DJK stands for Dave Scotland (guitar, vocals), Joe Lee (bass), and Ken Wylie (drums), three-fifths of Canberra's Baby Grande. The Baby Grande story makes for an interesting read - we encourage you to do so at the relentlessly centre-aligned Canberra Musicians website. The gist is that the band formed in 1974, first in a pre-Scotland incarnation as the infinitely preferable Far-Q-2, then as Baby Grande in 1975 when the line-up was finalised. Oh, the other members? Their names may be familiar: Steve Kilbey (vocals, bass, synth), and Peter Koppes (guitar).
Initially an intellectual take on glam rock, Baby Grande evolved as the summer of hate dawned in the UK; Koppes quit, and at Kilbey's behest, the band amped up the guitars and pursued a direction more aligned with the Pistols and the Dolls (note that Kilbey's take on "daggy" local guitarists in the Canberra Musos piece is consistent with our own). Through connections and coincidence - notably, EMI Australia being wrongfooted by the UK parent company's directive to sign the Saints - Baby Grande found themselves under contract with EMI, and in January 1977, five songs were recorded with (I'm) Stranded producer Rod Coe. Unfortunately, the session was rejected by EMI for lacking commercial appeal, and the recordings remain unissued to this day. Dejected, Scotland, Lee and Wylie jumped ship.
Kilbey's post-Baby Grande trajectory is a matter of public record - after a dalliance with Tactics, a realignment with Koppes led to The Church and worldwide acclaim. The remaining Baby Grandes quickly regrouped as DJK Band, and issued this self-financed single in an edition of "about 500" copies (note the sly nod to former glories on the label). It's a worthwhile record, and one that gets better with each listen, but absent Kilbey's stewardship it lacks any trace of punk; instead, Venus Flytrap evinces a regression to inventive grillfat with glammy overtones. It's a description that applies equally to the lyrics - we'll leave you to listen for yourself, but let's just say that "a venus flytrap in a bed of daisies" is Canberran for "dude looks like a lady".
How could you go wrong with a song called Kill The Warden? That's what we thought when we first picked this up in a Newcastle op shop in the 1990s. It's a tasty grillfat tale of prison murder, with blood and guts and oh, a hooky chorus!
Meccalissa existed from 1974 until around the time of this release in 1979, when they became DV8. In fact, some copies of this have DV8 stamped on the labels (see below). From what we've heard of the DV8 records, you don't need to hear them (Dead Baby from the Stab In The Dark live LP is OK, but not as good as this).
The key to Tactics is singer Dave Studdert. To get an insight on what inspired their first and best record we're gonna quote liberally from Bob Blunt's great interview with him in Blunt: A Biased History Of Australian Rock.
As a kid growing up in the 1960s I moved around a lot to wherever the family landed, meat work towns. I only had two records, Hendrix's Smash Hits and the Stones' 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!'. I wasn't musically trained or anything and, to tell you the truth, from my late teens into my early twenties I was more into cricket than being a songwriter or musician. It wasn't until I was about 21 that I started feeling lost in all that suburban marriage bullshit. I started reading NME and hunted down records by Love, Bob Marley, Syd Barrett and Dylan. I was drawn to that because I had always constructed myself as an outsider, so I hunted down dub albums and some Burning Spear. I was on my own a lot in those days. I developed an antenna for what was deemed good or bad.
In the mid '70s in Canberra, Studdert dropped out of uni and formed a band. Punk had arrived in Australia but he didn't like the Australian copyist take on it.
Everyone was copying stuff straight out of the NME. All that punk stuff was kind of funny in retrospect but I had heard the Stooges and didn't want to sound like that. The music in punk never did anything for me. I preferred Jamaican stuff and Arthur Lee, Television and Talking Heads, which was more rhythmical with lyrics that weren't so straightforward and narrative, but more symbolist and double edged. Punk to me was an attitude and a kind of spirit. It was like the old is dead and the new is antibodies. I used this attitude because I was angry, very angry. I was doing shitty jobs, like cleaning out incinerators, and being hassled by my parents because I was 22 and didn't have a real job. With all this psychological tension in me, I wanted to release it all. I was wired, all the time. I was reading Rimbaud and Nietzsche and going out at midnight and driving around Canberra until the sun came up. I really related to Travis Bickle because I went a year or so without speaking to anyone.
