I’ve been wanting to do a feature on the Scientists and Kim Salmon for at least 15 years now, but for whatever lame reason had never gotten around to it. Finally this year I went to his current town of Melbourne to see two shows on the May 2002 Radio Birdman reunion tour, and I figured it’s now or never, so get in touch with the man and get his story! A few well placed e-mails and everything was arranged.

If you know Salmon’s history and something of the records he’s played on, you’ll realize how incomplete the Noise For Heroes website would be without a story on him. The Scientists alone make Salmon six times worthy of inclusion in any Australian rock and roll hall of fame. But if that’s not enough, he also has a substantial body of work under his own name and with the Surrealists, and played guitar on all the early Beasts of Bourbon records, including one, The Axeman’s Jazz, that’s widely regarded as an all time Australian classic.

Salmon tells the story of his early pre-Scientists days in great detail below, but he doesn’t always name all the other players, so to fill things out it’s worth spending a little while talking about lineups and the records that were released.

The first group in the early days in Perth was the Cheap Nasties, who featured Dan Dare on bass, Neil Fernandez on guitar and Mark Betts on drums. Kim sang and played guitar. They played about a year, from August 1976 to July 1977, and then added Robbie Art to relieve Kim of the vocal role. The band played basic punk music – just trying to get off of square one.

The Cheap Nasties split in December of 1977. Salmon joined forces with John Rawlings (drums), Rod Radalj (guitar) and Boris Sujdovic (bass). They had formed the core of another Perth group called the Exterminators, whose set included a loving song about their hometown called "Asshole Of The Universe". They called the resulting outfit the Invaders. Meanwhile, Fernandez and Betts became founding members of the Manikins, who would later include future Hoodoo Gurus mainman Dave Faulkner. By May of 1978, Rawlings was out of the Invaders and was replaced by former Victims and future Hoodoo Gurus drummer James Baker. The band then changed their name to the Scientists.

After a couple months Sujdovic left and was replaced by Dennis Byrne, and this line up recorded a brilliant debut single pairing "Frantic Romantic" with "Shake (Together Tonight)". Released in mid 1979, the A side of this single regularly appears on bootleg compilations of Australian rarities and is a mid-tempo ode to sexually hyperactive teenagerism that’s lyrically on par with early Buzzcocks singles. The flip has a great, grinding rock guitar attack to go with a pumping beat. Neither has the greatest production value, but they excel by virtue of terrific hooks and sheer unfettered enthusiasm…the thrill of making that first record!

Radalj would also leave the band and join up with Sujdovic in the Rockets, and Byrne was soon out as well. They were replaced by Ian Sharples on bass and Ben Juniper on guitar, but Juniper was gone by May of 1980, at which point the band carried on as a three piece.

In early 1980 the band released the four song 7" Scientists ep, which while lacking the signature song that "Frantic Romantic" was to become still had some memorable tracks, like "Pissed On Another Planet" and "Last Night". The six tracks from these first two 7" records were released several years later on a 12" mini-lp called The Sweet Corn Sessions on the label Timberyard.

The three piece lineup recorded the first full length Scientists lp in the beginning of 1981, although when they entered the studio they’d already decided to call it a day. While the proper title of the lp is The Scientists, most people who are aware of it refer to it as The Pink Album because the sleeve has no artwork and is bright pink with the band name across the front. (Admittedly, this reasoning went a little off the tracks when Easter reissued the record with a different sleeve in yellow and purple in the late 80s.) The songs are all good basic punk pop material, but the production is more stripped down than the two 7 inchers due to the loss of a second guitar player. In a 1988 interview in the excellent Perth fanzine Party Fears, Salmon said this about the album: "If we’d recorded it live, we would probably have captured something that, for me, just isn’t on that album. There’s a bit of what we had on "Frantic Romantic" and the ep that followed it, but what the band really was about is basically lost, I think."

Still, the songs pump with youthful enthusiasm, and tracks like "High Noon", "Shadows Of The Night", "Teenage Dreamer" and "Making A Scene" all show that had they chosen that direction, the Scientists could have matched swords with groups like the Buzzcocks and Undertones. The Undertones comparison is not that far-fetched, either, as the band actually covered "Teenage Kicks" in 1979 (along with others like "Pills" by the New York Dolls, "Slow Death" by the Flamin Groovies and the Elton Motello/Plastic Bertrand fave "Jet Boy Jet Girl".)

Whatever might have been, the Scientists didn’t keep going that way, and the transformation started right after the album was released. The first step was a new band called Louie Louie that featured Salmon, Brett Rixon on drums, and Kim Williams (later known primarily for his power pop band the Summer Suns) on bass. It was during this time that the Scientists masterpiece "Swampland" was written. Even in earlier versions such as can be heard on the band’s Rubber Never Sleeps cassette, this song is a huge departure. It begins with a bassline that throbs like a living heart. The bass is soon joined by some well spaced and heavily reverbed chord slashes. Then a lead riff that’s part surf, part rockabilly comes slicing over the top. Rixon’s simple, tribal drumbeat joins in, and finally Salmon’s eerie voice fills out the picture. If there was ever a poster song for the value of feel in rock music, this is it – a track just oozing atmosphere from every pore.

Rubber Never Sleeps is an interesting artifact. It would never meet anyone’s quality criteria for a real release, but it has nifty takes of many early Scientists songs from the days leading right up through Louie Louie (this despite the fact that it wasn’t released until 1985). Some of these seem to be done live in the studio while others are from gigs. There’s some overlap with the Pink Album, but there are great additional pre-Louie Louie songs like "Don’t Lie To Me", "Have You Seen My Baby", or "Melodramatic Touch". Then there’s some other songs that point the way towards the new direction, like "Tiger Tiger", which has an almost proto-"Swampland" feel to it, or "Strangers In The Night", which has the sort of pumping throb of later material and some really noisy guitar, yet reaches back in time for a pop feel as well.

The ninth track is "Swampland" – much faster than the version that would be released a little later. There’s a primitive but powerful "We Had Love" – another future masterpiece. A cover of the Modern Lovers’ "She’s Cracked" powers. All in all, the cassette is a neat marker for where the band had been and where they were about to head.

But Louie Louie was just the point of departure and Salmon didn’t stay there long. Hearing of greener pastures in Sydney, he and Rixon determined to pull up stakes and move there. The Scientists had toured to Sydney previously and had done well, but since then a boom in the local band scene had commenced and prospects towered above what Perth could offer. Williams was happy with Perth and stayed behind, so in his place Salmon recruited Boris Sujdovic to play bass once again and then shortly thereafter they added Tony Thewlis on guitar as he describes in the interview below.

Arriving in September of 1981, the re-tooled band hit the inner city scene. Although they were heavily Stooges influenced, the influence led them in a very different direction compared to the group that was the strongest role model for the Sydney bands of that time – Radio Birdman. Despite their mismatch with this crowd, when the Scientists finally managed a regular residency at the Vulcan Hotel in early 1982, they were able to build a fairly solid following and routinely filled the club. They became regulars on the Surrey Hills scene, but their uncompromising approach wasn’t a plus when it came to getting gigs. Tony’s penchant for knocking out the stage light bulbs with the head of his Telecaster during their set closer, "Bring Back The Electric Guitar", probably didn’t help. And the frequent on stage arguments between band members also wouldn’t be expected to gain fans.

It was a frustrating time for the band. They were committed to what they were doing to the point of driving themselves into poverty, and it was at times galling to them to watch the tidal wave of garage bands sweeping through Sydney and making hay. According to an article by Jim Wylie they once played a gig at the Southern Cross with a set list of nothing but 60s garage band covers just to show that they could do it as easily as anyone else. But this ploy backfired when the crowd went wild for the oldies and then largely walked out when the band played a second set of their own material.

In spite it all, they achieved some level of success in the inner city. But when they ventured out into the suburbs it was a different story. On one oft-told occasion they were bottled off a stage while opening for hard rockers the Angels.

Through the odd tour to Melbourne they attracted the interest of AuGoGo Records in Melbourne, and that label released the classic single "This Is My Happy Hour"/"Swampland" in late 1982. It’s almost baffling that "Swampland" wasn’t chosen for the A side as it seems like such an obvious hit now, but the droning detachment of "Happy Hour" isn’t without its own neurotic charm, either. The single was critically acclaimed both in Australia and abroad, and it sold pretty well to boot.

In 1983 there were three more Scientists releases on AuGoGo. The Blood Red River mini-lp came first, with Salmon on the cover staring through a single uncovered eyeball in a very Lux Interior-like pose along with the rest of his bandmates. The six songs on the vinyl capture the essence of this period of the band. The rhythms are non-intuitive and backwards feeling. While the guitars scrape over the top, the bass throbs away in the background, and through it all, Salmon sings and snarls along like an pathologically clever man who’s drifting in and out of insanity.

It kicks off with "When Fate Deals Its Mortal Blow" – a tempo like a man wading through mud with a repeated twang! chord and a stop-dead chorus where the verse instrumentation is momentarily replaced by a simple guitar lick. Just for a moment, and then it’s back to the mud. "Burnout" is up next, with one of those inside out rhythms that makes no sense by conventional pop values leading call and response guitar interplay. Then it’s "The Spin" with yet more jerky rhythms and the psychotic tribal war-dance of "Revhead", a track that reminds me of feedtime at their best. After that up steps the monster classic "Set It On Fire" with an oozy, swampy riff and Salmon’s intense, edge-of-losing it, headin-for-a-trauma vocals. And finally things close out with the title track – a demented blues workout that sounds like the Cramps winding down just before dawn.

It’s not pretty or melodic (never was meant to be!), but it’s compelling stuff.

Now working mostly in a more appreciative Melbourne, the band closed out 1983 with the single "We Had Love"/"Clear Spot". The a side of this disc is another psycho-classic, with a nagging, repeating Stooges-like guitar line and Salmon's slurred, manic vocals giving the thing the atmosphere of the truly disturbed. "Clear Spot" is another warped rhythm piece but doesn’t create the same sort of atmosphere that "We Had Love" does.

