ICTV EPISODE 10: SWAMP A-GO-GO

BRUCE MILNE: I started doing a cassette fanzine which was called Fast Forward and that had really become my focus. But as that sort of fell to bits due to the usual sorts of squabbles, I decided to really concentrate on Au-Go-Go.  I got a partner, Greta Moon, and we did two 12” mini-albums, one by the Moodists and one by the Scientists.  And we really decided then to focus on these groups.

KIM SALMON: The music we tried to do away with structure, it was pretty of open-ended, a lot of improvisation, but it wasn’t like John Coltrane or anything like that, it was done sonically rather than melodically, that was the idea but all done in a rather rock’n’roll way. I guess when we got to Sydney we looked around and saw a lot of bands that were post-Radio Birdman, and we didn’t really relate to that. I mean, Radio Birdman are unmistakably a very influential band but not on us, other than we wanted to be different to what was going on around us, I guess that was their influence on us I suppose, we sort of adopted a look that was different from everything else and the way we got that was we thought if everybody’s got short hair we’ll grow our hair long, ummmmmm, we went to the op shop to find our inspiration and what there was, in the beginning of the 80s, there was lots of 70s clothes, they were all around so we kind of dressed in 70s threads. People though we were kind of daggy but we thought we were pretty cool, that was our look, our sound based on what there wasn’t around, we tried to fill the gap, fill the void.

DAVE GRANEY: They were strange venues that people like Ken West opened up like the Trade Union Club, the Yugal Soccer Club, the Graphic Arts Club, the pub scene was closed to the inner city bands, there was the incident of when the Scientists backed up the Angels and were bottled off stage, that confirmed everybody’s preconception of what life was like outside the inner city.

TEX PERKINS: There was rivalry and there was community. There was certain groups of bands that would… you needed rivalry as well. At the Southern Cross a lot of different bands played there, but bands like the Scientists, well, the Beasts of Bourbon was like the obvious result of that Southern Cross community sort of vibe with a member of the Hoodoo Gurus, a member of the Johnnies, a member of the Scientists. Early on there was even a member of the Church in the band and then there was me, so there again it was falling in with a bunch of people and just getting some results out of that. Seeing what happened. I was  just fortunate to fall in with such a professional bunch of people. There were wronger crowds than that.

KIM SALMON: Looking back historically on the 80s you could be forgiven for thinking it was the worst decade in musical history, but there was actually a lot going on and Oz music was definitely apart of it. There were bands like the Scientists, Cosmic Psychos, there’s a big list of bands, you could name some quite obscure, some well known like the Hoodoo Gurus, a lot was going on. I call it credible hard rock, history would tell you now though that Nivarna and Seattle grunge came out of a void but between that and the Sex Pistols there was a lot of credible hard rock going on and a lot of it in Oz, and I know you for a fact that you’d find Blood Red River, for a start and a few Cosmic Psychos’ records and whatever in the collections of quite a few people living in Seattle.

CW: To me, the swamp thing, which I enjoyed, I enjoyed because there was a lot of country music about it, it was taking punk and applying it to or rather fucking up country music with it. I have to like it! because in this same period in the 80s I even formed a band of my own, the Killer Sheep, who we all considered were a sort of country-grunge band.