Tactics began as Studdert and Angus Douglas and another soon to be famous Canberran.
Steve Kilbey was this computer programmer who couldn't play bass very well. We played a few shows with him in Canberra. Our first show we played two of his songs that I could never get quite right.
Oh well. After losing Kilbey and adding Geoff Marsh and Bob Whittle on bass and drums the band supported The Thought Criminals at ANU. Tactics followed them back to Sydney for shows, the first at Garibaldi's in Darlinghurst with The Thought Criminals and Crime and the City Solution.
I remember the joint was really packed. We played first and we weren't very good in comparison, but because I was this maniac it had something. When we returned to Canberra people slowly started to like us, mainly because Sydney bands liked us. The crowds still didn't get it. Copy bands were still the flavour of the month, especially the ones who belted out I Wanna Be Your Dog. Everything and everyone was a shadow of another. To this day that annoys me about this country because poor old neo-colonial Australia has always been good at copying. It's part of not wanting to be the excluded other.
Taking the tenets of originality and otherness with us, we leave the interview here and focus on the band's first recording, the Long Weekend EP. From the "postcard from another dimension" sleeve on in it delivers on the fronts Studdert wanted it to. The quest for originality doesn't lead the band up their own backsides; rather the visceral energy of the playing and the uniqueness of the structures deliver in spades. For us, Standing By The Window is the highlight with the double tracked spoken parts and the great guitar refrain. One of the best art punk tracks from this country, and while Studdert's voice can be an acquired taste, it's a pleasure to hear a Canberran guitarist play with conviction.
It was a surprise to rediscover Watch My Hands while researching this post - a sublime drum led track with, again, some great, gnarled guitar playing; landing somewhere between the first and third Urinals eps, without sounding like the second. We'll leave the third track, Buried Country, for you to track down. Tactics' story is long, and we're not going to cover any more of it here today. Maybe another time...
We try to approach our work here with something approximating scientific rigour. It's an approach which clearly also informed The Professor's earlier research at the Australian Punk Discography. Budding practitioners of the scientific method will note that the Discography follows the general format of a peer-reviewed academic publication: Introduction, Methods, a series of Results paired with Conclusions, and a Reference List for good measure. Indeed, it is "in the interests of Science" that The Prof subjected himself to the "metal-tinged pub-rock" of La Femme. Why? Because a credible source once described them as "punk", of course. Hypotheses are there to be tested.
Like the eligibility criteria for a randomised controlled trial, the Discography's Methods section establishes the scope for inquiry. It is from the list of exclusions that scholars of that work are likely to be familiar with Brisbane's Mr Meaner, a band ignored for being "so...unpunk that they don't deserve comment". But wait! What was that about metal-tinged pub-rock? Loose application of the description "punk"? Check! And check! It seems that the peer-reviewers at Collectorscum.com were on the bong the day The Prof submitted his manuscript, as that methodological inconsistency has remained unchallenged.
So today, in the interests of gender equality, we apply the old adage that what's good for La Femme is good for Mr Meaner (or something like that). The latter's sole single, the second and final release on Peanut Republic, delivers two slices of metallic grillfat in the vein of the Angels - palm-muted twin guitar riffing akimbo, and in I Dig The T.V., liberal use of our old mate the four-on-the-floor. What's missing is the Angels' melodic sense and knack for a hooky chorus. Still, the songs are carried by brisk tempos and energetic performances, and as metal-tinged pub-rock goes, the single has established itself as a keeper. We've presented the songs in the order determined by the single's matrix numbers as the A and B sides, but note that an alternative pressing exists which has stickers reversing the labels. This version has an EMI Custom catalogue number on the labels (in addition to the CBS number) with a corresponding matrix etching.
