Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  Bailey’s resentment is understandable. The singer complains that, while he took the name, his former songwriting partner has ‘probably got more mileage than I have out of the Saints in a lot of respects’. While Bailey’s most recent recordings under the Saints banner have fallen through the cracks, the original brand is stronger than ever: All Times Through Paradise, a box set of the first three albums with remastering supervised by Kuepper, is the last word on one of the truly seminal bands of the ’70s.

  It is a similar story for the Go-Betweens who, Velvet Underground-like, were always destined to be bigger after their demise. The original six albums have all been reissued in lavish double-CD editions, along with a best-of set Bellavista Terrace and a patched together ‘lost’ album of demos from the band’s early years. David Nichols’ biography of the band has been reissued internationally by the estimable Verse Chorus Press.

  More importantly, the Go-Betweens are a recording entity again, with Robert Forster and Grant McLennan backed by Adele Pickvance on bass and former COW and Custard drummer Glenn Thompson. The line-up first played the Zoo in December 1995, warming up for a one-off show in Paris on the invitation of French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, which had just named 16 Lovers Lane the third best album of the ’80s (following the Pixies’ Doolittle and the Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead).

  Robert Forster: It was a really nice big old Parisian theatre, and there were about 800 people there. People had come over from England, and we’d play a song and we’d just have to count in the next song over the applause, because people just weren’t stopping. And we walked off stage and people were screaming and throwing things at us, and we came back for four encores. It was pure Hollywood.

  Forster and McLennan continued to play sporadically as a duo, doing a run of shows to promote the worldwide release of Bellavista Terrace in 1999. By 2000, both songwriters had resettled in Brisbane.

  Robert Forster: [Bellavista Terrace] was coming out so I said, ‘Let’s just do an acoustic tour,’ Grant and I, we’d do interviews on the road and then at night we’d play a show in a club. And pretty soon into that we were having a great time . . . It was Grant’s idea, he came to me and said, ‘I think we should make a record,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, great.’ I hadn’t put out an album since 1996, since Warm Nights, so I had seven or eight really good songs.

  The Friends Of Rachel Worth (recorded with Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss) marked a strong, if somewhat tentative return for the Go-Betweens: often the album felt more like two solo albums cut and pasted together than a genuine collaboration. But there was no denying its successor, the sparkling Bright Yellow Bright Orange, released to a rapturous reception in 2003. With the third post-reformation album Oceans Apart hailed as a masterpiece upon its release in 2005, the Go-Betweens are more viable than ever.

  Of the ’90s bands, the two most successful ensembles have continued down their respective paths – one a superhighway, the other a sidetrack. Powderfinger have toured extensively throughout Europe and the UK, selling out shows everywhere on the back of Vulture Street’s release by the V2 label. The band’s extraordinary Australian success may yet be translated to a large-scale international audience. When the Livid Festival grew legs in 2002, travelling to Sydney and Melbourne, Powderfinger headlined over Oasis. For Peter Walsh, the symbolism was obvious.

  Peter Walsh: The original reason Livid started no longer exists. Brisbane doesn’t have to prove anything anymore. The whole thing now has come full circle – that we could go from having to bring local bands back here to exporting the event interstate, with a home-grown band headlining, the statement was too good not to make.

  Regurgitator, conversely, are commercially and artistically back on the borderline. In September 2004, the band holed up for three weeks in a transparent mobile studio in Melbourne’s Federation Square as the stars of a reality television program for Channel V called Band In A Bubble. Although the program was a hit, the resulting album Mish Mash was not, and the group’s status is now in doubt.

  Naturally, new bands have risen and fallen. Not From There, led by expatriate Austrian Heinz Riegler, burst through in 1998 with a stunning single Sich Offnen and a dissonant, intermittently compelling debut album, Sand On Seven. But the follow-up, Latvian Lovers, saw Not From There caught amidships: half electro-pop, half industrial rock, no one knew what to make of it. The band broke up soon after.

