Thursday, April 30, 2020

30 april 2020

Current state of my world: I haven't played a record since I played the Simple Minds New Gold Dream album a few days ago. I did get Don Walker's 1981 (?)  soundtrack to Freedom out for some reason but I have not yet put it on. That might happen.

Last night I recorded a lecture (due next week), this morning I plan to do another one, due tomorrow. I actually started a couple of times this morning but found it impossible to collect my thoughts. What a prima donna. 

It's cold, I have a lot of work-related reading to do, and a lot of emails to send, and potentially some shopping too (just for necessities). Good times (I guess). 

Sunday, April 26, 2020

simple minds new gold dream 81+

Sometimes I want to take my past self to task a bit. I bought the 12" single of 'Glittering Prize', and I really liked the two other singles off this record, why the fuck didn't I buy this album when it came out? As it transpired I only got it very recently and that's just weird. I can only imagine odd decisions being made by my 16 year old brain like 'it's only got nine songs on it', etc (I read somewhere that they had a tenth but lost it, which is hilarious).

It is totally my kind of album, I mean it's sort of pathetic that they went through three drummers while they were making it, particularly considering there is so much programmed drums/drum machines on here. And the cover art is kind of... what it is and the title is blah. But it's a really great sounding record with a lot of very catchy, very classy touches and I am firmly in favour of it.

I have been drawing tonight mainly, eating too much and watching Year of the Rabbit which is a lot of fun. Also working but look, it's Sunday I don't have to work relentlessly do I?

friends

I've been getting a lot of these kinds of requests lately, more on instagram (a couple a day) than on facebook, but this one is easier to post here, the instagram ones are of course tiny. I am also getting tagged in vanilla (I believe the expression goes) but nonetheless sexualised posts on insta. It's pretty interesting. If fb/insta knew me anywhere near as much as it thinks it does, it would know this kind of thing is not attractive to me in any way. It is interesting to me, because I am interested in the world, but I would never follow my interest in what Bonita Bunting is supposed to be offering to me by friending him/her or clicking on the WhatsApp link. (I know there's something wrong with me but I am genuinely offended by photographs of nude people, as much as I am offended by images of dead people and don't start me on dead animals.)

Bonita's face is kind of haunting because her features look slightly too big for her head - sorry sweetheart if this is a real picture of a real person, I'm sure your head will grow, just like that pineapple behind you has grown though hopefully not quite as much - she has the air of a 99% perfect photoshop. I note also she currently has precisely no friends, which I guess means either that she was launched onto the fb world to 5 million 55-y-o men at once, or that I am very special to her in her young widowhood.

Probably her husband was a soldier, hence the poppies on her head today. I don't know if I could be brave or resilient enough for her in contrast with him, though by the same token, he's a dead and I'm an alive.

writing reviews


I'm amazed that, now there's no money in it, how few reviews get published of interesting things. I was seized briefly by the desire to revive my old fanzine ways of the 1980s-90s and write long interesting (?) (to me anyway) rambling reviews of new books and records which might perhaps be equal parts contribution to the promotion of 'the' culture, and in and of themselves a kind of solid statement: 'this stuff is of consequence, look, I wrote a completely extensive response to it'. Probably best if I did it under a range of different names though so it looked like a coterie of interested people were involved, some sort of Algonquinesque crew, they could even argue with each other 'I was interested to see Paleo Negstrom suggest last week in these pages that the Alien Nosejob album was the Something/Anything for our times...' etc.

Like a lot of idiots my age, my first real experience of a cultural bible was the NME, which I devoured greedily between 1978 and about 1983. I have probably told you this before: I was entranced by the NME in the late 70s when it was (almost) all about punk rock, so I read all about the people, and particularly loved the magazine's graphics, but at the same time I had no idea how to access the music at all (and wasn't even sure I'd like it if I did access it). To take on punk/new wave at the age of 13 would have been very, very out there, so/and/but I experienced it at arm's length and followed the comings and goings of whoever - people generally now cast out from the canon, for better or worse - Jimmy Pursey or the Pleasers (not the New Zealand band but the 'Thamesbeat' one) who modelled themselves on the 1964 (or earlier) Beatles, and whose wikipedia page is so fucking bizarre I can't let it stand as it, it's appalling - and others who are consolidated within it, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe etc. I knew a lot about these acts (not that I've retained the information) without having any idea what they sounded like (I was just inspired then to actually listen to the Pleasers. It is what it is). It was like being obsessed by Middle Earth or something, a panoply of codes and tropes understood through one multi-faceted filter. Additionally, there was a comparable (in terms of 'scene', probably better in terms of music) music scene in Melbourne itself I would have loved, but which I had no way of accessing.

