After an extremely long genesis due mainly to publisher problems, my eleventh book, Suburban Songbook, is finally now out, through my own imprint GoldenTone and available to buy here or from selected good bookshops and record shops in the major Australian capital cities.

Its protraction has happily only made it a better book, and thanks to a great team numbering general manager Nick Shimmin, print wizard Murray Bennett and designer Carl Breitkreuz, it is a work of art in its own right as well as a book I’m confident will open people’s eyes to a fullness of Australian music history hitherto underappreciated.

The book was produced and manufactured with money raised through a GoFundMe campaign run by Nick, and so thanks too to the many people who signed on to pre-order copies, making the whole thing possible in the first place.

​As an all-new new book in the wake of the reissue of a new expanded edition of my 1996 book Stranded earlier this year, it is designed to get me back in the ring after the “Deadly Woman Blues Fiasco” of 2018, and I trust it will be judged only on its own merits. This is the least that any convicted criminal can expect, that if you’ve done the crime and done the time, you start a fresh new re-start…

​The palpable idea to write Suburban Songbook probably coalesced around the early/mid-2000teens. The manuscript just sort of built up around me, on this idea I’d long been interested in because it seemed so important yet all but undocumented. In mid-2017 I signed a deal with a new independent Australian publisher – and that was my first mistake. The original plan was to put the book out towards the end of 2018, after DWB. That that didn’t happen then was actually less a consequence of the fallout from DWB than that the publisher, now amid the rigor of actually producing a book, revealed he just wasn’t up to the task. So I had to exercise the termination clause in our contract and walk…

​I flailed for a while, with a virtually complete book in hand and nowhere to take it given I’d been cancelled, blacklisted by many local publishers, and it wasn’t till my friend Nick Shimmin, aware of my trevails, approached me with the idea to do what we’ve done. 

Which Nick saw as do-able after he’d met Murray Bennett, whose professional career is as a commercial printer but with a personal passion for music generally and a sideline passion for printing beautiful music books, with credits behind him like his own Product 45, Donald Robertson’s Roadrunner anthology The Big Beat and John Foy’s chronicle of Red Eye Records, Snaps Crack Pop.

Suburban Songbook completes a circle, for me, that started 40 years ago with Inner City Sound, and it carries on a tendency that’s only more recently fully emerged in my work: Using images to tell stories as readily as words.
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As a work of art in its own right, a beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated book of a type that most publishers have given up on these days, Suburban Songbook is devised to capture/evoke an era, or rather track a period in time that marked a few successive eras with all their shifting moods and mores. I never wanted to illustrate the book with all the same old dodgy old photos of all the same old bands we’ve seen a million times before. 

By using the sort of imagery the book does – mostly drawn from the public domain of copyright-free old advertising ephemera and commercial art; although it does include more than a few signature original artworks, with all due credit paid to and clearances obtained from their creators like Martin Sharp, Stewart MacFarlane and Glenno Smith (and myself!) – the imagery works as an ancillary to the text that opens out the associations and thus only adds breadth and depth to the book’s meaning/s.

Similarly, the accompanying chapter-by-chapter playlists on YouTube and Spotify - just search for Suburban Songbook as a playlist - are designed to further enhance the experience. My thinking always was, you can siddown and read the book to the tune of a Spotify list and then, to give it all your attention, siddown and watch the playlist of videos on YouTube, which was assembled according to one rule of thumb, which was that they must be live-action clips. I’d love to have produced an anthology album on CD or vinyl like I’ve done in the past for Inner City Sound, Buried Country and other books, but those days sadly seem to be past…

But the core remains the book, and it’s another credit I’m delighted to accord, to Carl Breitkreuz, who was both a joy to work with (especially during a time of such duress for him personally) and who delivered such a magnificent result. Onya Carl and I hope this isn’t our last collaboration!

I was recently asked to contribute a page to this new website that is of course essentially a marketing tool for books and writing. And so even if I’ve never been terribly enamored of what I call the listomania that infects the internet, I thought that nominating my Top 5 Australian music books was at least something not already done to death, and was all in a good cause (promotion, self or otherwise); and then I was totally tipped over the line when I asked if the list could include out-of-print titles – because if it was restricted to only the here and now, that would not genuinely reflect my opinion of the best – and they said, Sure. The ‘Buy’ link, in those cases, goes to second-hand copies...

