Holidays

I'm off to Europe for five weeks on Sunday. I probably won't update while I'm over there, so it'll be quiet here for a while. I hope your festive season is awesome. If you have any venue/music/record store tips for a couple of Australians in Berlin, Munich, Budapest, Belgrade, Rome and London, comment here or email me! Cheers.

In the meantime, check out Cyclic Defrost #24. I have a feature on Alps in there. It's a great issue.

7 albums from 2009...

...I would unreservedly recommend. There are seven albums here because that is the amount of albums I would 'unreservedly' recommend. I feel certain that I'll listen to these in 2010 and onwards. I could add another three albums to make a round 10, but I'd be lying then. I'll make this as short and bullshit-free as possible.



















Robert Haigh - Notes and Crossings

A few weeks before Notes and Crossings was released I discovered Omni Trio. Robert Haigh recorded ambient jungle under that alias back in the early nineties. Omni Trio was exactly what I was pining for but not getting in a lot of modern DnB influenced music: proto-CGI futurism, robo-melancholia, sci-fi references, helium diva vocals, nostalgia for an era I never experienced first hand. In a lot of ways it reminded me of Burial's Untrue. Notes and Crossings is the complete opposite to Omni Trio in some ways (no break beats), but exactly the same in others (potential tear jerker). These short songs are simple Satie-esque piano pieces, and there's nothing particularly noteworthy about them other than their immaculate beauty.

If you count this and Omni Trio together, Haigh was my most listened to artist this year. I listened to this album while grappling with a dozen aborted short story ideas. I also listened to it once when I was walking down a lane lined on both sides with high barbed wire and overgrown grass on a windy overcast day. Now, invariably, that's the image that comes straight into my head when I listen to this record. Listless and barren urban sadness.



















Lawrence English - A Colour For Autumn

Like Robert Haigh's album, this is just plain beautiful. There's nothing else to recommend it really. If you need some grand narrative to justify your listening habits then steer clear of this. There are tonnes of pretty ambient albums that get released every day with little consequence or fanfare, and this could easily be mistaken for just another of them.

English has his own story for this record, and I outline a bit of it in this review. I listened to this album one Sunday on a foggy train trip up the Blue Mountains, on my way to the Winter Tragic festival. I also listened to it a lot just before sleep and while reading. This is good Sunday morning music. I daresay listening back to this album in a few years time will make me all teary. It's like the Tusk of ambient drone music. I've listened to Leyland Kirby's output a lot this year as well (all 5 CDs worth), but I'll get back to you in a year or so, once I've digested it all.



















Odawas - The Blue Depths

So far it looks like my listening habits this year have betrayed a full-blown retreat into unabashedly sincere, texturally luxurious melancholia. Odawas' album is a true one of a kind, and it might have registered as more than a transitory blip on the critical radar if it had been recorded on a shitted four-track or something. It would have sounded good alongside Memory Tapes if that were the case, because the textures and tropes here aren't markedly different. Except this is widescreen. There's no attempt to hide the inherent grandiosity in this music. There's nothing to be ashamed of.

The Blue Depths is testament to the greatness of those sad and cathartic 80s New Romantic / pop anthems they still play on AM radio stations. I also associate this sound to John Fowles' The Magus. Probably due to the almost-raunchy photo of a naked couple on a beach on the back cover. A rare instance of an album I loved at first listen and - nearly 12 months onwards - still listen to many times a week.



















Sa-Ra Creative Partners - Nuclear Evolution

I love colourful and sprawling pop albums. But I don't know. I wasn't really on the look out for colourful and sprawling pop albums this year. I wasn't in the mood for it. Nuclear Evolution is a big exception though, particularly the songs 'He Said She Said' and 'Bitch Day'. I love the way the textures and rhythms swirl ever so slightly in and out of focus and time. I always imagine the vocalists crowned with a bird and star halo - woosy like they've just dismounted a high speed merry-go-round or been punched in the face by Popeye.

I guess this is what they call 'wonky'. That's a good name for it. Shits all over that dry as hell Flying Lotus album from last year. I mostly listened to this album while drinking beer on Friday evenings at home, or walking to and from work on Thursdays or Fridays. This albums sounds really good when you're a bit sloshed.



















Curse Ov Dialect - Crisis Tales

Here's the other awesome sprawling pop album of 2009. I didn't find this one though - it was sent to me. Thanks Mistletone. Here's the review that followed.



















Ghosts of Television - Forsaken Empire

Funny story: I was sent a pre-release copy of this record on cassette, which I immediately ripped onto my computer. During that first listen I was surprised that Nic De Jong's vocals had changed remarkably: his voice bore an uncanny resemblance to David Tibet. This is the Forsaken Empire I listened to every day until the LP version was finally released. Turns out my tape player is fucked, because on the LP De Jong's vocals are back to normal and the songs are a lot slower and darker than I'd previously heard. It's taken a few listens, but I finally like the 'normal' version as much as I loved the 'sped up', 'SPrescott remix' version.

