Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  Tex Perkins: Pork were quite groundbreaking, actually! When I was first going out and looking for some rock & roll, most of the bands that were getting about were like Xero and Pork, and they were very un-rock & roll. Pork would play in their underpants, or their cricket gear or something like that, and their music was completely experimental, but with a good deal of humour.

  Born in 1965 in Darwin, Greg Perkins grew up in Sandgate. His older brother Robert had been a roadie for the Leftovers, and Tex, as he would soon be known, was initiated into Brisbane’s punk scene from an early age. His potential was first spotted at the bottom of a flight of stairs by the Pits’ Ian Wadley, during a gig at a hall in Fortitude Valley that was owned by the Communist Party.

  Tex Perkins: I was a punter, and I’d taken some sort of inebriant and I was particularly out of it, shall we say. And I made a complete buffoon of myself . . . I actually fell down this very large, long staircase. A month later I was at a nightclub and these two guys came up to me and said, ‘Aren’t you that guy who was causing havoc at the communist hall?’ And I went, er, yeah.

  ‘You want to form a band with us?’

  Although the influence of the Pits was apparent in the performance-art approach of one of Perkins’ countless later bands, Thug, his tastes lay mainly in traditional rock & roll. Formed in late 1981, his first band the Dum Dums was completed by Greg Gilbert and brothers Greg and Ian Wadley. ‘We could have been Ian and the Gregs,’ Perkins says dryly. ‘That was another reason for me to become Tex.’

  As Tex Deadly, Perkins had a ready-made role to walk into. With songs like This Here Country and Cheap Funerals, the Dum Dums were very much an early version of the hillbilly swamp-rock he perfected later with Sydney’s Beasts of Bourbon. Rangy and photogenic, with a precociously deep, growling voice, Tex fitted the gunslinger part perfectly, but his band was too ramshackle to pack much of a wallop.

  The recruitment of Mark C ‘Marko’ Halstead in late 1982 gave the Dum Dums some much-needed muscularity. Some years older than the rest of the band, Halstead had already achieved small-time notoriety with the Disposable Fits. The name was not just an in-joke: the collective bad habits of the group could have killed a horse. Some of the members later formed the Fuji Angels, named after a brand of syringe.

  Mark Halstead: I’m sure the drug squad kept our posters on the wall . . . ‘Anyone here play bass? Our guy’s just turned blue in the gutter outside . . . Is anyone pumping him up, that’d be a good idea, good, OK. Oh fuck, he’s throwing up, I don’t want to give him mouth to mouth . . . Oh all right, I’ll do it! Jesus . . .’

  Halstead suited the Dum Dums’ approach. Schooled on rockabilly and the outlaw country of Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings as much as punk, he possessed a wider grasp of musical structure, and vocabulary of chords, than most of his peers. With a new line-up including another ex-Fit and former Swell Guy, Cyril Culley, and additional guitarist Clem Lukey, the group – but mainly Perkins – was spotted by manager Roger Grierson after a gig supporting ska band the Allniters.

  The Dum Dums moved to Sydney in early 1983, where the attention lavished on their charismatic frontman helped ensure they didn’t last long. Perkins was at the beginning of a slow climb to household-name status.

  Tex Perkins: Cyril and Marko left because I wasn’t helping load out enough. They just got the shits and went back to Brisbane in the dead of night. Without saying anything! That was pretty funny. That was the main reason the Dum Dums broke up, because I wasn’t helping to lug enough gear. Well, you know, I’ve got a microphone! It’s one of the reasons you become a singer!

  Mark Halstead: I thought at the time, if he sticks at it, he’ll be a star, this guy. There was no two ways about it – just through sheer force of will and this irresistible craziness. I don’t think it entered his head that he wouldn’t somehow be able to make a living out of it.

  Halstead and Perkins were not alone in their interest in the rural roots of rock & roll. Another songwriter was creating his own brand of self-described ‘urban and western’ under the unlikely name of John F Kennedy.

