Shepherd was immediately snapped up by the Hitmen, later to be joined by 31st bassist Tony Robertson. When Brett Myers also decided to take the End to Sydney little more than six months later, shortly after the release of their only single (the brooding My Confession/White World, released in a tiny pressing of 300), Peno could stand it no longer. He was already torn between his favourite bands, but Sydney versus Brisbane was a no-contest. He was a Sydney native anyway.
Mick Medew’s reluctance to leave his home town had left him marooned without a band, but what could have been a terminal setback proved his making. Recruited by former Fun Things Murray Shepherd and John Hartley, the Screaming Tribesmen gave him the vehicle – and the confidence – to take centre stage. He was a good enough guitarist to cover Brad Shepherd’s loss, a more than capable singer, and the power-trio format was better suited to the spacious dynamics of his songs.
The band’s shared history also ensured the Tribesmen a ready-made fan base. Unfortunately the new group’s first offering, a self-titled four-track EP recorded in March 1982 at Speak Studios in Milton, showed only glimpses of their potential.5
Mick Medew: We had troubles recording our first EP. We went to a couple of different studios and couldn’t get a good sound. We really just made it for the fans in Brisbane, because we had a bit of a following, and it was building. So it’s all a bit embarrassing. You could pick it up in London now for a couple of hundred pounds though.
The reality was the Tribesmen hit the ceiling in Brisbane almost as soon as they were born. Medew bowed to the inevitable. In Sydney they would immediately find themselves among friends and fans. Brisbane, by contrast, was about to touch bottom: venues were closing, another state election was looming, and the grip of the government’s law-and-order campaign was tighter than ever.
Mick Medew: A lot of people were leaving town. It was pretty sad. The police-state mentality was upsetting a lot of people. I don’t know, I always liked Brisbane, but it just seemed like Sydney was the happening place.
Brett Myers: We had to get out of Brisbane. It was just so oppressive, with the political situation and the cops – you couldn’t go out; there were no venues; everything closed at 10 o’clock. Sydney was like going to New York by comparison.
The recording of Igloo in December 1982 was a turning point for the Screaming Tribesmen. With a cavernous, echoing production courtesy of former Radio Birdman guitarist Chris Masuak, the single established the band’s Detroit-via-San Francisco template: a mixture of tough garage rock and spangled psychedelic pop, ‘floating on a guitar sound like a space-age heavy metal Byrds’.6 The combination oozed commercial potential. Released on the Citadel label, Igloo was among the biggest selling independent releases of 1983.
But the chemistry of the first, classic Tribesmen line-up was to be short-lived. By the release of the thundering follow-up single A Stand Alone in May 1984, Hartley and Murray Shepherd had returned to Brisbane and obscurity, leaving Medew to carry on with a succession of personnel, including Masuak and former Razar bassist Bob Wackley. With Masuak on board, the Tribesmen enjoyed some success, especially in America, where by the late ’80s the band’s fashion sense (leather jackets, leopard print, shag-pile hair and iron crosses) seemed to fit right in:
Mick Medew: When we went to Los Angeles everyone looked like Axl Rose. Not just people in bands. I mean people on the streets everywhere.
The End had not fared so well. Like the Screaming Tribesmen, the original line-up had disintegrated not long after arriving in Sydney, and a second version of the group was struggling to make headway. Brett Myers was becoming stale.
Brett Myers: I had a whole new band – I had a new drummer, new bass player and a second guitarist and they were all from Sydney. And then I met Frank Brunetti, he was a journalist from RAM at the time, and he did a couple of interviews with me. He really liked the band, and we became friends.
He and I and Ron were all having a drink one day, and I was talking about some problems I was having with the band and Frank said, ‘Well, get rid of them.’ I went, really? Then what’ll I do? And Frank said ‘Well, you can get into a new band with Ron and I, I’ll be your keyboard player and Ron will be the singer.’ And it actually sounded pretty attractive, to be honest!
