It
seems kind of futile for a guy living in the United States to be writing at the end of the
millenium about a band that never played outside the Sydney area and did their last gig in
1982. But it’s also unfair that a band like the Kelpies should just be forgotten. The
Kelpies had a brief existence, and some of the members paid dearly for their moment of
glory, descending through band breakups into addiction and nothingness for many years.
Even more reason to value what they accomplished in that brief time.
Bruce Griffiths,
label boss for the adventurous Aberrant Records, had much the same feeling when he penned
the liner notes for their lone lp, variously titled The Dungeon Tapes, The
Kelpies Official Bootleg or Live At 51 Stanley Street. You take your pick.
In those notes,
Griffiths said: "During their brief existence, beginning March ’81, The Kelpies
produced some of the best, wildest, and most memorable gigs seen in Sydney, developing a
knack for being banned from venues as quickly as they packed them out. Combined with
internal personal problems, this eventually led to their demise in August ’82, with
only one single on Phantom Records and three tracks on the first Aberrant compilation, Flowers
From The Dustbin. This tape, released with permission of the band, was recorded
sometime in 1981 during a rehearsal in the mattressed basement of 51 Stanley Street,
Darlinghurst. Its release is to make available the classic material that should have been
an album for a band that could have had the world."
Griffiths is a
guy to know a quality band when he hears one…a browse through the rest of the
Aberrant catalog will tell you that. So on finding that The Dungeon Tapes comes
from a cassette recording of a rehearsal and has the resulting dodgy sound quality, I
wasn’t put off and kept listening. Damned if Griffiths wasn’t dead on about this
being a killer set of songs, one that if recorded properly could rival the best of any
punk bands of the day. Even with dodgy sound it comes across very strongly. The songs have
a variety and flair that reminds me of the first Clash album (and in fact the Kelpies also
cover "Brand New Cadillac" to cement the connection.) Like the best punk bands,
the Kelpies play with power and aggression, but they also know how to use pop tricks with
the best of them. Check the stop/start hooks of "Die" for example, or the killer
chorus pump of "Love Is A Revolution", or that
"Go-gonna-go-gonna-ride-gonna-ride-gonna-go" bit in "Ride". These are
the kinds of things that when done by bands like Stiff Little Fingers resulted in songs
revered for two decades by thousands of punk fans. Kelpies songs are as good, but sadly,
no one remembers.
Even the studio
material from the Kelpies suffered from inadequate recording. There are 6 studio tracks
available on official releases, and all but two were recorded on 8 tracks. The Phantom
single, "Take Me Away"/"Second By Second" has two good songs, but
still lacks the sort of powerful recording that the Kelpies’ English and American
counterparts were often getting. (And it says something that the Kelpies could equally
catch the ears of two people with as diverse tastes as Griffiths and Phantom’s Jules
Normington, who favored bands like the Sunnyboys and a myriad of Radio Birdman ofshoots.)
Some of the 8 track recordings are actually quite a lot better than the Phantom single,
especially the stuff on the Aberrant compilation. These are now available on CD with the
reissue of the those three terrific records as a double disc set called Go And Do It,
and there’s an added bonus track called "How Can I Tell You"…more on
that later.
The Dungeon
Tapes is really an amazing record when you think about it. Recorded by the simple
expedient of hanging a microphone from the ceiling and rolling a cassette deck during a
rehearsal, it simply has no right to be this good. The drums sound boxy and the vocals are
distorted, but the playing is spirited and the guitars have a real bite to them. The songs
are punchy and to the point…a handful of lines to paint an image and then on to the
next track. First up, "Living In A World Of Fear", echoing the "no
future" idea of the Pistols’ "God Save The Queen". Don’t
really see any future but I hope I don’t die. Then "Love Is A
Revolution" spins up: Love is a revolution boy Survival for the best Love is a
revolution girl No one gets the best. No breaks – on to "Rich Man". You
can always spot a rich man He stands out in the crowd He don’t care He stands up fat
and proud. And maybe, in retrospect, the key lines of the record come next on the
existential "I Don’t Know Why".
Don’t
tell me, I know I’m wrong.