  John Kennedy: My dad’s name’s John Kennedy, so I’ve never thought twice about it, although I was always aware from a very early age of President Kennedy, and can recall seeing the images on television when he was assassinated. But I did take it one step further – being from a Catholic background, you can take a confirmation name when you’re about 10 or 12, and I picked a name that started with F. I thought it was a good joke at the time and have since lived to find the joke’s not funny anymore. It’s a double-edged sword – once people know you, they never forget your name, and the other side of it is, once people know you, they never forget your name.

  Born in Liverpool, where he spent his early childhood, Kennedy nursed an understandable Beatles fixation, but after his parents settled in the industrial southern suburban wasteland of Acacia Ridge in the late ’60s, he found himself drawn to the occasional country tune that would cross over to the local AM radio. A decade later the only punk or new wave artist of substance allowing any country leanings to filter through his work was Elvis Costello. Kennedy latched onto Costello’s debut My Aim Is True like a drowning man.

  In 1980 Kennedy met guitarist Graham Lee, then playing with Mark Halstead in pop band the Gasmen. Lee – whose nickname ‘Evil’ was a playful twist on his choirboy features – had earlier played on folk singer Eric Bogle’s original version of And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, appearing on the album cover wearing a fetching set of white flares. After assisting on some four-track recording, Lee helped Kennedy recruit the rhythm section of bassist John Downie and drummer Steven Pritchard.

  Dubbed JFK and the Cuban Crisis by Kennedy’s school friend and guitarist James Paterson, the band quickly became a fixture at the 279 Club. Kennedy was, by his own admission, something of an honorary member of the local scene – he actually had a job – and as one of the few bands able to put together not one but two full 45-minute sets of mainly original music without falling over, the Cuban Crisis played several prestigious support slots, notably to the Pretenders and Ian Dury.

  John Kennedy: Looking back on it, that was one of the benefits of being a band in Brisbane. Most bands on a similar level in Sydney wouldn’t have been getting that type of access to larger audiences, because there was a lot more of them, so there was much stronger competition for support slots.

  Of course, the high profile the band enjoyed made a move to Sydney all the more inevitable. After two cassette releases and the Paterson-penned first single Am I A Pagan? (written, allegedly, about the relationship between Paterson and Mark Halstead), the Cuban Crisis’ name was made by a jaunty, keyboard-driven song originally titled Take Something.

  John Kennedy: After Am I A Pagan? was sent off to be pressed, James said, ‘I think the next single definitely should be Texan Thing.’ And I thought, that’s a bit rude, because he’d already had the A-side of the first single, and now he was mentioning this song I’d never heard of to be the next single. Unbeknownst to me, when I played him this song called Take Something, he’d misheard it as Texan Thing. So I had to go back and rewrite the lyrics for the song.

  Released in December 1982, the four-track EP Careless Talk Costs Lives (featuring The Texan Thing) was the first release for Sydney independent label Waterfront Records, and gained Kennedy a wider audience. But Kennedy enjoyed precious little good fortune thereafter. Having left Downie and Pritchard back in Brisbane, momentum was stalled by constant line-up changes. After Paterson’s departure in 1983, Kennedy was joined by the gifted Lee, only to lose him to Perth band the Triffids, then cutting a swathe through Europe and the UK.

  In a later song originally titled Hicksville – its title underlined by a sawing fiddle and plunking banjo – Kennedy bade a not-so-fond farewell to his old home. The song was eventually released as Brisbane ’82.

  I come from a little town that they call Brisbane

 
; Where the government wants progress at all costs

  Repression’s a small price to pay, and corruption’s going to pave the way

  To a future where innocence is lost

  In June 1984 Joh Bjelke-Petersen was knighted for his services to Queensland. The source of his nomination is actually something of a mystery: the Courier-Mail, in one of its more breathless moments, suggested that perhaps Buckingham Palace had initiated the honour itself. Author Evan Whitton later wrote: ‘If that were the case, it would be difficult to know whether to condemn Palace minions for not making proper inquiry, or to applaud Her Majesty for a tour de force of sustained and sleepless irony.’ Bjelke-Petersen’s citation read, in part:

  In the high and responsible office of premier for 15 years, Mr Bjelke-Petersen has been not only an inspiration and a guiding light, but also a living embodiment of the spirit of self-sacrifice and service . . . Mr Bjelke-Petersen is a strong believer in the historic tradition of parliamentary democracy and he has had implemented many improvements in the parliamentary process.1

  When more than 1000 employees of the South East Queensland Electricity Board went on strike in early 1985, protesting against the government’s bid to break the Electrical Trades Union through the introduction of contract labour, Bjelke-Petersen’s response could hardly have been more emphatic: he sacked the lot. Peter de Hesse, of punk band La Fetts, was one of them, and wrote the scathing SEQEB Scabs in response.