My brain was trained by the NME in the ways of How to Proselytise, not that I have always wanted to do so but I have often tried to. I think on reflection it's the platform rather than the work itself that matters. The people who wrote in the NME mattered not because of anything they knew or thought but because they were writing for the NME. The NME was, by the way, a thoroughly manipulated environment - I appreciate that now, and I realised eventually (probably by the end of the 80s) it missed out a lot of amazing things because its writers actually didn't know or understand half as much as they thought they did, and they were also captive to their own biases etc. I don't even know where I'm going with this now. Probably I said it. These days I mainly prefer to write reviews of animals, anyway.

This morning Nancy woke me up crying from the other room 6/10.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

lol tolhurst's cured

A lot of people have asked me what I think of Lol Tolhurst's memoir Cured, which was published, I guess, three or so years ago and which I scored for not much money a couple of weeks ago in one of those cheap book pop up shops in town I shouldn't go into because of coronavirus.

Well, I'll tell you. Like a lot of books, I could have really fixed this one up, and made it a lot less cliched and a lot more interesting, but maybe that would have been less than true to its author. The first thing that bugs me is Tolhurst's constant sniping at the British new towns - The Cure are (is?) from Crawley, and he doesn't miss a chance to slag off Crawley for boringness. Jesus man you were living in Britain in the 70s, that's a beyond-boring situation. Don't blame Crawley and in any case, Crawley (and your alcoholic father and your indulgent mother and your creative friends, etc) made you and from what I can tell you may not be a multimillionaire but it seems likely you don't have to work, you just work for pleasure (I haven't heard any of LT's post-Cure work but I kind of want to).* 

I would also like to say that LT does not give himself any easy passes in detailing his alcoholism and plainly he can see it kind of ruined his life for a few decades there (unless, like Crawley, shrugging it off made him the man he is today). 

He doesn't go into intricate detail about his court case against the Cure, probably because it's too painful (he certainly has a lot to say about how bad he feels about it). 

Alright I'm not writing a formal review or anything, I didn't take notes while I was reading, and also, I have started drinking a bit of whisky so I am finding it hard to type, so that might do it. I think ultimately not a bad light read, some funny bits, some sad bits, good insights into the band (such as it is - i.e. let's be fair it hasn't really been a real band for a long time, if you know what I mean) and he seems like a decent enough guy but lay off Crawley ffs. 

*Understand that in dealing with me, you are dealing with someone who recently bought the only Echo and the Bunnymen album to not feature Ian McCulloch. 

Monday, April 20, 2020

55

Nothing much to say. I turned 55 today. Big deal. I had too many zoom meetings, for different purposes. Helmi spent the day in bed which seems smart. I imagine she will be running around like a fool in a few hours, when I want to go to sleep.
This might be Nancy contemplating that eventuality I'm not sure. Well it's definitely Nancy. I'm not sure what she's contemplating though, or why she hasn't cleaned up that mess. 

Thursday, April 16, 2020

worst problem ever

So I guess the lesson is, whatever you expect, don't expect it, just expect that your measly mind won't be up to imagining what will actually happen.
What worried me was that Nancy would be hostile to Helmi. What never occurred to me was that Helmi would bond with me, essentially (presumably as the Feeder) and be antagonistic to Nancy. Or, that Nancy would just choose to retreat under those circumstances. 
Well, I'm still hopeful that this will pass and that Helmi will not be eternally hostile (I don't know what I'll do if this is still a problem in, you know, five years) but all I'm going to say right now is, that's weird. 
Perhaps I should go and stay in a hotel for a few days and they can work it out amongst themselves Lord of the Flies style. 

* Helmi is a little fucked up, which is what you get with a rescue cat, they tend not to show up with too much optimism and bliss. The flat across the way is being mildly renovated I think in preparation for new tenants, and so someone is tapping away with a hammer over there - I assume that's what it is. Helmi was sitting next to me (Nancy is at the end of the bed - poor Nancy - but at least they sniffed and did not hiss, so I feel things are improving) and when she heard the tapping not only did she get flustered she started growling and pacing the room, even a second ago hiding under the cupboard.
Both of these cats get freaked out by external noise and I think in a way they never really feel secure, or perhaps they feel secure briefly and then something happens and they are like 'god, I was an idiot! Now there's tapping! What was I thinking!' but I note that neither of them seems to think I can protect them in any way, which is probably more what cats are like - individualists - than anything special about these two, though I have certainly known cats who will run to their owners for safety. Dogs and humans, with their understanding of and dependence on hierarchies, are so different though.

