Steve: What do you think of the gigs so far?

John: You’re not going to print this are you?

Steve: I might, if you’re really lucid.

John: How would I know? I was asleep in the dressing room! Um, the gigs so far…well, that’s really hard. They’ve been good so far. I think it was a little bit slow starting with the new bass player (Jim Dickson replaced Warwick Gilbert for this tour - Steve) and not having played for five years, then just to do three rehearsals and go out in front of 1200 people I think is difficult. The first one was not as good as the second which was not as good as the third, which was pretty good!

Steve: What did you think about last night (the fourth gig at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne) compared to Brisbane (the third gig)?

John: Um, I think that Brisbane was probably a lot more edgy and exciting. But I don’t know because I was trapped in the back stage area and I don’t know what it was like out front. It takes half an hour to get from the front door to the back stage area. Once you go through that crowd you don’t want to go back! It was a tiny little venue and it was just jam packed. So I was back stage for nearly all of last night. The sound was OK, but you really can’t accurately guage what’s happening

Steve: Well, if it was better in Brisbane than it was last night, I’d have liked to have seen that! Because the one last night was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. So tell me about the Minutemen to get started on the Citadel story.

John: Minuteman. The Minutemen were an American band. I can’t tell you about them. But Minuteman? I dunno, they were a bunch of losers.

Steve: (laughs, corrected) OK, OK, so how did you get that band together? Were you the guy who headed that band?

John: No, no, I never instigated it. But after the Birdman tour I came back overland to Australia through the Middle East and the subcontinent and southeast Asia, and I got back and I saw everyone from the old days, and they all seemed to be in bands. And one of those people was a guy named Jeff Sullivan who was the guitarist in the Passengers, and he said, well, you know three chords, we can have a rehearsal sometime. And he got some other people including Doug Lonsdale and we had a band. I don’t even remember what we were called. We played a few gigs and then he went off to his other band – he was playing in the Flaming Hands at the time. And Doug and I continued on with the drummer and we got a bass player. The bass player I think was Jeff’s girlfriend’s brother from memory.

We spent about 99% of our time rehearsing in a garage down in Woolloomooloo, and we got some gigs – just a three chord band. People left, new people came in. We recorded a single and no one would put it out, so I had to do it myself. The band broke up two minutes later, leaving me with all the bills. So I started from there.

There’s not much really to say about that band. It was just the usual stupidity and lack of dedication that most bands are imbued with.

Steve: Well, it seems like people like that single a lot.

John: Yeah, the A side’s really good. There’s a nice circularity to it, I think.

Steve: Did you record just those two songs, or did you do anything else?

John: No, just those two songs, including that terrible B side that I detest so much. B sides are always supposed to be a treat that you find, and you put that on – oh, god, it’s so horrid. Run, cover! That’s Rob Younger’s fault, I blame him for that. We just did it once and he says "You have no more time left. That’s it!" And I go "What about the overdubs?" And he goes "No, no time. Let’s concentrate on the A side." So that was actually a two take wonder with absolutely no overdubs and a minimum amount of time mixing it.

Steve: When you put that out was there any idea that this was going to turn into a big label that went on for years?

John: No, the whole idea with putting that out is that it was supposed to create circumstances for the band to become big and go on for years. There was no feeling about starting a label. That was a by product more than anything. In those days I had no idea that things would progress.

Steve: After the band split up did you try to form other bands, or did you stop playing in bands completely at that point.

John: Well, after I started releasing records – it’s quite a time consuming thing and I just never really rallied – I didn’t have much enthusiasm for working with other people in that context, of a band. I got to a point where I thought to myself, well I can continue trying to learn a fourth chord, or I can put out records, and putting out records seemed like an easier option. Because I found working with other people of that temperament and stupidity to be really difficult – on the level of being in a band with them when they presented me with those problems. As a record label, when they presented me with those problems it wasn’t quite as irritating or frustrating.

Steve: The next records that you did, there were a bunch of them that were sort of re-issues or releases of things that had been around for a while, like the New Race single and the Deniz Tek single. How did those come about.

John, Well, after that Minuteman thing – it’s probably been told too often – but when I designed the label, you had to get like 10,000 labels made and they were all laying on the floor there. And the thought of wasting them really bugged me. I used to worry about it in the evenings. Couldn’t sleep. (laughter) So when Rob came up with the idea that I should start a career making records that wouldn’t sell, I thought, that’s a good way to use up all those labels. That was his agenda, a way to spend all of my savings! And he was always concerned that the New Race had never had a single, so that was the second single, the New Race single, which was more so that Rob could have a single of that band than anything else. And from there, I did Deniz’s single, and it wasn’t until the fourth one, the Screaming Tribesmen single, that there was actually a proper band associated with it.

But in those days, the money thing was such that you had to make the first pressing and sell it pretty much before you had enough money to continue on with your next one. It was a very slow start – it didn’t happen quickly. Learning the various aspects of the manufacturing side of getting the things made. Printing, which of course is the most disappointing thing about the total whole thing of the music enterprise. Printers are the worst aspect of it. You spend months making a record and getting great artwork for it, and then you get back this shitty print. God, I HATE printers. 95% of all problems I’ve ever encountered have been bad printing, INCLUDING this recent reissue of Radios Appear (when we met in Sydney, John told me a litany of artwork disasters that had repeatedly held up the release of the reissues – Steve) . If you look at it, it wasn’t stapled in the middle of the booklet, so there’s a white stripe down the back pages. You spend months working on it and those pricks do that. They can’t even staple and fold in the right place. Anyway…

Steve: Citadel was pretty well known for the quality of the packaging in general.

John: Well, people would say that to me and I’m going Jesus Christ, I’m just going through hell with these printers and it’s NOT what I wanted at all, and people really admire it.

Steve: Well, look at the sleeves other people were doing. Singles were coming out in these black and white xeroxed things. Just a piece of paper folded over.

John: Well, that’s punk, isn’t it? It’s part and parcel of the sort of music that it contains. But the stereotypical single for me was always the Lipstick Killers "Hindu Gods Of Love", you know? The fantastic piece of vinyl wrapped up in a really nice, starchy white piece of cardboard. That was always my goal, to make everything try to approximate that record as far as its presentation goes. But a lot of those early records, things come along, you’re on a deadline and substandard packaging goes out. But people don’t seem to notice. I guess if you’re not intimately acquainted with what’s going on you don’t really perceive it as being shitty print.

Steve: On that "Igloo" single…listening to their first ep, I never would have guessed that something like "Igloo" would be the next thing they would do, because it’s such huge step up in sound quality and production.

John: Well, they recorded that up in Brisbane at the time, because I’d met Murray Shepherd when Minuteman was playing. He used to come to all of our gigs. Of course, the rhythm section of the first Tribesmen was the Fun Things rhythm section. I’d always loved that band and their record. So I was really interested when he said, oh the Fun Things rhythm section is now in the Screaming Tribesmen and they’ve got an ep. They must have recorded that at the same time as the Minuteman single had come out. And I listened to it and I just couldn’t stand it! It was terrible. It was just shoddy. So I met Mick Medew and I was like, sorry! But I’d seen them play live. They’d come down to Sydney and I’d seen them play and they were really good. And they had that association with the Fun Things and with Ron Peno – he’d written the lyrics to quite a lot of their songs, which were songs that had come out of that band the 31^st. So it’s sort of interesting, because live I thought they were quite good, but that first record was just nothing to write home about. And now it’s a very valuable thing on the collector’s market, which I can not understand, because as a musical piece it’s terrible production and the songs aren’t great.

