In the spirit of today's subject, we'll keep things short and to the point. Salient features:
Average song length = 25 seconds.
There are more building blocks on the front cover than are used in the construction of each song.
Like the Sheiks single, excellent production comes courtesy of Scattered Order and the M-Squared studio.
Heavy influence is drawn from Wire, whose 106 Beats That was covered live.
Conversely, approximations of the D-beat found in Salient Feature and Warhol are less a direct influence than a shared response to a technical limitation (viz. independent coordination of right hand and right foot).
Check out that guitar sound - monstrous, like nuclear stockpiles; enormous, like a door slamming in the depths of hell. Grown record collectors are said to weep at the guitar sound on certain DIY records. As we drop the needle on side 1, we laugh at those crybabies and proceed to trash our living rooms when the descending riff kicks in.
A live cassette was released on the 2 Tapes label from Wollongong. To maintain the self-contained conceptual integrity of the 7", don't click here.
Syzygy is the longest singular word in English with no vowels. So I remember my mum telling me back in the early '80s. Now nearly thirty years later I find out why the word was even in her mind.
On Wednesday, March 10, 1982 the planets of our solar system came within 91 degrees of each other, all on the same side of the sun; a state of syzygy. Astronomers tell us this is a very rare event. Funnily enough it brought out the end-is-nigh crackpots.
That same night freaks of a different kind were drawn en masse to French's Wine Bar, a dingy and much loved basement venue on Oxford Street, Darlinghurst. The event was a celebration by the Dri Horrors of the potential end of the world.
The story of kiwi legends Toy Love's time in Sydney has been retold several times - see the epic Chris Knox interview in Forced Exposure 18, or Stranded In Paradise, or parts of the Toy Love website. Towards the end of their time here drummer Mike Dooley expressed a desire to switch to guitar. The band decided it was all too hard to continue, and to incorporate this change. They secretly broke up, telling no-one until they completed a short New Zealand tour. Dooley returned to Sydney and started a twin guitar band with our man Paul Cupples of The Sheiks.
The tale of the Dri Horrors is told here by Dooley in much more entertaining fashion than we can conjure. In summary, they got together, gigged a bit, recorded this EP and an unreleased album, booted Cupples, recruited half of Proud Scum then broke up after the death of their drummer Animal.
What we find interesting is the incursion of the famed New Zealand sound on an Australian record (recognising of course that three of the players are ex-pat Kiwis). We'll leave it to listeners to decide if it's the Dunedin, Wellington or Auckland variant on show here. It's most evident on Drown Or Swim and Maybe Next Time - downbeat, repetitive strum giving a drone-y effect, with a bit of the angular approach favoured by Wellingtonians. Sing Me A Song shows the most similarity to Cupples' earlier efforts in the Sheiks - a bit shouty, the guitar strokes dramatic. Part Of You has a jaunty, bluebeat rhythm (the other six letter word in English with no vowels) that we can't quite come at.
You may have read some hype about the Sheiks' first single, released in 1979 by our old friend the Local Label. Well, someone's wallet was lightened to the tune of 110 bucks to find out what we can tell you for free: it sucks. Two parts whitey blues and one part Dylan cover will always a turd cocktail make, and no amount of comparison with Dr Feelgood can render it any more palatable. As with past cases of seller-generated hype, emptors should consider themselves caveated.
The real three-figure Sheiks record is the second single, though Popsike and the unclaimed copy in the Wallaby Beat trade pile might argue otherwise. Perhaps listening to Ten Times Around - which we invite you to do at the link below - will help to redress the balance. Hard to know what happened in the year between records to prompt such a drastic reorientation, but we suspect that the release of Entertainment by Gang of Four might have had something to do with it. The perfectly mid-fi recording (courtesy of Scattered Order and M-Squared) works in the song's favour, and the forcefulness with which it's delivered makes its dissonance sound less "post-" and more "punk". Rondos fans are unlikely to be disappointed.
