such an enormous body of work that it is hard to know how to approach it all. It’s hard to decide what is a good representational work from their idiosyncratic and diverse oeuvre. But Duck Stab is a good place to start, I think. It is certainly where I started. I did eventually see the Residents on their 2016 Australian tour. It was a strange and beautiful and funny and disturbing show and just what I wanted from them. Is Duck Stab (or The Residents in general) to everyone’s taste? Well, probably not -- there’s a reason this is one of the lowest rated albums on the 1001 list. But Duck Stab is special to me. I find The Residents’ creativity inspiring, and especially this record. It demonstrates how far you can push the pop music form. And I do think everyone _should_ try this at least once. The Residents (and Duck Stab in particular) opened my ears to new ways of listening and to the fact that there were whole worlds of music that existed a long way outside the Top 40. I will forever be grateful for that insight. I hope that listening to this will have the same impact on someone else as well.