Wrong, wrong, wrong. We try to make a habit of not being wrong, but sometimes the mistake was made long ago. This one hurts because I owned this record in the early '80s and purged it almost immediately, deeming the band too suburban, too MMM, too rocky. Ugh, how wrong could I have been.
Fast forward thirty years and a copy of this showed up in an online auction out of all places, Midwest America. Oh no, I thought, another pissweak record being pimped as KBD. But the listing had sound clips and over the next ten or so minutes, well, that's when my walls really started to crumble. Behind rocky vocals is a band coming across like a Brisbane powerpop band, the aesthetic choices being highlighted by short, tight guitar solos, and lyrics about the ups and downs of drinking and enjoying your youth.
Apart from the good time feel what I really like about this record is the stripped back production. Although these guys were aiming to be Oz Rock stars, in the studio their sound was like any other mid-fi inner city sound recording, relying on feel and not modern studio trickery. Given the antiseptic sounds of so many similar bands from the era who "made it", we're left with a what-could-have-been reaction to the whole genre. Bent Elbows, maybe with the aid of the credited "alcoholic adviser", got it right.
So to the songs: St Lucia Road is about the band's home, the road leading from Toowong out to the University Of Queensland at St Lucia, and now renamed Sir Fred Schonell Drive. References are also made to another local landmark, Hawken Drive, Rec week (the first week of the University year), and not dropping out before 4ZZZ's third Joint Effort; Free-way Connection is about joining your friends for a piss-up down the South coast; the plaintive Scoring Sugar is an ambivalent drug song; and the probable highlight - Chip On The Shoulder Boy, the great Queenslander affliction writ small. Here the protagonist is picking fights at the R.E. (Royal Exchange Hotel at Toowong), talking big while on the sauce - one great line "Woodstock is over, throw your beads away".
Ulsers - Remember Them 7" EP (WBRS-2601)
Deluxe reissue of this DIY masterpiece. Up there with early records by SPK and the Slugfuckers as one of the most original and creative statements of Australian punk.
Ulsers - Forget Them LP (WBRX-2602)
Ten jaw-dropping, previously unreleased songs from the Ulsers in full-band mode. Same mayhem, bonus drums, shouting and electricity.
Over the years, our obsession with the Ulsers has bordered on the pathological. Their Remember Them EP is such a perfect storm of OCD-inducing elements, we've sometimes felt that they made it just to torment us. A whirlwind of one-finger acoustic guitar, cardboard-boxes-as-drums, harmonica and sax, its four songs are so wilfully, uniquely obnoxious that those who "get" it can't help but be equally awed and amused. Putting it over the top are abstract, profane and hilarious lyrics, all delivered by a truly unhinged vocalist yelling as if the vocal mic was in the next suburb. Who the hell were these lunatics?
Conceptual greatness aside, the other factor that had us repeatedly washing our hands and touching every second fence post was Remember Them's utter obscurity. Adelaide scenesters and seasoned record collectors alike were unaware of it; those who knew of its existence had no clues to the Ulsers' identities. Years of solid detective work amounted to nothing. And then, as is so often the case, a stroke of pure luck brought results. An autographed copy of the record landed in our laps, yielding three legible signatures (and one illegible mess). "A Hitler" and "Dick Ulser" proved to be unwise Google search terms. We'll be forever thankful that principal Ulser Terry Wilson chose to scribble his real name.
That the Ulsers' story turned out to be even better than we could have imagined has only added to our grovelling fandom. Existing solely for the amusement of an isolated inner circle, beyond which their record barely circulated, it is no wonder the Ulsers remained unknown for so long. Pressed in a tiny run to begin with, the Remember Them EP suffered from zero formal distribution, rapidly waning enthusiasm from the band, and - just to rub salt into the wound - a box of unsold records disappearing into the aether. In 2012, locating a copy is tough; locating a copy with a sleeve is brutalising. We're grateful to Terry Wilson for leading us through the full story.
Terry Wilson
What was your musical history prior to the Ulsers?
None of us except maybe Richard on the sax were in any way accomplished on our instruments. I could strum chords on a guitar and wrote a lot of songs across my teen years. In the years leading up to the Ulsers, Richard and I listened to a lot of free form jazz which influenced how he played in the Ulsers. Without any particular musical ability, we experimented with playing avant garde music, which was quite abstract and dry - eliminating melody or rhythm or solos or even recognisable instrumentation. This was just something we did in our front rooms when other people went out. It's probably why they went out. Punk music also had a sort of avant garde feeling to it then, in terms of attitude and lyrics. In time this influenced us. We had plumbed the free form music as far as we were able and it was a relief to do something more structured and recognisable and fun, like songs.