Sometimes I wonder if the future of rock music (assuming it has or even deserves a future) is simply the clever marriage of disparate styles and period references into a new sound. All the best parts get knitted together, while the sloppy boring parts get scrapped. That's basically what Ghosts of Television do and always have done. There's nothing mild about this music. The band are confident and, if you see them live, threatening. I don't listen to music to assuage anger or frustration much (must be getting old) but when I need to, Ghosts of Television is what I turn to. You can download this album for free here, and I do intend to write about this album 'properly' some time, because it really deserves it. There were other good rock albums this year, I guess, but none of them were as musically interesting as this.




















James Ferraro - Jarvid 9 pt. 1 + 2

I only heard the first two in this three part series. The third part is probably sold out now. It doesn't really matter though, because James Ferraro's music is just a big soup of weirdness you can dip in and out of at will. I'm the right age to be feeling all the nostalgic vibes David Keenan describes in his recent Wire feature on hypergogic pop. A lot of people on the internet called bullshit on that pet theory but it resonated with me. This sound really does feel like mis-hearing pulp 80s television - action, advertisements, children's fare, adventure - from the next room at 4am in the morning. It reminds me of Videodrome and the special pre-CGI ambience of science fiction and horror films. Music for people who wanted Kurt Russell to be their uncle.

But remember when you were a kid, and night time television would feel somehow dangerous? Like the people who appear on television at night time were part of some dark nocturnal underbelly or something? Have you heard Ariel Pink's Creep Show? That explains everything. James Ferraro has the same strange atmosphere as 'Creep Show', sans vocals or any semblance of song. I listened to it, naturally, at 4am in the morning with my eyes closed.

00s - #2 Indie

The second in a series of rambling reflections on the past decade in Sydney. Seconds as a response to this post by Anwyn at Popular Demand.

Bereft of any tenable cause and up to its eyes in trust fund apathy, indie music this decade ogled the past in order to pilfer ‘youthfulness’ from generations they had nothing in common with. Brought up on documentaries valorising pioneer pop icons and dreaming of the heady years they operated in, the past seems a colourful place to hide, especially given that everything that might have been sharpened and rendered dangerous and vital has now been blunted by commerce. Indie music is now a middling lifestyle marketed.






















Borrowing from those who precede is a necessary (and begrudgingly accepted) reality in popular music, but the wholesale reproduction of ‘period piece rock’ is business as usual in the 2000s. Blatant mimicry was once relegated to open mic nights and shitty suburban bars to provide background entertainment, but nowadays it’s good enough to see Deep Sea Arcade plunder 60s psych pop and bang out carbon copies of the past. As a headline act, no less.

Youth is a commodity now, and once you’ve reached and passed a certain age you move from one market demographic to another. There’s no coming of age because your parents have already done that for you (ask them – boomers are always happy to talk about their youth.) The desire to make a mark or extend the art seems to have disappeared. There's a lingering doubt (or refusal to believe) that post-millennial youth can be as fulfilling as the youth experienced by our parents. In order to live up to that glory, to experience our own version of the birthing days of 'youth culture', we try to emulate them. Damned if we can find a way of making our own.

It’s not even the bands’ fault. If they’re keen to play their own 60s psych pop songs they can - what you do in the privacy of your own home etc. But why does the radio flog this guff? Why is it all over our street press and web zines? Why isn’t Sydney’s community or ‘youth’ radio stations reaching for something (even a bit) riskier? Songs are a decent band with a catchy album, but some 20 years after collegiate indie rock donned its beige sweater and inherited college radio it's baffling that we still get excited about this stuff.

Shock me! Shock and frisson is what we should be demanding now, not this retrograde pulp, played hour after hour between sponsorships. None of this decrepit sound could have reached the point of canonisation if someone hadn’t taken a risk to help it along in the beginning. Sadly, the groups that do want to fuss over trivialities such as ‘originality’, ‘creativity’, 'staking your own claim' etc, don’t stand such a chance. That's the domain of late night niche programming, or zines, or underground venues. Leave the muckrakers to chase their own tails and preach to the converted - alternative culture, afterall, has come of age! Adult music for young people. Music for walking to work to.



























And even if Sydney’s most urgent and creative bands noticeably borrowed from the past, they always expanded on it and made it their own. They worked from foundations that are impossible to uproot. You can’t knock popular music down and start from scratch (if only you could!) but you can decorate and fuck with it in new ways, which is precisely what bands like Castings, Ghosts of Television, Moonmilk, Kiosk, Naked on the Vague, Holy Balm, Alps (I’m limiting myself to NSW bands, here) and many others did.

