Private Function’s Chris Penney: ‘I try to create art as escapism because everything else freaks me out!’

17th Sep 2024 | gimmiezine

Original photo: Johnny Russell / handmade collage by B

Private Function are a punk band that embodies more than just chaotic energy and humour. Beneath their wild shows, tongue-in-cheek attitude, and fun exterior lies a band that blur the lines between art and everyday life with witty commentary on modern life.

Gimmie recently caught up with Private Function’s frontman, Chris Penney, for a candid conversation that covered everything from his roots growing up in housing commission to his first experiences with therapy. He reflects on how his formative years and growing up with his metalhead single mum shaped him, and tells us about his first concert, and the time he sat on Ozzy Osbourne’s lap. He shares his theory on the moment he feels culture died, and his honest opinion on NOFX and Blink-182, while celebrating the revival of Australian music in the 2000s by bands like Eddy Current and Royal Headache. We hear the story of what drove their manager and booking agent to quit. And, talk about joy, creativity, and so much more. Chris’ blend of quick wit and sincerity makes for an unforgettable conversation.

CHRIS PENNEY: I’m the classic example of a housing commission boy, come good. I grew up in Redfern in Sydney on Morehead Street, which is a pretty gnarly street.

You know, how you can do that thing where you say the name of your first pet and the name of the first street you lived on, and that’s your porn star name? Well, mine’s Jesse Morehead—that’s pretty good [laughs].

Seriously, it was a pretty crazy place. It’s the most condensed housing commission in Australia, which, to be honest, maybe isn’t the best idea. I think there’s talk about maybe taking it apart, but there are easily a thousand different apartments on that one block. So it’s pretty fucking full on to live there. Especially back in the ‘90s, I saw some crazy, full on stuff. There’s many, many stories; a chick got stabbed to death once.

Whoa! Oh-no. I guess, high-density housing commission projects can face a lot of challenges like overcrowding, maintenance issues, strained infrastructure, and there’s also social stigmatisation. All these things can lead to deteriorating living conditions and lead to stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as diminished overall well-being and quality of life.

CP: Yeah! And these things do happen. There shouldn’t be that much housing commission condensed into one street.

Did the things you’ve seen growing up there have an impact on you?

CP: I don’t know. Maybe? I mean, the only thing I can think of is that I’m extremely emotionless—probably that. So this week, I actually went to talk to a psychologist for the first time in my life, which was pretty good.

That’s good to hear, I’m stoked for you. I’ve been to many over my lifetime and it takes a while to find a good one sometimes, but when you do, I’ve found it can help.

CP: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve never done it before. So I don’t really know what to do, because I don’t really know what I need out of it. I’m pretty together. Although it would seem very much like I don’t have it together [laughs]. But I have a bunch of crap going on.

It’s cool; I can talk to the guy about the end of the world, which is kind of fun. I made him squirm. I talked to my girlfriend; we’ve been sitting down and chatting, and I go on these crazy doomsday rants about the end of the world, or World War III, and the climate crisis running in direct parallel with each other. And we’re storming ahead into this apocalypse. It’s coming so soon. She’s like, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to hear any of this.’ [laughs].

A lot of people are like that. It’s constantly in our face in the news so they don’t want to spend much more time thinking about it. It’s a really interesting time. But no matter when you look back in history, there’s always been terrible things happening. As humans, how do we cope with this? What do we do with this information? Because obviously it can start to affect our day-to-day lives.

CP: For sure. It’s something I think about a lot. The news is always happening, right? The world’s always happening, always changing. There’s always people dying. I guess there’s more emphasis on that stuff now because of social media, how dramatic that is now. Is it any more or any less important than it’s been in history? I don’t know. I don’t know shit. But, things are always gonna wrap up, and things are gonna begin. And people should want to know about it.

Yeah. I don’t have answers either. The world can definitely be a difficult place so to stop from feeling overwhelmed, I chose to dedicate my life to things like music, art, connection, conversation, and community, and sharing knowledge, ideas and experiences with others. Through my work it’s important to counter the shitty stuff in the world and offer something that’s a more positive offering for people’s lives.

CP: Yeah, 100%. That’s absolutely what I try and do as well! All the art that I create, and that we create in Private Function, is hopefully that. I try to create art as escapism because everything else freaks me out! I try to keep this one escapist form of art that’s joyful, fun and stupid at the same time. I fucking swear to God, if this psychologist makes me cease it, if I become a more serious person because of this prick, and I have to release art that isn’t fun and dumb—I’ll be so upset! [laughs].

There’s definitely a place for fun and dumb art. Not that I think your art is dumb, by the way. There’s a place for all kinds of art. Art is more important to society than a lot of people think it is. I think often there can be a misconception that real art has to be serious.

CP: Yeah, totally. I couldn’t be serious, man, even if I tried. Private Function definitely has an element of humour, obviously. But it’s not jokes. The way I try and approach it is that it’s like a joke without a punchline. The vibe is funny, but there’s no actual joke here. I really like relying on humour and comedy in a song to bring these artistic ideas to life because I feel like humour is the only artistic avenue that still has innovation in it.

For instance, the scratchie record we did, people would think that’s a funny, stupid idea. But it’s also innovative because it hadn’t been done before, which, to me, is important.

I couldn’t think of anything serious that hasn’t been done, and hasn’t been done significantly better than I could ever hope for it to be done. Like, every song about love has been written, every song about addiction has been written. It’s set in stone, how they’re meant to sound and how that it’s meant to be shown to people. But with humour, there’s this depth of endlessness that you can continually find things in. BUT then you just have to deal with people being like, ‘You’re a fucking joke band!’ [laughs].

Frank Zappa used to get that too. Full transparency, it took me a little while to come around to Private Function, and to get it. On the surface level, and the way PF were pitched by publicists and seen in the media, it kind of seemed that way. But when I took the time to listen and saw a live show, I realised it wasn’t that, it was more that. You write great songs and you’re one of the most exciting and entertaining live shows around.

CP: Yeah, it’s funny, right? [laughs].

When I look back on all the things that people discounted as just publicity stunts, I see the innovation that we’re talking bout.

CP: This has been an eight-year project now. At the beginning, in the first few years, people were really into it, and then some of those people left. People come and go, and there are always new fans. Now it’s almost like, to get into Private Function, you need to understand this linear story, along with all the concepts and imagery that are repeated and consistently used, blending into each other. There’s themes about the whole thing. To jump into the band now, and to take it at face value, is like jumping into a podcast after it’s been going for years. It’s like, ‘Oh, fuck, what the fuck is all this? Who are these characters and these people?’ It’s hard to do.

I think the live show sells quite a lot. That’s the one thing that’s changed a lot of people’s minds about us. I like our albums but the songs are quite different live to how they sound in the studio. Recording is hard. Especially for me, because I’m not the best singer. When we’re jamming, I’m like, ‘This is fucking amazing!’ And then you hear it in the studio and it’s like, ah, maybe, my hubris has gone to my head somewhat [laughs].

How did you first discover music?

CP: My mum. I had a young mum. She’s only 19 years older than me—54. Because I grew up with a single mum who was a huge punk and metalhead growing up. She was massively into Metallica and all those kinds of bands. From a young age, she was taking me everywhere and making me go to shows.

My first show, I still got the ticket stubs, was in 1996, The Offspring. I was nine. There’s a photo of me with Ozzy Osbourne too, when I was 10 years old. She took me to a signing and I have a photo of me sitting on Ozzy’s lap! It’s really funny.

Ha. That’s awesome!

CP: [Laughs]. So she would just fucking blare music through the house. She’d be cranking Tool. So I was listening to all that stuff from a young age, and it just went on from there. My mum would listen to The Stooges, so I would.

Self-exploration is such an important part of being a music fan, and formulating who you are. Remember before the internet?

I sure do.

I think it’s the worst thing that the internet has taken away from us, like self-exploration and finding those things you like on your own and not just having someone hand them to you. In the pre-millennial age, finding stuff was a major part of formulating your self.

Now it seems like everything’s at your fingertips and there’s overwhelming so much choice. Back in the 90s and before, you had to really dig for stuff and it wasn’t just readily available. Things seem to hold more value because of the effort you’d go to to discover them. Music didn’t seem as disposable.

CP: Yeah, 100%. It was way more satisfying to find things yourself. I went and saw EXEK the other night.

We LOVE them! They’re one of our favourite bands!

CP: Yeah, they’re great. The singer Albert asked this question to the audience on the mic, he said, ‘Does anyone even have passion for music anymore? Does anyone care? And, there was a quietness and awkwardness from the audience. I was like, yeah, people don’t care! [laughs]. It’s funny to see that; you could really feel it in the room, people don’t have that connection to music like they used to back in the day, and what it used to mean.

Anyway, like I was saying, I was listening to all of this music way younger than I should have been because of my mum. Getting into my teenage years, it should have been pop-punk, like NOFX, Blink-182, and AFI, but I was like, ‘This is fucking shit!’ [laughs]. I missed all the music that I should have liked during my teenage years, and I’d think, ‘Well, we’ve already got The Stooges, so what’s the point in this?’ I jumped over this whole chunk of music that lots of people my age were into. It’s funny that older music was my teenage music. I’m pretty happy for that because that other stuff IS fucking shit—my mum was right [laughs].

Was there anything, though, that you discovered yourself?

CP: For sure. Billions and billions of things. You ever heard this album? [holds up a record] Rites of Spring! I bought this just now. I actually hadn’t heard them until last year, which is so fucking funny, I went through my stupid Minor Threat thing and then I was like, who’s another guy in Fugazi?

Guy Picciotto!

CP: Yeah. So I was listening to them all year and then I went into Rowdy’s Records today to go get a bunch of record sleeves. They had that album behind the counter and I bought it. It’s an original press, which is pretty cool. I’m always finding fucking new music. My fucking record player has been broken for over a year but I’m still buying records.

Nice! When and how did you first start playing music?

CP: High school. We just liked to play because we like rock and roll. None of us could play any instruments, AND some of us still can’t play instruments [laughs]. We jumped into it and figured it all out. That was a long time ago, I guess, I’ve been playing music for 20 years.

Did you ever think he’d be a front person?

CP: Yeah, I’ve been a front man for a long time, in every band except for Mesa Cosa. I’m still technically in Mesa Cosa, I guess [laughs].

Is there anything that attracted you to being a vocalist?

CP: Not being able to play an instrument [laughs]. And, it’s fun. I like a band with a front person, which sort of oddly it’s becoming kind of rarer. Especially front people that jump around. I like to jump around, it helps me sing, which is funny. Having a front person adds a whole other element to have a connection into the band, in a way, because you’re out in the crowd.

I noticed when you play live that you’re very aware of all the stuff that’s going on around you and you genuinely engage people.

CP: Yeah, yeah, totally. I like looking at people. It’s cool! [laughs].

Not all bands do that, but it’s always nicer when they do. Sometimes, when a band gets lost in their own world and ignores the audience, it can be boring. When we saw you play, it was great how you involved the crowd by letting them choose your set through picking song written on pieces of paper they’d pull out of an old vacuum cleaner. Everyone was into it. The show’s vibe was chaotic but positive, with people looking out for each other. After going to some rough hardcore shows lately, where a bunch of the audience felt pretty thoughtless, it was refreshing to experience the opposite. Your show was joyful, and I wasn’t on edge, hoping I didn’t get hurt watching a band play. It was a real highlight of my week.

CP: I love that you got that from our show! Thank you very much. You used the word joyful, which often has connotations with it being kind of silly and stuff but it doesn’t need to be that. It can be joyful in the way that… [pauses]… it’s cool to have a show that’s kind of like a [Steven] Spielberg movie, where you’re like, [puts his arms in the air triumphantly]. I always find that it’s a good movie if it’s got me going like, ‘YES!’ [pumps fists in the air]. Like, watching Smokey and the Bandit, it’s like, YES! They got the beer to the party! They beat the cops—fuck the cops! It’s that kind of joyfulness that could take you on an adventure. It’s a different kind of joy.

What you said about the show, really means a lot. I don’t even mind when we get criticism. I love really respectful, truthful opinions. Criticism of anything should be more truthful—more real.

So, we just talked about Private Function shows being joyous, in your tour diary, you’ve written for Gimmie, you mentioned a show you played in Adelaide that wasn’t so great; what happened?

CP: I really fucked the cat with that one [laughs]. So basically, what had happened is, I was very drunk, obnoxiously drunk, and there was a balcony. I got up there to jump off the balcony… I’ve done it before. But this time, I had an idea that before the show, I wanted to hide a 6-pack up there, and during the show, I could throw beers out to the crowd. I had to buy a 6-pack, and it was $66 from the bar.

I was like, ‘Can I get it half price ’cause I’m playing?’ And they were like, ‘No.’ So, I was like, ‘Alright, I’ll do the 66 bucks!’ I went and put them in the balcony. But then, during the show, I got up there, and they were gone. I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ I was up there and looked like an idiot.

Then I, literally like a small baby, threw these chairs off the balcony into the crowd. It was nothing of a deal, basically like crowd surfing; everyone got them and put them down. But, mid-show at the bar, I was like, ‘What happened to the 6-pack?’ And this chick was like, ‘Oh, I took it away. You can’t have an unopened beer in the venue.’ I was like, ‘Oh, what? That sucks!’ She felt pretty bad about that.

It wasn’t joyous that I made someone feel bad. Like I said, this was mid-show, and it’s always important to remember how much power you can have mid-show. I apologised that night to her, and I wrote her the next day too. It’s good to acknowledge when you’re wrong.

The show was a little bit more violent than usual. We had found a ladder that we were jumping off into the crowd, and the crowd surfing got a bit wild. It was a bit much. I got in so much trouble for that show. Like, we no longer have a manager or a booking agent anymore.

Our mosh pit is a fun mosh pit. It’s not as wild as Speed shows, and that early-2000s hardcore vibe is back in a way, kind of like that weird energy at shows.

Its funny you mentioned early-2000s hardcore, because after going to shows since I was young, that’s the era that made go, nah, I’m out for a while. With all the macho-ness happening and the way women were treated, the vibe was not fun anymore.

CP: Should we talk about the early-2000s? It was full on. Like I was saying about Redfern, it was a different fucking time in the ‘90s and into the early-2000s—crazy, really bad shit happened. The art is bad as well, of the times. Does art imitate life here? Everything from the early-2000s fucking sucks. Especially rock and roll, man. From 2000 to 2009, it’s the most dogshit period of music [laughs]. It fucking blows, man. It’s like everywhere lost, what it is to be a human, for some reason. Maybe because of the introduction of the internet? You can see it in Australian music as well, you know, that’s a period when Australiana, or sense of a national identity disappeared completely. People were like, ‘No, we have to play the game of what it is to be an American artist right now.’ So, they’re replicating these ideas of post-9/11 America. It’s like you’re really pushing that into your art, into everything you’re making, and it’s made the worst fucking things possible.

Here’s a funny example, if you want to pinpoint what happened. The fan belt on my car broke and I had to wait on the side of the road for a fucking tow truck. So I watched the first episode of the show from mid-2000s, it’s called Supergroup. It’s this reality show where they get put together a super group of musicians like Sebastian Bach, Ted Nugent, Scott Ian from Anthrax, Jason Bonham, the dude from Biohazard, and so on. All these musicians who are washed up. Clearly, what’s happened is, the producer is like, ‘OK, guys, so you’re rock and roll icons, but we need you to play up to the South Park generation. Be a bit more pushy and a bit of a dickhead.’ I was watching it and was like, whoa! Scotty walks into this reality TV mansion and he’s like, ‘What a fag palace. Does Liberace live here?’ It’s like, boom, this is it’s so intense. I think it’s the pinpoint of the moment where rock and roll died. That TV show, everything about it, is everything I hate about rock and roll, and is what I had to grow up with.

In the 2000s, I started to look elsewhere to find that energy I once got from rock n roll, punk etc. I did an interview with Michael Franti once and we talked about how sometimes you just have to go where the energy is.

CP: Yeah, for sure. You chose the right time to get out [laughs].

I was going to a lot more hip-hop shows, and electronic shows, and doofs. I think there’s always good stuff going on somewhere, you just have to look harder for it and sometimes find it in unexpected places.

CP: I have this weird time thing in my head. 1997, I think, is where music and all culture die. A little after, there’s some cool stuff because things had been in the pipeline and were finally coming out. But by 2000, that’s when everything stops and becomes convoluted and strange. It doesn’t make sense, and it took almost a decade to figure itself out again. It really was this blurred idea of everything coming at you. Like you were saying, it’s jumping from scene to scene; there was just so much happening. Predominantly because of the internet, it was a bombardment from every angle, on everything you could possibly be shown. And because you’re shown so much, everything became nothing.

But then 2009 rolls around, I was in Sydney, and not long after Royal Headache’s first release came out. I saw Eddy Current Suppression Ring at the Excelsior Hotel and holy shit, it was so good! In my mind, Eddy Current, and then Royal Headache changed everything. Things got back to some sort of level of normality for a while.

I chatted with Shogun from Royal Headache recently for his new project Antenna, which I think is even better than Royal Headache. He told me about how he was struggling mentally for a lot of the band’s existence, especially when they gained so much popularity. He spoke of how he felt a little abandoned by the local punk scene. Have you ever had anything like that?

CP: Yeah, for sure. It’s always gonna happen. I spoke to him about it back in the day. They were going through some weird stuff. They seem to always be going through weird stuff, though [laughs]. But he hatred it, I never really understood it. But now I do. You mix music and bravado, and Private Function are always gonna be on top! [laughs]. Some people sometimes see us say that or write that and they give us shit. It’s like we’re not the first band, artist, or human in history to have a bravado or be like—I am the greatest! [laughs]. It’s a stupid joke. But I think it’s a very easy thing for people to hate.

Where did ‘PF still on top’ come from?

CP: My mate is this tagger dude, Metho. There was this wall he tagged and then a friend, Matt, had written above it ‘Metho sucks. Fuck Metho.’ Then Metho wrote above that ‘Matt’s got no friends.’ Then Matt came back and he went on top of that one, like, ‘Metho fucks dogs.’ Metho came back and it kept going. Eventually Metho got this huge, huge ladder and went to the very top of this factory and just wrote ‘Metho still on top,’ above everything. So Matt couldn’t get any higher than him. Me and Joe, the old guitarist used to always see it and laugh—fuck it’s funny. Shout out to Metho wherever you are!

I know a big thing for Private Function is concept over quality; where’d that approach came from?

CP: We’re all pretty artistically minded people in every aspect. We can all write songs, it’s very easy for us. We like to challenge ourselves with other things. We just recorded a new album last week. We went into the studio and figured most of them out in the studio while we’re recording.

Did you ever go to art school?

CP: I avoided all that stuff. I was too dumb. To me, art is innovation, and it doesn’t matter what the form is. It could be painting, it could be a movie, it could be whatever. But it has to have innovation in it, and the closer you get to innovation, the better the art gets. That’s my takeaway—that’s what I think art is. So that’s why I’m always trying to think about that, which is hard to do in rock and roll and in music because everything’s been done. You know, it’s been 70 years or whatever of people doing things, and it’s hard to really do more.

That’s why I try to focus on concepts because conceptuality is quality. Songwriting quality does have an end, but conceptuality—if you can think of an idea, there’s no limit to where it can go.

The scratchie album cover, I was pretty proud of that. I thought it was cool because it hadn’t been done before; it was a conceptual idea. Or the idea of putting piss in the records—which maybe only had been done before once before.

Or pressing bags of speed into records, that hadn’t been done before. Maybe innovation is too strong a word, maybe they were just unique, and that’s the satisfaction I get from making art—trying to do something unique.

That’s something a lot of people come up to me and talk about. It’s inspired them in some way to think about things a little bit differently, and that’s more important than teaching them how to write a good song or whatever. If you can teach someone to just think about things a tiny bit differently, you’ve really given them something. It’s important.

Totally. That’s the stuff that really excites us the most.

CP: Yeah, me too.

All of us have ADD. So we also want to do a show, where we would be able to sit through it and be mentally entertained the entire time, something that creates its own story. I want to give people something, no matter how small, that they can take away from it, and retell it and it can be part of their life. I want to give them a pub yarn.

You mentioned you were working on the new record; what kind of things have you been writing about?

CP: About things that I look at. Most of the times I’ll see a sign, her like I’ll see this bottle of water here and be like [sings]: ‘Cool Ridge, Cool Ridge, Co-cool Cool Ridge!’ I have these rules for songs which are, I don’t write about people I know, I think that’s really bad luck to write or get inspiration from people you know; that’s fucking instant karma for you, mate. I don’t write songs about sex, I can’t do it.

Why is that?

CP: I mean, I can do sex! [laughs]. Here’s the thing, Bianca, I respect sex too much. I really like having sex and when I write about sex, it either comes out as seedy or a joke—I don’t want to do that to sex. Sex is better than the songs I could write about it. There’s already a billion songs written. It’s hard to write a song about sex well.

That’s nice that you care about it so much you don’t want to fuck it up.

CP: Exactly. Yeah, somethings are off limits. I also try not to swear that much as well in songs, which is funny.

Why?

CP: I find it unnecessary. There’s a lot of words you can say. I swear, there’s a lot of swearing. But I tried not to do it. I really only swear when it like needs to be there. That’s the, I’m just not gonna swear for the sake of just like swearing rule. It has more impact then when you do.

Have you ever written la really personal song?

CP: No, I don’t think so.

You don’t use writing songs to process stuff in your life?

CP: I’m not smart enough, nor good enough as a musician to be able to put my problems and thoughts into a genuinely good song. It’s not going to come up, it’s going to be bad. I’m just going to stick to three chord songs about different signs and things I see. Otherwise, no one’s going to like it. I do like writing though, I liked writing the tour diary for you guys.

You know how in records, there’s sometimes those really long, waffling inserts about the history of the artists? They’re so shit! I always try and read one, then get halfway through it, and it feels arrogant, waffling, irrelevant, or like they’re probably lying [laughs]. I wrote one of those for the new pressing of 370HSSV 0773H (the scrathie record). It’s poorly written nonsense about the story of this album.

That’s cool. Looking forward to checking it out. I love what you write for Gimmie. In our correspondence you mentioned you took so personal stuff out; how come?

CP: I was going to bring up like what happened with the manager and the booking agent stuff. I showed it to the rest of the band they’re like, ‘Nah, now’s not the time.’ I really thanked them for the work they did for us, it can’t be underplayed how much they’ve done like for the band.

