Bad Batch caught up with Sorcerer Records boss and drummer, Dave Lang ahead of the show…

Melbourne quartet Cry Cyclops have released their debut full-length, ‘Nightworld’, through the local institution Sorcerer Records. A twelve-track slab of unhinged, noisy Rock that arrives loaded with pedigree, history, and a reputation for chaotic live shows that precedes the record itself.

Cry Cyclops didn’t spring from nowhere. The band is made up of three-quarters of the Melbourne outfit formerly known as Bits Of Shit. Those guys released an LP on Homeless Records, put out a string of 7”s through Total Punk, Lexicon Devil and Matador, and toured the US and Japan before going into hibernation for near on a decade. When they eventually reconvened, the brief wasn’t merely to resurrect the old, but to create the new. The goal, as the band put it, was to jam, write songs, and trying not to sound too much like what came before.

What emerged instead is a sound that draws on early US Hardcore, scuzzy Aussie Noise-Punk, and a heap of obtuse Post-Punk influences filtered, inevitably, through the muscle memory of a band that already knows how to turn a room upside down. Anyone lucky enough to have caught Bits Of Shit at packed Melbourne shows, a rare Sydney appearance, or those Japanese and US tours will recognise the same confrontational brio in Cry Cyclops. A live show more than one witness has described as genuinely intimidating, in the best possible way.

We put that question directly to Mr Lang… Cry Cyclops shares three-quarters of its lineup with Bits Of Shit, a band with a serious reputation. How much of a conscious decision was it to sound different this time around, and how hard was that in practice?

“OK, to answer this question... my brother, Andrew (BOS’s guitarist) rang me in about January of last year and said: Dave - Danny, Eli and I are going to get a new band together, and we want you to drum for us. I hadn’t played in a regular band for 15+ years, and given that those three guys were all in BOS, my response was: You getting the band back together? I don’t want to be in BOS and you always swore you’d never do a reunion (or something like that). So, to make a short story short, the intention was something slightly DIFFERENT, although the comparisons will always be made. Which, of course, is fine, coz they were a great band, especially the Elias/Pete lineup that most people know. But we wanted to mix it up a bit, with perhaps a slightly less linear sound. We were keen to mix up the aggressive punk sound that we simply can’t escape (it’s what we love to play) with other kinds of music we like, such as early PiL or Australian underground bands from the ‘80s like feedtime, Grong Grong, etc., which are basically part of our musical DNA, whether we like it or not (we like it). Was it hard to forge a kind of new identity? Yep, but we’ve made a mantra of trying not to repeat ourselves (too much).”

The band has playing regularly around Melbourne and its surrounding regions. Confident they had something worth documenting, they booked in studio time to commit the songs to tape.

‘Nightworld’ runs twelve tracks deep, and is indebted to hardcore forebears like Black Flag and Flipper, as much as to homegrown noise-rock troublemakers such as Sick Things, X and Lubricated Goat.

The album was released on 3 July 2026 through Sorcerer Records, the Melbourne label whose catalogue already runs deep with Australian underground heritage - Lubricated Goat, Died Pretty, X, Kev Carmody, Whirlywirld and more sit alongside ‘Nightworld’ in the Sorcerer roster. True to the label’s ethos and the format’s collector culture, the release has come wrapped in vinyl variants. A limited run of 100 on green colour vinyl exclusive to Bandcamp and live shows, and 200 copies pressed on classic black wax for wider release. Some of which have circulated as band-signed copies through independent record stores.

‘Nightworld’ as a title carries a certain mood. What does the phrase mean to the band, and how did it come to anchor the record?

“Well, Danny is our lyricist, so such opaque references are perhaps best answered by him, though I don’t think he likes to explain himself too much, either. It’s the name of one of the songs on the LP, and we threw a bunch of names around as suggestions (I think the original idea was to make it self-titled), and it was the only one we could agree on. Read into it what you will, but don’t take it as being a theme of ‘darkness’, as I don’t see the band as being like that. We are too old to be edgelords.”

There’s a particular kind of anticipation that surrounds a record like this. It isn’t a debut in the conventional sense, there’s no “unknown quantity” element, because all four members have already proved themselves capable of something wild and have done it on stages across two continents. What ‘Nightworld’ represents instead is the same appetite for confrontation and noise, rebuilt from scratch, not simply repeating old tricks.

From a label perspective, what was it about Cry Cyclops that made this a record Sorcerer needed to release?

“If we were to release anything, there was never any question of it being on any other label. I mean, if you can’t release your own band’s music, why have your own goddamn label? We had interest from another label who were very keen to release it (which is nice), but I’m also a control freak, so I had to do it myself.”

For Sorcerer Records, the release slots comfortably into a catalogue built on exactly this kind of lineage, bands and artists connected to Australia’s underground Rock and Punk history, whether through direct membership or shared spirit. It’s a label that trades in continuity, and ‘Nightworld’ is very much a continuation story, even as the band insists on charting its own course.

Sorcerer’s catalogue spans decades of Australian underground music, from Lubricated Goat to Died Pretty to Whirlywirld. Where does ‘Nightworld’ fit into that lineage, and what does it say about the label’s direction going forward?

“I hope it fits in there somewhere among such musical giants(!), but that also probably sounds a bit conceited. I don’t think we’re in that league, but hey, I also think we’re pretty good. I’m going to be reissuing feedtime’s debut album on Sorcerer later in the year, a band that was absolutely pivotal for us growing up (especially my brother), so being in such company is surely not a bad thing. It’s nice to know we’re on the same label as Lubricated Goat, GOD and feedtime.”

With the record out and both the green and black vinyl pressings moving through independent stores, attention turns to what Cry Cyclops do with the well deserved momentum. So, with ‘Nightworld’ out and the pressings moving through stores, what comes next for the band — more shows, more recording, or something else entirely?

“Yes. The most important thing right now is to sell the album. There’s 300 of ‘em and we gotta move ‘em! We have the launch coming up soon, then a few more gigs booked, and then the next priority is to write some new material and hopefully record it. Like I said: we don’t want to repeat ourselves. Perhaps in due course we will record that difficult and experimental second album...”

Cry Cyclops are set to launch ‘Nightworld’, at the Old Bar on Saturday August 1^st with support from Techno 666, Cloven Fang, Alma Rink and curated by veteran MC Jonathan Schuster. Tickets are available now from Oztix - https://tickets.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/46a76c09-f32c-4b43-b6a8-d067a6652744

‘Nightworld’ is out now via Sorcerer Records on black and limited green vinyl, with digital and streaming versions also available -sorcererrecords.bandcamp.com

Photos by Brooke Hampton

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Melbourne’s music scene has a way of quietly assembling its most storied figures into unexpected configurations, and Fancy Weapon is exactly that kind of supergroup. The band brings together four musicians whose combined résumés read like a who’s who of Australian and international Rock. Bassist Guy Maddison, best known for his time with Mudhoney, Lubricated Goat, and Bloodloss, holds down the group alongside guitar legend Mick Turner, a man who has lent his unmistakable playing to Dirty Three, Sick Things, Mess Esque, Venom P Stinger, and Bleak Squad. Whilst helming the lineup and playing guitar and drums respectively are vocalists Joel Silbersher, whose songwriting fingerprints are all over the catalogues of GOD, Hoss, and Tendrils, and Claire Birchall, known for her solo performances as well as her work with Smoked Salmon and Paper Planes.

The four have channelled their considerable collective experience into Fancy Weapon’s self-titled debut LP, a record that feels both like a natural outgrowth of everything these folks have done before and something entirely its own. Bad Batch sat down with Guy Maddison to talk about how the band came together, recording the eponymous album, adventures in music past and present and what audiences can expect when Fancy Weapon take the stage for the album launch on July 4th at the Tote…

We don’t normally ask this question of bands, about band names and that sort of thing, but, you know, what’s behind this band name? It’s got us intrigued.

So, Fancy Weapon - We were having a devil of a time trying to come up with a name for it. And there were a lot of sort of jokey, non-serious options bandied around, which I won’t go into, but we couldn’t really agree on anything, and then one time we were practising, we were doing one of our songs, and one of the lyrics in the song, Joel sings the line about a fancy weapon, can’t find the charger, and Claire piped up from behind the drums, ‘What if we call ourselves Fancy Weapon?’ So, we just chose that. So, it came from, essentially, one of the lines of the lyrics.

So, who instigated the band then? How did you come to be involved?

As you guys may know, I was living in America for a long time and moved back with my family in 2022. I’ve been a long-time friend with Mick Turner over the years. We didn’t often see each other, because I lived in the US for 30 years and he lived there for a while, actually, in Chicago. Anyway, we remained friendly for a long time since the ‘80s, when our bands used to play together. When I got back, none of my equipment had come yet and I needed some amplification and I called up Mick and I said, ‘Oh, can I borrow some stuff? I’ve got to warm up for a Mudhoney tour,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, sure. Come over,’ and we just started talking. He goes, ‘Here, have a listen to these tracks I’ve got.’ They had 4 tracks and they said, ‘Maybe you want to do something with this?’ And he said he’d been working for a long time with Joel, and they just had 4 pieces of music at that point. So we started playing and then Joel brought Claire in and that sort of gelled into a band after a little bit. So that was how I got involved with it, essentially. I also knew Joel before as… I’ve known Joel for quite a long time as well. Perhaps not as closely as I’ve known Mick, but yeah…

Well, that was one of our questions as well - had you shared a stage with the guys in the past? Was that when Mick was in Venom P Stinger or…?

Yeah. So that was back in the ‘80s. In the mid to late ‘80s, early ‘90s, I lived in Sydney and I was in a band called Lubricated Goat, amongst some others. I was just living up there and playing in bands and, yeah, Lubricated Goat and Venom P Stinger, I believe we played a couple of shows together. I was a big fan of Venom P Stinger, so I’d go and see them whenever they came to town or if I came to Melbourne and they were on, I’d go check them out. So, that was that. And then Joel, I think that Joel has a distant memory of God and Lubricated Goat playing together. But maybe at a festival down here in Melbourne. Some festival at the showgrounds!?!

What prompted the move back to Australia? Was that during COVID?

Well, no, I made it through the whole pandemic. Haha. I was actually a registered nurse; I’m retired now. No, it was more just the overall social changes in America, essentially. Our daughter’s 15 now, and it was right at the time to go to high school and a lot of… a lot of weird stuff going on there. It didn’t seem like it was gonna get any better and actually my wife had the opportunity to take a job here and so we did it.

What’s the funniest thing that you’ve seen as a nurse? You would have seen some stuff, I’m sure.

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, so I worked in an ICU and in the emergency room, a fair bit at a trauma centre in the US, so I would have to categorise the majority of the stuff I saw as not very funny.

Yeah, right.

People often ask the question, like, what do people get stuck up their butt, you know?

I can imagine all manner of things…

All manner of things. Sometimes they place them there and sometimes they just accidentally sit on them and they ended up inside, you know… [he chuckles] Or so the stories go. But I think probably the funniest thing I ever saw was, over the last decade or so in hospitals, at least at the hospital that I was working at in Seattle, there’s been a real rise in the use of therapy animals and the ability to have therapy animals come into the hospital with patients. Which obviously creates a lot of administrative problems, because there’s infection risks and stuff like that. But there was always an interesting list of what would be included as service animals. One of them being miniature horses, believe it or not? I never saw a miniature horse in the hospital, but I will say, there was the story of a service animal snake, a companion snake. And the snake was noted to be able to tighten its grip on the patient if it sensed that something was wrong.

Right. Wow

Of course, the snake could just be opportunistically taking that opportunity to... [laughs] …finally, finish the human off. Who knows? I think the snake service animal might have been… Yeah, therapy snake, I think, might be the funniest. Good band name, right?

There you go. A missed opportunity.

I know, I should have brought that one up.

Where was Claire when you were telling that story?

I know. Well, yeah, I should whip more stories out, maybe.

So, who are the principal songwriters in Fancy Weapons? Do you write as a band or...?

Yeah, it’s sort of, I think, what you’d refer to it as a sort of collaborative writing group. Obviously, you know, initially there were those 4 pieces which became songs that are on the record now.

But I’m sure you flesh those out as well and they probably morphed and changed.

Oh, without a doubt. Then Joel or Claire wrote lyrics to them and then they changed once they had lyrics in them as well. So, it’s kind of farmed around. I’ve written some of the lyrics, I’ve written some of the music, Claire’s written some lyrics, and then it’s just sort of an amalgam. We sort of look at it as a collective. There’s not a principal songwriter, like a Jagger/Richards or Lennon/McCartney, it’s not in that mould. I think that’s how a lot of bands generally look at it, like even if you didn’t write something. If you participated in it, you gave it something. Like you say, it gets fleshed out, and so everyone in a way is - this is my opinion - everyone in a way is a composer because they bring their own unique style, flair and input to every song, and so it becomes a group thing anyway. At least that’s how I look at it.

I agree. Once it goes through the machine of the band, it never comes out the way you imagine it when you’ve written a song. It always changes.

Yeah, you know, most often for the best. Joel likes to say, ‘I shouldn’t get too married to my demos,’ because you start to think this is what it is but it may not end up being that in the end, and you’ve got to be okay with a bit of fluidity, I think.

Where did you record the album?

It was done at a great studio called Head Gap, here in Preston, in Melbourne. It was unfortunately burnt down the week after we recorded there. It was pretty tragic. There was a guitar shop [Shub Guitars] as well, apparently, at the back of it. Like, a guy [Jon Shub] that did guitar repairs and at the front there was a burger joint and that got torched maybe, you know, like a sort of insurance job or something. I don’t know. But they were able to save some of the studio. I think the guy’s guitar studio got kind of burnt out entirely. So that happened like a week afterwards. We were working with Finn [Keane] there and then he started using a different studio in Brunswick, actually Jack the Bear’s mastering studio, and we ended up finishing it there because no more work could be done at Head Gap. The initial tracks were laid down at Head Gap and then the mixing was done at… It’s still under Finn’s studio name, Head Gap, but it was a different venue. Some of the guitars and vocals were then done again in separate studios. I know that Joel worked with a friend of his to lay down some of the vocal tracks and I think some of the guitars. So, they got imported.

Had you done some of those already and they got burnt up in the fire or…?

No, nothing was destroyed for us, luckily. We did use tape and that tape, I believe, is gone. We were going on a quarter inch to compress the drums and so that’s gone, but the whole digital file was all intact. So, nothing got lost from what we recorded that day. There were guitars done that day, but really only scratch vocals on the initial recordings and so they got done by Claire and Joel later.

Why did you choose Poison City? I know there were a few labels sniffing around. What made you go with Andy?

Well, some people reached out to us, and we reached out to some people as well. We had a chat with Andy. There’s obviously a band on the label called Bleak Squad that Mick’s already in. So, there was a relationship there. Andy just impressed us with his enthusiasm. Like, he thought the record sounded great, and so obviously you want someone who really likes what you’re doing to put your stuff out. So that was the first thing and then he just seemed to have a really solid view of how to do things without being too… What’s the word for it? Without promising too much like, you know, ‘I’m gonna make ya… Have a cigar boys. You’re going to be the next big thing!’ There wasn’t any of that. It was more, ‘I think we can make this work and it fits in with the other bands we’ve got on the label.’

What about overseas? Have you got other representation over there?

We are working on that. I think Andy does have international distribution and he goes through, Rough Trade in the UK, and then Revolver. Something like that. I can’t remember exactly off the top of my head. There’s a west coast and an east coast distro. We’ve reached out and I mean… Were my friends at Goner to read this interview. Once again, we’d be more than happy to be on Goner Records [he chuckles]… And that’s one of the other things that was great about Andy, like, ‘I’ll put your record out and we can do this distribution,’ and he’s got good distribution set up, but he’s also, ‘I’m totally open if someone else in another market wants to take this on, I’m totally down with that.’ We’re open to offers!

Are you gonna take it overseas? Do you plan on touring?

We would love to. We don’t have a solid plan for that yet, but we’re beginning to form it. The booking agency Feel from Sydney has just taken us on, and so hopefully after the record comes out, we’ll be able to do more shows in Australia and some different cities and then hopefully look to going to Europe and seeing if we can get some dates over there. Yeah. I think we’d like to. It’s obviously, Mick’s pretty busy and I can get a little busy at times. We’ve got some Mudhoney dates here in Australia later this year, which is great, and probably having a record next year. So, you know, it’s a bit of schedule juggling to take place but we’d love to get away and see if they like our stuff over there. Hopefully we’ll get some good press. I think that we might get some decent write-ups over there, and if we do then, we’ll look to get over there and show them our stuff. Ha.

So, what attracts you to these esoteric noiseniks? You seem to be in bands with some interesting people. You’ve done stuff with Michael Sheridan and John Murphy and then the Mudhoney guys. Now you’re in a band with Mick Turner. You’ve done all the Stu Spasm and Black Eye Records stuff. What draws you to that?

I guess a lot of the music I like a lot and that probably my taste formed around was a lot of the Post-Punk stuff. I was heavily into Punk Rock as well, but I liked a lot of those sort of bands like Magazine, Public Image, Japan and Pere Ubu and stuff like that, that all have more unusual sounds and arrangements to their stuff and often use synthesisers. Because even early Lubricated Goat, Stuart [Gray aka Stu Spasm] loved the synth. He had the drum synth thing, and there’s all sorts of weird synth sounds on those records that kind of colour the swamp rock up. I think it’s probably mostly coming from my musical taste there, when I was younger, which I still have, I guess. I still love all those records. All those bands.

Speaking of Lubricated Goat, we were scarred as teenagers, seeing you live on ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’.

I’m very sorry. [laughs]

That’s all we talked about the next day at school. It was the best! But how did your parents take it?

My mum never really talked about it. My parents were separated, but my father, he was not pleased. Not pleased at all [chuckles]. Because it was on the papers the next day and… Yeah. Nah, he wasn’t happy about it. I think he said something like, ‘I suppose you think this is some sort of clever political stunt do you, Guy?’ Nah, we just wanted to get on TV, Dad! But, ah… No, not pleased at all.

So, how did you meet Stu Spasm? How did Lubricated Goat start?

Well, initially we met in Perth, where I come from, and the band. It’s Stu’s band, Lubricated Goat, and he’s the driving force of that band. He’d had some bands in Melbourne with the original drummer Brett Ford, and actually Martin Bland, who’s in Adelaide. Who’s a drummer that I still work with on some projects. They had these raw ideas. These ideas that were one side of the first record, the second side. And then the first side, Stuart had been in Britain. He was coming back to Perth and Peter Hartley, who was the guitar player and a friend of ours, in our little scene in Perth and Brett, who lived there as well. They all went in, they recorded side one of that, which was all the songs like ‘Gutter Snipe’ and ‘Jason the Unpopular’. But anyway, that first side of the record, they recorded that in Perth and I met Stuart then when he was there doing that. Then not long after that, I moved with my punk band to Sydney, and we obviously lived in the same neighbourhood and I was crossing the street one day and he was like, ‘Ah, you. You want to play bass in my band?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I do.’ I think he’d given us a tape of that recording that they made in Perth, which is side one of ‘Plays The Devil’s Music’. And me and my buddies in the band we’d driven from Perth over to Sydney and listened to that almost constantly the whole way. Yeah, so that’s how I joined Lubricate Goat.

So, what was your first band?

It was a band in Perth called Greenhouse Effect.

Oh right, that was the first. That was with Rusty Hopkinson [of You Am I fame], yeah?

Yep, Russell. As you can probably imag… Do you guys come from the Geelong area?

Yeah.

So, you guys are like me. You know what it’s like in Perth. Probably, if you’re into anything even remotely left of field, you know every other one of the 30 people that are like that in your town, right? There’s like 30. So, we’re a pretty small scene of Punk Rock in Perth. So, yeah, Russ played in other bands and he joined us. He was our second drummer. Our first drummer was super short-lived. Just a month or something and then Russell, and then after that, Dave. Russell was on a much faster trajectory towards stardom than any of us [laughs]. Because he’s so fucking good, right? He’s just amazing. Everyone wanted him in their band. They’d come along and watch, ‘Oh, there’s that crap punk band with the really good drummer. We’ll get him!’ [laughs].

There must be something in the water over there. You were saying it’s a small scene, but a lot of talent has come out of that Perth Punk scene, like right back from The Victims and Cheapskates, right through to now.

Yeah, The Scientists, I mean, even like big sort of pop bands which were more alternative like the Hoodoo Gurus that come out of the Victims and stuff… Yeah, I don’t know what it is, if it’s in the water, if it’s just the isolation of it and you’re just forced to, you know…

Entertain yourselves?

Entertain yourself and to try harder to entertain yourself because there’s not... Yeah, that was the classic thing, and I’m sure you probably saw it a lot in your hometowns, nothing’d come. You’d see these bands billed, these international bills, bands billed in the eastern states, but they’d never come to West Australia. Probably not going to Tassie either.

Nah it’s even worse in Tassie. Yeah, but I think…

Then you’d have to go up to Melbourne to see ‘em. So yeah. Yeah, you really did have to make your own fun, as it were.

Yeah, but I think that boredom is the key to those scenes. Being that bored that you need to do stuff. You need to make art, make music, you know?

Yeah, try and make stuff happen. It was super boring because there weren’t a lot of places to play, so there actually weren’t even a lot of gigs happening. There were lots of gigs if you wanted to go and see a band doing U2 covers, or Angels covers [laughs], but there wasn’t for our sort of thing. So yeah, it was very boring.

So, you moved straight from Perth to Sydney? And then Sydney to overseas or had you done time in Adelaide and Melbourne?

In Melbourne, I think, in 1985, the Greenhouse Effect just went across and we hung out in Melbourne, couch surfed and stuff around the punk scene there for about 4 or 5 months. For as long as we could hang, you know, hang it together…

Until you wore out your welcome?

Till we wore out our welcome. Till there were no more couches left! We did make a lot of friends. Then we went back to Perth and we played a bit more and we’re like, ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ Then we went to Adelaide to play some shows. We went to Melbourne to play some shows, and we went to Sydney to play some shows, and then at that point we were just like, ‘OK, we’re here in Sydney, that’s it. No more moving.’ But unfortunately, the band kind of fell apart then as well. A couple of guys didn’t want to live in Sydney and so moved back to Perth to carry on their uni or whatever, with all their partners and stuff, so... I still have friends that I became friends with back then in Melbourne that are still around the scene and stuff, you know...

That’s great. You mentioned earlier that you’re still doing some projects with Martin Bland?

Yeah.

That’s why I thought you might have had a bit of a stay in Adelaide. Just with Lubricated Goat and Bloodloss, there’s a bit of an Adelaide connection there.

Well, Stuart was from Adelaide, and obviously Ren [aka Renastair EJ] and Martin are from Adelaide. And then a lot of the people that were in our sort of weird little Black Eye scene in Sydney. Like Peter Read, who was in Thug. He was from Adelaide. And Lachlan [McLeod], who was actually technically from Broken Hill or Silverton, but closer to that South Australian thing. So yeah, a lot of weird people in Adelaide back then [he laughs].

Martin and I have got a thing that’s just a recording project, called La Paire D’Or, that’s like drums and synthesisers and some guitars. I guess the closest analogy would be The Silver Apples. And we can still work on that. For a while we were swapping 8-track mini discs. Just put them in the mail to each other. It actually started like that during the pandemic when there was lockdown and social isolation and all that stuff, and we’d actually started it that way where we put a track down on 8-track mini disk, and then just left the mini disk in the other person’s letterbox, add something on and then put it back in the letterbox. Which actually served us well because now we don’t live in the same place. I was back at Christmas time for some New Year’s shows with Mudhoney and family visit, and then we actually went in and mixed a bunch of stuff then for a new record, which will hopefully come out. But it’s worked well in terms of setting up that relationship of working in isolation.

So, he’s still over in Seattle?

Yeah, Martin’s still there. Over there with his family and he does local music. He’s got a couple of bands on. He does a thing with a guy called Tom Price, who’s a kind of legendary underground figure from Seattle, who was the guitar player in the band called the U-Men. Who were kind of the progenitors of what started to bubble up towards the end of the ‘80s. So, Martin’s still drumming away. He’s a phenomenal - well musician in general - but he’s an amazing drummer.

I wanted to know a bit more about Extinkt. What was that project? Was it strictly a recording project? I just haven’t been able to find much information about Extinkt.

Yeah. It was a short-lived project in Sydney. Well, it was the project of a guy called Jamie Fielding, who unfortunately passed away. Jamie was a classically trained pianist and a very, very, very good piano player and keyboardist, and he sort of hung around the scene. I used to hang out with these strange guys in Sydney, John Evans and Louis Burdett, who were in a thing called the Unconscious Collective, which was sort of like a free jazz experimental thing. Different people would turn up and play weird instruments and stuff. It was very spontaneous. There was a lot of stuff like that all over Australia, I think, in the ‘80s. A little bit, probably, like the Little Bands movement here in Melbourne. Jamie was part of that, and we used to muck around a lot with trombones. Couldn’t really play them but could make a sound come out.

I was going to ask whether you were actually adept at it or...

I know the basic slide positions. My first instrument was the trumpet, and I played in a Salvation Army band when I was a boy.

Oh, wow!

I can no longer read trumpet music. I can make a sound come out of the trumpet and I can play a few scales, but I’m not a trumpet player by any stretch of the imagination. I could make the trombone work, and I knew a few of the slide positions for the notes. We used them more like they were Tibetan horns than they were trombones. It’s huge. If you’ve listened to that record, you obviously have, I guess. It’s got these long, like, [mimics a trombone drone]. Almost like a Tibetan horn. So, yeah… He liked to play it as well. He could get a sound out of them and we did those. We played live, I think, one time. Our friend Sybilla did some vocalising on it, and then John Murphy did some percussion and other stuff, and Michael… The gig that we played, Michael Sheridan and John Murphy weren’t there. It was more of a studio project. Those guys did their stuff in isolation, I think. It wasn’t played live, I mean.

Was it just the one album or...