Oh, but you can’t play a 10 minute drone song during drive time? You can’t play reckless and volatile pop-punk on morning radio? No screaming? Wake up! Why the fuck not? Invent the future!

These were recognisable templates – ranging from punk and pop through to drone and noise – presented in idiosyncratic and meaningful ways, either inspiring thought or reflecting something genuinely contemporary, or maybe just making sounds they or we had never heard before. By contrast, it took me a couple of weeks hearing Deep Sea Arcade’s lead single on the radio (twice a fucking day, by the way) before I realised it was even recorded in 2009.

For music granted the privilege of public scrutiny it was a game of balancing the degree of derivation with credibility and record sales. You sacrifice one for the other. Wolfmother and Jet vs. Deep Sea Arcade and Tame Impala. The former were too demonstrative: not reserved and noncommittal enough to appeal to the mild-of-manner arbiters of credible pop music. You’re either one of these or an eminently worthy singer-songwriter, or a guitar indie band that plods so heavily and blandly that there are barely any colours to identify as pilfered anyway.






















I don’t think popular music (anything outside the “framework of classical institutions” as defined by Anwyn) is anywhere near as horrible as she claims. Which might make me a Pollyanna, but I don’t see any correlation between U2 and Green Day being the biggest bands in the world and all music being fucked. It’s true that extremes aren’t allowed to influence and manifest into mass epiphanies as seamlessly as they once were, which is devastating: ‘alternative’ culture is unprecedentedly conservative, and there’s now another virtually invisible layer beneath the old mainstream/alt dynamic that prides itself on separatism and has no apparent desire to ‘break through’.

Still, I think that the sooner these purely retrograde, fantastical and utterly pointless music-as-quaint-distraction acts are eliminated from our lists of ‘bands to watch/give air to/write glowingly about’, the better. I’m sure there’s a quiet pub somewhere in Glebe with an open mic on Tuesday nights – direct your inquiries there.

Curse Ov Dialect

My review of Curse Ov Dialect's Crisis Tales @ Mess+Noise

Interview with Mitchell Jones (Scattered Order; M Squared)

This is the slightly cut down transcript for an interview I did with Mitchell Jones of Scattered Order and M Squared earlier this year. The resulting feature can be found here, but as Scattered Order is performing again in Sydney this weekend I thought I'd chuck this up for the trainspotters. The conversation was very, well, conversational, and it ends where it does (kinda abruptly) because the rest was very small talkish. Hope this is of some value, Jones was a fascinating and articulate guy to speak to and I thank him again for his time!

Scattered Order last played in 2002. Who was on the line-up?

That was myself and Drucilla [Jones] my wife, as well as Craig Robertson on bass who’s been with us from the beginning, and a guy called Paul Doherty who played guitar with us from about the mid 90s on. That was the last show with the band. Shortly after that Drucilla and myself went to live overseas, we went to the UK and we lived in Wales in a little village. By that stage we just wanted to get out of the country for a while and do something different. Playing in Sydney, we were just playing to smaller and smaller crowds, we were playing to just our friends. And the last show was just somebody’s birthday party. We just thought we don’t really want to do it like this anymore. So we went overseas and I kept writing material, we came back again (to the Blue Mountains) and both Craig and Paul were living in Sydney so we kept drifting apart. So I kept writing material and staying in the bedroom until earlier this year.

Scattered Order mk 1 is very different to mid-period SO. I’m thinking [the releases] Selling the Axe to Buy The Wood and Career of a Silly Thing in particular.

At that stage we were more of a rock oriented band with a serious record label behind us and we had serious intentions of making our career in music. It’s all a bit misguided looking back. After that period we lost our drummer and we just retreated back into the studio. Our record company wanted us to write dance music (the label was Volition – Severed Heads, Box Car, Southend etc) and they couldn’t really position us. We lost heart really, and the record company lost heart in us. We drifted off in the 90s and did our own releases. Then, it was more like the very early Scattered Order material, we had a drum machine and loops and it was more constructed soundscapes than writing songs. We developed that sound throughout the 90s. I’ve always needed a foil to work with. When there isn’t one around I just get bored.

So when you last played in 2002 it wasn’t sonically too different to what you and Michael did?

No, sonically it wasn’t much different at all. We used a backing tape and loops, and added guitar and keyboard parts to it. It was similar to the method we were using in the early 80s, but with different technology.

What was different about the setup at the Cad Factory show?

