It’s a rare pleasure to encounter a musician who’s music left a significant impact on your youthful, impressionable self. Rarer still for their music to sound as deeply melodic and punchy as any great pop/rock band you’ll hear today, but alas, if only I could show you. It’s a fate that has befallen many a small band in the days before the internet, before Youtube, before any kind of shared archive or means of documenting information that would prove, beyond scratchy pieces of vinyl and faded memories, that they even existed. The music does remain, but so too unanswered questions about the band itself — where it all started, why it all ended and what happened inbetween.

The band in question were called Helvelln. It’s ok for you to think “who? never heard of ‘em”. Honestly, you’d have to be aged 35+, Australian, and a regular listener of Triple J or Triple R. Maybe you watched Neighbours. In the finicky annals of Australian music history, and with no disrespect to Helvelln, they barely warrant a mention. To briefly summarise, Helvelln were an inspired pop/rock 3-piece formed in Melbourne in the late 80′s, released two singles and one album and then broke up in the early 90′s. Google them and you’ll get pictures of mountains. Impressive and rocky, but hardly rock n’ roll.

It was a great pleasure to track down Jeremy Gronow, Helvelln’s vocalist/guitarist and songwriter who gave up considerable time and effort (in one of the longest interviews we’ve ever done), to help shape another chapter in our series on the Secret History of Australian Music.

How did Helvelln get started?

The bass player Andrew Papadopoulos and I met at school and began playing in a couple of bands. After school we kept going but lost a singer to NIDA (an acting school) in Sydney and a drummer (I forget why).

We met Nick, Helvelln’s drummer about 1988/89 after I called 3RRR in desperation to ask if they would mention we were looking for a drummer on air. By chance the girl who answered the phone knew Nick and hooked him up with us. At that time we had a new singer as well who left after a couple of months.

Rather than look for a new singer (we were sick of auditioning people), we decided I would sing until someone better came along. At the time i was a bit disappointed to be the singer as I really wanted to be a cool guitarist and singing made it hard to show off on guitar.

What was the decision behind giving the band such an obscure and prone-to-misspelling name? If I recall correctly, you chose one spelling on your first single and then subsequently dropped it!

The band name was Nick’s idea – it was originally Helvyvelln, which he liked because it had a kind of symmetry around the ‘V’ (Nick’s next band was called ‘dollop’ for similar reasons). It was the name of a mountain in Wales that he had heard about while travelling. We later found out that it is the highest mountain that you can legally cycle across in the UK.

As you mention unfortunately no-one could pronouce it (the first in a series of pretty stupid marketing ideas we had) and eventually we shortened it to Helvelln. That didn’t clear things up though and we kept getting mistaken for a Melbourne Van Halen cover band called Hans Valen. I recall turning up a gig once and the bar manager saying “I’m pumped you’re playing here tonight, do you do “Hot for Teacher”?”.

What were your influences starting out?

I was really into The Jam (Style Council also, I’m a longtime Paul Weller fan), the Clash and the Who. Hoodoo Gurus, Violent Femmes, Paul Kelly, Steven Cummings, Wedding Parties Anything. Harem Scarem, Blue Ruin, TISM, the Fish John West Reject and Paul Kelly. I remember we all liked Midnight Oil as well (hell, who didn’t at that time?). Nick brought in some different influences like Hendrix and Peter Gabriel (we loved his movie soundtrack to Passion of Christ).

As the band went on we turned each other on to a lot of bands. Some of my favourite memories of the band are the way we would play each other new stuff, usually in the van on the way to gigs – we got into the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Ride, Pixies, the Breeders, Jane’s Addiction and Nirvana.

I recall some early hype being that you won nationwide campus band competition? How long had the band been playing at this point?

We won the National Campus battle of the Bands in 1990 and would have been together 2 years at that stage.

Andy and I were both at Melbourne University which had a bit of music scene going on at the time. I think we entered the year before and didn’t do very well but then in 1990 we hit our straps and won our heat, then the Melbourne Uni final then the state final and the nationals. We already had the “Subway/Elvis” single out at the time and had toured Sydney as well so I think that helped because the judges knew us a bit.

It was kind of a weird thing to compete playing music and it all felt a bit arbitary to say one band was better than another (although some were pretty awful). Anyway I think we managed to stay relaxed about the whole thing and that helped too.

Apart from having this tag possibly dog you throughout the band’s career, were there any benefits – girls/money/studio time etc?

Winning the national final was a huge help – at the time it was the biggest competition of its kind in the Southern hemisphere. The prize was a tour of universities all over Australia, so we were able to go everywhere and offset the pub gigs with lunchtimes at unis and colleges. It also got us noticed by JJJ which had just gone national at that stage and were very keen to play bands from other states, so we became their ‘Victorian’ band. It also got us noticed by Mushroom who eventually offered us a deal although we had already self financed the record that became our debut release for them. As I recall it didn’t really help with the girls though….

Did this win dovetail into the band recording the “Subway”/”Elvis” 7″?

Actually we did the 7″ before the Campus battle of the bands. In 1989 we won a battle of the bands run by the City of Malvern (Stonnington these days). The prize was a couple of days recording at Bakehouse in Fitzroy and we recorded “Subway” and “Elvis”. I remember finishing mastering the single and walking down Brunswick St to Polyester Records. We walked in and played it to Paul Elliot who ran the shop and label and he agreed to put it out if we paid for the pressing. In retrospect I can’t believe it happened like that, it was so easy. All of a sudden we had a single and a cool indie label was putting it out for us. I remember making the record cover at a friends place, I don’t think Photoshop was around then so we just cut out bits of paper and stuck them together in a collage. It was all very naive and DIY.

What can you tell me about the decision behind recording those two tracks? Did you feel they were the most band representative and radio-friendly songs in your set at the time?

“Subway” was just the best song we had at the time and we did “Elvis” because it was favourite to play live. “Elvis” orginally had a totally different arrangement (kind of average white boy funk, dear god!) but a friend of ours, Ben, had been playing it solo and worked out the new arrangement so we borrowed that and the song became much better.

Lyrically both songs came from the same place, teenage angst about girls. Subway was about a real railway underpass in Melbourne (its called the Degraves St Underpass) that I used to walk through and thought was really cool. Since then its become even cooler with some great left of centre shops there including one called Sticky that only sells fanzines. I used to see girls down there that I thought were awesome and lust after them. “Elvis” was about me jokingly accepting that my girlfriend of the time loved him more than me.

Subway Girl by Helvelln

I guess they’re more or less a thing of the past, now that most bands tend to duke it out over the internet, but it seems the moral of the Helvelln story is never underestimate the power of a battle of the bands?

Hell yeah, even though the idea of bands fighting it out and being judged kind of appalls me, band competitions really worked out well for us. At the time it was one of the only ways for bands with no profile to get noticed.

So a quick timeline of the band would be formed in 1988, released “Subway” 7″ in 1989, won National Campus Band Competition in 1990, and then released your self-titled debut in 1992 (with many a trip up and down the Hume inbetween). You mentioned that you self-financed the recording of your debut prior to Mushroom’s involvement. From the DIY beginnings of the 7″, did you have aspirations to avoid major label trappings?

No, we weren’t trying to avoid them, we just didn’t believe major labels would ever be interested in us. Our aspriations were very low, I think we really just enjoyed making noise.

Also at the time the indie stations PBS and RRR were huge in Melbourne and if you made a record you could get enough the airplay to keep a band going. The DIY thing was just what everyone we knew was doing so thats what we did as well.

With the amount of radio play that “Subway” got, what made you go with Mushroom, and what were the terms of Mushroom’s involvement with the band? The album was released on their alternative “White Label” imprint and had some marketing campaign around it that reduced the price of the album as in incentive to purchase.

At the time Mushroom had a really good A and R guy called Bill Page and we got on well with him and he seemed to get where we were coming from.

Beyond that, they were the only label interested in us. To their credit Mushroom had a policy of signing lots of local bands back then. Some of them would work and they’d write the others off on tax. The year we got signed they also picked up Frente and Have a Nice Day. They didn’t spend a lot of money on the bands but just took a small punt in the hope that one might take off.

Given the album was already made they really didn’t have much involvement in the music part. They did get a ‘name’ photographer Polly Borland for the cover, she’d had stuff in The Face which was super cool back then.

They also found a great video director called Clayton Jacobson who went on to have a hit film called Kenny (its about a guy who hires out portaloos, apparently its fun) who did us a low budget clip to show off his stuff to Mushroom.

Most bands tend to get their live set down on record when it comes to recording their first album. Given that it was paid for on your dime and you weren’t there to muck around, was this the case with Helvelln?

Yeah just did the stuff we had been playing. No writing in the studio or experimentation. The place we were recording at (Sing Sing) in Melbourne was pretty expensive anyway so there wasn’t much time to fool around.

As debut albums go, for Australian bands in the early 90′s (god, there was a lot of innocuous shit about — The Sharp, Things Of Stone And Wood, etc), it had at least one thing going for it — a solid side 1. The first half dozen tracks are some classic 3-piece rock/pop — strong hooks, great melodies, just perfect, catchy radio tunes.

Although we didn’t plan on being a three piece (people just kept leaving the band until thats all that was left) the three piece line up has a lot of advantages sonically. No one has to compete for space in the mix and you can overplay all you want. Once you bring in a second guitar or a keyboard suddenly theres competition for space and you have to think a lot more about everything, the sounds, parts, arrangements, etc.

Given your penchance for other classic 3-piece acts like Violent Femmes and The Jam who made equally memorable debut albums (hmm, less so The Jam…), did the album live up to your youthful aspirations? What were some of your memories of making the record?

