Radio
Birdman
Parts of this article appeared in Noise
For Heroes #19 in the summer of 1990. The original piece borrowed verbatim an older
article written by Adelaide’s Harry Butler which appeared in his DNA fanzine #49 in
April of 1986, with an introduction added by myself . This issue of DNA is critical for
anyone really interested in the origins of the Aussie underground scene, with great
articles about all of the early Sydney bands with Birdman roots. I’ve subsequently
re-written the bulk of the article, but it still draws heavily from Butler’s article
with the addition of information from a number of other sources. The definitive Radio
Birdman history...certainly in terms of quantity and possibly also in quality...can be
found in Vivien Johnson’s 1990 book on the band, entitled Radio Birdman. There is
only room for the essentials here.
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"Any
rude variants on this group's name (good contest idea?) wouldn't be unjust. Radio Birdman
should be stripped of all their Stooges and MC5 records and forced to play disco in a
singles bar."
This is the sum total
of all the words ever written about Radio Birdman in Trouser Press, my favorite US fanzine
of the 70s. Not very encouraging, is it? Certainly not what you would expect to have been
written given the near godhead attributed to this band today. What's more, there's
precious little else that was said outside of Australia about Radio Birdman while they
were still flying. Looking through my piles of old fanzines, mostly Zig Zags and New York
Rockers, the only other words I can find are in one Sire advertisement with the Radios
Appear lp along with records by the Saints, Talking Heads and Dead Boys. That's it.
Christ himself was better recognized in his day. Even in the mid 80s the best Ira Robbins
in his Trouser's Press Record Guide could manage was a grudging concession that Radio
Birdman had made "a small contribution".
But maybe the values
of the times have to be taken into account to understand what happened a little
better...Yes had gone from songs covering one whole side of an lp to songs covering three
sides of a triple lp set; Emerson Lake and Palmer did a triple lp live set with songs that
were basically classical music which they then gave themselves credit for writing. Radio
was dominated by disco music or soft rock. So punk rock was the savior as far as the
critics were concerned, although it was pretty fuzzy in many quarters just exactly what
punk rock WAS. At various times, I recall reading that Springsteen, the Bay City Rollers,
Nils Lofgren and the Rolling Stones were punks, and it was unanimous that Blondie, the
Talking Heads and Devo were, too. Amidst all this confusion it's hard to understand how
Radio Birdman could have been thought to NOT be punk, but all I can think of is that the
jazz flavored bits that showed up on Radios Appear struck people as a taste of
progressive rock. Maybe the long hair? But the Ramones had long hair, too. Suffice to say
that although Sire was my favorite label in those days (Ramones, Richard Hell, Dead Boys,
Talking Heads, Rezillos, Saints, Plastic Bertrand, Undertones on one label! Holy cow!),
the Trouser Press review made me wait to find Radios Appear in a used bin, which
took over a year...I guess the people who went out and bought it when it first came out
recognized a treasure better than the critics. And I have to admit that when I got it, I
thought of it as a good lp, but not a great one...sort of like Eddie and the Hot
Rods’ Life On The Line or in that class.
So why has Radio
Birdman turned out to be such an important band? A whole legion of Australian bands look
at Radio Birdman as the band that taught them that they could make lasting music
themselves...they look to Radio Birdman far more than to the Saints, whose lps were just
as pioneering and exciting. And in Europe legions of bands also look up to Radio Birdman
and singer Rob Younger's subsequent band, the New Christs. In fact, it seems obvious that
in rock and roll circles, at this moment this once ignored band from down under is as
important or maybe even more important than the Sex Pistols, Damned, Clash or Jam from the
70's punk explosion...only the Ramones are clearly more revered today. The reason that
this has come to be is not totally clear; I suspect it has to do with a number of factors.
First of all, the 70's punk philosophy of anger, speed and simplicity has passed through
hardcore to thrash to its logical conclusion of bands that create a furious din that
consists of little music or room for creativity and while some in the crowd may still get
a rush from it, for the musicians it's ultimately unsatisfying.
