KILLER SHEEP (+)
Cover photo (St George, Queensland) by Lisa Walker
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Afront El Alamein Fountain, Kings Cross: Michael, James McKay, Astrid, James Scanlon, CW
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“Wild Down Home” was the single on Au-Go-Go Records that my self-proclaimed hillbilly-grunge band the Killer Sheep released posthumously in 1988. I’m just wrapt to have made it onto vinyl, if only once! The Sheep were a Kings Cross band – numbering, as well as myself on bass, guitarist James A. Scanlon (also of the Craven Fops), singer/guitarist Michael O’Connell (formerly of Brisbane bands the Apartments and Xero), and singer Astrid Munday and drummer James McKay. We came together initially to play in a talent quest at the Courthouse Hotel on Taylor Square, must have been around 1986. We were intent on mashing up country music, which we were all smitten by, with the thrashy sound of DIY punk because that was about all we were really capable of on our instruments. What we were kind of going for, I used to like to say, was as if Jesus and the Mary Chain were playing bluegrass. When we started out on all covers, a lot of them you could have more accurately called bluegrass than country songs. In the mid-80s, there was swamp rock, psychobilly and cowpunk all over the place, and I suppose I have to admit we came from that same gene pool. We did “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” but we also did Tom T. Hall’s “Macleay Street in Sydney,” and duets like Waylon and Jessie's "I Ain't the One," which MIchael and Astrid were great at doing. We rewrote Waylon's "Big D" to be "Big T," about Tamworth rather than Dallas. It was like it all started out as a bit of joke and kept on in search of a punchline. Now that I look back on it, we were actually a semi-viable inner-city attraction in Sydney in 1987. We played solid every weekend. We played the Tamworth country music festival in January 1987, in tandem with our sort of sister band, the Honky Tonk Raiders (who eventually morphed into the great Love Me), and we returned triumphant to Sydney to go on to play all sorts of gigs, including residencies at now-storied pub venues like the Hopetoun, the Palace, the Petersham Inn, the Sandringham and the Harold Park. With our other sista act, Doris Dazed, or our brother band the Bum Steers, we did a lot of these places and packed ’em out. Sunday nights at the Hopeless or the Palace, especially after a Swans game at the SCG, were huge. We had a huge amount of fun. I was the worst bass player in Sydney – Australia! the rest of the band would quickly correct me! – but I enjoyed performing and I loved writing the songs I started to write towards the end of the band’s life. We broke up towards the end of ’87 because both Michael and myself were going our separate ways overseas. We cut a number of songs in a home studio in Newtown before that. “Wild Down Home,” the eventual A Side of the single, was one I’d written; on the flip side was Michael’s “Don’t Turn Your Back.” We cut two other songs at those sessions, one a ballad written by Astrid called “Tell Me,” and the other our breakdown version of “I Saw the Light,” which was sometimes otherwise called “I Saw the White Light/White Heat.” The single, which Bruce Milne charitably released on his Au-Go-Go label, might have sold twelve copies, but still went indy Top 20! Michael went on to become a successful businessman in North Carolina; Astrid went on to sing BVs with Paul Kelly and others and release a couple of albums of her own, and happily she still continues to paint (she is a great painter). James McKay now works at the Sydney Theatre Company. And James Scanlon is still James Scanlon, and Sydney would be a poorer place without him and his hat, his dictionary and his umbrella.
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Click to read
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1987 Big T Tour. CW: "And so MIchael, is this how you do an A chord?"
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Even James Scanlon guffaws: "As if!..."
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Ps: WILD OATS & ROC PIGG
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Of course, my music-making career didn’t fully end at the Killer Sheep. In 1988, I formed a band called the Wild Oats with Stuart 'Mr Bum' Grant (formerly of the Primitive Calculators and Bum Steers) and Belinda Cape (Craven Fops' drummer), and we extended the hillbilly-grunge aspect of the Sheep while fusing it with my newfound love of (now-old skool) hip-hop. With Paul Kelly one day after having a kick of the football, Stuart and I co-wrote a song called "Ratbag," which was one of our live favourites and which Paul to this day, despite constant badgering from me, refuses to record. The Oats' great claim to fame was so blowing the Beasts of Bourbon offstage at a show in the back room at the Petersham Inn that we were asked back after them to play our seven-song set again! After that in 1989 I cut some demos as Roc Pigg, with me on vocals or rapping and David Messer and Robert Scott doing the backtracks, a version of “Ratbag” plus a few more of my originals like “King of the Gravy-Makers,” “I’m Clean,” “Sex Roll” and “Future of Our Nation” – and one cover, of Johnny Cash’s “What is Truth?” – but after that I never darkened a studio’s doorstep again, nor the stage.
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PPS: HOLDEN BROS
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Cut this last track in Sydney in 1987 with Geoffrey Datson, in between the Killer Sheep and the Wild Oats, before we embarked, as the Holden Brothers, on a US tour
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