Thus were born Died Pretty who, Brunetti and Peno aside, were soon made up entirely of Brisbane personnel, with the original trio joined by Mark Lock on bass and former 31st drummer Chris Welsh. And Peno was right: the band was great with him singing, his flamboyant presence and cryptic lyrical imagery proving the ideal foil to Myers’ heady musical ambitions. With a cluster of the End’s leftovers and a fresh brace of new songs, Died Pretty became the spiritual hub of the burgeoning Sydney scene, centred on the Trade Union club in Surry Hills.7
Just as Sydney was the place to go, Brisbane had become the place to leave.
CHAPTER EIGHT
everybody moves
Brisbane you have to leave. You come out of your mother, you go to school, and then you think, oh shit, what am I doing here?
— Tex Perkins1
Since the Second World War, Brisbane’s skyline had been overlooked by an eccentric structure at the top of the inner industrial suburb of Bowen Hills. The Cloudland Ballroom had a distinguished history. Originally intended as a Luna Park development, the site was initially serviced by a so-called alpine railway running from Breakfast Creek Road all the way up to the high-set location. In 1942, by which time Brisbane was a garrison town, Cloudland was set aside as a defence facility for the American military.
After the war’s end and the venue’s reopening in 1947, Cloudland became a social Mecca. Generations of young people courted and caroused there; it was once mischievously suggested that a third of the city’s population had been conceived in the car park.2 After Buddy Holly brought rock & roll to town on February 1958, the venue regularly hosted bands and was also used for end-of-year university exams.
The building itself was striking, to say the least. Its arched, laminated entrance was a full 18 metres high and by night was rather tackily lit in various fluorescent shades that, combined with its prestigious location, made Cloudland visible for miles. Inside, thick columns supported the high ceiling. Most famous of all was the magnificently sprung dance floor.
Such self-conscious glamour in an otherwise barren town captured the irony that lay at the heart of Brisbane. Had the sails of the Sydney Opera House flown atop Bowen Hills, they would scarcely have appeared any more anomalous than Cloudland. Journalist Linden Woodward, who had joined the Triple Zed newsroom in 1980, remembers:
Linden Woodward: I’d grown up seeing pictures of my mum and her sisters in these gorgeous ball gowns, and I remember saying, ‘Mum, where is this, you look so beautiful’, and her saying it was at a dance at Cloudland. You could sit there with this big arch above you and look down over Brisbane. I remember once doing that – I think it could have been when UB40 were playing – and sitting there, having a joint on the stairs, and looking down on this police dog spectacular at the Exhibition grounds. So it was a fantastic place, this whimsical symbol of lightness and fun up on the hill, above what could be a fairly harsh and arid city for a lot of people.
After the Queensland Licensing Commission put paid to the Queen’s Hotel as a live venue in March 1979, Triple Zed had successfully relocated its Joint Efforts to Cloudland. This was a coup for the station. Brisbane’s other medium-sized venue, Festival Hall in the city, was prohibitively expensive to hire. Following the Stranglers’ appearance at the Queen’s, Cloudland allowed Triple Zed to attract bigger international and national acts, with local bands providing support. In the latter months of 1979, thousands of madly pogoing fans tested out the sprung floor for themselves to the sounds of Graham Parker and XTC.
The live music scene was still subject to constant harassment. A show featuring the Sharks at the Caxton (formerly Baroona) Hall on 30 November 1979 was particularly hard hit
when patrons began spilling onto the street after the show. The unforgiving heat, lateness of the hour, alcohol and seething frustration had all taken their toll. Anne Jones, who was playing bass on the bottom of the bill with the Toesuckers, witnessed the violent aftermath.
Anne Jones: About seven police cars came, and as you’d imagine in that situation, people in the crowd were yelling ‘Fucking pigs!’ And then the police started laying into the crowd and it was on for young and old. I was actually with these two young guys, and one of them came running past with a cop chasing on foot, followed by a police car.
So we raced after them, and they’d caught up with my friend and were beating him up. And his friend went, ‘Oh, this is terrible,’ and walked over to them – ‘Excuse me, officer, you can’t do that!’ and of course you can imagine what happened. He got walloped as well, they both get arrested, and I’m sitting on the footpath in my taffeta petticoat watching the whole thing.
