Sharp Toys - Nuclear Daisy from Goldfields Rock LP Goldfields Records MA 12304,1980

Before the Cosmic Psychos, there was Rancid Spam. That's some crucial science we learned from the new Cosmic Psychos documentary, Blokes You Can Trust, screening in all discerning theatres around the country. Rancid Spam featured a teenage, pre-Psychos Ross Knight plus - according to Knighty - the two other punks in the small town of Kyneton, rural Victoria. Along with some cool happy snaps, the film also shows a tantalising glimpse of a 1977 Rancid Spam demo tape. Surely we can't be the only ones wondering what treasures might be found on that cassette. The fine fellows at Aarght are giving the early Cosmic Psychos records the reissue treatment - perhaps they might be persuaded to look into it.

The last of those records, Go The Hack, is notable not only for featuring the best Australian song ever to sport a D-beat, but also for being the last release by the line-up with guitarist Peter Jones. Jones was soon replaced by Robbie "Rocket" Watts, allegedly after an audition at which Watts blew up two amplifiers. You won't often find us quoting Ian McFarlane's Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop, but his conclusion that the change in personnel didn't alter the Cosmic Psychos' sound might be the most insightful analysis in that book. Yup. Watts had previously played in I Spit On Your Gravy and the Quivvering Quims. And, before that, Sharp Toys.

Um, who? Just as Rancid Spam included the only three punks in Kyneton, Sharp Toys must have been the four biggest freaks in neighbouring Castlemaine - the kind of freaks Rancid Spam would have beaten up as a matter of general principle. Among said freaks were Robbie Watts and older brother Rex. The only trace of Sharp Toys' existence is a handful of tracks on a 1980 compilation LP, Goldfields Rock, released as a fundraiser for community radio station 3CCC-FM in Castlemaine. Of the four songs, Nuclear Daisy is our favourite, a world away from the wah-drenched fuzz-storm of the Cosmic Psychos, but even at this early stage Robbie possessed a nimble set of fingers and the song really opens up when he rips his solo. A song-ending explosion wins brownie points, too.

There are a number of places on the web where the remaining tracks on this LP can be heard, so we'll leave interested readers to explore that for themselves. On second thought, we'll direct you to the Rock On Vinyl blog, which tells us of the band members that "I suspect they didn't go onto bigger and better things". Hmm, perhaps Rock On Vinyl should stick to cutting-and-pasting its information directly from Wally Beat [sic].

Nuclear Daisy [Download]

It Never Ends: The Numbers and The Riptides - Sunset Strip 7" Able AB-003 and AB-004, 1978, 1979

One of the finest Australian records of the punk era is this 'un, Sunset Strip by The Numbers. There seems to be some latter day criticism by wooden ears that this is too poppy or sixties influenced. Those critics should take off the dunce cap and listen again - the pace is definitively 1978, the vocals disaffected, and the band smashing into each other in a completely endearing fashion. If you were born on Mars and haven't heard it you'll know straight away it's from Brisbane courtesy of the handclap solo - all the Briso bands feature 'em. Since this is an it-never-ends feature we're duty bound to point out the film like card the boys used for the sleeve and the miniscule chance of finding one without ringwear at this late stage. After a few decades we found the one above which had been stored separate to the record. It still shows a visible scratch though, ugh.

At some point word filtered in from down south about another Numbers and the band decided to change their name. This was not a major problem as they had already used and discarded The Grudge and Neon Steal (rumours persist of recordings from this version of the band). The Riptides were born. The Numbers single had been taken to Melbourne and Sydney by Robert Vickers and had been well received, so first point of business was to reissue the record under the new name.  