That was all that I did, and I think that what eventually was released as the full Extinkt thing had other stuff that Jamie had been working on. That’s my understanding. It is really the solo project of Jamie Fielding more than it’s a band.

Yeah, it’s really cool stuff, but like we were saying before, you’ve played with a lot of noisy artists and it’s impressive. Your back catalogue’s pretty impressive.

Ah, well, thanks. I appreciate it. Have you heard the Beauty Hunters? The synthesiser band from Seattle?

No.

Yeah, it was like 2 synths with a projectionist, but yeah, if you like that sort of thing…

So, you guys have obviously known Claire for quite a long time then.

Yeah. Well, like you were saying before, the Geelong scene’s quite small. Everybody knows everybody.

Yeah, she’s remarkable. I mean speaking of a back catalogue and quite a remarkable resume for someone who’s not that old. She’s really had a lifetime of work already, really.

My word. Yeah, she could have put out a lot more as well. She is super talented.

She’s doing great stuff. Her vocals and her drumming in Fancy Weapon are amazing. And I think that’s one of the things about the band that hopefully will set us apart is her vocalising in the way that she can harmonise with Joel and also do lead vocals and then he can harmonise on the ones that she’s lead on. You don’t often find that in a band. That and that interplay between the two wildly different styles of the guitar players.

The band’s album launch will take place Saturday July 4 at the Tote with special guests Star/Time and Chris Smith.

Tickets are available now from:

https://tickets.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/9fc84283-777e-4587-bf17-cfa5be63ee67

Fancy Weapon’s debut album is available on limited edition ‘Deep Sea Blue’ colour vinyl (first 100 copies signed by the band!), CD and all digital stores world-wide. It is available now via Poison City E-Store and Bandcamp:

poisoncityestore.com

poisoncityrecords.bandcamp.com

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Japan’s Sister Paul hit Australia this May 2026 - Bad Batch caught up with the dynamic duo of Susumu and MACKii ahead of our upcoming hometown show at Geelong’s Medusa Bar on Friday 22^nd, with supports from The Hybernators and Pernicious Nefarious.

There are bands that chase the spotlight, and then there are bands like Sister Paul — Tokyo’s Glam-Punk underground institution who have spent three decades doing exactly what they want, for exactly the people who get it. In 2026, they’re bringing that thirty-something years of controlled chaos to Australia, and if you sleep on this tour, you will regret it.

Sister Paul began in Tokyo in 1992, the brainchild of bassist and songwriter Susumu. What started as a five-piece sprawl of guitars gradually shed members over the years until 2005, when the departure of their guitarist left Susumu and drummer MACKii as a duo — bare-boned and, as it turned out, perfectly formed.

Rather than recruit a replacement, the pair leaned into the starkness of their two-instrument setup. Bass, drums, and two sets of vocals. On paper, it sounds like a limitation. In practice, it sounds like a freight train with feeling.

Susumu explains, “Yes, everything is a challenge for us. Becoming the two-piece band, we can play only limited songs. We can’t play complex songs like ‘Aquarius’ of 5th Dimension. That’s a good song, but difficult to play for us. We always play simple songs now.”

“Almost the same line with the bass and guitar was played on some famous songs, like ‘My Sharona’ of The Knack, The Ramones or AC/DC songs. We are good at that kind of songs. That’s simple, cool, and easy. Very nice.”

“One of the biggest changes after becoming a two-piece band was the disappearance of guitar solos, which had previously been a given. I started listening to rock music in the ‘70s. In the ‘70s, every song had a guitar solo, and I quite liked them. Even now, the 13-minute-long guitar solo in ‘Free Bird’ is one of my favourites. They play simultaneously with high energy for 13 minutes. The solo in ‘Cocaine’ is also long, but the energy level is not as high.”

Describing Sister Paul’s music is a fool’s errand that music writers have been attempting for three decades. Their own self-description, “Songs for Gays & Social Deviationists”, tells you as much as any critical appraisal. Born from the energy of ‘60s and ‘70s Pop, Rock’n’Roll, Glam, Punk, and Psychedelic Rock, their sound is simultaneously retro and unplaceable. They are, as their Last.fm biography states with rare accuracy, “impossible to classify.”

Their discography spans multiple albums across their long career, from their 1995 debut ‘Sister Paul Sings Songs’ through albums including ‘The Edge Of The World’ (2000) and ‘Howl! Howl!’ (2001), which were re-pressed due to sustained demand from a devoted cult following. Later works like 夢遊病者の夢 I (The Dreams Of A Sleepwalker I, 2007) and its 2010 sequel further cemented their reputation for music that rewards patience and repeated listening. Their songs carry titles like ‘Rain Falls on Everyone’s Head’ and ‘The Other Side of the Sun’, wistful, strange, oddly comforting.

Earning cult status the hard way, Sister Paul have never made a record designed to please anyone other than themselves. Susumu was characteristically blunt on the subject, “I’m always conscious of having music fans listen to our music when making an album. MACKii is a drummer and may not be so, because she has a different role from me.”

“But it’s not good about too much care of listeners. That’s not fun. There’s no point in doing the music.”

“As far as our fans I say, soon after the guitarist left in 2005, a few fans who saw our performance asked for a new guitarist. They said, ‘New guitarist please’. But I had a feeling we could do something new and nobody does, with only drums and bass. Now, you might think I am exaggerating. I’m not sure that I was exaggerating myself. But that’s what I thought at the time, so I said ‘No’. As a result, a lot of fans abandoned the band. That’s what fans are, I think.”

That philosophy hasn’t made them rich or famous in any conventional sense, but it has earned them something arguably more durable - an intensely loyal following, and the respect of their peers. Among their more notable admirers is Japanese playwright and director Kankuro Kudo, who used their song ‘My Silver Raincoat’ as the opening theme for one of his stage productions. That’s the kind of lateral cultural footprint Sister Paul leaves.

Their international profile got a significant lift in 2003 and 2004 when they became the backing band for Richard Strange, the sole surviving original member of the UK art-rock outfit Doctors of Madness, during his Japanese tours. Strange brought along David Coulter (violinist for the Pogues) and together the four of them produced something that Japan Times described at the time as a “glam-punk rhythmic assault.” Since 2016, Susumu and MACKii have served as the official rhythm section of the reformed Doctors of Madness, cementing a transatlantic connection that has done much to broaden their exposure beyond Japan.

Their Australian visits, including most recently a tour in 2024, have produced exactly the kind of underground word-of-mouth that money can’t manufacture. People who have seen them play tend to become evangelists.

Why Australia? Why Now?

“I like the place of Australia, where it’s safe, and has a lot of kind people, and has a lot of nature,” says MACKii.
Susumu adds, “The system for venues where we perform is completely different in Japan and Australia. Most of our Australian tours involve playing in pubs. Pubs attract both people who come to drink and people who come to see live music.”
“On the other hand in Japan, bands perform at venues called ‘live house,’ which are built solely for the purpose of performing. These are closed-off places that the general public wouldn’t want to go to. Unless the band sells tickets themselves, there’s no audience there. However, they are soundproofed with double doors, allowing bands to perform however they like in front of only their fans. Sister Paul are not a band that tours for the sake of it. Every overseas excursion feels deliberate, chosen. They are not the kind of act that accepts every booking and sleepwalks through forty dates in forty cities. When they venture somewhere, they mean it.”

Australia has proven to be fertile ground. There’s something about the country’s appetite for raw, unpolished Rock’n’Roll and its deep affection for music that doesn’t condescend. That seems to suit the Sister Paul aesthetic perfectly. An audience that will go to a small bar on a Tuesday night to watch two Japanese ratbags make a cacophonous brouhaha is, by definition, the Sister Paul audience.

The 2026 Aussie run takes the band across the country, with stops in the major cities alongside some welcome regional detours. It’s the kind of itinerary that suggests genuine curiosity rather than a greatest-hits circuit adopted by most touring bands. The tour might touch down in all the usual haunts, but the date that has Bad Batch abuzz is the hometown show at Geelong’s Medusa Bar.

Medusa Bar has quietly become one of the best venues in regional Victoria. It’s a bar that punches above its weight and draws a crowd in the know. It’s the kind of place Sister Paul were made to play.

For Geelong, the show represents something of a coup. Tokyo underground legends don’t typically swing through on their tours. That Sister Paul’s 2026 routing includes a Geelong date speaks volumes of Kasumuen Records, the guys bringing them out here. The city, and country at large, should certainly count itself lucky.

“This will be our first performing in Geelong,” says MACKii. “There are still many cities we haven’t been to. We’ve never been to Adelaide, and we’ve never been to Perth either. It’s a great joy to perform at a new place.”

What to expect on the night? Well, volume, for one thing. The duo produces a sound that is genuinely difficult to reconcile with the number of people making it. MACKii’s drumming is described by those who have witnessed it as both “tight and loud” — a combination that, in the right room, borders on transcendent. Susumu’s bass playing carries the melodic weight that in any other band would be shared across two or three instruments, while his synthesizer adds textures that keep the sound from ever feeling thin.

Their live set draws from across three decades of material. The through-line is always the same, a kind of bittersweet, urgent energy that is uniquely theirs. For anyone lucky enough to have seen these guys before you may notice one distinct absence. Susumu explains, “We’re a two-piece band and don’t have a guitarist. So, we usually have a dog toy playing in the spot where a guitarist would generally be, but it broke down and stopped working after our long journey. It’s a little sad, but both MACKii and I are really looking forward to playing at Geelong on Friday. We’ll be playing some new songs too.”

Sister Paul’s visits are infrequent enough that missing one carries real weight. The Geelong show at Medusa Bar is a particular opportunity — a chance to see a genuine underground institution up close and personal.

Tickets are limited by the nature of the venues size. The time to move on this is now!

Sister Paul are a band that have spent thirty-plus years refusing to compromise, refusing to make music on anyone else’s terms, and somehow building a devoted international following anyway. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. For now, though, the more pressing takeaway is simpler… get to Medusa Bar!

With the final word, Susumu throws out an invitation, “See you all on Friday! Let’s have a beer together after the show.”

Sister Paul’s 2026 Australian tour dates are listed below. Follow the band on Facebook and Instagram for updates. Tickets for the Geelong show at Medusa Bar this Friday 22^nd May CLICK HERE.

17 May 2026 – Smith’s Alternative, Canberra ACT with White Knuckle Fever

21 May 2026 – Kindred Bandroom, Yarraville VIC performing a free lunchtime show

22 May 2026 – Medusa Bar, Geelong VIC with The Hybernators and Pernicious Nefarious

23 May 2026 – Trash Cult, Bendigo VIC with Paddock Bomb

24 May 2026 – The Social, Balnarring VIC with The Nowa Nowas

25 May 2026 – Northcote Social Club, Northcote VIC with Velvet Parade and Ebi Nori & the Phantom Fingers

28 May 2026 – Espy Basement, St Kilda VIC with User

29 May 2026 – The Painted Lady 1862, Ballarat VIC with Neutron Flow

30 May 2026 – The Belgrave Hotel, Belgrave VIC with The Lickspits and The Wax Eaters

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The queen of New York’s No Wave movement, Lydia Lunch, is returning to Australia this June for a run of shows that honour the legacy of legendary synth-punk duo Suicide and the late, great Alan Vega, marking a decade since Vega’s passing in 2016. Lunch, who first crossed paths with Suicide in 1970s New York as a teenager and forged a lifelong creative bond with the duo, will be joined by Andrew Coates of acclaimed Melbourne electronic trio Black Cab to perform the songs of Suicide alongside Vega’s solo catalogue. The tour follows a sold-out impromptu Melbourne appearance in 2024, when Lunch surprised audiences at the Tote during her Spoken Word tour, backed by Black Cab - a night that made clear this music deserved a proper antipodean run.

Woven into the ‘Songs of Suicide’ dates is an additional treat for Australian audiences. Lunch will team up with Beasts of Bourbon and The Cruel Sea frontman Tex Perkins for a series of exclusive co-headlined shows in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney under the banner of ‘So Real It Hurts’. In these performances, Lunch will deliver her characteristically confrontational spoken word while Perkins - performing as Tex Perkins Basic - presents a new electronic soundscape set he describes as “cyberpunk karaoke,” built from laptop, guitar and voice. There will also be limited screenings of Beth B’s incredible documentary, ‘Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over’, and ‘From The Page To The Stage’, a women only spoken word workshop. Together, the various strands of this tour paint a vivid picture of an artist who has never stopped pushing boundaries — raw, uncompromising, and as vital as ever.

Bad Batch were honoured with an audience with the singer, poet, writer, actress, author, photographer, fine-art practitioner, spoken word artist and self-empowerment speaker in the lead-up to her tour...

We have to start off by asking, will the coat hanger be bought out for Andrew Coates and Tex Perkins, this tour during rehearsals?

Well, I hope not to have to employ such techniques with such budding geniuses. No, I don’t think so. Unless they request.

You never know. Have you got a special case for it?

We’ll just see what happens, won’t we? I mean, I don’t think I will have to do any kind of corrective schooling for these two gentlemen, at all. Maybe they’ll school me on something. Who knows? Doubtful, but whatever.

Are you still deflowering prospective collaborators? Should we be warning these guys about it?

Well, both of you are a bit too old, and I think so are they. No. I mean look, that was a training camp I had for young men when I was a younger woman in the service of other women. I just thought I was doing a good service to ease young men into their sexual realities, because it can be a terrifying thing. And I didn’t seek them out, basically, they sought me out. And by the way, I was underage most of the time, too, so I wouldn’t call that a... dirty act. [chuckles]

Oh, I never said it was a dirty act.

I’ve been thanked many times for my encouragement.

So, where are you living at present?

In my body, as always [chuckles]. Right now, I’m in Brooklyn, but I’m about to relocate in a couple of months. I don’t know where, but as a nomad, I’ve moved to many places, many cities, and I’m getting the itch to move again, so...

Do you find your environment affects the output? Like, what you’re writing or…?

Okay, interesting question, because I’ve moved many times, sometimes not knowing anywhere, anyone where I was moving, because why? I don’t have to. Sometimes I take a survey on tour - in Pittsburgh, for instance, one once. Or I would live in a cheaper city, because I knew I’d have to move to a more expensive city, you know, going to LA. Like a squirrel with nuts, gather for that. After living in Barcelona for eight years, I was a nomad for four years. I wasn’t in my 20s, 30s, or 40s - I’m a nomad for four years in my 50s, which is ridiculous, because I didn’t really want to live anywhere, and I was on a rent strike. So, I would just watch cats, watch dogs, watch birds. Had a few friends that would take me in. I don’t even know how I did it. But at that time, I knew 2 or 3 other female artists that were like, “I’m not paying rent. I’m moving around as well.” Okay, well, there comes a point where that’s gotta end. But, the nomad nature… I usually live in a place two to four years, and it’s for a variety of reasons. It might be the architecture. Hardly ever is it the collaborators. Except in New York, it has been. It could be that I don’t know anybody. It could be the size of the environment for the price you pay, because I’m on tour a lot, and when I’m home, basically, I don’t leave my house. You want to see me? You come to see me. Why should I leave the house if I’m not getting paid? I don’t go to bars when they don’t pay me. That’s ridiculous! Doesn’t make sense. So, I’m not a shut in, but I prefer entertaining in my own home, so, wherever I am, they will come… Or not, I don’t care. [chuckles]

So, what does your average weekend look like?

There is no average.

I know you’re a big fan of forensics.

I’m a big fan of forensics. There is no average anything. I have no idea. Um, as prolific as some people I think I am, I compare myself always to the comedian Red Skelton, who wrote 8000 songs. I’m a slacker compared to that. I’ve written 400 and maybe 50. I’m slackin’. Yup. He painted, like, a thousand paintings of clowns. I’ve met about a thousand clowns, so on that level, we relate highly. I mean, he’s dead I’m not, but... [laughs]

There is no average anything. I can be a completely luxuriating, lazy, lazy lady. Which I do deserve and love. Ah yeah, forensics, true crime, books about true crime, psychopathology. I should have been a forensic scientist - there’s still time - true memoirs, whatever. Visits from the intelligentsia… so called.

Yeah. Well, we’re both obsessed with the macabre as well. So, what do you think it is that draws…

[Bad Batch mascot, Clawdette, jumps into frame]

Wait a second. Did I just… Did I just see a tiger cat?

Yeah, It’s Clawds.

By the way, my last cat could have been that cat’s brother. I love tiger cats. I love grey cats. Grey cats and white pumpkins, kind of my fetish but, I don’t see any white pumpkins, but I have some in the other room. But I love a grey cat.

Yeah, well, this one’s constantly getting in the way…

Because I travel so much, I can’t have a pet right now, but in my backyard, which I can’t go into, I can only look out my window at. Every night, there is a great tiger cat that comes stalking around, and I just… When I happen to look out the window, I know they are there. Just looking up. Stalking me. Haunting me. Because it knows I’d love to go down and pet it, but I just can’t. I can’t get down there, but anyway...

What do you think it is about the macabre that draws people in?

Well, anything to get out of their boring lives or to overcome their trauma, to find something that is even more outlandish, ridiculous, or wonderful. I have no idea. I mean, the freaks find each other, and they find freakish things.

Yeah, well…

That’s a stunter. That’s a stunter.

Has the age of the podcast had any effect on the spoken word audiences?

You mean my podcast, or podcasts in general?

Just in general.

I have no fucking clue what has any impact on anything. I mean, my podcast, ‘The Lydian Spin’; we have over 450 - I don’t even know 450 people – episodes. What it has allowed me to do is proselytise, as I like to say, and the intros for whoever we have on there. Who we have on this week is incredible. He’s a physicist. I call it science porn for me because as I’m reading his bio, I have no fricking idea what he’s on about, but I love it. But he’s also a jazz scat singer who invents his own language. Now that’s macabre! So, I mean, I did not know all the 450 people we’ve interviewed. Tim brought some. I brought some. Some people are recommended. But I find it a service, and I find it definitely a way for my spoken word. Obviously, I would like to be performing every night of my life and getting paid for it, just by opening my mouth, like some other fucking asshole, men mainly, in American podcasts. But that’s not gonna happen, so, I just dish it out for free in 15-minute increments as an intro to my podcast; thank you very much. [chuckles]

You’ve turned your trauma into art. Do you think your art would have been different had therapy been on the table back in the ‘70s?

I started doing public psychotherapy at the age of 17, so I have had therapy my whole life at the expense of the audience. Look, I have a documentary, ‘Artists: Depression, Anxiety and Rage [- A film by Lydia Lunch and Jasmine Hirst].’ I don’t have depression. I don’t have anxiety and I’ve paid for my rage. But when I started asking my friends, and the statistics are 75% of artists have some kind of trauma, depression, anxiety, or rage. When I started asking my friends, who I thought, “Oh, no, that person with happy disease can’t possibly...” Oh yes, they did. And by the way, speaking about cats, I was asking one of my friends, “Depression? Anxiety?” I thought he had the happy disease. “Uh, rage?” And he’s like, “Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” And I’m like, “When do you think your trauma started?” And his friend was there. He said, “I think the first time I had to turn homework in,” and his friend goes, “Oh, no, it was before that.” And just off the top of my head, I said, “Did it involve a cat?” And then he was like, “[Gasps] I think it does. I think, in the cradle, I would have a cat in there, and then one day he scratched my face, and then there was trauma.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s all that happened. Great.” [laughing] But it affected him deeply. I was like, “Whatever.”

I think because I was able to start speaking, not only for myself, but other people that have been traumatised; and realising at a very early age, that it just didn’t happen in my house. It happened across the street, across the pond, across the ocean, every country, continent forever and ever, trauma happens. Whether it’s religious persecution, poverty, parents, incest, genetic mutation, molecular memory. We all have some kind of trauma. It’s just how we relate to it. How we express it. What we do with it. How much we suffer from it. I tend [she sniggers] to pass the suffering on. Not that my heart is to cause others to suffer, and it’s actually a painful expression. Where I feel that I am the mouth for others that do not have a voice to scream, so… I’m very successful at that, thank you very much. I think without trauma, a lot of art would not exist.

That’s true.

By the way, what is it, 9:00 a.m. there? [laughs]

Yeah.

Wine o’clock for me. Hellooo. Are you often up at this hour?

Yeah, I’ve got two kids, so I have to rouse them for school and that sort of fun stuff.

That’ll keep you up. I have no set time limit for anything, so I’m up all hours of the day and night. Time is one long second that goes on forever.

That is a haiku for you. A one-line haiku.

Your relationship with the English language, is it the same as it’s always been or do you find you have to self-edit because of modern audiences?

Oh! Fuck no! Excuse me, self-edit! First of all, when I started writing for spoken word, I started writing very conversationally, so it was already very much pre-edited. No, I don’t edit... There is no politeness in this. But what I’ve had to do was, because when I first started spoken work, it was not such a hysterical level, like my music, Teenage Jesus - a hysterical level - that you then have to find other ways to sophisticate it. Because you can’t go beyond, for instance, can music go beyond Teenage Jesus? Mmm, I’m sure some has. Noise mainly. So, you just have to find a way to change it. To have another kind of language within the language. To find different ways, or with music, to find different musical collaborators to use as the machine for the bullets of the word. Also, being a kind of functional musical schizophrenic, and word schizophrenic, there’s all kinds of spoken words that I do. If somebody might have heard one thing, or one record, they might think that’s what I am, and fine by that, and really you can go out and investigate if you want. Good luck finding it all. Ah, no. What I started doing when I lived in Europe, because, obviously, the language barrier, but I would sometimes have translations up, people didn’t want that. I’d have backup vocalists, doing it. No. They’d rather see my lips move and not know, like America does not know half of what I’m saying. But I decided, after doing large monologues, to break pieces down into song size structures. With or without music. Because they were easier, I think, for people to comprehend, because a longer monologue, it’s almost too hypnotic. Hahahahaha, yeeessss. Which is grand, because I’m an intellectual sadist. So, I would love it when I saw people just getting stuck on maybe a sentence or word. Not en masse. But I knew there were some phrases, some images, that people would actually have a brain freeze. Which to me, unlike most artists, I love to not be completely understood, because good-motherfucking-luck. Am I saying the truth? Am I saying my truth? Am I saying a philosophical dissertation? Is this sarcasm? Is this just brutal poetry? Or is this just my tongue in your fucking ear, making something go in and come out immediately, that you may or may not comprehend? Well, what should I tell you what it is? Choose one of the above or all. Thank you.

That’s fair enough.

[laughs] Fair enough…

What can we expect to see on this trip out? So, you’ve got some spoken word…

With Tex Perkins. Can’t wait. I do believe we are doing a duolette of ‘Hard For You’, which I had done with Shotgun Wedding years before. We’ll see about that. I’m just gathering what I might do. There’s a variety of things I could do. And also, it depends on what the atmosphere of the club is. Or the space that we’re doing it in. So, it could be a number of short pieces, or it could be a rather long story. I don’t know. I’m bringing a collection of things. It will be dependent on my mood on that night.

How the mood takes you?

That’s right. But I’m very excited to be doing it with Tex, and I’m very excited to be doing the Suicide shows as well.

So, with the Suicide shows, you’re so prolific yourself. You’ve got so much going on, like, Retrovirus right back to Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Why do somebody else’s work when you’ve got so much to draw on yourself?

Well, first of all, I think it was so important, not only to me but a lot of people. I think there’s a lot of leeway within the sparsity of the lyrics to put something else in. It’s a very mobile event, because there’s only two people. Whether it’s me and Mark Hurtado, or me and Andrew [Coates of Black Cab], who are doing it, which also takes it in a slightly different feel, you know? So, I just think that the words that Alan Vega did are very important, but it allows me plenty of room. I could just do stand-up solo spoken word for the rest of my life and be very happy, but I think in paying tribute to the first people I met in New York. To the first band other than Mars. I mean, I’d love to do that. Can you imagine if I did a Mars cover band? Nobody could do that. So, it’s just really, you know, bringing something back to people that might be familiar but taking it somewhere else. And it allows me the freedom of saying what the fuck ever I want, so it’s just a great backdrop. You know? And it’s psychopathological. With Suicide, what I love is, the concept of both doo-wop to psychosis.

[laughs] That’s great.

Very. Very interesting. Yeah. Kinda a big turn on. Big turn on.

Will you be bringing the stage show as well? Like, are you going to be wielding chains and...

Oh, please, come on now. Keep your fantasies to yourself. The music just speaks for itself, god…

I live in hope.

I mean, bring your own chains, goddamn it. Come on, now. No, and I won’t be slapping myself in the face with the microphone. Which was a grand affect that Alan Vega often did, because his cheeks were tougher than mine but no, no, no...

You’ve worked with some of the greats in that, sort of, avant-soundscape world, and then you’ve said, “the only thing worse than a guitar is a guitarist.” So, how do these people take that comment?

Well, that’s their frickin’ problem, man. All I can say is that’s their problem. Pfft. Look, I’m not insulting the ones I’ve worked with, of course, because I mean Rowland S. Howard, Thurston Moore, doesn’t really get any better than that. Weasel Walter, it doesn’t really get any better than this, so… It’s a useless instrument unless wielded in the right hands. Let’s face it, there are too many guitar players, and maybe too many guitars. But what does that then leave? I mean, J.G. Thirlwell, a great collaborator. Omar Rodríguez-López, a great collaborator. I’ve been very lucky, and most of these people, I have pursued, except for Omar Rodríguez-López from Mars Volta. He’s one of the few that ever approached me to do something. Like, “Here’s a 17-minute piece of music. Just do your goddess stuff.” Thank you. All right, very obscure, one EP out there somewhere. Mars Volta, one of my favourite bands, when they were in existence. So…

You’ve collaborated with Hubert Selby Jr. as well, have you not?