It was great to wake up in the morning and think, ‘Wow, I’m going to the studio to record’. We were in our early 20′s and really living the rock dream. There was no pressure on us either ‘cos we didn’t have a deal and really only wanted to get our stuff played on RRR. So my memories are that it was really fun and great to be in a studio with a decent recording room and gear.

A lot of the songs seem to be about, or involve, girls…. (“Subway”, “T-Shirt”, “Cigarettes & Beer”, “Elvis”, “Cruelest Plague”). They always make for great subject material or inspiration, no?

Yeah, like I said, I was in my early 20s and didn’t have a lot else on my mind. I don’t think you could call me a deep thinking kind of songwriter at that time. I was involved in a fairly tumultuous relationship as well and every time we’d have an argument I’d write a new song.

Click here for part 2 of Secret History of Australian Music – Helvelln

Part 2 of our Secret History of Australian Music retrospective on Helvelln and interview with guitarist/vocalist and songwriter Jeremy Gronow. For part 1 and a more considered introduction, go here.

Bedroom critic that I am, I’d be amiss not to suggest that only thing that lets Side 1 down is the lugubrious “Temptation”. If I had my way, I would’ve swapped it for “Subway” and barn-stormed Side 2 with “Cigarettes And Beer”. Though Side 2 seems to be weighed down by the less up-front rock-y numbers. It’s hard to believe that the critical response would’ve been anything less than positive, but was this the case?

Yes, I think you’re right there. “Temptation”, yeah, I reckon it went down better live but we didn’t have the chops to pull it off on record.

The other one that makes me cringe is the pseudo funk of “Crown of Thorns”. One of the problems we had with that record was because of the limited time and money we didn’t have any spare songs we could use – so everything we did went on the record. A few other options would have been good.

As far as critics go, I can’t remember how it was received but we were getting strong airplay on JJJ and the program director there Mark (forgotten his surname) really liked us as well. So the record reviews weren’t really important to us.

Cruelest Plague by Helvelln

You released one single from the album with “Cruelest Plague”, which didn’t seem to do you many favours. It wasn’t the strongest track on the album, nor did it have an inviting title (but hey, it got played on Neighbours!). Was this your idea/their idea?

God, I can’t remember, it was probably the record company’s idea. I guess we were young and not in a position to stand up to the record company – they were the experts and we were the dumb arse musicians. Also it took a long time to get the contract finally signed after they first offered it to us and I think we were grateful to have anything come out.

It did get hammered on Neighbours which meant great publishing royalties since at the time they were showing Neighbours twice a day in England (revenge for On the Busses, I reckon!).

Record companies can be prety literal in their approach. I remember meeting one of Mushroom’s (or maybe their distributor Festival) sales reps in Brisbane and this guy had been wracking his brain for a gimmick to push Cruelest along. Bless him for being enthusiastic but he came up with the idea of sending test tubes filled with green slime labelled ‘Cruelest Plague’ around to radio and so forth like it was dose of anthrax – probably not the best way to have the band remembered.

Many of the tracks on that album still stand up today, and you can’t get any more “Oz Rock” than “Cigarettes & Beer” and that great opening line — “I don’t know what you see in her/she’s always taking about nothing”. Why on earth wasn’t this released as a single? Or “T-Shirt” or “Crystal”? I’m amazed that (again, if my memory is playing tricks, excuse me) no other singles were released from the album when all three seemed to capture the raw pub-rock/pop vibe of the band perfectly.

What a nice thing to say. I reckon what happened was that the A and R guy who signed us to Mushroom left a few months after the record was released and we didn’t have anyone there championing our cause or pushing for more singles. I always thought we really were much more of a rock band than Cruelest or Subway suggested. Mind you, at the time we were also doing a spoof version of Wake me Up Before You Go Go (as a waltz) so you can draw your own conclusions……

Cigarettes And Beer by Helvelln

My last recollection of the band was your national tour with Frente and Archie Roach (late 1992?). During the Sydney show at the Annandale Hotel, word went round Archie was unable to perform so Helvelln had to play an extended set which was heavily weighted in new material. Presumingly this would’ve appeared on your second album….. which never happened. Was the album recorded? Did Mushroom pull the plug? Is there a complicated story here or a rather simple one?

Oh yeah, this is where the Helvelln story starts going a bit tragic. We got 75% of the way through recording our second album when Mushroom shelved it.

What happened was that the guy who signed us, Bill Page, left the company. The guys that took over from him in A &R didn’t have a stake in the band and didn’t get what we were about. I remember one of them giving me a copy of KD Lang’s Ingenue and telling me this was how our record should sound. It remains one of my favourite records but Hevelln were never going to sound or be like KD, when i think about it now it just seems absurd. I think a lot of bands have been through this situation when they lose their champion at their label.

I remember these two guys came to the studio to listen to what we had done and seemed to like it at the time but the next morning word came through that we were to stop recording. They didn’t like the feel of the songs (particularly the drums) and they didn’t hear a hit song. I was totally devasted, I had put an enormous amount of work into the record. I lost all confidence in myself and I felt lost.

We had also spent a lot of the recording budget already ($30K). Part of the problem I think was that our manager was also the manager of the studio we were using as well as producing the record. To us at the time it seemed like a really convenient way to go but there is an obvious conflict of interests although there was no malice intended. If you think about the roles a band manager, studio manager and producer are supposed to play then you can see how it would be impossible to serve all three masters well.

But it didn’t end there. We picked ourselves up and began intensive rehearsals to work on new material and ‘fix’ the problem with the feel of our songs.

Some good stuff happened during this period, Mushroom organised for me to do some writing with Paul Kelly. He was incredibly generous with his time and taught me a lot about how a craftsman goes about writing a song*. After a while it became apparent that Mushroom had a problem with our drummer Nick. Interestingly, one of the A & R guys who shelved us was making moves on Nick’s girlfriend at the time but I don’t know if that was a part of their opinions, seems like a pretty mean thing to do if it was.

This was a big problem for me. We were under pressure to sack a band member and for a three piece that can be pretty difficult. We were friends and it was an incredibly difficult decision to make. Also I was tired of having to be the main songwrtier and front man, I was feeling pretty isolated both on and off stage. So my solution to both problems was to turn Helvelln into a seven piece band with Nick playing percussion and a new drummer installed.

I think it was my way of dodging the issue. I was only 22 at the time and not really equipped to understand the situation, not to mention having had my confidence totally shattered when they shelved the record.

Turning into a 7 piece was totally the wrong thing to do. We stopped being what we were and became a new thing. What we needed at the time was some good advice to stick to our guns but none was forthcoming – our manager had gone off to tour America with Archie Roach and we were young and inexperienced.

Helvelln continued to stagger on as a seven piece and Mushroom set us up with Michael Spiby from the Badloves as a producer. We did some demos with him and he was great but his own career was taking off and didn’t have the time to deal with a broken emotionally needy songwriter and band.

To their credit Mushroom did support us financially during this time paying for rehearsals and a demo but there was no-one who actually cared about the band that much. We were really lost and eventually they cut us loose. I don’t feel bitter towards them as a company at all, they took a punt on us (and many local bands at the time) and it was a great ride while it lasted.

If I could go back and talk to myself about it I would say – stay as a three piece, make the hard decisions and keep doing what you do, have faith in yourself. We really needed someone to protect and help us, we were just kids.

*Paul Kelly doesn’t piss around with songwriting. He would start with and idea and then the first line and then methodically work his way through the song in one sitting. At the time I would have an idea and then put it down and then come back to it later and generally procrastinate with the song until the original intention was long gone. Its only recently that I have realised the importance of just focussing on a song and working on it until its finished, only took 20 years to learn that lesson :)

Given that you had a lot of new songs written, were you disappointed that you never got to release a follow-up? Considering my cassette of that show is in a box on the other side of the world, can you recall much about those songs and the direction the album would’ve taken?

Yes, I was disappointed. I think it would have been a much truer representation of the band. A lot more guitars and a harder sound. I remember a fair number of the songs – some of them I kept playing in other bands. One, called “Adverse”, got recorded two of my subsequent bands. Recently, as a result of your interest and kind words in fact, I have been thinking about resurrecting a couple of others. My latest band (with Andy Pap from Helvelln) just recorded a demo of one of those old songs (“Drama Queens”) and it came out really well.

What did you do after the band broke up?

Well, I had a bit of a hard time immediately afterwards. I got glandular fever, I think largely due to the stress of the whole thing and splitting up with the girl I was seeing at the time. After that I formed a new band called Colourbomb with Andy Pap from Helvelln on bass and Carl Panuzzo from a legendary Melbourne band called the Chequerboard Blues Band on drums. We were together for about 18 months and then ran out of steam. After that I formed another band called Idiot Son that were together for about three years and made a couple of records.

Around 2002 – 03 I got totally jack of playing in bands and stopped.

I was sick of how much time (and money) you had to spend on managing a band and organising people as opposed to actually playing music. I had forgotten why I enjoyed doing it. So I quit for a while and didn’t touch a guitar for a couple of years. I went back to Uni and did a masters degree and had two kids. After a while (2007 maybe) I started playing guitar again and doing occasional gigs in weird locations. I played at a fish farm one night where the fish were actually leaping out of their pools – I’m not sure if it was to escape me or a sign of how much they were enjoying it.

From the look of things you’re back recording and playing shows as a solo artist after a considerable absence. Have you found a renewed interest in making music and performing again?