When did the Ulsers start playing together, and how did this come about?
Maybe 1978. The early Ulsers songs were written at work and the group grew out of a work context. So other than Richard who I'd played music with in the past, the Ulsers were friends from work, and even the audience was substantially the larger work group. I basically cobbled together six songs and we got together in my lounge room and played them onto a cassette recorder.
The EP recording comes across as having almost a "one-man band" feeling about it. Was the Ulsers a full band as such?
I was the one who brought most of the material along. I was interested in accidental elements coming out in the music and perhaps had a purist view of what the music should be. So we tended not to work on the details of songs, and we never came to a polished or tight version. Also because we weren't really musicians, the possibility of building a more integrated sound probably wasn't available.
The Ulsers were: David Banbury - drums (actually cardboard boxes for the recording and many of the shows); Tony Lang - harmonica and bass; Richard Lees - sax; Terry Wilson - vocals, guitar. Also, John Packer - roadie.
Music to cut your ears off by.
L-R: David Banbury (note cardboard box), Terry Wilson, Richard Lees, Tony Lang.
I'm curious about what you were listening to at the time - whether there were other bands which informed the Ulsers' sound or approach?
I was enthusiastic at the time about the Sex Pistols. Also liked The Fall, the Clash, PiL, the Smiths, Joy Division - mostly British bands. Liked the Saints. Reggae. Didn't follow the local scene. There was an ethos of do-it-yourself non-musicians that was part of punk, and the instrumentation of the Ulsers was just what people had or did already. There was no decision made - this was the only configuration available. Later I bought an electric guitar, and there were drums (rather than cardboard boxes) and a bass. At the time, it was our impression that it wasn't as together as the original sound because having electric instruments shows up the lack of musicianship more than a more contained acoustic sound. But in hindsight it actually sounds rather good.
Were you involved with the Adelaide punk scene at the time?
No. We weren't a public commodity. Friends or friends of friends set up parties at their houses and we played shows there. Often we had an audience of 40-50 people, though sometimes it was only a few people. We did about 12 shows.
How did the Ulsers' record come about?
We always performed to a cassette recorder - we always wanted to play it back and hear how it came out. This was the case even with the early free form playing prior to the Ulsers. The first two Ulsers practices were taped and passed around work. It was natural that in time we would want to make a record.
Where was the EP recorded?
In the front room of our roadie's house.
How many copies were pressed?
250. I don't know how many record covers we did - it may have only been 10 or 20. Most went out in the blue sleeve from EMI. Even I never had a copy with the cover. A friend of ours, Ross, drew it. In a way, we were a bit of a collective where a number of other people made contributions of their own. So John provided his speakers and bought mics and he was our roadie, Ross was inspired to do a cover for the record, Ross let us do a show at his house, etc. Probably every band is the same, the boundaries to what the band is are more widespread than just the four playing the instruments.
Do you know whether the EP was reviewed in fanzines or street press at the time? Did it receive any airplay on the likes of 5MMM?
It wouldn't have surfaced to the notice of the street press. It was submitted by someone to a mainstream radio station as part of the worst record ever made contest - and won! So it got airplay through that. They wanted us to play at a function in a shopping mall but we said no.
How was the record distributed? Were copies circulated beyond Adelaide?
People bought them at work or at shows. We took some in to Andromeda Records - he put it on, laughed and said not totally negatively, "This is so bad".
The point is there was no distribution method as such - after a while we just gave them away at shows, if we even brought them along. The record sort of lost its interest for us - it was something we did as a bit of slightly expensive fun, the next logical step, and then the band moved to something else. I went overseas, came back, we picked up again at a new point, and did some more rehearsing and shows, and then shows without rehearsing. The record was back there and we'd lost focus on it.
When did the Ulsers disband?
I went overseas in late 1980. That was just after a show where the audience rang the police to stop us playing. We put it out that I had to leave the country for a time. I wrote a whole new batch of songs while in England. We worked on them on my return and the group got a little more "serious", got proper instruments, etc. Then it drifted apart for about 18 months. Later we reformed for one show. We had about 40 people there. We decided to play the earlier material and keep it fast and more punk in style. It was our best show. We hadn't played together for 18 months and there had been no rehearsal. Some songs the group only heard for the first time that night as they played them. That was the last show.
Julius Sumner Miller
I'm An Italian
Sounds like the back cover looks.