There's been much supposition over the years as to whether this version is re-recorded, remixed or simply remastered. Starting with the easy ones even the tinniest of tinnitus affected ears can hear the recording is the same. Remastered is a yes - The Numbers has a DB matrix scratch indicating Don Bartley at Studio 301 in Sydney. He captured the energy well. The Riptides version is an EMI Custom pressing plant job - new plates and a softer mastering job. Which leaves remixed. After some intense A/B-ing plus study of the waveforms we're gonna say yes. You can compare below but at the very least the hi-hats are way more prominent on the Numbers version. Mark Callaghan explained in Andrew Stafford's Pig City:

The main difference with the remix was we turned off Dennis’ hi-hat microphone, because at that stage he didn’t realise you were supposed to clamp the hat down when you did a drum roll, so you have the cymbals spilling out over everything!

Once again the band went with easily scratched glossy stock and even with 2000 pressed finding one without ringwear is a frustrating exercise. Bomp took 300 copies so our American readers should be well placed. Ours above still has the slightest hint, ugh. After the band moved to Sydney the last few copies were sold through stores there with the stamped sleeve below, a nice piece of it-never-ends to end with.

Well not quite - don't neglect the two b-side tracks! 

Sunset Strip [Download]


Magic Castle [Download]


Rules Of Love [Download]


Sunset Strip (Riptides) [Download]



In case you haven't seen it - the video. Handclaps at 2:26.

Third Annual Report

To address our new most frequently asked questions: Yes, the Ulsers records are still coming out; yes, they'll be available soon; and yes, they sound amazing. Like a turd filmed in high-def, Mikey Young's tasteful (re)mastering has elevated Remember Them's every shouted profanity and atonal blurt without in any way fucking with the sound of the original, while fans of UK DIY, Black Eye nonsense, Flipper/No Trend fuckyouness, and barking dogs will be left joyfully brutalised by Forget Them's 10 previously unreleased tracks. Watch this space.

So, to our annual top 10 most viewed posts, and this year brings something of an aesthetic watershed: a grillfat record in the number one spot! The Ulsers in a close second place restores the natural order.

1. Strutter
2. Ulsers
3. News - I'm So Confused
4. Last Words
5. Voigt/465
6. Ginger
7. U-Bombs
8. Microfilm
9. Numbers
10. News - Dirty Secrets

Fans of those records may wish to consider the following less well-patronised posts of the past 12 months. In particular, we direct anyone that dug Strutter's bong-fuelled Kiss worship to our favourite Westie idiots, The Ash Band, while Ginger fans should proceed to Maureen Elkner's great first single, post-haste.

1. Maureen Elkner
2. The Ash Band
3. Rick Huxley
4. Merv Megastar
5. Systematics
6. Systems Go!
7. Bent Elbows
8. Eleven Eleven

Contrary to the quality level of certain recent posts, the well is far from dry. We'll be back in business from Sunday August 11 with a stack of killer unknowns in our greasy mitts, and a new semi-monthly posting schedule to help us preserve our remaining sanity. As always, a big thank you to the regulars. See youse all next month.

Jump Vision - Can't Get Used To You 7" Basilisk BAZ 004, 1980

If by choice or circumstance the subculture you swam in was Sydney mod revival, then we hope you have a good memory of the time. Mind you, if the purple hearts did do a number on your bonce, you can relive it all through the excellent Stark Raving Mod book and website. We say all that because the physical records (i.e. discs, 45s, singles) of the scene are, by and large, an underwhelming lot. This is typical of scenes which are backwards looking, and where the music isn't the prime aesthetic focus.

One particular example which slightly pre-dates the more formalised union jack/scooter scene is Jump Vision's only recording. Though commonly described as a soul/ska band, the prominent bass, echo and guitar effects on the A-side come across more as a slightly (more) anaemic Cure fronted by a pre-tantric Gordon Sumner. The Sting inflections aren't as obvious as on fellow scenesters The Personnel's effort, but still there. It's alright though. The flipside is a ska instrumental; you know by now we'll save you the few minutes.

The band were Richard Knott on bass, David Rowley on drums and Mark Bradridge on guitar. All shared vocals. Rowley ended up in the last line-up of The End, and all three went on to Watusi Now with Peter Mengede. Organ was provided by Russell Handley of Popular Mechanics.