Yeah, I’m really glad to have got back into it, music is such a big part of my life and I don’t think I would have been happy without it. As I mentioned above I started off playing solo shows but recently have started another band with Andy from Helvelln and Miles who played drums in Idiot Son. Its been great just to make some noise and communicate with other people by playing music with them. When things are going well in a band you forget about what you are playing and focus on what everyone else is doing which is very zen and relaxing. I’ve been enjoying putting some work into new songs as well.

My approach these days is a lot more craftsman like- not the bolt of inspiration you have when you’re young but these days its not nearly so nerve wracking either. When I was young i used to feel like every song I wrote was my last and get quite worked up about it. With the benefit of experience you learn to relax and work through things knowing you’ll get there in the end.

What are your thoughts about Helvelln 20-odd years down the track? Are you surprised that people still remember the band?

I was really surprised that people still remember the band. Andy Pap was saying the other day that he was coming home from a gig about 1am one night when he heard “T-Shirt” on 3RRR and was blown away by how big it sounded. We were always really self deprecating about what we did at the time (I think as a bit of a defence mechanism) so its been good to think, actually we weren’t so bad. I wish we’d been more sure of ourselves back then but, as they say, the past is another country.

What’s the likely outcome of Helvelln songs appearing at one of your shows? You wouldn’t want to disappoint the old crowd, right?

There a pretty good chance I’d say but I’ll have to listen to the record to remember the songs, its been a while. I reckon “T-Shirt” would be fun to play again.

Thanks again to Jeremy Gronow for this exhaustive and informative (like holy shit, dude!) insight into the life and times of Helvelln. We were touched by the admission that our extended conversations have re-ignited a fresh creative spark and have noticed some heavy activity on Jeremy’s reverbnation page of late. If you like what you heard, or you’re an old fan of Helvelln and have been directed here instead of the top of a mountain, we insist you check out http://www.reverbnation.com/jgronow

“My name’s Ivan. My occupation…”

There’s a distinct appeal to your biographical/confessional style of songwriting, largely due to the allure of its conversational tone. It catches your attention and it’s meant to. It would be bad manners at this point to just get up and walk away after someone has made an introduction. That technique is as good a hook for a song as any, and moreover, it’s genuine and lends an element of pathos, whether fictional or real. Suzanne Vega knows what I’m talking about, Eminem and Weezer to a lesser degree, and so too, New Zealand’s Headless Chickens.

“Gaskrankinstation” could almost be a taped conversation set to music, if it weren’t for the comedic undertones that make Ivan sound like more of a twisted caricature than a real person. I like him though. He’s friendly enough. Seems like a decent guy on the outside, the kind of guy you’d have a beer with down the pub. It’s easy to get reeled in by his tormented monologue that falls out seemingly unprovoked, and over that dramatic dun-da-dun-dun-DUN-DUN beat and mechanical groaning, you realise what an unbalanced man he is.  He takes pride in his job, boasting “those cars wouldn’t go very far without me” but then as quickly as he puffs out that chest, it’s all gone seconds later when he speaks of his wife belittling him . The next time she’s mentioned he’s mimicking her with a grim (and quickly regretted) threat of violence.

As the song progresses you feel the cracks in Ivan widen and the desperation coming through. The video clip that accompanies this song is essential viewing. You watch Ivan as he goes about his job, filling up cars, wiping down windscreens and talking about his life, cackling insanely about his two friends (“They’re both called Dave and they don’t know how to behave…”) and his poor wife who just wants more than this. The lyrics are as potent as they are nightmarish and disturbing. The breakdown in the middle, where the synth and sequencer backing turns into a climactic barrage of guitars and drums becomes deafening as you feel Ivan fighting with the voices in his head. As a side note, two members of my family actually worked in petrol stations in the ’70s (but thankfully bore no resemblance to Ivan).  They cranked the gas, filled the pumps, worked the nights and came home stinking of petrol.  One of my early toys as a kid was a wooden, hand-made, hand-painted Shell petrol station with pumps and everything. No wonder I identified with this song on some level. I was filling my own cars at the same time I was learning how to walk.

It’s easy to find Ivan a pretty loathsome person, but you can’t help to sympathise. He‘s trapped in a consumer-driven world where for our ends rarely match our means and there’s an ever-widening gap between them. The irony isn’t lost that Ivan doesn’t drive (“When I walk home from work” — which, yes, is an assumption on my part), yet he has two televisions  and the wife is pressuring him for a child. When he suggests “Maybe I’ll take up the piano again” you know he’s grasping at straws, and the heavy sarcasm of “most of the time everything is just swell around here” is funny but fools nobody, least of all Ivan. It’s already assumed, long before he relates the vision “and my head is looking down from the edge of the brink. That’s my body…” that this is the prelude to a suicide or worse. But as the song builds up to that screaming crescendo, Ivan is a near frenzy, shouting “As long as my heart keeps pumping/I guess I’ll just keep pumping gas” but pairs this with an existential moment whilst passing a church (“I wonder whether there is a god?”) and the repeated phrase “I look but I don’t see anybody in there” doesn’t bode well. The song might seem like it’s of limited relevance to most people, but it’s as interchangeable with any occupation you could think of, and part of me believes this song would be hilarious if it wasn’t bursting with moral dilemma.

Released in 1990, “Gaskrankinstation” was the last single from the Headless Chickens before the addition of vocalist Fiona McDonald. Formed in 1985, the band were signed to the highly regarded Flying Nun label, releasing their first EP in 1986, and a further 3 albums and close to a dozen singles between 1986 and 1998, culminating in a number 1 hit in New Zealand with “George” in 1994 taken from their third album Greedy. Initially sounding like a cross between Suicide and Severed Heads, Headless Chickens opted for an experimental electronic/avant rock approach to making music and used synthesizers and samples to full effect. After their debut album Stunt Clown in 1988, “Gaskrankinstation” would be seen as the mid-way point in their career before the band evolved into a more creatively and commercially successful entity in a time where the dance music/sample culture was at its peak. The core of the band at the time of “Gaskrankinstation” was Chris Matthews (Vocals/Guitar/Keyboards), Michael Lawry (Keyboards/Samples), Grant Fell (Bass) and Bevan Sweeney (Drums).

After an absence of over a decade, the Headless Chickens recently reformed for a few dates in New Zealand and Australia. Realising that this was a good time to reengage with the band, Webcuts spoke with Chris Matthews, chief-Chicken and songwriter of “Gaskrankinstation” to give some background and insight into the song and the history of the band.

Where did “Gaskrankinstation” come from? The title, Ivan, the music? What was your inspiration? I loved the fact that he spent all day pumping gas, but didn’t even drive.

The whole song, musically, evolved from the marimba line which I wrote on Michael Lawry’s sampler. It reminded me of the TV themes from wildlife shows I used to watch when I was a kid, because the marimba is an African xylophone, and they always seemed to use them in shows from the ’70s. The rest of the music was designed to just build the song up to its climax from a quietish beginning and then go back to the quiet ending.

I don’t know where the words came from. Out of my head, obviously, but I wrote them all out in one go and never changed anything afterward which was unusual for me.

There was a strange phenomena in Australia when we originally played that song live there in the early ’90s, which was for guys to come up to me after just about every gig and tell me in the most enthusiastic way that they loved that song because they themselves were Ivan and they identified so strongly with him. Which obviously, if you listen to the words, is a bit weird ‘cos Ivan’s not necessarily a very nice bloke — it always made me think of Dennis Hopper insisting to David Lynch that he had to play the sociopathic Frank Booth in Lynch’s Blue Velvet because he himself actually was Frank. Maybe Ivan’s not quite as crazy as Frank but it certainly made me wonder about the sort of Aussie guys who were coming along to our shows back then.

And how do you know Ivan didn’t drive a car? He only walked home from work.

Gaskrankinstation is the German word for a gas chamber that the Nazis used to kill the Jews in the death camps in the Second World War. Make of that what you will.

The video clip was played constantly on music TV in Australia in the early ’90s. It’s gotten to the point now where I can’t disassociate the song with the clip. What can you remember about the making of the video?

We asked some guy who owned a gas station out in South Auckland if he’d let us film it there one night, after he’d closed for the evening, and he said yes, so we rounded up a bunch of mates, organised the evening’s shoot and went to work. I think it took us about seven or eight hours to film most of the stuff at the gas station and then we shot the scenes at the end of the video, of Ivan watching TV, on a different day.

What was the general reaction to Gaskrankinstation? Did it become something of a cult song for the band in the way that I imagined it to be at the time?

Some people liked it, I guess. And, yes, it did become a cult song which is because not everybody liked it, heh heh.

Gaskrankinstation was released as a stand-alone single in 1990, but by the time it appeared on an album a year later, the band, and the sound, had changed quite significantly. What were the circumstances that lead up to Fiona joining the band? Did you see it as a natural progression or just an experiment?

Both a natural progression and an experiment; they go together, really. I’d known Fiona for a few years before she came to sing on Body Blow and then joined the band, but it just so happened that she’d come back to Auckland from a couple of years of living in Sydney and I saw her singing live with another band (N.R.A.) and was reminded again of what a great singer she was and asked her to sing on “Cruise Control”. It went from there. Initially, we just asked her to come and sing on a couple of songs but then it seemed like a good idea to ask her to join. Because of fiona, our audience demographic went from about 75% male/25% female to about 50/50 in the space of a few months, which was pretty cool.

It worked out well for the band though, didn’t it? Success and fame and all that entails?

Unfortunately in New Zealand, success and fame don’t equal getting rich or even necessarily making a living out of music, which we didn’t, but the band just kept going nonetheless. I’ve never really understood the whole wanting-to-be-famous thing, though, or male musicians who will tell you that they only started playing in a band because they wanted to meet girls: the only reason that I ever wanted to play music was because I wanted to play music. Everything else is incidental.