  But by far the biggest success story belongs to George. Formed in 1996, the band’s earnest hybrid of jazz, classical and rock seemed to strike a lost chord. Topped by the breathy vocals of Katie Noonan, George’s debut album Polyserena entered the ARIA charts at pole position upon its release in February 2002, going platinum within weeks. The band’s 2004 release Unity showed them outgrowing their early roots as – in co-leader Tyrone Noonan’s description – a ‘Jeff Buckley appreciation society’.1

  Brisbane’s music scene today is not so much a reflection of the city as an indicator of its changing fortunes. With the end of the Bjelke-Petersen era, an insular scene began to look outside for inspiration. Nowadays, when a Brisbane band touches on politics, they are more likely to be addressing the realities of life in John Howard’s Australia (Powderfinger), or the American-led war in Iraq (George), or even the first world’s exploitation of the third (Regurgitator).

  Their endeavours are actively endorsed by the state. Peter Beattie – who currently enjoys a bigger majority than the National Party did when it had the help of the gerrymander – is known to hand copies of the latest Powderfinger and Go-Betweens releases to visiting dignitaries.

  In August 2003 legal advisors for an ailing Joh Bjelke-Petersen submitted an ex-gratia compensation claim of over $350 million for loss of earnings, loss of reputation, legal bills and ‘pain and suffering’ caused by the Fitzgerald Inquiry. The claim was based on the technical premise that the inquiry had been improperly established.

  Labor premier Peter Beattie treated the bid carefully. He had adopted an unofficial policy of rapprochement with Queensland’s past; only days earlier, he had wheeled the 92-year-old Bjelke-Petersen around the redeveloped Lang Park, renamed Suncorp Stadium. His old foe was in the degenerative stages of Parkinson’s disease; for that, if nothing else, Beattie accorded Bjelke-Petersen respect.

  Bjelke-Petersen’s compensation claim was followed two weeks later by another, this time from his former police commissioner. Terry Lewis – paroled in 1998 after serving half his 14-year prison sentence for official corruption – never accepted his jury’s verdict. His attempt to rewrite history was immediately rebuffed: it was, in author Ross Fitzgerald’s words, an insult to the intelligence as much as it was to the citizens of Queensland.2

  After two months, Bjelke-Petersen’s claim was also rejected. The crown solicitor advised the government that not only were the Fitzgerald Inquiry’s legal credentials beyond question, Bjelke-Petersen had been lucky to escape a retrial on perjury and corruption charges. Undaunted, the former premier’s advisors took their claim to Buckingham Palace. They had learned little from the past: not for the first time, Her Majesty declined to intervene in Queensland’s affairs.

  As Bjelke-Petersen’s health declined, another old campaigner continued to cling to life. Improbably, Triple Zed is in better health now than it has been in 20 years. By the late ’90s, equity in the station’s Fortitude Valley headquarters gave it sufficient leverage to purchase a one-third stake in Broadcast Park on Mt Coot-tha, a joint venture shared with classical broadcaster 4MBS and Christian network, Family Radio. A 12-kilowatt transmitter and a tower reaching over Mt Coot-tha’s tree line enabled Triple Zed’s signal to be beamed clearly throughout Brisbane for the first time.

  Slowly, the station began to adopt a more pragmatic approach to its future. After years of bitter infighting and inaction, the collective slowly died away. Triple Zed’s manager and promotions coordinator are both paid for their efforts, and while the quality of the station’s output
still varies wildly, it has successfully applied for government funding for a range of employment training programs. The station’s old siege mentality is gone: a belated adjustment, one might say, to no longer living in a state of siege.

  Brisbane today is a very different place from what it was even a decade ago. Not even its harshest critics could accuse it of being a big country town, but neither is it an international city on the scale of Sydney or Melbourne. Not yet.

  Jim Soorley – whose 12-year administration did much to transform the city’s visage – left office pushing for the construction of a horrendously expensive tunnel under the Brisbane River; now, a new lord mayor, Campbell Newman, is promising to build five of them. He may yet be serious. By the middle of the century, Brisbane is predicted to be a vast urban sprawl of over 5 million people, linking the Gold and Sunshine Coasts.

  Stoked by a growing population, a protracted boom in the property market has placed intense pressure on Brisbane’s few remaining landmarks. After hosting the reformed Blondie one last time, Festival Hall was pulled down in August 2003 to make way for another block of luxury apartments. For some, the demolition of the old boxing pavilion turned music venue was all too familiar: while Festival Hall’s architectural significance was hardly on par with Cloudland, its rich social history was undeniable.