  I’ll tell you what Joh did to the electricity workers

  For expressing their rights, he put ’em on the dole!

  The unionists were eventually offered back their jobs on the condition of signing new contracts with punitive anti-strike clauses. A little over half buckled. The rest lost their positions and their superannuation.

  It was a bitter time. Bjelke-Petersen had previously hinted that Queensland might be better off seceding from Australia, complete with its own currency (coins could potentially have featured two heads, with Bjelke-Petersen’s opposite the Queen’s). The sense of unreality that was becoming a part of living in the state – the feeling that, at times, one really was living in a foreign country or perhaps on another planet – deepened when the newly knighted premier was awarded an honorary doctorate of law by the University of Queensland in May 1985, an occasion that prompted outraged protests by staff and students alike.

  Even more curious was the awarding of another knighthood later the same year, this time to Terry Lewis. It was the first and last such honour accorded to a police commissioner and, as Lewis’ diaries later showed, came after considerable agitation on his own part. (Shamelessly, Lewis let it be known he would prefer to be addressed as ‘Sir Terence’ henceforth.) According to self-confessed bagman of the force, the late Jack Herbert, Lewis was receiving as much as $11,451 a week in corrupt payments at the time.2

  It was against this surreal backdrop that the most deliriously weird album ever to emerge from Brisbane surfaced. The Pineapples From the Dawn of Time were an odd hybrid, initially a three-piece featuring former Dum Dum Clem Lukey (aka Big John Featherduster), singer Michael Gilmore (King Farouk) and Rod McLeod (Vance Astro). McLeod was a veteran of the Brisbane scene, notorious for two primitive EPs cut with underage punks the Young Identities, the band he had formed with his brothers Clayton and Gavin in 1978. Inspired by the Leftovers – McLeod had helped cover the manufacturing costs of Cigarettes And Alcohol – the Young Identities’ disdain for anything that smacked of professionalism was the common thread of McLeod’s many bands right through to the Pineapples.

  Rod McLeod: I think music had become too serious in Brisbane, the whole scene had become dour and self-important by that stage . . . Everything had started slowing down, people were getting methodical and self-absorbed, so we decided to speed it up a bit.

  The group’s drum-machine augmented demo Too Much Acid was seized upon by Triple Zed, and injected a welcome dose of levity onto the scene:

  Taking acid made me aware

  Bent my mind, lost my hair

  Lived my life to the full

  Now I am a vegetable

  The band quickly expanded to include like-minded spirits Peter Kroll and Mark Halstead. Both were playing in country combo the Kingswoods, who in 1983 recorded a cover of the Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant (as Purty Vacant) for Sydney label Green Records. On the ‘straight’ single version of Too Much Acid, released in 1986, Kroll’s faux-Hendrix guitar playing established the Pineapples’ blueprint as, in McLeod’s words, a ‘joke hippie psychedelic band’. Live, the group put a more tuneful spin on their inspirations, the Pits and the Leftovers.

  Mark Halstead: You weren’t allowed to perform or for that matter record sober, but despite all the psychedelic bullshit, I don’t think anyone took any drugs at the time, other than Victoria Bitter.

  Crediting ex-Leftover Warren Lamond for spiritual guidance, the band’s sole album Shocker spiked the punch of many a local party. Recorded on an eight-track machine used to capture an Engelbert Humperdinck gig the night before, it featured a sleeve worthy of the album’s hallucinogenic content.

  Rod McLeod: There’s an infamous episode of Star Trek where these space hippies take over the Enterprise. That’s the space hippies on the cover; Spock ends up jamming with them and he’s actually playing this thing that looks like a spare tyre from a bicycle . . . I suppose it comes back to a trash aesthetic, I think most rock & roll definitely comes from that.