I always am.
But why does fame take so long?
Get fucked around, I’m sick of it
We’d better get somewhere
And we’d better be quick
Or the next thing you know
We’ll be gone.
The throwaway
shock horror of "Dead Meat" follows, then "Underway", and then their
cover of "Brand New Cadillac", which has an even more panic-stricken sense of
urgency than the Clash version of the previous year.
Flip it over
(it’s a vinyl record, mate!) and kick off with the escape of "Life Looks So Good
Through A Beer Bottle". You don’t need a home You don’t need a wife If
you stay paralytic for the rest of your life. Then it’s "Change". Living
on your high hope Living on your hill You will never change me No you never will.
Another "no future" song in the pounding "Die", and then comes ace
track "Ride" that feels like an entire band on horseback:
We’re
gonna go and you won’t see us for dust
We’re gonna go and get away from this slush
We’re gonna leave you all behind to rot
There’s not enough brains to make one between the lot
"Without
The Pain" follows, alternating between woeful verses and triumphant choruses. And
then it’s the slamming "Naked Flesh" with a brilliant wobbling guitar bit,
and all too soon, the last track of the batch, "Television", which reprises the
Victims’ classic of a couple years earlier. Your violence and colour fill my brain
Nothing else I’d rather do Television I really need you.
So they
didn’t spend 50 grand on 24 tracks to record it…the songs are still brilliant
and thank heaven the people involved had the foresight to make it available, even if it
was only in very limited quantity.
I met up with
Kelpies drummer Ashley Thomson this past year via the internet, and after several e-mails,
we decided that an interview was definitely in order to get the Kelpies story down. Ashley
has had a challenging existence since the Kelpies, going through a long period of heroin
addiction that he’s now out of. In fact, he’s heavily back into playing music,
drumming for the Panadolls and the great Brother Brick of late. He had this to say about
the Kelpies lone album:
"When Bruce
Griffiths released The Dungeon Tapes he put this bit in the credits about Terry
Parkes secretly running off a tape from the copy I lent him and later it getting chewed up
by my dodgy cassette recorder. I can’t remember this at all. I remember Terry lied
all the time as most junkies do, and being the ungrateful bastard I am I hassled Bruce for
writing it there in the first place. True or not, you gotta understand this was my first
album and Bruce made me out to be an arsehole (which I was and am, but I didn’t want
it on the cover of my first album!!). So when it came time that Bruce put out the CD comp
of the three compilations guess who redeemed himself by having an unreleased Kelpies track
mastered and ready to go (me!! me!! me!!). I asked Bruce to write on the cover what a hero
I was to salvage that Kelpies stuff. He said there's no room, but it was a personal
victory for me."
"The photo
on the back was taken at a place called The Gaelic Club. It was just a place that we
rented out to play gigs at. It was around my 19th birthday. Jim and Mark had birthdays
pretty close to mine, so this was a bit of a birthday gig for us. There were no fights at
this gig - maybe it was after the Mosman incident (see below - ed). Jim was a
fucking show off, just what you need for a front man. He had just got a new girlfriend
around this time and was out to impress. It was a great show and for some reason I
remember this night pretty well. Jim had a huge cock and was getting changed side stage
just before we went on. A couple of people down the front noticed Jim and he started
dancing in the nude side stage for them, twirling his dick around like a helicopter. Jim
liked a drink, and most of the time when he was drunk he was like this, a funny guy with a
big dick flashing it. But like a couple of Kelpies members he had the dark side as well,
the dangerous self destructive side, possessed, mean, out of control, a savage temper, a
snapper, a huge appetite for substances. Jim was very charming, he bullshitted all the
time but it was endearing and naïve. People looked up to him. He had two close calls with
cancer, one very young as a teenager. He had this "why didn’t I die" thing
from it. It was hard for him to reconcile it…his mother had written a book about
praying for him to get well and how it worked. Hell of a thing, surviving cancer. When I
met him in the band it was afterwards, and he was still coming down from it, the
experience of not knowing if he'd live or not. He was in that limbo for a while. After the
Kelpies finished I hung around Jim quite a bit. We would scam together to get money for
smack, a couple of shifty punk junky losers drifting through the 80's completely losing
touch with everything. I haven't seen him for 10 years. I heard he was living in
Darwin."