We took that out bits and bobs just to make it even. That was the most dramatic part of Private Function’s career. We were like, ‘Shit, we didn’t know, maybe the band’s breaking up, I don’t know,’ because everyone was like, ‘Fuck, what’s gonna happen now? No manager, no booking agent.’

We’re actually kind of stoked, to be honest, like we’re not doing anything much. We wanted to have a little break. But we were like, ‘What’s going on? I don’t know what to do anymore, what do we do?’ And then everyone’s got their own mental health issues they’re going through, just like every band. We’re all just dealing with our own shit, dealing with the reality of the modern world, and dealing with all the problems that every single other artist is dealing with right now as well. We’re not immune from any of that, we just don’t wear it on our sleeves as much as some other artists do. And I don’t think we get a lot of—it’s awesome if artists can get inspiration from things like that—but for me, it doesn’t work.

Is there any kinds of things that you do for your own self-care?

CP: Not really, I’m all right. I’m sweet. I was a workaholic. I’m always working on different things

What kind of things?

CP: I’m always doing jobs. I’m always writing songs. Always focusing on something.

You mentioned challenges of being a band; like what?

CP: There’s this real expectation when you’re perceived to be successful that you have heaps of money and that everything’s really easy, and it’s like, motherfucker, there’s no money. It’s also like, we’re a 6-piece band who’s going to travel around Australia. The fucking costs of just dealing with six people to go play shows like Vinnie’s Dive—there’s no money there. Like, we have to pay for six flights, have six people in accommodation every night, and then pay for the opening bands, the gear hire, the venue hire, and then, at that point, the manager takes 20% of every ticket, the booker takes 10%. There’s so much going out that at the end of the day, you’re like, ‘Oh, that barely covered the costs at all.’

I thought managers got less than that? Like, 10%.

CP: I guess the industry standard is now like 20%. I think it’s a bit much to be honest, but it’s a hard thing to argue with the industry about that and individuals about that as well.

I think there’s so many problems in the actual industry. The industry treats people as products for the most part. When I was young, I also wanted to work in the music industry because I love music, and then I started working in it and it was fucking horrible.

CP: Yeah, it can be. The only time I do interviews is when there’s an album cycle and I’m forced to do it. I fucking absolutely hate interviews. But this chat is different, it’s really, really lovely.

Also, for the record, you’ve mentioned you’re dumb a few times throughout this chat; you’re totally not!

CP: Aww, thank you very much. That means a lot. I’m excited about the future!

I’m excited for your new album!

CP: Me too. Have you ever thought of being a psychologist, you have a very calming aura, and you’re good at listening.

Thank you. I’m actually a book editor by day and work with fellow First Nations writers, helping them get their story on the page. It’s important to me, to try to do something that I think is worthwhile with my time because our time is really valuable.

CP: Absolutely. Time is all we have. That’s it. Nothing else matters. As you get older, you start to see the value in time. Even to conceptualise the idea of time is fucking crazy, man—it goes like that. I heard an interesting thing about time the other day. There’s this kind of worldwide collective feeling that time is speeding up, and we’re losing time; most of the world are feeling this. This report said we were losing time because now a majority of the world have like iPhones, and if you look at the amount of hours you use in a a day and in a week, sometimes it’s four or five hours a day. You do the maths, that’s 24 hours a week. Now we’re down to six day week, because a day has been used being on your phone. You don’t actually really get anything out of that really. What you get back is quite a small amount to how much time you’re giving away. You’re basically giving away your fucking time to companies for free so they can advertise you bullshit.

I haven’t used my personal Instagram, since September last year. It was a New Year’s resolution. I can’t do that anymore. It’s a fucking weird realisation where it’s like, I’ve been on social media for 20 years. How much more time do I give the machine? When is this end? Is the answer, never? It’s this thing that I have to chase and follow, especially to be in a band now. It feels like I’m giving my time, my life away, for something that I’m already giving so much of my time to, being in a band.

What do you reckon you’d do if you weren’t in a band?

CP: I ask myself that every single day. I have never known a reality as a man where I wasn’t there.

What do you kind of get from being in a band?

CP: The avenue to be able to make the art that I to make, is a big one. Everything I want to do at the moment, artistically works in the realm of a band. I love all the the record covers and these weird little conceptual ideas. It scares me as well, though, because I have a small skill set of things. If I was to ever stop being in a band and get a real job and grow up and be a real boy, this fucking Pinocchio little motherfucker, it scares me because I’m pretty skill-less. And, I have no inheritance coming my way. I don’t know what’s gonna happen when I stop playing in a band.

If you reflected on all the things it takes to be in a band, you’ll see you have many more skills than you think you do. It takes a lot to keep a band going for years.

CP: I guess, yeah. Hopefully with the end of this year the idea is to have a moment, after losing a manager and a booking agent and kind of like our mental state, and have some time off to reflect, recess, and reset. It’d be my first time in 20 years, where I’ve not been doing something. I don’t know how that’s going to go [laughs]. Expect a mental breakdown in the third quarter of this year.

Ideally, in the perfect world for me, I would be asked to go on the reboot of Supergroup. And I can be in a piece of shit.

Yeah, but you’d actually have like a grasp on what South Park is.

CP: [Laughs] Exactly! Yeah, instead of just effing and jeffing mindlessly.

I’m sure I’ll be fine. I’ve never been massively phased by anything. I’m the kind of guy that, when stuff really does fall apart, I’m always pretty good at figuring things out.

I noticed that on social media, a lot of people comment about your band, and not always in the most positive light. But I love how you handle those comments. I saw a snarky one where you responded with, ‘Is that the best you can do?’ You seem to use humour to diffuse what they’re saying.

CP: Everything on the internet is a fucking joke. I don’t care how anyone feels about anything, and I don’t even care about how people feel about the art or who we are. To save debate, it doesn’t matter to me, so it’s funny to make fun of all these idiots. But I don’t want to do it because I don’t want to make fun of anyone or anything. Really, nothing matters. Nothing that we’re doing actually matters, so for people to get upset about something that doesn’t matter is just ridiculous. The idea of being really famous — oh man, I would definitely lose my mind. Even now, I’m relatively known to an audience, and, like, jeez, going to the pub sometimes can be a bit of an ordeal.

I had a great chat for my book with Amy Taylor the other week and we were talking about how she’s in the public eye and always being scrutinised by people, and of what it’s like to grow up in front of people, and make mistakes and grow.

CP: I can imagine. She’s great! She’d have a pretty interesting story as well. Amy rules!

She does!

CP: She’s always been a very real person. She’s the best. So cool. The first Private Function show was with Amyl & The Sniffers. That was the night their original bass player quit. That was a funny show. Bryce and Declan, for some reason, when they were playing, were just yelling at each other. I think Declan punched Bryce in the face, and then they just started fighting. The bass player was like, ‘Fuck this,’ threw his bass, and walked off. Then they were fighting, got into the mosh, and were pulled apart, dragged downstairs. And then they started fighting on the street. I think Amy was still on stage. So I hopped on the drums, and then my friend, my flatmate, got on bass, and we jammed for a while. Then they broke up for a bit, and Gus joined the band. I love seeing a show where everything just falls apart, and it becomes chaos.

Follow @privatefunction69 and get a piece of them HERE.

OSBO: ‘There hadn’t been anything to inspire hope or a positive outlook. When stuff like that happens, really good hardcore music gets made.

12th Sep 202413th Sep 2024 | gimmiezine

Original photos: Jhonny Russell / Handmade collage by B – inspired by Sukit

OSBO stands as a distinctive force in Sydney’s 2024 underground music community. Their new EP (out on Blow Blood Records) offers a raw, visceral experience that exemplifies modern hardcore punk. Its production strikes a fine balance—fiercely energetic and gritty, yet clear enough to highlight the potency of the songs. It’s a taut 10-minute wire, poised on the edge of snapping. With its powerful bass lines, frenetic guitar riffs, and intense vocals, OSBO brings their own unique edge. With plenty of fast, adrenaline-pumping tracks that capture the essence of hardcore’s loud and relentless drive, you’ll find a soundtrack for both your frustration with the world and moments of healing release. One of the best Australian hardcore punk EPs of the year!

Gimmie was excited to speak with OSBO’s vocalist, Tim, and bassist, Ravi.

RAVI: Tim said he’s running late. He said start without him.

OK, cool. No problems. It’s so great to finally be speaking with you. I can’t find any other OSBO interviews anywhere.

RAVI: We’re pretty low-key [laughs].

We love you guys so much. The first time we got to see you play live was at Nag Nag Nag, and you guys blew us away! You play the kind of punk we love!

RAVI: Thank you. Greg and Steph, who put on Nag… are the best and it’s always a lot of fun. We’ve played that a few times now.

Greg and Steph are totally the best! Two of the nicest people in the community. So, what’s life been like for you lately?

RAVI: To be honest, it’s just been work. I hate saying this, but it’s true—work occupies a huge amount of time. Music-wise, OSBO previously had a free practice space, and the downside of a free practice space was that we were quite lazy. Sometimes we wouldn’t even get together for a few months, or we wouldn’t see each other at all. Now we’re paying for practice, and because we’re paying, we don’t want to skip it, so we actually get together every week now [laughs]. In the last three months, we’ve been more productive than we were in the past year and a half, which is good!

That’s great to hear. We kind of just figured OSBO was a pretty casual band.

RAVI: [Laughs] Yeah, well, we’re all well and truly in our 30s, and work a lot. Everyone’s quite understanding of each other when we can’t play or can’t practice. It’s all very low pressure.

What do you do for a job?

RAVI: I’m an Assistant Principal at a high school for students with mental health concerns.

Wow, that must be such rewarding, and challenging, work.

RAVI: Yeah. I have been doing it for a while. It’s quite a small school, only 56 students. But it is rewarding, you get to see kids grow and progress over a period of time, it can also be quite intense; there can be a lot of self-harm or suicidal ideation. We’ve unfortunately lost a couple of students, which is always hard. Overall, though, the school is hugely positive. Some of the kids are just going through a rough teenage patch, but then they wind up doing really well.

What made you pick that kind of work?

RAVI: I stumbled into it, actually. I was teaching at a regular high school, and got fed up by it and quit. At the time, I was working at Repressed Records in Sydney.This guy was working at another record store in town, and I got chatting with him and it turns out, he worked at a mental health high school, and he hooked me up with work. I like it being small, we don’t churn through kids. I sometimes hear about kids that have finished school a few years ago, and they’re either finishing degrees or working, and doing well. So it’s nice to hear that.

That’s so awesome! I saw on your Instagram that you have a therapy dog!

RAVI: I do—Scout.

[Ravi talks to Scout, ‘Come here. Come here Scout. Say hello!’]

Oh my goodness! She is sooooo beautiful!

RAVI: Scout comes to school with me. I got her from Guide Dogs Australia. She’s pretty awesome. I live in an apartment, so I never really wanted to have a dog because I would feel bad leaving them at home all day. It’s great being able to take her to work every day. I’m pretty appreciative of that.

Dogs are the best! I mostly work from home and our pup Gia is always by my side keeping my company.

RAVI: Definitely. They’re good company.

Have you always lived in Sydney?

RAVI: I grew up in Western Sydney, and then lived overseas for a few years but not long. I’ve lived in Sydney pretty much my entire life. I feel like this is it—an ‘I’ll be here’ sort of deal. I like it. There’s a lot of things not to like about Sydney, but then there’s enough good things to keep me here as well. My sister’s recently moved back to Sydney with my niece and nephew and I spend a lot of time with them, which is really nice.

When I visit, Sydney it always seems so fast paced to me. It’s definitely got a different vibe from what I’m used to, having lived in Queensland most of my life. It’s pretty laid-back up here, especially on the Gold Coast where we are—no one seems to be in a real hurry.

RAVI: There’s parts of Sydney that are really hostile. The rent being so expensive makes it hostile; everyone has to work. It’s not an easy place to just live, which sucks. You hear stories from people about back in the ‘90s where you could just get the dole, play in a band, and hang out. It’s not like that anymore, everyone has to work quite hard to just survive. We have a good group of friends that are close, I’ve known a lot of them for a long time. Like, Greg and Steph I’ve known them for a dozen years. It’s nice to have a community.

One thing that I really love about going to shows in Sydney is that it’s much more multicultural. As a Brown person, it’s really nice to to not be the only BIPOC person in the room.

RAVI: That was a shift a few years ago. Growing up, going to punk and hardcore gigs, it was pretty white. Being Indian, I noticed that where I grew up in Western Sydney was also quite white. It was definitely noticeable, but over the last dozen years or so, it’s definitely shifted, and it is really cool and nice to see. So, I get that.

My experience growing up in the punk and hardcore scene was similar to you, everything was very white. Being a Brown female at shows too, I really felt like an outsider in a subculture of mostly white male outsiders.

RAVI: Yeah. And that aspect was alienating.

Yes!

RAVI: Having the whole traditional Indian parents, they were never like, ‘Go out and learn an instrument,’ or anything like that. So the whole idea of it all was just foreign to me. There was no access point So even though I was going to punk gigs and stuff from a very young age, it always felt like something other people do. It never really felt accessible in that sense.

How did you get into music?

RAVI: It was through a guy who sat next to me in roll call back in high school. He was into a lot of the skate punk stuff, like Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords. The one local band that everyone seemed to be into was Toe To Toe because they’d play everywhere. If you talk to people my age, I’m in my late 30s, Toe to Toe was often the first band a lot of us saw, ‘cause they’d play the suburbs. Toe To Toe was a gateway band. From there, I’d go to the city and various youth centres to see shows quite regularly.

Penrith was actually where I grew up, so for a while in the early 2000s, it was a hot spot. There was a lot of gigs out there. American Nightmare came and played. In the summer a lot of touring bands (Epitaph stuff) would play.

Yeah. I remember all of that. I’d go see anything. I was just so keen to see bands, and those were the ones I had access to too. I may not even like everything but it was a chance to get out there and be a part of something exciting.

RAVI: I lapped it all up too, I couldn’t differentiate between good or bad stuff for the first couple of years, it was just all excellent [laughs]. After catching a lot of pop-punk stuff, I then that moved into a lot of hardcore stuff. After the mid-2000s, I got into to a bit more garage rock. I guess, I burnt out on hardcore punk. But then came Eddy Current Suppression Ring and I was like, oh god, this is really fresh! This is really cool! And, that kick things off again.

It seems we had a pretty similar music trajectory. I got burnt out on hardcore too, not the music but more the scene…

RAVI: It was too bro-heavy, yeah?

Exactly!

RAVI: I got that sense. But then, in Sydney, there was a secondary punk scene, where there were punk and hardcore bands that would play with Eddy Current or Circle Pit or whoever, so there was that clash of things. I started working at a record store when I was probably 15, and then started working at Repressed when I was 17. Chris, who owned the shop, was always turning me on to stuff, and not just punk-related stuff. He’d be like, ‘Oh, you should listen to Guided by Voices or Modern Lovers.’

That’s awesome. I used to have the dudes that worked at Rocking Horse Records in Meanjin/Brisbane turning me on to different stuff. It’s funny you mentioned Toe To Toe before, Scott Mac, was the second person I ever interviewed!

RAVI: Cool. I often think of them. I had this conversation with Mikey from Robber, and we were all like, ‘Toe To Toe were like the Australian Black Flag of the 90s,’ in a way—just in the sense that they went everywhere. Like, you’d see flyers of them playing places like Townsville or wherever. Even talking to my friend Nick, who owns Repressed now, he said that he saw them in Cairns when he was a kid. I think that was hugely important, they played in places that other bands didn’t.

Yeah. I know you collect records. What are some albums that have been really big for you?

RAVI: Formatively, The Replacements‘ Let It Be hit a spot so much so that, not that I listen to it frequently now, but I’d still call it one of my favourite albums. It was huge for me; I listened to it constantly. The first wave, as a kid, would have been bands like Good Riddance or Sick Of It All. Even now, I’m constantly buying records—lots of Australian stuff. Particularly right after Eddy Current, it felt like there were so many good Australian bands happening, so I’d be catching all of that stuff.

Totally, Eddy Current is such an important band! What’s one of the last records you bought?

RAVI: I bought The Dicks [Kill From The Heart] reissue on Superior Viaduct. I was happy to get it. I also grabbed a couple of things from Sealed Records. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Sealed Records? But Paco who does La Vida Records, he runs a label called Sealed and they do a lot of archival stuff. I got a release by this band Twelve Cubic Feet, never heard of them but I trust the stuff that he’s putting out. It’s good!

What inspired you to start making music yourself?

RAVI: Social stuff, I very much like spending time with my friends. It’s an extension of that. Pretty similar to playing in a team sport or any sort of group activity. Spending time with the same people regularly. I never felt like it was something I could do. But some friends of mine actually said, ‘No, let’s let’s do this,’ and following through, them pushing me to do it.

Was OSBO your first band? I know you play in The Baby as well.

RAVI: Yeah. The Baby. And then, OSBO has a similar sort of cast of characters. So yeah, Lucy from OSBO played in The Baby as well. She’d never played in a band either and just started playing in Photogenic. Max the drummer had never played drums before. Ben the keyboard player had never played keyboards. So, The Baby was everyone just giving it a go.

I love that! I find bands like that seem to create really interesting music to me. I feel like there’s more experimentation, and the naivety, give you a better chance at developing something more unique. We love The Baby when we saw you play Nag.

RAVI: Thank you. It’s very unorthodox. I remember our first practice, Max had to look at YouTube, how to set up a drum kit, he had no idea. Our band is just built around friendship.

Did you ever think you’d be a singer?

RAVI: No, no, no. Other people suggested it. I’m glad they did. It was a similar thing with Tim from OSBO. He’s been a good friend, and he’d come around, and we’d play chess and hang out. Then he mentioned he was starting OSBO, and was like, ‘You want to play?’ I was like, ‘Yep.’ And OSBO started. It took a while to get off the ground because everyone has other things going on.

Had you played bass before then?

RAVI: No, I hadn’t. Joe, our guitarist just taught me from scratch. There were times when I thought, I’m never going to get it! I should quit. But they were like, ‘No, no, you got to do it. We want you in this band.’ They really pushed me, which was awesome!

It’s so good to have that encouragement, support and camaraderie, hearing about that makes me love you guys even more.

RAVI: Yeah, exactly, and I’m really glad they did that. As I said, it’s primarily built around the social aspect, so everything else is secondary. We found our friends in Sydney were always so supportive, but not even just in Sydney, all our friends everywhere are really supportive. From the get-go, people were coming to shows.

Where’d the band name come from?

RAVI: That was Tim. He had that band name for a while, and he had planned on starting a band called that, and various members had come and gone and it just never sort of happened. So it’s very much, in that sense, Tim’s band, I guess you could say.

What’s something you could tell me about each member of the band?

RAVI: Jacob, our drummer, he’s going to be having a new baby very soon. So that’s, parenthood and hardcore coming together—he’s very excited.

Joe, our guitarist, was working an insane job where he was working 18 hours, and he’d even sleep over at work. But he quit and now is feeling a bit more of that life balance. He’s doing really good.

Lucy, our guitarist, she’s awesome. She’s a primary school Librarian and very good with young kids.

Tim, our vocalist, is probably the focus point of the band. He has a good presence. He’s like an MMA guy, so he’s quite fit and energetic on stage. He’s been doing that for a few years. I think it was something that was really good for him.

OSBO put out their EP on April 1. It’s really amazing! The art work is similar to the photo on the demo, the pile of bodies.

RAVI: Joe, our guitarist, does all of our artwork. He’s a graphic designer by trade. You’ll spot his artwork on Sydney bands’ records. It’s nice having someone you trust to do the art. I’ve never asked him where the image comes from, but to me, it almost looks like there’s a horse’s head in there, and it reminds me of The Godfather—the horse’s head in the bed. It’s sort of abstract. Maybe I’m just imagining that [laughs].

I’m gonna have to take another look at it now! How long did the EP take to record?

RAVI: We did it over two days, at a random house. The contact came from our drummer at the time, Coil. It was this house in the suburbs that was clearly a rich person’s house in the ‘70s, but was now overgrown. The pool had been filled in and there were trees growing out of everywhere. We recorded in this old pool house. It was run down as all hell.

[Tim joins the chat]

TIM: Sorry, I’m late. I was riding my bike in the Blue Mountains with a bunch of friends.

That would have been really lovely. It’s really pretty up there. I think I saw you post online earlier that you did something 40+ kilometres!

TIM: Yeah, I didn’t even record all of it, so it was more than that.

That’s a lot! Wow. Is that something you do often?

TIM: I’d like to do it more often. Occasionally we go out and do long rides or overnight rides.

You also do Jiu-jitsu?

TIM: Yeah, that’s one of my other things that I do.

RAVI: I mentioned that earlier too.

TIM: It’s fun—it gets you out of your head.

It’s so important to have stuff like that. Do you have any fond memories from recording the EP?

RAVI: The guy who recorded it Ben [Cunningham] had nice gear, a nice drum kit, so that was nice. Next time we might record with friends in Melbourne.

TIM: I was stoked that we got to do it in Macquarie Fields, and it being so close to where I grew up. Also, having that connection into somebody like Ben who’s younger, and who is doing something new, rather than it all just being like, if we’d gone and recorded with David Ackerman, it would have felt a bit different, you know, like recording in Marrickville or whatever.

The whole experience to me was so different to the other recording experiences I’ve had. It felt more like of the band as well, and it was cool to like have Coil there as his last thing to do with us as well.

Other times I’ve recorded were either even more DIY or like more professional. And this was sort of somewhere in this weird kind of space in the middle, whilst being in the back of somebody’s house in the suburbs, 40 minutes from the city. It’s kind of this strange space that felt very DIY, but also very earnestly trying to do a great job of that.

RAVI: Ben did a great job. If anyone is keen to record—hit Ben up!

It’s a pretty intense collection of songs; was there anything you did to get that vibe?

TIM: [Laughs]. It’s kind of weird. It was a very chill day. We were sitting around. There was little bit of back and forth with the tracking. I did every song but one, in one take.

RAVI: We were a bit concerned that Tim was going to blow out his voice, because he gives it 100%.

TIM: [Laughs].

RAVI: We were hoping that didn’t happen.

TIM: Because I wanted to do it in one take, I went particularly hard at each song. We did just spend a lot of time just like chillin’ though.

RAVI: It was pretty low-key. There was a lot of sitting around in the overgrown backyard, with a tree growing through a bench, and a bicycle stuck up in another tree. There was this other shed that we went into and it was full of old movie posters…

TIM: And, dentist stuff.

RAVI: Yeah, and stuff from junior football teams from the 1970s. It was a weird vibe.