Can't Get Used To You [Download]

Jump Vision collared, from Inner City Sound.

Frank Savage And The Citizens - Ordinary Persons Rock And Roll 7" Mambo 503, 1980

Usually we'd jump at the chance to be smart-arsed pricks about an apostrophe catastrophe, but in describing themselves as "ordinary persons rock and roll" we reckon Frank Savage and co. knew exactly what they were doing, pub rock being music made by ordinary people as much as it is music for ordinary people. Besides, you don't get to play in not one but two bands with Johnny Topper without being something of a smart arse yourself. Little Boy Lost is a decent Sports-a-like, but the punkier Helicopter is the real winner, its near-perfect 60 second length spoiled only by that same smart-arsed-ness - a jokey label plug tacked on at the song's end.

This is the best of the three records known to us on the Mambo label, the others being singles by (in descending order of listenability) Japanese Comix and the Dynamic Hepnotics.

Little Boy Lost [Download]


Helicopter [Download]

It Never Ends: The Victims - Television Addict 7" MX46813/4, 1978

It's time for an it-never-ends on one of the great worldwide punk records - The Victims' Television Addict / (I'm) Flipped Out Over You 7". Released in an edition of 1000 in early 1978, every copy of this is effectively in a unique sleeve. That's because each one is hand stamped with kids' block stamps. However, there's still a lot of room for variation with such a scheme. So, in the spirit of the Flipper Sex Bomb sleeve blog (or the definitely NOT safe for work Nubees blog), today we'll start giving visuals for some of the sleeve variants for this hallowed record.

Sometime in early '78 our boys, James Baker, Dave Flick and Rudolph Vee, sat around a table and started stamping sleeves. A combination of red, black and blue ink was used, and most sleeves contain some combination of all three. For us, the nicest ones  just have the band name on the front of the sleeve and the titles on the back. The red and black sleeve on top of the post, paired with the tricolour reverse to the left, is a nice example. Some copies, and these seem to show up in America, only have the band name on one side and are blank on the reverse.

Flick outlined the process in the liner notes to the Sleeping Dogs Lie album:

We used a children's toy rubber stamp set to label each of the paper sleeves individually. In fact, as we had only bought a couple of sets there weren't even enough letters to spell out the band's name and the song titles so we had to leave a couple of gaps and fill in the missing letters later (we also stamped those ones with a different colour).

A cool variation, perhaps from the start of the process, is the all black version seen to the right. Now is probably a good time to point you towards Ross Buncle's Perth Punk website. There you can read about James Baker and Rudolph Vee's pre-Victims exploits with The Geeks, where Buncle and Baker had written (I'm) Flipped Out Over You. Flick had previously played with high school bands and, while starting a university degree, had decided to see just how far he could get playing music. He had joined a blues band called The Beagles on keyboards and toured around Western Australia. Having proved to himself making a living was possible, and having heard the Ramones album, and liking it, he hooked up with Vee and Baker and the Victims were born.

The record really needs no introduction. We can't think of many people who don't rank it in the best three Australian punk records. If you haven't heard it, well, it's been booted thrice in the US (black printing on white sleeve, then on pink sleeve, then on yellow sleeve, all with large holes) and recently legitimately reissued by 1977 records in Japan. We won't even start on the various compilations with the two tracks, just get yourself to YouTube. For now we'll just show pictures of some other versions:

Many copies have the band name and one of the song titles on one side.

We love the spelling mistakes, part I...

...and part II.

Television ADD/ADHD. A particularly cool variation which came from James Baker - note the different typeface. Perhaps done as a test run - a literal proto-type.

To bring things to an end for today we have to cover the photo inserts. These are the little fuckers that send collectors spare. They appear either by themselves or in pairs in odd copies. So far we've been able to round up seven different ones which you can see below. Particularly cool (and hard to find!) is the band under a Live At CBGBs poster, but as always, we can't imagine not wanting to own all of them.

