A quietly menacing bass drone on a synth. Crisp woodblocks clack a steady 4/4. Eventually a clean and spiky funk riff on a guitar appears. Strange warbles and clashes bring a bass in but it's not a normal rock bass. It's notes feel like hammer blows. They're forged from steel. Soon we're pounding through a breathlessly hot jungle as a tortured voice calls out about loping walks, monkeys and caretaker's home. It might be a zoo. It might be an imperial expedition through a great screeching morass. Whatever it is there's danger there and the bare protection from it. "Semi-detached in a world of stone" and suddenly the track breaks into a searing grind with clanking bass below and screaming organ overhead. The pattern holds. No guitar solos or middle eights, just the big machine of song slashing through the foliage.
Flip it and you get Watcher, a much busier groove with more plinky funk riffs. More strained vocals. An aging surburbanite growling at his tv. The backing vocals invite you to come and see him in his display case of a home. There's a vague preacher vibe like Once in a Lifetime but, despite the funk that might unite them, this has an anguished energy and none of the designer weirdness of David Byrne and co. Thump thump thump. Come and see the watcher.
Lastly there's the one that would really dig in when the band was mentioned. Loinclothing has a brighter riff that can recall the Andrea True Connection's More More More disco smash from the previous decade. There's no shame or self-consciousness to it, probably more than a little defiance. There's also a ton of Krautrock in the ancestry. Mostly, though, this is the sound of a band breaking through influence and sounding like themselves. The bass takes the gloves off and pounds with its knuckles. The big modal calls of the verse sing ropes of imagery: cowboys toe tapping, howls of distant pleasure, worms feeding, hay, rag and bone man before the big chanting chorus breaks out with a massed cry of ... Loincloth? Plastic? Placemats?
This is one I only had as a cassette from someone else's record. While some of the lyrics are clear, I have not one sausagey notion of what they are calling in the chorus. It sounds essential to the song but the song is imagery rather than narrative or confession. In the end I liked not knowing. It could have been Latin or Old Sumerian but it sounded like they meant it. The combination of obscure meaning and earnestness or even ceremonial joy had a shiver of horror. Jungle holocausts from Deep River. Like the best nightmares, especially those known to soft little city dwellers like me, it was not knowing that kept us looking over our shoulders.
January 1982 and I'd just come back from my two months of Uni holidays up in the tropics. First term of second year wouldn't be starting for a couple of weeks. I lugged my baggage back up to my room, cleared out the miasma of baby clothes and other detritus that my brother and his wife would use my room for in my absence, and unpacked to a much needed dose of 4ZZZ. World of Stone came on. In the stinky humid air of a late Brisbane summer, the sounds of the jungles of horror movies rose and got right into me. I turned it up and listened. Who the hell was this?
I listened to the end of the bracket for the back announcement. Hunters and Collectors. From Melbourne. Playing at the New York on Sunday night. It was Friday. I finished unpacking, making mental notes. Melbourne. Like The Birthday Party and Models. Wow. It didn't surprise me once I knew. That big clangy bass and the non-rock spread of the funk were a fit for place. I was about to call around to see who was going when my brother in law Roger came by to invite me to it. Perfect.
The New York in Queen St was a depression era building with a deco name plate built in to the façade as well the the name York. The semi circle portico bore the renaming to New York. I can't remember when it became a venue but had already been there a few times (possibly The Birthday Party and the Laughing Clowns). It was the place for interstate bands from the alternative margin or international acts that got played on ZZZ. It was the best venue in town. The sound was always big and clear and the bands played on an elevated stage so far above any of our heads that you had to be standing right behind a giant not to see them. There was a mezzanine with table service.
Hunters and Collectors emerged, looking like the roadies, all singlets and jeans ripped by lifting and days and nights on the rig. There were about twenty-seven of them; a rock band core plus a workshop of percussion on bin lids, gas cylinders and hub caps. They made a big noise but it was cleanly defined and deliberate, turning the venue into a great big sweaty pagan church. No cacophony, no mess, just a solid mass of orchestrated rage and wonder. I caught up with a lot of people I'd been missing but we didn't so a lot of talking.