Like the Last Words, the Ulsers had a prominent German connection.
End of Part 2 (as they used to say on The Goodies). Time for another break for us. Check back on Sunday August 5 for the start of year 3.
This year our stats were sullied by a couple of spambots and some other unsavoury netizens that kept hitting the blog. Not much we could do about it, and it seemed to take Blogger most of the year to sort out a method to minimise the effect. Anyway, we tried to take it into account when compiling the top ten most viewed posts from the last twelve to thirteen months. Here's what everyone out there was looking at:
Last Words' Animal World mask from the Wizard Records press kit
If you want something done properly, do it yourself. Living in the West of Sydney in 1977, Scottish emigree Malcolm Baxter and Irish transplant Andy Groome took such sage advice to heart. Having arrived in Australia in 1968 and 1969 respectively, they met at the Cabramatta Hostel at which their families first lived. They started playing music together in 1972 and went through a few school bands before some pivotal musical exposures focused their attention.
The Two Malcolms, 1980.
Malcolm Baxter:"We first saw what was going on in the NME and Melody Maker. We got them every time they came out, so we first saw the punk stuff there. Then Andy went to see Radio Birdman and came back saying to me, 'You've got to come and see this band!'. So I did, at Sydney Uni. That night we met the Saints and started hanging out with them in North Sydney. We had seen the five second clip of the Sex Pistols and we were buying The Ramones records and Clash records and just eating this all up. But we had started writing songs that had that flavour anyway!"
The first Last Words lineup included ex-Brisbanite, Saints acolyte Jeff Wegener on drums and Mike Smith on bass. As recorded in Pulp fanzine (and reproduced in Inner City Sound), "the band were getting desperate. They've been considering all sorts of attention getting stunts, like: advertising themselves in Ram magazine; beating up journalists, a la Sid Vicious; playing illegally on the Sydney streets; moving to Melbourne; recording a single (even though they can't afford it); or, at worst, breaking up". A single it was to be though, and a novel funding arrangement was brokered. Before the recording Wegener left to Melbourne and the Young Charlatans, and Smith was jettisoned.
Malcolm Baxter:"We wrote Animal World in Andy's bedroom in Miller [a suburb in Liverpool, Western Sydney]. Then a few months later my father went guarantor and we got a loan out to record and press the records. We thought no one would ever put this out, so we will. The Last Words then was myself and Andy - I played the drums and sang, Andy played the guitar and bass. It was recorded on an 8 track at Axent Studios in Kogarah in the winter of 1977".
The record was released on the band's own Remand label in October 1977, with flip side Wondering Why. A few copies sported a stamped die-cut sleeve:
The loan the band took out also extended to a few roneographed posters which were included in copies sent to record shops. Not many of these have survived (well, one that we know of).
The record was well received by those in the know, and why not? It's a truly great record. But was it enough to get our boys out of the Western suburbs?
L-R: Malcolm Baxter and Andy Groome
outside Axent Studios, 1977.
Malcolm Baxter:"Being in Liverpool was like being at an AC/DC gig every day of your life. It was a backwater and people did not get punk, we needed to come into the city for that sort of stuff. But we did not know where this was happening, we just got on with writing and making the single and then we went around to a few inner city record shops and asked them to sell it. Then we sent a copy to Wizard in November 1977, and a few weeks later they got in contact with us and said they would like to do something. But nothing happened until February 1978 as the whole country shut up shop for Christmas in those days, so we started to explore the music more and moved into Berrie St North Sydney after the Saints went to the UK, and we played a few gigs there and hung out in the scene that was starting up. We started doing gigs at a place called Blondie's in Bondi, and the Boys Next Door supported us there - it was all a bit strange in those days. Then me and Andy moved to South Dowling Street in Darlinghurst and we started playing at the Grand Hotel and recorded Animal World again for Wizard".
Wizard paid for the June, 1978 recording of six songs with a name producer, Les Karsky, who had worked with Midnight Oil and Boys Next Door. For this phase Baxter and Groome were joined again by Wegener on drums. Rounding out the band was bassist Rique Lee Kendall. Kendall was born in Melbourne in 1958 but had lived in Canada for six years where he had played in legendary Vancouver punk band the Skulls. On his return to Australia he'd played bass as Matt Black on the Thought Criminals' Hilton Bomber EP.