But that’s
closer to the end of the story, and we need to start at the beginning. So Ashley takes us
back to when he first joined the Kelpies.
"I was
living in Brisbane and moved back to Sydney after this girl I was in love with fell in
love with my best friend", he begins. "I’d played in a couple of cover
bands but no punk or original stuff yet. I had a few English punk singles and an older
mate played me Iggy Pop saying "What a rip off!" and complaining that things
weren’t as good as they were in 1971!"
"My early
influences were AC/DC and Rose Tattoo who I went and saw as a little kid. Mind blowing and
life changing. I got into punk from watching a national TV show here in oz called
"Countdown". Ian Meldrum helped to get the show started and had a segment on the
show. My earliest memory of punk is him referring to what was happening in New York with
Richard Hell as street punk rock. Sounded good to me. I bought a few singles…Clash,
Stranglers, etc. No one was into punk music amongst my friends in Brisbane at the time. It
wasn’t until I was old enough to move out of home and moved back to Sydney and joined
the Kelpies that punk exploded for me personally. "
"My step
sister in Sydney was going out with Brian Connelly (Kelpies guitarist) who before the
Kelpies was in The Swankers, a Mosman High School punk band. I hung around my step sister
and Brian all the time as I had no friends in Sydney, and I would go with Brian to
Swankers rehearsals and occasionally sit in for a bash with them."
"For a
bunch of 15 year olds these guys were very impressive. They wrote all their own songs,
talked art and politics, had petite intellectual girlfriends, and cranked it up Saturday
nights at the odd gig. Me being 18 at the time, and coming from a very low rent area of
Brisbane (I guess you could say trash), these guys were a big influence on me. Not that
they’d tried to be."
"Through
Brian and my stepsister I started meeting and making new friends in Sydney. The music
culture was so strong (for guitar bands) that I had a lot in common with people I met. I
guess in any man’s language it’s growing up. I moved out of my aunt’s into
the middle of the city, into Riley Street, Darlinghurst…the home of hookers, junkies,
artists, derros (homeless alcoholics) and about 200 punks."
"One day
Brian said that Mark Easton (from Suicide Squad) and Jim Atkins (Bedhogs) were starting a
new band and they asked him to join. I have never been so jealous and envious. They
didn’t have a drummer, so I hassled him to get me in for a tryout. Two weeks later I
went along…I didn’t really look very punk; I had long hair, shorts, and wore
wharfie singlets (as worn by Rose Tattoo). These guys blew me out. Mark Easton had a brand
new Marshall stack (stack as in two quad boxes). They wrote all their material and had
done about 50 or so gigs in Sydney, but they said my drumming was not good enough. I
figured it was how I looked. Shit, they didn’t want a yobbo in the band, so the next
day I cut all my hair off, brought the tightest black jeans I could find and the biggest
black boots and managed to get another audition the next week."
"Well they
were very impressed with my drumming then, and I was in! They said something like
"You’ve been practicing". Anyway, three weeks later we did our first gig at
a pub near central station. I was very nervous. 200 punks piled in and off we went for our
45 minutes of glory. I can’t remember who we supported…they were probably like
the bands I fooled around with up in Brisbane. But they were not a punk band and all the
punks left when the band started playing. I had never seen that happen before. We
didn’t get paid because there was so much damage to the pub. Someone pushed over the
glass food warmer, tons of drinking glasses broken, toilets smashed, 2 or 3 fights,
furniture thrown around, bar staff abused and threatened, drugs consumed openly. Shit, it
was a good gig to me!"
Atkins, who goes
by the name James Gelding on the cover of The Dungeon Tapes, is brother to Danny
Atkins, who now plays in The Cruel Sea, a hugely successful (for Australia) band
that sells 50,000 to 100,000 copies of each record they release. That’s about as much
as you can do in Australia no matter how popular you are.
"Suicide
Squad had released a single called "I Hate School"", continues Ashley.