Hunters and Collectors felt new and of the moment and for the moment seemed incapable of buying into the top ten with a cute chorus and a riff. That would change but it would take years. Getting to the crafted hard pop numbers that Mark Seymour at the helm started to churn out was a lengthy process that involved a painful untangling of ties to the dark night time bonfires they'd started with. But for a band whose sense of purpose ensured them the ears of any passer by with hooks that took forever to happen after a lot of scary declamation, they were matchless. Most of the dearly years stand solid now but that first long fast spinner with the uncomfortably off cover art will please now as uncompromisingly as it did then. Classic in the best sense.
As an outfit that added a gas cylinder to its drum kit and considered its mixer to be a band member Hunters and Collectors were a perfect fit for the Australian post punk scene in the early 80s. They fit perfectly because they didn't fit. If your synth pop bips leaned a little toward Depeche Mode or powerpop had real guitar solos you were part of the problem, not the solution. And this was no time for blurring irony. So, when Hunnas took the stage in their sweaty blue singlets and prison haircuts, clanging, ticking and calling titanic footy war cries they weren't being yobs, they were being new.
Really, what great point to try outdoing Devo or Kraftwerk when they'd sewn up that ol' industrial thang? There was still a working class culture in Australia at that time that ... worked. There was still industry. And Hunnas weren't that interested in coming across like bosses or lab coated animal testers, they yelled from the factory floor among the clamour and drones and shuddering engines. And when they sang it wasn't about penalty rates or capitalism - they could happily leave that to Midnight Oil or Redgum to shore up their future self-embarrassment - but urban tribalism with a strange J.G. Ballard tinge and a big misshapen absurdism; nursery rhymes with jungle drums.
I came back from my northern Christmas holidays with a week or so spare until uni started and the mighty World of Stone was the first thing I heard when I switched 4ZZZ on. Its scrap metal in the rainforest vibe spread out but it never coasted or got too samey. A thin-boned funk figure on the guitar, the strong vocals calling from the next valley and at every chorus a huge grinding riff under an organ wash. The back announce added that they were playing at the New York Hotel the next Sunday night. I counted my coins and made a mental note. I gathered a few friends to order a the White Chairs. Two of them were going to see the band at one of the leagues club venues that night (Cherie jokingly clicking her fingers as she said she was "going tribal, man"). I couldn't afford both so aimed at the NY. My brother in law Roger came over and told me about the gig as well. I went with him.
The New York Hotel was massive inside. There was a table service bar with a sky high ceiling that once, when I thought I was flashing back, briefly hovered centimetres above my head. The venue was also huge and had the highest stage I've ever seen. Flanking the stage were two mezzanines with tables. Down on the floor everyone could see everything. One of the supports was a band called Sigh of Relief who had a guitar sound composed entirely of chords played through a Roland Chorus amp with the chorus on 11. The singer completely misjudged the audience vibe (very cruisey at the end of summer) and snarled before one number: "this is for all those fucking people who sit in their fucking bedsits and fuck themselves!" Silence. Enough silence to let the band know that living well was a better revenge and, besides, no one in Brisbane lived in a bedsit (it wasn't bloody Manchester!). And so they ploughed through about five more chorused chord showcases and left.
When Hunnas got up they wandered on like roadies. There seemed to be about fifty of them. By the time the light funk of the guitar lifted from the workshop clave tinkle and the massive picked bass shuddered to operation speed it dawned on us that the set had started. When Mark Seymour began the urgent valley cry of the vocal that led to the giant riff of the chorus we were home. Through just over an hour of mighty jungle steel and we were exhausted and thrilled. It was new and massive and didn't have to be from anywhere. God, that was a good time to see bands. And that was before The Birthday Party played there but that's another anecdote.
