Also understand that this was from a dark hour in the live music timeline. Things were starting to turn but what I found when I came to live in Brisbane (from Townsville) in 1980 the pubs rang with the fresh young sounds of jukeboxes or racing stations. The traditional home of bands without industry management (who had that then?) and accessible to anyone who could pay the two buck cover and at least convincingly lie about their age, were giving bands the black card. It felt like there was a ban on them. So what bands I saw (and was in) did was hire halls or vacant shopfronts and these were all shut down by cops (see also, parties with bands except bands that played Khe San).
While I did get to see Xero live it was difficult to do regularly. What I and everyone else in the margin of the mainstream in Brisbane did was hear them and other locals on 4ZZZ. One of the pleasing effects this had on the flow of music from the FM band was that all of it sounded like it could have come from anywhere. The Go-Betweens record a single in Scotland and it sounded like them down the road. Big dub grooves rubbed shoulders with cassette compilations from anywhere. And that is how I came to hear at least two of the tracks on this record and they sounded sensational.
So I bussed into Adelaide St and came back with the record in a plastic Rockinghorse bag, and looked at the cover. My Silver three-in-one was nestled in my old room's wardrobe back up in Townsville and wouldn't be coming down south for another year. I could take it to a friend's and tape, of course, but for now I decided to leave it until the Uni holidays and play it among the cane toads and coconut palms o'er the Tropic of Capricorn. Until then, there was the cover.
I took it out of the plastic sheath and discovered that it was a long sheet of cardboard, glossy on one side, folded in half to look like an LP cover. I figured getting a tabbed and glued cover was one expense too far. That aside, it looked great, from the distressed Egyptian tomb statues on the front, the handwritten band name and title and the industrial looking bed of tiny squares on the rear, the high contrast band mugshots, handwritten track titles and fonted statements like "This record contains no hit singles" it felt perfect. "Technical stupidity and Big Ideas: XERO. Technical assistance and Big Mouth: Colin Bloxsom." A thank you to Xero shareholders told of begging and borrowing between the conception and the release. This cover art by band member John E. testified not only to the cheeky modernism of it but the trouble it took to create. These are things that major label cover art conceals to give the impression that superstar bands' records are magically produced acts of charity with recommended retail donation stickers. This cover felt like it was from a community.
Then, after handing in my last assignment for the year which had been disrupted by the Commonwealth Games (Griffith's student housing served as Games staff and athlete units) I booked a sitter berth on the Sunlander and headed north. Then, once the shambly shuffle of Christmas holiday organisation and all the phone calls to herald my return to the tropics were done with, I was able to pour myself a cheeky rum 'n' coke and put the record on.
The Girls starts with a stuttered beat on kick and tom toms. Heavily treated guitar comes in with squeals and whines and a bass plays a descending slap progression. A woman's voice also steps downward, singing of stying in the safety of your own home, watching tv. Then it's "watching what's happening to yourself on tv." And then the feminist chant against male violence calls to reclaim the night.
Crazy Eddie turns what feels like a noodling acoustic chord progression but, after a big compressed crash launches into a droning drive as the male vocal tells of travel or escape with a middle eastern flavour in the melody. The chorus cryptically intones (female voice): "Crazy Eddie what did you do? Poor Delores, she never knew." Repeat, except it doesn't quite repeat as the arrangement and playing intensify. It's a trip. Good to listen to but maybe not to live.
The Misfits starts with a belching slap bass figure and proceeds to a funk groove thickened by organ chords. The woman's voice (I should start using the names, as they're on the cover art and I know them, anyway), Irena's voice reads out lists of imagery which don't quite flow but that seems deliberate: "Dead tiger in the kitchen. There's an Arab in the bath reading Goldilocks." "Facts, facts, relevant facts." And again but again it doesn't repeat so much as run the same thing through which changes it.
Flip!
Love and Anarchy starts with a wordless vocal in a minor mode over a nervous speedy tango. The vocal melody takes up the Latin feel in a warbling minor key. A bright synth riff breaks the verses and then ends the song with a pronounced deceleration to a clean stop. No lyric sheet but the title is taken from Lilliana Cavani's dark comedy of desperation politics and romance.
Every Kiddy Gets a Prize begins with a galloping snare and a dislodged James Bond chromatic figure. Two male voices trade lines, take up the Bond figure but are rhythmically across it. The lines end in a falsetto descant over the keyboard, giving it a kind of vintage sci-fi feel. On cue we then get a quote from Telstar, just enough to let us recognise it before it vanishes. An unintelligible declamation sounds beneath the falsetto figure before the track ends with a kind of self disintegration.
