We originally had high hopes for equal participation in and control of the station, but because of the need of certain elements to exercise power, monopolise information and establish hierarchies, the ‘tyranny of rock’ became hegemonous. We take for granted readers’ reservations about rock music: an extended discussion of the problem of the sexism of rock music is not possible in this particular article.10
Ironically, one of the station’s strongest-performing and most enduring programs was the feminist show, Through The Looking Glass (later Megaherz). Neither was the station above indulging in its own brand of artistic censorship. Helen Hambling remembers the Rolling Stones’ Black And Blue being among the records unofficially banned from airplay on the grounds of sexism.
Helen Hambling: I think it was a clash not of politics but of using the medium. If it had been a station that had been started by a feminist collective, I think it probably would have been different. But it had a very strong feminist flavour to it, even though some people were criticising it on feminist grounds. Basically anything that was explicitly anti-woman or pro-violence against women, those sorts of things were pretty well blacklisted. In a way it was quite sanctimonious. I was a lot surer about what was good politics and what was bad than I am now.
A more serious censorship threat came from outside the station. Queensland’s resident morals campaigner Rona Joyner, founder of the fundamentalist Christian pressure groups Society To Outlaw Pornography (STOP) and Committee Against Regressive Education (CARE), must have been one of Triple Zed’s most ardent listeners for the number of obscenity complaints she filed against the station. Joyner had the sympathetic ear of the premier, and news of the station’s indiscretions was inevitably forwarded to Canberra, threatening the renewal of the station’s licence. As 1976 melted into 1977, and the new music emanating from England and New York began to take on a harder edge, such complaints were bound to increase.
It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that the mutually confrontational agendas of punk and Triple Zed were made for each other. The truth is its rise caused as much division within the station’s ranks as it did almost anywhere else. In large part the station had come into existence to play the music that wasn’t deemed suitable for AM radio formats. It is one of the ironies of punk that, beyond its obvious rawness, part of the shock of the new lay in its return to AM radio values: short, simple, repetitive songs and, at least in the case of the Ramones, bubblegum melodies to boot.
A glance at Triple Zed’s first Hot 100, aired on New Year’s Day 1977 (the start of a long tradition, and the predecessor of Triple J’s Hottest 100) is a roll-call of hits and artists still endlessly rotated on commercial FM radio formats today: Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Santana, Queen.11 Although its compilation was statistically very dubious – this was long before computers began crunching the numbers – the list is a reliable enough guide to the kind of music then popular at the station.
Stuart Matchett: The stuff that we played early on was incredibly commercial by today’s standards. Initially [music programming] was really easy, because you could play Rolling Stones songs and it was regarded as being incredibly avant-garde. At night we used to get into the jazzy fusion stuff, like the Weather Report and Chick Corea and Mahavishnu Orchestra, which looking back now seems really arty and pretentious, but at the time was absolutely de rigueur.
Even more revealing than the Hot 100 was a list of the best 10 albums of 1976 as voted by the station’s announcers: Joan Armatrading’s self-titled debut, Guy Clark’s Old No. 1, Ry Cooder’s Chicken Skin Music, Genesis’ Trick Of The Tail, Al Jarreau’s Glow, Graham Parker’s Howlin’ Wind, Boz Scaggs’ Silk Degrees, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes’ I Don’t Want To Go Home and Steely Dan’s Royal Scam.12
Yet in the previous two months alone, three astonishing singles had been released: the Damned’s New Rose, the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK and – most important of all in terms of local context – the Saints’ (I’m) Stranded. The station had stated plainly in the first edition of Radio Times that Triple Zed would give support, via airplay and promotion of gigs, ‘to Australian bands in general and local bands in particular’13; the Saints would sorely test that loyalty.