Mr Meaner were: Chris Greentree (vocals); Chris McWhirter (bass); Jim Poulos (drums); Brian Butler (guitar/vocals); and Dave Nelson (guitar). More from this line-up can be found on the That's Queensland compilation LP, released in 1980 by radio station 4IP (YPRX 1742), which includes the song Russian Roulette. Neil Coombe from Bad Habit joined the band after these recordings, but later line-ups weren't documented with vinyl releases.
June 2012 update: check out an article on Peanut Republic Records here.
A year ago Ipswich was under water; surely you remember the claim that a shark was seen swimming down the main street, 30 kilometers from any ocean! Today we revisit the city, but failing the emergence of any more unknown records from there this is our last visit.
The Toy Watches were a punk/pop band based in Ipswich and Brisbane between 1979 and 1981. A popular live prospect, they were picked up by aspirational label Peanut Republic. The result was this obscure 45 - highlighted by the punky pop A-side, Too Long. To be honest we've always neglected this 7"; it's good but doesn't reach out and grab you by the balls. However, in researching this piece we came across the video below, and the photos at rhythm guitarist Ian Davies' myspace site (also see below), and the sense of fun surrounding the band endeared the record to us one more time. The flipside, Hawaii, sounds half-written by comparison, perhaps too much fun was being had.
The iconography on the label starts with a map of Queensland (let's be thankful they weren't Tasmanian). Bursting through is state premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the kiwi of Dutch extraction who ruled the state from his farm in Kingaroy, the state's centre of peanut production. Don't be fooled by the cheeky grin, as detailed in many places, it wasn't fun politically. See Task Force, Pig City, the band Gerry Mander and the Boundaries, the Dead Kennedys appearance etc., for more musical evidence. Whatever, like the Credits, this is a love song, not political polemic. Davies and later bassist Russell Sky ended up in the great paisley pop band the Colours, whose wistful song Blue Shirt, which really unfortunately never made it to vinyl, was a 4ZZZ hit. I was interested to find out recently that that song is about the cops: "in my blue shirt, nothing touches me".
To round things off the other members were Shaun McGrath on vocals (the tall drink of water in the photo below), John Spresser on lead, Noel Howe on bass, and Cameron Howe on drums. McGrath and Spresser ended up in the Skeletones with Brad Cox.
June 2012 update: check out an article on Peanut Republic Records here.
"The Barons' maxim was So?, meaning Do you expect me to justify this - I won't" - Michael Tee.
Read The Barons' story straight from the horse's mouth at the always excellent No Night Sweats site, the web's definitive first-hand account of Sydney post-punk. In short, we have a loose assortment of prog rock obsessed stoners from Sydney's northern beaches prone to wasted jams in the privacy of their own living room, the conclusion of which would be signalled by a tape of crowd noise culled from Kiss Alive!. Among said stoners numbered Michael Tee and Mitch Jones, future two-thirds of Scattered Order and the driving force behind the M-Squared label, not to mention Mark Tremlett and Fred, designer of the M-Squared logo and landlord of M-Squared's Wilshire Street HQ, respectively. Though released by the Thought Criminals' Doublethink label, Tee considers The Baron's Greatest Hits to be the first true M-Squared record. The songs were recorded in 1977 and 1978, but by the time of the record's release in 1979, the pair had already begun cobbling together studio equipment and documenting the Sydney scene (see the Sheiks, Seems Twice, Nervous System); the experience with Doublethink served as a catalyst for the formation of their own label.
As can be heard in the likes of Always Lurking and Dog Squashed, The Barons could barely hold it together long enough to work their way through a barre chord. We can only imagine that steadfast lack of ability applied to covering the turn-on-a-dime Frippisms of 21st Century Schizoid Man ("where we would play along with the live version off KC's USA LP. We used to play along with records a lot; it was easier as we could not be bothered working out how to play our instruments properly"). Instead, on Greatest Hits, we have an assortment of originals ranging from inspired amateurism to a painful lack of ideas masquerading as minimalism - Boiled Dinner explores the lower reaches of the tempo dial on the Hammond organ drum machine, and is every bit as compelling as that description implies. As with The Popes, the influence of They're Coming To Take Me Away rears it head in the cadence of Just In Time, highlighting a certain self-awareness about the absurdity of this whole mess.