But then they got Masuak to produce their single, which I think was the really critical factor, because the first record wasn’t anything at all like they were without Chris’s input. He has a lot to do with those first two records. Peno wrote the lyrics to those two A sides. But I should have known what direction they were going to go in ultimately by listening to the B sides. Which is what they did after those first two singles. They started chasing heavy metal, I guess.

Steve: Actually, I didn’t care too much for the second single, but I really liked the Date With A Vampyre ep.

John: (long silence, then speaks) You’re asking me to give a comment on it – I had an agreement with them and the ep was going to come, and I don’t want to go into all this nefarious bullshit that went along with the dismissal of the original rhythm section and their ultimate replacement with other people and how Masuak actually joined the band, but I was already committed to doing that ep. I didn’t like it, because – I’m not passing critical judgment on it musically, and it sold like hotcakes…it was a huge seller – but I thought I was getting something like the first couple of singles and it was like a more metal rock kind of thing. So I parted company with them really quickly after that record. Because I didn’t like their management either.

Which is one of the great joys when you run a small independent label – if you don’t like the band or their management you can just throw up your hands and say "I’ve got no more money" and they immediately want to leave you!

Steve: "Igloo" was a pretty big seller, too, right? Wasn’t it independent single of the year for the year it was released?

John: Yeah, but you know, what’s that? 1500 copies? The label didn’t start selling in good quantities for quite a while after that. That was another single that had to sell a certain number. It sold a bit quickly…it had a better life than the ones that didn’t have bands attached to it, because they were around and touring. It got a bit of momentum, but it didn’t sell any great number.

In those days, for alternative or indie single of the year they solicited like four record shops around Australia, and there was a very strict definition of what alternative or indie was. So there wasn’t much competition. It seems more impressive than it really was. Although it had a good shelf life, that single. It never stopped selling. So I actually made quite a significant sales figure when taken over a period of about five years.

Steve: But in the short term it sounds like it didn’t really give you enough money to make you able to do a lot of other things.

John: No, I never had that. It was only the Lime Spiders single ("Slave Girl"). That was actually the first single that sold well immediately. All the others trickled out. Died Pretty’s first single – Jesus, it took about eighteen months to sell the first 200 copies. That was really hard. That single never sold until it got a good review overseas quite some time later and the export kicked in. But here it was just a total failure.

I thought it was earth shattering, that record, when I first heard it. But it didn’t take at all.

Steve: I thought that first one was a little more subtle compared to something like "Mirror Blues". I thought "Mirror Blues" was a really awesome one. Although that’s kind of a weird song for a single the way it splits across two sides.

John: Yes. Well, that’s the band. (long pause)

Steve: You sound like you have something to say that you’re not saying…

John: They’ll read this, and then I’ll be in big trouble. No, that band always has their own way of doing things. I didn’t particularly agree to a lot of their philosophies in their early years. The way they did things, I didn’t think that they made much sense, but you know. As always, I was very laisse faire about that sort of thing with selection of records and how they did it. It’s just how it was. The real problem with that record was its record cover.

Steve: That’s the one stolen from Ansel Adams?

John: Exactly. I’d never even heard of Ansel bloody Adams. If someone had said Ansel Adams I would have said it was a brand of condom. You don’t know what it’s like – I find out two years later that I’ve bootlegged one of the world’s most famous photographers! I was shocked by that, and the band thought it was hilarious. (much laughter)

Steve: The first time I saw that single, I knew what it was right away!

John: Well, I didn’t! You know, they said we’ve got this really obscure little photograph, it’s really cute and nice. A little cemetery somewhere in America. And I go OK, because I didn’t have any idea about anything in those days. I didn’t even know what copyright was until such time as a lawyer came and reamed me with it. Thank god that never happened – I just deleted that as soon as possible, that cover.

But it was released as a 12" ep in England with the same cover. And I knew about it by that time and I told the guy over there, but he just went ahead and put the same cover out. The fact that it was never seized and operated upon by the estate was nothing short of a miracle.

Steve: Probably just the luck that the people knowing about the estate don’t have anything to do with this kind of music.

John: Yeah, all they would read would be geography journals.

Steve: Tell me about the early New Christs singles.

John: Ah, the most expensive recordings I’ve ever done. They had to be recorded three times, mixed three times, mastered three times and go through three sets of covers. Thanks Rob! They were really expensive and they just completely devoured everything at the time. But I was just too weak in those days to say "fuck this, I am NOT remixing it again". Because Rob would remix until the cows come home. He’s never happy – that’s his artistic temperament.

The first one actually didn’t come out on Citadel ever. "Like A Curse" – I licensed it. But that’s just a whole lot of background stuff in there, being manipulated by the music industry. God when this gets put in print…the machinations of all of this. But I was pressured by the band’s management and publishing to license that to a big company because I didn’t know what I was doing, but all that was really happening was that I was being manipulated by these two people into putting a huge amount of money into these two singles so that they could set it up and walk the band off to a major record company deal, and I would have spent all the money to feather their nests.

But it never worked out, because the thing came out through EMI distribution and it just sold NOTHING. It was a total stiff, that first record. Just didn’t do a bean.

So they were dropped from that whole thing. And three years later the artwork from the second single – because they were recorded at the same time – three years later the artwork was given to me, and I sold in the first week about four times what EMI had ever distributed. Which really goes to show you that you’re not going to sell anything from a major company unless they’re dedicated towards it. That was always gonna happen, that that single was going to die a death being among a major company. Because they didn’t give a shit about the band.

Steve: So how many has that sold up to now? It’s a really popular single among those who like this kind of music.

John: What, "Like A Curse"? Well, there were only about 1200 copies made.

Steve: It was never repressed?

John: No. You’d think it would be more imminently collectable than it is, with that picture sleeve and everything. It was actually meant to by CIT006.

Steve: What’s the story with the Sonics label in France that put out "Like A Curse" and the Minuteman single?

John: Nice Frenchman! Good boy! That was Stephane Saunier and he started up that label and he just sent me a letter – this was before faxes and when telephoning another continent was too expensive. He just said he’d had a fanzine and he’d written some fabulous review of the Minuteman single and he sent me a letter saying he had this record company in France and I want to release your record and I thought, well, shit, why not. So I licensed that to him, and he was actually quite influential I think in the whole penetration that happened in the years following into Europe of all of that stuff. Because he promoted the single and then he licensed the Tribesmen singles. But they had those funny French covers on them. Only the French can understand.

So anyway, Stephane released those singles and he started doing the promotion and that actually developed a bit of interest in Europe. Because I think that what happens traditionally with Australian bands – independent bands or mainstream bands – they all head straight to London. And all effort goes towards the cultivating of the UK, because the philosophy is that if you break the UK you spill out into Europe. So bands that you would see in Australia that wanted to escape here or weren’t getting noticed would go and live in poverty in London, which is what bands like the Birthday Party and the Go Betweens, the Triffids and the Moodists all did to varying levels of success.