We’re glad you were able to capture the ferocity of your live show on record. Often I find, a lot of bands miss that mark.

TIM: The imperative of the band is that we’re all pretty much on the exact same page about what we’re trying to do with the band and what our references are. Because of that, we go into that kind of situation knowing that’s what we want to capture about the band.

RAVI: We were conscious that we didn’t want it to sound too glossy.

TIM: I think it would be hard for me to sing these songs and not like blast on them. It needs to be full on, otherwise it’s not the thing that we’re trying to do.

A lot of the songs on the EP are from the demo…

TIM: Having practiced them a lot more, makes a big difference [laughs].

RAVI: The demo was done with a Zoom mic at practice sort of deal. We recorded it and sent it out.

TIM: Yeah, we probably should have done a better job with that.

RAVI: [Laughs]. But I feel like it captured what a demo was meant to be.

TIM: We re-recorded because the demo was so scratchy. We’re now in a spot where we’re practicing a lot more, writing a lot more. We’re working more consistently. COVID lockdowns, that kind of happened right in the middle of when we were starting to do stuff. Now we’re aware that we need to be tighter to be that sound as well. We need to be able to know the songs inside out before we can go into a recording situation and produce that kind of intensity.

RAVI: Hopefully we’ll be able to record again before the end of the year or if not early next year.

Yes! That’s great news. Do you have many new songs?

RAVI: A couple of new songs but then a bunch of part songs.

TIM: Since the EP, we probably got like another three or four.

With the songs that were on the original demo that you’ve re-recorded, were they written back around like 2020? Was there anything that was happening in your lives that was influencing those songs?

TIM: It wasn’t a particularly nice time [laughs]. I remember talking to Joe even before we started the band; I just felt like, politically, people were just very angry. There was a lot of stuff that had completely failed, and there hadn’t been anything to inspire hope or a positive outlook. When stuff like that happens, really good hardcore music gets made—which makes it sound a little cynical.

RAVI: It was a weird time, definitely.

TIM: Not for me personally, but I think it was an angry environment, and I just wanted something to put that in, and so I put it into this.

What about the newest song, ‘Say It To My Face’?

TIM: Same deal. A lot of the songs are about work, which is a very stressful and unpleasant environment. I have a professional job. I work in an office. There’s a lot of politics and that kind of thing. So a lot of the songs are just about me wishing I didn’t have to deal with those people.

I feel that, in my work experience, I know I’m not really built for an office.

RAVI: The song ‘Time’ probably captures that. Like, people who abuse your time in the work setting, they’re almost like vultures.

TIM: Yeah. A lot of the songs are about feeling like you have to deal with things against your will. Like, I don’t want to go into those scenarios. I don’t choose those scenarios; I would prefer to not have to ever do any of that stuff. And then people make it worse, like ‘Say It To My Face’ is basically about people talking about you or your work, but not having the guts to tell you, and how frustrating that is to deal with—which is a general situation at work. But there were also some specifics I was dealing with at the time that I was extremely, really, really not enjoying.

I’m so sorry to hear that. That sucks.

TIM: I wrote a nice song about it.

What are the things that you do to counterbalance this shitty things, like, stuff that makes you happy?

TIM: Write nasty songs about it.

[All laugh]

TIM: Like we were talking about, I have Jiu-jitsu and cycling, and they’re really good outlets for dealing with mental health issues or dealing with just not being able to get out of your head.

RAVI: I spend time with my niece and nephew—that forces me to be present and put everything else to the side because. Like, you can’t be zoned out thinking about work or anything like that.

What else do you do outside of music?

RAVI: I go to see a lot of gigs; a lot of our friends play in bands. Some friends of ours have recently set up a bit of a record store in Sydney, so I’ve been helping them out with getting stock. Shout out to Prop Records in Ashfield. Aside from that, I babysit my niece and nephew at least once a week. Today, I went to visit my mum—just the usual family stuff.

TIM: Really just Jiu-jitsu and cycling, and work a lot. I’ve got a pretty big yard, so I have to garden a bit. That’s about it. I try and keep it simple. Sometimes I can let hobbies spiral [laughs].

RAVI: For a while, Tim and I were playing online chess against each other constantly, all day.

[Both laugh]

TIM: I like letting new hobbies in because I love to dig through information. I have to edit down and be tight. I also played Dungeons & Dragons, with some friends.

Find OSBO’s EP HERE on Blow Blood Records. Find the demo at OSBO’s bandcamp.

Lost Animal: ‘I don’t want to sound like anything else.’

10th Sep 202410th Sep 2024 | gimmiezine

Photo: Jhonny Russell / handmade collage by B

To us here at Gimmie HQ, Jarrod Quarrell, creator of Lost Animal, is one of the most underrated songwriters in Australia and one of our all-time favourites. He creates poetic expressions. His work is very interesting in a highly original way and richly emotional. The songs reveal themselves more over many listens and always feel fresh. His powerful, beautiful, transformative, and unforgettable songs possess the vast depth of the human spirit. Last time we were in Naarm/Melbourne, we met Jarrod in Fitzroy Gardens, a historic park lined with elms and autumn leaves, to chat about life, feeling good, and the music he’s working on in his own time.

It meant a lot to have this chat—enjoy!

Thanks so much for meeting us today! We’ve been having such a nice time in Naarm/Melbourne. It’s always such a pleasure to come down here for Jerksfest out in Djilang/Geelong, Billy does such a wonderful job. It’s nice to explore the city too. We went to a shop that sold all these old movie day bills. We got this awesome Breakin’ one!

LOST ANIMAL: Breakin’ was one of my favourite movies as a kid. I was in a breakdance gang in Papua New Guinea called, The Rap City Connection.

That’s awesome. Do you reckon you could still do it.

LA: I’m sure I could do a dolphin dive or something. Might hurt myself, though [laughs].

I’ve always loved breakdancing too, but I was so bad at it!

LA: Well, yeah, I was the worst in the game. They were all legit dudes in Papua New Guinea. They had afros, were good dancers, and did helicopters and headspins. I couldn’t do all that.

How’s life been lately? It seems like you’re in a really good place.

LA: Life’s really good. I’m making a new record, so that’s probably got a lot to do with it. Always happy when I’m making tunes. I’m very well. Thanks for asking.

I remember you saying once that, ‘Music on records I make, are a fuck you to the bad things in my life.’

LA: Yeah, I guess. The new music feels like I’ve transcended all that shit and I’ve finally got to a good place, where I can just be good and make tunes.

I was talking about it to a friend recently. Those were dark times for me—those two records, Ex Tropical (2011) and You Yang (2016), were hard to make. It was my spirit trying to get out, trying to shine through when I wasn’t well, trying to overcome all the shit that gets you down.

The music you created before Lost Animal was darker as well?

LA: The lyrics are a bit dark. I always wanted Lost Animal music to not be dark; I wanted that to be up.

When I listen to a lot of your songs, even though they are dark lyrically, the music is uplifting.

LA: Yeah. You can dance to it. Lyrically, it’s hard to write songs about feeling well, I’ve found, without sounding like an idiot [laughs]. I’m rewriting lyrics a lot on this record. Like, I write them and think, yeah, that’s it. Then I’ll go to record and think, is it because it’s cheesy? Or not because it’s cheesy—just because I want to nail it. I really want to get it right. I’m more engaged. I am happy making the effort, happy just doing it.

What are the things that have helped you be more engaged?

LA: Therapy. Psychedelics. Music.

Jerk Fest last year was probably the impetus for it all. When Billy asked me to play, my instinct was to say ‘yes,’ but I kind of didn’t want to do it. Even up until the day, I didn’t want to go. But then I had a great time and really enjoyed playing. It dawned on me how lucky I was to be able to do it, and how fortunate I was to be asked to play good shows like that, six years after putting out my last record. It hit me. Then, around that time, I started feeling better. I found a good therapist after searching for one and going through a few bad ones. That gradually led to writing the right tunes.

I started a side project with a friend, Stuart from Primitive Calculators. That really helped with the playing. I was always just a songwriter—I wrote, and I was a front guy. So it was really good to just play. All those things combined put me in a better place.

Jerk Fest is a pretty special event. It’s such a great opportunity to see so many bands play, and catch-up with people.

LA: Yeah, that was part of it—nice people saying nice things.

We were so stoked to see you play! You mentioned being asked to play shows six years after you put out your last record, those albums are timeless. You could listen to them today, and they still sound so fresh. I don’t know anything else that sounds like that.

LA: That’s cool. I’ll take that [laughs].

We love that there’s so many different elements from all over the place. I know you’ve got a punk rock background and like you were saying there’s a love of hip-hop, and then there’s rock and electronic elements.

LA: That’s where the new record is. It’s kind of along those lines but maybe a little less electronic. Lost Animal, to me, has been beats and piano chords, songs built like that. Now it’s just become a bit more jamming in one key and building songs around grooves and little riffs rather than me writing songs. Then they turn into songs. It could go any number of ways. I was trying to make it go that keyboard chord way, and it really wasn’t working.

We had two songs we were working on that I thought were shit. Then I wrote one that was good, and four months later we had the whole record. You Yang was mostly written in the studio. I had a handful of songs I’d written. So for this record, I was like, I’m never going to do that again. Because it’s expensive, taxing, and stressful, but I really like doing it—almost writing songs to tape.

Before, I’d always done demos to write. With this new record, I got to a point where I’d written a song and recorded it, and then we had nothing else to do, so we wrote two songs in a day, Dan Luscombe and I, who I’m making the record with. It’s been written in the room together. I’m usually the impetus, and he’s the finesse guy, making me redo things or asking, ‘How about you try it this way?’

Are you ever surprised at how he finesses things?

LA: I’m surprised at everything. I try to say ‘yes’ to everything he suggests and just try it. If I don’t like it, I’ll tell him later. But I don’t think it’s come to that. I’m less controlling now. There’s co-writes with him; I’ve never done that before. Maybe once with Shags [Chamberlain].

So you’ve been more controlling?

LA: Yeah, way more. Now, I feel like the less I try to control things, the better things are. And if you’ve got a talented person in the room that wants to do something cool, you should probably shut your mouth and let them do it.

He’s the man. He finessed the fuck out of Amyl and the Sniffers for their latest album.

LA: Was it a big change?

Yeah. He really brought their sound together. Comfort To Me is miles ahead of their other releases. Sonically it sounds really big. It’s so cool seeing them progress as songwriters too.

LA: Dan’s got really good taste. He can play anything. He’s got that classic songwriting sensibility, but is open to stuff. He’s played with everybody.

I remember a post you made on Instagram a while back and at the time you mentioned you were exploring Middle Eastern scales.

LA: Yeah, because I never learnt how to play.

You’re self-taught?

LA: Yeah. When I started this thing with Stuart, because it’s a guitar duo, I thought, ‘I better brush up on my guitar playing.’ I loosely learned different scales from around the world, but mostly I stuck to the blues minor pentatonic. Most of the new record is in the blues minor pentatonic, which is the first thing everybody learns.

I’ve kind of grown up on some basics, and that was enough because I’ve been playing for so long. My playing feels pretty good. Even if you’re not trying to learn, if you play music for 30 years, you’re going to learn.

How many songs do you have?

LA: Right now, we have 10. So we’ve got an album on tape. They’re not all finished, but they’re all pretty much structured up and I’m writing the lyrics.

Do you usually write lyrics afterwards?

LA: Yeah. If I demo something, often there’ll be a phonetic vocal line, so sounds or sometimes, whole lines will jump out. But I often don’t finish writing the lyrics until all the songs are done and it’s time to put the vocal on. Sometimes a whole vocal will just fall out with the song. But generally I’ll wait till the end because it can change. And there’s always a better fucking line.

Is there any lines that you’ve written at the moment that you really love?

LA: Yeah. Some say that life’s a game, it’s just a setting. Some but life’s a bowl of berries, so come get some. I wrote a really trad soul ballad, ‘The Sun Cleared the Rain’ which I’m really proud of.

Was there anything in particular that inspired that one?

LA: I was just writing a song. I was sitting playing keyboard. It was one of those things where I’ll mumble it a line, and it just all fell out of my mouth. I was listening back to it. Sometimes that happens, but it’s really rare. It kind of feels like channelling. You’re not really thinking about it too much. Trying not to think about it. I try to not direct it and not control it. I try to let it come and to recognise what it is and let it become that.

You’re really great at writing narratives.

Narratives? Really? I don’t feel like I write that, really. I feel like I’m a surrealist. It’s just feelings. But sometimes they do turn into stories. ‘Lose The Baby’ is a little bit like that, I guess. But ‘The Sun Cleared the Rain’—that’s kind of just telling. That’s a narrative. There you go. It’s about when you need something and something comes along into your life, but it’s not necessarily great for you. It’s quite relatable for everyone, I think. Very universal.

What else are you writing?

LA: There’s a song called ‘On A Bird Now,’ which is about transcendence—about turning into a bird. I wrote it when I got back from Indonesia. I was trying to write proper haikus: five, seven, five syllables, which is fun. And that led to that song. We just pressed record. It was a weird way to record a song. That’s fine. It’s just about being in the now, transcendent. Maybe a bit psychedelic. Maybe a bit witchy.

I noticed in a story on Instagram you posted a photo of a book on the occult.

LA: I am reading those books, yeah. I’m just a curious guy. I like to read. It’s too early for me to talk about that stuff. I’m learning. But it’s definitely not what people think it is. It’s an occult universe, for sure. There’s more out there that people don’t get.

Totally. So many unseen things!

LA: Yeah. I guess that’s what the record is about.

You mentioned Indonesia, I know travelling there recently inspired you. You said you cured your insomnia while there.

LA: I don’t know what it was. Maybe the weather; it was the wet season, balmy, raining. Maybe it was because we were busy doing a lot, and I wasn’t concerned about shit. I was with my godson and my best friend, so I was chill. I was fucking glad though, man, because when we left, I was literally sleeping two hours a night. It’s fucking horrible. At home you’ve got your routine, your comforts when you wake up in the middle of the night, you don’t have that shit when you’re away. So that was a challenge. Gradually, like a week into the trip, I started sleeping better. By the end of it, I was sleeping 8 hours a night.

How did that feel?

LA: It felt amazing. I cried with happiness, a few times, on that trip because I was just so relieved to be out of the country and to be sleeping. I used to live in New Guinea, and the smells are the same, the weather felt the same, it brought a lot of things back. It was very emotional. Also lots of fun.

Was there anything in Indonesia that you saw that was really cool?

LA: I saw the fucking devotion. Because there’s Hinduism, there’s Buddhism, there’s Christianity, there’s Islam. Hinduism especially seems really just present. They put out offerings every day. Light a candle. They’re more present. It’s so chaotic. But the chaos kind of works. I thrive in chaotic places.

I felt I got mega-stressed when I got off the plane back here. It was a culture shock. It was just like, oh, fuck, this again. Back to all that shit. I was cool, though. Went back in the studio, wrote two songs, wrote two songs a week after that.

You asked me what I liked about Indonesia? Probably the sense of connection. It just seems so fucking ancient, too.

Is there any other places you feel really connected to?

LA: I feel kind of connected to Castlemaine, because I was born there, and conceived there. But no, not really.

You mentioned that a lot of your album and just in general, your life lately, has been about being present. When did you first start noticing that?

LA: Therapy. She helps sort me out.

A good therapist makes all the difference. I’ve been through some terrible ones.

LA: Yeah, well, the first ones I went to were. She spoke to me for half an hour and then prescribed me something which made me feel awful.

This lady I’m seeing now is a psychologist, so it’s just talk therapy. A little bit reiki as well. So feels me out. Sometimes if we get stuck, she does tarot. In a nutshell she was like, ‘You’re awesome. Just be awesome.’ And I was like, ,What? I’m so fucked up. What are you talking about?’ It took me months to get on that.

I guess the therapist could see beyond all the stuff you’re hung up on to see that real you, which IS awesome!

LA: As soon as I walked in the door, she could see what I was, and what I’d forgotten, or it was a flickering flame, and she put that in me back there.

That’s so great! Do you have any thoughts on what your album you’re working on might be called?

LA: Yeah. A Dragon Ascending Toward Heaven.

Where inspired that?

LA: A friend did my my birth chart when I was 21, and he was like, ‘That’s what you are. You’re a dragon ascending toward heaven.’ I was like, ‘Okay!’ [laughs].

I was going to call it I’m a Bird Now. But we were recording the song and Dan’s like, ‘There’s an album called, I’m a Bird Now.’ Luckily, I’d already thought of the other title, and decided to call it that.

I think that one’s seems really fitting. That’s exciting! I’ve got goosebumps as soon as I heard it.

LA: [Laughs]. It suits it.

Have you thought about cover art yet? I know you paint, have you thought of painting it yourself?

LA: I won’t paint it. I haven’t been painting much. I tend to do other things like that if I’m not writing to try and have an outlet. I’m not sure what it will be yet. The last albums have been a side profile shot, maybe it could be a side profile shot of an animal or a bird. I did some photos with a friend, and one was double exposed, that looks really good.

Have you tried anything different on this album?

LA: I’m playing a lot more guitar. I’ve be singing a bit more rather than just sort of the talk singing I do.

Is singing something you’ve always done since you were little?

LA: Yeah, I always wanted to be a singer. Always wanted to be a front man.

Who was the first performer to inspire you?

LA: Michael Jackson. No one’s done it like Michael Jackson has done it. Maybe Prince too.

The first people that made me think I want to do that more, was maybe Bob Dylan, and songwriters like that. Dylan is a big fav. If I could write songs like he’s writing when he’s fucking 85 or whatever he is, that’d be cool. I just don’t want to sound like that, though. I don’t want to sound like anything else.

That’s the best thing anyone can do—not be a replica of something that already exists. That’s the highest achievement you can get.

LA: I think so. People ask me, ‘What kind of music do you make?’ I just say—good. I refuse to describe it. I can’t describe it. That’s all a little bit stupid.

Most reviews these days should just be called ‘comparisons’ because that’s all they do. But they’re really bad with the comparisons. I find that a lot of people who write about music don’t have many reference points; they have a real limited knowledge and just compare it to something popular, even though it doesn’t sound anything like it.

LA: Oh, man. You shouldn’t seen some of the comparisons we got in America. One said we were a cross between Pearl Jam and Gorillaz. I mean, yeah, there’s a little bit of dubby stuff and melodicas and stuff. It’s like, ‘Okay, your record collection is big Billboard Top 20 stuff, right.’ I used to get really annoyed at all that. I’ve just let it all go.

I used to go see a psychic, and I’ll always remember a piece of advice she gave me: what other people say about you is none of your business.

LA: Very true. Yeah. My therapist really helped me with that.

You don’t want to take on that energy they’re putting out there. It really has no effect on you unless you let it.

LA: Yeah, totally.

Or people will say something to you and they haven’t even really thought about it much, but then you take it to heart and it’s a big deal for you and upsets you, but it doesn’t do a thing bad from them.

LA: Yeah. And perception is a funny thing too. A lot of times someone has been a bit standoffish and I thought, they haven’t liked me. But it’s come to pass that they’re just a bit shy and actually admire me. Sometimes your perception is off of what people think.

Some people definitely mean it, though [laughter]. I always take people on a case by case basis because sometimes you can hear things about people, but then whatever your interaction is with them could be different.

LA: Yeah, it’s a good way to be.

In front of us is, over there, is a fairy tree apparently and it was created as a place that is sacred and safe and it’s a place for kids to imagine and dream. I was wondering, do you have a place like that?

LA: Yeah.

Where’s your fairy tree?

LA: In my mind, my consciousness is my fairy tree.

Do you meditate?

LA: Yeah, I meditate. I’m reading a book on Astral travel, which is basically a form of meditation.

I’ve meditated on and off for about 20 years. I find it really useful, especially for my mental health.

LA: I did a short course on Transcendental Meditation. They gave me a mantra.

I’ve always wanted to try that.

LA: Just make up your own.

Really?

LA: It’s like, we know what to do. Just make up your own mantra, really. That’s all it is. I changed mine because I didn’t like it. It didn’t feel right. I was like, well, fuck that, I’m just going to change it.

And then it felt right?

LA: Perfect. Yeah.

That’s very punk rock! [laughter]

LA: [Laughs] Well, meditation is pretty punk rock, I guess.

Has it helped with being present?

LA: Yeah. Or maybe not. No, it definitely does. I’ve been thinking about meditation. People think you’ve got to quiet the mind. That’s not it. It’s like getting away from your mind—like, consciousness is here, it’s not in there. It has to be nothing. I feel like that’s what I’ve seen. Consciousness feels like that. And I feel like I’ve got consciousness on multiple levels. My instinct feels like it’s here. My intuition is in my solar plexus. Sometimes I can feel things going on behind me, in my back. I’m just starting to become aware of things that maybe I had little inclinations towards and maybe ignored. I’ve looked at these things in the past but never stuck to them, never really put them into practice in any kind of way. I’m becoming a bit more disciplined about it, being more disciplined about my mental health and doing what it takes to protect it. If I’m tired, I rest. If I’m stressed, I don’t go to those places that stress me out. Hard-earned lessons. Same mistakes made over and over again.

A lot of stuff in Buddhism and different spiritual texts, say that you’re just going to keep learning a lesson over and over and over until you get it.

LA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.

And then if you get it—you level up.

LA: Yeah, I think so.

It’s so good to see you healthy and it’s such a good place and making music. Like, you mentioned to us before that you were thinking, you have this opportunity, you’re still here to make music, you can do this!

LA: Yeah. I realise that’s a great thing about music. It’s not like we’re the people that are going to come up with the thing that’s going to save the planet, but it might be the people that write the song that inspires the person that saves the planet, and that’s enough. Just play your part and do it the best you can.

I love that when we make a song it can inspire and go places that we may never go, and affect people in ways we’ll never know.

LA: Yeah. I get people write to me all the time, from Europe and America. Or they’ve heard, Tropical Fuck Storm do my song [‘Lose the Baby’] and they reach out to me. So, yeah, it’s beautiful.

How did you feel when they did your song? How did it come about?

LA:They told me they were playing it. Dan was still in The Drones; they’d done a side project thing and played the song a few times, so I knew that. Then Gareth wrote to me and said, ‘Look, we’ve been playing the song, and we want to put it on a 7”.’ I played it with him a couple of times. It was cool.

