Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  Nevermind was, from the name down, the Never Mind The Bollocks of its era: as divisive as it was defiant, at the very least it set the agenda and the benchmark for much of the decade to come. And for the first time in years – even if only for a moment – popular music felt like a genuine popular movement again.

  In the mid ’70s, before anyone had heard of punk, bands sprung up all over the world, working off the same basic template handed down by the Stooges, the MC5 and countless garage bands. Similarly in the late ’80s, before grunge had a name, there were countless groups exploring the possibilities of introspective lyrics, soft/loud dynamics and melodies drenched in distortion. These were the musical descendents not just of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, but ’80s icons the Replacements, Hüsker Dü and the Pixies.

  By 1990 a new crop of bands was surfacing in Brisbane, the direct influences of almost all of whom could be traced to immediate American antecedents. Formed in Townsville in 1988, the Madmen were the first of many local bands attempting to unearth hooks from a bottomless pit of noise, and their second single, Tower, confirmed the melodic sense of songwriter Tim Steward, a stringy Londoner who had begun playing in bands after his family emigrated to north Queensland in 1983. By the turn of the decade, the Madmen had relocated to Brisbane. It didn’t take them long to fall in with a like-minded crowd.

  Tim Steward: There were bands like Noose, Krud, Budd and Midget . . . I remember me, Kellie and Jeremy and John from Budd were all at the Funkyard one night. We all had long hair and our gym boots on, and we looked at each other and went, ‘Man, we all look the same – we should form a band!’ So we formed this covers band called Slugfest, and we’d do songs by Mudhoney and Tad and all that Sub Pop stuff. This was all pre-Nevermind.

  Kellie Lloyd was already playing bass in Krud. A second-year film student and fan of the Madmen, she wrote to Steward offering to make a film clip for the band. She got more than she bargained for.

  Kellie Lloyd: My practice room was actually my house; I lived in a flat above a barbecue shop with this other girl. Bands in Brisbane were always on this never-ending search for a practice room that you could stay in for more than six months. And Tim wrote to me saying yeah, we’d love you to make a clip for us, can we share your practice room, and I said well, actually it’s my living room, but why not? So they basically moved into my living room! They practised there for about a year.

  The Madmen had already released three singles and a mini-album by the time Lloyd joined the band in early 1992, replacing Cam Hurst. Changing their name to Screamfeeder, the group inked a deal with Sydney’s Survival Records. A promising debut album, Flour, quickly followed, and Screamfeeder were soon playing to packed houses in Sydney and Melbourne. For almost any Brisbane band before them, it would have been time to move on. But Screamfeeder set a precedent in being content to remain at home.

  Tim Steward: I guess we didn’t need to leave. We could always go on tour. We were comfy in Brisbane, Tony [Blades, drums] and I had girlfriends and we just didn’t want to move.

  Screamfeeder’s inner-city sound and musical alignment with the American underground saw them attract early press and some devoted admirers. But their shows were erratic, and the gap between Steward’s best and weakest material was still wide. Out in the suburbs, heavy metal ruled: if a group could play well enough and put on a show, the strength of the songs barely mattered. The other rising tide was rap, then being mainlined to white kids by funk-metal bands Faith No More and the aforementioned Chili Peppers.

  The unlikely birthplace for this new musical force in Brisbane was Cleveland, more than half an hour from the city on the southern shores of Moreton Bay. Cleveland High School boasted an exceptionally strong music department, and three of its pupils would form arguably the most potent and influential new combination on the scene. The first of them, Ben Ely, had excelled on trumpet at school after being forbidden the drums by his parents. Like most adolescents, Ely wanted to make as much noise as possible, and he took up bass after a friend reminded him that fire-breathing hero Gene Simmons played the instrument for Kiss.

  Ben Ely: I’ve always liked bass because you could feel the vibrations in your body. It’s a caveman’s axe!