The Barons' only other official release was a cover of Paint It Black on M-Squared's Growing Pains compilation 12". There's a disappointing lack of playing along to Aftermath to be found, but it does make for a nice companion piece to The Residents' Satisfaction. These days it can be heard on Ascension Records' Terrace Industry 4xCD. More home-recorded nonsense is available via Mutant Sounds.
While Mopsie Beans didn't make it to John Peel's glory box, one Australian record did. It's an old favourite of any follower of the Australian punk canon - XL Capris' great punk version of Tommy Leonetti's nightly signoff song from Channel 7, from back when 24 hour broadcasting was still a thing of the future.
The original XL Capris (Nancy Serapax on drums, Errol Cruz on guitar and vocals, Alligator Bagg on bass and vocals and Dag Rattler on guitar and vocals) were a fine, quirky punk band who played their first gig on New Year's Eve 1978 in the foyer of the Nimrod Theatre in Darlinghurst (now the SBW Stables Theatre).
Over the next year they gigged aplenty around Sydney (see a review below), and made an early trip to Melbourne. We particularly like this snippet of info from the band's history in Aberrant's Why March When You Can Riot LP liner notes: "Mid January 1979; first 'real' gig at Garibaldi's. The band was banned from this venue because an excited fan threw the men's toilet out the window". Continuing their connection with today's date, the year culminated with the release of My City Of Sydney on New Year's Day, 1980. There are all manner of stamped variations of the white paper sleeve, some busy, some sparse.
Apart from this first single, the best way to hear the original line up is as a download, Live At Georges. Skylab (Son Of Telstar) from these recordings appeared on the aforementioned Aberrant compilation. With various members leaving, the band became less interesting as they evolved, eventually releasing two albums and three more singles. Some later live stuff can be heard here.
Today we feature the less heard flipside of My City Of Sydney, Dead Budgies. It's a strange amalgam of punk rock, bird calls and parody; the song title getting twisted to "dead Bee Gees, dead bodgies" and "dead bludgers". If you never flipped over My City Of Sydney, here it is.
In a small piece of it-never-ends action some final copies were sold at a later gig. Rather than do up more stamped sleeves the band simply applied a sticker to some found sleeves (and stamped the back with the red XL CAPRIS seen on regular versions).
Since most of you are SSL speakers, that's Strine as a Second Lingo, you'd be forgiven for missing the small ocker revival amongst tastemakers in recent years. The original Ocker was a character in the '60s TV show The Mavis Bramston Show, codifying the broad speaking, straight talking, piss taking, clever but smartarse bloke Aussies seemed to love to love. The genre never really went away, but it did start to seem less attractive as it morphed into the garden variety yob by the 1980s. Perhaps starting with the reissues of the Bazza McKenzie fillums, crate diggers started pulling a few old ocker classics out of bins country wide and proselytising their worth.
John Vincent was a South Australian DJ who put out many ocker novelty records, both under his own name and as the 'Ken Oath Ockerstra. We like this one in particular because of its links back to a cool earlier version from 1967. We'll get to that in a minute, but for now enjoy a bit of seasonal stupidity, with Thin Vin's approximate vocals taking centre stage.
The song has its roots in an earlier song, in fact Vincent's debut record, recorded with legendary Australian '60s band The In-Sect, whose I Can See My Love is rightly regarded as a classic of Australian '60s punk. As told by guitarist Frank Sebastyn to Ian Marks in the great recent book Wild About You, the In-Sect were the regular house band at the Arkaba Hotel in Adelaide, where they played six nights a week and an all day Saturday beer garden gig to 1200-1300 people.
