For those who came in late (as the Phantom comics used to say), Plastic EP and the Records debuted in 1981 with a self-proclaimed "New Wave" record - in reality a great, punky DIY single, the product of a spontaneous creative process and a desire to capture the moment, warts and all. Resurfacing in 1982 under a more collective appellation, the EPs' second single shows them pursuing a musical direction befitting of the previous 45's product information message.
A very different proposition from its predecessor, the follow-up displays a greater degree of, dare we say, "professionalism". For starters, there are drum machines and sequencers all over this puppy, which have the effect of corralling the songs into much tighter structures. The songs are more fully developed, too (one gets the sense that the band is aided and abetted here by their producer, Rudy Brandsma), but still show telltale signs of the classic EPs minimalism - the intro/outro riff of Secret Love is Three Special Words in reverse! And of course, singer Plastic EP's trademark tendency to loiter in the vicinity of (but never actually on) the note is in full effect. Add some inexplicable sound effects - dogs barking, babies crying - and things are never in any danger of becoming too, uh, normal.
Before moving on, we note with interest that the labels credit "Eric" with videos for both tracks. The videos have so far eluded us - Eric, if you're out there, we encourage you to avail yourself of Youtube.
Secret Love
Forget All I Said
Secret Love was the EPs' last appearance on vinyl. As record collectors, it's tempting to view this single as the end of the story, when in fact it was just the beginning. The EPs continued on throughout the '80s, gigging sporadically, and even appearing on Hey Hey It's Saturday's Red Faces in 1987 (again, if anyone reading this has the segment on tape, Youtube awaits). With some line-up changes, the band still exists to this day, rehearsing and recording at its Melbourne home base. In our last instalment, we alluded to the fact that the 7" format enforced a certain quality control on the EPs' output, and noted that the culling process became less and less apparent over time. Taking their "record now, think later" MO into the digital age, the EPs' every fart is now documented and uploaded to the internet for the whole world to hear. At the time of writing, there were 100 albums - 100! - available for download, with more being threatened. Some of this material is self-described as "comedy rock", but it's often difficult to determine where the sincerity ends and the comedy begins. Where, for instance, does an amateur "Mega-Mix" of At Home fit in the scheme of things?
If Wesley Willis floats your boat, we suspect that there are some hidden gems awaiting you among the EPs' back-catalogue, but to find them you'll need to be made of stronger stuff than us. That being said, fans of the Secret Love single are advised to check out Make A Record, another early EPs composition which appears to have been recorded in the same session.
Addendum: 20 January, 2011
Ask and ye shall receive - The EPs on Red Faces, 19 September, 1987.
The graphic design clusterfuck to your right has created a great deal of confusion among punk collectors and Australian music discographers alike. Is it the Plastic EP by New Wave and the Records? Or New Wave by EP and the Records? No, no, and no to the other more creative permutations that have circulated, Chinese-whispers-like, among the small cadre of enthusiasts aware of this 45's existence. Plastic EP is a pseudonym adopted by the band's vocalist (a.k.a. Daniel Samargis), an homage to the four-tracks-at-45-rpm 7" format embraced by Australian record companies in the '60s; the Records is his backing band. "New Wave", it seems, was either their label or a misguided attempt at consumer advice.
Contrary to the Sydney locale documented in the Who's Who of Australian Rock, the EPs (as we shall refer to them for brevity) were Melbourne-based. Formed in late 1979 or early '80, the EPs' main inspirations were the bands that popularised their namesake format - the Monkees, the Beatles, the Yardbirds et al. It's no surprise, then, that the band existed in isolation from the Melbourne punk and DIY scenes; what is surprising is the choice of direction for their first release (pressed in a quantity of 250, and distributed locally to friends and gig attendees) - a deliberate stab at UK punk.