  Ely had finished high school and was playing in punk and metal covers bands when he met drummer Martin Lee. Lee had just returned from Los Angeles with Simon Gardner, a graduate of the city’s Guitar Institute of Technology. Gardner was, unsurprisingly, an extremely technical player in the Joe Satriani mould. Completed by singer Andy McDonell, Brasilia’s trad-metal indulgences impressed some, but Ely didn’t last long, sacked by the demanding Gardner. Ely was heartbroken, until he remembered two younger high school chums, Dave Atkins and Jim Sinclair, were also playing the covers circuit.

  Ben Ely: I remember them being phenomenal players, they were really studying their jazz stuff and playing different time signatures and scales. I was also doing a bit of acid at the time, so we were kind of trying to make the music as freaky as possible. Those guys were still in their school uniforms when we were going and doing our first shows.

  Dave Atkins, a stocky young man of South American heritage with massive forearms, had been spotted as a natural drummer in his first year of high school. At home, his dad would spin records: everything from Mozart to Led Zeppelin IV. Television in the early ’80s was Countdown, breakdancing (Atkins’ older brother was a regional champion), and early hip-hop: Malcolm McLaren’s Buffalo Girls, Grandmaster Flash’s The Message, Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight. But jazz was Atkins’ first love.

  Dave Atkins: I could play classical, I found it really easy, and I did it really to prove to my father that I could cut it in that scene, but jazz was like, wow, that’s the free area, that’s the punk, you know, that’s the rock & roll! You can be outrageous, you can be like Animal in the Muppets; you can be whatever you want.

  Sinclair, for his part, was a guitar shredder to rival Simon Gardner.

  Dave Atkins: I met Jim in the music block at school . . . He was a year older than me, and he was sitting there playing some classical piece of music at lightning speed, and I was totally blown away. It was like he was Eddie Van Halen; there was no one like him around.

  Sinclair and Atkins played in a variety of covers bands through school, performing underage around the suburban pubs. Sinclair dropped out, convinced he was a career musician. He bumped into Ely soon after the latter’s ejection from Brasilia.

  Dave Atkins: I was finishing high school, and right at the last month of term, Jim rings me up and says, ‘I’ve just hooked up with Ben again, he’s really changed, he’s writing some really crazy stuff.’ They came around and we had a jam. Ben had dreads, you know, it was like, ‘What happened?’ I’m pretty sure he told me there was a whole year there where he ended up just eating mushies and taking acid.

  Taking their name from Miles Davis’ 1975 jazz-rock fusion album, Pangaea’s debut in January 1992 made an immediate impact. Ely’s feral energy (and appearance) next to Sinclair and Atkins’ virtuosity – the band could stretch out and improvise on stage like no other in town – covered for the rudimentary songs. Brisbane had a long history of punk bands that prided enthusiasm over ability, but Pangaea’s sets were showcases of groove, volume and instrumental prowess.

  Dave Atkins: We wrote a song called The Power Of Three; it was all about uniting and becoming one force. That was the whole concept of the three of us coming together to make this sort of supergroup, you know, a dominating group that could outplay any other band.

  Playing alongside Screamfeeder and Pangaea in 1992 were two other bands whose burgeoning reputations were forcing venues to open their doors again to original music. The first were the Dreamkillers, formed from the ashes of earlier hardcore groups Mystery of Sixes and Insane Hombres. Fronted by former Mystery of Sixes lead screamer Les Jobson, the Dreamkillers brand of punk-metal mayhem was made for the alcohol-fuelled frenzy of live performance. Pa
ul Curtis took on the daunting role of managing the band.

  Paul Curtis: I think I was amused by the intensity of their image. I did all the graphics for them as well, and I found that worked really well. I liked to draw things that were very kind of dark and horror in a cartoonish kind of manner, and there was a certain cartoon element to them, a larger-than-life thing.

  The second band was far more traditional, looking past punk to the classic rock of the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and the mellow early ’70s folk of Rodriguez. They even took their name from a Neil Young classic: Powderfinger.

  The success of the Funkyard made it inevitable that the management of Bertie’s Tavern would agree to put on live shows. It was still a substantial risk. When Livid mastermind Peter Walsh began staging shows on Thursday nights under the name Alive She Cried, the midweek timeslot did neither the bands nor the venue any favours. It wasn’t until Walsh’s assistant Jessica Astrid (then known as John Darcey) came up with the idea of reviving the shopworn concept of Rock Against Work on Friday afternoons that things really started to happen.