It’s always a shame, of course, when good books are allowed to slip out of print, but as I myself know only too well, if a groundswell of interest clearly builds up whether, say, in spiraling collector’s-item prices, or in on-going discussion, then that can lead to a book getting back in print… so this feature, I think, is an all-round good thing, and while I will list below my Top 5, in chronological order, you will have to go to the website here to find out the reasons for my choices…

1993 – Glad All Over, by Peter Wilmoth
2004 – Wild About You, by Ian D. Marks and Iain McIntyre
2004 – Pig City, by Andrew Stafford
2009 – Ballad of Blind Tom, by Deirdre O’Connell
2015 – Down Under, by Trevor Conomy

(False modesty, and the site’s rules, prevented me from listing any of my own titles, but if you asked me for a Top 10 without any such caveat, might it comprise these five plus, umm, five of mine?... I wouldn’t dare! – or would I?)

“At least every few pages readers might come across a juicy snippet, whether fact or opinion, and maybe think, Hey, you can’t say that” – this is my favorite line from Kerrie Hickin’s item on Stranded in the May/June issue of Rhythms, which I think is quite a perceptive little piece, and which I’m taking as flattering and with all appreciation (read it here). But this whole thing about me being so contentious and opinionated? I think more than anything it’s a reflection not on me but on just how lame and fence-sitting so much so-called music ‘criticism’ has been for a long time. 

Nobody ever called Lester Bangs opinionated, and while I was loathe to say that for fear I’ll be pegged as even more conceited – comparing myself to the Great Master! – I can’t win anyway and so I said it (“You can’t say that!”) because it’s a fact that like Uncle Lester I have always had a vision for what makes music great and have never been afraid of calling it out when I don’t think it’s great… I mean, what are music critics for? To not warn you against the shit you shouldn’t waste your time (and money) on? To not alert you to the good shit? At least, that’s what I thought it was for. And I also think Stranded has turned on as many people (all round the world) as it hasn’t – and is still doing so with this new edition 25 years after the first, which I think is a pretty good result, just to still be here after that long…

​Next week I head briefly to Brisbane and there, on Wednesday March 17, I will be doing a Q&A event regards the new Stranded (Expanded) at the fabulous Phase 4 record store in the Valley. It’s pretty appropriate because if Stranded started anywhere, it was obviously in Brisbane, and up there they’re very proud of the legacy they enjoy that certainly punches above its weight for a city that for so long was a backwater; a city whose coming of age was indeed partly due to the way the Saints blazed a trail out of it..!
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            The artwork above returns to the precise scene of the crime. I created it to go in the aborted Bein’ Gnarly festival in Sydney in 2020, its ‘Girt by Shit’ exhibition component “featuring many of Australia’s punk rock artists.” Call it fan art, based on a lino cut I recall I did at Brisbane Art College in around 1976, a view of the Saints’ old crashpad on Petrie Terrace before they put up the ‘Club 76’ sign – long before the place became a landmark, complete with its own mural – showing the billboard for a travel agency I think it was that was on the roof.

            The illustration of Chris Bailey was then mooted for the cover of the new edition of the book but dropped in favour of Nick Cave, for two reasons – 1) to open out the meaning to suggest the book wasn’t just purely about the Saints, and 2) because Nick has a global identification-factor beyond any other character in the book. Sadly, the Bein’ Gnarly event, organised by the inestimable Glenno Smith, became the first major Covid cancellation for me and many others. And yes, as some have asked me, the ‘Jamie Dunn’ penning that ultra-clueless assessment of the Saints’ epochal single is the old Brisbane DJ who would go on to enjoy an illustrious career with his hand stuck up that TV puppet ‘Aggro’…

           But as the book itself makes plain, in the time in between the Saints and the Go-Betweens in the late 70s and the whole renaissance of the late 80s/early 90s, Brisbane ceased to be a place you had to leave in order to get anywhere… and for me personally I’ve always loved going back, because in Brisbane I have family and many friends, and I just enjoy the place now that it’s so cosmopolitan along with being so commodious as it’s always been. Its music scene is second in this country only to Melbourne’s.
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            Stranded (Expanded) is getting out there and seeming to be going down okay. I’ve done a couple of radio interviews with Neil Rogers for his ‘Australian Mood’ show on 3RRR and with Phil McDougall for his ‘Sunglasses After Dark’ show on 3PBS and you can hear those, as long as the links last, here and here respectively. I also had an epic chat with Aaron Curran that he’s divided into two whole episodes for his fab podcast Unmarked Tracks that you can find here. Don’t forget either, there are Stranded playlists I’m making public in a staggered fashion to accompany each chapter of the book on both YouTube and Spotify, and you can go and see what’s up so far here and here.

            Go to publisher the Visible Spectrum's site for more details, and to BUY, if especially a hard copy, go to Amazon here if you're outside Australia, Booktopia if you're in Australia, and if it's an e-book you're after, go here for a links to all the online retailers.