One of the constant
themes of the 70s punk movement was that music had been taken out of the hands of the kids
who were listening to it and was played by old farts with years of music school playing
pseudo-classical music at a level of ability that a novice couldn't hope to match. Lyric
topics were equally divorced from everyday reality. The industry end was controlled by
rich insiders (nothing new there), but unlike today, there was no independent alternative
at all. So a major punk credo was that anybody could be in a band and make good rock music
for his mates.
But this idea got
taken to extremes; the idea that anybody can be in a band is a good one. The idea that if
his playing improves his music becomes less valid is a bad one, but often that concept
dominated. The attitude should have been that any level of playing ability is valid as
long as the end result is exciting and fresh and not pretentious; granted a hard mix to
combine, yet there are bands doing it all over today. But most people who would make any
worthwhile music to begin with would improve just by virtue of playing more and more, and
besides that, one would hardly be human to not want to get better at something that he or
she is fond of doing. Yet the common wisdom of the early 80s didn't allow for this; the
result was that by the time many bands got to their third or fourth record they were in a
trap where they could either go mainstream or make an lp that didn't make use of their
expanding talents but placated their existing following. There wasn't any middle ground;
you couldn't make a non-mainstream record that really showed some playing ability.
This was exactly the
kind of record Radios Appear was...an lp by a band that played a whole lot better
than most of their peers but was way too hard and heavy to have a prayer in the
mainstream. Radio Birdman were naive...they didn't know what the rules were at the time,
and if they had known they probably wouldn't have cared, so they fell in the cracks.
But by the mid 80s
(earlier in Australia where preconceptions seem to have been less widely held) a lot of
hardcore bands were starting to break the rules. Husker Du are probably the best example
of a band that risked their entire "underground credibility" to break out of the
straightjacket thinking of hardcore. But I think many of the others that have done so, and
who have used Radio Birdman as a jump off point, have done so because they recognize that
here was a band that was able to combine energy with ability to make some really exciting
music.
Radio Birdman were a
lot more than just a Detroit metal band, though that's the way everybody tends to think of
them. But there were also strong influences from jazz and surf music. Deniz Tek, the lead
guitar player, claimed that the Rolling Stones were more influential for him personally
than anyone else, and he was also a big fan of sixties soul like James Brown, Sam and
Dave, and Otis Redding.
Radio Birdman’s
story has to be one of the more fascinating ones in rock’n’roll history. An
American and a Canadian joining up with four Australians in Sydney to play music
influenced by the Stooges and MC5 in 1974, two of them medical students who would
subsequently become practicing physicians, one who would come to lead a great band of his
own and become the premier producer of independent music in Australia in the 1980s,
another an accomplished graphics designer, and who as a group would release the single
most influential album in Australian music history and one of the most important albums of
the 1970s worldwide...it certainly goes a long way beyond the normal path bands take. To
record the entire history in the detail it deserves would take a book, and in fact a very
good one exists in Vivien Johnson’s Radio Birdman. Here it is possible only to
summarize the key events in the life of the band.
Like most bands that
achieve a legendary status, Radio Birdman did not arise from nothing. The key members of
the band had previously played in other groups which few people ever saw and of which
nothing would be known if not for the fame that Radio Birdman came to achieve. While each
member of Radio Birdman made substantial contributions, singer Rob Younger and guitarist
Deniz Tek are generally regarded as the most vital components of the group. They started
Radio Birdman in late 1974 shortly after Rob had moved into a house where Deniz was
already living. Deniz was originally from Ann Arbor Michigan in the United States, but he
had arrived in Sydney in 1972 to attend medical school after studying chemistry as an
undergraduate in the US. He brought with him a passion for two classic Michigan bands; the
Stooges and the MC5.
