ictv episode 5: beyond birdman
(Clicks through to YouTube to view…)
RAY AHN (HARD-ONS): Even back then the Australian stuff really impressed us because it seemed to be a lot more savage than the stuff from overseas. Like, the Dammed and the Ramones were awesome bands, but their sound on record was very produced and clean whereas the Saints was so in your face, and X, legend has it, it was recorded in 9 hours, which was just like amazing. LOBBY LLOYD: Oh, that was very exciting, I mean X were really vibrant, I mean they had something musically and lyrically, Rilen’s a great writer and Lucas, what a singer, the only thing I can say that was kind of like X, was Black Flag, and that was Henry Rollins’ band, I saw them a couple of times in America and they were a bit more punky than X. What X were doing was more in your face, more unusual riffs, strange songs… I mean when you’ve got charming lyrics like “I wanna get the dole and whack it up my arm, I don’t wanna go out, I don’t wanna go out” and all that sort of stuff, it’s pretty crazy stuff, they were very exciting, the majority of what was happening in Australia when I came back was Angels, Cold Chisel, Rose Tattoo, Icehouse and all that, well that was kind of what was happening everywhere else in the world, that was kind of general fare … but in the underground here there was always something happening. BRUCE MILNE: I think Australian music in the '80s offered a lot, a lot of records sold really well overseas, and Citadel needs a lot of credit for that, a lot of their records became very important records to people, the Citadel label. Rob Younger's production sound is still not given the recognition it deserves. ROB YOUNGER: I hear a lot of people say… they use something as an example of someone’s influence by us and I can never even bloody hear it, I don’t know what they’re talking about. They said the Sunnyboys were Detroit and that Radio Birdman was a big influence, but I mean Jeremy Oxley told me that he’d never even heard us when he started that group. PETER OXLEY (SUNNYBOYS): When Jeremy came to Sydney, we formed the Sunnyboys, I was 20, he was 19. All of a sudden we played our first show and Lobby Lloyd heard us rehearsing and said, Hi, I’m Lobby Lloyd, and we said, Who? We eventually figured out he was a guitar legend from the 60s. |
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LOBBY LOYDE: The Sunnies had an awesome sparkle to them, the first time I heard them, they walked in the rehearsal room, we used to have a tiny place in Bay Street, and the Sunnies walked in a played a couple of tunes and you could hear it through the walls … all the bands who were sitting around waiting for their turn in the rehearsal room (there were three rooms) were sitting around listening to it … and they were actually putting it down because it was pretty shiny, vibey, Beach Boy-ey kind of stuff, but it was absolutely amazing, it was kind of hypnotic and there was something about that Jeremy, man he could play great guitar, he could sing great songs, they were a great little batch of writers, great band. DAMIEN LOVELOCK: I wanted to have fun and there had been nothing, there’d been no sort of credible ground-level music scene in Australia as long as I’d been alive and suddenly there was this thing in Sydney and there was like six or seven venues in the inner city and they had three bands on, four nights a week, and everybody was going to them, every night you got there and people would go to three different venues in one night and see eight or nine bands, it was just so exciting, so much energy, so much stuff happening. PETER OXLEY: All of a sudden within eight months of our first show we had a Top 20 album and Top 20 single. We were still in the high school rock band mode, didn’t know what to do or how to deal with it. Inevitably we fucked up quite a bit. JOHANNA PIGGOTT (XL CAPRIS): It was disrespectful, it was about being funny, I think. It didn’t take itself seriously, musically particularly. I mean we couldn’t even play. We were just thrashing around making an incredibly loud noise. And I guess – actually what happened was that we suddenly – we were just thrashing around in our living room and suddenly we saw our name up on a poster one day and there we were playing in a pub. And then the next thing that happened is that, you know, Midnight Oil got us to support them, because we were as loud as they were. So kind of we stumbled in, you know, almost by accident. |
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JOHANNA PIGGOTT: It did become quite serious. See one of the big things about that time too, was that girls came in that weren’t – you had girls other than your belter sort of good looking singers. Actually coming into bands. And that was a big thing. And you had the guys in my band encouraged me to write. I didn’t think I could, I didn’t think I was a good enough musician. So they encouraged me to write. And yeah, off I went and ended up writing serious pop songs, if there is such a thing. All I can say is, it was very funny, the characters around at the time – Ian Rilen, you know, the guys in our band – it was just hilarious. I mean we just laughed for about three years. IAN RILEN: It was time for X to have a bit of a break and I bought this beautiful guitar and it sounded the way it sounded, and I started writing songs on that, sort of different to X, you know, bought this keyboard for my children and Stephanie just sort of walked past one day and played this note and it just fitted perfectly with what I was doing so I got here to do it again and we wrote a song together and formed Sardine, Sardine V. I thought Sardine really had everything… the music was good, it looked fantastic and it was a seemingly a well-behaved band, you know, you could take it anywhere and it wouldn’t upset too many people. When I rehearsed Sardine at home I had no problem at all, at the odd time that X would come in and rehearse wed have police banging on the door and there was no volume change it was just the music you’d have cops on the door, old ladies screaming… |
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