Walsh remained friends with Forster and McLennan, and Don’t Let Him Come Back (the B-side to the Go-Betweens’ next single for Able, People Say, recorded with Mustafa on drums in May 1979) is both a fond and funny farewell, its reedy harmonica playing a good-humoured nod to their shared love of Bob Dylan.
Tim Mustafa had also decided his time was up. Despite recording a series of demos recorded at Golding Street with Gerald Teekman (the so-called ‘Teeki Tapes’, a crucial document of the band’s early sound4), Forster and McLennan were still making noises about finding a female drummer: in fact, they had already found one. Mustafa, who at that stage wasn’t even sure that he wanted to be in a band, graciously vacated his stool.
Belinda Morrison had seen a great deal more of life than either Robert Forster or Grant McLennan by the time she joined the Go-Betweens in 1980. Born in 1951 in Sydney, she was a full six years older than Forster, and very nearly as tall, standing just over six feet. She was also highly politicised, with a background in social work. In 1973 she had taken a job in the Aboriginal and Islander Legal Service, where the house lawyer was future Labor premier Wayne Goss, and where she had a relationship with radical activist Denis Walker, the son of Aboriginal poet Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal).
Lindy Morrison: He took me all over Queensland, he showed me all the communities, everything. I can’t tell you the number of times we were stopped . . . We couldn’t get a drink in a bar, because Denis was black. We couldn’t get motels to stay in, but the biggest thing for me was that I just lost so many of my white friends. I was completely tainted by having had an affair with an Aboriginal man in Brisbane.
Morrison was sharing a house in the inner-west suburb of Auchenflower with Stuart Matchett (then in the process of helping set up Triple Zed) and a trio of budding actors, Geoffrey Rush, Bille Browne and Trevor Stuart. The house featured a dedicated music room, and Morrison started banging the drums, simply because they were ‘the easiest to pick up, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t understand guitars or amplifiers. And also they were physical, and I wanted to do something that was physically active.’
After a period spent travelling through Europe, Morrison joined her first band in 1978, an acoustic women’s group called Shrew. However, it was as a member of Xero (then Zero) that she would first make her mark. Xero also began life as an all-female band, although they were soon joined by guitarist John Willsteed who, along with singer Irena Luckus, would become the creative nucleus of the group (and who, many years later, would himself become a Go-Between).
Xero were defiantly experimental, taking their cues from the fractured sounds of British bands such as the Slits, the Raincoats and the early Cure. Already a veteran of political demonstrations in Queensland, Morrison responded enthusiastically to punk, and most of the singles she took to her heart emanated not from New York but from London: the Slits’ Typical Girls; X-Ray Spex’s Oh Bondage Up Yours!; and, of course, the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK and God Save The Queen. ‘I’d found a way to be political artistically,’ Morrison says, ‘which was what I was looking for in those days.’
Xero had found a rehearsal space behind the Sun’s newspaper offices on Brunswick Street in Fortitude Valley, which many other bands, including the Go-Betweens, would soon share. And Morrison had found, in the Go-Betweens, a group that both shared and complemented her interests.
Lindy Morrison: This sounds really snobbish, but I just couldn’t find any intellectual satisfaction in the music scene . . . Grant and Robert introduced me to a whole new cultural world, because they knew all the American film-makers, and all the American writers, and all the American groups like Television, and Bob Dylan. And in many ways I was introducing them to my culture too, but with the arrogance of youth, they weren’t so interested in what I was trying to show them!
Morrison’s passage into the Go-Betweens was far from smooth. Even as she and Forster became inseparable, rehearsing together daily (and Forster, briefly, wrote songs and played for Xero), she unsuccessfully attempted to persuade other drummers around town to join the band. It was, in fact, Morrison’s very personal interest in Forster that made her as reluctant to become a Go-Between as McLennan initially had been. Forster himself took some time to twig to Morrison’s intentions.
Lindy Morrison: It took me ages to realise. We went to see the Apartments at the University of Queensland, and I was asking him about girlfriends, and he was being really obscure with me, and vague, and evasive, and suddenly it just clicked. And I said, ‘You’re not – you’re a virgin!’ And after I found that out, of course, it was all really easy!