Naturally, a vinyl-derived band moniker (so nice, they named it twice) delivers brownie points right off the bat, but there are other admirable qualities on display here which appeal to our more conceptual sensibilities. For starters, we are big fans of the EPs' spontaneous approach to song writing - hit "record" and see what happens. "Some of our best songs have been written in under five minutes", explains Plastic EP. "I can write a song from a drum beat and sing the song from start to end without any words written down...it's more important to get the whole song down as a whole than to record a perfect song". Obviously an inherently hit-and-miss technique, here the band wisely distils the hits at the expense of the misses (an approach that was subsequently abandoned; more on that next week). Whether the attempts at UK '77 were a stylistic success is open to debate, but both songs are undeniably catchy, and performed with commendable energy and disregard for technical precision. At Home opens with a gangbuster intro, among the best in Australian punk, before settling in to a more straightforward, '60s-inspired 12-bar punker. Three Special Words more obviously displays the EPs' "make it up as you go" ethos (Can't think of what to sing next? Nonsense syllables are an acceptable substitute for words!), and is arguably the stronger track.
An additional appeal is that nobody here is playing with a full deck. Plastic EP's inability to sing a note, combined with the rudimentary lyrics and musicianship, lend proceedings an air of the mentally deranged, only adding to the EPs' standing in the Wallaby Beat canon. Things would only get stranger over time - we pick up the trail next week.
Summer has finally arrived down here. So here's a good summer record - breezy, unaffected, fun. Like this year's summer though it's a bit all over the place - poppy, punky, even a bit Oz rocky in the full-frontal basslines. You will certainly wish that the guitarist put a bit more grunt into his sound, but all four tunes are good, the energy level is high, the voice distinctive and the lyrics odd. The punkiest track is Johnny Was A Rock Star which also features a touching tribute to Ian Krahe:
Ian was the X guitarist,
He never got to be 21
I read about it in the papers
Them bastards dragged him down
Never saw him, never heard him
I never really cared
But two bottles and a couple of belts of scag
Didn't seem to me very fair
We'll mark this one as a Sydney record, though we're not 100% certain. It was recorded at Paradise Studios which at the time, December 1981, was in Kings Cross. Then there's the mention of surfing at Cronulla in Go For Broke. Then there's the "thanks to the boys at Stead Bros", a metal and rubber stamp factory at Rockdale. Hmmm, the stamped labels are quite fancy, maybe the guys worked there. Ok, ok, it's a Sydney record. Someone once told us 200 pressed, though that's still hearsay at this stage.
The band appears to have resurfaced in the last decade. A CDEP called Scales And Scrapes was released.
Hmmm, weekend is here and we're low on inspiration. "What about Fred Cass's great At The Weekend?" said the Professor at the weekly meeting. Alright! Then we remembered it's been blogged elsewhere. Oh, no! We scrambled, and here's Fred's second 7". It's not weekend-themed but we hope you'll find something on it for today.
On this one Fred (a.k.a. Lee Cass) is again backed by various members of the Sports (and their daughters), News, Skyhooks and Schizophrenias. Yong Talent Team Xmas 2001, a medley of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer and Jingle Bells, is a cool piece of seasonal kiddie punk. Fans of At The Weekend might also wanna check out the Soft Boys/Heartbreakers-style rave-up of Family Fun Parlour, and fans of Let's Get Married should also like Fred's satire on Australian coupling rituals.
As promised in our recent screed on Ipswich nogoodniks the Upsets, here's another barnstormer (literally!) from the same locale.
Like many bad habits, this one was formed as a product of teenage boredom - a 15 year old Neil Coombe (g) and buddies Paul Wilton (b,v) and Neal Ward (d) first began making a racket together in 1975. By 1977, after a couple of years of gigging (including a support slot for AC/DC at Brisbane's Festival Hall), Wilton had been replaced by Steve Arthurson (v,g) and John Pankof (b), and the expanded line-up retreated to a rural chicken barn to record Stormchild, Bad Habit's one and only LP.
