Cocky Laura - Cowboys And Indians 7" no label 13260, 1981

At the risk of being wrong (again), we'll stick our necks out and say that Doug Ironside (guitar, vocals), Jon O'Rourke (drums, vocals), and Warren Slater (bass, vocals) were on a Gang of Four trip circa December 1981. But if that leads you to expect Cowboys and Indians to be some kind of Marxist allegory about dispossession, a narrative crucial to understanding Sydney punk (um, apparently), then think again. Lyrics are more F-Troop than Althusser - hey, there is an O'Rourke in the band, after all - with some added belching for good measure. Classy.

So the influence is purely musical rather than ideological. Fair enough - it'd take another decade for the schtick of printing layout instructions on a record cover to seem fresh again, anyway. With that in mind, we might expect Every Dog Has His Day to be a tribute to the band's touch-football-meets-Lord-of-the-Flies namesake. Nah, it's your conventional "I saw you with another guy" song, but at least it's spat out with some conviction and at an acceptable BPM. Making Albert Studios sound like Basilisk is a real accomplishment, though.

Every Dog Has His Day [Download]