DEVIL ELECTRIC - New album Tahlia...

DEVIL ELECTRIC – New album Tahlia is out now

And the Gods looked down…

 By Ian McFarlane

 Thanks to Pierina ‘Pip’ O’Brien and Chris Maric (Maric Media)

 I’ve always had a thing for loud, heavy guitars. I can think back to my adolescent faves, Purple-Zeppelin-Sabbath-Heep-Budgie-Stooges; into the ‘80s with UFO-Maiden-Metallica-Girlschool-Motorhead; the ‘90s with Soundgarden-Alice in Chains-Sepultura; then of course the Aussie connection via Coloured Balls-Buffalo-AC/DC-Rose Tattoo-Mortal Sin-Voyager (okay, there are hundreds of other heavy bands to mention but you get the picture…).

 The point I’m getting to is, that it’s always a buzz when you discover a new band. Can you imagine my surprise when on first hearing Melbourne band Devil Electric less than a year ago, I found out that they’d already been together for 10 years. Damn! How did I miss this band?

 The original Devil Electric line-up comprised Pierina ‘Pip’ O’Brien (vocals), Christos Athanasias (guitar), Tom Hulse (bass) and Mark Van de Beek (drums). This line-up recorded two Limited Edition 7" singles, The Gods Below Vol 1 and The Gods Below Vol 2 (both 2016, 150 copies each) and the albums Devil Electric (2017) and Godless (2021). I did a deep dive into their earlier recorded work and found them incredibly impressive.

 Pip O’Brien is the band’s focal point, with her strident vocal phrasing and confident stage presence – I saw on Facebook that the band referred to her as “our Lady Evil” – but the three guys creating the music behind her are no slouches in the heavy department. Hulse left in 2023 to be replaced by Aidan McGarrigle (ex-Massive) but sadly he passed away in August of that year. Recently they added new bassist, Nicolas Dumont. With new album Tahlia just released, I wanted to find out more about this electrifying quartet.

Photo courtesy of Devil Electric

 Firstly, by way of making sense of the band I had to get to grips with Tahlia. At first glance you think that, with six songs adding up to 35 minutes of music, is there something missing? Then you realise it’s perfectly in-sync with their focus – in the time-honoured fashion of the record industry – on releasing an LP’s worth of tunes (both earlier albums run about 36 minutes). This is deep Doom Metal underpinned by a solid ‘70s hard rock feel, with fuzzed out, sludgy, thick guitar rifferama of a high order maintaining the pace. The riffing isn’t fast but there’s that sense of menace ever present. The melodies aren’t catchy in a pop way, but once the hooks get embedded in your brain they’ll take you by surprise at how often they emerge screaming into your consciousness. As he did with the previous albums, engineer/mixer Julian Schweitzer has anchored the band’s sound with effective clout.

 They haven’t deviated from the patented sound established on their previous records, so one question might be: are they progressing? I was thinking maybe they haven’t pushed themselves far enough, but there is scope for that here. The title track arises as one of Pip O’Brien’s darkest lyrics. Then there’s the epic ‘This Hereafter’ which twists and turns around its nine-minute length like a gigantic Amazonian Anaconda ensnaring its latest victim. Man, that thing must be intense to play live. A future Devil Electric classic in the making. Dig it!

 (The band just posted on Facebook that Tahlia debuted at #16 on the ARIA album chart.)

 I was fortunate to secure a half hour conversation, over the phone with singer Pip O’Brien.

 IMcF: Thanks for your time, Pip. I’m going to make a confession here: I only heard of Devil Electric about a year ago, and I was thinking, “How did I miss this band?”.

PO’B: We have been quiet for the last five years, unfortunately. Not by choice at all, by circumstance.

 IMcF: Well, also I was thinking that three albums in 10 years is, you know, it’s kind of leisurely. So, congratulations on the new album, Tahlia. I was intrigued because you signed to a German label straight away, Kozmic Artifactz.

PO’B: Yes!

 IMcF: Did you feel you were being ignored in Australia, and did you set out for European recognition first?

PO’B: No, literally none of the above. The way the band started was the drummer, Beek – his name’s Mark Van de Beek, but we call him Beek – and Christos, the guitarist, they decided to jam one day. I guess after that they decided what they had written was good enough to form a band. They got in Tom, the original bassist, so I was the last one to join. I’d sung a song with the Ugly Kings which is Christos’s other band. They already had a gig locked in by the time I joined, which was only a couple of months away. We had three months to write all the music. And then they already, off the back of that, had a recording session locked in. It was all very quick, and we didn’t really think about anything. We just knew we were already friends. So, it was a very easy band to start. We played this gig and then went into the studio to record. The first EP did quite well for us, which was a shock. Bandcamp was becoming more mainstream so people could discover you through that.

 Then suddenly we had this European label contacting us. The interest started before we even knew we had anything. We didn’t think of it as “Australia versus Europe”. Our fan base is definitely stronger overseas than it is in Australia. I don’t know if that’s just a product of the genre. But then again, we’ve always been really well supported in Australia. The first gig we played was with Peep Temple. It’s actually out of control when you think about it. We’d all been playing in other bands, and a few friends helped us out. We’ve always had the support of the community here. But from a fan base perspective, we do see a lot from overseas, which is nice, but also, you know, we’d love to build it up here.

 IMcF: I’m really into genres of music. In terms of your sound, I immediately put you in the Doom Metal / hard rock style. There’s that ‘70s feel, a bit of Sabbath and Zeppelin. But do you see yourselves as a Doom Metal band?

PO’B: It’s so funny because we’ve been trying to answer that question for a long time. I think instinctively, we do fit into that doom / hard rock sound. Some songs are more doom, some songs are more hard rock. That ‘70s Sabbath sound is probably the base of our inspiration, in terms of starting to write songs. It’s peeled back, still heavy but quite melodic at the same time. I think all of us are just so diverse in the music that we listen to anyway, so that naturally brings in other elements as well. When we try to define it as a specific genre, it starts to get difficult because there’s so many other influences that layer on top of that. But I think it’s safe to say we’re traditional hard rock / Doom Metal.

 IMcF: What bands and singers have you been listening to?

PO’B: It’s ever changing. Well, my dad’s a singer and musician. I actually love my dad’s songwriting. He is a brilliant folk artist, but I can listen to anything. I listened to a lot of ‘80s metal. I love Judas Priest. I like to listen to ‘70s folk, a lot of pop music. On the last album, for the song ‘The Cave’, I took one of the vocal treatments from what Billie Eilish was doing. I try to pull things from a lot of places. I love Big Thief at the moment. I think they’re doing fantastic things. They’re a cool, folky sounding band from Brooklyn. I can’t even describe what they sound like. AdriAnne Lenker, who’s the singer and songwriter is just phenomenal. It’s a bit of a mix. Really depends on what I’m thinking that morning.

 IMcF: In terms of where you see yourselves positioned, if I say four band names can you say whether you’re like them or they don’t fit? Blood Ceremony, Blues Pills, Black Road and Nightwish?

PO’B: I would say that’s bang on. A lot of people have mentioned similar bands. I would love to sound like the singer of Blues Pills. I think that’s the biggest compliment that I can get when we do get compared to them.

 As well as Black Sabbath, another band we get compared to is Pentagram. And I know the boys love Uncle Acid. There’re sometimes elements of Uncle Acid in the songwriting. I think our sound is rawer, a bit more live sounding. We’re not overly produced. It can be a wall of sound, but melody is embedded in that kind of ‘70s way. I guess we try and pull that through into what we do, with a bit more of a contemporary take on it.

 IMcF: As a singer, are you classically trained?

PO’B: Not at all. I have zero training, apart from what my dad taught me. I come from a very musical family. On my dad’s side, singing was a given, it wasn’t a choice. I can remember growing up around my grandparents and aunties and uncles all singing and harmonizing together. That’s where dad got his musical talent from. I was always singing with dad, that’s how I learned to sing. He’s always encouraged me and then the rest of it, I just kind of figured it out. I knew I wanted to be in bands from, I can’t even remember how young I was. I just thought it was the coolest thing. Despite trying, I never got good at any of the instruments I attempted. So singing was the next best thing that I could do. And I just kind of threw myself into it and then realized later I probably should have had some formal training.

 IMcF: Well, you’re doing all right.

PO’B: Thank you. It’s taken me a long time to figure out some of the things that I probably could have known early on. Breathing and preserving your voice. But we live, we learn.

 IMcF: How do you find your vocal melodies in amongst the riffs? What’s that process involve?

PO’B: It is hard. And I’m going through the writing process at the moment. We’re actually writing for the next album because the last thing we want is a huge break in between albums again. And now that we’ve got Nic (Nicolas Dumont), our new bassist, bedded in and we’re all kind of writing together again, which is great. I’ve got to fight for space sometimes.

 And the boys are cognisant of that. They give me a bit more space at times. They try and write knowing that they want me to have a bigger vocal part in some things. It can be a battle of the instruments. We know each other quite well now. And when we write, we write together. Every single thing that we do, we do as a unit. There’s no one that’s writing everything. Someone will come up with a riff at home, but it all gets written and finished in the room together. I think that really helps. And I’ll sit back and think, I’d like this to go a little bit longer, or they’ll hear me sing something and decide that they want to dial that up a bit more. It’s an organic writing process. But yeah, it can be difficult with such prominent guitars happening all around me.

 IMcF: Another question might be, how do you avoid going more guttural? Some heavy bands with female singers, they tend to do the guttural thing rather than singing clean notes. Are you conscious of trying to avoid that?

PO’B: Yeah, I’d say 99% of the time. I think about that as a point of difference as my thing that I like to avoid going too guttural or too heavy. Also, I just don’t think that I have the ability to do that well. I think I’m better at singing. I didn’t realize how much I thought about it until this writing process. Whenever I think of a melody for a song, I’ll go back and question it within myself. I’ll record it then listen back and then see what I would do if I could do it differently. I’ll do that about three times before I decide on which is the best way of doing it. I might try and push myself into something a bit more ethereal, if I feel like I haven’t gone high enough. Or if I feel like I’m too comfortable in what I’m doing, I try and add another element that’s a bit different. I sit back and try and think of lyrics that can easily fit with a chorus. This goes back to that love of Judas Priest. I might want to hold a big note and soar above the guitars because, you know, we’ve all got ego. I try hard to approach it from a different space. I try to get a bit out of my own head of what it should sound like into something else that I would like to listen to.

 IMcF: I wanted to make mention of another Melbourne singer. Did you ever encounter Mia Stone and Satellite?

PO’B: No, Mia Stone rings a bell, but not that I can bring into my mind at this point.

 IMcF: Mia was around in bands in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Stone Circus was a heavy acid rock band. And then Satellite was a progressive metal band. She was this little thing that just dominated the stage. And she had a very bluesy, operatic vocal style. She was different, she had a strong following around Melbourne. She passed away sadly last year. If you get a chance, try and have a listen to Satellite with Mia Stone.

PO’B: I’ll definitely check it out because I love to hear different things. Anything with a uniqueness, a little bit quirky. I think you can always tell when someone is being themselves in their critical approach.

 IMcF: Okay, I’ll turn my attention now to the new album, Tahlia. You’re very much an LP-centric band. Your albums are all about 35-36 minutes long, perfect for an LP. So once again, is that a conscious thing?

PO’B: Yes. It’s really funny because my partner is always saying, ‘you should add more songs to the album’. But then it affects the sound quality of the vinyl. We love analogue. We like writing for a vinyl album. We think about the grooves and making sure that we’ve got, you know, just enough space for the sound to be at its optimum. That’s what we’ve always been into, and hopefully we’ll continue to do that because it’s so nice to have that tangible, beautiful album sitting on the shelf.

 IMcF: The other thing about your new album, it’s that new liquid filled vinyl.

PO’B: Yes, Kozmic did a limited run of glitter liquid and then a blood liquid. They sold pretty quickly. They’re so amazing, very heavy and thick. It was to be a bit more collector oriented. Vinyl is expensive for everyone, but I think people like being able to choose. There’s the splatter vinyl LP too, like our version of the black one, but we like having that differentiation and it makes it a bit more special, a little bit of fun.

 IMcF: So, who’s Tahlia? It sounds like a creepy song. Is she a stalker or something?

PO’B: I wish! No, I don’t wish… but I wish I was famous enough to have a stalker. Tahlia is like an entity. It’s loosely based on the Roman god Tahlia. It’s all about abundance and celebration, but in a dark and evil way. Yeah, it’s that tipping point when abundance isn’t about fruitfulness anymore, it is more about a lack of self-control and a downward spiral, that’s the best way of putting it. Tahlia became the name of the album, and we have the cover with that ominous sleeping woman. The theme of the album is very much embedded in that image. What nourishes me destroys me is kind of the theme of the album, if I could give it one. That sort of dark side of life where things go a little bit too far, and you know you’ve spiralled out of control.

 IMcF: You’ve got Lex from Seedy Jeezus on ‘Acid Bath’. Seedy Jeezus seems to be about the only other Melbourne band in the same style. Was that a match made in heaven?

PO’B: It was. We’ve known the guys from Seedy Jeezus for years. We used to rehearse at the Bakehouse. We’d always sit out the back and chat with them. So Beek and Lex are graphic designers and artists, and they connected. When we did ‘Acid Bath’ we knew it was always going to be a an instrumental. We love having an instrumental on the album, it gives the boys a chance to shine, um without me. When we were listening back to it, we thought it needed something else. There needed to be another element. And then Beek said, ‘I’ve got an idea. I might ask Lex to see if he wants to have a crack at soloing over it’. He did and we were like, this is perfect. What a legend! It changed the song and really elevated it to a whole other stratosphere.

 IMcF: And you’ve got the longest song you’ve done so far, ‘This Hereafter’, the nine minute epic. It reminds me of something like Sabbath’s ‘Megalomania’ off Sabotage.

PO’B: Yeah, and we love doing a long song. Where it starts isn’t where it ends. It’s got the most lyrics I’ve ever written. Particularly in that outro, which kills me every time we do it live, but I love it. It’s one of my favourite songs. It’s one of the darkest songs I’ve written from an actual lyrical standpoint, because it touches on some pretty real stuff around the people that I was with at the time. It encapsulates a moment of pushing into a realm of abundance that is not healthy or sustainable for anyone. It can be quite painful because I have to get into the mindset of someone who’s very troubled and basically damaging themselves. It’s emotionally draining. Luckily, we play it last every single time. There’s no way I could ever start a gig with that song, but I absolutely love it. I think it captures us as a band. It has all the cues that we normally have. And it’s nice and long, and you can really settle into it.

 IMcF: I want to mention a couple of tracks from the previous albums that I really like. The first song I heard was ‘Hypnotica’, which I think is a real landmark moment for you. And then also ‘All My Friends Move Like the Night’. Do you think you’re going to surpass what you’ve already done?

PO’B: It’s so hard because I do worry that we would never surpass something like ‘Hypnotica’. It’s still our most popular song, by far. It’s a bit like a juggernaut. That one came quite naturally, it wasn’t a labour to write, which is always good. Sometimes it takes months, if not years to finish a song. And it can take me even longer to do the lyrics sometimes. ‘Hypnotica’ is unusual; there’s no real chorus, it just kind of flows through. It’s obviously a big, beautiful song that somehow came to us for our first album, which was fantastic. And ‘All My Friends…’ I love; that’s such a bratty kind of party song. My friends are very aware that I wrote it about them. They’ve mentioned it more than a few times and I’m like, yes, yes, yes. I’m really interested to see what songs people connect with on this album. I personally love ‘This Hereafter’. I love ‘Tahlia’, it’s a very unusual song. I obviously lyrically love ‘Jill & Jack Shit’, it’s a big sort of F you to my ex-husband. This album has very Devil Electric songs on it, but then I think it has some others that are a little bit left of centre. I hope that we can get another one like ‘Hypnotica’ out there into the world with the same success.

 IMcF: You’ve got some gigs coming up so maybe you’ll find out what people really respond to best.

PO’B: That’s the thing I always say to the band. You never really know if a song is good until you’ve played it in front of people and you can instantly see their reaction. You can feel the energy shifts when people just click into a song that they love. It’s not always the ones I expect.

 IMcF: I also noticed that you’re now Heavy magazine cover stars, so you’re getting a bit of traction.

PO’B: All thanks to Maric, our PR guy. It’s always fun and exciting to see it start to get out there. It’s like throwing your own party. Like, will anyone come? That fear you go through before a release, but so far, so good.

 IMcF: I wanted to ask a question about Christos’s guitar playing. He gets that heavy, fuzzed out sound, but to my ears he doesn’t always tune down.

PO’B: I believe so; we’re not always into those devil chords all the time. I know he did on ‘This Hereafter’. And then he’s got an incredible pedal board. I think his pedal board weighs 25 kilos. He’s got his whole thing there. He’s one of my favourite guitarists, which is lucky because I play in a band with him. But he always has been, even before we were in a band together. He’s got such a unique take on things. He has his signature sound, which he tinkers with, like he’s very into it, which is really fun to watch. And it’s really funny at gigs when he rocks up with this giant pedal board.

 IMcF: I guess with his Greek heritage, which might be why there’s a certain Europeanness about what you do.

PO’B: That could be true. I never even thought of that, but yeah. And now with Nic, he’s French, so we’re covered over there. And because Christos grew up in Greece, he was exposed to a whole different style of music altogether versus here in Melbourne, which has its own distinct thing going on as well.

 IMcF: Thanks Pip, take care and good luck with the gigs. And get another record out in the next year.

PO’B: We’re definitely going to do that, we’re onto it.

THE EASTERN DARK - Guardians of the Dark

THE EASTERN DARK – Guardians of the Dark

 By Ian McFarlane

The 4th of March 2026 marked the 40th anniversary of the death of guitarist / singer / songwriter James Darroch from legendary Australian band The Eastern Dark. Melbourne label Grown Up Wrong! Records will reissue the band’s 1985 single ‘Julie is a Junkie’ / ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’ on 17 April.

 The band derived the unusual name from Phantom comix (“Evil men… from the Eastern Dark”). To ascribe them legendary status now is not overstating the case. Sadly, the Dark had almost certain universal success snatched from its grasp with the tragic death of leading light and genuinely talented frontman, James Darroch, in a car accident while on tour. Fortunately, however, the band left behind enough recorded evidence to support the case for immortality.

 The original 7" release remains one of the greatest Australian rock ‘n’ roll singles of all time, the high energy quotient undiminished to this day. Released during an era when stellar indie guitar rock singles were coming out every week, one after another, it continues to shine like the brightest star. At the time I was buying everything released by indie labels such as Citadel, Waterfront, Au-go-go etc. These names continue to inspire a sense of completeness – Died Pretty, The Screaming Tribesmen, The New Christs, The Lime Spiders, The Stems, The Hard-Ons, Hoodoo Gurus, The Celibate Rifles, Ups and Downs, Scientists, The Moffs, Harem Scarem, The Zimmermen etc… the list is mind-spinning in its goodness, jam packed with a million delights.

 Recently I spoke to the Dark’s drummer Geoff Milne, but before we get to that below, and just for the hell of it, here is The Eastern Dark profile from my Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop (2nd edition).

 The Eastern Dark

 Original line-up: James Darroch (guitar, vocals; ex-Trans Love Energy, Celibate Rifles), Bill Gibson (bass, piano, guitar, vocals), Geoff Milne (drums; ex-Sigh of Relief, New Avengers)

 Of all the legendary Sydney-based independent guitar bands of the 1980s (The New Christs, The Screaming Tribesmen, Beasts of Bourbon, The Hard-Ons etc.) The Eastern Dark will be remembered as the most talented, all-encompassing and passionate of the lot. The band was one of the pioneering power trios on the Australian alternative scene. Unfortunately the band never got the chance to fulfil its early promise because guiding light James Darroch died in a car accident on 4 March 1986. It was a tragic end to a classic band.

Darroch’s first band was Trans Love Energy (aka Fifth Estate and Slaughterhouse 5), a three piece playing Radio Birdman/MC5/Stooges/Ramones-inspired garage rock’n’roll. Dean Coulter (guitar, vocals) and Murray Engleheart (drums) completed the line-up. Trans Love Energy did not release any records. Darroch joined The Celibate Rifles at the start of 1982. Engleheart became a rock journalist with Juke, Drum, Hot Metal, Metal Hammer and countless other publications. Coulter went on to join Decline of the Reptiles.

Original 7-inch single picture sleeve, purple variant (Waterfront Records, 1985)

Darroch formed The Eastern Dark in January 1984 following two years as the Rifles’ bass player. One of the band’s earliest ambitions was to play every Ramones’ song ever recorded. Accordingly, over the next two years, the band opened each gig with a Ramones’ song (in chronological order) until the catalogue had been exhausted! The Waterfront label issued the band’s classic debut single, ‘Julie is a Junkie’ b/w ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’ (August 1985), which became a #1 alternative hit. Although it reflected Darroch’s Ramones/Radio Birdman fixation, it also revealed his ability to craft melodic, perfectly structured, neo-guitar pop. At the time rock writer J.J. Adams described The Eastern Dark as the “epitome of inner-city cool”.

The Eastern Dark completed its debut, Rob Younger-produced mini-album Long Live the New Flesh! in February 1986, just days before setting off for its second tour of Melbourne. Tragedy struck on the Hume Highway when the band’s van (driven by Darroch) left the road near Wagga Wagga, NSW. As well as killing Darroch, the accident put Billy Gibson, Geoff Milne and the band’s sound engineer Tim Pittman in hospital. Darroch was 26 years old. Waterfront issued the mini album in July, complete with a dedication to James Darroch. In June 1990 Waterfront issued the double retrospective album Girls on the Beach (With Cars) which compiled live material (including one of Darroch’s best songs ‘Whore’) and unissued studio cuts. Steven Danno included The Eastern Dark’s ‘Stay Alone’ on the Sydney compilation Swingin’ from the Trees (1988).

Once fully recovered from the accident Gibson went on to join The Smelly Tongues, The Surfin’ Caesars, The Hellmenn, The New Christs and, in 1996, Evan Dando’s band Lemonheads. At the end of 1996 Gibson returned to Australia and joined Hey! Charger. Milne played with The Plunderers and The Red Planet Rocketts.

Albums: Long Live the New Flesh! (mini-album, Waterfront, 1986), Girls on the Beach (With Cars) (compilation, Waterfront, 1990), Where are All the Single Girls? (compilation, Half a Cow, 2000).

In conversation with Geoff Milne

IMcF: Thanks for your time, Geoff. This is the 40th anniversary of James Darroch’s death. There’s the new issue of the 7" single, ‘Julie is a Junkie’ b/w ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’, coming out. Your head must be in a bit of a whirl now that people are coming to you to talk about this situation. How are you dealing with it right now? No doubt it brings back memories.

GM: Yeah, I spoke to Bill the other day, and this year I think it’s hitting home more than it has for a while. We always call each other at 12 o’clock on the fourth of March. This year I think it’s just projected bigger, you know, like, yeah, all the attention on it.

 IMcF: Did David Laing from Grown Up Wrong! Records approach you with the idea of reissuing the single?

GM: Yeah.

 IMcF: He’s a champion.

GM: Oh, he’s a total champion. He saw us play at the Trade Union club. It would have been 1985. He said, ‘I’ve got to get you guys to Melbourne’. And two months later we were down there. And Melbourne just loved it. You know, it was hard for Sydney bands in Melbourne then. Most of them didn’t really take off down there.