  As the population has filtered back from the suburbs to the inner city, venue operators have been faced with growing noise complaints from residents, even around the traditional nightclub strip of Ann and Brunswick Street in Fortitude Valley. Recognising the resource on its doorstep, in 2001 the Brisbane City Council commissioned an independent study into how best to protect and promote the city’s music culture.3

  Otherwise, Brisbane is, well, relaxed and comfortable. The culture has changed. Grant McLennan, who returned to Brisbane in the mid ’90s, found himself as impressed as he had been so many years before, after leaving Cairns to come to boarding school.

  Grant McLennan: You could actually get a handle on the scene here. You didn’t have to sneak around anymore; there was almost a bit of an infrastructure happening. There were art galleries. There were people talking about writing. There was even a writers’ festival! And it’s a beautiful town, as well. I love river towns, I always have.

  Writers have indeed played a role in the renewal of the city’s self-image. While Andrew McGahan’s Praise and Last Drinks captured the paranoia and disturbance of the Bjelke-Petersen years, Nick Earls’ suburban love stories – especially Zigzag Street – pinpointed a lighter, cheerfully self-deprecating consciousness. The two novelists contrasted in much the same way as the Saints and Go-Betweens before them; Earls even named one of his books, Bachelor Kisses, after a Go-Betweens song.

  Nick Earls: I think writing was always going to be it for me, but [the Go-Betweens’ third album] Spring Hill Fair was the signal that you could come from Brisbane and still have an impact. It’s interesting that it wasn’t a novelist; it’s interesting that it wasn’t David Malouf, and I’m not sure why it wasn’t. Perhaps because he was of my parents’ generation.

  By 2001 recognition for Earls’ novels was so high that the author starred in a council television campaign that sold Brisbane back to Brisvegans. This wasn’t just a warm, comfortable, laid-back city. No, it was a creative, exciting, happening place. The weather wasn’t just beautiful one day and perfect the next. Frankly, it was hot out there. Now you could go to a gallery, go to a restaurant, go see a band, play in one yourself.

  No one was about to stop you trying.

  notes

  Introduction – Know Your Product

  1.See R McLeod, ‘Young Identities’,

  http://www.breakmyface.com/bands/youngidentities.html

  2. I McFarlane, The Encyclopedia Of Australian Rock And Pop, Sydney, Allen & Unwin 1999, p. 706.

  3. A McGahan, Last Drinks, Sydney, Allen & Unwin 2000, p. 73.

  4. Quoted in A Stafford, ‘Dream Believer’, Rolling Stone (Australia), May 1997, pp. 23–24.

  Chapter 1. A Million People Staying Low

  1. P Burgess, quoted in S Harris, Political Football: The Springbok Tour of Australia 1971, Melbourne, Gold Star 1972, p. 13. This notorious incident occurred during the Springboks’ 3 August match in Toowoomba, on the Darling Downs. A 21-year-old student demonstrator, Brian Tovey, had his nose broken in the unprovoked assault by a rugby union fan. Despite the assault occurring directly in front of numerous police and the identity of the assailant being known, no charges were ever laid.

  2.P Charlton, State Of Mind: Why Queensland Is Different, Sydney, Methuen-Haynes 1983, p. 16.

  3.Charlton, p. 75, and H Lunn, Behind The Banana Curtain, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press 1980, pp. 121–123.

  4.Charlton, pp. 138–139.

  5.ibid., p. 139.

  6.A McGahan, Last Drinks, Sydney, Allen & Unwin 2000, pp. 143–144.

  7.H Lunn, Joh: The Life And Political Adventures Of Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press 1978, pp. 14–15, 24–25.

  8.ibid. p. 27.

  9.R Fitzgerald, From 1915 To The Early 1980s: A History Of Queensland, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press 1984, p. 245.

  10.E Whitton, The Hillbilly Dictator: Australia’s Police State (Revised Edition), Sydney, ABC Books 1993, p. 10.

  11.Fitzgerald, p. 261.

  12.Lunn, Joh, p. 255.

  13.Harris, p. 135.

  14.Lunn, Joh, p. 93.

  15.ibid., p. 94.

  Chapter 2. Guerrilla Radio

  1.See ‘FM In Australia: The Background, The Future’, Radio Times, vol 1.1, December 1975, p. 6.