When he arrived in
Australia, Tek had been playing guitar for a while, though never in a band. Once in Sydney
he soon joined his first group, the Screaming White Hot Razor Blades, playing covers of
bands like the Rolling Stones and Bonzo Dog Band. This band didn’t last long, but
members from it formed a new band called the Cunning Stunts, which quickly mutated in TV
Jones, which played covers of the Stooges, MC5, Alice Cooper, Rolling Stones and J. Geils
Band along with some of their own originals (including the Birdman song
"Snake"). Future Radio Birdman and med-school fellow student Pip Hoyle sometimes
guested on keyboard for TV Jones. But in 1974 TV Jones split with Tek being asked to leave
over some personal issues with the other band members.
Meanwhile, Rob
Younger was fronting another Sydney band called the Rats, which also included future
Birman bassist Warwick Gilbert (he played guitar for the Rats) and drummer Ron Keeley.
They played nothing but covers; Stooges, MC5, Velvet Underground and New York
Dolls…probably the only other band in Australia playing a repertoire that would allow
them to fit with a group like TV Jones. Jules Normington, who later would become Radio
Birdman’s manager and the owner of influential Sydney record shop and label Phantom
Records, served as the Rats roadie.
The first lineup of
Radio Birdman was basically ex-Rats Younger (vocals), Keeley (drums) and Carl Rourke
(bass) with ex-TV Jones Tek (guitar) and Hoyle (keyboards). Their name came from what was
almost certainly a misinterpretation of the line "radio burnin’ up above"
from the Stooges song "1970". By April 1975 Carl had been sacked for dressing
like a hippie rock star and trying to grab the vocal duties from Rob while on stage.
Normington had been keeping in touch with Warwick Gilbert and brought him along to a gig
that had been booked while Rourke was still in the band. Ex TV Jones guitar player Chris
Jones played bass to fill in, and after the gig Warwick asked if he could join up as full
time bassist, and after a couple rehearsals it was agreed to take him. Gilbert was
studying graphic design, and his posters and other promotional artwork turned out to be
very significant in creating a strong image for the band later on.
Later in 1975 Pip
Hoyle lost interest in playing and was replaced by Chris Masuak on guitar. Masuak was a
Canadian living in Sydney and had been playing in a group called the Jackals, who had
played on a couple of bills with Radio Birdman. By now the band was turning into a very
focused and intense group; too much so for many of the local pubs who were looking for
bands to come in and provide backing music for drinking beer. But the Radio Birdman’s
intensity also brought them a small but dedicated cadre of hardcore fans; fans whose
commitment to the band was far greater than anything that could be commanded by bands with
broader yet thinner support bases. Among their followers were a small group of writers for
Rock Australia Magazine (more commonly called RAM), a now-defunct weekly magazine
that covered what ever was happening in the local rock scene for many years. In December
1975, the magazine ran a contest that was co-sponsored by Levi’s (the clothes
company) called the RAM/Levi’s Punk Band Thriller. Since this was in the days before
the term "punk" was in common usage to describe bands like the Ramones or Sex
Pistols, it’s not totally clear what the magazine had in mind for the competition,
but at any rate, with their inside support and powerful performances, Radio Birdman
captured the contest and the associated noteriety.
The gig situation was
getting tough, though. The band had a regular gig at the Oxford Tavern in the Darlinghurst
area of Sydney, but other than this hall, they had slim pickings as most venues
wouldn’t book them at all and in many others they ran into fights with bouncers and
members of the audience who couldn’t relate to their powerhouse confrontational
approach. In addition, Tek’s commitments to school made scheduling a nightmare with
those venues that were willing to book the band.
In the middle of 1976
Radio Birdman recorded their legendary "Burn My Eye" ep, a four song 7"
single that included "Burned My Eye", "Snake", "I-94" and
"Smith and Wesson Blues". This ep was sold for $1.50, and only by mail in an ad
that ran for just one issue in RAM. This was enough to sell the first pressing of 1,000
out completely, and a quick second thousand was made and also sold out. No more have been
pressed, although the record has since been bootlegged and finally officially re-released
in a different format with the Under The Ashes boxed set and the 1996 re-mixes of
the Radios Appear material on CD. By today’s standard, and even by the
standard of later Radio Birdman, these four songs are not that strong, and they were
greatly improved when re-recorded later on. But at the time the "Burn My Eye" ep
was a landmark in intense rock and roll, and it’s a significant relic for collectors
today, with prices well over $100.
