The End - My Confession 7" 13199, 1981

The Gap is a suburb in Western Brisbane named after the hole in its inhabitants' aesthetic sensibilities. It takes just one person to break the cycle and that person was Gap High student and guitarist, Brett Myers.

I used to play bass in high school bands. The End started in late 1979, I had just bought my first electric guitar.  I had a friend called Andrew Massey who was a bass player and he lived in my street. He came over and asked me if I wanted to join a band. I said as long as it wasn't with the guy down the road. I used to hear him playing Led Zeppelin songs!

The guy was drummer Colin Barwick, who with Massey on bass and Murray Davis on keyboards formed the first line-up of The End. Barwick was re-educated. Myers :

I wasn't into jamming, so to play anything I had to teach them all these Velvets songs. We played lots of parties, but we'd finish an average of about one song out of ten. It was a real thrash but it was coming from a different direction to everyone else. In those days no one was playing the sort of music I liked. If there had been another band playing it, I probably wouldn't have started.

In the end though, there was.

We used to do a lot of Stooges stuff as well, and New York Dolls. Then I saw the Fun Things and they were doing that stuff really well, so we stopped.

The new, "wimpy" End, started exploring space and dynamics rather than power. In most cases such a development would have us running fast in the other direction, but if there was one guitar player whose non-obvious choices we enjoyed the challenge of watching through the eighties, it was Mr Myers. The End took on Malcolm Cole on violin and keyboards, and swapped Massey for Johnathon Liekliter on bass. Their only single is a sometimes tentative, sometimes assured venture. We like its indirectness, though will champion their more powerful tracks like Birthday Boy, which saw release on a posthumous cassette that Citadel were due to issue on CD last decade before the arse wore out of the pants of the reissue market.

The End moved to Sydney and Myers got together with Ron Peno in Died Pretty. With Peno he could marry more direct rock and roll (and shred with the best of them, 2:42 on), with his more delicate sensibilities.

My Confession [Download]


White World [Download]


Thanks to X-change #4 (1981), and DNA #49 (1986) for the quotes.

October 2013 Update The long promised CD on Citadel is now out. It's not exactly the Hot cassette but it looks great, and Birthday Boy is disc 1 track 1. Buy it here.

The Screaming Tribesmen 7" EMI Custom 13349, 1982

Mick Medew had been playing in a blues band in Brisbane in the late seventies when he met New South Welshman Ronald S. Peno, who had moved to Brisbane in late 1979 at the behest of Bruce Anthon of the Survivors. The aim was to audition for The Credits, but the first rehearsal didn't work out so Peno hooked up with Tony Robertson and they grabbed Medew and eventually Chris Welsh to form the 31st. The 31st married Peno's interest in midwest and New York American rock with Medew's love for '60s punk, via a common interest in Radio Birdman and The Hitmen.

The 31st played for about a year and here it gets complicated, so hold on tight: Brad Shepherd (ex-Fun Things but at this stage post-The Aliens' final line-up) joined briefly before he and then Robertson decamped to The Hitmen. Michael O'Connor from The Apartments joined on bass and the band played a few gigs around August 1981 as Died Pretty. Peno and Medew then grabbed the rhythm section of the Fun Things and The Aliens, John Hartley and Murray Shepherd, and became The Screaming Tribesmen for a small number of shows in December 1981.

So if you learn nothing else today it's that Mick Medew was in Died Pretty and Ron Peno was in the Screaming Tribesmen. Hopefully there's a rock'n'roll pub trivia near you that you can ace with that piece of science.

Peno returned to Sydney at the end of 1981 and the "classic" three piece line-up of the Screaming Tribesmen played around Brisbane with occasional forays to Sydney up until mid-1983, recast as more of a classic '60s punk sounding band. Like other Brisbane garage bands they covered then quite obscure Australian garage - The Missing Links' Some Kinda Fun and the Black Diamonds' See The Way. American songs covered included The Starfires' I Never Loved Her, the contemporaneous Vertebrats' Left In The Dark (from Bomp's Battle Of The Garages LP), and a couple of soul songs as reinvented by the Human Beinz - The Isley Brothers' Nobody But Me and Bobby Blue Bland's Turn On Your Lovelight. The set was rounded out with originals and songs from the 31st. A live set from the time can be heard on Citadel's The Savage Beat CD.