** It would be hard for me to deny that one of the four or five books I'm presently reading is Lol Tolhurst's memoir from a few years ago, so I won't. I'll tell you more about it if you want.

*** Yes this is my bed. Yes I am in bed, we are all on the bed. Is that OK. 

labour saving devices

Alright I know I am about to turn 55, but I am not necessarily always a complete technological idiot and indeed I am lazy enough to care enough to understand enough about technology to figure out how to get what I want out of it. 
So of course we are required at the moment to record our lectures at home. It is not straightforward or pleasant as an activity and recording takes time. I have tended to try to record my lectures onto powerpoint, which does (who knew!) have a function whereby you can record a narration to slides. Powerpoint seems to regard the recording of voice to slides as of minor importance (ie there is no way of seeing levels or anything, and indeed there is nothing to indicate whether you are actually recording anything - it tells you you're recording, but it is ambivalent about whether you're recording complete silence or the talking you want to record). 
I have four lectures to record before next week. I did one in the afternoon, it was what it was (as they say). It worked. I converted it to an MP4 and uploaded it to the system. All easy peasy lemon squeezy. (Well it wasn't EPLS, I spent two hours in the morning getting access to the computer etc, it's something the university has provided me with, but essentially I got it done). 
Then, I recorded my second lecture. Turned it into an MP4. Just before I uploaded the fucker I checked and found there was actually no sound recorded to it at all. Complete silence. For whatever reason, the computer registers no sound either through my microphone which worked fine a few hours before, or through its inbuilt microphone.
So much time wasted. So boring. Tomorrow I will have to work out what's wrong (I've contacted university IT and 'logged a job') and, assuming I can do it again, do it again. 
Meanwhile, none of us are getting any younger. And it's 4:02 as I write this by the way, but that's because I fell asleep watching Mad as Hell and woke up just before 12 (btw I have since watched that episode of Mad as Hell, it was pretty good). 

i call this one 'lost youth'


siouxsie and the banshees' kaleidoscope

A few days ago I got it into my head that I should have some Siouxsie and the Banshees records. I am not sure I ever really owned any before but I was into the singles, I liked the Creatures too. So what was I waiting for? And why did I wait so long? Well, you know, they broke up in like 1993 or something so I had to be really certain. I started off with Kaleidoscope and I have to say that aside from listening to the Glitter Band in the car, I have not listened to anything else. It's immense! I could go on but I think I've said the important stuff.

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

finished the krazy book

So it took me more than three weeks but I finally finished reading Michael Tisserand's biography of George Herriman which I mentioned last month. It is a very well-researched and comprehensive piece of work about a man who, strangely, created a magnificent oeuvre and was a genuinely brilliant artist but who seemed hellbent on being nothing more than genial and self-effacing. In that regard, Herriman is a disappointment because he made no particular grand gestures or outrageous statements; he seemed to firstly be nice to everyone and secondly, sadly, afflicted by a host of awful ailments. He died a widow and though young by our standards (mid-60s) quite debilitated in his last few years.

Tisserand sticks to the theme of Herriman's African-American background and continues to make a lot of it, which I think in the circumstances is valid. The Herrimans are absolutely wedded to the lie of his whiteness (they buy into a restricted housing area in Hollywood) and his work adheres to the racial tropes of the period he's working in (though Tisserand does find instances where he is able - largely through use of whimsical funny animals - to veer away from convention).

In short, I will say, you could not ask for a better and more thoughtful biography of a major artistic figure of the early 20th century. I guess the problem is that, while Herriman's impact was huge and indeed continues (Tisserand even gets into the muddy waters of whether Mickey Mouse is an outcome of Krazy Kat - seems probable - but is that something to congratulate anyone about?) the man himself was an introvert who left no record of a complicated inner life. I will have to say though that I learnt a lot about newspapers and other media in the US in the early 20th century and, remarkably because I never even considered for a moment that there would be even the slightest interesting element to boxing, I learnt some stuff about the extraordinary role boxing played in US race relations in the 19-teens and twenties.

Thursday, April 09, 2020

'Revving towards tomorrow today': Suicide Records and Lethal Weapons

* This is an article I wrote probably in late 2007 for the music magazine Mess + Noise, but which now appears to have disappeared from the internet (although it did appear in a print edition, I now gather from old emails), so I figured I'd repost it here as it was a lot of work, is not terrible, and there has been a little interest on social media (see screen caps at the very end). (Note this is the version I sent to Mess + Noise, it might have been edited further before being published, the only thing I did to this was correct the ridiculous mental-block-derived-glitch of misspelling Garry Gray's name a few times). 

The one thing everyone remembers about him is his cowboy boots.