The Wizard issue (ZS-196) was released on 6 November 1978, this time with Every School Boys Dream on the B-side. All copies are on blue vinyl and the period appropriate company sleeve is the Phonogram one above - Wizard switched distribution to RCA sometime around 1979 (around the ZS-300 series of 7"s). We've put the complete press kit put together by Wizard on a separate page, it's well worth a visit. There was a fucking great video too, which if you haven't seen yet, well, do yourself a favour:
L-R: Baxter and Kendall
at the Grand Hotel.
Malcolm Baxter:"When we did Animal World [for Wizard] we recorded 6 songs but the master tape has never been found. We have the songs we recorded on a live tape from our last gig at the Grand Hotel in 1979, but that [Wizard] recording of the songs looks like it has gone forever.
"We went to the UK because this was not the music history that Australia wanted. Molly Meldrum banned the Last Words from Count Down and he had never even seen us. The only reason we got to release Animal World on Rough Trade was a friend of ours from Virgin records nicked the 1/4 inch tape of four of the songs from Wizard and brought them to London for us. And with Rough Trade, we got to London and we started work, but Andy and me thought 'We did not come here for this', so we got up one morning and took the blue vinyl Animal World to the BBC and gave it to the John Peel show. Then we went to Rough Trade and gave them a copy. By the time we got home, Rough Trade wanted to sign us and John Peel was playing Animal World and asking who was this band called the Last Words! When the record came out it sold something like 5,000 copies in the first few days and we went to number 8 in the NME alternative charts. The first pressing did not have Wizard on the labels, it was only after Wizard forced Rough Trade to put it on that they did and that was the second pressing".
The third release of Animal World uses the Wizard recording and came out in the UK in 1979 on Rough Trade (RT 022). As detailed by Malcolm, there were two pressings; and despite internet wisdom, Malcolm has set us straight on which came first:
The London era band was Baxter, Groome, Kendall (now Leigh Kendall) and a local, John Gunn (born Hammersmith London, 9 April 1962) on drums. A Rough Trade hype sheet of the time details goings on: "They were quick to pick up followings in places as Chelmsford and Coventry. Derby made them No 8 in the alternative charts. They also have a strong following in Germany and hope to follow it up by playing there in March [1980]". The band played on for a few more years releasing two more 7"s and an LP - selected highlights can be heard on the Retro CD. But, what about those Germans?
Malcolm Baxter:"We were playing with a band called the Swell Maps in London in 1979 and a bunch of Germans turn up and Eric [Hysteric] was one of them. They were fans of the Last Words and we got talking after the gig, and they would come to the gigs and hang out with us. Andy, Leigh and John had more to do with them. When my father died I came back to Australia and they did some recording with Eric".
The recordings with Eric we'll cover another time, but it segues into today's piece of teeth-gnashery - the fabled, legendary, almost completely unknown German sleeve. At some stage Hysteric got a bunch of copies of the first Remand pressing sent to Germany and constructed a crude photocopy sleeve to help sell them. The back of the sleeve has a postcard of Sydney at night and an indication that it may date from 1984. The German address for Wasted Vinyl listed on the back, and the general thrown together style of the sleeve, fits with Hysteric's releases from WASTE 6 on. The earlier records on the label have an English address and more professionally constructed sleeves. All up, a 1984 date is not an unreasonable guess.
Here's a surprise. An Ed Ball-esque mod-pop 7" hailing from Brisbane in 1983. I knew the band and the 7" existed but never picked it up. It took borntobepunched's recent virgin trip to the Sunshine State, and his unjaundiced ear, to open my eyes to this one. I lived through the Brisbane equivalent to the Paisley Underground and while it had its moments, it seemed the kicks were harder to find compared to the punk stuff the city is rightly famous for. I was wr-wr-wr-wr-wrong, and it wasn't the only local record I misjudged badly, as we'll find out later in the year.
The hit is the B-side, (Machismo For) What We Need. Sure, the song title is as clumsy as they come, but the tune is great! Starting with guitar stabs, it launches into a critique of materialism over a really good piece of Anglo-pop. That's not to deny the A-side: a plaintive, disaffected love song with gurgling bass lines and clunky solo. We'd prefer power pop to have straight ahead punk guitars but, when it's done well, we'll take this dainty, priggish, tight-laced substitute any day.
So who was Eleven Eleven? We were intrigued too, so we visited the musty Paisley wing of the archives and found a manila folder with some gig flyers and a photo (see below). Turns out there's an Ipswich connection! A while ago, when discussing the Toy Watches, we mentioned The Colours, whose song Blue Shirt is etched in the memories of those who were there. It turns out one of them continued to write great songs in his next band. Stand up Mitchell Kunde, on guitar and vocals. Andrew Palmer on rhythm was also in The Colours. Dale Jones on bass and Scott Austin on drums rounded out the lineup. Eleven Eleven played from 1983 to 1985 before half the band rebranded as The Nasties.