Not that punk was ignored. Indeed, Triple Zed may have been the first radio station in the world to play these songs. A former station-hand, Ross Creighton, had left for England to work for an independent record label, and from this base he posted several test pressings of singles and albums back to the station, often before their release to British radio. Additionally, new import record stores (the short-lived Discreet Records, and the enduring Rocking Horse) were feeding Triple Zed new albums, along with equally vital editions of New Musical Express, Melody Maker and Sounds. Jim Beatson dates the length of time it took for punk to take off in Brisbane as approximate to that of a sea-mail subscription of the NME to reach the country.
Jim Beatson: Again, there were huge divisions within the station, almost within six months. And it became big at Triple Zed because the most popular presenter by a long way was Michael Finucan, and he was a very strong supporter of everything that punk represented. So a tremendous argument went on between those who argued that the station’s audience was being alienated by this incoherent, aggressive rubbish, and those arguing, with equal force, ‘At long last, something new and exciting in the world of music.’
The die was soon cast. Quite by accident, Finucan, or more correctly Finucan’s attitude, was to become the embodiment of Triple Zed’s on-air approach.
As a 17-year-old music fan, Michael Finucan had first checked into Triple Zed in February 1976, during the university’s orientation festivities. Enrolled as an economics–law student, he quickly found himself spending more of his time washing dishes down at the station. At first he was regarded as something of a hanger-on: he was just a kid, even by the youthful standards of most of the staff. But the depth of his musical awareness soon became apparent.
Michael Finucan: I’d just got out of high school and had been a music obsessive for a long time. I probably was buying import records at that point, and probably heard about Triple Zed at one of the import record stores. Anyway, somehow I heard about the station and really liked it. I previously thought I was the only person in Brisbane who was interested in the music they were playing.
Finucan soon found himself helping out Alan Knight, then presenting a request show under the nom de plume Duane Flick. As the obnoxious Flick, Knight had a penchant for abusing subscribers for their less than adventurous taste (those requesting Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven were singled out for particular scorn). When Knight went out for a cigarette one evening and didn’t come back, Finucan graduated to announcer. He’d learned his lessons well.
Michael Finucan: I just kept up Alan’s tradition of passing judgmental comments on people’s choices. I think I was willing to listen to new music a bit more than some people who had more Catholic tastes when it came to what they thought was reasonable rock & roll. I just liked the sound [of punk], it was energetic, and it said, ‘Get stuffed.’ And the songs were short!
Triple Zed had its first and probably its last genuine radio star.
Abusive, hilarious and spontaneous, Finucan’s on-air technique was simply to circle anything in the Courier-Mail that looked to have comic potential and go to town. After promoting himself to the breakfast announcer’s chair (to the relief of an exhausted John Woods), Finucan literally moved into the studio for six months, sleeping in a narrow brick room out the back known as the Black Hole. This meant that Finucan didn’t waste valuable sleeping time commuting to and from the station, as he was woken by the departing graveyard announcer five minutes before commencing his shift.
But it was the music Finucan played that left the most indelible impression on his listeners. Brad Shepherd, of the Fun Things and later the Hoodoo Gurus, is one who remembers taping one of Finucan’s shows. While the cassette is long l
ost, such was its influence on the teenage Shepherd that he recalls to this day the track listing, in its original sequence: the Ramones’ Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue, the Stranglers’ (Get A) Grip (On Yourself), John Cale’s Leaving It Up To You, the Damned’s New Rose, the Stooges’ Real Cool Time, the New York Dolls’ Personality Crisis and the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK.
Brad Shepherd: There’d been a lot of talk about punk rock. By that time I’d seen the Sex Pistols on TV, on Countdown, and I’d heard Radio Birdman talk about the Stooges. But to actually hear it myself for the first time, that was something else.
