In this installment, the story picks up at the height of the band’s achievement and traces their history through their demise. The band recorded their first classic lp, Radios Appear, for Australian release and then were signed by Sire for the international market. The Sire version of Radios Appear featured several different songs and new packaging. A fiery cover of the Stooges "TV Eye" and the old TV Jones tune "Monday Morning Gunk" were dropped off and their anthem "New Race" was shortened by nearly two minutes, but a brilliant cover of Roky Erickson’s "You’re Gonna Miss Me" and four new originals more than made up for the shortfall. The best of the new tracks was perhaps "Aloha Steve And Danno", which copped the theme from "Hawaii 5-0" for its bridge and even today is without question one of the toughest surf songs of all time.

I can still remember picking up my used promo copy of Radios Appear for $1.99 in a bin at Al Bums Records in Tucson in the summer of 1978. I’d never heard of the band, but they were on Sire, and almost everything else on Sire was great, so I figured it was worth a go. It seemed an odd record for the times…the cover showed six band members (everyone else had either 3, 4 or 5) on the front looking like for all the world like some kind of special forces group with guitars – the Dirty Half Dozen.

Unfortunately, by the day I got that record, the band was already nearing the end of its lifetime. Sire sent them to the UK for a tour that ended in disaster. Vivien Johnson’s book on Radio Birdman does a terrific job of describing the tensions leading to the band’s break-up – there’s only room to hint at the issues in this interview. From that UK tour period a second album ultimately surfaced in Living Eyes, a slightly more subtle record than the debut, but still a powerful piece of work.

The mid 1990s saw a flurry of Radio Birdman activity in Australia. The band recovered the original multi-track tapes to Living Eyes from Rockfield studios and produced a re-mixed CD version of that recording that greatly toughened up the sound. At the same time, they also re-mastered Radios Appear for CD and made substantial improvements in that one as well. This activity led to the band re-uniting for tours in Australia the next two years, where they often played to more fans in a single gig than they did in their entire 70s career. A live-to-radio show from that period was released as the CD Ritualism.

Fans of Radio Birdman should also search out the New Race CD The First and the Last, which documents an end of the 70s tour by an all-star pick-up group featuring Tek, Younger, Radio Birdman bassist Warwick Gilbert, Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, and MC5 drummer Denis Thompson. The one lp by Tek’s post-Birdman group the Visitors is also strongly recommended – it’s been reissued on CD under the title Visitation. Chris Masuak has also participated in loads of post-Birdman recordings with the Hitmen, Screaming Tribesmen, Juke Savages, and also under his own name.

Steve: Can you talk a little about how you recorded the original Radios Appear album?

But that didn’t happen very often, and it was tedious, because we had to haul everything in and set it up, set the drums up and get a drum sound. Sometimes we’d record a little bit in the afternoon and then we’d have to tear everything down and go to a gig, and then come back the next day, Sunday.

Rob: I don’t remember it being so spread out – I have no recollection of that at all! But I remember all those sheets of corrugated iron that we used to liven the room up a bit.  It always seemed a somehow little bit muffled or subdued. It was one of those LA or west coast designed studios for Eagles sort of music or something, wasn’t it?

Deniz: Yeah, and it was heavily carpeted. Everything on it was carpeted – the walls, the ceilings. The only thing that wasn’t carpeted was the window on the control room. And even that was some kind of special glass that muffled sound.

Rob: (laughs) Bullshit! (all laugh)

Deniz: So we would bring in sheets of corrugated iron roofing material from the streets, bring it in our van into the studio. The engineer thought we were being deliberately contrary, but we weren’t – we were just trying to make it sound a little harder. And if you listen to the sound of the record now, it sounds pretty good. One of the things I’ve been asked a lot in interviews lately since this thing came out is: how come it endures? How come it still sounds OK when everything else recorded around those days sounds dated?

And I think one of the things that makes it endure is that the production was pretty straight forward. They didn’t use a lot of gimmicks. We got a good guitar sound, and we played really loud in there, and we had the corrugated iron to help it sound harder.

Steve: Can you tell the story about how you got signed by Sire? I heard that Seymour Stein came to Sydney to sign you, is that right?

Rob: He came to sign the Saints, I think.

Deniz: He was there to sign the Saints, but somebody dragged him along to one of our shows at the Oxford Funhouse. At least that’s what I remember hearing.

Rob: He was dancing on a table, apparently!

Deniz: I never see things like that because I always have my head down.

Rob: Yes, I know. You are quite diligent, but I have the luxury of perusing the room and, yeah, he was over there doing all this. And he came to another gig, that one we did at the ABC TV studio. And subsequently he had a meeting with us out in Trafalgar in the control room there, and he was deep into it by then. He was talking about us going to the UK and supporting the Ramones as it was going to be at the time, and tour around there. But as we know, it turned out to be the Groovies.

