Pig City

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Pig City Page 11

by Andrew Stafford


  Jim Dickson: The great thing about the Leftovers was that whereas everybody else paid lip-service to punk, the Leftovers lived it. Of all of the bands in Brisbane that could actually say that they related to it the most, they’d be it. And they were scary in that way, because they were genuinely unhinged . . . I mean, they had problems where they’d come from, they had problems with the people they hung around with, they had problems with alcohol, they had problems with drugs – these guys were problem magnets! But somehow they could siphon this energy into something that they liked, which was music, and very often they had problems with that too.

  Yet as self-destructive as the Leftovers could be, they were also victims. On 17 August 1977, the night Elvis Presley died, Ed Wreckage experienced the fear and loathing his band engendered in brutally first-hand fashion when he was severely beaten with a fence paling.

  Ed Wreckage: Me and Glen, Warren, Jim and Robert Perkins, Tex’s older brother, were at this hotel in Shorncliffe, near Sandgate. Somebody took a dislike to us and they came and beat the fuck out of us. I had massive internal injuries – ruptured spleen, perforated stomach, ruptured intestines. I had to have parts of my organs and ribcage removed. Very nasty. That’s the sort of shit we had to put up with. It wasn’t just the cops; it was the locals in our neighbourhoods, too, who were just as vicious.

  The violence was not all one-sided. An early October gig at Darra Hall, featuring the Survivors and the Same 13 (the latter including Ed Kuepper’s younger brother, Wolfgang), degenerated into a showdown between Saints and Leftovers fans. Brawling – both on and off stage – either blighted or enhanced performances, depending on one’s point of view. And persistent vandalism of venues undercut everyone’s efforts. Rocking Horse’s Warwick Vere remembers one Curry Shop gig where a piece of porcelain washbasin went sailing past his head, hurled from an upstairs bathroom.

  Warwick Vere: There were a lot of problems with those early punk gigs. Glen from the Leftovers had a particularly obnoxious brother, Gary, who used to make it his business to smash toilets up. So of course any venue you secured where bands could play, like little halls, you were never invited back again, because there would be so much damage. And that led to police presences at gigs, dog squads, raids, all sorts of terrible things.

  Ed Wreckage: We never accepted responsibility for any vandalism. It wasn’t our doing. But the cost of destroying venues wasn’t a consideration of most dedicated punks in those years. The band never retained a bond for any venue we hired, so we also bore those financial losses.

  Drugs, too, were becoming a serious problem. Throughout 1977 Brisbane had been in the grip of a severe marijuana drought. When heroin became the alternative of choice, musicians began dropping like flies. The Leftovers, who derived a significant amount of their charisma from their status as rock & roll animals, were quickly swept into the drug’s vortex. So too were many other bands, promoters and record store personnel. Discreet Records’ Phil Smith, a victim of sustained harassment over the importing of stock for which local record companies held the rights, found himself fighting on too many fronts to survive. The much-loved store folded in 1979.

  Phil Smith: Things seemed to explode at different times. Weird things would happen, and I think it became harder to concentrate on running a store. If you’re running a store you’ve got to keep your eye on the ball. I think that being young . . . Well, it’s hard for me to reflect on those things without seeming like I’m making excuses, you know. It was up to me to change things.

  The Task Force had its origins in an early random breath-testing unit, colloquially known as Murphy’s Marauders. Originally stationed in downtown Fortitude Valley a kilometre from the CBD, the Marauders were there to maintain a visible presence in a precinct where, in March 1973, 15 people were burned alive in the firebombing of the Whiskey Au-Go-Go nightclub. But putting police on every corner of the city’s red-light district only helped further the spread of corruption into illegal vice and gaming over the next decade.

  It was in the Valley that the Leftovers first began rehearsals in late 1976, next to a brothel known as Pinky’s. The area was almost a no-go zone, dominated by the crime bosses and Licensing Branch officers that a decade later would become the star witnesses of the Fitzgerald Inquiry. But it was one place where the Leftovers could (almost) blend in.

