There’s a classic Looney Tunes cartoon where Daffy Duck presents an act no other performer ever dared to emulate. Warning those with weak constitutions to leave the theatre, Daffy – dressed in a Lucifer onesie – consumes gasoline, nitro, a “goodly proportion” of gunpowder and uranium-238, then swallows a match and blows himself to smithereens.
Cheered for an encore by an impressed Bugs Bunny, Daffy’s ghost delivers the punchline: he can only do it once. Such was the fate of the Hoodoo Gurus’ Dave Faulkner, who said much the same thing of his band’s legendary first album, Stoneage Romeos. “I look back at it with a bit of awe myself,” he told Double J this year. “You only get one shot at that moment.”
It’s not unfair to say Faulkner has never made an album to hold a candle to Stoneage Romeos, largely because he never wanted to. Like Daffy, he blew himself up on debut with a collection of songs as lurid as the album’s dinosaurs-and-cavewoman cover. Where do you go after a record featuring necrophilia (Dig It Up), a volcano sacrifice (Leilani) and Cyclone Tracy (Tojo)?
Forty years after its release, Stoneage Romeos’ twist on the trash aesthetic has only grown in stature, casting a long shadow over the Gurus’ excellent subsequent body of work. While the album won best debut at the 1984 Countdown awards (the forerunner to the ARIAs), its subject matter meant the band was sometimes viewed a novelty by critics and the wider industry.
Yet the Gurus had impeccable late-’70s punk credentials. Faulkner and drummer James Baker had started their careers in a Perth band called the Victims, producing an unforgettable single, Television Addict. Guitarist Brad Shepherd had led Brisbane’s Fun Things, who had their own fabulously belligerent self-titled four-track EP.
The band came together in Sydney as Le Hoodoo Gurus in 1981, with Faulkner and Baker joined by another Perth punk émigré, Rod Radalj, and Kimble Rendall, originally of XL Capris. Inspired by the Cramps’ campy voodoo rumble, there was no bass player. It was this lineup that recorded the band’s debut single, Leilani.
Rendall left to pursue a successful career in film, while Radalj defected to form the Johnnys. The recruitment of Clyde Bramley on bass gave the Gurus a third dimension, but getting Shepherd gave them a fourth and fifth: the guitarist’s playing encompassed everything from surf and spaghetti western to psychedelia and blasts of white-hot punk noise. The re-tooled lineup quickly re-recorded a much punchier version of Leilani to find its rightful place on Stoneage Romeos.
It was Radalj’s departure that inspired Faulkner to write I Want You Back. Like Steve Harley’s Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me) – a song directed at his former bandmates in Cockney Rebel – Faulkner was telling Radalj: you’ll be sorry! The barbed sentiment was disguised in a sublime power-pop tune.
It sounds like a love song, until you realise it’s actually a kiss-off. It was the fourth and final single from Stoneage Romeos, and its video features toy dinosaurs singing backing vocals. The third single, My Girl, undercut its classic boy-girl ’60s-pop feel with a video featuring a champion greyhound called Defiant Lee as the “girl”.
That’s Stoneage Romeos – an album where the apparently sincere songs are not all they appear to be, and the ironically intended songs are everything they appear to be. The most notorious, Dig It Up, took the Cramps’ gravedigger shtick to new depths – six feet underground:
I take her flowers each day
And I place them over her grave
I want her back, because I look so bad,
So bad in black (like a maniac)
The album’s closing track, I Was A Kamikaze Pilot, could be interpreted as a metaphor for how Faulkner saw as his likely career trajectory:
Taught how to take off, I don’t know how to land
They say it doesn’t matter and I just cannot understand
I was a kamikaze pilot – they gave me a plane
I couldn’t fly it home
Perhaps it helps (or perhaps it doesn’t?) to know where the Hoodoo Gurus were coming from. The title of Stoneage Romeos is taken from the Three Stooges, while the cover nods to a 1966 B-movie, One Million Years BC. The album is dedicated to the Get Smart! characters Larabee and the Groovy Guru, as well as Arnold Ziffel – the pig from Green Acres – “and his tailor”. The Gurus were taking junk culture and elevating it to high art.
Then there were the musical inspirations. Besides the Cramps, the album’s opening cut (Let’s All) Turn On is a garage-rock manifesto, name-checking the Flamin’ Groovies, the Count Five, the Rolling Stones, Eric Burdon and the Seeds’ Sky Saxon in the first verse: “Shake Some Action, Psychotic Reaction, no Satisfaction, Sky Pilot, Sky Saxon, that’s what I like!” (James Baker’s drum intro for Leilani quotes another reference point: Suzi Quatro’s Can The Can.)
That was the Gurus: children born in the late ’50s who had grown up with the first generation of television and rock & roll, only to watch in dismay as the latter’s capacity to disturb and upset parents and squares everywhere was dimmed by its practitioners’ demands to be taken seriously. Stoneage Romeos told them they’d got it all wrong.
But Faulkner could only do it once. “As a writer, I didn’t want to keep doing flippant songs with this kind of ironic existence … I wanted to talk about real things, not just Hollywood storylines.”
The Gurus became one of Australia’s greatest singles bands, with a slew of hits: Bittersweet, Like Wow – Wipeout, What’s My Scene?, Come Anytime and many more. In all its schlock and awe, though, Stoneage Romeos had a purity and even innocence that the band would never recapture. I can hardly think of another Australian album that makes me smile like it.
First published in the Guardian, 18 May 2024