We'll be happy to add any sleeve variations, (or, god forbid, inserts), not pictured here if you want to send them to us at the usual address. Thanks to those who already contributed scans.

Sounds, 6 May 1978

All afflictions catered for: here, double vision

Leap In The Dark - Samurai 7" Sundown SUN 0087, 1984

It was about 10 years back - a heady time when people actually read music blogs - that Dave Lang coined the useful phrase "record-collector-rock". Back then, he used the concept to mean music that is "drool fodder for collector/obsessive dorks: you know, not the kind of music 'regular' folk buy" (or more succinctly, records that are "good to show off but not to listen to"). What he didn't anticipate was the emergence of "meta-record-collector-rock": music made by record collectors, released by record collectors, for a target audience largely made up of record collectors. It's not exactly news that there is overlap in the collector/musician Venn diagram, but that kind of closed cultural feedback loop is a relatively recent phenomenon, right? Hmm, what of the Australian punk collector who, in 1983, created a limited edition of his own band's record with a cover directly referencing the Victims' handpainted 7" EP? What could possibly be the point, other than to amuse said collector and appeal to the OCD of similarly afflicted obsessives? Three decades later, that party trick has worked a treat - the self-aware tribute is even tougher to find than the Victims' original.

We'll come to the Victims EP and its simulacrum in due course, but what intrigues us today is the "anti-meta-record-collector-rock" of the Leap In the Dark 7". Vocalist Mark Overett was a year-zero participant in the Brisbane punk scene, documenting future legends in real time in his fanzine, Fad. These days, Overett is a self-described "anoraky guy who collects Aussie punk records 1976-1981". We applaud the tightness of those parameters, but dig the recording dates of Overett's own work - December 1983 to January 1984! Talk about hiding your light under a bushel. Luckily for Mark, others find worth in music made outside the classic '76-'81 timeframe - Samurai is a neat, punky powerpop track, and yet another example of the endearing tweeness that pervades many a Brisbane record from the Go Betweens on. The EP's two remaining tracks sit at opposing extremes of the tweeness spectrum, and are less endearing as a result. Other band members were Wayne Harvey (drums), Bob Reeves (guitar), and Adrian Mengede (bass).

Samurai [Download]

The End - My Confession 7" 13199, 1981

The Gap is a suburb in Western Brisbane named after the hole in its inhabitants' aesthetic sensibilities. It takes just one person to break the cycle and that person was Gap High student and guitarist, Brett Myers.

I used to play bass in high school bands. The End started in late 1979, I had just bought my first electric guitar.  I had a friend called Andrew Massey who was a bass player and he lived in my street. He came over and asked me if I wanted to join a band. I said as long as it wasn't with the guy down the road. I used to hear him playing Led Zeppelin songs!

The guy was drummer Colin Barwick, who with Massey on bass and Murray Davis on keyboards formed the first line-up of The End. Barwick was re-educated. Myers :

I wasn't into jamming, so to play anything I had to teach them all these Velvets songs. We played lots of parties, but we'd finish an average of about one song out of ten. It was a real thrash but it was coming from a different direction to everyone else. In those days no one was playing the sort of music I liked. If there had been another band playing it, I probably wouldn't have started.

In the end though, there was.

We used to do a lot of Stooges stuff as well, and New York Dolls. Then I saw the Fun Things and they were doing that stuff really well, so we stopped.

The new, "wimpy" End, started exploring space and dynamics rather than power. In most cases such a development would have us running fast in the other direction, but if there was one guitar player whose non-obvious choices we enjoyed the challenge of watching through the eighties, it was Mr Myers. The End took on Malcolm Cole on violin and keyboards, and swapped Massey for Johnathon Liekliter on bass. Their only single is a sometimes tentative, sometimes assured venture. We like its indirectness, though will champion their more powerful tracks like Birthday Boy, which saw release on a posthumous cassette that Citadel were due to issue on CD last decade before the arse wore out of the pants of the reissue market.

