Radio Birdman

Radio Birdman: Reign in Blood

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Fifty years after their formation in Sydney, the vastly influential punk band Radio Birdman are preparing to call it a day, with a final series of Australian shows over winter culminating with a farewell gig in their home town.

But is this really goodbye? Songwriter and guitarist Deniz Tek isn’t making promises. “The rationale is to go out there and have at least one more Australian tour and say goodbye to the fans properly,” he says, but: “You never know for sure.” Singer Rob Younger isn’t much more definitive: “It’s supposed to be [the last tour], yeah. But, I mean, I wouldn’t want to sign anything in blood.”

Being in their early 70s doesn’t preclude Tek and Younger from going around again, but with years between shows – the band last performed in 2019 – it has to be unlikely.

Tek is calling via FaceTime from his home near Kona in Hawaii, where he and his wife, Ann, are spending their semi-retirement on a coffee and macadamia farm. A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, he emigrated to Australia as a medical student in 1972.

He is, to say the least, a man of many talents. Previously, he was a flight surgeon for the US navy (Tek is sometimes claimed to be the inspiration behind Val Kilmer’s “Iceman” character in Top Gun – Iceman being Tek’s call sign).… Read more..

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Ron S Peno 1955-2023

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

From around 1984, after the release of their perfectly titled debut single Out Of The Unknown, Died Pretty were the inner-city Sydney group to see. “They were a dangerous band,” Paul Kelly wrote in his memoir, How To Make Gravy. “Some nights they fell in a heap. Other nights they were incandescent.”

And a big part of Died Pretty’s magnetism was singer Ron S Peno, whose death was announced on his band’s Facebook page on Saturday morning after a long struggle with cancer. Tiny, gifted with immense presence and a keening voice, Peno had held Australian audiences spellbound for over four decades.

But he had some rotten luck along the way. Died Pretty’s fourth album Doughboy Hollow, released in 1991, was his band’s most successful and critically esteemed album. Released in mid-1991, its singles Sweetheart, D.C. and Godbless were crossing over to commercial radio. The album quickly sold out – only for their label to fail to re-press it, stalling its momentum.

Died Pretty subsequently moved to a major label, and their fifth album Trace followed in 1993. A new single, Harness Up, was making inroads on US radio. A tour was lined up, and the band played an industry showcase where an executive allegedly took exception to Peno’s suggestive stage moves.… 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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Damien Lovelock 1954-2019

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Trying to sum up the truly Wonderful Life of Damien Lovelock, who died on Saturday morning aged 65, is no easy task. Where to begin? Lovelock was a rock & roll singer (for the Celibate Rifles, the Sydney band he fronted since 1980), solo artist, author, spoken-word performer, football broadcaster for the ABC, Sky and SBS (alongside the late Les Murray), yoga instructor, father to Luke and friend (to the Dalai Lama, among countless others).

Above all, he was a fabulous raconteur. Lovelock was a big man with a big voice and a hell of a lot of stories. Silence wasn’t in his vocabulary. Even in his yoga sessions, he peppered his students with anecdotes that had them trying to maintain poses in between contortions of laughter. This combination of physical mastery and people skills saw him hired as an instructor by, among others, the New South Wales State of Origin rugby league team.

But most of his stories were poured into the lyrics he wrote for the Celibate Rifles, whose name was a pun on the Sex Pistols. The band released nine excellent studio albums, along with a clutch of EPs (including their first effort, the tearaway garage punk of 1981’s But Jacques, The Fish?… Read more..

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Spencer P Jones: Hellraiser among Australian rock greats

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Spencer P Jones wasn’t a household name of Australian rock music. But he worked with many who were (Tex Perkins, in their band the Beasts of Bourbon, as well as Paul Kelly and Renée Geyer) and was held in high esteem by many beyond these shores, notably Neil Young.

His work as a guitarist and songwriter also influenced many, including the Drones, who covered one of his songs and whose principal members, Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin, recorded an album with him under the name the Nothing Butts in 2012.

The news of his passing from liver cancer on Tuesday, aged 61, was no surprise. He’d been forced into retirement from the stage (a place you otherwise couldn’t keep him from) a few years ago, and was advised of his terminal condition in June.

His rare appearances had been limited to guest spots, one of his last being for the Beasts of Bourbon’s bass player Brian Hooper in April. Hooper came out of hospital to perform, took the stage in a wheelchair and wearing an oxygen mask, and died days later, aged 55.

If this paints a familiarly grim picture of the rock musician’s fate, it might be worth mentioning that Jones’s first album with the Johnnys, recorded in 1986, was called Highlights Of A Dangerous Life.… Read more..

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“A bloody-minded bunch of bastards”

Music / / 25 minutes of reading

The place: 8 Ormiston Avenue, Gordon, a leafy suburb on Sydney’s Upper North Shore. The year: sometime in 1972. A teenaged Robert George Hirst hauls his drum kit into the attic of the Cape Cod-style home owned by the parents of James Moginie.

Pretty soon, all hell starts breaking loose. There’s a thudding bass riff, played by Andrew “Bear” James. A couple of mighty clangs from Jim, and soon he’s noodling away over the top of Hirst’s kick drum. Hirst, all the while is hooting and hollering:

“SCHWAMPY MOOSE! SCHWAMPY MOOSE!!!”

It’s followed by an even greater cacophony, which sounds like Hirst kicking his drums back down the stairs again, just for the fun of it. Bands have, perhaps, had less auspicious beginnings. So begins the story of Schwampy Moose, soon to be known as Farm, and – later – as Midnight Oil.

THIS box of recordings represents both a purging and a history, but history is rarely linear and never neat. Tentative steps and great leaps forward can be followed and are sometimes accompanied by self-doubt; by glances sideways; by the occasional strategic retreat. It is a collection both of defining and celebrated moments, and of things that fell between the cracks.… Read more..

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