Consensus suggests as well that he always wore white and was short, bald, and prone to rock 'n' roll excesses. He was the most unlikely godfather to punk rock imaginable, though if that was the mantle he was seeking, it soon became clear that few were going to thank him for picking seven arguably young 'n' aggressive groups from round the country to sign to his record label. The year was 1978. He was Barrie Earl. The label was Suicide. The bands were Teenage Radio Stars, JAB, X-Ray-Z, The Survivors, Wasted Daze, Negatives and the Boys Next Door. The one album released was the compilation Lethal Weapons.

The dying days of the Whitlam government had seen the way paved for public broadcasting, and at the same time the long-established ABC was continuing to reach out – as it had long done in often fairly haphazard ways – to the youth market. Yet the late 70s, according to Bruce Milne who was twenty in 1977, were a frustrating time for anyone who “didn't like prog rock or mainstream stuff. There was nothing exciting. You would read with such envy what it was like musically in '65, or the 1950s.”

Groups that would later seem to naturally come together under the 'new wave' umbrella had already been around for a while. In Australia, that meant Garry Gray and Chris Walsh's bands (Judas and the Traitors and later, The Reals) in Melbourne, JAB in Adelaide, The Saints in Brisbane, Radio Birdman in Sydney, Slick City Boys and Pus in Perth, and no doubt more. None of these people seemed to know about each other, or see themselves as anything but musical outcasts, until a unifying movement was identified by the media: 'punk rock'. By 1977 it was seen as an international – initially, many saw it primarily as British – phenomenon. A small coterie of Australian 'punk' groups, some of which had barely changed for years, some of which had stripped back their sound for the sake of seeming/being new and cool, began to be identified. The punk experience was replicated everywhere, spontaneous enthusiasm fired by awareness of the international movement. Many punks in Australia read about punk in foreign magazines and imagined what it was like – even tried to replicate it musically – without actually having heard it. The imagined version was often better than the real thing, and often blended well with it.

Milne recalls that in Melbourne, the punk scene got a shot in the arm when Keith Glass Band, or KGB, got a residency at the Tiger Room in Richmond. The group played a lot of exciting, obscure 60s covers - anathema to contemporary mainstream rockers who wanted to forget that archaic nonsense - and asked young local groups to support them. “That became the essential night to go out,” says Milne. “The Boys Next Door and Teenage Radio Stars had their first gigs. It was the meeting of the very, very small Melbourne punk scene. Sports were another important band, partly because they were basically playing R 'n' B, but they gave a lot of supports to punk bands too.”

Milne became close to one group in particular, The Babeez, who changed their name to News in 1978. The Babeez rented a run down weatherboard house in Faraday Street in Carlton. The house became a focus of Melbourne punk, and when Melbourne's first punk festival, Punk Gunk, was in danger of being cancelled because the hall that had been booked was withdrawn at the last minute, the festival was held in the street outside the Babeez house. Teenage Radio Stars (then known as Spred), Babeez and the Boys Next Door all played.

Paul Norton, who had a top ten hit while being managed by Earl ten years later, recalls him “with his cowboy boots, Indian jewellery, messy hair, drooping moustache and a three day growth, sort of a scruffy David Crosby.” Author Clinton Walker, who ran the punk fanzine Pulp with Bruce Milne (see Walker’s Inner City Sound for a 1978 tirade against Suicide) says “I'm sure everyone's impression was that he was just some hippy hustler, I mean he had a beard, and that was reason enough back then for eternal contempt.” Ash Wednesday, who played synthesiser in JAB, remembers Earl as owning “a sports car which sagged in the middle when he got into it”. Chris Walsh, bass player for The Negatives, speaks of a man “5 foot nothing, shirt unbuttoned down to his belt-buckle and massive amounts of bling.” Eric Gradman, who played in a number of hip 'Carlton' bands in the mid- to late-70s, recalls a “short, balding, energetic” man with a “rough charm”; Gradman also recalls fighting with Earl, but doesn't remember what the fight was about. Norton concedes Earl was “likeable enough”.

No-one seemed to have a picture of Barrie Earl back in 2007 but here he is, photo by Adrian Barker, stolen from Punk Journey in 2020

Barrie Earl must have looked ridiculously conspicuous in the crowd but he was probably the guy with the biggest plans at Punk Gunk that day. He'd been involved in music festivals, and management, for at least a decade; he'd managed New Zealand group The Cleves, and Mississippi, as well as the legendary blues singer Wendy Saddington. According to Wednesday, Earl’s cavalier attitude to Saddington’s career was far from professional. “He had the reputation of getting acts to a certain point and then not being able to take it any further,” recalls Norton.

