ICTV EPISODE 14: HOMECOMING

ED KUEPPER LAUGHING CLOWNS): Once the Clowns overcame the sort of confusion and the resistance to the fact that we weren’t going to be the Saints Mark 2, things started to move along quite well. It was actually, I think it had grown up really quickly. There was suddenly a sort of a real sense of a local musical sort of community. There were a lot of independent locals starting up, people trying to do things for themselves which I always thought was a good aspect of it. I mean, it’s still really hard and, you know, I’m not romanticising it but it was a lot better than it was from …say three or four years earlier.

CHRIS BAILEY: Yeah I think the major difference was that by the time the 80s had come around, the Saints was a very different animal to it was in the late 70s… and a lot of the bands that were coming out of here were the very skinny art rock...  I mean, rock was actually a very bad word to use in England at that time and it was just a drag.

BRUCE MILNE: I think we had such a wonderful period in Melbourne in the late 70s, but once a bunch of those groups went overseas - the Go Betweens were living in Melbourne at the time, Birthday Party - once they moved overseas, things really died down and musical tastes changed and there was the rise of the Culture Club, ABC, the move back to a sort of - almost an ironic, manufactured pop sound.  And the Melbourne live scene, I think there was just for a while there in the mid '80s, there weren't any rock’n’roll bands.

ROGER GRIERSON: I mean that whole us and them mentality lasted for a very, very, very long time. I don’t think that it would have, that really any kind of new music, any fresh Australian music of the remotely anti-establishment type that was picked up by any major record companies, wouldn’t have occurred until eight or nine years after the initial explosion. That’s a long time in pop music. When you’re 18 and it’s 27 before something happens, that’s an eternity.

KEN WEST: I think things like the indie labels were a misguided attempt at not having to confront the big brother industry, we all knew it was almost kind of a failure, doomed to failure the idea of pressing up records and selling them out of the boot of your car, if there had been a decent distribution network it would have changed very quickly but in those days all those label scenario’s were, sell them at the gig and have six record stores in Sydney and four or five in Melbourne that you personally go into when you’re on the road with a box of them selling 50 at a time hoping that you can get rid of them and that’s it. And we all know that while it’s not an unrewarding experience and you make some kind of a profit on your record, ultimately you’re never going to break out of that loop.

DAVID MCCOMB: If you’re U2 you have the financial backup to do that sort of thing, to take stock of yourself and maybe represent yourself,f but for an Australian band, you know, with no government subsidiaries or anything like that, you’re literally having constantly to survive so the idea of taking time off to, you know, take stock of what your musical or artistic direction should be, is completely laughable, you know, you have to be playing, you’ve got to be there at the Dee Why Hotel, you know, the next Friday night to sort of make sure that the whole juggernaught is being paid. So it’s fanciful thinking but I still have hope that in the future, you know, I can do some more things because whatever people say about the death of rock, the death of rock’n’roll, the death of this, the death of that and how such and such a form of music comes in and supersedes and makes another form of music redundant, I’ve a fairly resilient faith in, you know, just the point of intersection where words and music of any kind meet, whether it can be the most outrageous form of noise but if you can still call it a song, it’s got a human voice, backed by some sort of rhythmic noise, that to me is a song and there’s still a long way to go in the exploration of that format.