Frank Savage And The Citizens - Ordinary Persons Rock And Roll 7" Mambo 503, 1980

Usually we'd jump at the chance to be smart-arsed pricks about an apostrophe catastrophe, but in describing themselves as "ordinary persons rock and roll" we reckon Frank Savage and co. knew exactly what they were doing, pub rock being music made by ordinary people as much as it is music for ordinary people. Besides, you don't get to play in not one but two bands with Johnny Topper without being something of a smart arse yourself. Little Boy Lost is a decent Sports-a-like, but the punkier Helicopter is the real winner, its near-perfect 60 second length spoiled only by that same smart-arsed-ness - a jokey label plug tacked on at the song's end.

This is the best of the three records known to us on the Mambo label, the others being singles by (in descending order of listenability) Japanese Comix and the Dynamic Hepnotics.

Little Boy Lost [Download]


Helicopter [Download]

It Never Ends: The Victims - Television Addict 7" MX46813/4, 1978

It's time for an it-never-ends on one of the great worldwide punk records - The Victims' Television Addict / (I'm) Flipped Out Over You 7". Released in an edition of 1000 in early 1978, every copy of this is effectively in a unique sleeve. That's because each one is hand stamped with kids' block stamps. However, there's still a lot of room for variation with such a scheme. So, in the spirit of the Flipper Sex Bomb sleeve blog (or the definitely NOT safe for work Nubees blog), today we'll start giving visuals for some of the sleeve variants for this hallowed record.

Sometime in early '78 our boys, James Baker, Dave Flick and Rudolph Vee, sat around a table and started stamping sleeves. A combination of red, black and blue ink was used, and most sleeves contain some combination of all three. For us, the nicest ones  just have the band name on the front of the sleeve and the titles on the back. The red and black sleeve on top of the post, paired with the tricolour reverse to the left, is a nice example. Some copies, and these seem to show up in America, only have the band name on one side and are blank on the reverse.

Flick outlined the process in the liner notes to the Sleeping Dogs Lie album:

We used a children's toy rubber stamp set to label each of the paper sleeves individually. In fact, as we had only bought a couple of sets there weren't even enough letters to spell out the band's name and the song titles so we had to leave a couple of gaps and fill in the missing letters later (we also stamped those ones with a different colour).

A cool variation, perhaps from the start of the process, is the all black version seen to the right. Now is probably a good time to point you towards Ross Buncle's Perth Punk website. There you can read about James Baker and Rudolph Vee's pre-Victims exploits with The Geeks, where Buncle and Baker had written (I'm) Flipped Out Over You. Flick had previously played with high school bands and, while starting a university degree, had decided to see just how far he could get playing music. He had joined a blues band called The Beagles on keyboards and toured around Western Australia. Having proved to himself making a living was possible, and having heard the Ramones album, and liking it, he hooked up with Vee and Baker and the Victims were born.

The record really needs no introduction. We can't think of many people who don't rank it in the best three Australian punk records. If you haven't heard it, well, it's been booted thrice in the US (black printing on white sleeve, then on pink sleeve, then on yellow sleeve, all with large holes) and recently legitimately reissued by 1977 records in Japan. We won't even start on the various compilations with the two tracks, just get yourself to YouTube. For now we'll just show pictures of some other versions:

Many copies have the band name and one of the song titles on one side.

We love the spelling mistakes, part I...

...and part II.

Television ADD/ADHD. A particularly cool variation which came from James Baker - note the different typeface. Perhaps done as a test run - a literal proto-type.

To bring things to an end for today we have to cover the photo inserts. These are the little fuckers that send collectors spare. They appear either by themselves or in pairs in odd copies. So far we've been able to round up seven different ones which you can see below. Particularly cool (and hard to find!) is the band under a Live At CBGBs poster, but as always, we can't imagine not wanting to own all of them.

We'll be happy to add any sleeve variations, (or, god forbid, inserts), not pictured here if you want to send them to us at the usual address. Thanks to those who already contributed scans.

