Bjelke's Brisbane | Punk | Artschool Dropouts | Out of Here | Surf's Up | Punks in Exile | Rock Snaps | ABC Shop

In 1983, Comedian Austen Tayshus made the country's biggest selling single ever 'Australiana'. Everything in the 1980s in Australia had to be big. For the followers of a small new movement called Punk the challenge was to be heard at all, over the din of excessive self-promotion.

"Australia still needed America or England to tell them what was good." - Nick Cave

This generation of musicians would ask themselves the question: excess or exile?

This was the decade when Australians realised they had something opf which to be proud. Just like the tourist commission, the local music industry was proud of Australia and ready for the biggest challenge of all: selling Australia's bands to the Americans. It was a group of survivors from the sixties who devised the initial marketing strategy: give the Americans something they could relate to - more American music.

Little River Band's world was mellow. A southern comfort zone stuck somewhere in the recent past. But not everyone was into it.

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Bjelke's Brisbane

If LRB's nostalgic sounds held America captive, Queensland's hillbilly premier, Joh Bjelke Petersen, used less subtle methods to keep the sunshine state firmly in the past. The Go Betweens Drummer, Lindy Morrison was part of an inner city Brisbane scene where music was about resistance.

"Queensland was a horrible place to live in. It was incredibly conservative and if you were going to live there and be part of an artistic subculture, you were inevitably going to be radical." - Lindy Morrison

Punk was all about alienation, being out of the mainstream. Even before the Sex Pistols went into the studio in London, Brisbane's own punk band, The Saints, were practising in a garage.

The Saints didn't try to break into the corporate music culture of the late 1970s. They by-passed it. They paid to have their own single recorded and pressed. And they were signed directly to EMI in the UK where punk was about to explode.

"If I remember correctly Ed was actually working in a warehouse and if he hadn't of been working there and if someone hadn't of told him that you could do a custom pressing it might have been different." - Chris Bailey

Their first single 'I'm Stranded' was about being marooned in deep suburban space. Pockets of punk-minded devotees around the country where taking note.

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Punk

"Chris Bailey would sometimes not even come on stage and be singing in the wings in a heap somewhere. Just extraordinary for us to be seeing this, they had a real attitude." - Nick Cave

Nick Cave was to become a very different kind of Australian icon. One who seemed to hate everything about mainstream Australia. His band The Boys Next Door, later renamed The Birthday Party, were a bunch of arty grammar school kids from Melbourne who took to the spirit of Punk if not the politics.

"No one felt they were ever going to get anywhere so you could make the kind of music you wanted to make or you could push the boundaries." - Nick Cave

Some characters worked both ends of the spectrum. At Richmond Recorders in Melbourne, sound engineer Tony Cohen recorded commercial acts by day and underground acts like Nick Cave by night.

The Punk movement called for the total deconstruction of rock music. It was all about individuality. No experience required.

"At Narrabeen we were thrown off the stage. The managers just came and said 'you cant play, you know'. He didn't realise it was hip not to be able to play."- Lindy Morrison

As punk diversified it split into many tribes. The New Wave was rolling.

The corporate culture of 'Cock Rock' was challenged by do-it-yourself bands with tone deaf singers, wimps playing synthesizers, and most shocking of all girls on drums and bass.

"I was an appalling student and there was a course at the CAE in Flinders St in electronic music. I was kicked out of school, I was 16 and I signed up with a mate from school, Olly Olsen and we studied under the tutelage of an old [Mebourne] Age music critic called Felix Verda. We played on these fantastic synthesisers, these Moogs and English synthesisers called Putney's, VCS3s that were used by Pink Floyd and they were truly exotic instruments. You couldn't keep them in tune, you couldn't play a chromatic piece with them and they were totally unpredictable so the whole punk thing was a kind a very convenient. We were at a loss to do anything else with them." - Andrew Duffield

Punk was a cultural movement, it was growing and it was subsidised by a unique Government grant. Art School was another form of government aid diverted to fund the new music scene. Mental as Anything were a parody of pub rock with their own take on Australiana.