Steve: Why was the overseas version of Radios Appear different from the original Australian one? It seems like it’s half a second album and half a first album – it always struck me as strange that you didn’t just release the Australian version outside of Australia or else do an entirely new lp.

Rob: What happened there? Did we get cold feet or something? Maybe we just thought we could make a stronger album. I know we had some more new songs.

Deniz: I think when Sire signed us up for the world wide release of Radios Appear that was one of our conditions. We said, we’ve been living with this album for about nine months now and there’s a lot of things about it we’d like to change. If it’s going to go out to the whole world, we’d like to make it better. We’d been in the studio recording some new songs. Not nearly enough to make a whole second album. but enough to change it. And we figured, who’s ever going to hear the Australian version of the album anyway? We weren’t really thinking globally.

Rob: We hear that quite often from people, about how some of these gigs really were like seminal moments in their lives. They say that’s case and it’s really quite flattering when you hear it. I think people like Nick Cave used to come to some of those Melbourne shows, I believe, and all that crowd.

But the second time we came back they copped a pretty hostile attitude. So I suppose that’s an influence of sorts.

Steve: Was it sort of a competitive thing?

Deniz: I don’t know if it was competitive or whether it was genuine hate.  I don’t know.

Steve: It doesn’t seem like they’d have much reason to dislike you…

Deniz: What I picked up at the time was that they’d found out that a couple of us went to medical school and they thought that that signified a lack of commitment – as compared to being a junkie or something like that, which implied more commitment. (much laughter from all)

Rob: I wouldn’t argue with that!

Deniz: Yeah, that’s what I picked up.

Steve: One of those Adelaide shows got shown on TV, didn’t it?

Rob: Yeah, the Marriatville show, they filmed about seven or eight songs, I think. Sort of washed the whole room out with these really bright lights and I had two microphones to sing through, one for the PA and one for the recording. It was actually a bit inhibiting in a way. But that footage is really well regarded, and they keep recycling it on the ABC late at night to this day. We broke the attendance record of that place. It wasn’t doing so well in those days, but we got over 900 people that night and the place was jammed. It was quite exciting going to Adelaide the first time. That’s the city that gave the Beatles the biggest reception they’d ever gotten anywhere in the world too. There was like 400,000 people out to see the Beatles, and there’s barely that many in the whole frigging city!

So there must be something about that place. But it was quite satisfying to feel that momentum building up. But there were still strange things going on. There were people from TV stations – like we did an interview after that particular gig that was filmed, and I believe that the person who conducted that interview subsequently had a nervous breakdown and said that "if Radio Birdman come back to Adelaide it’s going to bring down the government" and all this shit. I think the guy went right around the bloody bend.

But we seem to have evoked pretty strange reactions from people where ever we went. We were still getting banned at different times, weren’t we, even at that point. Yet popularity was building and we were getting radio airplay, too.

Deniz: Some of us, I don’t know if you were with us that night Rob or not, but that first time we went to Adelaide, some us went to see Fleetwood Mac play at an outdoor concert.

Rob: Yeah, I went to that.

Deniz: We wanted George to get Stevie Nicks to come back to the Grange with us. We actually thought he might be able to do it. Talk about hubris! (laughs)

Rob: I didn’t know that went on, but I went to the show.

Deniz: Yeah, George went off somewhere after we really goaded him and pestered him, and he came back fifteen minutes later and said "sorry, I can’t get you backstage". And that was when we ran into Blondie, wasn’t it?

Rob: Oh, yeah, one of the trips down there. I suppose it was that first one. The place we were staying was called the Grange, right on the beach there. The beach with no surf. And the guy who was putting us up there, our friend Patrick Miles who had the rock column in the Adelaide Advertiser and he’s the one who championed us and was the catalyst in getting us over there – Blondie were touring so he invited us over there. So we got to meet the band and so forth. She seemed really sweet. Yeah, I’d forgotten about that.

Steve: Can you talk about the final tour that you did to England and how that got arranged and all the problems between Phonogram and Sire and all that?

Rob: Deniz is probably more expert on this because there were a lot of things I didn’t even know went on until about ten years after the fact. It’s quite strange – I keep learning things about what went on before I arrived in England, because Deniz and our manager went over before the band did. I’m still learning, so I’d be happy to hear anything.

But somehow, George Kringas our manager managed to talked them into letting us finish the tour. So we went on the tour anyway, while knowing that things were bad relationship-wise, and where ever we went the record wouldn’t be in the stores or available to people. So it was kind of demoralizing.

It’s amazing that George was able to get them to continue to fund the tour and not just cancel it, but he did that, and we even went into the studio as previously scheduled and recorded the next album, again, just sort of running on fumes because there was no real backing.

