Thug with Peter Read pictured left.
Thug co-founder and Black Eye Records artist, Peter Read, has passed away. The circumstances are unclear but a friend said Read had been battling liver cancer and was thought to have been in remission. He was living in Melbourne.
Read (Leather Moustache) and Tex Perkins (Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums, later to join Beasts of Bourbon) formed electro-punk band Thug in Sydney in 1987, initially to make home recordings. Thug became one of Sydney's most confrontational live acts, with chaotic 20-minute sets featuring dancers, theatrics, bizarre electronic equipment and—at one performance—an entire audience showered in flour. Thug gigs would end with members mock-brawling amongst themselves, at times sparking audience participation.
Thug, along with Lubricated Goat and Kim Salmon & The Surrealists, were part of the underbelly of the Sydney indie rock scene, releasing music on the Red Eye Records offshoot, Black Eye Records.
Thug's debut single was the "Fuck Your Dad” b/w “Thug". Along with the “Mechanical Ape” EP and “Electric Woolly Mammoth” album, it was released on a CD, “Everything Is Beautiful In Its Own Way”.
Read temporarily joined Lubricated Goat for their infamous nude-on-national-TV performance of “In The Raw”. More about the Black Eye bands at Cousin Creep’s website. He went on to work as a Front of House sound operator.
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It started at a Some Jerks gig at the late, lamented Beetle Bar in Brisbane. Journalist Andrew Stafford, author of Brisbane rock history "Pig City", approached his friend Sean Clift, of Red Dust Music Management and drummer with local thug-rockers Lords of Wong.
“Listen,” he said. “This band is great. Everyone here loves ’em. If we can’t sell a few hundred of their records we’re dumber than I thought. Maybe we’ll lose a bit of money but fuck it, let’s do it anyway.”
Several months later, Some Jerks asked Staffo if he’d write them a bio for their new record. “Well, yeah,” he said, “But, funny you should mention it. Would you like to be on this new record label Sean and I are putting together? Then I’ll have to do it!”
And so, after a fair bit of planning and a couple of false starts, Pig City Records was born – a vinyl/digital only model, with Some Jerks’ second album, "Strange Ways", to be the first official release in October, with the vinyl limited to a special hand-numbered run of 300 copies.
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Luke Peacock and Vic Simms.
Conceived by Luke Peacock of Robert Forster-produced Brisbane outfit Halfway, The Painted Ladies are a black and white supergroup brought together to celebrate and reinterprete the classic 1972 live-in-prison LP "The Loner" by Koorie country iconoclast Vic Simms.
The band released the fabulous album "Play Selections from The Loner" in 2014. Produced by longtime Simms spruiker Rusty Hopkinson of You Am I, the album revealed a fabulous and rootsy rockin’ combo and an all-killer set of songs, highlighted by the unabashed all-Australian classics "Get Back Into the Shadows" and "Stranger in My Country".
Both are depictions of a young black man’s life experience that remain both lyically potent and musically thrilling. In the Painted Ladies’ hands the former became a hard-driving pop-soul rocker, and the latter a sullen and beautiful, six-minute moan of alienation and anguish that builds to the sort of electrical storm that your average Died Pretty or New Christs fan should identify with. (And yes, I’m talking to YOU!)
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The media release is cagey, avoiding too much specific information on Caen’s background. He’s fronted bands, played in bands (to quote the bio: "such as Mental as Anything, Dragon and Jenny Morris … played hundreds of shows … from big city stadiums to outback mining towns").
At this point the diligent, well-paid reviewer on a daily paper should do their homework and look the man up, perhaps at www.mikecaen.com.au, to find out more. But I am a lowly scrubber at the I94-Bar zine and I have a mountain of CDs to approach (some with caution) and I am going to quail, claim I don’t have the time ("I don’t have the time for this, dammit" - see what I mean?) and go along with the between-the-lines message from the screed: Don’t look at the man’s history, listen to the bloody songs.
