This article was originally written in December, 2002 and is based on an interview with John Spittles in Sydney in May, 2002.

Throughout the eighties the Australian independent music scene could be counted on to deliver an almost non-stop series of terrific new bands. Every month it seemed like another mind blowing outfit was hitting the boards, and fans were spoiled rotten by the embarrassment of riches available to them if they only knew enough to look.

All that changed in the early nineties. The collapse of overseas indie distributors like Rough Trade and Dutch East India cost many Australian independent labels heaps of money and left them without their main avenues for lucrative export sales. At the same time, Australian major labels suddenly recognized the potential to make money from a lot of the bigger bands on those labels. They began signing them up, and in the process deprived indie labels of the cash they desperately needed to finance signing and development of new groups without existing followings. Coupled with the rise of video poker games in pubs that formerly throbbed with rock and roll bands, and the scene dried up shockingly quickly.

In a classic case of bad timing, John Spittles (guitar), Grant McIver (vocals), Scott Nash (bass), Darren Pierce (drums) and Michael Gibbons (guitar) launched their new band Asteroid B-612 into the collapsing scene, and from the early 90s to this day they would simultaneously be one of Australia’s least appreciated and most accomplished bands. Their brand of rock and roll rests on the same classic Australian reverence for guitar-fueled Detroit mania that drove Radio Birdman, the Celibate Rifles, and the New Christs, but they’ve added their own twist to the recipe. Over the years they have produced a series of albums that are distinctly their own.

In the interview below, Spittles tells the story of how Asteroid B-612 struggled to get gigs in Sydney and decided that they’d have better luck in Melbourne, where they’d at least have the cachet of being an interstate touring band. He was right not only for that reason, but also because Melbourne, despite its long standing reputation as being the art yin to Sydney’s rock yang, was at the moment enjoying a surplus of rocking powerhouses that Sydney had rarely rivaled – Bored!, Hoss, the Powdermonkeys, the Seminal Rats and others were bashing in ears nightly from St. Kilda to Carlton. Asteroid B-612 fit that scene like a glove, and it’s small wonder that Bored’s Dave Thomas was moved to offer them a recording opportunity.

The resulting self titled debut on Thomas’ Destroyer Records label came to my own attention via AuGoGo Records mail order catalog, and I was lucky enough to believe their praise for it and order up a copy, since according to Spittles only 300 were ever made. Recorded in April of 1993, the disc has a load of solid rockers mixed with some slower and longer blues rock numbers to break the intensity. In retrospect the record might have been more coherent had it been accorded anything remotely approximating a decent budget and a producer, but given the fact that it was essentially recorded live in the studio in one day and mixed the day after, and that it was the band’s first time in a studio at all, the record is nothing short of amazing. Songs like "Hate Me Honey", "Gasoline", "I’m Not Ready", "Moody" and "I Like The Way" rip it up with real rock action (a favorite AB612 descriptor), while "Chainsaw", "Hounder" and especially "Undertow" give up smoldering workouts. McIver screams, shouts and yelps through the vocals like a man possessed, and the musical backing is rock solid and impressively mixed for maximum impact given the limited time.

The three hundred CDs sold, and they got the Asteroids off on their first step. They could now get gigs – and especially in Melbourne, where they were well respected. A lineup shuffle provided only a brief distraction, with Pierce and Gibbons departing in favor of drummer Ben Fox and guitarist Stewart Cunningham (see the Brother Brick feature on these pages for more about him). Spring of 1994 came, and again Dave Thomas funded recording of another limited quantity lp for Destroyer. The resulting Forced Into A Corner was even more impressive than the debut – a huger, fuller sound that feels like an army of guitars. Again the record mixes rockers to grinders at about a 2:1 ratio, but this time the guitar hooks on songs like "Edge A Bit Closer", "Plastic", "Which Way", "Can I Touch It", "Danny’s Sister", "I’ve Had You" and "People Like You" are almost staggeringly good. Leavening from "The 31^st To The 2^nd", "I’m Not For Sale" and "Turn This Feeling Around" makes this an ignored classic of Australian rock that deserves to be honored as much as the greats of the eighties.

Ready to take a next step, the band signed to AuGoGo Records, Melbourne’s premier independent label. Their first AuGoGo release was a five track CDEP called Teen Sublimation Riffs. Breaking their previous pattern, the band recorded in Sydney and without Dave Thomas lending a hand. The disc leads with a solid rocker in "Straight Back To You" and then kicks into the very Stones-like guitar rock of Cunningham’s "You’ll Never Be Good", which has a feel like an Exile On Main Street out take with all the needles in the red. The title track, another Cunningham effort, has more of a Seattle rock feel and doesn’t connect that well for my tastes, but a kick-ass cover of Alice Cooper’s "Is It My Body" goes down a treat. Spittles’ rock ballad "Undertow" follows with a beautifully haunting riff and some Hammond organ backing tucked just nicely in the mix. It’s a solid set of songs overall, but it lacks the signature tracks that made Forced Into A Corner so brilliant.

In 1996 AuGoGo released the first full length Asteroid B-612 album, Not Meant For This World. The ace tracks here are the title track, a strong remake of "Straight Back To You", and the slinky rocker "Believe It’s True", which projects an atmosphere a lot like Distemper-era New Christs with that almost oriental guitar feel. Despite bucketloads of thick guitar, "True Romance" is one of the poppiest songs the band ever did, and it reminds a bit of "The Song Didn’t Get The Girl", a track that would appear on their Readin’ Between The Lines disc a few years down the road. "Emotional Tattoo" and "Farewell To The Cosmic Commander" are rock ‘em sock ‘em slammers, but lack the quality hooks the best AB612 material features. But "Always Got Something To Lose" is a first rate rocker.

Overall Not Meant For This World is a fine CD, but as Spittles points out in our conversation below, it wasn’t a step forward from Forced Into A Corner and as a result it was a big disappointment to him. But an even bigger issue was about to confront the band when they went on a long tour of the US in 1997, a tour that ended disastrously with Stewart Cunningham being ejected from the band. Cunningham had a lot to say about this situation when I interviewed him for the feature on Brother Brick a couple years ago, and here John Spittles gets to tell his side. It should be recognized that in these sorts of situations it is impossible for an outside observer (and especially an observer in a different country at a distance of many thousands of miles) to determine what has really happened. The opposing parties almost always each feel that they are the one who has been wronged, and the reality is that the fault is usually shared to some extent. All that can be done by the writer is to present what each individual has to say about the situation and not offer one’s own view, but suffice to say, Spittles feels that Cunningham’s description of the situation could use some revision.

In the discouraged atmosphere around the band after Cunningham’s departure, singer Grant McIver also left. The band could have disappeared at this point, but Spittles decided to re-form with himself as the only guitar player and with his brother Grahame as the singer. These two changes altered the band’s sound quite a bit. As a singer, Grahame Spittles snarls and shouts much less than McIver did, but he has a wider range of singing styles and resulting recordings seem to have more depth and variation. The guitar change is probably more evident in a live setting – on recordings there are still generally multiple tracks of guitars, but there does seem to be much more room in the mix for bass and drums.

After the change, attendance at AB612 shows fell off precipitously for a while, and by Spittles’ own admission it took a little time to work up the band’s new modus operandi into a viable approach. They debuted on CD with a three track ep on AuGoGo that included two Spittles compositions and a cover of the Flamin’ Groovies "Second Cousin". "Gasoline" was a remake of the song that had appeared on the first CD, but "September Crush" was a fine new one. "Second Cousin" is a treat for anyone who likes Chuck Berry riffs painted on thick.

