My 1982

I tried for a kind of miscoloured '80s gig poster look for this
but all I got was this after a few worse attempts.

So, I got off the Sunlander at Roma St Station in February with a suitcase stuffed with new clothes and a bag of photographic prints of The Pits. Days later I was out of The Pits. It wasn't because of the photos. When that happens and you're still a teenager it's disturbingly similar to a breakup, the communication dries up and you're dropped. While I felt like writing a plea to Amnesty International I let it run out of steam (for the entire year whinging about it but I did it) and set in for more uni. I went to see Hunters and Collectors at the New York Hotel which was incredible. They came out like the staff of an assembly line and wowed us with tribal industrial for over an hour. That, at least, felt like a good start.

I was out but not empty handed, with a sheaf of songs that grew by one a fortnight or so and plenty of drive to start my own band. I was about to find out how hard that is when the aim is not fun with friends but a career. If you're part of the scene you really only have to know who's available. If you're unknown, as I was, you're asking people to buy into something with no enticement. Even the worst cults put work into sweetening. It's uphill, especially if you're juggling something like uni. So, I did both, getting interest from other players who promptly forgot the conversation. At least uni was easy.

My brother Michael had driven down from Townsville in the Holden Statesman that Dad had given him with my Maton Flamingo in the boot. I even had an electric to use for whatever came my way (never got an amp for it, though).

The year came with a big sink hole in second semester due to the Commonwealth Games. Griffith provided a stadium and extensive housing for the athletes. We all had to go and play while that happened. I went out to the Darling Downs to play a bit part in a short feature directed by one of the staff at Griffith, an experience both stimulating and ugly (maybe in another blog) and came back ready to assault the library again. Gigs, movies, parties, nights at the pub. More conversations about joining my then nameless band and more forgetting.

Greg, a member of The Pits, liked my songs. He knew someone who had a 4-track reel to reel. Before I went off to Towoomba we got together at his parents' place to put down about six songs. The result, taken objectively was a near formless mess but to us it was a blueprint for future greatness if a deal looser than we imagined it done well. So I rode off into the west and pretended to be a local yokel. One thing I will say about that experience is that I discovered an old Rolling Stones album near the record player in the livingroom of the farmhouse where we stayed. I became an utter fan of Let it Bleed and probably played it at least once a day for two weeks. One of the first things I did when I got back to Brisbane was find a second hand copy at the Record Market for about $2.

There was still time to play around a little until uni started again so I went back on the warpath to find willing helpers for the nameless band that had ... a few songs. About three abortive practices later it looked hopeless but I figured once the real people were found it would fall into place. Because of an incident getting stood up for what was meant to be a band related conference at the White Chairs pub (aka the Cartlon Elizabeth St bar) I wrote a song called Running Late which, at a later date, a friend asked about thus: "is that song autobiographical because it sounds like it's about the biggest loser of all time?"

I'd missed about a month of demos because of the movie jaunt but counted myself lucky to have been removed from temptation, considering the severity of the police response. I know I should be more heroic about that but the sense of blinding havoc that was still building from the Commonwealth Games Act and the State of Emergency Act was getting under my skin. So, like a lot of people I knew, I sipped on the now legendary Games Special lager from XXXX (made down the road from me in the Castlemaine brewery which illumined the sky with hell-red neon by night) and went to gigs in what was emerging as a new gigging scene in more or less permanent venues. I know that that looks like a see-through bandaid after how I began but the conflict is still hard to unravel.

I convinced Dad to fund a series of night courses in Cinematography which was a massive waste of time and money but felt like I was doing something practical. I had continuous fantasies of future film productions, seen behind my eyelids as slick mainstream movies with an edge. I wrote two one act plays which I thought were ok but the one that was rejected by the university theatre society/group/ensemble/drinking club was treated unfairly. Added to my continued failure to form a band and people (including the substance-free bigshot in the theatre society/etc) kept assuming I'd been thrown out of The Pits (I had but they didn't have to assume that). Anyway....

Meantime, there was a ton of music and I've covered a fair bit of that here. Some significant releases proved impossible to experience again (though, some online resources continued to surprise me). I remember a sense of the music being in transition, still as raw as punk but increasingly drawing from sound beyond the realm o' roque and then beyond the twentieth century itself (which suited me as it's how I began as a music fan). The Teardrop Explodes and Siouxsie and the Banshees led the way into a psychedelia that wasn't dependent on '60s iconography but found new paths to the sweetly strange. 

Numberless acts appeared in the waves of 4ZZZ's signal, many noisy, some intriguing, all, in some way, compelling for being so determinedly of their own kind. I think of nights spent listening to such sounds while forming the arguments of essays and feeling the strange wafting like vapour from the speakers of my clock radio to where my thoughts were taking shape, splintering and splicing. And it wasn't just ZZZ. I started listening to some of the richer shows on 4EB. The Lebanese and Turkish shows were regular appointments along with the Egyptian show. The Indian hours were disappointingly poppy, being largely from what became known as Bollywood but if I found the show I'd leave it on. Everything went into the mix. 

By late November I handed in the last paper of the year and headed over to Greg's to do more of the recording, ending with a Birthday Party parody as a 4ZZZ subscription ad (they hated it and said no, thankfully) and a song called The Keeper of the Gate. I don't remember if that came before the band name Gatekeepers but that was also a term bandied in the media strain of my second year studies and I liked how it sounded psychedelic era but had a quite heavy meaning which was like the songs themselves with chirpy, boppy, upbeat sounds but lyrics about scapegoating, social cannibalism (still don't know what that is but it sounded "crucial" at the time), forced marriages and marriage breakdowns und so weiter und so weiter. Whichever it was, the band now had a name and, um, just needed members. Meantime, I had a cassette of over ten recordings to play to folk up north for their bedazzlement and helpless admiration (many were kind).

The UK had had a weird war which I was wondering if it would include the loss of some of the younger breeders from the royal family and, after a year of anticipation and resistance, the Acts that gave the Brisbane cops even more powers were not going to be repealed any time soon and the following year's election loomed with foreboding that we'd have another government of the people who had taken down Gough Whitlam. I'd get back to all that. So I headed north to instruct all and sundry of the wisdom of the ways of Marxism because no one had ever known about that before me.

Until then, there were familiar faces up in Townsville, playing bass and writing some tunes for a local theatre group production and the best New Years Eve celebration to date, on Magnetic Island. I haven't done the usual roll call of hits 'n' memories. There were a lot of them, sweet 'n' bubbly pop tunes that moved us all further away from the monolith o' rock. But the more I investigated things in the margins and from different cultures it felt more like a big tasty blend. It felt like we were winning from under the radar but that's what it's like when you're twenty years old, you win because you think you win.