The Surrendering opens with an expansive drum pattern which seems to pour down slowly in sheets. A big murky minor key riff on guitar bass and keyboards crawls out from the dark. Irena follows the melody with an operatic vibrato mixed low through a wall of reverb. The chorus is in two parts, a high major third pattern that ends in a monotone on the final word: "The tempest is calling him away." Then over a lamenting progression the chant: "Living with the very fear of change." It's played and sung first twice in minor then twice again in minor. The whole sequence of verse to chorus repeats ending with a spoken outro and a lumbering stop.
I opened my eyes and took another sip and smiled.
Broken beats, droning keyboards, vocals that either wailed or murmured, observations and stories; none of it sounded like anything around it but it sounded like 1982. This leads me to a point I've ranted on too much but is worth repeating here. It is not just important to sound like your times but preferable than to affect timelessness. Timelessness in rock music really only refers to a set of production standards struck in the late '60s and early '70s that have been maintained since by the mainstream. But instead of being timeless, the parade of mainstream rock since then and up to today and beyond really only evokes the era of stadium rock. It implies that this normal setting sound carries with it the desire to attain stadium status. Bands in Brisbane at this time did not think this way. True they knew their squeaky, honky and spiky music would never be heard at Madison Square Garden (or even Lang Park) but it's also that they didn't aspire to it. Saying that there are no hit singles on your record is a joke but it's also a plain statement.
Also, sounding like something was recorded in 1982 is different from saying that it's meant to sound like 1982. As synthy or slap bassy as this record gets it never brings to mind bands in dayglo lurex, blacklight bow ties or fringes gelled up in hair tsunamis, it just sounds like music made then and for as long as it would be listened to for pleasure. That goes for other releases from the time like The Reels' Quasimodo's Dream or the Go-Betweens' Send Me a Lullaby. Also, this music didn't come from nowhere and was definitely not made in imitation of anyone. However their name was spelled, Xero had formed over half a decade before and had changed over the years, in personnel and musicality, developing along their own timeline. They have a hefty history before this which I won't go into because I don't know it very well. They didn't form in 1982 to sound like Flock of Seagulls. Lust in the Dust is neither the apex of their output nor just something they knocked together, it was the statement they made in 1982.
And that leads me to something you won't hear on this platter: rock music. No guitar solos or even a ringing barre chord anywhere. Some of the keyboards sound expensive but a lot of them could just be played on cheap Casios. Some of the songs have clear and definite structures but others seem to be patched together or allowed to wander. The point is that each track is a moment to be visited, occupied and left for the next, from the fevered flight of Crazy Eddie to the twilight jungles sprawling around The Surrendering.
To be anti-rock in Brisbane at that time was not a pose, it was a stance. In a city that so ferociously guarded its monoculture, the choice to stand outside of that was a lifestyle decision meant the difference between walking freely through your streets and getting decked by smart casual yobbos who thought your pants needed more flare. I and a group of friends were thrown out of a pub the following year because our hair was too short! The music on this disc didn't have to use any sloganeering about any of this as the fact of it, there forever on black vinyl, with the suggestion of the campaign to get it recorded, pressed and in shops told on the back cover a clear if implicit statement of defiance.
I remember one night crossing King George Square on my way to the bus home and hearing a twangy caw from behind: "Yuz had a fight with a Lawnmower, mate?" I kept going, tightening internally. He repeated the taunt in reference to my haircut, a George Orwell special that I used to get every two weeks at a barber behind a newsagent in Edward Street. He caught up with me and I saw him. At least twice my size with the kind of leering grin I knew too well. "Are ya a punk rocker?" he asked. For a second I was in a vortex of indecision (and laughter because calling anyone punk in 1982 was like calling them a rapscallion or a mastodon) but I righted myself, flashed him a grin and said, "er, yeah." Satisfied with his insight he cranked himself into third and cantered up the steps to the Ann Street footpath. I'm painting that with a light brush but for a moment I really was terrified. Brisbane was not a place to advertise being at odds with its beer commercial culture. In some way, to some degree, you could feel that every day.
More pleasantly, back in Townsville for the holidays, I put this record on as the big overcast sweltering night pressed down and the smell of dead fronds and alcohol rose to meet it. And I wafted with the incoming tide of the drums and bassy swell of The Surrendering and, for a few minutes that felt like the best half-dreaming states I felt warm, and not from the humidity.