  2.J Tebbutt, ‘Constructing Broadcasting For The Public’, in H Wilson (ed) Australian Communications And The Public Sphere: Essays In Memory Of Bill Bonney, Melbourne, Macmillan 1995, p. 130.

  3.ibid., pp. 128–129.

  4.Edited transcript of John Woods’ opening speech to mark the birth of (then) 4ZZ, 8 December 1975. This speech, plus an extract from its parallel three years later on 15 December 1978, was replayed on 4ZZZ (along with the Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again) on 20 November 2001, as a tribute to Woods after his death from leukaemia.

  5.‘News And Information’, Radio Times, vol 1.1, December 1975, p. 4.

  6.R Fitzgerald, From 1915 To The Early 1980s: A History Of Queensland, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press 1984, p. 571.

  7.ibid. pp. 571–572.

  8.‘In Depth’, Radio Times, March 1976, pp. 12–13.

  9.‘4ZZZ High Power’, Radio Times, vol 1.6, May 1976, p. 11.

  10.Brisbane Women’s Media Group, ‘Triple Z: Maintaining Credibility or, Did Homogenised Radio Turn Sour?’, Hecate, vol 3.1, February 1977, pp. 110, 113.

  11.11. G Williams, Generation Zed: No Other Radio Like This, Brisbane, Kingswood 2000, p. 76.

  12.‘Top Ten’, Radio Times, January 1977, p. 13.

  13.‘Music’, Radio Times, vol 1.1, December 1975, p. 5.

  14.Anon, Letter to the editor (with reply by Michael Finucan), Radio Times, October 1977, pp. 8–9.

  15.‘Pick Of The Platters Of ’77’, Radio Times, January 1978, p. 9.

  Chapter 3. The Most Primitive Band in the World

  1.C Walker, Stranded: The Secret History Of Australian Independent Music, Sydney, Pan Macmillan 1996, pp. 9–10. Additional biographical detail on the Saints was drawn from this source.

  2.ibid. pp. 11–12.

  3.ibid. p. 19.

  4.D Kimball, ‘The Saints: The Most Primitive Band In The World’, 2000. URL: http://saints.binke.com.au/bio-2.html. This site was also an additional source of biographical information.

  5.J Ingham, Sounds, 16 October 1976, p. 37.

  6.Walker, p. 22.

  7.V Johnson, Radio Birdman, Melbourne, Sheldon Booth 199
0, pp. 93–94.

  8.Kimball, URL: http://saints.binke.com.au/bio-4.html.

  9.I McFarlane, ‘Memories Are Made Of This’: liner notes for The Saints: Wild About You 1976–1978, Raven 2000.

  10.ibid. McFarlane lists the track sequence on the master tape box dated 25/10/77 as follows: (side one) Orstralia; Lost And Found; Perfect Day; Run Down; A Minor Aversion; Private Affair; (side two) No, Your Product; New Centre Of The Universe; River Deep, Mountain High; Untitled; Misunderstood; Do The Robot. These sessions have been released on the All Times Through Paradise box set.

  11.C Walker, ‘Ed Kuepper: Exile From Main Street’, Rolling Stone 468 (Australia), March 1992, p. 58.

  Chapter 4. The Striped Sunlight Sound

  1.D Nichols, The Go-Betweens, Sydney, Allen & Unwin 1997, p. 24.

  2.Forster discusses his taste in cover versions in Nichols, pp. 21–22.

  3.Nichols, pp. 36–37.

  4.These are now available on CD as 78 ’til 79: The Lost Album and include both Able Label singles as well as the two recordings made for Beserkley.

  5.Nichols, p. 88.

  Chapter 5. Task Force versus the Brisbane Punks

  1.R Fitzgerald, From 1915 To The Early 1980s: A History Of Queensland, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press 1984, p. 572.

  2.Former police constable Michael Egan gave this quote after resigning from the force following a demonstration in March 1979. This and figures for numbers of arrests and charges are both cited in Fitzgerald, pp. 573 and 575.

  3.Fitzgerald, pp. 583–584.

  4.This is of course not the same band as the Sydney group formed in the 1980s.

  5.C Walker, Pulp, No. 1, 1977, p. 9.

  6.Walker, Pulp, Nos. 3 and 4, 1978, p. 4.