Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  Marty Burke: Greg [Wackley] jumped his kit, and in combination with three lesbian feminists who shall remain nameless – I can’t name them, but they were legendary for their heart and what they did that night – they jumped this guy and kicked the fuck out of him. And we’re all standing back going, whoa, hang on, what’s gonna happen now? And within probably two minutes, the cops at the door realised something was wrong, and bang, it was on.

  The Models came up to [promoter] Dave Darling, and Sean Kelly and Ash Wednesday were saying, ‘Fucking hell, this really is punk city. What have you got next, have you got another punk band?’ And David said yeah – because we were due on next – and they said, ‘Well, we want to play now, because we’re out of here, man, this is bad news.’ They were freaked out!

  Razar had just released a second EP featuring Shutdown Countdown, but the band disintegrated soon after, a victim of their own strictly imposed parameters.

  Marty Burke: Steven wrote a lot of the music, but he was the one who was changing and we just didn’t like what he was getting into. The songs that he was writing didn’t spit any venom of any sort; they didn’t say anything.

  The punk scene was splintering as it grew, like the brittle bones of an undernourished child. After the breakup of the Survivors, Jim Dickson moved to Sydney, playing with the Passengers, and later with the Barracudas in England. On his return to Sydney in early 1982, he bumped into Warren Lamond at the bus shelters on Broadway. Lamond and Glen Smith had also made the trek south.

  Jim Dickson: Warren said to me, ‘Hey Jim, have a look at this’ – and showed me the roof of his mouth. I said, ‘What’s that mate?’ And he said, ‘That’s where I tried to blow my head off last time.’

  Ed Wreckage: Warren wasn’t so humoured by his own predicament. He suffered immensely during that period.

  Miraculously, Lamond had survived the attempt on his own life, with the .22 calibre bullet lodging behind his cheekbone. The delicate placement of the projectile meant it stayed where it was until 12 October 1989 when, after years spent rebuilding his life, Lamond died in his sleep of a brain haemorrhage following a minor car accident.

  The year earlier, original guitarist Johnny Burnaway had hanged himself in Sydney, where he had been having some success with his band the Plug Uglies under his real name, John Gorman.

  Gorman’s brother Michael Hiron (the Leftovers’ first drummer, who later played with the Riptides) never got over the shock. He died suddenly in 2001, unaware even of the existence of the stomach ulcer that claimed his life.

  Glen and Gary Smith, whose individual stories are as grotesque as they are tragic, are dead too, after pursuing the cosseted punk ideal all the way to its logical conclusion in their quest for musical and personal self-annihilation.

  Jim Shoebridge and Ed Wreckage are now all that remains of the Leftovers. After years in and out of jail, where he served time for a variety of offences, Ed Wreckage has returned to Sandgate, and seems to have found a kind of peace.13

  Ed Wreckage: I didn’t shake my skin in jail. I still consider myself a punk, in every sense of the word. That’s my life. It’s always been the same.

  CHAPTER SIX

  swept away

  Although several Brisbane bands released independent singles throughout 1978, the Able Label was the first local label to cater for a number of like-minded acts. Its six singles and four bands – the Go-Betweens, the Riptides, the Apartments and the short-lived Four Gods – came to represent an entire aesthetic: romantic, yearning, undeniably self-conscious. The music of these groups shared a fragile, sparse quality that some dubbed the Brisbane sound. Being barely able to play was a mere technicality that need not interfere with one’s breadth of vision.

  Robert Vickers: I remember talking to Mark Callaghan once about why we thought the Go-Betweens were so great. If you were the Numbers or the Saints, you could be doing something that was very good, but it was difficult for you to step outside that. Whereas it seemed like the Go-Betweens could do absolutely anything. They weren’t trapped in any genre.

  Like Chris Bailey, Mark Callaghan’s father had been in the army and had taken the family from England to Africa and back before retiring and emigrating to Australia in 1972. Callaghan was 14. After initially settling at Bundaberg on Queensland’s central coast, he relocated to Brisbane in 1976 to study architecture at the University of Queensland. There he met Scott Matheson who, along with Robert Vickers, was yet another graduate of Corinda High.