You were the only band in the Flying Nun roster to have a number 1 song. Is that something to still feel smug about? As a band you were quite different from the “Flying Nun sound”, almost in complete opposite of it. Did you consider yourselves a part of that scene at all?

Let’s get this straight: the “Flying Nun sound” is not just the sound of the early Dunedin jangle-pop bands, if that’s what you mean. It was a very diverse range of different-sounding bands from the day that Roger Shepherd started the label. The first single ever released by Flying Nun was by the Pin Group who were a bunch of Joy Division-ists from Christchurch, and it was the early Christchurch bands like them, the Victor Dimisich Band, Scorched Earth Policy, and The Bilders etc, who defined a lot of the original Flying Nun sound for me, which was basically the ’70s Krautrock/Punk ethos fused with ’60s Psychedelic/Garage Rock. We, initially as Children’s Hour, came out of that same early ’80s post-punk scene, even though we were from Auckland, and the Headless Chickens was a logical extension of that same fertile environment that spawned bands like Fetus Productions, N.R.A., and Skeptics, and they were the bands who were our peers (amongst quite a few others) and who were experimenting with musical genres and instruments beyond just the standard bass/drums/guitars lineup, so i don’t think we ever felt out of place at all on Flying Nun.

And, yes, of course we were part of that scene: most of the various members of the Headless Chickens over the years all came from bands who were on the Flying Nun label right from the beginning, and consequently we knew just about everybody else in all the other Flying Nun bands personally. It was a very tight little scene for about the first ten years and most of the bands during that time would often stay at each other’s places in other cities when they were touring, for example, rather than motels. I think we, as a band, grew further away from the Flying Nun ethic as we developed and began to embrace dance music more in the early ’90s, and we certainly were the most commercially successful of all the bands, but The Chills, The Clean, The Straitjacket Fits and a few others all had quite a lot of chart success in New Zealand. I don’t think we ever felt smug about having a number one single, but then we’d already had five other singles in the N.Z. top ten so it seemed like a logical conclusion at the time.

Now, you just reformed recently for shows in Australia and New Zealand. How did that go down? Enjoy playing the old stuff again? Did it feel there was life in the old Headless Chicken yet?

I think most of the people who came to see us enjoyed it, judging by the audience response. I enjoyed a lot of it and some of it I didn’t enjoy at all, but I definitely enjoyed playing the songs again, as always. We didn’t really make any money out of it, once again, and I’m not sure that the often-tenuous relationship between former bandmates can stand the strain of doing this chicken-shit thing without any fiscal reward, so I’m guessing that’s pretty much it for now.

Finally, just out of curiosity, what do you think ever happened to Ivan?

He went back to living in my head; after all, I did subconsciously name my currently seven year old cat, Ed, and it took me about a year to realise why…

Questions of fame and fortune aside, If you wanted my opinion where it all went wrong for the Welcome Mat, I’d tell you it had something to do with “Hell Hoping”, the less-than-enticing two minute taster off their debut album Gram. It’s a fact that nothing can quickly end the life-span of an album than under-selling it with one of the least impressive songs (sorry, Mullens) on the record and here was the Welcome Mat literally daring us to give them the cold shoulder to go buy the new You Am I Ep instead. The release of two prior EPs, Fairy dust (1991) and Spare (1992) had accumulated a dedicated fanbase and received a groundswell of radio attention and acclaim. Though ‘acclaim’ in Australian terms means about 2000 copies sold and being able to sell out the Annandale before 9pm, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Everyone was expecting the boys to expand on the buzz and pop of those EPs with hip producers Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, better known for their golden touch with The Lemonheads, Throwing Muses, Buffalo Tom and Radiohead. It seemed the perfect pairing – up and coming American producers meet up and coming Australian band on their home turf. The Hummingbirds did it with REM’s producer Scott Litt with the sweet smelling pop bouquet Lovebuzz and they had to fly to the States to do it. The Wellies had the home town advantage. Everyone (or perhaps it was just me) was expecting Gram to be their Bandwagonesque – that kind of perfect pop record that is faultless from start to finish. It was an expectation that I felt was entirely within reason.

For those who never had the pleasure, The Welcome Mat were a Sydney-based guitar-pop quartet formed in 1989. They comprised Cory Messenger on vocals/guitar, Wayne Connolly on vocals/guitar, Leo Mullins on vocals/bass and Peter Bennett on drums. Messenger and Connolly were originally the two main songwriters both having met and played together in John Kennedys Love Gone Wrong before going on to form The Welcome Mat. Their first single, Connolly’s “Last of The Great Letdowns” was a rough-hewn glimpse of what the Welcome Mat would become, but even then the key ingredient of the Messenger/Connolly duelling harmonies was clearly in effect. Second single “Cake”, written and sung by Messenger and a was better (cleaner) representation of the band’s sound, though the use of the wah-wah pedal and funky drumbeat dates it somewhat. The Welcome Mat on first glance were like a more fun Teenage Fanclub or a less drunk Replacements with, as their own label claimed, ‘Plenny’o'Hooks’.

I arrived on the Welcome Mat scene via their contribution to the Youngblood 3 compilation, which was both a crucial release for this writer and a prescient collection of acts that would later become mainstays of the Australian music scene. This compilation succeeded in showing the doubters (Anglophiles such as myself) what fertile music scenes there were in Sydney, Melbourne, and er, Brisbane. Having been a religious reader of the NME for the last few years and recently acquiring a girlfriend who owned a car, I felt it was time to take advantage and witness what was happening outside of the beachy confines of the Central Coast. Working backwards, I picked up their second single “Cake” and was blown away more by the track on the flipside, the swirling guitar fuzz of Connolly’s “Coming To The Worst” which was in direct opposition to the relative bright pop of “Cake”. “Last of the Great Letdowns” was also quite easy to find. If I recall correctly, Waterfront Records were practically giving them away…

It wasn’t until the Fairydust EP with the lead track “10,000 People With the Same Idea” that the pieces began to fall in place for the band and their live shows around the Sydney circuit began to swell with newfound fans. The video clip I have for “10,000 People” even has an MTV Australia ident on it, so it only goes to show how wide the hype was beginning to travel. The band also had the privilege of opening the first ever Big Day Out in Sydney, not that I would’ve seen, since I refused to pay $45 to see a bunch of bands I could watch on any other night for $5 and bought a Tank Girl t-shirt instead (yeah, shoot me now). Another EP Spare cemented their standing, with Leo Mullen‘s “Landspeed” showing that his songwriting was just as strong as his counterparts. Having submitted to a bidding war which was won by Regular, the band was given the opportunity to make that all-important debut album and break free from the annoying half-an-album EPs that were the trend with bands in the 90′s.

Catch up lesson over, let’s continue.

It was in the pages of Countdown magazine around 1984 that I first recall seeing the Hoodoo Gurus, hanging out in the Land Beyond Beyond surrounded by comic books and looking like a ragged bunch of psychedelic hipsters. The significance of this (for me at the time) being a comic book store in Sydney I didn’t know about. I’d gone through the phone book (I had, comic book junkie I was), and I swear I’d found them all, but this one was tucked away down a nondescript corridor on George St, with only a sign above the doorway indicating something otherworldly lay ahead. I always loved that name – the Land Beyond Beyond. Beyond beyond? This I had to see, but for those who never made the journey, it was really just a mecca for B-grade movie freaks, full of rare sci-fi and horror flicks and movie ephemera, run by a gothic looking version of Pee Wee Herman.

The Hoodoo Gurus made their second appearance in my life with the video clip to their now-legendary fourth single “I Want You Back”. The band were playing in front of a blue screen, with animated plastic dinosaurs waving their limbs around, chewing up the paper trees while the band play out the song, each member having their own unique look. Guitarist Brad Shepherd played an orange Gretsch guitar and wore this cut sleeve C&W shirt, tight black jeans and dyed black hair. A little “note to self” was then planted inside my head which said ‘remember this when you start buying your own clothes”. Singer Dave Faulkner had the most absurd hair I’d ever seen on a man. It was as if he was sucked head-first out of the sixties and landed feet first in suburban Sydney. As the photo below attests, Hoodoo Gurus were the coolest fucking band in town bar none.

For the better part of a decade, and despite my mother’s repeated interjections, I was entirely couch bound from 9am to 12am on a Saturday morning watching a music show called “Sounds”. Not only was this part of my routine, but I religiously watched ALL music shows on television. Staying up till all hours of the night recording favourite bands/songs and then setting the video to record what I missed. Sound and vision. You might take that for granted these days, now that you can call up youtube and get instant gratification, but the advent of music television was the shit. My radio went out the window. I had Sounds and Beatbox, Nightshift and Rock Arena, Eat Carpet and Rage and I was happy.

This is where I first heard “My Girl”. In an era of expensive video clips filmed on yachts with hot models, the clip for “My Girl” were entirely original. In a bit of inspired film-making, the focus of “My Girl” changed from being about some two-timing troublemaker to being about a champion greyhound called “My Girl” with singer Dave Faulkner as her trainer. The clip shows Dave taking My Girl for her morning walk through the backstreets of Glebe, down past the racetrack, letting her loose for a run around the park. You see the pennants she’s won for him. He gives her a kiss. You can feel the love between a man and his dog. The clip cuts back footage of the band playing inside a local inner city pub, they’re all decked out in paisley, Brad Shepherd looking like a goth Colonel Sanders with Nick Cave-esque “I’ve just been electrocuted” hairstyle. The picture then shifts back to the big night at the racecourse. My Girl is down on the tracks getting ready for the race. Dave has been to the bookie, made a few bets, and heads down by the track to watch the start. The dogs tear off around the track My Girl doesn’t win. Dave tears up his ticket, heartbroken. Much to the chagrin of the band, most people still think this song is about a dog.