Meanwhile, the band
was honing their live presentation. Warwick Gilbert’s graphic skills were put to good
use in providing a cohesive theme to all their promotional material. Gilbert designed the
well known Radio Birdman graphic logo, something that’s commonplace today but was
very unusual at the time. The band played in matched clothes that were often described as
a uniform, and included a shoulder band with the logo. They organized themselves and their
closest followers with titles that made them sound like a military organization. Their
were two results of this...their fans were bound even closer in identifying with the band,
while their detractors accused them of fascism...a ridiculous charge since Radio Birdman
never showed any political leanings in any of their material, although the theory was
given a boost by the song "New Race". Although anyone willing to listen to more
than a couple lines of the lyrics would realize that the band was talking about a new
approach to rock and roll, members of the press found it much easier to just watch the war
rally sort of frenzy that erupted whenever the band played "New Race" and assume
that there were much darker forces at work.
Two close friends of
Deniz Tek’s played prominent roles in helping to create the frenzy of their shows;
Mark Sisto and Johnny Kannis. The two had come to the band’s attention first as
crazed fans. Sisto showed up at one show dancing like a lunatic, and at one point he
stuffed his head inside the PA speaker for a good part of the set. It turned out that he
came from Michigan and so he and Deniz had a lot in common. The two became close friends,
and Sisto would do his dance routine at the side of the stage during Birdman shows from
then on. He even managed the band for a short stretch in late 1976.
Johnny Kannis was a
friend of Chris Masuak’s from his school days, and he eventually took the title of
"Master Of Ceremonies", introducing the band and working the crowd to a fever
pitch prior to their shows. Kannis would lead chants of "Yeah, hup, Yeah, hup!"
at the start of "New Race", and the crowds would stab their fists into the air
and chant along at the beginning of the song and throughout the rave-up ending. The effect
was by all accounts like a preparation for war.
In the end of 1976
the band played a series of shows in Sydney that brought rave reviews all around.
Elsewhere, in the US the Ramones had released their second lp, Leave Home, and the
CBGBs groups were starting to get noticed. In the UK, the first Damned album was out, the
Sex Pistols "Anarchy In The UK" had been released. In Australia, the Saints had
released their firebrand single "I’m Stranded". A generation of faded but
wealthy and contented rock stars were wearing out, and it was looking like 1977 was going
to bring a new race of hungry and energetic groups all around the world, with Radio
Birdman poised to lead the Australian efforts. But first, there was a pause to consolidate
as Deniz Tek returned to the US for a three month holiday.
When Tek returned,
the band found that the Oxford Tavern was about ready to close its doors. This would have
been a disaster for Radio Birdman, since this was the place where they played most of
their gigs and got their strongest crowds. So the band negotiated with the owners and
arranged a deal in which they managed the club themselves. They renamed it The Oxford
Funhouse, and began booking bands in which they saw a spark of spiritual kinship. At
the start it was Radio Birdman, the Hellcats (including Ron Peno, who would later lead
Died Pretty and Eddie Fischer, who later was the drummer for X), and the Psychosurgeons.
They ran an ad looking for more bands, which said in part:
BANDS
WANTED FOR GIGS AT THE OXFORD FUNHOUSE!
The
Funhouse is Sydney’s only genuine rock’n’roll venue. We are having trouble
finding good bands to book. To us, a good band is energetic, exciting, innovative (or
unashamedly derivative) playing rock’n’roll with real manic fervour.
WHAT
IS NOT WANTED
Bands
who play shit like Quo, Purple, Queen, Zeppelin, ZZ Top, Bad Co., Ted Nugent (post
’72), Bowie. In short, any of the crap anyone can hear anywhere in this boring burg.
Dumb
clothing - stage gear consisting of fashion jueans and overalls, platforms, hippie gear
(beads, baggy overalls, shoulder bags, etc.)