​            Meantime, with a few other bits and pieces of promo on the horizon, I look forward to hitting Phase 4…

On the eve of the official publication date - February 26 - of the new expanded edition of my 1996 book Stranded, see below here the Visible Spectrum/Dave Laing Publicity press-release: 

STRANDED, CLINTON WALKER'S OVERVIEW OF THE EARLY DAYS OF AUSTRALIAN INDEPENDENT MUSIC , GETS A REBOOT. 
 
AN UPDATED VERSION OF THE CLASSIC 1996 TEXT THAT TELLS THE STORY FROM THE EARLY STIRRINGS OF PUNK THROUGH TO TRIPLE J, THE BIG DAY OUT AND BEYOND, STRANDED (EXPANDED), IS PUBLISHED BY THE VISIBLE SPECTRUM, FEBRUARY 26 2021.
 
FEATURING THE SAINTS, RADIO BIRDMAN, BOYS NEXT DOOR/BIRTHDAY PARTY,  LEFTOVERS, GO-BETWEENS, WHIRLYWIRLD, X, VICTIMS, SPK, LIPSTICK KILLERS, SCIENTISTS, LAUGHING CLOWNS, SEVERED HEADS, SUNNYBOYS, MOODISTS, TRIFFIDS, CELIBATE RIFLES, HARD-ONS, DIED PRETTY, BEASTS OF BOURBON,  NEW CHRISTS, GOD, RATCAT, SPIDERBAIT, YOU AM I, MAGIC DIRT, THE DIRTY 3 and MANY MORE!
 
On February 26, music writer Clinton Walker, acclaimed as “our best chronicler of Australian grass-roots culture” by the Sun-Herald and the author of such classics as Inner City Sound, Highway to Hell and Buried Country, publishes the first of two books planned for 2021 – a new, expanded edition of Stranded, his definitive account of Australia’s 1980s’ post-punk/independent rock scene.

  
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Stranded ruffled a few feathers on its initial publication in 1996 by Pan Macmillan, but was nevertheless widely praised; in the intervening quarter century its boldness and prescience – not to mention its unavailability! – have garnered it an international cult following on a par with books like England’s Dreaming and Please Kill Me. Now it is finally available again via The Visible Spectrum, a new, internationally distributed imprint of Verse Chorus Press, publisher of several major works of Australian music history, including reissues of Walker’s earlier classics.


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This new edition, available in both print and e-book versions, is significantly expanded – the author calls it Stranded (Expanded)! – with a lengthy new foreword and afterword, many additional illustrations, and extensive footnotes that, the author laughs, “now actually tell the whole truth!”

Walker’s eleventh book, Deadly Woman Blues, was the subject of considerable controversy in 2018. A graphic history written and drawn by Walker (inspired by Robert Crumb’s famous Heroes of Blues, Jazz and Country), it was conceived as a companion piece to his universally acclaimed Buried Country (2000), which brought national and international attention to under-recognized indigenous musicians, but was withdrawn and pulped following allegations of factual error and cultural insensitivity. Walker apologised for the errors and the hurt the book had caused, and only after a long period of reflection does he now return to the publishing scene.

Stranded, as Pig City author Andrew Stafford notes on the back cover of this new edition, is “one part stoned memoir, nine parts hard-boiled history.” Walker was no mere passive observer of the scene Stranded portrays, but a full participant. He defied Lester Bangs’ advice and became a friend and confidante of all the dark stars. He was there in Brisbane hanging with Kid Galahad and the Eternals even before they became the Saints and recorded “Stranded;” he saw the Go-Betweens play their first-ever gig as an acoustic duo; he was there in Melbourne every Tuesday night at the Tiger Lounge in the winter of 1978 when the Boys Next Door served their apprenticeship; he put out the fanzine Pulp and presented the 3RRR radio show Know Your Product with Bruce Milne; he wasn’t there in early 1982 when the Birthday Party played at the launch Ken West organised for his first book Inner City Sound, because he was in London, where he saw the Party, the Go-Betweens and the Laughing Clowns make their first international inroads; he was back in Sydney for the halcyon days of the Trade Union Club and the Strawberry Hills Hotel, living those ‘Darlinghurst Nights’ with the Triffids, the Moodists, Beasts of Bourbon, X, the Craven Fops and Died Pretty; he failed an audition to play bass with the Pretties, but did form his own bands the Killer Sheep and (with Primitive Calculator Stuart Grant) the Wild Oats; he was part of the team that launched the Big Day Out in 1991. Along the way he churned out what felt like millions of words on all this for RAM, Roadrunner, Rolling Stone, the Age, Stiletto, the Bulletin, Juice and other media.