During the same late 1983 period, Salmon also debuted in another venture that was to help his profile on the Aussie indie scene quite a bit. A fellow named Tex Perkins (later of the Cruel Sea) had been fronting a band called Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums and playing a demented sort of country rock. But the group fell apart in the summer of 1983, leaving Perkins with a handful of gigs to play but no band. Scrambling to patch something together, Perkins recruited Spencer Jones from the Johnnys and then signed on Boris Sujdovic. Boris in turn brought in his mates Salmon and ex-Scientists drummer James Baker. The Beasts Of Bourbon were born.

Playing out the gigs, the band found themselves enjoying things and booked into Paradise Studios in October to record The Axeman’s Jazz, a truly twisted slab of psychotic country music that’s been highly regarded ever since its release in mid 1984. Perkins comes across as some kind of a lunatic Johnny Cash, with songs about murder, mayhem, and being too out of it to notice either. Best of the bunch is "Psycho", which in all aspects but the lyrics has a fairly classic old-country feel. Perkins sings in a reasoned baritone but in his words he’s talking to his mama over breakfast and telling her about all the people he’s murdered. And at the end, he leaves little doubt that once the needle is in the runoff groove mama’s time will have come, too. "Psycho" is the best of the lot, but the atmosphere of the whole album lines up with it pretty well, making The Axeman’s Jazz something of an Australian classic for people with an appreciation for true dementia.

In the same month that the sessions were underway for that first Beasts Of Bourbon record, the Scientists were also recording tracks that would become their second AuGoGo mini-lp, with the that’s-a-mouthful title This Heart Doesn’t Run On Blood, This Heart Doesn’t Run On Love. But it took so long for this one to come out that between "We Had Love" and the mini-lp, the band snuck out a crude sounding live single "When Worlds Collide" – one that’s not up to the normal quality either for production value or for creating an atmosphere. The mini-album itself came out in the fall of 1984, and by that time the Scientists had already been in the UK for half a year.

The title is a line from the first song, "Nitro", which features a mangled Bo Diddley beat and a lyric about a guy whose heart is only alive because of the nitroglycerine injected into it. The second track "Solid Gold Hell" uses almost the exact same beat with a disturbing lyric whose meaning isn’t clear but doesn’t sound good.

The three tracks that make up the second side of the record weren’t found worthy of inclusion on the Citadel reissue CD Blood Red River – which does have both side one tracks. So if you want to hear "I Cried No Tears", "Crazy Heart" and "This Life Of Yours", you’ll have to track down the vinyl. While none of them are essential, they still do a nice job of creating classic Scientists moods – disturbed, troubled, and prone to irrationality.

Meanwhile, arriving in the mother country the Scientists had hit the ground well enough – playing Dingwall’s, the Electric Ballroom, the Lyceum, and the Clarendon Garage. Working a cheeky approach to Kid Congo Powers of the Gun Club to their advantage, the band maneuvered itself onto the opening slot for a well matched tour with them. They even got a UK release for Blood Red River on Rough Trade. Lindsay Hutton, scribe for Sounds and also author of his own great fanzine The Next Big Thing became an ardent and helpful booster, and would remain so for years to come.

But the situation with Scientists recordings becomes very confused at this point. Approached to tour Belgium, the band played several gigs there and were given an offer to record some songs for the Soundwork label in late 1984. Salmon provides a humorous recollection of the events in the liner notes to the Citadel Blood Red River CD – in this version the label owner’s English is so bad that the band are unable to make him understand that their contract with AuGoGo does not allow them to record for anyone else, no matter how bad his English is. So they find themselves in the studio for a week with no clear idea of what songs to record and lacking the motivation to really try. Yet somehow they come out with four pretty fair numbers, "Murderess In A Purple Dress", "Backward Man", "Temple Of Love" and the title song to what became the Demolition Derby ep. Only "Temple" didn’t make it to the Citadel collection, so despite initial reluctance, Salmon apparently saw value in the results.

In January of 1985 the Scientists recorded tracks for an album that came out in the UK under the title You Get What You Deserve on the Karbon label (run by the Scientists management). In Australia a similar, but not wholly identical set of tracks was issued as Atom Bomb Baby. At this point the Scientists were ensnarled in a major struggle with AuGoGo over their contract situation, and the result was a complete mess, with overlapping releases on both 12" and 7" formats sprouting out all over throughout 1985. A look through the combinations of titles on these two albums plus Heading For A Trauma (released the same month as Atom Bomb Baby by AuGoGo!) and Demolition Derby would leave anyone wondering what in the world was happening. No matter – all of these records have classic Scientists songs on them, like "Hell Beach", "If It’s The Last Thing I Do", "Go Baby Go" and "Bad Priest", not to mention a twisted cover of Credence Clearwater Revival’s "It Came From Out Of The Sky". Even Britain’s jaded NME went for the record, with Richard North branding the Scientists as "the premier grunge merchants" a full six years before Nirvana-styled Seattle rock usurped the description.

In February of 1985, Brett Rixon dealt the band’s prospects a serious blow by announcing that he was leaving. Rixon’s rhythms were a key to the sound of the Scientists and his leaving marked the end of an era. In the liner notes for the Citadel reissue of The Human Jukebox, Salmon summarizes the situation as follows: "The Scientists might have looked pretty tough, but there was an extremely delicate balance in place keeping them rocking. Boris Sujdovic’s bass lines, having two, three or four notes at best, created a heavy reliance on nuance. The subtlest difference in the drum’s nuance was sure to upset things. The prospect of a new drummer was something akin to having an organ transplant. With all the best procedures the body still might reject it."

The band had a tour slated supporting the Sisters of Mercy, and they needed help quickly. They ended up recruiting an American drummer named Richard Hertz, who played for them most of the year. His recorded legacy consists only of the A side of the "You Only Live Twice" single – a cover of a Nancy Sinatra hit that features a picture of the original songstress on the sleeve.

In December of 1985 Leanne Chock replaced Hertz as Salmon recounts in the interview, joining them just in time for an opening slot on a Siouxie and the Banshees tour. She had only begun to play then, but by February of 1986 she was recording with the band as they made the Weird Love album with Richard Mazda producing. Recorded in only 3 days, Weird Love was a weird album – it consisted primarily of re-recorded versions of old Scientists classics, mostly done quite faithfully to the originals. This record was another outgrowth of the AuGoGo situation, but it gave the band a US release (on Bigtime) and the first really cohesive, consistent sounding full length album they’d had.

At this point the band was losing what stability it had. Boris Sujdovic had to leave Britain because his visa ran out, heading home to join the pop/rock band the Dubrovniks. He was replaced by Joe Presido, and the band struggled through to the end of 1986, when both Presido and Chock walked away. Making shift quickly, Salmon moved to bass and recruited Nick Combe to play drums. This lineup recorded the album The Human Jukebox at the very end of 1986. In the liner notes to the CD, Salmon says that it was "a return to the kind of shambles that previously the Scientists had always felt most comfortable with." Maybe, but it wasn’t the sort of shambles their record company had in mind, and Bigtime declined to release it. In retrospect it’s not clear what they were expecting – it’s not like Weird Love was going to land the Scientists on the cover of Smash Hits, either. The Human Jukebox was just a logical progression from where they’d been before. It’s noisy, and it’s not pretty, but it’s still compelling. They released it on their own Karbon label, and it vanished fairly quickly.

Ultimately the reception accorded this last album was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Salmon returned to Australia and to his hometown sunny Perth, that asshole of the universe. He picked up the Scientists mantle once again and with Thewlis and Combe arranged some gigs in Perth in April of 1987. In the interview in Party Fears, Salmon and editor David Gerard describe the audience as largely composed of people who hadn’t seen the Scientists since their first incarnation and had dropped out of the live scene. These poor souls were visibly stunned at what the Scientists had turned into while they had their backs turned.

In November, the Scientists did one last tour to the eastern states. After that, Combe returned to his home in London and the Scientists were done. But not Salmon – he still had a couple of cards up his sleeve. First of these was to hook up with Tex Perkins, James Baker, Boris Sujdovic and Spencer Jones and reform the Beasts Of Bourbon. The first Beasts album had been steadily selling over the past three years and the ticker now stood at nearly 30,000 copies, so it was clear they’d touched some kind of a chord. They recorded a second lp, Sour Mash, in the spring of 1988. The sound was substantially changed, which you’d expect given that Salmon had his hand in writing about a third of the songs. But Perkins also had hardened his singing style through gigging with the noise rock group Thug, and the result was that Sour Mash was very different album from the debut. Australian music fans still loved the Beasts of Bourbon, and they bought Sour Mash like they’d bought The Axeman’s Jazz.

Salmon’s other card was a new band of his own, Kim Salmon and The Surrealists. This band was a three piece, with Tony Pola on drums and Brian Hooper on bass. They released their first lp in late 1988. Entitled Hit Me With The Surreal Feel, it features hysterically funny pictures of Salmon’s face with his eyeballs replaced by fish eyes. The recording took place in a rehearsal studio using only a four track recorder and as a result is fairly primitive sounding – very echo-y. The studio time cost a total of sixty dollars and Kim obtained the multi-track master tapes by the expedient of asking for them as a birthday gift from his wife and parents.

The music is less non-traditional rhythmically than the Scientists, but it’s still not your standard rock workout by a long shot. The jazzy title track is split into four pieces that separate the record into three parts. There’s an odd song called "Torture" that with different instrumentation could have been a late 60s bubblegum hit. Follow that up with the 50s rock sound of "Devil In Disguise", tack on a version of "Blue Velvet", and you have a very interesting record.