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Even if you don’t like what people call jazz, you’ll react to "I Reject This Reality". It’s far more honest, creative, exciting and interesting than dealing with those talentless oiks, berks and preening nobodies on the telly. Talk about too much methane in a fartbubble - hell, how many channels do we have these days? And how much is really, truly, actually worth watching? Are we children or goldfish to be distracted so long and so often by such bling? Life’s far, far too short. Dig "I Reject This Reality", it’s far more grown-up.
You may recognise the surname. Eric’s dad was famous, and groundbreaking at a time when ground needed to be broken, and the world watched with bated breath for every new jazz development.
Jazz, that is, real jazz, not that muck you hear in shopping malls, nor that cheery "trad jazz" stuff which seems so much part of the everyday background now, is now a rare thing. There is no longer a huge, rollercoasting movement like there was from the twenties to the sixties. This isn’t a new concept; you can say that the rollercoaster of punk and new wave more or less shivered, then sort of dawdled forward from, say, late 1984 (notwithstanding there were still brilliant bands and lps, the tidal wave was receding from the foothills, only to begin to gain momentum in Japan when nobody in The West was looking).
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This record is so damned cool. So damned ultra-cool.
It’s sorta- like the late ’80s indie punk art of Sonic Youth with its rocky side exposed, combined with The Pixies and with the classic English rock pop of T-Rex thrown in. There’s even a nod to US ‘60s girl pop and urban country twang. It stayed in my CD player for a few weeks, and I keep hitting the the play again.
Los Dominados is essentially a band formed from the remnants of Moler, who mixed it up as a grungy, power pop band playing hip, street-level music with tough lyrics in the late ‘90s. Twenty years later, there’s been a vast development in song-writing - as shown in this, the band’s fourth album. We find a broader tapestry of influences and the band members have learned a lot about minimalism as well as using dark and light shade. And about sophistication.
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Aussie pop-rock supergroup The On and Ons have been busy recording their follow up to the highly acclaimed album "It's The On and Ons Calling", along with a bit of touring including a Radio Birdman support. Later this month there'll be a gig with a special preview of songs from the new record.
Marrickville Bowling Club in Sydney is the venue on August 27. The On and Ons wil lbe supported by Loose Pills and Chicanery. Every punter receives a free download of a new On and Ons single, "Run About".
The On and Ons contain former members of the Screaming Tribesmen, Hoodoo Gurus and Barbarellas. Details of their launch event are on Facebook here.
Loose Pills have recently returned from a break, supporting Died Pretty and featuring at the Mazstock festival in Northern NSW. They are in blistering form.
Chicanery are an exciting bunch of young ladies and formed at the age of 15 during high school. The group has played numerous shows since then. Now university students, the band has begun recording their debut EP, set for imminent release. "Open Road" is the first single from the upcoming EP, written for a documentary titled "Pontiacs Down Under", and has enjoyed some good radio play.
Get on down. Cheap drinks and food. Only $15 at the door.
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Leadfinger rocks out. Adelaide slumbers. Mandy Tzaras photo.
It’s going to take a while to recover from this weekend. Each of the bands above play very different rock from each other, and were all well-suited in the line-up. Curiously, at each gig I was reminded of the late Darby Crash.
Friday night gigs are always a bit weird as so many of today’s musicians have day jobs. So, for example, they finish a week’s work and, instead of coming home to a beer or four and a chewie, people have to hurry home, put their gear together, get their stage concentration going and head out the door.
So a Friday night gig has all the makings of tired people fucking up and so on; for myself, I have work the following day, so I have to curtail the popping of champagne corks (cue: mock-chorus of “aaww” followed by a hail of empties).
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The Secret Buttons are an outgrowth of The New Invincibles, a Perth band now in the veteran class with 10 years under its collective belt. Like the Invincibles, The Secret Buttons deal in ’60s derived rock and roll via the garage, and this is their debut EP.
It’s often said three-pieces are the perfect configuration for rock and roll because they leave lots of spaces for individuals to do their own thing. The Secret Buttons revel in the trio format. Drummer Dave Rockwell is the common thread between both bands and while The New Invincibles have keyboards, more of a pop bent and a broader aural palette, The Buttons play it straight and mostly go for the throat.
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