With the imminent release of the Lipstick Killers’ anthology Strange Flash Studio & Live ‘78-’81 on Grown Up Wrong Records, I get the lowdown from guitarist Mark Taylor.
By Ian McFarlane
The first time I'd spoken to Mark was back in the early ‘90s, when I interviewed him for a feature I wrote on the Lipstick Killers for Prehistoric Sounds ‘zine. He was a great interviewee so this was an excellent chance to reconnect.
I never saw the band play live, but I had bought the ‘Hindu Gods (Of Love)’ 7 inch and the Mesmerizer LP when they’d come out. I had to backtrack and search out a copy of the Psycho-Surgeons single ‘Horizontal Action’ – with the legendary blood covered sleeve – so it's gratifying to have these items in the record collection.
Strange Flash is a comprehensive collection, gathering the released singles tracks, the live Mesmerizer set, two sets of demos and another live recording from Adelaide , plus some more surprises besides. The full collection on Double CD comprises a whopping 49 tracks, while the Double LP drops the 16 Adelaide live tracks – obviously due to time restrictions – and will get its own LP release.
The band’s story is laid out in the liner notes but for a brief history lesson, this is the excerpt from The Encyclopedia Of Australian Rock And Pop 2nd Edition (Third Stone Press, 2017).
LIPSTICK KILLERS
Original line-up: Peter Tillman (vocals; ex-Filth), Mark Taylor (guitar; ex-Psycho-Surgeons), Kim Giddy (bass; ex-Precious Little), David Taylor (drums; ex-Psycho-Surgeons)
Lipstick Killers grew out of the ashes of two of Sydney’s most notorious late 1970s punk bands, Psycho-Surgeons and Filth. Inspired by Ramones’ first album (issued July 1976), import record shop owner Mark Taylor formed a band called the Frozen Stiffs with Ronnie Pop (vocals), Charlie Georgees (guitar), Craig Amiet (bass) and David Taylor (drums).
After a few months of rehearsals Pop and Georgees wandered off to form The Hellcats. Pop later re-emerged as Ron Peno in Died Pretty.
At the start of 1977 Taylor, Taylor and Amiet recruited singer Paul Gearside and began to play gigs. Rechristened Psycho-Surgeons after a newspaper headline, the band’s street-level punk credentials were based around a crude measure of musical proficiency and a full quota of Stooges-derived material in the live set. Until Filth came along a year later, Psycho-Surgeons earned a reputation as the most despised band in Sydney. Alongside The Hellcats and Johnny Dole and the Scabs, Psycho-Surgeons were one of the first bands to become associated with the scene that grew up around the Oxford Funhouse, the legendary venue in inner-city Sydney run by Radio Birdman.
Gearside left the band in late 1977 after being severely beaten up by three Hell’s Angels during a gig at the Oxford Funhouse. As a result of the violence, which was not symptomatic of the Funhouse itself, the owners closed the venue’s doors to rock gigs. Psycho-Surgeons issued their debut single in September 1978. ‘Horizontal Action’ / ‘Wild Weekend’ was a crudely recorded but intriguing release pushed along by Taylor’s hard thumping beat. Its collectability as a punk artefact was assured from the outset due to its limited edition of 500 copies, and because the band members splattered real cow’s blood over all the sleeves!
Not long after the single’s release Psycho-Surgeons mutated into Lipstick Killers with the arrival of Peter Tillman and Kim Giddy. Tillman had sung with Filth alongside teenage guitarist Bob Short for a year. To many observers Filth was the most nihilistic band on the scene and Short was known to take his Iggy Pop obsession to unhealthy extremes. Lipstick Killers’ Americanised brand of glitter/hard rock drew as much on late 1960s acid punk as The Stooges and New York Dolls circa 1973 for inspiration. Another of the band’s stated musical influences was UK glam star Gary Glitter. Lipstick Killers played the Sydney scene alongside The Passengers, The Other Side, Flaming Hands, Hitmen, Sunnyboys and The Visitors. In November 1979 the band issued the classic Deniz Tek-produced, independent single ‘Hindu Gods (Of Love)’ / ‘Shakedown USA’ which was atmospheric, hard’n’fast rock at its best.