 IMcF: It’s interesting you say that because my recollection is there was always a huge buzz for any Sydney band that came down to Melbourne, whether it was The Eastern Dark or Died Pretty, The Screaming Tribesmen, The Celibate Rifles, The New Christs. They all came down and yes, it was definitely a Melbourne inner-city thing, not further afield. I believe that you were all well received, even though you might not necessarily see it as, you know, being successful. You played all those inner-city venues. I loved seeing all those Sydney bands. Of course, I always liked Melbourne bands, but at that time in the 1980s, in particular, when all the Waterfront and Citadel bands came to Melbourne, people loved them.

GM: Yeah, it was a golden era. It was just awesome.

 IMcF: And one of the things I remember about James on, maybe it was the first tour, he was wearing those big woolly shoulder pads with the bull’s horns.

GM: Oh, yeah! He also had a rabbit fur cape he used to wear on stage. I don’t know what he was on. He used to wear a Duran Duran t-shirt, just to piss people off, you know?

 IMcF: Quite a character.

GM: Totally.

 IMcF: There’s a quote that I’ve always thought was one of the best things written about the band, and that was from J.J. Adams in RAM (Rock Australia Magazine). She described The Eastern Dark as ‘the epitome of inner city cool’. It was just the perfect description.

GM: Yeah, exactly. She was right on to it. She was one of the first writers to take us seriously. Murray Engelheart wrote an article in Juke and then Jodi wrote the one in RAM. So they were the first ones to really put us on the map.

 IMcF: Exactly. From within the band, what was it - why do you think people responded so positively to you?

GM: I just think it was the way we went about things. And the chemistry in that band was amazing. I mean there was tension as well, but that all made what we did more intense. People who saw us would say it was just so focused and intense, you know. James was like, ‘look I don’t care what you do after the gig, but you turn up sober and you play straight’. I think that made a big difference. We were just on a mission. We knew we had something and it was ours and we weren’t going to back down.

Photo by Mark Roxburgh, courtesy of Grown Up Wrong! Records

 IMcF: One of the identifying things about the band was that you played a Ramones song at the start of every gig until you’d completed their catalogue. How did that concept come about?

GM: That was James’s idea right from the start. And it wasn’t just every gig; it was every set we did. So if we played three sets, we’d do three Ramones songs. It got tricky when we used to tour because you’d have to learn seven or eight Ramones songs for the week. But they were Ramones songs, so they weren’t too tricky. It was great fun. It was just a gimmick that worked really well, and we can say we played every Ramones song at least once.

 IMcF: Now talking about the Ramones, which is an obvious name to bring up, and you had the song ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’… So who were your other influences? Or maybe put it a better way, who were you listening to at the time?

GM: We used to do a lot of covers, probably a third of the set was covers. And Bill or James would bring a tape into rehearsals, with half a dozen songs on it and we’d learn those. Hüsker Dü was a big one for us at the time. We covered a couple of their songs, ‘Flip Your Wig’ was one. We liked the Dictators. I’m trying to think of others. Hüsker Dü had a live album in 1985, and it sounded so similar to what we were trying to do. And they were a three piece, like us. I’ve always loved three piece bands, because everyone’s gotta do their bit, you know, there are no passengers in a three piece.

 IMcF: Other bands at the time, like the Rifles and the Hitmen had two guitars and a frontman, so five-piece, and they were great too. Then you had the Hard-Ons who were also a three piece.

GM: Actually, I saw the Hard-Ons last Friday night, supporting Redd Kross in Brisbane. That was the first time I’d seen them with Tim Rogers singing and they were just awesome. They’re more rock now. I was talking to Blackie and Ray, and we remembered that they did their first gig with us. They were so young. It might have been at the Trade Union club. Yes. And they wouldn’t let them use the name Hard-Ons, so they called themselves The Females.

 IMcF: When Redd Kross started in the early ‘80s, they were just kids.

GM: That’s probably the best I’ve ever seen them play. I’ve seen them four times and they just nailed it.

 IMcF: I saw them in Melbourne, when they did the Dig It Up show with the Hoodoo Gurus (2013). They were probably the best band on the day. All the bands were great that day, the Gurus, Died Pretty, The Sonics. And talking about other bands from the era, Mick Medew’s still doing stuff with his own band, and Rob Younger is still touring with Birdman and The New Christs. One of the things I wanted to touch on, you recorded Long Live the New Flesh with Rob Younger producing, which was the last session you did before you jumped in the van to come down to Melbourne. What was it like working with Rob?

GM: Rob is awesome. We did the single with him too. I’d grown up in Tweed Heads listening to Birdman and then got to meet the guy and work with him. He was just amazing. Such a humble guy.

 IMcF: I’ve met him many times over the years and got to interview him probably half a dozen times. And I’m always gobsmacked how humble he is and such a lovely guy.

GM: When I was playing in The Plunderers, he produced the first couple of singles.

 IMcF: Do you remember any specific demands he had for you? I ask that because he told me a funny story about when he produced The Psychotic Turnbuckles, and he made them wear their coloured fright wigs to get them in the right frame of mind.

GM: In their costumes, that’s right. No, we were sort of… I don’t want to say we were cocky, but we were pretty accomplished. We were well-rehearsed and we’d worked the songs out. He might have said, ‘you can do that better’, or whatever but no he was great to work with.

 IMcF: Could you tell me about recording the first single with Rob?

GM: Well, that was a bit of a Frankenstein situation. We were booked into a studio in north Sydney that was supposed to be 16-track and when we got there the guy only had eight tracks up working. So we did all the beds on the eight tracks and then this guy just disappeared. I don’t know what happened there, it was a bit dodgy. Luckily Rob found Tony Espy and he saved us. He was working at Canterbury Studios, so we went in there and dumped it down to make 16 tracks. I had to overdub all the cymbals on it. They said, ‘can you do it?’. I said, ‘I don't know but I’ll give it a go’. That worked out, and I think we did the vocals there too, and mixed it. I’m trying to remember the rest; it was a long time ago.

 When David Laing said he wanted to re-release the single, we wanted to go back in and tweak it a bit. We wanted to remaster it, and we did a bit of remixing. Only just to bring the drums up and some of the vocals. We found that the floor tom was coming through the kick drum mic, which was a bit dodgy. But I think it sounds modern now, I guess. With the original single, we’ve been on a few compilations, and we noticed every time our track came on it dropped down from every other track, so we wanted to address that.

 IMcF: Now, ‘Julie is a Junkie’, I believe that Julie was James’s girlfriend?

GM: That’s right. She was Dave Morris’s sister, Dave from the Rifles.

 IMcF: And was it James just telling it like it was?

GM: Yeah, well, I look at it as being a love song, you know. Julie lives up in Lismore now and I’ve caught up with her. I know she was pretty upset at the time. And all the Rifles just sort of disowned us. I remember Kent saying to me one time, he said ‘you’ve got better songs than that, why are you putting that out?’ It was James’s band and it was a huge decision for him to make. People are still playing it and listening to it, so...

 IMcF: This might sound like a bit of a cliché, but in your mind how do you reckon the single has stood up to the test of time?

GM: It’s amazing, I don’t know. I can’t believe it. There have been so many covers of the songs, especially ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’. I was talking to the crew from the Glycerines at Redd Kross the other night, and they were just wrapped, there were hugs everywhere. The original stands up really well. All I ever wanted to do when I joined bands was to release a single. That people still want to listen to our single after 40 years; it just blows my mind every day. I’ve got goosebumps right now talking about it.

 IMcF: You were on the Waterfront label. How were the guys at Waterfront like to work with? Was it Steve Stavrakis then?

GM: It was Steve and Frank and then Chris Dunn came on board. Yeah, they were great. We had Au-go-go in Melbourne chasing us, John at Citadel wanted it. We had a meeting at a pub and we thought, ‘we’ll go with these guys’.

 IMcF: Waterfront had a pretty good track record, but you probably wouldn’t have gone wrong with Citadel either. But it certainly sounds like you were more suited to Waterfront.

GM: Yeah, exactly. It was right from the word go.

 IMcF: Just getting back to Redd Kross, have you ever met them?

GM: No, I haven’t, but... when The Lemonheads came out to Australia, I got to meet Evan Dando and he was a huge fan on The Eastern Dark. It must have been 1991 and I was playing in The Plunderers. I said I was going to America and he said, ‘well come and stay with me’. I went and hung out on Martha’s Vineyard with him and his family for a couple weeks. That was lovely. Evan gave me a copy of the first Lemonheads single, so I thought I’ve got to give him something. I had my Eastern Dark t-shirt, the black one that came out, so I gave it to him. Then lo and behold, when Nic from The Plunderers joined The Lemonheads, just about the next year, there was Evan on Letterman wearing the Eastern Dark T-shirt. That was worth giving to him. And another time when I was in The Plunderers, we supported Dinosaur Jr. and I said to the drummer, ‘you’re a legend’ and he said, ‘no no no, you’re the legend’. That just blew my mind.

 IMcF: That is fantastic. I love hearing those kinds of stories. Another interesting thing about the 7" on Waterfront, it had four different colour combinations on the cover. Who came up with that concept?

GM: It’s the oldest marketing trick in the book, isn’t it? Collectors wanted every colour, so they’re gonna buy it. And now there’s gonna be four different colours of vinyl, too, on the reissue. There’s the yellow one for Record Store Day, then there’s green, blue and purple. Another great marketing tool.

 IMcF: I’m guessing it will be an exact replica of the original single picture sleeve?

GM: No, it’s a bit different. When it first came out, the Dutch East Indies licensed it for release overseas and when it came out it had a different cover. It’s more like that cover. Thinking back, we never got any money from them. And that’s also why we lost the master tapes for ages; we’d sent them overseas. We eventually found them and got them baked and digitized. That’s how we were able to tweak it.

Reissue 7-inch single picture sleeve (Grown Up Wrong! Records, 2026)

 IMcF: Oh, you must have been spewing when you realised the masters had gone missing, but where did they turn up?

GM: I don’t know, Bill found them somewhere. When we’d remastered all the stuff before and it came out on CD, I think we had to do a disc dub off the original vinyl.

 IMcF: With the original single, sometimes it’s listed as ‘Julie is a Junkie’ b/w ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’ and other times it’s listed as ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’ b/w ‘Julie is a Junkie’.

GM: We called it That One and The Other One. We couldn’t really pick an A-side or a B-side. We’re playing both, you know.

Original 7-inch single back cover

 IMcF: Is Bill doing interviews as well?

GM: No, I put my hand up to do all the promo stuff because Bill’s not so good on the phone. He did a lot of the organising for the reissue. So I said, ‘I’ll do the promo’. David did say in an email he sent me that there’s more requests for interviews coming up. I was talking to Judy Jetson from Triple ZZZ in Brisbane, I saw her at the Redd Kross gig, so I’ll go in and have a chat with her. I remember when we first went up to Brisbane in ’85, Tony Biggs interviewed us on Triple ZZZ when it was at the university. Then a few years later he interviewed me in Sydney when it was still Double JJ.

 IMcF: Tony Biggs is still on Three Triple RRR in Melbourne. And I know that Neil Rogers on his show The Australian Mood has often played The Eastern Dark.

GM: All the community radio stations back then were the only ones who played our music. I don’t think I’ve heard it played on Triple J. But I did hear a song of ours played on the ABC one night, that was crazy.

 IMcF: Since the Eastern Dark days, you’ve played in quite a few bands. You’ve mentioned the Plunderers and there was also The Red Planet Rocketts. Are you still playing?

GM: I’m in a band now called the Bombed Alaskans. My mate Jock Lee is the guitarist. Years ago, after the accident, I couldn’t walk for a couple of months and Jock lived across the road from mum and dad’s place. He used to come over, and he helped me get back into playing. Later on, we shared a house. We got a band going and we’ve had Brian Seymour on bass for 20 years.

 Then probably about 15 years ago, Dave Morris from the Rifles moved up near us. I knew his girlfriend she said, ‘oh look Dave’s really keen to play’. I said, ‘send him over’. He came over and I said, ‘let’s have a jam’. He said, ‘I don’t jam’. I said, ‘well, have a beer, I know you have a beer’. And two songs in he said, ‘give me a guitar, you guys aren’t jamming you know what you’re doing’. We’re just doing all covers. We do Alice Cooper, Dictators, Ramones. Just good rock stuff. Last year we did two gigs and that’s pretty good going for us. We rehearse nearly every week. Everything’s set up at Jock’s place. We just walk in and start playing. It’s great fun. We do it for ourselves. It’s like our men’s shed, if you will.

 It was through Dave Morris that I got to know James in the first place. He was playing bass in the Rifles. I was in a band called The New Avengers, this was Sydney in 1983, and we used to do a lot of gigs with the Rifles. We were all mates and then I had a jam with James. About a month later he left the Rifles, or he got tossed out as it were. He rang me up and said, ‘I’ve got a bass player, I want you drumming’, so that’s where it all started. Right from the outset we were on a mission, we all had the same mindset.

The Eastern Dark single and other forthcoming Grown Up Wrong! releases, by the Breakers and Beathoven, and the label's recent Lipstick Killers live album, are available to order from Grown Up Wrong! – sound-merch.com.au

MICHAEL CHARLES - Guitars, Music and Miles

This article was originally published in Rhythms magazine (Issue #331) September-October 2025

GUITARS, MUSIC AND MILES - Australian-born blues guitarist Michael Charles returns home in November on a leg of his eighteen international tour.

By Ian McFarlane

The question on some reader’s lips might be: who is Michael Charles?

 By way of introduction, Michael Charles is an internationally recognised, Australian-born blues guitarist who has lived, toured and recorded in the United States for 35 years. Following his early career playing the pubs and clubs of Melbourne in the late 1980s – alongside contemporaries Dutch Tilders, Geoff Achison, Jimi Hocking – he received an invitation from Buddy Guy’s management to appear at the renowned Legends club in Chicago, Illinois USA.

 After making the life changing decision to relocate to the States in 1990, Charles worked the Chicago blues circuit performing with Buddy Guy, Phil Guy, James Cotton, Eddy Clearwater, Junior Wells, as well as touring with blues legend Jimmy Dawkins as his guitarist. Since then he has developed his solo career, as well as receiving further accolades such as being inducted into the Chicago Blues Hall of Fame in October 2015.

 He’s currently undertaking his eighteenth consecutive international tour, “Guitars, Music and Miles 2025”, which will see him return to Australia this November. He last toured here in 2016.

 When we connect, I asked him about that first experience of playing at Legends.

 “My manager at the time said, ‘you’ve been invited to play at Legends club with Buddy Guy, what do you think about that?’. I said, ‘well there’s nothing to think about, let’s get out of here, let’s do it’. Between my management and Buddy’s manager, Marty Saltzman, they organised the whole thing.

 “When we landed in LA the plane had already been delayed by eight hours. I got to Chicago, they picked me up at the airport and took me straight to Legends. I didn’t have any time to clean up or have a shower. Marty introduced himself and Buddy was on stage playing. Marty goes, ‘I’m gonna get you up to play’. My official show was planned for two nights later. I was supposed to get introduced to Buddy and warm into the whole situation. I was jetlagged, I couldn’t see straight, I was on another planet, here I am totally in awe. Before I knew it, they’d tossed me this guitar and I’m on stage. Buddy just looked at me and I looked at him but walked right passed him to the farthest part of the stage, as far away as I could get so no one would even see me. I asked one of the members of the band, ‘what key is he playing in?’. He said, ‘figure it out for yourself’. I went into automatic pilot.

 “The place was totally packed. Next minute I hear through the monitors, ‘take it Michael’. I was weak at the knees, but I pulled it off. We got off stage, that’s when they introduced me to Buddy. I said this is totally backward. He just giggled and said, ‘welcome to Chicago’. My gig was two days later and I had adapted, got to know some people. I was a lot more comfortable. Something like that has never happened to me again. It was one of those one-time deals. I was over the moon with the whole thing.”

 Charles taps into classic blues sounds with a Stratocaster played through a Marshall stack, with distortion and wah wah adding that extra tang. Once he started getting noticed by the US blues music press, there were comments such as “Australia’s answer to Stevie Ray Vaughan”, or “sounds like Eric Clapton”. What was his reaction to that?

 “Ah, it’s all lies, man,” he laughs out loud. “Yeah, I read that stuff and I don’t like being compared to others and I truly don’t believe I sound like any of those guys either, but at the same time you gotta take the compliment. I don’t bring it up myself.”

 I ask him who were some of his primary inspirations?

 “It was guys like Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, Jeff Beck, George Harrison. Also, Scotty Moore and James Burton, who both had played with Elvis. Even going back further, my dad taught me how to play guitar, so he was my biggest influence. And Glen Campbell, he’s one of the greatest guitar players of all time.

 “I remember watching the Glen Campbell TV show with my dad. I would have been 15 at the time. He was playing ‘Classical Gas’. I said, ‘dad, do you think I’ll ever be able to play like that?’. He looked at me with this cheeky grin on his face, thought about it for a minute and said, ‘practise’. Just one word. I’m still practising to this very day. That was the wisest thing I ever heard from my dad. Then I heard about Hank Garland, who was one of Glen Campbell’s heroes, so he had a big influence on me.”

 In his live set, he’s been known to play blues classics such as ‘The Sky is Crying’, ‘Going Down’, ‘Hey Joe’ and ‘Key to the Highway’, but I ask him what are some of the best songs he’s written?

 “That’s a tough one because every song you write, and I think every song writer will say this, they’re all my children. It really depends on what mood I’m in because there’s always a reason why you write a song. Certain songs I’ve written will affect me in different ways. There’s a song called ‘Leaving My Troubles Behind Me’ which is a slow blues thing. I wrote that when I was starting to feel disconnected with my marriage. I got married when I was really young, at 20 years old, just a kid. That song always brings me back to a time I was feeling a little lost, confused, not knowing what was going on. But I always knew my music would keep me alive.”

 For those readers who are now keen to see Michael on his Australian tour, what can audiences expect?

 “Um, I’m still figuring that out. I’ve got Winston Galea lined up to be my drummer. Last time I used Greg Williams, my producer, on bass. I know a lot of musicians, so I’ll leave it about a month before I get there to put them together. My shows when I tour here in the US and Canada, I put in a three-to-four-hour show. So, the show will be a surprise. All I know is that whoever plays with me when I do hit the Australian shores again, they might hate me because I’m very particular on how I play my shows (laughs). But we’re all friends and they’ll chuckle, ‘oh, we have to deal with Michael again’.”

RICHARD CLAPTON - Hello Tiger!

This article was originally published in RHYTHMS magazine (Sounds of the City) September-October 2024 (Issue #325)

RICHARD CLAPTON – HELLO TIGER!

With the reissue of three of his classic albums and a run of dates throughout August – including his 15th annual concert at the State Theatre – singer-songwriter Richard Clapton has been busier than ever.

By Ian McFarlane

Album cover photo by Violette Hamilton. Art work by Geoff Kleem

The life of a touring musician can be, by turns, interminably gruelling and terribly hectic. With the shaggy haired, perma-sunglasses wearing Richard Clapton now such an established artist and public figure, having lived the touring life for 50 years, he knows the ropes. There’s lots of down time and waiting around, in the lead up to the show. Then the excitement of presenting a two-hour concert, in front of committed audiences, makes it all worthwhile. Playing live remains a perfect way for an artist to get their music across to the fans, that mix of buoyancy and intimacy that can make the event so enthralling.

“It seems the older I get the busier I get,” he tells me when we connect. “But it’s just the modern age. The modern age is like that parable of the tiger running around the palm tree chasing its tail and it ends up turning into butter. That’s how the human race is now.”

As well as the State Theatre, his tour itinerary took in shows in Birdsville (Big Rock Bash), Broken Hill (Mindi Mindi Bash) and Gympie (Gympie Music Muster). Clapton has always surrounded himself with high quality musicians. There are too many to mention here, albeit pertinent to say that his current band includes regular members Danny Spencer on guitar and Michael Hegerty – who’s been with him, on and off, for 45 years – on bass.

Clapton spent much of his formative, pre-fame life travelling around Europe. He’d based himself at various times in London and Berlin. He drew on much of those experiences when it came to his song writing craft. On his return in 1972 he set about getting those songs heard. For most of his professional life, he’s been known as Ralph. Does he ever get tired of that name?

“No, I never get tired of it. I call myself Ralph now. It’s just a nickname. It’s ingrained in everyone, a bit contagious. Some people thought it was offensive. It’s a dumb, simple story. When I got back from Europe... I’d been in London for four and a half years, living in Kensington, and it took me a while to lose the southwest London accent. I was talking like, ‘know wot I mean, guv’. I had long hair. I was doing a gig, Chuggy (promoter Michael Chugg) was my manager. The roadies were packing up afterwards and everyone’s getting drunk. One roadie kept looking at me and saying ‘Ralph’. I kept turning around going, ‘Who the fuck are you talking to? Who the fuck is Ralph?’. He says, ‘You, you’re Ralph, the hairy English sheepdog, you know from the cartoon’. That stuck. Chuggy started calling me Ralph, and it’s gone on from there.”

The other great news for Clapton fans is that Warner Music Australia has reissued three of the singer’s classic, long out-of-print albums. With brand, spanking new LP and CD editions of Prussian Blue, Goodbye Tiger and The Great Escape on the market, we are now reminded of just how important these recordings are. The LPs present the same music programme as originally conceived, with the CDs adding rare bonus material.

Musically Prussian Blue (November 1973) might have been tentative is some ways, a typical debut, but it put Clapton’s creative endeavours on full display. There were country rock sounds, melancholy folk rock jangle and moments of tough Aussie bar room rock. His song writing was already fully formed, with the likes of ‘Last Train to Marseilles’, ‘I Wanna be a Survivor’, ‘All the Prodigal Children’ and the reflective title track providing the basis for all he’s done since.

Goodbye Tiger (August 1977) is a genuine classic of Australian ‘70s rock. A quote of mine has appeared in the press release, and it still hits the mark (if I don’t say so myself): “Goodbye Tiger remains Clapton’s most celebrated work, an album full of rich, melodic and accessible rock with a distinctly Australian flavour. It established his reputation as one of our most important songwriters.” The album reached #5 on the charts.

Intriguingly, part of the inspiration for the record had been seeing noted American gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson on his 1976 Australian tour, immediately after which Clapton flew off to Europe to write the songs. He’d finally taken advantage of the travel grant he’d received from the Australian Arts counsel. Even though the songs had been written overseas, they were essentially about his homeland (more on which below). And it’s the quality of the songs that still stands out, such as the hit single ‘Deep Water’, ‘Down in the Lucky Country’, ‘Wintertime in Amsterdam’ and the elegant title track which caught the mood of the day.

Having initially signed a record deal with Festival Records, for release on the Infinity imprint, Clapton signed a new deal with WEA which resulted in another strong album, The Great Escape (February 1982). Produced by Mark Opitz (Angels, Cold Chisel, Hitmen) it boasted a solid rock base. It reached #7 and spawned three singles, the hard rocking ‘I am an Island’, the ballad ‘Spellbound’ and the perennial ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’. I call the last-mentioned track “perennial” because, not only did he think highly enough of it to have called his 1989 live album after the track but also, he bestowed it upon his 2014 autobiography. Furthermore, it’s always been a showstopper at his concerts.