"I think Mark wrote it and wanted to write about something kids hated so he asked his
or Con's sister what she hated - "I hate school" she said. This has been
re-released by Small Axe Records with the original artwork, as well as a Rejex single.
Suicide Squad played at the Grand Hotel on George Street amongst other places (the Grand
Hotel was a pretty cool place to see punk bands). The Kelpies played at the Grand once. We
blistered through our set…at the time I was taking speed, buying a line for 5 bucks
and snorting it. The thing about speed was drinking beer had no effect (except for being
broke buying beer that didn’t get me drunk and 3 years later when I had speed
psychosis). This particular gig I did a bit of a Who-Keith Moon tribute and smashed up my
kit and threw it about the place at the end of the gig. Except then Jim said "C'mon
lets do a couple more". Let me tell you it wasn’t very "Who" fetching
my kit from around the pub and straightening up my cymbal stands to do more songs. Still
smashing it up was pretty satisfying and a cool way to end a gig. I still do it in the
Panadolls from time to time, when I really feel like it. I never do it for the sake of
doing it."
"The Grand
Hotel was THE birthplace of Ozzie punk, where Johnny Dole And The Scabs, Suicide Squad and
the Bedhogs played. We played at the Mosman Hotel a couple of times (one of the few places
to have us back), The Civic, and Frenchies Wine Bar…the homes of punk. Even
Paddington Town Hall where I saw bands like The Birthday Party and Radio Birdman."
"This was a
pretty exciting time for me. Nothing beats playing in a popular punk band as a teenager. I
had 200 friends that I saw regularly at gigs or visiting. I had no time for work and
usually had a rich smart girlfriend from the north shore to look after me. "
"I
didn’t know how good it was until two years after it finished. To me the Kelpies
music was very rock’n’roll, but fast and aggressive, with a threatening attack
in the live delivery of the music. This combined with the fact that we were very young
gave it all a vulnerability and an innocence that washes over all great art, like a pretty
ten year old girl shooting a machine gun. Brian the guitarist took three months off one
summer to study and finish high school, (his mother wanted him to pass and he did and now
he owns a digital signal processing company employing 15 people, so it worked.)"
"Once 3
years after we split I was hanging around with Jim listening to a tape of us and Jim said
"No wonder people used to go ape shit at the gigs!" There was always fighting at
Kelpies gigs. No one was ever killed or stabbed - the violence was innocent – but the
venues asked us not to come back. I would watch the fights as I drummed, it always looked
like a Marlon Brando 50's biker film with the cool leather jackets and clothes and fists
flying. Most of the fighting was people who were established punks beating up new punks,
kind of the initiation of low self esteem. As in if you came along and were hanging around
the punk scene and got beat up and came back people figured your opinion of your self was
low enough to hang around and become a part of it. I resented the fighting…I knew it
was wrecking the band’s chance of ever getting more than we had."
"One night
at the Mosman Hotel on the north shore near the end of the Kelpies run, backstage two
girls offered me free drugs just before I played. We went into the toilet - I had
progressed to injecting drugs at this stage and one girl had coke and the other speed, in
the toilet one girl injected me with the coke in one arm and the other girl simultaneously
injected the speed in my other arm. I walked from the toilet like the Frankenstein
monster, my heart ripping up inside my chest. Time to play - there were about 300 or so
punks and fuck outs at the gig and the fights started straight away. Half way through the
gig my own rage about fighting exploded and I leapt off the kit into the crowd and beat up
15 people, some of them friends. No one hit me…I guess I looked like a maniac and I
was. I leapt back up onto the stage with the other guys in the band just standing still
mouths open staring at me. I sat at the kit and screamed out 1234 and we finished the set.
There were no more fights at that gig. During the next week I bumped into some people I
knew with black eyes and asked "who did it ? ". "You did" they said .