In the mid-1990s James Freud, the vocalist in Teenage Radio Stars, was interviewed for Kimble Rendall's Mushroom Records twentieth anniversary special, Counting the Beat. He recalled that “Michael [Gudinski] has always been fairly progressive, and he had this guy Barrie who'd just been hanging out in London and came back and said this is where it's at and Michael said OK let's do a punk label and they did… We did one record and it was a bloody disaster.”

In 1978, Bohdan, the singer, guitarist and the original 'B' in JAB (Johnny, Ash, Bohdan – second guitarist Bobby Stopa and bass player Pierre just confused the issue when they joined) told Juke magazine that JAB had got involved in the label because, having heard someone was planning to release some 'new wave' records, he “thought I'd just come and see him.” Earl was up for it. Wednesday recalls “We went round for the pre-signing talk at Barrie's apartment in South Yarra. There's a white fluffy carpet, nice white fluffy lounge, a white afghan hound, and a nice human lady incarnation of the hound. Barry gave us a tacky initiation speech; it was all "hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands, money money money"; he behaved as if he was right in there at the pulse and he knew what was happening…”

JAB had relocated from Adelaide a year previously; their formative period had been extreme, with many of the shows they put on in the hills ending in violence and brutality amongst their fans and followers. Michael Gudinski's mettle was, surely, tested the first time he saw the group; Earl took him to see them rehearse near the Mushroom offices and, says Wednesday, “there we were, not really sure he was going to show up, Bohdan was in the full SS get up, singing 'jab jab jab it to death'. I had a few iron crosses on my shirt too. It was all the shock value; our knowledge of German history was molded on Hogan's Heroes. There we are and the door opens and Michael comes in and stands there nervously laughing...”

“I don't know if we were really a punk band,” adds Wednesday. “It was synthetic shock rock. Anything that was taboo was ok with Bohdan, and he wanted to be noticed at any cost. We'd evolved independently of punk.”

“We certainly weren't into punk,” agrees Stopa. “We didn’t try to look like a cohesive thing although Johnny tried to get me to change my name... I wasn't going to change my name to some ridiculous thing I'd be embarrassed about five years on. Most of the guys on that record, you couldn't really call punk. Guys like Rowland Howard and Nick Cave they were upper-middle-class. It was all theoretical to them.”

Another Adelaide import to Melbourne's punk scene was X Ray Z, regarded by many as dubious because they were, through no fault of their own, a few years older. They'd come together as Rufus Red, “a more melodic style band, really, which had kind of evolved in the early 70s”, says their guitarist, singer and main songwriter Peter Doley. Some close to the band compared Rufus Red to Split Enz; they were theatrical and dressed up for shows. Their drummer, John Wilkinson, “came into it with a deep background in modern jazz – this led to the arrangements being complex and interesting; the lyrics were always a story, that was Peter's thing, he always had a story to tell,” Wilkinson recalls. In Melbourne they were briefly represented by Jon Blanchfield, who'd released some of Lobby Loyde's great mid-70s solo albums, and Blanchfield and Wilkinson found a way for the group to record some demos. The next step, according to Doley, was to “scratch our way in playing shitty little gigs. Then we were chucked out into the wilds of Melbourne, going through Premier Artists. We changed in response to what we saw; we realised that the softer stuff wasn't the go, and we got a harder edge.


“It was a case of getting a bunch of new songs and just 'play as fast as you can!' We copped a bit of flack for being pseudo-punk. I would have been thirty at the time, which was certainly old compared to the Boys Next Door. But we were all exposed to punk stuff. The credo that ‘everybody can have a go’ was really quite prevalent, and everyone was banging away these funny little bands chucked together making horrible noises. It was quite lively.”

“I really liked the new direction,” says Wilkinson now. “I was very fond of Rufus Red, but we'd picked up a bass player in Adelaide called James Lloyd and he came to Melbourne with us, and James and I had a nice rhythmic brotherhood there. I wanted to tighten up the rhythm section and give it a punchy sound, rather than before when it was a bit waffly.”

X-Ray-Z made a rugged, bolshie EP for Mushroom records, 'Poor Image'. Somehow this – and the connection with Gudinski's Premier Artists booking agency – saw them shifted sideways to become a member of the Suicide Records family.

There were seven Suicide bands, and only two of them didn't live in Melbourne. Sydney's Wasted Daze are somewhat mysterious, though main guitarist/singer Terry Wilson had been a member of the late 60s progressive group Tully. The Survivors were legends in their home town of Brisbane, a highly popular and adept band whose sets were mainly cool 60s covers. Their contribution to Lethal Weapons was a single that had already been issued by the band themselves, and a multiple-album deal came to nothing. With 2007 hindsight, the biggest bands on Suicide look like the Boys Next Door – whose recordings for the label would be the group's first release – and the Teenage Radio Stars, Suicide's pop hopefuls who brought Sean Kelly and James Freud, later of the Models, their first wide exposure.