The arrival of the reissues has been most welcome and timely. Then again, the process of getting the reissue programme underway and the finished product on the market must have been incredibly drawn out?

“You betcha it was,” the singer states emphatically. “I don’t want to say too much, but it’s been a long haul. Terry Blamey started managing me several years ago, he was responsible for getting me to record my hippie anthems album, Music is Love. Terry was trying to reach out to Warners for quite some time because he’s a big fan, that’s why he’s hanging out with me, and he’s got his favourite albums. We were getting nowhere; it’s been touch and go with Warners. Then I was having coffee with John O’Donnell, he’s been a long-time supporter, and he jumped on board. He’s got a relationship with Dan Rosen at Warner, so it was a fast process from then on in. Don Bartley has remastered them. He’s worked on so many of my albums, he’s got the masters to nearly every album I’ve done. Glory Road was mixed in America, mastered in America. Hearts on the Nightline was recorded in America, so we don’t have those masters.”

Some Clapton Classics and Deep Cuts

In an attempt to explore the Richard Clapton experience, let’s go on a deep dive into his catalogue. With sixteen studio albums and three live ones under his belt, there are a multitude of songs on which to draw, but I’ve selected ten songs that I see as signposts along the way.

‘I Wanna be a Survivor’ – “I see my ship, she’s down there in the harbour / I hope she waits for me to board her / ‘Cos I wanna be a survivor / and I’m gonna be a survivor / And I won’t come back / Even if I live to be a thousand years”

This strident statement depicts a young man living in a city ghetto who is intent on escaping the strife and pain of his urban existence. It’s emblematic of the album. Other singers of the day quickly picked up on Clapton’s message, including Jeff St. John who made it a feature of his concerts. What memories does Richard have of recording Prussian Blue?

“I don’t remember anything negative about Prussian Blue. The producer, Richard Batchens, was recruiting some of the best players around Sydney at the time. The La De Das are on ‘I Wanna be a Survivor’, which sounds like the La De Das, pretty much. We had Don Reid on sax, a lot of jazzers. Then on Mainstreet Jive we had Crossfire, Batchens got them in as session musicians. Years later I was amazed at how famous John Capek had become in the States. He played on ‘Last Train to Marseilles’. We had Mike Perjanik on piano.

“Most of those songs were written in Europe. I’d been living in a commune in Berlin. The main guy there was Volker, and he took me in when I had no money. He was about eight years older; he was my mentor. There was Georgie, a hippie farm boy from Bavaria, he married one of the girls who had come from a very rich family. There’d been a big altercation in the commune and some of them left. They got me to stay in this huge mansion, I was there by myself for a while. I was writing about my experiences in Germany. ‘Southern Germany’ was written literally. ‘Burning Ships’ was a heavy song about a girl who overdosed in a nightclub when I was with her. ‘All the Prodigal Children’ is more London, a slice of real life.

“I got back to Australia, homeless again, crashed out at this guy’s place in Redfern. Hence ‘Strange Days in Chippendale’, at that point in time it was very gritty. ‘I Wanna be a Survivor’ I wrote after I’d done the deal with Festival and I’d received a pittance, enough to pay rent on a little shithole in Kings Cross. I did have a great view right over the harbour. Life was very tough for me at the time. I was hoping for the best, and the deal with Festival with Prussian Blue was gonna lead on to bigger and better things. Therefore ‘I Wanna be a Survivor’ makes sense. It was a statement of intent.”

Album cover photo by Graeme Webber Returb Studios

‘Girls on the Avenue’ – “Girls on the avenue, know how to get you in / Casting out sighs like tricks from a hat / All the miss Lonely Hearts, oh they look awful hard / Then sometimes they seem as fragile as glass”

This was his first major chart hit, a national #2 in 1975. The song came adorned with a gorgeous guitar refrain played by country picker Red McKelvie, and it remains one of his most iconic songs. Festival staff had shown little interest in the song initially, relegating it to the B-side of ‘Travelling Down the Castlereagh’. Strong radio support forced Festival’s hand; it was reissued as an A-side and picked up by the fans en masse. Oddly, it has been suggested that it was written about ogling ladies of the night as purely sex objects, but that’s not so...

“I was hanging out with Colin Vercoe, head of publishing at Festival. We lived in Rose Bay and the next street along there were three pretty girls that lived in this house, it was written about them. Festival had wanted to drop me. Prussian Blue got good reviews – there was a great one in Rolling Stone – and I thought ‘that’ll put me on the map’. All Festival cared about was money, they didn’t care about an artist showing promise. Getting good reviews might have been well and good, but it was all about getting good sales.

“Colin was responsible for getting me to write ‘Girls on the Avenue’. He kept imploring me, ‘make one compromise, man! It will enable you to make another album. Go from there and when you’ve established yourself artistically, you can do whatever you like’. Festival would have their A&R committee meetings every Tuesday, where they’d decide what singles to release. Colin invested so much of himself personally in that record and they kept rejecting it. Colin was getting increasingly agitated, and it dragged on for weeks.

“Then Colin had been having secret lunches with Marius Webb and Ron Moss, who founded Double J. On the last occasion he had lunch with them he got really drunk, took the job as the first music programmer at Double J and went back to the selection committee at Festival. For the final time they said, ‘No, we still don’t get it, it’ll just be a B-side’. Colin took a swing at one of the executives, ‘Well, fuck you’... ‘No, fuck you’. He goes ‘You know what, I’m going to be the first music programmer at Double J’, and walked out. He played ‘Girls on the Avenue’ every hour, on the hour, and because of that it got picked up everywhere and became a huge hit.”

‘Blue Bay Blues’ – “Janie, see how the sky looks today / I bet they’re having fun up in Byron Bay / All our friends – ah, I’m feeling just a little bit blue / I can tell it’s been getting to you too / Tryin’ to make sense / ... and I got those blue bay blues”

Another splendid track from the Girls on the Avenue album, this introspective, reflective folk ballad displays plenty of charm.

“That came out unscathed. Richard Batchens was happy with that very simple arrangement, just Mike McClellan and me playing acoustic guitars with the band I had at the time. There were some unpleasant experiences recording that album, however.

“Richard was called the house producer, which means he thought he had the authority vested in him to produce in any way he saw fit. But he put in a string quartet, two violins, two cellos and it was crappy. We had a big falling out and I stormed out of the studio. I went home, I was living in a one room bedsit in Bondi Beach. ‘Girls on the Avenue’ was powering up the charts at #2, started as a B-side by the way, and I thought, ‘Fuck ‘em, they must have spent 100 grand on it by now, I won’t call them, I’ll make them call me’. It was over a week and my phone hadn’t rung! (laughs). How could record companies do this? I’d just had an argument with the producer, and I assumed they’d thrown the album in the trash can.

“But no, they hadn’t done that. After seven days I went sneaking back to Festival, at about 7.30 at night. I snuck up the back stairs, which is where the studio was and I could hear Richard working on ‘Rose Wine Cafe’ without me, doing whatever he wanted with it. I snuck around in the darkened hallways, and I bumped into the managing director. He said, ‘Richard, what’s going on? We haven’t seen you for days; what’s up?’. And I said, ‘I really don’t like what Richard’s doing with my songs’. And Jim goes, ‘You mean our songs’. ‘What are you talking about?’, I said. ‘They’re our songs, so Richard can do whatever he wants’. He said, ‘Come into my office’. He got out the contract and said, ‘Have you read this?’. I lied. This was my first contract, I was too young and naive, I was so excited to get a record deal. I just signed off. He said, ‘You’d better read this clause here; they’re not your songs anymore, you assigned your songs to us and they are now property of Festival Records’.

“I obviously learned the hard way but once you sign a contract that’s not your property anymore. In other words, I wrote ‘Blue Bay Blues’ but it doesn’t belong to me. I wrote ‘Girls on the Avenue’ but it doesn’t belong to me. If Festival wanted to do anything, do a reggae version of ‘Blue Bay Blues’, they can do anything they like without my permission.

“Then when Rod Muir first became my mentor – he was fabulously wealthy, a multi-millionaire – he approached Festival and said, ‘I’ll give you one million dollars for Richard’s whole catalogue and they said, ‘No, forget it’. Rod said two million, stupid money and because it was owned by Rupert Murdoch, his policy is he retains copyright until 50 years after the artist’s death. It got a bit better because Michael Gudinski ended up buying my whole Festival catalogue and the publishing and moved it over to Mushroom.”

‘Factory Life’ – “And they’re so tired of the factory life / Try to escape it on Saturday night / Pick yourself up and open your eyes / Get yourself out of the factory life”

Mainstreet Jive (1976) yielded the uptempo single ‘Suit Yourself’ and the soulful ‘Need a Visionary, while the hidden gem was this ode to the search for a better life. By this stage, Clapton had added Canadian master guitarist Kirk Lorange to his band; he played slide, lead and acoustic on seven of the album’s tracks, while it’s Mario Millo who takes the lead solo on ‘Factory Life’. Did Richard remember writing that one?

“Yeah, I do but I’d approach it from a different angle. Insofar as all the students in that commune in Berlin were left wing, very anti-right and they had Nazi parents who they all hated. After I’d been in the commune for two or three months, I felt guilty ‘cos I had no money. Volker would give me 10 deutschmarks to buy cigarettes and a bit of food every day. It was a proper commune, I’d go to the market to buy vegetables to make the casserole, clean up the apartment, all that sort of stuff.

“One of the girls in the commune had contacts at the British Embassy and she got me a job as a gardener. That night we were having dinner and I told Volker, in half broken German and English – he’d taught me some German – I said, ‘I’ve got a job, all I have to do is mow the lawns’. He goes, ‘What!? You said you were a songwriter’. I said, ‘Yeah, but I gotta pay my way’. He was very guttural German when he got mad, he yelled, ‘If you want to be a gardener, there’s the door, see you! Do you want to be a songwriter?’. I said, ‘Yes’ (laughs). Volker was a lecturer at the university, and he had access to these old Revox tape recorders and next day he came in with this big tape recorder and a Neumann mic. He set me up in one of the spare rooms, he said, ‘You sit there and write songs’.

“Now getting back to ‘Factory Life’... I really looked up to Volker and, because he was very political, he had a thing about Marshall McLuhan (Ed note: Canadian communication theorist who coined the phrase “the medium is the message”). Volker was educating me to write songs that were commercial and successful. He didn’t want me to write protest songs that hardly anybody would hear, he wanted me to write songs that would be heard on the radio. After Prussian Blue I kept going back to Berlin and Volker kept urging me to get the message across subliminally in a candy coating. The best example of that is ‘High Society’, I think, my most successful sugar-coated song.”

‘Capricorn Dancer’ – “Gypsies ride from wonderland / I took my horse down to the sand / Underneath a thousand miles of sky”

This enchanting song is one of his most successful folk rock ballads, a whimsical ode to an idyllic and carefree existence, a way to ease his worried mind. It was one of six Clapton songs included on the soundtrack to Steve Ottens’ surfing film, Highway One (1976).

“That’s an odd one out. That came about because I’ve always had a penchant for wanting to write a film score ‘cos I’m a real movie buff and always have been. That came out of the blue. I’d received the Arts Council grant to go overseas, and I’d already booked my travel plans and, at the last minute, David Elfick, who produced Highway One, approached me to write the songs. It was a mad panic, I wanted to do the whole album but I didn’t want to miss my flight back to Europe. ‘Capricorn Dancer’ was written lightning fast and recorded lightning fast. All those songs were done in one or two takes. I had about two days to get them done.

“I wrote ‘Capricorn Dancer’ sitting in front of the film rushes. They set up a film projector in the studio, projected the images on the wall. I would sit, writing then and there. You’ve seen the film clip? And they synced the song perfectly to the visuals.”

Courtesy of Richard Clapton

‘Deep Water’ – “They closed down the doors of the Trocadero / And I came back looking like a ghost / The posters are scattered all over the stairs / Nobody read them so nobody cares”.

The Goodbye Tiger album represents a masterclass in song writing and this is probably the highlight. It was unlike anything else heard on commercial radio at that time, a deep-seated rumination on times already fading, evocative, moody and elegiac all at once. The album’s layered production sound is front and centre but it’s not overproduced, so it retains a gritty toughness shot through with bitter emotions, faded glory and deep regret.

“That song is very melancholic. How I wrote the songs on Goodbye Tiger... I went up to Norre Nebel in Denmark, with friends. German students would go up there for winter break. We’re sitting up there, it’s 30 degrees below zero, it’s so cold even the beach is frozen. I was living in this lovely house, Air B&B nowadays you’d call it. The Germans would be having their intellectual raves and rants. I had a little attic room, and it always piqued my curiosity, it was freezing and I wanted to write a song about Bondi Beach (laughs). I don’t know, there’s obviously some mental process there.

“I say in interviews now that I wrote those songs, the Australian songs which were written from Denmark, because of homesickness. I was finally confessing up to the fact, yes, I did get homesick. But it was a marvellous experience writing those songs.

‘I am an Island’ – “Little darling this is the end / I needed you like oxygen / ‘I am an island’ some sucker scrawled / I am an island on a city wall”

This was the powerful lead-off single lifted from his seventh album, The Great Escape, and it was another Top 20 hit. The lead guitar work is credited to Harvey James (from Sherbet) but it subsequently came to light that another foremost guitarist was the main man.

“In the early 1980s, Ian Moss and I used to hang out a lot. Mossy loved ‘I am an Island’, as soon as I wrote it and he wanted to play guitar on it. Then Cold Chisel went on tour to America and Mossy would call up out of the blue, at all hours of the night and go, ‘What are you recording?’. I’d say, ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’, and I’ve got Mick ‘The Reverend’ O’Conner on Hammond organ and it sounds fucking awesome!’. He’d say, ‘Yeah, I want to be on that’. He called me up from LAX and said, ‘What are you doing now?’, ‘I am an Island’... ‘I wanna play on that!’.

“Mossy jumps on the plane, got back to Sydney, came straight over to Billy Fields’ studio Paradise, he and Mark Opitz ordered 11 Marshall amps. They pretty much went bang bang bang, his guitar solo was down. And Jimmy Barnes and I were best friends also and he ended up singing on ‘I am an Island’. Don Walker came in and played piano on ‘I Fought the Law’. Then their manager, Rod Willis, found out and went ballistic! He called Paul Turner, head of WEA, and demanded, ‘You fuckin’ take my band off Richard’s album!’.

“Chisel were on WEA at the same time as I was, so Paul held the upper hand and he said, ‘Tough titties, no I’m not taking them off the album, it sounds fantastic’. They had a huge fight and Paul won, in my opinion. The compromise was taking the Chisel guys’ names off the cover. The Rolling Stone article came out and the writer was raving about this great album and how it had now established Harvey James as Australia’s greatest ever guitarist. He played on the record too and then toured in my band but it was really Mossy playing the guitar solos. I was reading the Rolling Stone review at Sydney airport and Mossy comes over and goes, ‘What the fuck is this!? Where’s my credit on the album?’. I just had to say, ‘Speak to your manager’.

“Even though it stayed like that, Jimmy would never shut up about it. He’d do an interview and say, ‘That’s me, I’m singing on Richard’s album’. Fast forward 40 years and John O’Donnell is the co-manager of Cold Chisel, and John was producing Diesel’s new TV show on SBS and he got me over to Botany to work on Diesel’s TV show all day. He lives near me; he drove me home and it took two hours to get to Neutral Bay from Botany. We’re sitting in the car chewing the fat and John kept going on about The Great Escape. He was so glad that we’d chosen it as one of the three albums we’d reissue. I told him the whole story. He goes, ‘You gotta be kidding me! We’re gonna get this fixed’. So, we made sure that Mossy’s name was on every song (laughs), just to make it up to him.”

(It’s pertinent to acknowledge that the late Harvey James was indeed a phenomenal player, it’s just that Ian Moss was due his credit.)

‘Solidarity’ – “Hey kid! Don’t you lean on me / I wanna talk to you ‘bout Solidarity / Hey Ma! I keep falling on my knees / And I need you now in Solidarity”

Once again produced by Mark Opitz, the Solidarity album (1984) was Clapton’s bold move into modern recording technology and keyboard programming. There’s also that ‘gated’ snare drum sound but the likes of ‘The Heart of It’ and ‘Cry Mercy Sister’ retained Clapton’s soulful tang. The anomalous, sequencer heavy title track might have been influenced by newer electronic bands such as Machinations, for example, and it’s the highlight.

“I really like that song, such a different style of song, particularly the keyboard sequencing. I got caught up in that early ‘80s technology, and I’ve been trying to get the message out to the kids that you can’t let this technology control you, you’ve gotta make sure you’re the master of this technology, not the other way round.

“So that album being 1984, that’s when that technology had taken off. Drum machines were popular, sequencers. Roland had made a bass sequencer. You’d put a pattern into it and press the button and it would arpeggio it all. That was the whole synth line in ‘Solidarity’. And once again, I don’t try to hide the fact it’s a very European song in its flavour. Even the lyrical attitude was different. All my songs don’t have to be about Australia. I had been in Europe for a long time. We’ve just started putting that back into the set. We’ve extended the intro, almost two minutes, and it’s a good way to start the night off.”

‘Everybody’s Making Money (But Me)’ – “I got holes in my pockets / You can feel my naked leg / Every time I reach for money makes me wish that I was dead / Now the politician’s telling me that it’s gonna set me free / Everybody’s making money except me”

Clapton recorded this rocking, mocking, bitter rant in the late ‘70s but it remained unreleased until included on The Definitive Anthology (1999).

“Believe it or not, one of my many frustrations – I have so many frustrations – I’ve come so close to international acclaim and I’ve had it snatched away by politics back here. This is another Festival Records story, because one of the biggest publishers in Nashville heard that song and just loved it but Festival had the publishing on it. It was only on that compilation, so (laughs) that song’s about managers in general. It’s the ballad of the muso. It’s the only time Andy Durant (Stars’ guitarist-songwriter) played on a record with me.”

‘Dancing with the Vampires’ – “And now the party’s over / Gonna clean up all this mess / Gotta pick up all the pieces / Wipe the stains off mama’s dress / That wasted Casanova / Gon’ and passed out on the floor / He’s been crying out like a baby / Couldn’t take it anymore”

 Another tough rocker, tinged with stoic resignation, the single taken from the Harlequin Nights album (2012).

“I think I was calling that my divorce album. I had a big empty house. Danny Spencer used to come up to Sydney to play with Jimmy Barnes, also Jon Stevens, Friday and Saturday nights. Cos we’re all mates, Danny would say ‘I’m going to stay at Ralph’s place’. He’d do the gigs and then stay with me for three or four nights; I had plenty of room in the house. We worked on things so that was one of the highlights of my professional life because it was so liberating. There was no producer.

“I did have a sugar daddy, another multi-millionaire (laughs) without whom I’d probably be in a homeless shelter. Ross Jackson was just a massive fan. He owns Jackson’s Electronics. He got me to play at his 45th birthday and he wanted to invest in my career. I was telling him I had all these new songs. He said, ‘What about doing a new album and I’ll finance it’. I said, ‘In my experience it is very expensive to record in a professional studio, I don’t want to impose upon your finances’. I told him about Pro-Tools, the computer music program. I claimed I could make an album as good as anything I could do in a studio.

“Ross outlaid 35 grand for the Pro-Tools rig, all the PCI cards. I ended up with about 50 grands worth of equipment in my home studio. I could just spend days and days down there, working with top technology. It would have been like The Band recording at Big Pink. You’d just go downstairs and record. I remember when we recorded Rewind, Danny just stayed down in the studio for three and a half days straight. I’d say, ‘Danny, enough already’ and he’d say, ‘No man, I’m really starting to nail this’. So Harlequin Nights is very near and dear to me because of the subject matter.

Music is Love

Music is Love (1966-1970) has been Clapton’s most successful latter-day album (2022). In presenting 12 well-known Californian songs – such as ‘Get Together’, ‘Riders on the Storm’, ‘Summer in the City’, ‘Eight Miles High’, ‘Woodstock’ and ‘Cinnamon Girl’ – and treating them reverentially, while retaining the Clapton touch, his fans responded positively. He tells me that he and Terry Blamey had curated the project over a period of two years but that he didn’t warm to the idea initially. Once Blamey (previously Kylie’s manager) had convinced Michael Gudinski to finance the recording, he thought, “What have I got to lose?”.

“The song writing thing is becoming the bane of my existence; that’s a whole other interview to talk about. I hadn’t been writing songs for a couple of years at that stage. Over a couple of weeks, I let the idea percolate. Terry said, ‘Honestly, I’ve got a good vibe on this’, and I agreed. The whole thing just evolved organically. Gudinski put the money up but he and Warren Costello at Bloodlines didn’t interfere at all.

“I started out thinking about doing British songs. I’ve been a lifetime Stones and Kinks fan. I wanted to do ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and ‘Street Fighting Man’ but I thought I’d be spreading myself too thin. I wanted a centrifugal point to the whole thing, so we decided to keep the London anthems for a Volume 2. The only thing that stopped that has been Michael’s death. When the hippie album went to #1, he was over the moon. He knew I was interested in doing a British hippie album as well, but sadly he passed away so end of story.”

As we sign off, I ask him how he reflects on that idealistic young songwriter recording Prussian Blue 50+ years ago?

“Well, to be honest I’d rather not answer that. I’m not trying to be a Mickey Downer but I’m worried about the state of modern music. There is so much that’s really bad and it’s affected my desire to make music. It’s not just me; I think there are so many worthwhile musicians all around the world who are screaming at the human race, ‘Are you listening or not?’. Everything is getting out of control with the AI thing now. We’re all starting to get impudent because what’s the point? I’m not doing this for the money but being raped and pillaged as we are, it’s just soul destroying, literally.

“To turn this around, I’m 76 and that’s every reason to be cheerful. I’ve led the life. I saw the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park in 1969. I saw Syd Barrett play with Pink Floyd; it’s almost a perfect life and I feel sorry for almost everyone else that it’s over.

“I do love performing and I love my bands. My fans are incredible; I can’t believe I’m so blessed to have such dedicated fans. In terms of making more records, I don’t know, it’s hard to get a good vibe. But thank Christ I wrote those songs when I did, because now I’m just a performer. I’ll never get sick of performing; it’s what I do best.

“How do I see myself retrospectively? I am blessed to have had so much success but I’ve had bad luck too. As Van Morrison sang, ‘I’ve been used and abused, I’m so confused’ (‘Brand New Day’). I couldn’t be more grateful for the body of work I’ve created over 50 years, there is that. I’d still like to be writing songs but it’s very hard to find something tangible to get hold of. The inspiration I’ve had in the last 50 years, that’s just not around anymore. That’s why I’m screaming at everyone, ‘Can’t you see where this is going everyone?’. AI and androids and robotics, this is just madness now. I don’t think I’m answering your question properly but I am very grateful, thank you.”

ORSTRALIA A Punk History 1974-1989 by Tristan Clark (published by PM Press, 2024)

X photo by Bruce Tindale

ORSTRALIA A Punk History 1974-1989 by Tristan Clark (published by PM Press, 2024)

In conversation with Tristan Clark

Author Tristan Clark

By Ian McFarlane

 I met author Tristan Clark a few years ago at a book launch in Melbourne, and he explained to me that he’d been working on a manuscript covering the history of Aussie punk, and that he was thinking of calling it Orstralia.