Unlike past albums where song writing was largely a shared responsibility, on Readin’ Between The Lines the only song not written by John Spittles is that Toussaint cover. And it’s without a doubt Spittle’s finest hour as the album rolls from strength to strength. "September Crush" is beefed up and speeded up from the ep version and rocks like a fiend. "Am I The Problem" is a burning mea culpa that again reminds the listener of how much respect Spittles has for the New Christs. "The Song Didn’t Get The Girl" shows a lighter side with very Rolling Stones instrumentation. "Easy The Hard Way" has a fiendish whipsaw guitar riff and a dust dry vocal that feel Damien Lovelock. A bluesy ballad called "Let It Slide" breaks the momentum for a moment and then there’s another Rifles-styled banger in the brilliant "Gimme Little Something". "I Won’t Be Behind You" is another slow burner that provides a neat echo of "On The Way On Down". The record closes with another Stones influenced rocker in "So Long Goodbye", loaded with guitar that feels like Keith Richards wandered into the room.

Spittles talks at length below about how happy he was at how this album came out, and a couple listens through it will justify his pride in the result for any listener. But strangely, since that record the band hasn’t had opportunity to record again. Full Toss distribution wasn’t very good, and although the print run of the album has sold out, the record is good enough so that it should have been able to do a lot more than just a limited run on an indie. The Asteroid B-612 phone ought to be ringing off the hook with offers, but oddly enough, it’s not. Spittles whiles away his time working in a tattoo shop down near Sydney’s central train station, pulling the band together for gigs now and then and working up a new set of songs. But there’s no record offer. It’s a bizarre state of affairs for a band that has proven itself as convincingly as this group has over the past decade.

I met up with John in May of 2002 while I was in Australia to see the Radio Birdman reunion tour. I’d come from interviewing Jules Normington out in Bondi Beach, and was due to meet John in Red Eye’s used record shop down on lower Pitt Street. It was raining pretty well, so we walked around the corner to a handy pub, sat down and ordered a couple of Coopers drafts to help the conversation along. John’s a big, barrel chested guy who speaks openly and generally says what’s on his mind. It takes little time to recognize what a fervent fan of good rock and roll the guy is – he’s full of opinions and questions about bands from all over the world and we probably could have spent the rest of the afternoon talking music without ever even mentioning his own band if our intent hadn’t been to create an Asteroid B-612 feature.

Very quickly I found John asking me about the San Diego band the Dragons, a group that I know well from seeing them many times in my home town.

John: They do work hard at it though, don’t they? They’re always playing and touring and stuff like that. I only hung out with them for a couple of nights, but you could tell that they had that sort of ethic that they always played their balls off, and that’s good. If people are going and seeing them, I’m sure it’s because of that.

Steve: They also went for years of playing to almost nobody. Here it is 2002, and they’ve been playing for probably ten years, and the first five of those years they were doing Wednesday nights to seven people and that kind of stuff, so they’ve just really plugged at it.

John: It gives you character when you do that sort of stuff, you know?

Steve: Well, I should really have some character then, because Wednesday nights are all I EVER did!

Steve: Well, maybe you can talk about how you got Asteroid B-612 off the ground and how you got started.

John: Um, it wasn’t really very difficult at all, because when the band first started it was just a bunch of mates with like minded taste in music. So we just started playing and mucking around at people’s houses and stuff like that. It really started around February of 1992. That’s when it really started when we tried to get gigs and stuff like that. We had a bunch of songs up our sleeves that me and Grant had written. We could never get gigs off anyone so we would just find clubs to give us Tuesday nights and stuff like that and try to put as many people in there as we could. That’s pretty much how it started.

I kind of thought, well, we can keep doing this in Sydney and playing to our mates. Because at the time no one was really going out and checking bands on a Tuesday night. And so we thought, if we go down to Melbourne, like if one of us flies down there and has a couple of words with a few people, we can see if we can go down there and play down there – an opening slot on a gig somewhere. We went down there and spoke to Dave Thomas from Bored, and he was more surprised than anything that someone had sort of turned up on his doorstep and said "Look, I play in this band, and we’re pretty fucking good. How’s about giving us a gig? If you give us a gig, someone else will." And that’s exactly what happened. He got us two gigs, and then someone else got us another two gigs.

So that meant that we could go down to Melbourne, and it just started from there. We basically got a record deal, as small as it was, from the first time we went to Melbourne.

Steve: It seems like around that time there were a lot more bands like you in Melbourne than Sydney. There was Bored, Hoss, Seminal Rats…

John: Powder Monkeys, yeah. There was lots of bands down there at that time. It seemed as though by then – I’d always figured that Sydney was a more rock and roll town and Melbourne was a more Birthday Party-ish sort of art sort of thing, you know what I mean? Which I quite like as well, but it seemed to change. The guard seemed to change about that time, where Sydney was very, very intoxicated with pop bands. Like there’s a whole bunch of bands on Half a Cow – all those sorts like Smudge and after the Plunderers sort of thing. It seemed to be the only thing that was doing shows and getting gigs that people were turning up to.

But Melbourne had changed and bands like Hoss and the Powder Monkeys and Bored and all these other bands were doing lots of gigs and playing to lots of people. So when the band first started going to Melbourne in 1992 and 1993, even up until 1995, we were probably going anywhere from five to six times a year down there. We were going down there a lot.

Steve: Did you play in any bands before Asteroid B-612?

John: Me? Not really. I pretty much learned to play guitar from playing with my uncle who plays in 60s cover bands doing Easybeats songs, Chuck Berry songs, Beatles songs and Hollies songs. Stuff like that. I used to just always tag along. I was someone that he could ring up and say "You gotta come down here, we’re going to play in this guy’s back yard." And then next weekend it was like "We’re going down to Mudgee on Thursday, make sure you’ve got some guitar strings and stuff like that." And he’d come pick me up and we’d go to Mudgee Race Course and play on the back of a semi trailer, you know what I mean? I was only like 14 or 15, something like that. Some of those things were a little bit of a baptism by fire. But that’s basically where I learned how to play guitar.

Steve: Who were your favorite bands before you started playing yourself?

John: 1984? Early 1985? I was working and listening to different things – I still do really like the first record by the Specials and by the English Beat. I really liked those records, and I was listening to that at work a lot. Those were the first two records that I bought. And this guy came along, and he was working with me, and he used to play in a band called Love Shark, and his brother was in Examplehead, which had records out on that Aberrant label. And he said "You play guitar, why are you listening to this lame skanky reggae sort of music? You should be listening to this…" and he basically brought in like that Damned record – the best of the Damned kind of thing – a Motorhead record, and the Radio Birdman record. And that’s what I started listening to, and I started buying those kind of records.

So I didn’t really buy records or listen to much other sort of stuff. Once I could afford to buy records, luckily I started buying good records.

Steve: Yeah, that is lucky. I’m a fair bit older than you, but I think of all the crap I bought before I started buying good records! It’s pretty sad. Most people don’t get into the good stuff right away.

John: That was around the same time…he started working with me, and he was much older than me, but I remember him one Tuesday night saying "Look, you’ve gotta come see this band, my brother’s band Examplehead is playing with this band called the Exploding White Mice." I guess it was like 1985 or something like that. Or 1986. And I really hadn’t seen many bands at all because I was too young to get into pubs. And I went to the St. James Tavern on Castlereagh Street. There was fucking no one there, but I was sitting there going "Wow, this is pretty wild!" you know? I just didn’t know about that sort of stuff.