The song itself has that classic 60s feel to it. The doo-wop bassline, the bittersweet “love and love lost” lyrics that sat so firmly on the fence of cliché that I always wondered whether there was some little tongue in cheek here. The Gurus weren’t exactly setting sail on a sea of high art, and on a debut album that featured death ships and kamikaze pilots, a simple sad love song wouldn’t seem too unlikely. The opening lines “Once a girl took my love until I couldn’t give anymore/and I tried to pretend not to see what I couldn’t ignore” can’t be faulted and basically sums up the essence of the song in two lines. The moment of confrontation, the “Who were you with? She said no-one” is something we’ve all heard (or had to endure) before. God, I’m sure I said it yesterday…

What else do I love about “My Girl” Brad Shepherd’s Dave Faulkner’s slick surf guitar solo that almost steals the show. The way the song builds up to a sudden stop and then slowly, sorrowfully winds down. Everything about “My Girl” fits together perfectly. There’s not one unnecessary word or a note out of place. If there was ever a song that announced “here was a band to take notice of” for sheer versatilities sake, it was this one. Twenty-odd years later and I still never tire of hearing this song.

Whilst interviewing Dave Faulkner about their recent UK tour, I managed to get him to say a few words about the secret history of “My Girl” and this is what he had to say.

We were on tour promoting our first single off that album which was “Tojo” and we couldn’t be there for the final mix, and the producer who was generally a great guy had this scheme to put on backing vocals and keyboards at the start, neither of which we knew about, and we got the final mix given to us when we were in a hotel in Adelaide and it was quite shocking to us and we still find it appalling. These horrible backing vocals that are done by a session singer in an American accent, and also that keyboard at the start which is some bad Oberheim synth or something. It was certainly a shock to us from where we were coming from. So that was amusing, and the record company wouldn’t let us take those off because it made it more commercial, and it probably did, but it appalled us.

It’s so mainstream AM radio sounding that if you flipped the sexes Olivia Newton-John could’ve had a hit with it.

(laughs) Well I wrote the song for a make-believe feature film/home movie I wanted to make called “Gidget Goes Ape”, and it’s all about Gidget meeting some hippy/merry prankster types and one of them slipped some acid to her and she wigged out and had altered consciousness and couldn’t be the same happy-go-lucky beach bunny again. I wrote that song for before the wigged-out change, she’d be hearing that on the radio, on a little transistor on the beach. It was basically my attempt at writing a classic 60′s pop song that might be overheard by Gidget.

When did you write the song?

I wrote that in Perth before the band had even formed, and it was a song I actually brought to the band fully formed.

Brad Shepherd’s solo there is one of my favourite…

That’s my solo…

(quelle embarrassment) It is? I had no idea. I thought the video clip had Brad playing it (again, completely wrong!).

No, it’s my solo. Brad plays rhythm. I haven’t got fast fingers but I like a melody and there’s a bit of a tune in that solo that sounds kinda cool.

There was a bit of a band upheaval in the beginning of the Gurus. Was Brad’s joining something of a catalyst for what the band became?

Basically we were three guitarists and a drummer. When one of the guitarists (Kimble) left, it was obvious then to just bite the bullet and get a bass guitar. We always said we wouldn’t as we didn’t want to have five people in the band as all three of us wanted to play guitar and didn’t want to change to bass. It was really a product of necessity rather than one of musical direction. When we were playing for a while, it was about a year or a little less, it was obvious we lacked something without a bass guitar to unify the drum kit with the rest of the sound. We thrashed but didn’t pummel. It was obvious we needed a bass, and we did that, and we rehearsed for a while and then second guitarist Rod Radalj got cold feet that we’d lose our cool-ness, so he left just before we were due to play a gig. We’d been rehearsing for a couple of months, even though he’d been saying how great it sounded and how he loved it. He suddenly did an about-face and was gone, and then we quickly replaced him and that’s when Clyde (Bramley, original bassist) was able to get in touch with Brad Shepherd. I’d seen him perform with Clyde in a band called Super K. I’d seen him in the Hitmen, but he was the rhythm guitarist and so I didn’t really pay much attention and it wasn’t my cup of tea anyway. When I saw him in Super K it completely turned my head around as far as what he was capable of. He sang and played guitar and all this melodic stuff. It was untapped potential as far as I could see, and obviously that has borne out by the career we’ve had. Brad joined in ’82 and that became what the band was meant to be at that moment.

Was “My Girl” part of the Stoneage Romeos sessions or did it come before?

We recorded the album in three separate sessions from memory. We did the single for “Tojo” and one or two tracks extra for that, and then we went out and toured and came back did some sessions for “My Girl” and extra tracks and went on tour again, and that was the “Tojo” tour and came back and “My Girl” was released and we did some more touring and then finished off the album, so it was recorded in bits and pieces in a funny way, and I liked that idea as well.

Did you have a lot of the songs written before you went into the studio?

The only one that was a new song on the album that we hadn’t played live was “I Want You Back” and I wrote that just before the sessions and I just thought that was a really good song. We tried it a couple of times in the studio and it just wasn’t gelling and it wasn’t until the end of the sessions that I said we had to start that one again, it’s not right. Finally I had a bit of a brainwave to the right drum feel and stuff and that pulled it all together. Everything was songs we’d been playing together, some as Le Hoodoo Gurus a year early, but “My Girl” obviously was something I’d written a long time before.

The video clip is something of a favourite of mine and I’m sure many others. Who’s idea was it to turn the song into a heartbreaker about a man and his dog?

That was only because we didn’t want to fit in with the 80′s prevailing thing about having supermodels gallivanting around drinking champagne a la Duran Duran. I talked to Kimble who was the film-maker, saying that I didn’t want to make it like that, acting out the story of the song would be boring, so he said make it about two dogs. My original scenario was to make it a love story about a greyhound and a stray, and the stray dog would see the greyhound in the electrics store window winning races and fall in love with this dog “My Girl”, and then of course he ended up palling up with some hobo and drinking meths out of the gutter and being taken off to the pound was the story I’d written for the video (laughs), but we didn’t have any budget for dog training or anything, so that got changed, so it basically became a story about a trainer and his dog and having the dog on a leash which was a lot easier.

I can’t imagine that its something you still play in your sets regularly?

Not regularly, but we do play it now and again. I was thinking about doing that tomorrow night actually. I had that thought today, so I probably will.

….and true to his word (and to my immense satisfaction), they did….

Thanks, Dave!

Hoodoo Gurus – Official Website

I remember when I first heard this (which would’ve been sometime around January 1997), turning to my flatmate to ask who it was, and upon answering I uttered with a look of complete surprise ‘No shit! The fucking Earthmen?’. The Earthmen writing a hit single seemed about as likely as You Am I recording a rap album.

If I were to be incredibly unfair, The Earthmen were a second rate Britpop-sounding band in a country that unless you were actually cuppa-tea-mate British you may as well pack up the instruments and go home. It’s a very lazy pigeonhole to drop them in, but when you stick yourselves in button-down suits and throw in a guy on Hammond organ, you’re either authentic 60s revivalists or Britpop fair game. The Earthmen actually pre-dated the rise of Britpop, but after having released a bunch of EPs and singles their sound quickly became aligned with that of the sweeping guitar-led pop bands of the UK and Australian audiences seeking a similar sound found refuge with The Earthmen. The songwriting partnership of singer Scott Stevens and guitarist Nick Batterham, one a diminutive, golden-throated frontman and the other a geeky looking, spec-wearing muso helmed the band through thick and thin. Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon they weren’t (and I’m sure such comparisons only made their blood boil) but for a while they were as close we got.

If it isn’t already apparent, I didn’t particularly like this band to begin with (blame it on the usual Sydney vs. Melbourne rivalry) and the singer didn’t particularly like me either (I think I borrowed his girlfriend once), but there’s no denying the classic pop song appeal “Whoever’s Been Using This Bed“ has in spades. This song could actually sound like a long-lost Blur single recorded inbetween Modern Life is Rubbish and Parklife and something that would stand up easily when measured against their UK counterparts. The gorgeous melodies and rich arrangements matched with Steven’s soaring vocals really elevated this song to a point where you just had to stop and listen, and what could’ve become a spiteful lyric takes a more endearing, heartfelt turn. In indie clubs across the nation, this was the one song guaranteed to bring all the barrette-wearing girls and Ben Sherman-wearing boys onto the dance floor as if it were the adopted national anthem for the Australian club kids.

That cover in all its naked glory

If anything, “Whoever’s Been Using This Bed” signalled the sudden rise and then even more sudden death of the Australian Britpop (Auspop?) scene, something that most bands influenced by the current UK trends tried to replicate and create some momentum within their own respective club scenes, but for whatever reason or another (major labels cashing in on a dying fad/record buyers who weren’t convinced) couldn‘t make it happen to any profitable degree. The Earthmen never came close to repeating the success they had with this single, and their debut album Love Walked In released a couple of months later received positive column inches by critics but failed not only to meet public expectation but also the charts — blame here could be shared on the appalling album cover of a pixellated photograph of a boy and girl sans clothes — and thus after a final EP the following year, with nails and coffin in place, The Earthmen troubled the music industry no further.