Hunnas just kept it up over the next years, working with krautrock's own Conny Plank to produce great new albums that roared, hammered and thundered but sounded nothing like rock (very, very important in both H&C's native Melbourne and my temporarily adoptive Brisbane with its sparse is class minimalism). Their odd clanging thud with melody infiltrated the charts. In 1983 they even made it to Countdown with the Richard Lowenstein directed clip for Talking to a Stranger, both sound and vision heavily cinematic, a kind of melange of Man Called Horse, Mad Max 2 and a tour of the Fitzroy Housing Commission towers and grounds, all face paint, junkyard bonfires and wriggly scrawled titles that appeared and vanished mysteriously as the violent bass machine and horn section charged on. Everything about it absorbed its times but was so adamantly itself. So what happened?
What happened? How come only a year and a bit after that we get a three chord song so identikit you could sing Hang On Sloopy over the backing track?
People left and the band moved on. By the time the next major album appeared the band was a tighter unit gathered around vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Mark Seymour. Actually, that role-call looks a little egalitarian. By the time the next major album appeared the band was a tighter unit gathered around leader Mark Seymour. If they had been the scream of the dispossessed over the storm of machinery they were now a rock band. If we had seen a collective working as a spontaneously generated organic unit creating the sounds and images of the sickness of the cities we now saw a rock band. One step too close to comfort and they would fall into the abyss of being an Ozrock band. The mighty would have fallen. Did it fall here?
A grinding major key riff played in the D position on the guitar and rising a full fourth to G and then A and we're in. He's telling his lover that he will come to her and she will throw her arms around him. That's the song. No twists or archness. No cynicism either but, crucially, no naivete. It's not the red-clawed venery of The Slab, it's love. This time it's love and if your first hearing of it sounds like the pub after closing then you need to hear it again because the man who screeched and wailed about monkeys in the caretaker's lodge is now singing about love.
As the chords insistently swing on a pendulum of I to IV to I to V, Seymour tells his love that he will kiss her in four places, that she'll make her call his name, that she should shed her skin so they can get started and the call in the title. Three chords. Not so simple, though.
First, Mark Seymour's voice is instantly recognisable. It is masculine. And it is frankly Australian. If Chrissie Amphlett a few years earlier sounded like someone from the cast of Ginger Meggs: The Musical and Redgum's John Schumann twanged like the back o' Bourke Seymour just sounded Australian. Not Paul Hogan but something unaffected, as comfortable as a white-with-one in the morning and a beading stubby of Vic at sunset. More, the great machismo in a lot of the early vocals here found its vulnerability and a means to represent both in the same song without switching like Sybil. Seymour plays this love lyric knowingly, aware that the more bloke in a singlet he tries to be with these words of compulsion the more vulnerable he will seem to the other blokes in the canteen, aware that in this moment he no longer cares. He declares. And declares. And declares. It keeps just feeling better even if it's just the same words over the same chords.
This is a very muscular work. There might be the sliver tinkling of an acoustic and some Telecaster chime in that pretty opening but the first verse is delivered over big hard bass and drums only. Seymour's voice, always perfectly pitched, sings the melody he wrote and allows a slight tremor in his voice, made clear and close in the absence of a comfy guitar wash. It's just him and her and he's letting the real stuff emerge from the shadow of his six packed toughness. The guitar starts late and enters cautiously. The first breakout section ("and we may never meet again...") introduces the organ which glides in comfortably. We've hardly noticed the harmonies but they've been consolidating the vocal from halfway through the first verse. So, by the time she makes him call her name and he shouts it to the blue summer skyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy we have to struggle not to join in:
And you will throwowowow your arms around meeeeee.
A repeat of the pretty intro, this time more strongly supported releases its tension with a big sighing chord on the guitar with some lovely Fender amp tremolo. And now Seymour starts playing his plain but sweet melody, stretching and twisting the phrases to match the bucking in his heart: you know I will never say goodbye.... Below this, the wordless choir ohs and aahs, the organ swells and the now constant grinding guitar compells. And when the second breakout happens it's even bigger and when he shouts to the blue summer sky it's a 40 degree Melbourne sky with not a wisp of condensation in the entire visible dome:
And you will throwowowow your arms around meeeeee.
