This article was written for The Big Takeover.  Due to its length, it will run in two parts, with the first appearing in issue #49 in December of 2001.  The second part will appear in June 2001 and will be posted on the web then.

Signed to Sire Records in 1978, Radio Birdman released their first lp Radios Appear in the US and UK (with substantial modifications in content and packaging from the original Australian release) and left Australia for a UK tour. They returned in the fragments of wreckage. The tour was an artistic success but a logistical disaster, with their tour sponsor Polygram breaking from Sire before they started, a negative and ideologically straitjacketed UK rock press hounding them, the headlining Flamin’ Groovies dropping out of the tour due to Cyril Jordan slicing his hand open, and finally Sire dropping their contract while they were in the middle of recording their second album at Rockfield Studios. With internal pressures building, the band exploded. That second lp, Living Eyes, finally saw Australian release two years later. It has never been released anywhere else.

Time passes and clauses on contracts turn over, and this summer the fates have finally allowed the first American Radio Birdman release of any kind since Radios Appear in 1978. SubPop has put out a terrific package called The Essential Radio Birdman, combining most of the Radio Birdman originals from the two lps. Along with the fabulous music and piles of pictures it’s got great and accurate liner notes from David Fricke.

Steve: I wanted to start by asking some questions about the Essential Radio Birdman compilation on SubPop and how it came into being.

They were one of the labels out of I think about five or six that contacted us, but they were the one that had the most credible offer and we decided that we’d work with them.  So that’s how it came about.

Rob: They’ve done a nice job actually.

Deniz: Yeah, they’ve done a great job. We never really knew what it would be like, but it seems like they’ve done a lot of work.

The guy at SubPop who is handling our project is named Andy Kotowicz and he’s really gone out of his way to make a good effort.

Steve: Did you have a lot to do with the artwork and how it was packaged and what songs got chosen?

Deniz: Andy at SubPop did the first draft of song selection and I edited that heavily, and then I sent my ideas about it over to Rob and got his input on it. We pretty much agreed on it. There were a couple things we changed from that. We went back to Andy and went back and forth a few times until we got a compromise song list that everybody could live with.

Steve: How did you get David Fricke to write the liner notes? I thought he did a really nice job.

Deniz: SubPop must have written him a big check!

Steve: (laughs) Oh, really?!

Deniz: I have no idea, but he’s a pretty busy guy, and it’s amazing that he wrote such extensive and complimentary liner notes. I never expected anything like that.

Steve: Are you getting any feedback on the CD being out now, or is it too early to tell?

Rob: Well Deniz has been sending me e-mails from various sources, like American newspapers and magazines, and the response has been incredible, really. There’s nine and ten out of ten ratings for the record. They’re really waxing ecstatic with the damn thing. It’s quite surprising actually. Whatever happened to the "hated band", you know? It’s incredible press, and apparently it’s selling because of that.

Steve: I think it’s a sign of how far ahead of it’s time a lot of that material was. I remember I used to read Trouser Press all the time in the late 70s and I still have the one where they reviewed Radios Appear. They dismissed it very quickly, despite the fact that they tended to hit the mark much more often than not in their reviews. It just seems like Radios Appear just didn’t fit into what people were looking for in those days, outside of Australia. The songs were too lush, and there was too much going on, and people were looking for really stripped down stuff by people who were barely learning to play.

Deniz: Well, you have to give them credit for naming the magazine after a Bonzo Dog Band song.

Rob: That’s a good point! But if they think our stuff was over-embellished, I’d like to hear the stripped-down stuff you’re talking about.

Steve: I’m talking about the Ramones and the Sex Pistols…those bands were definitely more basic than Radio Birdman.

Rob: Well, yeah, we had one more guitar!

Steve: And keyboards…

Rob: Ah, yeah! Shit!

Steve: And I think your songs were a lot more sophisticated, too. Songs like "Descent Into The Maelstrom" – I can’t imagine the Pistols or Ramones doing a song anywhere near like that.

Deniz: Yeah, I dunno. Maybe they had a different style, but there’s something outstanding about the songs on that first Ramones album, too. What they achieved to me was really revolutionary. We were sort of in between periods with our band because we pre-dated that stuff by a little bit. We didn’t see ourselves as part of the punk genre, because when we started up, the word punk was used to refer to bands that were mid-60s garage bands mostly. It was a different sound.

