Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  Paul Curtis: I could totally relate to it . . . It echoed the political concepts I had in my mind about punk rock versus the corporate way of doing things. Which was ironic, because it became embroiled in the big corporate world.

  Live, the group’s impact was immediate. Within three months of their debut in March 1994, Regurgitator had notched a string of impressive support slots.

  Peter Walsh: I gave Regurgitator their third gig, supporting Primus at the Roxy, and I couldn’t believe the crowd reaction, because no one had ever seen the band, and the crowd went nuts. And I thought fuck, we’ve got something going on here.

  In August 1993 Screamfeeder’s second album was released. Burn Out Your Name was Brisbane’s singular contribution to the Seattle sound, the songs carried on a tidal wave of distortion. On the heavier numbers, the group sank under the weight of their own ennui. But when Tim Steward allowed his melodic gifts to shine, the results transcended his band’s generic limitations. Wrote You Off and Around A Pole melded speed and sweetness like the very best Hüsker Dü songs; Button was compact and explosive; while the agonised loneliness of Kellie Lloyd’s contribution, Sushi Bowl, was a clear highlight.

  But Screamfeeder enjoyed little luck thereafter. After a successful tour through Europe, broken promises on the part of US independent label Taang! saw a planned American jaunt fall through. Replacing original drummer Tony Blades with the dynamic Dean Shwereb in 1995, the band matured into an accomplished outfit, trading some excitement for consistency in the process. Despite a loyal following and increasing radio exposure, Screamfeeder never caught fire commercially.

  Powderfinger were a different story, although the band almost came dreadfully unstuck following the July 1994 release of their first album for Polydor, Parables For Wooden Ears. If the pedantic title implied lessons being learned, those lessons were entirely the group’s to absorb. Produced at great expense by Tony Cohen (then riding on the success of his work with the Cruel Sea, whose lean sound was perfectly suited to his signature atmospherics), every song on Parables was overburdened as songwriting took a back seat to technique. Jack Marx’s review in Rolling Stone typified the album’s reception.

  [Powderfinger] write, construct and execute themselves rigid: their songs are meticulously planned feats of engineering . . . This is not necessarily a compliment. Sometimes it’s a certified jerk-off.1

  Curiously, Marx claimed to like the band. He even entered into the spirit of his own critique, playfully signing off his review as Jackson G Marx. But his point was not lost on the group.

  Bernard Fanning: A lot of it was really a product of being influenced by bands like Soundgarden and also on a local level Pangaea, where it was all very technical. But that wasn’t our strength at all, and that’s why our first album was so misguided and strange. As someone said at the time, it disappeared up its own arse!2

  Shortly before Parables’ release, Paul Curtis drove down to Sydney. His intentions were twofold: to negotiate a deal with Warner for Pangaea, and to seek a manufacturing and distribution deal for his new label, Valve. As part of his pitch, he handed Michael Parisi a tape of what would become Pangaea’s Raggacore EP, with the Regurgitator demo on the other side. His excitement was tempered by unease: as a vocal champion of DIY enterprise, Curtis felt he was dancing with the devil. After a fitful night’s sleep in his car, he drove back to Brisbane the next day. Parisi was not long in calling.

  Paul Curtis: Parisi said, ‘You’ve got a problem, Paul. You have to make a choice.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘I don’t want to sign Pangaea anymore. I want to sign Regurgitator.’

  I just thought, oh my god, this is going to be so messy.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  spring hill fair

  I’ve got a little melody, and it hangs in the air – there!

  I’ve got a little melody – there it is again!

  And again, and again, and again, and again

  Melody is my friend

  – Custard, Melody

  While Screamfeeder smothered their best tunes in distortion and Pangaea eschewed song craft in favour of the extended jam, another emerging group of musicians was looking in the opposite direction. Rising from late 1980s incarnation Who’s Gerald?, Custard’s influences cut a clear line through classic American college rock from the Modern Lovers to the Pixies. Moreover, the band’s leader, David McCormack, held a healthy regard for Brisbane’s musical past: his favourite Australian band was the Go-Betweens. Custard would provide as bracing a challenge to rock orthodoxy post-Nevermind as Robert Forster and Grant McLennan had to punk, circa 1977.