And I guess not long after that I started seeing bands like the New Christs, who started playing again around that time with Charlie, Jim and Louis Burdett. And that’s basically when I started seeing bands – the Rifles, the Lime Spiders, Trilobites, all that sort of stuff. So I was kind of lucky, I’d reckon.

Steve: I’d have liked to have seen the Exploding White Mice around then – I don’t know if you know, but I put out an Exploding White Mice CD in the US – I thought those guys were great.

John: Yeah, I read all your magazines. I thought "Wow, this guy really likes this band!" I thought they were good, but I didn’t think they were as good as you thought they were (laughs).

Steve: Well, I think they were better before I put out their CD, actually. Their first couple I thought were great, but by the time I did Collateral Damage they’d lost Paul Gilchrist.

John: Ah, OK. I think that Paul was such a big part of that band, and even though Jeff wrote most of the songs, Paul was just the big essence of the band, especially live. He was just a great frontman. Once he wasn’t in the band I didn’t like them much at all.

Steve: Yeah, I’d have to agree they lost a lot without Paul. They had some good songs on that CD I put out, but it wasn’t as strong as their earlier ones.

Tell me about making the first Asteroids CD – the self titled one.

John: Well, we went to Melbourne like I said, and Dave Thomas said "Look, I’d really like you guys to record a record." And we’re thinking we only have like nine songs and a couple of covers. And he was like "Well, we’ll record those nine songs!"

So it was not long after that that we went back down there, and he booked some studio time for us – two days at Birdland Studios. So we’d record for two days and play two shows. So we recorded all the record live on the first day and mixed it all the next day and then went and played the two gigs.

Steve: The first time is quite a shock I think, usually. It’s hard to be comfortable.

John: Yeah, and you’ve got to reinvent yourself a little. Because what you do live, or what I do live, doesn’t necessarily go to tape. It’s hard to get your head around, especially when you’re young and you think you know everything. It’s hard to get your head around someone saying, well, maybe if you do it like this it will sound like this on tape. But if you do it like that, it won’t sound like that. I mean, I still have trouble getting my head around that now.

But we were pretty fortunate that Dave liked the band enough to take a chance on it and shell out the little money that was needed to record the band and put the record out, you know?

Steve: You did a pretty limited run on that, right?

John: There was only 500 of them. And I doubt that you could have only bought 300 of them. Because I know that at the time his distribution was through Shock, and the way they do things there, anything from 100 to 180 copies of anything are promos, and they just give them to people. Because they’re such a big company, and they only needed to sell 230 CDs to break even. They never thought that they were going to make any money, just so long as they got their money back.

Steve: I got mine off AuGoGo – I used to buy mail order from them all the time. For some reason they don’t push the mail order much anymore, but it was a big thing in the 80s, to be able to buy from them. Because they used to carry just about everything.

John: That’s what I used to do in the 80s, too. Me and a friend of mine used to just order records from AuGoGo. We’d come in here and have a look at record shops, but it just seemed as though the stuff we were into at the time, AuGoGo had all of it. We would get whatever we wanted.

Steve: It’s funny, I just got signed up to buy from Shock’s distribution for my mail order business, and they show that they still have that first Asteroid B-612 CD. It remains to be seen whether I can actually get them. Maybe they just haven’t taken it off the list.

John: Well, if they do, as soon as I go home from talking to you I’ll be making a couple of phone calls, because I don’t have them. I only just recently got hold of the second one, because I never had it for years. Because I gave my last copy to someone and that just disappeared and I’ve never been able to get it off of anyone.

Steve: Well, I’m certain they showed Forced Into A Corner, and I think they had the first one. We’ll see if I get them, because I ordered them just before I came here.

John: From what I got told from AuGoGo and from Dave Thomas, you haven’t been able to buy them in seven years. Maybe they found a box of them under something.

Steve: Sometimes what happens is they have them, but no shop picks them up. The other thing they had that really surprised me – I don’t know if you’re into this band at all – but they had the Little Murders’ Stop! Album on AuGoGo, which came out in like 1984. That’s a record that sells on EBay now. It’s bizarre.

John: I wouldn’t be surprised. But I will be inquiring about that as well, if they have any.

Steve: Tell me about Forced Into A Corner. That was a pretty big step up in recording quality. I think the songs on both are really good, but Forced Into A Corner sounded great to me.

John: They were recorded the same way at the same place. Basically the only difference with that was that when we finished recording it, we didn’t mix it the same time we were down there. We may have taken two days to record it, or a day and a half. Yeah, we got there and set up in the early evening, recorded a little bit in the night, and recorded the rest of it the next day. When I went home…actually, we were there for two and a half days, because we mixed it the day after that as well.

When I went home, I realized that I really didn’t like the guitar sound that I had on that record. So about a month later I flew down there and re-recorded my entire guitar track on all the songs. But not knowing this, when the guy was re-recording my guitar track, as we were doing it we were wiping out the vocal track – the lead vocal track.

Steve: Oh, shit!

John: And we didn’t realize it until about 1:00 in the morning, after I’d finished recording all my tracks. Then we realize that we’d gone over the lead vocal track. And no fault of mine! And Melbourne and Sydney aren’t close together, if you know what I mean. If you want to drive in a car, it’s ten hour’s drive.

So I made a frantic phone call to Grant, the singer, at one o’clock in the morning and said, look, you’ve gotta fly down here tomorrow, and they’re gonna pay for it, and redo these vocals. Of course, he wasn’t happy at all about that! But it wasn’t my fault – basically the engineer just made a mistake and didn’t even know he was doing it.

Again, there was large quantities of alcohol involved, and that may have had something to do with it, but he flew down the next day and recorded all these vocals, and we mixed it the next day and took it home. And that was it.

I think that that record is a much better record. I think the songs are much better. We definitely had a better idea of arrangements – the arrangements are much better. I think some of the arrangements on the first record are a catastrophe. Some of them are just really terrible. But we had no idea – we were just playing what we played in the rehearsal room and what we’d come up with.

That record was written about three months before we recorded it. The original guitar player Michael Gibbons was in the band, and he quit about three weeks to a month before we recorded the record. He just didn’t like Sydney anymore and wanted to move away. The timing was bad, but he had to get out and he did.

So the record was pretty much all written and ready to go, so we asked Stewart (Cunningham) to play, because he’d played with us once before. And he played on that record.

I was listening to a lot of stuff the other day – little bits and pieces of that record and a couple of our other records, and the Brother Brick record A Portable Altamont, and different things that Stewart had done, and I really think that that was the best guitar playing that he ever did. Some of the guitar parts he played on there I think were really fantastic – really great sound, and it just seemed that even though he’d only been in the band for one or two months max, he was able to adapt to those songs really well. He was really great on that record, and I don’t think he’s done anything nearly as good since.

Steve: You changed drummers, too, right?

John: Yeah, yeah. The original drummer was more like a school yard friend and just realized that he didn’t want to have to forego work every now and then to play music. He just didn’t want to do that. So the guy who plays drums in the band now, Ben, he’s been in the band for the best part of eight years, and he was basically playing drums in my brother’s band, who’s also in the band now. He was just out of school. This kid was great. I remember filling in guitar once in my brother’s band, just playing a bunch of Stooges covers and Velvet Underground songs and Stones songs…

Steve: What band was that?