. .sorry guys. "
"The most
destruction I ever saw at a gig ever was when we played Paddington Town Hall one summer
Saturday night. During the week we put up 100 screen printed posters around the city. The
Machinations were supposed to play but turned up, looked at the crowd, and left. So we
headlined by default. During the gig one guy was beat from one end of the hall and back,
people were finishing their drinks and throwing their glasses through the windows, all the
toilets were completely leveled and water flowed down the stairs, I looked out a smashed
window onto Oxford Street and the footpath was covered with glass. I couldn't believe the
police weren’t there. Shit I wasn’t going to call them. As per usual after the
gig I went to French's Tavern and drank cider until I crawled out of there at 10 am the
next morning, staggered home and slept till Tuesday. It's probably good we didn’t
tour as we would have crashed a car every second day. "
"One of the
most important feelings I have about playing and listening to music is a sense or feeling
of freedom. I always had this up until shooting smack took it off me (or I gave it away to
shooting up smack). I’ve been off smack a long while and have no interest to start
again. The sense of freedom came back when I gave it up. I listen to more music now than
ever, punk-rock’n’roll-heavy music, and because I'm getting old acoustic singer
songwriter stuff, like Mark Edsiel you know."
"None of us
knew what we had. We didn’t have a manager and we didn’t know about the music
business. We played, we drank, we recovered Sunday and talked about it all week until the
next one. Jules Normington from Phantom Records put out the single and Bruce the other
stuff. I live one suburb away from Bruce and see him a few times a year in Bondi Junction
shopping centre. We always chat, and last time I saw him he said he wanted a girlfriend.
"
"Just after
I joined the band and had moved into Darlinghurst, I started hanging around with Jim and a
few punks. There was this club down the road from Jim's place, and as we never worked and
were on dole check day we went down to hang out. They had cheap beer and cheap pool, the
juke box was pretty cool and the manager of the place used to chat to us. We told him we
played in a band called the Kelpies, full of pride and beer about it. So he asked us to
play there…it was the Trade Union Club. They were just starting to have bands on and
subsequently that place ended up the holy heaven of rock and roll in Sydney…bands
playing on three floors at once. I could write a book about that place. When we started
hanging around there it was still populated by old folks, retired inner city folk. With
the infiltration of music they split. Fuck it was so cool, the music scene in Sydney
peaked in the 80 to 86 period, as good as any music culture scene in the world. We had it
sooooo good but didn’t know it till later. But who does?"
"The other
bands around at the time are all on Flowers From The Dustbin and Bruce
Griffith’s other comp records, or on the Go And Do It CD (if some one from
Small Axe is reading this e mail me). I hung around the other bands a lot as 2 or 3
members would live together in shared houses in the inner city. I would often visit the
Rejex house hold and the Queen Anne's Revenge house hold, I would go walkabout for three
days visiting and smoking hash and jamming and listening to music. Often a band’s
house would have a rehearsal room with the standard mattresses on the wall and sound
proofed as much as possible. I would end up staying the night on the couch and booting off
some where else the next day. As most people were from interstate or outer suburbs there
was a good punk and music community in the inner city. I guess there wasn’t any
particular rivalry…we all went to each other's gigs. "
As for the
crowds, Ash says: "They sure did love the fast stuff! When you play in a band with
the same people for a while, you get to know them, as people, like a lover or marriage.
This translates to playing, but you can never talk about it at the time, hey it's too
fucking loud! You know how the other guys breathe, you can tell how they’re feeling
from the first few bars…it's going to be a good gig tonight! It flows into this
melting pot of intuitive energy. Being a good player is not about not making mistakes,
it's about a quick recovery from them or turning it into something else. When all the
players can lock into the downstroke and deliver the energy, have the power and give it to
the audience, people absorb it and they have an emotional response to the music. On a good
night that's what we did - we rocked. That’s what I like when I see a band, and I
still see many. The Kelpies rocked and people loved it."
"After the
Kelpies finished Mark and Con started Soggy Porridge. Mark rang me up at Redfern and asked
me to join. I was shooting up all the time by now and had caught hepatitis. What a sight!
I had bleached blonde hair and bright yellow skin. The local koorie kids in Redfern
thought I was the weirdest thing they had seen. I did about 10 gigs with them and bowed
out before I was kicked out. I went on to shoot up and hang in my room for 6 years until I
went to this hippie/surfie rehab up the north coast of New South Wales where I got off the
gear. I waited about a year before I started playing again and have been pretty active
since 1988."