In late 1980 Michael Charles (ex-Shy Impostors) replaced David Taylor on drums. Lipstick Killers then spent a year living in Los Angeles and became involved in the burgeoning Californian hardcore scene that had already thrown up the likes of Black Flag, Circle Jerks and Flesh Eaters. During that time Stephen Mather (ex-Playboy Lords) replaced Giddy on bass. The inspiration for the move to LA had come about after Greg Shaw (of Bomp! fame) had re-issued ‘Hindu Gods (Of Love)’ on his Voxx label, also adding it to his Bomp! Various Artists collection Experiments in Destiny.
The band, however, made little headway and was living in poverty. Following a Christmas dinner that consisted of boiled onions and refried beans, Lipstick Killers broke up and the members limped home to Australia at the start of 1982.
(Ed Note: I'm speculating here but I don’t think the ROIR label having issued a cassette compilation of New York Dolls early demo material called Lipstick Killers at that time did the band’s cause any good.)
Mark Taylor moved into computer graphics, Mather joined Decline of the Reptiles and Charles joined Angie Pepper Band and later on The Screaming Tribesmen. Citadel Records issued the live album Mesmerizer in December 1984. It had been taken from a cassette recording of one of the band’s infrequent Los Angeles gigs (in the manner of The Velvet Underground’s Live at Max’s Kansas City). As such the sound quality was rough’n’ready but the energy and atmosphere were enough to gain an insight into the band’s true spirit. The independent Vi-Nil label also issued the single ‘Sockman’ / ‘Pensioner Pie’ (January 1985), which was taken from demos the band had recorded at the end of 1978.
Lipstick Killers reformed for a brief Sydney tour in January 1989. In April 1995 Mark Taylor, Tillman and Mather formed 1960s acid punk revivalists Doctor Stone. Bil Bilson (drums; ex-Sunnyboys) and Chris Willing (Farfisa organ) completed the line-up. The band played a few gigs around Sydney during 1995. Doctor Stone issued the EP Purple Slice in December 1996 on the Appointment label. It contained three new songs and a re-recording of Lipstick Killers’ ‘Hindu Gods (Of Love)’.
IN CONVERSATION WITH MARK TAYLOR
Congrats on the new comp Strange Flash. David Laing has put it out on his Grown Up Wrong label but I guess you did all the remastering, that being your thing?
Mark Taylor: Well yeah it is. I did the remastering because I had some of the original tapes on hand but Dave really put it together. He decided what was going to be on it. He was the impetus behind the whole thing. He's a good lad. I don't know why he likes us (laughs) but there you go.
He's into all that. I've ordered the LP, the first will be the double album and then a single album of the Adelaide live stuff which is all on the CD. The thing I was impressed with, not that I wasn't expecting it to be good but the sound quality is sensational, given some of the original sources.
MT: That's great to hear. I always thought it was a bit rough because a lot of it was recorded on cassette.
Sure, the live stuff does sound like a cassette recording but I went back to the Mesmerizer LP on Citadel and that always sounded pretty good but now this new redoing is phenomenally good.
MT: I just happened to have, I don't know how I got it, but I had the original cassette. I suppose John Needham must have got it to me somehow. When I looked in my box of junk there it was! That was great, I put it on and it sounded so much better than the previous release. Funnily enough, the Adelaide tape was reel-to-reel so it was the opposite way round from what you think.
Okay, the Adelaide live stuff sounds more garagey. And you had the original drummer at that time too, right?
MT: Yeah, David Taylor.
And so his drumming was a lot different from Michael Charles drumming, who played on the Los Angeles live recording.
MT: Hence the whole sound of the group when Michael joined it was like two different bands really. So it was Michael and Kim on bass, he was there from the beginning of the Lipstick Killers. Michael only joined after Dave left.
That certainly is the difference. I want to stick with the live stuff for now, we'll get on to the studio stuff. So the earlier live tracks with David, that maybe informed your guitar playing a little bit more?
MT: Do you mean garage rock?
Yeah, the Adelaide tracks to me are a bit more garagey, with the punk energy etc.
MT: I suppose in those days the big influence was The Stooges and the MC5. We didn't know too much about garage rock because we only had what was available in those days and that wasn't a lot. There was the Nuggets album and I think the first Pebbles might have just come out.
Had The Sonics’ albums been reissued at that point?