 With a title that specifically referenced a Saints song, I said I thought it sounded like a damn good idea, that it was something I’d want to read, so get on with it. With the recent publication of his book and the chance to catch up and talk about it, he confirmed that I was encouraging, and “you weren’t dismissive at all”.

 Not that I had anything to do with getting him over the line, but ORSTRALIA A Punk History 1974-1989 is the result and it’s a deep dive into a huge slice of musical and cultural history. The back cover text says, in part, “With appeal to more than just punk history obsessives, Tristan Clark’s Orstralia offers an unprecedented exploration of a largely unseen segment of Australian life and history”.

 All the best-known and much-loved names are present and correct, and as you dig deeper into the text there are so many subterranean names emerging that it reveals a whole tremendous mosaic in full detail. The text is readable, the narrative easy to follow. If at times he skips over things relatively swiftly, at least you know he was covering as many bases as possible. In fact, he wrote so many words that he had to divide the manuscript in half, so if you want you can also get hold of Volume 2 which covers the years 1990 to 1999.

 It’s also worth mentioning that Clark is a musician, having played guitar in Melbourne crust punk band Schifosi (circa 2004) and post punk band Infinite Void (circa 2012), so I would suggest that he has a fine appreciation of the tenets of the punk genre.

 Third Stone Press: Congratulations on the book. You explain in the Introduction that it wasn’t your intention to resolve the question of what constituted punk. And being based around interviews and your experiences, how did you approach it to start with?

Tristan Clark: I wanted it to be readable to my friends. I didn’t want to make it too convoluted.

 When did you first get exposed to punk?

My first exposure was a skate film that came out in the early ‘90s, there was a brief snippet of DRI playing, a very fast intense band. I had no frame of reference at that time but there was still something alluring about it. Slightly terrifying as well. Back then you had no means of identifying or acquiring the music easily, not like now, you had to dig deep. It was more what was in your immediate vicinity. Then a friend from school he met a guy in a punk band who passed on a cassette and that ended up in my hands so I could then trace it back to what I had heard earlier. ‘Ah, this is it’. Then we discovered this whole scene. There was an all-ages venue close to where I was living in Croydon, EVs, they would have international touring bands there as well as all the local bands. You’d have hundreds of kids. I remember seeing Fugazi there and it was wild.

 When did you start hitting the pubs? It was past even post-hardcore by that stage.

I guess it was that weird period when punk wasn’t particularly strong. It was being subsumed by that resurgence of interest in guitar music, alternative rock and grunge and punk was being mixed in with that, that weird amorphous era. You’d get punk bands alongside grunge bands on bills. Looking back now it was all very rigid. I think I started sneaking into the Tote when I was 16. The first gig I went to was a crust punk night, very intense. We were just these long-haired stoner kids from the suburbs, and it was the full regalia with the mohawks, the studs and the full black clothes. That was eye opening and rather intimidating.

 I can visualise your flow. So, what then tipped you off to finding out about earlier punk bands... when did you go, ‘what, there were punk bands in 1976?’. Was that a Eureka moment?

I guess we were more just consuming what was available, the bands that were local to us. As well as the bigger bands from interstate. The Hard Ons we loved. I think the only early band we listened to was The Saints. Other stuff, the early UK stuff, early ‘80s hardcore, the studs and mohawks, it just didn’t appeal to us. We were suburban kids in our converse sneakers and flannies, more akin to grunge at that time. I guess the style didn’t really resonate with us. Whereas stuff like The Meanies, that was very much the style I could identify with. More drawn to bands like that. It wasn’t until much later that I then started excavating into the past and hearing the earlier stuff.

 So, you didn’t change to suit that? In the late ‘70s kids cut off their long hair, adopted the punk mode of dress and renounced the past.

I didn’t change, even when I first moved into the inner city I still had my long hair, I probably wasn’t even exclusively dressing in black at that point. That was obligatory eventually. No, I was never big on the aesthetic, it was foreign to me. I came from a middle-class background, it was too performative to me, given my background.

 What was it about punk music in particular that did resonate with you? The music? The history? What was the impetus to do this book?

Thought Criminals photo by ‘pling

It was probably born out of being in a mundane customer service job, if I’m being honest. I was seeking something with a bit more purpose. Also, I’d just re-read Inner City Sound, and I was finding out about other punk histories from overseas. The Jon Savage British punk book.

 Yes, I’d consumed all those books too.

And then it became apparent that books on Australian music tended to be narrower in terms of the bands and the places and the years covered. There was nothing really comprehensive to bring it all together. I had this thought that someone needs to bring it all together. I thought maybe I’m that idiot to take that project on.

 I love that, you’ve spotted a gap and decided to leap into it. Have you gone back through everything and marvelled at what you achieved?

That’s the thing, I’ve read it so many times. It’s been seven or eight years since I started, so it got to the stage that I wanted it done and out of my life. I want to move on to something else. Looking back at the ease of being able to get interviews with people was surprising. I spoke to pretty much every band that I had wished to.

 Did you have to do a bit of detective work to get hold of people? I do marvel at the number of people you did interview.

Most of it was simply through social media. Trying to apply names to the profile and I’d enquire, ‘I don’t suppose you played in this band?’. Sometimes it was, ‘ah no mate what are you on about?’. I started small and once I had a few interviews I could use that as leverage, ‘here are the people I’ve interviewed, would you be willing to do one as well?’. Doing an anonymous ‘I’m writing this book’ doesn’t always work. But then I was surprised that so many people were putting their trust in me, that people who were unknown to me or I was unknown to them, that they were willing to afford me their time.

 I’ve learned that, by and large, musicians want to tell you about their experiences.

Yes, that became evident. Some people were chuffed that someone was giving them a sliver of attention after all these decades.

 There are some obscure names in there, bands like Queen Anne’s Revenge and Screaming Abdabs for example, miniscule names in the greater scheme of things. Did you get to talk to Carmel Strelein, a very important if generally unknown figure in that early Sydney punk scene?

She looked wild. Actually, from memory I believe she’s dead. I have a feeling, ‘cos she moved to the States and then was murdered by her partner.

Carmel Strelein photo by Norman Parkinson

 Ah, right. By all accounts she was a real scene stealer.

You can imagine that silhouette walking down the street in late ‘70s Sydney. People expressed to me a number of times that punks looked like people from another planet.

 Yes, in London you see those original news items or news footage with people literally looking on with disgust and distain. That was a real cultural upheaval. It happened here to a certain extent but not to such extremes. I do remember a friend of mine, who was in one of the original Sydney punk bands, he was dismissive of some of the second generation punk bands, I can’t remember the exact words, but it was like he thought they were try-hards. And some of those bands only played a few gigs. But then you have all the big names in there.

 I was fortunate enough to have seen quite a few of the early Melbourne punk bands. I wasn’t in the punk scene but I did see it unfold. Also, when Sydney bands toured Melbourne, you had Scientists, Celibate Rifles, Hard Ons, Lime Spiders etc. One band I also remember was called Box of Fish and they were one of the first we’d seen sporting foot high mohawks. And all the Melbourne hardcore bands, Depression, Permanent Damage etc, they all had the regulation look and outfits and that UK Decay Exploited look with the mohawks that they’d plaster up a foot high.

 You’ve covered bands such as The Press and The Nauts, who either came out of a hard rock background or the glam scene. The Press were previously Southern Cross, full on hard rock, then they changed direction to a more Clash like sound. Couple of the same members just a different sound. Some people were sceptical of Supernaut changing stream, they were looked down on by listeners. They started to do Stranglers covers. I like the Nauts record, but how do they fit into a punk book?

Ah, that was the thing. I was pretty broad in my terms of reference, without actually offering a qualifier at the beginning of the book. I tried to keep it as broad as possible without going on to make it a 12-volume epic. Um, I just thought it was fascinating that a band like that, who had some commercial success, then whether it was a real interest in punk, they sniffed the winds of change, ‘this is where music is going’. They jumped on it. They claimed they were into punk.

 They made that transition, but whether it was seamless or not is another question. Don’t get me wrong, I think both the Press record and the Nauts record are good, more New Wave and I don’t have a problem with them being included. I’m thinking other people might?

Ah yeah, someone questioned the inclusion as soon as I put the list up. I included others like Dave and the Derros for the punk single, ‘Death to Disco’/’Punk Princess’ but that was a parody. I figured anything that might have a good back story I was willing to include, regardless of the debate or the contentiousness of whether they’re punk or not. If it had an interesting story accompanying it, I was willing to include it.

 I get it. Another thing is the early Melbourne punk scene and the arrival of Suicide Records, and that was a really divisive thing for people in the scene. You were either true to your roots or were willing to try a commercial path. As an observer, the Suicide story is very relevant. For me some of my friends were on a record, it was exciting. I saw those bands at the time. I was a suburban long-haired guy and I’d go to the gigs and not feel out of place. The Suicide venture was a failure ultimately, and divisive but I thought it was really good as a statement and for some young bands to get a foothold on the broader scene.

Yes, and I begin the Melbourne chapter with Suicide because I thought it was the overarching theme of the time. It was fascinating that you had someone who was able to get support from a major label, trying to get their hooks into punk. The complete inverse of everywhere else; labels in most other places weren’t interested, at first. You could say that Birdman ended up on a major label, and you also had The Last Words, from Sydney, they were the first band, post Birdman and The Saints, to put a record out on a major label. Beyond that the music industry just wasn’t interested at all.

 In Melbourne, bands that didn’t sign to Suicide, Babeez and Philip Brophy’s band Tch Tch Tch, I guess that they hated the whole idea of Suicide. And Bruce Milne is quoted as saying it was so divisive. And people would laugh behind Barrie Earl’s back. He was an old style manager, he’d been around managing bands since the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, so he was kind of a chancer. At the time, he intimated that he was the guy who launched Melbourne punk but that was far from the case.

Yes, I guess you had that more politicised element, exemplified by the Babeez and News. You had the north side of the river who were derisive of the other side, St Kilda and the Ballroom scene, and vice versa.

 And you had Boys Next Door who went on to bigger and better things. Teenage Radio Stars played for one year then they divided and that paved the way for Models and James Freud and the Radio Stars. I like to follow the narrative of these things, so I see that as important stepping stone onto other things.

There were so many people who had that background in punk who went on to greater recognition in more mainstream acts. Especially with the ‘90s alternative scene. I mention in the second book that there was a compilation of early ‘90s Aussie alternative bands and you can identify former punks in most of the bands. It was called The Next Wave, put out by Polydor. It had Def FX, Caligula, Mantissa, Tumbleweed, You Am I, Clouds... many of the musicians played in earlier punk or hardcore bands. They all gotta start somewhere.

 Any particular interviewees that challenged your earlier beliefs?

I think the one thing that I extracted from most of them was this greater theme of damage or trauma within punk. Aside from those who made good out of punk, beyond the music itself, through art or fashion and other creative outlets, there were lot of stories about the damage that was done conversely to so many people. That was really challenging. To hear those stories, at times I felt like I was counselling people. It might have been one of the few opportunities to dispel that past and those emotions. People got quite intimate with me, even though we’d never met before. That was hard. It was quite discouraging in that you immerse yourself in a cultural form for literally decades but then you find this dark negative side to it. Coupled with all the violence you start questioning your own place within it. There was a lot of hard drugs coming into it.

 I don’t want to portray it all negatively. Punk also had the ability to perform this collective self-care. That hasn’t been acknowledged. It gave people a place and identity within the scene, to expel their emotions.

 I think a good example of that might have been Smeer, guitarist from Depression and his Hardcore House which was a centre for that Melbourne hardcore scene. Bands gathered and created. You had the girl band GASH and Smeer played drums for them.

Depression photo by Liz River

Yeah, and they were anti-drugs as well. They had more of a positive emphasis, whether it was widely listened to or not, they made that attempt at least.

 There are some funny names appearing here, Alligator Parade... did you know their original name was Aardvark’s Afterbirth?

Yep. At various points I do make light of some of the names. Often you don’t think about the names without the context. I mean, even Dead Kennedys as a band name, someone who thinks about it outside of the punk context will find it really confronting. Some names seem absurd or grotesque.

 There were bands like Murder Murder Suicide, Crucified Truth, Insane Hombres. With regarded to recorded works, a lot of these band put out singles or cassettes, maybe a mini album, but aside from the legendary Saints, Birdman, Scientists, Victims or whoever, what are some of your favourite punk records?

A lot of my favourites never really got proper releases, or it was only posthumously like the Cheap Nasties, the pre-Scientists band. It took decades till it finally had a proper release. That’s as good as anything else that was going at the time, even internationally. I think it’s stood up really well. A lot of the ‘80s hardcore is not my thing admittedly but there are a few things through the ‘80s as cassette releases that have never been reissued, which is a shame. I think a few of those really stand up against anything being released at the time and which are still completely unknown. The end of the ‘80s into the ‘90s was great. I love the Cosmic Psychos, their early albums. The Hard Ons as well. The Splatterheads were one of my biggest faves. I could listen to them every week for the rest of my life.

 Proton Energy Pills? I thought they were more that stoner rock, pre-Tumbleweed sound.

Sure, definitely more that Detroit sound, I wanted to include them. Other people were questioning me, ‘is this just going to be British mohawk punk?’. So, here’s the list of bands, and they’d go, ‘great, I’ll read that’.

 Frenzal Rhomb, Bodyjar, all those kinds of bands that were successful in the ‘90s, all deserve to be included. They admittedly had a more commercial sound. The early Living End records are phenomenal.

People definitely would be rankled by the inclusion, but I was like, well, how could I not include them? By writing something that was a comprehensive history, without including them didn’t make sense to me. Regardless of whether you consider them to be punk or not, I had to include them.

 What’s your view on The Saints? They are legendary but do you position them as the originators of punk in Australia? Ed Kuepper and the late Chris Bailey never saw themselves as punk, but they and Birdman are considered the originators of that sound here. Some people have this view that in Brisbane when The Saints were going they were stymied by the oppressive state but they’d already left Brisbane (early 1977) by that stage. It was the Joh Bjelke Petersen era but it wasn’t the police state it became with the formation of the Task Force around 1978. It wasn’t like they got raided by the police all the time. They just couldn’t get gigs because certain agency bookers who had a monopoly on the Brisbane live circuit took a disliking to them. It was the next wave of bands like Razar and The Leftovers who became the focus of the police Task Force which made life hell for anyone remotely punk.

Saints photo by Violet Hamilton

 I went to a punk forum a few years ago at Bakehouse studios and Ed was one of the panellists. And a whole bunch of interesting people from that punk era. A couple of people in the audience were saying, ‘well Ed, you lived through the police state, how did you survive the police raids?’. His response was, ‘that’s a total misconception, a fallacy, that never happened to The Saints’. They had left Queensland before the Task Force took over. Where they were in Petrie Terrace was right near the local police station, occasionally they’d get told to turn it down but they never got attacked like the later bands. What’s your position on that?

Yep, I agree. The other misconception regarding the Task Force was that it was solely created to target the punks. It wasn’t, it was to combat unsociable behaviour in general. They made it so that you couldn’t gather in numbers on the street because it constituted an unlawful fray, a threat, a riot or whatever. I think the punks just became a readily identifiable target because of that. And a very easy one too. Just these scrawny kids. And because The Saints didn’t play that many shows in Brisbane in the day, it’s something that people aren’t aware of. They didn’t have the same aesthetic as the later punk bands, the kids that came after, so therefore they weren’t as easily identifiable to the police. And yet, that whole punk and police thing is probably an unacknowledged part of punk history.

 It wasn’t just punks; it was anyone deemed to be subversive. It was any activist, whether it was gay people, indigenous people, so punks were just one section of that. They were all confronted by the police violence. I feel that when I spoke to some of the early Brisbane people, they emphasised how bad it really was. There have been accounts of it but I’m not sure they felt that it had been adequately conveyed. I did try my best to portray that level of oppression. People looked to Razar and The Leftovers copping the brunt of it but it actually got worse during the ‘80s. It’s the degree of harassment that went on. People speaking of being pulled over multiple times every day. That has to have a huge effect eventually. That was borne out by so many people departing. They took off to the southern states or to London.

 I interviewed a guy who had been treasurer at 4ZZZ later in the ‘80s. He said there was a three-month period where they didn’t get a single subscription, and he saw that as a marker of the impact the police had had, not only on the punk scene but the broader alternative and political scene of Brisbane.

 Who are the cover stars on the books?

The first one is a guy called Bird from a band called World War XXIV, and the second volume is a guy called Alf from a hardcore band called Drawback. Both of those guys were unaware they were going to be on the covers. The photo on the first cover is blurred but my friend who’s a graphic designer said, ‘no, use it, it’s perfect’. I struggled to find good photos from the ‘90s, most were terrible. But that one was just a small segment of a bigger photo and I thought this looks interesting.

World War XXIV photo by Bruce Griffiths

 What was the path to getting published by PM Press in the states?

Well, I’d sent out this mammoth 200,000 word manuscript to some publishers locally and I guess they just laughed and said, ‘well, what can we do with this?’. I’m very naive. Then I sent it to publishers in the US and there were two who accepted it, and I chose PM. They said, ‘this is fantastic but there’s no way we can publish it at this length’. I had to go through the process of editing it and that’s when I split it into two volumes.

 The founder of PM Press had also founded AK Press, I guess the most renowned anarchist publisher in the world. He left and started PM Press because he wanted to be broader in its politics. He’d played in punk bands in the ‘80s and he was interested in Aussie punk as well. Immediately he was, ‘yes, I want to do this’, which was great. So much Aussie punk is revered overseas.

 Oh yeah, whether it’s Radio Birdman, The Saints, The Victims, Scientists, X, Psycho Surgeons etc, it is remarkable that so many of the records stand up against international punk records. The interest from overseas is still there. Someone like Henry Rollins would be into your book.

Yeah, undoubtedly, he’d love it.

Thanks to Tristan Clark, David Laing and for the use of the photos.

THE DOUBLE AGENTS - NEW MOTION

For Melbourne garage rockers The Double Agents, their new album, New Motion, finds them stepping out of the past.

By Ian McFarlane

On face value, the above headline might suggest an ominous past catching up with one… but the album was born of a desire to find positive expression in the face of adversity. Given that singer-songwriter-guitarist Dave Butterworth had been diagnosed with cancer in 2022, they’ve re-emerged with a modern sounding record that is direct, forward looking and ultimately rewarding.

Butterworth and his band mates, Kim Walvisch-Bukshteyn (piano, vocals), Ryan Tandy (guitar, lap steel) and Myles Gallagher (drums) originally emerged out of the Melbourne 1990s indie scene before breaking up in the late 2000s, following the release of their second album Seemed Like a Good Idea. They were a rockin’ band live, mixing their regular garage rock sound with bright pop melodies. And that continues to shine through on New Motion.

The current line-up also includes Mick Stylianou (bass, backing vocals) previously in Saint Jude, an unsung Melbourne band who issued four albums of country-tinged indie rock. Butterworth produced the album, recorded by Finn Keane at Head Gap and Julian McKenzie at Newmarket with vocal post-production by Dave Larkin (Dallas Crane) who also contributed piano. Callum Barter mixed and Mikey Young mastered the result. All up, almost a who’s who of the Melbourne indie scene.

I spoke with Dave Butterworth about his cancer diagnosis, falling in love, recording the new album, an ‘80s vibe and more besides.

Thanks for your time, Dave. How’s your health?

It’s good, I’m still a stage 4 guy. Things have been stable, over 12 months now, I’m on some intense drugs. Not getting better, not getting worse. I go for PET scans every twelve weeks. I can still get out and work part time. I’m currently touring with the Dirty Three, I work with Warren Ellis. I got asked to do a Kim Gordon tour and I’ll be working with The Saints 1973-1978 for their tour. I’m still surfing, the ocean is good for my soul. I go to the gym. I’m feeling fit. I am still full of positivity. I worked a lot on my mindset to get above where I’ve been for the last couple of years. It’s intense but I’m still doing stuff.

What then was the impetus for getting the band going again?

I got diagnosed and I didn’t think about anything else for a year. I hadn’t played guitar for about 10 years anyway. I’d been working for other bands on tour. I had very little interest in picking things up again, I was so exhausted. I had no creativity and my world had been turned upside down. I just concentrated on my treatments. Then I wanted to do one show at the end of 2022. I was certain at that point I was gonna die. It was purely just to do something with friends. We did the show in a small pub, it was rough as guts, but we had a lot of fun. We got a gig supporting Scientists, February 2023, and we were pretty good, as good as we used to be. Then we did a Mudhoney support. I was still in a negative frame of mind. I felt I had to wrap up the band’s past. We put out the Best Of comp. That was a lot of work but I felt like I wanted to leave something for my daughter. I didn’t think we were done; the band was back together to help me but in a way it helped other band members too.

Kim lost her husband, Greg, to cancer three years ago. He was in Black Pony Express. Ryan’s job is heavy and hardcore and just to have a release playing music, we all really enjoyed it. It gave us all hope, so we decided to keep going. I got a huge urge to make a new record.

How did the songs come together?

I write the songs and the others add to what I bring. I had jammed with a couple of people on the side. I had written ‘If You Don’t Mind’ but that band wasn’t really nailing it. I was the only guitarist, and I’m not that good so I missed the other guys. I thought, ‘hang on, I’ve got a band that can record this song’, my family. So, we had that one and I’d written a few others, ‘New Motion’, ‘Side Effect’. We’d actually demoed ‘Golden Rule’ in 2007, we ended up re-recording that. I put a lot of pressure on to record the album fast. I was quite manic, actually. I wanted something ready before last Xmas, ‘cos I really felt I was against the clock. Not in a bad way but I like to have a challenge, a deadline. Then we could get it mixed and out in six months’ time.

After The Double Agents had split up, I did another band in 2011, only a recording project. Myself, Ryan Tandy on guitar, Callum John Barter on drums who had come on our second European tour with us, when Myles wasn’t able to go. Mick Stylianou on bass, at that point he was in Saint Jude, and Andy Macintosh on guitar. We’d recorded ten tracks and they were really good but I never finished them. We pinched four tracks from that. I had three or four new songs, two from 2007 that we’d never recorded and four songs from the 2011 recordings. I used the base tracks, added Kim and my vocals on one then kept my original vocals from 2011. Doing the new vocals was really hard for me, so that’s where Dave Larkin came in and he did the new vocals in his studio. Essentially two recording sessions 12 years apart. Dave played piano also because Kim had nerve damage in her hand at the time. Kim was fine with that. I wanted to do something really different with this album. It’s still us but it’s a big step up in terms of production and sound.

Photo courtesy of The Double Agents

It’s a seamless album, the songs flow well, you can’t tell it’s from two different sessions. In terms of the band’s beginnings, you came out of that ‘90s Melbourne scene... do you think you’re out of time? Do you wonder If you’re relevant now?

As long as we think so, that’s the main thing. In the past I used to think none of what we did was any good. I’m not one of those guys who go, ‘I’ve made a great record’. I was never proud of them, but this one, with the passing of time and what you learn about production, I’m happy. Working with Dave on the production side, especially with the vocals and his encouragement to do different things and keep your ears open, was great. When you’re younger, you’re often closed minded about what you think is cool. As you get older you think, ‘I really like punk rock and garage rock and country music, but hang on, I like Hall & Oates too and The Cars’. Why can’t I make a big sounding rock record, a modern record?