The
Equipment Obsession Syndrome - the popular notion that a new expensive brand amp and
guitar and monster PA will automatically make the group ‘insane’,
‘incredible’, ‘good’, ‘rock’n’roll’. Equipment
freaks rarely cut it when it comes to actually playing rock’n’roll.
We’ve
made a few mistakes through booking groups who said they played certain good material and,
when hired, played these songs in a thoroughly gutless fashion. Bands who play original
material only (or mostly) would be asked to bring tapes or lay down so crazed a testimony
of their fervent commitment that they would persuade the management to forget about the
tapes.
The DIY approach was
a new thing anywhere in the world and especially in Australia. Radio Birdman opened the
door for a whole new scene by showing bands that they could take control of things and
arrange gigs and records on their own terms. In short order new indie labels like
Doublethink or M-Squared would emerge, and more new bands with a host of different styles
like the Lipstick Killers, X, Thought Criminals, Razar and Rocks would arise from nothing.
Merged with members of key Brisbane bands like the Saints, the Fun Things, the 31st,
and the End, the Oxford Funhouse scene would lay the foundations for an incredibly durable
field of Aussie independent music that despite a few ebbs and flows has continued to this
day.
On the return of
Deniz Tek from the US, Radio Birdman played a short tour to Melbourne, Canberra and the
southern parts of New South Wales with the Hellcats. The buzz on them by now was great
enough so that these gigs were packed out, and the time seemed ripe for an album. In July
of 1977, Radios Appear was released by Trafalgar Records, an offshoot of the studio
of the same name. The title of the lp comes from "Dominance and Submission", the
Blue Oyster Cult song. Similar to the first Clash album, Radios Appear eventually
saw two releases; the "Australian version", which was the original, and the
"overseas version", which has a different cover, several different songs, and
stronger mixes or complete re-makes of the songs that remained from the Australian
version. The Australian version is particularly notable for a rampaging cover of the
Stooges "TV Eye", played much faster than the original and adding a lot more
intensity to a song that was already pretty intense.
The album had been
recorded in four different sessions during the past year, a fact that contributes to the
unevenness of the Australian version. The most recent sessions produced the strongest
takes; a healthy sign. This trend would continue in the sessions for the overseas version
of the album, where everything is way tighter, harder, and more powerful.
After the first 3,000
copies, Warner Brothers became convinced that there might be some money in this loud and
little known band, so they signed up for a distribution deal and pressed 3,000 of their
own. On the strength of their promotional nudge, Radios Appear nicked the bottom
end of the Aussie Top 40 album charts before disappearing. Its real impact on the music
world would surpass every record above it, but it would take many years for this to become
apparent.
To complement the
album release, the songs "New Race" and "TV Eye" were paired as a
single. This record also was a commercial failure, but it was the logical choice as it
paired their anthem with the song that demonstrated their roots most prominently.
The rest of 1977 was
spent consolidating their position in Australia. The band made appearances on TV,
featured, along with the Saints, on the ABC show "The Real Thing". They toured
as far as Adelaide (with the appealing tour name "Aural Rape") in September, and
then again in November did another tour through Adelaide and Melbourne and then back to
Sydney. An Adelaide show was taped for a TV show called "Rockturnal", and in
Geelong south of Melbourne a show at the Eureka Hotel on November 30th was taped and
issued as a bootleg lp originally under the title of Eureka Birdman in 1979 and
then again later as Where The Action Is. Towards the end of the year, Sire Records
approached the band with an offer to release Radios Appear in the US and UK. Sire
had taken a strong lead in pushing punk and new wave bands, with the Ramones, Saints, Dead
Boys, and many other bands on their label. The resulting updated Radios Appear was
released in Australia as well. The band played one more round of gigs in Sydney in
December, and then set their sights on England. Punk rock was attaining widespread
popularity there, and it seemed like the place was ripe for Radio Birdman.