I was in a band called St. Helens. Towards the end of St. Helens, I’d started Lost Animal and had written ‘Say No To Thugs,’ ‘Lose The Baby,’ and a bunch of the songs on Ex Tropical. I thought, oh, maybe I should give them to St. Helens. So I tried them in St. Helens. The St. Helens version of ‘Lose The Baby’ isn’t too far off from the TFS version. It’s a long version. To me, the TFS version just sounded like the St. Helens version, but they wouldn’t have heard that. Gareth is a great songwriter, and he wanted to do my song—that’s cool.

Both you and Gareth are my all-time favourite Australian songwriters.

LA: Oh, really?

Yeah, for real!

LA: I’m playing on a song of Gareth’s next week. He’s reissuing his solo album, he’s re-recording a song.

Awesome! I know you grew up in the bush, like country Victoria, and Papua New Guinea, and you lived in Geelong.

LA: Yeah. Castlemaine too. Some other places, and then I moved to Melbourne when I was 21.

Why Naarm/Melbourne?

LA: When I was a teenager, Geelong was awesome. Heaps of fucking great bands three to four nights a week.

What bands did you see?

LA: Bored!, Magic Dirt. There was Warped and She Freak, they were Geelong bands. There’d be bands that tour, like, Meanies, and Hard-ons. And then international bands. Especially back in the 90s, like Shellac and Fugazi. They’re probably the best live band I’ve ever seen, as far as energy goes.

We love those bands. I saw Fugazi when I was younger and they were incredible. When you play, is there a kind of, like, energy that you try to bring? When we saw you play at Jerk Fest, you brought a really cool vibe to the room.

LA: I just try to be open. I try to give as much of myself as I can and not hold back.

When you first started doing Lost Animal, that was the first time you were playing with a backing track, and I understand that was challenging in the beginning?

LA: Yeah. I used to shake.

Really? Wow.

LA: Yeah. But that’s what I wanted to do, so I just made myself do it.

It’s good to put yourself in situations that scare you sometimes, I feel like we really grow in moments like that. What are the things that are making you happy right now?

LA: I’m happy knowing I don’t feel like it’s a struggle anymore. I feel like I could sit down and write a song anytime I want to. I just hope I keep feeling like that. It feels like after this record, the next one will be ready in a year and a half. I’d be very surprised if there weren’t four records in the next five years. That’s how I feel. We’ll see.

I hope your creativity keeps flowing. We’re so here for as many Lost Animal records as you’ve got!

LA: Let’s hope! I feel good, which is nice.

Follow @lostanimal_. Listen to/Buy Ex Tropical HERE. Listen to/Buy You Yang HERE.

Punter’s Nathan Burns: ‘We have to fight for change.’

9th Sep 2024 | gimmiezine

Original photo: Jhonny Russell / handmade collage by B.

Naarm/Melbourne-based anarchist punk band Punter exploded onto the scene in early 2020 with a scorching demo, released on cassette by hometown label Blow Blood Records. Fronted by vocalist-guitarist Nathan Burns, Punter’s music challenges societal norms, with thought-provoking lyrics. Their 2023 self-titled debut full-length quickly became a staple on the Gimmie turntable, offering an eclectic mix of songs that delve into anxiety, fear, death, grief, boredom, and class politics. We caught up with Nathan just before he left Australia to tour Europe with Punter and travel indefinitely. He’s since explored Greece, the underground catacombs of France, and Spain, with his latest stop being the UK.

NATHAN BURNS: It’s been nonstop since Punter got back from tour with Rat Cage because we’re going on tour in Europe in three days. The space in between two tours is about a month and a half. Two weeks of that are taken up by me, realigning myself and working out who I am again, and adjusting to the fact that I have a lot of shit to do, but it can all happen on my own schedule.

Prior to that, I’ve been working a lot, for about six months, and doing band stuff all day, every day after work. I’ve been floating in a kind of timeless continuum in a way, but it’s full of deadlines in another way. I’m wrapping up my life here as well—moving out of my house and getting rid of my shit. I sold my car. I’m going travelling indefinitely after the tour. So it’s a lot at once, changing stuff.

I read a list recently about stressful events humans go through and death of a loved one, losing a job, and moving house or country, were all up near the top of it. So much is happening for you right now.

No one in my family or immediate friendship group has died recently, but you’re on the periphery and it’s always going to be constant once you get to my age, 30. It’s funny, these nexuses where everything happens at once. All that energy.

It’s exciting you’ll be travelling indefinitely. Not a lot of people get to do that. Do you know where you might end up or are you just going to wing it?

I’ll be lurking about in Europe. There’s options for me to get a visa until I’m 36, in France and Denmark. They’ve raised the age in those countries for Australians. In Switzerland, you can maybe get a permit to stay as an Australian now. It’s easier than before. I quite like Spain and connected with a few people there. I haven’t sorted out visas or anything yet. It’s all been too manic with the tour stuff, band shit and recording.

Have you been to Europe before?

Yeah, my old band, Scab Eater toured there and I lived there, the cycle is repeating now. I lived in the UK after the Scab Eater tour in 2016 for about a year and hung about there and did little trips to the mainland, to the continent and back. The band had fallen apart over there and I came back here and started Punter. I’m ready to not be in Melbourne anymore.

Why did Scab Eater fall apart?

We did two months of touring; it was stressful for certain members, to be honest with you. I felt like I was living the dream, but there was definitely struggling to cope with two months and 50 shows. We tried to tee up some other gigs in the summer, a year later from there, but by that point, a lot of people’s plans had changed, and we bailed on those gigs, which was pretty embarrassing, as far as I’m concerned. It had gotten pretty dysfunctional as a group. It can be really stressful when people are out on the road; you’re in such close quarters, and you’re basically living with each other the whole time. It can be really stressful for them. We pushed it further and further and further until we found out where our limit was.

Did that experience affect how you do things now with Punter?

Kind of. The personalities are slightly different with us. It’s a bit different playing in a three-piece. Jake, who played drums in Scab Eater, is also the drummer of Punter. In that way, we have that dynamic still as old friends. Then there’s just one other person, Bella, the bass player.

Scab Eater was a big rowdy boys club, and we’d fight like brothers, argue and be really stupid little boys together. You bounce off each other. With Punter, things are more chill; there’s less huge personality stuff and egos bashing their heads against each other. There’s probably more drinking and a bit less adventure as a group.

And I’m certain that although we are about to go on tour for a month in Europe, I don’t think two months on the road would ever be on the cards for this band like it was for Scab Eater. Everyone were travellers in that band, either on the dole or people were on their big holiday to Australia from the States. There was a lot of transients with that band. The other members of Punter are pretty settled in Melbourne for the time being.

What do you enjoy about travel? The adventure?

Absolutely. That’s what I’m in it for. I always want to improve myself through it somehow. It’s very easy to walk around sticking your beak into other societies and going, ‘Oh, that’s pretty, isn’t it? Oh, you’re pretty poor, aren’t you?’ Or how does that feel? And then you kind of get disillusioned. But the aim of long-term travel is to seek experiences that improve you as a person or connect you with other people you can learn from or offer what you have—skills, wisdom, or experience in an area—to whoever you meet along the way.

I enjoy that about travel too. You can actually see how other people live their lives firsthand. Lots of places in the world are very different to Australia.

Yeah. There’s a fair bit of phobia that sort of infected Melbourne society, particularly in the last few years. In the punk scene, I’ve noticed a distinct lack of traveling punks or whoever coming through and being put up by people here.

When I was a teenager, let’s say like 14 years ago, I was hanging out at a big punk house, and there’d be six Europeans that had come through for the first half of summer and then another six had come through the other half, and they’d all crash on the floor or the couch. Everyone was constantly meeting people from different parts of the world. That exchange felt really vital to me because it showed us, our little squat in the suburbs, that if we ever went overseas, there was this whole network of people that we could connect with, and that gave us mobility for travel in the other side of the world.

Hearing people’s stories was inspiring. Learning about the ways in which we differ because of where we come from was also really important. I don’t see as much of it anymore. It’s very easy to feel daunted by the experience because it’s almost like that culture is really not in my sphere anymore and certainly not really in the punk culture that I’m a part of here right now.

Is there anything that you like like about European culture that’s different from here?

It’s hard to say without coming off slightly insensitive because there are so many little cultures. Broadly, I guess what interests me with Europe is a twofold thing that’s sociopolitical. In that, it’s not colonised land in the way that we think of it being colonised land here in Australia. It’s also a place that has experienced vast amounts of political turmoil and change in the time in which Australia has been a British colony.

So, the average person there, between them and their parents, in certain countries, may have experienced really radical political change from regime to regime, to democracy, to fascism, or whatever you’ve got, within 60 years or something. They really have an ingrained understanding that politics matters. It affects your life, and it affects everyone, and that there are certain things worth fighting for.

I don’t think it’s as easy for Australians as a whole to feel passionate about political change because we’ve pretty much never seen one since the British came. There’s definitely things that we benefit from as workers or whatever, like the union movement from the 50s through the 80s, that now has resulted in quite high wages for certain parts of working-class society. There’s this narrative there. There’s the Eureka stockade. There’s all this stuff, but the system has remained the same, and its goals have remained the same. The exploitation of the country and the society that has resulted from that have remained the same. It’s very hard for us to imagine something being different, and there’s a lack of imagination there.

To go on a little bit, the struggle against capitalism or the state or whoever it is at the time that the people have essentially mobilised against in a popular movement, like right now, it’s in France. It’s [Emmanuel] Macron because he’s raised the retirement age. Those struggles are uncomplicated by this extra element we have here, where the European descent people or other migrant families that have come since, we have to fight for our rights as working-class citizens, or let’s say, working to middle-class citizens, anyone who’s not part of the elite. We have to fight for change.

But we also have to keep in mind that it’s not our country and that there’s this underneath that struggle, that shit’s the tip of the iceberg. That decolonisation is this huge other part of it that we have to learn to unpick as people who aren’t First Nations people. We have to work all that out and work out how that relates to our goals. A lot of our goals, let’s just say, like white activists or whoever, might have more of a relationship to things that we actually don’t like about colonisation than we admit.

And that’s saying we want the political change that we see in Europe. We want the radical political, we want their type of socialism or anarchism or socialist democracy. But to want that stuff here could be, at points, in direct opposition to what decolonisation actually means for First Nations people in Australia. In Europe, it’s likely that the movement is always going to be a bit more straightforward, and we’ve got a lot more to try and work through and learn here.

As a First Nations person, I know that many of us have immense intergenerational trauma that filters through everything, in ways that you wouldn’t even think it does.

My grandfather lived in a time where after 4 PM and on Sundays, Aboriginal people were forced to vacate the town centre beyond the boundary posts; this wasn’t even that long ago really. The society that he lived in made it seem shameful to be Aboriginal. A lot has changed but it’s such a complex and hard thing trying to navigate and process—to just exist. Being a First Nations person, just existing can be a political act. Everything you do is so often looked at and scrutinised.

It must be hard knowing that that’s the stage where it’s at, because that’s a long road from simply just existing.

It can be. Every time I walk out the door, I have so much to think about and protect myself from.

What was your first introduction to punk?

Superficially, my first introduction to punk would have been borrowing a Good Charlotte CD from the library when I was about 11. The lady at the library was like, ‘Oh, that’s that punk rock band, isn’t it?’ I was like, ‘I guess, maybe it is.’

Then I wound up in Borders Books one time. They had CDs and CD players on the wall that you could sample your CD with the little scanner and play what was on there. I found all these CDs, like the Punk-o-Rama compilations and Rock Against Bush CDs. I was pretty into all that pop-punk and ’90s skate-punk stuff. Through those compilations, I was exposed to a great variety of things that were happening in the mainstream. There was stuff on there, like Madball, which for 15 years, ever since, I’ve been like, ‘This just keeps getting better the more I listen to it.’

I liked all that kind of stuff until I was about 16 and wound up going to shows, finding out about gigs through meeting people around the neighbourhood. I grew up in Brunswick, which through the 2000s was the place where you went and lived if you were a punk on the dole because it was cheap. You could afford to live there. Back then, it was a rundown, working-class neighbourhood, and there were heaps of abandoned buildings everywhere, so everyone was squatting. There were lots of parties happening all the time in them.

I went to school across the road from a block of squatted warehouses; they were all artist warehouses that weren’t all even necessarily punk. There were unicycle-riding, circus-hippie types and all that kind of stuff. You’d run into people, and that sort of autonomous, anarcho-punk culture was right there. Anything else like hardcore or metal was all happening between Brunswick and the city too. I was very lucky geographically. It was a really exciting time.

At some point, I realised when I was 18, ‘Oh, shit, I think this is actually better than most places. We’re kicking ass over here in Melbourne.’ It’s not the same anymore; it’s more expensive to live there.

How did you learn to play guitar?

I had the benefit of guitar lessons through school when I was about eight. Like your foot on the stand and reading the music off the page. That kept going until I was like 12 and I was starting to try and learn a bit of flamenco. About then was when the punk started happening and my folks got me like an electric guitar. I started to learn how to play power chords.

I had a band, some friends at school that we knocked about with when I was about 14. Classical guitar lessons was really important to the way I play now. I learned to be nimble and expressive through that.

I can see that, you have a unique style of playing.

I don’t really know scales and keys very well, standard nuts and bolts. In the last four years I started playing leads. I stopped really being concerned with music theory. As a player, I was in a state of arrested development that I’m only really just emerging from now. It’s this kind of awkward, clunky stage where I think a lot of original sounding things happen by accident.

Are there any songwriters that are inspirational to you?

As a child, I was totally into The Living End. The sort of songwriting conventions that Chris Cheney has, crept into my songwriting decisions. There’s a lot of changes from minor bar chords to major ones.

Also, AC/DC and The Clash. When I was about 18, I was obsessed with Tom Waits. Hard to say how much of that ended up in my music, but I spent, endless hours with Tom Waits records.

King Crimson was another. They have an attitude towards creating music in a progressive and original way. Although to compare oneself to the King Crimson is pretty presumptuous. More recently, I became obsessed with The Jam and Paul Weller, his lyrics were observational and depicted scenes as he saw them in a way that said so much about who he was as a person without having to delve into his own personal feelings in an explicit way.

I was attracted to that in Sleaford Mods as well. It’s so accessible and witty. I remember when I was with them a lot around 2015 or 2016, those guys have this way of making everything sound like actual conversation. I’ve strived to replicate that a little bit because I’m good in conversations and not as good as a poet. I try and make the lyrics of a song more like having a conversation with me. I get across what I’m trying to express uninhibited.

Do you think your involvement with punk, helped shape a lot of your political views or how you see the world?

It’s a chicken and egg situation. Yes, it did. Unequivocally, it did. But I was raised in a pretty political family, a decently educated, lefty, middle-class family in Brunswick, so that shit was all around, it was constant. John Howard here’s this guy, he’s on the newspaper, he runs the country, he’s a prick. Every day swearing at the newspaper, this guy’s a prick and he’s in charge. So when you get raised in that kind of environment, I was raised into anti-authoritarianism.

My grandmother on my dad’s side was a Labor politician under government. They were, as a Canberra family, academics and so forth. My dad went on to work as a solicitor in Native Title. So that was obviously something he’d come home and talk about all the time. For what it’s worth, he got terribly jaded by it, which I’ve heard happens to almost every Native Title lawyer. For those that might be reading this, that are new to the concept of Native Title, it’s the attempt by the Victorian or State Government or whoever to resolve disputes between different mobs who claim traditional ownership of the land. The state attempts to mediate between the different groups that lay claim. It’s vastly complicated, obviously, by The Stolen Generations and genocide and who can actually trace their lineage back during all the chaos of what had happened in that time.

And then on top of that, you’re trying to apply the white man’s legal system to this other culture that has their own way of doing things. And since you’ve come in and fucked it up and now you’re going to use your legal system to try and stop them from tearing each other apart over the land that you’re, oh so graciously, giving them back. My dad did that for a bit because he wanted to feel like he was doing a good thing while putting food on the table. He would have tried his darnedest. It sounds really, really hard to me.

The politics in punk appealed to me as a kid because there was already conversations happening in my house all the time. On the other hand, my dad worked for the institutions of government, so I could be a bit like miffed about that if I wanted to on the odd day.

The more I listened to punk music, the more political bands always stuck out to me. Growing up around the sort of autonomous DIY and anarcho-punk stuff informed me on so many things that my parents wouldn’t have really held as their own political beliefs as well.

I noticed in the liner notes for your self-titled album, you mentioned that Punter are Anarchists. What does that mean or what does that look like for you?

Anarchism – there are different sorts of strains of it and different beliefs that people choose to express through that word. But the most pragmatic way to look at it for me is to try and establish a society which is not based upon structural violence or institutions whose sole purpose is to punish or inflict violence on other people.

So the idea is that everything that we’ve created as a society, let’s say, Western society, over the thousands of years, is built to rest on these pillars of enforcement, where the principles of the society must be enforced. That the only way to make things fair and just is to punish the few people that disobey. Institutions that have violence at their core are unnecessary.

From there, you could hope to build a somewhat utopian civilisation whereby people didn’t need to be punished and where bad things probably still happen, but maybe in much less frequent amounts.

In your liner notes you were also talking about, the trauma and the collective trauma, we experienced through the pandemic and lockdowns. Melbourne had the longest, most harshest lockdown out of every everywhere in the world—you mentioned you felt like it changed people’s brains. What were the changes you saw in yourself?

I feel regularly more afraid—not just of the future and what’s going to happen broadly in a political sense or anything like that, but just afraid of taking risks on a day-to-day level. I feel more withdrawn into myself. I feel like the instances where I speak my mind in a confrontational way, maybe where I tell someone what I really think, even though it’s going to be hard to say, have diminished greatly. It’s hard for me to imagine change in my life or the lives of the people around me. You know that thing they say about depression – it’s impossible to envisage happiness or the change that’s going to, step by step, bring you out of that. It seems all-encompassing.

I feel like everyone went through that a little bit. There’s like a fog beyond the city limits here. And because Melbourne’s been such a self-absorbed cultural town anyway for so long, we’ve been up our own ass for ages. Then we got forced into the isolationism of Melbourne and I suppose a lot of people probably just went, well, yeah, that’s alright. What do we need the rest of the country for? Bogans. Whatever.

Do you kind of get tired and overwhelmed by all the shit that’s happening in the world?

Currently that’s the case.

How do you deal with this feelings?

Just try and launch myself into it. That’s what I’m hoping to do when I hit the road after the band does our tour.

Because you’re taking risks? It’s a risk not knowing what will happen or where you’ll go. You’re running headfirst into all these things that you’re afraid of or scared of, and going to do it. That’s a big leap.

I hope so. Look, let’s be honest, there’s definitely been riskier things than an Australian citizen travelling in Europe and having a little holiday that he saved his money up for. But I’m hoping to engage in some risk taking behaviour whilst I’m over there. Hopefully it will make me a more fortified character when I do, because I know I need to break myself out of the rut that I feel I’m in and that I feel like a lot of people that we know down here are in.

European societies, whilst being superficially similar to the Australian society here, it’s different, it’s older, there’s far more people, there’s more poor people. The systems in place for people’s health care are different. A lot of people died during the pandemic and it just gave me a bit of a different perspective on that.

My mother was in a coma in the Royal Melbourne Hospital during the first outbreak of the pandemic. We weren’t allowed to go there for months at a time. She was coming out of it and she’d had a stroke.

I’m so sorry you had to go through that. It must have been brutal nor being able to see her because of COVID. That’s full on.

It was crazy. Obviously when someone in your family is sick or in a health crisis or in the fucking ICU, that’s this whole thing, it takes over your world. Then suddenly the pandemic happened out of nowhere on top of it. It was something that we obviously didn’t really see coming.

Before, you were talking about a fog and depression and not being able to see happiness sometimes; I was wondering, where do you find moments of happiness?

Being able to lose yourself a little bit can be the closest you get. Happiness is probably a bit of a misrepresented overused word. The place that people commonly find happiness is in the arms of their lover. That to me is closest to the definition of happiness. But there’s all these other forms of release that we have and music is a really obvious one that allows us to transcend the happy/sad dichotomy because there’s so much melancholy in happiness, don’t you reckon? Sometimes sad songs make you real happy. When they’re singing about heartbreak or death or grief, all these things like that. Whenever I feel quite happy, there’s always got to be a little bit of a blue note to it, otherwise it wouldn’t be legit.

Jamming is a big one for me. I don’t mean jams in rehearsing the songs from start to finish. Jamming when you’re actually improvising or writing a new song with everyone in the room contributing parts and it’s coming together and everything outside of that room does legitimately go away because you’re building in there.

I tried to take up surfing in the pandemic. I fell off a lot. I was raised boogie boarding, so maybe I had some kind of base layer of knowledge for what waves to take and things like that. Unfortunately, I busted my shoulder, six months into the whole thing. I couldn’t really touch it for another nine months. But floating around on the surfboard just made me feel grouse. It was nice being on the water. That made me really happy.

It makes me happy too. I find Punter songs to be mostly observational. Is there a particular song on your album that’s more personal?

They’re about broader things that we all experience. Look, when you say ‘personal,’ like something that I feel like I’ve really gone through just me… no, not really. I was trying to reach out into the pool of emotions out there amongst me and my peers and just the people of Melbourne. At that time, when we were stuck in Melbourne (where a lot of the lyrics came from), the closest it would get would be on our song ‘Curfew Eternal,’ is about grieving during a time of upheaval or change.

That’s when my mother was in a coma following a stroke or recovering from the stroke. It’s a bit of a blur. There were moments in which we didn’t know if she was going to survive or if she would want to survive, if that was available to her.

That song, whilst being set against the backdrop of the pandemic and lockdown, was really about these golden clichés – like embracing life and seizing the day – and trying to say that we’re heading into an era of increasing social instability. The powers that be are going to try and do whatever they can to make you feel like you cannot take risks. The greatest risk that you can take is to express solidarity with the other people in your community, and that as soon as you do that, you are giving up your only opportunities to make money and achieve security for yourself.

The song is desperately trying to push back against that concept and say that the only hope that we have is to constantly throw our lives into turmoil together to try and make it through and to push back against all authoritarianism. The really severe brand of authoritarianism that I feel is looming in the not too distant technocracy that’s coming quite soon.

I’ve always, like my parents were, been very anti-authoritarian too. Most people teach their kids that if something goes wrong, police are there to help you, well, my parents were always like, ‘Don’t trust cops.’

My parents eventually developed that position after I got arrested enough and they had to deal with them. But before that, it was very much like, oh, you know, the cops are all right, the Salvos are all right. They’re trying to do what they can.

What did you get arrested for?

Kid things; graffiti or drinking. There was a couple of instances where I was involved in direct action stuff that wound up in criminal damage cases and stuff. I was in court. But generally just getting picked up by the cops and my parents would get called up.