February of 1990 saw the release of a second album with the Surrealists, entitled Just Because You Can’t See It…Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t There. In marked contrast to Hit Me With The Surreal Feel, this album has full and professional sounding production, and it’s also got some of the most accessible songs Salmon had recorded since the Perth lineup of the Scientists (it also has its share of tracks where royalties from radio play are not an issue). "Melt" is a funky tune driven by a mercilessly frantic bassline. "Sundown, Sundown" has a feel much like the Scientists’ take of "You Only Live Twice". "Sunday Drive" harks back to the Scientists’ rhythmic tricks…with a three note guitar lick running for the duration while the drums are playing 4 beats per measure, you’re left feeling like you’ve been patting your head and rubbing your stomach a little too long. "Je T’aime" starts like a re-make of the Troggs "Wild Thing" and then pulls into a strange but entertaining sort of ambient rock song with lots of heavy breathing. "You’re Gonna Die" has a boogie rock rhythmic backing that would make Black Oak Arkansas proud. But that brief visual is quickly overcome by Salmon’s scrawling guitar leads and his alarmingly sincere screams of the song’s title.

About eighteen months later the Kim Salmon and the Surrealists album Essence appeared. This record continues in the vein of Just Because You Can’t See It, but adds a slight rap influence on songs like "Zero Blank" and "Lightning Scary", both of which saw release as singles. "Zero Blank" has a wah-wah’d riff that’s not dissimilar from the signature lick in the Rolling Stones "Heartbreaker" serving as a link between verse and chorus. "Lightning Scary" is a terrifically catchy song whose "Admit it, you’re scared!" coda is guaranteed to stick with you after just one listen. But other songs are darker and more difficult, like "Self Absorption", or "A Pox On You". The latter of these songs had started as a Scientists number several years back.

Almost on top of this release came a solo Kim Salmon album called Hey Believer. With the exception of 2002’s E(a)rnest, this record is Salmon’s quietest ever. There’s little of the noisy squalling electric guitar sounds that Salmon had built his name on to this point…instead there’s lots of acoustic and most of the electric that’s there is played clean. "Pass It On" is the rowdiest number, with a feel that might have made it fit well on the next Surrealists album. But in spite of the more relaxed approach to the music, Salmon’s singing style and his nebulous lyrics give this record the same kind of disconcerting sensation that pervade his other efforts.

1993’s Kim Salmon and the Surrealists album Sin Factory marked a substantial turn in direction, with the addition of a sixties soul/funk vibe that made them sound like a twisted take on Superfly or Shaft. "I Fell" has a heavy 60s acid rock guitar feel. "Rose Coloured Windscreen" has an almost lounge-y, languid feel disguising some clever lyrics. "Something To Lean On" has more wah-wah and a neat, driving bassline from Brian Hooper. This album saw a US release on the Deep Six label almost 3 years after appearing in Australia.

With the recording of Sin Factory completed, drummer Tony Pola left and was replaced by Greg Bainbridge, who’d played in Melbourne band the Ton Up Pirates. Despite the line up change, Surrealists fortunes were peaking on the live front around this time. They toured Europe for three months in early fall of 1993 and landed an opening slot for a U2 tour in Australia later that year. Red Eye were regularly releasing singles and CDEPs from their albums, and Salmon was becoming a known commodity outside of the underground cognoscenti in Australia.

The first album to be recorded with Bainbridge was a self titled disc that came out on Red Eye in 1995. It’s another turn in style, dropping most of the funk/soul aspects of Sin Factory for a mostly harder, heavier sound. Strangely enough, it includes a fairly straight re-make of "Frantic Romantic" from the very first Scientists single. But songs like "Redemption For Sale", "Plenty More Fish" or "I’m Gonna See You Compromised" are more typical of this CD.

The next release didn’t come until 1998, and when it did, it was on Citadel Records, not Red Eye. Ya Gotta Let Me Do My Thing came with a bonus CDEP and featured a huge pile of songs (some of which, like "Undone", last only briefly). Like some other Surrealists records, it uses a recurring theme that pops up multiple times…this time in the song segments "The Zipper", "Horizontal Zipper" and "Caught In The Zipper". But there’s an ample selection of cool songs on this one, like "You’re Such A Freak", "The Connoisseur", "You’ve Got Layers" and "Space 1999" – songs that are perhaps more structured and conservative than in the past but which work very well on their own. This CD is arguably the most entertaining of all the Surrealists albums.

In 1999, Salmon released a new CD under the name Kim Salmon and the Business, simply called Record. This one appeared on the Half A Cow label, and while it includes Surrealist drummer Greg Bainbridge, Brian Hooper isn’t present. Instead, the line up is fleshed out with a full horn section, with a resulting sound that’s yet again a total departure. There’s a lot of that Superfly aura that was on Sin Factory, but there’s also lots of distorted vocals and a return to noisiness on a fair number of the songs. The horns work great on tracks like "Anticipation", where the music complements the lyric sentiment just perfectly. "I’ll Be Around" begins with a slinky introduction that feels like the start of "Heard It Through The Grapevine" but ends up going its own interestingly soulful way. "Emperor’s New Clothes" is another memorable track from this CD.

Which brings us to 2002 and the new CD E(a)rnest. Salmon describes its making in the interview below, but suffice to say it’s by far his quietest record ever. "It wasn’t the wages that attracted me – it was the sin on its own, I’d have done it for free" he sings on the track "Lord Of Darkness", reviewing his own long and varied career in lyric form. That sort of lyrical cleverness pervades the record. But despite musical backing that’s primarily acoustic guitar and keys, somehow the sound is still rich and full. Superficially it sounds like a very basic home studio job, but there’s been a lot of care paid to detail and the result is a record that really holds attention. Ultimately this has become my favorite post-Scientists Kim Salmon record.

I met up with Salmon the night after seeing Radio Birdman at the Prince Of Wales in Melbourne in late May. Kim was good enough to drive by the little hotel in East Melbourne where I was staying and we drove together looking for a quiet coffee shop on Brunswick Street in the Fitzroy area. Being Saturday night, a quiet place wasn’t that easy to find, but eventually we found something suitable.

It turns out that Kim had also been at the Birdman show and was impressed by what he saw. It must have been interesting for him to watch, seeing as he’d recently done some Scientists reunion gigs as he talks about below.

In person, Kim isn’t exactly what you might expect from listening to the records he’s played on. He’s of moderate build, and was dressed in fashion more suitable for a high school literature teacher than the fire-breathing madman who belts out "We Had Love". He speaks with measured tones in a soft voice that seems very different from the full throated roar that he unleashes on the Scientists records. Of course, he’s getting older like all of us, and he’s got the responsibility of a child to look after, and these things tend to be calming influences. At any rate, he’s an extremely nice fellow and certainly took care to follow up with me after the interview to make sure I got his new album and any other information I needed. And he also invited me to come by his house for a chat next time I’m in Melbourne. Which I think I may have to do!

Anyway, we sat down at a table, ordered up beverages appropriate to the situation and got down to work. I began by pulling out a dog-eared copy of the old Munster Records fanzine on the Scientists, and turned to the family tree in the center that outlines the history of the band from the predecessor outfit the Cheap Nasties and heading through to the first incarnation of the Surrealists.

Steve: I was wondering if you’d seen this family tree in this fanzine on the Scientists. I always like looking at these things.

Kim: The people who do these things tend to put more detail in them than there really needs to be. (laughs)

Steve: Yeah, you have a line up that plays for three weeks and they end up getting in there.

Kim: Well, I’ll have a look. I’m just looking at this, and it’s just facts – it doesn’t try to analyze it. There’s the Punjabbers – they’ve kind of mixed Tony’s band and my band. They weren’t a band that lasted more than two weeks, I’m sure!

Steve: Tony’s in both of these at the same time. Of course I guess that it happens a fair amount of the time in Australia that people play in more than one band at a time.

Kim: Is he really? I think that’s a mistake. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t in that. Oh, maybe he was, actually. That’s the first I’ve even heard of that band, to be honest.

Steve: I think he was in that band. Didn’t these guys have a single? I know there’s a couple singles by the Interstellar Villains, and I’m pretty sure there’s a Punjabbers one, too. I’ll have to look.

Can we start at the earliest days, with the Cheap Nasties and how you got started in rock and roll in the first place?

Kim: I guess I always wanted to be a musician. Well, no, strike that, I didn’t always want to be a musician. I had some other ambitions, but I was a fine arts student and I deferred because I was only 18 and had done one year of Uni, and I didn’t like all the hippies there much. I dunno, somehow I didn’t really fit in with it. And I also thought that I’d like to go and get a few jobs and live a bit rather than continue being at school. So I deferred with the intention of coming back to being an artist, I suppose. I guess I had wanted to be a musician in that time but it wasn’t like I had ever claimed that it was a serious career choice. And about that time I read an article by a journalist called Charles Shaar Murray in the New Musical Express about a New York scene that really kind of captured my imagination reading about it. They had all these bands decked out in black leather, talking about the Ramones and Heartbreakers, and there was some history mentioned about bands liked the New York Dolls and the Stooges and the Velvet Underground. I didn’t really know much about any of that kind of thing, but it seemed very rock and roll to me.

Steve: I didn’t get the NME in those days, but I’d get the US Rolling Stone, and they used to have things he wrote. I guess they just bought them from the NME.

Kim: Yeah, because Rolling Stone was very into the Eagles and all that crap, weren’t they?

Steve: Yeah, but they’d have reviews from him on the Ramones and that sort of thing. I still have this copy of Rolling Stone with this cover that says "Rock Is Sick And Living In London" or something like that.

Kim: Ah, I think I read that in something else. Yeah, so I didn’t know what punk rock was, because I hadn’t heard any of these bands, I’d only read about them. But just the images that were in my mind were enough to make me think that they were something I wanted to go out and find. So I went on a sort of a…a quest to find punk rock (laughs). And I ended up arriving at the Modern Lovers – that was the first thing I got hold of.

Steve: How did you find that in Perth?

Kim: Well, I’d read an article somewhere about Jonathan Richman and I went into a record shop and found this thing called The Modern Lovers. And I liked the look of it. Compared to other records it had a very sort of art influenced or Picasso-ish looking cover. Minimalist or something. It beckoned to me. And I put it on when I got it home and I loved it. I went and got hold of the Dolls and some Stooges records, and that’s what formed my idea of punk rock.

So the Cheap Nasties was really just an attempt to put it into practice. And I had drafted some guys that I knew from high school, and that’s how it started

Steve: So were the other guys into it, too, or did you have to convince them?