  McCormack had grown up in the upwardly mobile western suburb of Kenmore, completing his secondary education at Ipswich Grammar. In 1986 he was accepted into the University of Queensland, eventually graduating with a double major in psychology. He could not have cared less: ‘The idea of having people tell me all their problems for hours on end was not my idea of a good time.’ For McCormack, tertiary education’s appeal lay in its social and recreational benefits:

  David McCormack: The whole reason I was at uni was because it sounded like a really cool thing to do. By the time I went to uni I was listening to Triple Zed and I heard the Go-Betweens, the Saints . . . Everything I learnt about Brisbane music was from Triple Zed, because there was no other way to hear it, unless you were already in the scene, or you had an older brother who knew what records to listen to. I think the Go-Betweens were like the key in the lock and from there it was like, the Saints, Know Your Product, hey, that’s a pretty good song. Stranded, that’s pretty good. And then the Riptides, nice one!

  McCormack had formed Who’s Gerald? – a name purpose-built for a mass graffiti campaign – with fellow Ipswich Grammar boy Paul Medew after leaving school. The band’s drummer, Cathy Atthow, earned her place at least partly through McCormack’s obsession with the Go-Betweens and Lindy Morrison. By his own admission, Who’s Gerald? had no redeeming features: Wrestle Wrestle, the band’s sole seven-inch single, is so poorly recorded that when played at its correct speed of 45 rpm, the group sound like they’re on helium.

  David McCormack: That’s when the drugs really came into play, around that time . . . In 1988–89 it was all speed, acid, ecstasy had just hit. And because we had nothing to do – we’d basically finished our degrees and were on the dole, and we were white middle-class kids from Kenmore – we could just get out of it forever. That’s why Who’s Gerald? broke up. We’d be speeding for days on end.

  When Who’s Gerald? mercifully folded in 1989, McCormack formed a new band, Custard Gun. Retaining Medew on bass, he was joined by drummer Shane Bruun and, briefly, another Ipswich Grammar alumnus, James Straker. A junk-culture obsessive, Straker’s uncanny likeness to his hero, Dinosaur Jr frontman J Mascis, was unfortunately not matched by his guitar prowess.

  James Straker: I was then, and am now, a shithouse guitarist, terrible, I’m close to retarded . . . I lasted a grand total of about four shows, I think, and I got a phone call from David saying that they were having band practice the next night and I didn’t have to come, and as a 16-year-old, that hurt!

  But the energetic Straker would not be denied his place in Brisbane’s musical pantheon so easily. In late 1990 he opened a shop in the Toowong Arcade, the same location where, in 1978, original Go-Betweens manager Damian Nelson had attempted to establish his own record store. Though Straker was no more successful in private enterprise than Nelson had been, Silver Rocket – named after a track off Sonic Youth’s milestone album Daydream Nation – represented the beginnings of a new angle on the trash aesthetic in Brisbane.

  James Straker: Silver Rocket started as a record store, and it got burgled three times in one week, everything got stolen. I had to find something to put in the windows to display, so I brought in some toys that I had at home, and the toys started doing heaps better than the records. There weren’t a lot of people selling anything like th
at in Brisbane at the time.

  After moving Silver Rocket from Toowong to Elizabeth Arcade in the city, Straker experienced a lifetime thrill when Sonic Youth dropped by the store while on tour in January 1992. Avid toy collectors themselves, the band’s Festival Hall show climaxed with a seething encore of Silver Rocket, guitarist Thurston Moore sporting a T-shirt bearing the name of Straker’s new band, the Melniks.

  Custard’s debut EP, the sprightly Rockfish Anna, was released in December 1990. The B-side included a cover of C Is For Cookie, the signature song of Sesame Street’s resident glutton, Cookie Monster. It served notice of a group never in danger of taking itself too seriously. Like Robert Forster, David McCormack had drawn considerable early inspiration from the suburban obsessions of Jonathan Richman.

  David McCormack: I was at John Swingle’s house, he was in the Melniks, and he said you’ve got to hear this . . . He played me Roadrunner and Government Centre and it just blew my mind, it was one of those life-changing experiences. Because up until then I was listening to Devo and Kraftwerk, stuff like that, which is all very alienated, but it’s not really Brisbane. Brisbane’s too hot for that!