This spry, otherworldly piece of punky Melbourne DIY packs more gibberish-per-minute than even our pal Plastic EP, but unlike Mr EP and his Miscalculations, Microfilm vocalist Lisa Gerrard turned the baby-babble into a career, leading Dead Can Dance through an extensive discography throughout the '80s and '90s. Even more impressively, if we're to believe Gerrard's Wikipedia page, all of this lyrical nonsense actually means something. Perhaps we should ask Plas to translate.
Gerrard's collaboration with Microfilm/Dead Can Dance co-founder Brendan Perry arose from the fertile Little Bands scene, spotlighted in recent years by Chapter Music's Primitive Calculators reissues. Fittingly, Centrefold from Microfilm's lone single can be found on Chapter's Can't Stop It 2 CD. The 7" was released by Unforgettable, a label founded by Melbourne post-punk iconoclast Ron Rude (careful not to confuse yer Rudes, trendsetters); it was issued individually as well as packaged in the Carboard Box set along with the two other 7"s in Unforgettable's catalogue, Ron Rude's Piano Piano and the Fabulous Marquises. Two Ron Rude LPs (with the Unforgettables and Piano Piano, respectively) round out the Unforgettable label discography. Summer House, another good Microfilm track, was included on From Belgrave With Love (Cleopatra CLP 204, 1981), a compilation LP based around Rude's home studio recordings.
If there's one question we've fielded more than any other over the last two years, it's "What is grillfat?". A while back, we bit the bullet and uploaded grillfat's year zero, an article by Johan Kugelberg from Ugly Things #24, to deal with that specific inquiry - check it out via the sidebar. More recently, we've read some incredulous comments about our preference for grillfat over long-established and, ostensibly, perfectly good genre descriptors like Oz Rock (as used by Murray Engleheart in his grillfat guidebook Blood, Sweat and Beers). "Why bother trying to reinvent the wheel?", we hear the naysayers naysay.
In Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To It's Own Past, Simon Reynolds dedicates some time to discussing "invented genres", i.e. "retroactively creat[ed] genres that never actually existed as recognised entities during the period in question", primarily driven by record collectors reclaiming, reinterpreting, and recategorising the detritus of pop culture. Examples cited include relatively recent developents like minimal synth and junkshop glam, though Reynolds argues for garage punk and Northern Soul as the first instances of "genre-as-retroactive-fiction". In fact, the history of invented genres probably extends back further still. In her book In Search of the Blues, Marybeth Hamilton argues that the Delta blues wouldn't exist if it were not for the personal taste of James McKune, a record collector whose wants list of obscure 78s curated the genre's defining artists, thereby establishing a roadmap for subsequent collectors and reissue compilers - a sort of pre-war NWW list.
Reynolds ascribes an economic imperative to the development of invented genres - the creation of markets upon which to foist rare records and compilations of such. Variations of that theory have done the rounds for a while (recounted here and, if you can bear it, here), but a quick search of eBay for the keyword "grillfat" suggests that there's more to it than that. We're happy to report that grillfat suffers from a dearth of genuinely rare records - good news for dollar bin hounds, not so good for potential compilers of Killed By Grillfat. Instead, the main advantage of grillfat has been to allow us to talk about Australian hard rock minus the cultural baggage that we associate with the term Oz Rock - a pejorative catch-all for leaden, lifeless, commercial beer-barn rock. Grillfat is shorthand to differentiate Geeza from Australian Crawl.
Which brings us to Geeza's Sydney City Ladies, one of the genre's OGs (that's Original Grillers). Described by The Kuge as one of the greasiest records in his collection ("The kind of track that would leave an oil skid on your turntable"), this mildly brain-damaged hard rock reinterpretation of California Girls is archetypal grillfat. The version in question is the flipside to Geeza's second 45 (Run 'n' Hide), a rougher take than that featured on Streetlife, the band's lone LP (Laser VXL1-4046, 1977). Apart from a slicker recording, the LP version also takes on a more expansive arrangement, extending the song by a full two minutes. We prefer the medium-rare cut, but the well-done version is presented below for those situations when three minutes of grillfat isn't enough.