Stranded plots this musical course over nearly two decades from punk through to grunge, with the author sharing digs, secrets and needles with his quarry, a generation of post-punk musicians who were so far ahead of the curve for the conservative Australian music mainstream that most of them had to go into exile in the UK before they could return home to (eventually) a hero’s welcome.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted – it remains as provocative and compulsive as it was a quarter-century ago. Fast-paced, plain-speaking, incisive, evocative, sometimes even poignant, it tells the story of an important, almost shamefully neglected chapter in Australian music history that has tended to be forgotten as its most successful protagonists have gradually, finally, been integrated into the larger official history.

It was a time before the term ‘alternative’ entered the lexicon, let alone became meaningless; before the music industry could see ‘niche markets’, so that if you weren’t on Countdown or going down the (middle of the) pub rock road, you were actively resisted; when if you were a female musician, the boys’ club laughed at you or worse, pulled the plug; when there were gigs on every corner in the inner city, and record shops were like salons around which the scenes revolved and out of which grew seminal indy labels like Missing Link, Phantom, Au-Go-Go, Waterfront, Hot, Red Eye and Half-a-Cow, which are as much a part of the story as the bands themselves; it was before grunge ‘legitimized’ fifteen years of obscurity in the wake of the punk/DIY revolution, when the risk-taking went way beyond just musical risks, and drugs, AIDS and the road claimed many; when a generation of Australian bands spurned in their homeland first got taken seriously overseas, and then played prominent roles in laying the foundations for the global grunge/alt-rock revolution to follow…
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Many years later, these artists are belatedly getting the Hall of Fame-style accolades they always warranted, and it seems quite natural that their spiritual heirs – from Courtney Barnett and her Milk Records label to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard and their Flightless empire – find ready acceptance. Clinton Walker was there at the beginning forty years ago, and Stranded gathers his dispatches from the trenches that lay it all bare. It’s a book about culture wars becoming history wars, a glimpse into a lost world that remains a cautionary tale for the present day. It’s about music, people and place, and the talent and commitment it takes to reinvent an art form and to keep butting up against resistance until it’s finally overcome – and it’s also about the price, sadly, that that process so often exacts.
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Clinton Walker’s twelfth book, the all-new Suburban Songbook, is due out later in 2021, but meanwhile Stranded serves as a reminder of his pre-eminent status. How many other music writers have written so many books that, decades after their first publication, are still in print, or are coming back into print, and have inspired albums, documentary films, even touring stage shows? The literature of Australian popular music would be much poorer without Clinton Walker’s work, and now old and new fans alike can enjoy again the brilliantly flawed glories of Stranded. You won’t be able to put it down.

After a few years of laying low in the wake of the ‘Deadly Woman Blues Fiasco’, I am now ready to climb back in the ring again. Later this year will see the publication of my eleventh major work, Suburban Songbook: Writing Hits in post-war/pre-Countdown Australia. Meantime, in February, the Visible Spectrum will publish a new expanded edition of my 1996 book Stranded...

Suburban Songbook was in fact virtually all ready to go towards the end of 2018, but – happily I can say now in retrospect – it was scuttled because relations between the would-be publisher and I broke down. (‘Happily’ because this clown was the worst so-called publisher I’ve encountered in my entire forty years in the game [who is now effectively out of the game for that reason], and happily also because in the interim the book has become so much better, not different but just deeper, more comprehensive and way, way better.) So with the Songbook in transmogrification, when Steve Connell, my long-time American publisher at Verse Chorus Press, approached me last year with the idea of getting Stranded back in print, naturally I was dead keen. Stranded (Expanded) will be coming out through Steve’s new bespoke sub-imprint, the Visible Spectrum. The Visible Spectrum is designed as an outlet for a series of reissues, of ‘classics’, and so I’m just chuffed to be nestling alongside other fine writers and titles in the series like, so far, Susan Compo and David Nichols. Stranded (Expanded) is that, expanded, but in a very particular way: the original ‘integrity’ of the book is not compromised, meaning that the original text is not tampered with save for largely correcting errors of fact, but is appended with extensive footnotes. Which tell the real truth! Just wait!