I arranged that for John. He used to keep hanging 'round the Arkaba saying, 'Can I sing a song, mister?' And after weeks of telling him to piss off, we let him up on stage, and he did this song called 'Ow Ya Goin' which knocked 'em out. So I spoke to Ron Gillespie [from W&G] and he agreed to record him, too.
It goes on to tantalisingly say Ow Ya Goin' was "allegedly recorded in the lavatory at the Adelaide Railway station" with no further details!
Detailing the three stages of a standard piss up, the lyrics in total are:
'Ow ya goin'? Alright! Crack a coldie. You beaut! See ya later. Hoo roo!
Again for our SSL friends a few translation hints are in order: crack a coldie is "open yourself a cold beer from the esky"; you beaut is an exclamation of pleasure equating to "you little bloody ripper"; hoo roo they say is an archaic Australian farewell, but I've been hearing it all this weekend as I've done the rounds of family and friends. It's all helped along by a sterling performance by the In-Sect with loud drums, organ and some great guitar by Sebastyn.
Vincent and the In-Sect combined twice more, first on the Madge's Charity Badges / Choko Brandy 7" (RCA 101860, December 1968), then on the Ballad Of Andy Capp 7" on Adelaide label Gamba. Dean Mittelhauser said of the RCA record, "this was another of Vincent's terrible novelty songs, but the band's raunchiness is undiminished, particularly on the A-side where there is a truly fab guitar solo. It's absolutely boss, and makes Vincent's bad lyrics and even worse vocals almost bearable". It's a cool record and has been comped on the Australian psych CD, Datura Dreamtime.
Vincent revisited 'Ow Ya Goin' in 1973 on his only album. Without the In-Sect, and without '60s enthusiasm, it's reduced down to a pretty standard 12 bar blues workout. We include it for completeness. If you absolutely have to dig further into Vinnie's back catalogue we can perhaps suggest this approximation to Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie style satire from 1975, and again with a Ramones tribute band.
So quipped Gus Chambers one night at the White Sands tavern, shortly after a disgruntled publican pulled the plug on his band. Such was Gus's rage, he momentarily forgot how to count - you can hear the results on Rupture's Sex, Drugs and Rupture CD. Antipathy to the ol' Dullsville is something of a Perth punk tradition, the most well-known example of course being The Victims' Perth Is A Culture Shock. However, the Perth kiss-off we really wanna hear seems to have remained unrecorded.
Paul Keating famously described Australia as "the arse end of the world"; Arsehole Of The Universe – a song variously attributed to the Exterminators or its short-lived offshoot, Sad Sack and the Bags – narrows down the anatomy and ups the cosmological denominator in laying waste to late-'70s Perth. Readers who have internalised Harry Butler's Perth punk family trees in B-Side #6 and DNA #34 will know that the Exterminators existed from May to November 1977. The band's core – Rod Radalj (guitar) and Boris Sudjovic (bass) - morphed into the Invaders (no relation) in December 1977 when Kim Salmon (guitar/vocals) joined the fold, the band in turn becoming the Scientists in May 1978 when James Baker, fresh from the recently disbanded Victims, occupied the kit. Readers who have internalised the Scientists' Wikipedia page could probably tell you much the same thing.
Sudjovic didn't last long in this line-up of the Scientists, exiting prior to the recording of the classic Frantic Romantic / Shake Together Tonight 45; Radalj played on the single's A-side, and left the band soon afterwards. The pair soon teamed up again in April 1979 as the Rockets, and along with Allan Stewart (vocals), Peter Johnson (guitar), and Johnny Cole (drums), supplemented a set of Heartbreakers and Ramones songs with high-energy originals. Accounts from folks in the know have the band pegged as a shit-hot live proposition, reportedly Perth's closest approximation to the Detroit-via-Sydney rock of Radio Birdman.