Kim: They were kind of drafted. They were I suppose just keen on the idea of being in bands, because they were really fairly rudimentary players. The drummer had only recently bought a drum kit and taken some lessons and the bass player – I think he really probably had more of a career in other areas in mind, but he liked rock music.

Steve: Were you doing mostly covers?

Kim: Well that was the thing, what songs to do. So yeah, we did about half of that Modern Lovers album. We did "Trash" from the Dolls, did "Now I Wanna Be Your Dog". I think we might have done "Search and Destroy". "No Fun". You know, really the pretty standard sort of thing. But it was in 1976 I think, so that was relatively early.

Steve: That’s quite amazing taste for teenagers!

Kim: Well, yeah, I guess. We just stumbled on the right kind of articles to lead the way. So that’s what the Cheap Nasties was. I don’t know that the band was really very good. It had a few lineup changes and we got another guitar player in, Neil Fernandez, who was a really good singer, and we shared the vocals and the guitar. He was a pretty slick muso. He could sort of carry a tune and everything.

Then later on we got a guy I knew from art school who became a singer, and his name was Robbie Art. I think we were a competent band, and I think we were ahead of our time for the place, but I think in a lot of ways the band was probably not that remarkable. I mean it was remarkable for those two things that I said, but beyond that, there really wasn’t much that could be said about it.

I left the band, or we decided we’d split up, because I used to argue with Neil all the time about songwriting. It was always a competition between guitarists.

Steve: So did you play many gigs?

Kim: Oh, yeah, we did quite a few gigs. I think really that’s something that the band did, which was to kind of galvanize a bit of a scene together. There were small pockets of interest around the place. Have I mentioned that this is in Perth? I have to remember to give you some background on that in a minute. But I guess it was a way for people with the same common interests to get together, and out of that a couple of bands formed, one of which, the Victims, was probably the most notable. Which I wasn’t in, but later I joined up with their drummer, James Baker, and formed the first Scientists line up.

Steve: The Cheap Nasties transitioned into the Invaders at the end of 1977 – what happened there?

Kim: The Invaders was this band with some of these people who were part of the scene who couldn’t play a musical instrument but went and got guitars and things and learned how to play a barre chord and do three chord songs. The guitar player wanted me to join, and he wouldn’t let me play guitar, so I had to sing. Because he didn’t want to be shown up (laughs). We’re talking about relative ability here – I guess my singing wasn’t much to speak of either.

Steve: So you each did what you were worst at?

Kim: (laughs) Yeah, you’ve got it. That’s very punk! It was probably the worst band I’ve ever been in.

But when the Victims finally broke up, everybody in the scene was very sad about that, but I thought "this is really good, because now I can grab James Baker from that". And he joined under the condition that I play guitar. And that was the Scientists. We changed our name – what we really wanted to be was primitive, like the Troggs or Stooges, or like the Velvets doing "White Light White Heat" or something. That was our idea, just a big throbbing mess. Kind of caveman like. So we thought the name the Scientists would have the right amount of irony.

Steve: I read an interview where you were talking about the early Scientists, and one thing that was very different from many other older bands who are often dismissive of their early material, even though you’ve done a lot of music that’s very different from that early material, you still were positive about what you’d done with the Scientists on The Pink Album and the two early 7 inchers.

Kim: Well, I think that Pink Album’s rubbish! I think it’s very badly produced. It doesn’t give a very good idea.

Steve (attempting recovery from bullet-riddled thesis): Well, it maybe badly produced, but there’s a lot of badly produced albums that are still really good. There’s something to them.

Kim: Well, maybe, but you’re a lot more kind about it than I am. But I think the Cheap Nasties – I wouldn’t say I was all that positive about them. I think I kind of got that all out of my system doing the Cheap Nasties. But, I thought it was a really good band that definitely did have something right from the start. But it was a very different thing, that early lineup, compared to the later lineups.

Steve: One of the things I didn’t realize for a while was that James Baker wrote all the words for the songs. That kind of amazed me.

Kim: Well, yeah, but that’s sort of going back to the Invaders idea of doing the thing you’re worst at. (laughs) That’s very good…

I guess I was at that time just a guitar player. I wrote melodies – that’s what my strength was. I liked lyrics, but I’d rather somebody else wrote them. And James was like "Oh, I can write lyrics". And of course they’re all "Girl, oh won’t you do this" and "Girl come and do this with me".

Steve: Well, "Pissed On Another Planet" is about something else! About the only other thing there is when you’re that age, I guess.

Kim: Yeah, but I think Ian Sharples wrote those words. He was the bass player at the time. It was James’ idea to write the song, but Ian put all the couplets together. He was a little bit more literary than James.

Steve: So did James write the lyrics first and then you provide music?

Kim: Well that’s sort of funny too, because he was fairly a-tonal, and he would sort of say "I’ve written this song" and sing it. And I’d never be able to hear anything in it, so I’d have to make up a melody to go vaguely with whatever rhythm I’d hear. And whatever I’d play, he’d say "Yeah, like that! That’s right!" So he probably thought he wrote all the melodies, but in actual fact, I had to find them somehow. Maybe they were buried subliminally in his words.

Steve: What are some of your favorite songs from that era? Or are there any?

Kim: Um, well I liked that whole series of girl songs – there’s probably about 8 songs with "girl" in the title. And they were quite primitive and that’s what I’d wanted to have in what we put across. Oh, I guess "Frantic Romantic" was a good one. I still play that solo. That was one where James sang it and they were the first chords that I came up with and the melody and everything. It just happened pretty much as I was singing the stuff along with him. So when something works that naturally, there must be something about it – something special about it.

Steve: That’s one that you re-recorded with the Surrealists, right?

Kim: Yeah, I’d forgotten about that. A bloke at work the other day was telling me that I had this Scientists song on some compilation from this public radio station called 3PBS, they’d put out some album that had a Scientists song on it. And I thought, no that can’t be right. The Surrealists did something. And I stumbled on it somewhere by coincidence and I saw that it was us doing "Frantic Romantic". So I realized that he was sort of half right. But yeah, that was on an album where I guess we must have run out of songs.

Steve: What caused the Perth lineup with James and Ian to split up?

Kim: Oh, we all just agreed to split up. When we were in Perth we found just the apathy of the scene in general – the music scene, that is – to be really kind of stifling. It sort of killed us off. We actually left Perth to come over this way – Perth people call anything to the east "the eastern states", an expression that nobody really knows about here. Like in Tasmania, they call people here "mainlanders". So we came to the eastern states to just do a couple of little month long tours, and sort of did alright in a way. And then we came back to Perth and found that we’d been usurped in our gigs that we’d set up and found it really hard to get work again. Other people had taken our audience and we were sort of like last year’s thing. But we’d come over here and actually gotten on a national television pop show called Countdown. (They played "Last Night" – ed)

Not that that means that much, but it seemed like it didn’t count for anything. We went back there and were kind of considered to be passe. We didn’t really fit into any kind of fashion thing anyway, because we were doing a kind of sixties thing in reaction to punk, because we felt like we’d done punk and we wanted to move on. Our music was punk in a lot of ways, but the image and everything and the fact that we had melodic songs and everything, that was not very punk.

At first they couldn’t ignore us, but I think people were kind of glad when we were passe.

Steve: So who were your contemporaries in Perth in those days? Bands like the Rockets and the Mannikins?

Kim: The Mannikins were like our rivals – they were all guys from the Cheap Nasties. What had happened there was that we’d all agreed to split up and then they’d reformed without me. Pricks! No they’re not, really, they’re good guys.

Steve: What about the Rockets? They had that "Mean Mistress" single that’s really good, but there’s a cassette of theirs where they sound like the Eagles or something. But I’ve heard that they were really good.

Kim: Nah, they were crap. They were absolute rubbish, just yobbo metal. That’s my opinion. I mean, a lot of people at the time thought they were good. But you know, I suppose "Mean Mistress" had a bit of that sort of Birdman influence, I suppose. There’s a bit of Stooges or something in it.

Steve: Yeah, it seemed to fit into that, but the rest of what I’ve heard of theirs is nothing like that.

Kim: Well, they were kind of like that, but they seem to have gotten things a bit wrong. There was a couple of guys in it that had the right idea, but most of them had it wrong. It’s one of those bands that tread a very fine line and tended to slip the wrong way. And they didn’t really know they were treading a fine line, either.

Steve: Was there a big gap in time between the Scientists breaking up and your forming Louie Louie?

Kim: Just a few months. What happened was, I guess I was always going to start another band, and one of the guys who was financially involved in the pink record – I was hanging out with him. His name was Kim Williams. I was talking about it and he basically volunteered as a bass player. So I had him and all we really needed was one other member, so we found Brett (Rixon) who was, as the tree says (looking at the fanzine) in the Screaming Fits. I would have forgotten that if I hadn’t seen that. I knew he was in some band around town.

Steve: It was a pretty substantial change from the previous Scientists – what happened? Was Louie Louie more like the Baker / Sharples Scientists or like the subsequent Thewlis / Rixon / Sujdovic lineup?

Kim: More like the later one. I guess all along as I was saying we had this thing about being primitive and kind of punk rock and everything. I guess I had always had that agenda, and I always wanted to – when I mentioned that I was trying to find punk rock, it wasn’t that I was trying to find it and copy it, I wanted to come up with something of my own, or since I was working with a bunch of people, something of our own. And in a way, the Scientists kind of sidetracked me a bit in the start, because I thought that we were going to do that, but these songs that James, or these words that he’d sing to me, tended to have a really retro sixties sound, and you couldn’t put the sort of melody to something that goes "ah you’re a pretty girl" that I had in mind. You had to put a certain kind of melody to it – you’ve got to make it sound pretty! So I just found that we went sort of naturally into this pop direction.