But I’d been on Radio Birdman’s 1978 European tour and I detested England and I had no interest in the place. So I was really happy when someone in France came along and he actually propelled us into the other European territories’ interest. And it built up, and I think it’s because all those bands that went and struggled and suffered in the UK – they never actually got out into the continent. They didn’t tour much, and their records were exclusively English phenomena rather than doing anything out there. So I kind of came in through a different door into Europe.

And Stephane of course released stuff and he himself had managed bands over there and toured, so he started touring acts for me in France and it just built from there. He’s a marvelous individual who I dearly love. I still see him whenever I’m around in Paris. He’s a character!

Steve: I’m trying to remember where I’ve seen his name around before. Did he have anything to do with Closer Records?

John: Yeah, he worked for Closer Records, and his label was tied in with them. So through his label, the other Australian things that came into Closer, they were all things that he A&R’ed for Closer. He worked for them until Closer bankrupted. Then he got the job running Roadrunner, France, which he did really successfully, I might add. And he’s now the musical producer of France’s biggest entertainment – I don’t really even know what to call it – it’s a cable show…they have chat and it runs for half an hour and four million people watch it, and he does all of the acts that go on there. And he tells Metallica they can’t come on and lets Deniz Tek go and have his three minutes. He’s a character! But he was the tour manager of all the early Died Pretty tours through France.

Steve: Tell me a little more about the Lime Spiders. You were starting to talk about "Slave Girl" earlier, and the other day you were telling me some things about them which you may not want to appear in print.

John: Not now! When it’s documented on tape, they’re a lovely bunch of guys, fabulous blokes!

No, I don’t know why, but a lot of my most successful records have been with bands that no one ever wanted to touch. No one wanted to release "Slave Girl". They’d had that ep previously on Green, and Green disappeared and they could find no one to put it out. So I just listened to it once and I knew that it was going to be the first big record that I was going to get, and that’s exactly what happened. It was huge in this country. It had a lot to do with the live circuit, because they toured, and the label was beginning to develop a bit of profile. That record was actually a very successful record – a good financial shot in the arm for the label.

But they always had their eyes set on a major deal, and they were very emphatic when they came – well, they told me that I’d only ever get one single from them because they were so great that a major company would sign them really promptly after the release of this first single that no one wanted to know about. And that proved to be correct, it just was after the second single, not the first single.

But I never developed any relationship with the individuals in that band. The manager at the time I did, but the band I never got close to.

Steve: Tell me the story you were telling the other day about the recording of "Out Of Control".

John: Well, the two guys in the band sacked Younger and Thorne saying that they were incompetent and they didn’t know what they were doing, and they went off and mixed it and apparently it’s the greatest recording of vocals and drums ever made. Shame that there’s no bass or guitar in there! So they were forced to admit that they were idiots and Younger and Thorne were called back and gave them their best sounding record. Because they never did anything good after that. And that’s a really common thing from bands that have all that potential if they’re treated in a correct way on that sort of small level, and they get in with a major label and money is thrown at them and they just acquiesce to everything and as you know, their records – I found them myself, well I only ever listened to their first one after they went on their own – but I found it a bit of a bland thing. And that’s the way it is.

The Trilobites, you know, their first major record, they read in a magazine once about what a bland, disappointing record it was. In fact the record’s really good, it’s the production that stinks on that. And that was just part of the fact that the producer was the son of one of England’s worst comedians. The joke was on everyone he ever produced, I’ll tell you.

But Died Pretty suffered the very same fate with their first album with Beggar’s Banquet when they were sent over to LA and had this American producer who took away every ounce of character and everything appealing about the band was sacrificed for the sake of a "commercial" sound that’s probably only once in fifty times going to do anything as far as sales go, particularly in America.

Steve: What is it about Younger and Thorne that made them create so many good records? It seems like record after record after record that those two guys worked on sound like the best records that the band ever did.

John: People came from overseas to have those guys work on their records. It’s just one of those things. I think it’s a bit of chemistry. Alan Thorne pretty much knew his engineering, but Rob knew what he wanted to hear and didn’t really know how to ask for it – we’re talking on a technical level here. The magic in that sort of relationship is something to do with the bands at the time as well, but Alan wasn’t the sort of engineer – and so many are like this – to go "this is the sound that this band should have". Rob asked for certain things and Alan gave him the sound and didn’t interfere. Rob’s always the sort of guy that when he goes in there and produces that sort of stuff – he’s not a technical producer or anything – but he always sees that one little thing in there that no one else would even look at. He just has a knack of being able to grab it and really bring it to prominence – to pull something out of the box that makes the single. That was his great strength. Plus he’s really good at getting a performance out of a band as well. I think that was the thing, that Rob had those talents and Alan Thorne didn’t have any particular personality disorders that made him a control freak or anything. He just flowed along with it and tried his best to give Rob the sound that Rob knew that he wanted but really couldn’t put into words that well

Steve: Speaking of bands that came over to have them produce, one of them was Fixed Up, who you released a few records by.

John: Yeah, Stephane Saunier managed that band.

Steve: So what did you think of the records that you put out by them?

John: Ah, well, you know, I owed Stephane so many debts that I had to put them whether I liked them or not. But I toured them out here! It was the funniest tour. Those French guys! Carting them around Australia – Jesus Christ! They actually toured with Porcelain Bus – it was a double.

I sort of liked their stuff. It’s French – that’s the whole thing. Those French, they just don’t have the same sort of rock traditions. They just don’t get it the same way English speaking people do. But they were very dedicated and they were pretty tough.

Steve: To me, that can be a plus that they don’t get it the same way that English speaking people do…

John: Yeah, well that’s why their records are slightly a bit different. But they did that one single "Who Is Innocent" and it’s THE worst selling Citadel record of all time. The first press was like about 500 and it just never, ever, ever went into a second pressing. And yet it’s far better than a lot of other things that sold four or five thousand copies.

Steve: I think "Who Is Innocent" is a terrific single myself. I wish it was a little stronger sounding – it feels a little thin to me, like there’s not enough bottom end, but other than that, it’s a great song.

John: That’s Rob.

Steve: You just mentioned Porcelain Bus, who’s another band I wanted to ask you about, because I think their stuff is great, too, and they weren’t exactly a phenomenal success.

John: You and three hundred other people in the world. Ah, no, they were never…they only ever achieved any sort of popularity in Germany, Austria and Switzerland – those three. They never did anything here at all. I think I signed them or did their first single because Waterfront was really interested in them, and I thought, Jesus, this will really shit Waterfront if I steal these guys (much laughter). Which I did!

Steve: Shit them or steal them?