I knocked on his door one day, when he was in total obscurity and I was a young upstart, and I just said, “Do you know how important you are to my generation?” To which he said, “No.” Like, “Well, can I come in and tell you?” [she laughs] And so he let me in, and, yeah, I brought him on the first tours he was ever on in Europe, and then he did write the introduction for one of my editions of ‘Paradoxia’. A great joy! And Jerry Stahl also; I work with, and do a lot of shows with. One of my favourite shows was, The Knitting Factory in L.A. was doing a Beat Generation thing, and I’m not into the Beat Generation. I’m into Hubert Selby and Henry Miller, I’ll do something anti-Beat. So, I call up Hubert Selby, and he said, “Yes.” And somebody suggested I call up Harry Dean Stanton, who had that fabulous monologue in [the Wim Wenders film] Paris, Texas. Now, Harry Dean Stanton did not know me, but through a friend, I just said, “Hey, Harry Dean Stanton, this is Lydia Lunch. Your friend told me to call you. Wondering if you want to do this show with you and Hubert Selby.” They were both 72 at the time. They did not know of each other. They did not know each other, they did not know the work of each other, which to me was shocking. Harry Dean Stanton had been sober for 40 minutes, and Hubert Selby for 40 years. So, I was the sandwich meat between these two, and it was just one of the big joys of my life, I have to say. Oh, and so, to convince Harry Dean Stanton, I said - ‘cause I knew he would read [Charles] Bukowski or Sam Shepard - “I’m like Bukowski, only more physical.” He said, “All right. I’ll do it.” Thank you very much.

Nice! Have you ever worked with Bukowski?

Oh, no, I wasn’t in the same place at the same time. No. What would I have done? Pour him a beer? [laughter] I was lucky. I was really lucky to work with Hubert Selby. He would always say, “You’re rotten, kid! You’re rotten!” I’m like, “Thank you!” [laughs]

Was that captured at all? A recording or…?

I had released a record, it’s now out of print, called, ‘Our Fathers Who Aren’t In Heaven’, where one side I read Henry Rollins, Don Bajema, Hubert Selby, and myself, and they read pieces on the other side. And then he wrote the introduction for one of the first editions of [Lydia Lunch’s autobiographical book] ‘Paradoxia’, but other than that, I don’t know if there’s any footage. Mostly, we did… I don’t know how many shows in Europe, basically, that was that.

Yeah, wow!

Henry Rollins, myself, and Hubert Selby.

Would have been nice to be there.

Fucking amazing!

Is there anybody you haven’t collaborated with?

Plenty of people I haven’t collaborated with, but that’s not the issue. The issue is, the concept comes before the collaborator. I get a concept; who best fits that need? So, I never think, “Oh, yeah, I’d like to work with, mmmm.” No. Because I would say, “I don’t know right now.” It’s like, not that there aren’t people, but what is the concept? Somebody I’m very thrilled-beyond-thrilled to have done some shows with, is Umar Bin Hassan of The Last Poets. My heroes! I mean, ‘This Is Madness’, his big track. ‘This Is Madness’. Doing that with him was unbelievable! Just phenomenal! And he is still alive, and that’s great pleasure to my existence, so... OK, is there anybody you think I should work with? How about that question? [laughs]

Oh, wow. There’s plenty…

Stumper. It’s a stumper.

Sunn O))).

Who?

Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley. Like, Sunn O))) the...

Oh, I love O’Malley.

… or Oren Ambarchi, the Australian guitarist…

Let’s go back to Sunn O))) for a minute. Not my particular kind of music, but I love the spectacle. But I don’t see why I would be needed in that collaboration; you know what I’m saying? I just don’t see how I’d be needed.

I just think exactly what Omar said. Just you “being the goddess” over the top of that noisescape would be amazing!

Well, you know, when he sends me to track and takes his robe off, I’ll be right there. Or he gives me a robe to wear. [laughs]

Well, fingers crossed.

I could always put it out there. I know we were in… I think we were in Greece together at one point, doing collective shows on the same bill or whatever; different nights, I don’t remember. No, maybe it was Istanbul? But yeah, O’Malley, he’s great.

One person I tried to get into Retrovirus when I was first forming it, was Paul Leary from Butthole Surfers. He knew a lot of my shit, but he’s like, “I know. I think I’ll just sit on the couch and collect royalty cheques.” I’m like, “Oh, fuck you. You’re like…” Whatever. Whatever.

We’ve got a head off soon, but tell us about stealing food for Richard Hell and the Dead Boys?

Ah, no, it was for Mink DeVille. I didn’t steal food for either of those two. I stole food for Mink DeVille, Willy DeVille gave me my name. Well, come on, we’re starving, and somebody had to do it. I was always a good shop lifter, food thief, pick pocket, etcetera. Come on, that’s what you have to do to survive when you’re a young runaway. Yeah, alright. I’m hungry right now, so I’m gonna go steal myself some food. I’m gonna steal some of my own food for myself. Because at 7:30 at night, where it looks like 9:30 in the morning for you. You better go have some breakfast and feed those children.

Rowland S. Howard said that “…in her heart she’s this enthusiastic, cheerleaderish American girl.” Is that still the case?

Yes, it is. I mean, I’m still promoting. There’s 3 bands I’m promoting now, which, one is called Bog Creeper. You can get them on Bandcamp. A two-piece, totally psychotic, great. Genre Is Death, who’ll have an album out next week on In The Red Records. So, I just took on tour with Murderous… Again, which is me, Tim Dahl, Matt Nelson. And New City Slang, which is kind of a cross between the Stooges, New York Dolls - like, I mean, trad, good rock, nobody makes anymore. All of the song’s based on books. That’s also on Bandcamp. New City Slang, Bog Creeper, Genre Is Death, rah, rah, rah. That’s what I do.

That’s fantastic.

That’s why I have the podcast. I’m like the rah, rah, rah. Yeah, hello.

Yeah, well, we’ve got so many more questions, but we’ve been given strict instructions that 9:30 is the limit, so we’ve got to wrap it up.

You just have to make up the answers, I guess. Thank you so much.

We’re looking forward to seeing the show. We’re going to one of the Tex shows.

Where are you at?

We’ll be going to the Melbourne show, but we’re about 2.5 hours’ drive from the venue.

You’ll have to make the trek. Come on, if I can make the 16-hour trek from LA, you can make a 2.5-hour trek.

We hope you can join us in taking the trek from wherever you may be as well. Tickets are selling fast, so you best get to it…

LYDIA LUNCH PERFORMS THE SONGS OF SUICIDE AND ALAN VEGA
featuring Andrew Coates (Black Cab)
Sun 14 June - Meow, Wellington, NZ (as part of Lōemis) - Tickets
Wed 17 June - The Tote, Melbourne (with Black Cab) with guests Belle Phoenix & Jeffrey Wegener - Tickets – SOLD OUT
Thu 18 June - The Tote, Melbourne (with Black Cab) with guests Tongue Dissolver - Tickets - NEW SHOW
Sat 20 June - Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane - Tickets
Sun 21 June - Factory Floor, Sydney with guests Rebel Yell - Tickets
Wed 24 June - Ed Castle, Adelaide with guests Messianic Gloss - Tickets
Thurs 25 June - The Milk Bar, Perth with guests Streets of Separation - Tickets

SO REAL IT HURTS - LYDIA LUNCH & TEX PERKINS
Fri June 19th (two shows) - Kew Courthouse, Melbourne - SOLD OUT
Sat June 20th - Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane - Tickets
Sat June 27th - Riverside Live at Phive, Sydney - Tickets

pressplaypresents.com

Additionally, a special one-off screening of the film LYDIA LUNCH: The War is Never Over has been announced for Melbourne, with Lydia introducing the film herself:

LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER (A FILM BY BETH B.)
Tue June 16 - Brunswick Picture House, Melbourne
(Personally introduced by Lydia) - Tickets

FROM THE PAGE TO THE STAGE ~ Spoken Word Workshop with LYDIA LUNCH

Tue June 23^rd - Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst - Tickets through Eventbrite

Don’t miss out! Order an issue here: BAD BATCH BANDCAMP

International orders: fantasticmessrecords.com

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Fifty years on from their formation in Hermosa Beach, California, Black Flag are heading back to antipodean shores, this time with a whole new lineup and a renewed sense of purpose. Founding guitarist and songwriter Greg Ginn will be joined by the three latest recruits, vocalist Max Zanelly, bassist David Rodriguez, and drummer Bryce Weston.

The addition of Zanelly marks a genuine first for the band - she’s the first woman ever to front Black Flag. Remarkably, this is also her first time singing in any band, yet Ginn speaks of her with unbridled energy and talent, describing her as “just incredible” and crediting the new lineup with reigniting his passion for performing.

Bad Batch caught up with Greg Ginn to talk about the chemistry of the new lineup, his preferred tools of the trade, and why Black Flag’s music still resonates with audiences half a century after the band first tore through America’s underground…

You’ve been busy.

Yeah. We just finished a short tour. A couple weeks in the U.S. and then we’re going to Canada and doing 11 shows across Canada. We’re leaving next week. Then we’ll go to Hong Kong and then Australia.

Sounds hectic.

It’s good. The long plane flight to Australia is quite a task.

Yeah, it’s gruelling.

Try to get some sleep on it.

Easier said than done sometimes.

Yes, that’s the problem.

In a past interview, you said you were glad that you pulled the plug on Black Flag when you did. What lured you back and why start from scratch? It’s a whole new band this time out.

Well, I just thought it was not going in a good direction in 1986. I thought, ‘Okay, this has been good so far, but it’s a good time to stop.’ I wasn’t really interested in getting Black Flag back together or anything like that. I played a lot of music with a lot of different people, did a lot of touring. Pretty much toured a lot in between that time. Then finding people that I like to play with.

For a long time, I’d only do new songs on tour. Just brand-new songs that weren’t familiar. And one thing I found was when Black Flag were playing, is that it’s a different thing when people know all our songs now, and all the lyrics. I really like that a lot. I feel like, there’s so many people that are into the songs, and they get a lot from them, and they become familiar with them. That’s something I really like, and I didn’t know… I didn’t necessarily expect to like that, that much, but I love that aspect of it.

Yeah, that’s great. So, what was your vetting process for choosing the new band lineup?

One thing that’s pretty important is just getting people that were ready to go, anywhere, anytime, that don’t have the kind of encumbrances that, you know, other aspects of their life. So that was, as far as the vetting and then as far as the bass players and drummers, I just tried out a lot of people. Put kind of a wide net out there, and had a lot of good bass players and drummers, and I just was able to get the best ones that also live close to me in Texas, where I live outside of Austin. And that was important because I had been playing with a lot of people from out of state, back in California, or different places and I really wanted to have people that were close and that we could really work on things.

Well, there’s something about the energy of a room full of people playing music, I guess, as opposed to doing it via Zoom.

Oh, yeah, well we didn’t do that. We’d get together to practice, but you know, had a little less version of the band, a couple of guys had young kids, and it was just hard for them to be away so much. And they lived in California. There’s a - you know, you ask about vetting - that’s a practical end of it. But I feel like I was able to find us great band members. Our singer, Max Zanelly, I ran into her at a Black Flag show, and she was singing along. And after I asked her, ‘Do you sing in a band?’ And she said, ‘No, but I love to sing.’ I said, ‘You should start a band,’ you know? There’s something in the way she sang along with us.... And I wasn’t looking for a singer. I mean, potentially for a recording project or that, but Black Flag wasn’t looking for a singer, then Mike left. Who was in the band for about 10 or 12 years, I think. Then she was the first person I thought of. Whereas the bass player and drummer, I put a wide net out there. With Max, just the first person I thought of, and she was up for it. She had never sang in a band before or anything, but she just did it incredibly well.

A baptism of fire, jumping straight in there with you guys.

Yeah, she’s a brave person, and adventurous. You don’t know until people tour. Some people just aren’t made out for it. They might think they are, but once they actually do it, it just doesn’t work out, but with this group, we love it. We love playing all over the place, and travelling, and everything that comes with it. So, it’s been very awesome.

That’s great. So, what’s the set list going to look like? Are you doing stuff right through to ‘What If… ?’, or are there any new ones?

Pretty much. No new ones on this tour. We’ve just been so busy, we’ve been adding more songs. We’ll do 2 sets, and each one is about 50, or 55 minutes. Then we have a break in between, about 15-20 minutes, and then another 50 or 55 minute set. So, we try to do as much as we can. I figure if we go to these places, and travel, and, like, weather that plane flight, that we want to leave it all on the stage. Do as much as we can and prepare for it. So, we spent a lot of time learning the older songs.

Will we get anything off ‘The Process Of Weeding Out’?

No. No, in fact, we’re not gonna have any instrumentals. We’ll have lots of jams and stuff, but no specific instrumental songs. ‘The Process Of Weeding Out’, the first side of it with the long takes, that just took many hours of playing to kind of develop that. Out of improvisation and a kind of skeletal thing. Hopefully at some point, we can do something more extended. I like to record a lot of different things. I played mostly instrumental music the last number of years. So, I definitely still enjoy that, and I’m sure we’ll add some instrumentals. We’ve talked about it, but we just have to get to them.

So, there are plans to record with the new lineup?

We don’t have any plans right now, but I imagine we will at a certain point. When we got together, the first thing was just being ready for the tours that were already booked, like in Europe, and then the US. And then wanting to add more songs. So, that’s been kind of our concentration, but now that we’ve got set up to about almost 2 hours. We could think of doing new stuff, and I’m all for that. Like I said, that’s all I did for many years. Just absolutely new material with every tour. I like that and I’m sure I’ll do more of that. But with Black Flag, it’s different. It kind of adds to what I’m doing. Where people know the songs and the lyrics connect with people. I like that, you know?

Well, the political stuff - I guess it’s almost more relevant now than it was back in the Reagan era.

Well, yeah. I think in that way, we’re kind of fortunate that our lyrics… the songs aren’t really tied to a time period. They’re tied to personal time periods. They’re generally about real people and real things. Most of the songs have a personal nature and they’re not really dated with a certain, like I said, cultural period. Period for me personally, you know, knowing all the people, and being involved with things where you have a lot of interesting personalities. To say the least.

That’s a diplomatic way to put it.

Well, but in a very positive way, you know? Looking back at ‘70s punk rock, I consider myself like, ethos of ‘70s punk rock, not ‘80s, or beyond. It was all kinds of characters and misfits and accepting of people. As long as you weren’t a hippie. (He laughs)

I was reading this morning that you discovered punk through the Village Voice and reading about what was going on at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. How long was it before you actually heard it? What was the first punk release you might have heard?

The first... Of course, you know, there’s the pre-stuff, The Stooges, and MC5, and the Detroit stuff that I was already listening to...

Oh, so you were already across the proto-punk stuff?

Oh, yeah, The Stooges. And then so when punk rock came along, it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, this is cool.’ And I love the Velvet Underground. But the first single that I got was the Television ‘Little Johnny Jewel’ single.

Oh, wow!

Ordered in the mail, and I think that’s about the first record from New York that was put out, I believe.

That probably explains some of your angular guitar attacks that you’re famous for.

Yeah, it doesn’t hurt! All the New York bands were first and then L.A. too. But New York bands, everybody from Mink DeVille, Robert Gordon, Blondie, the whole ‘70s New York scene. And a lot of those bands came and toured pretty early on to Los Angeles. I was able to see all of those bands. So, that’s kinda even before hearing about the English bands. Of course, I love the Sex Pistols, and some of those other bands, but it was really the New York kind of, I guess, art oriented. There’s a lot of different sounds. It wasn’t like a specific sound. You had these bands with all different kinds of approaches and they kind of encouraged the scene, kind of encouraged different approaches and people doing different stuff. And I think that kind of got lost by the early ‘80s. And a lot of people consider us like, probably even think we started in the early ‘80s or something like that, but the inspiration was from a less scripted, wilder time, in a sense. Mid ‘70s. Mid to late ‘70s. And L.A. bands, there was a lot of great bands that have never really gotten the full, I don’t know if anybody deserves credit, but just incredible bands that we could go and see and then play with. Los Angeles was just great in the ‘70s

Were you seeing stuff like Black Randy, Weirdos, Screamers - all that sort of stuff?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love the Screamers. They were one of my favourites! Devo. The Plugs. Then you had Agent Orange, Middle class, X, The Go-Go’s, you know, I’m forgetting a million bands!

Yeah, there’s plenty out there, but once again, all so different. Like you were saying, there were no cookie-cutter punk back then in the ‘70s.

No, you had anything from the Screamers to... The Go-Go’s. Yeah.

Is that part of the reason why you split the band up, because there were so many cookie cutter punk bands by ’86?

No, because we weren’t really... We weren’t playing cookie cutter music really. It was like ‘In My Head’ and we’d play all those songs live. I just think that was going to affect the band. There was a kind of a thing, ‘Well, why don’t we do a few records that sound the same,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Well, not that interested in that.’ I felt like I would say pretty much... I don’t know if this sounds egotistical or not, but - I think that was pretty much the end of rock music. You know, like people say rock music has died. In a sense, I think there was that. Then you had the hair metal, and then the ‘90s rock. I think in terms of new stuff evolving, by the mid ‘80s, I think that was over. That phase. I don’t agree much with Gene Simmons, but I agree that rock died back then.

Yeah, that’s a fair assumption.

And, of course, that’s always a very general type of thing, you know? You’re commenting on a culture and there’s so many exceptions. So, when I say that, it’s a real general cultural shift that I’m talking about, not specific bands or people that are doing adventurous things that continued doing that. So that’s not to knock them at all. It’s just, I think the cultural swing was like, more money oriented. Then you had the glam metal comeback and all that kind of stuff, and I don’t think that added anything, really.

So, are you still playing your Frankensteined AMPEG Dan Armstrong Plexi?

No. I do have a couple lucite, or acrylic, depending on the brand, it’s same thing, guitars. They’re custom made to my specifications. Ordered a couple bodies from China. It’s a very, very heavy physically, guitar but it sounds great. I had another guitar, so I don’t play the Dan Armstrongs, but something that has a similar type of body and the sound to a certain extent. But mine are actually a lot heavier than Dan Armstrong’s. Last week, I had a guitar stolen that I played a lot. A wood guitar. Again, with a graphite neck, and it just stayed in tune so well. It had a good sound. So that’s the guitar I played a lot since the late ‘80s. The van got broken into and I lost that one, just about a week ago.

You seem quite okay with that!? Is that a common occurrence? You seem quite...

No. No. No, if it was common, I wouldn’t be so OK. With stuff like that, I always like to think, ‘OK, nobody got hurt and everybody’s healthy. So how bad can it be?’ I try not to get attached to, I guess, physical things or instruments.

It’s just stuff at the end of the day.

Yeah, right. And, I don’t have real expensive instruments or anything, so it’s not like, thousands of dollars, you know? I play a lot of the same ones, year after year and it doesn’t happen, too often, fortunately. But I just like to be OK with it. ‘Cause what can I do? Just move on, and everybody’s healthy. I have another guitar. They only took one! (he chuckles)

Do you use effects pedals?

No. I’ve never used pedals. Ever since the first ‘Nervous Breakdown’ EP, I used a tube amp on that, but ever since then, I’ve used solid state amps. Since the early ‘90s, I’ve used Tech 21 SansAmp preamps. I like the solid state sound. It has a faster attack to me, whereas tubes have a little bit of swell at the beginning of the note. I like it for playing slow music too, but I like the fast response with solid state. I played a number of solid state amps but, since the early ‘90s, it’s been SansAmp preamp through a power amp. Yeah, no pedals or that, just...

Do you have a preferred power amp or is it just whatever’s available?

Well, one that I’ve got is real good. Seymour Duncan makes it. It’s very small, portable, light weight. It runs off of 220 [volts] as well as 110 so I can take it out of the country. My preamp does the same thing. It’s really small. It’s built in a pedal sized thing, and the amp is 700 watts per channel. So, our bass player uses one too, and we’re able to fly with them. I’ll have that down in Australia. I have to rent cabinets unfortunately, but I will have my amp sound.

Oh, that’s fantastic. The portability of amps nowadays just blows my mind.

Yeah, it’s so good to be able to travel with just a little suitcase or backpack; foreign wise, and be able to get at least that sound. At home, I use custom made speaker cabinets, which I have for a very long time. I’m probably into, like, the fourth or fifth generation of them. With the EVM speakers, and they’re very heavy. They’re nothing that anyone would manufacture because the shipping costs would be too high. And that’s why I think, you know, a lot of the cabinets are... I don’t like them that much, it’s because they have to ship them. So, with the Marshall, their shipping costs would go way up if they made a really heavy cabinet. So, I miss my speakers, when I’m in foreign places, but fortunately, I am able to bring the other stuff.

You can still get a close approximation of the sound with the amp.

Approximation. Yeah. (laughs)

What was the draw to move your operations to Texas?

Just life in California is very high overhead for the business, SST records, and so, a lot of it is the usual reasons.

I wanted to go someplace with a warm climate. I don’t like cold too much, and it’s still a Hispanic culture, like Southern California. Just that kind of influence and just more affordable, basically. There were so many reasons for picking Texas specifically. I was open to go any place, but it just ended up being the best place. And I live near Austin, and there’s so much music every night there. All the time. A lot of local music and everybody tours there, so…

It seems that South by Southwest (SXSW) kind of brought the industry to town. Is that fair to say?

It’s always had a good music scene, so I don’t think it’s just that. That certainly hasn’t hurt, but I avoid that. That’s like a circus. I haven’t been to that in many years and I’d rather see bands that play their own night and play their full set, not like 30 minutes. And they’re spread out all over. You think you’re gonna see all these bands, but sometimes it’s filled up already or you can’t get from one place to another in time. So, I avoid Austin during that period (laughs) and I go all other times. But it sure does expose a lot of people to Austin and the music, but it already had that. But I’m sure it amplified it.

Is the label still going? Are you still running SST?

Oh, yes, but I haven’t, for a long time. I’ve just wanted to release my own music, not release bands anymore. Having so much problems with distributors.

Apart from reissues, was Good For You the last thing you put out?

I think so. Unless the Texas Corrugators... No, probably Greg Ginn and the Royal We. That’s probably after that, but it’s been a little while. I record music all the time. I mean, I would say 5% of it is Black Flag, you know? Of music that I’ve recorded.

Yeah, well, you’ve been in a lot of bands over the years. That doesn’t surprise me that it’s only 5%!

Yeah. Yeah, and I’ve played with so many great musicians. It’s been really, really rewarding, I guess, would be the word for it.

Well, we’ve got a stack of questions, but we probably should wrap it up, otherwise, we’ll be here all day.

I appreciate it. And I hope I see you out there.

Black Flag’s Australian Tour takes in Melbourne’s Corner Hotel - May 28, Crowbar Sydney - May 29, Crowbar Brisbane - May 30, and Vinnies Dive Bar on the Gold Coast - May 31.

Get tickets now at www.troubadourpresents.com

Don’t miss out! Order an issue here: BAD BATCH BANDCAMP

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Long Live the New Flesh

Forty years after the tragic death of James Darroch, Eastern Dark bassist Bill Gibson spoke to Bad Batch about the band that almost changed everything, and the single they’ve finally brought back into circulation…

There is a version of Australian music history in which The Eastern Dark are a household name. In which the power trio from Sydney - James Darroch on guitar and vocals, Bill Gibson on bass, Geoff Milne on drums - followed their incendiary 1985 debut single with an album, then another, and gradually claimed the recognition that the critics had always insisted was theirs by right. In that version, Darroch’s gift for melodic, perfectly structured guitar driven Pop Rock eventually found the audience it deserved. But that is not what happened.

What happened instead was a van accident on the Hume Highway near Yass in the early hours of 4 March 1986, and with it the death of James Darroch at twenty-six years old. It remains one of the great what-ifs of Australian Rock’n’Roll.

Forty years on, Gibson, who survived the crash, went on to play with The New Christs, The Hellmenn, and Evan Dando’s Lemonheads among others, is sitting down to talk about all of it. The occasion? The long-awaited reissue of the band’s debut single, ‘Julie Is A Junkie’ b/w ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’, out on Grown Up Wrong! Records. It’s the first time the single has been made available on vinyl since the original Waterfront pressing went out of print nearly four decades ago.

Though he didn’t come from a musical family, Bill’s parents were nevertheless encouraging of creative pursuits, “My dad had bought home a guitar that he’d bought at an auction when I was about 5 or 6. It was an old beast of a thing, and I had no idea how to play it. I thoroughly destroyed it in the years that I had it, but I would sit there just banging away on it and thinking, ‘Yeah, this is something I could do.’ Watching the Beatles cartoons on TV. Sitting in front and pretending to play along.”

His route into playing was, by his own account, unconventional, “It would have been 1970 or ‘71. I was a regular reader of Go-Set, and they ran a 20-part comic strip of sorts with guitar lessons in it… I’d had guitars around the house for years, but never really been able to play. Never had proper lessons and when I saw that I was like, ‘OK. Well, might as well do something with it.’ So that was really where I got my grounding. A couple of years later, my mum enrolled me in some guitar lessons.”

Though the Go-Set lessons would pay off in spades in coming years, Gibsons earliest foray into life as a Rock musician kicked off a little differently, “Well, the first musical thing I did, really, was my high school brass band. I played the euphonium, which is like a smaller version of the Tuba, in that. But that kind of got me started. At the same time, I was already playing guitar when I joined that, but that got me into sort of formal musical training. My first band was these guys, who were local club musicians, came up with an idea to put together a band of students from a number of the local schools as a sort of everybody-working-together kind of project. Funnily enough, that band was called Oasis, and the only time we ever played in public was when we got hired by the local council to provide incidental music for a pie eating contest on the main street of Fairfield.”

By the time Gibson found himself part of the Sydney underground, the city had developed one of the most distinctive and self-contained music scenes in the country. Radio Birdman had already written the template. They were loud, fast, Motor City-influenced Rock with an almost religious intensity, and a dozen bands were scrambling to build on it or push back against it. One such band were Lime Spiders.