It was just the two of us: I used a backing tape and Michael was playing guitar, keys and a laptop for all the effects. The computers are all a bit new to me. In the early 80s I was using a cassette player with loops. I’d make loops up and we’d play it live really loud and try to play along with it. Then we developed that, and in the 90s I was using a four-track live. Now with just the two of us it’s great because it gives me the freedom to listen to what’s happening on stage and react, and I’m not nailed down to a specific part. When it was the four of us everyone had our own little part. With the two-piece we have more room to improvise. Plus I’m not as precious as I used to be. It used to be the case that if it was rehearsed that way it should be that way, every night should be the same - [the attitude was] ‘this is my livelihood you’re talking about here so you can’t muck around with it’. But now I’ve gotten to the stage where I’ve realised that I’m a musician who is going to be... ...it’s a hobby that consumes my life, and it’s not going to be a job. It’s only taken me 50 years to work that out. (laughs)

Was that the first time you’d played with Michael since 82?

It was the first time I’d spoken to him in that many years as well. M Squared fell apart a bit, not messily. Well, sort of messily. By that stage Michael and Patrick and myself were all sick and tired of each other and we all had our separate bands at that stage. We were all thinking that the label was spending too much time on his band and not my band, you know what I mean? It got a bit messy, so it split apart and we all went our separate ways. I had no reason to get in touch with him, and I always thought ‘well I have my career, and he has his’.

So what was it like meeting up with Michael again?

Wonderful. It was one of those situations where you think it could go really badly or really well, and it went really well.

How many times did you rehearse before the CAD Factory gig?

Three times. There were a few emails sending material back and forth. We did half old songs and half new songs and he had a few new songs, I had a few. So we sent bits and pieces back and forth. It was three rehearsals and we did it.

Were you happy with the show?

Yeah yeah. There were a few messy things. I’m releasing a CD-R, which is released in a couple of weeks and I’d hoped that it’d be the whole show, but some songs were a bit...(trails off) ...so I’ve got other versions from the rehearsal instead. It was okay though, we had a few technical problems as usual, about latency in computers. You play something and wait 5 minutes and then there it is! But when we finished we thought ‘we want to do this again.’ And that’s the best feeling.

What kind of venues do you think you’ll play as Scattered Order?

Anywhere. Anywhere that’ll have us. Shane Fahey (...Dead Travel Fast) helped organise the last one and he’s looking at possible warehouse spaces in Marrickville to do something in November. We’re playing on the 21st I think.

Would that be at Megaphon Studios?

No, he’s trying to find another warehouse. I thought Marrickville bowling Club would be good. But at the moment we’re just trying to put together some packages – that’d be Dead Travel Fast and A Slow Rip. Hopefully it’ll be those three in November, and next year we’ll do a big extravaganza for the 30th anniversary [of M Squared]. But we want to play anywhere and everywhere. We’re just sending stuff overseas at the moment and hopefully we’ll play a couple of things in Europe next year.

Given that in 2002 your audience was dwindling, do you find it surprising – given the Systematics and M Squared box sets – that this resurgence of interest has occurred? Where do you think it came from?

Well it’s come from Europe, and it’s our time. We’ve come around to the early 80s and everybody’s saying “there must be something in the early 80s we can rerelease” and they’ve done Severed Heads and SPK so it’s M Squared’s turn. That’s what has happened, and it’s amazing. We rebuilt the website, and then we got the interest for the box set from Germany with Vinyl on Demand. We thought, oh yeah, this guy is kidding. But it’s almost sold out, and we’re really shocked.

When in 2002 we stopped, the internet wasn’t as powerful for marketing bands and getting people in touch with each other. Nowadays it’s so much easier to find your audience, especially if you’ve got a bit of a name which we’re lucky to have. It’d be hard to start out now because there are so many bands. But if you’ve got a name you can have some presence and build up a cottage industry. That’s our plan.

So this isn’t just a revival?

No, we’ve gotten new songs written, we’ve started to record for a new record. We’ve got a CD-R coming out of the live set, but we’ll have a new record out hopefully early next year.

Any label in mind?

No, we’re searching around. If no label will do it then I’ll end up doing it myself through the site again. But hopefully with the interest we’ve had in M Squared I’ll get somebody who’ll put some money into it.

That’s exciting.

It is. I’ve been kicking myself for the past few years that I should’ve gotten off my arse and got something released. But when you’ve got the luxury of a home studio you end up making music for yourself (laughs).

How much material are you sitting on?

About fifty or sixty songs. We have about two-dozen all finished that over the years could’ve been released, but never did. I just wanted to do little things as well – this live CD-R will be 5 bucks but on the website we have all the Hugo members, for them it’s going to be free. I’m only making a hundred of them, hand numbered. I’ve got a lot of live material from the 90s which I’m going to do the same thing for. Sell it to the general public cheap and give it away to the fans.

I first came across Scattered Order through talking to current bands in Sydney who are fans of Scattered Order and M Squared, and release their own material on CD-Rs and small independent runs. are you aware of what’s happening in that domain?

As much as I can be. I listen to FBi, which I find really good. I try to chase up things. I don’t buy much music, I listen to the radio a lot. The things that I like I make a note of and I buy it. But I get really lazy and go back to listening to old things. I think most people do that. There’s just so much good material.