John: Stole them! They were actually a bunch of people I did have a relationship with – I hung out with them a lot. I always thought their records were actually quite good, and they never sold because live they weren’t – I’m not going to say they weren’t good, but they never did consistently good shows in Australia. It was really weird, because I toured them in Germany, whatever year that would be. Just before the Iraqi war, because I can remember when that started the band was like (adopts pathetic, whining tone of voice) "Can we go home? Can we go home? There’ll be a nuclear war. We’ve got to get back to Australia, it’s the end of the world!". And I remember this happening – we were in some place in Switzerland, and I remember hearing this harangue on the radio and they hadn’t, and we got on the bus and I went, "Oh, by the way, war’s started!" And I just remember we stopped somewhere and it was the weirdest urinal I’d ever been to in my life. They had pink and blue fluorescent lights shining and flashing in the urinal. The weirdest toilet I’d ever been into. And I always associate this whinging about going home and the war and this urinal in Switzerland.

But on that tour they were fantastic. I don’t know, I think when they didn’t have their friends around they didn’t have that thing in the back of their minds that was holding them back. They played fantastic shows over there. Everyone was shocked at how good they were in Germany. They just let loose.

I did some things that they didn’t like over there. It was the only time I’ve ever made a band play the same set every night. I made it formulated so that they could do things without losing their momentum with five minutes of tuning. Songs where the guitarist would always go out of tune, I’d go play this song next, because it’s got a ten minute bass and drum intro and you can tune up!

So that’s what we did, and they got into the flow, and it’s really great for them that they played great shows and everyone wanted them back in Germany. The agent said, they’re great, bring them back immediately! But there were internal disputes among a couple of them and they just finished the tour and broke up immediately.

It’s funny, there’s a hierarchy of things that break up bands. There’s landmarks. Like a record breaks a band up really quickly. A tour breaks up a band really quickly. This is if you’re in Australia. The threat of going overseas can break up a band, and actually going over there can also break up a band. It’s a strange phenomenon over the years when you see this sort of stuff happening. But they actually reached this whole lip where they could have gone on and done a whole lot better for themselves, but they broke up at that critical juncture. And that was it for them. (drawls out the band’s name…) The Bus – the Porcelain Bus. Robbie McKiernan.

He’s a train fanatic, you know? It’s all trains. He collects train artifacts. I told him that when I was a kid I used to vandalize all the trains. In order to get to school I had to ride for half an hour on the train every day. I detested the school so much I vandalized the little trains. They had these little holes in the toilets where all of the droppings would go down onto the tracks. And there was a little sign that said: "Do not go to the toilet if the train is at the station". And for years I took every one of these signs, and I told him "Oh, I used to vandalize the trains – I had a box of all of those!" I mean, I had like twenty or thirty of them, and when I moved up to Sydney I just threw them all out at a local dump. You’ve never seen a guy more mortified. And Rob says: "I would give ANYTHING for one of those signs, John!"

When we got home I spent a lot of my time traveling around here, and I used to love telling him how I used to go travelling around India on all these really famous train lines. You know, the Upline Lucknow Express and shit like that. And he’d go (assumes a dreamy, starstruck tone) "Oh, you took that train!". And I’d go "Yep! Sorry Robbie, I did. And they were all steam trains!"

Steve (after much laughter): So there’s a couple of Perth bands you did…the Stems and the Bamboos. So how did you get hooked up with those guys? It seems like a long way to go for a connection.

John: Well, there was nothing happening for anyone original in Perth. There wasn’t a Perth label as such. By this time, what are we talking about, number 11? Well, at any rate, there might have been a few stores over there, and there was some sort of thing by that time happening around the label. And they had a manager. And he turned up one night…Died Pretty was playing at the Old Chevron – the hotel that was built for R&R in Sydney during the Vietnam War. They were playing with someone – I forget – and this guy came up and he introduces himself and he tells me that he’s the manager of the best band in the world. And I go OK, yeah right! And he says, I’ve got a tape here for you, and I go OK, yeah, this is going to be fucking crap if they’ve got this guy for a manager. (Steps out of the story for a moment…) I’m not a very friendly person, let’s get this established now (laughter).

So anyway, I took the tape. I always listen to tapes. It may take me six months, but I will listen to it. And he was insistent that I listen to it. He described it as a boogie shuffle. You know, when a manager describes the band that he’s touting as a "boogie shuffle" and you’re dealing with inner city alternative music, it’s not really a selling point! So he says, I’m gonna get the PA guy and I’m gonna play it through the PA for you. So I just left the venue.

But a week later, I had the tape and for some reason I went in a friend’s car and I was driving down Crown Street in Darlinghurst and I thought, oh, yeah, this bloody Perth band, I’d better listen to it. And I put it on and about ten seconds into it I thought (assumes a voice like a mad scientist brewing up a formula) "Oh, I’ve found my Shadows Of Knight!" So I’m at a light, and I’m really ecstatic, and then a car ran right into the back of my friend’s car at the corner of William and Crown, this huge big smash, and then escaped! So I always associate the first time I listened to the Stems, this great rush of the Shadows Of Knight and then the jolt of the car accident that cost me hundreds of dollars in panel beating.

But they were a very, um, they got rid of the manager very quickly. They actually got rid of every manager they had very quickly. They had a succession of managers. I put the single out, and at that time Richard Lane, who was the sort of keyboard, guitarist guy and not the main vocalist, but he wrote a lot of the songs, he sort of managed the band and was their organizer (they got rid of him, too – Steve). They put out the record and they immediately just drove from Perth to Sydney at a time that the live market was so vibrant that they turned up, and they were there for just six weeks, and they turned up and they did one show at the Trade Union and within a week their other five weeks were filled up. Just immediately – GIRLS! Girls liked the band! And they just took off and they sold really very well.

Steve: They were really young, too, weren’t they like 20 or something most of them?

John: They were younger than that when they first arrived. Mariani was a little bit older than the rest of them. And the drummer was a little bit older. But Julian and Rich were 17 or 18.

Steve: How did the first Someloves single come about?

John: Well, Darryl Mather was in the first Lime Spiders and since that time he’d always wanted some band to send his songwriting into the future with. He met Mariani when the Stems were over here, I think. There was some association – he might have had that association before the band actually came. But he and Mariani just got together and did this as a side project with the idea that it would develop into something else in the future, which it sort of did.

Steve: Quite a long way in the future. But the other Perth band I was asking you about was the Bamboos.

John: Yes. (dead silence)

Steve: Is there an unhappy memory there?

John: No, I never had any problem with the Bamboos. Oddly enough I think their first manager was the same guy who’d been managing the Stems. And he brought me the Bamboos and then I put that record out and then they fired him immediately as well. I thought "I’ve got a track history!"

Steve: So that was the last band he brought you, I guess!

John: I think it was. He’d been a promoter over in Perth and he moved here to Melbourne, and he’s still doing stuff in Melbourne. He books the venue down the road from here known as the Prince Of Wales. So he’s still around and does stuff.

But the Bamboos – their tape just came, and I thought, this is pretty good. My thing with these bands is that it’s a very risky thing. Because how many times does a band have one single that’s good and everything else is rubbish thereafter. It just seems to be a recurring theme at this level. It’s always a risk, you never see them, you don’t know what they’re like, you just hear something and you think "That’s really good. Christ, I hope their follow up single is as good." But I really like it, and they weren’t a difficult bunch of people to work with. They toured.

The sound of that single, "Snuff", it was produced in Perth.

Steve: It’s got a sort of Gun Club-by feel to it.