Around 2015, wasn’t Scab Eater in the news in connection to an ANZAC War Memorial being graffiti? How was that time for you?

I’ll start by saying my parents were not particularly phased after everything they’d already gone through up until that point. That time, I’ll be quite honest here and say that it was terribly exciting for me, having grown up as a punk rocker as a little boy, as a teenager, and getting into the really up-against-the-system kind of political punk stuff. Suddenly I was public enemy number one. I felt great…

It was a good opportunity for the scene to have an argument with itself because there were so many people who were way more offended than they should have been. Also, a lot of really reasonable people that got to pick it apart for what it was.

It was a thing that happened in response to the 100 Years Centenary of ANZAC, which at that time was everywhere. They spent more money somehow on the 100 Years Anniversary in terms of billboards and bus stop advertisements, like ramming this glorious soldier shit down your throat. At some point, there was going to be this sentiment expressed in one way or another. These ANZAC memorials get defaced every year; this just had the band name on it.

Regardless of your opinion on the Australian Government or the Allies, or what’s become of the world since World War II, or whether or not we should have been involved going into World War I and II, it was deeply unpopular with working-class people. It was divisive. It wasn’t this one-sided thing where the working class all went off to war and then people like me, 100 years later, shat on them for it.

ANZAC was invented to stir up patriotism and militaristic patriotism at that. There was a lot of debate about how much money should actually be spent on it—millions and millions every year. It’s this huge amount of money for people to glorify stuff that we shouldn’t have been doing. There’s a way to still grieve the exploited people that wound up being tricked into going to war and killing each other. Everyone should just listen to Discharge on that day [laughs].

How was your show last night?

It was killer. It was a mixed bill. Over 100 people through the door on on a mixed bill always feels like a success.

We love mixed bills!

They’re always so under-attended. This is the only reason that all bills are not mixed because people know that they’ll get a crowd with five things that are the same thing. It’s a commercial decision every time you see it. And that’s the kind of artistic landscape, the heavy-handed over regulation of live music creates, less mixed bills in the city of Melbourne. What the fuck is that?

Punter’s self-titled album is out via Drunken Sailor Records (EU) and Active Dero in (AUS/NZ) – GET it here. Punter have no socials.

Ancient Artifax: unearthed punk-rock artifacts from the 1970s and 1980s – NYC, Washington, DC, and Midwest scenes

6th Aug 20246th Aug 2024 | gimmiezine

Gimmie was really, really excited to talk with our good friend, Brian Gorsegner, about his new book, Ancient Artifax. It’s one of the essential punk-related releases of 2024. A hefty tome at 242 full-colour pages, it showcases rare and sometimes one-off 1970s and 1980s artifacts from his personal punk collection, lovingly curated over many, many years.

Commentary throughout, provided by those who have connections to the items and speak of their provenance, gives an insider’s snapshot of the New York City, Washington DC, and Midwest punk scenes. We learn all kinds of nerdy stories and trivia: why Roger Miret really joined Agnostic Front; who taught John Brannon from Negative Approach about creativity; which hardcore drummer has the neatest handwriting; which punk has kept every Christmas card they’ve ever received; what songs Ian MacKaye was putting on a mixtape for a friend in 1979; which 45 Brian offered Tesco Vee from Touch & Go $4,000 for on the spot to be left to him in Vee’s will; why Creem magazine blows; the contents of a letter to the Screamers from a punk-icon-to-be living in NYC in 1978; why Brian LOVES the Necros, and much, much more!

If you’re a true music nerd, especially a punk music nerd—you’ll love this chat. AND you should 100% buy, Ancient Artifax. It’s truly a cave of punk rock wonders on the page. Brian’s love for what he does is palpable and infectious.

How did the book get started? And, how have you been?

BRIAN: I shot what was supposed to be a TV show. We shot the pilot and then three more episodes. When I did the second one, I decided I didn’t want to play music anymore. While I was working on the show, I got brought in to work on that [Punk] museum project in Vegas. While that was happening, I started working on the book. Then the band [Night Birds] broke up. And the TV show went away, I stepped away from the museum too, and I finished the book. The book came out and sold out [if you missed out it now has a 2nd run – but don’t snooze].

Last night, I was like, ‘Oh, fuck. That’s it. Oh, no! What’s next?’ I don’t have my next thing figured out, planned or even even thought about like, I just have never gave myself time to think about it. I would get up in the morning and go in some direction. But yesterday, I was really like, ‘Oh, shit. What do I? What do I want to do now?’ I don’t think I’ll ever make another book. That really feels like a one and done project.

What was the TV show? Was it about collecting?

BRIAN: Yeah. I drove from New Jersey to Detroit, like 18 hours, it’s not close. I went out to see John [Brannon] from Negative Approach. He found all of his old boxes, his fanzines, and his flyers, and a ton of cool stuff, in his mom’s attic after she passed away. He called me and he’s like, ‘You know how you’re always asking if I have stuff and I’m always saying no?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ He’s like, ‘I just found a bunch of boxes.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah?!’ I was like, what the fuck?!

He started sending me pictures. He’s like, ‘You got to come out here.’ I knew it was going to be interesting. I was doing the TV show with the new revamped Creem magazine. I mentioned it to them and they gave me a crew and we flew out there. It was a big thing. We had a seven person camera crew and we shot the pilot. It went fucking really well. Then I ended up doing three more episodes that were all very good. I was feeling really good about it all. And then… Creem fucking sucks! They totally dropped the ball, they never knew what to do with it. It might get picked up at some point by somebody else, but they own the rights to all the footage.

Oh-no! I’m so sorry that’s happened to you.

BRIAN: Yeah. It just ended up being a headache. So, the book was kind of a secondary thing, so I could still get my favourite stories across. I could still show images of my favourite things from those collections—that’s exactly what it is. It helped me be like, ‘Alright, I can still do this!’ But there’s still so much cool footage that I think people would really get a kick out of.

I hope it sees the light of day! I would LOVE to see it. I love all those collecting and picking shows like King Of Collectables, Antiques Roadshow…

BRIAN: Yeah. When I started watching American Pickers, it was like, I don’t necessarily care about old motorcycles, but when you watch those episodes you’re like, these guys make me care about it because I like old stuff and I like a story!

Yes! Same.

BRIAN: So when I started doing this, it was very much the same kind of thing except the stories are like, ‘We were living in an abandoned building in Detroit and they were shooting shotguns at us. Then we lived out of the van. Then Nirvana came over and they stole my sweater. Like, what the fuck? stories! They were like a more dangerous edgy punk rock kind of American Pickers, with just crazier people. It was really funny too, everything about it was just like… man, this is great! This is really fun. Obviously a way more niche audience, though.

I feel like they could do those shows about anything, if you can prove that it’s important. What’s important and what’s not, I think is very subjective, but we were kind of getting the point across that—without this there would be no Nirvana, no Foo Fighters and no Beastie Boys. We made a pretty good case as to the cultural importance of early punk rock and hardcore. I think we would have had a wide audience.

Agreed. Look at the Agnostic Front documentary or the Kathleen Hanna documentary success and appeal. People love stories, and tend to pay more attention to things once they have a documentary about them. It’s like it legitimises things more in people’s eyes.

BRIAN: Yeah, it’s a more easily digestible thing. Somebody’s more likely to sit down and watch an interesting 30-minute thing that’s on TV, which is they already have it sitting in front of them, versus having to make the effort to buy a book and read a book. You have to be interested in the subject matter to buy a book. But anyone could be sitting around watching TV.

Hopefully the show comes back around at some point. But right now, I was hoping that the book did well and would generate a little bit of interest. It only came out this weekend.

AND it’s already sold out! Congratulations. It doesn’t surprise me. It’s such a quality, cool book. You did such a great job! I’m so proud of you.

BRIAN: It surprised me! Everybody kept saying, ‘A book is a really hard sell!’ I was like, ‘I don’t know. It’s not a book about me, though, it’s a book about stuff that people are already interested in.’ I put it together in a way that I thought people would dig it and it would be digestible. I think people were ready for it.

Yes. People always say ‘Print is dead’ but I can tell you as a zine and book creator for three decades, that’s not true. You know what I’m talking about, though, you love paper stuff too. Are there any books on punk that have made an impression on you?

BRIAN: Banned in D C: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground [by Cynthia Connolly and Leslie Clauge] was a really big one. That got me really into the early early stuff.

Brian Ray Turcotte’s first book, Fucked Up + Photocopied: Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement, that was a huge one! That was the first time I was seeing so many flyers. It even just got me thinking about flyers as being a thing that is designed for advertisement, then they get torn off of walls when you’re a teenager and they get thrown away. They get destroyed. Thinking about them as being like an artefact 40 or 50 years later—that shit fucking blows my mind. It got me really into collecting the paper stuff even more than records. Records have always been designed to keep and collect, you keep them in nice shape. Even back as far as 45s, they’re a tangible thing, but not paper so much.

American Hardcore: A Tribal History [by Steven Blush] was a cool one. That was the first time I read about so many bands in one place, that didn’t have as much coverage.

Better Never Than Late: Midwest Hardcore Flyers and Ephemera 1981-1984 is a flyer book that the people that did my book, did. I’ve flipped through this thing a fucking million times, I love it!

Also, Why Be Something That You’re Not: Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985 is a book about Detroit hardcore that my friend Tony [Rettman] did. So many cool stories that got me enthralled with the fucking Midwest hardcore scene.

One that got taken off the shelves very quickly, Scream With Me: The Enduring Legacy of the Misfits,everything in there is fucking eye candy, all crazy, crazy collector shit.

And then, the Radio Silence: A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music was another book that friends – Nathan Nedorostek and Anthony Pappalardo – did that has a lot of cool artifacts.

The thing that I thought was unique about my book is that it’s my personal collection that I have purchased from people. I think the transition of the property from one generation to the next is cool and interesting, in the way of preserving some of that stuff.

Otherwise, it’s interesting how many people sit on the stuff for their life. Like, ‘I’m never gonna get rid of it!’ And then it’s like, well, how much of that stuff ends up in dumpsters when people come clean out someone’s place when they die, because people don’t know what it is, so it doesn’t end up where it belongs. That shit happens a lot. People don’t have a game plan with their stuff. I guess once you’re dead, you don’t really give a fuck anyway, but… I don’t know, a lot of stuff that should have been preserved has been destroyed over the years. That’s an interesting point to convey.

Now you got me thinking! We don’t have a plan for our stuff.

BRIAN: Yeah. You got a lot of records there behind you. So what happens tomorrow if you guys go out skydiving and you fucking splat on the ground?

I totally see your point.

BRIAN: it’s funny, I’m sort of the same, I don’t have any of my stuff in a will. But I make notes with certain things. Like, if I get something from someone, I put a note in there and I say: ‘This is from Brian [Baker] from Minor Threat.’ Or ‘This is from that or this,’ just so the provenance can continue to live, to move on, if something happens to me. My wife can give something to a friend or sell something. I want to be able to track it back to its original place it came from. Or be like, ‘Hey, this is valuable!’ I point things out every now and again, incase something happens to me, just so she knows. If something happens to both of us, there’s not really any great plan, so I guess the idea is to just not die ever! [laughs].

[Laughter].

BRIAN: I was talking to Tesco Vee from Touch and Go Records at one point. He had a record that I really wanted. I offered him $4,000 right then and there to leave me the record in his will. At the time it was a $10,000 record. I’m like, ‘I’ll give you $4,000 now while you’re alive, and then if you die in the next 30 years, I get the record.’ I was kind of kidding, but also dead serious [laughs]. He told me, I was fucking mental! [laughs].

What was the record?

BRIAN: The Fix – Vengeance, the second record that they put out on Touch and Go.

I’m guessing his collection must be pretty amazing!

BRIAN: I don’t know. I’ve never seen it. I’m hoping to maybe bother him to let me come take a look at it when we go do our Detroit pop-up book release thing, because it’s not super far from where he is. But I would like to see his archives!

Same!

BRIAN: The first two records, the first two singles, that he put out in 1980, they’re each like $10,000+ records. Because they just did 100 of one of them and 200 of the other, and they sat on them forever. Nobody wanted them. Eventually they sold out and then eventually they came big collector items.

I used to love the Touch and Go fanzine.

BRIAN: Yeah. That’s my favourite early fanzine too.

To give people context for Ancient Artifax, it started as an Instagram profile, the first post was 21st of December 2016 and you posted a Big Boys 7”.

BRIAN: Wow! So almost eight years ago, huh? Doesn’t feel that long [laughs]. Yeah, I was working a really boring job that I fucking hated. So I sat on the internet more than I should. I started a separate account to just post punk shit. My daughter was little. So, at that point, I wanted to have a traditional Instagram account with pictures of food and my daughter, and then have my punk account for all my bullshit. Before having a kid, my family didn’t really follow me on social media. But once I was posting baby pictures, all my fucking aunts came out of the woodwork. And I was like, ah, maybe I should keep these things separate. That’s funny, I haven’t even really thought about that, but that’s exactly how and why it happened.

It was a way to share your collection with others? Did selling things come after that?

BRIAN: I’ve always sold stuff a little bit. I’ve been buying collections for a really long time. I bought my first collection, when I was probably 19 or 20. I spent every single dollar I had, but I knew that if I bought the collection, I could keep the things I wanted, and could sell some of the other things, and make a bunch of my money back. So then in the end, I get a pretty good deal on the stuff that I kept. I’ve always had stuff to sell, and I was never a big eBay seller.

At that time, I was working at a screen printing shop with everybody else that collected records. If I bought a collection, I would literally just come in there with boxes of records and at lunchtime everybody would flip through the boxes and I would sell a bunch. So when I started the account, I definitely had stuff that I wanted to sell. Before that, I had started posting things here and there on my personal Facebook. It was just a nice way to kind of like generate trades; I like trading a lot.

I really love how in the introduction for your book, you talk about how you started to realise that it’s not even just about the item you find or what it is, it’s the stories that go behind it that became really interesting and exciting for you. Do you remember when you first felt that?

BRIAN: Going back, the first collection I bought was from this guy Jim, he had done a really early New Jersey fanzine. I thought it was cool that I was getting records from him that bands had sent in for review. They were rare records. It wasn’t like a Ramones radio station copy or something that was on a major label. It really made me think about these tiny bands that only put out 400 copies of a record, and they were popping this in the mail to this guy. I always liked the provenance of stuff and knowing where things came from.

When COVID started, I was at a work, so I put a lot more focus on trying to find stuff and hitting people up. That definitely generated a lot of the really neat stuff I have from people’s personal collections. Because I think the other thing about COVID is that so many people were doomsday buying and doomsday selling. There were people who were like, ‘You know what? As a matter of fact, I just cleaned out my closet for the first time in 45 years, and I found stuff.’ That’s what happened with John, it was a perfect storm timing-wise.

That makes sense. We go to a lot of the car boot sales locally, and we figured that during COVID people would cleanup around the house and want to get rid of stuff when things opened up again.

BRIAN: What’s a car boot sale?

It’s kind of like a swap meet. They have a market, usually in a carpark somewhere, and people sell stuff basically out of the boot of their car.

BRIAN: Oh, that’s so fucking Australian!

Yeah. Just this weekend we ended up getting a bunch of 7”s. I find other stuff too, like I just got a Winnie the Pooh stuffed toy from 1950s for $2!

BRIAN: Oh, that’s fucking awesome. I wish I was more well-versed in stuff that wasn’t just punk. When I go buy collections, or if I’m in somebody’s basement, there’s always stuff that I’m like, fuck, I wish I knew more about, like, postmodern furniture, or even jazz and other music, or comic books, or toys. I’m getting better with some stuff.

We also went to a big secondhand book fair recently too and got a lot of old Mad magazines from the 70s.

BRIAN: That’s cool!

Yeah. We love all that kind of stuff. Old stuff in general, pop culture stuff, and old underground comics.

In your book, the very first image is of you spreading out Necros flyers on the floor. What’s that band mean to you?

BRIAN: I always loved the Necros! There’s like a weird something I always liked about them. When I got into playing in bands, it was so we could go play with our favourite bands, and we would make flyers and we would do fanzines and we were just really enthusiastic about the whole thing. That was always the impression I got from the Necros, they were always a very hands on band. They were record collectors, they did fanzines. They were just fucking hardcore kids through and through.

The book really shows that they were doing a Ramones fanzine that’s like the most archaic fucking thing you’ll ever see. They went to see the Ramones when they were 17, and came home, and were so excited that they had to participate somehow. It’s like starting a band almost seemed secondary to them from being fans of hardcore.

A lot of bands start because somebody takes guitar lessons when they’re a little kid or whatever but you know the hardcore movement, a lot of it were like—the Ramones came to town, you saw the Ramones, and then you went home and said, ‘We don’t know how to play an instrument, but we want to emulate what we see going on.’ I was always able to relate more to that because I’m not a musician. I just wanted to be a part of my generation’s hardcore scene. Necros were the pioneers of that stuff, everything they were doing and their fucking records are just terrific.

When I was just getting into some baseline punk shit, my friend Evan introduced me to the Necros, he had a CD with like a million songs on it. It was so fucking raw and so wild. I thought it was the coolest thing I ever heard. That was really it.

Doing the book and buying collections from some of them and getting to know them all a little bit, they’re still the coolest people, who are still super enthusiastic about the whole thing. Extremely supportive of the book and what I do. At this point, I call some of them friends, which is pretty awesome.

Yeah! That’s exactly how I feel about all the people I interviewed for my book, Conversations With Punx. I grew up really inspired by these people and now I call a lot of them friends too. If you told teenage me that would happen, it would have blown my mind. I noticed that the next image in your book is of John Brannon’s handwritten lyrics for the song, ‘Can’t Tell No One.’ Was there a reason why you started the book with that piece?

BRIAN: Somewhere in the middle of when I was putting the book together, but I wasn’t even thinking about putting the lyrics there, I wrote the last little bit about listening to ‘Can’t Tell No One’ for the first time. Or at least my recollection of hearing it when I was a kid and being like, jesus christ, this is the fucking meanest, but like such a meaningful, powerful song! I was like, oh, what better way to start the book than to put his hand-penned lyrics right next to the thing that I’m referencing? It was very organic in that way.

I didn’t know how to put a book together. So when I started doing it, I knew I wanted to do it with three separate regions, and I would pull the things from each that were really cool. The first thing I did was chronologically laid everything out for each region, and then conducted my first rounds of interviews based on that and based solely on specific things that I wanted some feedback on. Once I did the first round, I realised that there was a real cohesive story in there. It’s cohesive while being very disjointed, intentionally disjointed in the book, because it’ll start a story and it’ll kind of skip to something. And it might not even ever go back to a story that it started. But there is a flow to it all.

Once I realised I could put that all together, I went back and did some secondary and third interviews to help tie some of the stories together or to even help give some idea of the cultural landscape of what was going on in this city at this time. Or what was going on in politics, or what were the drugs of choice, whatever I thought needed to help paint the picture.

I can see that. I think everyone is going to get something cool and different from your book. One of my favourite stories from it, is when John Brannon was talking about how his mum kicked him out of home, and he went to live with Larissa from L7. He said that he’s really, really lazy – which I would have never thought because he’s done so much – and he said that she would wake him up every day and be like, ‘What are you gonna do today? Are you gonna write lyrics?’ And she’d say something like, ‘To be a creative, you have to create.’

BRIAN: Yeah. I absolutely love that same thing for the same reason! It’s cool. I think the Midwest section shows a little bit of a softer side to a more fucking meat and potatoes, raw, angry kind of hardcore scene. They were kids, they were teenagers, and 20-year-olds doing what kids do and learning how to do shit. The stuff about Larissa is super sweet. I like that part a lot, too. It made me think a lot. I don’t know what came first, whether it was the interview or the image of the notebooks, (probably the image of the notebooks} but then having that as a segue. That was fun.

I would see those little segues where I’m like, oh, fuck yeah! When I would put something together, I’d be like, god damn it! That gets me excited! I don’t expect anybody to like this book as much as I like it, because it’s so cultivated to my very specific tastes.

I conducted hours and hours of interviews, but there’s not a lot of text in the book overall. I pulled the bits that I thought should be in there. Which I guess is the closest thing that makes me to an actual author with the book, the fact that I kind of carved the way that the whole thing was going to go.

Another part in the book I really loved was I think it was when Parris Mayhew was talking about writing the set lists for the Cro -Mags because he had the neatest writing. When you look at the setlist included in the book, you really notice that. Also, I loved the boot print and Adidas shoe print on it! That’s telling another story visually and there’s so many layers if you really look at each object featured and start to dig down, it speaks to the culture and the time. I really nerded out on that.

BRIAN: Yeah, yeah, same! Because I already have a Cro-Mags set list in there that’s more interesting because I think it is their first set list ever. So really, the only reason the other set list made it in there is because of the boot and the Adidas print. You can picture people running across the stage and stage diving. What is more, 80s, more ’85, ’86, ’87, then an Adidas print and a fucking boot print?

Totally!

BRIAN: That’s New York City shoe wear, through and through. I thought that was the coolest thing. When I got that set list, I was like, ‘Oh, man, that’s fucking rad.’ And, that’s one that I was like, I’ve been in a bind where I’m like, ‘Maybe I should sell something? Maybe I sell that Cro-Mags set list?’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it because of that fucking Adidas print!’ [laughs].

The stuff in the book is my personal collection and not stuff I’m going to sell. That finalised that stuff. If it made to the book, I’m like, ‘No, no, no, this is my stuff! This is my collection.’ When that set list went in there, I had to make a firm decision—this is definitely staying.

[Laughter]. Being a massive fanzine nerd, collecting zines, and having made zines most of my life, I was really, really stoked to see the inclusion of the Ramones magazine masters in your book.

BRIAN: Yeah. There’s like 10 copies of those. That’s another thing, like when I dig through somebody’s collection, I’ll find stuff that I didn’t know existed. I don’t think anybody knew that existed and nobody’s ever really seen it. This will be the first time that people put eyes on it. And it is just the most… it is a fan-zine! It’s exactly what it fucking is! I LOVE the Ramones. Here you go. It’s this goofy, immature, fucking perfect thing.

I know you love the Ramones as much as I do. We’re both big Ramones fans, they’re my favourite band in the world. So seeing the zine, it kind of takes you to a place in a time and you can imagine what it would have been like, to be that age in 1980 1979, go see the Ramones and come home and be like, I need to do something creative. You just have to do something. And that’s the fucking thing he made. It’s so funny and so weird. That’s one of my favourite things in the whole book. It’s the kind of thing that somebody might look at and be like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ But that’s the kind of shit that I’m like—no, this is fucking counter culture! Like, here it fucking is, this is incredible.