  The paucity of venues available in Brisbane by the mid ’80s meant that it helped one’s cause greatly to create a sound acceptable, and preferably familiar, to punters. If the country crowd were looking backwards for inspiration, and the experimentalists were glancing sideways, then the Ups and Downs were very much the band of the moment.

  The core of the band, rhythm section Greg and Darren Atkinson, had played together in 42nd Street since 1979 and had already tried their luck in Sydney. Making no secret of their commercial aspirations, 42nd Street was straight guitar pop, and had been included on a compilation album (the appalling That’s Queensland!) put together by local AM station 4IP.

  Darren Atkinson: Rather than play the Triple Zed circuit we got ourselves involved in the Hutchinson booking agency, which looked after all the cover bands and booked all the places on the Gold Coast like the Jet Club and the Paradise Room, places that all the big mainstream bands played.

  Unsurprisingly, 42nd Street was unable to gain a foothold in the Detroit-obsessed Sydney scene. Returning to Brisbane, the two brothers recruited guitarists John Flade and Peter Shaw. The Ups and Downs plied a slightly edgier trade than 42nd Street, drawing heavily on the jangling sounds of early R.E.M. and American ‘paisley underground’ bands such as the dB’s and the Rain Parade. The most obvious reference point was the Church, an influence some members took rather too close to heart: Shaw even hyphenated his surname to Hamilton-Shaw in homage to Church guitarist Marty Willson-Piper.

  Ultimately, the Ups and Downs stood out on the Triple Zed circuit almost as much as 42nd Street had in Sydney.

  Greg Atkinson: I think we were considered to be fairly squeaky-clean pop, although we got a little bit darker as we went along. We didn’t even do drugs, apart from a little bit of pot. Actually we didn’t smoke pot until we got to Sydney, most of us! We were just good Brisbane boys. I remember seeing Lovs é Blur once, and Wendy [Seary, singer] blew me away when she said it was as dry as a nun’s cunt up on stage. I remember thinking, wow, that’s an expression I haven’t heard before! I may never hear it again!

  The band’s first single, Living Inside My Head, had little impact on its release in December 1984, but the next, Perfect Crime, transformed the Ups and Downs into next big things. With the single reissued by Waterfront in the spring of 1985, the group were again caught in Sydney’s gravitational pull. This time, they found the city considerably more accommodating, despite groups like the Lime Spiders and the Celibate Rifles having usurped R
adio Birdman’s crown.

  Greg Atkinson: The press was starting to get on to us, because I suppose they needed something to align with the new music that was happening in America, like R.E.M., and Ups and Downs fitted into that perfectly . . . We weren’t a part of that Detroit thing happening in Sydney, which was why some journalists jumped on us. We got hyped to death.

  After a third single, In The Shadows, gained them a deal with Polygram subsidiary True Tone, the sublime The Living Kind, released in August 1986, saw the Ups and Downs on the edge of the mainstream Top 40. The accompanying mini-album Sleepless showcased a deeper sound, albeit still a derivative one, with the group in thrall to British groups the Cure and Cocteau Twins (and wearing black instead of paisley). But the band peaked too early: when their management tried to capitalise on The Living Kind’s commercial promise by prising more money out of True Tone, the Ups and Downs spent two years in limbo before crossing to Mushroom. They never recaptured their momentum.

  Greg Atkinson: In retrospect it’s easy to say we shouldn’t have done that; that was a decision our management made and we could have said no. But of course we didn’t want to know about that stuff; we just wanted to play in a band. What we should have done was go overseas and follow that up while nothing was happening for us here, because we were making the college charts [in America], and we made a dent in the European independent charts with Sleepless.

  The story of the Ups and Downs was emblematic in many respects. Countless other Brisbane bands were ground under the wheels of the music industry machine after developing in relative isolation, especially those yet to develop a strong sense of musical identity. Had the Ups and Downs surfaced at the tail end of the ’80s, when the rapid rise of Sydney’s the Hummingbirds pre-empted the incorporation of independent bands into the mainstream, the band’s fate might have been different.