John: Yeah, they were really into that, but Christ, the singer – ever lyric was about killing women, I later found out. Seriously! That was his thing – serial killing and murder! I mean, I didn’t really much know that guy. He was very impenetrable sort of quiet and very reserved guy who just wrote about murdering people. Snuff! Virginia!

Steve: "Dead Girl" – that was my favorite!

John: Yeah, that was a laugh. But they were just a band who came along that their live thing – they were a bit difficult to take live. I don’t think they had the vibrancy. They were a bit too dark for an Australian audience. So they really withered a little bit on the vine. They never really struck a chord in Europe, whereas a lot of bands like the Stems and Died Pretty, the Lime Spiders and the New Christs all had a really big – and the Trilobites as well – sort of big European following. The Bamboos, no one ever really took to them over there as well. Maybe they had some sort of sound that they didn’t associate with being Australian. The interest was in things Australian.

It’s a cyclical thing. It was the right place at the right sort of time with the right sort of sound. You came from somewhere exotic as far as they were concerned. Then of course after that early penetration into Europe it got so that every Australian band could get a record out there and it killed it. And then Seattle came. That was the next flavor. But that took off of course in a far more serious way, because it was American, so it had that promotional clout that only billions of dollars of multinational money can buy.

Steve: I always thought when I started to see Waterfront and AuGoGo putting out records by American bands that the Australian scene was probably going to be in trouble. It didn’t seem like there was a lot of need for them to be doing that then. And they were wasting all their energy on stuff that already had enough promotion behind it.

John: Well, they were probably thinking that because of that promotion that they would make money from it. Because it’s a struggle financially. It’s always been a struggle to survive if you do this sort of thing. Australia’s a small place – when you compare it to America, it’s a VERY small place. There’s a lot of capital cities just separated by large areas of not much life. Touring’s different here and the whole market is small. It’s really hard to survive. I’d never have been able to survive on anything I’ve ever done in Australia. Without Europe I’d have never done anything. I’d have died fifteen years ago, got a job in a bank, and now I’d have a house and a stable life and my liver wouldn’t be swollen and my attitude wouldn’t be so cynical.

Steve: But what you’ve just said is why I think it was a really bad idea for those labels to do singles from America. Because they didn’t have the European market to sell them into. They only had the Australian market.

John: That’s true, but there’s always been a big market in Europe for Australian pressing in American copyrights. I knew somebody who used to sell reams and reams of AC/DC Australian pressings to Germany. It’s quite illegal to do that, but they did it. All that Fixed Up stuff – I never sold anything here, it was all export back to France. It’s a long way to come to get a release to have it sold at home!

Steve: There’s one other band I wanted to ask you about, because nobody ever says anything about this band, and I know nothing about them, is the Inner Sleeves? I’ve never heard a single word about that band. (The Inner Sleeves had one Citadel single, 1986’s "End It All"/"Heartache". It’s pleasant power pop material but not the first water level of music that their Citadel labelmates were making. Ian MacFarlane doesn’t even show an entry for them in his encyclopedia.)

John: (groans like an ex-con being asked about his prison record) Well, you’re asking the wrong person – I don’t know anything about them!

Steve: But you put out their record!

John: Well, I’ll tell you, the history of that was that I had this sort of golden period where everything worked and everything sold and by the time we get into that period I was doing my own distribution. And distribution is a very weird animal, really, that insists that to perpetuate you have to have more and more things. You can’t run distribution without more and more new things coming all the time or the back catalog doesn’t move. And that’s where the real money is. So by then I was distributing Flying Nun, distributing Red Eye, Greasy Pop, Phantom, quite a lot of things. And with Citadel I got to the point, right at that time, where I actually started releasing records that I shouldn’t have touched. And a whole string of them came thereafter. Plus I wasn’t in the country that much. So I’d never seen the Inner Sleeves. That was something that was done to start fulfilling the needs of the distribution, rather than fulfilling the staunch criterion that had previously been enforced on what a Citadel release was.

So I didn’t really have much to do with those guys. I met them a few times, and I know that they went up and played in Sydney and tried to tour, but I was in Europe so much doing tours over there that I never really knew them.

Thereafter there were things released on Citadel that I didn’t even know they were released. They were done by the troops back here, looking after the distribution while I was over in Europe in six month alcohol hazes.

Steve: What were some of the other releases that fall into that category? I never realized you had another group of people working for you that made decisions like that.

John: Well, you know (shifts uncomfortably at the idea of answering this question). The people who read this will hate me... If I had the written catalog here in front of me I could point them out to you. The Vindaloonies should never have been released on Citadel, and that happened because my manufacturing guy was their manager. But Rob did sanction that, actually. But that sort of stuff – once you start doing that you’re fucked. You’re out of the picture, because you’ve dissipated – it’s OK for multinational companies to release everything in a wide range of styles, but when you’re a small indie label you’ve got to release just one genre of thing or you’re in trouble. Once you start trying to widen things out, that’s a problem for certain.

Steve: How about the Bam-Balams?

John: (in visible discomfort) God, I hate the idea of these people reading this thing, but the Bam Balams bass player worked for a newspaper and I never had any money, and for years and years and years that guy did all of my promo for free, and I owed him! So when they came along they got on Citadel because I owed the bass player, not because their record deserved to be on Citadel.

They were nice people, though, the Bam-Balams. They were friends. And that’s another thing, when a band comes along and you don’t know them – you release their record and then develop a relationship with them – that’s very workable. But when you start releasing records from people you know who are already your friends before their records – that’s going to be a problem too. Those sorts of things.

But you know, in those days it was like I was just traveling and I was out of my mind the whole time, and these things just propel you forward. The real trouble was that I never knew zip about economics. Didn’t know the first thing about accounting, and that was always the trouble back then. I know that it’s a long jump from "I didn’t know how to balance a spreadsheet" to "I signed the wrong act", but there’s a sort of trend there that I understand, anyway. But those things all went hand in hand and that fueled the distribution – I had no idea about cash flow. Absolutely zip. It was always spontaneous fan shit, really. Like "Whoopee! A new record – let’s release it!" But some of those records just sold a LOT of copies – the Bam Balams and the Vindaloonies. They didn’t lose money as far as the sales went. They sold quite a lot of records. But I think they dissipated the strength of the label. People started to go "we’ll listen to this new release before we buy it" rather than race out and just buy everything.

So if I could turn the clock back, there would be a certain time there when I would have gone out and bought a book on accounting and said no to a lot of people even though it was going to hurt their feelings and they’d helped me out financially.

And in the end, the Green Fez label was actually created to take care of those sorts of problems. That’s where the Plunderers for instance started, although the Plunderers perhaps shouldn’t have been made to start there.

Craig Regan: (has been dead quiet for almost 45 minutes, but perks up now) Johnny Teen?

John: Yeah, Johnny Teen. Johnny Teen actually turned up at the gig last night. Greg and Doug. My man, Johnny Teen! He’s the solution to all your financial problems. He’s gonna be big! Their records just sold so well – it was just amazing. I sold a LOT of copies of that. No export, no interstate, just all in the Sydney beach suburbs.

Craig: Why? They used to be at the Caringbah Inn every Friday night every two weeks. And people packed the joint out. Dreadful!