  Ed Wreckage: You were walking into gangster territory there, and we were just kids. We were wearing our own version of rock & roll clothes, and they must have thought we were totally nuts, with balls this fucking big – ‘Can we rent this place for a week to rehearse?’

  By 1978 Murphy’s Marauders had mutated into the Task Force, a specially uniformed squad. A smaller undercover coterie of male and female police – pigs and sows, as they were often referred to – had their own casual, gendered code of clothing: while the pigs would wear Hawaiian shirts in summer and lumberjackets in winter, sows alternated between tracksuits and light frocks (with modesty culottes beneath). Cruising the streets in paddy wagons, the Task Force had a roving brief to assist in the breaking up of demonstrations and any other designated trouble spots more or less as they saw fit.7

  In a political climate where dissent was actively and often violently quelled, it should be no surprise that punk dances became a target, and would have become so even had those attending them behaved like angels. The tabloid frenzy surrounding punk in the UK had reached the Australian media, and the police were quick to catch on. As John Reid writes, tongue well in cheek:

  The Task Force had a new social evil identified to them: young, fashionably skinny, green-haired ratbags. Age and sex indeterminate but usually 15 to 20 years old, these were not long-haired university radicals, but street kids mixed with students mixed with clerks mixed with hairdressers.8

  In early January, two months after the government’s re-election, four people were arrested at a dance at Hamilton Hall featuring the Survivors and the Leftovers. About 30 people were present. At roughly 9pm – two hours before proceedings were due to end – an equivalent number of police, backed by dogs and the vice squad, descended on the venue, allegedly acting on a noise complaint.9

  Jim Dickson: There’s a great anecdote about that gig. There was this guy who saw all the cops out the front of the hall, so he raced out the back door and started jumping the fences of Hamilton, and as he was jumping the fences he was pulling clothing off people’s Hill’s Hoists and dressing himself in this clothing. And once he’d actually got himself an attire that looked normal, he went back to the hall. Just walked past the police and they didn’t bat an eyelid!

  But for a teenage Brad Shepherd – by then fronting his own band, the Aliens – the experience was no laughing matter.

  Brad Shepherd: I got put in a headlock and chucked in the back of a paddy wagon, supposedly for public profanity, which was just bullshit. This bloke on the street said, ‘You’ve left your headlights on, mate.’ I said, ‘Oh thanks,’ and that was it – before I knew it I was chucked into the van. The bloke was an undercover cop, and they were just cracking down, intimidating these young kids.

  My dad had to come and bail me out of jail. It was pretty dreadful. All those horror stories that you used to hear about Aborigines being beaten by the cops, I saw all of that while I was just sitting in the cell for an hour. I saw them pick this black guy up and spear him into the corner of the jail cell, knocked him unconscious. He was in the cell across from me. They dragged him out by his hair and left this trail of gore along the floor of the watch-house.

  It was pretty terrifying. I thought I was next.

  The song to capture this era most vividly – indeed, written immediately after the Hamilton Hall bust – was Razar’s Task Force (Undercover Cops), which opened with a siren-like peal of guitar:

  We’re having fun, people are swearing

  You and your haircuts, you’re arrested

  You put our friends away overnight

  But h
ey, Mr Task Force, that’s all right!

  The song’s author and singer, Marty Burke, was all of 16. Razar – Burke, guitarist Steven Mee, drummer Greg ‘Keg’ Wackley and younger brother Bob on bass – were a high school band from the southern suburb of Mt Gravatt. Completely taken by the noise of British punk, especially the Damned, the band was a virtual punk jukebox, filling out their set by covering new singles almost as soon as they were released. But it was the topical irreverence of Razar’s original material (other songs included I Hate Abba, Stamp Out Disco and Shutdown Countdown) that stood out.

  Marty Burke: We wanted to write about things that people were going to connect with in Brisbane – you know, ‘I come from Brisbane and I’m quite plain’, lines like that. We knew that we wanted to write stuff about what was going on here, because it was truly unusual and pretty exciting, especially what was going on with the political situation.