Taking a leaf out of the Birdman playbook of fleshing out the live sound with Mark Sisto, later of The Visitors, and Johnny Kannis, later to front his own outfit, The Hitmen, as backing singers, Lime Spiders adopted Gibson into the fold, “I honestly don’t know if the Lime Spiders ever thought, ‘Oh, well, let’s do a Kannis kind of thing.’ I’d tried out as a guitarist for them, and didn’t get that gig. That was when Rick Jakimyszyn came into the band, being mates with Darryl [Mather], the other guitarist. Nobody else in the band sang at that point, and I think he went, ‘Well, we could use some backing vocals. Why don’t you come along and do that?’ I just kind of stuck that out for a bit and then there was a period there where they were playing random gigs around the place. Then they split for a little while and reformed a little while later with a slightly different lineup and that was specifically to do the Southern Cross Band Competition. Which is what won them the double single that they did. At that point, I think it may have been Mick Blood whose thoughts were, ‘Well, we’re going to get a bit more professional about this, and we don’t really need a random backing singer.’ But I was just always at their gigs anyway. So, I was kind of being a roadie for them, I guess. Tuning guitars and stuff like that. I’m sure there was no serious thought put into, ‘Let’s get a backing singer.’ I was just kind of there,” he humbly adds. Though the band obviously recognised his talents, getting him into the studio, “I’m on that double single. Sang some backups on a couple of tracks on that. And two tracks on ‘Cave Comes Alive’, on the debut album. Actually, that’s the only time I’ve ever been paid by a record company as a session singer. Because they had Virgin behind them at that point. I remember getting like $100 bucks a track for those and thinking, ‘Oh, this is good. I’ve made it!’”

It was within this world that Gibson first encountered Darroch, whose previous band Trans Love Energy, a three-piece playing Radio Birdman/MC5/Stooges/Ramones-inspired Garage Rock, had already marked him out as someone worth watching. By January 1984, Darroch had spent two years as bass player in The Celibate Rifles and was ready to start something of his own. Around the same time, Bill was kicking about in both Hell Yes and Smelly Tongues, and Geoff Milne’s New Avengers were on the cusp of calling it quits. Both jumped at the chance. The trio were culture junkies, “Oh, absolutely, yeah. Me in particular. I was just a sponge for all that kind of stuff,” Bill confesses. “Actually, when we were tossing around ideas for the name, James had suggested The Klingon Alliance. He was obviously a bit of a Star Trek fan and I think now, ‘Gee, I’m glad we didn’t go with that one!’”, he chuckles. The Eastern Dark’s moniker would eventually be plucked from Phantom comics.

Right from the get-go, The Eastern Dark’s relationship with the Ramones was not a casual one. The band set themselves an extraordinary goal - to open every gig with a Ramones song, working through the catalogue in strict chronological order until they had played them all. “We caught up to them,” he declares. “The last album they had out at that point was ‘Too Tough To Die’. We did all of that. We went through all the albums, got to the end of ‘Too Tough To Die’, went back and did B-sides and stuff like that that hadn’t been on albums. By December of ‘85 we’d caught up to them. ‘Go Home Ann’, from the ‘Bonzo [Goes To Bitburg]’ single I think, was the last song we did.”

“We started talking about, ‘Well, now we’ve caught up. What are we going to do now? Do we pick another band? Will we do the same thing with The Dictators or something?’ And I think by that stage we decided we’d put ourselves through enough,” he smirks.

In August 1985, the band released their own single on the Waterfront label and produced by Radio Birdman’s Rob Younger. ‘Julie Is A Junkie’ b/w ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’ arrived fully formed. A No.1 alternative charts hit that somehow managed to be simultaneously indebted to the Ramones and entirely its own thing. Darroch’s melodic instincts were all over it. Tight, hook-driven, and sharper than anything else coming out of the Sydney scene at the time.

The original pressing came with its own cryptic language pressed into the vinyl itself. Inscribed in the runout groove of side ‘That One’ is ‘4BG’. “It’s nothing to do with me. I noticed that only just recently, I was looking at it. I have a suspicion that that was James’s dedication to Julie. And I’m speculating here, but I think the BG might have been ‘Baby Girl,’ or something like that.” On the flip side, ‘The Other One,’ it’s etched with ‘Word Gets Around’, “That was James’s pun on the whole idea of having messages in the runout groove. Put the single on and the word gets around,” Bill laughs.

As for how far that word travelled, did the Ramones ever hear the track they inspired? “I gather they did,” he says with a shrug. “We got a card from the European Ramones fan club. Honorary membership. I believe a copy was sent to [the Ramones representatives] Kurfirst Management. Hopefully they did get to hear it. I never got to actually confirm that, but I’m led to believe they did.”

The Eastern Dark completed their debut mini-album, the Rob Younger-produced ‘Long Live the New Flesh!’, in February 1986, just days before setting off for another tour of Melbourne. The van, driven by Darroch, left the Hume Highway near Yass. Gibson, Milne, and sound engineer Tim Pittman were hospitalised. Darroch did not survive.

Now seen as a cult classic, The Eastern Dark was largely ignored by the mainstream and the major label machine at large at the time, “I think we hadn’t really gotten that far yet. We certainly weren’t looking for that kind of thing. Really, in the grand scheme of things, we were still just a local band with one single out. I suspect that had we still been going when the EP came out, we might have attracted some interest on the basis of that. But then you never really know, in this situation, how much of the interest that we wound up generating; how much of that was a result of the circumstances of what happened. Obviously, you know, that generates a certain amount of interest. But I would like to think that that EP was good enough that we might have started attracting some interest from other sources, but at that stage, we were perfectly happy just staying on Waterfront,” Gibson says of the record label that fostered so many great bands, including the Hard-Ons, Splatterheads and Ratcat, among many others. “They were doing the right thing by us, and we were funding all the recordings ourselves. We certainly didn’t need, or particularly want, record companies getting involved in that kind of thing. So, we’d do the recordings ourselves. With the single, we shopped it around to a few labels. We had interest from Au-Go-Go and Citadel, as well as Waterfront and wound up going with Waterfront. Once the EP came out, we might have had a bit more wider scale interest, but you just can never tell.”

James claimed he’d never heard an album he liked all the way through, and said the plan was to just continue doing EPs and singles, “I don’t know that we ever really discussed it. I think that was something James peeled off in an interview one time and was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds good enough. I’ll go with that.’ Certainly, I wouldn’t have had any problem if we’d just done EPs, if that was what he wanted to do. You’d have to think that if we got to the point where an album was expected of us, the pressure would have been on to do that, and I think we probably could have. You just never really know.” Darroch’s ultimate vision for the band would sadly never be realised. What the band’s trajectory might have looked like is now mere conjecture.

While it would take Milne considerably much longer to recover from his extensive injuries, Gibson was able to throw himself back into his work, “I was straight back into it as soon as I possibly could. I was off my feet for a couple of months afterwards, but as soon as I was off my crutches and able to get around again, I was getting right back into it. We had Smelly Tongues and then I was playing with Red Giant, and I was absolutely keen not let the grass grow under my feet, get back out and into it as soon as possible,” he says, as a way of coping with the tragedy.

The rhythm section would eventually be back in a rehearsal room together. This time under the banner of Crunge. “Yeah, that was an interesting thing, working with Dean Coulter, who played in the band with James before the Dark.” Referring to the band Slaughterhouse 5, featuring James, Dean, and Rock journalist extraordinaire, Murray Engleheart on drums. “We thought, ‘Well, Dean knows James’s style better than just about anyone else.’ We rehearsed that band for 9 months, then we played 9 gigs in the space of 9 weeks and then, just as soon as that, it was over. Dean took a job in Canberra and moved away. A brief shining light.” Adding, “We could potentially still get the three of us back into a studio and do something, with a revamped Crunge lineup, 40 years later.” We can only hope.

Gibson’s path eventually led, improbably, to one of the bigger names in ‘90s American Alternative Rock. “The first time the Lemonheads toured Australia, Nick Dalton was filling in for Robyn [St. Clare] in the Hummingbirds who were doing the support. So, Nick met Evan [Dando]. Geoff was playing in the Plunderers with Nick, so Nick introduced those two, and then Geoff introduced me to Evan, and his first response upon meeting me was to sing, ‘I Don’t Need The Reasons’ to me. He was obviously already a fan. Apparently, we got a good run on Boston radio. We stayed in touch over the years and I basically just went to the States for a holiday in ‘96. He’d been here just as I was gearing up to head over there and I said, ‘I’ll give you a call when I get to your neck of the woods. We’ll catch up over there,’ and he called me back at one point and said, ‘Well, look, while you’re here, would you be interested in doing something?’ And I said, ‘Yeah sure.’ I figured I’d do some backing vocals on an album or something like that and then it turned out he didn’t have a bass player lined up and I was like, ‘Well, you know, I can do that if you want.’ So again, it was just a case of being in the right place at the right time.”

The reissue of ‘Julie Is A Junkie’ b/w ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’ began, as so many archival projects do, with a search. Unfortunately, the original master tapes were simply gone. Lost in the decades of moves, storage units, and the general entropy of time, “What happened with that single, in a very rare and uncharacteristic lapse of judgement on James’s part, when we had a label in France release the single. This would be a few months after it came out here. James actually sent the masters; the actual one and only copy of the 2-track master. Sent that to France, for them to master the single, and it never came back to us.”

“I had been in touch with the fellow who ran the label [in France] back then and he has no idea... Well, I mean, this is probably 10 or more years ago that I was talking to him about it, but he had no idea what had ever become of them. In the meantime, we dug out the multi-track tapes and thought, ‘OK. Well, next best case, we can go back to the multi-tracks and do a new mix.’ It took us forever! Literally, I think it took about 3 years, trying to find a studio that had the right tape machine that we could transfer the multi-tracks to digital, because it was a format that was only sort of briefly in use.”

Things were dragging on and they seemed to be running out of options, “We were thinking we were going to have to send it overseas to get it mastered, but I eventually found a studio up in Tamworth. Country music territory, but I sent the tapes up there and got the digital transfer done. So, what we’ve done now is remixed from the masters, as closely as we possibly could, to the sound of the original single. We haven’t really tried to change anything much. We did manage to make the drums sound a little bit crisper.”

The remixing and remastering were handled by Michael Carpenter, with Gibson and Milne overseeing every decision. One of those decisions concerned the intro to ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’. “We’ve tried as much as possible to stay to the spirit of the original mix where we can, making things sound a little better. And the only thing that we’ve actually changed on it is in that intro to ‘Johnny and Dee Dee’. It’s not so much about the overlap of where they were joined, because I’d discovered that it was like that on the multi-track master,” he says of the acoustic intro glitch on the original single that had always bugged the band. “There was a flaw on the master tape and, in the original, what we did was just drop out a couple of notes and we’d been able to fix that so that we could leave those notes in this time around and made it work. So that’s the only sort of technology fix we’ve done on it.”

On the latest sessions, the singles original producer, Rob Younger, and engineer, Tony Espie, wouldn’t be on hand to help out, “No. Not this time around. Obviously, we compared all the way along to the original mixes, but the new mix was done by Michael Carpenter, who’s something of a Power Pop guru. And I felt like there was always a big pop influence in the band, as much as the Ramones were the obvious influence, but both James and I were particularly into pop kind of sounds, and I thought Michael would be the guy who could… If anyone was going to be able to improve things at all, he’d be the guy who could put a new slant on it and I’m really glad we went with him because I think he’s done a great job.”

The reissue’s being pressed in France, and there will be no cryptic runout messages, “We didn’t even think about having anything put in the grooves for this one. I wish I’d thought of it earlier, but no. It’s all just going to be the regulation label information, I guess. This is what happens, when, back in the day, you’d actually be there in the studio when they were cutting the vinyl and you could say to the engineer, ‘Oh, let’s scratch this into the groove.’ But it doesn’t happen quite like that anymore.”

The reissue of the single may not be the end of things for The Eastern Dark either, “Years ago, I’m trying to think how long ago now. I think it might have been for the 25th or 30th anniversary of James’s passing, I made a little compilation of some of those live tracks that hadn’t been released and just made sort of a semi-authorized bootleg that we shared with friends of the band. I think Dave [Laing of Grown Up Wrong!] is very keen to do something along those lines with unreleased live stuff. There’s a handful of unreleased originals that we have live recordings of.” Hinting moreover, “I think the first thing we’d be looking at following up with, assuming this one doesn’t go down the gurgler; Dave wants to do an LP of all the studio recordings. Because that stuff, it’s all physically out of print now.”

And, if unreleased material and long overdue reissues weren’t enough, Gibson teases further, “I’ve been brewing this concept up for a while. Having sort of a spinoff project called The Guardians of the Eastern Dark.”

“We’ve been kicking around the idea of doing something for close to 10 years now. We resisted the idea for the longest time and then thought, ‘Well, if not now, then, it’s never going to happen.’ We started thinking about it, a year or 2 prior to lockdown, and we just were starting to get to the point where we thought we might do something when lockdown hit, and that took the wind out of our sails. At my 60th birthday, which is a couple of years ago now, we did a handful of songs with Stu Cunningham [aka Leadfinger] on guitar and he was a really good fit for that stuff, and we thought this would be a good lineup for the Guardians. That would definitely be the lineup I’d be looking at if we were going to record anything more.”

“Geoff and I, I think we’re agreed that if we were ever going to go out and try and do something in that vein, that we absolutely would have to have substantial rehearsal time beforehand, because it’s not something we’d want to go out and do half arsed. We could get away with it at a party, but we’ve thought about, like, maybe we could do one big show. Film it or stream it or something. Put it out there,” he baits. “These are all ideas that float around in the back of my strangely addled mind from time to time. Who knows what might happen?”

Forty years is a long time to wait for a single to come back. But then, some singles are worth waiting for. The Eastern Dark made music that sounded like it had always existed, angular and melodic and desperate in the best possible way, and James Darroch wrote songs that still sound like they belong in a world slightly better than the one we have. Getting them back onto vinyl feels less like a reissue than an act of overdue justice.

“I’m looking forward to seeing what the reaction is.”

‘Julie Is A Junkie / Johnny and Dee Dee’ by The Eastern Dark is reissued via Grown Up Wrong! Records. Remixed and remastered from the original multi-track tapes by Michael Carpenter, under the supervision of Bill Gibson and Geoff Milne, the limited-edition pressing is available on coloured and black vinyl - the first time either track has been on vinyl since the original 1985 Waterfront pressing!

Order ‘Julie Is A Junkie / Johnny and Dee Dee’ now from Grown Up Wrong! Records. The Eastern Dark @ sound-merch.com.au

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“Probably the single most underrated songwriter of the last 50 years”
- Neil Gaiman, author

As founder, frontman, and chief songwriter of the Adverts, T.V. Smith helped define the first wave of British punk. Formed in late 1976, the band quickly became fixtures at London’s newly opened Roxy Club and earned early cult status with their debut single ‘One Chord Wonders’. Their follow up, ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’, crashed into the UK Top 20, sparking a flurry of radio and TV appearances and cementing the Adverts as one of Punk’s most compelling voices. A third charting single, ‘No Time To Be 21’, and tours with The Damned and Iggy Pop carried them through a whirlwind 1977, culminating in the release of ‘Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts’, now widely hailed as one of Punk’s greatest albums of all time.

The band’s second record, ‘Cast Of Thousands’, initially dismissed by critics, has since been re evaluated as a lost classic, with Mojo famously calling it “the long lost punk album that rivals The Clash’s ‘London Calling’.” After the Adverts split in 1979, T.V. Smith remained fiercely independent, continuing to embody the uncompromising spirit of the movement he helped ignite. His prolific solo career has produced a steady stream of albums and singles, and recent archival releases - including an early 1977 rehearsal tape unearthed via a cassette bought on eBay by superfan Henry Rollins - have only deepened interest in his legacy.

Today, he stands as one of punk’s most enduring and authentic voices, and this April, NOT as support but as the actual backing band, Australia will be witness to T.V. Smith & the Hard-Ons ploughing through tunes from across the entire Adverts’ discography.

Bad Batch was granted permission to pester Mr Smith ahead of the tour…

Do you think had you not been made redundant from the sweets factory in your youth that you ever would have made the leap to leave town for London? Was this a sliding doors moment or was the move inevitable?

I took up that job after my first band “Sleaze” had broken up and swore it was just going to be a temporary thing to earn enough money to get me through until I could move to London and form a new band. The first person I talked to in the factory told me, “I was only planning to be here six months too. I’ve been here thirty-five years.” I thought, “Oh shit.” On the plus side, I was working in the packing department and got really good at it. When it comes to birthdays and Christmas, I’m your man.

Jake Riviera of Stiff Records told you, “Sign with me and I’ll make you poor.” Did he live up to his promise?

He certainly did. It was one of the reasons we couldn’t stay with Stiff. Having said that, we moved to Anchor Records, which was a subsidiary of USA giant ABC, and got a hit record - but still didn’t make any money.

You’ve said, ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ was “…hampered by public expectation.” Do you think the Adverts would have hung around a little longer had the single not been so successful?

It was a hard record to follow, to be honest, because it had “novelty single” stamped all over it and releasing “Safety In Numbers” - a critique of the punk scene - as a follow-up may not have been my smartest commercial move. Actually, I’ve always wished that I’d saved the B-side “Bored Teenagers” for the next single.

How important was The Roxy? What other venues were pivotal for The Adverts?

It was beyond important - for the first six months at least, while everything was loose and coalescing. Bands needed to have a place to play, and the Roxy was that place. It was exclusively devoted to young bands who wanted to be part of this forming punk scene, and they had to come out of their bedrooms and rehearsal rooms, cut their teeth in the real world and face real audiences. The Roxy was the only club that let them do that. After that first six months a lot of other venues started to see the potential and opened their doors to punk bands too, but the Roxy took a gamble at the beginning of 1977 that no other clubs were prepared to do.

Referring to the Adverts you said, “What was happening inside the band seemed to be reflected outside, it felt like autumn.” Did this precede a proverbial winter of discontent?

In a word, yes. In a sentence, the troubles within the band and the diminishing interest in what we were doing meant it was no fun being in a band anymore - by 1979 it felt like it had run its course.

Drugs/internal tensions the reason for going solo?

I formed the Explorers after the Adverts and thought it would be a new start, but within a couple of years the same thing started happening - arguments within the band, lack of commercial success. The politics of holding a band together started to distract me from what I wanted to do, which was write songs and play them to people. By the end of the ‘80s I was slogging around the UK with a band called Cheap, and a friend of mine, ranting punk poet “Attila The Stockbroker,” came up to me after yet another poorly attended gig and said, “Tim, I’ve been making a living playing solo gigs all my life. You write all the songs and sing them and play guitar - why not try a solo gig?” I thought it was ridiculous and terrifying, but he promoted a gig for me, and I found the experience totally thrilling and addictive. After that there was no turning back.

According to Leee Black Childers “The way to record that kind of music was to go in, do it, and get out again.” He went on to cite Adverts’ ‘One Chord Wonder’ as “…the most brilliant example of it.” Was the way you guys recorded a deliberate decision or was it dictated by budget restrictions and necessity?

It was because of budget restrictions basically. Stiff gave us one day in the studio to get it done. But I do agree with that principle, too much messing around in the studio takes the edge off it. The trick is to hold on to the excitement and not get swamped by technology.

Do you still record albums the way you always have?

My days of recording in expensive studios are long gone. I have a simple home studio set up and then tend to move on to professional studios for the mixing and mastering phase. It’s a luxury to record without the studio clock ticking, you can take as much time as you like - but I still try to record fast.

You secured a management deal after your second show and a label deal not long after that. Sent Chiswick a cassette but they snoozed and missed the boat. Who was your number one choice of label?

It wasn’t really a management deal. A guy called Michael Dempsey, who was actually a book publisher not a manager, came to one of the Roxy shows and told us how much he loved it afterwards. He always said he didn’t want to manage us, but he did want to protect us from the sharks. Soon after that I turned over all the responsibility for the business side of things to him. The band was full on touring by then and I couldn’t handle trying to deal with the business as well. Michael was a bit of a maverick himself, which caused some tensions within the band, but I always trusted him and liked him very much. When he died in an accident at home in the early ‘80s I was devastated - and had no skills myself to deal with the music business. As for choice of label - I felt lucky just to get any of them, to be honest. Despite the critical acclaim of “One Chord Wonders,” it was hard to find a new label after Stiff, and even after “Gary Gilmore” and “Crossing The Red Sea” we really struggled to find a different home. When major label RCA signed us for “Cast Of Thousands” we thought we’d cracked it, but when the record bombed commercially, they immediately threw us off.

What was it like - the attitudes and reception - touring in the ‘70s vs now? Any habits or lessons learned that you’ve kept with you?

Well, from the first gig onward I learned that you have to take the knocks and the criticism. The band got a hard time from the press right from the start, and as a nineteen-year-old trying to do my best I just couldn’t understand why they were being so rude. Eventually you come to realise that that’s the game and you have to hold your nerve. I suppose the main thing I’ve learned is that if you truly believe in what you do, and you are as authentic as you can be, then criticism and lack of commercial success can’t harm you. The only thing that matters is getting your creative output out there.

Every other band from the ‘80s and before appeared to meet at ‘art college’. Does the institution still exist in the UK? Is this still a narrative you hear these days?

“Art college” in the ‘60s and ‘70s was another way of saying “free money” for those not academically inclined in other ways. You got a financial grant which just about covered your cost of living, and all you had to do basically was turn up. I used most of my year at art college in 1975 forming and playing with my proto-glam/punk band Sleaze and barely touched the course work. I doubt if it’s that easy nowadays.

JG Ballard crops up a lot in ’70s punk. Does literature still play a major role in what you do now?

He was a great writer, and I read a lot of his books, as well as a lot of other science fiction writers who were pushing the boundaries, like Philip K Dick. The Adverts songs “Drowning Men” was directly inspired by Ballard’s “The Drowned World” - not in the subject material itself but in the kind of eerie futuristic atmosphere he created. These days I don’t read so much, and not at all when I’m in a phase of writing.

You’ve mentioned that poetry was your first love, written quite a few books chronicling life on the road and a collection of lyrics, called ‘Alternative Top 50’. Have you ever written, or considered writing, a book of prose?

I wrote a couple of fantasy novels when I was in my twenties and both the Explorers and Adverts had broken up. One of them even nearly got published - but in the end, didn’t. What I learned from the experience of writing those was that it takes an enormous amount of time, and while I was doing that, I didn’t write a single song. There’s only so much energy you can expend. So, although I find the idea of writing a novel attractive, my focus is still very much on songwriting and I can’t do both.

Why were T.V. Smith’s Explorers kicked off the Undertones tour? Do you think things might have been different for the band had you had broader national coverage?

Some silly band politics, I guess. The first few gigs went really well but then suddenly we were no longer welcome on the tour. Our manager claimed it was because we were going down too well and The Undertones weren’t happy about it, their manager said it was because we were only contracted for the first few dates. I’ll never really know.

That first wave of Punk seemed to feature a lot more female involvement, and androgyny was able to exist without ridicule. What do you think changed to create the ‘macho’ Punk and Oi! that followed in the early ‘80s?

All I know is that it was awful, and I’d steered my band in a totally opposite direction, which ended up leaving us way out on a limb as everyone else jumped on the Oi bandwagon. Of all the ways punk could have developed from its initial promise, the idea that it had to be dumbed down and macho was the worst possible outcome.

T.V. Smith’s Explorers released ‘Tomahawk Cruise’ - a response to the installation of BGM-109 Tomahawk Cruise missiles on UK soil - and T.V. Smith’s Cheap recorded the politically charged ‘Third Term’, is it time to get another band together in response to what’s going on in the world today?

No, I’m good thanks. I can move faster and get to more places and people when I’m solo.

Are there any artists or bands you’d like to work with in the future, given the chance?

Well, I don’t have anyone in my sights, but then - six months ago I didn’t see this tour with the Hard-Ons coming, so I just stay open minded and wait for whatever happens.

The album ‘Handwriting’ was released in 2024. Do you presently have any irons in the fire?

I’ve just had a fairly intense period of writing and plan to get to work on a new album this year. I’m already pretty excited about it.

You’re touring constantly, both solo and have even been aided abroad by a variety of other bands, including Germany’s Die Toten Hosen, Finland’s Punk Lurex OK, the United States’ Midnight Creeps, Spain’s Suzy & Los Quattro and Australia’s own Thought Criminals. What do you like most about using pick-up bands?

The great thing about being solo and a free agent is that I’ve had a lot of chances to collaborate with some great bands, and because it’s just for a short period things don’t get a chance to get bogged down in band politics or personality clashes or expectations of success. When I work with other bands now we all do it just because we want to, not because we have to. The knowledge that we’re not tied to each other makes it a lot more fun.

How did the Hard-Ons come across your desk? Was it the fact that you were both on the UK record label Boss Tuneage?

The Boss Tuneage connection is actually just a coincidence - although good people do tend to end up working with good labels, so maybe not. This gets complicated so hang on. The Hard-Ons connection came up after Roger from The Thought Criminals, who I toured with in Australia fifteen years ago, saw me playing some dates in Japan in 2024 with a pick-up band called the Rough Kids. Last year he contacted me to tell me that the Hard-Ons were fans of the Adverts and might be into playing some dates with me in Australia. So, then the idea was out there and we all worked together to make it happen.

What will the band bring to your songs?

That’s what we’re going to find out…

What can the Australian punters expect with this tour?

We’re all thrilled to be doing it, and I believe that excitement is going to be infectious. One thing’s for sure, these gigs are going to be very special but none of us really know exactly what’s going to happen until we hit the stage on the first gig. You’ll have to be there.

…and if it’s anywhere near as good as what we witnessed his last time out here, you are not going to want to not be!