John: Craig, you don’t understand. For a guy who works for a multinational drug company (Craig has a senior media relations position at his company – Steve), you’ve got a very narrow view that people don’t buy any sort of shit. But Johnny Teen was basically a novelty act, except their novelty was naughty sexist lyrics and they were like the Psychotic Turnbuckles – dressed up in wigs. But they were a novelty act and they appealed to the – you know – people who like novelty acts!

Steve: That "She Stinks Of Sex" single was pretty funny, you have to admit. But the rest of them weren’t that great.

John: Yes, it was! Well, I only did that one single by them didn’t I?

Craig: I think you did two!

John: Well, I was very good friends with the people who were their management company. The people who managed them owned – well, they didn’t own, they managed – a venue called the Petersham Inn. And I never lived anywhere – I had no fixed abode when I went bankrupt – and they let me live in the pub for a year and a half. So that’s how the Johnny Teen record came out. My two landlords managed the band. They come up to me and say "My man, we’ve got this great act!".

They also coerced me into releasing the Tav Falco album that I did. Because "My man, we must have a new album! We’ve got Tav coming in three months." So they brought Tav Falco out here and then on the day that they were supposed to go off to the first dates in Melbourne they’re out there on the footpath in front of the pub arguing about whose responsibility it was to have hired the van that was to be their transport to get up there! Tav Falco’s wandering around, you know! Anyway.

Steve: Then you had that deal with Festival for the Blue Mosque label – what was that about?

John: Oh, yeah. How that happened was that after the Stems first single they did their ep and sold a LOT of records, and there was a big vibe on the band, and I never had long term contracts with these people. And I don’t know how it – oh, of course, Festival did all my manufacture. I started off using them because Festival had the most marvelous pressing plant underneath their offices. They never, ever pressed defective records. Everything they ever pressed was perfect. They had beautiful quality control. And through that I’d met the people down there, and they were there of course at the time going "Jesus, we’re printing a lot of records for this guy!" And suddenly the managing director up there liked the idea of the Stems. And Gudinski from Mushroom would come along, and he was sniffing around and basically flying over to Perth and telling them that he was going to make them stars and so on, so I had to find some source of money. So I went down there and convinced Festival that they should sign – because Festival never signed acts in those days; they were solely a distribution firm – to sign this act. And they offered that band the most amazing deal, and they didn’t take it and went with Mushroom.

But the whole process of working with them and talking about deals – basically I was going to become like this weird A&R offshoot of Festival with this deal – so when the band eventually went with Mushroom I’d already sort of made these relationships, particularly with the general manager down there at Festival, Jim White. And he goes "Oh, well the Stems have fallen through, so you’d better bring us something else, then." And Died Pretty had gotten big enough by that time, because they’d done a lot of overseas touring, and my distribution just – for a band that may have had the ability to leap into a chart position – what I was doing just couldn’t fill that promotional need particularly. And so I said "Oh, I’ve got Died Pretty and no one else wants them". And Jim White goes "OK, we can’t have the Stems, we’ll have them!" Which is sort of basically what happened. And they were just given an imprint label, which was Blue Mosque.

So I had Green Fez, which was primary school, and Citadel which was high school school, and Blue Mosque, which was tertiary education. That’s how I used to view it. That’s how stupid I was! And so Died Pretty went into Festival for distribution. Of course, their first one for them was Lost which came out and just doubled what they’d done. There’s no way my distribution could have done that. The deal with Festival was quite successful – and they were able to survive for many years on the back of Festival’s work and making their money out of live touring in this country. So when this Festival thing came on line, they actually spent a lot more time in Australia touring. They made money there and then got a concurrent deal out of Beggar’s Banquet.

But that’s what that was meant to be – if I could develop bands for Citadel that suddenly require twenty people working the promotion rather than just me calling up people and pleading – journalists who probably didn’t return their calls, but would take the calls of a known publicist – that they would go into that. So the New Christs – and at that time I went bankrupt so I didn’t have a distribution. That’s right! So the New Christs and the Porcelain Bus went into that thing as well. But those two acts were very unsuccessful because the company couldn’t grasp Rob Younger or where he was coming from, and the Porcelain Bus – they did actually sell a reasonable number of their last record from memory. And they got airplay on Triple J. But then they went to Europe and broke up.

That was supposed to be the gist of that – that Citadel would work bands up to a point where I could just license them to the bigger distribution without actually signing the act to that distribution, which meant that I’d actually be in control of the copyrights.

Steve: Tell me about the whole bankruptcy ordeal and how you managed to come out of that on the other end.

John: Well, I came out on the other end, but I only had about twenty percent of my mind left. I never recovered from it. It was one of those things where you find out that you’re bankrupt nine months after it’s really happened because you don’t understand about cash flow and accounting procedures. But that had more rumbling around in the background. The real problem was that I was never here, because I had the office in London and I had label licenses happening in Greece and Spain and Germany, and Rough Trade doing distribution in England, and I just never attended to what was going on here. When all the shit hit the fan and ultimately I was forced to audit everything and I started to come to understand that you’re really stupid if you spend more than you make. And that’s what had happened – more had been spent doing things here. I’m not going to actually say that I’m not responsible, because ultimately if you own a business and things happen that you don’t know about you’re still responsible, but the singles were being recorded by all these bands that I didn’t even know. You know, I’d get a phone call saying, well, I’m going to do this new single by such and such, and I didn’t know that meant that I was paying $5,000 for a single that would sell a thousand copies. So a lot of those records, when I got to do the auditing, I didn’t know that I was paying for those singles. And that just ate up so much money. Singles from the Dubrovniks. Singles from the Bam Balams. Singles from the Vindaloonies. All this sort of stuff…non-sanctioned stuff. And people who in fact were being paid to do their job and weren’t doing it properly. Just weird shit that happens when you run an office with four or five people and you’re never there.

So in fact really with a sort of thing like that you are really ill advised to go off and start and office on the other side of the world and be there and run that office. You should stay at home and hire someone for the other territory. It was all very traumatic. It was all a huge amount of debt. But I was never officially bankrupted because I went around and pleaded with everyone that if they didn’t allow me the time to pay off the debts over a three or four year period, that I’d just have to make the bankruptcy official and they’d never get a cent anyway. So everyone acquiesced to that, and then Died Pretty took off with Doughboy Hollow and all my management commissions for years and years when into paying off the great bulk of my debt.

Some of that debt remains, but I can’t figure out what it actually is because the book keeping while I was gone was so bad, and there are huge gaps with invoices missing left, right and center. It was really bad, because the tax department came along – the sales tax department first and then the income tax department – and that was like four years of fear. That whole thing – the ongoing payment of back taxes and stuff. And after that it really soured any liking I really had for doing what I was doing. I just do it now because I don’t know anything else. I hardly get much pleasure out of it. Not like the old days. It was exciting then. Now it’s just mundane. I’m good for nothing else. What can I do?

Steve: Well, you’re still doing a good job. Obviously there’s not that much new stuff that you’re coming out with.

John: Well, the thing is, I’ve got an opinion on new stuff. There ain’t any of it that’s any good! Actually, I’ll take that back. There’s nothing that I like. What kids come up with today, I listen to it and I’m just not enamoured of it. I did actually try to go out there and work with a few new bands – I thought maybe they’d give me some sort of new enthusiasm for everything, but it never did. It was just like – I’m very limited in my musical likes.