In fairness to the first single, there are microscopic traces of Ten Times Around in one of its four songs (When You Bring Home Your Pay). Not enough to elevate it beyond being passable - we're talking a generous C-minus here - but just enough to connect the dots. Similarly, Ten Times Around's less strident flipside signposts singer/bassist Paul Cupples' next outing - we continue that story next week.
Looking like an unknown Music De Wolfe library LP, the eye you see peering over Bruce Lee and Geoffrey Holder's shoulders on the LP cover above is one you're unlikely to have seen staring at you from any record stacks before. An obscure Melbourne powerpop record that truly sank without trace - it has literally taken us over a decade to track down a copy. More on that later.
The Illusions were a pop band from the Blackburn and Box Hill suburbs in East Melbourne. Members were Mark Davis on vocals, guitar and bass, Phil Tregonning on vocals and guitar and Peter Allan on drums. We caught up with Mark recently to get the skinny on their sole LP Mirror Image.
Phil, Peter and I went to school at St Leo's senior school together and in about 1971 I started to learn guitar. I just loved music. The Monkees in particular appealed to me - catchy, fun songs with great melody lines. We got together by chance in Form 4, 1973 I think, and started jamming in a mate's dad's shed, he was a ham radio expert and built us some little amps. We called them the rats' nests due to all the wires amongst the valves. When we left school we would practise songs most nights and weekends, as well as going to see bands like The Aztecs, Madder Lake, Red House Roll Band etc.
As we all worked days we decided that rather than play live at night, that we would do a Beatles and record our songs at night after work. In 1981, we found a studio called Labsonics in South Melbourne run by Gerry Duffy (Labsonics still exists in Sydney today). We would go about twice a week for about two months to put down the tracks. He had a 24 track two inch tape machine which was really cool, as being a three piece we liked the idea of overdubbing a lot to fatten up the sound.
The backwards guitar on Gone Too Far really stands out. How did that come about?
This was an idea I had as I read somewhere back then that the Beatles did it. We just put the tape reels upside-down, played the lead break as normal and once played the correct way that's what comes out. That's my favorite memory of the studio time: beer and experiencing a bit.
I played a 1972 Fender Mustang through a Gibson amp with distorion and chorus pedals and Jazz Bass on all the songs. Phil used his Fender Telecaster. Drums were Ludwig.
The name Illusions was my idea as we were a band that did not play live much, but locked ourselves away in the studio. Mind you, the cost was difficult to maintain as studio time was expensive and all paid for by the band.
We were never a punk band - that scene came a bit later, we preferred our own songs, but loved going out to see all the other groups around. Bands that influenced us? Lots: The Gentrys; Shocking Blue; The Beatles; The Monkees; Suzi Quatro; The Aztecs; The Who; Humble Pie; Madder Lake; ELO; Badfinger; Jo Jo Gunne; The New Dream.
Despite the diverse list of musical mentors perhaps the biggest influences that can be heard on the album are at the poppier end of the spectrum: The Beatles and Badfinger. Given there are only eight tracks on the LP, one problem is that the songs are all a bit long. Nevertheless, there are lots of good ideas at play. Mark is humble about the LP.
I thought only two or three songs were any good: Say It Isn't True, Gone Too Far, I Was There. These songs were written about things I was feeling emotionally at the time. They were personal things. Say It Isn't True for example is about the death of John Lennon. I Was There is about being pushed into a law degree I could not cope with...I wanted to be in a rock band.
You only pressed 100 copies of your 7" Empire Builder, how many copies were pressed of the LP?
Fifty.
Come again?
The reason we only made fifty copies was that I was was not sure how the LP would go. We went to all the radio stations and labels we could find to give our records to - Au Go Go, Missing Link, 3RRR, 3CCR, EON FM, Molly, Deluxe Records, Mushroom, etc. Only 3RRR gave us a chance. I was very disappointed we couldn't go further, but Phil and Peter really didn't have their heart in it after a while. I did some solo stuff but it never made it to vinyl.