When we finished recording, I went into a manic pace to get it mixed and wrapped up. I was really obsessed; it totally took me over. So, I handed it over to Callum; he’d drummed on four tracks but he’s also gone on to be a recording engineer in LA. Instead of mixing it myself I had someone else with a different perspective on things. He knows what the band is about, he’s played with us, and he knows how to mix a record. That’s what I wanted. It was his mix with my notes. To go from total control freak to ‘here ya go, this is what I’ve done, show me what you can do’ was great.

To my ears you’ve successfully combined that garage rock sound with accessible pop melodies. You’ve always been a rockin’ band from back in the day but you can tell you’ve always embraced a broad range of sounds. I can hear elements in this recording, like a Celibate Rifles feel on ‘If Ya Don’t Mind’ or a Neil Young and Crazy Horse feel, I like that and it’s some of the influences I can hear.

Someone else said the Celibate Rifles thing the other day and I thought, ‘we don’t sound like them but it’s so obvious I love that band’. I think they’re the greatest Aussie band ever. This album has got a million influences, like everyone’s record should. I like records that offer more than one thing. Different songs can work cohesively together. We never really fitted in, in the past. We always had lots of different elements.

No one else ever played Mink Deville songs live, either (they did a killer version of ‘Venus of Avenue D’).

That’s true. He’s a classic example of a guy who really rocks but he’s got swing and soul and slower songs. Now I think, if you haven’t moved on as a record maker in that time, then there’s something wrong with you.

With the songs, were there any that reflected your state of mind in terms of your health?

Um, of the newer songs... I didn’t want it to be an album about having cancer. Some are influenced by what I went through. ‘If You Don’t Mind’, it’s like a footy turn of phrase but I don’t necessarily know what the song’s about. It was the first new one that I wrote. At that time, I kept getting bad news after bad news. Then ‘New Motion’ is about finding a way to get through things. ‘Side Effect’, which you would think was about being ruled by bad outcomes, I wanted to switch it around and make it about falling in love. Which did happen at the same time I was diagnosed. So, it’s not about medical terms, I made it into a positive song, not a complaining song. It works well as a record about a wide range of emotions.

‘Picture in My Hand’, I wanted to write a song for a woman to sing. Kim doesn’t write songs but I still felt she had something to say. I told her I’d started writing this song and asked could I finish it. She said ‘yes’. It was about her husband Greg, so it was important for me to write that song for her. I think it’s a great song. And Larko pushed her to do her vocals in a different way.

‘Claw Hand’ is a kooky, hooky little instrumental. How did that come about?

Yeah, I’ve always liked doing instrumentals. That one features Andy at the end. It’s a different sound for us, a good way to finish the record. It can get a bit gloomy in the middle, not overly, but it’s a nice lift to the end. A snappy instrumental is always handy for that.

Lastly, I think the cover art is really good. It’s got an ‘80s indie feel about it, to me. Totally different from the sound of the music. Sort of retro but futurist as well.

Good. I love ‘80s rock. Not all ‘80s music is cheesy synth pop. With the cover we tried out a few ideas of our own and then my partner said, ‘you need to try another artist’. I found George Gillies and we went through a process; I sent him the music but I didn’t give him any direction. He sent back four or five ideas, and we went with that one. Again, I just wanted something different.

New Motion is available now through Yeah Nah Records (vinyl, streaming and download). The Double Agents will be launching it on Saturday 13th July at The Curtin (Carlton).

END NOTE: Dave Butterworth also talked about his involvement with Mudhoney and The Saints 1973-1978:

I was the guy who put Mark Arm forward for The Saints gig. Mark and I are friends and after the last Mudhoney tour he stayed with me for a week and we went surfing. We were surfing at Lorne and we were talking about music and he was just raving about the first three Saints albums. A few days later I was talking to the promoter (Feel Presents) and he was saying that Ed’s doing this Saints thing and wants a band to do just the old stuff, ‘but we can’t think of anyone to sing’. I said I’d been talking to someone who’d be perfect for the job, do you want me to ask him? He said ‘who?’ and when I told him he said, ‘Ed loves Mark, he really liked what he did on the MC50 thing’. So that’s how that all came about.

Vale Renee Geyer (11 September 1953 - 17 January 2023)

A DIFFICULT WOMAN’S HAD TO BE TOUGH ALL OF HER LIFE

By Ian McFarlane

This article was originally published in Rhythms magazine Issue #310 (March-April 2022)

SOUNDS OF THE CITY

The much loved Renée Geyer has long been recognised as Australia’s foremost R&B, funk and blue-eyed soul singer, and she’s still making her mark.

 By Ian McFarlane

 Thanks to Renée Geyer and Kathy Nolan

 By any criteria, Renée Geyer’s career has been phenomenal. From her earliest days with bands such as Sun, Nine Stage Horizon, Mother Earth, Sanctuary and the Renée Geyer Band she’s long been recognised as Australia’s foremost R&B / funk / blue-eyed soul singer. Best known for her rich, sultry and husky vocal delivery, she scored hits with ‘It’s A Man’s Man’s World’, ‘Heading In The Right Direction’, ‘Stares And Whispers’ and ‘Say I Love You’.

 She has recorded 20 albums as well as singing back-up vocals on numerous other sessions, ranging from the La De Das, Dragon and Men at Work to Richard Clapton, Paul Kelly and Jimmy Barnes. She lived and worked in the United States for many years, where she also earned accolades for her role as backing vocalist for international artists such as Sting, Joe Cocker and Chaka Khan.

 She is now set to take part in the 33st Byron Bay Bluesfest, alongside Midnight Oil, Paul Kelly, John Butler, Ian Moss, Kate Ceberano, The Waifs, The Black Sorrows, Russell Morris, The Church, Mark Seymour, Vika & Linda and so many more.

 “I can’t wait!” enthuses the singer when I catch up with her over the phone. “I think I was on the very first one, way back, so I know them really well. I’ve got a great band and I’ll be playing all the usual songs everyone knows, plus I always throw a few surprises into the set. We’re on the edge of our seats with the COVID situation but at the moment it’s full steam ahead.”

 Even before the advent of the original Bluesfest, Geyer had established a presence on the outdoor stage when she appeared at Sunbury 1975 with Sanctuary. Given that we’re currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sunbury ’72, it was a magical time for the young singer.

 “Oh, I just loved Sunbury. It was such a great celebration. We were all so happy and excited to be there. I remember I got a suit made for the concert. It was a beautifully tailored garment in lime green satin, a jacket and flared trousers and I also wore platform boots. When the light hit me I couldn’t wait for people to go ‘wow, Renée!’. Rather than just going on stage in jeans and a Miller shirt I made it a spectacle, and it ended up making me sound better too. In those days I’d always hang around too, to see the other bands.”

 In her memoir Confessions Of A Difficult Woman (2000) she described her early love for Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, and then how guitarist Mark Punch (from Mother Earth) introduced her to the music of Donnie Hathaway, B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert King, John Lee Hooker, Bill Withers and Muddy Waters. With her love for black music entrenched she also embraced Gladys Knight, Merry Clayton and Thelma Houston. These inspirational singers have continued to inform her career to this day. Geyer marked her place alongside the great singers of the 1970s such as Wendy Saddington, Colleen Hewett, Marcia Hines and Kerrie Biddell.

 She also made no bones about the challenges she faced, such as drug addiction, throughout her career. She was never one to suffer fools gladly, a stance which might have worked against her on occasion, but her relentless drive and creative spirit have always seen her come through the tough times. It’s easy to admire this remarkable women, not only for her astonishing voice and sheer determination but also her grace and poise under pressure.

 Rather than take you on a standard tour of her history, my purpose here is to explore the Renée Geyer experience via a dozen songs.

Some Renée Classics and Deep Cuts

 ‘Them Changes’ – “Well, my mind is goin’ through them changes / I’m about to commit a crime / Every time you see me goin’ somewhere / I know I’m goin’ outta my mind” – Geyer recorded this stomping Buddy Miles song with Mother Earth, for her self-titled debut album (1973). It had originally appeared on the Jimi Hendrix Band Of Gypsys LP and Miles’ own self titled debut album (both 1970) so was a very unusual song for a white Jewish woman to be covering. Still, it suited her voice and she’s certainly having a wailing good time with it. The album was a set of covers anyway, from ‘Do Right Woman, Do Right Man’ and ‘Moondance’ to Gulliver Smith’s ‘Mascara Blue’ but ‘Them Changes’ showed Mother Earth to be right on the ‘one’ with Punch’s guitar work to the fore. Funk wasn’t an area generally covered by Australian bands at the time (one can think of the likes of Johnny Rocco Band, Skylight, Hot City Bump Band, Stylus and a few others) when good ol’ Aussie pub boogie and glam rock were in the ascendant.

 Geyer says, “Them Changes’ was a great song but I don’t remember it as being such an important song at the time, it was just part of our set list. The tempo was perfect for the timing in our live set. Mother Earth was a great band, very funky. Our manager Horst Leopold would always say, in his thick German accent, ‘oh Mother Earth, they’re grooving their asses off!’. Mark and I were together at the time, and we had Jim Kelly on guitar, Russell Dunlop on drums and Harry Brus on bass. It was a cool thing; other musicians were going ‘I hope I can get a gig in Mother Earth’.”

 ‘It’s A Man’s Man’s World’ – “This is a man’s world / This is a man’s world / But it wouldn’t... it wouldn’t be nothing / Nothing without a woman or a girl” – As one of James Brown’s greatest songs, it was a statement of intent. Geyer’s gorgeous rendition on her It’s A Man’s Man’s World LP really was the one that made people sit up and take notice of this remarkable young woman. Released as a single it reached the Top 30. Backing musicians on the album included Tweed Harris (keyboards), Phil Manning, Tim Gaze and Tony Naylor (guitars), Barry ‘Big Goose’ Sullivan (bass) and Geoff Cox (drums).

 “I recorded that in Melbourne with Tweed Harris producing. It was an incredible experience. I always loved that song. It was the time of Women’s Liberation and people thought I was making this grand statement about that. They thought I was being so smart to say that. I just ran with it but it was never planned that way. It was just my answer to the situation and in the end it was good for everybody. And on the album cover you can see the hand written name and title. I just wrote that out in gold lettering, in my fancy hand writing. It really looked good on the black background.”

 ‘Sweet Love’ – “I just want to populate but you just won’t cooperate / I don’t want to segregate because I just want to stimulate” – Having formed the Renée Geyer Band, with Punch, Sullivan, Mal Logan (keyboards) and Greg Tell (drums), in June 1975 this was one of the first songs they wrote together for their Ready To Deal album. I bought the single as an impressionable 15 year old because it was sexy as all get-out and just so funky, I’d never heard anything like it before. Then the single got banned because it was too much for the staid radio culture of the day; the wowzers thought it would corrupt our tiny little minds. Well, it had already done that to me so I was well and truly on the way to funk hell.

 “Oh my God, it was such a fuss, because people thought I was singing ‘copulate’. They thought I was trying to pull a fast one, it was ridiculous. I’m saying, ‘well, I wrote this song, don’t you think I know what I’m saying’. This whole thing blew up but I have to say the album ended up selling more copies than it might have because of this furore. People had to hear the album because everyone had an opinion about what I was singing. I was just sitting back laughing at it all. I loved that song because it had such a funky rhythm (she hums it). It was very revolutionary at the time, it was very new to most people in Australia because it was such an unusual groove. It was just really natural for us to do, we had a ball playing like that.”

 ‘Heading In The Right Direction’ – “Since I was a small girl / I’ve always been alone / I’m trying so hard to find someone / I could call my own” – The Ready To Deal album also had another ace up its sleeve is this slinky blue-eyed soul ballad, written by Punch with lyricist Garry Paige. It remains one of her finest performances and reached the Top 20 singles chart. Fired by the powerful combination of these two songs, plus a brace of other gems such as ‘If Loving You Is Wrong’ and ‘Love’s Got A Hold’, the album also hit the national Top 20. The band was in huge demand, not only for their own concert appearances but also as support act to such overseas visitors as Eric Clapton, Freddie King and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee.

 “Mark had already been doing ‘Heading In The Right Direction’ with the Johnny Rocco Band; Leo De Castro sang it. It just happened to really take off when we did it. It’s such a great song. I always thought the words were pretty simplistic but I knew that people loved it because the melody was so strong. I enjoyed doing it.”

 ‘Shakey Ground’ – “Lady luck and a four leaf clover / Wanting this hurt I feel all over / My life was one special occasion / Till your leavin’ ended the situation / I’m standin’ on shakey ground, yeah / Ever since you put me down” – Legendary Motown act The Temptations had made this a hit in 1975 (co-written by producer Jeffrey Bowen and Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel) and the Renée Geyer Band laid down a spellbinding rendition on their live album Really Really Love You (1976). When recorded at the Dallas Brooks Hall in April 1976, Punch had moved on by that stage with John Pugh taking his place. With the added spice of a three-piece horn section it was another validation of this band’s greatness.

 “I remember recording that, the band was so hot live. We did all those concert halls and all the pubs. On those hot nights you could hardly breathe. ‘Shakey Ground’ used to get everyone going. We loved doing that, it was basically just four on the floor but you’d dance to it like crazy.”

 ‘Moving Along’ – “With a life that’s sometimes so complicated / You’ve got to keep your spirits up to win the race” – This is a life affirming song that Geyer co-wrote with Logan, Sullivan and Judy Wieder. One of her aspirations had been to work in the US. She first got there in 1977 when she recorded this in Crystal Sound Recording, Hollywood, with Motown singer / songwriter / producer Frank Wilson and a host of American session players, including members of Rufus and Stevie Wonder’s band. She also insisted that Logan and Sullivan be on hand to play on the album as well. Wilson had worked with the likes of Brenda Holloway, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, The Four Tops, The Temptations and Eddie Kendricks, so it’s safe to say he knew what he was doing in the studio. The sophisticated R&B ballad ‘Stares And Whispers’ was the big hit from Moving Along, but for mine the elegant title track is one of the best things she ever did.

 “Working with Frank Wilson was amazing. He was such an incredibly talented guy. I was right into black music, all my influences were from Rhythm & Blues and soul. He’d produced all my idols at Motown, I was in heaven.”

 In Confessions Of A Difficult Woman she wrote, “Frank Wilson was a Motown stalwart, a beautiful-looking black man, and from the moment he heard my voice he was confounded. ‘You’re going to have a really interesting life,’ he said. ‘Nobody who looks like you sounds like you’.”

 ‘Be There In The Morning’ (vers. #2) – “Your eyes flashing tells me that you are needing / Someone who will help you make it through the stormy night / Follow your heart and you’ll find that I won’t let those dark clouds gather round” – Another Geyer/Logan/Sullivan co-write on Moving Along, she’d already recorded a version as a B-side in Australia during 1976. Wilson worked his magic, adding a swooping string arrangement atop the funky rhythm and stabbing horns.

 “We re-recorded ‘Heading In The Right Direction’ and ‘Be There In The Morning’ for the album because Frank liked the songs but wanted to record better versions, in his eyes. We did them in the spirit of his vision as producer so it made it a better album.”

 ‘Bellhop Blues’ – “You keep me waiting / You keep me waiting / Just to sing my bellhop blues” – The combination of Renée Geyer and ace guitarist Kevin Borich for the Blues License album (1979) was a revelation at the time. This is spirited blues rock with a determined soul blues singer at the top of her game. Tracks on this tribute album included brilliant versions of the likes of B.B. King’s ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, T. Bone Walker’s ‘Stormy Monday’ and Elmore James’ ‘Dust My Blues’ yet this Borich penned tune, with its slow grinding blues shuffle, is very powerful on its own merits.

 “I don’t think Blues License is one of the best albums I’ve done but the spirit and the atmosphere is what I’m proud of. It was probably one of the first tribute to the blues albums. It was all the Kings, B.B., Albert, Freddie; I’m just doing my versions and paying tribute to them. I loved working with Kevin, he’s still one of my best friends. I love him, his kids and his grand kids. He has his own style of guitar playing. Recording that album was just the right time and the right sound.”

 ‘Hot Minutes’ – “Standing on the corner just-a waiting for you / The look on my face shows what I’m-a going through / Losers all around me saying you got somebody new / Wait and just you see what I’m-a gonna do” – Co-written with keyboardist / producer John Capek this one-off single (1980) saw Geyer temporarily reinvent herself as a tough, leather-clad, mane shaking rocker fronting a blue collar bar band. This song fairly rips it up over a pounding beat and slashing guitar riffs. On top of that, lyrically it’s a song of retribution, with a spurned lover just about to give her ex-beau his come-uppance. At the end Geyer spits out “Hot minutes, oo-OW oo-OW oo-OW” in her best wild cat snarl. Whoa, she’s hot indeed.

 “Oh, that was just a silly song I wrote. Well, I hate to say ‘wrote’ because when you say that you think of great people writing incredible songs. That’s not one of them but we just really went for it. It rocks for sure.”

 ‘I Can Feel The Fire’ – “I can feel the fire / I can feel the fire oh yeah / I can feel the fire burnin’ / I can see you by my side / Picture you here by my side” – Another song that lyrically is no great shakes but it doesn’t take much to home in on basic, raw human emotions and this Ron Wood song nails it pretty convincingly. It’s from her 1981 hit album So Lucky, co-produced by drummer Ricky Fataar (who had worked with The Flames, The Beach Boys, The Rutles) and Rob Fraboni (Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker, The Band, The Beach Boys, Bonnie Raitt etc). The standout track on a work that also includes her biggest hit, the infectious salsa-pop single ‘Say I Love You’, ‘Do You Know What I Mean’ and ‘Baby I’ve Been Missing You’. With former Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan and his Bump Band as the main studio group, there are also appearances from Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys and backing vocalists Blondie Chaplin, Bobby King, James Ingram and Venetta Fields.

 “I loved that Ronnie Wood song. I remember doing a gig in New York before I recorded the album and Ronnie was in the audience. He and his wife invited us back to their place. I was thinking ‘wow, I’m in Ronnie Woods’ house, I can’t believe it’. I had a migraine at the time but it was just so incredible to be there, I was so happy. I just kept saying to myself ‘just enjoy it, you’re in Ronnie Woods’ house’. And I loved working with Ian McLagan and the Bump Band. I loved the Faces too. Mac was so funny and endearing, he had these great stories and we got on so well.”

 ‘Difficult Woman’ – “A difficult woman / Sometimes hurts her friends when she don’t mean to / A difficult woman / Makes it hard for the ones she loves / It’s easy to do / She’s had to be tough all of her life” – Songwriter Paul Kelly knew what he was about when he produced Geyer’s 1994 album Difficult Woman. It featured a strong set of R&B, jazz and soul tunes including other Kelly-penned compositions, ‘Foggy Highway’, ‘Careless’ and ‘Sweet Guy’.

 “I still work with Paul Kelly, on and off things. I loved working with him on that album and I toured with him. We locked into a friendship and we’ve never lost that. I just had the best time with him. I love the way he approaches the songs. He’s a very curious person, he’s so observant and he notices things that most people don’t. He’d describe something and you go ‘oh, yeah’ but you don’t remember seeing that at the time. We actually came up with ‘Difficult Woman’ together. It was something he was mucking around with for some time. I remember talking to him on the phone about it and I’d go quiet, and he’d say ‘Renée, are you still there?’. I was thinking ‘I don’t know if I want to sing that song’. It wasn’t the lyrics so much, it was the chords. He doesn’t come from the blues, he uses major chords that are not blues influenced. That already puts them in a certain vein which was new to me. He brought me to that side of things and I’m sure with me being Rhythm & Blues oriented, he learnt things from me too. We did have a good time. ‘Foggy Highway’ is great to sing too, a very dark, moody song that worked.”

 In her memoir she wrote of Difficult Woman, “It was a joy to make. It was quite sparse, darkish and unadorned, and I sang in a softer, huskier voice than usual. It’s through that record that I developed a sweeter sound to my voice. People who had never heard of me before loved this record, but some people who loved me as a belter were a little uncomfortable with it. Overall, thought, it’s a record that’s won a lot of critical acclaim.”

 ‘Sexual Healing’ – “(Get up, get up, get up, get up / wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up) Ooh baby, now let’s get down tonight / Ooh baby, I’m hot just like an oven / I need some lovin’ / And baby, I can’t hold it much longer / It’s getting stronger and stronger / And when I get that feeling / Sexual healing” – This 1982 Marvin Gaye/Odell Brown classic is one of the horniest songs ever written. It found the one-time Motown titan re-energised for a new generation, like Rick James trying to outdo Prince. Of course, Geyer knew a thing or two about sexual healing (refer back to ‘Sweet Love’) and her version is full of understated, steamy appeal. From her classy 2003 album Tenderland.

 “Of course, I loved Marvin Gaye. We recorded that because it has that bubbling feel, that percolating rhythm. That’s what got me into the song. The lyrics are very ordinary, really, they are what they are. We loved that rhythm but we made it our own.”

Vale Ian 'Macca' McCausland

Vale Ian ‘Macca’ McCausland - Dedicated to the consummate graphic designer and illustrator (31 March 1944 - 9 August 2022)

By Ian McFarlane

This article was originally published in Rhythms magazine Issue #314 (November-December 2022)

SOUNDS OF THE CITY

Ian ‘the other Macca’ McFarlane pays tribute to Australia’s greatest rock’n’roll graphic designer, the late Ian ‘Macca’ McCausland.

With thanks to Dia Taylor, Otis McCausland, James Anfuso

Images courtesy of Ian McFarlane Collection and the McCausland Family

“Home is where the heart is / Closer all the while / Silver capsule in the night / Reeling in the miles / Heading back home, heading back home” (‘Heading Back Home’ by Ian McCausland, 1995)

 During one fraught week in August 2022, the Australian music community lost Judith Durham, Olivia Newton-John, Archie Roach and Ian ‘Macca’ McCausland. Anyone’s death is always sad news but this was quite extraordinary. There are more connections here than at first seems obvious but for now I want to pay tribute to my friend Macca.

 Ian ‘Macca’ McCausland was a graphic designer, illustrator (foremost in air brush art) and musician who gave more to the story of Australian rock music than can ever be repaid. I believe that he captured the essence, identity and framework of Aussie rock music more so than any other designer of the age. He can rightly be regarded as a national treasure.

 He began his career in the 1960s, was most prominent throughout the 1970s and continued to create amazing art up to the mid-2010s when his failing eye sight began to curtail his chosen pursuits.

 I first saw Macca’s artwork in the mid-1970s when, as a music obsessed teenager, I became enthralled with his numerous album covers. I first met him in the mid-1990s at the Continental in Prahran and got to know him better after the launch of Ed. Nimmervoll’s book Under The Covers: The Music Graphics Of Ian McCausland, Graeme Webber & Steve Malpass (1999).