And I had sort of wanted to be like the Stooges. The Troggs was kind of as close as we could get. I mean, James is hugely into the Stooges. Every now and then I’d complain and say "Why can’t we be more like the Stooges?" And he’d go "Well, why don’t you write that kind of stuff?" And I’m thinking "You’re half writing it! Write me some nihilistic anthems and I’ll put some nihilistic backing to it!" Nihilistic melodies! (laughs)

Yeah, so I guess somewhere in that time the Cramps came along (this is the early line up of the Scientists, I mean), and when I heard that I thought "that’s the sort of idea I had". Not necessarily that much rockabilly in it, but the feedback and the simplicity of it and the kind of screaming and everything. The wildness of it. That was the sort of thing I had in my head. So we never really went that way, and when we broke up, I set about trying to get a band that would do that. And Louie Louie was an attempt.

Steve: It always seemed hard to believe that Kim Williams was part of Louie Louie given that what he’s done since then is all this really soft, jangly power pop.

Kim: Well, that’s the thing about Perth. Everybody wants to write this pop stuff. It’s like a disease over there. And I think the Scientists started the whole thing off – we planted the bloody seed. I tend to get a bit bored by hearing another guitar pop band. The idea doesn’t excite me. I didn’t get excited by Teenage Fanclub or any more that have come since. It doesn’t do anything for me.

Steve: You and Kim Williams wrote "Swampland" together, right? Did one of you do music and one lyrics, or did you do it as a jam and work the whole thing out together?

Kim: No, I had the line "In my heart is a place called swampland" and I had a melody for that, and I just wanted it to be a really primitive thing in E that just sort of chugged along and sounded a bit like "Green River" or something – that sort of thing. And I asked Kim – because he was pretty good with words – if he could come up with something, and that’s what he did. He just came up with the verses. And they’re really good – they’re really good lyrics. It was pretty much that easy.

I think I had Roy Orbison in mind with the melody of it a little. I don’t know if that comes through at all. In the chorus, perhaps.

Steve: Did you write any other material together during the Louie Louie time?

Kim: Yeah, but they tended towards the sort of pop thing. I dunno if any of it survives out there in any form – if anybody’s got a tape or anything.

Steve: Maybe on that Rubber Never Sleeps cassette.

Kim: Oh, yeah, there’s probably stuff on that. That’s Scientists stuff that was adopted by Louie Louie – I mean Louie Louie stuff that was adopted by the Scientists. The whole thing – I suppose you’ll want to know about the change when we went to Sydney, what happened was that Boris Sujdovic, who was the first bass player the Scientists ever had and went off to join the Rockets, he persuaded me that it would be a good idea to reform the Scientists over in Sydney. Because he’d been over there for quite some time. He said that there were a whole lot of bands that were kind of ripping us off, doing what we had done already, and he thought we did it better. He said we’d clean up, but I wasn’t sure. But he believed it – at least he had the enthusiasm. So I kind of up and left with him – Kim didn’t want to go anyway. He wanted to stay around in Perth and had no ambitions to leave. James Baker had already left.

Steve: You were already playing with Brett, right?

Kim: Yeah, because we’d split up before. And I asked James to join, but he was in the Hoodoo Gurus who were already starting up. So I asked Brett to come along. It would have been a three piece band except that this poor guitar player who answered an ad when we were looking for another rhythm guitarist – because we went through lots of rhythm guitarists – he answered. But he came from this place called Narrogin or Kulin or some country town like 300 miles away from Perth. I didn’t get to meet him, but James and Ian thought he was a bit much of a yokel or something. And he came to Perth – he’d seen us on Countdown and he wanted to join this band. When he answered the ad he said he liked Blondie and Split Enz. I don’t think they laughed at him directly, but they were kind of telling me about this dumb yobbo who’d come.

So I didn’t meet him or anything, I just thought, oh, right, and I eventually met him later when he introduced himself to me. Then later on I saw him in a band and I thought "This guy is really good!" So one day, I dunno, I must have been in a good mood and I saw him walking down the street and said hello and we stopped and had a bit of a chat. And I kind of said, oh, why don’t you come and join our band, we’re going to go over to Sydney (laughs). It was madness – we didn’t know what we were leaping into. We all just up and left Perth.

Steve: So he had just met you, and he decided like that to commit to moving across the country?

Kim: Well, kind of. Yeah, maybe he was a bit of a country yokel. You know, he’s a veteran, cynical musician is what he is now. He lived in London and he’d hardly match up with the initial impression that James and Ian had of him.

But yeah, we went over to Sydney, but there was nobody in the band – I thought that somebody was going to write words, and eventually I realized that that was me. I just didn’t have any idea how to do that, even though I was always singing the words. So that’s what I did.

Steve: In the same interview that I read where you were talking about the earlier Scientists, you were also quoted about how when you had your first rehearsal in Sydney it wasn’t at all what you were expecting, but that you recognized it as the direction you wanted to go right away.

Kim: Yeah, it was amazing. It was a real din! I guess because Tony and I were both sort of – you wouldn’t say lead guitarists, but we weren’t rhythm guitarists, either. We both liked to make a lot of noise. And we were kind of competing with each other, and it sort of worked. It was really loud, but in amongst all the feedback and blur you could kind of hear…it made a sort of ambiguous sound. Sort of jagged as well, and that with the cymbals crashing away and Boris who was pathologically lazy playing just one note sort of lines underneath it – it just had something that I hadn’t really heard before.

Steve: You’re right that you don’t hear any standard rhythm guitar playing in Scientists songs…

Kim: No, no. I was actually talking to a friend of mine last night about Radio Birdman, because the Scientists had recently done some shows, and I asked him were we anything like that. And he said, not really, you guys didn’t do chords. And I said, well we did "E". I can remember we used to do E a lot. But that was about the only chord we ever did do, because E made the biggest sound. Open and crash! But yeah, there wasn’t any of that.

Steve: Brett’s drumming was pretty interesting, too.

Kim: Yeah, I dunno, when I first met up with him, he was just a sort of yobbo. Does that word mean anything in America? What do you call people like that in America? He liked going around in his fast car. But he was into being in a band, and I sort of told him what I was into. He didn’t know about the Stooges, but when I played them for him, he really loved it. We used to get together and jam with the express purpose of coming up with unusual beats. So we’d work on these things together. This was in Louie Louie. I had this idea that as much as it was going to be primitive, it wasn’t going to be a beat like anybody else’s. So we’d jam just for the purpose of getting it to happen. And we spent a lot of time with that sort of stuff. We did things like put 3/4 against 4/4. At first that can sound like a bloody mess, but once it jells it has some sort of tension that you can’t get any other way. A lot of it’s from then, and a lot of it is that the Stooges were a really big influence on us.

We really weren’t that much into the MC5 as an influence, or the Ramones or any of those other bands. But the Stooges had a kind of jazz thing going on. Jazz in that it had a certain freeness. Especially the first Stooges album. I guess it was our naïve attempt to tag that onto it. But then the Stooges were a naïve attempt to copy something else anyway. It’s people getting something wrong.

So I guess that’s what the Scientists beat was, and Brett developed this style from playing the drums kind of in reverse almost. I mean there was a lot of backbeats, but there were a lot of songs where he wasn’t playing on the backbeat, and normally you wouldn’t do that.

But I found, writing more and more simple music, it was a way to make the music even more simple and melodic in harmonic terms, so that people when they heard that, it was like a trick to make them think that "wow, these people can play on one note and yet it doesn’t all sound the same". It’s a bit of a perception trick.

Steve: How did you get connected with AuGoGo and start having records coming out with them?

Kim: I think Bruce Milne was doing some cassette magazine, and I thought that would be a good publicity thing for us to be featured on there, so I approached him about that and gave him a tape of "Swampland" – a demo of it – and he put that on and he decided that he was interested in releasing a single from the band, because that was his idea of what he liked. And we’d approached a few people, but in those early days it was really hard. Because we weren’t like the blueprint for an Australian punk rock band at that stage, which was sort of Radio Birdman influenced thrashing buzzsaw guitars and things and fast chord changes – we weren’t really like that. So the sort of indie labels that would sign up a band, that’s what they wanted, especially in Sydney.

Down here in Melbourne there was maybe a different scene going on, and AuGoGo was a part of that.

Steve: Yeah, I was going to say that in those days moving to Sydney was not as logical a move for you as moving to Melbourne might have been, given that Melbourne had the Birthday Party, Moodists, and other bands that were a little more arty.

Kim: Yeah, Sacred Cowboys was another one. Yeah, but we weren’t really like them either. People sort of likened us to the Birthday Party and some people still do, but it’s more that the bands were kind of out there on their own. And things that are out there on their own, you put them all together even thought they’re not really related. That sort of thing happens quite a lot, with distances, especially. When we moved to England, in Europe a lot of people used to say to us, "Oh, you get to hang out with all these great bands like the Lime Spiders and New Christs!" And back then, because we were so strongly interested in what we were doing, we weren’t the least bit interested in those bands. From a distance I can see why people would like them, and being homesick I thought "Yeah, they’re better than the crap going on over there", but I also thought, gee, people must think we all hang out in one room! It’s just not like that.

Steve: Well, one of the things that was good about the Australian scene at that time was that there were a lot of different kinds of bands. Garage influenced bands, Detroit bands, arty bands, pop bands. So from the outside perspective you’d look at it and go "wow, there’s a lot happening there". But I interviewed a lot of bands from Australia in the 80s and I’d ask them "So what’s it like to be part of such a great scene?", and I’d get an answer like "What are you talking about, there’s no scene!"

Kim: Yeah, I know what they meant. But now, I’ve had time to look back on it And I think yeah, well OK, the Lime Spiders, the 80s, Australia, the Scientists. And it definitely comes out of the same framework. The same something! (laughs) I guess if you compare that to what was going on in other parts of the world at the same time, it does have more in common than any of us would have realized. It’s all perspective and who’s getting the big picture. Not us back home, that’s for sure.

Steve: The US scene was completely overrun by hardcore punk bands by 1983. You could hardly get to see any other band, and if you’d want to go see the Cramps, for example, they’d often be on a bill with a bunch of hardcore punk bands. That whole scene was just lousy, and I was completely sick of American bands at that point. So to me the Australian scene was so refreshing because there were so many different things going on. It was a lot more vibrant.