Steve: I wasn’t trying to imply that the Ramones weren’t good. I love the Ramones, and most of those late 70s punk bands, too. It’s just that it was kind of a straitjacket in terms of what people would accept if they were into those kinds of punk bands, and I think that hurt Radio Birdman.

Deniz: Well, yeah, because once people lock into a genre or recognize a genre as being what they are into, they can put the blinders on a bit, and we didn’t really fit into a genre. We took elements from all over the place. We had a pretty heavy Blue Oyster Cult influence as well as a British Invasion band influence. I even copped riffs from James Brown’s Live At The Apollo for one of our songs…

Rob: Did you?

Deniz: Well, yeah. That riff in "The Hand Of Law".

Rob: Oh, right!

Deniz: If you think of the intro kind of fanfare thing on Live At The Apollo ’63.

Rob: That’s great, I’d never connected that.

Deniz: I’m not sure I was aware of that at the time, but I can hear it now.

Deniz: Yeah, so there’s a lot of mixes of stuff in there. We had a pretty broad base of influences. We liked a lot of different kinds of music.

Steve: It seems like in Australia you could do that sort of thing more easily than you might elsewhere.

Deniz: I wouldn’t say easily…

Deniz: Yeah, that’s right. When we started off it was mostly laid back boogie bands and bands that would do sort of electric blues like Company Kane and the La Dee Das, and things like that. Then there were bands that would cover whatever song was popular from the band that had most recently toured in Australia, because in those days not that many bands would come out. When I first got there, everybody was doing Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin songs because those two bands had come out in the early part of that year, and that’s what people wanted to hear. So when we started to do what we did, it took years for us to get more than one or two people to come along and see us.

Steve: As long as we are going back to the beginning, I thought I’d try my trick question, which is to get Rob to describe TV Jones for me and then get Deniz to talk about the Rats a little. So maybe Rob I can put you on the spot and ask you to go first.

Rob: Oh, dear! OK, well, basically TV Jones (pauses as Deniz laughs in the background) – TV Jones were a great band, because they were different. They were just as different as anything that Deniz was a part of later on. Deniz used to be the front man in that band – he didn’t always have a guitar in his hand. From that I actually probably learned a bit myself. But the style of music that they were playing – the covers were anything from J. Geils to Alice Cooper, the Stooges, the Stones, and that type of thing. The originals they were writing were complimentary to that. They had a sort of a glam aspect about them, too, which in a way my own band the Rats did at the time. So there was a fair bit of common ground. I never saw their earliest gigs, which were mostly at this place called the Charles, wasn’t it Deniz, down my way where I live now?

Deniz: Yeah, the Charles Hotel.

Rob: Yeah, and they apparently had developed a pretty large following down there. So they actually had a great base of appeal. They weren’t unattractive to look at either. Apparently they’d cut quite a dash down there. I dunno, I think you had a couple of name changes before you arrived at TV Jones. But I was impressed.

Steve: So how about the Rats, Deniz?

Deniz: The Rats was the first really hardcore rock band I saw in Australia. I heard about them because my roommate, the guy who had the lease at the student house I was living in was Ron Keely – that house actually was the site of the formation of a lot of personal relationships that are still going on today. John Needham (Citadel Records founder and a key figure in Australian indie rock for the last 20 years – Steve) was one of the other students who lived in that house. We just sort of met there because we picked up an ad foor a room in a student house, and Ron was the guy who was running the household. I rented a room in that house, if you can believe this, for six dollars and fifty cents a week. (laughs)

Rob: Now it would be six hundred and fifty dollars!

Deniz: Yeah, exactly. But Ron was a drummer, and he knew some other musicians in Sydney, and it was through him that I’d met Rob and got in touch with the Rats. I think Ron actually played me a tape of the Rats before I saw them, and the tape sounded great. I guess it reminded me a lot of the New York Dolls at the time. It had a lot of similar elements to the Dolls, and they actually covered a few New York Dolls songs.

Rob: Yeah, we played about six off the first album alone! (laughs) The first song I ever did was "Bad Girl", actually.