MT: The original albums weren’t available in Australia at that time but a compilation called The Explosive Sonics had come out. We had got it in to sell to our customers at the White Light record shop. We were well acquainted with The Sonics from that comp.
You were well placed with being at White Light and you were there from the beginnings of the Sydney punk scene, the whole Birdman scene. You'd had the Psycho-Surgeons going by the end of '76.
MT: It could have been, might have been early '77. I think we had a different name originally, late '76.
Even back at that time did you feel you were part of something happening?
MT: Oh god yeah. I had a strong feeling of something happening. Even the Funhouse itself, I remember thinking it's great to be part of this because it's going to be something that will be talked about for years to come. Not because of the Psycho-Surgeons but all the bands, in particular Radio Birdman and The Saints that played there.
We'd heard about Birdman and The Saints down in Melbourne because we'd started reading about them in RAM (Rock Australia Magazine) and there were articles in Juke – I didn't get to see either of them when they originally toured Melbourne in early '77 – but there was definitely that Sydney-Melbourne divide. The Melbourne punk scene which I was able to see burgeon was very different from what was happening in Sydney. By the time you got the Lipstick Killers going and you were playing with Rob Younger's band The Other Side, The Visitors, Sunnyboys were forming... How did you see the Sydney scene by the 78-79 period.
MT: Um, well, I suppose we differentiated in broad terms. Sydney was more rock 'n' roll / hard rock / garage punk and American influenced. Melbourne seemed to be more attuned to the British punk and post punk scene; that's the broadest difference I remember noting at the time.
I'd agree with that, Melbourne was a bit more arty maybe. By the time you got cracking with the Lipstick Killers it seems that you'd made a big leap in the quality of you playing maybe. By the time you did 'Hindu Gods (Of Love)' you'd mastered your instruments (laughs).
MT: Yeah. It was a bit of a fluke that we managed to play pretty good on 'Hindu Gods'. We were still pretty rough, but having the Radio Birdman guys in the studio was great. Ron Keeley tuned Dave Taylor's drums. Deniz was there producing and Pip was there, and I think Rob Younger dropped in for a while. So we were on our best behaviour, put it that way. Trying our hardest.
So 'Horizontal Action' has that classic early punk sound, whereas 'Hindu Gods' had a radically different sound. That's an archetypal hard rocking song but still garagey, you know?
MT: Well it definitely had a garage influence because the riff itself was influenced by a track by Teddy and His Patches, called 'Suzy Creamcheese'. I'd bought a copy of that in Sydney. In fact somehow I'd found three copies and it turns out it was a hard to find record. To us it was just an oddity. But it had this really pounding riff, so when I got hold of that I twisted it around a bit. So 'Hindu Gods' is definitely 60s garage punk influenced. The earlier one wasn't.
The other thing I like on that single, the B-side 'Shakedown USA' has that fantastic boogie woogie piano. Was that Steve Harris from The Visitors?
MT: It was. He just took to that like a duck to water. He's a fantastic player and he was able to knock that off straight away. We were so grateful to Steve for having done that.
And the difference also, coming back to the live in Adelaide, what guitar were you playing at that stage?
MT: I think I had a Fender Strat at that stage. If it's covered in bandages it was my Fender Strat.
So what I'm getting at, you had a very different sound from other guys like Deniz. And then even for the '81 recording from Los Angeles you had a very clean but still vicious tone.
MT: The earlier stuff has that sound, the crunchy sound, not so much because I had the Strat but because I played it through an Acoustic solid state bass amp. That head is not a valve amp so it had a completely different sound. I knew nothing about amplifiers, I just somehow got hold of this amp that was solid state which nobody else was using at the time. It was also a bass amp, so anyone plugging into that thing would get a sound like that, it just doesn't have that slashing normal rock sound. That's what makes it so distinctive and it's only in retrospect I can see that. At the time I was just trying to get the best sound out of it I could get. It's more like the sound the LA hardcore bands ended up getting.
I was gonna come to that. I've listened to a bit of that stuff, not a huge amount, Black Flag but I'm struggling to hear the parallel there, you reckon it's closer to that sound?