TV SMITH'S ADVERTS (Featuring Ray, Blackie & Murray from the Hard-ons)
LIVE IN AUSTRALIA APRIL 2026

EASTER THU 2ND APRIL Young St Tavern Frankston (w/ Alien Nosejob) - tix
GOOD FRIDAY 3RD APRIL The Tote Collingwood (w/ Alien Nosejob) - tix
EASTER SAT 4TH APRIL Barwon Club Geelong (w/ Handgrenade Hearts) - tix
EASTER SUN 5TH APRIL Last Chance Rock'n'Roll Bar, Melbourne
(w/ Handgrenade Hearts) (matinee) - tix

WED 8TH APRIL Hamilton Station Newcastle
(w/ The Dark Clouds, Laura Panic) - tix
THU 9TH APRIL Link and Pin, Woy Woy (w/ The Dark Clouds) - tix
FRI 10TH APRIL Lansdowne, Sydney (w/ The Dark Clouds,
Cammy Cautious and the Wrestlers )- tix
SAT 11TH APRIL La Las Wollongong - tix (w/ Cammy Cautious and the Wrestlers)

TICKETS ON SALE NOW!

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After tearing through Australia with two blistering tours in 2023 and again last year, Tokyo’s Guitar Wolf are heading back to Oz this very month — and they’re bringing a brand-new record with them!

Their first album in seven years, and the first to feature new drummer Takuro, ‘MORE JET’ via Sorcerer Records promises to be “an awesome din of no-fi garage-punk-noise scuzz,” and will be available at shows, or from select indie record stores.

Formed back in 1987, the band dropped their debut on Memphis’ legendary Goner Records in 1993 and have been unleashing their ferocious, no-holds-barred sound ever since. Led by the indomitable Seiji, Guitar Wolf have built a global cult following across 15 studio albums, with a 16th already on the horizon. Their first Australian tour in the late ’90s has become the stuff of legend, including the night Seiji rode onto the stage at a packed Tote Hotel astride a borrowed motorcycle.

Drawing inspiration from ’50s Rock ’n’ Roll and ’70s Punk, Seiji christened their explosive brand of glorious cosmic katzenjammer ‘Jet Rock ’n’ Roll.’ Renowned for dishing up nothing but no-beg-ya-pardons, take-no-prisoners performances, the trio of Seiji, Gotz and Takuro, bring a level of energy and intensity that, frankly, few can rival. Truly, a band that needs to be experienced in the flesh.

Bad Batch caught up with mastermind — the fearless pack leader of Guitar Wolf himself, Seiji — to talk all things Jet Rock…

Is it true you keep all your instruments in glass cases along with your favourite LPs to harness the Rock ‘n’ Roll energy?
Look, it’s true. I seal my instrument in a glass case. It’s a Rock ‘n’ Roll reactor. I lock it up with my favorite LPs - Link Wray, Elvis records. The sound swirls. The spinning black disc resonates with the guitar’s wood grain, charging it with cosmic power. It seals in Rock energy and compresses it inside. And sometimes I enter inside it. There I take a cosmic shower. The Rock seeps under my skin, and my bones start to vibrate like amplifiers. When that’s done, I’m back on stage. Jet!!! I was blown away by Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’. He can be that wild even without singing. He can be that dangerous with zero words. The moment I realized that, I picked up a guitar. That’s why it started out as an instrumental. It’s vibration. Jet.

Explain Jet Rock?
Jet Rock isn’t music. It’s propulsion. It’s rocket fuel that ignites motorcycles, UFOs, loud noises, and leather jackets all in one hit. Don’t listen to it. Be launched.

Eric Friedl’s Goner Records and Jimmy Stapleton’s Bag Of Hammers label - how did those collaborations come about?
It was a moment in a Memphis basement, where records, sweat, and beer mixed together. Eric Friedl and Jimmy Stapleton were both men possessed by the ghosts of Rock and Roll. No words were needed. We shook hands with a bang.

What’s the difference between Australian and Japanese audiences?
Australian audiences are on fire from the start. Japanese audiences start quietly and explode at the end. But in the end, they’re both the same. They all return to the wild.

You are the Godfathers of Jet Rock. What new bands of the genre excite you?
We’re still an extension of new bands. But I’m happy to see young bands with a spark in their eyes. It’s not so much technique that counts, it’s whether they have a sense of danger.

Do you think you’ll ever make a Jet Rock instructional DVD?
Hahaha! I could make a DVD where the speakers explode the moment you press play. But Jet Locking isn’t something you can learn. It’s something that happens.

When you were robbed in Memphis were you there as a tourist or with the band?
It was my first time in America. And I was alone. I walked to a part of Memphis that’s said to be dangerous. I was surrounded by a few people. I thought, “Here they come.” But they weren’t as cruel as I thought. It was kind of comical, like something out of a movie. We were struggling, and by chance my elbow hit the guy in the face. The next moment, I was sprinting. Suddenly I was the 100-meter boy. I could hear the sound of running alive ringing inside me. Jet.

Did you get to witness any real blues while you were there?
The Memphis experience above. I thought I was dead when I was surrounded.

What equipment do you use and what are the music stores like in Japan
Japanese music stores look like spaceship hangars. They’re all lined up in shiny new condition. But I like guitars that have a few scratches. Like ones that look like they’ve just been brought back from the battlefield.

Past or present - which bands would you like to tour with?
If I could travel through time, I’d love to blast off with The Stooges.

We’ve seen some previews for a Wild Zero sequel. Do you have any idea when it will hit our screens?
A sequel? If some rich person gives the director 100 million yen, it could be done in a flash.

What can punters expect from the new album, ‘MORE JET’?
With this album, I’ve really stepped outside the box. We don’t do Rock to fit into a box. We do it to break through the box. ‘MORE JET’ is not like igniting the second stage of a rocket; it’s an album that goes off-orbit and breaks through the atmosphere. Individuality is only individual when it steps outside the box. More, more Jet! More dangerous. Get ready to step outside the box. Jet!!!

‘MORE JET’ is out now on Sorcerer Records - sorcererrecords.bandcamp.com

Thanks for reading - BB

GUITAR WOLF AUSTRALIAN TOUR MARCH 2026
Sat 14 Perth - Seasonal Brewing Co.
w/ Aborted Tortoise & Benny J. Ward
https://events.humanitix.com/guitar-wolf-seasonal-brewing-perth

Sun 15 Fremantle - The Buffalo Club
w/ Aborted Tortoise & Skortz
https://events.humanitix.com/guitar-wolf-buffalo-club-fremantle

Wed 18 Gold Coast, Vinnie’s Dive Bar
w/ JJ and the Germans & The Calfkicks
https://tickets.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/576e9bbd-8f80-4e2e-b5c5-15580fe2b1c8

Thu 19 Nambour - Mort’s Brewing Co.
w/ Defomofo & No Allegiance
https://events.humanitix.com/guitar-wolf-japan-at-morts

Fri 20 Brisbane - Season Three
w/ Future Shocks & Evil Dick Industries
https://events.humanitix.com/guitar-wolf-japan-season-three

Sat 21 Sydney - Factory Fusebox
w/ Meow Meow & the Smackouts & L.Ä.R.M.
https://aucentury.sales.ticketsearch.com/sales/salesevent/160762

Sun 22 Wollongong - La La La’s
w/ Itchy & the Nits & The Strike-Outs
https://moshtix.com.au/v2/event/guitar-wolf-japan-w-itchy-and-the-nits-the-strike-outs/191161

Wed 25 Bendigo - Trash Cult
w/ Alarms
https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing/1532782

Thu 26 Castlemaine, Bridge Hotel
w/ Ratbird
https://tickets.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/97282c06-9ad4-4b38-bdf0-27197bddc058

Fri 27 Melbourne - The Tote
w/ Alien Nosejob, Elvis 2 & Cujo
https://tickets.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/379b9ffc-3794-44e7-bdde-5c925af086e2

Sat 28 Frankston - Singing Bird
w/ Split System & DJ Centipede & The Worms
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/guitar-wolf-japan-w-split-system-dj-centipede-the-earthworms-tickets-1981819526553

Sun 29 Balnarring, Social Club
w/ Cry Cyclops & Kissland
https://events.humanitix.com/guitar-wolf-at-social-club-balnarring

Visit our new Bandcamp page : BAD BATCH BANDCAMP

International orders: fantasticmessrecords.com

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“You’re in good hands with Kim Salmon behind the wheel!”
– John Foy (Red Eye Records)

“[There] seems to be a hell of a lot of stuff to do. I don’t mind this stuff though. Nothing like talking about yourself.”

It’s a typically wry opening from Mr Kim Salmon, a man whose creative output across music and the visual arts has rarely paused long enough for reflection. Right now, there’s more than enough to talk about - a new single, a forthcoming album, European touring plans, and an inspired multi-media extravaganza bringing together two of his most revered outfits.

“Well, yeah... The first thing I think is the ‘Freudian Slippers’ launch, which is Smoked Salmon. But I’m just doing a couple of solo shows for that. And then around 10th, 11th and 18th of April, it’s Surreal Science. The Smoked Salmon thing doesn’t happen until maybe late July, and that one goes over to Europe as well. So, it’s kind of from July through till the end of the year… July, August, heading off, with maybe a straggling regional show in September, and then we’d be going off in October/November - probably for a 3-week stint - around Europe.”

At the centre of this latest flurry of activity is ‘Freudian Slippers’, the new single from Salmon’s latest band Smoked Salmon, taken from the upcoming album ‘Totally Sick’, “A compilation of my greatest hits that never were.”

The seeds of ‘Totally Sick’ were planted in reflective rumination.

“In actual fact, if you put it into perspective, what I’ve noticed when it comes to my repertoire, or oeuvre, or whatever you want to call it, people know about where I started. They know about the Scientists and the Beasts of Bourbon. So, you can have as many latter day, potential hits as you like, people will just go to the default setting. Which, for that generation of people my age, or for what people have heard about me, it’s a cumulative effect because those people talk about the songs. It’s like, if you were to say talk about, I don’t know, pick something - Sky Saxon & The Seeds. I’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, ‘Pushin’ Too Hard’.’ But they had a whole bunch of stuff like, ‘Mr. Farmer’ and ‘Falling Off The Edge Of My Mind’ and god knows what. So, you know. We’re all like that. Not you guys, of course,” he chuckles.

“I’m going on, aren’t I?” The “default setting” he refers to is however most certainly formidable. The Scientists and Beasts of Bourbon remain towering names in not just the Australian but global underground music scene. But Salmon wanted to shine a light elsewhere.

What pushed him into action was unfinished business, “But what also happened was, with Smoked Salmon, we did our tour last year of Europe, and we had to cancel the Spanish dates because a chunk of the band got COVID. So, that was about 5 dates wiped out. And I thought, well, we’re going back there, and seeing as we’re doing that, I thought, maybe I need another thing there, you know, just to add that little bit of added value. So, I just thought, I’ll do an EP. I got this idea that I could do an EP of forgotten songs. Songs that kind of slipped through the cracks. So, I projected this idea to Wally [Kempton] from Cheersquad [Records & Tapes]. I realised, looking at the songs that I had in mind - there was ‘Fix Me Up’. ‘Freudian Slippers’, ‘There’s A Virus Going Round’ - they all had a theme. I thought, I’ll call this album ‘Totally Sick’. I’ll make it like a compilation of my greatest hits that never were and make it like a K-Tell album.”

What began as a budding EP soon blossomed.

“I’ll make it like all the Smoked Salmon branded stuff. It’s sort of got paintings that I do, people with fish heads and things. I painted a cover with a hospital ward with, out the window, there’s an ambulance rushing by. There’s a doctor and he’s got a fish head or a fish doctor. Then there’s a couple of patients in there with ice packs on their heads and thermometers coming out of their mouths, and you’ve got a spatula down one of the throats, and there’s a sexy nurse in the background there with a fish head and a syringe in her hand and then some guy on a drip... The whole, Smoked Salmon trip, really. So, I did a cover with that, and I’ve got to admit, I was really pleased with it. I thought this looks cool, and I’ll call it ‘Totally Sick’. I presented it to Wally and he said, ‘Can you make it an album?’ And I thought, oh my god, do you think I can? Really? But I dredged through my collection and realised that there was a lot of songs there, there was an album’s worth.”

Each rediscovered track carried a familiar spark.

“Each time one of these songs came up, it was like, ‘Oh, I think I’ve got a potential hit here.’ and everybody around me would agree. I don’t think they were being sycophants. I think the songs worked, you know, not all of my songs are like that. Some are pretty opaque. Obscure. But these weren’t those ones.”

“This album is pitched at people like me. With their short attention spans and limited understanding of things.”

With the memory of a fish, just to go with the motif?

“Yeah, yeah, of course. All of that. How can it fail? And ‘Freudian Slippers’ was particularly fun and, I thought, clever little thing.”

Smoked Salmon’s current iteration also marks the return to the Salmon fold of drummer, Michael Stranges, who’d previously played in both Darling Downs and Precious Jules with Kim.

“Doug [Galbraith] had so much on his plate and family stuff. He’s a guy that likes to do lots of… he’s a bit like me. He likes to do too many things and kind of bit off more than he could chew. I mean, he was kind of managing Smoked Salmon, you know? He was doing the whole damn lot.”

“At first when he said he couldn’t do a particular gig, I thought, ‘Aaahhhh!’ He said, ‘Well, why don’t you get Mike?’ And I thought, ‘Ah.’ I asked him, and of course, Mike’s brilliant. Jeff [Hooker] has played with him; he’s got history,” he says. “Because we all had a history, well, Claire [Birchall] didn’t, but Jeff and I did. So, it was like, ‘Oh, this is a really great comfortable feeling.’ Yeah, so it was great to have Mike back on board for that reason.”

If ‘Totally Sick’ revisits the overlooked, Surreal Science looks set to recontextualise the iconic. This monumental undertaking unites The Scientists and Kim Salmon & The Surrealists in a single, seamless multi-media royal rumble.

“The way I envisage it is that we’re going to have a screen behind the stage. Nice big screen to project, because it’s a big part of the show. Before we start, there’ll be film and videos of the bands with Brian [Hooper] and Tony [Pola] and we’ve got a fair bit of footage of Leanne [Cowie] from our last European stint. We’ll also have some kind of art projections, sort of like those oil lamp things, things like that. With the Surrealists’ stuff, there’s a little bit of art that Stu [Thomas] and I have concocted. Very simple stuff because you can’t really project effectively with complex looking images. We’ve kind of got these symbolic things going on up there and I think Greg’s [Bainbridge] got some kaleidoscopic images of flowers and things that look really mean. For the Surrealists, we’ve got that. And for the Scientists part, Boris [Sudjovic] has concocted up a whole lot of oil lamp looking things and psychedelic looking imagery or abstractions and it looks great.”

“It’ll be the Surrealists’ tech doing all of the tech, as in, all of the sound, and Boris will be taking care of the Scientists’ projections because it’s just too much for me. I got to curate this fucker. And make the set list, because if you think about the set list, well, you got to get it right and not move it.”

With guitarist Tony Thewlis; bassists Boris Sujdovic and Stu Thomas; drummers Clare Moore, Greg Bainbridge and Phil Collings; along with production engineer Andrew Hepburn and Mr Kim Salmon himself sharing the stage, choreography becomes crucial.

“It’ll go like that, but it’ll be seamless because we won’t be plugging in and plugging out and getting up on stage. Everybody can kind of position themselves during songs… they might want to stay there.”

“We’ve got to do some dress rehearsals. But that’s what I envisage. This sort of show that’s more of a curated, almost theatrical thing going from one part, interval, then another part. And it won’t be chronological, it’ll be more sort of dynamic, more to do with the thematic and dynamic,” he posits. “Just to get that idea across is going to be the challenge now.”

“It’s all a big family really. It’s going to be great.”

Capturing the spectacle for posterity’s sake feels inevitable.

“It seems like it’d be a wasted opportunity if we didn’t. I’m assuming Andrew Hepburn, our tech, will do that. In fact, I can’t imagine him not doing it, so we’re looking at filming it too.”

“Yes, a chance to bring back the DVD,” he laughs. “How do you put things like that out? It’ll probably go straight to YouTube.”

Across decades and numerous labels, Salmon has occasionally encountered expectations about direction.

“That’s interesting, yeah. As an example, in the late ‘80s when the Beasts of Bourbon were signing up to a licensing deal with Normal Records in Germany, they got on board for ‘Sour Mash’. They loved it. It was right up their alley being Germans, they loved the Blues and they love Industrial, and there was those two. That’s what that record was. Kind of a mishmash of Blues and Industrial. We did that, and then we just went on our merry way to do another album, and that was ‘Black Milk’. ‘Black Milk’ was a very eclectic affair and when it was presented to Normal, they were saying, ‘Oh, this is a bit disappointing for us. We were hoping for...’ And it seemed like a lot of people at the time found ‘Black Milk’ to be a strange record. It’s proven to be a real lasting thing. It’s one people focus on because I think, the thing about The Beasts was that they were eclectic in those days, and they could do songs like ‘Cool Fire’ and were as known as much for that and ‘Words From A Woman’ and those sort of Country things. Because we started out with ‘Psycho’. It wasn’t like the band was a bloody hard ass, tough Rock ‘n’ Roll band, at all. It was a bit of everything, you know? It was sort of Swamp Music and a bit of Country on the first album, bit of psychedelics. People might have focussed on certain aspects, but they kind of got the wrong end of the stick in a way. So yeah, there was an aspect of pushing the band in a particular direction and it has happened with the Darling Downs.”

“It wasn’t so much labels, because we did them [albums] pretty much ourselves, but I know that when we came back with the second album, [‘From One To Another’], people were saying, ‘Oh, it’s not as immediately accessible.’ I thought, ‘what?’ I thought it was actually more accessible. I thought that’s what we’d done, but I think because it wasn’t all uplifting and bright, there was a few couple of dark songs on from one to another. People do tend to put you in a box, and labels aren’t exempt from that. Labels have their brand as well,” he sagely concedes. “There’s a balancing act you’ve got to do between following the muse, doing what you want, and also pitching it or matching it with the right people. Some shoes just don’t fit, you know? It’s just the way it is.”

Not one to be hamstrung by the constraints of outside expectation and influence, Salmon has continued to manoeuvre his way through the industry at large, “It’s happenstance, really. I kind of realised in the early naughties that maybe the way I should go about things was to put things in boxes. I had a phase when I really went solo, the first album in that phase was this thing called ‘E(a)rnest’. And it was really me doing a kind of acoustic Folk thing, focussing on a Songwriter Folk thing. That didn’t go down with my fans, but it’s around and it’s endured with certain people because, for some reason, on a couple of songs I went into the domain of the ‘chanson air’, or whatever you call it. Singing a bit in French. Not that I knew any, but it just seemed to be the right thing to do,” he laughs. “Getting all Jacques Brel, ‘cause that seemed Folky. It seemed in France that there’s a bit of an audience for it. It got a release not so many years ago, of ‘E(a)rnest’ on vinyl with Beast Records. So, that’s exactly what I was saying; if it’s the right fit.”

“I think the Darling Downs sing in many ways at a conceptual element because it was Ron [Peno] and I experimenting with stuff that we liked, like we were saying. Ron always said that the first album was from the Appalachian Mountains, and he said when we got to the last one, it was like we were in Greenwich Village,” coming down from the mountain and into the city.

“Yeah, maybe via Laurel Canyon on from one to another, but it was sort of in a kind of Folk-Country idiom. In a way, Smoked Salmon is in that, because it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, well, we’re going to focus on the accessible stuff.’ I’m not going to try anything experimental with Smoked Salmon, and it has by and large worked. People say, ‘Oh, this is your best thing yet,’ because people are a sucker for a hook line, snappy guitar riffs and harmonies. They don’t know that. They think it’s just me finally doing stuff people like. The original part of Smoked Salmon’s repertoire was old stuff. It was all the things like ‘Come On Spring’, ‘Swampland’, ‘Frantic Romantic’, ‘Cool Fire’. It was all those ones that people latched onto. It was just not trying to be obtuse at all. I was just trying to go, here ya go. Here’s a dose of all this stuff. I’m just saying that’s what’s worked well for me, these particular songs. So, Smoked Salmon, you’re gonna get ‘em!”

With Kim at the helm, what you’re also guaranteed to ‘get’ is an interesting choice of covers. Is it deliberate antagonism or does Mr Salmon genuinely like the songs he chooses to tackle? John Cougar Melon Camp’s ‘I Need A Lover’ is surely not for the faint of heart.

“That was early days,” he nostalgically recalls. “I got a bit of flak for that, and I would have said at the time, ‘I genuinely like that song,’ but that was before John. It was Johnny Cougar, and he was a kind of pop star, and my point at the time was, this is a pop singer. He’s all pretty boy, and the very early Scientists had that thing about pop music. We didn’t reject it, like a lot of New Wave Post-Punk bands did. We sort of thought, ‘Well, we’re about that.’ But we kind of did it in such a way that we made it less accessible. It was made so loud and so confrontational, you know? It was Punk! We put the Punk element back in it. It was sort of like punk with melodies, you know? A bit like Jesus & Mary Chain. They did that. They did it in a different way, but that’s the kind of vibe we were going for. So, it was before he became John Cougar Mellencamp, and sure enough, I mean, I kind of grew tired of it. It didn’t stay in our set. But ‘Slow Death’, by the Flamin’ Groovies! Loved the song. Undertones, ‘Teenage Kicks’. We loved it. It wasn’t really… There was an element of antagonism, but… We did a version of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’, and it went on for a long time. It was more like ‘Sister Ray’ when we did it. It was loud. It was brutally loud and white noise.”

You might be asking, as we did, ‘Are there any examples of that kicking around?’

“Ah. Oh, god. If there’s a bootleg of it, yeah, who knows? There’s so much stuff lost from the Mark 1 Scientists. The best bet for any of that is on that album that Grown Up Wrong [Records] put out. Dave Laing’s label. Yeah, it was the second pink album. It was called ‘Not for Sale [:LIVE 1978/79’ - 2LP (GUWDM0001)]. Yeah, that’s your best bet.” Nope. Not on there, but it’s still worth your hard earned regardless.

Despite his prolific output, Salmon is candid about his few creative droughts.

“It’s creative. I’d call it creative block, because I paint. Paint as well. To illustrate, I had a bit of a block with… Well, it wasn’t so much a block. I went through a period after I did this art exhibition. I did 2 of them. One was called Smoke Signals To Aliens, and it was done over in Perth when I got a residency at Wireless Hill Museum, and that went very successful. I sold half of my works, made a ton of money. Not that that is the way you gauge these things, but it was very well received… And I did another one at One Star Lounge & Gallery, with Katie Beale, and she’s been really good to me, and that was called Smoke Signal to Aliens Part Two. So basically, because I’d sold half of it, I did another half worth, and it evolved slightly. And it went really well. It was the same result, exactly the same result. And I thought, I’m on a roll, I’ll do more. And suddenly the painting started turning into shit, the new paintings. I just, every time, everything I’d do I’d ruin it somehow. I just didn’t seem to be able to do it. So, that’s kind of like a block. It wasn’t that I was trying to do things and everything I did failed.”

His medium and methodology are often misunderstood.

“When you say watercolours, these are massive things. I mean, look, I’ll show you what they look like…” Kim says as he gives us a tour of his art adorned walls.

“Yeah, that’s an old one when I was in a phase of doing things that looked like they were botanical, but they weren’t. They were pseudoscience things…”

“I just took delivery of one that was up in East Gippsland Gallery today. It’s in a frame and it’s, like, 2.5 metres across. When you say it’s watercolour, it’s just ink. That is what I use because if you see the colours, they’re quite vivid. You wouldn’t get that from… Watercolours are kind of muted looking, you know? It is called watercolour ink, but I’m thinking of going back to oils; or maybe acrylic. I’ve done a lot of it over the time. I sort of started out as a 12-year-old when I first started getting into oil paints. It was where I started, in oils. I think I won a prize at some newspaper thing and continued on, but I’ve done it all my life. Painting was really my first love.”

When on tour, the practice continues in miniature, “Actually, funnily enough, I use just little tin of watercolour paints. It’s about this big,” he demonstrates a square about 3x3 inches. “It’s real cute. A little tiny brush and just a little pad and I do stuff plenaire out there when I get a chance. Either it keeps my hand in, or I get ideas from that but it’s just a thing to do. Something I enjoy. But the writer’s block thing, I think I’ve learned with writing music and the creativity kind of come from the same place. They’re really different things, but it’s really just a matter of use it or you lose it.”

He has learnt though that these things can’t be forced or contrived, “If you come to a point where you are turning out rubbish, just give it a rest because it doesn’t do your psyche any good to turn out rubbish. You kind of start feeling bad about yourself and think, ‘Oh, I’ve lost it,’ you know? And that’s what I did. I stopped doing paintings for a while, a couple of months, and I just got an idea and had a go at it, and that worked out, and I learned a way. I just learned a new method about how to be more careful with stuff. So, I did that. I planned out things in a different way. It’s just a new process and the new lot of paintings; they’ve evolved from the ones you just saw. They’re more abstract, but in many ways, people can pick that it’s my stuff. It’s not a huge move, but it is a move. It’s probably got as much to do with the process of it.”

“It’s more a matter of just trying ideas. The more you do, the more things come to you. You’ve got to let those things flow. I’ve also found creativity kind of happens in an instant. It’s not a thing you piece together, meticulously. You piece things together meticulously when you’re executing an idea that you’ve had. For instance, the Smoked Salmon album covers, I’d get an idea and I’d have to paint it, but it’s like, I don’t know what a salmon looks like from underneath, looking up at the top of the ocean, you know? I’d have to find images. For [the cover artwork for] ‘Freudian Slippers’, I wanted something suggestive. Those slippers are meant to look like...”

When it’s suggested they resemble something along the lines of a prominent pant-area protuberance, he shifts our foolish focus.

“Like what? No, no, they’re meant to look like… No. The fish is meant to look like that!” he laughs. “Oh no, they’re meant to look like vaginas.”

Adding, “Well, the point is it’s Freudian.”

There may indeed be “a hell of a lot of stuff to do,” but for Kim Salmon, whether through hook-laden Rock excursions, surreal fish-headed hospital scenes, or a theatrically curated career retrospective, the work continues to flow — inventive, irrepressible, intransigent and ‘Totally Sick’, in the best possible way.