And it’s growing every day...

Yeah, and I hear it and I think that’s great. But I can’t afford it all, so I try to limit it to a CD a month.

You must have a steady work rate if you’re making so much music, what’s your routine?

I go through periods where I wouldn’t go into the studio for a week, but then I’d go in there and be in there for days. I’m always putting together loops either from samples or building loops from scratch. I’ll often throw them away, but when I have more tuned ideas I go back to the loops and see what’s suitable and then start construction. Most of the songs these days are instrumental; there’s not much singing involved which I find great.

You’re not a fan of singing?

Not a fan of my singing. I was voted the singer for Scattered Order.

Did you write the lyrics?

Most of the lyrics, and Drucilla wrote the rest. Even before she joined the band in 84 she was writing some of the lyrics.

I sit in the studio and build up a library of semi ideas and then I go back to the best ones. Some might stay there for years, but I’ll go back and find them and think “oh that’s good I can use that in something I’m doing now”. With Michael, we put the ideas together and we have a song. But by myself I’d have a whole lot of semi-ideas, and get to a point where I know it needs somebody else’s input, so I’d shelve it and go on to something else.

So it must be liberating to have Michael to collaborate with again.

Very liberating. It’s fantastic. It’s weird, because we’ve got a sixth sense together. We know, even after all these years, how each of us operates. He can give me an idea with plenty of room for my input and vice versa. It’s working out well so far. Like any musical relationship you can’t say what will happen next.

When Scattered Order formed – before M Squared – was there a period where you thought you’d shop it around and get another label to release the material?

No. We had the band and we were good friends with Roger Grierson who ran Doublethink Records on Bourke Street in Surry Hills. I was doing live sound for the Thought Criminals [ a Doublethink band], and Scattered Order had just done our first recordings. They’d done a record by The Barons (which was Michael Tee etc), they’d said they’d do it, but there were no real advantages for us to do it with them, they weren’t offering any money, it was just to be on their label. So we thought, hang on, we can do the same thing, make our own label. They’ll tell us how to do it and put us in the right direction. Right at the same time Doublethink introduced us to Patrick Gibson of the Systematics. They’d just recorded Pulp Baby with Double J, and they wanted a B side for the release. We had the little four-track studio so Doublethink sent them over to us, we recorded the B side and it came out on Doublethink records. Then we found similar interests in Patrick and thought, well let’s form the label.

All up it lasted about 3 and a half years?

It burnt brightly but briefly. (laughs)

How long were you and Michael playing together before M Squared kicked off?

We hadn’t played live, but we’d played together for six months. We had the recording equipment – we had access to this terrace house (Surry Hills), and the front room was turned into a small studio.

That’s the Wilshire Street studio?

Yeah, the terrace house is still there.

Who lived there?

My wife and myself lived there. It was one of those tiny terraces that didn’t even have a corridor. So it was straight into the front room which was originally the recording room, so there were all these bands in the front room. In the middle room there was the control room. There was a kitchen at the back and there were two bedrooms upstairs. Me and my wife were living in the two rooms upstairs, and she had a full time job so she’d come home and there’d be all these bands in her house! (laughs)

Was it an exciting space? Did it get frustrating having so much happening at once?

In some ways, but it was exciting mostly. It was just wonderful, we’d have all these different bands like Hoodoo Gurus and New Christs, people like this. It was like “wow this is happening in our house”. It also attracted likeminded people, that’s how we got to meet Tom Ellard, Phil Turnbull of Voight/465 – all those interesting acts. And because it was a central point you could get to know these people. But we didn’t last long living there.

It was funny because the landlord for the house was an old friend from years ago, he’s the same age as us. He didn’t really care what we did with that house as long as we didn’t burn it down. The rent was paid – we sort of mostly did that. But after four years it was enough.

So you just vacated.

We vacated the building, split up the gear between us – we had to sell quite a lot of it to cover debts and just moved on. With Scattered Order we’d lost the rehearsal space, and it meant that we had to pay for recording for the first time in our lives – it was all a bit of a shock to us really, looking back on it. Scattered Order was always a studio band who happened to pay live, but because of the situation it ended up being just like any other band who is playing live and trying to get enough money to get into the studio.

After the M Squared studios shut up, where did Scattered Order go?

We had a deal with Volition Records at that stage, which was really lucky because it was just as M Squared was closing Volition was starting, which came out of GAP records Australia which had all the Factory records. And Andrew Penhallow from Volition said “we’ll do your next record”. There was no contract, just a handshake, but we had to supply finished tapes. So we never had a recording budget but he’d pay for all the manufacturing. And when he covered his costs we’d see some money back. So the first thing we did we went down to this farm near Newcastle – a friend of a friend’s – who had a huge disused chicken shed. We set the band up with a PA in there and recorded it live. (A Dancing Foot and a Praying Knee Don't Belong on the Same Leg)

It worked fine, but we got caught in the wrong position. We’d been recording these new songs and you’d get the record done and you’d go out and play these new songs, and by the end of the tour the new songs were sounding better than the record. I just hate the whole idea of going out and playing a new set before it’s released, I don’t like that idea, it doesn’t sound new.