  Razar, however, wanted nothing to do with Go-Betweens-style whimsy, despite performing several times with the band at Baroona Hall (John Reid, who became Razar’s manager, once dubbed the Go-Betweens ‘armchair rock’, prompting Forster and McLennan to play a short set standing on their own furniture). From their first gig on 25 February 1978, supporting the Survivors at the Atcherley Hotel, Razar’s motto – ‘young, fast and non-boring’ – was backed up by better than average playing skills.

  John Reid: I have to give it to them, they were the only punk band I ever saw who could play an hour and a half from the first time they got on a stage. And tight! None of this ‘My string’s broken so I’m stopping’.

  In fact, so tight were Razar that the band earned several high-profile support slots to the likes of Jo Jo Zep, the Angels and even Cold Chisel, where their rabble-rousing style kept hecklers at bay. At one memorable gig supporting the Angels, Burke won over the rabid crowd by feeding them a life-size masonite effigy of Saturday Night Fever-era John Travolta during Stamp Out Disco. They tore it to pieces, hurling chunks back at the band.

  Marty Burke: Years later this guy came up to me and said, ‘Mate, you remember that night with the Angels?’ I said, you mean the one with John Travolta? And he goes, ‘Yeah! I’ve got the kneecap!’ I thought that was really great.

  Other gigs are remembered less fondly. In April 1978 Razar were booked to play a medical students’ ball in one of the function rooms of Lang Park, Queensland’s home of rugby league. The result was a catastrophe, as original Leftovers guitarist Johnny Burnaway and Brisbane’s resident cartoon punk, known as V2, ran amok. The gig lasted 18 minutes.

  Warwick Vere: They smashed up the bathroom and smeared themselves with blood. They smashed all the photos of the football heroes that lined the stairs, and smeared them with blood. Understandably the wallopers were called, and they cleared everybody out. As of course they would, having seen the damage.

  This incident, which remarkably was scarcely reported, could have done irreparable damage to the fledgling scene, yet little over a month later it received a vital boost. Triple Zed had been raising revenue through its Joint Efforts (boasting the unsubtle slogan ‘you’d be a dope to miss it’) since early 1976 at the University of Queensland, featuring the likes of Carol Lloyd and deathly jazz-rock groups such as Quasar and Moonlight. But with the station’s commercial viability on the rise along with street-level rock & roll, the events soon migrated to the pubs.

  On 24 May 1978 Skyhooks and the Survivors played the first Joint Effort held at the Queen’s Hotel on the corner of Charlotte and Creek Street in the city. With nearly 800 people crammed into the room, the Queen’s was exactly the mid-sized venue Brisbane needed. The aftermath of the gig was described by Rob Cameron in Semper:

  Half deaf and three quarters off our faces, we step out into the cool autumn night. Parked in the driveway between the hotel entrance and the car park is a police paddy wagon . . . Two plain-clothed police and a few uniformed police start arresting people, at least three, maybe four. What the charges were is still a matter of conjecture as the police at the watch-house were not inclined to give you the time of day, let alone giving reasons for dragging young kids off in the middle of the night.10

  Despite the inevitable police presence, the opening of the Queen’s and the Exchange (a mere block away, on the corner of Charlotte and Edward Street) to new bands was a turning point for live music in Brisbane. Not only did the venues provide fresh stages for local acts, Triple Zed was able to begin attracting overseas bands to play in the city. A few fans were misguided in their attempts to show their appreciation of their punk heroes. When the Stranglers came to town, V2 made the serious mistake of spitting on bassist and karate exponent Jean-Jacques Burnel.

  Bill Riner: Burnel just stepped off the stage and whacked V2 over the head with his bass. I actually have it on tape, they’re playing, there’s all this noise and then they stop – thump! – and then they start playing again!

  The first of the new groups to commit to vinyl was the Survivors, whose debut single Baby Come Back/Mr Record Man was released in January 1978 on their own Real Records imprint. It was a disappointment – the two original songs hampered by weak lyrics and production – but the band was nevertheless approached by Melbourne-based label Suicide, a new offshoot of Mushroom.