MT: Well, yeah I think so. I think that sort of grinding, crushed guitar sound is to me more like the early Psycho-Surgeons which was that solid state amp sound. Then by the time we were playing in LA, I'd gone through Vox amplifiers and then a Fender amp. When I got to LA I bought a Fender Super amp, a nice vintage small amp because we wanted it to be portable, we were carrying our gear around. We only had a car, not a van. I also bought a semi-acoustic Gibson guitar. So the combination of the ES-335 guitar and this vintage Fender Super amp is what gives the Mesmerizer sound, a totally different sound.
I guess from memory, having asked you about this years ago, my thought was that you might have felt out of place on the LA scene? It was when all the early hardcore guys were starting to hit big.
MT: Yeah, it was. Bands like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks had been going for a while I guess, but that kind of sound was really taking off. In fact the Circle Jerks came to our shows. Keith Morris, the singer, really liked us and he was a great guy and we really liked them. I said to him that the Lipstick Killers is nothing like the sounds that were coming out of LA. He said he liked it because it was rock 'n' roll, he said ‘you guys are the Rolling Stones, like real rock 'n' roll guys’. He didn't mean we were like the Rolling Stones but... I forget what he said about his own sound but he put us in a totally different category.
David Laing has pulled a quote from Keith Morris for the one-sheet promo about how much he liked the band (“The Lipstick Killers were easily one of the greatest live bands I've witnessed in my 65 yrs, on this planet”).
MT: Yes, I think David's friendly with a lot of people and he managed to get that quote from Keith which I thought was fantastic.
I'm jumping all over the place but there had been articles in RAM at the time and there are lots of flyers around, but I'd not seen that article on the Madame Wongs show, by Byron Coley from New York Rocker magazine. That's a great piece of writing.
MT: Yeah, it is. Well Byron was in LA at the same time we were and he and Peter Tillman got on really well. I mean I got on well with him but he was particular friends with Peter and he came to see us at the Madame Wongs show. I think Keith Morris was there as well, the Mesmerizer show. But they liked it, even though it wasn't like the sound that was going around LA at that time. Byron just wrote a good review for us.
There are extra tracks that didn't make it to the Mesmerizer LP. Were they just on the cassette too?
MT: Yeah, so Chris D was the lead singer for the Flesh Eaters and he produced that for us. We played with them a couple of times and he really liked the Lipstick Killers as well. He'd produced the first Gun Club album and he wanted to produce our studio album. I don't know why we didn't do it, maybe because we ended up breaking up instead. Um, so Chris produced Mesmerizer from the cassette tape; I don't know why? Maybe he had the tape. The tape had been done from the mixing desk at the gig and then we just left it there and Chris somehow kept it and he must have played it to John Needham and John wanted to release it. He must have asked Chris if he could produce it from the cassette and that's how that happened.
You mentioned Chris D producing the Gun Club album. I reckon that Peter Tillman sounds like Jeffrey Lee Pearce; maybe where JLP got his vocal phrasing? That's a long shot I suppose? Do you reckon that Peter sounds like what JLP came to sound like, or have I got it the wrong way round?
MT: Well, there are some parallels. We played with them in LA; the first album might have just come out, or just about to come out. They were playing very small venues then, well they were playing with us and there was only about 40 or 50 people coming to the shows so they obviously hadn't made it to any level of success at that stage. But JLP was unique in many ways. One time I remember him dancing around on stage cutting clumps of his hair off with a Bowie knife! And tossing it into the air. An interesting character. But his guitar player was the guy my eyes were fixed on, Ward Dotson, he was incredible. There were only a couple of guitarist that I saw in LA that really blew me away.
The other guy that had a super high energy approach was the guitar player in the Misfits, Doyle. We saw them at the Whisky A-Go-Go. The guitar player had used his guitar to hit someone over the head, it was a big scandal in all the papers. They came out on the stage at the Whisky, they had that gruesome aura to them already and the bass player, the minute they got on the stage, was flailing his bass around his head. I thought, god he's gonna let go of it and it'll fly into the audience. The guitar player was just pounding these power chords that sounded amazing. The original guitar player from X, Ian Krahe, had that power thing too. He was the guy I saw and thought he's got high energy, he's a fantastic player. Him and Ed Kuepper were amazing. Then Ward Dotson and the guy from the Misfits, they all had that fantastic power in their playing.
I love the sound of the early Gun Club albums, the first two or three...
