After signing with Festival offshoot Regular Records, the Riptides began recording demos for a six-track mini-album, Swept Away. But the band was already pulling apart at the seams. Living under the one roof on a diet of bread and black sauce was hardly conducive to group harmony; drinking and playing by night, no matter how good the gigs, only poisoned the cocktail further.
First to leave was Matheson, beginning a chain reaction of departures that would destroy the band. He was replaced with one-time Leftovers drummer Michael Hiron on bass, allowing Callaghan to switch to guitar. But when such eminently melodic and danceable material as Holiday Time couldn’t crack Australian radio playlists upon Swept Away’s eventual release in late 1981, the cracks finally opened, then swallowed the group. Cantwell and Leitch followed Matheson.
While Callaghan soldiered on with Hiron, recording the darkly gorgeous Hearts And Flowers single in 1982, the Riptides’ spirit had been broken. The group had been tarred commercially by their initial association with punk, but their fan base on the live circuit was so strong, the question of what might have been still lingers.
Mark Callaghan: The line-up changes derailed us, without a doubt. It was so stupid in retrospect. See, that’s where you want a good manager – someone to say don’t worry about the hassles you’re having now, they’re not important. Just don’t share a house, move out, have a bit of space – come together to play and think about the things that you like about each other. I think in retrospect that was what stopped our momentum.
Mark Callaghan was too clever a songwriter to be stifled permanently by the breakup of the Riptides. With his new group, GANGgajang, he achieved deserved commercial success, writing a string of hits throughout the ’80s, experiencing a roughly equivalent measure of spoils and compromises along the way: the classic Sounds Of Then was even used as the soundtrack for both Coke and Channel Nine commercials.
After a brief stint with the Colors in New York with Robert Vickers, and with the Laughing Clowns in London, Peter Milton Walsh assembled a new version of the Apartments. The album he cut in London for Rough Trade in 1985, The Evening Visits . . . And Stays For Years, has become a cult classic, cementing Walsh’s reputation in Europe. Never even released locally in Australia, the album’s highlight was the soft-sung elegy Mr Somewhere, later covered by British ensemble This Mortal Coil. Like Ed Kuepper’s Brisbane (Security City), the song was a bitter lament for his former home.
A boat from the river takes you out
Cross the other side of town, to get out, to get out,
You’ll take the tide, any tide, any tide
Like there isn’t gonna be any tide
The brief rise and messy dissolution of the Riptides and the Apartments were important signposts in Brisbane’s musical history. Both Return Of The Hypnotist and Tomorrow’s Tears marked not just the end of the ’70s but also the beginning of a new era. Over the next decade, as the city’s horizon darkened, countless groups left town, only to dash themselves against the rocks of foreign shores. Those that remained retreated into different forms of musical insularity, tracing ever-diminishing circles of parochial punk noise and exclusive avant-garde experimentation to an increasingly disillusioned, frightened audience.
ups and downs
(1980–1989)
CHAPTER SEVEN
last of the leather age
Ron Peno was on his way to the social security office when he was stopped by police. After relocating from Sydney at the end of 1979 friends had warned him about the reputation of Brisbane’s finest, but he had brushed them off. ‘I was told that you had to be very careful,’ he remembers, ‘and I would say, “What? What are you talking about?” And they would say, “No, really, look out, police are patrolling.” “What do you mean police are patrolling? I’m getting a cab now, I’m going home.” “Well, don’t get taken to the watch-house!”’
After explaining his mission – even showing his tormentors the unemployment form in his hand – the conversation took a predictably downward turn. ‘So,’ said the first cop after a pause, ‘you take drugs.’ It was not really a question, not even an accusation, but a presumption: Peno had long hair. In fact, Peno was sober at the time, albeit hungover; it was, after all, barely 9.30 in the morning. It made no difference. They took a full description. Eyes: bloodshot. Hair: dirty.
Ron Peno: They had me there for like half an hour by the side of the road. It was just amazing; I could not believe it. And then it all sort of fell into place – like, yeah, you do have to be careful going out in Brisbane! You actually have to watch yourself when you go out . . . [Before that] I was like, ‘Hey, I’m from Sydney! Rock and roll!’