  By then McCormack had also met artist Glenn Thompson through a mutual friend, Who’s Gerald? keyboard player Glen Donald. Originally from Toowoomba, Thompson had played stand-up drums with his friend Bob Moore in a busking trio called Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds. True to their name, the band exploited country music’s clichés to the hilt, playing material from Johnny Cash to the Violent Femmes.

  Glenn Thompson: We used to get really dressed up. I was the Indian Scout, Robert was the Gambler and Troy [Skewes, guitarist] was some kind of renegade cavalry runaway or something. It was that kind of vibe.

  Country music had long been the two dirtiest words in independent rock circles, but McCormack loved the idea of the Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds, prompting Glenn Thompson to call up Bob Moore. Several years older, Moore had recently married and had retired from music to concentrate on his own blossoming art career.

  Bob Moore: Thommo rang up and said, ‘I’ve met this kid, he’s just learning to play guitar, but he’s got something, Bob. We should have a jam with him.’ This was Dave McCormack. And I said, ‘Glenn, I don’t want to be in a band anymore, I’m sick of being in a band.’

  And he said, ‘But he’s really good, Bob, he’s really good!’ And then he said, ‘I’ve got the idea for the band. It’s a country or western band, and it’s called COW.’

  COW was far more than the in-joke their name suggested. Intending to score a hotel residency where they could have some fun, a few drinks and pick up a little extra cash at the end of the night, the band could indeed play country ‘or’ western, albeit with a knowing smirk. But such was the improvisational flair and natural showmanship of the musicians – McCormack in particular was becoming a formidable guitarist, distilling influences from Tom Waits’ sideman Marc Ribot to the Pixies’ Joey Santiago – that COW’s scope was almost limitless.

  McCormack, meanwhile, had moved into an old artist’s studio annexed to the rear of his father’s advertising business on Boundary Street, Spring Hill. Along with the Target offices in the Valley, the room became Brisbane’s most fertile practice space, and as the house band, COW became the fulcrum for a dizzying number of new outfits, all seemingly under the faux-naïf spell of Jonathan Richman. (COW’s timing was spooky: little more than a year after the band’s live debut, Richman released Jonathan Goes Country, exploring an uncannily similar sideways-glancing take on the genre.)

  Bob Moore: The reason that whole Spring Hill scene happened was because Dave’s mum and dad, Jude and Ian, allowed that place to exist. None of us paid any rent! . . . If you took that practice room away, none of it would have happened, it would have all gone back to bedrooms in Toowong, St Lucia and Kenmore.

  But McCormack’s ambitions lay firmly with Custard. Rockfish Anna had been included on the third Youngblood compilation by Sydney label rooArt, and the band boasted two shiny new recruits in guitarist Matthew Strong and manager Adine Barton, then editing the BUMS (Brisbane Underground Music Scene) fanzine with Screamfeeder’s Kellie Lloyd. The strictly local focus of BUMS catered to a niche only partially fulfilled by a mushrooming street press.1

  Adine Barton: I think it certainly helped tie the music community together a little bit, especially the younger bands . . . There’s heaps of music management courses now, but back then, nobody had managers, nobody, it was all a big mystery. We used to get lots of phone calls from venues saying I want to put such and such band on, what local bands would suit playing with them, to bands ringing up saying I want to send my tape to a few record companies, how do I do it, can you give me any names. And even just seeing your friends’ bands in print was a bit of a boost and an encouragement. It was needed then. Something like that wouldn’t be anywhere near as important today.

  After winning eight hours of recording time in an encouragement award from the Australian Academy of Music, Custard decided they were ready to make their first album. The result, Buttercup/Bedford – the dual title a result of McCormack accidentally asking both Moore and Thompson to design a cover for the release, giving both artists different names to work with – was enough for rooArt, who signed the band immediately after the CD’s launch in May 1992. Released in a pressing of 500 once reserved for vinyl singles, Buttercup’s lightness of touch could hardly have been more refreshing. It was the striped sunlight sound all over again.

  David McCormack: We hated all that [post-Seattle] music. We’d say ‘Oh, this is crap,’ and put on our little jangly Go-Betweens record or They Might Be Giants’ first album or something like that.