At the start of 1978, around the time I turned 21, I moved from Brisbane to Melbourne, for a couple of reasons: one, to get out of Brisbane, which after the departure of my mates the Saints in early ’77 had started to seem like a lost city, or empty city (even as it was actually on the verge of exploding all over again); and two, to get more closely involved in putting out Pulp, the fanzine that Bruce Milne and me had launched as a sort of twin-city title during 1977.
            What actually transpired, of course, was in one respect quite the opposite: Pulp quickly folded. But since a reconstruction of the lost, last issue of Pulp #5 that never came out in ’78 has recently resurfaced, or at least what remains of it, I’ve been prompted to reflect on the whole episode.
            To see this reconstruction of the last Pulp, which is thanks to the efforts of Melynda von Wayward and Scotti Henthorn, and which was originally, ostensibly aimed at coming out around the middle of ’78, was something that blew my mind just a little bit. I was looking at what was most of the artworked pages for a fifth issue that I hadn’t seen for forty years and had virtually totally forgotten about – and I thought it all looked quite good!
            Of course, some remnants of Pulp #5 ended up in Inner City Sound, and in fact, it was one of the seeds that drove the conception of ICS in the first place, that here was this final issue of Pulp that had never come out and so why not – I can now reflect and think maybe this was my initial thinking – why not compile it with the previous four issues of the zine, which obviously had fairly limited distribution in their day, and put out a sort of best-of Pulp? But then obviously that idea expanded during 1981, and rightfully, to become what ICS is, which is a general sort of cut’n’paste history-as-it-happened record of the rise of punk/post-punk/indy music in Australia that drew on reprints from other fanzines as well as Pulp, plus reprints of articles from Roadrunner magazine, the new endeavour coming out of Adelaide in 1978 that Bruce and I got involved in that was part of what spelled Pulp’s end, plus reprints too of mainly stuff I wrote for RAM magazine, Australia’s leading rock rag of the day, which I started working for at the start of 1980 after I’d moved to Sydney.
            Up until only recently when I saw the mooted reconstruction of Pulp5 and got involved to help complete it, all I had was the above memory of the genesis of Inner City Sound, and a memory of carting around for years a stack of the artboards that I’d started putting together, pasting up, towards that ill-fated last issue.
            Some of those pages, like the Radio Birdman interview headlined “Radios Talk,” or Peter Nelson’s article on Crime and the City Solution, ended up in ICS as straight reproductions, since that was part of ICS’s agenda, to facsimilise stuff direct from its original publication in fanzines. Some of the other stuff in ICS from Pulp5, like a review by me of the Saints’ second album Eternally Yours, and a feature I did on Suicide Records, were newly typeset and re-artworked for the book, which was something else the book did, with Marjorie Macintosh doing a fabulous job designing it all into an integrated whole.
            But those artboards I knew I carried around for a while – and this was maybe an inch-deep stack of A4-sized stiff-card boards on which the layouts were assembled; because that was how you did it in those days, pasted the type and pictures down on artboards, Bainbridge Boards they were called – I remember them and I remember having them and then I didn’t have them. I didn’t know what happened to them, eventually.
            Well, now I know. They ended up, as did so much more history like them, in the piles of stuff in the backroom at Au-Go-Go Records, the shop that Bruce Milne opened in Melbourne in the mid-1980s. It was most likely there that then-employee Scotti Henthorn happened across them one day in the course of his regular tidying-up duties, and had the great prescience to photocopy them before they went back in the piles thenceforth never to be seen again.
            So, I’m just so grateful that Scotti had that archivist’s prescience back when – and that Melynda von Wayward still has the on-going passion for and dedication to documenting Australia’s punk history that’s driven her to getting this reconstruction of Pulp5 back out into the world. It’s like the way they rebuilt the Beach Boys’ Smile! and I’m just so chuffed that someone, anyone, has enough interest in this that’s part of my legacy to try and keep it alive – wow!
 