Deniz: Yeah, and you used to do "Jet Boy" and "Personality Crisis" and things like that. But then I got to see them. It was a two guitar lineup. Warwick was the lead player, Warwick Gilbert. I think he played through a Fender amp, but he had the treble and volume on ten and the bass on zero – just this incredible slicing treble sound, and the only thing I’d heard that came close to that before was Williamson on Raw Power. Just this incredibly biting treble. So they had that going, and the rhythm guitar player was named Mick Lyon, and he just had this style where he played like every down stroke that the Ramones played, plus every backstroke, too. It was just this wall of noise coming out of his amp.

Rob: Yeah, he played a Telecaster thinline.

Deniz: You couldn’t even see his hand going up and down, he was playing that fast. And since it was a thinline Tele, again it was extreme treble. It was this incredibly abrasive yet somehow compelling wall of noise coming out of this band, and then Rob singing. I think in the early days they were doing makeup and stuff and had a great look, and it was the only thing out there that was different. So we immediately became pals and started going to each other’s gigs, and I think we had at least one gig together. Down in Wollongong, didn’t we?

Rob: Yeah, I think we did one or two.

Rob: Yeah, we often outnumbered the audiences, I think. But I remember Ron Keely saying he knew a guy who played the same sort of stuff that the Rats were playing, and I just said, "Oh, bullshit. There’s no chance!" And he said "I can introduce you". And I said there’s no way that any bands out here know anything about the Dolls and the Stooges and all that. But we got together eventually.

I was trying to have a quiet evening at home listening to my records and all these people started turning up.

Rob: Shit, I’m sorry!

Deniz: So I look up from headphones and there’s all these people in the room, and they look like a band!

Steve: So then the origin of Radio Birdman was when Deniz you got kicked out of TV Jones…

Deniz: Yeah, I was sacked from the band. As Rob said, we had a little popularity in Wollongong, which was a town – I guess it was a coal mining or steel mining place about 100 kilometers south of Sydney. It’s a blue collar town, and that’s where we had gigs. We had a residency at this hotel there, the Charles Hotel. You know, in Australia, hotels are pubs. That’s their word for a pub – "hotel". It’s not like you’re going to the Hilton. It was just this corner pub. They had bands, and we would get to play every Friday and Saturday night and get a free meal and a few bucks and free beer. At the time I was student in Sydney and I had to hitch-hike down there every Friday or Saturday afternoon and hitch-hike back on Sunday afternoon.

So we decided to make the move up to Sydney, because we saw that as going to the big time. We thought we were doing so great in Wollongong and we had no problems in generating this vibe down there that we just assumed that when we went to Sydney we’d be popular there, too. And that was quite a wrong assumption, because the minute we got to Sydney problems started.

We got a one week residency in Checkers, and the other band that we were opening for was Sherbet. We would do four sets, Sherbet would do one set, and then we would do a last quick set. After the first night we got fired from that gig. We showed up on day two to play and all our stuff was thrown off the stage – equipment was on the dance floor and these heavy grade bouncers were telling us "Get all your shit out of here now, or we’ll confiscate it and you won’t see it again." Try to argue with these guys and cop an attitude and they offer to break both of your hands and put you in the garbage bin out back.

We didn’t have a van organized or anything but we had to get our stuff out of there. We played at the Whisky and it was the same thing again, and we couldn’t get a gig after that. So to make a long story short, the other guys in the band said it must be Deniz. There’s this vibe of negativity – that was the word they used – he’s too negative on stage…

Rob: (laughs) You were!

Deniz: (ignores Rob and continues) …and we’re not doing the covers people want to hear and it’s unpopular. So we’ve gotta get rid of Deniz and get somebody that we’re more likely to be successful with. So they came around the house and said I was going to be out of the band.

Rob: Yeah, I was there. That was hilarious!

Deniz: Yeah, Rob was actually there when it happened.

Steve: So what happened Rob?

