I noted the name. and when I saw it on the bill of a Griffith Uni gig I went to that. They were as good as the record's promises, loud, tight and forceful. I even thought it was funny when Jeremy Oxley giggled into the mic and said, "this one's called Happy University Student". Not remotely funny now but the moment made it gold and that's the point of the Sunnyboys and their lingering legacy to anyone who wants to reignite guitar band rock with an eye to that attention-grabbing something: make your moments pay. They did. I stayed over at a friend's flat at the housing village (getting to and from Griffith was an epic) and as we strolled around the next day I picked up an unmarked poster for the gig. It was a massive black and white and orange cartoon of a mod girl grinning at a striped shirted boy with a sun symbol for a head. The background was orange with tiny white outlined triangles. It was a stunner. Well, I say picked up but what I mean is that I asked my friend if he'd ask the hippy at the cafe near the Hub if I could have it. HO, rock and roll! Anyway.
The Sunnyboys were there in the air all through the year. New singles on the radio and more gigs and then a mimed performance on Countdown for the touchdown which for a band that had formed only a year before was like being showered with precious metals. The EP had had a beefed up remix and they had been scooped up by Mushroom (so it was now a 12 inch with better sound). I bought the picture sleeve single with The Church's double EP Too Fast For You on the same day from Rockinghorse (now THAT was a double bill!). And then finally toward the end of the year there was the first LP.
My memory will fault me here but I recall two different releases of the album happening. As the DJ said, one fothe new fans and one for the true fans. Both covers were identical apart from the background colour (one blue like the current CD release) and the other yellow. And I theeeeenk the yellow one came with a cassette which included the song Tomorrow Will be Fine. I can find no direct evidence of this online but would be interested to know if anybody has the alternative version or even just knows about it because that's the one I wanted and could never find (vanished form the shelves before I could get to it. And that's why I never had my own copy until the expanded CD release (which does have those extra tracks). Anyway, jonesing nostalgia aside, the album. (Edit: the cassette was an alternative release of the single Happy Man, not an adjunct to the album. The yellow cover edition omitted Happy Man but included the otherwise unreleased Tell Me What You Say. These tracks, along with the two b-sides of Alone With You are on the CD rerelease of the debut. Right, breathe out.)
Anyway, jonesing aside, the album.
I'll pull a few tracks out of the stream for this instead of trying a track by track. Why? Well, despite this being one of the most engaging and listenable records of any time in rock music history it is drawn from a narrow pallette of arrangement resources and the chief songwriter, while highly effective at it, drinks from a small pool of melodic ideas. Before any one of you go at me for dismissing the record, my point is that this is one of the things that make it a great set and make the commitment that band and producer had to the fore. It's just that as verbal desctiptions of songs you'd be getting a lot of repetition (maybe my own well is a tad shallow when it comes to guitar rock).
Just as Richard Gottehrer was able to lift The Go-Gos into a firm edged 1981 guitar band sound through his experience with everything from '60s girl groups to the Ramones, so Australian rock legend Lobby Lloyd took much expertise and little strain to tighten everything about the young band in front of him. They were already an indentifiable live unit with a following based on a lot of gigs around NSW and were clearly in it for real. If Lloyd had seen parades of Dunning-Kruger hopefuls file past his throne with eager popping eyes and nothing else what he saw in Sunnyboys was a band that needed next to nothing to get them the attention of a nation.
The galloping descent of the first few seconds (I Can't talk to You) is only temporarily relieved by some punching full band chords before Oxley's deep and melodic vocal comes in urgently. Lloyd layers the guitar attack on the downward plunge with feedback (or Ebow?) as well as some multi-tracked parts but instead of sounding processed it just sound powerful. He and the band know that the live version will not be as rich as this but this is a band that uses the moment more than most and that will fill the gap. Trouble in My Brain breaks the powerchord panzas with a plinky pressing figure high on the fretboard of a decidedly undistorted Stratocaster. After pleading for a few bars it lies softly down with a tiny strum. When the chords do kick in they are joined by a gentle piano. Oxley's vocal comes in and is also joined with light wordless vocal harmonies. Each track, however recognisably from the same pen is showing the record developing beyond that showcase of the live set that many bands make the mistake of insisting on.