Was that unusual?

Well yeah, the whole idea was before you signed you’d play all your best songs in the hope of being signed and they’d all end up on the first record. But the idea was to go out and promote the record. Our idea was to get out there with the new songs, and have them judged by the audience beforehand. But with us as a band we kept going about it the wrong way.

Apart from Terse Tapes and Doublethink were there any other labels working on a similar level at the time?

No. Right at the end there was Basilisk, that was Andrew from Doublethink – they released Sekret Sekret and they had a singles release. Roger at the same time was starting Green Records who had Tactics – the Glebe album came out on that. Phantom was just starting – anything Detroit was being released on that. They did the Visitors album, anything that Denis Tek was anything near.

What was the attitude towards M Squared? Did anyone take it seriously?

Nah. (hesitates). It was a bit clubby like. The Detroit guys, the ‘ghosts of Radio Birdman’ side just abhorred anything that had a keyboard in it. Because it was at the stage where if you turned up with a Casio they’d put you among Flock of Seagulls and ask ‘where’s your drummer’? We once played out in the suburbs with Systematics and they used to get abused because they had a drum machine. This was years before karaoke became popular but anyway. (laughs)

Can you describe an instance where you had a shocked reaction from the audience?

Mainly out in the suburbs. During that time we could play in and around the city and pull likeminded people and pull a crowd at the Trade Union Club – you’d get a 1000 people in there. But if you went out into the suburbs and you’d be physically abused, people would come up onto the stage and want to fight you because they thought it was shocking. And this was only 5 miles up the road.

At that stage in Australian music, the pub rock stage, bands were playing six nights a week around Sydney’s suburbs. There was none of this ‘one day in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane’, if you went interstate you went for three weeks and you played every night more or less. I did that with The Numbers doing their sound. That’s the way the industry was geared – you go out there and you play and play and play until someone offers you a record deal.

Why do you think bands only play one show per city nowadays, for the most part?

There’s not enough venues, with noise restrictions etc. Plus, there are hundreds of more bands. Then, bands who played at pubs would be handled by one booking agency in Sydney like Harbour Agency and Premier. And each hotel would be signed with them so you’d have to be on their books. The amount of bands then would have been 50 maximum, now there’s 500.

Were M Squared acts, at the time, ever with a booking agency?

No, all we did was blag our way onto supports for those acts. We did Midnight Oil supports with the Dead Travel Fast – their audience hated them. But because we knew people in the bands we got them onto those tours. But booking agencies no, you had to be a ballsy rock and roll band, it was how many beers your band would sell at the bar.

It sounds like back then it was a bit easier for a challenging band like Scattered Order play in front of audiences in licensed venues.

It was easier. You’d always get one gig, but it was whether you’d ever get invited back. You would get the chance though. There were a number of places in the city and even the Mosman Hotel (M Squared showcase). That was a mod hangout. It was easier to get a first gig then, but harder to sustain it.

A lot of groups who play with a similar spirit to the M Squared groups now play in unlicensed underground venues around Marrickville.

You can’t get shows. It’s a shame because if you do that I start to feel you end up doing what we did and end up playing to your friends. You might as well have them at your loungeroom. It’s not like taking a punt and playing to newer people who might enjoy it. Rather than people you know. There’s nothing worse than knowing everyone in the crowd.

Bands are often preaching to the converted, but that’s what they’re limited to.

Yes, it can be soul destroying. It’s fun for a while because you’re all in it together and that’s all fine and good, but you need to keep generating a bit more interest all the time, just to keep your crowd numbers and interest up to the same level. Because your friends aren’t going to be available every night you play, either that or they’ll get bored with it.

Why do you think the interest in Scattered Order waned?

We did Chicken Hilton in 97 and we hadn’t played live in four years. We got out and started playing live and it was going very well, good crowds, and we thought we’d just keep playing where we can and start recording the next thing. Pretty Boffins was ready in 99, and by that stage it felt like we’d overstayed our welcome and when the CD was ready people had moved on. It took us 12 months to organise a CD launch which was under-promoted and that was pretty depressing. Which is a shame but anyway.

Nowadays it’s easy with the internet, but how did M Squared makes connections in Europe, particularly in France?

They wrote to us.

How did they find out about you?

Some journalist was in Sydney at the time from some French magazine who was being paid to write on the experimental music scene in Australia. I’ve forgotten the name of the magazine, but Invitations to Suicide contacted us and we said ‘great’. This was all by mail, and we did it. We never saw a cent. At that stage college radio in America was quite big so any radio station that looked like they were playing similar stuff we’d put an album in the bag and send it to them and hope.