They probably deserve a much more kinder and better thought out tribute than this, and I’m sure in a different time and place they could’ve been huge, but given the lack of overwhelming hype that is often visited on many an undeserving band in the UK, The Earthmen did well with what they had and gave us more than a few good songs to remember them by, this being just one of them.

The Post-Punk years in Australia were a mixed ground. The key bands of that era were floundering or disbanding while the second wave was about to hit, bands like Hunters and Collectors, Hoodoo Gurus, The Scientists and The Beasts of Bourbon would soon come to prominence, but one of the bands who had been lingering on the fringes pushing their skewed new wave pop since 1978 was Melbourne’s Models.

Released in 1983, The Pleasure of Your Company was Models third album, an undeniable step up sound wise from their quirky previous releases, incorporating a dance-floor funk angle that acts like Shriekback and Gang of Four were hitting paydirt with in the UK. From the beginning of the band the line-up never seemed consistent but what is regarded as their classic line-up (as far as I’m concerned, matey) is Sean Kelly (vocals/guitar), James Freud (vocals/bass), Andrew Duffield (keys/synths) and Barton Price (drums). Producer Nick Launey, having previously produced albums for Public Image Limited and Gang of Four, worked with the band to give them a more polished, radio-friendly sound. Despite being their most successful release to date, The Pleasure of Your Company would be the last recording for this line-up. Duffield was ousted a year later and in the wake of this the band dynamic and sound changed completely. Models post-Pleasure would be a less interesting, less innovative, though in no way less successful, entity.

I could’ve chosen the infectious “I Hear Motion” which was the top ten hit in Australia, a song I still remember hearing when it was released (on one of those double LP chart comps) or the dance-floor classic that was “Big on Love” released a year later, but the standout track for me has always been the pseudo-anthem “God Bless America”. Whilst at the time my musical leanings were still coming to fruition, I still recall the video clip they made for the song. Filmed in 3D (one of those jobs where you need the blue/red glasses), the band are sporting an “urban guerilla musicians of the wasteland” look, all greasepaint and guitars and attitude and they look incredibly fucking cool. Sean Kelly’s wearing a radio earpiece, calling the shots and has an American flag dangling from the neck of his guitar, James Freud wields his bass like it’s an M60 machine gun and Andrew Duffield stands there triggering bursts of gunfire from his sequencer. Kate and Zan from I’m Talking play the part of army backing singers, while the band stand defiant on the top of piles of flattened cars and machinery in a dirty old junkyard. For about three and a half minutes, the eighties actually looked awesome and in 3-D.

The Models in 1983

The song itself is Kelly’s tribute to Ronald Reagan, backwardly championing the then President of the United States of America and his movie star cowboy roots. The title and lyrical bent is largely full of sarcasm, unlikely to endear Models to the Americans, but which didn’t prevent them from being signed to Geffen for their next album (perhaps they didn’t read any further than the song title?). I love the way Kelly mockingly sings the first couple of lines — “I’m an Americaaaan/I ride into the suuuuun”, then a line later sums up Reagan’s career perfectly with “I’m Gene Autry in Lincoln’s shoes” and then with the punch line chorus of “I’ve had this recurring dream where I am in control” which is as relevant now as it was then.

Models weren’t exactly known for their lyrical insight, but this song, and the single that followed “No Shoulders, No Head” sidestepped their regular vagaries for some timely political/anti-war discourse without sounding like they’re jumping the bandwagon or trying to ape Midnight Oil. The final scene of the video is a real kicker, recreating the famous photograph of the American marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II. It still makes me laugh. For a promo video shot in a junkyard, what a piece of art it is.

After that it’s all aboard for “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” where Kelly gets the elbow out of his own band and Freud fronts them to number one with the most banal song in Australian pop history. But that’s a history which is best kept secret.

Bughouse’s classic debut single “V for Vendetta” is remembered in our ongoing “Secret History of Australian Music” series which digs through our archives looking for some forgotten vinyl gems by bands of the Australian music scene that shone brightly, but all too briefly.

We spoke with Genevieve Maynard, bassist of Bughouse and solo singer/songwriter of her own regard, about the recording of “Vendetta” and her memories in playing in one of the most captivating and original Sydney bands of the early 90′s.

a story…

It was late 1989. I had finished another year of High School and was working a weekend job in the local library to finance my weekly fix of comic books and records. Triple J, the alternative radio station in Sydney was going national, which meant I could pick up their signal and tune into those foreign bands I read about in three month old copies of the New Musical Express and put sounds to faces..

During this time, Triple J began to play two songs quite regularly, both bands incorporating ‘house’ in their names (thankfully not into the music), both songs were debut singles and seemed more than worthy of the attention the station had given them. There was Greenhouse from Melbourne, with “Seesaw” which had this glorious chiming riff that seemed to inhabit everything I wanted from my music, and Bughouse from Sydney with “V for Vendetta”, this unassuming, slow-building track which was the antithesis of what I was listening to at the time. It didn’t have a striking intro, or an upbeat chorus, it didn’t hit you with its best shot, but in its own way, under its own subtle charm, “Vendetta” stood out. Here was some non-strident blues-y guitar with a nice solo, a solid rhythm section, some rambling pool-hall piano and world weary female vocals. It sounded human .

Now any comic book reading kid worth his salt will recognise “V for Vendetta” as being the title of the acclaimed comic book by Alan Moore (itself twenty years away from its on-screen adaptation Mr. Moore would later disassociate himself with). You can raise those stakes and increase that pile of salt when you recognise the first two lines of this song are lifted straight from the comic book and fashioned into a song about domestic violence and rape — “I love the rain, I love the moon, I love the sea and stars/I’d love to visit you quite soon and kiss you through the bars”

Behind the laundry list of abuse, the lyrics detail a sense of bitterness and resentment in what has happened to force the victim’s hand. The lyric itself is not only directed at the incarcerated male, but of society itself with the line “when entertainment means a hole in the sky or raping girls on trains”. This isn’t pop music, kids. This isn’t “if you could see what I see, if you saw what I saw” (cf: Greenhouse “Seesaw”). This is “I hate the boots, I hate the shouts, I hate the attitude/I’m scared of the switch, the point at which the legal meets the lewd”. I love the juxtaposition between the “love” of the first verse, and the “hate” of the second. The simple beauty of the world set as a back-drop to a scene of violence and fear.

Bughouse (L-R): Lea Cameron (vocals/guitar), Steve Campbell (guitar),
Peter Brookes (drums), Genevieve Maynard (vocals/bass)

I soon gleaned from the street press that Bughouse were a four-piece with Lea Campbell on vocals, Genevieve Maynard on bass, Steve Campbell on guitar and Peter Brookes on drums. “V for Vendetta/Burn it Back” was their debut single on their Ursula records label. A sketchy black and white picture would detail two blokey looking men, one tall female with curly blonde hair, and slightly shorter woman with cropped black hair. The attendant article revealed as much about the band as the photo and did nothing to sate my curiosity.

A few weeks later I caught their promo clip on Rage and got my first glimpse of Bughouse in motion. The video itself, like the song, is entirely without bells and whistles. The band stand in a bare studio, perfunctorily performing the song in a very straightforward ‘this is the band, this is the song’ set-up. There are no smiles, pouts or poses. No make-up artists, stylists or storylines. The only thing that stands out in a slightly odd way is that both Gen and Lea are wearing lipstick. I’m sure they’d look back now and think ‘was that entirely necessary?’. Perhaps this is what I loved about the song to begin with. The band weren’t trying to win you over. What you saw is what you got.

I had just started to play guitar around this time and Steve Campbell would become something of default guitar teacher as he had this relaxed arpeggio/strummed style that he alternated effectively to allow some variety between the blues/rock rhythm patterns that I found interesting to watch and challenging to replicate. On “Vendetta”, the main focus was on Lea Cameron’s vocal, and she had this soulful, raw voice, that when paired with that of Genevieve Maynard’s on the chorus gives the song an extra lift, and it works especially well towards the end when Genevieve reaches out and hits that spectacular high note. I also adore the piano playing of session guest, Louis Tillet that comes in briefly about 1.20 and continues throughout as the song picks up momentum and intensity (note: guitar solo at 2.00), ending in a cascading piano run with Lea delivering the taunt of “I will bring the children and we’ll kiss you to the bars”. It largely plays in the background of the song, and sounds like he walked in the studio, banged it out in one take and then left, but it’s a crucial piece of the “Vendetta” puzzle and I can’t imagine the song without it.

Bughouse were one of the first Sydney bands that I religiously followed. After picking up their single from Waterfront Records, I saw them play an afternoon show a few months later at the Hopetoun Hotel, for an event held there every Wednesday called ‘Rock Against Work’. It was my first time diverting from the well-walked path to the record stores, my first time walking uphill from Central Station through the tree-lined streets of Surry Hills, which a year later I would happily call home, to the Hopetoun. I walked into the pub and saw Genevieve and Lea sitting at the bar. I was a little in awe to see them just hanging around having a beer and killing time till 4pm. Musicians were still something of an unknown entity that gained an instant elevated status, regardless of the fact they probably worked part-time in cafes or held regular jobs. I kept my distance, trying not to stare, fully aware that I was an interloper on their scene. I wanted to tell them of the circumstances that brought me here, but resisted in fear of feeling stupid. As it was, they came to me, somewhat impressed with my Tank Girl t-shirt (the comic book thing coming to my advantage) and wanted to know where I got it from. I glowed, feeling as if I’d suddenly gained acceptance and sat on a stool nursing my scotch and coke, nonchalantly flicking through a copy of On the Street.