"Jim's in
Darwin. He did ring me and Brian once and said he wanted to play some music again. He had
another bout with cancer, and they peeled his face off like Hannibal Lecter and cut some
cancer out of his brain. He was pretty fucked out by it and playing music helped him last
time he said so he wanted to play some more. After a week or so I rang his place and his
brother answered and said he went back to Darwin, I guess he's still up there."
"Mark lives
down the coast and started up a blues band, but I heard it split up. He's doing a lot of
surfing and pisses off overseas to surf. Post Kelpies he had a band called the Candy
Harlots that he sang in. They were very popular for a while in Sydney and I saw them a few
times. When Guns and Roses came out I thought they were a nice clean rip-off of the
Harlots."
"The only
member I see regularly is Brian. We are very close and visit each other with kids. He has
a wonderful family and an international business. He comes and checks out the bands I'm in
from time to time and lends me his gear from under the bed when I record. He plays me
songs he writes every now and then. He is a great song writer, and any feeling he has goes
straight down his arms through his hands into and through the guitar. He really taps into
energy. He is also an extremely good painter, but mainly he tells me about his work and
taking over the world via his computer."
The sessions
that produced the tracks on the Aberrant compilation also produced several solid takes of
songs that are on The Dungeon Tapes. Ashley burned me a full CD-R of the Kelpies
studio songs, many of which have never been released as studio recordings. All of them
have the general feel and quality of the Aberrant compilation tracks.
"Six years
ago I grew a crop of pot, a common pastime of some bands here in Oz", he said.
"As I gave up pot 10 years ago the money went on constructive things - a drum kit, a
Les Paul guitar, 4 track recorder etc. Every now and then I get chronic melancholia for
the past and ring up Mark Easton (Kelpies guitarist). Mark is a person and musician I
admire, I picked up how to write songs from playing in the Kelpies and Soggy Porridge with
Mark. While talking to him on the phone I asked him about old recordings by the Kelpies
and Soggy Porridge. He said he had the quarter inch tapes under the bed, and as DAT had
become a standard in studios I asked him for the tapes to copy off onto DAT. He was OK
about giving me the tapes as I had spent a couple of years convincing people I wasn’t
a hopeless junkie any more.
"When Mark
came over two weeks later I got two reel to reel tapes in white cardboard boxes, chatted
to Mark for a while and we played a couple of songs Mark on guitar and me on bass, then he
split. I opened the boxes and nearly had a heart attack, the tapes looked like a couple
dead bodies all green and smelly, and my chronic melancholia had been kicked in the head
by the skinheads of circumstance. Over the next 2 weeks I found out that dead body green
tapes were common and Albert's studio (yes where AC/DC used to record their early stuff
here) would "bake" the tapes to reduce the mould, master the recordings and run
off a DAT for $700 Australian bucks!!! If I didn’t have the money from the crop
there's no way I would have done it. I borrowed someone's DAT player and ran off tapes.
This year I got some CDs run off and burn CDs myself as I have a burner. "
These recordings
are a terrific thing for any Kelpies fan, and it’s a damn shame that the chances of
them getting released is small, because it’s wonderful to be able to hear reasonably
well recorded versions of songs like "Ride", "Living In A World Of
Fear", "Without The Pain" or "Change". These tracks come from a
session at Now Studios in 1981 when 9 songs were recorded; these four, the three that were
originally on Flowers In The Dustbin, "Underway" and "Brand New
Cadillac". These tracks are terrific…my favorite is "Truro Murders",
which has a nifty nagging guitar line and words about a serial killer topped off by the
chorus "Let’s go, well let’s go! Let’s go digging bodies up in
Truro". Ash fills in a litte more: "In the 60's there was some dirtbag rapist
killer who buried his victims at a beach called Truro in South Australia. I don’t
think the police found this piece of shit. Jim wrote the lyrics."
I asked if there
was a strong Clash influence in the band…it seems obvious from the general style with
tracks like "Second By Second" having a slight reggae feel in places and the
"Cadillac" cover.