Did you find that most of your audience remained in Europe once Scattered Order moved to Volition?

Definitely. It always has been.

Why?

It’s a population difference, but at that time people in Europe were looking further afield. I think maybe they thought that it was odd that this sort of stuff was coming from Australia, it added that cache – “look I’ve got this latest weird thing from Australia”, “look they’ve got electricity over there!”

What kind of people would turn up to M Squared related shows?

University students mostly. A lot of punks to start with, but they’d grown into Wire fans. Wire was really big and Public Image Ltd was really big. They were all mostly living in the inner-city because rent was cheap. They were either going to uni or working or whatever but rent was cheap so it was mostly an inner-city crowd who had good record collections.

Did you guys have any contact with like minded Melbourne bands?

We knew Philip Brophy and David Chesworth, we wrote to them a bit but there wasn’t much contact. It wasn’t an argument really, but we always thought they were too serious and they always thought we were too stupid, or silly or whatever. We thought they had too many rules and they thought we were just a bunch of rockers from Sydney.

There’s been a long conflict hasn’t there? With Melbourne being art school oriented and Sydney being more rock focused.

It took us two years to get any of the M Squared bands to Melbourne, it was a big build up. We all played raucous sets and they thought Dead Travel Fast were a bunch of hippies and Scattered Order was a too-noisy rock band. The Melbourne crowds were all a bit bemused.

Scattered Order / M Squared had a conspicuous sense of humour too.

It did, the attitude we had was you just have too laugh, you can’t take it seriously. It’s music. I’m no intellectual, I can’t sit down and theorise about why I do it and what I’m trying to do. I’m just making music and if people like it, good.

Without that theory context which drives a lot of experimental artists, what drove you to explore the different sonics that Scattered Order explored?

I always approached it from a sound engineer’s view. I can’t play an instrument to play my life – properly. So I always used the studio and tried to push the limits of what I could do with the studio. It was like “what happens if I plug this into this?”. I didn’t know the rules so I didn’t know if I was breaking them.

So the studio was the primary instrument?

Yeah. And at that time I was constructing the songs, doing some singing, but I wasn’t playing instruments much at all. Over the years I’ve picked up different things through necessity.

So if you were looking for the sound of a particular instrument, you’d just pick it up and give it a go?

And then I’d record bits of it, yep. At that time, everything we did was recorded – the tape recorder was going all the time. We had the luxury of using the studio when nobody else was in it.

Did you work as a sound engineer outside of the M Squared studios at the time?

Live mainly, I did some studio work. I was doing all these tours to pay the M Squared bills. I did The Fall, The Birthday Party and things like that.

I’m fascinated by the general atmosphere surrounding Scattered Order during that period. Obviously the art students took to it, but given that you were played on Double J and the community stations as well – did you ever get any feedback in terms of what other listeners made of your music?

Live, some people would say 'I really like your band mate but you shouldn't sing maybe'. It was always, I really like it ‘but’. At that stage we were really good live and it was sort of jarring. But everyone had advise.

Did you play really loud?

Yep, we cleared rooms. Since then I’ve been reading up about Swans. The whole idea of a 25 minute set of ‘grrrr’, standing in front of a jet plane.

In the old days you could get away with it. The old Trade Union Club – you could do anything in there. There were houses all around it but nobody complained because they knew it was like that.

What was it like in the Trade Union Club?

It was like a tired RSL club. Over the years things would be slowly falling apart but nothing would be fixed. There were three levels, and on the bottom floor there’d be a bar and a little band playing in the corner, the second floor would have bands as well and the third floor was the big room with the biggest stage and a bar at the back. You’d fit 1500 people into that place. There was one lift in and tiny emergency staircase. Nowadays with the regulations it’d never be done. I remember mixing Birthday Party shows in sweat would be dripping off the roof.
It was a lovely old place. It was run by a really friendly bloke. It was meant to be for members and guests but you’d just walk in and sign the book.

The second floor was the only place with a late license. It’d be open until 4am. There’d be musicians and locals on the second floor.

It wasn’t just scene people, locals as well?

No no, there’d be locals and pensioners would still be in there. There’d be tables full of punks among the pensioners. But there was a family atmosphere about Surry Hills then. Most houses then were rented, before it was gentrified too much. Nobody was spending millions of dollars on homes. But it was a lovely venue, and some of the best music I’ve ever seen was there. Laughing Clowns, John Cooper Clarke, The Fall.

Did Sydney as it was back then play a vital part, stylistically in what Scattered Order did?