The events of the show that followed are mostly lost to my memories. Songs played would later turn up on their still-astounding Tax Stamp EP and the muted, but still engaging debut album Every Fool in Town. I would’ve been surprised by their approach to the songs, which seemed to cover every style imaginable, drifting between rock, country and folk, skittish rhythms and time signatures, Steve Campbell’s deft playing and lyrics that sounded profoundly bitter and incisive. All of these songs sounding as good or better than “Vendetta”, which in a live setting tore shreds off the recorded version, building up to this intense, set-closing climactic finish. They played three sets in all that afternoon, but I had to miss the final one to make it home in time for tea. It makes me laugh to think that I skipped school to see them play, but traded an extra half hour of songs for a hot meal. My priorities were warped. That was the last time eating came before music.

The cover of “V for Vendetta” reminded me of a picture of myself and my mother in the days when you’d go to a photo studio to get a ‘family’ portrait done; back when it was just the two of us – a young, single mother and her doe-eyed child. I still can’t look at the sleeve any differently. I eventually became casual acquaintances with Lea and Gen, purely from being seen in the audience or relentlessly pestering them to play a song that they’d yet to record, and the band became (along with several others that will appear here in time) as much a part of my life as possible. Their last ever gig was one of those bitter occasions where the band bowed out from an unresponsive music industry rather than each other. I can understand the amicable splits, the hated unworkable relationships, or whatever excuse you’re handed when a breaks up, but when they call it a day out of being unappreciated, it’s just the worst possible way to go.

a footnote…

When I started writing these ‘Secret Histories’, there were a handful of bands that I had unfinished business with – questions that needed to be answered, and a desire to make sure these bands weren’t forgotten, and also to share a disappointment I felt in that while these bands were larger than life in my world, they were just another band playing in a pub on the outskirts of Sydney on a Friday night. I’ve got fond memories of the night Morrissey cancelled his Sydney show in June of 1991, and having played Morrissey on the drive all the way down from the Central Coast, missed the announcements on the radio, arriving at the Hordern Pavillion and finding only gladioli-bearing disciples refusing to take the bad news. Scanning the pages of the music press in the car-park to see who else was playing, raced over to Rozelle to catch Bughouse at the Rose, Shamrock and Thistle, just in time to hear guitarist Steve Campbell berate the sitting audience for not getting to their feet. “This isn’t performance poetry” he says disgusted, “this is rock and roll”. Everyone stood up.

a final word…

I managed to get in touch with Genevieve Maynard, bassist of Bughouse and steal her away from her daily duties of running a recording studio (Revolution Studios in Alexandria) and working on her as yet untitled third solo album with the Tallboys to indulge in a little Bughouse revision and give her thoughts on the recording of “V For Vendetta”.

How long had the band been together before “V for Vendetta” was released? How did you all know each other?

The band actually got together to record some of Lea’s songs.

Pete and Lea had been in the Lucky Dinosaurs together, and Pete knew Steve. Lea and I had been rehearsing some songs in a band that was going nowhere. Pete had some money and so the four of us got together in a rehearsal room for a few weeks, demoed the tunes on the guitar player from the Dinosaurs reel to reel 4 track and then went into the studio and recorded the single. It was all pretty quick. Pete also had a piece of paper as big as a table cloth covered in potential band names… at one stage we were almost called “Free Radicals”.

What do you remember in particular about the recording session?

Quite a bit. I remember Louis Tillet was about 4 hours late – we were unsure that he was going to turn up at all by that stage. I remember that the 2 inch machine was slipping and held us up a bit. I remember not fixing a bass mistake on the b-side (Burn it Back) that is there for posterity now… and I remember doing the backing vocals – there’s a line in the end chorus where the vocal goes up and when I did the high bv on it I got the thumbs up from the others in the control room.

Did you consider “V for Vendetta” to be anything special? Was it a defining kind of song for the band at that time?

It wasn’t one of the songs we initially demoed – Lea brought in into rehearsal a week or so later. As soon as she played it to us I knew it was the one. It was such a deceptively simple pop tune with lea’s typically brilliant lyrics. Defining? I don’t think we actually settled into being a band with a defined sound until the last album, Fink Tank.

How did this song come about? Did Lea bring it to the band fully formed? Were you aware of its comic book connotation? (ie: title, opening lines lifted entirely from the comic)

Lea brought the song in. We were very self-critical, but this song didn’t need any fixing up. I don’t think the arrangement changed at all. We all knew Alan Moore’s comic.

Were you surprised that it was picked up and played regularly on Triple J? Did you notice the impact at all?

No, we weren’t surprised that JJJ played it – in those days it was a local station and they would give pretty much anything a spin – but we were blown away by how much they played it and the reaction it got. Things started happening pretty quickly after that.

Looking back on the Bughouse experience, do you have any regrets? Do you feel the band could’ve achieved more?

Yes, I have regrets. I think Fink Tank was a great album. It still stands up today in terms of production values, and the songs are very strong. It actually sounded like us, unlike the first album (Every Fool In Town) we did with Mushroom, and I really wish Mushroom hadn’t pulled the plug on what would have been our second album (it was released unfinished as the EP Bardo). We were working with Tim Whitten and Daniel Denholm and Nick Fisher was now in the band on drums and had started using samples and loops. There were some great songs. It took us a year or so to get ourselves back into the right frame of mind to record Fink Tank, which we released independently, but by that stage the personal problems in the band had really come to the fore and were crippling us. When we broke up we’d only been together 5 years, but in that time had released 2 singles, 2 EPs and two albums. It was a pretty productive time.

Your current live band/recording outfit features Steve Campbell on guitar, is the chemistry still there? He always had such a recognisable guitar style. I’m glad he’s not entirely lost to music when not saving the planet through Greenpeace.

Yeh, he’s a great player. I wanted him in the band because he does that blues/rock kind of thing so tastefully. He still has his 345 and Markley head too. I think the chemistry is better these days because there’s no pressure on us to prove anything.

I used to fondly make the trip from the Central Coast down to the Sandringham Hotel every fortnight to catch Bug (Bughouse minus the boys), and pester you and Lea with requests. Your voices singing together old country tunes and the odd AC/DC number song were a delight. What became of her?

Lea and Nick and their son live in Northern NSW. She’s writing songs and has a home studio under the house.

Genevieve Maynard and the Tallboys have an album almost in the bag, and with Steve Campbell in the fold and playing guitar again, it’s going to be something truly special. And if the rest of the band read this feel free to get in touch and expand on this piece, I’d love to hear from you.

The plangent chords and echoed vocals of The Screaming Tribesmen’s “Igloo” create a chilling landscape, blanketing the song in a reverberating wall of sound, making you feel like you’re there, sheltering from the storm, while an arctic wind whips outside. The songs setting, the frozen surroundings of the “polar zone” is the complete antithesis of the tropical warmth of Brisbane, Australia — where both the Tribesmen, and this song originated.

Released in 1983 on Citadel Records, the roots of “Igloo” date back to 1979 and a 60′s garage rock band called the 31st, formed by Tribesmen singer/guitarist Michael “Mick” Medew. The 31st would retain some notoriety over the passing of time, as both Ron Peno and Chris Welsh of Died Pretty and Brad Shepherd of the Hoodoo Gurus played in this short-lived band before moving on to greater things. The dissolution of the 31st, along with another Brisbane band, The Fun Things would set the scene for the formation of The Screaming Tribesmen in 1981 by ex-Fun Things drummer Murray Shepherd along with bassist John Hartley. Shepherd explains, “They broke up, along with The Fun Things and I formed the band from the Fun Things rhythm section, Myself and Hartley, and asked Mick from the de-funct 31st to join us.” The Tribesmen would go through several line-up changes during their career but this was the classic line-up that recorded “Igloo” in late 1982.

I was instantly floored when I first heard this song. That cavernous guitar rumble and the haunting melody, the thumping drum fill that hides behind the chorus and the lyrics that captured my imagination. “I live in an igloo in the polar zone/at night I dream of a red telephone”. It’s not exactly Wordsworth, but it more than does the job. Keen on hearing more, I quickly came to the realisation that “Igloo”, (co-written by Medew and Peno from their 31st days) was a one-off, and that whatever Peno’s contribution to the band was (more about this below), the cerebral touch of “I tried to make friends with the Eskimo, but his thoughts were buried deep in the ice and snow” was gone, replaced with the b-grade schlock of “I’ve got a date with a vampyre girl tonight”.

“Igloo’s” over-reaching message of isolation, loneliness and despair is captured perfectly when Medew, after asking the Eskimos for help with food, spits out the line “I just see white around here/I don’t know what to do”, sounding like he’s hanging on by a thread. The melodic guitar sound that was indicative of that era (cf. Exploding White Mice, The Lime Spiders, The Hoodoo Gurus) is something which the Tribesmen would later move away from, pumping up their image (torn denim, long hair and chains) to serve a hard-rock crowd. As is my want when a song like this grabs me, I’ll pick up my guitar and try and disassemble the parts and decipher the lyrics. There’s a line in the first verse which had me at a total loss,

“I felt so lonely when my Samoyed died/I felt my tears freeze when I finally cried”

I didn’t have the benefit of a lyric sheet at the time, and as such couldn’t work out exactly what he was crying over. All I could recognise was the first syllable and it irritated me no end. Eventually I dug out a dictionary, went through every entry beginning with “sam” until I hit jackpot. How many of you know what a Samoyed is? I surely didn’t. A Samoyed is a breed of dog that is suited for colder climbs, originating from North-West Siberia. Find a picture and you’ll see one of the happiest looking dogs ever. I was instantly humbled. If this dog died, I’d cry too.