Exactly. And someone was so moved by the Ramones that they just had to make something themselves. I immediately identified with it when I saw those pages—I got it! Because as a teen, I’d go see local bands, and I wanted to be a part of what was happening so much and I found zines and that made me realise I could write about the bands and music I loved. I could be a part of it! You can use what you have on hand to make it. You can make something. There’s no rules. My first zine featured a hand-drawn illustration of a punk on the cover flipping the bird and drinking a beer! [laughter]. It may seem silly and immature but at the time that’s how I was feeling.

BRIAN: How old were you when you did that?

14-15!

BRIAN: And there’s the fucking thing! That’s kind of it. The thing to remember is, hardcore especially, maybe not so much the first run of punk in ’76 and ’77, but hardcore was a youth movement. A lot of it was a counter action to what the 25 year olds were doing. It was people telling them, ‘Ah, punk’s dead, move on, find something else to do.’ And everybody’s strung out on drugs. And these were kids were like, ‘We’re going to do it our way! The songs are going to be faster. We’re going to do it with other kids. We are going to put on shows and put out records and put out fanzines.’ I love so many current and new bands, but it’s a totally different thing.

The first era of hardcore, it’s exactly that. I can relate to it because when I was 15, it was the same thing. The songs were sloppy and stupid and the fanzines were goofy looking. And, you know, we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing. It was an artistic output because something in life sucked and we were looking for something to feel a part of. It’s interesting that things didn’t change from 1980 to 1997.

When I was 17, years later, when I was doing the same thing, it was just that instinct to do it the same way. And I didn’t know what Touch and Go magazine was when I made my first fanzine. You’re just learning and figuring it out on your own.

Seeing original mock-ups of flyers, and also seeing the hand-screen printed items in the book, like Tesco Vee’s shirt and his wife’s shirt was so cool!

BRIAN: Yeah, that’s the same kind of thing. Again, we had no frame of reference. Somebody in my middle school or high school had just taken silk screening classes. So we were like, ‘Oh, we can put any image we want on here.’ Then they were like, ‘Oh, you could put it on a t-shirt or a poster.’ I was like, ‘We’re going to do our band.’ Of course we’re going to do our band. So we printed our own band shirts. And then we once we knew how to do it, we went home and we did it on our own.

Hearing that’s exactly how Youth Brigade did it in 1980, and that’s how Cause for Alarm did it in 1983, it’s like, man, that’s so fucking cool. There was like never a point… I’m sure there are some cases and people would slap me on the wrist for getting this incorrectly, but it’s less likely that a lot of major label stuff ever had to do that. Like being DIY on that kind of a level, booking your own shows, booking your own tours, making your own shirts, making your own records, making your own flyers, doing all your own shit. That’s fucking punk ethos, that’s hardcore. I’ll always think that’s the coolest shit in the world because you’ve got to work hard for what you want. No major label is going to cut you a big check and you’re not going to get any tour support. You just got to fucking go out there and do it yourself—make it happen. You have to really want it to to do that. When I was a kid and I did all that same shit, I really did. It was the only thing I cared about.

There’s so much that I’ve picked up from getting out there and doing things myself, from making zines, to booking shows, running a distro, printing shirts, making a book. Before I did them, I had no idea how to do it but, like we’re talking about, I figured it out. I never waited around for someone to do it for me or to allow me to do something or expected anyone to do it for me—I just did it.

Another story from the book I really love is, you were talking to Todd from Necros and he just casually said that the chain from his boot he pulled out of a box was like, ‘Oh, I wore this when I first stage dived and it happened to be Fear on Saturday Night Live.’

BRIAN: Yeah! That was the other thing, once I had the regions, I coincidentally purchased multiple archives from the same cities, I realised, man, there’s cultural significance to a lot of these stories.

That was another thing with the book, you could show a Beastie Boys flyer that nobody’s ever seen, like an impossibly rare, wildly archaic Beastie Boys flyer! Or talk about Fear on Saturday Night Live in a different way then it had been before. That stuff is really, really interesting, because some of those bands and some of those people did go on to have quite a legacy, even some of them being household names.

To be able to put something in there and show my mom the book and be like, ‘Okay, well, you know what Saturday Night Live is, right? You know who the Beastie Boys are, right?’ It was a nice way where I was like, some normal ass people might be able to kind of digest some of this stuff.

That’s right! Punk has had an influence and impact on the world beyond our little underground communities whether people like to admit it or not. I’ve actually sold more copies of my book to more “normal” people than I have punks.

BRIAN: Yeah, I guess the other thing with your book, like mine, is more of a niche thing. But normal people think punks are weirdos. So if they see that book, they’re like, ‘Oh, I want to know what these people are talking about, I want to know what’s going on.’ And then, the weirdos, they get their fill of like plenty of fucking weirdo stories. And you know, it delivers in that, in a very thoughtful, cool way that I bet changes a lot of people’s perceptions.

Even explaining punk to my parents, when I was a kid, I was like, ‘This isn’t the evil thing that they make it out to be. It’s a really positive thing.’ You don’t even know the trouble that it’s keeping me out of. Just because my hair looks funny, or I come home smelling like smoke, or whatever they didn’t like about it… I learned so much in those years, about so much shit, that I’m still fucking doing it. I’m 40. The stuff that I was doing that was so impactful, my particular trip during that whole thing was just very fucking productive. We were always being very productive.

Same! I’ve been going and going since I begun without a break—always doing something. I get you. I really love the handwritten mixtape tracklist that Ian MacKaye made for Nathan Strejcek (Teen Idles). Seeing the songs he picked and he thought were the best at the time (1979) to share with his friend was so cool.

BRIAN: What a crazy time capsule, man. You’re like, ‘I wonder what they were listening to?’ Here’s exactly what they were listening to! I literally took that list and I went on YouTube, and put every one of those songs on a YouTube playlist. So when the book comes out, it’s like, here it is, check it out. Here’s Ian’s playlist. You can hear the influence that it had on those bands that it had on his bands.

Yes! I really adore the letter written by Kid Congo Powers to the Screamers in the book.

BRIAN: Yeah. That was pretty special. That thing is fucking insane. So Howie Pyro passed away last year, he was a New York guy, his collection ended up in Los Angeles, and I got a phone call. The book was done, totally done. I got a call to go out and look at his stuff. I bought a bunch of flyers and I came home and I was going through them. I looked at the back of a Blondie flyer, and there was that fucking letter. I read it and I was like, holy shit! The page before it in the book, I had the Johnny Blitz benefit button, the CBGB brochure, and Cynthia Ross from the ‘B’ Girls talking about things changing in the city and how he had gotten stabbed; it all fit. I don’t know how Howie ended up with the letter. Kid wasn’t in The Cramps yet, but he was writing to the Screamers telling them what’s going on New York. He talked about like The Cramps being his favourite band in town and then he joins the fucking Cramps. It’s like, holy shit! He’s tells them there’s gonna be a show this weekend with Blondie, The Cramps, Ramones and The Dead Boys. Jesus christ! Imagine all of that at one show in one venue—that’s so mind blowing that was all coming out of the same place.

Yeah. And then Kid talking about being kicked out of the place they were living and how they’ve got a new place, it really paints a picture for us.

BRIAN: Absolutely. I thought that that was so crazy the fact that something like that existed, it just ended up in a pile of paper in a box. And then it ended up across the country 3000 miles away, and then to go out there to find it and not even realise that it was on the back of the flyer when I got it and I came home, literally, it was the week that we were sending in the final files, and to flip it over and read that and be like, what is this?! What the fuck are the odds? I had to put that in the book. Such a fucking trip. That might that might be my single favourite moment of doing the book. It felt really… I don’t know, I don’t believe in anything, really. I’m not a God guy. I’m not a karma guy or anything. But that felt right! It was just like, holy shit, I was fucking meant to find that to put it here. It felt really cool.

I love those moments! Synchronicity. Something else I really thought was cool in the book, was a quote from Roger Miret saying that, ‘My girlfriend made me join Agnostic Front.’

BRIAN: I hope he’s not mad at me for putting that in!

[Laughs]. I’m sure he’s not. Roger is a sweetheart. It’s true! If it wasn’t for her we may not of had Agnostic Front as we know it, right?!

BRIAN: I know. Yeah, so crazy! He was a bass player, played in The Psychos doing what he was doing. And, for whatever reason, she pushed him in that direction.

I’m sure there’s a lot of unknown stories like that in punk and hardcore, moments where women helped shape things more than people know. Like, the one we talked about with Larissa from L7 pushing John Brannon to create every day.

Another moment in your book I thought was neat is Alex [Kinon] from Cause For Alarm and Agnostic Front telling you about how he saves all his Christmas cards! And in the book you have envelopes from people’s correspondence. It made me feel not so crazy because I keep all the stuff that’s been sent to me over the years, I’ve got mailers with handwriting from Keith Morris, Tim Kerr, Jesse Michaels, Toby Morse, all kinds of people. I kept them all. To some they’re just pieces of paper and card but to me they’re important. I’m a big fan of handwritten things AND paper! Handwriting is so personal.

BRIAN: That’s it, right?! People hold on to stuff. Even back then people knew what was going on in punk rock and hardcore and that it was going to have an impact. They knew that it was special, it was really cool, unique, and different. Initially, when I started doing the book, I wanted to get more people talking about why they held on to stuff. Obviously, some of it is a coincidence. Like, ‘I forgot I had it,’ or ’It was in this attic.’ But a lot of people intentionally kept it safe for all these years, which makes me feel really good that, I was the person who they were.

What’s something that you’ve come across in your collecting that absolutely floored you?

BRIAN: I’ve got four Teen Idles buttons, and they made 100 of them. I remember when I did my first band before we ever made a piece of music, a shirt, anything, going to make buttons, because there was a place that made them. And, when I got those Teen Idles buttons, it was like, fuck! It really like took me back. I was like, ‘I can’t believe that this exists.’

The Dead Boys contract that’s in there for the record release show of Young, Loud and Snotty, showing how much they made and their very funny rider, with the flyer that says ‘free chips’ on it!

Then there’s the absolutely bananas set lists for the first Rites of Spring show and for the second Minor Threat show.Those are both really cool.

Is there is there anything that didn’t make it into the book?

BRIAN: There was a couple things that as we were putting it together, it just didn’t have a place. Because it was going to only be the three regions, I had to go back and I pulled out some really cool Poison Idea stuff, like the bracelet that Jerry’s wearing on the cover of Kings of Punk. There was a ton of stuff that didn’t make it.

Do you have any holy grail item you’re still chasing for your collection?

BRIAN: I would love one of the Globe posters for the last Minor Threat show – especially like a ‘Minor Treat’ poster; they only made a very small handful that were spelling errors that they put the word ‘treat’ instead of ‘threat’. I love those old Globe posters.

Putting the book together, collecting for so long, and all these conversations you’ve had for it; is there anything surprising or new you’ve learned about punk or the people that create it?

BRIAN: I guess when it gets to that really early stuff, not that I didn’t necessarily know it, but it really puts it in perspective just how much those bands and those people, like… there wasn’t punk before it. So the bands that had such a large influence on them, whether it was Aerosmith or Black Sabbath or Kiss, that’s what they all grew up on, and how much of an impact a lot of that stuff had. Even going into the early-80s, because again, it’s like, if you’re 16 in the 80s, you’re not necessarily buying a Dead Boys record when you’re 15, you know, maybe like you’re buying an Alice Cooper record. So it’s not that it only influenced early punk, it influenced early hardcore too.

The other thing I did think was surprising, is it seems like every-fucking-body that got into punk, even as early as ’79, everybody knew the Sex Pistols, which is interesting of how much of a household name they were. My impression is that they got coverage on the news, they were popping up. It seemed like everybody was like, ‘I read about the Sex Pistols.’ They were in the newspaper, and on the TV. But it’s funny because we think of punk as being underground. But some of the stuff was way above ground. It wasn’t a secret. It doesn’t seem like the Sex Pistols were a secret to anybody in 1979. You didn’t have to dig too far to find it. A lot of people cite the Sex Pistols as such a huge influence because it was out there. It was available for people to discover. That’s pretty interesting. Who would have fucking thought that their antics and their bullshit would have such a lasting impression on so many people.

Yeah! And the Ramones desperately wanted to be popular, they wanted to write a hit. I always think it’s funny how people want to gatekeep punk and keep it underground and are so precious about it like it can only be their and their friends’ secret little thing.

BRIAN: Who would have thought that it would have got so much attention and something so small and trivial made such giant waves in our world.

I still hear people hating on underground bands for crossing over into the mainstream. It’s like, yeah, go on, hate on someone for actually being able to make a living out of doing what they love. That kind of mentality to me is so silly.

BRIAN: True. Yeah, that’s another thing people say, ‘Well, punks not about making money.’ I’ll never have an argument with somebody about what punk is and what punk isn’t because I don’t give a shit. There’s not enough time in the day. But if you want to call the Ramones the pioneers, it was a fucking goal for them to make a million dollars. They wanted to get fucking paid.

I do believe it was more part of the hardcore way of thinking. When you’re 16 and you’re doing it just because life sucks and you’re looking for somewhere to go and you don’t know where else to turn, making money on something was never in anybody’s vision of sight, that it could have ever been a possibility. So I believe the Ramones were like, ‘No’ and thought, ‘You get signed to a major, you do this, and then you hit the road, you put in the work, and you fucking make money like a rock band.’

But then hardcore was very, you’re doing it for the passion, you’re doing it because you love it and no you’re not chasing a shiny object because there’s no shiny object to chase. Playing in front of your 18 friends in the basement, that’s your biggest payoff.

That’s another thing: what’s not to love about people doing something for the most pure possible reasons and not because they think they’re gonna get something out of it?

GET a copy of Brian’s ANCIENT ARTIFAX book here. Follow @ancientartifax.

GET to the book release partyAncient Artifax pop-up shop this weekend if you’re in NJ (wish we could be there)! We ❤ you Brian!

Orstralia: A Comprehensive Guide To Australian Punk History

16th Jul 2024 | gimmiezine

Titled after a track on The Saints’ classic second album Eternally Yours, Naarm/ Melbourne author and musician, Tristan Clark’s books: Orstralia: A Punk History 1974–1989 and Orstralia: A Punk History 1990–1999 narrate the evolution of Australian punk from its underground inception in the ’70s and the emergence of hardcore in the ’80s to its commercial ascent in the ’90s. Clark’s comprehensive volumes delve beyond the music, exploring cultural and sociological contexts. Enriched with interviews from an extensive list of artists including The Saints, Radio Birdman, Boys Next Door/Birthday Party, Babeez/News, Victims, Leftovers, Fun Things, Zero, Psycho Surgeons, X, Depression, Hard-Ons, pioneering all-female artists Gash and the Mothers, Cosmic Psychos, Grong Grong, The Living End, Bodyjar, Frenzal Rhomb, and many more. The story is covered city-by-city, as well as significant regional centres, providing an unprecedented account of Australian punk history.

Gimmie spoke to Tristan about his 8-year-in-the-making project, how he used his discontent from a customer service job to start the project, his punk rock origins, and of the tragedy and triumphs he documented of the people that create Australian punk.

You’ve been involved in the Australian punk community for about 30 years. Your books, Orstralia: A Punk History 1974 – 1989 and Orstralia: A Punk History 1990-1999 are about to be released; how are you feeling?

TRISTAN CLARK: I’d like to say relief; it’s been such a lengthy process. It’s still hard to fathom that it will be out there. There are still all manner of things to do around it: I have to post a lot of stuff. I guess the perception is, ‘All done, it’s out,’ but there’s still a lot to do. It was probably approaching eight years from when I first started the book till its release. Admittedly, I finished writing it quite a while ago, but I was just waiting for it to get published. It was a glacial pace, almost probably worse than releasing punk records.

How did you first discover punk?

TC: I saw a skate film called Gleaming The Cube (1989). There’s a scene where he [Christian Slater as Brian Kelly, a 16-year-old skateboarder] puts on headphones and it’s D.R.I. playing. You know what D.R.I. are, such an intense experience. I had no frame of reference for it at the time. It was kind of terrifying, yet simultaneously alluring. Back then, obviously, you didn’t have the means of identifying and procuring that kind of music. So it passed me by.

A few years later, a friend acquired a tape, someone had passed on to him on the bus at school and then in turn he passed it on to me. Immediately, I could connect it back to that music that I’d heard previously. On that tape I recall first hearing Poison Idea ‘Feel The Darkness’. Needless to say that led me down a, an unforeseen dark path, pardon the pun.

Have you always sort of lived in Naam/Melbourne?

TC: I was born in Tasmania, but we moved here when I was six. My recollections are all pretty much Melbourne.

What were you like growing up?

TC: I was a pretty introverted, quiet kid. As to how I developed an interest in punk music, that’s a pretty uninteresting one. My upbringing was largely suburban middle-class normalcy, so there’s nothing notable to speak of. It was all good family, sports, and a good school. A lot of underage drinking, which later lent itself to punk. But I was kind of wary of the traditional life patterns that I was seeing around me. There was some sort of internal urge to break from that. I didn’t have a clear vision of why, but I was always aware that I was a bit different, internally, from most of the people I knew. I was also lucky in that, I didn’t struggle socially at school. That difference over the years has probably seen me perceived as a little snobbish at times. Really it was an awkwardness and introversion, which I came to realise later that’s quite pervasive amongst punks.

How did you find your local scene?

TC: I was pretty fortunate in that a kid at school, he was either playing in a band or he was really attuned to what was going on and he would put up fliers around the school. There was a noted all-ages venue that was close to where we lived that was part of the circuit touring bands or even international bands would play. I saw Fugazi, NOFX, and Propagandhi there. There was a big all-ages scene at that time really thriving, it went deep into the suburbs. There’d be 100s of kids attending shows in suburban halls. It was also very unregulated back then, which made it even more enjoyable. This was from ’92 onwards.

There’s some younger bands at the moment that are making a real conscious effort to put on all-ages shows. In Melbourne, given that we have a huge scene here, there’s always been a conscious desire to put on shows away from licensed venues, there’s a consistent history of shows in unconventional spaces, like under bridges and in disused buildings. There was one put on a couple of years ago in a tall office block right on Southbank overlooking the city. We’re sitting in this plush boardroom with our feet up on the desks. It was quite incredible till the cops came shut it down.

I’ve seen video online of some cool shows in Naarm, like the shows Christina Pap from Swab puts on in drains.

There’s been some really incredible ones of those, more often not involving the police as well. They’re just great, that kind of thing, especially as a young person would be so enthralling.

How has punk influenced your life? I know you’ve played in a lot of different bands: Bloody Hammer, Infinite Void, Deconsume, and more. I have some of your records.

TC: These kinds of aspects are just not things that I ponder. It’s interesting. You spend three decades of your life immersed in something without really giving much consideration to what the reason for your motivations are—at least, I don’t.

My background was more in the political scene, really quite explicitly, explicitly political, and that was very much entwined with activism. Therefore, a lot of stuff, even, I have to admit like a lot of zines and writing about punk just seemed of secondary importance to me, like frivolous navel gazing. I was more into dense political reading. As you get older, you get a bit less dogmatic and allow space to investigate these things.

When I was young, following high school, I was studying graphic design. I was promptly kicked out and banned from that. At that stage, I developed this budding political awareness through punk. I saw my future in an advertising agency, which was something that I couldn’t really reconcile with my very undeveloped anti-capitalism views back then. So then I went off to study politics, but that was very quickly subsumed by bands and touring and I dropped out.

Punk has come to permeate every facet of my life. At times I feel like I’m a relic in that still rigidly set in those ideals. I’m not inflexible, but maybe I am [laughs]. I’m still very much interested in politics. I still love the music and frequent shows regularly. My social circle is still primarily punks and my socialising does tend to be shows. There’s not even the thought of going away or pursuing something else. It’s been such a constant and all-encompassing to my life. Especially the last eight years spending every spare moment writing about it.

In the ‘About the Author’ section of your book it says you’re an educator; are you a teacher?

TC: A classroom aid. I work at a non-mainstream high school, a small community high school that’s traditionally attracted a lot of students who would be considered freaks and weirdos. Of course, there’s been numerous punks amongst them. There are kids that have played in bands. It’s interesting that we have a large proportion of students who are neurodivergent. There’s a number of punks amongst them, and it became quite evident to me from this and through my research and interviewing, just how sizeable that segment of people who have been attracted to punk are neurodivergent. But that probably hasn’t really been recognised or acknowledged.

I noticed that reading your books. I remember quotes from Link Meanie talking about mental illness. I had no idea he struggled with that. I learned a lot of new stuff from your book. I think his talking about that will make a lot of people feel seen and maybe not so alone. I think your books are going to start lots of conversations, which is really great.

TC: It was interesting how intimate that interview was. I’ve never met the guy, but we totally revered him as teenagers. It was surprising that a lot of people I’d never met face-to-face, once you get into conversation, how much they were willing to reveal. Really personal, even traumatic stuff at times.

Tragedy is a big theme throughout the book. At times it’s so brutal. Like, when Ed Wreckage from The Leftovers was talking about his band and said a couple of people in the band committed suicide and others died of cancer. Ultimately, Ed passed away before the book came out.

TC: That is definitely one of the overarching themes, sadly. But, you know, as someone like yourself, who’s been around for that long, you’ve seen all that firsthand. I was having a conversation with one of the first punks I ever knew this morning, and we were talking about how many people we know who are dead.

I gave the book to my dad to read before I signed off on the final edits. I was like, ‘Oh, what’d you think?’ His first response was, ‘A lot of dead people.’ That was quite jarring. The other day, I catalogued how many people I interviewed that are now past, I made a post about it to acknowledge those people. It’s a dozen. 12 out of 200, is kind of staggering. I don’t think it’s necessarily exclusive to punk, but they’re not lifestyles that are given to temperance or longevity.

I understand that you got started with your books because you said you were unhappy working a job in customer service and you were kind of looking for some purpose or some meaning.

TC: I was disgruntled with where that side of my life was going. In terms of my creativity or my social life, I couldn’t fault it, but my professional life didn’t really exist. I was working this crushing customer service job. And then I just happened to reread, Inner City Sound by Clinton Walker. It’s a cool book, but it’s very limited in what it documents. Seeing other books from places that were being published, it became evident that there was nothing that could be considered comprehensive that had come out of Australia. There’s a lot of other projects and books from here, but a lot of them tended to consign themselves to a specific place or time or a limited number of bands. I felt there was a glaring gap that someone needed to fill. I saw myself as that idiot that was going to undertake that project [laughs].