Yes definitely. Fast, flashy, a bit shallow (laughs), abrasive but without being nasty. I think that’s what it was like in Sydney at the time. There was lots of aggressive music being made, even if it was being made by Radio Birdman type bands. But it was always a friendly audience and the audiences were open to things. There was never a threat of violence. At that time Sydney was like that. I think Sydney is no longer like that – I think an air of violence hangs over things nowadays, which is a bit sad. I think that’s nature though – it’s a bigger city now.

Do you go to Surry Hills much now? How much has it changed?

Heaps. It just feels like Paddington – just another rich inner-city suburb with too many 4WDs and no village atmosphere. Also, every shop is a cafe now. When we lived there we had a corner shop, not a cafe. But people move where the rent is cheaper, so all those people are living in Marrickville or wherever now.

Do you think that when exciting things do happen in places like Surry Hills - when students start frequenting the venues, bands start playing there and it has that energy – that that triggers gentrification?

I think so. Once somebody gets the idea that they can make a lot of money out of this – whether it’s a venue owner or a real estate agent – that’s where it begins I think. Somebody has realised that over the years in Surry Hills and said “hang on, here’s a place that’s close to the city and if we can just get rid of those nasty unwanted people in the area we can call it the new Paddington.” They kick themselves because they were onto a good thing – but either noise restrictions got to them or they put on a DJ thinking that would get more money, or they do up the pub with a bistro, thinking “well we’ve got people buying houses in the area so we’ll turn the pub into a bistro”.

Do you think that will happen elsewhere in the city, like Marrickville for instance?

It will given time. There’s less chance in Marrickville because of the nature of the place – it’s semi-industrial and it’s going to take a long time for all that industry to leave. It’ll slowly gentrify but not until all the noisy visually-polluting industry is gone. It’ll take a while. Which is good, I love Marrickville, my wife grew up there. It’s good being able to have warehouse spaces and places with cheaper rent for people who want to do something artistic. It’ll shift though, one day in Marrickville everybody will be somewhere else.

When you started it was a ‘rock city’, but you didn’t like much of that stuff?

Well yes and no. I always like a good rock band playing good rock songs in a full venue. It became very narrow though, if you were slightly different to that people were wary. And there’s no point everybody trying to be like everybody else, it got boring. And there’s nothing worse than seeing an average rock band. It’s fine if you can go to your local pub and see Rose Tattoo and it’s really packed and loud, it’s fantastic. But if you go to see a Rose Tattoo cover band that is playing to five people, it’s not so great.

00s #1

The first in a series of rambling reflections on the past decade in Sydney. These will slowly pour forth here from now until the end of the year. Or until I feel I'm done. By no means exhaustive - just the things I care about.

For a while, the urges that informed Sydney’s youthful, primal bands – like Kiosk and later, Ghosts of Television – were shades of grey and satin hues. These primal, instinctive sounds were buoyed by a sense of unease: like they were purging demons instilled by default neglect, operating in an environment that negated their ever reaching a point where their sound actually represented an audience. They seemed propelled by an understanding that no one was listening. Neither the underground audiences they ostensibly appealed to nor the wider listenership they worked so stridently against, were overtly affected by their outpourings. It was merely rote to the select few who witness(ed) them, and completely alien to everyone else. Like anyone making music on their own terms in Sydney (you know, doing it just for the sake of it), they were non entities. Even more so to those who might have expected them to operate in the ultra-conservative and parochial Sydney 'independent' music scene.

Both (and others) were separatists, but not in a calculated way. They sounded the way they did because their influences – the sounds they were brought up on – were already canonised, but not to the extent that a local audience could connect the dots and draw parallels between these upstarts and identify them as a trend. Sydney’s underground scene is too fragmented. Funnily enough, Kiosk would sound middling in 2009, given the resurgent interest in everything lo-fi and barely orchestrated. Both bands operate(d) in different venues to entirely different audiences. Both were overtly gestural and transcendentally punk – in the purest sense of the term – but the ethos resonates and makes sense only in retrospect. Youthful fury, here delivered in vastly different capacities, was something that needed to be witnessed, not merely heard. Rock music is at a point now where the experience is essential: a statement can’t exist in these rigidly referential times without witnessing it in its pure context. If a recording is allowed to speak for itself it’s likely to be judged against similar sounds that preceded it.

These bands were noisy and volatile; they never provided an entry point to the not already disenchanted. Kiosk were frightening, not because they pouted in a certain way or dressed like the grim reaper or possessed any supernatural presence, but because they laid bare the discordance of their environment. Ghosts of Television mixed so many disparate sounds into their show that it only made sense with your ears half blocked: the rumble remains but the sharper edges blunted against oppressive and fogeyish critical faculties. Both bands recorded EPs or demos that paled in comparison to their performances, because the spectacle was paramount: something was being smoked out and the brighter they burned the more the audience inhaled.

The Twerps

My review of The Twerps' s/t 7 inch + CD set @ Mess+Noise