The Boys Next Door's, and the Teenage Radio Stars', tracks for Lethal Weapons are probably the weakest on the record. The first band were, perversely, covering Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood's 'These boots were made for walking', alongside some fairly straight punk songs, 'Masturbation Generation' and 'Boy Hero'. The Boys Next Door’s charismatic singer Nick Cave spoke appositely, however, when he told an anonymous Juke journalist in May 1978 that record companies had “thought the punk thing was just a fashionable craze. They didn't understand it was just new groups who'd be making music for a long time.” TRS (as they were often called at the time) had probably been retitled with a name nicked by Earl – there was a fairly prominent group in England at the time called Radio Stars – and he then coerced them into rewriting, almost note-perfect, a song by the British group The Vibrators, 'Baby Baby' as 'I wanna be your baby'. Earl was audacious to suggest this but the song itself – in either version – is hardly earth-shattering; Sean Kelly's lyrics are amusingly lame, and the stuttery guitar line stolen from 'Sweet Home Alabama' is catchy, but that's about it. The group's other tracks have more appeal. 

1978 wasn't over before James Freud had told the world that the Teenage Radio Stars' punk outlook was just a pose to get their foot in the door. But there was one band on Lethal Weapons who were probably the most genuine, and the most short-changed. The Negatives' Garry Gray told the same anonymous Juke journalist that he'd been trying to get his band going somewhere for years; the group, which also featured Chris Walsh, a uniquely original and creative rock bassist, and drummer Peter Cave – not Nick Cave’s brother – had emerged from the wilds of Mount Waverley.

“You could call us the Mount Waverley three,” says Gray. “Chris Walsh, Tracy Pew, Garry Gray. I met Chris at primary school, Tracy at Sunday school. When we got to be teenagers in the 1970s, Melbourne was the most boring, predictable place on the planet: Mount Waverley was the epitome of The Stooges' "No Fun". Straightsville, a bunch of squares...except for us guys.... We set about making it a whole lot more interesting and our insatiable curiosity for music took us exactly to where we dreamed of going...more or less.”

Gray is planning to issue a lost album by the pre-Negatives group, The Reals, which he describes as “one driven focused thing.” This band had featured Ollie Olsen, who changed their name and, necessarily, their line-up when Olsen decamped to form the Young Charlatans with Rowland Howard. Howard's band The Obsessions, Bruce Milne recalls, were due to debut alongside the Reals (not to be confused with Dubbo group The Reels) and the Boys Next Door at a show Milne had organised at Swinburne Tech. Milne recalls the Suicide label as “half baked”, adding “I was suggesting to bands I liked that they should see a lawyer. The Babeez, they were probably called News by then, took the meetings but basically decided they would stay independent.”

Gray says now that his reaction to being signed to Suicide was “totally naive. I saw it as normal. I think we were playing at the Tiger Lounge and Earl came up and said, "I can make you a star" or something... and we said, ‘yeah, right, you know where to find us.’” Walsh believes that it was obvious from the outset that The Negatives were brought in purely to make up the numbers, and that TRS and the Boys Next Door were the only bands Suicide, Earl and Mushroom were really interested in. 

Wasted Daze did Bo Diddley covers, and the Boys Next Door were also covering a song (as were TRS, let's face it). Earl, Gray recalls, “wanted the Negatives to do the Roky Erickson single "The Interpreter".....great song, but the fact that we were told to do someone else's song was like waving the red flag of rebellion at Chris and myself....we'd been working for a few years on original material and had no intention of releasing cover songs as our first record.” Instead, after a few unsuccessful attempts at recording live favourites like ‘Nothing to Say’, they recorded a slow and atypical original, 'Planet on the prowl'. It was over six minutes long, probably the reason the Negatives were the only Lethal Weapons band to get just one track.

For reasons unclear a number of the tracks on Lethal Weapons were produced by established musicians. The best-known, and probably strangest, pairing was Skyhooks' Greg Macainsh and the Boys Next Door; the last of the 70s Skyhooks albums, Hot for the Orient, tilts at the 'new wave'. Eric Gradman, who'd been a friend of Gudinski's at school but more importantly a well-known performer in Melbourne's mid-70s underground bands like the Sharks, the Bleeding Hearts and later Man and Machine, was brought in to produce 'Planet on the Prowl', which Gray says “wasn't very representative of the Negatives – it was representative of Eric Gradman.” Gradman now responds equivocally that no doubt participants had their “own (incommunicable) mental picture… I remember recording them as raw sounding as I could manage and then STRUGGLING to meld that with a (my) kind of psychedelic/B movie aesthetic… I remember Garry being sullen and uncooperative; [perhaps] I was trampling his garden.” The Negatives, says Walsh, didn’t hear Gradman’s final mix of their song until the album was released.