So what did actually happen back in Melbourne in 1978? Though it’s still not easy to piece together all the thinking that took place, it is possible to say that basically what happened to Pulp was – Roadrunner!
            I arrived in Melbourne towards the end of February, 1978, just after the Pulp double-issue 3+4 had come out, and straight away Bruce and I started working on a new issue. One of the big ideas Bruce had for it was to include a flexidisc, by the band News, who as the Babeez were probably Melbourne’s first punk-as-such band and one that Bruce, short of actually managing them, had given a lot of assistance to, including on putting out their debut single, “Dowanna Love,” at the end of 1977. Melbourne was electric with new music in the late 70s – which was one of the other reasons I’d moved there, it all just seemed so exciting – and one of the other things Bruce was doing at the time in early ’78 was managing the hottest new band in town, the Young Charlatans. Whose number included my then housemate, Jeffrey Wegener, who was an old friend from Brisbane who’d briefly played drums with the Saints before they left for the UK and he headed south, as I would do too. It was perhaps because Bruce was so busy looking after the Charlatans or perhaps because I had an aptitude for it – or both – that I took over from him on doing the artwork for Pulp. Bruce would readily admit that graphic art is not one of his strong suits.
            In March then, as the first issue of a new zine out of Adelaide, Roadrunner, came out, Bruce and I continued working away on the new issue of Pulp. I was laying out pages on the stuff we already in hand. But we needed money to print it, after Bruce had already shelled out the cash to press up the flexidisc that News had recorded, and that’s why we decided to put on a benefit gig. The Pulp Benefit took place at a short-lived venue in the city called Bernhardt’s (the former Thumpin’ Tum) at the end of April ’78, and whether or not it was successful – and that’s yet another thing I just can’t remember; I don’t remember the night itself, surviving photos notwithstanding – it certainly didn’t keep Pulp alive.
            But I think that by then Bruce and I had been drawn into the larger possibilities that Roadrunner presented, or that we felt it had as it got out a couple more monthly issues, and that’s what really put paid to Pulp. Roadrunner – Stuart Coupe and Donald Robertson – just seemed to have so much greater grand ambition than we did. They were talking about becoming a real rock magazine, like RAM, you know, on newsprint, in newsagents, nationally-distributed, and with advertisers, and I suppose it seemed to us like a shortcut to a place where we wanted to go, piggybacking on the impetus that these guys already had but from their perspective too, joining forces to make for a stronger team. I do remember going over to Adelaide a couple of times and thinking, wow, what a flat, dull little place, it’s even worse than Brisbane! Nevertheless, Bruce and I ditched Pulp, with its fifth issue still incomplete on the artboards, and threw in our lot with Roadrunner. Bruce even moved over there, briefly, to join the RR collective, which he was doubly encouraged to do because by then the Young Charlatans had broken up anyway, but by June he was already back in Melbourne, disillusioned especially by Stuart Coupe jumping ship to take up an offer of a staff-job at Roadrunner’s aspirational-rival RAM up in Sydney.
            But both Bruce and I remained mainstays on the Roadrunner mast-head nonetheless, and after Donald got national distribution for it in 1979, it became a vibrant player on a very vibrant Australian music media scene on the turn into the 80s. And it was only after Bruce got back from that short stint in Adelaide that, a) we started doing the show together on 3RRR that, known as Know Your Product, seemed to have had some impact too, and b) Bruce started working at Missing Link Records and working towards launching his own label Au-Go-Go Records.
            The News flexidiscs that were intended to go into Pulp5, and which contained the song “Sweet Dancer Au-Go-Go,” which was conceived as something of an ad jingle for Bruce’s prospective label but had to stand as just one of the number false-starts the label endured, ended up being included as part of a package that Missing Link’s Keith Glass put out in 1979 as a Babeez/News reissue called Dirty Secrets. Following on from the first News single as such, “Dirty Lies,” which the band put out themselves in ’78, Dirty Secrets contained a 7” comprising two tracks from the three-track first Babeez single, “Dowanna Love” and “Hate,” plus copies of the flexi. The release was itself another false-start for Au-Go-Go if by any other name; the label was finally launched later in ’79, with an EP by Two Way Garden. News broke up at the end of ’78.
The Young Charlatans’ demise was seminal in its own right, with Jeffrey Wegener going on to Sydney to join Ed Kuepper’s new post-Saints band the Laughing Clowns, Rowland Howard joining the Boys Next Door, thus marking their real rebirth as the Birthday Party, Ollie Olsen going on to form Whirlywirld with former News-drummer John Murphy, and Janine Hall going on to join Chris Bailey’s first incarnation of the post-Kuepper Saints.
            As for me, I kept stringing for Roadrunner, and Semper in Brisbane, until the end of 1979 when I moved to Sydney and almost overnight found myself a functioning, professional freelance journalist contributing stuff to RAM, Rolling Stone and the Adelaide Advertiser: My real baptism of fire as a writer.
            But I always hung on to those old artboards from the aborted Pulp5, and soon enough they would feed directly into the conception and execution of Inner City Sound, and that seems, or seemed then, as fitting an end for them as any.
            Yet now they’re back again! and in as full as they can be. I can’t remember if there were any more pages I’d artworked that have been totally lost, but I do remember it was an unfinished work-in-progress when we dropped it – and I’m pleasantly surprised I’m so impressed to see it again now after all this time. I like the critical tack it takes, and I love the way it looks. There’s nothing about it that’s that orthodox punky safety-pins/ransom-note aesthetic that I know for Bruce as well as me palled almost the minute it emerged. It’s just another indication of how far ahead of the global pack that so much that went on here in Australia was. And sad that that headway was so soon lost.
            But we tried.