People pointed out to me along the way, ‘Oh yeah, you know, so -and -so tried’ or ‘Many people have begun but never saw it through to fruition.’

Congratulations on finishing it! It’s a big achievement. Before you started doing interviews for this book, had you done interviews before?

TC: No. When I started, I really had no formula. It was really spontaneous. It very quickly fell into more of a conversational form, which lent itself to drawing out a lot more of those deeper and intimate responses from people. That was the positive side of it. The negative is, you have to go back and transcribe bloody two hours of tape that you’ve just done, waffling on to each other.

Who was the first interview?

TC: A friend of mine. He played in Thought Criminals in the late-70s. They’re one of the more noted bands of that time. Their record’s quite revered. So then I felt that I could use that as leverage with other people, like, ‘Oh, well I’ve interviewed this band, I’d like to interview you.’ Amazingly people were so forthcoming and placed trust in me. I was a random guy with this big claim that I was going to write this great book! People didn’t really question that, they were willing to offer me their time. I’m forever thankful for that.

What were the things that you were most interested in finding out about from the people you spoke with?

TC: Initially, it was more to do with the band details and minutia but it quickly became evident that wasn’t the interesting aspect. It was more people’s stories. Obviously, you want the humorous anecdotes that will get people to pick it up but I found people’s personal lives were more compelling than often the music itself. People had these really rich lives either adjacent to punk or after punk. I began to really try and capture that aspect.

I remember one interview I did with one of the guys from Last Words, it had gone on for an hour and a half. We got to the end of it and he happened to mention in passing that he was now a pastor. I’m like, ‘Oh, sorry, we’re gonna have to go back and unpack how you get from playing in a punk band in the Western suburbs of Sydney in the late-70s, living in a migrant hostel, to now being a man of the cloth. There’s a lot in-between here that I need to know about.

Any other really memorable stories or even ones that didn’t make it into the book you could share?

TC: You had really polished performers like Jay from Frenzel Rhomb or Russ from Cosmic Psychos, who have honed their interview skills over many years. They have a wealth of anecdotes to humour you with. But often it was the really unassuming ones that you went into with very little detail about their band or their lives and you’d come out of it and just be like, oh wow! That was so rich and fulfilling, or maybe traumatic as well.

I made a conscious effort… bands like The Saints and Birdman, obviously everyone’s heard Ed [Kuepper]’s story, ad nauseam, same with Deniz Tek and Rob Younger, but I made an explicit point of tracking down other members of the bands that could offer a different perspective. I spoke to drummer Ivor Hay. I said to him, ‘Oh, has anyone ever interviewed you?’ He’s like, ‘Outside of the documentary? No. No one’s ever talked to him about the band.’ It’s quite different to that standardised narrative that you get from Ed.

I think that the thing that makes The Saints’ story extraordinary is, when you look at the Ramones and The Damned, you’re talking these great cultural centres of London and New York. Then you talk of the Saints you’re talking about Oxley, that was the most conservative and stifling environment. Their message more spoke to suburban alienation and monotony, and that oppressiveness that was ever-present to people in Brisbane, transgressive or, buck the norm at that time.

Was there anyone that you wanted to find for the book that you couldn’t?

TC: A few people. Especially women it seemed were reluctant to share their stories. I could only speculate whether there’s trauma or an unwillingness to revisit that aspect of their lives. I’m not sure.

I was hoping there would be more women featured in your book, but I do understand the reluctance of women to participate. I wanted to include a lot more women in my own book because there have always been women involved in punk, and I know that there is a feeling that we often get written out of the story. As a woman in punk myself, it’s very, very important, but many I asked didn’t want to speak for it or ignored my request. I wanted to ask you about it because some people may see your book and complain there aren’t enough women, but what they don’t see is how many people you may have asked. It wasn’t through lack of trying on your behalf.

TC: That’s how I feel. Given the extensiveness of my research, I couldn’t uncover too much—it still is uniformly white and male. But then the proportion of women that I did get is reflective of the numbers of performers. Ideally, I would have liked more. I’m scared of that critique. But I did try. My book would probably be close to like 10% women.

I really appreciated all their contributions and the perspective they gave.

TC: For the most part, they were positive. There’s probably periods through the 80s where that real masculinist sort of thing was dominant, especially during the hardcore era.

It’s still that way to a degree. The hardcore scene, more so than the punk scene.

TC: That’s probably not something that I’m too exposed to. But within that more politicised scene that I tend to still be involved with, it’s changed so much and it’s fantastic. There’s always going to be problems, issues, but there’s been a definite attempt to rectify things and people are quite vocal about confronting issues and certain attitudes.

Your books are named after The Saints’ song ‘Orstralia’. When in the process did you realise that was going to be the title?

I originally had the title of Gobbin’ on Life. If you look through the content it seems quite suited, but then I had, especially some older men, questioning it. Even people that weren’t involved in the project were like, ‘Oh, that’s a dumb name.’

It can be scary putting stuff like this out into the world. People love to critique and judge.

TC: I am anticipating some backlash. I had an article in the City Hub the other day and they titled it: The Rise and Fall of Punk. I never made mention of a fall at all. He was an old school journo, he wrote shorthand. When I read the feature I felt sick. That’s not what I said. No, no. And then I stopped reading it. I thought that hopefully no one will see it, and then some people started sharing it on the internet. I guess I’m just going to have to live with it.

Are there any punk books that have made an impact on you?

TC: A lot of books are strictly oral histories. They’re still fascinating and have great anecdotes, but they then tend to lack context. I really wanted to sort of be able to place punk within its political and social and economic context within Australia.

I’ve read a few books, John Savage’s England’s Dreaming, that’s the classic. But beyond that, not a lot of them. I probably read, Please Kill Me years ago. I was always more into political writing.

I really liked that your book went beyond the major cities scenes and bands.

TC: That was a very conscious effort to do so. It is hard to excavate that history from outside the city centres. It took quite a bit of effort, but if I was trying to tout something as a comprehensive history, I had to do that. It was fascinating to hear about bands that never amounted to much in a conventional sense. A lot of them only ever played a small number of faltering shows, but they had some great stories that accompanied them.

I tracked down The Rejects who were the first punk band in Rockhampton in the late-70s. They were staggered that someone knew about them, let alone wanted to ask them some questions. They played one show ever at their high school graduation.

I noticed at the beginning of your book, in the preface, you said that some of the views expressed in the book don’t necessarily align with your own values. Reading through the book I was alarmed to come across the views of a particular band from Western Australia.

TC: Yeah.

Was it hard to sit there and hear these things during an interview?

TC: I didn’t actually give him any allowance to express any sort of repugnant views. I really stuck to the music, but he’s still, as far as I’m aware, a neo-Nazi.

People probably, they’ll find that contentious that I included people like that. You know, there are a couple of neo-Nazis that I interviewed or former neo-Nazis, and people will find that problematic. But I’m like, well, I don’t want to hide all these distasteful aspects of punk, I think I have to include it. Perhaps that requires me to speak to people that I never would otherwise – I find their views horrifying – to give the full picture. But yeah, that was a pretty interesting one. We did the interview and nothing distasteful was said and it was polite enough, but then he said, ‘Oh, the guitarist in my current band is now living in Melbourne. You should like meet up with him.’ And I was just really evasive, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure.’ Then he keeps calling me. I do’t want him to think somehow that we’re friends or maybe that I have some sort of sympathy to his views. I’m really polite. I’m not going to be like, ‘Fuck off.’ Eventually I stopped answering and that was the end of the correspondence, thankfully.

There’s people in the book that I included that I’m aware of things that they’ve perpetrated that makes me feel really uncomfortable, and especially uncomfortable meeting them in-person or speaking to them. I had to put that part aside, just say, ‘Look, this is your purpose, to try and glean information from them, to give a fuller sort of history.’ There’s a difficulty in that when I know what you’ve done in your past. Like, with the singer from Bastard Squad. I’m kind of scared that what I’ve written, not that I wrote anything that isn’t true in there, you know, most of that, aside from killing his girlfriend; he didn’t want to talk about that. But there’s a lot of sort of unsavoury elements in his life.

One thing about making the book… it’s interesting how people can oscillate between extremities, like especially people that, you know, found themselves as neo-Nazis and then could have sort of this ‘Road to Damascus’ moment and atone for that by then turning into ardent pacifist anarchists. And that they’re able to somehow make that switch. It’s like the same energy, but the opposite way. Like I said, my thinking is still fairly rigid and very much sort of in line with what it was 20 odd years ago.

Is there anything you learnt about yourself throughout the whole process?

TC: Probably more so the aspect about the neurodivergence, but that also coincided with my job as well that I started working. I was like, oh, you know, these certain things resonate with my own behaviours as well. But, beyond that, no, I’m not sure. Maybe I guess a patience and resilience that I wasn’t aware that I had. I felt at times that I was doing what was almost effectively informal counselling for some of people.

I’ve gone into a role at work where you take on this wellbeing role. So whether you know that ability to sort of sit and listen to people and really empathise with them. Maybe that in part really honed by interviewing so many damn people and listening to the often troubling stories and thoughts.

Anything else you want people to know about your book?

TC: I guess, weirdly, it feels like maybe some sort of semblance of reflection on it, and this might sound contrived, but it almost feels like an offering to the people and scene that’s given me so much.

I’ve speculated so many times about, what my trajectory might have been if I stayed that suburban stoner kid. I can’t imagine it to have been a tenth of the experiences I’ve got to enjoy because of punk.

Punk, it’s permeated, fashion, art, more mainstream music, that’s undeniable. It’s imprint on Australian culture is surprisingly much larger than what you would think for something that has mostly being fairly marginal, aside from brief periods of sort of prominence. It’s something that’s probably not been duly acknowledged.

Buy the books at PM Press (worldwide) or from Orstralia (Australia).

Artist and Split System bassist, Deon Slaviero: ‘Looking for new ways to approach creating… keeps the process fresh and interesting.’

27th May 202427th May 2024 | gimmiezine

Split System bassist, Deon Slaviero’s creative journey began in childhood, inspired by his brother’s guitar sessions. He started playing music himself in high school, forming bands and collaborating with friends. His love for art grew alongside his passion for music, influenced by the dark, bold imagery of heavy metal album covers and the chaotic style of street artists. Additionally, the warped, monstrous characters from cartoons fuelled his creative vision. These diverse influences continue to shape Deon’s distinctive artistic style. He creates artwork for releases, shirts & posters, for bands including EXEK, Screensaver, Autobahns, C.O.F.F.I.N, Stiff Richards, Grade 2, Unknowns, Cong, Ghoulies, Lothario, Private Function, Civic, and more—basically, everyone!

Gimmie caught up with Deon to explore his art, creative process, influences, challenges, and future plans—it’s exciting, and we can’t wait for it to manifest.

Also, we got him to choose songs he’s been listening to on repeat for our CRAFTY CUTS selections. He chose a track from a local band who he recently saw live that were fire! A track that’s his go-to when creating. There’s also his go-to track for creating, a gem from a 1978/79 Brisbane/Meanjin punk band, and a favourite from a local band whose entire discography he loves. Additionally, he selected a track from a band blending Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and T-Rex, a standout German punk band, and favourites from Sydney/Gadigal and Melbourne/Naarm bands.

Why is it important to you to make art?

DEON SLAVIERO: Making art is somewhat meditative for me, once I get into a flow with an idea I’m completely absorbed by it – it’s a nice space to be in. It’s also a really good activity to shut off from a hectic schedule and hang out with the creative part of my brain for a bit.

How did you first become interested in music and art? What kinds of things did you find yourself drawn to?

DS: As a kid I remember my brother playing guitar at home and bashing around with his mates in our shed. I always thought it looked like heaps of fun and wanted to be involved. I started noodling on the guitars he had lying about and just fluffed around till something eventually sounded okay. In high school (around Year 8) I started hanging with some crew who were into similar music to me and jamming with them. I’ve stuck to that approach which has given me the opportunity to collaborate with some really inspiring musicians and make some great friends over the years.

My interest in art kind of coincided with my interest in music, in my early teens I was introduced to a bunch of bands on the heavier side (Diamond Head, Mortal Sin, Venom, Dead Kennedys, Slayer, Metallica, Misfits, Motorhead, Iron Maiden) which all had bold and iconic album covers usually including some kind of mortal decay paired with bold illustrated logos. Discovering these bands and the associated imagery really resonated with me and sparked my interest in horror/darker leaning imagery.

Did you have a favourite artist growing up? What do you appreciate about them?

DS: As a kid I was always drawn to animation, in particular Aaahh!!! Real Monsters which featured all these bent monster characters usually with multiple limbs and warped faces – Gromble and Ickis are my favourites. ARM is great for inspiration when illustrating.

As I got into my teens I was drawn to street art. One artist that stood out to me was Neck Face, I love all his line work, bold colours and how chaotic his ghoul characters look. I also draw heaps of inspo from his work.

When and how did you first begin making art?

DS: I remember loving drawing as a kid. Mum always encouraged creativity in the household, I remember her teaching me how to draw Disney characters and always having art supplies around to tinker with. Towards the back end of high school I found a deeper interest in art and started to develop more of a style.

As for what I’m making now, that kind of came out of just making art for myself and mates musical projects and it’s snowballed from there.

You studied at RMIT; was formal study helpful to your art practice in anyway?

DS: After studying at RMIT I actually stopped practicing art for a while, I think the structure of study stifled my creativity/drive and I shifted my creative energy to making music. Now that I’m back to practicing art on a daily basis I definitely draw a lot from what I learned about spacial awareness and composition and weaving in and out of those ‘guidelines’ to try and create something visually interesting.

Can you tell us a little about your art workspace?

DS: Currently I’m set up in my spare room at home which doubles as my music studio. Amongst guitars, amps and keyboards are a few old scanner/printers and a bookshelf filled with my collection of reference books. The dream is to set up a shared creative space with a music studio and have the room to do some more large scale works and printing.

We admire your unique art style, particularly your striking posters, flyers, and album artwork. Your distinctive aesthetic is easily recognisable. Could you share some of the key inspirations behind it?

DS: Thank you so much! I’m stoked you’re liking it.

I’m really interested in creating movement/flow through the interplay of layering shapes and creating a storyline through that. I generally find shape inspiration through everyday objects around me, observing my surroundings whilst going for a walk or ride. I think the inner city marriage of organic and man made structures creates a unique landscape through the interplay of dissonant and complementary shapes.

I am also an avid collector of old printed material, specifically fan zines, travel guides, coupons, instructional material and classified sections. Distorted and aged print just looks so gritty and has heaps of depth, I love it. Old booklets and brochures can sometimes have some real quirky taglines which can also spark up an idea for me.

Has your style changed over time?

DS: I’m constantly trying to evolve my style and explore new ideas. Looking for new ways to approach creating and coming up with a concept keeps the process fresh and interesting.

I used to be caught up in making more concise and cleaner works, letting go of that has allowed me to be more free within what I’m making and just trust the process rather than being too calculated from outset. Sometimes the little mistakes can make a piece stand out and lead to more ideas.

What mediums and techniques do you enjoy working with most? Are there any downsides to the mediums you choose?

DS: Collage, cut ups and mixed media are the techniques I enjoy working with most, I love my scanners and photocopiers. Collaging, scanning and digital processing can be laborious but I do think the end result is worth the yakka.

Are there particular motifs that you’ll never get tired of using in your work? Do they have a special significance to you?

DS: I always try to base my work around a central character that ties into the subject of the work. Depending on the imagery I use, whether it be photographs or illustrations, these elements can really set the tone for the work, create a narrative and dictate how I choose to lay out the composition.

I really enjoy artwork that looks striking on first glance and at closer inspection more elements pop out and send your eyes on a journey around the page – that’s what I’m ultimately trying to achieve through my work.

What do you find most challenging about making art?

DS: Self-doubt in my output is definitely something I struggle with. I‘m super critical of my work which can be stifling at times, especially longer lasting work like record covers and merch. Posters are good in the sense that they only exist for a small period of time. I like how they are somewhat disposable so it takes the pressure off allowing me to be more experimental.

Can you tell us about the best and worst bits of doing commissions making art for someone else?

DS: I really enjoy collaborating with the clients I work with, workshopping visual ideas and concepts really helps the process and gets the best results. Bringing someone’s idea/vision to life and seeing their reaction is so rewarding.

The worst part would be trying to balance my commission work with other parts of my life, there are a lot of moving parts at the moment so it can be tricky to balance at times. I wouldn’t change anything though, it keeps me on my toes and I love what I do.

What’s one of the pieces that you’ve had the most fun making? What did you enjoy about the process?

DS: Probably the ‘Whip Around Melb’ poster for Split System – I had heaps of fun creating the Speed Demon character and the piece has a good balance of hand drawn, scanned collage and digital elements. The band ended up using this imagery for some T-Shirts and as a backdrop for our Golden Plains set which was animated, it was so cool to see the little devil dude bouncing around on the big screen.

What’s some of the best advice you’ve ever gotten in relation to making art, and who gave it to you?

DS: Advice from my high school art teacher which has stuck is: ‘Try to create something new everyday, you never know what might come out’. I think it’s a great habit to be in and has helped me develop some ideas I’m really proud of.

What’s next on your ‘to-make’ list?

DS: Ahhh, there are so many things to do!!

Planning to screen print a few of my own t-shirt designs which I have been meaning to do for a while. I’ve just got a few screens made so I’ll be printing some tees soon!

I’ve been working on putting a zine together which will be purely illustrations and little comics mostly drawn whilst sitting in the van during my two month stint touring Europe with Split System and Bad Dreems last year. I’m keen to showcase some of my art that is 100% hand drawn and not digitally manipulated.

Split System is taking some time off gigs over the next couple months to work on some new music which I’m really excited about. It’s always great creating some noise with my Splitties brothers and I’m really looking forward to what we cook up next.

What do you like to get up to when not making art?

DS: When I’m not making art I’m usually playing bass with Split System and Bad Dreems. Other than that hanging out with my partner doing some wholesome outdoor exploring.

I also really enjoy music research and finding some gems from the past. Recently I’ve been deep diving into the NTS radio archive finding some focus shows. Here are a couple playlists I’ve been enjoying: ‘POST PUNK BRITAIN: IN FOCUS – THROBBING GRISTLE’ and ‘OUTSIDER OLDIES – HOZAC ARCHIVAL SPECIAL’.

Anything else you’d like to share with Gimmie readers?

DS: DM for commissions!

Plus, Deon’s CRAFTY CUTS selections:

Future Suck: ‘Hell For Leather’

Buddies from Melbourne. This track hits so hard and Rhys’ guitar solo in this rips. Their set at the Legless/Rack Off – Total Tote Takeover gig recently was on fire.

The Cleaners From Venus: ‘Living On Nerve Ends’

The Cleaners are a newish discovery for me. Martin Newell’s output of jangly lo-fi pop tunes with clever one liners is in great abundance. Cleaners are always my go to when I’m doing some artwork.

Exek – ‘The Lifeboats’

I love all of Exek’s output, so it’s hard to pick one song. The Lifeboats is one I’ve had on rotation a lot lately, hits some NEU! and Brian Eno (another green world era) areas which I really dig.

Fun Things – ‘Savage’

Brisbane band from 78/79, this one is an Aussie punk rock nugget.

Buzzcocks – ‘Breakdown’

From their Spiral Scratch release with Howard Devoto on vox. I love how raw and bratty these songs sound.

Listen HERE.

Lafff Box – ‘Talking’

Nothin’ like some fast German punk. Lafff Box rule and their whole S/T is great – quirky, catchy and hardcore, all the good stuff.

Peace de Resistance – ‘Heard Your Voice’

This track is my favourite from PDR’s Bits and Pieces LP. The record is like a mix of all the bits I love about Lou Reed – Rock N Roll Animal, Iggy Pop – The Idiot and T̤.̤R̤ex ̤- ̤̤Electric W̤a̤r̤r̤i̤o̤r̤̤. PDR has a knack for making songs that sound so familiar and nostalgic but fresh at the same time. I’m also a big fan of their other projects, Institute and Glue.

The Velvet Underground – ‘White Light/White Heat’

Post Warhol VU. This track is so gritty and groovy, I really love the constant piano and claps throughout the track. Feels like they were trying to get back to basics on this release and keep things gritty/stripped back compared to the debut which was a lot warmer sounding.

Listen HERE.

The Judges – ‘The House Always Wins’

Relatively new Melbourne band with some shredders on the tools, this track streams along nicely from start to finish.

Gee Tee – ‘Pigs In The Pit’

I was a little late to party with Sydney punx Gee Tee but after catching them at Binic Festival last year I was a convert. I love that their songs aren’t too serious but seriously rock. The Pigs In The Pit chorus line is a real earworm too.

Check out Deon’s work @deonslaviero + find and listen to his band Split System out via Legless Records.

CONVERSATIONS WITH PUNX – Bob Vylan: ‘Recognising the power that you hold as an individual, and what we can do with that power as a collective.’

27th May 2024 | gimmiezine

UK grime-punks Bob Vylan stand tall, casting a bold and unyielding light upon the world with their new album, Humble As The Sun. They’re one of punk’s most vital voices right now— with their rallying cry for empowerment, championing a sense of revolutionary self-love, and their ever-present foundation of nurturing and growing community. They inspire us to dream big, persevere through hardship, and channel our anger for positive change. The sentiment that we have to heal, be strong in ourselves first and then we can be strong together permeates the album. It also dissects toxic masculinity, discusses colonisation, police brutality, racism, wealth inequality, and exploitation in the music industry—as always, they say what needs to be said.

Gimmie caught up with Bobby Vylan, the band’s vocalist, guitarist, and producer, for a fascinating insight into the album and their creative process. The conversation delves deep into topics like spirituality and life-changing moments. Additionally, we learn about Bobby’s early beat-making experiences on Playstation’s Music 2000, his love for Shakespeare, their commitment to the DIY ethos, and his experience walking in this year’s London’s Fashion Week.

BOBBY VYLAN: Music is a creative outlet. I really don’t know what I would do without it, to be honest. It’s been a constant throughout my life as a way to express myself. A way for me to communicate how I feel about certain things. It’s important to me because it keeps me sane, to a certain degree; it keeps me here.

You’ve been making music for a long time, even before Bob Vylan, you were making music through Music 2000 on PlayStation.