  The architecture faculty was to be Brisbane’s next hotbed of musical activity: Callaghan remembers that of the 40 students starting their degrees that year, more than a quarter played the guitar. Like almost everybody else at the time, Callaghan was initially inspired by the Saints: ‘We used to go over to Triple Zed and hassle them to play Stranded when Michael Finucan was on air.’ Formed in the winter of 1977 – first as the Grudge and then the Neon Steal – the Numbers were a band before they could play. The practical skills learned on campus, however, allowed a degree of DIY enterprise unusual even in punk circles.

  Mark Callaghan: In our first year at uni we had this explosion of wanting to do everything, because it was available there for us in the faculty. We took our own photographs, we developed them, we did our own sculpture and woodwork and painting and drawing and putting on shows. And then . . . We didn’t exactly get serious about it, but we wanted to do more playing, and we started writing our own songs.

  With fellow architecture students Dennis Cantwell borrowing a friend’s drum kit and Allan Rielly joining as lead guitarist, the band solidified as a five-piece, with Callaghan on vocals, Matheson on rhythm guitar and Vickers on bass. As the Grudge, the group had started life as a full-tilt punk band. As the Numbers, they developed a much lighter mod aesthetic, complete with suits and a fatefully generic name, mirroring the British transition from punk to new wave.

  Tall and rangy, with an open rather than guttural singing style, the genial Callaghan quickly realised he couldn’t relate with any honesty to punk’s negative energy. With its ’60s television references, ripe melody and sunny, youthful demeanour, Callaghan’s first notable song, Sunset Strip, confirmed the Numbers’ shift from angst to romance, and from realism to irony.

  Mark Callaghan: My family lived in Africa from 1964 to 1968, and we still heard a lot of music over there, Beatles and Stones and so forth. And then we came back to England from ’68 to ’72 . . . It was the golden age of English pop and rock. It was everywhere, we were watching Top Of The Pops, and it just sunk right in.

  When his band played host to the first impromptu Go-Betweens performance at Baroona Hall, Callaghan was enthused by Robert Forster’s quaint songs about forgotten film starlets and chaste librarians. The rapport between the Numbers and the Go-Betweens – which extended to games of backyard cricket, and even a partial merging of the two bands for two shows as the Lemons1 – made them the next group to officially record for the Able Label (disregarding Razar’s Task Force).

  With Sunset Strip the obvious standout, the band entered Window Studios on 4 July 1978. Callaghan looks back on his early classic with a mixture of embarrassment and wonder.

  Mark Callaghan: I don’t even think it’s a really good song! It’s naivety, that’s what it is. I couldn’t write a song like that now because I had no idea what I was doing then. Of course, the more you work in music and the more you write songs, the more you realise what an obvious chord progression it is, and what cheesy lyrics, but it worked. It was the second song I ever wrote.

  Robert Vickers: There’s a certain naivety that you have when you’re first writing songs. It allows you to use very simple chord progressions . . . Later on in people’s careers, they want to be more complicated, and it doesn’t necessarily produce the best songs. I think a lot of people’s first songs are by far their best . . . [Sunset Strip] was definitely our best song.

  Backed by Matheson’s spunky Magic Castle and a
nother Callaghan original, Rules Of Love, Sunset Strip was released almost simultaneously with Lee Remick, in a pressing of 500. With a picture sleeve of the band in matching suits, the look was gimmicky, but the group’s raw garage-pop enthusiasm is contagious: the single remains one of the most highly priced Australian collectables of its era.

  By this point the band had become aware of the existence of another Sydney band calling themselves the Numbers, who were less than amenable to making concessions to a bunch of upstarts from Queensland. In any event, the Brisbane group’s change of name to the Riptides (a reference to the dismal late ’60s beaches-and-bikinis television soap Riptide, produced in Australia, but with minimal Australian input2) was an inspired one, perfectly suited to their joyous but still developing hybrid of surf, ska and power pop.