John: My brother’s band? It was called Shake Appeal. They only played about four or five shows. But they had a show once in a pub where they’d been booked to support Hoss. And before the show they all realized that they really hated the guitar player (laughter). So my younger brother asked me: will you play? And I said, yeah, OK, I’ll play. And after playing with him once in my brother’s band I thought, this fucking kid’s great! If I ever need to find a drummer, I know where to go, you know?

Steve: After you did Forced Into A Corner there’s quite a long gap until your next CD. What went on there?

John: Well, I pretty much wrote two albums in the space of a year and a half, and Stewart had joined the band and we were playing a lot more gigs – we were basically playing more gigs than we were doing rehearsals. Because we’d never been a band that rehearsed much at all ever. So if we were playing gigs, there was no way we were doing rehearsals. If we’ve got shows to play, we’re just playing the shows. So we were playing a lot, which meant we weren’t rehearsing at all. There was a period of about a year where we hardly ever rehearsed.

I mean, everyone who plays in the band is for the best part a pretty good listener. We’re all pretty comfortable with where anyone could take a song in a particular direction. Maybe we did need rehearsal, but we could play without it, so we didn’t write as much, and if I did write it was spasmodically for about a year and a half.

After that, we signed with AuGoGo and then things weren’t as – when you sign a record deal to a label that’s interested in the industry and planning things, then things need to be scheduled and planned. I might have this recording sitting there, but they might not want to put it out for six months. And then when that six months comes around, they go "Oh, the time’s not quite right, let’s wait another two months!" I mean, for my money it just seems like bullshit, but they know the business and I don’t, so that’s basically what happened. We signed to AuGoGo who were a more going concern than Destroyer Records were, and things needed to be planned more. So there were songs written and stuff like that, but it did seem to me like a long space.

Steve: So the question is, did all the planning and stuff that AuGoGo did translate into you selling more records?

John: It translated into big fat fucking zero! (laughs) Because I think for 90% of it, it was all talk. It was all bullshit told to the band to try to make the band feel secure.

To be honest, they didn’t seem like they wanted to waste large amounts of money on a rock and roll band. I think that a record company would be more interested in putting money into a rock and roll band these days than they were back then. They wanted some sort of post Seattle, sludgey, quirky girl rock band, which they got in Magic Dirt. Who were good when they first started but went a little bit pear shaped in the middle there.

I mean, we were signed because we were everyone’s favorite band, and they thought "Better us have them than someone else." I kind of get that feeling.

Steve: The other thing that you see a lot with independent labels is that the first ten or twelve releases they do, they push really hard on all of them, and then after that they get into a thing where it’s kind of business as usual and they try to just put out a lot of stuff and hope something catches fire all by itself. And if something doesn’t catch fire, they go "OK, we’ll wait for something that does get going."

John: Yeah, yeah, I mean, they were always big on talking like "if the first thing fails, we’ll go onto the next thing. This is a long term project."

But the amount of different stories I got told from the different people who worked there and the different people who owned the place – I mean, I think that Bruce is a real gentleman and a really nice guy, and I have a lot of time for him. But he sat me down one day and said, "Look, you’re gonna hear rumours that I’m selling my share of AuGoGo, but don’t worry, it’s all OK. It’s not happening." And then two weeks later he was gone. And I’m like, "Bruce, I thought we were friends before all this. You signed the band, and you’re gonna tell me that?" I never was that annoyed at him, but he could have said to me "Look, I’m out of here", and I would have thought "OK, well, fair enough. What happens now?"

But it was the fact that he said "well, don’t believe the hype" and then he was gone. What’s that all about? But I think Bruce is a nice guy.

Steve: I read the Asteroid B-612 piece on the I-94 Bar website, and you said there that you didn’t like the sound of Not Meant For This World.

John: Yeah, I think it’s a bad sounding record. At the time, I think I was probably not thinking as straight as now. At the time I didn’t have a lot of grasp of a lot of things. But there’s no bass on the record. There’s no bass guitar on the record at all. I can’t believe that Scott hasn’t strangled me for what happened to that. But if you listen to the record, there is no bass on the record. The drums sound like they’re recorded in some gas chamber somewhere, just some big booming like drum thing that may have worked for one or two songs, but throughout the whole record just didn’t work.

I thought the guitar sounds were average at best. Way too compressed and distorted. No dynamics. There’s some good songs on there, definitely some really good songs. I think it was a shame that they got wasted on that recording.

Steve: I was surprised when I read that, because I think that the album before sounded better, but as a neutral observer I didn’t think this one sounded bad. It was a strong record.

Steve: Well, they’re good, anyway. It’s definitely true that when you’re in the band that makes a record, you have a totally different perspective from other people. You hear Rob Younger talking about his "Face A New God" single and how he can’t stand it, but those are two awesome songs – not recorded very well, of course, but two awesome songs.

John: I’ve always toyed for the last couple years of wanting to cover the song "Face A New God". Until the Do The Pop thing came out, and that sort of stole whatever thunder that I thought I might have. But I did want to record it because I thought it was such a great song. There were so many great New Christs songs that went unrecorded. So many great ones that I have sitting around on a live tape somewhere or someone’s got them somewhere. I definitely had them at some stage, but things seem to go missing a lot, you know?

I think that that song is definitely one of the better things they’ve done. I think it’s a great song. And that line in it that "nothing is cool" is something that has always been in my head since I first heard that single. I mean I first heard it on some 12" bootleg like Year Of The Rats or Where Birdmen Flew or something like that. I might have been like 18 or 17, and I got this record, and it’s like "Fuck, listen to this song, it’s SO great! Where can I actually get this? Is this on a record somewhere?" But I never got it on 7" until they re-released it on that Pink Flamingo label. I wasn’t shelling out 180 dollars for it.

Steve: I found an original in one of these used shops on Pitt Street for three dollars in 1987.

John: There you go! Right place at the right time.

Steve: But anyway, it’s a classic example. I interview guys in bands all the time who are telling me how some record they’ve done that I think is awesome and they think this just sounds awful. But it sounds fine.

John: But that’s a good thing. Because people will get what they can out of the music I might make or someone else might make, and that’s what it’s about.

Steve: Of course, you have a preconception in your head of what it’s supposed to sound like, and nobody else has that. Anyway, was the first US tour right after the release of Not Meant For This World?

John: Yeah, that’s right. Basically it came about from Jack Tielman who runs Lance Rock Records, he put out an Asteroid B-612 album, which was basically the Teen Sublimation Riffs ep along with a few tracks from the Forced Into A Corner CD made up as an album for a Canadian and North American release. And he knows so many people in Seattle – he’s always doing record fairs and stuff there. And he’s a gentleman – I really think he’s a great guy. So he was able to set it up. He said, look, it would be really great if you guys could make it over here. It might mean that I could sell a couple of extra records.

And if someone wants to get us somewhere, then we make it happen, you know? Because we all just love to play music with each other, and we did then, too. Well, we kind of did then.

Anyway, he set it up that Gas Huffer were going to give us 13 shows down the west coast. Then someone else set up a couple shows in Anaheim and Tucson and that sort of area, and then another person set up shows through the south and back through onto the east coast and up around there, and then back across again. So it was just friends who knew the right people in the right places who were able to link this all up and gave us a little over a month of pretty much solid playing.

And I felt a little bit sorry for Jack, because it took a long time for him to get the record out. And in the meantime, AuGoGo had signed a distribution deal with Mordam Records in America, so basically AuGoGo – and it was a pretty bad thing to do because Jack was very good friends with AuGoGo and he was releasing an Asteroid B-612 album in America. And AuGoGo signed this contract with Mordam, and because Jack took just a little bit more time than perhaps he should have getting the record ready, they basically released Not Meant For This World through Mordam and just basically kind of cut his grass. So by the time we got there, Jack’s record wasn’t ready and Mordam were distributing this new record. So he was just left with his dick in his hand going "I can’t believe you fucking did this to me, you know?" AND Greta had a couple of those songs off Jack’s record put onto the Mordam record. So it got a little bit sloppy.

Steve: It’s funny, I’ve never seen the Lance Rock release. Since it was announced that he was going to do it I’ve had it on a list of CDs that I’ve been looking for and I’ve never seen it anywhere in the United States.

John: The beauty of that being – the only thing that let the second record down a bit was the mastering, because we mastered it as we mixed it. And the six songs, or five songs that were included off that record got remastered at Festival Records and they sound probably a lot better on the Lance Rock CD than what they did on the Forced Into A Corner CD.

(we order another round of Cooper’s…)

John: I find myself being a bit of a snob now, and if I can’t get Cooper’s I won’t drink at all.

Steve: I didn’t know that AuGoGo had a deal with Mordam, either.

John: I think that that fell on its ass pretty fast. AuGoGo don’t pay their bills, so they lose friends fast. To the point that bands go into the recording studio to make records with the OK from the record company, and the recording studio won’t give the band the masters because they’re actually having to send tough guys around to AuGoGo Records to bash down their door and try to get money by threatening them. That’s how far it actually goes!

Steve: That’s a hell of a way to run a label!

John: Yep!

Steve: So this tour we were talking about is the one where all the problems with Stewart came up, right?

John: The problems that happened with Stewart were happening before we went, and we either shouldn’t have gone, or we should have kicked Stewart out of the band before we went. That was our mistake, taking him with us. He didn’t want to go anyway, but without a doubt he should have been told to pack up his guitar and go a good six months before the band went to America. There was stuff going on that was…see it becomes a little bit more like a relationship when you’re playing a lot and touring a lot. You tend to want to believe that everything’s OK, because things are going well, and you tend to turn a blind eye to lots of problems that are occurring, because you think that, well, if this happens then it’s going to fuck everything up. It’s going to tear everything down, and you don’t want that to happen.

So you tend to sort of ride the fence a little bit and not address the problems, and that’s our fault for not doing that. That’s not Stewart’s fault, that’s our fault for not saying "Hey, listen, fuck off!" That’s our fault. It’s our fault that we went there and played…this band went to America and played shows that people were blown away by, and we were like – if we were an eight cylinder car, then we were running on about 3 or 4 cylinders. Because we didn’t want to be…Grant, Scott, Ben and myself, the last thing we wanted to do was be on the same stage or be in the same band as Stewart. And that’s what we had to do for a month. So at times it may have made for some really spiteful and aggressive kind of gigs. But there was no cohesion. There was just aggression all pointed every which way but fucking loose. It was just crazy.

And I was disappointed that the band had the opportunity to go to America and we couldn’t actually play the way that we were quite capable of playing. Maybe it would have made no difference at all. But it would have been better for self satisfaction if we went there and knew that we gave it a good shot, but we didn’t. We went there and didn’t give it a shot at all, really. You know it’s not every day that friends are able to set up a tour in another country for you to go to, so for you to go there and not give it your best shot, it’s pretty lame. But that’s what we did.

Steve: It’s hard to play well when you’re not enjoying yourself.

John: I liken it to a relationship I may have been in where I couldn’t stand this certain fucking person, you know? And this has happened to me not so long ago. I was with someone that I could not fucking stand, and I didn’t know why I was with this person. But I just was, because it was easy. And I really do liken that time to that kind of feeling.

Stewart was in the band – wonderful, wonderful guitar player. Great songwriter. But mainly a wonderful guitar player. And I honestly believe that Asteroid B-612 brought the best out of Stewart as well, in his guitar playing and some of the songs that he wrote as well. But I couldn’t stand to fucking look at him, if you know what I mean. And that’s why I really do liken it to a relationship that I was in a couple of years ago where I was with this person and I couldn’t fucking stand it.

(long discussion ensues about experiences in other bands with guitar players who become anal in recording sessions…)

I don’t think that Stewart was anal. I think he was a fucking asshole, but I don’t think he was anal about things. But Stewart is technically a WAY better guitar player than I am. Much better. But I think that 90% of the time Stewart plays with his soul in his ass. He can play his ass off, but he doesn’t put his fucking heart on the line, if you know what I mean. And I’m quite proud of the fact that I know that when I’m playing…you can come and see Asteroid B-612 and we might be the worst band you’ve ever seen, but if we were it was because I was in no mood to play. I didn’t want to be there and I didn’t want to play, so that’s how it might sound. But if I’m there, and I want to like give up the funk so to speak, you’ll know how I feel about things. But Stewart was all about having things rehearsed properly, and he’d scream at me if I didn’t sing backing vocals in a particular part. And I thought it doesn’t need to be like that every night. It needs to run on emotion and not technicality. It needs to run on passion, and if it’s not, then I don’t want to do it.

That’s why I loved the Charlie Owen, Jim Dickson, Louis Burdett lineup of the New Christs. Because it could have fallen apart at any given moment, but somehow it hung in there, and when it came back it hit you like you’d never been hit before. I just thought that’s that what I loved most about music, was that uncertainty and that essence of danger. I don’t like things to be too programmed at all. I like to walk into a rehearsal room and say "This is my idea. Does it suck?" And they go: "No, it’s a vehicle. Let’s just play it and see what happens." I don’t want to walk in and go, "Then we stop after here, and then we go here, and then we go here. And then I want you to play this little bit here, and then I want the drums…". Just play it! And whatever feels right, that’s what’s right.

Because the person standing down there in the crowd, he’s not thinking about it too much. He just wants to feel right. He wants it to sit well around the hips, so you can fucking move to it a little bit. And if it’s too complicated or it’s not sitting well around the hips, then he won’t feel it.

Steve: Why did Grant end up leaving the band? When was that?

John: When we came back from America….me and Grant are really good mates and we have been forever, since I can remember. Grew up through school together and used to go on family vacations together me and him. Just the kind of mates where if one of us was down and out we’d be there for each other. That kind of thing. And I think that with what happened in America, he thought "I just don’t want to do this any more."

I think now – and I’m saying this mainly because I was hanging out with him not so long ago and he’d come to see the band. And when he heard the record that I wrote, Reading Between The Lines, he just started crying. Because he thought, "My friend has made a really good record." He wasn’t upset – he was crying happy, because he thought "this is really fucking good." And he said to me not long after that "I knew you had it in you, but I didn’t think that it was ever going to come out." And I think that if the band had stayed, and he probably thought it was going to stay the way it was, then he didn’t want any part of it. Because he was changing in his life, and he didn’t want to do what we were doing before, and maybe he thought that’s the way it was going to stay.

He wanted to go overseas and do some different things, but he definitely didn’t want to be just playing the same rock and roll that we’d been playing for the last five or six years before that. He was like "I don’t want to do this anymore. My heart’s not in it if we keep doing it like this." And he was right, because at the same time we had a guy from Perth named Ken Watt come and play guitar with us. And even though he’s a little bit younger than us, he was the shot in the arm that we needed. Because when we came back from America, we knew that we were still going to play but we didn’t know in what capacity we were going to play.

And when we asked Kenny to play and he said yes, and this kid was willing to pack up his stuff. And for American people, this is like traveling from California to Philadelphia or New York, and moving from home, to go and play in a rock and roll band that might play once a month and might go on tour once in a while. And he did that because he loved the band so much. He came and played, but as much as he was like a huge shot in the arm for the band with all his youthful energy, it just didn’t go anywhere. Didn’t go anywhere.

That’s when I felt like "I don’t want to do this anymore, because it’s not progressing, and it’s not going anywhere else." And at the same time, Grant was going "I don’t want to do this at all. I want to get out of this country and I want to go away." And that’s what he did.

Steve: Where’d he go?

John: He went to Scotland and was there for two years or something. Then he came back for a couple of months and was gone again for another couple of years or something like that.

Steve: That Reading Between The Lines album really is fantastic. I liked all the other records – Asteroid B-612 was one of the best bands in Australia during the 90s as far as I’m concerned, but Reading Between The Lines is a step above all the rest. More variety and a wider range of emotions. You’ve said that you wrote almost the whole thing about one girl, but it still feels like the songs hit a lot of different areas.

At the time of writing that record I was really fucking lonely and trying to grab on to anything that walked past. And I would very easily blame anyone but myself. There’s one or two songs on there where I’m sort of asking myself "Is it me that’s the absolute screw up here and not just everyone else?" Which you do have to ask every now and then. Because it’s not all the time that it’s everyone else who’s to blame.

But I think it’s a good record. I’m really proud of that record.

Steve: How does your brother feel about singing all these songs? They’re sort of personal songs!

John: He knows me pretty good. He knows me better than, not everyone, but he knows me as well as anyone. And I can sit there with a guitar in my hand and sing something to him, and he knows where my head is at pretty much. He does walk into a rehearsal sometimes, and I might show him something, and he’ll say, "So which Johnny am I talking to today? Is it this one? Or is it this one over here?" (laughter) So he likes a little bit of clarification every now and then to work out who he’s actually dealing with, but he’s got me down pretty much.

Steve: I guess that’s one advantage of having your brother in there. He probably doesn’t cut you any slack, either!

John: No, no. And he can sing! He single handedly gave that record a different dimension from all the other records, basically because he could sing with much wider range of emotional state. Because Grant, who was great, all he could do was yell his lungs out. That’s all he could do – that and crawl around the stage like some sort of wild monkey, but that’s all he could do.

Steve: You definitely notice that right away – a lot more dimensions to the singing. So what kind of reaction did you get for that album.

John: Well, no reaction at all other than the people I sent it to. I mean, everyone that I sent the record to said this is the best thing we’d ever done. But the shame about it was that it got no attention at all. The record company that put it out just did nothing with it. And that’s why at the moment we’re toying with the idea of releasing it with a different record company with much, much, much better distribution. And they are very seriously interested in doing it because they believe in the record. They can’t believe that the record came out of this band. They say this is a really good record. And this record company doesn’t just deal with straight down the line rock and roll bands. They’re thinking "This band made this record and this record, and they made THIS record?" They’re like, well, we’re not so interested in them, but we’re very interested in this. So we’re toying with the idea that maybe something’s going to happen.

But then I have a bunch of songs in my pocket at the moment that I’m more interested in recording. The record was made in 1998, so it’s four years old now. Although I really do believe in that record and I was quite sad at the fact that it didn’t get put into the places that it should have buy our record company. You can’t buy it any more, I know that. You can’t buy it from record shops anymore because there’s none left.

Steve: Actually, that’s another one where I buy it from Corduroy Distribution still.

John: When’s the last time you bought some, though?

Steve: Probably four weeks ago. And I sell it pretty steadily. I mean, I don’t sell huge amounts of anything, but I probably sold 30 of them. And it’s one of the few CDs that I sell where I’ve gotten multiple letters back from people who bought it saying, "this is one hell of a great CD".

John: That’s another phone call I’ll have to make when I get home, because I thought I’d bought the last forty copies, because I didn’t want to not have any copies like I did with the other records. So I went and bought what was apparently the last forty copies of the record.

Steve: I feel like there may be a resurgence in interest in this kind of stuff happening now. It may turn out to be nothing, but you just kind of watch the trajectory of things, and it’s going up right now. Whereas it has been going down for most of the last ten years.

John: I see that there are bands touted at the moment as the saviors of rock and roll. I may have heard five different band names in the last month that have been touted as the saviors of rock and roll. So I do see that there is some sort of avenue working at the moment that seems to be picking up all these bands and saying that rock and roll is back or something like that. So I do understand where you’re coming from.

Steve: To me it’s real encouraging that the Hives have done well. I don’t know what you think of them, but I’ve liked them a lot from well before they became popular and although I don’t know that they deserve to be head and shoulders above everyone else, I think they’re a first rate band, and I was really knocked out when they started charting.

John: Yeah, well I thought when the Hellacopters got signed and all this big stuff was going on with them, on the one hand I was kind of thinking I was doing this three years ago…

Steve: …and a lot better, too…

John: …well, depending on who you talk to, a lot of people might have said a lot better, too. And no one gave a rats ass. And all of a sudden there’s this band being flown around in a Lear jet to play in different festivals in Europe. And this band that I’ve been in was doing it to thirty people in a pub down at the corner. But then the Rifles could say the same thing. I guess there’s a lot of bands that could claim the same sort of thing. I’m not picking on them in particular, because I think that live they’re a good band. I just don’t think they really do a hell of a lot on record outside of their first record maybe that I thought was too original.

I can pick things a mile off and go "That’s MY fucking riff! You stole MY riff! Get away from me!" You know, that sort of thing. To the point where Nick once said to me "Look, I have to say that when I heard the second record, someone gave it to me on cassette, but it really inspired me to write this song and this song and this song, you know?" And I was kind of like, well, fuck, thanks! But then I guess it’s just human nature to kind of feel a little bit envious or jealous or something like that. It’s not really directed at them in any way shape or form, because they are really charming guys, but you do get a little bit envious and think "Well, fucking ay, this is MINE! And someone else is getting the credit for it." Not that it’s really mine – I mean there’s plenty of bands from before I was even a pimple on my old man’s ass that were doing this. But when you know that there’s definite ideas that you nutted out and all of a sudden they’re getting used elsewhere…

Steve: So much of success in the music industry is total luck, too. There’s so many factors that have nothing to do with how good your music is that go into being successful. You can drive yourself completely insane thinking about where you ought to be in the overall scheme of things.

John: Yeah, you’d become a very horrible person very fast if you did that.

Steve: All you’ve gotta do is play and enjoy what you’re doing and do the best you can at it, and take what comes. Do you play much around town any more?

John: Ah, we may have played…I’ve been home from America since September or something last year. I got home just before the World Trade Center thing. And we might have played like five times. We’ve played in Perth since then. We played four shows in Perth and in a couple of weeks we’ve got three shows in Melbourne and then another four shows in Perth. So in the next couple of months I think we’ll be playing a lot more than we have in the last four or five years. There’s a couple of people that are doing a couple things for the band that have their foot in a certain amount of doors that might work out OK for the band. I’m really interested in doing some recording pretty soon as well. Because I’ve got some songs that I think are pretty OK.

But lots of fans of the band were saying "it’s not as good anymore" and all this sort of stuff. But they’re now saying, "fuck, I don’t know what I was thinking. Not only is it NOT not as good anymore, it’s actually a lot better." Because there’s this going on and this going on that could have never gone on before.

So I would like to think that I’m still sort of pushing the envelope a little bit and maybe try to take it somewhere else. And maybe if we lose people again by the wayside, maybe they’ll catch up again or something like that. But I’d hate to think that I as a song writer rest on my laurels in any way and just go "Well, I’ve got this formula down, and people seem to like it, so that’s what we’ll do." And I think that that’s what the band was doing up until the time when we decided to ditch the second guitar. We had a formula down, and we were very, very good at it. Without standing on a soap box, there’s no way about it, we just were good – and better than most people at it. But it wasn’t going to go any further than that – that’s what it was gonna be. It was just gonna be that again and again and again. So I definitely don’t want to ever be caught out thinking that I’m on a good thing and just resting on it. I’d like to do something that might be slightly different again, and if it don’t work then it don’t work. But at least I tried it. I don’t want to become boring. I’m becoming old fast, I don’t want to become boring as well as old.

I mean there’s so many kids that get up and play in rock and roll bands these days, and a couple of people who were working with the band say to us "The only problem we get off of people with your band it that they go – oh, aren’t they those old guys that play rock and roll?" And I’m sitting there thinking "Well, I ain’t that fucking old, it’s just that everyone else is young!" But I don’t want to be thought of as some old fart with the same idea that he was doing in the late 80s or early 90s.

Steve: Well, how old are you now?

John: Thirty two. I’m really a baby.

Steve: Shit, I started learning how to play drums when I was 32, and then I played in bands for like 12 years after that! So you have a long way to go.

John: Yeah, but I don’t want to in any way shape or form think that this is all that I can do.

Steve: It’s funny what you were saying about the two guitar line up, because lately I’ve been playing a lot of sixties music, which I probably unfairly ignored for a long time, since I really got heavily into music during the punk years in 1976-1977 where, at least in some quarters, the ethic was to discard everything that went before. From punk I was really into the whole two guitar band thing, but one thing you notice in sixties music is that the bass is way more prominent and a lot of times it does things that lead guitar players are doing now. And if you go to a single guitar and you can get the bass player thinking in that mindset that at times he can almost take a lead, it can be pretty interesting.

John: If you’re capable of listening to Reading Between The Lines and solely concentrating on the bass, the bass playing on that record, and the bass lines that Scott came up with, I would go as far as saying that they made the record. Some of the melody lines that Scott came up with and some of the way that he played different things with the bass on different songs that I basically just had chords for and singing ideas made the record. It gave the record a certain groove and a certain underbelly that it wouldn’t have had if Scott didn’t come up with those ideas. And I definitely think that it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good as it was if he didn’t come up with those. Some of the bass playing on that record is fantastic. And it’s very subliminal. It’s like you don’t know it’s there, but all of a sudden you’ll find yourself waiting for that part to come when the bass line does this certain thing and turns the drums around and steers the guitar in the direction that it’s meant to go. And it’s actually the bass that’s doing that, and it takes you a couple times to realize that it’s the bass that’s doing that.

Steve: Tell me about the Johnny Casino CD and how you ended up doing that?

John: Well, I have a place in America where I can go and work. I don’t want many people to know about that, especially tax people and stuff like that. (laughs) But I have a place where I can go and work, and it means that I can basically live in a city and do whatever I want – go to work, make some money, and play some music. I got asked to play in Michael Wilhelm’s band, who was in the Charlatans and the Flamin’ Groovies, just for two gigs. And I did that, and the band that was that band basically ended up being Johnny Casino’s Easy Action. Because at the time I had a couple – maybe 5 or 6 – songs that I didn’t think were good enough to be used for Asteroid B-612, but I still thought that they were OK songs to muck around with and have some fun with. And there was a couple people over there who wanted to play some music and maybe record a couple songs, and so it just happened. We went in a studio one day and recorded and mixed those songs on that CD in six hours.

Actually not the last time I went back there, but the time before that we recorded about twelve songs, just live to cassette in a rehearsal room. Which I think probably sounds definitely just a little bit ruder. It’s a little bit sort of nasty sounding, but I think that it’s kind of better than that CD.

Steve: Are you going to release those songs?

John: I don’t know. I’m halfway between trying to make a tape of it for someone who’s interested in releasing it, so I’ve got to do that and see what happens. The last time I was there I recorded five songs with Michael Wilhelm and the same person wants to hear them as well. So maybe those things well come out in some shape or form at some time. There’s a couple things that I have that at some stage I’d like to release. Like the second to the last gig that Asteroid B-612 did with Stewart and Grant in the band was live on WFMU radio station in New York.

Steve: Is that Fairleigh Dickinson’s college radio station?

John: Yeah, I think so. Something like that. (ed – actually, I’m wrong here – WFMU was Upsala College’s radio station but is now a non-profit, listener funded station that can be heard over the air or on the web at www.wfmu.org)

Steve: Who ever it is working at that station seems to have really good taste.

John: We played live to air there for an hour or so and someone sent me a tape, and it’s this really busted ass crappy cassette – some mass produced Warner Brothers cassette with some band’s songs on it and someone put sticky tape over the top and re-recorded this show that we did, and it actually sounds great. So I’m toying with the idea of maybe some day getting a couple of dollars together and taking it somewhere and actually mastering it up and cleaning it all up and putting it out. Because it’s a little bit like a testament in some sort of a way, because there were five guys in that room on that night, and only four of them wanted anything to do with each other. And you can nearly hear that. The songs are played well, and they sound OK, but you can nearly hear this sort of cold tension. There’s nothing said in between songs, and then when there is something said it’s very sarcastic or dry. You can tell that no one’s looking at each other. Maybe it’s just me that can sense that, because I remember being in that place, and it was really cold that night. And maybe when I listen to it I can see that. But I do definitely think that when you listen to it you can nearly hear that there’s a band that knew that their time was up – that this wasn’t working anymore. So it’s kind of interesting.

Steve: Yeah – I’d like to hear that.

Steve: What are some of the other covers you’ve done? That "Mirror Blues" take you did for the Divine Rites compilation Storming The Citadel was pretty great.

John: An interesting thing, that was. That was the original take, and I remember Rob Younger was producing it and I think he was probably pissed off because for some reason or other I thought that I could go out and get drunk until five o’clock in the morning before I was meant to be in the studio at ten o’clock. And maybe I was a bit rude because there was some Frenchman out here paying all this money and I turn up like an hour and a half late, and they’re kinda looking at me like some "fuck you" kind of thing. I don’t know what was happening. Maybe it was me being still hung over and paranoid. But Rob said to me – still dressed in last night’s clothes – he said "So how long does this song go for?" And I said "I don’t really know". And he goes, "Well what do you mean?". And I said, "Well, we’ve only ever rehearsed it once two days ago." And he goes "You haven’t rehearsed?" And I went, "No we had a rehearsal like two days ago, and that was the first time we played it." And he said, "Well, how long did it go for in rehearsal?" And I said, "Well the first time it went for six minutes, and the second time it went for twenty five."

(much laughter)

And he goes, "Well, you can’t record a twenty five minute song!" And I said, "Well, we’ve got no plan, we’re just going to set up and play it." And he’s like "There’s eight and a half minutes left on this reel, do you think I should change the reel?" And I said, "Yeah, you’d better change the reel." So he changed the reel, put a new reel on, and then that was what it was. Ben counted it in and that was what it was. What you hear is what was recorded. The keyboards, Bruce (Tatham, formerly keyboardist in Decline Of The Reptiles and contributor to many Sydney recording sessions) came in and did the keyboards later on. But the rest of it, how it was done is how it is.

It was kind of a weird thing, because at first when he (Didier) was talking to us about doing it, he approached us – I think maybe Ian Underwood gave him an e-mail address that he could get us at or – no, that’s right. ‘Cos I’m pretty much computer illiterate. I mean, I’ve got no idea at all. I have a computer, but I have no idea. But Ben and his wife had a computer and they were just surfing the internet and stumbled across this site, and said "Oh, cool site. I play drums in Asteroid B-612 and it’s good to see that there’s other people around the world that like this kind of music." And then he e-mailed back and said, "Well, you know what, I’ve been trying to find you guys. And I want you to do a song on a compilation." And at the time I really wasn’t into doing it at all. I was kind of tired of being lumped as like – in this city definitely, and maybe in this country in a certain way – as being lumped as just another Detroit inspired band that is doing nothing new. And at this time the band had just become a one guitar band and I just wanted to be totally removed from that. Because I just thought that after all this time and making three records it was a little bit unfair to keep getting pushed into that pile all the time. I honestly thought that we had something to say. So for two months I kept saying no, no, no. ‘Cos Ben would ring me up and say, "Look, this guy’s e-mailed me again today and he wants to know." And I’m like, no! And Katie, Ben’s wife, still has them at home because I asked her to keep them because some really crazy shit went down afterwards, because he sent to her e-mail address like 26 e-mails inside of two months going "I really want you to do it, you’ve gotta do it. Everyone else is doing it." And I would just say no. And in the end, I was at their place and I said "Write this on the e-mail. If you let us use this song at a later date that you’re paying for as a B-side or on a compilation or some CD we might put out for yourselves, we will do it.

And he answered back saying yes. And then we did it, and then he refused to let us use it. So I used it for a CDEP that we put out. And we were only ever going to use it as a promo thing, because we put Different Licks For Different Chicks out by ourselves just as a promo thing just to give to people, because we weren’t with AuGoGo anymore and we were trying to line something up. And he was going to sue us and he sent out a letter to every record company in Australia saying "If you sign this band and use this song I will sue you." And all this crazy shit went on. And it wasn’t even our song anyway!

The only reason I wanted to use it was because I thought it was a great take. I thought "Wow, fuck, for some reason or another, we just hit the nail right on the head that day". It was like "Here you go, here’s a twelve and a half minute song done in one take." And I personally think it sounds fucking wonderful. There’s pieces in it that are crazy. I remember Rob and Didier when we finished it, they were sitting there going "Fucking hell!" I mean, no disrespect to all these other bands, but they were in there going, "We recorded this band and we can’t believe that you guys can just walk in here and do this all in one take! We’re going to have to put this on one side of the record because if we try to put anything after it or before it, it will make it look and sound like crap."

Steve: Didier said that?

John: Yeah, Didier said that we were an average band that had a handful of good songs. And I was just like, "Well, whatever. I want to put this out on an ep that we’re putting out ourselves. It’s not going for any record company or nothing. No record shops. It’s not getting distribution or nothing. It’s something that we have for ourselves personally to give to our friends." But he said no, and he sent me this huge letter about suing and all this sort of stuff. Craig got involved, and he was saying "Look, I don’t want to be the middleman, but I’m his Australian liaison and if you use it we’re gonna sue."

Now if he had said: "John, don’t use the song. I really would appreciate it if you didn’t use it." I would have went, "OK, well, I can do without it." But when he said: "If you use the song I will sue you", some teenage – I don’t know if it’s a punk rock kind of ethic – flared up in my back. And I went, all right, I WILL fucking use it. You’re telling me that I can’t, and it’s something that I did, then I will. But if you ask me nicely I won’t. Not that you have to crawl up my ass or anything, but if you’d say "Look, I prefer it if you didn’t." I’d go "OK, cool, you’ve got your reasons. No problem." But the fact that he said "If you use it, I’ll sue you." – I was like, well, sue me! I’ve got nothing! I’ve got a fucking guitar. That’s it!

Steve: The silly thing about it is that you can’t find those Storming The Citadel records anywhere.

John: See another reason that I said no for a long time is that I don’t particularly like the idea of those kinds of compilations. And I thought all those singles were like my favorite singles ever. I mean, what’s anybody going to do in any band in this country to improve them or do something to them. And I’m not trying to be an asshole, but I think that the only band on there besides Louis Tillet that did do something slightly different or mixed it up a little bit was Asteroid B-612. Nearly every other song that was on there on the copy that I had – I don’t have the other one – wasn’t as good.

Steve: The one other one that I thought was an improvement was the Challenger 7 take of "A Stand Alone".

John: Maybe. Yeah, maybe.

Steve: Because I thought that wasn’t a very good song to begin with, and I thought they made about as much of it as you could. They probably made a smart move by choosing a song that wasn’t too good.

John: Yeah, OK, right. Maybe they tried to do "Igloo" or something like that.

John: See I used to see Died Pretty in like 1986 to 1987, all those times, and they would often end their set – they even called themselves at one point The Final Solution – and the Died Pretty used to end their sets all the time, from what I can remember anyway, with either "Kill Your Sons", "Mirror Blues", or "Final Solution". And sometimes they would even merge "Mirror Blues" into "Final Solution". And I thought, "Well, if I’m going to do something that has anything to do with that" – because I knew that Didier wanted us to do a New Christs song, too, and I thought "I’m staying well away from that!" Because that’s taboo for me. Because I really do love that stuff so much, and as a kid growing up, I didn’t miss any shows. I would get on planes, trains, and fucking anything to get to a New Christs show. I’d sleep at the train station until the train came the next morning to get home. By myself, because I knew no one else would go. But I thought if I miss it I might actually miss something that I don’t want to miss! And it might just have been the same show that I’d seen the night before, but still I wasn’t taking the chance on missing something that may have happened that night that I would never forget.

And a lot of the times it did with that band, because they were un-fucking-predictable. And that was the beauty about them, and I thought that was the beauty about the Died Pretty, too. That sometimes they could be mediocre, and then sometimes – I remember seeing them at Max’s one night with the New Christs, and if my memory’s right it was the Died Pretty, the New Christs and the Celibate Rifles. That was the gig. On a Sunday night at Max’s in Petersham. I now live just around the corner from that place. It’s a shame to see it, but it’s turned into some big housing development or whatever.

But I remember that night seeing the Died Pretty, and they were the opening band for some benefit for one of Damien’s fucking save Tibet or the Dali Lama kind of things or whatever, and good luck to him, know what I mean? But I remember that night Died Pretty played the opening song and I thought "Fuck, that was pretty good", and the next song I think they went straight into "Winterland" or something that I was very familiar with. Maybe this is 1987 or 1988 at the latest. I had a couple of Died Pretty records, but I wasn’t a big Died Pretty fan by then. I’d seen them a bunch of times, but I didn’t have their records. But when the Died Pretty and the New Christs played that night, the music made me move and I had no control over it. It made me realize what I wanted to do.