BV: Yeah. Exactly. I’ve been making music for a long time, in various different forms, various different degrees of seriousness, by which I took it. I was introduced to software, games, and stuff that allowed me to make music, get into creating beats and backing tracks, and then I got into writing lyrics. I started recording and getting into mixing, exploring the more technical aspects of creating music. It’s been an ongoing journey; it’s still ongoing in terms of learning the guitar, being able to play that more proficiently; and even my mixing ability, to be able to mix tracks and get them to a point where they’re ready for the public to hear.

I know that you completely love to explore things and lose yourself in them. What have you been losing yourself in lately?

BV: To be honest, I’ve been losing myself in life a lot lately because there’s been so much going on. Things have presented themselves; they’ve come up, and I’ve thrown myself into it, which is good, but also tricky because I have to find time for myself. With this album coming out there’s so much to do on the business side of things. We have tours, festivals, TV appearances, and all kinds of things that have come up as the band gets bigger. On top of that, there’s been normal personal life change as well, which is quite beautiful, especially as it happens as the seasons change.

Because I’ve been throwing myself into life, I haven’t been making a ton of music; I’ve been experiencing life. It’s important because it gives me something to write about later on. You can fall into a dangerous trap of not living life as an artist. You need to live life in order to have something to write about; I write about personal experience so much.

Yeah, it’s helpful for artists to realise that it’s all part of the process.

BV: Exactly.

Your new album, Humble as the Sun, still feels political like your previous work, but to me, it also feels like a spiritual album in a way.

BV: For sure. It’s political purely because my existence as a Black man is somewhat politicised in the country that I reside in and in so many countries that we travel to. Naturally, it’s because of that. Again, I’m writing about personal experience, so it’s bound to have a political aspect to it.

With this album, we definitely wanted it to feel more uplifting and empowering. A spirituality aspect is needed for that: to believe in yourself, to feel as though you hold some sense of power; recognising the power that you hold as an individual, and what we can do with that power as a collective. It’s definitely a lot more spiritual than the other albums, for sure.

This is because of the space that I was in when creating the album, both physically in terms of the studio space that I was afforded to use and mentally. I had worked so long and hard to get to a position where I could make music, and this could be my life. So it would have felt disingenuous to to only talk about hardship and not talk about overcoming that hardship. There is a lot of hardship that I overcame in order to be able to do what I’m doing and I want to address that.

I get that, especially as a Blak Indigenous woman myself. When we make art, people often expect us to create from our trauma. Sometimes, obviously, that’s important for us to do for ourselves and our community. But I think it’s revolutionary and healing in another way to write about our joy as well.

BV: Absolutely! I completely agree.

I understand that Humble As The Sun got started and inspired by meditation. What drew you to it?

BV: The studio space—it was in the back of a residence. You had the main house that some people lived in, completely unconnected to the studio space, and then there’s a garden in the back. I’d find myself in that garden, meditating, watching nature, and enjoying the sun, seeing how the seasons would change in that space. The cat prowling around, looking for a mouse to eat, or the bird that would come and take some of my lunch and fly off back to its nest—it was quite eye-opening for me because I was very much lost in the city, in all of the hustle and bustle of it. Also, the hustle and bustle of being a touring musician, going to festivals every weekend and doing tours for two, three, four weeks at a time. That studio space really offered me a place to slow down.

Sometimes, I would go there and not even necessarily work on music or anything. I would just go there and sit and listen to music on the speakers that they had there, or I would watch videos on YouTube or a TV show. Other times, I would sit in the garden and peacefully take in everything that was happening around me in a very meditative state—no phone, no computer, just sitting and being and watching and trying to clear my mind as much as possible, not think about work, not think about personal life, not think about the traveling that I’ve got to go and do, the business side of things. I’d just try to clear my mind and be present in the moment. That heavily influenced the message in the album for sure.

I love how at the end of song ‘Hunger Games’ you talk about being present. The lyrics really resonated: Here, now / You are stronger than you think you are / You are love / You are not alone / You are going through hell, but keep going / Be proud, be open / Be loud, be hopeful / Be healthy, be happy / Be kind to yourself / Be decisive / Here, now / Do not live every day as if it is your last / Live every day as if it is your first / Full of wonder and excitement / As you wonder along, excited / Marvelling at the possibilities of all that stands before you / Here, now. That feels like the essence of being present; what does being in the present mean to you?

BV: It’s a tricky thing because I find myself wandering with my thoughts, and I found that to be very helpful. I am not Eckhart Tolle, where it’s like, I’m here constantly, I’m present constantly, always in the now. That type of attitude would serve me if I wanted to be like a Yogi or some sort of guru, but it doesn’t serve me for the life that I live.

It’s finding a balance of being here in the now but also allowing my thoughts to wander because they allow me to play out different scenarios and see which is the better decision to make and which choice I should be making. If I do this, I’m not constantly present in the moment, but I find myself realising when I’m wandering into toxic thoughts, and I can be like, just take a minute, take a beat and be present right now and try not to worry about what may or may not come. Accept what is, and that doesn’t necessarily mean don’t look to change anything.

It’s not accepting it in a very passive way, but it’s accepting it in a way of doing what is within your power to do, in terms of the change that you can have in your own life and other people’s lives in the world in general.

Yeah, that’s a really important point. I did an interview with Dick Lucas from the Subhumans for my book and he was saying that, ‘If everything is taken away from you and you’re beaten black and blue, even if you’re at the point of death, you can still think for yourself. That is the bottom line, you have to keep your thoughts intact no matter what happens, from thoughts come everything else, words, expressions, ideas, creation—life itself.’

BV: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s something I try to remember as well as much as possible. It can be hard though. Life’s really difficult.

It is. I’m so glad your new album is uplifting, in a way, countering and balancing all the crappy stuff out in the world.

BV: Yeah. You know, the record is made for myself. I need this music. I didn’t make it because I’m like, ‘Oh, the world needs this music.’ No. I need this music! I need this album. I’ve been enjoying the album for ages. I’ve been listening to it over and over again. Actually, now that it’s out, I’ve probably listened to it far less because I listened to it on repeat every day for months and months. I picked it apart and asked myself, ‘Do I want to say this? No, I want to say that.’ Then when I got to a point where I’m like, ‘Oh, this is done, it’s perfect,’ so it’s finished. And I listened to it and I enjoyed it; I was no longer critiquing it. Like, is it mixed right? Now it’s out there. I’m listening to it far less because I’m like, everybody else has it now so it’s not mine anymore.

I really love the song ‘Dream Big’! It’s very inspiring and puts a smile on my face every listen. By the time the song’s finished, you feel like you can go out and do anything. Where do you think your self-belief comes from?

BV: It comes from a lot of different things in and around my environment. Some of it is definitely down to where I was growing up. But some of it, is nature. It’s just something that I have. My father tells me stories of when I was a child and I was very headstrong. I wasn’t necessarily rebellious without a cause. I just knew what I wanted to do and I knew what I didn’t want to do. That all plays into my self-belief.

I grew up in council housing. It wasn’t a terrible area by a long mile; there were areas in this country that are far worse. We didn’t have tons of money, but we didn’t go without. I definitely knew that if there are things that I wanted, I had to figure out a way to get them myself. My mum always did an amazing job at making sure that me and my siblings knew that.

Though we didn’t have everything that we wanted or needed necessarily, we always were exposed to other ways of living, certain things that other people in our environment weren’t necessarily exposed to. My mum really wanted to make sure that we didn’t fall into the trap of just accepting our place in society is here. I thank her a lot for that. That definitely helped in terms of my self-belief.

It’s funny, because when I would express certain things to her, she would be like, ‘I don’t think you can do that. I don’t know about that.’ But that’s her fear for her son, if he’s gonna commit himself to a life of artistry, he’s gonna be poor forever. That’s not fun because she was working so hard to get by and keep us afloat. She probably thought, ‘I don’t want that for him’.

My self-belief comes from a feeling that I don’t want what is given to me. I know what I want. I know what I want to do in this world. Jim Carey said: you can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love. If you can fail doing the thing that you don’t want to do, that you have no interest in doing, but you’re doing it because you’re fearful of doing the thing that you do want to do or people have pushed you into this direction, I would rather fail at the thing that I want to do. I’ll give it a go because otherwise, god forbid, I’m one of these people that are like, I could have done this.

Yeah. I think as human beings, the things that are most important, obviously after having the basics to live, is love and connection. That’s the foundation of everything.

BV: Yeah, absolutely. And, it can be hard to focus on that. Sometimes when you’re focusing on so many other things in the world, like trying to survive, trying to keep a roof over your head and everything else, it can be hard to maintain connections with friends or family. It’s important to try and make that time for people.

It’s something that I’m getting slowly better at.Taking a little time away, focusing on myself and my loved ones around me. The things that you value the most as a creative is the time that i have to create. I also value the time that I have to experience things like what we were talking about earlier, living. I value having conversations with friends, family and people in my community. Learning things. I value being able to have the time to think and feel. I value being able to put into words, all of the things that I’ve been experiencing.

Do you remember the first time you realised that your words had power?

BV: I don’t think it was a conscious realisation, but it definitely would have been when I was a child and I said something and I saw how it got me in trouble. Like, I saw what I said upset somebody. The realisation of, I know how to get under this person’s skin. I’ve got siblings, so that offers a perfect training ground, right? [laughs]. To figure that out, how powerful your words can be, that clicked probably when me and my siblings were arguing about something.

So you’ve always kind of been a bit cheeky?

BV: [Laughs] That’s usually the word that people would use to describe me. I always acted in good faith. I was very, very rarely acting out of malice and trying to actually hurt somebody who didn’t deserve it or upset somebody who hadn’t upset me, you know. I wasn’t a bully or anything like that.

Again, I knew what I wanted to do in this world. When people would present obstacles, whether that was a teacher in the school or a friend telling me that you can’t do this thing or do that thing, I would be sure to let people know that ‘No, I’m capable! You might not be able to do it because you don’t have that belief, but I could do it.’

I’ve always been this way too. I had an English teacher that told me I would never, ever, ever be a writer. Yet that’s been my career for the last 30 years since I was a 15 years old!

BV: Yeah, exactly. That’s it. People tell you those sorts of things for various reasons. Sometimes so they can upset you. That’s all their aim is, to upset you and discourage you. Other times, it’s to protect you, or they think they’re protecting you from a life of hardship or pain or upset. Then other times it’s just because they don’t believe in themselves, or it didn’t work out for them; they feel it won’t work out for you too.

I always had this opinion of, I’m watching people on TV doing the thing that I want to do. So it worked out for them. That is somebody flesh and bone and blood doing it. If they can do it, then I can do it. Why would I concentrate on the people it didn’t work out for? I’m not watching them on TV. There’s absolutely no reason why I could’t.

That’s what you’re talking about on the album closer, ‘I’m Still Here’?

BV: For sure. That song is the biggest testament to resilience on that album. It’s talking about how I grew up, where I grew up, what I was doing, and all of those things that I’ve gone through, and of my friend that is currently locked up. All of these things I’ve seen that I narrowly escaped, and those that I didn’t escape.

Of course, there is an element of being calculated, streetwise, and smart, avoiding certain things. But it’s also by luck, by chance, by the grace of God. Even when I was going through all of those things, I always had that in my mind of like, what I’m doing right now, how I’m living right now is not necessarily my forever. It doesn’t have to be my forever. This is not as good as it gets for me.

For a lot of people that I grew up with, they had it in their mind that, this is as good as it gets. This is as good as it gets for us. If we could be career criminals and not get caught or only do a handful of years in prison, life will be good. That wasn’t my thinking. That wasn’t my lot in life—I always thought there’s more for me. I don’t know where it is or what form it takes, but there’s more out there and I need to find it.

Have a moment with Bob Vylan where you felt like things really have changed and that they won’t be the same in your life anymore?

BV: Absolutely. There’s certain things that they happen and it’s like, this is a turning point. For example, when We Live Here, the first album and single from that album started taking off, it was during lockdown. I didn’t realise at the time, I suppose, to what degree it would change things, but I knew something was changing. We’d put music out before and no one had really listened to it. And then I saw the audience find us. I was watching the YouTube views go up in real time. I was like, wow, we’d never gotten 10,000 people watch a video before. Then it’s like 15,000, then 20,000, then 30,000, and on. I saw at the top of a Reddit thread: listen to this! Then seeing it getting shared on like Facebook, and people with blue ticks following me and saying, Hey man, I heard this song it’s so cool!’ They were from other bands that I’m a fan of or they were actors or whatever. I thought, ‘This is cool.’ It was that moment where I could feel something’s changing, you know, but then there’s other moments that are not so, I suppose, they’re not so.

Sometimes those moments are not so joyous, though. You might go on tour, and you’re away for home long time, long periods of time and you come back and things have changed at home, maybe with friends or with family. I’ve got a daughter and I come home and she’s grown. I’m away for three to four weeks, in that time, she’s learned something new. She’s doing something new. She’s got this new thing that she’s saying. And I’m having to play catch up to her. Like, ‘Oh, what’s that? Where did you hear that? Where did you learn that?’ Even just seeing her, it’s like, ‘Did you grow?’ You realise things won’t be the same as they were when I was sat here and I was watching her do this stuff in real time. So some of those moments of change are joyous, and others are harder to come to terms with. You have got to be accepting of both.

Totally. I saw you walked in a show at London Fashion Week at the start of the year. That must have been pretty surreal, especially growing up in the world where you’ve come from.

BV: Yeah! It was for a brand I was familiar with, Saul Nash, I’d seen their clothes in the store and I really like them. Saul’s clothes are great, he’s got a great eye and he’s very innovative in terms of how he approaches sportswear. To get asked to do that was great, it was a lot of fun and an experience that I hadn’t had before. So, again, getting those opportunities is really cool. I met a friend there, we’ve worked in the future together. The person that was overseeing all of the hair on the Saul Nash show, then worked on my hair in the ‘Reign’ video. I love meeting people and forming connections and friendships. It’s really beautiful when you get those opportunities.

But it’s important not to get lost in those sorts of things, though, because they’re fun, but it’s not real life. I feel lucky, I feel very fortunate, that I’ve got people, the majority of my friends and my family are not in the industry at all in any sense, they work 9 to 5s. I get enjoy the opportunities when I’m in it, then I come out of it, and I get to just be how I am at home.

You mentioned the ‘Reign’ video, which I love. What was the inspiration for the visual elements in it?

BV: There was a lot of things that me and Taz [Tron Delix ], the director, went back and forth about, we had a couple of meetings and talked about what we wanted to get across with it.

For me, the African Moors that conquered Spain (and they were present in Malta – I’m part Maltese), so I wanted to present this visual representation of regalness and royalty that wasn’t stiff and stuffy like the English monarchy, but is more like the African monarchies. The Moors are extremely extreme. The most popular representation of a Moor in popular culture is Othello. Othello is a Moor—I love Othello. It’s probably my favourite Shakespeare play, though it is the saddest one. I took my dad to watch it not too long ago. Othello in that play is presented as someone extremely strong. He’s a leader, but then he has the potential to be corrupted, to be swindled. He’s a human after all. And so for that video, we wanted to create this idea of royalty but have it rooted in today. We also wanted it to feel relevant to what Bob Vylan is doing.

You also have Jamaican heritage too? Does the culture influence your creative choices?

BV: For sure. It influences the music a lot. ‘Ring the Alarm’ for example, on the album, is very, very much inspired by Jamaican culture and reggae and dancehall music. Even some of the drums are played on the album. They’re jungle drum breaks, the way that they’re played coming from this mix of Jamaican people bringing reggae music over to the UK and then mixing it with electronic music that was happening here in the UK; those fast drum breaks with reggae samples thrown in there. It definitely influences a lot of the music in terms of the sonics and the production.

Visually, I suppose, maybe I’m even less conscious of how that culture is pulled on. Except for ‘Wicked & Bad’ for example, where we shot the video in Jamaica. I really wanted to do that. The way that I wear things, the things that I decide to wear, my personal style that’s obviously influenced.

I grew up around a fairly big mixed Jamaican and white community. We pulled a lot of things from our parents, and then mixed them with things that were happening now in the UK and in England. Meshed the two things together to find our own or create our own identity.

How did it feel for you to go back to Jamaica, back to where your family are from?

BV: It was great. It’s a beautiful place. It’s troubled, though, because of a lot of corruption that happens over there. It’s a shame that such a beautiful island has got such a violent past because of its colonial history—the British occupation of the land. There is a lot of sadness in seeing that because you realise what that place could be. It’s unfortunate that at the moment, at least, it’s not able to be that, but hopefully at some point, it’s able to be; it’s able to live up to its full potential. That it’s able to remove its connection to the British and become its own country.

We speak about independence and it is independent to a certain degree, but there’s still a heavy, heavy hand from the British in that country. I would like to see that removed completely and to see the country be everything that it can be. We see culturally what it exports; that is absolutely incredible. One of the biggest musical stars ever has come from this tiny island—Bob Marley is arguably one of the biggest musicians ever in history. Reggae music and the popularisation of weed, and Rasta culture, and the Rasta religion, it’s all from this tiny island. So what it’s done artistically and culturally for the world is absolutely incredible. But what it receives in return pales in comparison.

Yeah. There’s even that connection to punk rock with Bob’s ‘Punky Reggae Party’ and how Don Letts would play the reggae at The Roxy (the UK’s first live punk rock venue), and then you’d get bands like The Clash who were heavily influenced by reggae.

BV: It’s influenced the world over. Look at the origins of rap music. It all comes from DJing and MC culture, like the toasting culture of Jamaica. As I said earlier, you get jungle music, it comes from reggae culture. It’s been extremely influential culturally and artistically from really the beginning of time.

Absolutely. One of the reasons I love Bob Vylan so much is that you mesh together so many different things to created this whole new thing. You’ve built on what’s come before and you’ve taken it in a new direction.

BV: That’s important to us, to not, not tread old ground. To constantly look for ways by which we can push things, and push them in new directions. We don’t want anything to sound like the punk of the 80s, that’s not what we’re trying to do. We want something new, something fresh.

Last question, what’s something that’s made you really, really happy lately?

BV: The sun and the sea. A couple of days ago, it was really nice weather here, and I sat by the sea, listened to the waves, and just relaxed after a busy week of playing shows and promo for the new album.

I got home and went and sat by the sea. I saw that people were enjoying themselves in the sun, and kids are running about and splashing in the water. There was something where I was like, yeah, it just feels complete in terms of, I’ve had such a busy week promoting this album, and I’ve gone through a roller coaster of emotions because I’d been sick just before we put the album out.

The day before the album came out, I’d been violently ill, I was throwing up. Then Friday we played shows and I was still ill, then I slowly got better. We’d put this album out and we’d been running around the country trying to play shows and do signings. Sitting at the beach, I kind of just took a moment and acknowledged everything that I’d done that week, and looked to start the new week fresh and at peace.

Follow @bobbyvylan & check out their music: https://bobvylan.bandcamp.com

CRAFTY CUTS with Alicia Saye (HACKER + Cult Ritual Audio)

23rd May 202423rd May 2024 | gimmiezine

Original photo: courtesy of Alicia / handmade collage by B.

Alicia Saye, bassist for hardcore punk band, Hacker, previously, Infinite Void, Deep Heat, The Diamond Sea is also a sound engineer, Cult Ritual Audio, and outstanding human. Enjoying collaborating with bands on their passion projects Alicia helps them get to where they want to be, working with great people like Cable Ties, Shove, Phantasm, Hex Debt, Blonde Revolver, and more. Plus, Alicia is a production coordinator for PBS 106.7FM!

Gimmie enlisted Alicia to curate tracks for our Crafty Cuts selections. Among them, a standout that marked a significant chapter, during a period of musical exploration, and that provided solace. There’s also a track from a band that brought unique queer visibility to the punk scene, fostering celebration and a safe space; they even stayed with Alicia while touring Australia. Additionally, a track with a horny lead line. An encounter with something fresh and compelling that felt like a reclaiming of something significant in music. A track that was delivered to listeners in pillowcases with speakers sewn in to induce nightmares. Something from a pop star who’s childhood nickname was ‘Nippy’. Not to forget a local band brimming with endless creativity. And much more, including two tracks from one particular band because, quite simply, they’re that good!

Green House – ‘Perennial-Bloom’

This whole album is great. It came out in 2020 to give everyone a specific time reference for its relationship to me. It was definitely a time where I chose to investigate a few other avenues for music. This album was therapeutic for the time.

Special Interest – ‘Young, Gifted, Black in Leather’

I’m notoriously shit at describing music, so this format works well for me. I’m not entirely sure how this came across my path or from whom, but after years of hearing reincarnations of every genre possible, this itself was something I obsessed over that felt fresh and powerful. The music felt like it was taking something back.

Whitney Houston – ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’

Anyone else miss Whitney? What a travesty.

Limp Wrist – ‘Just Like You’

Never really come across a band that has queer visibility in the punk scene the way that Limp Wrist did. I miss it. I miss the celebration of them and the safety of the space. They came out a few times, and one of those times we had them stay at our house when I was still in Sydney. One particular time, I was walking to the kitchen through the lounge, and they were all applying lotion to each other’s backs… like a little train. It was gorgeous, like a Tom of Finland model session. I had to bring it to their attention, the hilarity of the situation. There was another time where… we (me, some friends, and Paul from LW) may or may not have broken into a local swimming pool, only to be busted by the cops; we took a run for it. Those were the years of skinny jeans, and I guess you’ll just have to visualise us hiding out in the bushes, trying to put tight jeans on wet legs while the cops drive up and down the back streets.

Enzyme – ‘Masquerade’

THIS SONG. Everyone of them has endless amounts of creativity in them. Perfect blend.

Integrity – ‘Hollow’

Because……of the dive bomb leading into the horny lead line at the end.

Ancestors – ‘V’ (from album III)

This one is added because its whole deal is nightmares/haunting. They had merch that were pillowcases with speakers and a track sewn into them to help induce nightmares. The artwork on them is amazing, upturned couches, baths filled with black liquid. I was sent some test presses of the album by a friend, and my girlfriend at the time told me it was ‘upsetting.’ I think that’s possibly the best description given for this.

Good Throb – ‘The Queen Sucks Nazi Cock’ & ‘Bag’

Two songs here! Both lyrically unhinged and a perfect example of what some would describe as musical naivety, which for me is musical genius.

Tozcos – ‘Nunca Pasar á n’

Riffs! Another banger release out of Quality Control Records in UK.

Vampire – ‘Built For Decline’

Something new, local and killer. This is not my band, just love them!

Visit: https://cultritualaudio.bandcamp.com and listen to Hacker (we LOVE them!) https://hackerhc.bandcamp.com