When I was in Melbourne last week doing a bit of background business, I went in to the 3RRR studios on Sunday night with my old pal Bruce Milne and did a special episode of his regular show Where Yo Is by way of celebrating the show we used to do together on RRR in 1979, Know Your Product. Know Your Product was not so much a punk as post-punk show – because by ’79, certainly as far as we were concerned, the shock and fury of the Class of 77 was already a spent force, and now music, from a clean slate, was opening out again (like the universe itself, music expands and contracts in a cycle with big bangs in between, and punk was a big bang that like any other added whole new dimensions in space, new generic galaxies to the music universe) – and Know Your Product, we'd like to think, well, it was well-remembered for what it did, because people virtually demanded we do this reunion/tribute while we could... here.

​I had arrived in Melbourne from Brisbane at the very beginning of 1978 to continue work with Bruce on our trans-capital punk fanzine Pulp, the first issue of which had come out at the end of ’77. Pulp quickly folded, however, and Bruce left Melbourne to go over to Adelaide to work on our sort of panacea, Roadrunner magazine. I stayed in Melbourne and got a job doing paste-up in the art department of Coles in the city, while I served as RR’s ostensible ‘Melbourne Editor’. I can only say this with certainty now because for sake of this special show, I did something I’d long contemplated, which was go back to the State Library of Victoria and look up the archive of Radio City, RRR’s newsmagazine for subscribers, that started publication in April, 1978, around the same time the station took up residence in a new standalone studio in an old terrace house in Cardigan St, Carlton. Radio City would list the program grid. At long last I could get a bead on the true timeline, and put other things back together around it.

So it’s only now that I really understand that Know Your Product happened in ’79, not ’78, under which illusion I’d long labored. What actually happened was that when Bruce got back from three or four months in Adelaide, after the RR sands had shifted under his feet, we got back together again and went in to RRR to offer ourselves up as volunteer announcers. Bruce had previously, before going to Adelaide, done a bit firstly on 3SW and then 3RMT. It was the formidable Nadia Anderson I remember put us on. Starting in June, Bruce did Thursday nights 10-12pm, a nice slot, then - our routine became - we shot some pinball up on Lygon St,  then we went back to the studio at 2am for me to head my graveyard shift.
             It was a surprise for me to be reminded that I had done a solo shift at RRR in ’78 before Bruce and I came together as an actual two-header to do Know Your Product. But the timeline makes sense and explains other personal stuff besides. What I can’t figure out is how I got enough records to cover four hours every week, but Bruce and I shared stuff and he remembers borrowing stuff from record shops like One-Stop and Missing Link. When us two were doing those Thursday nights, the Saturday morning slot, I was delighted to be reminded, was done by our friend Linda Baron, with a show with ‘Little’ Mark Ryan called Teen Beat. When we all started in 1978, it was a bit of a new incursion on RRR. To us, the station was mostly older, refugees from Melbourne’s theatre underground like the Pram Factory and all that. Folks like us added a new necessary dimension to RRR.

By the start of 1979, Bruce and I were preparing to shift to Saturday mornings. When we opened at 9am on March 3, the show certainly wasn’t listed in Radio City as Know Your Product. It just had the generic ‘Weekend Radio’ tag. It took on the Radio City listing as Know Your Product in May, but I’m certain we’d long referred to it as that and always used the Saints’ track as our theme. 