Sounds, 6 May 1978

All afflictions catered for: here, double vision

Leap In The Dark - Samurai 7" Sundown SUN 0087, 1984

It was about 10 years back - a heady time when people actually read music blogs - that Dave Lang coined the useful phrase "record-collector-rock". Back then, he used the concept to mean music that is "drool fodder for collector/obsessive dorks: you know, not the kind of music 'regular' folk buy" (or more succinctly, records that are "good to show off but not to listen to"). What he didn't anticipate was the emergence of "meta-record-collector-rock": music made by record collectors, released by record collectors, for a target audience largely made up of record collectors. It's not exactly news that there is overlap in the collector/musician Venn diagram, but that kind of closed cultural feedback loop is a relatively recent phenomenon, right? Hmm, what of the Australian punk collector who, in 1983, created a limited edition of his own band's record with a cover directly referencing the Victims' handpainted 7" EP? What could possibly be the point, other than to amuse said collector and appeal to the OCD of similarly afflicted obsessives? Three decades later, that party trick has worked a treat - the self-aware tribute is even tougher to find than the Victims' original.

We'll come to the Victims EP and its simulacrum in due course, but what intrigues us today is the "anti-meta-record-collector-rock" of the Leap In the Dark 7". Vocalist Mark Overett was a year-zero participant in the Brisbane punk scene, documenting future legends in real time in his fanzine, Fad. These days, Overett is a self-described "anoraky guy who collects Aussie punk records 1976-1981". We applaud the tightness of those parameters, but dig the recording dates of Overett's own work - December 1983 to January 1984! Talk about hiding your light under a bushel. Luckily for Mark, others find worth in music made outside the classic '76-'81 timeframe - Samurai is a neat, punky powerpop track, and yet another example of the endearing tweeness that pervades many a Brisbane record from the Go Betweens on. The EP's two remaining tracks sit at opposing extremes of the tweeness spectrum, and are less endearing as a result. Other band members were Wayne Harvey (drums), Bob Reeves (guitar), and Adrian Mengede (bass).

Samurai [Download]

The End - My Confession 7" 13199, 1981

The Gap is a suburb in Western Brisbane named after the hole in its inhabitants' aesthetic sensibilities. It takes just one person to break the cycle and that person was Gap High student and guitarist, Brett Myers.

I used to play bass in high school bands. The End started in late 1979, I had just bought my first electric guitar.  I had a friend called Andrew Massey who was a bass player and he lived in my street. He came over and asked me if I wanted to join a band. I said as long as it wasn't with the guy down the road. I used to hear him playing Led Zeppelin songs!

The guy was drummer Colin Barwick, who with Massey on bass and Murray Davis on keyboards formed the first line-up of The End. Barwick was re-educated. Myers :

I wasn't into jamming, so to play anything I had to teach them all these Velvets songs. We played lots of parties, but we'd finish an average of about one song out of ten. It was a real thrash but it was coming from a different direction to everyone else. In those days no one was playing the sort of music I liked. If there had been another band playing it, I probably wouldn't have started.

In the end though, there was.

We used to do a lot of Stooges stuff as well, and New York Dolls. Then I saw the Fun Things and they were doing that stuff really well, so we stopped.

The new, "wimpy" End, started exploring space and dynamics rather than power. In most cases such a development would have us running fast in the other direction, but if there was one guitar player whose non-obvious choices we enjoyed the challenge of watching through the eighties, it was Mr Myers. The End took on Malcolm Cole on violin and keyboards, and swapped Massey for Johnathon Liekliter on bass. Their only single is a sometimes tentative, sometimes assured venture. We like its indirectness, though will champion their more powerful tracks like Birthday Boy, which saw release on a posthumous cassette that Citadel were due to issue on CD last decade before the arse wore out of the pants of the reissue market.

The End moved to Sydney and Myers got together with Ron Peno in Died Pretty. With Peno he could marry more direct rock and roll (and shred with the best of them, 2:42 on), with his more delicate sensibilities.

My Confession [Download]


White World [Download]


Thanks to X-change #4 (1981), and DNA #49 (1986) for the quotes.

Avalanche - Sweet Baby Brown Eyes 7" Bootleg BL-281, 1976

Along with such weighty topics as which of the 2013 fake Black Flags is the best (answer: this one), grillfat as a cultural touchstone is a subject close to our hearts, meaning that we're prone to running our mouths. It was on one of those grill-advised rants that we speculated that grillfat would be an unlikely candidate for KBD-style comp-age, given that grilldom is primarily the domain of the dollar bin ripper. So when we got wind of a boot being compiled from - where else? - The Boot, we thought we'd have to eat our words. Yes, contrary to predictions, Killed By Grillfat now exists (well, kinda. It's a Sharpie comp, so forgivably a few selections stray from the brief). But it turns out that even when we're wrong, we're right - at least half of the comp's track listing can be found languishing in dollar bins country-wide.