Mike Rudd, best known as the man at the centre of Spectrum and the recently-defunct Ariel, produced JAB's tracks. His explanation of his involvement shows the ways in which Lethal Weapons was an element in a wider network in which Earl and his erstwhile business partner Phil Jacobsen were the starmakers.

“When that album was being mooted,” recalls Rudd, “I imagined that I'd retired from gigging, so somebody at Mushroom/Suicide thought I should get involved in producing one of the bands. It turned out to be JAB. I was a novice as a producer, and I think it was JAB's first experience as a band in the studio too... I thought Bohdan was (mostly) very funny, but with humour running somewhat counter to the original premise of punk, JAB's lifespan was always going to be limited. The recording was pretty rushed, but I'm not sure that more time would have benefited the tracks.”

Rudd describes Earl as “a poseur hairdresser who affected a cockney accent and went to bed with his boots on. He adored hanging round with musicians and the music scene in general, and when Ariel was in London, he was our manager Phil Jacobsen's guide and advisor… Barrie had an unfortunate knack of eventually getting up everybody's nose. He talked me into getting a most unfortunate perm at a London hairdresser's.' Rudd has, however, maintained a friendship with Jacobsen.

Bobby Stopa remembers Rudd's work on JAB's songs as 'fine… I don't know if he really brought out the best in the band, it didn't exactly sound the way we wanted. I don't think the Boys Next Door’s songs were very good either, the whole album was pretty ad hoc!”

Engineer for the majority of the tracks on Lethal Weapons was Michael Shipley, an Australian with recent experience working with the Sex Pistols – who has since gone on to become a world-famous record producer. Wednesday remembers that Shipley told him that John Lydon/Rotten had wanted to put tape loops and synthesisers into the Pistols' mix – a little like the way Wednesday used such sounds in JAB – but that Malcolm McLaren wouldn't let him.

X Ray Z “recorded our tracks pretty quickly”, says Peter Doley. “It was all done on the cheap: we recorded over 2nd or 3rd generation tapes - Someone said Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs at Sunbury were on them. We had to mix it really quick because the tape was dropping out!”

The group's 'Three More Glorious Years' (incorrectly credited on the sleeve as 'Three Glorious Years') was a classic political anthem, written by Doley in disgust at the Liberal party's win that year. “A fair few of us were bearing the brunt of Fraser's dole queues,” he says. “It's a satirical send up of the chosen man. I'm still writing a few songs like that, and of course Howard's the latest version…”

Lethal Weapons is a queer fish, right down to its presentation. The cover image – blood oozing from a gun – is bizarre, and the credits are so convoluted you almost need a pen and paper to work out which tracks were recorded by whom  (the 2007 reissue corrects this absurdity with a straightforward track listing). The original LP was pressed in white vinyl as a limited edition (Chris Walsh and Garry Gray turned theirs into ashtrays). The second pressing – in ordinary black – was, in fact, far more limited because, despite a strong press advertising campaign, the album failed to sell. The Teenage Radio Stars' 'I wanna be your baby' was released as a single, and the group played some interesting supports, such as an unlikely Skyhooks show in August.

There were a number of Suicide package tours into Adelaide and Sydney. Dave Graney, who moved to Adelaide from Mount Gambier in the late 1970s, remembers seeing a show in Rundle Mall. “It was X Ray Zed, the Boys next Door and the Teenage Radio Stars,” he says. “X Ray Zed were a little bit older and had the heaviest sound… The Boys Next Door were Nick, Mick, Phil and Tracy. Rowland hadn't yet joined. Mick had a white trench coat on and was playing his Maton guitar. Tracy had a Rickenbacker bass (very modern at the time) and someone had that piano key tie on. They did ‘Boots’ and ‘Masturbation Generation’ and ‘Earthling in the Orient’ and probably ‘Boy Hero’ along with some covers and other songs. ‘Sex Crimes’? They were great then. Brilliant performers and I saw them every time they came to Adelaide… Teenage Radio Stars had more barre chords and heavier sounding guitars. And dyed blonde hair. I remember their version of that Vibrators song.

“A couple of years later we were in Melbourne playing with Chris Walsh who was in the Negatives. Their song, "Planet on the Prowl" was the most interesting on the actual Suicide album.”