We did the show all up for four or five months in 1979, the winter basically. It was certainly a time of an extraordinary explosion of new new music coming out mostly on 45, and in a way that makes making a radio show easy. Although that’s easy to say now. But it was, and Bruce and I were reminded of the fact when after forty years we did another two hours together on RRR last week. Hopefully it won’t be the last two hours! We only managed to squeeze in twenty tracks amid all the mad chatter, and there’s still another twenty shows’ worth of tracks you could do just like that, such was the fervidity of the reinvention of rock that took place in that immediate post-punk era. One great record after another every week, mostly singles, some hits but many, mostly, not. But no different to any time when pop generally hits some kind of tipping point and changes.
             Really, because I’ve long just wanted to hear how all the eras of music unfolded, I don’t think the excitement of my blank-generation experience is any greater than any other great flowering, and pop has so many such moments, but obviously for me a period that is my starting point has special import. And sometimes you can be embarrassed by listening back to things you liked, and think how awful they are, or other things you hated and think actually, they’re good. That’s just the ever-evolving brain of a true songcatcher.
             But measure what we can only reconstruct in our memories as to what our playlists were with the RRR charts of the time, and I’d still back our strike-rate. Put it this way. The sign up in the studio in the late 70s that Bruce refers to in the show/lead image above, that asked announcers not to play Elvis Costello all the time, well, we didn’t play Elvis Costello at all! Never been enamoured of him myself, and I know Bruce wasn’t either – too many words crammed into too small a space for me, making for nothing but suffocation – and we didn’t play most of what the station’s charts rated highly either. Didn’t play the Sports, the Cars, I dunno, didn’t play the Clash, didn’t play most everything everybody else seemed to. But did play Ian Dury, other things. We played what we wanted. We thought it was the good shit, the best shit, and we thought that everything else was real shit. We were right and we were wrong. Which is the whole idea and glory of public radio. You can hear all the more detail – and here just a handful of the songs we loved and loved playing – by going here.
            Know Your Product ended, for whatever reason I can’t remember, in July 1979. Teen Beat made a return to the Saturday morning slot and Bruce and I were shuffled around the schedule, Bruce in a sort of promotion back to Thursday nights 10-midnight, and me getting a real booby prize, one of the worst slots in radio, the graveyard shift on Friday night/Saturday morning. Go on air at 2am after being out at a gig or a party or the pub and somehow grind through to 6am. What I remember is being relieved at dawn by Ron Meerbeck and Julie Purvis, who were friends too, who were then followed by Linda Baron with Teen Beat and she was another friend too who, if I remember rightly, shared a house at that time with Julie. So there were more of us sneaking in there. Bruce was followed on Thursday nights at midnight by John Murphy, and Alan Bamford and others had started doing shifts too, and that was the ‘little bands’ scene that was eulogized in Dogs in Space. Most of the rest of the year played out like that until even I got a bit of a promotion, up to Thursday midnights, which meant Bruce and I were back where started, sort of, back-to-back and crossing over on each other’s shows. Playing pinball on Lygon St. I started doing Thursday-midnights in November, but did it only for a month because in December ’79, I moved to Sydney.
            So I went to Sydney and started writing for the major music press and Bruce for one thing,  continued on at RRR. His legendary, pioneering cassette-zine Fast Forward was conceived in and put together in the studio at RRR, which does beg the question as to why it wasn’t stand-alone show in its own right? Then in the latter 80s he and Phil Brophy fronted the legendary, long-running trash-pop culture show Eeek! And now he’s still there at RRR, doing Where Yo Is on Sunday nights – one of the longest serving announcers on the station alongside Johnny Topper and the aforesaid Geoff King – all of which is part of what makes, I reckon, 3RRR one of the world’s great not-just public-radio stations but radio stations period. For me, it did still remain all the Rs - I went from RRR and RR (Roadrunner) to RAM and Rolling Stone. I never went back to radio and now I think that's a bit of a shame. But I sit here at my desk in Sydney writing and streaming the many shows  RRR broadcasts that I love. And now I can stream a podcast that even features me! if you need to be reminded again, right here!

​I am very pleased to be able to say that the Suzi Q documentary is finally now out, after a long four or five years in production, and it is pretty damn good. But how could it be not!? It’s Suzi! She is – well, she’s just Suzi Q and her magic is so spellbinding it even worked in reverse so that Dale Hawkins was able to predict her more than decade before she even hit the scene. Of course, I’ve been a fan since “Can the Can,” when I saw her on the ABC rock show GTK and she explained that she had a star tattooed on her wrist because she was one, a star. ​ 

When old friend Tait Brady, producer at Acme Films in Melbourne, got in touch just recently to invite me along to the Sydney ​preview of Suzi Q, I’d forgotten altogether that I’d something very minor to do with its genesis. The credit I shared with Jen Jewel Brown was for ‘Editorial Consultancy’, which meant I had a look at the script, the material, and offered up my thoughts. Can’t honestly see I did much at all really, but I can see that Liam and Tait have divined a really satisfying delicate balance between a sometimes confrontationally honest family saga and the consequently comparatively almost routine tale of one amazing woman’s determination to make it. 

​That she did so at a time before it had ever really been done merely redoubles the magnitude of her achievement, and is the reason why so many subsequent feminist icons of rock (Debbie Harry! Tina Weymouth! Joan Jett!) weigh in here with such clearly heartfelt admiration. That she did it too in such a sort of punk-prescient way probably explains why she struggled to crack her home market, and why she warrants even more admiration. I’m in love! But then I loved her from the moment I laid eyes on her anyway. And so how could I be anything but delighted to see this fine, fine film. Suzi endeared herself even more at this Sydney premiere by doing a quick Suzi-Q&A after its screening, and showed that her apparent humility, humor and straightforwardness is absolutely for real. ​

My only regret is that when audience-members were asked to offer a three-word encapsulation of this five-foot wonder, I didn’t get a chance to offer mine – simply: Hot, hot, hot! See the film. ​