  Sadly, a five-year deal, and a reissue of the two songs on the label’s Lethal Weapons compilation in July, only helped kill off the band’s prospects. The two songs were toned down even further by a tame remix, and the album was widely panned as an attempt to cash in on the punk boom with second-rate bands, marketed under the friendlier ‘new wave’ tag.11 After the label collapsed ignominiously, the Survivors split following a Sydney tour in September 1978. Bruce Anthon has no regrets.

  Bruce Anthon: We had a really good little tour in Sydney, actually, we came out ahead – the Survivors is the only band I’ve ever made money out of! It wasn’t like the end of our world. We parted extremely good friends.

  Razar fared better, at least on record, despite a curious anomaly surrounding the release of their first single, Task Force/Stamp Out Disco, in September. A brilliant spurt of teenage enthusiasm, the single was recorded in between the Go-Betweens’ Lee Remick (May) and the Numbers’ Sunset Strip (July), both of which were released by the Able Label.

  Marty Burke: Bob and Steven used to hang around Toowong Music. Now, we used to put shit on the Go-Betweens when we used to see them play – ‘You’re fucking boring, why are you here, you’re pissing us off!’ – there was definitely a lack of respect! But Bob, I think, said to Damian Nelson something like, ‘We’re going to release a single, we want to do it ourselves, but what’s the go with your label?’ and Damian just said, ‘Oh, we don’t really want you,’ and we just said, ‘Whatever, it doesn’t matter.’

  When Razar’s single came back with the inscription AB002 – marking it as the second Able single, with Lee Remick as 001 and Sunset Strip as 003 – the band were accused of falsely appropriating the label’s name. With all three singles recorded within two months of each other at Window Studios, the more likely explanation is a simple manufacturing error at the M7 plant in Sydney, where all three records were pressed at around the same time.

  Marty Burke: Sure enough people started to take on the notion that we’d done this on purpose. What must have happened was, the guy who cut the platters would have got all the tapes together, and saw they’d all come down from rural, hick, big country town Brisbane. ‘Oh, three Brisbane bands! They must be all together!’ There was always this notion that bands from up north were hicks.

  But the band to make the most successful transition to vinyl, against all expectations, was the Leftovers. Cigarettes And Alcohol – the band’s solitary recorded contribution to musical history – was nothing short of miraculous.

  Warwick Vere: Having attended their gigs, when I heard they were putting out a single, I thought, oh my God, this is gonna be the acid test. And I was shocked. I was very pleasantly surprised by how go
od it was.

  Ed Wreckage: We wanted it to sound insane. I think we did it. I guess that’s where we were coming from at the time. It’s the life we led.

  Perhaps the group knew it was their only shot. After recording two songs for what became the B-side in August 1977 (No Complaints and I Only Panic When There’s Nothing To Do), the band was unable to finance the recording of Cigarettes And Alcohol until April 1978.12 Picture sleeves were designed but never printed and even the imprint Punji Stick records – named after a Viet Cong booby trap – disappeared after objections from EMI, who custom-pressed the single.

  In June 1979, 500 copies of Cigarettes And Alcohol were finally released with a generic sleeve and label. A select few were emblazoned with the stamped message, ‘The Fucken Leftovers Hate You’. All four members then took it upon themselves to destroy 50 copies each as they saw fit, both for fun and to enhance their collectable status. Ed Wreckage personally disposed of his share by hurling the platters off the Indooroopilly Bridge, into one of the muddier reaches of the Brisbane River.

  By this time Shoebridge had been sacked, his list of offences allegedly including bringing his mum to a rehearsal. Ed Wreckage moved to guitar, while Razar’s Greg Wackley filled in on drums. It was this line-up that played the infamous Great Brain Robbery at the Colossus Hall in West End on 15 June 1979, along with Razar and up-and-coming Melbourne band, the Models.

  The gig was ruthlessly targeted by police. As the Leftovers launched into their set with No Complaints, a lumberjacket-wearing undercover officer approached the stage. When Warren Lamond let fly with the first of several expletives, the officer simply picked the smaller man up and attempted to carry him out. The result was bedlam. With paddy wagons reversed up outside the door in readiness, 25 people were arrested in the ensuing melee.

 

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