Looking like a rock & roll star, Peno realised, could get you into serious trouble in Queensland.
By the turn of the decade, Sydney was undergoing an independent music boom hitherto unseen in Australia. Radio Birdman’s musical scope was not as broad as the Saints – lead guitarist Deniz Tek was a Michigan native, and his songs were unapologetically derived from the Detroit noise of the Stooges and the MC5 – but the band had succeeded where their northern cousins hadn’t: they had won over a large and devoted fan base in their home city. After leaving for England in early 1978 (where, like the Saints, they soon fell apart), Birdman left behind a legion of fans, associates and hangers-on. From their ashes rose the Other Side, the Hellcats, the Hitmen, the Passengers, the Visitors, New Race and the New Christs. Hundreds of others were directly inspired by their influence.
The fact that Sydney was the CBD of the Australian music industry was immaterial to the boom. Punk, by definition, was not a mainstream movement. Those that didn’t form their own bands, or didn’t last in them, instead formed record labels, partly to provide an outlet for groups the major labels had no interest in, partly as a way of immortalising their friends on plastic, and partly, if they were lucky, to make some pocket money. Names like Phantom, Citadel and Hot began to flourish. The late George Wayne, then the breakfast DJ on Triple J, gave the records heavy rotation. Venues opened their doors to original bands in every inner-city suburb and most of the suburban ones. The crowds came.
The combination of venues, audiences, recording opportunities and the lack of police harassment in Sydney would prove a magnet to aspiring Brisbane musicians, especially those drawn into the maelstrom of the hard-rock Detroit sound. A few would go on to play in some of the most revered Australian bands of the 1980s. The Screaming Tribesmen, Died Pretty and even the Hoodoo Gurus (whose leader, Dave Faulkner, hailed from Perth) all shared significant roots in the post-Saints Brisbane scene, evolving from three crucial groups: the Fun Things, the 31st and the End.
The most obviously enthralled by the Detroit connection were the Fun Things, whose leader, Brad Shepherd, was a card-carrying member of Radio Birdman’s fan club.1
Brad Shepherd: I read RAM magazine and I saw this article on Radio Birdman, at around about the same time as Countdown showed the Sex Pistols doing Anarchy In The UK . . . Birdman were listing songs that they covered by bands that influenced them, and there was this ton of stuff that I’d never heard of before – the Stooges, the MC5, the Blue Öyster Cult, and they had these amazing song titles like Kick Out The Jams and Search And Destroy. It was like this great, entire universe had opened up.
Cheerfully well adjusted, Brad Shepherd was not a punk in the Leftovers mould. Like Robert Forster, he grew up in The Gap, attending school at Brisbane Boys Grammar in Spring Hill. Moreover, his parents were exceptionally supportive of his musical ambitions, although he does remember unsuccessfully trying to persuade his mother to take him to see the Master’s Apprentices in 1971 when he was 10. He acquired his first guitar shortly thereafter, quickly becoming proficient on the instrument.
Like many a suburban teenager growing up in the mid ’70s, Shepherd cut his teeth on early heavy metal: Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Alice Cooper. At high school he formed his first band, Overkill, with younge
r brother Murray and new friend John Hartley, who picked up the bass. The Shepherds’ mother – perhaps feeling guilty about denying her music-obsessed eldest son the chance to see the Master’s – dutifully drove her sons to Hartley’s home in the southern suburb of Tarragindi for rehearsals.
When punk broke, Brad Shepherd persuaded an initially reluctant Hartley to start incorporating Sex Pistols songs into their set. By 1978 the band had changed its name to the Aliens. Shepherd had seen several performances by the Grudge and the Neon Steal, and it was Mark Callaghan who introduced Shepherd to the history on his doorstep.
Brad Shepherd: He tipped me off to where that place was on the front cover of the Saints album, and I went and had my photograph taken there in front of the fireplace. Which was a big thrill, because in the iconography of rock it was very cool to have something that was so seminal – the front cover of the first Saints album – and we just idolised that record. And there it was, just down the road, just across from my old bloody school!