MT: Yeah, me too.
I’m not so much a Misfits fan, I've only come to listen to them much later but I get what you're saying.
MT: After I saw them at that gig, I never listened to them again. I'm not a big Misfits fan, it just impressed me on that night.
Did you see recently there was a series of docos on the history of punk, they were shown on SBS. There was the English one and the American hardcore one and there were a lot of comments that it missed the mark, or that people didn't like the bands. Did you see that one?
MT: I did watch something recently about the Californian hardcore scene. I thought it was okay, filling me in on things I didn't realise. Although we did participate in the scene we were only on the periphery and it was only for a very short time we were there. So half the gigs we played weren't with those hardcore bands anyway. We played with groups like The Unclaimed, The Gun Club, others that I can't remember. We played at Godzilla's and that was known as a hardcore punk venue and we were in there with the bands with Mohican cuts, covered in studs and leather, the whole audience was dressed up that way. We were long haired Sydney guys. They didn't really respond to us in the normal way. They didn't boo us off, they just politely waited for us to finish and the hardcore group came on and then they were happy.
That photo on the back of Mesmerizer, Peter's holding up the skull on a stick with stuff hanging off it. You must have tried to present a gruesome image?
MT: That was actually from a show at the Civic Hotel in Sydney before we'd left. It was the Rock 'n' Roll Safari theme show, we rented a whole of stuff from the Opera Company.
The big revelation with this release... so every band that might have put out one or two singles must have recorded heaps of demo so the real crux of this album are the demos, the ’78 demos and the Trafalgar demos from 1980. You must have had a lot of songs?
MT: Well we did, we wrote constantly. Obviously we thought that one day we'd have an album but it never happened, mainly because of our ill-fated trip to LA. We broke up there, we'd tried to continue but we just didn't have the resources. We had the master plan there to put an album out but it was cut short.
So the demos are with Lobby Loyde and Dave mentions in the notes that he kind of toned you down a bit, which is interesting because he'd recorded X very raw.
MT: He did. I think what he was trying to do was to decide whether or not we had the potential to be stable mates for the Sunnyboys. So his thinking at that time was very much based around the success of the Sunnyboys. The Sunnyboys set that up for us, it was an audition tape really. He wanted to hear how I was playing my guitar, so he set one half of the split of the guitar directly into the desk and one into the amp, so it sounds like two guitars but it was just the one split. He wanted to hear the way I played the strings without the amp.
I really like them, it might dilute the sound but it makes you out to be bit more of a power pop band maybe? You probably didn't want to be that?
MT: Well, we were a bit disappointed with the sound because it wasn't our live sound. I do think it's okay. What I do sometimes when I play them I flip it to mono and it sounds just like us again.
Okay, interesting. Listening to this, the live tracks, the demos, you're actually a toe-tapping band. You've got some rockin' songs, there's a bit of structure to the songs, I think you were on to something. Do you feel that?
MT: Sure, we thought they were good. Maybe they would have been a bit better if we had completed them for an album. They were really played live. Lobby was pretty good generally with grunty guitars but we were only in the studio for an hour.
That tells the tale.
MT: I don't even think I met Lobby, he was just behind the console. We carried our instruments in, set up. I probably didn't even know who he was at that time. I mean, I know now but... we walked in, played 12 songs in a row and walked out again.
Unfulfilled potential but I like the songs. I think you reference other bands, things like 'Hide and Seek', 'Bongo Flip' have that garage surf sound, they've got lots of reference points without saying you're directly copying someone else.
MT: Well, 'Hide and Seek' is a cover of a song by The Sheiks; they were actually The Strangeloves. That one wasn't written by us. It's got that pounding beat, they'd done things like 'I Want Candy'. 'Bongo Flip' was an original we wrote after we'd gone up to Newcastle to do a gig. Jim Dickson was in the car with us, he must have been playing as well. On the way back we had all of our gear, the four of us in the band, Jim Dickson and maybe one other guy and we were in the Bongo van, that's the model van. We came around a corner. Peter was driving and he just rolled the thing over. It's a true story and everyone in the back of the van and all the equipment went everywhere. It all ended up on the ceiling of the Bongo van. Once we survived that we thought why not write a song about that.