I took to visiting him regularly and calling him on the phone just for a chat. He really was one of the most humble, friendly and loveliest blokes I’ve ever known. I’d ask him all sorts of questions about his career. He was never one to big-note himself or make out how important he was: he didn’t have to, he just was. He told me about his friendship with Gulliver Smith, photographer Graeme Webber and Mushroom Records founder Michael Gudinski; about hanging out with Keith Richards in Sydney when The Rolling Stones toured Australia in 1973 (Keith’s helpful piece of advice that day was “rub it on your gums...”); he told me about his love of music in general. I’d ask him if he kept much in the way of his original art work and he explained that most of what he created at Mushroom was eventually thrown out of the store room to make way for other stuff. He was genuine when he said that he’d moved on to other things. What an incredible archive that would be these days! His son Otis has told me that he’s kept some of the original art, so that was a relief to hear.

When he launched his art website (ianmccauslandart.com, I wrote the Introduction, so it seems relevant to reproduce my words here:

“The best graphic designers and illustrators present a unique and easily recognisable style. Melbourne-based illustrator Ian McCausland is one such individual. His illustrations and designs for albums by Little River Band, the Aztecs, Spectrum, Daddy Cool, Chain, Skyhooks, Company Caine, Matt Taylor and Carson plus his work as Art Director for the Mushroom label (in particular the triple LP gatefold release of The Great Australian Rock Festival Sunbury 1973) kept him at the forefront of the Australian rock music industry throughout the 1970s. In the days of the LP sleeve, essentially he was the designer of choice when you wanted a quality product.

 “Mushroom Records head Michael Gudinski is quoted in Under The Covers by Ed. Nimmervoll (Electronic Pictures, 1998) as saying, ‘Ian McCausland started Mushroom Art. He was Mushroom Art. He drew it, he looked it, he lived it. I thought he was peerless. There wasn’t anyone else near him, especially for the type of music Mushroom was about at the time. He was a master of airbrushing’.

 “It was that quality which the Rolling Stones were also able to tap into. Ian had been designing posters for local bands and gigs since the late 1960s, and when the Stones announced an Australian tour for early 1973, promoter Paul Dainty commissioned him to do the poster. The iconic image of a jet airplane winging its way into the open lips and massive tongue of the famous Rolling Stones logo over a stylised relief map of Australia captured the sense of the tour’s importance with absolute perfection. Dainty, the Stones’ manager Peter Rudge and their stage designer Chip Monck were impressed, immediately asking Ian to do one for the New Zealand leg of the tour. The Australian tour poster is Ian’s most important claim to international fame and original copies are among the most sought-after items by Stones fans and rock’n’roll memorabilia collectors alike.

 “Ian may have rubbed shoulders with rock’n’roll royalty, yet he remains one of life’s gentlemen and a true music fan. His career started in the early 1960s when he sang with Melbourne groups The Strangers and Little Gulliver & the Children (for whom he also played guitar). He was also a back-up vocalist and featured artist on Melbourne TV pop series The Go!! Show. All the same, design and illustration were his forte and he applied his music knowledge to his role as Art Director for seminal music paper Go-Set. He actually won a Who / Small Faces poster competition in order to get the gig. Subsequently, his work for early ’70s underground papers The Digger and Planet (in addition to his famous series of dope comix) led to his role as Art Director at Mushroom.

 “Ian is quoted in Under The Covers: ‘I was very influenced by San Francisco’s psychedelic Fillmore posters, Robert Crumb and Kelly of Mouse Studios’. His work retains that same timeless sense of rock history, of capturing the essence of the performer’s music in his imagery and style. This is Ian McCausland’s life’s pursuit – embrace it as part of Australia’s rock’n’roll heritage.”

 MACCA THE MUSICIAN

 That’s a basic introduction, so firstly I’ll delve deeper into his music career: as a teenager obsessed with rock’n’roll in the early 1960s, Macca formed The Lincolns with his high school mates. They did birthday parties and teenage dances around his suburb of Glenroy. The big Melbourne band of the day, The Strangers, caught his attention and he started singing a couple of sets a night with them around the thriving Melbourne suburban rock dance scene. This was the era when dances at Town Halls were the places to be on Friday and Saturday nights. You could see The Strangers, Colin Cook, Betty McQuade, Johnny Chester and The Chessmen, The Thunderbirds, The Premiers, The Bluejays etc.

 With the emergence of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and all the other British Beat bands of the day, the local scene was transformed irrevocably. Jazz musician Horrie Dargie saw the need for a dedicated teen music formatted TV show and subsequently, with the establishment of a new channel in Melbourne during 1964, ATV-O, he was able to launch The Go!! Show that August to great success. The Strangers were installed as the resident backing band, appearing on something like 130 episodes until 1967. The producers also launched the Go!! label. Just about every popular Australian solo artist and band signed to other labels appeared on the show: Ronnie Burns, Normie Rowe, Billy Thorpe, Marcie Jones, Lynne Randell, Olivia Newton-John, The Loved Ones, The Master’s Apprentices... you get the picture.

 Having been part of The Strangers vocal line-up, this also led to Macca’s role as a solo artist on the show, doing covers of Top 40 hits. As he explained to David Laing (I Like Your Old Stuff), “I only had four appearances on the show. First up I did Chuck Berry’s ‘Dear Dad’, followed by Billy Joe Royal’s ‘Down In The Boondocks’, Cliff Richard’s ‘Theme For A Dream’ (with Pat Carroll and Olivia Newton-John beside me) and Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.”

 As vocalist with The Rondells, he toured Victoria with Bobby & Laurie and The Easybeats. His mate Gulliver Smith (who had also sung with The Strangers and The Thunderbirds) then formed an R&B band, installing Macca as rhythm guitarist, backing vocalist and harmonica player. Smith had been playing around with stage names with which to launch his solo career. Originally he was Little Otis (after Otis Redding) before settling on Little Gulliver. Thus the band was Little Gulliver and the Children. They issued one self-titled EP on W&G Records in 1966; Macca sang the bass parts on the track ‘I Was Bewitched’.

 They appeared at all the Melbourne discotheques of the day, such as the Thumpin’ Tum and The Biting Eye, but when the band folded at the end of 1966 Smith headed to Sydney. As 1967 dawned so did the psychedelic era. Naturally, being an eccentric character to begin with, Smith became involved in this burgeoning underground psychedelic scene. He invited Macca up to Sydney to join a psychedelic soul/R&B band he was forming, Dr Kandy’s Third Eye. As Macca explained to me, after a few rehearsals he felt out of his depth with this new sound and took his leave.

 Besides, as a 22-year-old he was already married with a young child. He had to support his young family and to make a living he turned his attention back to his art career.

 Macca reflected on his friendship with Gulliver when he told me:

 “I first met Gulliver in about 1964 and we became good friends. Gully and I were very in tune with each other. He already had a great record collection of all these black American blues and R&B singers. It was everything from Sleepy John Estes to James Brown. And that’s where Gully got his inspiration from initially.

 “Gully was like a white bluesman, even in the mid-’60s. He could do an impromptu blues song with this great rave and it would be completely off the cuff. Whether it made sense or not didn’t really matter. Later on we used to listen to Frank Zappa and The Mothers and that kind of avant-garde / rock / jazz sound was also an influence on him.

 “That first time I met Gully was interesting to say the least. I was singing a couple of sets with The Strangers at the Essendon Plaza. They were one of the best bands in Melbourne at the time and they had this regular Friday night gig. On this particular night, the Sharpies were causing trouble, there were fights breaking out everywhere with the mods.

 “So this big Sharpie called Charlie, who was the king of the Carlton Sharps said to the promoter, ‘Oi, if you don’t let our mate sing, the whole place will go up!’ And so his mate was Gulliver Smith. Gully was originally from Carlton and, reluctantly on his part, he’d been adopted by the local gang and they wanted him to sing. So Gully sang a few songs, like a Larry Williams song or two, and I thought ‘gee, he’s a pretty good singer’. And so I started talking to him and we forged a lifelong friendship out of that crazy night.

 “This was around the time that The Beatles and The Stones had started to take off and the whole local music scene was changing. Everyone wanted to sound like them, but Gully already had his own unique sound and style based around his love of the black blues guys. He decided to call himself Little Gulliver because he wanted his name to sound black, like Little Johnny Taylor or Little Richard. He thought it was a cool name.

 “Gully might have been ambitious but he wasn’t a driven person, he just loved his music. After Little Gulliver and The Children had split up Gully decided to move up to Sydney. This was in early 1967 and he rang me up and asked me to go up to Sydney to join this new band he’d formed, Dr. Kandy’s Third Eye. I only lasted a few weeks in the rehearsal stage; I had a young family to support and I eventually came back down to Melbourne when I was offered the job as Art Director for Go-Set.

 “Dr. Kandy’s Third Eye turned out to be a really great band. Gully had recruited sax players like Mal Capewell and Zane Hudson, who he called Zane Tootsville. So he had that kind of Frank Zappa / Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band vibe going on there.

 “Gully stayed in Sydney for a few years. He was such a great singer, so charismatic. By the time he joined Company Caine, he wasn’t that young kid anymore. He’d matured and changed, drugs had started to come into it. But I thought Company Caine was an important band, a real standout on the Melbourne scene. Musically they were fantastic, really adventurous. It suited Gully to have such a great band to sing with.”

 He left the music to the professionals until the 1990s when he formed country rock band Chicken DeVille. As he put it, “We played at country themed suburban pubs and rural Victorian venues (anywhere with a mechanical bull) for four years before we broke up.” As well as playing covers, Macca wrote a few songs for the band; at his funeral we heard his songs ‘So Far So Good’, ‘Can’t Stop My Heart’ and ‘Heading Back Home’.

 MACCA THE ARTIST

 After leaving high school, Macca worked as an illustrator and designer for Studio Services. His first notable rock’n’roll art work achievement was when he submitted a poster for a competition run by Go-Set magazine, advertising the upcoming Who / Small Faces / Paul Jones tour of Australia (January 1968). His poster won and he was later installed as Art Director for the magazine. At that time Go-Set was the country’s foremost pop paper and his role in presenting a commercial format for music fans was pivotal. He left Go-Set around 1970 when publisher Philip Fraser launched The Digger, a radical, politically motivated broadsheet that tackled subjects such as the Vietnam war, abortion and pornography.

 It reflected the rise of the counter-culture and the anti-Vietnam movement, in particular, when the Moratorium marches around the country combined student protest with rock music. As Art Director, Macca once again played a significant role in the look of the day. It was here that he created his series of dope comix, heavily influenced by the likes of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton who had created The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers in 1968. Under the pen name of ‘McCosmic’ he created a comical representation of the stereotypical dope smoking hippie, Ace, and his pals on their never ending search for the perfect high and their hilarious efforts to avoid getting busted by the fuzz.

 He gave these strips titles such as: The Official Drug Addict Test; Highway Hi-Jinx; Down On Karmic Farm; A Quiet Day In The Country; Tee-Vee Jeebies; Strangers In The Night; School’s Out!; Country Capers; Outfoxing The Ferret; The Hungries; Guru To You Too; Just Cruisin’; Walkin’ Sideways; Footy Fever; Way Out West; and Porn Scorn.

 Around that time head shops had started to open up, stocking drug paraphernalia and so all this fed into the youth culture divide between the ‘heads’ and the ‘straights’. Macca had the idea of combining these dope cartoons in a book called Ace And His Adventures In The ’70s to sell in the head shops. He did a full colour illustration for the front cover but never got around to completing the project. Some of the strips were later compiled in the likes of The Wild & Woolley Comix Book (1977), Cobber Comix (1978) and Down Underground Comix (1983).

 Macca has always been honest about his personal inspirations in the art world. As well as Crumb and Shelton, mentioned about, he has also cited the likes of Alton Kelly, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson and others from the San Francisco psychedelic scene of the 1960s, Milton Glaser (Bob Dylan poster), Heinz Edelman (who drew The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine) and, closer to home, NZ artists Chris Grosz and Reg Mombasa with his art for Mental As Anything and Mambo.

 In 1971 two young music promoters, Michael Gudinski and Ray Evans, launched music paper Daily Planet (later Planet) with Macca as Art Director. Ostensibly set up as counter-cultural competition to Go-Set magazine, it was also a way for them to promote their bands and booking agency, the Australian Entertainment Exchange (AEC). They set up office in an old house in South Yarra and as he explained to David Laing, “It was very hippie, lots of marijuana and teenage runaways crashing there. I worked laying out the paper in the kitchen down the back where the electric stove provided heat as well as red-hot coils for spotting hash. I worked with some great people who enjoyed the fun times.” They included David ‘Dr. Pepper’ Pepperell, Jen Jewel Brown, photographer David Porter (Jacques L’Affrique), Lee Dillow and Terry Cleary.

 Macca had also continued creating poster artwork for various bands, and some of his early poster art included pieces for Gulliver Smith, Company Caine, Daddy Cool and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs (‘Most People I Know Think That I’m Crazy’). He was also the go-to guy for the best album cover art of the day. In 1971 to 1972 alone he created iconic covers for The Aztecs’ The Hoax Is Over and Live! At Sunbury, Chain’s Toward The Blues and Live Again, Carson’s Blown, Company Caine’s A Product Of A Broken Reality and Spectrum’s Milesago. In addition he provided the cartoon Daddy Cool shown on the front cover of their debut Daddy Who? Daddy Cool!, the inner gatefold comic strip for their Sex, Dope, Rock ’n’ Roll: Teenage Heaven album and the intricate, fold out design for the D.C.E.P.

 Macca had the knack for treating each piece of artwork as individual projects, choosing an illustration style and technique that suited the piece. He’d use pencils, ink, airbrush, collage, scraperboard or sculpture to get the result he wanted. A Product Of A Broken Reality is a great example of setting up a diorama to created the final effect. Macca explained that he was disappointed with the original photo used because it was out of focus. He told me:

 “I liked the art for A Product of A Broken Reality. Instead of my normal mode of illustration, I did something different by constructing a scale model, or a sort of diorama. The inspiration came about because Gully had explored that technological aspect, it was the early computer age, and he liked my idea that Company Caine was an electronic machine pumping out this new age message, a brand new sound. So that was the little model with the big mouth and the musical note coming out. And the audience was the ping-pong balls bouncing around and whether they got the message or not, it didn’t matter.

 “When Company Caine got back together in 1975, Keith Glass and David Pepperell re-released the album under the banner Rock Masterworks. I re-did the cover because the photo for the original was slightly out of focus and I was always disappointed about that. For the new cover I used a different shot from the same session and made the image smaller so that it looked sharper and you could take the whole thing in with one glance.”

 By 1972 Planet had slid by and Gudinski and Evans set up Mushroom Records with Macca as Art Director. He was responsible for creating the look of Mushroom and he rose to the occasion with the first release, the expansive, triple LP The Great Australian Rock Festival Sunbury 1973. Modelled on the original Woodstock triple LP, it had never been attempted before in Australia so Macca had to work out how a tri-fold jacket with three inner sleeves and a poster could possibly work. It remains a stunning artefact.

 His many other covers for Mushroom are just as legendary: Matt Taylor’s Straight As A Die (1973) and Music (1974), The Dingoes’ The Dingoes (1974), Stars’ Land Of Fortune (1979), Skyhooks’ Straight In A Gay Gay World (1976), The Skyhooks Tapes (1977) and Guilty Until Proven Insane (1979), Ayers Rock’s Beyond (1976), Various Artists A-Reefer-Derci! (1976) and Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons’ Screaming Targets (1979). Throughout this time he also did freelance work for other companies, such as EMI (Little River Band’s After Hours, 1976, using the pseudonym Preston Foster) and Epic/Portrait (Dragon’s O Zambezi, 1978).

 For Music, which featured his rendering of a kookaburra, he took inspiration from nature. “Matt wanted a rural feel but basically left it up to me. I was living in Ferntree Gully with a lot of kookaburras around. Two of them had actually drowned in the swimming pool in the back yard so I buried them in the garden. Later on I was digging in the yard and unearthed their heads and beaks. I was just fascinated with the construction of them. I’ve always had an interest in birds. I’ve got hundreds of drawings of birds I’ve done for my own pleasure, not commissioned things. I welcomed the chance to use the kookaburra as the main image on Matt’s cover. I justified it by saying that was as Australian as you could get, a kookaburra singing an Australian song in the bush.”

 He also admired the art work coming out of the British design group Hipgnosis, so his late 1970s work reflected that. For example, Guilty Until Proven Insane was inspired by the robots on the cover of Black Sabbath’s 1976 album Technical Ecstasy, designed by George Hardie and illustrated by Colin Elgie.

 Macca was a master at creating logos, not only for the Mushroom label itself but also for Go-Set, The Digger, Chain, Madder Lake, Matt Taylor, Skyhooks, the Renée Geyer Band and most famously Little River Band. His LRB logo on velvet green background depicted an elegant platypus swimming through the letter V, and it has come to be recognised on the international stage. Later on he created logos for Wheatley Bros. Entertainment, the Frontier Touring Company and an internationally flavoured series for Dean Markley Guitar Strings.

 After a decade or so at the forefront of Mushroom, Macca moved on to the corporate world of advertising. One of my favourites of his advertising posters was for Levi Jeans, “We’re gonna scare the pants off ya!”, which depicted a cartoon Frankenstein monster in Levis, surrounded by the Werewolf, Dracula, the Wicked Witch and the Mad Scientist with assorted rats, spiders, lizards and frogs scuttling around a graveyard.

 So we’ve jumped ahead here but let’s not forget his iconic artwork for The Rolling Stones’ 1973 Australian tour. Macca didn’t create the Stones’ tongue logo for the Australian tour poster (as has sometimes been suggested) but his great skill was incorporating it into the overall design. The Stones and their fans loved it of course. Trying to get hold of an original poster now is next to impossible, but when they do come on to the market expect to pay top dollar. He also did the tour poster for the New Zealand leg, which this time depicted a kiwi bird poking its long beak at the tongue logo on the ground.

 The Australian tour poster was originally folded and stapled inside the concert programme. There are stories of multiple copies of said poster discarded after the Melbourne concert (at Kooyong Tennis centre) and filling up the gutters along Glenferrie Road. If you were lucky you got hold of an unfolded copy because a small number were reserved for local record shops; when you bought a Stones record you were given a copy of the unfolded tour poster. Just how many of these posters still exist is impossible to determine. Not that Macca paid it much mind, of course; rarity or collector value was never in his mind set.

 The Stones kept him in mind, because he was commissioned to do a concept rough for their next album, Goat’s Head Soup. As he explained in Under The Covers:

 “Charlie Watts was the one who had his finger on the pulse artistically. He had briefed me in Sydney after being impressed by my tour posters. They wanted me to do a cover for their next album, Goat’s Head Soup. They’d recorded it in Jamaica and wanted that sort of vibe for the cover, so I came up with this idea of a fighting cock with spurs. I thought it was a very nice visual package. I sent the rough off and never heard anything more about it. Then I was contacted by Paul Dainty’s office again to say that my cover had been lost, or was at the London office but no-one had ever seen it so no decision was ever made about it and they’d gone ahead with the David Bailey photographic cover. I don’t know what the real story was. Maybe it was just misplaced, since they contacted me again to submit a cover for Love You Live. Because of the design I did for Goat’s Head Soup I was thinking roosters already, but this time I went the other way and made it cuter. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in it. I know it was completely the wrong image. They ended up using Andy Warhol. Not a bad move really.”

 The intended Love You Live image is cute indeed: a strutting rooster Mick Jagger, wearing leather chaps, sings into a microphone, while rows of hens go wild in the chook house stalls.

 LATER WORK

 During the early 2000s, Macca retrained in the field of computer graphics and created a new series of rock posters. They included: Skyhooks, Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons, The Dingoes, Spectrum, Chain, Daddy Cool, Little River Band and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. Some were based around his earlier designs but The Dingoes one, in particular, had a distinctive twist. It showed an abandoned farm shed and you had to look very closely to realise that the various bits of wood, posts, corrugated iron and old tyres spelled out the letters of the band’s name.

 Macca’s hand was still in demand and he created artwork for commissions from Frontier Touring (The Rolling Stones at Hanging Rock, 2014), Warner Music (Boogie: Australian Blues R&B And Heavy Rock From The ’70s, Silver Roads: Australian Country Rock & Singer Songwriters of the ’70s, The Glory Days Of Aussie Pub Rock Vol. 1 and Vol 2); Spectrum (Breathing Space CD), Starman Books (Rockin Australia: 50 Years of Concert Posters 1957-2007, compiled by James Anfuso) and Renegade Films (RockWiz Salutes The Bowl, 2010, on which he collaborated with his friend and fellow artist Chris Grosz).

 There are probably many more stories to be told but I’ll leave it there. I’m honoured to have known Macca and to have been his friend. He certainly enriched my life. As his funeral notice stated: “Ian passed away peacefully at the Geelong Hospital 9 August 2022. Loved and loving husband of Melitta. Much loved father of Brigitte and Otis. Proud G.D. of Dia, Elke and Oscar. Father-in-law and friend to Shaun, Silvana and Jodie. Rest in Peace. Legend.”

Mushroom Records 1973

Frank Zappa In Australia

Frank Zappa In Australia

By Ian McFarlane

This article was originally published in Rhythms magazine Issue #313 (September-October 2022)

 SOUNDS OF THE CITY

Australia has a long-term connection with the music of Frank Zappa. Ian McFarlane investigates from ‘Trouble Every Day’ and Zappa Plays Zappa to ‘Inca Roads’ and AC/DC

FRANK ZAPPA IN AUSTRALIA

“And I’m watchin’ and I’m waitin’ / Hopin’ for the best / Even think I’ll go to prayin’ / Every time I hear ’em sayin’ / That there’s no way to delay that trouble comin’ every day” (‘Trouble Every Day’ by Frank Zappa)

Over recent years I’ve become increasingly obsessed with Frank Zappa and his music. He is one of rock’s more fascinating characters and his music presents boundless possibilities. The legendary moustachioed one has been cited as one of the most influential and challenging musicians of the rock era. He’s been called everything from “iconoclast” (which could either mean he’s a genius or just a very naughty boy) to “visionary” (which suggests that regular mortals such as us are yet to catch up with his achievements).

His music has encompassed everything from garage R&B, doo wop and jazz fusion to classical, avant garde and Musique concrète, and several points beyond. Words such as “non-conformity”, “improvisation”, “experimental”, “virtuosity” and “satire” have been used to characterise him and his work. And while improvisation was an important element of his live work, all of his compositions were just that: strictly composed and charted but allowing appropriate space for those all-important improvisational segments. For the 35 years of his career, his music had the capacity to captivate / bewilder, inspire / repel, amaze / outrage, intrigue / confound listeners; as it continues to do long after his death in 1993.

It’s not my purpose here to explain or evaluate his contribution to the annals of rock music, merely to delve into one aspect of his career: his connection with Australia or, more to the point, our connection with him. For further analysis of Zappa and his music I’d suggest that you explore some of the multiple articles and books written on the subject. I’ve read half a dozen books on the subject, which is only scratching the surface.

For starters, if you’re interested, try No Commercial Potential The Saga of Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention (1972) by David Walley, Mother! Is The Story Of Frank Zappa (1985) by Michael Gray or The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989) by Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso. Then if you’re further inspired, go for Frank Zappa The Negative Dialectics Of Poodle Play (1993) by Ben Watson, which is 600 densely packed pages of dissertation on not only his music, but also philosophy, theology, classical music, politics, economics, censorship etcetera. I only made it to the end by sheer force of will.

So what do all those rambling introductory remarks mean? It’s Zappa’s music that endures.