"Jim was
pretty into 50's rock n roll", he replied. "He knew "Cadillac" pretty
well before he heard the Clash version and he used to sing Elvis songs right in my ear
when he was pissed. He had a pretty cool rockabilly look happening. The thing for me with
the Clash's version of "Cadillac" was it was probably just as lo fi as the
original, it shat on all those lame covers of "Johnny B Goode" I'd been hearing
and the white wash of rock’n’roll on Happy Days, rock’n’roll was
reclaimed from Grease and thrown back in the streets where it belonged. "
"The drum
intro on "Second by Second" is more my attempt to be clever than a reggae
influence, I hate reggae, any reggae influenced punk lost me right away, all that pussy
footing around with the rhythm, dink a doo a bob a dink, fuck that shit lets just hit the
hammer!! And dub. . . more like dud, don’t try and sell me that shit I wasn’t
interested. Before I get any race hate mail there's plenty of old black blues
motherfuckers I listen to, you know all those guys that were possessed by the devil to
drink, womanize and gamble. I love that shit and may be in need of an exorcism
myself."
Well, OK, guess
we got the record set straight there!
"Now
Studios was a rehearsal studio in Darlinghurst, Sydney. They had a simple 8 track recorder
set up for recording in one of the rooms there, and we recorded the tracks live one
afternoon with no overdubs. A couple of guys I didn’t know mixed it and I remember
when I first heard the finished tape how disappointed I was that it didn’t sound as
good as AC/DC records!! I cannot remember much about this recording, like who organized it
or paid for it, maybe it was money from gigs. Must have been, I didn’t work at the
time, I just chased pussy and drugs around Darlinghurst so I was broke. "
The Phantom
single was a bit of a different story. Now the band had a label behind them to put up the
money. "This was a pretty serious recording", says Ash. "24 tracks and then
mix just like the pros!! Jules Normington from Phantom records saw the band a few times
and loved us, he said if we recorded 2 songs he would release them. Wham Bamm!!! Phantom
records !!!, So Jules put it out, I don't know how many copies he manufactured 500 to
1,000 I guess and we (or I) never got any money from it. Our peers that year for releases
on Phantom were the Hoodoo Gurus, Machinations, Sunnyboys, Allnighters, and Surfside 6.
They all made it, we didn’t. We were so young and dumb, we had no manager and no idea
that there was a business side to rock’n’roll. None of us chased up anything, we
took what was offered but that was it. We were arrogant, naive, tough and scared little
punk teenage creeps who played punk rock’n’roll like people fight for their
lives. One day recording, one day mixing, 3 songs. Two for the Phantom single, one
("How Can I Tell You" – the track that got added to Go And Do It)
for safe keeping. Mark has good hindsight skills - he said to me once that by the time we
recorded this it was a band effort in the writing department. Brian wrote the intro riff
for "Take Me Away", but that song and "Second By Second" were written
with all of us contributing to the arrangements and writing. "How Can I Tell
You" was Mark’s baby though. The early days they were all Mark’s songs,
with Jim writing the lyrics."
"I still
think the lyrics to "My Wall" are magnificent. I don’t know if Mark liked
the idea of it progressing into a band thing, as 4 months later he left to start Soggy
Porridge, or if this was the start of Mark’s fear of successes syndrome. Start a
band, get close to making it and pull out just as it’s about to break. Mark did this
with Soggy Porridge; he released a single and left the band after two years hard work, I
dropped out of Soggy Porridge after about ten gigs as I was too out of it to drum. I had
hepatitis (as all my friends did) and the last gig I did with the Soggys was with yellow
skin (if you do a gig as a junkie with yellow skin it's time for the rest farm). Mark
pulled the plug again with the Candy Harlots when they were real close. WEA publishing
gave Mark 10 grand to record and Virgin put out the first 2 CD singles. But Mark left
after the recording and another singer was on the releases, they did a national tour
supporting AC/DC and POOF!!!!!!!!! into oblivion they went, crushed, killed and destroyed
by the monster that is the music industry. Fame scares me, I’m not a good enough
communicator to survive it. If I had the successes of Nirvana I would blow my head off
too. There's no way I could deal with that amount of bullshit and people."