Rob: (laughs again) They were all sitting around telling him he was Mister Bad Vibes on stage and they wanted to be a bit more, you know, um, welcoming to the people. Bands like Hush and so forth that played things that were more commercial. It wasn’t exactly like their music was all so left of field anyway. It was quite accessible stuff – it was rocking! But nevertheless, they couldn’t tolerate it…Deniz probably gave the audience a few vacant stares and a few glares and was doing a lot of various moves and stuff like that, the sort of thing that people around Sydney had never seen before, really. And I dunno, maybe that non-plussed an audience, but to me it was just the icing on the cake. They could play!

In fact, the Rats were dead primitive and I could understand if people hated us, but with TV Jones, they had more musicality about them. They had a level of confrontation to them to, but I couldn’t figure out what the other guys were on about. It was ridiculous. They got this sort of milquetoast character to sing sort of more in the British vein, I suppose, more of the upper range shrieking a la … that type of thing, you know?

Deniz: The guy’s name was Paul Greene, and he came on the stage with TV Jones as the new singer wearing jump suits, a big moustache and kind of a poofy feathered haircut. And he had a snake, too, so they could cover the Alice Cooper aspect. And of course, we all know where that all ended up!

Rob: Exactly. So I’m sitting here listening to all this shit and I’m thinking, well, this is just great, because now we can get a band together. So I was lapping it up. I thought it was quite amusing.

Steve: So were the Rats coming apart at that time?

Steve: When you first started as Radio Birdman, were you doing a lot of Rats and TV Jones tunes along with some covers, or did you start writing new material right away?

Deniz: Well, it’s obvious that we want to use the best of the two previous bands, so we did some of the same covers – we were doing "Personality Crisis" that the Rats were doing, and I think we did some Velvet Underground stuff…

Steve: That was that single that just came out in Europe a little while ago, right?

Deniz: Well, sort of. That single, half of that single was TV Jones and the other half was a Radio Birdman out take. The guy made an error that put it out. He had a tape and he figured it was all TV Jones, but there was a mix of stuff on it. We had the better part of an album done, but the tape got erased or recorded over and used again for something else, and all we had was cassette dubs of the stuff.

Steve: At the start, Deniz, you and Pip were both in med school, which seems like a pretty serious case of burning the candle at both ends.

Deniz: I dunno. You’ve gotta do something else. You can’t just sit around and study all the time. Pip had been in a later version of TV Jones, so we’d been playing together for probably about a year before Radio Birdman started up. Pip was an interesting character because he’d never played rock music before and didn’t know anything about it. The closest he’d gotten to rock music was something like John Mayall. He’d been playing jazz and classical music. So especially with his classical music background, his tempo was whatever he wanted it to be at that moment. Which made his playing really, really interesting as far as fitting in with the rigid 4/4 format of a rock band. There was a lot of give and take there, and I think the results were that he sounded different from everyone else.

But the other guys in TV Jones didn’t particularly like Pip. First of all, they’d never met anyone else who was intelligent like Pip was, so he was kind of intimidating to them for that reason. But also, they didn’t understand his time and pitch freedom as being freedom. They understood it as he couldn’t play 4/4. So I think Pip had been tossed out of the band just before I was.

But as far as having time to play in a band…I suppose I could have done better in medical school if I’d studied harder. But I did OK. I got a credit and distinction and got through OK. Most of the stuff you learn in medical school you never use again anyway in the real world. So I think it’s actually more important in life to have other experiences. Look at most doctors and they have zero understanding of most normal people because they’ve never been around them – they’ve just had their head in the books their whole life.

Steve: Well, you gotta admit it’s an unusual thing. There haven’t been many bands with even one doctor in them, let alone two.

Deniz: But if you have one it attracts more.

Steve: Probably true! Changing gears, Rob, can you tell me some of the details about recording the Burn My Eye ep and how you came to the idea of releasing it on your own?

Rob: Oh, dear, I’m fairly hazy on the details of all of that. I remember we became acquainted with this journalist who was the editor of this magazine called RAM – Rock Australia Magazine is what it stood for – and this guy Anthony O’Grady took us around to various studios introducing us to producers and engineers and getting us to try to put down a couple tracks here and there. Mostly it didn’t work out terribly well, but eventually he took us to meet the people at Trafalgar, which was Charles Fisher and an engineer that he worked with called John Sayers. And we hung around that studio and I suppose we must have talked about what we wanted to do, the direction of the band, how we saw ourselves – I can’t really recall. I can only recall that we kind of reached a point where we couldn’t agree, and it looked like the discussion was breaking down, and someone suggested, why don’t you just go in there and set up and play something anyway. And so we knocked out a couple of songs and they seemed really interested after that.