The Fun Things were completed when the original trio were joined by Graeme Beavis on additional guitar. Beavis was, as Shepherd recalls, ‘a belligerent son of a bitch, which is perfect for a punk rock band’. Beavis was also a big fan of glam rock, and the extra firepower he provided, combined with the caveman stomp of drummer Murray, immediately distinguished the band from others around town. Playing a mixture of Stooges, Dolls and Radio Birdman covers alongside original material, the Fun Things’ sound was wilder and louder than anything else on the scene. Mick Medew, who would soon be joined by Brad Shepherd in his own band, the 31st, remembers him as ‘quite a sight to behold’:
Mick Medew: Watching Brad in the Fun Things was like watching the devil. He used to stamp his foot so hard you’d think he was going to drive a hole in the stage with his boots! He had the sound, the presence and the voice. He’s probably got one of the loudest voices in Australian rock, Brad. He certainly had the fire in him.
Brad Shepherd: I was actually very serious about music, and in many respects I had to de-evolve. When punk came along I was so impressed by the raw energy of it, the stuff I’d been learning in Spanish guitar classes sort of fell by the wayside! I had to relearn again once I realised that essentially it was folly to play as badly as you could.
The Fun Things were not built to last. By Shepherd’s estimation the band played a maximum of a dozen performances around town in their entire existence, including as the Aliens. The only recording by the group – an infamous self-titled four-track EP – was recorded in February 1980 at a jingle studio at Buderim on the Sunshine Coast for the princely sum of $200, provided by the Shepherds’ parents. With the band having already decided to break up, it was no more than a postscript.
Issued in the standard pressing of 500 copies, the EP has since been bootlegged many times. Shepherd, understandably frustrated by the ridiculously high prices the artefact continues to attract on the collectors’ market, eventually reissued a newly mastered version on Spanish label Pennimann in 2000, dedicating the record ‘To the memory of Glen and Gary Smith, Warren Lamond and Johnny Burnaway – REAL fuckin’ punks.’2
‘I was just trying desperately to be Iggy Pop circa Metallic KO,’ he laughs, ‘with mixed results!’ With its roaring, heavily compressed sound, the final track Savage – on which Shepherd declares his band the ‘last of the leather age’ – features a guitar solo as pure as anything James Williamson committed to the Stooges’ Raw Power. ‘Cheap, idiotic, amateurish and hilarious,’ Shepherd writes in the liner notes to the reissue, ‘after all these years I can finally admit, for a bunch of green teenagers from the arse end of the world, it ain’t bad at all.’3
Ron Peno had been the singer of Sydney covers band the Hellcats, in which he had performed under the alias of Ronnie Pop. Like his hero, Peno was not much over five foot one, but his stage presence belied his stature, and his reputation had spread. In late 1979 he took a call from Bruce Anthon, inviting him to come to Brisbane to try out for his new band, the Credits. By then Peno was bumming around Gosford, on the Central Coast of New South Wales, and had nothing to lose.
In the end, Anthon was indifferent to Peno’s dramatic vocals, but the Credits’ bass player, Tony Robertson, saw potential and introduced the singer to his high school chum, Mick Medew. The slender, jockey-voiced Medew was no bigger than Peno but was possessed of similarly outlandish charisma. He was also a fine guitarist. Another school friend, Chris Welsh, was recruited on drums. The band was christened by Peno, shortening the name of an obscure ’60s group, the 31st of February.
Playing mainly at the 279 Club (at the Exchange Hotel) and the Silver Dollar in Fortitude Valley, the 31st found themselves the subject of some carping: like the Fun Things, the group could really play and didn’t mind showing it off. Further, the band’s brash taste in covers tended towards American hard rock – the Dictators, Blue Öyster Cult and Sonic’s Rendezvous Band – alongside psychedelic ’60s nuggets like the Vogues’ Five O’Clock World. Neither style was of much interest to a music scene desperately trying to recreate London 1977.
More impressive were the 31st’s originals, which managed an unlikely marriage between these two very different musical streams. Two early songs in particular stood out from the pack. They also introduced the world to the unique lyrical sensibility of Ron Peno.