Kim: Yeah, possibly. But once again, I was in it and I couldn’t get away fast enough.

Steve: It seems like every other release AuGoGo did for about 10 catalog numbers in a row starting with "Swampland" was a Scientists record. Were those records selling a lot?

Kim: Yeah, for an independent band they were selling big amounts. Not the sort of figures that bands do now days, but then 6,000 – we were reaching those sorts of figures. Not for everything, but three to six thousand. I know the "Swampland" single certainly reached six thousand, because we had a different label – "Scientists" was written in a different color for each thousand labels – there were six of them. And "We Had Love" would have done similar, and I think Blood Red River the same. We were doing a reasonable business for a little while there before we left.

Steve: You also got a deal with Bigtime that was a pretty good contract, right?

Kim: Yeah, it was, but if you look at those sorts of record contracts, the ones with like a five year term, they usually are for a big amount of money. I would say it was like a quarter of a million dollars or something – just to state that… People think of us as going to England and then getting lost in obscurity, but while it’s partly true, the other side of it is that we didn’t completely just lose. We did actually manage to kick some goals. You know, I don’t like to look back and think it was a waste of time.

Steve: Well, it gives you another era of the band, another page to the history. I think the fact that you were over there got you a lot of publicity that you wouldn’t have gotten if you’d stayed in Australia. I don’t think the English press would have ever written about the Scientists if you hadn’t gone there.

Kim: No, even if they did say bad things about it when we went there half the time. Barney Hoskins wrote this review that was one of the things that prompted us to go to London…really anywhere out of Australia was our goal. We had to kind of focus on somewhere and hone in on something, and that was the thing that made us hone in on London. Which is stupidity really, or naivete.

Steve: In retrospect would you have gone somewhere else, or would you have stayed here?

Kim: I would have stayed here for sure! Looking at what other bands did at the time, like the Hoodoo Gurus, although they were already on their way to big success. I think we’d have had a chance. I’m not saying it would necessarily be a good thing for us. But Died Pretty seemed to me from my perspective to be doing OK and selling a lot of records. Doing alright, getting good crowds for a show.

But like I say, we didn’t go to London and then disappear. We actually got a bit of a following and were able to travel around a bit.

Steve: Did you do the Weird Love album while you were there?

Kim: Yeah.

Steve: What was the reason for re-doing all those songs?

Kim: The reason is that us and AuGoGo had a very bitter fight and we parted company, and that made it very hard for us to pursue other contracts because they insisted that we had contracted with them, and they tried to basically kill us off. And when we eventually got someone who wasn’t scared off by them, they eventually approached that label…actually, no I’ve got to get this in the right order. What happened actually was that that label wanted the back catalog. And there’s no way they were going to have it, because AuGoGo had it, and they claimed possession of it. I mean, they had a contract that basically said they could be owning my children right to this day. This ridiculously punitive piece of paper that we were all stupid enough to sign.

And because they had that, they thought that they owned us. So we attempted to trade afterwards, and they made it very hard. We didn’t have access to our back catalog, and we didn’t want to jeopardize this deal, so we thought, oh, we’ll record it again. And we all kind of rationalized it as, you know, here we are kind of re-interpreting…I dunno. Just so we’d have maybe a bit of a future.

Of course, in the end Bigtime said, you know, could you sort this business out? And at that stage we’d recorded a record which became The Human Jukebox and they weren’t interested in that. It was completely not…it was very in line with our philosophy, but it was very different from the way they perceived the band.

Steve: That’s funny, because although Human Jukebox does press the envelope compared to what you’d done in the past, listening to your back catalog at that point I certainly wouldn’t have been surprised to have that be the next record that came along.

Kim: Yeah, I know. I guess it’s just a context of a different time. It had more noises on it and less music, or what was thought of as music. There were samples and things going on there. Sort of dissonance and general artiness, mayhem that definitely wasn’t part of some people’s perception of the Scientists. But it was very much part of other people’s perception of the Scientists. I know when we recorded You Get What You Deserve there was a contingent that were disappointed. They wanted more of the kind of thing we were doing on This Heart Doesn’t Run On Love, which was probably the closest we ever got to where the Birthday Party were going – that sort of vein. I guess we were just going on our own way, and occasionally going backwards. We weren’t going on a straight path.

Steve: A bunch of your stuff got released on Karbon Records as well?

Kim: Karbon was just our management. Because we couldn’t find a deal. Or we could – we had a lot of interest, but the AuGoGo thing kept on hampering us. They were in cahoots with Rough Trade as well, so it was very difficult for us. Things had been really good until that all happened. It’s not a time I look back on fondly. And I think I might be in a different position now if it were not for that. AuGoGo would say it was our fault, and we would say it was their fault. (laughs a melancholy laugh)

Steve: You did a couple of tours in the UK, right? With Siouxie and the Banshees and the Sisters Of Mercy?

Kim: …and the Gun Club, yeah.

Steve: How were you received on those tours?

Kim: Interestingly! When we did the Sisters Of Mercy one, we got a session drummer to play the gigs because Brett had just left at that stage and he was a really hard drummer to replace back then. Our lawyer suggested we get this guy who had played with PIL. Which was a pretty good idea when you think of it, really, because PIL was doing some pretty unusual time signatures and things. He came and auditioned with us, but Boris hated him, so we couldn’t do that. So we ended up with this other guy who I think had been in Motorhead for a week at one point in his history. He toured with us with the Sisters Of Mercy, so we were able to competently reproduce what we had done with Brett.

And the Sisters had these kind of gothic people that would come along to all their shows. This big sea of people in black leather and dyed black hair that used to form these human pyramids while the Sisters was playing. It was very bizarre. But they kind of dug us. There wasn’t any reason why they wouldn’t like a band like the Scientists. We didn’t wear all black, though. We had the long hair and we made a lot of noise. So we were received quite well then.

And when we did the Banshees thing, we had just got a new drummer and that was our tour manager-ess, Leanne. She’d only been playing drums for about a week. So most of the time was spent the first two weeks of that tour distracting the audience from her -–keeping their attention away from her. So we were probably pretty offensive. We certainly got a reaction.

And by the end of that tour we’d gotten pretty adept at getting that reaction and kind of irritating or aggravating the audience. By the time we’d finished it was almost like the audience were having such a good time…

Steve: …being aggravated…

Kim: …being aggravated (laughs) that you had this sort of thing where we’d leave and they’d go: "Woah, no, come back! Come back! You haven’t finished yet!" (laughs)

I mean, you know, maybe they wanted to come up there and beat us up or something. It was sort of amusing. But Leanne got a lot better. She got to be very good.

Steve: Is she on Weird Love?

Kim: Yeah, she is. She’s really quite good on that. She just played a couple songs on the reunion tour when we were up in Sydney, and she was amazing. Because she’s so good at keeping time, she’s just really got a good metronomic beat. She learned piano and I think she was used to playing with a metronome. Because the rest of us are kind of non-musician players whose concept of keeping time was that…

Steve: …it really wasn’t that necessary?

Kim: Well, it hadn’t occurred to us that that’s what makes things rock. It takes people a long time to discover that. Or it can do.

Steve: Whatever happened to Brett…did he pass away?

Kim: Yeah. Heroin overdose. Just about that time, Rolling Stone Australia magazine asked various people to sort of sum up the year in a few snappy sentences. And they asked me, and one of my sentences was "lost our drummer to heroin", but I was talking about the Surrealists and how our drummer Tony Pola went errant. He just totally lost the plot. And that sort of was strangely prophetic because by the time it came out to print this other thing happened. It hadn’t happened when I said it, but then it did happen very shortly after. It was very weird.

I’ve never really been attracted to it myself, or if I was, I got over it. There was down here in Melbourne a perception that it was pretty cool. The Scientists were really much more alcohol and amphetamine driven than anything. Mostly alcohol. But I know Brett used to dabble a bit. And that was the thing – he was more a dabbler than a junkie, and they’re the people who get hurt most easily. Because the grade of it obviously varies so much being an uncontrolled substance that of course somebody who just dabbles hasn’t got the tolerance for something that’s completely pure. I guess that’s what happened.

Steve: That was pretty sad.

Kim: Yeah. I’d gone a bit dark on him for leaving the band, but then we’d kind of made up and I used to bump into him every now and then. We ended up having a lot more in common than perhaps even the other guys in the band. But by the time we used to hang out a bit the Scientists was well and truly over.

Steve: Did you play in Europe at all while you were in London?

Kim: Yeah, loads of times. We played in Germany, Holland, Belgium and France. We never did Scandinavia. We never did Italy or Spain.

Steve: Never did Spain? That’s funny, there seems to be a pocket that’s crazy for the Scientists there.

Kim: Well, there’s a lot of places that we wanted to get to and it just never happened. As I say, we were ready to go places and people were interested in the band, and things just suddenly started to go awry. Things started fucking up. Brett wanted to leave the band, we had the shit with AuGoGo…just what else?

Steve: Tell me about the Citadel reissues a bit. I didn’t think of the Scientists as being a Citadel sort of band.

Kim: I sort of thought about the big picture once again and thought, well, Australia, the eighties. I think in those terms, people would think it was appropriate. And I thought looking back, yeah, in historical terms, we were part of that scene to everybody else in the world. So maybe in history if we’re remembered, that’s probably the way we would be remembered. So it seemed appropriate to me.

Also I had done a release with John Needham, and I really like him. He’s very down to earth, and I found him easy to deal with. So it just seemed natural and appropriate and he wanted to do it. He certainly felt the band was important.

Steve: It’s funny, because I interviewed him yesterday and I asked him what bands he had wanted to release and didn’t get to do back in their day, and the only two he could think of were the Eastern Dark and the Scientists.

Kim: Yeah, well he’s got an AuGoGo story about that too. I’ve noticed him go on about that. Could get some lawyers after me. But I’ve read it before.