An online bio of sorts fills gaps in the timeline and provides more detail about the recording of this LP, including the factoid that vocal takes were often ruined by the sound of gumnuts falling from an overhanging tree onto the barn's tin roof (from the sound of Arthurson's voice, those were the only dropped nuts in the vicinity of the vocal mic). It also promulgates some outrageous hyperbole about the record's punk-ness, the most noteworthy claim being that Stormchild was one of only two '70s Queensland-recorded punk LPs ((I'm) Stranded, of course, being the other). To our ears, the teenage amateurism and lo-fi recording herein certainly warrant the adjective "punky", but only as a qualifier to "hard rock". If these kids had heard the Sex Pistols, or ventured in to Corinda to catch The Saints, then it didn't osmose into their own efforts. Tsk tsk, TrippyHippy, if indeed that is your real name.
Punk rock or no, there is much to appreciate across Stormchild's ten tracks, which showcase a fairly advanced sense of composition for those so young. There are quieter passages and lengthier songs - all worthy, mind - but to comply with the Wallaby Beat remit we focus here on the most straight ahead rockers. The astute listener will note that all three songs plunder the same basic chord progression, yet each is distinct in its own right. To a degree, this is testament to the band's creativity in making the most of a limited palette, but the inventive lead work of guitarist Neil Coombe is deserving of particular credit. Coombe's playing runs the gamut from tasteful economy (the stellar dual lead interplay in Don't Touch) to tasteless bombast (see Burning Yearning, surely the most effective use of the chipmunk guitar solo this side of the Bob Seger System, and a WTF? moment that surpasses even our old friends Toxic), but is never anything less than great.
Neil Coombe himself is dismissive of Stormchild and his own contribution to the record:
"It's far from being my best work (I was 17) and I never know what to make of it...it was far down the track before I thought I did anything 'great'. It was my first album and I always dismiss it, but apparently there are some people out there who took to it...Truly bizarre".
Coombe subsequently played with the likes of 42nd Street and Mr Meaner. Though both have their appeal, we respectfully disagree about their relative merits vis a vis Bad Habit (nothing personal - as a general rule, musicians are the last people we trust to appraise their own work).
Scum stats: either 250 or 300 copies (depending on who you ask) pressed through EMI Custom, but it's more elusive than contemporaneous records pressed in one third of that quantity. Where did all of those records go?
After a few years learning the trade at parties and school dances around Sydney's North Shore, The Celibate Rifles (one of a bunch of one-off party names that stuck) progressed to playing pubs and getting a record out - and what a record! But Jacques, The Fish? is just about the finest record to ever emerge from up that way. Four great songs, some hilarious lyrics, and a frustrating set of sleeve colour variations.
As a rule we don't cross the bridge for nothin'. Every few years though one of our scouts up on the North Shore sends a telegram saying another colour scheme has surfaced and we don our radiation suits, jump in the Wallaby Beat detective van and head up there to bring it home. Now, twenty-eight years after this disc first appeared we think we can close the case on it, so welcome back to another it-never-ends session. There's been several years of does/doesn't it exist to and fro-ing with various parties, now let us supply some clarity.
The first pressing was organised by the band and appeared on EMI Custom labels in late 1982, with catalogue number 13355. EMI Custom pressings appear in one of two colour variations which we'll call black-on-white and white-on-black. These sleeves are different to the later pressing in that the sleeve is flapback - the folds are glued outside the sleeve on the back.
Note also that the colour scheme for these is repeated on the back of the sleeve; black-on-white is black-on-white on the rear (seen to the above right), and white-on-black is white-on-black on its reverse.
It's an odd sleeve in some ways - the iconography is from nowhere: a free-standing ewe with a tied off rifle, a foot on a stick with a tapping toe; and But Jacques, The Fish? You might be tempted to start to align our boys with surrealism and dadaism but we won't make the mistake of previous generations and link the motivations of suburban oicks with French philosophers. Just a healthily odd sense of humour, and a certain iconoclasm which came to characterise, and perhaps plague the band's output as time went on. Ultimately, the rarely seen heavy metal umlaut-ed Ä is probably gonna get you closer to the mark.
There are no mistakes to be made about the music though. All four tracks on here are absolutely great. The influences were Radio Birdman and the Saints - not just lazy pick-a-soundalike by us, but admitted by bassist Michael Couvret and lead guitarist Kent Steedman in several interviews (in Away From The Pulsebeat fanzine for example).