In that spirit, today we bring you a bang-for-your-buck grillfat knuckle-dragger, a relatively easy find for the tightwad digger. From their beginnings as the Bootleg Family Band, to their final single as Front Page and almost all of the Avalanche records in between, this band's output is uniformly turdly. The lone exception is Sweet Baby Brown Eyes, the second Avalanche single and a genuine butt-kicker. Lyrics about brown eyes are treacherous waters - was it really kicking that was on their minds? - but Avalanche navigate that minefield and emerge pretty much unscathed, leaving behind a song that is up there with the best of Fat Daddy and Taste in the Bootleg label discography.

The scuttlebutt is that other Killed By Grillfat comps are in the works, at least one of which promises to delve beyond the dollar bin into the realm of obscuro Australian hard rock mind-melters. Never have we so much looked forward to being 100% wrong.

Sweet Baby Brown Eyes [Download]

The Razor Gang - (All I Want For Xmas Is A) Neutron Bomb 7" RG 01, 1982

If you spend as much time as we do in the bins and crates then you're au fait with the basic tenets of quantum record theory. The bit which does our heads in is Schrödinger's Record Paradox, first posited by our learned colleagues over at the Corroseum. It goes like this: an unknown record found in the racks is simultaneously good and bad, until it is forced to collapse into one state or the other. We do this by putting them in our small hadron collider, a circular device where we smash industrial diamond at high speeds (45 rpm to be exact) against the vinyl, and study the results intently, looking particularly for evidence of the elusive punk particle.

So there I was, stood in The Pitt record shop in the 1990s. All of a sudden the Geiger counter in my toolbelt started going fucking ballistic. I took off my gas mask (this was a Bob Gould shop after all) and before me sat the record pictured above. Razor Gang. 1982. Crude sleeve. Military imagery. Neutron Bomb. Drawing of a razor blade. I added up the quantum probabilities in my head and easily cracked 100%. I could almost taste the Nobel Prize.

I quickly hotfooted it past the racks fronted by Danny Graham and Mopsie Beans 12"s (sadly I'm not joking), paid and rushed back to the collider, then based in Surry Hills.

Insert sad slide whistle...

To cut a long story short, my disappointment was such that until I recently pulled it out of the Wallaby Beat powerpop section, admittedly not the most visited part of the archive, this probably hadn't seen action round here for fifteen years.

With that much water under the bridge, the A-side is not too bad at all. Like the Mansons, the direct lyrics and vocals override an overly poppy backing. The "happy Hammond" does add something, though recent comparisons to The Go Betweens' People Say are gilding the turd. The flipside? Let's just say there is no New Wave section in our archive.

(All I Want For Xmas Is A) Neutron Bomb [Download]


Video Dreams [Download]

The Ash Band - Let's Go 7" Kanangra KAP-005, 1980

Cases of sexual mistaken identity aren't unheard of in the world of grillfat, but you'd be hard pressed to find a more clueless bunch of longhairs than Sydney's The Ash Band. Along with Sidewalk Teaser by U-Turn, Let's Go from The Ash Band's only single is our favourite grillfat tale about the world's oldest profession. The difference is that U-Turn know exactly what they're getting themselves into, while Ash Band vocalist Paul Flood is such a dope, he doesn't realise that his date expects a gratuity until after he drops his drawers. Amazing. He's got a pretty face, and it ain't going to hell - when he sings about "making whoopie", you know he's never made anything of the sort. Backing him are Danny McCarthy (drums), Dave Flood (bass), and Zac Zinic (guitar) who may or may not be Alex "Zac" Zytnic from the Sunsets/Tamam Shud/Blackfeather.