The travails of a touring band. There have been many instances of crashes while touring. Sadly the guys from Eastern Dark didn't come out of it so well, James Darroch dying in '86.
MT: Fortunately we all survived. Jim was bruised and battered. I was in the front seat so when it rolled on to the side I got all this gravel in my face. It slid along the road for about 50 feet and the window was open so all this gravel was spraying into my face. It was pretty bad, I got a few minor injuries and cuts.
I'm glad you're still here. I like that mystical fantasy themes in songs like ‘Hindu Gods (Of Love)’, ‘Driving The Special Dead’, ‘Twilight of the Idols’, ‘Date With a Thing’. You had themes going on there.
MT: Yeah, I suppose we did. That would have come from the 13th Floor Elevators I think, they were a strong influence at that time. We didn't want to emphasise that drugs angle which they did; we wanted to have the same mystical angle but without the drugs. The mix of garage rock and the mysticism without the drugs was just as valid.
I just remembered with the influences, there was also Gary Glitter; you used to come on stage to 'Rock 'n' Roll'.
MT: Peter and I were huge Gary Glitter fans. We'd seen him at the Hordern Pavilion in about 1972, well we found out that we had both been there and just couldn't stop talking about it. So the idea of using it for the band coming on stage, which we did all the time, we got that really from Radio Birdman because they used a Kraftwerk song, I've forgotten which one it was, but we just thought 'well what can we do which is even crazier and stupider than that?' We came up with Gary Glitter 'Rock 'n' Roll Part 1'. That was way before they used it for the football. It got done to death after that.
Jumping around again, you've related the story for me before, but tell us about the ‘Horizontal Action’ single covers and the blood. It's such a classic punk thing to have done.
MT: (Laughs) it is. I got the idea of splattering blood on the covers because of the band name, Psycho-Surgeons, it just made sense. I couldn't get the full sleeves, I had intended it to be a solid white sleeve with blood splattered on them but we could only get hold of the die-cut sleeves. We took those 500 sleeves to our rehearsal space in Henderson Road, which was just a really decrepit area of town where we could get cheap rent. It was also right above a printing factory where they printed pornographic magazines. They printed these mags 24 hours a day (laughs). We also did some gigs there.
We laid out all the sleeves on the bare floorboards and the blood was in a quart milk container. I'd said to my cousin I wanted to do this idea with the blood on the covers but how can I possibly get blood and he said ‘leave it to me’. He got on his motorbike and drove out to somewhere in the Western suburbs, found an abattoir and said to the manager ‘I'm at university and we need to study blood’, some story he made up and they filled this quart container for him with cow's blood. He arrived back a few hours later with this milk container of blood. We left it there for a couple of weeks while we got everything else ready, then we just spread out all the covers on the floor. There was the four band members involved and their girlfriends and wives. We just splattered the blood on the covers, just using our bare hands. Some of them came out looking fantastic and some only had a bit on them, it didn't work out all that well.
We left them there to dry but the blood got into the floorboards. Obviously there were gaps in the floorboards and it started leaking onto the pornography factory (laughs). On to their stacks of porn mags there. We copped a bit of flack for that. They might have thought we'd murdered someone up there. The thing is it got all over me and all over David, well most of us got some of the blood on us, into our jeans. It was pongy for sure.
The next day we had a band practise organised and we turned up all except Dave. He'd never been late for practise before so we waited and waited and then went home. This was before mobile phones so we had no idea where he was. Later that evening I got a call to say that Dave was at the police station, he'd been held there. He'd got into a cab after doing the sleeves and after he'd got dropped off at home, the cab driver had called the police because he'd decided it was very suspicious that he was covered in blood. The police descended on Dave's house and held him at the station all day. They had to do the forensic tests on the blood. He got out eventually when they found it was cow's blood.
You guys created such a legendary story. My copy of the single still smells a bit.
MT: Yeah it was unusual. I did end up getting infected from the blood that got on my jeans. I mean we'd often get cuts and scrapes on us because of the way we played, the things we used to do generally. So the blood got into this cut I had on my leg, so I got infected with Streptococcus, and I had to get a shot of penicillin to get rid of that. Putting out the blood sleeves was never easy.
The other thing I wanted to ask you about, because you've been a big collector of garage punk singles; have you pretty much picked up everything that you've ever wanted?