Kicking off with Kent's Theme (They Don't Listen) we have one of the band's earliest songs, dating back to their original singer Ian Martin. A comment on smoking and conformity with the great refrain "doesn't listen to the doctors advising, all she hears is the advertising" leading into the lead break appropriating the Marlboro theme. As we mentioned before, local guitarists love themselves some thematic "references".
Next up is possibly the highlight of the EP, Let's Get Married, a song that never fails to bring a smile to our faces, not just from the ferocious wah-wah solo and group-chanted chorus but mostly from the hilarious lyrics penned by vocalist Damien Lovelock. We particularly like the line "you must be okay coz you went down on my brother". Lovelock's vocals are excellent across the whole EP.
On 24 Hours the band kick back a bit with a more personal lyric. On this side of the disc the band really start sounding more like Radio Birdman, particularly in the guitar licks and backing vocals. Tubular Greens is the band's first surf themed song, a connection they continued occasionally, as detailed by Stephen McParland in Waltzing The Plank. Amongst other things this included pseudonymous gigs as Sandy Pile and The Beach Bums at Mambo's surf band battles, where they did T.V. Eye as Seaweed Eye. Anyway, cool song, great handclaps.
The EMI Custom EP was distributed by Hot Records. By 1983 Hot Records formally became a label and we have a second pressing of But Jacques, The Fish? as HOT 702. The same stampers were used, but the label is completely different and switches to an alternative spelling of Jacques. The sleeve artwork is the same as the earlier issue. The minutiae are as follows:
there is no longer any flapback - the folds are glued inside the sleeve;
there are four variations: red-on-white, white-on-red, blue-on-white, white-on-blue;
the back of the sleeves standardise - the red sleeves both have white-on-red reverses, and the blues have white-on-blue;
interestingly (come on, you've read this far) blue-on-white opens to the left, all other schemes we have seen have the more regular right hand side opening.
As far as rarity or otherwise goes, the EMI Custom pressings are harder to find than the Hot. We can't really divine any relative scarcity amongst the Hot sleeve variations - we'll just report that white-on-blue was the last one to land in our laps.
The lyric/info insert comes on white, blue, green, yellow, red or pink paper. Maybe others too. We haven't been able to find any variations on the inserts between pressings, even the handwritten extra phone number seems to be the same on all copies we've seen.
Finally some music - we've decided to just feature one track, the "all samples not cleared" Kent's Theme. 24 Hours, Tubular Greens and Let's Get Married saw release in the UK on What Goes On on the Quintessentially Yours LP. Kent's Theme was on a UK 7" on Shigaku Records backing Pretty Pictures and also made one of the early punk reissue compilations - Back To Front Vol 6 in 1995. All four tracks are on the Platters Du Jour double album/CD compiling the 7" tracks up to 1990. Go get it. Oh and report any other variations (with documentation please!).
Kent's Theme
February 2012 update Two more variations in hand: EMI Custom with black-on-white front and white-on-black rear; Hot red-on-white front with a red-on-white rear.
Plenty of cities had a pick-up scene parallel to their more formalised band scenes. Vancouver's fuck bands for one example, and the messingly incestuous London DIY scene. In Melbourne the Primitive Calculators and Whirlywirld solved the venues' requirement of having to fill a certain number of minutes with support bands by mixing and matching members and swapping instruments. Add a loose rule that each band could only have three songs and only perform twice, and the Little Bands were born.
Pretty much the only contemporaneous document was this 7", issued with blank black labels in 1980. Later the scene extended to a regular night centred around the Champion Hotel in Fitzroy. A lynchpin of the scene was Alan Bamford, who organised and faithfully documented proceedings. Ronnie And The Rhythm Boys - Hey Joe
Absolutely brilliant one note feedback version with dual vocals and localised lyrics. A mix-tape favourite of ours. Stuart Grant and Denise Hilton (Primitive Calculators), Jules Taylor (Thrush and The Cunts).
Morpions - Point Blank Great distorted guitar over a monotone beat and distracted vocals. Short and to the point. Lee Smith (Bowie-esque guitarist-around-town, also played with early Lisa Gerrard bands), his girlfriend Wendy (Joy) Morrissey, and Stuart Grant (Primitive Calculators).