Like the Assassins here's a good record that's easy to find. Also like the Assassins, it's somewhat ignored for that reason. We'll provide the public service and bring it to your attention. You could argue that big '80s production is starting to kick in and that points should be deducted. Points taken, but not deducted - the drums aren't shitty and the sound is big without sounding antiseptic. You could also argue the singer sounds like John Kennedy - you'd be right, we're a mark for that gravelly power pop style I guess. You could argue the rockabilly breakdown at the end of side 2 is unadulterated shite... OK you've got us there.
I don't know if you'd describe Grooveyard as a supergroup, but the members all had lots of involvement in the '80s Sydney scene. Sean Maguire on drums and "panicking" (might explain the rollicking rhythm of I Told You So) had done time in Coupe De Ville and Minuteman. Robert Hood we know well from his time in Razar and the Buddies. Guitarist Ian Little would end up in the Bam Balams. Other guitarist Jonn Schofield went to the Chinless Elite before joining Paul Kelly's bands.
The band also contributed to the Drown Or Swim cassette put out by 48 Crash fanzine and then there was a 12" in 1989, but our collections have chronological cutoffs as well as the obvious aesthetic cutoffs, so you'll have to chase that down yourself.
Despite living out at Merrylands for all of two weeks once, we are far from experts on the Western Sydney state of mind. Prejudicial reputation would have it as the place culture fails to thrive. We hope we've done something to redress this. Check out Walrus, hard rock being the genre that the hive mind would have as the region's speciality. Then there's Invader, proof positive that punk did take on out there. Of course, we always knew that due to what we'd find on our record shopping trips to the formerly fertile Blacktown and Liverpool shops. R.I.P.
Then there's evidence of the truly odd popping up out that way via our old friend Mopsie Beans. Mopsie was, by matrix number at least, the first release on the Local Label, based in Doonside, near Blacktown. Local did a small run of records, the third of which is today's subject, Paradox. Between Mopsie and Paradox was another off kilter 45 by The Worms. While the artwork has the hallmarks of a DIY masterpiece it's unfortunately not much chop; we've decided we're not gonna cover it on this blog.
So to Paradox. Like The Worms, it sports rudimentary artwork giving hope something demented lies inside. Again, like The Worms, that's not the case. What you do get is a decent piece of demo pop with nods to the Oz rock style of riffing. Which is to say they'd probably seen the Angels live many times, but they're not a hard rock band. Another case of accidental pop/grillfat cross-pollination. The flip side, although starting with a great, glammy power chord, quickly descends into something you don't need to hear.
In the end Local's approach was perhaps too much heterodoxy and too little quality control. A member of label-mates The Sheiks outlined the approach in the comments to their Wallaby Beat post.
Arch Browne, Local Label impresario, always wanted to release the quirky, the rough, the...exact opposite of what we thought was cool and sometimes it paid off.
Here's another good Canberra punk record, helped along by, surprise surprise, some great guitar! The Vacant Lot played around the national capital in the early '80s - photos can be found at the Canberra Punk and Beyond facebook page (or check the video below). Band members were Alex Anderson, Fergus Armstrong, Bruce Hart, George Howson and David Philip. In yet another one of those threads that seem to run through the things we write about, their one record was produced at M Squared by the the Scattered Order team (see the Sheiks, Seems Twice, Nervous System).
For a long time it was something of a mystery as to just how this record fit into the whole Doublethink label scheme. Common knowledge would have their discography ending on a high note in 1980 with the Seems Twice EP (DTDT12). Less known, for good reasons, Doublethink then attempted to kill the label with the odious Undertakers 7" (DTDT13, 1980). Then there was this in 1981. In the ensuing decades this record was pretty much unknown outside Canberra and, sporting just an EMI Custom catalogue number, rather than a DTDT one, its place was unclear. The connection was that drummer David Philip was Thought Criminals' guitarist Stephen Philip's brother, and his label was always happy to give a young punk band a hand up.
We hear there's a prospect of the EP and some live tapes being reissued at some stage so we're just giving you two of the four tracks. Tattslotto Night is the highlight. Tattslotto was the lottery that ran weekly in Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital and Northern Territories back then. It's a tale of suburban desperation and the idiot box. After last week's reflection on the punk era's talking points recurring, the Melbourne Demons, who are name checked thrice in the lyrics, were rubbish in 1981 (finishing last with one win), and currently sit winless at the bottom of the table in 2012. Some copies of the EP contain a Tattslotto entry form.
Multinationals, as the lyric insert asserts, speaks for itself...
The other tracks see the band veering off in a more experimental direction, perhaps recalling the dark punk sound of bands like Crisis and UK Decay.