And then instead of yet another pretty intro we get it's chords but all low down the fretboard in pure force (cleverly, this always sounds like newly introduced chords but they aren't) and an even bigger breakout where something resembling the old jungle cries rings out as the voices soar above the bashing swell:
And then, piece by piece, Seymour's voice is all over the place, repeating lines over each other before the chorus returns in the soaring guise of the middle section:
Throw-ohooooooooooooooooooh your arms around me!...
When this intensifies to saturation we stop, exhausted with a gentle lowering strum on the acoustic. Over.
It's not an instant replay job, this. It might have the three unchallenging chord structure of bubblegum but it plays things far more adult. There is neither the concussed ecstasy of adolesence nor the darker drives of young adulthood; here we cruise with the power of the narrator being drawn to the power of his lover through the electric air of a summer afternoon. The combined force of the two push the energy to its height and it flashes refulgent and blinding. End. Might happen again. Might never happen again but here was a moment when both of them were on peak form and will be a lifelong memory. Nary a single mention of the word love but that's the strongest thing in the air, here.
For me it was inseparable from Melbourne summer. Standing on the breakwater at the end of St Kilda Pier, encased in the cool dry air, I'd look up over the bay and the huge blue sky and smile just because I felt free from a year of doldrums. I thought the line was actually: "I'll shout it to the blue southern sky." Hearing Hunters and Collectors play the St Kilda Festival on the foreshore and feeling the rush of love for this song was like hearing the live Simon and Garfunkel album in Central Park where Paul Simon gets a big roar from the line: "It's good to play a neighbourhood concert." As cliched as the chords might have been and as studious the effort of creating a classic pop song I still plugged into it. I wasn't in love at the time but that didn't feel far away at any time at that age. Melbourne had winters the way that neither Brisbane nor Townsville had them. The ones in Melbourne felt real. They were cold all day long for months. The winter that year (1986) was so cold it snowed, lightly and briefly but still snowed. When the spring and summer came there was a relief in the difference alone between the seasons. There was a quirk to Melbourne and because of it I never felt alone. Still don't. So without making a sound or opening my mouth I would shout that to the blue summer sky. This was my town.
Throw Your Arms Around Me was never a hit. They'd tried it once as a single and then as a live track and again as a single as part of the Human Frailty album. See also the Angels' Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again? Was it the long titles? Both were pop songs in the classic 60s vein and both offered supremely satisfying rewards to the ear. Maybe it's that they came on like teens but proved far more grown up, a disturbing tension. Both were also tried a few times as though their time hadn't come with the first iteration. Everyone knows Throw Your Arms, though. Everyone can sing the chorus and a crowd will roar at the sound of any band playing it. They just didn't want to buy it on a piece of plastic. Does that make it more of a folk song? Maybe. You probably know at least a bit of Waltzing Matilda and this song but Sunglasses at Night?
I don't know if Hunnas turned into Ozrock but that seemed to be the accusation at the time. For those reading from other climes, Ozrock is a derogatory term for a host of record-company-directed charting acts from the 80s like Mondo Rock, Cold Chisel or INXS. Whatever their origins as creative forces, once these bands were Ozrocked they produced the same music with different titles until career desiccation. Human Frailty is a fine album and the kind that the band of World of Stone would make in time, given the everpresent need of musicians to develop. Is it the best direction? Well, I can listen to it happily but not with the same excitement as I hear Talking to a Stranger or Towtruck. They sound like a rock band not an organic force. The guitars and vocals are reinforced with double tracking and you can slot the songs into Rage without incident. This continued until the band's dissolution in the 90s. Mark Seymour's voice remains strong and he still writes songs and, while I have my Run Run Runs with their wild landscapes and primordial cries I know I can never pass up a listen to this one song that nailed what it feels like to be in love and grown up. Perhaps I just yearned for both and never lost the connection.
