ictv EPISODE 8: PLAY FASTER!!

CW: Of course the idea that punk was a genre was always totally missing the point to me - punk was an attitude and that meant it couldn’t be restricted to three-chord thrasherama a la the Ramones; it was more than possible that DIY almost semi-acoustic, songwriterly acts like the GoBetweens were more punk than punk. Certainly, for me, bands like the GoBetweens, the Triffids, Tactics, lots of others, became interesting due to their interest in pushing the whole game of songwriting, and the way they bent their music into different shapes to cohere with that. See my guitar starring in this clip from Countdown...

GRANT MCLENNAN (GOBETWEENS): Well I can talk without too much bias because I didn’t like those first singles, so if I can step back and see Robert Forster as a songwriter and what his contemporaries were doing, he had an attitude which…. is still ahead of the game to some degree now you know, literate, melodic, quite traditional in some ways pop music, and Australia, let’s face it, even from those days, Australians love hard rock, it’s very big, make a lot of noise a lot of bottom-end, get the booty moving sort of thing. Whilst I enjoy that as much the next person, I do like a little bit of an alternative, and for a long time people would yell at us to turn it up, which I’ve always thought was a good thing for a band.

That song “Cattle and Cane” was very much I guess a reaction to where I’d grown up living in North Queensland, living near the coast and being surrounded by a sugar cane farms and then moving out to a cattle station and just being surrounded by Hereford cattle and dirt roads and then finding yourself in London at 20, 21 playing music and playing such personal music it really became our armour in a way we could always fall back on this song.

The Brisbane sound thing I was talking to Dave McCormack from Custard about this, and he was a big fan of the Go-Betweens, and there’s a lot of bands that dedicate themselves to songs basically, so there’s not a lot of flash, not a lot of soloing, it’s play the song and have lyrics that you think mean something, there’s a sense of humour, there’s also a lightness of touch sometimes, there’s a subtlety there, you know, we don’t have a Superjesus but Powderfinger can hammer it as hard as anyone, but there’s a melody. I think in general melody is very important to Brisbane groups, but the Brisbane sound is still in your face set up in your lounge room, like I’ve been going to some parties and you can set up in your lounge room and just play and its exactly like it was in 1978, same Vase amps, little drum kits, little mics hanging from coat hangers and people doing the frug, I love it, you know, it’s lovely.

LINDY MORRISON (GOBETWEENS): That is my theory and so the kind of culture of music in the 70s was really a male culture and we had the Sports and we had the Angels, Cold Chisel and for someone like me it was very difficult, I was obsessed with female culture and it was very difficult for me to identify. Punk allowed women, as everyone would know, access to the stage, it was no different in Brisbane and I quickly joined up with three or four lesbian women who had a band called Xiro, it’s the same idea.

DAVID MCCOMB: As to how our music was received in pubs depended on the crowd. If we were doing support for a band that was perceived as a local punk band, like the Scientists or the Victims, we were perceived as a punk bands then.  There was a heavy skinhead crowd in Perth and we did do many shows where we’d do 45 minutes to an hour of basically, you know, 60/80% of the crowd just giving the fascist salute and siegheilling constantly throughout the whole dance floor throughout the show. I thought it was disgusting, and I thought it was ... we had a female keyboard player at the time, and it was just “get your tits out,” and she had to go through all that stuff, you know... and all those guys are now very much you know, in the insurance business and, you know, in middle management and things like that.