Deniz: Yeah, we were ready to walk out because there was such a divergence in attitude between us and those guys. This was about the third or fourth studio that we had tried to work with and each one had failed as far as we were concerned. They didn’t like us and we didn’t like them. And the same thing was happening here with the discussion. We thought, this is hopeless, we’re going to leave. We’re out of here. But then Charles said, well, you know, you’re here, you’ve got your equipment here, you might as well just play a couple of songs. And we said OK.

And you know what, they started to like us!

Rob: Yeah, which was to their credit, I suppose, from our point of view. Because hardly anyone ever did. So that was a surprise in itself. But I suppose we have to give credit to Anthony O’Grady for being so persistent as well.

Deniz: Yeah, he was willing to continue to take us around to other studios after the first couple of mishaps.

Rob: I think we went to one studio, it was something like 2SER radio station and I think we smoked out the console didn’t we?

Steve: Did Trafalgar actually pay for recording the ep and pressing it up, or how did you finance that?

Deniz: Yeah, Trafalgar paid.

Steve: Because it would have seemed like a pretty gutsy move if you had paid for it all yourself. But even so, the way you sold it was pretty unusual for the time.

Rob: We weren’t aware that it had. I thought it was the first independent release. I’d never seen a record come out with no logo or anything on the label.

Steve: I’m not sure if it came first, but the one other that springs to mind is the first Saints single.

the Saints debut on their own Fatal Records of "(I’m) Stranded" as September 1976 – almost like Bell and Marconi practically simultaneously inventing the telephone!)

Steve: Were you surprised at how fast they sold out? Or were you expecting that it would sell pretty well?

Rob: I don’t remember. I just remember stamping the things. They were all white label records and we had a Radio Birdman symbol on a stamp and I was just sitting in the Trafalgar office stamping them. Then they’d get parceled up and sent out mail order. I think there were only about 1800 or so ever pressed up.

Deniz: Didn’t they go for about a dollar or two dollars?

Rob: Yeah, something like that. A dollar seventy five, maybe. Probably that was fairly reasonable in those days.

Steve: Yeah, but still selling 1800 of anything that’s relatively unknown is really hard. Even with the internet, I can tell you that with my label I do a thousand copies of something and it takes me years to make a dent in it.

Deniz: Yeah, that’s right, Steve, but look how many records are being put out now that you’re competing with. Whereas in those days there just wasn’t that much.

Steve: I suppose that’s fair enough. Well, another story I was hoping you’d re-tell is the story of how you met Lou Reed at the Sydney Airport and how that led to the Oxford Funhouse.

Deniz: Yeah, you know, I’ve told this story so many times that sometimes it’s hard to remember what’s really true about it and what I read in Vivien’s book. But to the best that I can recall, we knew that Lou Reed was going to be at the airport, and I wanted to go and see the press conference and I wanted to give him a Radio Birdman T-shirt. I had this idea to give him a T-shirt, but we didn’t have any T-shirts, so I went over to Dare’s house – Dare Jennings. He had just started silk screening. That’s even a much more incredible story, because this guy essentially owns Mambo (a clothing line similar to Quiksilver or Billabong that’s made Jennings one of the richest men in Australia according to Tek – Steve) and is a world clothing magnate now. But the first thing he did was a Radio Birdman T-shirt.

So I got him to make one, and Lou Reed answered these questions, and he was pretty tired after a long flight and was really kind of rude to these journalists. And I’m just listening at the back, and at the end of this press conference I walked up to him and handed him the T-shirt and said, this T-shirt is a present for you. And he said, oh, is this a local band? And I said yeah. And he said, local band, great! Are you playing? And I said yeah. But we didn’t really have a gig, and when he took off his secretary came up and said, Lou wants to see your band. Where are you playing? And we didn’t have a gig, so I said, I don’t know, I don’t have my calendar with me right now, can I call you back? So I got her phone number and then we went and scrambled for a gig.