One of the more interesting threads to emerge from our posts here is the sheer number of (largely undocumented) records from Sydney's Western suburbs. Kanangra was a 24 track studio based in Westmead; it is perhaps best known for tracking the Numbers' Govt. Boy EP, although Wallaby Beat bottom feeders may also recognise the name from the Replicas 45. As a label, Kanangra's discography runs the gamut from suburban mystery bands to mystical singer-songwriter types to one-man-band Hammond organ lounge-dwellers. While later releases have the air of a genuine label about them, the earlier records seem to be drawn from the studio's client base who simply wished to delegate the drudgery of pressing their own records. Even taking that into account, it's a strange discography, peppered with oddball one-sided 12"s, and with packaging that ranges from the professional to the perfunctory. The sleeve for the Ash Band single - a nifty silver screen printed job - is certainly one of the better ones. It also doubles as a public health campaign up there with the federal government's plain packaging legislation. Never have cigarettes seemed less glamorous.

Let's Go [Download]

Rick Huxley - Drive Drivin' 7" 13151, 1981

Unlike Thorburn's crazy mug, Rick Huxley presents a more world weary portrait to those trying to figure him out 30 years (and counting) later. Even when Google was a useful tool, and not a shillbucket, it was impossible to find anything about Rick due to his recently deceased namesake. World weary or not, we're reasonably sure he's not the Dick Huxley from Hot Cottage (who did feature Kim Humphreys, though), or the one from Mecca. The liner notes, as such, say the A-side was written in 1978 by The Reputable Band, but that's another complete and utter dead end.

Like Thorburn though, we're in mildly demented DIY territory here, with an odd country/busker/blues vibe. With the rectal insertion theme popping up in Drive Drivin', Merv Megastar is another apt reference point. The flipside sounds like classic M-Squared, but was recorded just a bit further south at Axent Studios in Kogarah.

So what are we doing here? Well, we like the record, especially that solo in Drive Drivin'; but we're also intrigued by the involvement of drummer and guitarist Ed Fisher and Geoff Holmes, who readers of Blood, Sweat And Beers will recall were in Evil Rumours, the proto-X band from 1977, with Holmes reappearing in X proper briefly in 1979.

Special note must be made of the packaging - a plastic outer bag signed in texta, oversized 4-page sleeve featuring the lyrics and naive artwork below, and then there's the sports powder. Huxley thought it would be a good point-of-sale differentiator to add a sachet of effervescent pick-me-up into copies. If you think hard plastic outer sleeves wreck records after twenty years you should see what a leaky pouch of electrolytes does to seven inches of polyvinyl chloride.

Drive Drivin' [Download]


I'm Not A Competitor [Download]

More artwork for the interested student.

Rick Huxley branded sports drink. Puts back what not being a competitor takes out.

Frames - Never Coming Home 7" CBS BA 222832, 1981

The late, great Imants Krumins once disparaged my über-fandom of Grand Funk Railroad on the basis that as a young 'un, Grand Funk fans would beat him up for listening to Lou, Bowie and T Rex. So Grand Funk were cavemen and so were their fans - no doubt about that, but when I hear Inside Looking Out I find it hard to care (and I hasten to add, I'm not the only one). In much the same way, I can't expect my prejudices about The Frames to matter to those who didn't live in Perth in the mid-'80s, for whom Never Coming Home will probably sound like a pretty snappy piece of new wave power pop. If you were there, then you will remember the suffocating ubiquity of The Frames, The Jets, V-Capri, Flying Fonzarellis and countless others which essentially amounted to cover bands expecting to be taken seriously when snapping off the occasional original. As they say on the internet, fuck that shit.

Never Coming Home [Download]

Thorburn - Brick Wall 7" Mouth MTH.SP.001, 1978

Euan Thorburn was a fringe dweller in the early Melbourne scene and is vaguely remembered by various participants we've polled. As we hope you'd figured out by now, we love fringe dwellers, especially to the fringe scenes we cover. We'd like to be able to pinpoint exactly where he fit in but he hasn't answered our emails! Work with us, Euan. Anyway, Thorburn was a graphic artist (one of his better pieces appears below), who diversified into recording in 1978, the wonderfully loony Brick Wall / Charlie being the result. With its unique, DIY take on R'n'B, Brick Wall is the kind of thing that would have appeared on Charly, or Stiff, or maybe even Chiswick, had our man been in London, rather than the bleak city. We're also partial to the downer B-side.

Brick Wall eventually reappeared on Missing Link's Inner Sanctum LP, Keith Glass being a fan of the record through his record shops.

Thorburn still sits on the fringe, plying his trade as an artist - you can shop for his art here.

Brick Wall [Download]


Charlie [Download]

"Artwork by Euan Thorburn"