I’m not a musical snob – I don’t care what people listen to. I don’t care if twenty million people on the planet buy something I think is absolute shit. I really don’t care. I just do what I do. That’s fine.

But the younger bands these days – that’s why I just do reissues now, because at least the reissues is stuff I like. But if you ask me who are some good bands today, I’ll have to be quite honest that I don’t even know.

Steve: Well, the one playing band that you’ve been doing a lot with, although now they’re not playing any more, is DM3.

John: Well, DM3, God, they never leave Perth. They go to tour regularly in Europe but they can’t get it together to come to Sydney. In fact, they’ve only toured once. But the thing is, when I bankrupted I owed the Stems a truckload of money in back royalties and I rang Mariani and explained it to him, and he unlike so many others didn’t persecute me and give me any shit, even though Dom can be quite difficult to deal with at times – he has his own agendas – but we kept that relationship going. And the DM3 stuff, it doesn’t sell here because he never got out here and toured, and all of the acts and the sort of music and the people that I like working with can’t sell records in any great number in this country any more because they’re too old. Young kids don’t want old people playing their music, that’s all. Or what they perceive as old people. So you’ve got this huge spectrum of people like from Kim Salmon and people like Dom, who are really talented and mature musicians who have really got a lot to offer but no one’s going to listen. So yes, I’ve been doing the DM3 stuff and working on some other stuff – some Stems live stuff, and maybe a best of the DM3. It’s a bit of a talking point with Dom at the moment.

Steve: Tell me about the One Way Street label?

John: Is that guy in the other room gone yet? (referring to his One Way Street partner, promoter and manager Tim Pittman, who’s been on the phone in the adjacent room the entire time we’ve been talking). Well, that was a thing where I just was quite happy to do the paper work and stuff and I went into partnership with Tim who was going to do the A&R. But he had a different vision for how to go about it than myself with One Way Street. It was a one way street to poverty. And I’ve already had two decades of that! It was like the same old street, is what it should have been called.

It was a good idea, but he wanted to do things much faster. But my idea of a label is not to do a whole lot of press releases. If you’re a new label but you’ve got no acts, you’ve got to get acts first and develop your label profile from what you actually do. That way you can develop a profile that’s going to attract the people you might want to work with. So that was just me trying to do something where I wouldn’t have to A&R and go out to a smoky venue. Cigarette smoking – having been a smoker for thirty years and spent twenty years professionally for five nights a week in smoky venues, I can’t stand cigarette smoke. I just don’t want to do it anymore. Cigarettes – it’s a young person’s trade.

Steve: Well there’s a lot less of it now than their used to be. I noticed last night compared to when I was here in the late 80s there was vastly less smoking. In California they don’t allow it even in a bar now.

John: Good for them!

Steve: Well, you know I think that Wonderfools CD is great…

John: Well, Tim came across them. And I actually think that’s a marvelous record because it’s so youthfully snotty and stupid. It really appealed to me. The first time I heard it I thought it was wonderfully funny. But it never sold. I thought that main kid in there, Tomas, is actually quite a talented sort of guy. But you know, we signed this act as far away from this country as you could possibly be. And it’s sort of like if you flew around the globe they’re like almost at the halfway point, so we never really ever got the control over its development. I think they floundered over there.

Steve: When I was in Oslo this winter I went into a record store and said I really like all these bands like the Wonderfools and Basement Brats and Yum Yums and stuff like that, and who else here is like that? And the guy goes well, nobody likes any of those bands here. They only sell overseas. Those bands don’t play here, they can’t get gigs. They only like death metal here. So they go to Spain and play, I guess, and they do well there.

John: Well, you know that saying, no man is a prophet in his own land. The same could be said about a lot of these acts that couldn’t get a gig in Australia and would go and do a ten week tour in Europe.

Steve: What do you think of these compilations that have come out, Do The Pop and Born Out Of Time? They seem to be creating a bit of interest in those older bands.

John: Well, I don’t know, I haven’t listened to them. I don’t listen to music! I just listen to world affairs. That’s the only thing I’m interested in. (Puts on a Strangelove-ian stare…) When’s the big one going to get dropped? I want to be the first to know that the world’s ending in five minute’s time.

I don’t know, it’s sort of like – to tell you the truth, someone told me that one of them hadn’t been mastered properly so that there were dramatic level drops – is that true? The Raven one?

Craig: The Raven one, yes.

John: They did not spend – I’ll reserve my judgment until I actually listen to the thing – after this Birdman tour I can probably afford a CD player now. But someone told me there’s level drops in it and I wouldn’t be surprised because those people have no concept of quality!

Craig: The Shock one sounds fantastic.

John: The Shock one they spent a lot of time and a lot of money getting that one together and although I don’t like half of what's on there – I only like the half that I licensed to them – or the half that used to be mine but ran out of contract so they licensed direct. But I was a little saddened by them all, because it’s sort of like you wake up and suddenly these things come out and you’re history, if you know what I mean. There’s something sort of sad and final about it as if there’s no future in it. It’s like PS, in 1986.

Craig: Like you’re reading your epitaph.

John: No, not an epitaph. I don’t see it like that. It’s more a personal sort of thing. I feel a little sad because times were better then. I know times were always better than they are now, but…

Craig: But I think it’s great that they’re actually coming out.

Steve: The way I would look at it – you think of what the Nuggets compilations did and all the bands – it seems like half the bands in Australia in the mid 80s were listening to Nuggets sort of records and it had a huge influence on people. And with a little luck the same thing will happen and there’ll be another cycle now. To me it looks like – I mean, I wasn’t in Australia at the time that Radio Birdman got started, but everything I hear about it was that there was no place to play, there were no good bands…

John: Well, there were lots of places to play, but the band were never asked back. The only place they played more than once in this country was the Funhouse. Well, and the Paddington Town Hall, but that was a place that you’d hire anyway. But they overcame that just by finding their own venue. A novel approach! We’ve got our own venue! We can play whenever we fucking like!

Steve: Well it seems like that’s what it’s going to take again too. Some young band that can put together a scene like that, who has enough vision.

John: Yeah, well, I don’t think that can happen now because things have changed enough. In those days it was really exceptional for an Australian act. And when I started – that’s why a lot of my early records were really good. If it was now, and those bands were all coming along now, they’d all be signed by majors before you even heard of their name being mentioned in the press. That’s what it’s like now. In those days it was a great thing that the major companies were just totally disinterested in this sort of music, one, because it allowed me to release it, and two, because they weren’t in there with their fucking dumb ideas about everything. Because with them it’s all marketing. You’ve got a guy who starts out cleaning ashtrays in the office and fifteen years later he’s telling you what sort of a sound you need. That’s what happens when you go into that level of things.