If the way Suicide came together under Barry Earl was spectacularly fast, the way it fell apart was similarly dazzling. Lethal Weapons was released in March 1978; by the end of the year, JAB had split, Barrie Earl was managing James Freud and the Radio Stars which was, effectively, Freud and a whole new backing band; the Negatives were finished, with Garry Grey decamping to Sydney to, he now says, get away from hairdressers. The other groups soldiered on in various forms; X Ray Z changed their name again, to the Popgun Men. Models – the group formed by Ash Wednesday and manager Karen Marks and featuring ex-TRS member Sean Kelly, JAB's Johnny and Ash and, before long, crack bassist Mark Ferrie – were already hugely successful on the live circuit by December of that year.

The Boys Next Door had recorded an album for Suicide, Brave Exhibitions. As its release date dragged on they became a Suicide group no longer (there was no announcement of the label's demise – just the obvious fact it was over) and were instead co-opted into Mushroom. They appealed to Gudinski to let them scrap half the record and record five more songs showcasing the talents of their new member Rowland Howard, and released their first album as Door, Door. Keith Glass was managing them and later released their records on his label Missing Link, during which time of course they became the Birthday Party. In many ways, Missing Link picked up where Suicide left off.

Dave Graney and Clare Moore moved to Melbourne from Adelaide in the late 1970s. “Around that time”, says Graney, “you'd go to parties and there would be these characters who had this brooding cloud about them. Ex-members of Jab. The Suicide records experience seemed to colour the attitude to the music scene of everybody who was involved. They all had this "bad shit" in the background. It gave some people an "out" so as to stop them from ever trying anything again.”

Ash Wednesday says of the album: “I guess it's OK. Half the groups on it are really far from punk. It was really scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with something that was supposedly new wave.” Bobby Stopa is sure that Suicide wasn't “going to have anything more to it - it was basically a subsidiary to Mushroom, and they were probably just trying out bands.” Chris Walsh has the same feeling: “Mushroom was making sure there wasn’t money to be made out of this punk rock thing. They didn’t understand it, but they didn’t want to let it escape.”

Counting the Beat contains a brief segment on Suicide in which Gudinski announces that “The label achieved… nothing.” But Lethal Weapons has become notorious. One of the most extraordinary aspects of its story is that Mushroom's arty arm White Label saw fit to reissue it a mere five years after it first appeared; it was already becoming legendary. Now, Aztec have reissued it with one extra track – a TRS b-side – and spectacular sleevenotes.

It's a peculiar, and in many ways misunderstood chapter in Australian rock history. The artefact itself is fascinating enough; the stories behind it just add to the appeal. Putting aside for a moment the fact that, for many of the 44 people listed on Lethal Weapons' sleeve, this was to be the first (and in some cases most regretted) step in a luminous career, the album itself is diverse and bizarre and, in parts, pretty good. It captures a fractured array of scenes and styles, opportunists rubbing shoulders with great talents who in many cases didn't do much more, under a makeshift banner created by the industry and which at that moment was going by the names ‘punk’ and 'new wave'. It's not representative of a scene, and its derivative elements are more to do with the record industry trying to mould artists into something they could market, rather than a dearth of ideas. Once you take that on board, you can enjoy the ride like you would a shonky ghost train, or movie with hokey special effects, or perhaps, just perhaps, a compilation album with six or seven really good tracks. A trip and a treat. 

Coda: from the 'I got drunk at the Crystal Ballroom' facebook group, April 2020:




Update 20/4/20 - this is a little extra element of the B. Earl story from Beeb Birtles' autobiography.

Saturday, April 04, 2020

helmi

So this is what is known about Helmi so far: she is about three years old, she had a massive litter of kittens once, she likes to hide under the couch i.e. where the action is but always able to retreat; she sometimes comes out and does a nervous tour of the room and then returns. She likes pats, food, and she sometimes does odd things like sit and meow while looking you (ie me) in the eye.

Nancy is not outright hostile, which I'm taking as a very good sign. Nancy will sometimes sit in the doorway and look at Helmi. She (N.) has hissed a couple of times but that's just another word for hello.

'Helmi' was the best of the 25 most popular Finnish names for girls, 'best' including 'not identical with an anglo name'.

By the way yes there is a cat tower. I thought if I don't want Nancy to shred the couch - and I don't - I have to at least give her an option. She has no interest whatsoever in the cat tower but Helmi is very interested in it, not to the point of going inside it but she gravitates towards it every time she does a room tour. Something about it, but I don't know what. 

the early 70s was all juxtaposition

October 1970, everyone had their arms out in the air, from Barbra to, um, whoever that is on the left, to Thumbelina. This is from the Sprin...