Not all listeners were so appreciative of punk’s challenge to the unwritten conventions of what constituted good music and, by extension, good radio. Typical was a letter published in the October 1977 Radio Times from a disgruntled subscriber, begging Finucan not to continue playing harsh-sounding records at unseemly hours of the morning. Finucan responded by advising the anonymous listener to lock themselves in a room with the complete works of James Taylor; should this be impossible, they should at least ‘be thankful the songs are short’.14
The January 1978 issue of Radio Times featured a very different list of albums from the corresponding edition the previous year. Plainly there was less than unanimous opinion about the year’s best platters among the announcers, with the list expanded to a wildly schizophrenic Top 30. Several names appeared a second time – Joan Armatrading, Graham Parker, Steely Dan and Peter Gabriel with his first post-Genesis album – and they are joined by the likes of Bonnie Raitt, Bob Seger and Linda Ronstadt. But standing alongside them were a clutch of debuts that pointed the station’s way forward: the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks, Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True, Television’s Marquee Moon, Richard Hell’s Blank Generation, Talking Heads’ ’77 and, from Sydney, Radio Birdman’s Radios Appear.15
Curiously, the Saints’ (I’m) Stranded was absent. Stuart Matchett, who would shortly move to Sydney to begin a lengthy career with Triple J, remembers the single’s electrifying effect.
Stuart Matchett: I’d grown up listening to all this incredibly rough R&B stuff, and so as soon as the single came out I thought, hang on, this is exactly the same sort of stuff I used to like. And then I realised, if you hadn’t already heard all that, then it must sound really wrong and not tuneful and so on.
There was this one listener who used to ring up all the time and ask me questions about what did I think of this record and that record; he was obviously a big jazz-rock fan. And I always remember after I’d played Stranded a few nights in a row, he just rang me up and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing? What are you playing this absolute garbage for?’
CHAPTER THREE
the most primitive band in the world
The inner western suburbs adjoining the University of Queensland are a leafy mosaic of Brisbane’s aspirational middle classes. Set in the foothills of Mt Coot-tha, the houses around Toowong and Indooroopilly are archetypal of the city: high-set, rustic, surrounded by lush vegetation. During summer, the air rings with cicadas as the humidity sinks deep into the gullies.
Over the Indooroopilly Bridge, on the other side of the Brisbane River, it’s a different picture. The landscape is flatter, the heat marginally drier. Unconstrained by the ranges that fringe the city’s north-west, the suburban sprawl now extends all the way to Ipswich, the gateway to the farming country of the Lockyer Valley and, over the range, the Darling Downs, for years the centre of the National Party’s power base.
In the early 1960s the suburbs of Oxley and Inala remained on Brisbane’s south-west outskirts. A jumbled mixture of industrial, semi-rural and new residential estates, the area is determinedly pragmatic and blue-collar conservative, a metaphor for the rest of the state. It was in Oxley that Edmund Kuepper’s parents settled after emigrating from Bremen, West Germany in 1960. Kuepper was four years old.
Ed Kuepper: I think growing up in Brisbane definitely had an effect on people. Going anywhere else you sort of felt like a poor country cousin. You’d definitely come to other places and be a bit wide-eyed about it. But in a pretty arrogant way. There’s a pugnacious element to the city, which I think the Saints had.
Born in Kenya to Irish Catholic parents in 1957, Chris Bailey’s family had lived a nomadic existence before also sailing for Australia, stopping in Perth and Adelaide before finally settling in Brisbane. Bailey was eight. His father, who had spent a lifetime in the army, was highly politicised, active on the periphery of the Irish nationalist movement. He also had strong tastes in music, with an extensive collection of rebel songs. By the end of the ’60s, Bailey Sr harboured notions of returning to his homeland, intent on signing his children up for the cause.
Bailey’s elder sister Margaret was the most obviously influenced by her father. A member of Students In Dissent, she was expelled from Inala High School for wearing a miniskirt. Outraged, her father demonstrated his support for his offspring by chaining Margaret and Chris to the steps of the education department in protest, the latter wearing sandals and his first attempt at long hair. Yet Chris’ description of his involvement in Brisbane’s political resistance is couched in the terms of an outsider, even an unwelcome interloper.