In February of 1978,
Radio Birdman touched down in London and began their "Anglo Strike" tour in the
London area. To their complete surprise, there was virtually no connection between them
and the English crowds. In retrospect it’s less surprising; while Radio Birdman play
with the energy and intensity of the best punk rock bands, their music has a higher level
of sophistication as well, and the lyric content is more abstract, whereas the British
bands tended to play much simpler, stripped down 3 chord rock’n’roll with lyrics
that either made explicit statements or else were complete goofy. The Birdman mix of
poetic lyrics with Detroit metal musical influence didn’t go over well, despite the
fact that both they and the Sex Pistols could draw from Stooges roots.
After their initial
round of shows, the band went to Rockfield Studios in Wales to record for what was to be
their second album. The sessions included 15 new songs and remakes of three quarters of
the material on the "Burn My Eye" ep. While the sessions were an artistic
success, in every other way the result was a disaster. As it turns out, despite the fact
that they had originally set up the recording sessions with Rockfield, Sire decided to
drop Radio Birdman before they entered the studio but failed to tell the band that there
would be no money forthcoming to pay the recording bill. This resulted in the studio
confiscating the original master tapes of the session. As most fans of the band are well
aware, it turned out that Deniz Tek made a copy of the final mix on a quarter inch reel
the last night of the sessions and snuck it out with him; this tape eventually formed the
basis of the 13 songs on Living Eyes.
But there was a
bigger disaster than just the loss of the master tapes. During mixing, the band maintained
a schedule where each member could see when each song was to be mixed. Warwick Gilbert had
written his best song, "Crying Sun", for these sessions, and had strong views
about how keyboards and guitar should be balanced in the mix. But through some
misunderstanding, he wasn’t present when the song was mixed, and when he heard the
mix, according to Vivien Johnson’s account, he was fairly crushed by the result.
There was no opportunity to remix it, either, as the studio time had run out. Warwick
virtually stopped talking for the rest of the tour.
From here on, things
descended quickly into darkness. The band was scheduled to tour England as support for the
Flaming Groovies, supporting the newly released Radios Appear. But having dropped
the band, Sire withdrew promotional support for the record. What was originally billed as
the "Groovin’ on the Road" tour became something different, with "Van
Of Hate" crudely handwritten across the side of the tour van. Audiences couldn’t
have cared less. On June 10, 1978, the band played a show at Oxford, and when it was over,
the band split up. The various members returned to Australia separately; the legendary
Radio Birdman spirit was dead.
Radio Birdman’s
contract with Sire gave them their own rights in Australia, and for the next several
years, Deniz Tek tried repeatedly to get the original master tapes to use for an
Australian release. His requests got him nowhere, so eventually he decided to get a record
made from the second generation copy tape he had. The resulting Living Eyes was
finally released on Warner Brothers records in April, 1981, almost 3 years after the band
had split up.
For nearly 20 years,
various members of Radio Birdman have been active in independent music in various forms,
but other than the odd re-issue (such as the Under The Ashes boxed set release of
1988), there was little activity until 1996, when two incredible events occurred. The
first was that Tek and Younger went into the studio and remixed both Radios Appear
and Living Eyes for re-issue on CD. The original master tapes from Rockfield had
been found and after some repairwork were put back into service. In the two decades since
the band had last been active, Younger had become the best producer in Australia with a
knack for creating crackling hot records, and he put all of his skills to use in remixing
the two CDs. The final results are essential; it is rare to hear records benefit so much
from remixing as these two have; everything is so much more clear and punchy.
The second amazing
event is that after the remixes were done, Radio Birdman reformed with their original
lineup and did a brief tour of Australia, playing with a power that surpassed the original
band. Tek and Hoyle are both practicing physicians now, and taking the time to tour is a
big problem, but for a month’s vacation it proved possible to co-ordinate everything.
Old differences have smoothed over with time, and the band members maybe have an
appreciation for what a special place they hold in music. Certainly their audiences
did...every gig was attended by vast numbers of musicians from bands that Radio Birdman
had influenced, and by all accounts they went down a storm. A second tour is due for early
1997, and a live CD from the first reunion tour is on the way as of this writing.
