Sunday 26 June 2011

The Flying Calvittos - Lucky To Be Australian 7" Groove PRS2728, 1979


Ain't nothing like closure. Whether it's hearing from a band member from some no-count band forgotten by everyone except us, or nailing the last sleeve variation on some it-never-ends conundrum. Twoscore and eleven weeks ago we started this blog with Squeal Like A Pig, the punk track from The Flying Calvittos' Goodbye You Spaghetti Punks EP. We said then we'd come back for the rest. We won't ever split a record over two posts again, and to provide closure on this one we today present The Flying Calvittos: The DIY years.

The pick of the rest of the tracks for us is Lucky To Be Australian. The lyrics list events that play into the Australian psyche of being doomed at the arse-end of the world: DarwinGranvilleHobart BridgeWest Gate BridgeVoyager; even our old mates Fraser (not a popular guy among the, er, Dagoes Italian-Australian community) and the Hilton Bomber get a mention. We're exhorted to forget all that; the defiance lifting the crunching, elegiac riff into something beautiful. We half think this may have been used on a commercial or TV show theme some time in the decades between then and now - let us know if you remember.

Fastnet, about yet another disaster, is where we hear some definite Residents influence, maybe a bit of 1979's Eskimo. This approach is continued on the first of the Mamma tracks, Mamma's Recipe, a fine use of echo, sound effects and spoken snatches, perhaps presaging On U Sound's approach in the next decade. And to finish, Mamma's Table is where our boys descend into Italian new wave novelty - even piano accordion gets a look-in.

There's a self-released CD called 26 Hundred Moons floating around with all these tracks plus recordings from later in the 80s and the mid 90s.

Lucky To Be Australian [Download]


Fastnet [Download]


Mamma's Recipe Feeds The People [Download]


Mamma's Table [Download]

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi buddy

I always thought these guys were from melbourne...have recollections of hearing them on the J's back in the day and could have sworn they always announced them as being from Melbourne..

Anonymous said...

Had this record years ago - still remember it like yesterday - very cool.