Single out today! Thanks for reading. BB

KIM SALMON SOLO MINI TOUR
March 14 Melbourne – Cactus Room (w/ support Harpo Wah) - TIX
March 15 Sydney – Lazy Thinking Records (3-5 pm w/ support Richie Weed) - TIX

SURREAL SCIENCE TOUR
April 10 Melbourne – Corner Hotel - TIX
April 11 Sydney – Oxford Arts Factory - TIX
April 18 Perth – Rosemount Hotel - TIX

Visit our new Bandcamp page : BAD BATCH BANDCAMP

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Dear Bad Batch Subscribers,

We just picked up the latest Batch from the printers! Thanks to Geelong Printworks for bangin’ them out so quickly. They said they’d missed us and we got special treatment this week. They even spotted a few mistakes for us at the proof stage. We really appreciate it.

Thanks to all of the Issue 6 bands & artists for their patience. It’s been a huge effort to get this one over the line and the delay was out of our hands - Thanks for understanding. We feel like this issue is worth the wait.

We have set up a new bandcamp page to make it easier to buy our zines and we also have T-shirts for sale to help fund further Bad Batch projects down the track. Big thanks our Issue 2 cover star Karl at KDS designs for printing the tees. We will try and get them printed asap after orders are made. Thanks for your support!
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Ashley Naylor describes himself as “an indie artist hung up on classic rock.” We’d call him one of Australia’s most beloved Ranga Rock ‘n’ Roller’s. He’s the guitarist for The Church, Paul Kelly, The Stems, & the RocKwiz Orkestra, singer/songwriter/guitarist with beloved Melbourne band Even, leader of Ashley Naylor Spaceship, co-conspirator in The Grapes, The Ronson Hangup and Monterey Honey, and a musician who has worked with Vika & Linda, Tim Finn, both Stephen Cummings and The Sports, Fanny Lumsden, the Countdown Spectacular house band, the Allman Betts Family Revival and more. Now, fresh from a massive arena tour with Paul Kelly, Naylor breaks significant new ground with the release of his latest album, ‘Alexandria Sunset’.

This marks Naylor’s first vocal solo recording in over a decade, following his acclaimed instrumental work ‘Soundtracks Vol. 2’ and the formation of his band Spaceship. Unlike previous releases that showcased his formidable guitar chops, ‘Alexandria Sunset’ is song-focused and intimate—the first album since 2004’s ‘Four Track Mind’ where Naylor plays and sings every note himself. The result is a far more evolved and mature work that mines the classic stylings of the late ‘60s and ‘70s he’s always cherished.

Is anything ‘Even’ anymore? Is SPF 50+ enough? Is Steve Kilbey still required to fork out a portion of his royalties to the Milky Bar Kid after all this time? These are questions that slipped our minds! However, we did ask him about the release of his new solo vocal album ‘Alexandria Sunset’...

Tell us about the next outing – ‘Alexandria Sunset’… What was the recording process like in comparison to your last solo offerings? Do you still have a ‘Four Track Mind’ or was the lure of Pro-Tools far too great?

Coincidentally it was very similar to ‘Four Track Mind’ largely due to me playing all the instruments myself. I did some drums and guitars at Head Gap in Thornbury, which tragically burned down last Summer. Basically, I track all the parts I am able to then have my good friends Tim Johnston and Finn Keane mix the tracks.

Who’s your biggest influence?

It’s very hard to say, The Beatles and Bowie always loom large in my subconscious. In recent times I feel I’ve gravitated to a deeper connection to artists like David Crosby and Neil Young, more in the process of putting the music together. A lot of this album is not rock as such, but it has that mindset of a rock album from a bygone era hopefully.

What got you into music?

I think it was AM radio in the ‘70s and the TV show Countdown on ABC. It was fairly mainstream but occasionally a song which was perhaps more esoteric snuck into the charts. That said my first single, which I shared with my brother Justin was ‘Fox On The Run’ by The Sweet.

I’ve been on a quest ever since.

What was the first guitar you bought? How old were you?

I can’t recall the first one I bought but I think I borrowed my brother’s guitar when I was still in primary school. I plucked a string and was hooked from then on.

I think I bought a steel string at a trash and treasure market then my Dad bought me a Suzuki Les Paul copy when I was a teenager. Mum bought me a 3/4 size nylon string too; my son plays that around the house now.

I still have the Les Paul copy and had it repaired by Jon Shub, a local luthier who has the knack to bring guitars back from the brink.

What was the first band you played in?

Probably the school bush band... oh the humanity.

First rock band was The Swarm, I’m actually off to the studio today to continue work on our first album, some forty years later.

You’ve played in Pray TV and The Church, when are you going to collect the set with “Steve Kilbey & Martin Kennedy & Ashley Naylor”?

I’m totally open to that experience, love both those fellas.

Have you ever been confused for former English professional squash player Ashley Naylor? What’s your backhand like?

Not, yet but maybe one day. My tennis backhand needs work, I have a buddy giving me tips to improve the topspin. The topspin backhand is an elusive beast, hard to tame.

How do you decide which songs will make muster for a solo project and which you’ll dedicate to one of the multitudes of other bands you’re part of? Is there a common thread?

In recent years, most of my tunes and words have found their way into my solo records, two instrumental albums and this new one with songs on it. I have two other albums in the works as well.

Recent exceptions have been the Monterey Honey EP I made with my mate David Preston. That was a remote project we did in lockdown, he being in London and me in my loungeroom in Melbourne. He’d send tunes and I’d add vocals, then when studios opened again, I added my rudimentary drum parts to these songs. The other recent collaboration has been on The Ronson Hangul album ‘Centaurus’. I’ve also contributed to the group compositions for the recent albums by The Church, which as you can imagine has been a very rewarding experience.

I suppose I always assume my words and music will be on my next album in my own name.

You’re about to head out on the road with the great man – do you have a favourite Paul Kelly song?

I think my favourite is ‘Before Too Long’, closely followed by ‘Rising Moon’.

Both tracks give me the privilege of guitar features. It’s an honour to play Steve Connolly’s parts and also an honour to have contributed my parts to ‘Rising Moon’. I stepped on the Wah pedal on that lead break in Auckland and PK seemed to dig that.

We are gear nerds at Bad Batch. What pedals and amps do you prefer to use? Do you change things up between projects?

Due to all the flying, we usually rely on hire gear outside of Melbourne. For Paul Kelly shows I run a Top Boost Vox AC30. In The Church I run a stereo setup, through a Roland JC-120 and a Vox AC30.

At home shows I like to use my hand-wired Brookfield ‘Bohemian’ built by Reuben Hopikins. He very graciously loaned and then gave me the amplifier about five years ago and it has been my main amp since then. I’ve recorded with it and use it at all my Spaceship shows in Melbourne. I actually drove it to Sydney for Spaceship’s debut show there a while back.

It’s a beautiful amp, modelled on an AC30. It is very punchy and has crystal clear detail for each guitar I put through it. I’m very fortunate I can take it on the upcoming Red Hot Summer tour with The Church and Crowded House. It’s nice having a familiar amp on the road with you.

I have many pedal configurations for different shows. Essentially, I have a board for Paul Kelly shows and a different board for The Church. The PK board was made by Dugald at Rockwiz and my Church board was made by Neil Gray some 25 years back at Trueform/Bigsky Audio. It’s had a few tweaks since then of course.

For smaller gigs I tend to assemble a commando board which can often fit into the front pouch of a Mono guitar bag.

Between both these larger boards, my go to drive pedals are Boss Blues Driver and AC+. My overdrive favourites are Ibanez Tube Screamer and RAT. Fairly stock pedals, but great. I use Boss Waza craft Analog Delay and also Boss Digital Delay and recently added an Echorec pedal for more Floyd-esque long delays. I’m still using an Ibanez Stereo Chorus my brother bought me in Hong Kong in 1987. On The Church board I run stereo amps rig out of an 80’s Guyatone Stereo Chorus. On some Church shows I need to tun a Big Sky Reverb pedal too, adding a string pad to sone of the guitar lines. Depending on the set list I’ll add and remove pedals accordingly. The Lester K rotary simulator is a great pedal for that driven Leslie effect. I have an MXR phase pedal which gets an occasional workout too. Overall, pretty straightforward. I’m yet to enter the amp sim, multi effects unit world for live shows.

How was your time in the RocKwiz ‘Orkestra’? Do you have a favourite guest you played with? Can you get us Julia’s number? …or Brian’s? (Beggars can’t be choosers.)

RocKwiz was, and is a real honour and treat to be a part of. So many guests have been amazing too work alongside. Two standouts for me are Russell Morris and Brian Cadd. Performing with and hearing those artists sing the songs that shaped your musical world has been a career highlight. The RocKwiz Orkestra is such a great group of people and players. I’m always surprised and delighted to be called back on RocKwiz duty when I’m not on a conflicting tour schedule.

And in answer to your others question... ahhh...

You’ve shared the stage with quite a few other big names in the business over your career. Are there any names still left on your bucket list?

Oh man, where does one start? I’d love to share a stage with John Paul Jones, Anne Wilson....so many artists.

You have so many balls in the air these days. Will we ever see another Even album? Are you someone that likes looking back or are you always moving forward?

I suspect some day in the future I’ll dive into the archives and dig up a live recording of Even that all members deem worthy of releasing. The band never did a live album so it could be a good album project in the future.

I like moving ahead creatively. I like listening to older music but not so much music I have made. I like to think my best work lies ahead, which in all honesty might be borderline delusional but I press on regardless. I feel compelled to make music and hope to be more prolific in the future.

Shows kick off tonight, so don’t snooze on tickets…

ASHLEY NAYLOR, PERFORMING ALEXANDRIA SUNSET

IN SOLO ACOUSTIC MODE

Nov 14 - JUNK BAR, BRIS

Nov 19 - ODEON, MELBOURNE

Dec 11 - FACTORY FLOOR, SYDNEY

DEC 21 - GRACE EMILY, ADELAIDE

Tix onsale now via venues

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After three decades of explosive Australian appearances with Dead Moon, Pierced Arrows, and as a duo alongside her late husband Fred Cole, Toody Cole returns to our shores for the first time fronting her own band. The co-founder and beating heart of iconic Oregon outfit Dead Moon, Toody has spent a lifetime defining what raw, uncompromising DIY Rock’n’Roll truly means. Now, at 76 years young, this door-busting, ceiling-cracking force of nature—part garage-grit Patti Smith, part jagged-edge Joan Jett, part Janis Joplin’s biker sister—continues to hold more than her own in rock’s endlessly youth-obsessed, male-dominated landscape.

For this momentous tour, Toody has assembled a powerhouse lineup to honour and animate the Dead Moon songbook: longtime family friend and Pierced Arrows drummer Kelly Haliburton, alongside Christopher March of Jenny Don’t & the Spurs, whose otherworldly guitar work captures the singular style of the late, great Fred Cole. These rare performances offer new generations a chance to experience the mystic backwoods Rock’n’Roll soul they’ve only heard on record, while giving longtime devotees an opportunity to recapture that lightning-in-a-bottle feeling that made every Dead Moon show unforgettable. This may well be the last time the Antipodes witnesses this essential piece of American underground Rock history brought to life.

Bad Batch was honoured to speak to Toody to find out about her upcoming Australian & New Zealand tour.

Hey, Toody. How are you?

Good.

You home? On tour?

Just got home last night from Spain.

How was that?

It was awesome. We played a festival called Dracula Festival. It’s down below Valencia, where all the flooding is, especially in this town, they actually cut the first night short because the roof was leaking. But yeah, we had a blast. It went down really well.

So, when do you come down to Australia? It must be soon?

Yeah. I’ve got a week before Thanksgiving in November. I should have the date right in front of me, but I don’t. I think 17, 18, something like that.

And so Kelly and Christopher from Jenny Don’t and the Spurs, they’re going to be the band?

Yeah, they’re doing a more extended tour and I’m joining them for the four shows in Australia and then another four in New Zealand.

Ah, awesome. Yeah, we’re from Geelong…

Oh, cool! Yeah, I know Geelong.

Last time we saw you play was in the Pierced Arrows at the National Hotel in Geelong.

Yeah! Well we played down in Geelong in Dead Moon several times. Someone in Geelong sent me the book on Bored!

Marree Robertson we’re guessing!?! Our friend Clinton Rooney, he’s a mad Powder Monkeys fan…

Oh, those guys. WILD WILD WILD (laughs) Yeah!

He’s just put a few books together about this great Australian band and there’s an article in Vol. 2 that mentions the Dead Moon Tour with the Powder Monkeys.

Yeah, that was, like I said, that was a real blast. (laughs)

There’s a story about Fred Cole giving John Nolan his guitar to play at one gig…

Yeah, that was like, he’d never, never, never do that for anyone. He’s probably maybe the one and only that that actually happened. Yeah. It’s amazing. It followed through with all those guys. They were really fun to play with.

John said that he broke the G string that night and sent Fred a G string in the mail?

Yeah he did! Well, Fred broke more than that! The D. He always broke the D string. It’s that damn Bigsby, man! (laughs)

For the Australian Tour will the set be mostly Dead Moon songs?

I’m doing a couple of songs from The Rats. I’m doing ‘Caroline’ that we played in Pierced Arrows. So it’s kind of a bit of a gambit. We’ve been doing ‘You Must Be A Witch’, most of the time, too. Which is off The Lollipop Shoppe album. All Fred Cole songs, but you know, they kind of cover a wider spectrum. I do ‘Acclaim To Fame’ as well, which was kind of… I don’t know… It was almost a Western Front song for a while. I don’t know if that was ever on record.

You released the Dead Moon Box set. Any more songs in the vault that’re ever going to see the light of day?

No, not really. I mean, at the very end, Fred was working on a couple of more songs. I mean, on that box set, for instance, there’s nothing from ‘Dead Ahead’. The last album in that. So, that’s at the tail end of that, and then all the Pierced Arrows stuff as well. In the duo, we were just pretty much covering songs that had been written before, but the two or three songs that we were kind of messing around with at the end, before Fred passed, he was just too sick to record them. We kind of never got it, and they weren’t completely finished. So, those never got recorded, unfortunately.

What was Fred’s process when writing songs? Was it the riffs first or was it the lyrics that kicked things off?

A little bit of both. A lot of times it was lyrics. He was always grabbing whatever was close, a paper bag, a napkin, whatever, to write a thought down on. I think a lot of it started pretty much with a riff or more the melody line that was in his head. And he basically kind of composed everything in his head. He knew what he wanted, everything to sound like. So when we’d get together to rehearse a song, he’d kind of, you know, he’d show me a bass part to start out with. Because he started out as a bass player himself and he’s the one who taught me how to play bass. And then after that, I just kind of take it and make it my own. And, you know, I would give Andrew, you know, try, blah, blah, blah, and different points. But so he could hear how it should all go together. You know, he’s as much of a composer as anything else too.

Do you write songs yourself?

I have some of the lyrics, but I’ve never… Unfortunately, that’s a talent I don’t have. Wish I did. But, you know, it’s kind of something that you either have or you don’t. So, there were a few different songs where I wrote one of the verses of lyrics or whatever. That’s as far as my contribution to that went.

We’re guitar and pedal nerds. What equipment will you bring with you?

I don’t use any pedals. No effects. I’m bringing my baby, which got delayed in flight on the way there [Europe] and on the way back. I just went to the airport this morning and picked it up. So I’m still playing the same Vox Teardrop Wyman bass. It’s duct-taped together and beat to hell, but she sounds awesome. That’s the only one I’ll ever play!

We interviewed Jason Summers a couple of months ago about the Dead Moon documentary ‘20 Years in the Crypt’. Do you know if the DVD is coming out?

From what I heard the last time I talked… We talked, you know, once or twice a month on the phone. But the last time I talked to him, yeah, he was still planning on doing something with it. So, I don’t think it’s been done or finished or whatever just yet.

You’ve just got back from Spain. Spain and Australia seem to have a great Rock ‘n’ Roll connection…

You know, again, the weather is conducive to having festivals later in the year or like you guys in Australia. It’s during our winter when most bands aren’t really touring all that much. It opens up that whole area again for doing a lot of outdoor kind of stuff too.

Any bands that stood out in Spain?

There was a band from Japan, from Tokyo, called Angel Face that I saw that was really good. There was 1800Mickey, who was really great. I’m trying to remember, there was another local Portland band that I really wanted to see called Exploding Hearts, but they were one of the ones where they had to cut the festival short. We went out drinking with those guys and a bunch of other people. They just stayed up all night because they had to catch a plane to Stockholm at four o’clock the next morning!

Jenny Don’t and the Spurs, they’re going to be playing in Geelong at the River Rocks Festival. River Rocks has been going for 17+ years. It’s one of the best Rock ‘n’ Roll events in Australia…

Wow! It’s amazing that it’s survived that long. That’s great!

Are you going to come down for that? We’re assuming you’re going to tag along with the band?

I don’t get there until the 17th, so I’ll miss it unfortunately.

So, where is your favourite place to tour?

Pretty much all the ones that we kept coming back to all the time, you know? Mainland in Europe and then up in Scandinavia, especially in Norway, we really loved playing there. And then Australia, New Zealand, and then in the States, it was, you know, the different major cities up and down. The I5 corridor’s what we call it on the West Coast. And Brooklyn and New York down in Manhattan especially, we’re grateful to keep coming back to, over and over and over again… And Athens and Greece… There’s a bunch of different cities that we always play every tour.

You had an antique store called Junkstore Cowboy?

Yeah!... until COVID came! (laughs). No, that was a really cool thing to do. This was after Fred had passed, and it was kind of like… it kind of hits you and just to have to do something. It was kind of an idea that we had talked about doing together. So it was really cool. This was in the basement of Mississippi Records, so it was really tiny, really small. And so again, when COVID hit, that was the end of that, there was no six feet of separation that was possible (laughs). So pretty much everybody just kind of shut down for a long enough time to where it was just, at that point, rather than have to make that almost hour drive in and out to commute into downtown Portland to where I live… It’s just,”I’m done!” But it was really fun while it lasted. It was great. I had a great time doing it.

We thought it might have been Trump’s tariffs that might have killed it.

(Laughs) No! That was pretty much all stuff that I had saved over the years and different stuff that I found. Just junk. I love junk stores. I love finding hidden treasures.

So… the ICE agents rockin’ up to Portland. What do you make of it?

Well, it’s pretty funny. As far as I know, and I’ve been gone for a week, so, you know I’m not certain of what I’m saying, but at this point, from my understanding, they asked the Oregon Guard first to come and they went, “Oh, hell no! No, we’re not doing that.” So, supposedly we’re supposed to be getting troops from Texas or something crazy. Yeah, so I don’t know. As far as I know, I mean, there’s some federal agents there, from my understanding, but it’s very few. I don’t think they’ve actually sent the National Guard. And this is a building that’s way out away from downtown. It’s out in southeast Portland. It’s really isolated and everybody’s been really cool protesting, whatever. So, I don’t know. Anyway, we’ll see what happens. But that’s all we heard in Europe was, “Oh my God, what’s going on in Portland?” You know, it’s just the way Trump builds everything up to be such a (Trump voice) BIG DEAL. It’s like, really? I live here. That’s not happening. What are you talking about? (laughs)

Yeah, he describes Portland as a war zone…

Well, what was truly insulting is that he said it was run like a third world country. I mean how would you like to hear that about your hometown? Which is completely false. I mean, we’ve got our same issues with the homeless population as all the rest of them, but they really dealt with a lot of that over the last couple of years. But, you know, it’s even worse in Seattle. I mean, every major city is pretty much dealing with the same problems all over the world. So it’s just kind of like, to be singled out like that, and a lot of it’s just because we are a sanctuary state, a sanctuary city, you know? So, I think that’s why. And at this point, Oregon, Washington, and California are all suing Trump about sending troops. We’ll see what happens with that.

We love the protesters dressing up in inflatable frogs…

Halloween’s coming, yeah come on! That’s how Portland is, okay? (laughs) Keep Portland weird! Yeah, it’s a great way of dealing with it because everybody knows how absurd it is. Let’s have fun with it, what the hell.

What would Fred have made of it? Would he write songs about it, do you think? Was he political?

Once in a while he’d write something that was political, but neither one of us was really that political, even in the ‘60s when there were people in the streets and protesting the Vietnam War. But yeah… I don’t know. I mean, at this point, I know he’d have the same opinion that I do, how completely ridiculous it is. Yeah. You know? And especially once they did this thing of taking one of the late night shows off air for his comments and threatening to hunt him down. It’s just like, really? I mean, come on. You should by now have a thicker skin than that. Just because not everybody loves you. Give me a break! (laughs)

Yes, he needs smoke blown up his ass constantly. How do comedians make a parody of it when it’s already this nuts!

It’s so ridiculous but they still do. Bring it on!

The Kimmel’s and Colbert’s have come back even stronger and going harder on Trump.

Wouldn’t you?

TOODY COLE AND HER BAND - AUSTRALIAN TOUR NOVEMBER 2025

Thur Nov 20 - The Tote w/The States, Burning Effigy, Velvet Haze DJ’s - ON SALE NOW

Fri Nov 21 - The Tote w/ Fancy Weapon & Lewis Hodgson - SOLD OUT

Sat Nov 22- Theatre Royal, Castlemaine w/ The Gnomes

Sun Nov 23 - Social Club, Balnarring w/ The Miffs

Tickets from linktree.com/ontheloose.au

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Earthless is the kind of band that makes you remember why rock and roll was supposed to be dangerous in the first place, before it got neutered by focus groups and streaming algorithms. These San Diego psych-rock marauders don't just play music, they conjure sonic tornadoes that rip through your skull like some beautiful apocalypse, all Marshall stacks and fuzzed-out eternity. Isaiah Mitchell's guitar doesn't so much solo as it does achieve some kind of transcendental meltdown, while the rhythm section of Mario Rubalcaba and Mike Eginton locks into grooves so hypnotic they could probably cure insomnia or cause it, depending on your tolerance for having your consciousness completely reorganised by pure volume and repetition.

What makes Earthless so goddamn essential is their complete rejection of everything that makes modern rock safe and digestible. These blokes don’t just noodle out songs in any conventional sense, they're expeditions into the void, twenty-minute journeys that start somewhere around Sabbath and end up in the territories of outer galaxies that would make Hawkwind nervous. There're no vocals cluttering up the psychic space, no pop hooks to distract from the main event, which is watching three guys turn their instruments into weapons of mass transcendence. In a world full of bands trying to sound like other bands, Earthless sounds like the earth actually opening up and swallowing civilization whole, and somehow, we feel that's exactly what we need.

Bad Batch caught up with Isaiah Mitchell ahead of their September 2025 tour…

The first time we saw you in our hometown of Geelong the turn out wasn’t flash but subsequent visits now have you packing out the Barwon Club. Do you have any memories of those early tours?

Those early tours of Australia were awesome for us and myself. Right away I got a strong sense that people were very appreciative of us traveling and playing outside of the major cities. And it did feel like every tour things were growing in regard to the venue sizes and the attendance. And early on we did tours where we were driving instead of flying, and that was insane! We won’t do that anymore unless we’re playing a bunch of the small stops in between but, yeah, I don’t think we’ll be doing that again. I did really enjoy driving so I could see more of Australia, which I did really enjoy.

Is it a conscious decision to collaborate with other bands to keep things lubricated? Or is it that you just haven't been able to say no?

I collaborate with people who I want to. I’m also, in a way, a session player, so people will hire me to play on their music which I am open to. I always want to keep the guitar in my hands for my job. I’m grateful that anyone would ever ask me to be a part of their music. It’s a really cool thing.

How did the 7” team up with, local legends, Smoke Witch come about?

I was giving guitar lessons to their son and then they approached me to lay down some guitar on their music and I said yes. They’re great people and I enjoyed working with them.

Are there any other Aussie bands you’d like to collaborate with?

There's a lot of bands in Australia that I love and would love to work with. One of my favourite bands right now are Tropical Fuck Storm. They write really interesting music, and they have amazing energy. I’ve gotten to see them live a few times and I love them. I’d love to collaborate with Warren Ellis as well. I know my bandmates in Earthless would love to collaborate with a bunch of different bands as well. My buddy Joel Silbersher and I are going to try to record some music when I’m in town as well.

You frequent these shores plenty. What keeps you coming back to Australia?

We love Australia and the people of Australia. There’s a lot of love and gratitude that we receive from all y’all that makes us wanna come back. The shows have always been fantastic and very enjoyable to play. And there’s something in the air that I have found nowhere else on the planet that only exists in Australia. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s very special. I think a lot of it has to do with the Aboriginal spirituality and nature. It feels very magical to me.

Who did the artwork for the Australian tour poster?

Our good friend Lex from Seedy Jeezus did the poster for this tour. He’s done other posters for us in the past. He is a very dear friend to me and the guys and it’s great to have him on board for this tour poster. I know he has been a little quiet lately with his visual art so it’s great to get him inspired to make something for us again.

Who are your favourite gig poster artists?

I personally don’t know a lot of poster artists outside of friends of mine that we’ve worked with like Arik Moonhawk Roper and Alan Forbes. I mean, all the classic Fillmore posters are incredible. Rick Griffin did amazing work. But yeah, I don’t know a lot of artists by name, but I can recognize their style. Marq Spusta is another current artist that I really admire as well.

Black Sabbath have just wrapped things up in spectacular style. Do you have a favourite Sabbath album?

My favourite Black Sabbath record depends on the day, but ‘Sabotage’ is definitely consistently at the top as well as ‘Paranoid’.

Your songs last an average of 3 days ever thought of recording a 3 minute “ditty”?

We've done one song that is under three minutes, and it’s called ‘Volt Rush’. Even has a little music video you can go and watch on YouTube. The song sounds like a game show theme song or something.

Your band name comes from a song title by Druids of Stonehenge. If that doesn't scream Spinal Tap nothing does. What’s been your finest Spinal Tap-esque mishap to date?

I don’t know. The only thing that I can really think of is being backstage at a larger venue in the Netherlands, or Germany or something, and we can’t find the stage door and we’re definitely saying “Hello Cleveland!!” as we fumble around trying to find out how to get to the fucking stage.