No wonder this was tuff to track down. We teased you with a 69 copy pressing last week but as always we like to one-up ourselves from week to week. Here's our and Mark's favourite two tracks.
To paraphrase Buddy Rich by way of Frank Costanza: Australian hardcore...this is not our kind of hardcore. We'll leave it to scholars of the genre to compile the definitive '80s hardcore punk world rankings, but Australia's output sits well behind that of heavyweights like the US, Sweden and Japan. Better than France? Not as good as Germany? Whatever our position in the league table, it's hardly a source of national pride.
There are exceptions of course, and some gems to be found among cassette releases, but in general the vinyl landscape of Australian hardcore is bleak. Some of this stuff has seemingly developed cachet in certain circles, but as support for our prejudices, we'll direct you to the back-catalogues of Cleopatra and Reactor Records as the last word in mediocrity. Not all of it is bad, necessarily, but at best it's undistinguished. In some cases the records simply haven't aged well; in others, it's clear that there wasn't much going on to begin with. And then there's the Crucified Truth EP, which flat-out sucks no matter how you slice it.
So what's so special about The Rejected, then? Well, at first glance, not much. Their First Offence EP from 1985, a 300-press EMI Custom job, is blighted by two elements guaranteed to sink any hardcore record: bad (i.e. good) production and cheater-beats. The clarity of the recording is problematic across the board, restraining the songs from achieving the requisite level of urgency, but it's Personal Gain and You Don't Care which are the main offenders in the cheater-beat stakes - drumming lost in the no-man's-land between traditional hardcore polka rhythms and blast-beats, minus the propulsion of the former and the BPM of the latter. Copper, which closes out the record, is Plod by name and plod by nature, and does little to redeem proceedings.
What is significant about First Offence is its use of the D-beat. For the benefit of anyone reading this from under a rock, the archetytpal D-beat can be found in the first seconds of the first song on the first Discharge record, and thereafter up to the crushing Why 12". Others may have beaten them to the punch, but there's a reason it has come to be known as the D-beat and not the Buzz-beat: Discharge delivered it with such conceptual singularity as to map out the raw punk blueprint for the next 30+ years. In other countries the D-beat was embraced as an important stylistic innovation, but Australians, it seems, were not early adopters. Similar impulses manifested differently in Seems Twice (more on them later), but there's scant recorded evidence of the kind of direct influence apparent in Scandinavia and beyond. Discharge was held in high regard here, as various covers of the era attest (Decontrol by Sick Things; Never Again by Public Nuisance; State Violence, State Control by Mob Vengeance), but those covers are telling in and of themselves - not a D-beat among them. And on the rare occasion that D-beats did show up in Australian hardcore songs, the effect wasn't particularly Discharge-like (check out this pretty good and relatively early example from End Result; various takes by Arm The Insane are also littered across their generally dire discography).
Nuclear War and You're The Victim are notable, then, for being Australian D-beat songs with a heavy Discharge influence in the structures, riffage, and lyrics. The slickness of the recording is still less than ideal, but the songs do have brevity on their side, and they're the definite highlights of an otherwise unremarkable record. Both songs would be re-recorded for The Rejected's subsequent LP, but disappointingly - much like Diamond Head's fate at the hands of some other band - D-beats were conspicuously absent on the new versions. Which means that our interest in The Rejected ends here. Gluttons for punishment may wish to track down their second (and final) LP, but with a pressing of just 69 copies, we wish you luck and a speedy recovery to full mental health.
You're probably familiar with the Inner City Sounddiscography, and how after studying it for two decades you think you have a handle on it. Then you realise there's an obscure Infinitylabelrecord right at the end - no other mention in the book, or elsewhere really. Damn!
Well here it is. The Word were a punk band from Canberra who started in 1978. In 1980 they somehow got to record this single in Sydney. It was released on Festival subsidiary Infinity, continuing that label's flirtation with powerpop while they sat on money made from Sherbet. Festival house producer Martin Erdman sat behind the desk.