Ash mentioned
"My Wall" above, and I have to say that this track was probably the one that
first made me realize that this band was something special. It’s a dark, depressingly
suicidal song about a relationship breaking apart that builds to the chorus:
So I sat in
my corner with a rope round my leg
And I sat with my razorblades
And I watched
Watched the wall turn red
Do you think that I like living in a room with no light
Do you think that you could do it
Every day and night?
"I never
wrote any songs in the Kelpies. My favorites were Love Is A Revolution and Change.
I really want to cover these in the Panadolls so look out! Mark taught me how to write
songs…well, I kinda knew how to write but through hanging around with Mark, which I
did in the very early days because I lived about 10 houses around the corner, I learned
his process for writing…the way he would start with the chords and melody and add and
subtract over a period of time, record it onto a cassette and listen to it back to see how
it impressed him. One of my favourite songs he wrote was Life Looks So Good Through A
Beer Bottle. I observed most of the stages of him writing this and it really impressed
me. Playing in the band had a profound effect on me overall, but there I was playing with
some one who wrote songs that I loved just as much as any songwriter in the world. Very
powerful."
And to close,
it’s worth saying that Ashley isn’t one of these guys living only in the past.
He’s been very active of late, he’s got his health back and is back to playing.
"Me…well when I got out of rehab, the first band I played with was Damien
Lovelock’s Wigworld, with Damien from the Celibate Rifles. Then I was jamming with
Kenny from the Dolls and we had a few bands going before the Panadolls. A few gigs here
and there. The first band we got together was called the Funeral Clowns. We had a song
released on a compilation here and did some tours. Then I had a band called Cropduster,
but there's a band from New York called the same thing."
"The
Panadolls is the only band I’ve been in that comes close to the feeling I had playing
in the Kelpies, but I don’t think anything is as good as being in a popular punk band
in a big city at 19 years old. The guys in the Panadolls came and saw the Kelpies when
they were 13 or 14 and were impressed when I joined. I’m particularly good friends
with the singer, Ken Archbold. Read his lyrics (I’m sure you would anyway). He’s
really into poetry and prose and lyric writers like Tom Waites. The Panadolls have had
some great supports with the likes of Dead Moon, the Damned, New Christs, etc. We have
done some astoundingly good shows, but we don’t play as often as we’d like
to."
"A lot of
people whinge and whine about the old days. Not me…I play in 3 bands. Last year I
started a label and released the Panadolls album. I'm about to distribute some cool
underground Aussie music on the web to the world. The music scene has matured here. The
people who have been involved for a long time want their million bucks, but there just
aren't that many people here in Australia to make that kind of money. A lot of people in
bands here work a day job and organize to take time off to tour. I have seen some
wonderful bands over the last few years but some of them are so deluded thinking someone's
going to do it all for them, make them rich and famous, and complain when nothing happens.
Other bands have no talent at all and rather than get better blame venues or the media. I
can’t stand negative whinging about the music business, I just tell people to shut
up. I make sure I get what I want out of playing music, satisfaction, energy release,
artistic freedom. I try to enjoy it now, not later on."
"I do
computer work, design and stuff. I work out of my bedroom on a laptop. Beside me is a
turntable and amp. I play records all day long and love shopping for vinyl over the net.
My kids know what a record is and what rock’n’roll is. When ever they start
playing my guitar I'm saying: write a song! Make up your own song, just sing any words! I
have a 9 year old son and a 7 year old daughter. My girlfriend of 10 years (and their
mother) is a psychiatric nurse, an excellent partner for me. My kids and I jam. I play
fast and they love to scream out the words sometimes. My son reminds me of the singer from
Turbonegro a bit in his delivery."
"I started
writing songs in Soggy Porridge but it fizzed out along with every thing else, I got back
into it in 1988 and have 3 songs on the new Dolls record and a bunch of my own I should do
something with, I can’t decide whether to do a heavy record or an acoustic record. I
debate with myself all the time about what kind of record to do. I guess it's a fear
procrastination thing. Shit maybe I should 2 records…see, there I go again!"
Two would be fine with me. And
get a Kelpies retrospective out there while you’re at it.