MT: Pretty much; it's almost impossible to collect every garage punk 45 that came out, because there were so many of them released. Many of them are just one known copy or two or three, and you can’t get them, those ones are just never going to move from the guy who might have them.
What are a couple of these big ticket items that remain out of everyone else's reach?
MT: There are lots... let me think. The Human Expression singles are very difficult to get hold of. Adrian Lloyd ‘Lorna’ on Charger Records. One that I'm still chasing is the third Tennalaga label release by The Peabody Hermitage, called ‘Something So’. One of the most desired records is called ‘City Of People’ by The Illusions on Michelle Records, very hard to find. Another one is The Mods’ ‘I Give You An Inch (And You Take A Mile)’. And the other side is just as good, ‘You've Got Another Think Coming’. I could go on.
I guess you've got all the well known Aussie ones. But what about something like The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ released here on the Astor label?
MT: Yeah, look that's a great one but I've really only collected singles from the band's country of origin, like American bands on American labels.
Happy hunting, Mark.
STRANGE FLASH Studio & Live ’78-’81 (Grown Up Wrong)
2-CD Track Listing (* CD only tracks)
DISC 1
(Lost In Space/Voxx 45 – 1979 – produced by Deniz Tek)
1. Hindu Gods (Of Love)
2. Shakedown USA
(Mixdown Studio Demos -1978)
3. Sockman
4. Pensioner Pie
5. Teen Police
6. Hindu Gods (Of Love) (demo) *
7. Rot In Love
8. Accidents
(Live In Adelaide – May 1979)
9. Shakedown USA *
10. Dying Boy's Crawl *
11. Master's Words *
12. Bully *
13. Teen Police *
14. Wild Weekend *
15. I’ve Got Levitation *
16. Mercy Killer *
17. Pharmaceutical Au-Go-Go *
18. Human Crash *
19. Crush On You *
20. Hindu Gods (Of Love) *
21. Head Off *
22. Sock It To Me – Baby! *
23. Sockman *
24. Horizontal Action *
DISC 2
(Trafalgar Demos 1980 – Produced by Lobby Loyde)
1. New Hard Fun
2. Mesmerizer
3. Driving The Special Dead
4. Bongo Flip
5. Twilight Of The Idols
6. Strange Flash
7. Hide & Seek
8. Date With A Thing
9. Liquor Fit
(Live In Los Angeles – 1981)
10. Dying Boy's Crawl
11. Driving The Special Dead
12. Bongo Flip
13. Strange Flash
14. Twilight Of The Idols
15. I’ve Got Levitation
16. Date With A Thing
17. Sock It To Me – Baby!
18. Shakedown USA
19. Pharmaceutical Au-Go-Go
20. Out Of Our Tree
21. Liquor Fit
Psycho-Surgeons
(Wallaby Beat 45 -1978)
22. Horizontal Action *
23. Wild Weekend *
(Rehearsal – 1976)
24. Falling Apart *
25. Crush On You *
STRANGE FLASH Studio & Live ’78-’81 (Grown Up Wrong)
2-LP Track Listing
SIDE 1
(Lost In Space/Voxx 45 – 1979 – produced by Deniz Tek)
1. Hindu Gods (Of Love)
2. Shakedown USA
(Mixdown Studio Demos -1978)
3. Sockman
4. Pensioner Pie
5. Teen Police
6. Rot In Love
7. Accidents
SIDE 2
(Trafalgar Demos 1980 - produced by Lobby Loyde)
1. New Hard Fun
2. Mesmerizer
3. Driving The Special Dead
4. Bongo Flip
5. Twilight Of The Idols
6. Strange Flash
7. Hide & Seek
SIDE 3
(Trafalgar Demos 1980 – produced by Lobby Loyde)
1. Date With A Thing
2. Liquor Fit
(Live In Los Angeles – 1981)
3. Dying Boy's Crawl
4. Driving The Special Dead
5. Bongo Flip
6. Strange Flash
7. Sock It To Me – Baby!
SIDE 4
(Live In Los Angeles – 1981)
1. Twilight Of The Idols
2. I’ve Got Levitation
3. Date With A Thing
4. Shakedown USA
5. Pharmaceutical Au-Go-Go
6. Out Of Our Tree
7. Liquor Fit