ICTV EPISODE 1: PROPHETS OF PRE-PUNK

CW: In 1981 I published my first book Inner City Sound. Now, more than 30 years later, it’s come back to haunt me, not only in a new edition but also as a CD and this DVD you’re watching right now. Inner City Sound was basically a scrapbook that plotted the transition of the punk movement in Australia from a seismic blast in the late 70s to the 1980s independent underground that pre-figured the commercial co-option of alternative rock in the 90s.

KEISH (HARD-ONS): Sometime, I think it was 1980 or ’81, Clinton Walker released a book called Inner City Sound, which we all went and bought, and in it, it had interviews with bands that we couldn’t see because we were too young, so we’d go to the record shops and buy records by these bands. That was like a reference book.

CW: Punk in Australia began with two bands, the Saints and Radio Birdman. In the mid-1970s, when rock was all boring old farts like Rod Stewart, Peter Frampton and the Eagles, I was a sort of aging teenage glam rocker getting into even more obscure anti-social things like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and the New York Dolls, which as it happened were having a similarly belated effect on scenes just starting to emerge in England and New York, and I saw both the Saints and Radio Birdman as inheritors of this outlaw tradition.

(There is, incidentally, an ABC Radio National 'Earshot' program called Riot of My Own in which I appear as a talking head, among others, talking about these early stirrings punk, Brisbane and the Saints, and which you can listen to here.)

ED KUEPPER (SAINTS): It really becomes harder and harder to really focus on that, its such a long time ago now… and I suppose the more distance you get from something the fonder your memories become in a way and I’m not sure if that’s totally appropriate 

BRUCE MILNE (MISSING LINK/AU-GO-GO RECORDS): The Saints and Radio Birdman were phenomenally important to what happened at the time: that they were Australian and they got recognition overseas, that they were incredibly different groups.  The sort of tight, hard Radio Birdman were an army sort of push, a juggernaut, and the Saints totally sloppy, messy, went against every sort of rule in the book.

NICK CAVE: It always seemed to be more hardcore how the Saints were, as if it was in their very bones. As opposed to something that was adopted, which seemed to come from the UK music scene…  They just seemed to come out of nowhere and were extraordinary because of that... there’s certain gigs that you go and see… a venue in St.Kilda and it wasn’t the first Saints gig but one of the first, where I stood and watched this thing going on on-stage, and just felt my mind change about things and knew that I would never be the same again.

DAMIEN LOVELOCK (CELIBATE RIFLES): There’s so much history and all the people from Brisbane want to say the Saints did everything, it wasn’t Birdman, and people in Sydney say it was Birdman it wasn’t the Saints – who cares, who cares about any of that stuff? I mean that’s just crap old you know that’s just the detail but I think just sort of culturally when Birdman came out I think it was ’72 or ’73 Whitlam got in, which suddenly we were out of Vietnam, we had a Labour Government for the first time since the middle ages or something and that sense of revolutionary change, that was real palpable stuff and you had Jack Mundy and the BLF I mean there was lots of social action and there was a lot of working class culture that was really happening you know the Union movement and stuff and people supporting it which it all I think largely started around the Moratoriums and so it was a time again of a lot of hope and possibility and rejecting existing structures and forms in society and trying to do your own and do new things.

ROGER GRIERSON (THOUGHT CRIMINALS): You had to take sides. So, so – the impact – well Radio Birdman were fairly established already in Sydney before the Saints came down. The Saints were much more primitive, less thought out, faster, and made Radio Birdman look a little bit, look a bit more American. Whereas the Saints did actually have the whole buzzsaw thing going on. Which was of course the sound of the times. And initially I think the shock of seeing the Saints doing what they do made Radio Birdman just look a tiny bit dated at a time when in our lives in pop music, two or three months was an eternity. So suddenly they had a smidgen of 1975 in them, oh forget it, it’s like they’re old hat now. These guys – this is the new thing. But of course, you know, that’s just a phenomenon when you’re a kid that every, a couple of months goes by and suddenly the whole thing’s different.

ROB YOUNGER (RADIO BIRDMAN): We had a real distain for all the shit that was around the place, we…  perhaps we were… our aspirations were a bit lofty but there was no energy about the place, it was all blues bands or pop on the radio that we found was pissweak, and we just thought we could do better, we just thought we had something going, we felt something inside that was... that we thought was at least going to be entertaining for us.

RON PENO (DIED PRETTY): I just remember seeing that Radio Birdman had won the RAM competition and all that sort of malarkey, and I was staying on the central coast and I wanted to come down and find out who this band was. This fabulous singer with hair down to his knees and looking absolutely wonderful, and I liked the sound of their music because I was listening to the MC5 at the time and the New York Dolls also. So when the band was starting to play this sort of music in Sydney at this little club, I came down to Sydney with a friend and we just went wild, it was great, it was just a real eye opener.

ROB YOUNGER: At the time of the punk thing in England, you know, like, we arrived there in February ’78 so it was really happening there. We didn’t consider ourselves to be punk and I mean a lot of things about it, you know, we were aligned with the punk thing in Australia because of, you know, the high energy or the fast songs, you know, jumping around and all the rest of that, but when we were there it was pretty obvious from our appearance and really the nature of our music, at least on record, that we didn’t kind of sound like the English or the American bands all that much, you know.

BRUCE MILNE: I thought at the time when these sort of records were coming out, I remember hearing the first Ramones album, and thinking, oh my god, I'm actually here at a point, what it must have been like when someone heard Elvis Presley for the first time, or someone heard the Beatles for the first time, this is my - music will never be the same again.  And, of course, it didn't quite happen like that.  It didn't sort of take over the world but I thought at that point, all the rules were out the window.  The Rod Stewarts are dead, the Little River Band, they are all wiped out, you know

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