And because they weren’t interested in the middle 80s there, bands just made records for themselves, and that’s the great strength of that music and why it’s much stronger than a lot of the stuff that’s done today. And it’s more identifiable – I hate to sound nationalistic, because I’m not a nationalist – but it’s more identifiably Australian. Because the problem nowadays is that if you’re in a band – they have courses in schools and colleges about how to be in a band! It’s like – fuck me dead, what’s the world coming to? All these kids, they’ve all got this idea that we can have this career in music and we’re going to go out and learn that. And the first thing that they learn is like – whoever is successful at the moment, they all get played on Triple J, so they’ll go, oh, well we’ve got to make a record that gets played. That’s what they all want. So they all listen to what’s getting played on Triple J and it’s all American derivative. So almost every local act makes a record that’s more American than local, and they’ve lost…I mean, Americans are always going to make American music better than anyone else, because they’re Americans! Forgive me if I’m going on long here, but these people lose their local focus.

I’m just trying to think when there was a band to come along in this country that really had a local focus. I think maybe Midnight Oil was the last one? But that whole Midnight Oil era, that just went down the tubes with Silverchair. Silverchair are hardly influenced by things local. They probably did listen to Australian acts, but their first album was so big in America. It’s selling coal to Newcastle, isn’t it? Hey, there’s a double entendre!

But that was just like Seattle to me, that whole thing. And I think Silverchair defined a whole new Australian era. Because when they came along everything, just all of the Midnight Oils, the Died Pretties, the Ed Kueppers, the Celibate Rifles – all those acts – were just gone when Silverchair had their first hit. A whole page was turned over. It’s a new page, and it’s like "you’ve gotta sound like you’re American", and all of that identity.

I’m not saying that in that period there weren’t bands that listened to American music, but they had something extra rattling around in the back of their head that these modern ones don’t have. So there’s nothing to me that’s strikingly original about any of the bands. In fact, I’m just trying to think what local bands I like apart from the ones that I work with, and they’re all blokes over the age of 45.

Steve: Do you like Asteroid B-612?

John: No, or their singer.

Steve: Have you heard their newest CD?

John: I heard one single that I liked on the radio. I just feel like for 7 or 8 years there every bloody act was Detroit influenced and when that comes along to me it’s like – when the Hellacopters came everyone was excited and said let’s go see the Hellacopters, and I’m going, yeah, they’re a B-level Citadel act from years ago. There were so many of those bands before that did it so much better that I’ve seen in my lifetime, so I’m not impressed by that. I mean, I like You Am I.

Steve: How about Challenger 7?

John: (ignores or doesn’t hear the question) I liked You Am I, and I like Even, but they’re about the only two acts in this country that I like. I like Even because – I actually like Ashley, the main guy in that band, because he was in another band previously who toured with Died Pretty so I actually got to know him personally. I saw him the other week up in Sydney. They’re really good. They really play well. They’ve got great harmony.

Craig: How about the Monarchs?

John: The Monarchs I actually liked, and they had a good show and everything, but I thought that they committed a really bad mistake by doing too many things at once. And I find their record like – when you listen to something, you’ll go "this is fucking great, it’s just like the MC5" and then suddenly the next song comes on and it’s like Badfinger? There’s just too many influences going on at once. I thought their record suffered because it wasn’t any definable one thing, if you know what I mean. Maybe that’s my preconception. I listen to it and I like bits of it a real lot, but as a totality it didn’t grasp. But that’s something that might have ironed out and might have rectified itself had they continued.

But I like them when I saw them, because they played with Deniz Tek some time ago. So I went and saw their live show and I actually had a lot of fun watching them. But I wouldn’t put them in the same bracket as I would put Even and You Am I who I’ve seen and they consistently deliver a show. And You Am I are more English influenced than American influenced as well, and I’m more English influenced in my own musical tastes.

Steve: Of those bands back in the 80s, are there any ones that were on other labels that you would have really liked to have on Citadel?

John: Yeah, the Eastern Dark first single was probably the big one that got away. I mean, I really would have liked to have been dealing with the Scientists at the time, but they already had their relationship with AuGoGo, even though it was a sour one. But as far as Sydney bands, I felt that the inability to talk James Darroch into anything…James and I had a very combative relationship because Minuteman and the Celibate Rifles used to play a lot. So I knew Darroch from the Celibate Rifles, and he was an irritating little prick. And he and I just from the word go were very combative towards each other. He was always in my face, and so I made sure that I was always back in his. So when he came along with his single, which I thought was really great, he went to Waterfront. So that one got away. But I think that that was always going to happen because he was just – he put his record out there, and he knew I wanted it. And he teased me! (says this in a mock pouting tone of voice, producing much laughter between Craig and me) He teased me! He hung it in front of me like a big worm on a hook knowing that he was always going to go to Waterfront. That’s what I think in retrospect, because we’d had a whole lot of shit going down from all those times when the Rifles and Minuteman played on bills, and we’d be there at soundchecks at each other’s throats.

But apart from that, I’m just thinking.

Steve: What about the Hard-Ons?

John: I was never big on the Hard-Ons. I never liked their production qualities. That was one thing that I really didn’t like about them. Although I released their "best of", that’s just because their manager talked me into it.

No, they weren’t really – things were pretty factionalized in the music scene and they weren’t in my camp at all. I never really even met them until I released their best of. I didn’t mind them – I saw them play a few times live. I’m not saying they were bad or anything, but I didn’t like the sound of their records. I mean, when all the stuff I was releasing was having money spent on it to try to make it sound really sparkling and vibrant and rich.

Steve: What about the Happy Hate Me Nots?

John: Well, I just never liked their music. It didn’t ever do anything for me. Obviously I knew those guys, but it wasn’t music that I’d listen to and say that’s fucking great! I always found that there was no shade in their music. It was always straight up and at you and there wasn’t any respite from that. But that’s just a personal thing.

Steve: How are you doing now selling all these reissues? Is that working pretty well financially?

John: Well, the reissues, I mean, the Scientists reissues seem to have covered themselves now. These reissues, a lot of them are just for two or three hundred people in the world, so that’s what some of these things are going to sell. I’m not too bothered about that. I think the real future for me is probably not as a record label but as a mail order record shop that will over a period of time expand out to be more of the income source than anything else. I have to use someone else’s words, but some years ago I saw a documentary on Orson Welles, and it was near the end of his life, and he was a really big old fat scam artist with a beret, and they said, well, what is it that you do? How would you define what you do? And he goes "I make films that no one watches". And I went shit, that’s my life! You can just put in the words "I make records that no one will listen to". And that’s how I view it, because all that music market – it’s a niche thing now, and luckily – because I wouldn’t survive without the internet – they can find it now and search it out. But I don’t see myself dealing with bands that come out and sell lots of records. But I’ll just chip away and release the old things from the period of time that I liked music.

I mean if something new was to come along, I’m certain that I could get involved in it, but nothing comes along that I like. So that’s what the future is, is making records that no one listens to. But the three hundred people that do listen to them will be happy to have them, and if I’m really very tight with the finances, they won’t impact, and I’ll just chisel away at releasing them.

Steve: Did you consider doing the New Christs CD?

John: The new one? Well, they fired me as their manager, so there’s no way I’d ever touch another record that had those cocks on it! (long pause, then as though he’s just realized what he’s said…) The two that I had conflicts with – I’m not talking about Younger or Creed. I’m talking about the other two. I don’t want to know about them.

Someone else has to spend the 20,000 dollars to get it out of jail. Not ME! My days of getting the New Christs out of jail are over.