During March 1982 the band recorded four songs at a jingle studio, Speak. In interviews from the time the band bemoaned the fact that there weren't any studios in Brisbane that could capture their sound. I guess Mungo Coats had shut up shop by this point. The sound is pretty thin, and when you hear the massive sound achieved for the next single, Igloo, recorded over 48 hours at Trafalgar in Sydney, you can sympathise with the band somewhat. 500 copies were pressed by EMI Custom and quickly sold out.

I Don't Wanna Know [Download]


Lookin' On [Download]


Love Lite [Download]


Trans 43 [Download]

The Dagoes - We Sell Soul 7" DAG 001, 1980

When it comes to Australasian bands covering Texas sixties punk the pantheon probably consists of Robbie Steele's Maid Of Sugar, Maid Of Spice, Tom Thumb's You're Gonna Miss Me and The
Lime Spiders' version of The Liberty Bell's That's How It Will Be. Radio Birdman might be considered but come on, Tom Thumb get points for getting there first, covering Roky in 1967!

Somewhere down amongst the lesser gods are Adelaide's Dagoes, who covered a song by Roky's first band, The Spades, as their first record in May, 1980. The original We Sell Soul is interesting as a song without much structure, so I can see why Spacemen 3 saw fit to cover it. According to Teenbeat Mayhem it's "crude intense moody howlin' punk", which I guess explains why The Lyres covered it too.

We don't know the vector which brought the song to Adelaide in 1979. Boots of the 7" had been around since 1975 so maybe they were ordered from the States. The Dagoes themselves had been going since March 1978, starting as Daryl Breakaway and the Niggers, becoming the Dagoes in May 1978, and spending a few months and lineups as The Tony Rome Band. They settled and stayed as the Dagoes in September 1979.

Around this time they were covering Pipeline, Teenage Head, (This Ain't) The Summer Of Love, Pablo Picasso, Frenchette, California Sun and We Sell Soul. A quick scan reveals the band were looking to America rather than other favoured musical climes of the time, though in 1980 they added covers of English bands the Flys and The Boys. Originals included crowd favourites Little Blackie, Let's Liquidate and This Perfect Band.

Anyway, after breaking up in December 1979 the band got together on February 26, 1980 and recorded the three songs presented here. Earlier recordings, three of them, had been deemed unfit for release. To avoid the risk of another lecture from Harry Butler, I'll quote him (almost) verbatim from DNA 6:

Being typically Daygoes, the whole event was fraught with problems from start to finish. Firstly they hadn't played together for over two months, so a couple of hours of swift rehearsals were in order. Not only to learn to play together again, but also because some members had forgotten how to play some of the songs. Next several guitar leads were found to be missing, and as playing began Johnny Tomato began breaking drum sticks madly. Despite it all, the group won through and the first song (Blackie) was successfully recorded. Then disaster struck. A combination  of having forgotten the songs and being totally "out of it" resulted in the bassist cracking up and walking out... They resolved to carry on, and overdub the bass parts later. 

The next song attempted was We Sell Soul, and they managed to get it down on almost the first take. Then to Let's Liquidate. No real problems occurred here, but some overdubs were necessary. Firstly the bass had to be put down, and there was deep discussion about what should be played - in the end two bass tracks were recorded. Then some synthesizer was stuck on top. Finally all that was left were the overdubs on We Sell Soul. It was decided that no bass was necessary, so it was just a matter of getting the vocals done. People who listen closely will notice some unusual noises in the background in Dick's rave in the middle of the song. These are the result of the activities of Tony Rome, Frankie Thomas and Harry Butler in trying to inject some humour.

That explains the "who needs a bass player" line, and we assume the Billie Jean King reference is a dig at Doug Thomas's hairdo. In the end, We Sell Soul is probably the weakest of the three tracks, the others displaying a tough yet limber garage sound. As evidenced by this and their later recordings, The Dagoes really only followed their own star anyway, not really caring to sound like anyone else.

We Sell Soul [Download]


Little Blackie [Download]


Let's Liquidate [Download]