Despite the Beserkley debacle, not to mention the consummation of the Forster–Morrison relationship, Forster and McLennan decided to try their luck in England, travelling there in late 1979. Carrying no equipment other than two acoustic guitars, the plan was to shop their songs from record company to record company simply by visiting their offices and playing them.
Such a guileless strategy would have been an abject failure if not for the tiny Glasgow-based Postcard label, operated by Alan Horne. Horne was the manager of Orange Juice, whose singer Edwyn Collins would become a long-time associate of the Go-Betweens. On 28 April 1980 the Go-Betweens cut their only single for the label, I Need Two Heads, with Orange Juice’s Steven Daly sitting in on drums for the session.
The single marked an important shift in direction for the Go-Betweens. Forster, who at that stage was still writing the bulk of the Go-Betweens’ material, was himself coming under the spell of some of the post-punk groups he had been introduced to by Morrison. Bands like the Gang of Four, the Pop Group and Melbourne’s Boys Next Door, soon to become the Birthday Party, were taking punk in new directions. Catchy but less straightforward than either Lee Remick or People Say, I Need Two Heads formed the bridge to the more angular material that the Go-Betweens would begin writing for their first album, 1981’s Send Me A Lullaby.
Although separation had ended their liaison, Forster and Morrison continued to correspond intensely. This did not stop Forster and McLennan putting up yet another advertisement for a female drummer in a local record store during a brief stay in Paris. Even after returning alone to Australia in June 1980 – McLennan continued his pilgrimage to New York, where Robert Vickers was staying following his departure from the Numbers – Forster didn’t immediately invite Morrison to join the band. Instead, he recruited another Xero associate in Clare McKenna, whose apparent loathing for Bob Dylan probably killed off any prospect of permanent membership.5 It was Morrison who finally made the first move.
Lindy Morrison: When he came back, I had to go around to his place – he didn’t contact me – and we went out one night pretty soon after that. And he got incredibly upset. I didn’t think he wanted me, which he did. And at the same time the band wanted a drummer – a female drummer – and I was just there.
When McLennan finally came home to find Morrison had been anointed as the new drummer for the Go-Betweens, he was distinctly unimpressed. Apart from the fact that his opinion hadn’t been sought, Morrison was, after all, coming between him and his best friend. (Unsurprisingly, McLennan suggests it was Morrison who resented his closeness to Forster; either way, of course, Forster was caught in the middle.) The incident that Morrison believes betrayed McLennan’s hurt has stuck in her memory.
Lindy Morrison: Grant lent me one of his books, and I have always read in the bath. He came over one night – we used to just rehearse every single night – and he screamed at me, ‘What’s that, what’s that?’ And I said, ‘It’s your book.’ It was all wet, and there was no way it was going to dry properly. And I just laughed – I mean, I love books, but to me the more mucked up they get the better. But Grant is absolutely meticulous about his book collection, obsessional. He never did lend me another book again. But basically he was just incredibly jealous of the fact that I took Robert away from him.
Peter Milton Walsh: Well, Grant would always like you to envy his bookshel
f rather than his experiences. That was how he saw himself – you measured him by the films he’d seen, or what he’d received rather than what he’d experienced.
Grant McLennan: I remember the book! It was a Penguin paperback; I think it was The Crying Of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon. And she did drop it in the bath. I probably overreacted just to get a response. But there’s no acrimony because of that. There are other things I could probably single out, but it certainly wasn’t the book in the bath incident!
With Morrison on board, the Go-Betweens would finally become a real, and very different, band.
CHAPTER FIVE
task force versus the brisbane punks
There’s two of us here. Does that constitute a crowd?
– The Go-Betweens, Don’t Let Him Come Back
In September 1977, Joh Bjelke-Petersen was searching for some appropriately flammable material on which to fight the looming state election in November. Noting the rise of the anti-uranium movement in other states – and protective of an industry in which he and many of his peers held shares – the premier decided that law and order would again form the key plank of his re-election strategy. Invoking the spectre of the 1971 Springbok demonstrations, he declared protest marches to be a thing of the past.