Both Medew and Peno would get a songwriting credit for “Igloo”, but purely based on the rest of the Tribesmen’s recorded output (and ignoring an interview here in which Peno speaks about the lyrics), I always attributed the words to him. In this interview he explains the inspiration for the song coming from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, borrowing the symbolism of the igloo as being white and pure, and juxtaposing this toward the end of the song with the refrain “listen to the shoeshine boys”, which he admits were a black 50s doo-wop band from Alabama. Sadly, no mention was made of the Samoyed that I had grown so fond of. I always find it incredibly satisfying when you actually come away from a song enlightened. Peno could’ve taken the easy route and said “I felt so lonely when my dog died,” but he went the extra yard and plumped for the geographically correct Samoyed. Attention to detail should never go unrewarded, and neither should this song.

Thank you to Murray Shepherd for clearing up some factual details.

The Screaming Tribesmen – MySpace

The Dropbears only existed in the periphery of my memory, briefly clashing with the already discussed Beargarden in the “bear” stakes around the same time both bands had their brief moments of fame. The crossing of paths only occurred when Australia was granted their own version of the English teen-oriented music magazine Smash Hits in 1984, and in an effort to contribute Australian content, bands were often shoehorned in that really had no reason to be there, but good publicity can’t be ignored and if you’ve got a half-way decent looking frontman, a pin-up opportunity awaits. This is where I recalled my first sighting of a Dropbear* and I’m pretty sure throughout 1985 when they charted with “Shall We Go” there were several more. What happened after that, well who knows?

I’ll come clean, and while admitting as much that I was familiar with the name and that of its singer, the enigmatic-sounding Johnny Batchelor, I had never actually heard (or could recall hearing) one of their songs until last year. Granted, I was the epitome of the introspective and impressionable teenager when the only opportunity would’ve arisen and it’s understandable in those delicate years that if you weren’t called Duran Duran, chances are incredibly slim I would’ve given a flying fuck. The only records I owned around that time arrived during birthdays and Christmas, so I had to choose and choose well. The phrase “support your local band” really didn’t enter my head for many years to come.

According to their brief Wikipedia entry, the band was formed in Darlinghurst, Sydney in 1981 and consisted off Johnny Batchelor on guitar and vocals, Simon Rudlin on drums and Chris Toms on bass. “Fun Loving” was their debut single, released in 1981. Four more singles and one mini-album followed 1981 and 1985, charting with the “Shall We Go” single. The differences between “Fun Loving” and “Shall We Go” are too numerous to mention. They almost sound like completely different bands. No, actually, they do sound like completely different bands. I’ll save a discussion on “Shall We Go” for another time, but right now it’s all about where it began.

Five things I love about “Fun Loving”:

1. The way the song is pieced together, from the slow-building thin, scratchy guitar to the introduction of the first bass notes and that sharp snare hit. The song literally just creeps up on you, conspicuous by its lack of volume or intensity.

2. Johnny Batchelor’s softly sung lyrics is at odds with Chris Tom’s bouncing bassline, giving the song a tense/nervous feel. You don’t quite know the direction of the song at this point. It’s not punk (the bassist is though), it’s not rock, it’s not Detroit-garage, there are elements of a nascent post-punk sound that reminds me of Three Imaginary Boys-era Cure and Joy Division, without any excess British influence, but on the whole it sounds like a new band still finding their feet.

3. The clarity and sound quality between the instruments that instantly sets this song apart from their peers. This isn’t to say “Fun Loving” was made at 301 Studios with a fancy budget, but that the band managed to get the best sound possible without unnecessary overdubs or studio trickery that would’ve dated the record (and the rest of the 80s to come). Perhaps purely because of this “Fun Loving” has hardly aged at all. A young indie band could actually get away with pulling this song off today without sounding like they’d walked off the streets of Surry Hills when Malcolm Fraser was still in office.

4. The naïve lyrical charm and the way the simple melody in the chorus appears out of nowhere. The song is largely driven by Chris Tom’s bass, and when he reaches the chorus he plays a perfect Peter Hook-ish melodic bass figure, that puts the fun in “Fun Loving”. When you strip the song down to its parts you see how rudimentary the structure is. The song is your classic three chord trick, E > F > G (F & G are played as un-barred E chords on the second and fourth frets), then back to G for the chorus. In lieu of an unnecessary guitar solo over the bridge, the song just speeds up. With the exception of the dominant bassline there’s nothing out of the ordinary here, but that unexpected lift in the chorus is what makes this song so special.

5. I’m torn between how to interpret the song. It feels like a response to being dumped (“Tonight, something inside’s changed/you left me with my thoughts rearranged”) or from someone making him feel inadequate (“I feel strange, apart from it all/I feel about a size too small”) but when Johnny sings “Fun loving me,” it sounds positive and doesn’t really fit with either idea. To be honest, I really don’t know. First rule of songwriting: always keep them guessing.

In the interest of filling in the gaps for future music historians and finding an answer to the previous question (because I just hate not knowing), I tracked down Johnny Batchelor and asked him to talk about the history of the band and the origins of “Fun Loving”. Thanks for indulging us, Johnny. Next time I’m in town, I owe you a beer.

How did Dropbears get started?

Newly in Sydney, I had a band with Phil Hall, who later became Dropbear’s bass player, but when we had trouble with drummers (Kerry Jacobson, ex-Dragon kept falling off his stool) Phil left to join Sardine V. I noticed that a bass player lived downstairs; he made such a bloody racket everyday, so I invited him upstairs to join my new band. That was Chris Toms, aka Chris Cross, hardcore punk ex-Bedhogs, and we called the new band Dropbears, though god only knows why.

What were your influences and ideas behind forming the band? It’s strange, but I hear The Cure circa the first album in “Fun Loving”, is that far off the mark?

Sydney inner city in 1981 was a real post-punk melting pot of styles and tribes and bands, so much going on, while the suburbs were pretty much straight ahead Oz Rock. You could walk around town though and see all these different things like maybe X and Tactics and a punk and a ska band all in the same night. And the music crowd, whether they were punks or skins or mods or whatever, would be doing that. The scene wasn’t insular. I was into all kinds of stuff like, yeah, The Cure, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, The Ramones, lots more. The band didn’t really have “an idea” we just all new we had to be in a band. I had, I guess, an eclectic approach to song writing and Chris had a really unique bass style, so I guess we just did what we did.

Where did you record the single? The production is surprisingly sharp and clear, especially the balance between the instruments. How did you go about releasing it and what was the response like?

Fun Loving was recorded at Palm Studios which was a demo studio really but lots of indie bands did their first records there on the cheap. I did a custom pressing of five hundred copies to start with and walked around to all the Sydney music stores pleading with them to take a few. I took it in to JJJ and they loved it and put it on high rotation. Until then we were the band playing on the floor at the corner of the bar. After, we were headlining the Trade Union Club, which was quite cool.

When I think of the music scene in Sydney at the start of the ’80s I think of bands still doing that post-Birdman Detroit/garage rock thing, and in that context, “Fun Loving” really stands out on its own. What was the music scene like when you started? Where did you see Dropbears fitting in and who were the bands you felt shared a like mind?

Fun Loving was a bit unusual on the radio at that time; it started so quietly for one thing. As I said, there was heaps of different stuff going on in the inner city all the way from the post-Birdman fast and furious to wimpy pop like The Singles, who had probably stopped by then actually, then there was sort of power pop like Sunny Boys and baby electronica like Severed Heads. In that scene nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. We played a lot with Sunny boys and Sardine V, two bands that couldn’t be more dissimilar but it all seemed to fit at the time.

“Fun Loving” has an almost childish naivety to it. It sounds like you’ve been dumped by a girl, but when you reach the chorus, I can’t tell whether you’re questioning an accusation of not being much fun, or surprise that you were dumped because you’re a fun loving guy? So which is it? Or am I completely off the mark?

Ha, I’m glad it has some mystery for you. I guess it was about that state of naivety of youth where you meet someone and they have such an effect on you. It might be as simple as the way they stand or move their hands but you’re just so moved by them. Then it all happens again the next night. That’s it really: fun loving.

With the success of “Shall We Go” and the minor pop star status afforded to you in the teen music mags, what was it that lead to the demise of the band?

Gee, so many things contributed to our downfall. A big thing, probably, was that we managed ourselves, meaning that I was managing the band. And though I thought I was pretty clever, I wasn’t really equipped to deal with a multi-national record company, I didn’t really know how it all worked. Ironically, though, it was when we finally did get a manager, ’cause everyone said we were too big not to have one that we really came to strife. Everyone thought we were rich ’cause our pictures were everywhere but our new manager got us seriously in debt and the record company wouldn’t let us do an album, so we decided to quit. Funnily enough, we did a last tour to earn money to pay debts, ditched our manager and stripped it back to the three piece sound, and it was the most successful tour we ever did.

What are your thoughts on “Fun Loving”, a quarter of a century on, and what have you been up to in the intervening years?

That long ah? I still like that song. There is quite a bit in the back catalogue that I can’t stand to listen to but the singles don’t bother me too much. “Fun Loving” has a kind of nice frailty yet Chris’s bass line is so strong. After doing some solo projects I dropped right out of music for quite a while. I’ve got a new thing now though, a duo, drums and guitar, called Best Friend Ever. We’ll be playing around a bit, every now and then, and doing some recording soon, which will be up on MySpace probably in May. You should hear the drummer, he’s magic.

*In case you were wondering, a Dropbear is a fictional Australian marsupial that resembles a more vicious version of the koala. They inhabit treetops and drop onto their victims from above, hence the name. So, look out…

Dropbears – MySpace