But yeah, it seemed appropriate, and I’m glad to have the records out again. For lots of reasons, the Scientists never really got to make…well, Blood Red River should have been an album, but instead we made all these eps and things. And Blood Red River’s packaging back then was a little bit cheap looking I thought. I just thought it wouldn’t do any harm to do it again and have all the releases that were sort of associated with Blood Red River like "We Had Love" and "Swampland" – from the same era - and make an album of it instead. It worked for me. Nothing jumps out as not belonging on that record.

Steve: Did you think of putting more material on that CD? Because there are still a lot of other songs from that era. Or did you just want to pick the songs you thought were the strongest.

Kim: Nah…well a bit of that. We did throw out a lot of ideas. We were trying a lot on, and some of it was pretty dodgy, and of course, some of it gets out there and that’s the songs that some people think is the best stuff, naturally enough. Because there’s some kind of law that applies – some axiom that if you do an interview the stupidest thing you say is the headline. Or if you’re going to have a photo session, the worst photo is the one that gets on the cover of the magazine. If you’re recording stuff, there’ll always be something dodgy out there to haunt you.

There’s two songs that are dodgy out there. One of them is called "Monsters In The Back Of My Mind", and I think that’s quite appropriate that it’s called that. There’s another one called "The Monster In Me". I think that’s pretty lame. (laughs) But I’m sure they’ve got their fans, just because if something’s hard to get. The rarity of it…

Steve: But what about something like "Bad Priest"?

Kim: You know, that’s funny. I had this band with Tex Perkins in the interim, somewhere in there called Salamander Jim, and that was one of the songs we had. But he had different words. It’s really stupid, but he had this line about this Father Black standing on a pulpit shaped like a penis, and being such a prude, I couldn’t sing the word "penis" (laughs). I just thought "Nah, I can’t sing the word penis!" So I sang it’s shaped like his dick, and I thought, that just doesn’t sound right. But that got on record, and I thought "That’s bad!" And I dunno, the music – Salamander Jim would have done it better I’m sure. It just didn’t quite gel.

I heard a bootleg tape of it live, and it’s all distorted and sounds like the Stooges. And that’s fine and wonderful – that’s on You Get What You Deserve, isn’t it. I dunno. It’s not a favorite of mine. I was quite glad to let that one go missing.

Steve: And "Fire Escape" didn’t make it either. That’s another one where I was surprised.

Kim: Yeah, well even with CDs you’ve got a limited amount of time, so you do tend to pick the strongest. To me, that was in that interim period where I found "well, I’ve got to write the lyrics", and I didn’t know what to sing about. So it was one of those corny lines about fire escapes looking over the city. I just didn’t know what to write about. So I think the lyrics are kind of stupid. Maybe somebody can string them together and make sense of them, but there’s no sense to be made. They’re just dumb lyrics trying to sound psychedelic. But I think the music…maybe I shouldn’t be saying that and de-mystifying it if somebody is a fan of it.

Steve: Well, if you take it as an abstract song where the lyrics don’t necessarily have to mean anything and are just words chosen for how they sound…

Kim: Well, that’s what they are…

Steve: …it’s a pretty strong performance as far as just sounding committed.

Kim: Oh, yeah, definitely. Abstract is good. There definitely is that. I think it was quite a strong piece of music in its way. That’s one of the earliest things we did. But it had too many chords and I wanted to strip it back. It had chords all over the place. I included it on that Absolute Scientists thing (a Scientists compilation released by Sub Pop in the early nineties – ed) because I thought, well, we were around doing this sort of thing before Sonic Youth. That’s what I thought – it was a little like the kind of thing that they’d do. In terms of its, I dunno, its sonic-ness. I just wanted to kind of let people know, I guess. Ego. So that’s how that one got let out.

I was really trying to go about making the statement that in an ideal world, had we been on Elektra or something, and I say Elektra because that was the Stooges’ label, and we had some A&R person looking after us, and a manager, then somehow we’d have been directed to making an album rather than wasting everything on these eps. And we’d have had these albums – we had the material, but it would have been put together and taken full advantage of. That’s what would have happened if we’d had some help in an ideal world.

So I was just being that person, going back in time and trying to be the kind of helping hand.

Steve: Have you heard that Set It On Fire tribute album? What did you think of that?

Kim: Well, it worried me.

Steve: In what way?

Kim: Well, we had an influence that was such a dodgy influence (laughs). Well, I guess I shouldn’t feel that way about it. It’s nice to be honored in such a way, and there are some really fine bands on it, but I don’t think anybody really did a very good job of it. And I think it was because we were a fairly idiosyncratic sort of band, which we really tried hard to be. It’s back to what we were talking about with Brett’s drumming – it was a difficult thing to pull off. And other things made it particularly quirky. So I don’t know that anybody really got the essence of it. That’s my feeling about it.

Some things come close. I mean, Mudhoney and Jon Spencer – there’s a Jon Spencer incarnation on there somewhere, isn’t there? Honeymoon Killers.

I guess we made the songs the way we thought they should be, so these are a little bit different. I didn’t hear something that I thought was a definitive new interpretation. Actually, no, there’s a "Frantic Romantic" on there by a band called the Star Spangled Banana which I know nothing about. I thought that was kind of amusing. That had a sort of a sense of humor about it that I quite liked.

Steve: When did you decide to give up being in England and come back to Australia?

Kim: I had sort of a windfall, I suppose…I’m married now, but it’s my second marriage, and back then I was married and we had a kid and we lived in Notting Hill Gate in some flats that people had bought up. And the housing laws there were such that you couldn’t make people homeless and evict them without compensating them. That was when the Greater London Council, which was a fairly left wing organization, held sway. The people that bought these flats, which were incidentally in the same street where Prince Charles and Di’s kids were going to kindergarten, they wanted to redevelop the place. They gave us a large sum of money, which was enough to go back to Australia and buy a house. So we did. In Perth anyway, because the prices of houses in Perth were cheaper than anywhere else. And that’s where we came from.

So I guess we thought, nah, we’ve had enough of this, let’s go home! I guess if you had to take the choice between struggling on in poverty and becoming more and more obscure and going back to your home town and owning a house, it seems like a fairly obvious choice. Of course when I got off the plane and looked at the place I got instantly depressed and never came out of it!

Steve: Once you came back, how long did it take before you got into doing things on a solo basis? Or I guess the first thing was the Surrealists – I don’t know whether you consider that a solo thing or not. It kind of has your name on it but then a band as well.

Kim: Well, I did the Surrealists back in London. It was just a name I’d had for a band that would be me and whoever else I had with me. Because I figured that the way things were going with the band, it wasn’t like people talked about any member’s name. They just knew the name the Scientists. In some ways the whole band was the star. It was like Black Sabbath or something. It wasn’t like any one of us – I dunno, I was writing all the material, but the image was so strong that that’s all people knew about was the Scientists and I was the singer in the Scientists. So I figured I needed to make my name known. So I set about doing that, and I began the Surrealists idea in London. And when I was in Perth I continued with it.

Steve: The first Surrealists album, was that Hit Me With The Surreal Feel? The photos on the cover of that with the fish are absolutely great. Whose idea was that?

Kim: Yeah. That was my idea. If your name is Salmon, it’s kind of like you’ve grown up with it. It was pretty obvious. (laughs)

Steve: Well, the idea of replacing your own eyeballs with those of a fish isn’t that apparent to me.

Kim: Sometimes the obvious things aren’t that obvious. I like that sort of thing. That’s been in a way my mode, is to find what’s under your nose and make something of it. Put a twist to it that maybe wouldn’t occur to people. I dunno. I guess I’m a little bit twisted in my own way. A little bit. Not much.

Steve: My knowledge of your solo stuff isn’t as good as it is with the Scientists…

Kim: That’s the way it is with most people.

Steve: All the solo material I have I like, but it seems like around 1990 all the distribution of Australian bands into the United States really dried up, and in addition, I used to buy things by mail from AuGoGo and they stopped doing mail order. So all of a sudden I didn’t have access to all this stuff, and especially access to information, because there was no way to get fanzines from Australia any more. So I probably have four or five different solo or Surrealists things you’ve done, but I have no sense of what order they go in or anything. So I have Hit Me With The Surreal Feel, Sin Factory, You Gotta Let Me Do My Thing, Record, and the self titled one with the remake of "Frantic Romantic" that we talked about. Are there others?

Kim: Yeah, there’s one called Just Because You Can’t See It Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t There. And there’s one called Essence, which is my favorite one, only because it’s the most obscure. You know how it is. I’ve just been listening to it and remembered a lot of stuff that I’d forgotten.

Steve: All those CDs are pretty different from one to the next. It seems like each time there’s a substantial effort to make something new.

Kim: Yeah, well Hit Me With The Surreal Feel was the first thing. And that was just – I had the two guys in the band. They didn’t get a lot of time. We rehearsed a bit in Perth for a couple of weeks and played some shows, and then they wanted to leave for Sydney or Melbourne or something and so I wouldn’t have a band. So I took them into a rehearsal room, borrowed a Teac Simul Sync four track, grabbed the microphones that were in the rehearsal room, and recorded the band in a rehearsal. And only three of the tracks were working. So I didn’t really bother with multi-tracking it – just had the mikes around the room for ambience. But it turned out that the vocal track was no good, so I re-did that over the top at my friend’s place, and I guess it sounded pretty bizarre recording like that. But I took it away and got it mixed. I wanted it to sound weird. I dunno, I guess I wanted to sound like some sort of cabaret band from some other dimension.

It was really funny, in the time that we were recording The Human Jukebox, I wanted us to do "Blue Velvet" then. I really liked that film Eraserhead and the drummer told me that David Lynch was doing a film called Blue Velvet and I thought, oh, that’s great. We do "Blue Velvet". But we didn’t end up recording it.

When I saw the film, the way those guys dressed was sort of the get up we were getting around in. Because we were living in Brixton near Brixton markets, and there was a big black population, so there was a lot of sort of funky threads out on the racks in the markets. And we used to buy those things because nobody else would. That’s with the Scientists, but it was the same with the Surrealists, wearing these sort of open necked shirts with big pointy collars and things. Those guys, Raymond and what’s the guy, Dean Stockwell’s character. That look, you know? The suave guy in it anyway. We were right into that look anyway.