Members over the band's existence included Michael Moriarty (vocals/guitar), Peter Palij (guitar), Terry Sounder (vocals/guitar), Archie Van Der Glass (bass), Frankie Villegas (bass, on the record) and Darcy Deegan (drums).
The record is somewhat over-produced, and, at the best of times, if there's one word to describe the Canberran approach to playing guitar it's tentative. Nevertheless, the band's enthusiasm shines through, and the Only Ones style vocal inflections are effective. As poppy Oz Rock it fit the sounds of the time and we're kinda surprised it wasn't some kind of hit. The flipside, Angel, is less distinguished - ramping up the Oz Rock at the expense of the powerpop. Only Moriarty troubled the compilers of the Who's Who Of Australian Rock again, ending up in the Gadflys.
Mopsie (a.k.a. Elizabeth Ward) and Jerry Beans formed an ongoing creative partnership in the mid-'70s, the Conservatorium-trained Mopsie writing music and Jerry contributing some unique, funny and unmistakably Australian lyrics. The pair were genuine iconoclasts, especially in Sydney's western suburbs, around which they'd lug their own PA and set up DIY performances (literal train-spotters may recognise the old Blacktown station on the LP's front cover). Initially, Mopsie would sing and play live with keyboards and drum machines; later, backing tapes were introduced, allowing her to pursue an ever more theatrical performance style.
Almost inevitably, Mopsie crossed paths with the fledgling westie Local Label, which issued her One Out 7" EP in 1979 (Local MX189770). Though not our preferred Mopsie record, it does have its charms, and is said to have accrued some prominent supporters. The Introduction to Can't Kick the Sucky Tit and Other Cream Cakes, a self-published anthology of Jerry Beans's lyrics, notes that the EP received airplay from John Peel; over time, this has morphed into a claim that the 7" was one of Peel's favourites. Given its absence from the infamous record box, we'll charitably assign that one a yellow verdict.
Mopsie's next (and final) record, 1981's Appearances LP, may ring bells for eagle-eyed scholars of Incredibly Strange Music, thanks to an incidental, blink-and-you'll-miss-it mention by Jello Biafra in the second of those books. Jello likened the LP to Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy (well, vice versa, actually) - to us, Mopsie sounds more musically theatrical and less experimental, but we fully acknowledge that sans blogs or Youtube, it's not a comparison we'd ever be able to critique. Say what you want about Jello, but the guy was switched on.
Appearances is a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the more successful tunes, like L=E/R or Baby Romeo ("A sort of aging embryo"), are the kind of downer minimal electronics which would appeal to fans of the Denial single on M-Squared. Chaos, with its processed vocals, clunky drum machine and anti-rockist tendencies, should find favour with the more art-punk inclined. Elsewhere, however, things descend into absurdist, one-woman-band show tunes, but even then the music is odd and the lyrics unerringly eccentric.
After the LP, Mopsie pursued her interest in drama, directing and acting in plays which had evolved from Jerry's lyrics. A cassette with post-LP material - performed at the likes of Garibaldi's, Cabaret Conspiracy, Glebe's Toucan Cafe - was sold via mailorder, but we've been unable to locate a copy (drop us a line if you have one you'd part with). Mopsie maintained an involvement in the western Sydney theatre community up until her passing in 2007 - you can read an obituary at her posthumous Facebook page.
Chaos [Download]
Update: 29 June 2012
We're indebted to Roger Grierson for drawing our attention to an uncredited Mopsie Beans work. This advertisement for TDK, surely etched into the brains of most Australians born before 1980, might make Mopsie the most widely-heard performer featured on this blog.
Mopsie Beans (right), 1982
Lyrics for L=E/R (retitled Love Song) and Chaos, from Jerry Beans' Can't Kick the Sucky Tit and Other Cream Cakes (Mopubs, 1984)
And we're off again. Let's begin year two with a little heard Melbourne punk record by a band notable for their odd iconography - fish, invented calligraphy, and a fairly unique pink and green colour scheme.