At trial, the magistrate dismissed Jones’ evidence as unreliable. Many years later, after years of court battles, her friend finally had his conviction quashed. He subsequently, and successfully, took civil action against the police.
The Go-Betweens were in a state of transition. Since acquiring Lindy Morrison, the band had completely deconstructed its original sound. Their music had become angular, based on shifting rhythms and tones rather than naive melodies. Robert Forster had no interest in rewriting Lee Remick, but for some time found himself unsure of which musical path to pursue: through 1980 and into 1981, by his own admission, ‘I didn’t write a really good song for two years.’ The band was practising obsessively and becoming stale.
Robert Forster: It was dreadful . . . It was the harsh wind of a new decade, and Brisbane was just not ready for it at all. And there we were, practising five days a week, playing this deconstructed, fractured music. For a year and a half Grant, Lindy and I played in a practice room in Brisbane and we were playing rubbish, absolute rubbish. But we got very good at playing with each other. We became a band.
The internal dynamics of the group were evolving too. Pushed to one side by the relationship between Forster and Morrison, Grant McLennan had begun writing his own songs. When Forster did the vocals on McLennan’s first major contribution, Your Turn, My Turn, the latter’s ambition began to surface. McLennan’s voice was plaintive but pleasing and, although Forster was the greater presence, he was determined to establish himself. Predictably, Forster and Morrison’s perspectives on this development differ.
Lindy Morrison: Grant quickly made it clear that he wanted to move onto guitar to be able to sing his songs, and Robert didn’t like that at all. He didn’t want to share [the spotlight] with Grant, no way. I remember saying to Robert, if you don’t share it, you’re going to lose him.
Robert Forster: If I really [wanted] to be powerful I would have got rid of Grant after three weeks. I knew, just through Grant’s personality, that he was an intensely creative person. The fact that he started to write songs came to me as no surprise.
There was a big world waiting for the Go-Betweens’ music beyond Brisbane. In November 1980 the band played their first Sydney show at the Paris Theatre, pitting their frail sound against the monstrous noise of the Birthday Party and the Laughing Clowns. When the Go-Betweens emerged with their reputations enhanced, their confidence was boosted immeasurably. Keith Glass, whose Melbourne-based label Missing Link boasted both the Birthday Party and the Clowns, had reissued the Go-Betweens’ Postcard single I Need Two Heads for the Australian market; now he offered to record another single for the band. In April 1981 Your Turn, My Turn was recorded in Sydney with Tony Cohen, then establishing a name for himself as the Birthday Party’s producer.
In July the band travelled to Melbourne to record their debut album, for which Glass’ wife unkindly volunteered the working title Two Wimps And A Witch. Following Your Turn, My Turn’s release as a single in October, the reinvigorated group decided to make the move permanent. Almost immediately, Forster overcame his writer’s block with a clutch of new songs.
The drain of creative energy out of Brisbane was becoming all too familiar.
Warwick Vere: I don’t know how many Sundays I spent waving people goodbye at the airport, leaving for parts unknown. There’s probably a Brisbane ghetto of people my age in just about every major city in the world. We lost an enormous number of talented people during that time, and only a few of them would have filtered back.
Lindy Morrison: Why did we leave Brisbane? That was the one thing that all three of us agreed about, that’s what really made the group. We knew we had to get out of town. We were equally ambitious, and we were prepared to sacrifice everything for the band.
Next to the albums that followed, Send Me A Lullaby, as the Go-Betweens’ debut was eventually titled, is often dismissed as amateurish and tentative. It is in fact ripe for rediscovery, making far more sense when viewed in the context of the band’s immediate post-punk peers. Still, the band was only beginning to find its feet. ‘It’s us,’ says McLennan, who contributed five of the 12 songs but sang on just three, ‘not fully realising it’s us.’3
Grant McLennan: Both Robert and I have incredible reservations about Send Me A Lullaby. It’s an inauspicious debut. But it certainly sounds like no one else! Robert’s since said, and I know, that he was a bit lost then. He really felt like he wanted to make a statement at that time, and it wasn’t until Before Hollywood that he found his voice.