Nobody, including the Communist Party or anyone else, is going to turn the streets of Brisbane into a forum . . . Don’t bother applying for a permit. You won’t get one. That’s government policy now.1
In fact there had never been a genuine right to peaceful assembly in the first place. The police had long held the discretion to grant or refuse permits for street processions, a power tempered only by the right of appeal to a magistrate. Bjelke-Petersen’s tactic was to remove this right of appeal, making police commissioner Terry Lewis, then less than a year into the job, the sole arbiter on such matters.
A slope-shouldered, rubbery-looking figure, Lewis had long been the subject of well-sourced rumours that he was part of a ‘rat pack’ of corrupt police. He was also a staunch government loyalist, having been curiously promoted to the top job ahead of a field of more highly credentialed candidates. He was, above all, a yes-man: Bjelke-Petersen’s stand had effectively predetermined his own ability to make decisions on the matter of street marches anyway.
The timing and public nature of Bjelke-Petersen’s announcement – not to mention his identification of Brisbane as the principle source of troublemakers – invites speculation that the street march proclamation was really an electoral stunt, designed to appeal to the National Party’s rural constituency. The party held only a single parliamentary seat in the capital (which it subsequently lost on the election of 12 November), but it mattered not: the electoral system ensured the party won easily, on the strength of 27.4 per cent of the primary vote.
The Right to March campaign became the longest civil liberties action in Queensland’s history. Over the next two years dozens of protests led to thousands of arrests and the laying of over 4500 charges by police. At each demonstration, hundreds of police were deployed to quell anti-government sentiment. Police brutality was rife, extending to undercover Special Branch squad members provoking violence by ‘running through the crowd and stirring them up, pushing people over and going hysterical’.2
Empowering the police as political shock troopers enabled the government to step up its attacks on minorities and dissenters.3 And the police proved willing enforcers, prepared to stamp out the slightest disturbance. So-called punk dances, frequented by groups of garishly dressed young people, were the easiest of small targets.
Jim Dickson had arrived in Townsville from England as a teenager in 1968, eventually moving to Brisbane in 1972. A few years later the lean bass player was recruited by Railroad Gin, whose mellow, Jethro Tull-influenced sound was well established. The group tried their luck in Sydney but were already disintegrating, their ambitions thwarted by the departure of original singer Carol Lloyd. Dickson was more interested in the Blue Öyster Cult anyway, and while in Sydney he immersed himself in the beginnings of a new music scene obsessed with Detroit-style rock & roll.
In early 1977 Dickson returned to Brisbane, where he found a more stable line of employment behind the counter of Rocking Horse. One day drummer Bruce Anthon walked in and immediately established a rapport with Dickson over a copy of an album by British group the Nice. As a rhythm section with a shared passion for the ’60s mods in general and the Who in particular, the pair shared a perfect musical symmetry. Dickson played bass like a sledgehammer, while Anthon – he who was almost a Saint – was an enormous if unfulfilled talent.
Jim Dickson: Bruce is a complete drummer, he doesn’t really think about anything else. He’s one of those few people I’ve met who’s completely devoted – not only does he want to play but he wants to learn, and then he wants to share his knowledge, so he teaches as well. And not only does he want to share his knowledge, he wants to share his talent, by playing.
Bruce Anthon: I’m essentially a player. I still am a player, I’ll always be a player, and I always played with the view of wanting to improve.
Completed by the recruitment of former Tintern Abbey guitarist and fellow Pete Townshend fanatic Greg Williamson, the Survivors were essentially a covers band with one important difference: they played mainly for themselves, their zeal for what they considered to be the primary virtues of rock & roll largely overwhelming audience considerations. A typical set list would consist of a few keepers (Eddie Cochran’s Something Else, Otis Blackwell’s Daddy Rollin’ Stone) interspersed with selections plundered mainly from the Who, Kinks and Small Faces songbooks.