  Australia was in the middle of a devastating recession, with more than 10 per cent of the population unemployed in every state. Youth unemployment was closer to 25 per cent. There was plenty of time for seeing bands, or forming them. The Rock Against Work shows were free, and the drinks cheap.

  Kellie Lloyd: We were all rocking against work! I don’t know whether it was how old we were, but everyone was doing the same sorts of things. Everyone was mixing and going out, no one was married or having kids or any of that kind of thing. Everyone was finishing a degree or starting a degree or just on the dole.

  The Funkyard, too, started putting on shows. When the club hosted the launch of the Dreamkillers’ debut CD in April 1992, 560 people came. While it wasn’t the numbers the club pulled when Graham Don’s DJ skills were the primary attraction, it was more than any local band had ever attracted without first making a name for itself interstate or overseas.

  Graham Don: Before that, local bands were getting 60 people, you know. I remember going to see Ups and Downs when they were the hippest things around and they’d get 50 people, 60 people. Same with the Headstones, who had a record out on Waterfront.

  The Rock Against Work concept was extended further on public holidays, with Darcey staging mini-festivals of up to 10 local bands in the venue. For these shows, Rock Against Work moved from Bertie’s to Metropolis, a 1500-capacity venue deep in the bowels of the Myer Centre. The results were revelatory. Putting local bands on a big stage with a decent lighting and sound system – sometimes even headlining over interstate visitors – gave them a status they hadn’t previously enjoyed. Hundreds came to Rock Against The Queen (on the Queen’s Birthday) or the Ekka (on Exhibition Day in August).

  The Dreamkillers began tearing the roof off Metropolis, attracting more than 1000 punters to their shows, prompting Paul Curtis and Graham Don to set up a record label catering solely to Brisbane artists. The Dreamkillers’ live popularity made them the obvious first signing to Velvet Urge, but the inexperienced duo failed to heed the warning signs: a shortage of genuine quality material, compounded by internal strife and personal problems dating back to the troubled Mystery of Sixes.

  Graham Don: They looked like they were going to sell. They scared people enough; they were going to get noticed no matter what. But the wheels fell off in the end, because they had the addictions.

  Curtis later fell out with the band and, more bitterly, with Don, after the demise of the Funkyard in August 1992. At the same time Pangaea had split with their Elvis-impersonator manager. Curtis, who had sidestepped earlier advances from the band to concentrate on the Dreamkillers, stepped into the breach.

  Pangaea’s blistering live shows had attracted the attention of Michael Parisi, then working in A&R for Imago Records. When Imago folded in 1992, Parisi returned to his former employer, Warner Music, working on the tougher end of the label’s American roster including Helmet and Nine Inch Nails. At the time, no Australian bands had ever been signed directly to the label. Parisi thought Pangaea might be the first.

  Fortitude Valley was slowly coming back to life. Paradoxically, the exodus of business – compounded by the recession and the precinct’s tarnished reputation – helped create the necessary space for music to filter back into its natural environment.

  Once run by another Fitzgerald Inquiry star, Tony Bellino, the reclamation of the Roxy as a medium-sized venue by Paul Curtis and Livid Festival co-producer Paul Campbell-Ryder was critical. Only a few doors down from the Brunswick Street railway station, the venue’s capacity of 1500 proved the ideal substitute for Metropolis, after the Myer Centre’s management quietly decided a shopping precinct was no longer an appropriate place for an alternative nightclub.

  Even more important was the December 1992 opening of the Zoo, on Ann Street. Beginning as a gallery-cum-café-cum-pool hall, the Zoo boasted a rare combination of atmosphere and conviviality (ghosts, apparently friendly ones, were claimed to be regular after-hours patrons). After experimenting with acoustic shows on a makeshift stage, the venue’s owners, Joc Curran and her business partner, known only as C, threw open the 450-capacity room to bands. Curran and C had made the decision to open a venue after the demise of their own group, Creatures Downstairs.