Anyway, the Surrealists got this review that gave us a real caning, (a) for having such a crappy sound, and (b) for ripping off Blue Velvet the film that heavily. But it was just a coincidence.

But really I didn’t give the band a chance to develop its own sound. I just wanted to record it the way it was, and that’s what it sounds like. And I quite like the record for that reason.

But the other records…for one reason or another we managed to get back together again and do some shows. We ended up – the three Surrealists at the time were living in three different cities. I’d find myself in Sydney playing with the Beasts of Bourbon, and Tony would be living in Sydney or something and we’d get Brian to come up and do some rehearsals, and I’d have some new songs of course, and there’d be another album’s worth. We’d do a bit of jamming, too. And they had more input after that, too. I think they kind of thought it wasn’t fair that they recorded in such a way and they wanted to have the way the band sounded – because it was a fairly rocking unit – they wanted to bring that out. So in a way the next album was an attempt to re-dress that balance.

And Essence was in a way the same sort of situation. We happened to be back together because of the Beasts of Bourbon. I think the other two guys by that stage were IN the Beasts of Bourbon. We all found ourselves back in Perth and had a chance to do some shows and play another new bunch of songs in a studio. So we didn’t get a chance to develop the way a band normally would. We’d just record whatever songs I had in the way they’d sound after a couple of rehearsals and what we could throw together into a studio.

Steve: When did you record that "Lightning Scary" single?

Kim: That was around 1989 or something.

Steve: That was around the time of the second Surrealists album? I thought that was a very cool song.

Kim: The third one. Thanks. Yeah, that was just in that time when I was alone in Perth without a band after Brian and Tony had split, wanting to do something. I use the word "split" as in "split the town", not from me. I had ideas of doing an album, and it was going to be an acoustic thing, I think. It never happened. But I’d heard about that label and I approached John, and he fronted me some money to go into a studio. And that’s what I did. There were about three different ideas that I had been kind of messing around with and I chucked them together.

Steve: That was a pretty interesting sound – there’s a lot of different styles amongst the things you’ve done and to me that’s one that sticks out in a different category.

Kim: Yeah, maybe. I dunno, I tend not to think too much about categories. It was all to do with my situation. I was there in Perth for those years, between when the Scientists split in 1987, and I moved over here to Melbourne in about 1991, I think it was. So for that three or four years I was kind of on my own. And they’re all like a valiant attempt to kind of say…to not disappear. To not sort of vanish. I must have felt like I was gonna vanish if I didn’t go and madly record everything that popped into my head. And it’s not that I had the money to go and do it, but these situations just kept coming up where I would find myself with some studio time somehow. And that’s what happened.

It wasn’t until the move to Melbourne that the Surrealists all lived in the same place and actually functioned as a band would normally function. That was in the early nineties, and we started getting a few people along to our shows, and things were looking kind of promising for us. Sin Factory is the album that shows that it actually was a band. It wasn’t just me and a couple of pot heads in the studio with lots of stray ideas. This was like a band that had developed and you could actually hear the sound that the three of us would make naturally. It was kind of a rock sort of funk kind of thing. It was a lot funkier than anybody including us would have suspected. This sort of funk thing had crept in, and I don’t know where it came from. I used to like the idea of blacksploitation films, so there were ideas from that.

Steve: Backing up again, how did you get involved with the Beasts of Bourbon?

Kim: Well, that goes way back to when the Scientists were still in Sydney before we’d moved to London. What happened was that Tex Perkins was a friend of ours and he had a band called Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums, but they kind of split up or something, and he found himself with some shows booked and no band. So he just got together a bunch of suspects, and that was the Beasts of Bourbon. He had the drummer from his band the Dum Dums, and he had Spencer Jones from a band called the Johnnys, whose thing was wearing cowboy suits and chucking hay bales around at their gigs. Boris played bass for a couple of shows, and they did a bunch of songs – whatever they could get together in a rehearsal. Some Johnny Cash songs, some Alice Cooper songs, and some Credence songs. It was weird. I dunno, I never saw the band, but Boris was saying, "It’s a great thing. You get to drink all the beer you want and play a bunch of cool songs and have a good time."

And I bumped into Spencer one time and he was saying kind of the same thing, and asked if I wanted to do it myself. So I found myself in the band, and the next thing you know, this guy called Roger Grierson was giving us the money to go into the studio and record it. So we made The Axeman’s Jazz.

Steve: I’d forgotten that somehow. I guess I haven’t spent enough time looking at the backs of record albums lately.

Kim: Yeah, well I’d forgotten that, too. I was too out of it. Too drunk to remember a single thing about it. All I remember is walking in there and then coming out. And I know what my sound is like, so I’ve got an idea what I’d played. And there’s a lot of beer around and other stuff. So that’s really what I can remember.

The Scientists left for London and the Beasts of Bourbon continued a bit and had a few other people in it. It had that floating line up idea, one of those sort of things. But for the records it really didn’t turn out that way, it was very fixed. The first couple of records, Axeman’s Jazz, Black Milk – the first three records, actually, and Sour Mash all had Boris Sujdovic and James Baker, so it’s kind of like the Scientists as well. And "Dropout" is a Scientists tune as well. So there’s a little bit of that in there. It was more Tex’s kind of vehicle than anything, but I found it very useful to try to get as many of my songs into it, because that’s somewhat where the money is, in publishing, so I definitely pushed a lot of my material into that band for that reason.

Steve: They’ve sold pretty well, haven’t they?

Kim: I think they have, yeah. Certainly that band kind of kept me above water for a fair stretch of time. Because the Surrealists wasn’t!

Steve: How have you done with your more recent records, like Record or Do My Thing? Have they sold much?

Kim: Oh, they’ve sold kind of – a few thousand. Nothing more than that. It’s really hard these days. If you sell a couple thousand you’re doing really well if you’re strictly independent. It’s always distribution or something like that that kind of stuffs things up a bit.

Record got quite a bit of airplay on the big radio station Triple J. That’s sort of got the national coverage and the big youth audience. A couple songs got quite a lot of exposure on that station. I dunno, it never quite translated into – it was like a funny thing but I guess the band wasn’t around long enough – the Business, I mean – that particular band, for people to register that that was where they heard that song "Disconnected" from. That band was also hard to keep on the road, because that was a floating lineup as well and I had to have fairly accomplished horn players and things to pull it off. And horn players tend to have lots of different gigs. It’s really hard to pin them down. They want their money two months in advance, and they want a lot of it, and you can usually get them for one or two shows and then you find out "Oh, I can’t do that show, I’ve got a gig down at the big jazz place in town, but I’ve got a guy who can do the gig really well."

It turned out that I had a file full of charts and a dress code – everybody wears suits, and a bunch of songs. But the rhythm section was a bit more fixed than that. I had Stu Thomas, the bass player from the Surrealists and a couple of different drummers that ended up being the same guy toward the end. It just wasn’t around long enough and I couldn’t keep funding it. It was really hard. But I feel that in some ways that record is certainly the most polished and developed in terms of arrangements and the songwriting is a lot more crafted than anything I’d done until that point in time. By those standards it’s maybe the best thing I’ve ever done. In terms of raw energy it’s not really up there, but it just depends on what standards you judge on. But I’m really proud of that record, and it’s a pity I wasn’t able to do more with it. But it’s out there if you want to buy it.

Steve: So are you doing anything now?

Kim: Yeah, I just mastered an album on Thursday, and it’s essentially just me – there’s no other musicians that appear on it. I’ve got a little two year old boy, so I’m in a fairly sort of domestic situation at home looking after him when my wife’s out working. I work maybe one day a week. So I had the odd afternoon to tinker in a studio and put together an album. It’s taken me nearly a year and a half. So I’ve re-written the thing over a couple of times now. It’s just me and an acoustic guitar and some, I dunno, I played the Hammond organ, a bit of piano, and the odd bit of percussion, but it’s essentially just me and my instruments. It’s very stripped back, and it’s very different from the other stuff I’ve done, but that’s nothing new for me. Probably a really bad career move. But I’m at the point where I’m doing it just because I want to do it.

Steve: That’s the best reason.

Kim: Yeah, it’s turned out to be the best reason. And that record is called E(a)rnest. That’s the thing I had first, was the title E(a)rnest. Because the starting point was that I was getting jacked off by the idea that everybody seemed to be a songwriter and they had a swag full of songs and an acoustic guitar, and you’d sort of find in people’s households in share- houses, people passing their guitars around like joints, singing their diary entries over A Major 7^th. That used to piss me off.

But that kind of thought that gave me an idea, so I’d embrace that idea. It’s sort of an exorcism, I suppose. I’ve actually got a song called "Diary Entries Over A Major 7^th" but it’s more of an instructional song. So it’s probably a little bit sillier than anything I’ve done in the past. Some of it. But some of it does sound earnest. It sounds a little bit folky.

Steve: Do you have a label lined up to release this?

Kim: I’m doing it myself. I’m distributing it on MGM, because they tend to be getting good results for people. Half a Cow, the label that did Record, they switched over to MGM and Nic Dalton, the Half a Cow guy, was very happy with their performance and was very hopeful and apparently they get the records out. On a modest level, but they do a good job apparently. That’s what I’m told. So that’ll be out in August.

I don’t know how John from Sympathy would be about it. I’m hoping he’ll be into it. I know the White Stripes have had an acoustic song somewhere on their records. One maybe. I don’t know if that’s a precedent for his label.

Steve: He does a lot of different stuff.

Kim: Yeah, I know it’s very different, but I don’t associate acoustic guitar with his label. But then again, people don’t associate acoustic guitar with me, because I’ve never really touched them. One thing I’m using is a Yamaha G55 nylon string thing, because that’s where people’s songs tend to originate. It sounds a little different to the steel string sound. Sort of Martin or whatever people play. I was going to say a Martin DB80 or whatever. I don’t know what people play.

Steve: I don’t know my acoustic guitars, so I can’t help you.

Kim: Yeah, me neither!

At this point we run out of tape and out of steam, but the story is pretty well covered.  Thanks to Kim for his help and patience in putting this together!