  It also marked Callaghan’s burgeoning ambition. Upon his return from Sydney, Vickers was ousted from the band on account of his rudimentary bass playing, and plans were made to remix and reissue Sunset Strip under the new name. Probably Vickers suffered for being more easily replaced, since the primary purpose of the remix was to tame his equally erratic rhythmic counterpart, drummer Dennis Cantwell.

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

  Robert Vickers: It was funny, because the last show that I played with them I finally began to realise what I should have been doing, you know, how to play scales around chords. But by that time it was too late.

  Vickers was untroubled. A genuine dandy, with his Beatles mop-top, preference for suits (off stage as well as on) and fondness for Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick, he unsurprisingly found Brisbane stifling, and not just for the heat. Having already been to London in 1977, he set off for New York. There he formed a new band, the Colors, before himself becoming a Go-Between in 1982.

  Robert Vickers: I had already begun to feel that Brisbane was a place I had to get out of. You started to see things on television, or read in books, that other cities had that Brisbane simply didn’t have. There were no restaurants in Brisbane, for example. It seemed a really barren place in a lot of ways.

  Another dandy about town, Peter Milton Walsh, was equally desperate to escape.

  Peter Milton Walsh: Anybody with a pulse would have felt they were trapped in a scene from In The Heat Of The Night. It was like a northern version of a southern American state; it was the cops against people who were alive.

  Born in 1956 in Sydney, Walsh was slightly older than most of his contemporaries on the Brisbane scene when he formed the Apartments (with fellow guitarist Michael O’Connell, Peter Martin on drums and former school friend and ‘old drug connection’ Peter Whitby on bass) in October 1978. Both Walsh and O’Connell had prodigious record collections – the latter worked for some time behind the counter at Rocking Horse – and although galvanised by punk, both were interested in rather more exotic fare than what was coming out of England circa 1977.

  Peter Milton Walsh: I had a turntable that could stack, and I never found it odd that I could have on Big Star’s Third, and on top of that I’d have Burt Bacharach’s greatest hits, and on top of that I might have, you know, Nuggets.

  Walsh’s brief induction and swift departure from the Go-Betweens, shortly after the Apartments’ birth, was to prove fortuitous for both parties. Walsh shared much in common with Forster and McLennan, but he was too much of an individualist to be comfortable playing a supporting role for long. He needed an outlet for his own material, which was, if anything, even more eccentric than Forster’s. Influenced by the slow, wounded ballads on Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks and the third Velvet Underground album, the prickly delicacy of Walsh’s music was completely out of place and time. Some concessions were required to present the songs on stage.

  Peter Milton Walsh: We sped them up! I was terrified of doing my own stuff, because it was so slow, and because it was intimate. And essentially, the thing that I liked about that time was everything felt like it was all amphetamine-driven and it was a great rock experience . . . [Whereas] a song like Nobody Like You, I could play it on the piano now and it’s a big, slow ballad. It wasn’t lounge music in the sense of the commodity that lounge is now, but very much like playing in your living room.

  Walsh describes the single turbulent year that was the original Apartments’ existence as ‘just an event. It flared, and then it was gone, and then it was just smoke and ruins.’ Such a poetic sense of haphazard creation and combustion was, for Walsh, simply a function of living in a town where there wasn’t a great deal to do. This was punk’s greatest gift to Brisbane: far more crucial than any specific political refusal was the impetus that it provided to a bored youth to create its own history.

  By this time, however, the music alone wasn’t going to be enough. As heroin swept through Brisbane, it slowly picked the group off one by one.

  Peter Milton Walsh: That definitely worked against keeping the band together, because it becomes a much bigger demand than anything else. It was never a big problem with me, but it wasn’t productive either. If you turn up to rehearsal and somebody’s stoned, that’s fabulous if you’re stoned, but if you’re not stoned, it’s just gruesome. You are rigid with boredom, looking at pinned eyes.

  The solitary EP recorded by the Apartments in May 1979, The Return Of The Hypnotist, was released shortly after the group’s break-up in October. Its lead track, Help – its longing mood carried by some beautiful lead guitar – saw Walsh return the compliment originally paid him by the Go-Betweens on Don’t Let Him Come Back:

  I’ve seen the choirboys dancing cheek to cheek

  I could sell it all, talk about the world, but talk’s so cheap!