Gone is distinguished not just by the slower pace but the bass riff that opens it. When the drums come in so does a big organ wash. Oxley's first verse is anguished but assured. He delays the chorus with a chord prgression that lets the organ add some space and then some beautiful Fender tones. The next verse does let the tension break with the chorus, a lament of melissma and melancholy. The guitar solo is the exact type that was still verboten in the Brisbane band scene but done so convincingly here, and so musically that it passes. The last verse suprises by being sung as harmony and an octave lower before the soaring chorus resumes.
Happy Man starts with some choppy chords and one of Oxley's characteristic minor key variations with a major key bridge. The difference here is that the chorus is tight and serious. A singable solo guitar instrumental played in several parts gives way to a more conventional pentatonic wail but then dives straight back into the chorus. A perfect single of its time. Alone With You follows and if you're not listening closely you might mix it up with Happy Man. It was the first of the two to be released but as it comes next on the LP it loses out by using the same progression for the verses. The chorus saves it from being too samey but maybe this was a good reason to get the yellow version of the record. That said, Alone With You was the song I first heard from the band and I had the single of it and to this day it's the song I associate with the band more than any other. Also, I wrote my own songs at the time (or tried to) and seldom ever bothered to work out any contemporary ones. I did know this one, though (even the words!)
Let You Go is the closest the set gets to an epic. Big chords and a sinewy lead figure brings us to the confessional vocal. Another delayed chorus allows some story through and adds power to the chorus we've been waiting for. He's come to a decision about his relationship and it hurts to understand that he's not as important to her as he had believed. So what? Well, he was only recently still a teenager and however quotidian it might appear to any of us now that kind of cirumstance can weigh a younger mind down more than the notion of the Earth's eventual heat death. More guitar pryotechnics and an increasingly screamed chorus lets us konw the pain. I'm Shakin' combines the more intricate guitar work of Trouble, the big Kinks style grinding progressions and urgent vocals but then adds a whistled riff. Whistled! As the song gets well underway a curious choral moment gives way to a garage organ and intensifying organ and guitar build. Then the whistling returns. After it's over we get a brief run through of the oopening downward gallop until it fades in less than twenty seconds.
At the end of this record you will have heard the band at the best they have sounded to date and know what to expect if you go to see them. What strikes me, listening today, is how easy this sounds despite what I know of music production and song arrangements and how much work needs to be put into things as easy sounding as second guitar parts. It sounds easy for the same reason that so many of the '60s-based bands following from this one sounded mangled or clumsy or, at worst try hard: an astute producer. Lobby Lloyd isn't just getting someone in or organ for a few songs, he's guiding the judgement of a band who've only heard themselves through cruddy desk recordings of live gigs in what might as well be sheep sheds. He's getting the band as close as he can to what they are hearing in their heads when they play the songs.
He has noticed how they quieten down in this one or try singing differently for this verse. He's finishing what they started and he'st stopping at that point. Jeremy Oxley would break out of the limited melodic range he had as a composer with the very next album and go to many finer plains but his trust in his producer was the great reward of this album. Even with the limitation of musical range each of these songs are distinct from each other. This doesn't just help the listener get through the whole thing at one sitting (and it is an album you can leave on) but it puts the standouts like Gone or Let You Go on something like display risers of their own.
Sunnyboys bridged a gap between the already-old Radio Birdman and the mass of bands that rose like a flood in Sydney who, packing their copies of Pebbles and Nuggets, bought up all the Paisley they could find at the markets and plugged their speed-driven inspirations into fuzzwah pedals that the Electric Prunes had advertised. All of those gathered for a fun scene that lasted a year or so but now instead of them there are still Sunnyboys.
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