The Take - Summer A more straightahead song style here, but the guitar 'solo' is cool. Frank Lovece (Primitive Calculators), Marisa Stirpe (Thrush and The Cunts), Tom Hoy.
Too Fat To Fit Through The Door - Flintstones, Meet The Flintstones Tomfoolery (as you may have guessed), idiocy, directionless art. Lots of fun. Marcus Bergner (artist/filmmaker/poet), Marie Hoy and Ollie Olsen (see Forced Exposure #14 for a rundown), Michael Buckley, Stuart Grant and Dave Light (Primitive Calculators).
There are plenty of tapes from this scene still extant - the 2010 exhibition at the Potter Gallery in Melbourne temptingly had them under glass, so here's a gentle push to those with access to get them out there. After all, we've lived with the teasing listing of the unreleased No Sin Like Dancing double LP in Inner City Sound for nearly three decades now. Put us out of our misery.
In the meantime you can hear some of the later Champion Hotel era Little Bands on the Terse Tapes One Stop Shopping cassettes which are in most households. If you want to hear some Thrush and The Cunts (and if you don't, what are you doing here?) then check out Chapter Music's Primitive Calculators And Friends CD (which also includes this EP and some Prim Calcs throwaways). Or, go and see the concept live - it's still kicking on!
Finally, a bonus - more Ronnie And The Rhythm Boys from Fast Forward 007 cassette magazine:
Ronnie And The Rhythm Boys - I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend
If you believe the insert, the Klerks' material was written in the Palm Beach branch of the ANZ bank. How apropos. From that home base in Sydney's northern beaches, the band ventured into the inner city throughout 1979 and became a regular Friday night fixture at the Sussex Hotel (where the EP's cover photos were taken). At that time, the venue was evolving into the epicentre of the Sydney mod scene - the Klerks shared a stage there with the likes of the Sets and rubbed shoulders with other future mod scene-makers.
Musically, stages were about the only thing the Klerks shared with the mods - bar the new wave-ish closing track, The Groove Tapes is raw and menacing punk rock. We have featured The Rider below as the standout song, but Love And Pain and Fun In The Sun are both worthy efforts, too. The EP highlights what seems to have been an ongoing alliance with Wallaby Beat favourites, the Flying Calvittos - both singles featured musical contributions from the mysterious Groove, and were tracked at his Surry Hills studio (here, Groove is responsible for some spastic keyboards, which thankfully tend toward fart noises as often as not). The Klerks' logo, as well as the cover of their only other single, were also designed by a Calvitto.
As for the other single, this is where things get a little complicated. Though The Groove Tapes was recorded in 1979, it did not see the light of day until some six years later, when it was released in a tentative edition of 250 copies on the Vi-Nil label. (Vi-Nil, of course, is best known for the first Hard-Ons single, as well as its other live-in-the-studio archival release, the Lipstick Killers' 1978 recordings). In the interim, the Klerks had expanded to a four-piece and recorded what was to be their first release proper, a two-song single appearing on Vi-Nil in 1983 (K001/2). This outing was incomparably weaker, and included an extended but anaemic re-recording of Love And Pain.
As if the Klerks' chronology wasn't convoluted enough, the matrix etching of The Groove Tapes belies its 1985 release date, placing it firmly at 1981. The most likely explanation would be an aborted '81 attempt to put the EP to wax, with the original plates being rescued for its eventual Vi-Nil release. Another theory involves the great scientific innovation of 1985, the flux capacitor. Keep an eye on our other website, where we intend to expound on this theory at length.
The Rider
Groove: "a wild, wild operator". From the advertising LP The Adventures of Smedley Strongheart (EMI Custom PRX.5667, late-'60s).
From delicate, fluttering insects to loud, lumbering mammals in the space of a week - talk about biodiversity. Befitting of a blog named Wallaby Beat, we're about to get all anthropomorphic-like.