We are pedal, amp and gear nerds. Can you give us a peak under the hood?

My rig usually consists of a Wahwah pedal, some kind of delay, but hopefully an echoplex, a treble booster, an overdrive pedal, Strymon Flint pedal, which is Tremolo and reverb in one box, maybe a phaser pedal, and that’s about it for pedals. I primarily play Stratocasters because I love single coil pickups the most out of all the pickups and I love the Strat’s Tremolo system. I prefer Marshall amplifiers like JMP’s or JCM 800 or a JTM 45. I like 50 W amplifiers so I can really turn them up and get them sounding juicy. And for my cabinets, I prefer 412’s with higher wattage speakers, say 50-Watt or 75-Watt speakers.

Did you grow up with the Groundhogs and The Pink Fairies or was it something you found later? Who's your biggest influences?

My dad is a musician and turned me onto bands like Blue Cheer and the Groundhogs when I was not even a teenager yet, so that stuff has grown all around me. There’s so many different influences, but I love Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Funkadelic, Freddie King, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Prince, Joni Mitchell... it’s an endless list.

Mushrooms being quite topical in Oz at the moment - Lynyrd Skynyrd were a notorious jam band who would commune in a shack and live on magic mushroom soup. Is there a sweat lodge in the Earthless Compound?

We've been known to enjoy ourselves in that way performing. If it feels right, then it's all right.

You all play in so many bands with so many styles. What keeps bringing you back to Earthless?

There's an energy when the three of us play. There’s a sound when the three of us play. We have our own language that is unique to the three of us playing together and it’s something that I do enjoy, appreciate and hold with care. I love playing with all kinds of people in different styles of music and I need that for myself as well. It’s very important for me to play with as many people as possible and to do different musical things. It keeps me fresh and keeps things interesting and when I come back to Earthless after playing with other folks, I feel invigorated and can bring a fresh energy and a well of fresh ideas to the table as well.

Being one of the hottest tickets in town, you won’t want to snooze on this one...

Tuesday 9th September – The Northern, Byron Bay
Wednesday 10th September – Crowbar, Brisbane
Thursday 11th September – Crowbar, Sydney
Friday 12th September – Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Saturday 13th September – Theatre Royal, Castlemaine
Sunday 14th September – Barwon Club, Geelong
Friday 18th September – Rosemount Hotel, Perth

Tickets are available now from davidroywilliams.com

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Children of Finland Fighting in Norway, or C.O.F.F.I.N to their friends, are Ben Portnoy, the tub-thumpin’ vocalist, Abijah Rado and Aaron Moss, on guitars and backing vox and Kosty on the 4-string thing and backing vox, and formed as schoolmates in 2005. All hailing from the sunny climes of Sydney, the band was bought together by a common love of Rock’n’Roll, skateboarding and shenanigans. Since playing their first show at the age of 12 opening for The Hard-Ons, the band have turned the Australian Rock‘n’Roll scene on its head, coming a long way from those heady salad days in the process.

C.O.F.F.I.N’s reputation for unhinged live shows is now well documented. They’ve toured and shared stages with the likes of Rose Tattoo, T.S.O.L, Celibate Rifles, Dead Kennedys, Cosmic Psychos, Parkway Drive, Frenzal Rhomb, and the Misfits, to name but a few. Following their lap of this little blue marble, Earth, with their cobbers, Amyl and The Sniffers, they hit the studio, capturing that magic on their most recent LP – ‘Australia Stops’. Released through Damaged Record Co in Australia, Bad Vibrations in Europe and Goner Records in North America.

C.O.F.F.I.N are set to give the globe another what-for later this year and have decided to grace us with a whirlwind tour before they depart. Bad Batch caught up with Ben to for a chin wag before he hits the road…

Ahoy, hello! Thanks for having us!!

Is the new local tour a chance to get match fit for the European tour?

We just got back from a run in Europe and the UK, so I feel like the fitness is up! Except for Kosty who came back with pneumonia… He probably needs to re-up.

You've been mates since high school. Who has the most annoying habits on the road?

We’re all angels and love each other…

Some people snore demonically. I let off one of those powder fire extinguishers in the hotel room last tour. Won’t make a habit of it.

Have you experienced the prodigal AC/DC effect yet - where you go to Europe, get a name and come back to Australia and get treated differently?

I suppose a bit. Seeing you play to a huge festival crowd overseas definitely grabs a bit of surprise and notice from folks back home.

Europe seems to champion bands no matter their standing, as opposed to lopping the taller poppies like here in Australia. With a foot now planted in both camps, what have your experiences been?

Yeah, maybe there’s a bit of that. We’ve always had a steady and committed growth in our fan base. We’re super lucky, people seem to get turned onto us and stick around. Real good word of mouth stuff. But I think we all need those proximity shifts sometimes to show us what we love out our back door.

KISS has beaten you to the punch with the C.O.F.F.I.N merch. What merch ideas would you steal from Kiss?

Pinball machine. KISS RULE! “First I drink, then Iiiiiii smoke…”

Black Sabbath wrapped up last week. Was Bill Ward an Influence on your drumming? Can you see C.O.F.F.I.N on the blue rinse circuit in 2075?

No surprise, Sabbath have been, and are, massive in terms of turning us onto what we do and how. Bill Ward’s space and groove continues to fascinate and challenge my approach to Rock drumming. His entry in War Pigs… Woooowhheeeee!

Bit cringe, but I remember years ago dootsin’ a pinga at a Sabbath show and thinking, “Fuck yeah, I wanna make this my life…” So maybe we’ll be up there in 2075. Footage from that was pretty grim but.

How do you sing and keep that swing?

Only Wolfgang from Stiffies has the answer!

What drew you to the Legless label?

We had recently met and become pals with Stiff Richards. Actually, it was at our debut Geelong River Rocks performance where we both played! It was Covid times and this label that was looking like they’d put our new record out bailed on us last minute. I had noticed this Legless label associated with Stiffies and asked Mawson and Gaz from the band what the deal with it was. It was them! A DIY passion project Mawson was running out of his garage. I gently floated the idea of putting out our abandoned recordings, and without hesitation Mawson confidently told me over the phone, “I don’t even need to hear it, I’d be so stoked to put it out!” Been best mates since. xoxoxo

Who is the Sydney King? Does the city get to vote?

It’s a blast at a combo of crooked sorts that would like to believe they’re top shelf in town but are slimy thumb sucking creeps. A vote on that would be quite revealing…

Your album ‘Under The Influence’ featured a song ‘I Don't Need A Girlfriend.’ Does this sentiment still stand with you all?

Hahaha, made that one up while walking home from a house party we had snuck into on the beachfront when we were 12… I sure as shit was years away from having a girlfriend.

With your ‘Bernard Fuckhead’ song, are you Fanning the flames of QLD band hatred or is it about the one true ‘King’ of Pot Luck?

I’m sure he’s alright. That fucking song though - ‘Wish You Well’ - absolutely tormented us when it was released.

Are you working on a new album?

It’s pretty much done!

Best places to play in Australia/Europe?

Geetroit, Harbord Bowlo, Vera, The Tote, Basque Country.

What's been the biggest show here and abroad?

Do festivals count? Probably Meredith here, and Azkena Fest in Vitoria-Gasteiz. About 10 years ago when we first took ourselves (and no clue) over to Europe and the UK, we played to 3 people in Essex. And the first time we came down to VIC it was to the other bands in St Kilda.

Things have certainly turned around now. We recommend you all jump on this latest run of pub gigs post haste, because it won’t be long before a stadium is the only place you’ll be able to see this incredible band. It all kicks off in Geetroit, August 7^th.

Thu, AUG 7 - Barwon Club, Geelong/Djilang

South Geelong

Fri, AUG 8 - Theatre Royal, Castlemaine/Dja Dja Wurrung Country

Castlemaine

Sat, AUG 9 - Singing Bird Studios, Frankston/Boonwurrung

Frankston

Thu, AUG 14 - Vinnies Dive, Gold Coast/Yugambeh

Southport

Fri, AUG 15 - Koala Tavern, Capalaba / Quandamooka Country

Capalaba

Sat, AUG 16 - Kings Beach Tavern, Kings Beach / Gubbi Gubbi

Kings Beach

Then onto WORLD DOMINATION!!!

Get your tickets through Oztix.

Photo: Dougal Gorman

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You may well be asking yourself, ‘Just who indeed is John Foy?’ Lucky for you, Bad Batch is about to tell you… Record label boss, graphic designer, printer, screenprinter, photographer, cancer survivor, and World Citizen. If that wasn’t enough, he has now added author to that list with the release of ‘Craic: As It Happened’.

While his last offering, the stunning coffee table book ‘Snaps, Crack, Pop’, showcased his visual output, ‘Craic’ offers up the stories behind his Skull Printworks, the three pioneering record labels, and the crazy life and times of the man behind it all.

How John Foy transformed from record store clerk to the defining visual artist of Australia's Punk and Alternative music scene

In the late 1970s, as Punk Rock exploded across Australia's underground music scene, a young man from Sydney's southern suburbs was quietly revolutionising how the movement looked. John Foy, born just before the 1960s dawned, would become the visual architect of an entire musical era - though few knew his name.

Foy's journey began like many teenagers of his generation: trading suburban conformity for the raw energy of inner-city Sydney. Abandoning his earlier musical tastes, he embraced the blistering sounds of Radio Birdman and the Saints, two bands that would help define Australian Punk.

The White Light Years

His path to becoming Australia's most influential underground poster artist started behind the counter of White Light Records, one of Sydney's most important independent record stores. In an era before music blogs or streaming services, stores like White Light served as cultural nerve centres, introducing Australian audiences to imported releases by Patti Smith, The Damned, and the Ramones.

“When I was a teenager, I worked at White Light Records as soon as I left high school and I was helping him [store owner and Lipstick Killers frontman, Mark Taylor] do advertising, design and stuff.” One example, a quarter page ad for Iggy Pop and James Williamson’s then upcoming ‘Kill City’ album, is reproduced in the ‘Snaps Crack Pop’ book. “That was interesting, because the artwork doesn't look anything like the album because when I had to do the artwork we hadn't seen the album. There was no Internet to look up the record cover in advance, so I just had to get something with the energy,” he says of the process employed on multiple occasions to great effect.

Working at White Light, Foy absorbed not just the music but the entire spirit and aesthetic of the Punk movement. He studied album covers, band photographs, and the distinctive graphics that gave each label its identity, “It's interesting. I've never mentioned this in the books, but I should have. As a teenager, you'd go into these bookshops and there wasn't much in the way of Rock books or pop culture back then. People don't realise that. But I remember buying a poster book by a Japanese guy, Tadanori Yokoo, and I just loved his poster designs. And then there was a big poster book out of England called ‘Get On Down’, which had the best of some of those English ‘60s posters and the psychedelic ones from San Francisco. That's a very fine poster book. Those books definitely influenced me and captured my imagination.”

When the initial Punk wave crashed in late 1977, taking White Light with it, Foy found himself thrust into the real world. “I didn't have any formal training,” he proudly admits. Though, with a natural affinity for the art of graphic design his future path seemed predestined, “I don't know. You just pick it up,” he says by way of humble explanation of his talents. “You know how it is, if you're interested, you get into it.”

From T-Shirts to Art

A brief stint as a trainee screen printer might have seemed like a career detour, but it provided Foy with the technical skills that would define his artistic legacy. When entrepreneur and future Mambo visionary, Dare Jennings, purchased White Light's remaining stock to launch a new store, Phantom Records, he invited former staff into partnership - including Foy.

The transition from record selling to poster making happened almost by accident, “The first one was for The Visitors and The Lipstick Killers. I was sharing a house with The Lipstick Killers at the time and The Visitors had passed through the house to rehearse in the squat next door. Our house was like this bloody Airport waiting lounge, you had so many people passing through. Like, when Bob Farrell, who was to become a Laughing Clown, first arrived from Brisbane, somehow, he was in our kitchen, and Rob Younger would be in our kitchen and just all sorts of people passed through all the time. The Visitors needed a poster for this gig, you know? ‘Cause Radio Birdman used to have some pretty good posters. Radio Birdman understood that to have a good poster, you’re sort of helping to create a sense of occasion. And so running with that, The Visitors wanted something, and I just cooked up something overnight. I stayed up all night. And then it got printed by these offset printer people who reduced the size of my artwork with an axe, it looked like, to fit on a litho press, and I thought, ‘Well, there's gotta be a better way.’ And that's where I started learning about how to print posters for myself.”

Determined to control the entire process, he began learning paper printing techniques, eventually establishing Skull Printworks. He adopted the reverse of his surname - "YOF" - as his designer signature.

Innovation Through Limitation

Working in the pre-computer design era, Foy's methods were both labourious and innovative. Encountered challenges were met with creative solutions. Rather than seeing these as problems, Foy embraced the experimental results, and his methods became as intrinsic to the final product as the design itself, “I never used the conventional poster inks ever, because I did it for a year and a half working in filthy industrial factories, printing stickers and I even printed giant corflute American Express Card advertisements and stuff. And I was working with horrible stuff. Possibly how I got my cancer that I got rid of, because, you know, putrid stuff with no OH&S conditions like today. And so, I knew I just never wanted to work with that stuff again. But working with T-shirts at Phantom T-shirts, I just went, ‘Hey this stuff's fine. Barely any fumes at all.’ So, I thought I’d try it on paper, but it made the paper ripple up and I couldn't register the things. I thought, ‘Ohh I'll just use thicker paper’, and it worked and that helped my posters to survive a lot longer than a lot of other posters ‘cause they're on good paper stock.”

“I knew I was cutting through when INXS approached me. I thought, ‘Oh OK. Something's going on here.’”

Skull Printworks’ designs often incorporated imagery gleamed from cult television shows like The Avengers and The Prisoner - a practice with roots in 1960s San Francisco psychedelia that also crossed over into the 1980s alternative scene, “Well, that very first one, The Visitors had already purposed an eagle for the design. I don't know how I came up with multiple eagles and stuff for that one, but I just did. But a lot of the stuff was just inspired by television, like, Danger Man, Patrick McGoohan… there were a lot of classic TV shows then.”

“A lot of people don’t understand that sort of era of pop culture now because we didn't have so many heroes. There wasn't so much going on, you know? There were just a bunch of core shows that a lot of people had in common, in liking them. These days there’s a million bloody shows everywhere. But also, back then you could do what we call ‘cultural magpieing’. You could take an image without permission and do something with it. And now, everything's so hamstrung with legalities and copyright, which you know, you learn to respect anyway. I learned to respect. But I didn't then,” he smirks.

The Golden Era

Skull Printworks, with its astute yet brash approach to the medium, emerged at just the right time and place, “I don't know what the reason for this was because Melbourne always had more of an art identity, but Sydney seemed to be producing 90% of it more graphically minded posters back then.” But Foy’s talents were still underappreciated by his chosen industry at the time, “In Sydney, a lot of people were doing political posters, like Redback Press and Tin Sheds, and they got a lot of attention in the media and a lot of accolades. Rock Posters were sneered at. And there were only a handful of us doing it. It was considered low brow compared to what they were doing.”

By the mid-1980s, Foy had established his own studio in a Surry Hills warehouse, entering what could be called his Renaissance period. Clients like the Flaming Hands and Riptides trusted him completely, providing only basic information - date, venue, and tour details - while leaving all creative decisions to him.

“Later on, not so much a mentor, but an inspiration was Paul Worsted. I became friends with him via the Phantom T-shirts and Mambo people. Paul definitely had an influence on me in terms of lightening up, injecting a bit of humour, and maybe using a few louder colours, and just not being quite so perfect. I think the best example of that stuff is actually the Black Eye posters. Most of which I co-designed with Tex Perkins,” a collaboration he recalls fondly. “They’re some of my favourites for the level of irreverence and looseness, even though they’ve got a tight frame. All my stuff always had a tight frame. But that was just to contain what was going on inside.”

Foy's business model was as unconventional as his art. Charging only for printing expenses while retaining design copyright, he prioritised creative freedom over immediate profit.

Record Label Success

When Red Eye Records opened near the original White Light location, Foy's involvement seemed inevitable, “I had a screenprinting studio in Surrey Hills, but it was in a warehouse building and, like so many things, eventually the warehouse building got redeveloped and all us creatives that we're in there at the time we all got turfed out. So, I was sort of screen printing on my front veranda at home and not sure what to do and then Chris Pepperell rang me up and invited me in to Red Eye [Record Store]. At that stage, so that's ‘83 and he'd been going for five or six months already. He just knew that I had a lot of energy and loved selling stuff to people and loved putting people on to new things. I still love it. I still do record fairs to this day.”

Always driven, sitting behind a counter day in, day out, would never cut it for Foy, “I couldn't do that full time anymore. I got sick of doing it. Dealing with the public can really wear you down, you know?” He laughs facetiously.

Balancing daytime retail work with nighttime poster creation, he helped launch the Red Eye Record Label in June 1985, envisioning it as long-term career support for promising bands. The strategy proved successful, nurturing acts like the Clouds, the Cruel Sea and the Beasts of Bourbon. Foy even went so far as to manage the latter for half a dozen years or more. The label eventually spawned two subsidiaries: Black Eye Records and Third Eye, “When I went to Red Eye, now Chris, he'd come from a background of Ripple Records and Anthem Records. He had so much of a broader palette. Just amazing. He would stay up to midnight tracking down records in a pre-Internet world from obscure people in the Midlands of America, or whatever. Like, if there was a Half Japanese box set you had to buy directly from the guys, he would. And so, it's not like I didn't like any of the music. It's just, all of a sudden, I was being hit with heaps of sounds I'd never considered, and I developed a very broad outlook which eventuated in the three labels.”

Red Eye’s stable would feature artists with a chance at the charts, Third Eye was home to the ethereal end of the spectrum, and while there would be some crossover, Black Eye’s roster mostly catered to the more abrasive and those operating on the fringes, “Look, the Black Eye stuff is a totally different animal. The Black Eye stuff was all just licenced stuff. And when we did [the compilation LPs] ‘Waste Sausage’ and ‘Leather Doughnut’, what we did was we dealt with Lachlan McLeod only. He administered all the actual payments to all the various individual artists. Half those people are dead or paranoid or junkies or whatever you know? I don't know. Quite a messy bunch of people to deal with. The four I dealt with were fantastic - Peter Reed and Lachlan and Stu Spasm and Tex, they are great to deal with. But I'm glad I didn't have to deal with some of the other individuals, but gee there were some great talents amongst all that stuff.”

“But the book that's coming up, ‘Craic’ - it's got all that stuff. All the detail of how these things happened and stuff like that. And how the responsibilities of running the record label really swallowed everything else… First of all, the screen printing and design went, then working in the Red Eye record shop went, and then it was flat out. So, where I used to basically have a real hand in designing everything on Red Eye, that responsibility slowly transferred to Jim Payton, my art director, who was a great interpreter of stuff for me. And then bands like The Clouds came along with her own design teams too. So, after a while we have like about eight really genius graphic designers and conceptualists that we could draw upon, which is, you know, much better than just trying to squeeze it out of one head like mine. That's why we ended up with, you know, such great graphics. Wasn't down to me. It was an amazing team of people.”

A Lasting Legacy

Though John Foy's name might not appear in Rock history textbooks, his visual language helped define how an entire generation experienced music. In an era before social media marketing and digital design, his posters served as both advertisement and artifact - physical manifestations of a musical movement that prized authenticity over polish.

There will be no tickertape parades or fanfare for this year’s 40^th anniversary of one of Australia’s most important record labels, though the legacy is being bolstered nonetheless, “Well, it's weird. The world's changed. I mean, Red Eye stopped being active back in 1996, right? And back then labels had an identity and people approached labels with a certain confidence. You know, if anything that came out on a label like Red Eye, or Waterfront, or Au Go Go, or Citadel, you know, there's a reasonable expectation that it might appeal to you, right? So, there was that label mentality. That's all gone. Where we used to have annual shows where we’d group bands together and have a big night, or two big nights, that's all gone. So, the whole philosophy of having a 40th anniversary show, we gave up on very quickly. But, as it happens, all the bands are playing this year - all the key ones. It's weird. The Crystal Set haven't played for 3 decades. Drop City, they're in the studio recording a new album - they’re gonna play. The Clouds are doing a 35th anniversary tour. Cruel Sea’s about to go around the block with their new album and then they're doing the ‘Three Legged Dog’ anniversary tour at the end of the year. Kim Salmon's got a new album out. You name it, they're playing.”

Today, surviving Skull Printworks posters are recognised not just as promotional materials but as genuine works of art that captured the raw energy of Australia's alternative music golden age. Foy's posters were deliberately limited productions - typically around 110 copies each, with strict quality control, “10 were given to the band and me. So, I'd keep one or two, and the band would have the rest of that 10 and most of the other 100, whoever it was, got used. Taped up and wrapped round Telegraph poles pasted up. So, they're pretty scarce.” Most served their intended promotional purpose, though as mentioned, the thicker paper used to accommodate water-based inks inadvertently aided the preservation of a few. Those eager to track down originals can expect to pay a pretty penny, with auction prices in recent years climbing into the thousands.

“I don't own any of my posters,” confesses Foy. Fortunately, for the sake of posterity if nothing else, there’s somebody that is stepping up, “There's a retrieval system-cum-museum being built in Braidwood, New South Wales and a very, very quiet achiever there - the guy’s still very busy with his professional life - he's got this aim of having this retrieval system-cum-museum a bit like the Michael Oakes Archive overseas, or something like that. Basically, he’s filled the gap where the institutions have been ignorant.”

The End of an Era

By the early 1990s, the handcrafted poster era was ending. As music became increasingly commercialised, cost trumped aesthetics. Street press, free postcards, and mass-produced pole posters replaced the artisanal screen prints that had defined the previous decade. “AI is just galloping over the horizon at a rate of knots,” he concedes. “Everyone's got a bloody computer. Everyone's a graphic designer. Everyone's a recording artist. It's getting a bit tedious in some ways, isn't it?”

In late 1996, Foy withdrew from contemporary music entirely, turning to arts and antiquities before eventually becoming, “a World Citizen of no fixed address.”

Copies of both ‘Craic: As It Happened’ and ‘Snaps, Crack, Pop’ are available to purchase from skullprintworks.com.au

Lead Photo: Kevin Blyth (May 2023)

The States are a week away from giving Negative Waves what for on Sunday, 8^th June! 

These leaders of the pack will be dishing up their Countryfied-Rock’n’Roll with a large side of swagger and sass. It’s no surprise that their latest slab of wax, ‘Gimme Joy’, sold out its two-colour variants in record time. Their live show has also been the talk of the town since their last trip down to the Barwon Club Hotel, with their next shaping up to be no different. 

Bad Batch couldn’t miss the opportunity to pick the collective brains of The States (not to be confused with the precursor to The Southern Sons, The State) ahead of next weeks event… 

How long have The States been around? Who's in the band and what other bands have you all been in?
We've been kicking about for a year or so now. We are Scarlett Maloney (Tuffy, Delivery) on vocals and guitar, Joe Imfeld (The Prize) on lead guitar, Paddy Leahy on bass and Georgie Harkin (Ozzie Hair) on drums and vocals.

What do The States sound like? What are your influences? 
We reckon we sound like a good time! Influences are many but to pick a handful I'd say our queen Suzi Quatro, Faces, Sweet. Heavier sounds like Lynyrd Skynyrd and poppy stuff like The Knack. All the classics like ‘60s girl groups/RnB. And we all love old Country music. I dunno if you hear that in our songs but we sure listen to our fair share. 

What is the best remedy when you find yourself in a state?
Bitta Rock’n’Roll is always the best medicine.

Who are you looking forward to seeing at Negative Waves?
We are diehard fans of W.O.M.B.A.T! 

The band popped its Geelong cherry at Jerkfest this year. How was it?
Jerkfest was a bit of a tick off the old bucket list for us. Grateful to be included in a stellar lineup, at a sick event that we've all attended as punters, for years. It was super fun and we're looking forward to being back at the Barwon Club for Negative Waves!

What are your favourite States? ...and what are your favourite States?
Favourite states include sleeping and rocking. Also, it's that time of year to get around the mighty Maroons... Scarlett is a Queenslander. 

What guitars/amps/pedals do you use to achieve your sound?
Joe's a Rock and Roll purist... his set up is straight up - drive and boost pedals, Gibson guitar, Fender amp, grey pick. We don't wanna reinvent the wheel, just remind people of the wheel. 

You're signed to Legless and released your debut album this year. Being that it’s sold out, like all Legless releases, do you have any plans to repress it or do you have another album on the boil?
We are beyond stoked to be with Legless! Mawson is a king and the whole community is equal parts loving and inspiring. Only got a handful of records left so we may do a repress down the line, but we have some more tunes on the horizon for sure.

Who is the 'Queen Of Mean'?
Queen of Mean is a state of mind.

What does the view from the top look like?
We'll let you know if we get there.

Was the band name inspired by The State? Are you all fans of Southern Sons?
The States was actually inspired by names like ‘Chicago’ and ‘60s showbands from Ireland like ‘The Royals’ and ‘The Miami Showband’. Just gave Southern Sons a spin - so ‘80s! 

The lineup for the showdown at the Barwon Club on June 8^th will feature the likes of Cosmic Psychos, Dr. Colossus, The Meanies, The Stripp, Fly, The States, W.O.M.B.A.T., Snub, Clay Dirt, Mulshlucka and more.

If you’re yet to secure your tickets, there’re still a handful available from Oztix and The Barwon Club Hotel… but don’t drag your feet. They won’t be around for long.

TICKETS HERE

What better way to find out for yourself what Oz Rock has to offer these days than to catch a slew of acts at this years’ Negative Waves Festival at the Barwon Club on June 8^th.

The 2025 line up for River Rocks’ lil cousin features the likes of Cosmic Psychos, Dr. Colossus, The Meanies, The Stripp, Fly, The States, W.O.M.B.A.T., Snub, Clay Dirt, and Mulshlucka.