The band received an early break when they were asked to play at a new restaurant in a downstairs room at the lower end of George Street in the city. Proprietor Kevin Hayes (who as an architecture student had directed construction of Triple Zed’s studios two years earlier) set up the Curry Shop to add some spice to a city of limited culinary options. But the enterprise was struggling, and Hayes approached Dickson with a new idea for attracting patrons.
Jim Dickson: They said, ‘There’s no one coming to our shop, we’ve got this little space in the corner, do you guys want to come and play?’ We said sure, and the first time we played there the place was packed, and we made more money than we’d ever made before. And Kevin came up to us later and said, ‘You guys have a good night, did you?’ and we said yeah, we did. And he said, ‘We didn’t have a good night at all,’ and I asked why, and he said, ‘Because people couldn’t get to the food!’ We split the door money after that, and it developed into a venue.
The group’s timing was perfect. New bands were appearing on the scene, sporting names like the Leftovers, the Sex Haters, the Trash (later the Same 13), the Disposable Fits, the X-Men and the Hard-Ons.4 What the Survivors’ high-energy performances helped provide was the necessary musical context through which the new bands could be viewed: both the intellectual and the unschooled wings of punk found common ground in the Survivors’ feral brand of classic rock & roll.
The most important and certainly the most notorious of the new bands to emerge in 1977 was the Leftovers, who hailed from the deadbeat north-eastern suburb of Sandgate, nestled against the mudflats of Moreton Bay. Miles from the city, boredom was the highest motivating factor to do anything. And boredom, denied any more appropriate outlet, is a recipe for trouble.
The Leftovers, Clinton Walker wrote in his Pulp fanzine, ‘are the first new group I’ve met who actually stick safety pins in their ears’.5 They were, essentially, Australia’s first uniformed punks in the mould of the Sex Pistols. In a later edition of the fanzine, Walker appraised their musical abilities in a review of a gig at Sandgate Town Hall:
The Leftovers don’t ‘play’, or even put on a ‘show’, rather, they consider the whole affair a ‘performance’. Heavy (deep) stuff (?).
This is the scene: a large hall, containing at most 19 people (I know cos I counted them). There are some Ro
xy-style Leftovers fans throwing chairs and breaking bottles (ho hum). The Leftovers, dressed to punkly excess as usual, are on stage warming up (i.e. feeding back). The ‘performance’ has begun.
Vocalist Warren lies on the stage floor, and screams inaudibly. Glen leans against his amp and nonchalantly picks out his bass lines. Jim prowls around the stage, intent on his guitar playing. Eddie, their new drummer and old friend, sits behind his kit, and simply doesn’t play! He just leans back and laughs, or smokes and drinks, or even wanders around.
They play songs, but you wouldn’t know it – nothing is recognisable or discernible, it’s just a big fuzz of noise that has little to do with music.6
In fact, Warren Lamond, Glen Smith, Jim Shoebridge and Ed Wreckage were all avid music fans, with a deep and equal appreciation of both Jerry Lee Lewis–Little Richard-style ’50s rock and early ’60s teenage pop. Later, as their skills improved, they would perform a medley of the Velvet Underground’s Run Run Run and the (very different) song of the same title by psychedelic band the Third Rail. Early on, though, there is no doubt the band suffered from terrible technical shortcomings.
John Reid: I know the whole beauty of punk is non-musicality, but the Leftovers used to stop in the middle of songs! Glen was a hopeless bass player, absolutely hopeless. He only had four strings and he still couldn’t work ’em out! And they would have these huge fights. Warren would stop a song in the middle, fly across the stage at Shoebridge and say, ‘You swished your hair during your lead break, we don’t allow swished hair here’ – thump! They were always at one another’s throats like that. They were personalities before they were musicians.
The Leftovers or, as they sometimes referred to themselves, the Fucken Leftovers, were certainly unique to Brisbane at the time. Lamond cut a somewhat monkey-like figure, with a large head on a small body. Smith towered over him, well over six feet tall, with a long pink fringe hanging over his face. Ed Wreckage – the youngest at 19 – looked like a teenage Frankenstein. Shoebridge, for his part, was relatively normal, which soon eventuated in his dismissal from the band. He simply didn’t fit.
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