Ron Peno: Mick and I sat down in a lounge room one day and we wrote Igloo, and then A Stand Alone . . . I’d read Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, and that’s where I got the idea for Igloo, just about alienation and isolation.4
It was at about this time that Brad Shepherd – fresh from the breakup of the Fun Things and a trip to England, where he was dismayed to find punk’s energy to have long since evaporated – was brought to the 31st by Peno. Peno had also fallen hard for another new local band, the End, led by gangling, square-jawed guitarist Brett Myers. Myers was similarly enthralled by Peno’s shamanistic stage antics.
Brett Myers: He was actually wilder back then, when he was young and cocky. When he was on stage it was like, fuck, what the hell is this? I’d never seen anything like him before. I guess we were all very Stooges-fixated at that time, and Ron fitted right into that mould, with these wild spastic stage movements . . . You couldn’t help but watch him.
Myers was another product of The Gap, growing up only blocks away from Brad Shepherd, whom he would not meet until years later. By the time he formed the End in 1979, he was nursing a serious Velvet Underground crush. Patti Smith and Television were equally important reference points. Introducing the sounds of urban New York to the brick veneer and backyard pools of The Gap, however, would be a next to impossible task. The heavy metal/proto-punk practised by the Fun Things was easier to understand for most teenagers, and it was certainly easier to play. For a long time Myers’ musical ambitions were ahead of his band’s abilities.
Brett Myers: I didn’t know anyone who liked any of this stuff, except for the people at Discreet, and I really wanted to play it. I’d learned how to play guitar and I basically just found some guys at high school – a guy called Murray Davis who played keyboards, another guy called Andrew Massey who lived about three blocks away, and Colin Barwick, the drummer, lived about 20 metres away. That was the End.
Mick Medew: They were just a catastrophe waiting to happen live, that band, though they ended up being incredibly tight and very musical by the end of it. But boy, when they started, it was organised chaos, although I guess that was part of their appeal too.
Certainly it appealed to Peno, whose allegiance to the 31st didn’t prevent him from offering his services to Myers immediately after seeing the band play at a new Fortitude Valley dive called Kisses. Myers, though charmed, was taken aback.
Brett Myers: I guess what made me really like Ron . . . He was a lot more rock than I was, and when [the 31st] played it was all Dictators, Stooges, obscure ’60s punk bands, and he was really fantastic at it. But when we talked, he said something lik
e, ‘Oh, [John Cale’s] Paris 1919 is one of my favourite ever albums,’ and it was just not what I expected to come out of his mouth . . . That made me really warm to him and realise he was a bit more multi-dimensional than just this screaming rock-god guy. The only thing I wasn’t keen on was that the End was my band, and I didn’t like the idea of him being the singer in that!
Ron Peno: I tried desperately! ‘Brett, please, let me join as lead singer!’ And Brett being Brett would say no, no, this is my band. ‘But Brett, it’ll be great if you let me be the lead singer!’ He softened a little bit and let me do Goo Goo Muck with them, by the Cramps. It was the fucking highlight of the show!
The bond formed between Myers and Peno would ultimately result in the mutation of both the 31st and the End into new, more powerful combinations.
In early 1981 Brad Shepherd and Ron Peno travelled to Sydney in the hope of booking some shows for the 31st. Shepherd in particular took to the city’s Rock & Roll All Night credo with unrestrained gusto.
Brad Shepherd: I was very fortunate to meet some great people in the first week that I was in Sydney. Ron had arranged to meet Jim Dickson – he had become part of the post-Birdman scene in Sydney and was playing in the Passengers with Angie Pepper. And Jim brought Clyde Bramley along, who I ended up playing with in the Hoodoo Gurus. He was originally from Toowoomba.
It became apparent to me that I couldn’t go back to Brisbane. Sydney was just a ball of energy – places would stay open, there were all-night bars, there was a lot going on creatively with music, and it was all very much the sort of thing that appealed to me personally. It was all American-based rock & roll, you know. So I attempted to get the other guys from the 31st to move down and make something of the band. They weren’t into the idea, so I gracefully submitted my resignation.
Pig City Page 13