  Following Shane Bruun’s defection to form Hugbubble (to be replaced briefly by Gavin Herrenberg, later by Danny Plant), Custard’s debut EP for rooArt was released in October. Including Buttercup’s standout title-track-of-sorts, Bedford, Gastanked! showcased McCormack’s rapid growth as a songwriter and, especially, as a performer. Listening to the band was becoming a game: lyrics would be pilfered from unexpected sources (Satellite, for one, cherry-picked the Electric Prunes’ acid classic I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night); riffs recycled in unfamiliar contexts. And although Custard wore their influences as openly as Screamfeeder, the band could not be contained by a single genre.

  There was something else about Custard, too, underlined by the band’s next EP, Brisbane, and its childlike cityscape artwork by Glenn Thompson: a mixture of self-deprecation and whimsy, born of a hick city that had somehow managed to host a Commonwealth Games and a World Expo, that before the recession had featured its own brand of white-shoe entrepreneurs, that was only just emerging from the shadows of a corrupt government. Out of such contradictions, somewhere in the early ’90s, the term Brisvegas came into popular usage. The term gave many of the city’s occupants a chance to feel they truly owned their town for the first time.

  Adine Barton: Everyone expected Custard to move once they signed, everyone assumed it was just going to happen. And they considered it, they talked about it a lot, but decided that they’d probably break up within a week of all being poor, away from girlfriends and family and living in a house together . . . Plus I don’t think David really wanted to leave, I think that was it more than anything – he liked living in Brisbane, he felt secure. He’s very family-oriented; he loves his mum and dad and his brother, and Brisbane was home, he didn’t feel he needed to go anywhere.

  Robert Forster returned to Brisbane in the winter of 1992, after three years secluded in the south of Germany with his new wife, Karin Baümler. His first solo album, Danger In The Past, had been recorded in Berlin with ring-ins from Nick Cave’s band, the Bad Seeds. With a swag full of lighter-sounding songs that leaned naturally towards country, he wanted to make a ‘smaller, boxier Brisbane record’.

  Forster had felt uncomfortable on previous visits to his home town, finding little he could relate to. This time the atmosphere seemed more sympatheti
c, and he tested the waters with a few acoustic performances at the Zoo.

  Robert Forster: The Zoo had only just started. I can’t think of anything over the last 10 years, including Livid, that has done so much for Brisbane music as the Zoo, there’s just no two ways about it . . . It’s a venue run by really nice people; there’s no greasy 50-year-old publican cruising around the room, no thugs in tuxedos . . . You’d just walk in there and relax.

  Forster had made up his mind to record at Sunshine (formerly Window) Studios, where the Go-Betweens had cut their first singles. All he needed was a new set of musicians to play his songs. An old acquaintance, Rocking Horse’s Warwick Vere, steered Forster down to the Queen’s Arms Hotel in the Valley where COW had a residency. Moore, McCormack and Thompson were in a position to offer Forster more than just equipment and a rehearsal space.

  Robert Forster: When we went over to practise they’d immediately get the bat and ball out and start playing backyard cricket, which Grant and I used to do with the Riptides! They were all into Jonathan Richman . . . It was a little bit eerie, how much it superimposed back on an earlier time. I felt like phoning up Grant and saying, there are guys here who are just like we were back in the late ’70s.2

  But Forster was not to be distracted. According to Glenn Thompson, COW’s rehearsals with Forster at Spring Hill were ‘relentless – he had a real holistic idea of what he wanted’. Essentially, what Forster wanted was a genuine band record: while COW’s loose feel allowed his songs plenty of room to breathe, the group had little previous studio experience, and Forster needed them locked tight behind him before venturing into Sunshine.

  Released in June 1993, the resulting album was perhaps Robert Forster’s most fully realised work. Where Danger In The Past was brooding, even solemn, Calling From A Country Phone was bright and optimistic. And while McCormack’s impish guitar style highlighted the frequently droll lyrics, the addition of boogie-woogie piano, violin and pedal steel also lent the music a certain grandeur. On one song, I Want To Be Quiet, Forster’s domestic bliss became a sly comment on a musical era: