Bored!
This article originally appeared in Noise For
Heroes #19 in the summer of 1990
Melbourne's top entry
into the field of heavy handed grungey punk metal are Bored!, and they've decided to do
something about it. Although the band has been in existence only a couple of years, and
they're really from Geelong and not Melbourne, they've risen to the top of their local
heap and have managed to pull support gigs for international touring bands such as the
Rollins Band, Sonic Youth, and the Ramones; shows where, in my humble estimation, they are
likely to have proven themselves the superior act. Their sound is yet another contribution
to blurring of the lines between punk and metal...but the attitude is clearly punk. Bored!
are into chaos.
Singer Dave Thomas
tries to explain: "What makes a good rock and roll band? Any band that can just go
crazy without putting it on...just really pump out a lot of volume and everything. There's
a lot of other good bands that we like. I like some of the Sub Pop stuff that's coming
out. Not all of it. I like that band Thee Hypnotics from England, I think. They're pretty
cool. There's a lot of bands in Australia that we really like. There's a band down here in
Geelong called the Dirty Lovers, who are really fantastic. There's a band from Melbourne
called Nice Girls From Cincinnati. They're probably my favorite Melbourne band. I usually
like the new bands that are starting up, because they're just more hungry. The bands that
have been around for a while just play the usual gig, or whatever, where the new bands are
really trying hard and just throwing caution to the wind and just going crazy whether it
works for them or not. Sometimes the shit gigs are the best gigs."
Bored! might fit in
on Sub Pop, but then they might leave a lot of Sub Pop's bands looking more than a little
contrived, too. Their first lp is a slab of six tracks featuring basic, heavy riffs that
grind away, drums that never tap when they can bludgeon, and David Thomas singing voice, a
voice whose general texture sounds like THE RULES being ripped in two. I got their first
record about a year and a half ago in the middle of a pile of other Detroit influenced
punk records, and being saturated with the style at the time I made the mistake of giving
it an average review. But cream always rises, and I've since seen the error of my ways. Bored!
is a record that grows steadily and now a year later is still in regular rotation on my
turntable. At least three songs out of the six will probably end up being remembered as
classic examples of Australian rock and roll in years to come. It's that good. If you
don't believe me, just listen to the thundering drum bit, guitar intro and scream of
anguish that start of "Little Suzie".
Says Dave: "We
probably started about two and a half years ago. There was myself, Buzz the drummer, and
John on guitar and Grant on bass. We just started off playing all the usual stuff; Stooges
songs, MC5 songs, and just anything that sounded good to us. And then we had various
different members, and our bass player Grant ended up leaving."
Dave himself played
in several Melbourne bands before Bored!; names like White Noise, Sister Ann,
Slaughterhouse and the Melbourne Dolls lurk in his past. "We all had been in previous
bands", he says. "John played in a band called Behind The Magnolia Curtain, a
sort of sixties really wild r'n'b band, and I played in a couple of punk bands. Our first
gig was only a couple of years ago. It was pretty crazy when we started playing; we
probably knew about eight songs, and we played as loud as we could and as crazy as we
could to fill out the set. And David had seen us playing around with some of the Melbourne
bands that he used to go and see like the Seminal Rats, and I think he liked what we were
doing and asked us to record some stuff and give him a listen. It just sort of went from
there; he liked what we were doing and was stupid enough to get involved with us."
A second lp, Negative
Waves, came out this fall. It gave no reason to complain either, even though the heavy
style is lightened up a little bit and the pace is generally a lot quicker. Dave agrees:
"I think I like it more than the first record. Over the last year or so we've just
had a lot of angry songs or whatever, and we just wanted to get a lot faster than what the
other one was. It's a lot less reliant on a basic riff, like you say. We like it... it was
recorded over about six months in different stages and the sound quality is different
between songs. But probably 90% of it I really like. I think the new one's going to be a
lot better."
That's right, the new
one. It should be out as you read this, and it'll be called Take It Out On You.
There's seven tracks, and once again you'll notice a change in the sound. This time it's
mostly due to the addition of Tim Hemensley, who used to sing for God (the band, not the
almighty dude) on bass. Tim, who wrote his share of cool songs for God, gets in a couple
on the new Bored! record as well, and he keeps up his normal standards. He also sings on
his stuff, which is part of the reason things sound different once again. Dave couldn't be
happier at having some of the load of being the frontman lifted off his shoulders.
"It's good having Tim in the band. When we were playing gigs I just could not do a
gig all the way through, singing and screaming my head off. I'd be totally fucked
afterwards. It's good having Tim because we've got it set up where he can do a few songs.
It makes it a lot easier on me. He's also writing songs and helps out with the scene, and
he's pretty fun to have around."
It seems that Tim
adds a certain obnoxious element to the stage feel, as well. One reviewer says "Tim
Hemensley has a stage presence that reads: 'Gee, I'm on stage therefore I'm cool and you
people who pay are losers'". This attitude seems to be a risky one for a smallish guy
like Tim to try to pull as the following story of Dave's illustrates: "We played in
Sydney in a place called Max's Petersham, and a few people had come down to check us out,
and one of them was Peter Wells, who was the original guitarist for Rose Tattoo. He was
there, and he was extremely pissed. He was banging his head and smashing the table with
his fist and spilling beers everywhere and screaming out and all this sort of stuff. And
after the show, in which we did a Rose Tattoo song called "Remedy" with Tim
singing, we were kind of backstage...or behind the PA stack; there's no such thing as
backstages in Australia, and we were really fucked after the show...Tim was laying on the
ground with his eyes shut just trying to breath. So Peter Wells comes behind the PA and
says "Where's the little guy with the big mouth?" because Tim has this really
good habit of abusing everybody and being a loudmouth, and Peter's looking for him, so we
all point at Tim; because Peter Wells is like...you don't answer him back because he looks
exactly what he does on a Rose Tattoo album, which is really quite scary to us wimps, and
he goes over to Tim and slaps Tim in the face. Tim opens his eyes up and Peter Wells gives
him the thumbs up sign and goes "That was great mate, fucking great. You're a
prick!". So he calls Tim a prick with his thumbs up in his face...it's Tim's proudest
moment ever. So he was pretty happy...must have felt like joining Guns'n'Roses or
something like that, having Peter Wells do that!"
So the truth is out
that despite the tough sound, Bored! quake in fear in front of one single member of Rose
Tattoo. Dave admits as much: "Our band is a band full of nerds. Anything that's dumb
that can possibly happen to a band happens to us." So much for cool posing.
From my perspective
across an ocean it seems that Melbourne is an odd habitat for a band like Bored!...it's
Sydney that has the reputation for being packed full of Detroit metal bands, and Melbourne
is where a lot of the more arty Australian bands come from. But Dave isn't buying that for
a minute: "I wouldn't agree with that; you say that Melbourne is more
"arty" and I think that might have been true in the past, but at the moment I
think Melbourne is the Detroit metal capital of the world. It's not Sydney. In Sydney all
the bands are like the Hummingbirds and Ratcat; really poppy. All this sort of melodic,
sweet, sort of bands. I dunno...haircut bands or whatever. There's a lot of really rocking
bands in Melbourne. I think Melbourne's a lot better for live bands at the moment than
Sydney. It just seems that there's more people going to gigs, more gigs happening, and the
bands here are a lot more full on. When we go to Sydney...it's getting better all the
time, every time we go there, but Sydney's really wrapped up in that arty sort of scene.
And we just go up there and blast; we don't have backing vocals; we just scream our heads
off. It's getting better every time we go up there, more people come to see us. But
Melbourne rocks!" You heard it here, first, folks.
It's almost pointless
to talk about Bored! influences, they're so obvious. But I'll do it anyway. They got the
name from the Destroy All Monsters song written by Ron Asheton. They love all the standard
Detroit bands...aside from the Stooges there's the Sonics Rendezvous Band and Ron
Asheton's New Order. They also go for lots of 70s dinosaur metal bands like Black Sabbath
or Blue Cheer. But although they are influenced by those bands, Bored! seem to have
learned from their mistakes as well, because they borrow the heaviness without the
plodding and excess...punk as a reference is never far away. Says Dave: "I reckon
we're a lot more punk than a hell of a lot of other bands. We're just into playing rock
and roll as dirty as possible. The dirtier the better."
Their covers show
more influences...the first record has a take of "Human Being" by early 70s Oz
heavy rock band the Colored Balls, while the Negative Waves lp has Rose Tattoo's
"Revenge" and AC-DC's "Whole Lotta Rosie". The new one has two more
covers, one of the Sex Pistols' "Satellite" (the great flip to "God Save
The Queen") and a shambolic version of Pere Ubu's "Final Solution".
"That's a really
great song that we've all known for years", says Dave. "Or me and John anyway,
because we're the old bastards in the band. We like to play a lot of other people's songs,
especially when we're rehearsing, because playing our own songs...we can't be bothered.
We'd rather save them for playing live. So we usually stuff around at rehearsals playing
other people's songs or attempting to play them. There's a lot of other songs that we want
to record, too. I think as we put records out we'll probably have one or two covers on
them of bands that have really influenced us. We're planning to do Patti Smith's
"Rock'n'Roll Nigger". We've asked a couple of people to sing...some lovely
ladies. We've asked Marie Hoy from No to see if she's interested...she says she's
interested, but we haven't got a definite answer. If we don't get her we'll probably see
if we can get Liz from the Twenty Second Sect, or a girl who sings in a band called Stone
Circus, and she's also put out a single with another band called the Dirty Strangers which
is pretty good; I reckon it's about the best thing that's come out this year.
"Final
Solution" on the record drags on a bit, but when we play live sometimes we finish
with "Final Solution" and we just smash our instruments up and throw them on the
ground and let the amps feedback. So we didn't want to do a normal version of the song on
the record; we wanted it to be as close as possible to live. It was pretty good fun
recording it...we just did exactly what we do live. Threw the guitars around the room and
left them on the ground, and we were just kicking them and making noises coming out of
them that normally wouldn't have.
"We played with
the Rifles last Friday; the Celibate Rifles and the Trilobites, and we finished the set
off with that, and I threw my guitar down on the stage and it was feeding back, and
someone threw a glass at it and it hit the strings and went "Grrraaoowww!". And
everybody saw that happen and they all started throwing glasses at my guitar. So I went
back on stage after the amps had been turned off, and there was glass everywhere, which I
thought was quite funny at the time."
As for
"Satellite", Bored! are probably one of the few bands around that could take
that cut on with a level of savagery to match the Pistols. They don't really add a lot to
it; just a slightly heavier and less punky feel. "That was a hard choice", says
Dave. "It was going to be that or "Belsen Was A Gas" if you can believe it.
We've played "Belsen Was A Gas" live with Sean from God singing, which is pretty
funny to see."
Take It Out On You
also has five originals with the titles "Conquest", "Take It Out On
You" (both with Tim singing), "Sweet Charity", "Mr. Ten Percent"
and "Motherfucking Motherfucker" (these three with Dave), the latter being a
song they cooked up on the fly in the studio. "It's a song where we've ripped off
riffs by Motorhead and the Leather Nun, and it's basically a dedication song to GG Allin,
who I'm sure you know plenty about. It's sort of a "Free GG Allin" song. It's a
song we wrote just so we had an extra song to play, so the lyrics are dumb, the riff's
dumb, and everything like that." But the song kicks, no lie.
Bored! have grown to
where they are a significant factor in the independent scene in Australia these days. Dave
says they have a large and solid following in Victoria (the state that includes
Melbourne). Negative Waves reached number one in several indie charts, and they also seem
to get consistently good reviews for their live shows. Good connections have landed them a
lot of good support slots for international touring bands that have really helped to
broaden their audience, and it's also been a lot of fun for the band to get to play with
overseas bands they like a lot. Not that it's made them many new friends...Dave says that
most of the touring bands seem to stick to themselves and don't watch the support bands.
Sonic Youth were an exception to that, and Dave professes a lot of respect for them as a
result. Overseas Bored! has two of their best mini-lp tracks on a Sympathy single in the
US, and Glitterhouse has put out both 12 inchers in Germany, where they've sold pretty
nicely to the sensibly oriented Europeans. Bored! want to tour Europe soon, and
Glitterhouse have indicated that they'd like them to come over; it may happen within a
couple months after the new album comes out. Bored! songs have even been used as the
backing music on a couple of Aussie TV soap operas, including one called "Home And
Away" that has been shown in England, and is a highly rated program. Accordingly to
Dog Meat's Dave Laing, "Every time there's a character in one of these shows that's
some young kid who's a street kid or whatever, or a skate kid or the occasional token
punk, then often's the chance they'll be Bored! fans it seems." In addition,
"Little Suzie" also appeared in an Australian feature film called Return Home.
Within Australia
Bored! recently completed what might be described as a co-op tour with Sydney's
Splatterheads and Adelaide's Twenty Second Sect. This was kind of a neat idea...the bands
played Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide with each band coordinating things in their
hometown; this is the sort of thing bands ought to be doing all the time. It worked out
well enough on this occasion. Says Dave: "It was really good; they're probably our
two favorite bands in Australia; they're just fantastic, those bands. We played three
shows in Adelaide, which were pretty average, you know? It seems like Adelaide is behind
Melbourne and Sydney, or whatever. They're just standing there with their mouths open.
Melbourne was really great and Sydney was...well, we probably could have played in better
places. There were two out in the suburbs of Sydney where not too many people went along,
but the two inner city ones were pretty cool."
"Well, we got to
Adelaide...that's where we first started, and the first night the Twenty Second Sect
played first, and then we played, and then the Splatterheads played, and Simon the
guitarist from the Splatterheads...I don't know if you've seen them or heard about them,
but they're really crazy on stage and sometimes they have these gore-shows on stage where
they cover each other in blood and put on all this make up and stuff and they are pretty
crazy. Some times they cut themselves up on stage. And during one song Simon just
collapses on the ground, and we're all down in front going "Yeah, Yeah" thinking
it's part of the show. But he hasn't moved for a long time, and he's twisted his knee or
dislocated his knee or something like that, and he's laying on the ground in agony. And he
also hit his head when he fell over. So we're all going "Oh, no, what a great thing
to happen...first night of the tour this happens." So for the rest of the shows he
could hardly walk, and in some shows he had to sit down on a chair and play guitar, and he
was walking around on crutches. But it was pretty good."
As if being in one of
the heaviest bands around isn't enough for Dave, he's already started up another project
with a second band called Sabotage. something that had started before Tim joined Bored!.
Sabotage includes Buzz and John from Bored! and Joel from God; they've already got a
single out and are working on an lp with a batch of covers and some originals.
Bored? Get Bored!