At this point, this was like mid 1975, this was the low point in terms of success for us. We’d been banned from all the major pubs on the circuit in Sydney. No place would have us. So we got the idea of going back to the Oxford, which is where the Rats used to play. Rob and Ron knew the guy that ran the thing, and they asked the guy – his name was Bill – if we could play there. They said, you don’t have to pay us, we just want to play, and our friends will come. Oh, and Lou Reed will come. And Bill said, well, if Lou Reed’s gonna come, you can play, but you’re not getting any money.

And we said, OK that’s fine, we’ll play. So we set up and our friends came, and it was actually a pretty good night. But of course Lou Reed never came. By then he’d forgotten about it or he blew it off. But it was a good night, and Bill actually came up to us after and gave us a ten dollar bill. I remember that really clearly. We’re sitting there, sweat-soaked, the place is full of beer cans and equipment, and we’re completely exhausted, and Bill goes, just to show you guys I appreciate how good you played, here’s ten bucks and be sure to pick up all these beer cans on your way out.

But then Bill wanted us to come back and play again, because a lot of people came and they drank a lot of beer. So that started off the residency for us at the Oxford. That’s how I remember it. Is that how you remember it, Rob?

Rob: Yeah, pretty much. I remember you also telling me at the time that Lou said something to the affect of see those people over there – he’s pointing at the journalists – he said "Fucking animals!". I remember you telling me that. I was impressed!

Steve: So after that you had a lot of pretty interesting bands play there with you that aren’t very well known outside of Australia, and probably aren’t even that well known inside Australia today, like Johnny Dole, or the Psychosurgeons, or the Hellcats, or the Mangrove Boogie Kings or those kinds of bands. Can you describe some of those?

Rob: Well, the Mangrove Boogie Kings were basically a rockabilly band. They were nice guys, and they played pretty well and had a huge repertoire. They were deeply rooted in the 50s. And Johnny Dole and the Scabs were playing 60s sort of songs, like Easybeats gear and so forth, maybe a few of their own, but in a more amped up way, more in the line of what became the punky sort of feel I guess. And who were the others we’re talking about?

Steve: The Hellcats?

Deniz: Yeah, that was ’77. They were doing some of those early punk songs from England, and they were also doing some odd sort of gear like Beach Boys songs, but in an amped up way. They were doing "Fun Fun Fun" and things like that.

Rob: Yeah, I remember you being really taken by Mark Kingsmill’s drumming.

Deniz: I thought his drumming was really great and I loved Charlie Georges guitar playing.

Rob: Yeah, he had a tough style. It was mostly me and the Radio Birdman manager George Kringas who were booking that place, and I think we even either printed up leaflets or published some sort of little manifesto – it’s a bit embarrassing to think of it now – but it was basically like a set of rules about what you could wear in the place. But we were just trying to sort of give the place a kind of exclusive feel and create a sort of insular atmosphere and alienate the people that we thought were into all the weak stuff that we perceived as wimpy (laughs). So there were all these rules and edicts and shit, you know? We were trying to book bands in there that we thought were really like minded. But it wasn’t easy to do that, because there weren’t too many around there like that. So often that idea got compromised. And when we couldn’t play there ourselves, we had to get someone else in and now and then we’d have an expedient sort of band and we’d hear later on "fuck, don’t ever get them again", you know. It was the sort of stuff that we loathed in the first place.

Deniz: But for the most part the idea was to try to get bands in there to play that had a hard time finding any where else to play because they were rejects like us. That was the idea, for rebellious people that would be rejected by the music establishment, they could play there. And the other idea was to turn all the money over to the bands. We kept nothing…we paid the girl at the door twenty bucks to take dollars at the door, and the guys who owned the bar got whatever the bar tab was, but all the door money, the band owned it.

Steve: Do you feel like having that place had a lot to do with developing bands in Sydney?

Deniz: I think some bands started just to play there. The Psychosurgeons probably started up just to play there.

Rob: Now, they were a pretty wild outfit.

Deniz: They later transformed into the Lipstick Killers, but originally they had a different singer and a different drummer. That was Mark Taylor’s band. They were pretty far out, those guys.

Next issue the story continues with the recording of the Radios Appear lp, getting signed to Sire, touring the UK, splitting up, and the reunion tours of the mid 90s.