  Walsh insists he was joking with these lines, which are certainly in keeping with the ironic farewell at the heart of Don’t Let Him Come Back. The remainder of the song, however, confirmed that Walsh wanted out – not just of the Apartments, much less the Go-Betweens, but Brisbane itself.

  The Riptides had slimmed to a four-piece following the departure of Robert Vickers, with Mark Callaghan taking over bass duties. Gone also were the suits as the band dispensed with further affectations in favour of a more suburban, everyday appeal. The blue-collar approach won the Riptides few admirers among the scene’s more ideological adherents, but otherwise only broadened their already wide appeal.

  Mark Callaghan: We had a very genuine egalitarian attitude. We really wanted our music to be successful, even if it was a suburban pub in Brisbane . . . We didn’t really like the exclusive attitudes of these bands that wanted to be successful in the inner cities of Brisbane and Sydney but thought it was demeaning to play in a pub in the western suburbs.

  After the reissue of Sunset Strip in July 1979 (again on Able, this time in a whopping pressing of 2000 copies), Allan Rielly left to concentrate on his architecture studies. His replacement, Andrew Leitch, was exactly the foil Callaghan needed. An exceptionally talented guitarist and keyboard player, Leitch’s addition to the line-up helped flesh out Callaghan’s songs, as well as giving them the necessary room to breathe.

  The band’s next single, Tomorrow’s Tears – released on the Flat label on Valentine’s Day, 1980 – may be the Riptides’ finest moment. Infectious and exuberant, it should have creamed the charts. But the Riptides remained a guitar band, and guitars still spelt punk to the local music industry. Commercial radio wouldn’t touch the song.

  Investing in the band’s prospects in Australia would, in the long term, prove the Riptides’ downfall. The band’s move to Sydney was, in hindsight, the beginning of the end.

  Mark Callaghan: This is a true story, and I’m still amazed by it to this day. We’d built our own PA and rehearsal rooms, we did all that ourselves. Incredible! And then we went down to do some gigs in Sydney that had
been arranged by our agent up in Brisbane, and we got there and there were no gigs. We’d driven all the way down, with our gear and our PA and it all fell over. I think we did one gig at a place called the Rock Garden and there were maybe six people there.

  We went back to our hotel, a place down in Bondi where we were staying. And I remember sitting around this milk bar on the corner of Campbell Parade the next day and saying, ‘Look, this is stupid, we’re never going to get to play in Sydney unless we move to Sydney.’ And so we all decided then and there to move to Sydney. It’s the sort of thing you do when you’re 20 years old and don’t know any better.

  So that’s what we did. We got a newspaper, and found a house, right there. We went and rented the house and said, ‘Right, you – get all the stuff out of the van. You – drive back to Brisbane, go to all of our houses and pick up all our gear.’ I’m sure to this day I lost heaps of stuff in that move. I didn’t go back to Brisbane for a long time after that.

  And we absolutely starved. I’m serious; we absolutely starved for about six to eight weeks. We couldn’t get any gigs in Sydney at first; we got the occasional gig but it was very, very tough. And whenever we did the gigs we’d go straight up to the Cross and buy hamburgers, because we had no money. We did it all literally on bread and black sauce, which was all that was in the house for a while.

  After a few months the Riptides’ courage looked like paying off. The band was scoring consistently good reviews and had matured into a surprisingly tight musical unit without sacrificing the fragile chemistry that gave the shows their edge. Most of all, the natural humour and warmth of Callaghan’s songs radiated from the stage. The band soon became one of the most popular draws in town.

  Mark Callaghan: We’d go out and support the Sports or Skyhooks or some other rock band, and the audience would be very sceptical. And you know, they might not have been raging fans by the end of the night, but we saw other bands trying to do the same thing and they would have things thrown at them! We never had things thrown at us. People were amused, and they enjoyed themselves, you could see them laughing and having a good time.