Frank Vincent Zappa

Frank Vincent Zappa was born in 1940. As one of America’s pre-eminent musicians, composers, guitarists, singers, songwriters and bandleaders he produced something in the vicinity of 62 albums in his lifetime, with many more released following his death.

The first Zappa albums I can recall hearing were Just Another Band From L.A. (1972) and Apostrophe (’) (1974). In the pre-punk days of the mid-70s, when I was 15-16 years old seriously getting into music, a friend’s older brother had them and we’d play ’em when he wasn’t home. Said older brother also had records by Hawkwind, Nazareth, King Crimson and The Kinks, so unwittingly he had a hand in my musical education. I liked ‘Dog Breath’ from Just Another Band... and ‘Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow’ and ‘Cosmik Debris’ from Apostrophe (’).

After that, while I investigated all sorts of musical avenues, I lost my way a bit with Zappa. I just didn’t know which way to head when it came to buying his records. Tracks such as ‘Fifty-Fifty’ and ‘I’m The Slime’ from Over-Nite Sensation, ‘Inca Roads’ and ‘Po-Jama People’ from One Size Fits All and ‘Muffin Man’ from Bongo Fury were outstanding, but then there was his 1960s albums to contend with. Nevertheless, while Zappa’s music was full of complex twists and turns, his songs were always memorable and never short of melodic inventiveness. ‘Inca Roads’ remains my favourite Zappa track.

Next, Joe’s Garage I, II and III and Sheik Yerbouti were popular around my block. ‘Wet T-Shirt Nite’, ‘Joe’s Garage’, ‘Catholic Girls’, ‘A Token Of My Extreme’ and ‘Dancing Fool’ combined Zappa’s commercial acumen with some of his more controversial lyrical statements.

He scored the closest thing to a hit single here with the hilarious 1982 song ‘Valley Girl’, which featured his teenage daughter Moon Unit’s spot on parodic take on the “Valley Girl Speak” of her San Fernando Valley contemporaries. The 1984 album Them Or Us connected with me. Reviewing the album for Juke magazine at the time I wrote, “This album serves up a bevy of surreal anarchy, a diverse selection of styles and moods guaranteed to have fans lapping it up while others run a mile”.

Tracks such as ‘Stevie’s Spanking’, ‘Truck Driver Divorce’ and a version of the Allman Brothers’ classic ‘Whipping Post’ are very powerful. It was certainly one of his more straight forward rock albums with blistering guitar work from a young Steve Vai. Not that Zappa was a chump in the guitar stakes... he was a phenomenal player and many of his 70s and early 80s albums are chock full of his licks. I also mentioned the live ‘Dog Breath’ earlier which features one of the mightiest examples of his wah wah explorations in the rock mode.

In fact, the three volume Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar series (1981) and the multi-volume You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore (from 1988 onwards) are strictly celebrations of his guitar prowess in the live arena.

When it came to accessing Zappa’s records in Australia, it was inevitably a bit of a mine field. He’d started out on Verve/MGM, switched to Warner Reprise, had his own Bizarre, Straight, DiscReet, Barking Pumpkin and Zappa imprints, been distributed by Phonogram, Warners, CBS, Festival, EMI ad nauseum, so one was hard pushed to follow the trail.

The very first Mothers Of Invention record released here was the 1966 single ‘How Could I Be Such A Fool’ on Verve. How anyone in the Astor organisation (which held the Verve distribution license in Australia at the time) thought it might have some commercial potential is staggering to imagine now. It’s reckoned that only 100 copies were pressed. (By the way, even more bizarre is the fact that Astor also issued the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’ as a Verve 45 here in 1967. Both singles are highly sought after collectors’ items these days.)

The debut Mothers Of Invention album Freak Out! (1966) was not issued here at the time. It eventually got an official release here on CD in 1995 when the Rykodisc label took over Zappa’s catalogue and commenced an extensive reissue programme. At least Freak Out! must have made its way to Australia on import because singer Ross ‘The Boss’ Wilson has cited it as one of his earliest musical influences. He would also have heard Absolutely Free (1967), We’re Only In It For The Money (1967) and Cruising With Ruben & The Jets (1968) which did get released locally. The Zappa influence was evident on Wilson’s live craft with The Sons Of The Vegetal Mother and the likes of Daddy Cool’s ‘Teen Love’ extravaganza and ‘Make Your Stash’ from Sex, Dope, Rock & Roll: Teenage Heaven (1972).

When it came to other local musicians influenced, or at least inspired by, Zappa I can mention Gulliver Smith, Russell Smith and Jeremy Noone (real name Jeremy Kellock), lead singer, guitarist and electric saxophonist respectfully with progressive psych band Company Caine. Gulliver was known for his be-bop monologues and freaky lyrics which had a Zappaesque slant to them. Also the band was known to play a version of ‘King Kong’ at various festivals and concert events, which is one of Zappa’s more challenging 60s compositions. Furthermore, if Company Caine’s astonishing ‘The Day Superman Got Busted’ (from the 1971 album A Product Of A Broken Reality) isn’t an unhinged exploration of Zappa proportions then I don’t know what is. (Note: Kellock also played on Sex, Dope, Rock & Roll: Teenage Heaven.)

Sydney band Duck, featuring guitarist John Robinson (ex-Blackfeather) and singers Bobbi Marcini and Jon English, covered ‘Dog Breath’ on their 1972 album Laid. I’d like to think that the master himself would have approved of Robinson’s exciting, spot on wah wah solo.

Heavy rock band Bakery were known to cover ‘Road Ladies’ (from Chunga’s Revenge, 1970) in concert. (More on this below...). Then there was Sydney pub band Big Swifty who derived their name from a track title on Waka/Jawaka (1972). It’s doubtful, however, the band ever actually covered said song, because it’s an epic, multi-part, 18 minute jazz fusion behemoth, among Zappa’s more eclectic compositions. By the way, Big Swifty morphed into pub rock faves The Radiators.

One thing to note here is that while Zappa was one of the original 60s freaks, he was never a hippie. In fact he abhorred the hippie lifestyle and all it stood for. So while Zappa was overlooked by the fashionable flower children of the era, the more progressive leaning musicians did have a thing for him. He was also prescient when it came to concocting genres having included the song ‘Flower Punk’ on We’re Only In It For The Money. Years later Melbourne psych band Sand Pebbles described their music as, you guessed it... “flower punk”.

Sydney jazz ensemble Petulant Frenzy were known for getting together on special occasions during the late 2000s to perform the music of Frank Zappa. Writing for the Sydney Herald Sun, Pat Sheil reviewed a concert at the Basement (December 2009): “Describing Petulant Frenzy as a ‘Frank Zappa covers band’ is akin to describing the Australian Chamber Orchestra as ‘a group that rehashes old Mozart hits’. But the back-handed compliment of being a ‘hot covers band’ was shrugged off by the Frenzy many moons ago, as a devoted audience of jazz musicians and rabid nostalgics realised they were not simply a note-for-note re-enactment.”

Wollongong stoner rockers Tumbleweed included a psychedelicised version of ‘Trouble Every Day’ (from the Freak Out! album) as a B-side on their 1993 single ‘Daddy Long Legs’. Most recently, Beasts Of Bourbon included ‘The Torture Never Stops’ on their 2019 album Still Here.

Then there was Australian pianist, composer and conductor Allan Zavod OAM whose career played out mostly in America. He toured as part of Zappa’s 1984 live band, appearing on the archival live albums Does Humour Belong In Music? (1986, recorded September-December 1984) and You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol 1 (1988).

Zappa’s first solo album, following the dissolution of the original Mothers band, Hot Rats (1969) was a seminal instalment in the evolution of jazz fusion and progressive rock. Zappa described it as “a movie for your ears”, and it remains his most revered album. It would have been likewise popular here at the time, as were 200 Motels (1971), Fillmore East June 1971 (1971) and The Grand Wazoo (1972). These are the kinds of countercultural touchstones that got an airing in the right places.

During that era, musician (and future Rhythms contributor) Keith Glass ran Archie ’n’ Jughead’s import record store, along with writer David ‘Dr. Pepper’ Pepperell. Glass recalls, “Frank’s albums were more popular in Melbourne than they seemed to be in the US. I love the first couple – Ross Wilson introduced them to me – but the biggest seller was the white cover Fillmore East album as Warners did not release it locally at the time. We sold the heck out of it for years – so I never need to hear it again!”

Photographer Brecon Walsh told me about some of his experiences attending the Much More Ballroom concerts at Cathedral Hall, Fitzroy, circa 1972. He said, “I remember one time talking with Rob Mackenzie, Jen Jewel Brown and Renée Geyer. We were standing in the hall and Peter Lillie was over to the left hanging there looking like a hippie aristocrat / early Roxy Music Eno. Renée was there with her first band, Sun, and she would have been 19, if that then. I recall that The Mothers’ Live at The Fillmore East was playing over the PA with Zappa’s ‘Latex Solar Beef’ or ‘The Mud Shark’ blasting out.”

Frank Zappa On Stage

Frank Zappa and the Mothers toured Australia twice: June-July 1973 (John Gunnell on behalf of Robert Stigwood with Tour Consultants Evans, Gudinski Associates P/L present Frank Zappa The Mothers of Invention) and January 1976. The 1973 tour took in 11 concerts, including four at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion and three at Melbourne’s Festival Hall (a proposed fourth there was cancelled). Folkie Glenn Cardier and country rock band Albatross (featuring guitarist Lindsay Bjerre, ex-Tamam Shud) were supports in Sydney.

Jazz fusion masters MacKenzie Theory were due to provide support in Melbourne but, as guitarist Rob Mackenzie told me, Zappa cancelled their appearance. Mackenzie was unsure as to why Zappa did so but suggested that “our style of jazz rock fusion might have been too similar to his, or maybe he felt we might upstage him”.

That is possible but supposition only, because the 1973 tour featured one of Zappa’s best live bands: George Duke (keyboards, synthesizer, vocals), Tom Fowler (bass), Bruce Fowler (trombone), Ruth Underwood (marimba, vibraphone, percussion), Ian Underwood (woodwinds), Ralph Humphrey (drums), Sal Marquez (trumpet, vocals) and Jean Luc Ponty (violin). He often introduced them as “our rockin’ teenage combo”.

The repertoire encompassed the likes of ‘Dupree’s Paradise’, ‘Cosmik Debris’, ‘Montana’, ‘Big Swifty’ / ‘Eat That Question’, ‘Inca Roads’ and the ‘Yellow Snow Suite’. Many of the concerts were two hours long and recorded evidence (i.e. audience bootlegs) attests to the brilliance of this particular Mothers line-up. Anecdotal reports also indicate that the pungent smoke haze wafting above the audience was a show in itself.

Ben Watson wrote in The Negative Dialectics Of Poodle Play of a ruction at one of the Hordern shows. An overenthusiastic (or perhaps belligerent) audience member lit a firework. “Zappa very expertly paused mid-song, called on security to remove the culprit, no doubt not wishing to relive his memories of the fire at Geneva in 1971 (Ed note: when “some stupid with a flare gun” burnt down the Montreux Casino, an event immortalised by Deep Purple in the song ‘Smoke On The Water’), and then used the routine to vent his wrath with a verbal improvisation.”

On this tour, Zappa dropped into Chequers club in Sydney and caught a set by Bakery fronted by singer Barry Leef. He was suitably impressed by Leef’s vocals and invited him to sing with the band at one of their Festival Hall concerts. Leef sang guest vocals on a performance of a blues jam which incorporated ‘Road Ladies’. Zappa then asked Leef to move to Los Angeles and join the Mothers, but visa and work permit problems arose when it came time for Leef to head off and he reluctantly had to decline the offer. The prospects could have been interesting but Zappa always moved like a tiger on Vaseline and he had a new vocalist, Napoleon Murphy Brock, lined up in short order.

John Robinson interviewed Zappa for Soundblast magazine (August 1973). Robinson was a noted Zappa fan and based on the masters’ answers, the extensive interview was a great success. A couple of excerpts include:

JR: “One thing that amazed me on ‘It Must Be A Camel’ was the tremendous depth you got right at the end like a reflection of the theme restatement.”

FZ: “Amazing – you’re the first person to pick that out! Ian Underwood got that effect by playing a bass clarinet walking around the studio. He was being recorded with two mics, in different parts of the room.”

JR: “Do you see yourself as educating your audience as you go along?”

FZ: “We’re trying to correct the missing link between pop music and so-called serious music, and also record company executives who need to find out what they are selling. This is because they don’t really know just how important rock music is today.”

Zappa made appearances on TV shows while in Australia, including The Ernie Sigley Show in Adelaide and the ABC-TV arts/discussion programme Monday Conference, hosted by Robert Moore. The full Monday Conference appearance is available to view on YouTube. Zappa fielded questions posed by Moore, a number of specialist panel members (including future Double Jay presenter Chris Winter and a young journalist called J.J. Adams) and people in the audience about politics, sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, consumerism, advertising, media manipulation, censorship, groupies and radio. He proved to be very articulate, listening closely and answering every question with intelligence and wit.

Returning for the 1976 tour, the version of the Mothers was a smaller (but no less impressive) group: Zappa, Brock (vocals, sax), André Lewis (keyboards), Roy Estrada (bass, and who had been an original Mother in the 60s) and Terry Bozzio (drums). They were promoting the DiscReet LPs Bongo Fury, One Size Fits All, Apostrophe (’) and Roxy & Elsewhere. The seven-date itinerary took in concerts in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. Wendy Saddington supported in Melbourne and Split Enz in Perth. Graphic designer Chris Grosz created one of the iconic Zappa posters for this tour.

The repertoire incorporated ‘Filthy Habits’, ‘Black Napkins’, ‘The Illinois Enema Bandit’, ‘The Torture Never Stops’, ‘Muffin Man’, ‘Zoot Allures’ etc. This time, however, while the playing was again splendid Zappa tended to allow the jamming tendencies of this group to get out of hand so the end effect now sounds a bit overwrought.

A bootleg called Back On The Straight And Narrow (recorded in Adelaide, 24 January) had made its way on to the market at the time. Then in 2002 an official archival recording of one of the Hordern Pavilion shows (20 January) came out, FZ:OZ (pronounced “Eff Zee:Oh Zee”) which was a 27-track double CD. It’s a very good representation of the concert.

What is remarkable for us to hear is the guest appearance of Norman Gunston (aka actor Garry McDonald) playing harmonica on ‘The Torture Never Stops’. The Gunston-Zappa connection came about when – with the Zappa tour imminent – McDonald and his crew flew to Los Angeles and secured an interview for The Norman Gunston Show. The hilarious interview excerpt is viewable on YouTube.

Award winning crime novelist Shane Maloney later wrote a piece for The Monthly (August 2009), saying “Frank Zappa was no stranger to Australia and its wildlife. Inspired by a monotreme encountered during his 1973 tour, the avant-rock polymath composed a complex jazz-fusion instrumental entitled ‘Echidna’s Arf (Of You)’. Three years later, he came face-to-face with that even rarer antipodean creature, the little Aussie bleeder, Norman Gunston.”

Zappa was initially bemused by Gunston’s manic persona but caught on to his humour quickly. When Norman produced a harmonica and suggested they jam together, Frank played a blues shuffle on his acoustic guitar and the multimedia star blew up a brief storm, deftly incorporating the ABC-TV News theme into his outro. “The boy has got a promising career,” Gunston concluded, “and when he comes to Australia, give him a break. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Frank Zappa, Mother Superior of The Mothers of Invention.”

Zappa reciprocated by inviting Gunston to join him on stage in Sydney. Kicking into ‘The Torture Never Stops’, Zappa introduced his new friend as “Ladies and gentlemen, Norman ‘Blind Lemon’ Gunston The Little Aussie Bleeder”. Zappa and his band were later spotted at the much loved Bondi Lifesaver, partaking in après concert activities (possibly catching a set by AC/DC).

In fact, the seemingly enigmatic Zappa was omnipresent while in Australia. He went into the studios of the recently launched FM radio station Double Jay (2JJ) for an interview and to play tracks. Arnold Frolows was a music programmer at the time and remembers the event.

Frank Zappa poster 1976 by Chris Grosz

“Yes, Frank came in and I was there ‘producing’,” Frolows explained to me. “He was interviewed by the very nervous late Mac Cocker on what was the 2-6 pm drive time show but could have been 4-6 pm. Mac and I were the ultimate Zappa fans so you can imagine how overwhelmed and excited we felt. Frank couldn’t have been more affable in his usual Frank ‘I don’t suffer fools gladly’ way. I also got to meet my other all time hero the great Roy Estrada at a later gig... big times for a fan like me!”

And did you know that our illustrious editor of Rhythms, and long-time presenter of Off The Record on Triple R, Brian Wise is also a Zappa fan. He got his community radio start at PBS-FM and in the book 40 Years Of PBS Radio there’s a grainy black and white photo of Brian in the cramped studio circa 1980; you can only see his back but one of the albums just visible on the console is Frank Zappa’s Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar. He has interviewed George Duke for Off The Record.

Likewise, renowned radio presenter and regular Rhythms / Triple R contributor Billy Pinnell is also a major Zappa fanatic. He has been collecting his albums for many years, attended several of Zappa’s concerts and interviewed him in 1983. At the start of the interview, the ever fastidious Zappa gave Billy a polite lesson in R&B history:

BP: “Thanks for your time Frank. The title track of your new album, The Man From Utopia, is a medley with an old Ronnie Hawkins song ‘Mary Lou’. Is the song ‘The Man From Utopia’ from that era as well?”

FZ: “Yes, but you’re incorrect that it’s a Ronnie Hawkins song. So here’s some rock’n’roll history; ‘Mary Lou’ was originally written by Obie Jessie who recorded under the name of Young Jessie circa 1955. ‘The Man From Utopia’ was released around that time too, it was the B-side of a hit called ‘Death Of An Angel’ by Donald Woods and The Bel-Aires. When Ronnie Hawkins decided to record ‘Mary Lou’ he claimed the writing and publishing credit for himself and wound up getting sued by Obie Jessie and Obie won the case.”

With recent events in the US, Zappa would be turning in his grave now. Pinnell asked: “Were you surprised when ‘Valley Girl’ became such a big hit in America?” His pithy reply was, “Well it’s pretty hard to be surprised because as with anything in America, stupidity knows no bounds.” (Note: the full interview is available on Pinnell’s iTunes podcast Billy Pinnell The Music Show).

Zappa Plays Zappa

Frank Zappa died on 4 December 1993, a victim of prostate cancer. The aforementioned Allan Zavod (who passed away in 2016) wrote a tribute piece to Zappa in the February 1994 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. They had been neighbours in LA by the time he joined Zappa’s band in 1984.

He wrote: “Playing with Zappa was the greatest gig that any musician could wish for. He always challenged you, stretching your musical abilities beyond your wildest imagination. As a musician, he was never boring. Each night was a new experience. We did 250 shows in one year - each show unique in some way. The vast amount of musical material in itself was an enormous challenge to learn. Frank would pull out songs we hadn’t done for six months. On the first day of a three week rehearsal, Frank presented me with 200 tunes and asked if I could learn them in that space of time. I began to realise you could never learn all of Frank’s music - it was a continuous ongoing adventure. Sorry to kill the myth that he was weird and wild; his lyrics may have been, but the man was not. Zappa was a serious composer and one of the most professional musicians I’ve ever been associated with.”

By 1993, Frank’s son Dweezil was entrenched in his own career. Growing up, his guitar heroes had been Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads and Jimi Hendrix. In fact, it was Van Halen who produced his debut single, ‘My Mother Is A Space Cadet’, when he was 12 years old (1982).

In the late 1980s, when Dweezil was working as a VJ for the MTV network, he befriended INXS while Jenny Morris was singing backing vocals with them. She then invited him to tour Australia as her guitarist. Still, he was never far from his father’s influence and in 2006 he elected to honour his music and legacy by touring as Zappa Plays Zappa. Since then he has toured Australia three times (2007, 2011, 2018) with his fourth, proposed tour curtailed by the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020.

Dweezil has managed to translate his father’s work from record to the live stage by balancing his father’s original intentions with his own approach to how he interprets the music. In some instances, such as with ‘Son Of Mr. Green Genes’ (from Hot Rats), he learned his father’s seven-minute guitar solo, note-for-note, because what he played originally was so pivotal and specific in that instance. For a glimpse of the music of Zappa Plays Zappa there’s YouTube footage of Australian trumpet player Kendal Cuneo delivering a gorgeous, Miles Davis styled solo on the otherwise salacious ‘The Illinois Enema Bandit’ (from the Forum, 1 April 2018).

In August 2017, Greg Phillips interviewed Dweezil for Musician magazine.

“The goal of this particular show is to present the audience with more of a chronological experience of my dad’s music,” Dweezil told him. “We go from Freak Out! to a bunch of Mothers Of Invention stuff. Then it gets into the early 70s and 200 Motels and jumps around within the 70s. There will be a host of things from different records and there are a few songs from the 80s. It’s usually almost a three hour show, two hours and 45 minutes on average but it can be longer. The real goal is to give the audience the chance to hear a variety of musical styles within my dad’s whole catalogue but from song to song there is a ton of variety too. We have added in a few things that we haven’t played before. The thing is … the music is hard. There is no way you can get around that. You can’t fake playing the music.”

Frank Zappa & AC/DC

To conclude, Dweezil Zappa once revealed that his father was an AC/DC fan. In a 2017 interview with Classic Rock magazine, he said that Frank even tried to sign them following his 1976 tour. They ended up signing to Atlantic Records for the US.

“He wanted them for his own label because he thought they were great. I think he saw what everybody saw. They could play, they had a ton of energy and they were authentic. It was blues-based and it had an attitude. The thing about AC/DC is they’ve carved a massive career out of playing one style that’s changed very, very little. That’s what people love, that consistency. They’re rock solid and they have a great sound. He (Frank) loved rhythm and blues. AC/DC is essentially a very heavy-duty, electrified rhythm and blues band. He actually had one of their records. When I was getting into music he played it for me. It was either Back In Black or Highway To Hell. He just thought they were great because they were really just a high volume version of the Blues.”

Dweezil also revealed that AC/DC guitarists Malcolm and Angus Young played on one of his tracks, recorded as a tribute to his father. Around 1994 they played on ‘What The Hell I Was Thinking’, a continuous, 65-minute piece of music that is yet to be completed. Eddie Van Halen, Brian May, Eric Johnson, Steve Morse, Joe Walsh and Yngwie Malmsteen also contributed parts. He said Angus played six or seven different takes for his solo and every single one was very well crafted.

Datura 4 - Neanderthal Jam

Datura 4 - Neanderthal Jam

DATURA 4 - Neanderthal Jam (Alive Records)

Review by Ian McFarlane

Originally published Rhythms magazine (Issue #313) September-October 2022

Let’s boogie! Neanderthal Jam is the fifth album from Perth-based band Datura 4. Led by seasoned singer / guitarist / songwriter Dom Mariani, there’s no guess work involved when it comes to these guys musically: full-tilt hard rock, boogie and blues in the classic forthright fashion with a liberal seasoning of heavy psych-soul. Very tasty indeed.