Starting as a school blues band at Brighton Grammar School in 1975, the Relatives made their punk debut as The Velvet Underpants at their school dance in 1977. Covers included the Saints, Sex Pistols, plenty of Lou and Bowie, and a fnarr fnarr throwback to their blues roots - Chain's Grab A Snatch And Hold It. After a name change to the Nooney Rickett 4, the band made its public debut beyond school halls and parties in May 1978, opening for News at Bernharts (formerly the Thumpin' Tum in the 1960s, then commandeered by News as a regular haunt).
Post-school the six members stayed together, had a name change to the more serious Relatives in 1979, and gigged aplenty at the regular Melbourne haunts - the Crystal Ballroom, the Exford, The Tote, Prince Of Wales etc. Their first 7", released in June 1979, is highlighted by Picasso (Private Collector) which encompasses all the things we love - instruments all racing to get to the end of the song first, 1-2-3-4s (including one to end the song), and lots of attitude: eventually, Pablo Picasso was called an arsehole. A simple riff and some nice acid guitar underpin Now She's On The Beat, a tale of prostitution. Clock Struck One rounds out the record.
Bassist Simon Kain recalls:
"We pressed 300 of the 1st and gave them all away on our launch nite - many were trashed then and there!"
Which jibes with the record's elusive nature. Some remaining copies we've had over the years also skip during Picasso, but keep at it - playable copies are out there.
The band continued until 1982 with one more 7", which features some more standard punk rock icons - we'll get to that later. Members ended up in the later garage influenced Wet Taxis, post-Sekret Sekret band Red Ochre, Chad's Tree and the Jackson Code.
There are some good Relatives resources on the web: a blog, Andrew Dowd's memorial page (with some live tracks), and some CD-Rs (email addresses at the bottom to get copies).
It has been a busy year - 55 records, 65 if you include It Never Ends variations, and a handful of tasty unreleased songs. We're pooped. Wallaby Beat will be on a short hiatus to allow us to recharge our batteries and plan for year two. Check back on August 6. We have some treats lined up.
But we're not done with the stats just yet. Here are the results of a readers' poll of sorts - the top ten most viewed posts from our first year in business:
The top three spots were hotly contested, with the lead changing more times than a Satriani/Vai/Malmsteen shred-fest. "But wait!", we hear you say. "British Jets should have made the list, but it was only posted two weeks ago! No wonder it has fewer hits!". Right you are. To account for this, we undertook Cox regression to estimate hazard ratios for different genres, adjusted for the number of external links to each post, the subsequent fame of former band members, and band members' propensity to repeatedly hit "refresh" on their own entries. The results are a closely guarded corporate secret - after all, we have to maintain a competitive advantage over cheap imitations. But, we can tell you the obvious: y'all have an insatiable appetite for punk and DIY; grillfat, not so much; and powerpop? Fuhgedaboudit.
We feel strongly about most of the records on this blog, and while we fully expect to see recent entries like Black Chrome and Invader in next year's top ten, we're surprised that certain others haven't accrued more page views. Here are five earlier posts that we think can mix it with the top ten:
Sick of the blog layout? There are some cool, unadvertised, alternative ways to view blogspot blogs. Here are mosaic and flipcard for ours.
Finally for this year we want to give a sincere thanks to the people who leave comments. While it's always great to hear from the bands themselves, our favourite commenter is Steve who, right from his hilarious memoir on the Celibate Rifles, has always had something salient or enthusiastic to add - thanks mate. But (almost) everyone is appreciated. Anonymous can, of course, fuck off...
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: Darwin, Granville, Hobart Bridge, West Gate Bridge, Voyager; even our old mates Fraser (not a popular guy among the, er, Dagoes Italian-Australian community) and the HiltonBomber 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.