The Tasmanian mock variety notwithstanding, Walrus is yet another example of an Australian hard rock band named after a non-native species (see also: Buffalo, Rabbit, Bengal Tigers). As anyone who has endured an episode of the Crocodile Hunter would know, Australia has a vast array of beasties capable of reducing your life expectancy, so we're not sure why the unpatriotic nomenclature held such sway (Steve Irwin would surely have approved of this exception). In the case of Walrus, it's possible that the appeal lay in a ready-made theme song, a cover of I Am The Walrus included on the band's lone 12". On the plus side, their version gives the song a tough HM arrangement and is surprisingly listenable. On the negative side, it's still a Beatles cover, so it doesn't appear here as a matter of general principle.
The 12" was recorded in January '78 and released mid-year (three years after Walrus formed in Sydney's western suburbs - click here to read more biographical details in the band's own words). The recording date is remarkable given the musical approach of the standout track, Wild Time Tonight. The tempo, double-tracked guitar riffing, and overall attack are nothing short of NWOB(A?)HM a whole year before the genre's defining bands made it to vinyl in the UK. Add a second kick drum and we're in territory mined by Jaguar three years hence. We can only assume our Westie hairfarmers were dialled in to the same Budgie tunes (Breaking All The House Rules..., especially) as their limey counterparts, and were possessed of the same impulse to trim the fat and hit the accelerator.
Walrus, Jaguar, Budgie...it's like a fuckin' zoo in here.
Props are also due to the band for dispensing with pragmatism and opting for the 12" format, a decision that clearly enhances the power of the tunes. Spread out over a whole 12" side, Wild Time Tonight hits like a brick to the erogenous zone - reason enough to consider the supplied mp3 a placeholder until you chase down the vinyl. Largely used as a promotional tool, copies sometimes surface with the aforementioned bio and/or the promo photo pictured below.
Though there were no more official releases, a number of other recordings exist which confirm that Wild Time Tonight was something of a one-off - the remainder of the band's repertoire tended towards sluggish hard rock, without the personality or taut execution evident here. With a change of name to The Lads around 1980, the band remained active to varying degrees throughout the following decade (mainly confined to the western Sydney pub circuit, including one memorable afternoon gig at the Viking Tavern on September 2, 1984), but never did reach the level of like-minded long-hairs Boss or Heaven. Or Finch.
Wild Time Tonight
Photographic evidence against the bio's claim of "a lengthy stint of shaving". Seconds after this pic was taken, vocalist Mark Collier deployed his chute.
The Limp came down to Sydney from Newcastle in late 1980. They shared DNA, songs and attitude with Pel Mel, who became vastly better known (not saying much). Both formed part of the Sydney version of Melbourne's Little Bands, continuing to swap members and ideas with like minds in the inner city suburb of Surry Hills. The Limp released a 7" on Primate records; it's ok but not one of our go-to records for that scene.
What is pretty much unknown is their first 7", recorded and barely released just prior to the move to Sydney. The band was given the chance to play around in the local Teachers' College music department's instrument room and record a 7" in their studio. 100 copies (or maybe 200, sources conflict, memories lapse) were pressed and then given away at an art exhibition at said college, thus pretty much disappearing into the æther. Member Tim McGee recalls more details of the recording at No Night Sweats.
Going back further in time, to 1979, The Limp were probably the first Australian band to embrace the No Wave songbook, covering Helen Forsdale and 3E live. The studied mixture of awkwardness and brash attitude of that scene comes through on the stuttering music and thousand-yard-speed-stare vocals of the A side.
We have no idea what an outer space moth looks like but if this song is any indication it must be a fragile and beautiful insect, and needless to say rare beyond belief.
Outer Space Moth
Animal Kingdom
Embarrassing as it is to admit, we probably don't have the complete packaging for this puppy. If you have a magazine or any other packaging that might have come with this and would part with it please get in touch.
Think you know a lot about Australian records in the punk era? We promise to astonish you with stuff off everybody's radar. We apply quality control so our powerpop has power, our glam has prominent balls, our punk is spiky and our DIY is far, far out there. We'll also do it-never-ends exposés of sleeve variations and inserts you didn't know existed. Strap yourself in and enjoy the ride.