When it comes to Mariani himself, I wondered if he might have no little personality crisis going on musically. There’s been ’60s Garage Rock Dom (The Stems), Power Pop / Jangle Pop Dom (DM3, The Someloves), Surf Rock Dom (The Stone Fish, Majestic Kelp) and Boogie Rock Dom (Datura 4). Naturally, Datura 4 has been compared to just about every vintage hard rock / fuzz rock entity in existence – Cream, Blue Öyster Cult, Grand Funk Railroad, Blue Cheer, Groundhogs etc. with a nod to the Australian chapter of Carson, Master’s Apprentices, Chain, Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs and Perth locals Bakery. And I would throw in other American acts such as Cactus, Nitzinger, James Gang and Steppenwolf with a soulful West Coast rock vibe.

“I’ve always loved those kinds of bands,” Mariani confirms. “They were a major inspiration when I was growing up, I had a lot of the albums. It’s that primal rock sound, simple but heavy riffs, flavoured with great melodies. I’m also still connected to the Aussie Rock thing too, it’s very much still a part of the band’s sound. It was that impressionable age of 15-16 when you’re trying to find out who you are, trying to be cool. It was just what was happening musically, that blues rock, hard rock sound. I was watching GTK on the TV, seeing the bands at school socials. I remember seeing the Coloured Balls headlining the Freo Rock concert and that made a real impression on me.”

 The current band line-up of Mariani (guitar, vocals), Warren Hall (drums), Stu Loasby (bass), Bob Patient (keyboards) and Joe Grech (guitar, vocals) gets a boost with the addition of blues slide master Dave Hole as a guest player on the rip-roarin’ ‘Going Back To Hoonsville’. Hole has been tearing up the blues since the late 1960s, while Patient was a long-time member of his band, so it’s not hard to appreciate the combination.

 “Dave Hole is a real champion, such a great guy. I first met him when the booking agency Saturn Enterprises got my first band, Gypsy, a Monday night gig at the Sandgroper supporting the Dave Hole Band. I was fresh out of high school and it was a real eye opener. He was amazing, playing those great songs like Rory Gallagher’s ‘Bullfrog Blues’ and Eric Clapton’s ‘Motherless Children’. He had that whole unorthodox slide guitar technique of playing over the top of his fretboard and it was very exciting watching him. I’ve followed him ever since. Also, I first saw Bob in Fatty Lumpkin and later he worked on DM3 sessions. I wanted that Hammond organ sound on the albums.”

 As a long-time listener to the band’s music, the major revelation for me is the development in the song writing. Not that the early albums lacked substance but initially they comprised songs written by Mariani; by the third it was Hall/Loasby/Mariani and now it’s all songs by Datura 4, a more collaborative approach.

 “That’s been a natural evolution. In the early days I’d present songs I had written to the guys at rehearsals, ‘this is how I want it to go’ and away we went. We got over the first couple of albums and we realised we had more in us and it’s more the case now that I’ve got the germ of an idea, we have a jam and we all contribute. And Bob has really opened up the palette for the different songs we write now. I’m trying to broaden my songs, some bluesy, some West Coast psychedelia, hard rock; for me it’s always been about writing good songs.”

 ‘Open The Line’ is one of the key cuts, a superbly commercial slice of buoyant hard rock that would do any band proud. Guitarist Stevie Van Zandt aka Little Steven has been an unabashed fan of Mariani’s work for many years, and recently chose ‘Open The Line’ as “The Coolest Song in the World” on his popular radio show on SiriusXM, The Underground Garage.

 “Oh yeah, Little Steven has always been a great supporter of what I do. He got The Stems over to the US to play one of his concerts a few years ago. He just likes what I do and I’ve always been grateful for his support. He’s a very funny guy. We got to catch up when he came out here with The Disciples Of Soul.”

Photo courtesy of Datura 4 promotions

 Digging deeper and the likes of ‘Bad Times’, ‘Black Speakers’, ‘Worried Man’s Boogie’ and in particular the super-charged ‘Digging My Own Grave’ (whoa! those twin guitar lines) push the energy levels to overload. ‘Black Speakers’ for example features that classic Stratocaster guitar / Marshall amp combo. Yet it’s not all energy over substance; the most abiding elements tying these tunes together are the tight structures and melodic inventiveness.

 There’s a great deal of diversity here too, the range and variety of tonal colours being impressive. The instrumental title track brings the mood down with an acoustic guitar motif, cruising beat, funky keyboard lines, blues harp, subtle washes of wah wah and a suitably lysergic vibe. A very cool track. The mournful ‘Hold My Life’ likewise works the acoustic side of the band to perfection.

 The guys stretch out on the final track, the eight minute ‘Drive By Island’. Rather than being a superficial afterthought to fill up the record, there’s not an ounce of fat wasted on this gem. I’m calling it my favourite track, not least for the astonishingly grand melody, the shifting arrangement and the gorgeous rising harmonies but principally for the quality of the ensemble playing. It’s a Datura 4 classic of the highest order.

Sound As Ever

SOUND AS EVER – A celebration of the greatest decade in Australian music 1990-1999 (Melbourne Books)

By Jane Gazzo & Andrew P. Street

Book review by Ian McFarlane

Every generation of music fanatics has its own era. By that I mean they came of age at the time, they saw their favourite bands playing live for the first time, they formed their own bands, they bought the records, they lived the life. For broadcasters and journalists Jane Gazzo and Andrew P. Street it was the 1990s, which saw the explosion of Australian alternative rock. So Sound As Ever is essentially a celebration of the bands and events of the era.

 Gazzo got her start as a teenager presenting an indie show on 3RRR, and is best known for her work with the ABC’s Triple J and Recovery at the time, and subsequently as presenter of The Sound. She also fronted her own indie band circa 1994/95, Rubher, so is well placed to commentate on the era. Likewise, Street was a regular contributor to the street press and Rolling Stone, and in his own words is a “failed indie rock superstar”.

 Their book Sound As Ever grew out of the Facebook community page that Gazzo and Scott Thurling (of Popboomerang Records) set up in 2020. Of course, the title is taken from You Am I’s 1993 debut album. Nostalgia retains a pull on the emotions, and often it’s that 20 year cycle that ignites the memories. The FB page became so popular that it spawned CD collections of unreleased tracks from the era, as well as a series of Sound As Ever gigs. A book was the logical next step.

 If names such as You Am I, The Cruel Sea, Ratcat, Something For Kate, Tumbleweed, Sidewinder, Gaslight Radio, Spiderbait, Holocene etc, plus events such as Big Day Out, Meredith Music Festival and Push Over resonate then this book is perfect for you. Just don’t expect a full recounting of the era’s history and developments, as the book presents a snapshot via photographs, gig posters and flyers, reflections, lists, diary entries and other ephemera.

 I like rock ’n’ roll ephemera so have no issues with the content. Also, while I started out seeing pub gigs at 18 in 1978, I was still a regular gig goer and record buyer throughout the 1990s so I saw many of the bands addressed here. In fact, I have contributed to the book in a small way but I’m not beating my own drum because it’s Gazzo and Street’s deal.

 Gazzo says her abiding memory of that era is one of freedom and joy. “Freedom to run around pubs and clubs at night inhaling the local inner city sounds and the joy of discovering new bands and seeing old ones do what they do best - play music to appreciative audiences. There was also the joy of listening to community radio and hearing your mate’s bands on the air and that sense of community. It was strong and everyone seemed to help everyone. I felt it was a time of unlimited potential. I was young and felt that we could all conquer the world - and some of us did just that!”

 The design replicates a scrapbook approach to presenting the era, so it has an occasionally grainy, fanzine look which might be distracting for some eyes but really does represent the emergence of indie rock and grunge in the day. Still, one might be tempted to quip that it also reflects that generation’s short attention span. Okay, I just did that but like a lot of teenagers Gazzo made her own scrapbooks based around her favourite bands.

 “One of my favourite bands of the 1990s was and still is Magic Dirt. I think Adalita is one of our greatest songwriters and most of Magic Dirt’s music has stayed with me through the years. I also love early You Am I. My fave song? So many... but right now it’s Roland S. Howard’s ‘She Cried’ from his criminally ignored, 1999 album Teenage Snuff Film. I want to be buried with that record.”

 Did you know that the members of Sydney indie band with the unpronounceable name of SPDFGH derived it from their high school physics exams (SPDFGH corresponds to the orbitals of electrons within an atom)? And did you know that the night The Cruel Sea won five ARIA awards in 1993 one of the shiny objects was pinched from under their noses, only to turn up 27 years later in a skip in Darlinghurst then offered for sale on Facebook Marketplace? (You’ll have to read the book to find out how that story ended.)

 As for the subtitle, A celebration of the greatest decade in Australian music 1990-1999: what is it that makes the 1990s “the greatest decade in Australian music”?

 “It’s a bold statement isn’t it?!” Gazzo affirms. “And it is meant to be bold! It’s the greatest for so many reasons: the breadth and scope of artists - many of whom are still playing today; the amount of bands that were signed in the great commercial record label signings/swallow up of independent bands; the songs, the festivals, the charismatic personalities of our front men and women. I think the ’90s is the last decade of innocence in a way. It was a time without mobile phones and the internet was in its infancy. We relied on radio and TV to help us choose our anthems and the journo’s word in the street press or newspapers was gospel. I think the internet and mobile phones changed everything for Australian music. Some of it’s good of course, but some of it not so good, but as Screamfeeder’s Tim Steward said: ‘It wasn’t to last and why should it? The future was beckoning’.”

The First Australian Blues/Rock Festival, 1975

Originally published in Rhythms magazine, November/December 2019 (Issue #296)

Sounds of the City – The First Australian Blues/Rock Festival, 1975

By Ian McFarlane © 2019

Thanks to Sleepy Greg Lawrie, Adrian Anderson and Gerald McNamara

On the Australian rock music touring circuit, the international package tour has been a mainstay, and guaranteed crowd puller, since the advent of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s.

You only have to consider the likes of the Lee Gordon Big Shows, where you’d get Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran (1957) or Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Jerry Lee Lewis and Paul Anka (1958), with local support from Johnny O’Keefe and the Dee Jays.

The 1960s was the era of Roy Orbison, The Walker Brothers and The Yardbirds (1967), and The Who, The Small Faces and Paul Jones (1968). In 1971 you could have gone to see Deep Purple, Free and Manfred Mann, or The Giants of Jazz – Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Sonny Stitt and Art Blakey. In 1973 it was Slade, Lindisfarne, Caravan and Status Quo. Moving on, there was the Legends of Rock (1989) with Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, The Everly Brothers and Lesley Gore. The 1990s saw the advent of the enormously successful Big Day Out travelling juggernaut, with just as many local acts as the big name international bands.

There are, no doubt, many more that you could remember but one lesser known event that has always intrigued me is the First Australian Blues/Rock Festival tour which took place in March 1975. The overseas contingent consisted of Freddie King and his Band, Alexis Korner, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers and Duster Bennett with local supports Phil Manning, Renee Geyer and Sanctuary, Matt Taylor, Smokestack Lightning and Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. The tour was sponsored by Levi’s jeans with the banner reading Levi’s Presents the Blues. Renowned graphic designer Ian McCausland created the art for the banner and the concert handbill.

The full tour took in Brisbane (1 March), Sydney (2 March), Wollongong (3 March), Canberra (4 March), Adelaide (5 March), Perth (6 March) and Melbourne (9 March) and was described as the “biggest airlift of international talent since the days of Lee Gordon”. For the princely sum of $4.50 you got six hours of hot blues and R&B, indeed “a feast of incredible electric blues”. In between the main concerts a number of the artists did side gigs at various university campuses and small clubs.

Promoted by Evans Gudinski and Associates, it was the first time there’d been so many blues artists on the one tour. Many local musicians at the time were blues fanatics and Michael Gudinski, as well as being a shrewd record company CEO and tour promoter, was also a fan (he’d already toured Muddy Waters and his band with Chain and Matt Taylor as supports). Other international blues and R&B artists who had toured Australia previously – not necessarily through Gudinski’s company – included John Mayall, Canned Heat, Willie Dixon and the Chicago Blues All Stars, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and B. B. King, while Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee had already been to Australian four times. I’ve even heard mention that Josh White made it to Australia in the 1950s.

For decades in the States, the blues had only been associated with rural and working-class African-American audiences. It was only when young, white rock musicians and fans became enamoured with the blues during the 1950s and 1960s that black musicians were able to start transcending the typical racial and social barriers of the time. This lead to the rediscovery of many blues artists who’d been largely forgotten over the years.

One of the better know blues guitar giants of the day Freddie King – “The Electrifying Texas Cannonball” – headlined the tour. Known for his deep Texas blues and funk, he’d already released such influential examples of modern blues as ‘Hide Away’, ‘I’m Tore Down’, ‘The Welfare (Turns Its Back on You)’ and the original rendition of Don Nix’s oft-covered ‘Going Down’ (from the 1971, Leon-Russell produced album Getting Ready...). He was promoting his 1974 album Burglar.

French-born guitarist Alexis Korner – “Mr. Blues! The man responsible for The Rolling Stones and Cream” – was one of the most inspirational figures in British blues music. He’d formed Blues Incorporated in 1961 with Cyril Davies (harmonica), with the shifting line-up over the years featuring the likes of Charlie Watts, Mick Jagger, Art Wood, Long John Baldry, Jack Bruce, Graham Bond, Ginger Baker and Paul Jones. His encouragement was crucial to a generation of aspiring musicians. In the early 1970s he formed the pop-based big band C.C.S. (Collective Consciousness Society), scoring notable hits with a version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘The Band Played the Boogie’.

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee – “The world’s finest ethnic blues team” – had forged a long-term partnership since the 1940s, one of the most enduring in the blues. They proved enormously popular, having taken their folk blues to vast audiences worldwide. Sonny had been blinded as a teenager after two accidents. He was known for his distinctive singing voice, punctuated by falsetto whoops, and harmonica playing. Brownie played acoustic guitar and had already worked with the likes of Leadbelly and Josh White, recorded his own albums and later contributed electric lead guitar to albums by Champion Jack Dupree. By all accounts the duo never really got on and finally parted ways at the end of 1975.

Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers – “Chicago’s greatest boogie blues band” – was a three-piece powerhouse, comprising Taylor (slide guitar), Brewer Phillips (lead guitar) and Ted Harvey (drums). Theodore ‘Hound Dog’ Taylor had played with Elmore James in Mississippi, before heading to Chicago in 1942 where he regularly played at the Maxwell Street markets. By the early 1970s he and the HouseRockers had became known for high energy bottleneck guitar blues and rocking R&B. He’d push his cheap Kingston Japanese guitar through a Silvertone amp with cracked speakers which further drove the intense distortion. Blues aficionado Bruce Iglauer formed the famed Alligator Records specifically to produce and release the band’s self-titled, debut album (1971).

Duster Bennett – “The internationally acclaimed one man band” – was a relative newcomer to the scene. He’d signed to Mike Vernon’s Blue Horizon label in 1968 and recorded his debut album backed by Peter Green and John McVie of Fleetwood Mac. His fourth album, Fingertips, and single ‘Sweet Sympathy’ came out locally on the Toadstool label to coincide with the tour.

Gudinski had set up Toadstool as a Mushroom budget subsidiary imprint to issue various blues records, also including Hound Dog’s Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers and Natural Boogie and Korner’s Get Off My Cloud, plus albums by Flo and Eddie. The most intriguing release on Toadstool was the Levi’s Blues EP, featuring three tracks recorded live at the Melbourne Showgrounds concert by Armstrongs’ engineer Ian McKenzie. Essentially issued as a promotional release, you got handed a copy of the EP when you bought a new pair of Levi’s jeans.

Hound Dog says “Thank you, honey! I’ve been thinking about something, I don’t know what it is, but this is how the blues is, what you say?” and launches into a slow blues, ‘Everything’s Alright’. Korner does ‘Baby Doll’ and Bennett ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ with the audience clapping and singing along enthusiastically. Presumably the whole show was recorded so one wonders whatever happened to the mastertapes? Levi’s Blues is a great little period piece, a genuine collectors’ item, so if you ever see a copy second-hand be sure to snap it up.

In the wake of the tour, sadly three of the main participants died within the next 18 months – Hound Dog in December 1975, Bennett in March 1976 and King that December. It truly was the end of an era. Korner passed away in January 1984, Sonny in March 1986 and McGhee in February 1996.

Sleepy Greg Lawrie (Musician)

“I was playing guitar with Matt Taylor for that tour, it was after Carson had broken up. I remember the Sydney gig, at the Hordern Pavilion. It was great to watch Freddie King and his band play. They were one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen, absolutely incredible. They were like Weather Report but playing Texas blues. They were all seasoned, professional session players in that band, unapproachable in many ways. I’ve got a feeling they were doing a world tour, they’d been to England and Alexis Korner had helped them out. That’s why they had him on the Australian tour.

“Then there was Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers. Just two guitars and drums but what an incredible sound! They were one of the rock ’n’ rollinest bands ever; completely authentic, 100% raw blues, real rock ’n’ roll blues. Hound Dog tore the roof off every night with his slide guitar. He was a fantastic player, very basic but he hit what needed to be hit, no more, no less. He had Ted Harvey on drums, who’d been Elmore James’ drummer for years.

“So they combined the best elements of Elmore James, Robert Nighthawk and JB Hutto and the Hawks, just like they were playing in Maxwell Street, Chicago. As well as their own stuff, they played all Elmore’s big hits, ‘Dust My Broom’, ‘Shake Your Moneymaker’. Genuine rock ’n’ roll blues, straight out of the south side of Chicago, as raw as hell but played with great spirit and real heart and soul.

“Half way through his set he’d say, ‘We’re gonna have a break for five minutes, and I mean five minutes’. He was back on stage in three and a half minutes! Those guys really meant it. They weren’t just playing the blues for the fun of it, they were singing about their life. They really shed blood for their music, it came across in their playing and their singing. Young white guys like us might have thought we were playing the blues, but really we were barely learning how to crawl. It wasn’t just entertainment, they were singing about things like civil rights, impoverishment. That’s so rare now; it’s all about show business and making money, playing in big blues clubs. All those old blues guys lived hard lives, nobody comes close to those guys now. They were the real deal.

“When Hound Dog played at the Bondi Lifesaver, they played all night. I walked out just as the sun was coming up and I could still hear them roaring inside. Then Matt and I were doing a gig at Frenchs’ Tavern in Taylor Square and someone said that Hound Dog was listening outside. I went to see and sure enough there he was. He was pretty drunk but it seemed like he’d talk to anybody. He had this huge crucifix around his neck; something like the Pope would wear but Hound Dog’s crucifix was bigger than the Pope’s! I just said hello and he replied ‘Hiya, honey!’ and then went on his way. He was a real character.”

Adrian Anderson (Tour manager)

“That was some tour! I’ve still got the T-shirt. Because it was sponsored by Levi’s jeans, we had these huge banners with Levi’s Blues across them. When we went to Perth, we got fitted out with new Levi’s jeans, the whole crew. Matt Taylor and Phil Manning were on that tour, they still remember it.

“We had Eric Robinson from Jands looking after the stage set-up. Prior to the tour we’d been sending faxes to Freddie King’s manager, asking what speakers they wanted to use. They replied ‘we want Lansing Lansing speakers’ but we kept saying there’s no such thing, we can supply you with J.B.L. Lansing speakers. The tour started in New Zealand, so we’d just landed to meet the bands and the first thing Freddie’s tour manager did was he walked straight up to me, didn’t say ‘how you going?’, he just handed me this piece of paper and said ‘here’s the bill for the freight costs, we’ve brought our own speakers’. Everything was on a tight budget, but he hands me this bill for $350.00 or whatever it was in those days. So that wasn’t a great start.

“But Freddie King was just incredible. One of my favourite songs is ‘She’s a Burglar’, ‘She’s a burglar / she broke into my mind / she’s a burglar / she took ev’rything she could find’. I love that whole album, Burglar. See, all the great guitarists, whether it’s Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix, they all have a signature sound. It comes from their fingers, through their guitars, into the valves, out through the amps. They’re getting a sound that no one else can copy; everyone just tries to emulate it. Freddie King was like that. It was just the sound he got out of those speakers, these Lansing Lansing speakers they had. Mr Lansing had made these speakers just for Freddie, which is why they were so unique. That baffled Eric at first but he knew he could work with that set-up.

“Hound Dog was something else. He also had his signature guitar sound but just raw as anything. I remember when we were going through Customs, when he had to sign something he held the pen like a knife and signed with an X. He couldn’t write. I tried to keep clear of Hound Dog a bit, he was an outrageous character. He was having this disagreement with one of the other musicians. One night this guy had taken a girl up to his hotel room and Hound Dog sat on the steps outside the room and played his harmonica all night. There he was going ‘wha-wha-wha-wheeze-wha’, wailing away mournfully, at four o’clock in the bloody morning!

“In between the main concert dates, the tour broke up into three parts. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Alexis Korner and Hound Dog all played dates at the Bondi Lifesaver in Sydney. Sonny and Brownie did RMIT and La Trobe uni (Agora Theatre) and Hound Dog played at a Caulfield Institute union night. We even got Freddie King on radio 3XY in Melbourne, for an interview on the Sunday night Album Show. “It was the Moomba long weekend, so the concert at the Melbourne showgrounds was on that Monday. That went from 6pm to midnight, while the Hordern Pavilion show in Sydney went from 1pm to 6pm. That same weekend I had to go and collect the guys from Tangerine Dream for the start of their Australian tour. Not long after that I was looking after Split Enz, they’d just made the move from New Zealand. It was all systems go in those days.”

Gerald McNamara (Punter)

“The First Australian Blues/Rock tour was a brilliant idea. I’d started at Caulfield Institute and they had a Friday Union night in the old union building, a federation style building that was adjacent to the main institute. Hound Dog Taylor played that night. There wasn’t even a stage, they just set up on the floor in the corner. I’d forgotten this but Pat Wilson reminded me a few years ago that her band, Rock Granite and the Profiles, were the support act that night.

“The whole thing was pretty spectacular. Hound Dog was a mischievous old bugger. He had this beaten up, old no-name guitar that had once been in tune many years ago; he didn’t worry about the intricacies of actually tuning his guitar. It was only two guitars and drums but it was fabulous stuff, just raucous, outrageous rock ’n’ roll. He only knew how to play slide guitar one way, that raw gut bucket sound just roaring away.

“After every song he’d say to the crowd, ‘thank you, mama!’. He was swigging away on this bottle of whisky and when he finished that he opened his guitar case and there was another bottle in there, ready to go. He was always well equipped for any eventuality.

“As well as having played all night at the Bondi Lifesaver, there’s the legendary anecdote about when he walked on the stage in Perth, he said to the crowd ‘Hello Paris!’. He’d been on tour for so long all he could remember was that he was overseas somewhere and the city started with the letter ‘P’. There’s also the famous story about him shooting one of his guitar players after they’d had an argument, this was back in the States.

“I also went to the concert at the Melbourne showgrounds on the Monday. It was great to see the whole show. Duster Bennett was a one-man band, just him, his guitar, harmonica on a rack and a bass drum. He walked a fine line between being a genuine blues artist and a circus act. Alexis Korner was a real professional, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee were relatively erudite in comparison to Hound Dog. Brownie would lead Sonny on stage, he was blind and could hardly walk but they made a great team. Apparently they used to argue all the time. Those old blues guys all came from the deep south so they’d lead hard lives. It was fabulous to have seen Freddie King, ’cause most people wouldn’t have even known he ever came out to Australia.”