ictv EPISODE 11: HOT STUFF

ROGER GRIERSON: There was a big brick wall all the way round Cleveland Street. If you got beyond Cleveland Street, it was like escape from New York, you know. You’d beg people to take you out to play in the western suburbs, because it was a whole new world, and you’d expose people to this new music, and they’d be instantly smitten and follow you around for the rest of your life. In actual fact what happened was you’d go out to these places, if people did turn up, which on the rare occasion that they actually did, you’d get a dozen people and they’d throw bottles at you. But you know, you proved a point. You’d proved the point that you knew you were right.

You know, we’d comb the Yellow Pages looking for community halls to hire. Obviously, you know, even if you found somewhere they were sceptical, but you’d go as far as you know, Mt Pritchard, down the coast, anywhere you could find. I mean the Heffron Hall in Darlinghurst was one. But traditional rock venues were very patronising towards any kind of new music at all. And again, it wasn’t the multicultural sort of selection that community we live in now was in the days when there was, you know, there was like the music that was on the – there was Top 40 music and anything else was just made by weirdos. You know, Gough had only been in for a couple of years, it was all very new.

DAMIEN LOVELOCK: Well yeah, making it with the Rifles, we started off as this sort of funny little adjunct where we were deliberately suburban, we were deliberately daggy because the one thing that I didn’t like about what happened to punk and like what happened to the hippy thing and like what happens to every movement, the initial people doing it had a kind of a vision, had a set of principles and beliefs and whatever, very quickly every punk band, all you had to be to be in a punk band was to have a certain haircut, and a certain uniform and we didn’t want to do that.

ROGER GRIERSON: The reality was that if you had to, if you wanted to play in a band, you actually – when you had the energy and the enthusiasm, that you had to actually print your own posters, you had to learn how to print the posters, buy the paper, make the screens, print the posters, make the flour and water paste, stick them up, you know. I mean all the little things that you learned about how to organise things, mastering records, how record covers get made, all these things you had to learn. I had no idea, I couldn’t care less how you print a record cover, but I had to learn, because if I didn’t, it wasn’t going to get done. And fortunately, EMI had a custom pressing service, which they did for brass bands and school bands, and those kind of people, football teams wanted to make a record, you could walk in off the street with a tape, they’d press it up for you and give you back the, give you back the vinyl records. And this of course, once we found that, then well we were unstoppable really.