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Artschool Dropouts

"They didn't do anything. Hung around drinking beer at each other's houses. That's where the band got its impetus from, all that time listening to records thinking 'we can do that'. I don't know where the art came in. Art came in on the t-shirts and album colours later on."- Peter O'Doherty

The art school crowd modified the Punk pose and took it way beyond the garage. They re-invented pop and the three minute song was back. But catchy songs didn't always get played on commercial radio. As the punk generation began to master their instruments, many of their followers had to tune into new radio stations like 2JJ and 3RRR to hear a new sort of Australian song.

Australia's corporate music sector had much the same attitude as commercial radio. To them punk or anything tarnished by it meant commercial death.

'Down Under' was a strange concoction, Australiana with a reggae beat and piercing flute, written and sung by a Scotsman and produced by an American.

"It was very strange because I remember that we had sold a lot of records in Canada and it was a prime example of cultural arrogance. The American record companies rejected the album twice at A & R because they didn't think there were any hits on the record. The record started to get played and even then the record companies weren't too into it. They were going, 'ahh', they didn't like the cover. They thought we were kind of a punk band." - Colin Hay

What Men at Work tapped was that other new phenomenon of the 1980s, the video clip market.

'Down Under' might have been tongue-in-cheek Australiana but it gave the salesmen their corporate soundtrack and for the Punks it was a sign of much worse things to come. Those who couldn't take it anymore chose the road to exile. The Saints and later Nick Cave were the first of many who thought they'd find acceptance and success in London.

Out of here...

"What was going on in Australia at that time was far more interesting than what was going on in London. Far more original groups taking far more risks than what was going on in London. Kind of disappointing." - Nick Cave
"I guess we encountered the last vestiges of British xenophobia." - Chris Bailey

The anti-corporate message of 'Know Your Product' made sure the Saints would never make it really big. They were still stranded somewhere between punk and the pub - even further from home. Back home, the pub circuit was still dominant. But the influence of punk was finally beginning to show. It started in the inner city and worked its way into the suburbs.

Ms Amphlett

Chrissie Amphlett took on the beer barns with a sexually aggressive fashion statement.

"You didn't have to be a really slick singer but you could develop your style. Everything was very possible again and it was raw and you didn't do big guitar solos. Mark and I, we hated guitar solos and we'd sit there with little melody lines in our songs and we were really very focused on what we wanted to do and what we didn't want to do and it was a really great period that bred a lot of creativity. I built up this persona which was a good defence mechanism for me to ward off all these people and men were quite scared of me and I liked that." - Chrissie Amphlett

Surf's Up

Midnight Oil were a band from Sydney's northern beach suburbs with a sober political agenda. They were as punk as a pub audience could handle. They had a serious message delivered in person by a belligerent bald giant.

We didn't hate the suburbs. We didn't decide that once you played in a beer barn you lost all of your credibility. We actually thought that it was a very good place to play."- Peter Garrett

The same surfie crowd went crazy about INXS. They had enough punk attitude to be different and Michael Hutchence looked and acted like a ready made rock star.

"I nearly had to fire him one time, though. Sat him down in front of the band truck and said 'if you don't start helping with the gear..', he was too busy chatting with the girls. We were trying to survive doing pubs, and going along and seeing Cold Chisel and Jimmy and thinking 'you could never get the audiences reaction that they had with Khe San. What could we do?" - Andrew Farriss

Corporate Australia in the Shadows Watching.

Given the corporate studio treatment The Models became the ideal crossover band. Street credibility plus big production values. Their breakthrough single for Mushroom Records was 'I Hear Motion'. The New Wave now got the corporate treatment. Big drums and luscious keyboards were going to sell them around the world.

As colourful musical entrepreneurs boosted their enthusiasm for new bands with generous lines of cocaine, bands like the Uncanny X Men had a lot of fun flirting with the accessories of corporate excess.