Chris Bailey: I thought it was a great big middle-class party. I wasn’t directly invited but I managed to sneak in the back door. I believed in the possibility of revolution, but after hanging around St Lucia for a couple of weeks I realised that (a) I’d have to get dressed up for it and (b) my table manners weren’t quite correct.
I think I was just a teen rebelling. I was fairly politicised, was anti-Vietnam. I used to wear radical feminist badges to school just to piss teachers off. Because Brisbane in those days was, well, a police state, a fascist state.
After beginning his own secondary education at Inala in 1969, Bailey convinced his parents to allow him to cross over to the ‘slightly posher’ Oxley High School the following year (motivated by a friend’s recommendation that the girls there were better looking). In fact, Oxley High was extremely conservative, and equally intolerant of the wearing of moratorium or women’s liberation badges, as the insouciant Bailey was wont to do. On his first day he was pulled out of assembly on account of his long hair. Ed Kuepper was taking notes.
Ed Kuepper: There weren’t many boys who had long hair and those that did got to know each other, because you got barred from classes and people would pick on you. So you got tough, or at least learned to run. And we had a shared interest in music, not exactly the same sorts of things really, but they seemed close enough at the time.
Kuepper was already a voracious music fan. Somewhat alienated from his peers, resulting in the creation of an arch, omniscient persona – ‘I was fairly condescending towards what was going on around me. I definitely felt above it’ – Kuepper’s discovery of the Stooges’ second album Fun House, released in 1970, was a pivotal moment:
Ed Kuepper: Fun House had a quality that transcended everything. An unbelievable simplicity, for starters, which was actually shocking to people at the time. People would be like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ They were like cavemen, and yet obviously they weren’t stupid. When you move into your teens, if you’re in an environment where you’re not feeling a part of what’s going on in society, to have a record like that come along is a real life-saver. At the very least it can help point you somewhere.
Tall and lanky, with prematurely thinning blond hair, Ivor Hay was another Oxley teenager who was learning to play piano when aspiring guitarist Kuepper met him at local hangout Oxley Station. Hay was practising his pick-up lines, a skill that would prove invaluable for his future bandmates.
Ed Kuepper: That was one of the great things about having Ivor around. He could set everybody up! I don’t think Bailey and I could get a date if we carried enormous amounts of money in those days. But Ivor was the man. There’s a place and a purpose for everyone in a band. Apart from that, he was the only one who could drive.
Hay was studying at Corinda High, a far more liberal school to which both Kuepper and Bailey would eventually decamp for their final years. Again, the motivation for joining Hay at Corinda probably had little to do with politics: one urban myth suggested the school then had the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the state. Either way, Corinda High was to become something of a breeding ground for the first wave of Brisbane’s musical talent.
One student enthralled by this emerging scene, and who later became its most earnest chronicler, was a young Clinton Walker. He quickly fell under the spell of these ‘antisocial young longhairs’, of whom Hay, Kuepper and Bailey were the most driven. There was already, Walker later wrote, an aura about them, ‘an absolute arrogance, a contempt not only for the adult world of authority generally but everything else as well, especially the music you were supposed to like’.1
Clinton Walker: They were terrifying! Because their hair was so long, and they were so haughty, basically. Ed always kept himself at a height and a distance; he was most at home with his record collection. And Chris was this cavalier vagabond who even in grade 11 had cultivated this image of a wine bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
In 1973 Bailey, Kuepper and Hay began playing together as a three-piece, under the name of Kid Galahad and the Eternals (Kid Galahad from the Elvis movie Kid Creole; the Eternals from the science fiction film Zardoz). Bailey – a natural frontman with a nascent willingness to push everything, and everyone, to the limit – would sing as Hay pounded the keys and Kuepper thrashed away over the top. Walker witnessed an early rehearsal in Hay’s mother’s garage. As he later described the event, perhaps a little romantically:
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