Dave Faulkner

Hoodoo Gurus’ Stoneage Romeos: still death-defying

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

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.… Read more..

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Paul Kelly: “I never heard back from Warnie”

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

For a brief moment in the mid 1980s, when huge crowds packed Australian sporting stadiums for 50-over cricket matches, signs reading “Like Wow – Wipeout!” began appearing in the outer, usually when a six sailed into the crowd. It was a reference to the hit song by the Hoodoo Gurus. Singer Dave Faulkner told an interviewer that he was touched, because Australia’s real rock stars were, in his view, our sporting heroes.

Paul Kelly, a longtime admirer of Faulkner, would agree. On his new album People – part of an ongoing series of thematic compilations of the singer-songwriter’s work – there are no less than four songs about athletes: Every Day My Mother’s Voice tells the story of Indigenous AFL champion Adam Goodes; Every Step Of The Way honours his peer Eddie Betts; and there are odes to cricketers Shane Warne and Don Bradman.

Kelly, a genuine sporting tragic, admits that he can get as starstruck meeting athletes just as others might get starstruck by musicians. Once, he spied tennis champion Venus Williams at Prahran pool in Melbourne. “She was sitting on a bench and it was like a goddess had come down from heaven and was just sitting among the mortals for a while,” he says.… Read more..

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The Hoodoo Gurus’ “bogan Sgt Pepper”

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

There’s a moment at the beginning of the Hoodoo Gurus’ new album, Chariot Of The Gods, where Dave Faulkner sounds like he’s stuck in the corner of a bar. You can hear clinking glasses and the hum of a crowd, chattering over Faulkner as he strums one of the Gurus’ classic hits, Come Anytime.

At first, it sounds like a throwback to (Let’s All) Turn On, the first track on the band’s 1984 debut Stoneage Romeos. That, too, opened with a snippet of cocktail-bar sounds, before the band tore into a rock & roll manifesto: “Shake Some Action, Psychotic Reaction, No Satisfaction, Sky Pilot, Sky Saxon, that’s what I like!”

But no, Faulkner says: he was thinking of the Beatles. “What I was thinking of was the beginning of Sgt Pepper’s, when the orchestra’s warming up and you hear the crowd settling in their seats. It’s obviously meant to be a theatre – it’s a slightly dampened sound, carpeted, with plush seats. This is my bogan Sgt Pepper!”

He hadn’t even made the link to (Let’s All) Turn On. Perhaps it was subconscious. His real intention, he says, was to take the piss out of the idea that he’s now washed up: singing oldies to an indifferent audience, more than 40 years after the band’s rough beginnings as the exotically named Le Hoodoo Gurus in Sydney.… Read more..

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The Great Australian Songbook IV (20-11)

Music / / 7 minutes of reading

Now it starts to get hard! This is where I start to become ultra-conscious of who and what’s getting left out. The songs get harder to put in any kind of order. And I haven’t made it any easier for myself – I found I’d written Nick Cave’s The Mercy Seat down twice in my initial list of 40 (hmm – should that make it higher?), meaning I now have to find an entirely new song that’s magically going to vault straight into my top 20! Choices, choices…

20. BILLY THORPE & THE AZTECS – Most People I Know Think That I’m Crazy (1972)

This wasn’t the song, by the way. I always had this one in here. (I won’t cheapen which one it actually is by revealing it.) But, in short: what a wonderful chord progression this is, and what a great lyric, that anyone who’s ever got shitfaced in a bar with their friends should be able to relate to. Don’t we all, deep down, feel a little crazy as we try to navigate our way through a world we never asked to be born into? To be honest, I struggle to understand the fuss about much of Thorpie’s catalogue, but props to him for this brilliant common touch.… Read more..

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