"If we had to make an appearance anywhere we'd get a limo, so the kids could see, 'oh well, they're doing well'. You'd walk down the street and 'ah ya poofter', you know. I don't know why I was a poofter but I was, I suppose with the eyeliner and the bangles and the scarves - know what am I saying?"- Brian Mannix

No one called Peter Garret a poofter.

Midnight Oil built a career preaching against the evils of this new yuppie world. To prove it wasn't all talk Peter Garret became a politician and nearly made it to parliament. To Midnight Oil and their party faithful, public radio was the only medium for their message. The enemy was a TV show that represented all that was wrong with the rock industry.

Once again the man in the hat - Molly Meldrum - was everywhere.

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Countdown v. the World

"I don't like my blowing my trumpet of my own show but definitely Countdown became an international known thing. It woke up the Americans." - Molly Meldrum

Everyone used to watch it every Sunday night and go and buy the records on the Monday. At the time there was no national radio broadcaster, no Triple J. It was almost like sport. Few bands were making headway overseas and everyone was proud of them kicking goals overseas." - Greedy Smith

"We cracked a lot of things in US but not the top 40." - Greedy Smith

"We were big in Saskatchewan."- Jeremy Fabinyi

The Mentals made a joke of it but there was serious money to be made from an Australian hit as they discovered when they toured with Men at Work. Even old Rolling Stones went backstage to pay tribute to the new heroes of the Australian wave.

"We played Madison Square Garden, twenty thousand people. It was overwhelming and after, I had to go backstage to hide. Keith Richards comes through the door, walks up and says 'I really liked that'." - Andrew Farriss

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Punks in Exile

While INXS were filling Wembley Stadium, Australia's punks-in-exile were facing the more brutal realities of trying to make it in London. Australian Punks living on the margin could expect little mercy from Thatcher's Britain. Let alone the dole.

A life of drugs and drudgery gave songwriters the space to reflect and create. The exiles explored their own country from a distance. The Triffids 'Wide Open Road' was a subtle search for national identity. The moody music of authentic experience wasn't what the British wanted from Australian bands.

"You got fairly used to the critics mood fluctuating." - David McComb

"Even now it makes my blood boil. The whole attitude the English have towards Australia, it's just this real intellectual snobbery, a lot of it's got to do with our own insecurity, the idea that a colonial society can't actually emerge and develop a sense of itself. There was definitley this attitude that we stunk because we were Australian men and we probably did." - Mark Seymour

What happened to the Triffids happened to many Australian bands who crashed on England's shores.

Corporate Grind

For the exiles that returned the Australian scene was a parody of itself. Inspired by the approaching bi-centenary of white settlement, the video clip makers took to the air. Akubra hats and ugh boots became rock accessories. National sentiment reached truly epic proportions when Glen Wheatley brought Johnny Farnham out of retirement. He re-christened him 'John' then re-invented him as 'The Voice'.

Even a few pub rockers got the corporate treatment. Jimmy Barnes was dragged outdoors to beat the drum on behalf of the 'Working Class Man'. It was a huge hit. Michael Gudinski even hired a punk to write songs for the Working Class man, The Saints' Chris Bailey joined Jimmy at his country retreat.

As they dealt with the record industry many bands of the punk generation had to compromise, change their sound, change their style. The Go Betweens' corporate producers preferred a drum machine to Lindy Morrison.

It wasn't the drugs that killed off Punk. It was constant touring, bad record deals, mad management and musical differences.

Nick Cave for Berlin

Nick Cave was one of the few who survived the decade. He did it by remaining in exile, now in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.

"We were welcomed into an artistic community that had something to offer. They were willing to offer us something which was support and encouragement which we felt we never got in London and certainly never got in Australia."
- Nick Cave
"The Berlin Tourist Bureau even had a postcard of Nick Cave's face, an ad for Berlin. It said 'Nick Cave for Berlin'. Nick sitting in his room, he was even a tourist attraction I suppose you could call it that." - Tony Cohen