  Joc Curran: We were looking for somewhere that was quite cheap in terms of rent, and we didn’t want to come to the Valley at all. It had a really bad reputation; it was really rough; people didn’t go there. And we looked at rental prices in the city and they were astronomical and beyond our budget.

  C: We were looking for about nine months, and in that nine months the concept of how people viewed the Valley began to change. It just had the tiniest seed that was going to develop into something kind of groovy and a bit more offbeat.

  Even the practice room situation had been solved. Bands had begun renting out the deserted offices above an old Target warehouse in the Brunswick Street Mall. Built in the ’50s, the themed floor plan of the offices – three floors individually carpeted in blue, red and yellow; porthole-like windows; toilet doors more like submarine hatches – gave the Target building the spooky ambience of an abandoned film set.

  Kellie Lloyd: There were bad vibes in certain places; in a lot of the rooms the lights didn’t work. We used to break in there before it was a practice space and go looking, and you’d find places where people had been squatting, with needles everywhere and human faeces and stuff . . . A couple of the rooms were used by prostitutes, like dens.

  The offices were carved into rehearsal and studio spaces. Bands played and sometimes lived there, honing their craft, mingling, sharing ideas. Not all of it was healthy: sometimes rooms would get broken into and gear stolen. For one skinny, charismatic young singer, however, it marked a convergence of common interests.

  Bernard Fanning: The combination of Rock Against Work and the Target building were the catalyst for it becoming a real scene, I reckon, where everyone started to get to know each other and did gigs together . . . That’s when that group of people all started hanging out together a lot more, and that kind of fostered things. And there was a certain amount of pride after a couple of years of that, which got people thinking, we’ve got some really fucking good bands here.

  Powderfinger were rising fast. Accusations of the group being musical followers were of no consequence to those flocking to their shows. The launch of their debut CD in August 1992 – a self-titled seven-tracker generally known as the Blue EP – had seen lines form around the block of their original stomping ground, the Orient Hotel. For their second effort, the Transfusion EP, the five-piece sold out Metropolis in September 1993.

  The gig was a watershed in more ways than one. The launch attracted 1100 people, more even than the Dreamkillers had managed. Moreover, one song, Reap What You Sow, was receiving heavy rotation on Triple J.

  At the Transfusion launch was Polydor’s T
im Prescott. Prescott went out drinking with the band after the show, and the band appreciated his earthy demeanour. Ambitious and driven, Powderfinger were all in their early 20s and had no qualms about jumping in the deep end with a major label. Like Screamfeeder, though, they had no intention of leaving home to do it.

  Ben Ely’s music may have united punk and metal fans across town, but he was something of a hippie at heart, and he was a regular attendee at the Full Moon parties hosted by a friend on the Sunshine Coast hinterland at the end of each month. Jam sessions were always held, and one night, through the fog of smoke and booze, he recognised the guitarist of heavy funk-fusion band Zooerastia sitting in on drums. Aloof and mysterious, Quan Yeomans liked to keep himself in reserve. On this night, however, the usually abstemious Yeomans was under the influence.

  Ben Ely: I remember hanging out with him afterwards. He walked off into the bushes, I followed him and said, ‘What are you doing?’, and he said, ‘Oh, I’m just going to lick the leaves on the trees.’ I think that was the moment I thought, this guy’s good fun.

  With up to 10 bands occupying the Target building, it was not uncommon for musicians – especially rhythm players – to moonlight in several groups at once. When Martin Lee told Ely of Brasilia’s breakup, the bass player didn’t hesitate before suggesting they form another band with Yeomans. Ely quickly became more enthusiastic about his new combination than he was about Pangaea.

  Ben Ely: I think we wrote She’s Got A Hangup in our first practice, and we went straight on to talking about trying to get signed . . . We’d all been on the dole for about three or four years by then, we were just scraping through, trying to pay rent and get food every day.

  Regurgitator took to new extremes the Funkyard’s original concept of mashing styles together and spewing the results back out. The band quickly recorded a demo, which Ely passed on to Paul Curtis. The first song on the tape was the lumbering, metallic Like It Like That. But in Quan Yeomans’ lyrics, Curtis sensed a kindred spirit.