Unfortunately, the Rockets' sole single (released in May 1980 by import record shop White Rider) doesn't quite capture that attack. Mean Mistress is fine punky rock and roll, somewhat hobbled by bog-standard riffing and typically "Perth" production (hard to put a finger on the defining characteristics, but to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we hear it). That said, we have found ourselves coming back to Mean Mistress again and again over the years, surprised each time by the energy of the performance. The flipside, Little Donna, is slower and wimpier, alternating between a singular pedestrian riff and a truly cringe-inducing middle-eight. 'Nuff said. Five hundred copies of the single were pressed, housed in a silver cardstock sleeve overlaid with either a black or white screen print. In our experience, there's no discernable difference in rarity between the two sleeve colours, though white seems to have surfaced more frequently in recent times.
Sudjovic has reflected that the Rockets "lasted much longer than they should have, two months would have been about right". By the middle of 1981, he and Radalj's disdain for Perth and disaffection with the band had reached critical mass, with the pair leaving both the Rockets and the city for the perineum of the universe, Sydney. There, Radalj teamed up with two ex-Victims to form Le Hoodoo Gurus, and Sudjovic rejoined the Scientists to spearhead the band's swamp-rock phase. The pair would eventually regroup in 1986 as the Adorable Ones, a.k.a. the Dubrovniks. Back in Perth, the Rockets continued with line-up changes to fill the Croatian-sized void, and pursued a less interesting hard rock-tinged sound. This direction can be heard on Automatic, the revamped Rockets' contribution to the West compilation LP (96fm/Polygram MX198965/6, 1981), where somewhat confusingly they sit back-to-back with the Invaders, an unrelated band led by ex-Bakery vocalist John Worrall. A cassette from 1983 showcased more of the same with flourishes of the old punk and roll sound, but the band would fold with no further vinyl releases.
If you told me blind we'd be championing a white reggae single where the singer actually attempts a Jamaican accent, and there's a proggy guitar solo, I'd cock my eye and suggest you were mistaken. Nevertheless, here we are in that exact situation.
Nigel Lawrence was a shortarse Yorkshireman who landed in Adelaide and joined a band called The Bank Of France. The band did mostly satirical, novelty stuff like It's Still Billy Joel To Me and Please Let Me Be On Countdown. It is suspected the A-side song featured today is supposed to be humourous punk novelty.
So, what lifts Jonestown Suicide out of the kids' pool of punky reggae novelty and into the deep end of the punk pool? Great songwriting and a truly superb vocal delivery by the remonikered Nasty Nigel.
Starting with ominous keyboards, a reggae beat sounding more fuelled by GBH than THC fades in. The chanted Jonestown Suicide refrain builds to our man Nasty taking over.
Jonestown suicide Jonestown suicide Thousand people take their lives Lemonade and cyanide
Brilliant in its simplicity, and delivered with a really, well, nasty tone. The fade in, verse, verse, verse, solo, verse, repeat first verse, fade out structure is interesting - the kind of thing attempted only by inspired amateurs or gifted professionals. Then there's that solo, and the staccato rimshot outro. Together with the subject matter, tough production and perfect song length it all conspires to make this something of a classic. We don't even cringe when he goes all yardie accent in the verse starting "Enigmatic mystery man".
Did we mention the clean, simple cover art? It's nice to see a band get everything right for once - leaving the band name completely off the sleeve is a plus, isn't it?
The song was well played on the alternative radio stations at the time - 2JJJ, 4ZZZ, 3RRR, 5MMM etc. and was something of an underground hit, not unlike the Brats sole vinyl appearance. At least one of the song's writers, Greg Champion went on to make a living out of songwriting, though his main money spinner (and general oeuvre) was a return to daggy, novelty stuff like I Made A 100 In The Backyard At Mum's. Lawrence and Champion and some of the Teenage Hellcats got their earlier wish and appeared on Countdown in their next guise as happy-go-lucky pop band Young Homebuyers.
The flipside, A.K.A., sees Lawrence again carry the song with another great vocal performance. The wonky instrumentation, jaunty rhythm and the little slip into French shows him in the thrall of Wreckless Eric and Ian Dury and the Blockheads. It ain't Stiff, but it's still worth a fuck.