Also on the bill is Cat Crawl, a band making their Pivot City debut. In typical Bad Batch fashion, we asked a whole lot of irrelevant questions ahead of the show that left us even more in the dark about the band than when we started…

Explain your band in one hyperbolic sentence?
A tantrum in the form of a band, powered by catnip.

How did the band get together? Has there been any lineup changes? Who's in the band?
We met, our eyes locked, exchanged numbers and the rest was history.
We are: Jenn (vocals/bass), Seona (vocals/guitar) and, our new drummer, Vanessa (aka Fleshy Metronome).

Have you played in any other bands?
This is Vanessa's first band (and fourth gig!) ever.

In a previous life, Vanessa was a cagefighter, Seona played in Diana's Bow and Pedestrian Daze, and Jenn fronted Let Them Eat Cake.

Favourite bands and venues to play?
Nation Two, Vicious Blonde, Ze Wisenheimer, Dubhessa and Assteroid, are a few of our favourite local bands.
Mamma Chen's in Footscray is our mothership - it's an accessible and inclusive space for everyone.

Vanessa - you've described yourself as a “Fleshy Metronome” - have you ever been medicated for the ticks?
Hitting things with sticks is my therapy.

Australian Crawl wrote a song about Tasmanian film star Errol Flynn. Which Australian would Cat Crawl chose to sing about?
Mr. Squiggle, he's our spirit animal.

How many more songs do you have to write about the idiocy of men before the message sinks in? Do you think it ever will?
How many men does it take to change a light bulb?

Is the ‘Negative Waves’ show your first gig in Geelong?
Yes, and we are super stoked! People of Geelong, please bring your earplugs, your dance shoes and your nannas.

We noticed you have a song called ‘Same Shit Different Century’ - do you dabble in amateur archaeology, and what's the appeal of coprolites?
We wrote this song about sexism and the coprolites that women experience on a daily basis.

And Jenn has a toy brontosaurus so she's basically a palaeontologist.

Any meaning behind the band name? Did you have other names before deciding on Cat Crawl?
We all love cats! We liked the imagery of a group of drunk cats crawling from one pub to the next.

You've done a few eps. Any plans to record this year?
Watch this space!

You have a song called Hungry Ghost. Is there anyone in the band who identify themselves as a pretas?
Jenn can be pretty scary if she runs out of snacks at rehearsal.

Who are you talking about in the song ‘Look like Rubbish’?
It's about gender expectations and beauty standards that have been placed onto women.

And Oscar the Grouch!

First band poster you had on the wall?
Magic Dirt, L7 and Hole.

Favourite Album Cover?
Goat Shaman’s ‘Alpha Mushroom’.

NEGATIVE WAVES - SUNDAY JUNE 8
THE BARWON CLUB HOTEL GEELONG

TIX HERE: https://tickets.oztix.com.au/outlet event/4f122189-26df-4d70-93b2-32a98528e2a0

Cat Crawl Photos: Angela Dicello

Brad Lonergan was the very reason we started Bad Batch Zine. We could not believe someone with Brad’s talent was hiding under a rock here in Geelong. More people should know about this great Australian artist. He was truly gifted and his portfolio of artwork is astonishing.

His friend Ash Nozzlefinger has published a new book on the great man’s art titled ‘THE BOOK OF BRAD’ (link below). We thought we’d reshare the interview from Bad Batch Issue #1 in honor of this legend. All our love to his friends and family.

Ads & Rick

BRAD LONERGAN - ISSUE 1

There’s no better way to start this zine than introducing you to the one man Bad Batch - Brad Lonergan!

He’s done it all, as you’ll see. We’ve been fans of his work ever since we found this Johnnys T-Shirt in Sydney back in 2005. We didn’t know who the artist was until we tracked him down 15 years later! As luck would have it - Brad was found to be plying his craft at Wise Monkey Tattoo in Geelong!

Meeting him inspired us to put this zine together and collect more bad eggs.

Sad to say, he’s moving back to NSW soon, so lets get him while we can! Thanks Brad for your lifetime contribution to Australian Rock ‘N’ Roll Art!

Where were you born and where/when did you start tattooing? Did you have a tattooing mentor?
I was born at Auburn in Sydney in 1968 on my own birthday! Began tattooing properly around '96 at House of Pain in Annandale. Never had a particular mentor, but I've been lucky enough to work with many great artists & great people over the years, I'm very grateful to everyone who gave me a job and helped me with my work, ta!

Any Australian tattoo artists we should suss out?
HEEAPS!!! There are gazzillions of incredible artists in this country, here are some I dig, there are loads more, depends whatcha like....Andy Craddock, Karl Kaufman, Nick Lissarrgue, Rob Abel, Tarek DEM, Andrew Macloed, Matt Cunnington, Josh Roelink, etc...........

What are your favourite tattoo machines to work with and why?
I've mostly used Steel Demon coil machines (gunnz), because they're great. Last few years I've been using pen style machines (dildos), 'cos they're much easier to use & I'm old & enjoy convenience.

Favourite TV/Movies?
Thunderbirds, The Addams Family (TV), Metalocalypse, Return of the Living Dead, Planet of the Apes, Mad Max, Godzilla, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead.

First record you ever bought?
Black Sabbath ‘Paranoid’, still a huge favourite!

What art or animation blew your mind when you were a kid?
I loved all the old cartoons, Looney Tunes, Rocky & Bullwinkle, B.C & Jolliffe's Outback in the paper, Thunderbirds on the telly.

Best Album Cover?
Motorhead ‘Bomber’. Love loads of others too!

We’re big supporters of the Bombers! What do you think of the Essendon Football Club?
Fark orf! UP THE PIES!

What are the best and worst parts of living and being an artist in Australia?
I think the best part is being able to make a living, doing what I love, in a place that's pretty ace! On the downside, err, it's too hot sometimes & Fkkkkn flies.

Favourite Music?
Black Sabbath, Motorhead, AC/DC, Ramones, The Cramps, The Dwarves, Kool Keith, Turbonegro

Favourite Artists?
Greg Irons, Rick Griffin, Robert Williams, pushead, Mort Drucker, Ed Repka....

LIMITED COPIES AVAILABLE - BUY THE BOOK OF BRAD HERE:
https://openstudioweb.bigcartel.com/product/the-book-of-brad

As the red carpet rolls out on the new film, ‘20 Years in the Crypt: Embedded on tour with Dead Moon’, by Jason Axel Summers and Kate Fix at its Aussie premiere, courtesy of In-Tense Touring and the couples’ own Magic Umbrella Films, Bad Batch caught up with Mr Summers to discuss a fortuitous collaboration for the ages…

Back in 2001 filmmakers Jason and Kate joined forces with Andrew Loomis and Fred and Toody Cole, known to their legion of fans as legendary American Rock band Dead Moon, to film the documentary ‘Unknown Passage: The Dead Moon Story’. With so much footage gathered over the subsequent years, they’ve now been able to give the fans, not just a concert film, but so much more, “We had 180 hours of footage, and the shit was on mini DV tapes. I would go through and log it… If I wasn't working on jobs, I would be at home editing all the time, like 10 hours a day.” The painstaking hours of archival work have paid off in spades, with the new film delivering up Dead Moon performances peppered with intimate insights, captured during multiple tours across multiple continents. An access all areas pass to both the inner and outer workings of the Cole/Loomis clans.

So, how did it all come together in the first place?

“I got done with film school at the University of North Carolina and stayed here in town for a while and then started working on films professionally. Then I went up to New York in 97, when I met Kate.” Jason met his future wife and partner in crime in New York on the set of Jesse Feigelman’s ‘Snapped’. A film starring Seymour Cassel and an actor by the name of Johnny Alexander (AKA Johnny Zander), the inspiration behind Ben Stiller’s ‘Zoolander’. “We were into a lot of the same music, like, I love Crash Worship and Kate actually travelled around with Crash Worship in a rubber suit, and would throw shit on the crowd, like blood, and wine, and honey for them,” he says with a chuckle. “They're like The Butthole Surfers, but with heavy drumming.”

No slouch himself either, Jason also moonlighted as a radio DJ and musician, “I was in a band, called Minerva Strain, that was kind of like early Flaming Lips kind of stuff and I worked at a couple of the clubs here in town too, besides doing restaurant jobs like everybody else.” Fortunately, though, that movie industry stereotype was short lived, and in a sliding doors moment the auteurs found themselves presented with an opportunity to good to pass up.

“Kate was friends with Andrew Loomis, the drummer.” The two had met in Portland while Kate was studying at the illustrious Reed College, “We were out on the street in front of our apartment, and we saw a poster for Dead Moon playing, and it was their first gig ever on the East Coast - ever in New York. And Kate was like, ‘I know those guys.’ I was like, ‘Holy shit! You know, Dead Moon? I fucking love them.’”

At that show, introductions were made, friendships were sparked, and correspondence began between Fred and Toody Cole and the filmmakers, “They can't get enough of each other and yeah, they supported each other, and they shared what they had with people, you know, unflinchingly.”

Toody would always write back on her signature manual typewriter during those initial exchanges and a lot was learned and cultivated in the process. “[Their generosity and approach to everything they did was] hugely important and that's how they operated with everybody. They would always write back and respond, and we learned from them, how good that felt. And they did it because when they got shit on, when they were nobodies, that they vowed they would always watch the opening bands and give them attention, and anybody that interacted with them. And it's like, you know, you respond like that, and you aren't an uptight arsehole and the right people, the earnest right people, will find you.”

With solid bonds now laying the foundation, the natural evolution of the friendship was broached, “Because we were involved with Dead Moon, and they were as cheap as we were poor,” he smirks. “We were like, ‘You guys! We think this is totally stupid. We have no experience…’ even though we were already in the film business, ‘We want to do a film about you,’ and they were like, ‘That's fucken cool as shit! You guys are gonna be our roadies. You're going to get free hotel rooms, and you're gonna help us, roadie and shit. And you'll get free booze, free food, and you'll even get, you know, like a couple of bucks.’ So, they fucken totally hooked us up. And so, in fact, it was [cheap to do]. When does that ever fucken happen? That never fucken happens!”

The filmmakers were embraced wholeheartedly by the band as if they were family, quickly discovering that Dead Moon was uniquely authentic. Unlike many meticulously contrived bands, Dead Moon walked the walk and talked the talk - their public persona was not a performance, but just them. Their genuine passion was unmistakable, and through nearly two decades of stellar performances that forged deep connections with audiences worldwide, they transcended the music to become true Rock’n’Roll legends.

“It certainly wasn't luxurious; except we did get put up in some really nice hotels a couple times,” Jason admits. “But yeah, so it was like, so do-it-yourself-budget-Rock that it's not even funny. We weren't in a follow car or anything, we were just in their face. Literally two feet away from their heads, for 5 weeks straight. And then we toured the States with them and then went and lived with them at their house.”

However, it wasn’t all beer and skittles filming on the road, “We never knew what we were going to get issued. And we had no budget, we were usually hungover as fuck and loading the gear. Loading their shit in and helping them set up and then setting our shit up and we would just… we would get… Every night you get fucked. Either the sound guy was an arsehole and wouldn't give you a feed, or the lighting’s fucked or something was wrong. So, it was hard to find, you know? Out of so many opportunities, only a few of them worked out well.”

“When Kate and I were shooting, there was just the two of us, so, we had no idea. You're just flying blind.” Not that there’s any sense of this when watching the film, with the inventive use of camera angles and kinetic coverage. “They were real supportive of us, so we felt comfortable getting up in their space.”

“The kind of ad hoc way we did it also kept it fresh, and if we’d have gone in with a big crew, if we had resources or whatever, that would have stifled everything,” Summers says by way of elucidating their process. “And they would have been uncomfortable, and I don't think they would have been as… I think they would have been more uptight or something. And so, the way we did it, it was like double dating with them really.”

After filming had wrapped up, they all stayed in touch, despite living on opposite sides of the country, “So, after the movie we became closer and closer with them. And then, when Fred was dying, we went out to see them with our [8-year-old] daughter… And Fred and Toody played their last five songs on the planet for our daughter in their bedroom,” he says mournfully. “That was the last time they played music together.”

“Fred was just so positive there. He had no hair, and he was just like, ‘Guys, I'm telling you, life is great, man. It's just fucking great. Yeah, you guys are so fucking beautiful and awesome. Just fucken, you just gotta keep going, man. Fuck it.’ Like, he was just excited, and that was when he was getting in the car to leave with Toody to go to a casino.”

Fred Cole would pass away just 2 weeks later, in November 2017 at the age of 69.

Fred and Andrew may be gone but there legacy, thanks to Toody, Jason and Kate, live on. Though, in an age of streaming platform oligopolies, things are becoming more difficult for the independent production houses to find an outlet for bigger projects such as this, “I think it's always been tricky, especially for no-budget nobody's like us. Nobody gives a fuck about us. But we're not just gonna give it away like everybody else. Everybody else just wants to have their fucking movie out there, so they give it away… But we're not interested in that. We’re do-it-yourselfers like Dead Moon. We did the first DVD, but I've recoloured, and re-audio mastered the original ‘Unknown Passage’, and we're sitting on it right now.” Like a lot of creatives and innovators though, Jason and Kate aren’t waiting around for the big wigs to catch up. They’re currently chipping away, simultaneously, at documentary projects on woodworking celebrities, musicians and C.I.A. spies, “I've got all kinds of projects I’d like to do. My grandfather was a glider pilot in World War 2… he was in the same squadron as the original Uncle Fester from the Addams Family, Jeremy Coogan. One of the Little Rascals. They were both fucken glider pilots and lived. I wanted to do a film about that, because that shit nobody knows about. So, I'd love to go big-budget-film on that,” he says, before rattling off an impressive list of other potential endeavours.

“There's lots of other projects we'd love to do, but you know, we need to find… I'd love to get grants. I don't know. With what Donald Trump's doing, there's not gonna be any grants for fucken anybody anymore. Except for rich people. So, I would love to get some kind of support somehow or something, but you know that's never come our way. No rich stockbroker wants to throw money at some dumbass like me. You know? So…”

Whilst we might have to wait some time for those stockbrokers to come to their senses, Jason Axel Summers and Kate Fix have us covered for the time being with their latest film, ‘20 Years in the Crypt: Embedded on tour with Dead Moon’.

From their formation in 1987 to their eventual demise in 2006, Dead Moon were the greatest cult rock'n'roll band in the world. The passing of drummer Andrew Loomis in 2016 and then of Fred Cole himself in 2017 has done nothing to dim Dead Moon's shining light. Indeed, they have more fans now than they had when they were around, and ‘20 Years in the Crypt: Embedded on tour with Dead Moon’ will provide new generations of fans with a chance to see the band they missed and old fans a chance to recapture the feeling of seeing this amazing band live.

“If you never saw the legend that is Dead Moon here’s your closest chance… If you did, it’s time to relive the experience!"

From all reports, the Adelaide screening was a resounding smash! Don’t miss your chance to beg, borrow or steal your way into one of the next two screenings…

EXCLUSIVE AUSTRALIAN SCREENINGS MARCH & APRIL 2025

Sunday March 30 - The Dendy Cinema, Newtown, Sydney
(w/ live solo acoustic performance by Blackie - Hard-Ons - before the film)
T

ix

Sunday April 13 - Cinema Nova, Melbourne
(w/ live solo acoustic performance by Joel Silbersher - God, Hoss, Tendrils, Fancy Weapon - before the film)
Tix

It may well be that time wounds all heels, but just when the world seems ugly, everything turns to hate, and you feel you’ve gotta push the world away, somebody gets ahead of the breakdown coming refuses to rest in the doldrums and with a large helping of blood, sweat & beers releases a book to crank me up. It’s gonna be hard to stay straight until morning.

Clinton Rooney is the supernova that never quits. A man that wasn't born yesterday, talks softly and carries a big shtick. After another nite in hell and in valediction to his 2000 sins he decided to play that insane old game by making an atomic resolution. The nature of the offence is a three-volume archive of one of the greatest bands to walk the globe. In his fit of the persecution blues, all bruised, battered & bloodshot, he’s managed to put together a beast with not two but three backs.

We were in ten minds, but as the first of the three weighty instalments hit the shelves we decided to send someone who ain't no stranger to dirt. Lady Muck herself, Norma Dunstan, caught up with Mr Rooney to discuss the yin yang of the project…

It's a love letter to all things Powder Monkeys. It’s clearly a massive undertaking. What prompted you to do this in the first place and why the lack of editorial?
It's a love letter to all things Powder Monkeys, indeed. The lack of editorial was intentional. This project was done entirely out of love for the Powder Monkeys, our deep friendships, and as a tribute to the families and close friends. I was inspired by Maree Robertson's amazing 'Bored: This is Geelong' book, which set the bar real high, and my childhood obsession with 'The Sex Pistols File.' These influences encouraged me to present the story as raw and authentic as possible, letting the chronological arrangement, starting in late 1991, speak for itself.

It's a massive undertaking, but one driven by a genuine passion to preserve the band's legacy. Hemo was our first choice to narrate the Powder Monkeys' tale. After many conversations with Loretta Hemensley, we envisioned the following people to bring the story to life: TJ Ray, ‘Dog Meat’ David Laing, John Harley, Murray Engleheart, Mark Walsh, Richard Stanley, Patrick Emery and Marty Bolton. Sadly, we also thought Patrick Emery would have been an excellent choice. Ultimately, I hope these books inspire a writer to step forward. When they do, I’ll say, 'Here, have this; it will guide you, along with all the other stuff like the recorded interviews and journals that didn’t go into the books.'

How long did the book take to finish?
12 months and counting, because new stuff comes up every week. I would come home from working a straight 9 to 5 job and be keen as to get stuck into the book, get told off and forget I had real life shit to deal with. I would play with the kids, watch something with my wife, and then roll up my sleeves and “get into the scrapbooking”, as my family would say. I would have moments where I would get lost in the detail and then ‘bam’ it would hit me. I would get upset at the whole tragedy of losing my friends. Thankfully, more often I would be smiling at the success they achieved or laughing my arse off because the three of them in the band were the funniest cats you could meet.

When did your friendship with John Nolan start?
John and I bonded and remained friends until his passing; I spoke at his funeral and truly loved him. Besides my family, John was the person I talked to the most. While some people have Robbie Williams and Madonna etc as their heroes, my heroes were in Australian bands. This friendship started around 1991/92: I was a collector scum and couldn't believe that John Nolan, so easily approachable, worked at Greville Records. Every time I visited Melbourne; I'd bring along my homemade cookies and deliver the 'holy sacrament' to John. I loved John’s passion for underground comics, I loved Johns’ passion for film. John introduced me to amazing, off-the-wall films, educating me on characters such as Jesco White, the petrol-sniffing, mountain dancer from Boone County, West Virginia.

He loved Black exploitation films like ‘Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song’. We watched ‘The Decline of Western Civilization: Part 1’, ‘Hated: GG Allin & the Murder Junkies’, all that. Meeting my heroes turned out to be an amazing experience.

When did you first hear Powder Monkeys? Did you think they stacked up against Bored!?
I first heard about the Powder Monkeys from John and first heard them when the 'Ying Yang' single came out at Mark Walsh’s first shop [You Beaut] that he opened. I recall seeing the poster in the front window, and then the news would travel back here from people who had caught their shows. Bored! only toured down to Tassie once, but what a show it was! The 'Take it Out On You' lineup in Hobart, 1989, just prior to their Euro tour with Dave T, Buzz, Hemo, and Nolan, changed everything for me. It was alright to love the Sex Pistols as well as Rose Tattoo, Metallica (they played 'Seek & Destroy' at soundcheck), Black Flag, AC/DC, and Slayer. At the time I was into pre-Celtic Frost era Hellhammer. This mix created a new Australian sound that opened the doors for many new bands, especially out of Geelong—seriously, buy Maree’s ‘Bored! This Is Geelong’ book if you haven’t already.

The Powder Monkeys, I think John sums it up pretty well. They had a deep respect for the great Aussie tradition of Hard Rock—from the Easybeats through to Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs live at Sunbury, AC/DC, Rose Tattoo—all that stuff. There was an Australian tradition where bands played in pubs; people in the suburbs worked all week, came out on the weekend, and you had to put up or shut up—there was no room for fancy-pants stuff. That’s what gave Australian Pub Rock its real tough edge. But at the same time, they grew up listening to West Coast Hardcore Punk, so they had to incorporate both elements. Powder Monkeys were the greatest live band I have ever seen.

Tell us about the suitcase that John left for you? What was inside? What made it into the book?
I talked Tony Neil from Fridge into coming along with me to Melbourne as Mudhoney was playing down your way in Torquay, and again with the Cosmic Psychos at Cherry Fest. That journey was a wild ride that ended with me sharing a hotel room with our great friend Mad Macka at a hotel opposite the airport. We could write a book on that trip alone!

But the main reason for the trip was to collect three extra-large suitcases of John's music-related history. I am so grateful to the Nolan family, especially David, who put it all together. It took me a good three months to sort it all out, and thankfully it's all together and filed away. I don't consider that I own it—I am just the gatekeeper, making sure it goes to the right people.

Inside was everything from signed Devil Dogs, Nomads posters, Dead Moon signed drum skins, artwork by Spencer P Jones, tons of emails, letters, journals, Chrissie’s amazing artwork, ‘Pure Shit’ movie poster and of course all his bands that he played in news clippings and photos.

Any tapes or recordings in the suitcase that might see the light of day?
Bloody oath! I will share a picture of the tapes here that we have been going through, as part of a promise to the band. John always mentioned to me that ‘Dog Meat’ Dave Laing would get first choice on all releases if interested, and I am happy to say we have been in contact most weeks. We have sent off some DAT tapes for a double live album of 'Blood, Sweat, and Beers' to be released, including around 8 additional tracks from the same gig that have never been released before. Amazing photos from their show at The Espy before their Euro tour, with the bouncers wanting to kill Tim—you can see the tension in the pictures.

Then Dave will release all the albums with bonus material from John’s collection, or out of his own collection. He has also unearthed some forgotten gems. We've been discovering some great stuff, from early practice room recordings to the first two shows at the GB and the Euro tour of '99. There are also two different tapes from the GB in 1993 when they had the studio upstairs—sounds pretty wild!

How often did they tour Tassie?
Yes, they toured Tassie five times, from 1994 to their last tour here in 1998, mainly because of the great man Mark Walsh. I was always happy to help out. They chose to stay at my place instead of fancy hotels on all their tours and would always play at the Trades Hotel in Launceston. That one with Mustang and the Onyas was the greatest. Anyone who was there would attest to the life-changing experience.

Also, the Powder Monkeys played at the Basin Concert one year—I think it was 1995—along with other great Tassie bands like Fridge and Dreadnaught. Just beautiful times.

How often did you go to the ‘mainland’ to see them?
Back then, airplane tickets were not cheap for me, which is why I got involved in their touring here—it was cheaper to get them down to Tassie. I saw them more often in Melbourne in their own homes etc just hanging out watching videos at John's/Chrissie's flat or at practice rooms. The Club in Collingwood was a ripper show, I recall, with an early version of Sean Greenway's Yes-Men, featuring Jimmy Sanchez, Richard Stanley, and Hemo on drums."

You’re Tassie born and bred. Were you ever tempted to move to Melbourne after getting a sniff of this dirty Rock‘n’Roll bug?
I’m still tempted! But now I have cheaper flights and the comfort of home only an hour away. It takes me just 5 minutes to get to work here, and that’s hard to beat.

Now that you’ve become Powder Monkeys official historian have you been regaled with any stories you hadn't yet heard?
All the time! Just last week, Paul from LiveWire RRR told me about a night he saw the Powder Monkeys at Swinburne collage. I'm pretty sure it was in a classroom. John broke a string, and while he was changing it, Tim H shared a bong with some enthusiastic uni student!

Are you still in touch with Powder Monkeys drummer TJ Ray? What's he doing these days?
We have a whole family of TJ Ray fans— Aimee and the kids love him. We talk all the time on the phone and catch up every three months, with the last time being at The Saints with Mark Arm in Hobart. He’s doing great, just working away in a 9 - 5 job. I’ve been nagging him for the return of his great band, The Roobs, which is looking more and more likely to happen. He also plays in a couple of other bands, playing bass. Yes, the greatest drummer in the world is playing bass!

Let's play what-ifs… What-if the band went with Rick Rubin's Def American Recordings label. Where do you think it would have taken them? Has the band ever spoken to you about this?
TJ reckons they would have got their shit together if they hit the USA. By the end of that '99 tour in Europe, they were all clean and healthy on that return flight to Australia, so they could definitely have done it. I think David Laing says it best in an interview: “They didn’t want to play to a more mainstream audience. Whenever they did, they abused them. But on an underground level, they could have had more success, like Dead Moon or the Cosmic Psychos maybe.”

We know you have a checkered past with Bad Batch’s own Dr. Deaf can you tell us any stories of misadventures together… fit for print?
The Nirvana show at the Palace in Melbourne was unforgettable. The cookies I mentioned earlier, which I would give to John, did a number on both me and Dr. Deaf. I was chucking a whitey inside just before the main show, lying on the ground. Dr. Deaf was carried out by the bouncers and was found drinking the sauce off a hot dog seller's stall because he was that dry!

When are ‘Powder Monkeys File Volumes 2 & 3’ going to land?
‘Volume 2’ is filled with more awesome content, again around 240 odd pages, and it’s just about done; give it a couple of months at the most. It was done, I printed off 3 copies and then a heap of relevant new stuff was donated to the cause.

‘Volume 3’… I am not ready to tackle that one yet.

When and where can our readers pick up a copy of this amazing tome?
You will reach me here:

Limited numbered hardcover and numbered soft cover books message me here:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61572905126882

Or…

This is a print on demand service. These guys are quick to print and ship but expensive. If anyone has a better idea sing out.

https://mixam.com.au/print-on-demand/powdermonkeysfile

Or you may have something that you think needs to go in the books email me here:

streetwalkin@gmail.com