With neither the band nor Keith Glass much taken with the results, Send Me A Lullaby was released by Missing Link in November 1981 as an eight-track mini-album. But when Missing Link’s UK distributors Rough Trade released the album three months later in its intended 12-track format, import copies began to outsell the local version. It was becoming obvious that the Go-Betweens’ future lay offshore. Enticed by Rough Trade, the band followed the Birthday Party to London, moving into a squat in Ladbroke Grove. They were soon joined by a fellow Brisbane émigré, Clinton Walker, who later wrote:
Grant McLennan and I lived on a diet of speed, beer, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Richard Pryor tapes. This lasted only until the reality of the heroin situation hit home. There was truckloads of it around, it was good and it was cheap.4
In fairness, the Go-Betweens were mere dabblers compared to the Birthday Party (and Walker), but neither were they immune. In the middle of an English winter, scraping together an existence from one gig to the next, drugs could be more sustaining than a hot meal.
Lindy Morrison: I was a pot smoker. [The Birthday Party’s] Nick Cave used to rubbish me to death about it, he used to say why didn’t I take a risk and use other drugs? And heroin was the drug of choice, because it made you feel so warm. You’d be freezing and hungry, living in these disgusting places, and you’d take heroin and everything was fabulous. You can see why people did it.
Yet the band was making steady progress. Another McLennan-penned single, Hammer The Hammer, did well when released by Rough Trade in July. The B-side was Forster’s By Chance, a song he regarded as a personal breakthrough. The Go-Betweens’ identity was being reconfigured around the partnership between two very different songwriters. The British press were fascinated by these opinionated yet effete Australians, denizens of a country they thought populated mainly by sheep and kangaroos. And the outsized personalities of Forster and Morrison gave the band genuine charisma.
Rough Trade found an unusual venue for the recording of the band’s second album, the International Christian Communications Studio in the seaside retirement village of Eastbourne. It was hardly rock & roll, but the decaying atmosphere suited the album the band cut with English producer John Brand. Refining the edgy arrangements of Send Me A Lullaby, Before Hollywood’s impressionistic lyrics and sparkling blend of acoustic and electric textures recalled earlier folk influences – Simon and Garfunkel, the Byrds and, especially, Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home. Even Before Hollywood’s sleeve des
ign nods towards the Dylan album, with the Go-Betweens framed by a collection of antiques.
Appropriately, the songs were suffused with homesickness, nostalgia and beauty, like the yellowing pages of an old photo album. The touchstone was the band’s first classic, McLennan’s Cattle And Cane. In both this song and the exquisite Dusty In Here, he moves through a series of vignettes drawn from his childhood in far north Queensland:
I recall a schoolboy coming home
Through fields of cane, to a house of tin and timber
And in the sky, a rain of falling cinders
Robert Vickers, who joined the band on bass immediately after Before Hollywood, allowing McLennan to shift to guitar, was astounded by the group’s development.
Robert Vickers: I’d heard Send Me A Lullaby and thought it was quite different, obviously, to the early material. It was interesting, but it sounded like they were trying to work something out. So I was very happy when I heard Before Hollywood, because it was obvious that they had worked it out. It contained a lot of the melody that was in the early songs, but it was more intelligently put together. The structures of the songs were complex but also memorable, which is an almost impossible thing to do in music.
The rapid growth of the two songwriters aside, at the heart of Before Hollywood’s sound is Morrison, who picks her way through the songs’ changes with the nervy concentration of a tightrope walker: Cattle And Cane may have become lost but for her remarkable rhythmic undertow. Her influence on the group’s sound was never greater.
Lindy Morrison: I remember talking to Bruce Anthon, who played drums with them before me, and I asked him what he did when they played him songs that were in 7/4 time. And he told me to play straight through them in 4/4 time, and they will eventually come back around to where you are. And I consciously said to myself, I’m not going to do that. And that’s why the first two albums have so many songs with bizarre timings. But they’re so lovely.
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