The End moved to Sydney and Myers got together with Ron Peno in Died Pretty. With Peno he could marry more direct rock and roll (and shred with the best of them, 2:42 on), with his more delicate sensibilities.

My Confession [Download]


White World [Download]


Thanks to X-change #4 (1981), and DNA #49 (1986) for the quotes.

October 2013 Update The long promised CD on Citadel is now out. It's not exactly the Hot cassette but it looks great, and Birthday Boy is disc 1 track 1. Buy it here.

Avalanche - Sweet Baby Brown Eyes 7" Bootleg BL-281, 1976

Along with such weighty topics as which of the 2013 fake Black Flags is the best (answer: this one), grillfat as a cultural touchstone is a subject close to our hearts, meaning that we're prone to running our mouths. It was on one of those grill-advised rants that we speculated that grillfat would be an unlikely candidate for KBD-style comp-age, given that grilldom is primarily the domain of the dollar bin ripper. So when we got wind of a boot being compiled from - where else? - The Boot, we thought we'd have to eat our words. Yes, contrary to predictions, Killed By Grillfat now exists (well, kinda. It's a Sharpie comp, so forgivably a few selections stray from the brief). But it turns out that even when we're wrong, we're right - at least half of the comp's track listing can be found languishing in dollar bins country-wide.

In that spirit, today we bring you a bang-for-your-buck grillfat knuckle-dragger, a relatively easy find for the tightwad digger. From their beginnings as the Bootleg Family Band, to their final single as Front Page and almost all of the Avalanche records in between, this band's output is uniformly turdly. The lone exception is Sweet Baby Brown Eyes, the second Avalanche single and a genuine butt-kicker. Lyrics about brown eyes are treacherous waters - was it really kicking that was on their minds? - but Avalanche navigate that minefield and emerge pretty much unscathed, leaving behind a song that is up there with the best of Fat Daddy and Taste in the Bootleg label discography.

The scuttlebutt is that other Killed By Grillfat comps are in the works, at least one of which promises to delve beyond the dollar bin into the realm of obscuro Australian hard rock mind-melters. Never have we so much looked forward to being 100% wrong.

Sweet Baby Brown Eyes [Download]

The Razor Gang - (All I Want For Xmas Is A) Neutron Bomb 7" RG 01, 1982

If you spend as much time as we do in the bins and crates then you're au fait with the basic tenets of quantum record theory. The bit which does our heads in is Schrödinger's Record Paradox, first posited by our learned colleagues over at the Corroseum. It goes like this: an unknown record found in the racks is simultaneously good and bad, until it is forced to collapse into one state or the other. We do this by putting them in our small hadron collider, a circular device where we smash industrial diamond at high speeds (45 rpm to be exact) against the vinyl, and study the results intently, looking particularly for evidence of the elusive punk particle.

So there I was, stood in The Pitt record shop in the 1990s. All of a sudden the Geiger counter in my toolbelt started going fucking ballistic. I took off my gas mask (this was a Bob Gould shop after all) and before me sat the record pictured above. Razor Gang. 1982. Crude sleeve. Military imagery. Neutron Bomb. Drawing of a razor blade. I added up the quantum probabilities in my head and easily cracked 100%. I could almost taste the Nobel Prize.

I quickly hotfooted it past the racks fronted by Danny Graham and Mopsie Beans 12"s (sadly I'm not joking), paid and rushed back to the collider, then based in Surry Hills.

Insert sad slide whistle...

To cut a long story short, my disappointment was such that until I recently pulled it out of the Wallaby Beat powerpop section, admittedly not the most visited part of the archive, this probably hadn't seen action round here for fifteen years.

With that much water under the bridge, the A-side is not too bad at all. Like the Mansons, the direct lyrics and vocals override an overly poppy backing. The "happy Hammond" does add something, though recent comparisons to The Go Betweens' People Say are gilding the turd. The flipside? Let's just say there is no New Wave section in our archive.

(All I Want For Xmas Is A) Neutron Bomb [Download]


Video Dreams [Download]