About half through this, or three quarters of the way through that we found out that we also were dropped from Sire. So Polygram dropped Sire, and Sire dropped us. My understanding was that Sire dropped a whole bunch of other bands at the same time, like the Dead Boys. They only kept a few bands…they kept the Ramones, they kept the Talking Heads, and they kept the two bands that were paying for all the other bands at that stage, which were Renaissance and Focus. They were the acts on Sire that were actually earning money. Nothing else was earning money at that point – the other bands were just an expense.

So Sire had to retrench, I guess because of cash flow problems or whatever was happening with this distribution deal going bad. So we got dropped. That’s my understanding of it pretty much in a nutshell.

Steve: Can you talk about some of the gigs you played on that tour? There were gigs both in England and in Europe as well, right?

Deniz: We only played a couple shows in Europe that I can recall. Paris and Brussels and Amsterdam. Everything else was in the UK.

Steve: These were all with the Flamin’ Groovies, right?

Rob: Well, the Groovies had to pull out of it because Cyril Jordan fell over on this walkway down to a gig at this place in Brussels and he severed a tendon, I think, in his right hand, so they couldn’t play in that gig. So we filled in for both the nights, I think. And I think we did OK, actually.

I think one night they hauled us off the stage, which apparently is a customary thing in that area, for rival promoters to ring up and say "there’s a bomb in the place" and stuff like that, so we had to clear off on one night.

Deniz: Yeah, and the next night after that one, we went to Amsterdam and opened for Van Halen.

Rob: We didn’t play with them I don’t think, we went and saw them. I remember going to see them. We didn’t actually play with them, did we?

Deniz: No, they played after us at the Paradiso.

Rob: No, shit! Christ, I remember seeing them, I remember their singer David Lee Roth standing over at the side of the stage beseeching the balcony, because it had this balcony running high around the side of it, and he was shrieking "I’m on fire, I’m on fire!". And this guy’s up on the top there and right through the center of the spotlight that’s beaming down on Roth he pours this beer, and you could just see the stream going right into his head. And he was shaking his fist and cursing this bastard up on top there. That was the highlight of that show for me! And their insane bass player strutting around there…

Deniz: I really didn’t know who they were then. They might have been famous and I didn’t know about it, or they weren’t famous yet, but I didn’t know who Van Halen was. They were just another band on the top of the bill. But I’ve got a great photo of us playing at that gig, there with that big circular balcony.

Rob: I just remember George struggling and cursing getting the banner put up behind the stage there, and none of us would help him. It was a huge banner and he was really perched on the top of this ladder trying to pin this damned thing up. I think he was pretty sour about that.

Deniz: We didn’t really know what to do, because we didn’t know if the Flamin’ Groovies cancellation of the rest of the tour was going to affect us, or if we were going to keep going, or what was going to happen. There was just one thing after another going wrong.

Steve: You had a pretty rough time with the press, didn’t you?

Rob: Well, we got a few unkind reviews, but we got a lot of great receptions at the gigs. It’s not accurate to say…a lot of people have perceived us as having gone down badly in the UK, but it’s not really true. We really killed at lots and lots of places where we played, and there actually were some occasions where there was some real yellow journalism going on. There was gig we did at the Hope and Anchor where, I think it was the third one we played there, and the previous two had been all right, too…I guess that’s why they had us back…and we killed it. The place was stacked. And this bastard from the NME, I think…could’ve been Sounds, but I think it was the NME…he reviewed the gig as being a real pile of shit and saying how people were walking out and criticized us for having six members, for Christ sakes, shit like this. But he was referring in his review to our songs by the names that only we would know, sort of abbreviated versions of the names.

And what turned out was that Patrick Miles, our publicist that I mentioned before from Adelaide, he saw this guy grab a set list and piss off after about three songs. So he didn’t stick around. So he reviewed the whole gig, shit canned us completely in a magazine that had a vast influence both in the UK and across Europe…

Deniz: And in Australia, too…

Rob: Yeah, and all this sort of shit was getting back, and the perception was that we were doing really badly. Now that was one gig where we really killed it.

Deniz: We killed it. We actually did three encores that gig, and it was a riot. People were throwing chairs, and it was unbelievable. And we’d NEVER get three encores – that was the only time in our life where we ever did it.

Rob: Yeah, that’s absolutely true, and even if there were a few isolated gigs where we didn’t play so well, the majority of times we really put in and we got a great response. Like that first gig at the Marquee was fucking great! So I think we were pretty harshly treated at times.

Deniz: It was pretty inspiring to play at a place like the Marquee, when you’ve seen pictures of the Who playing there and the Stones.

Rob: The dressing room was covered with graffiti with the names of all these different groups, and I was just hoping that it was all genuine stuff and hadn’t just been scrawled up there in the last couple of weeks. Because it had all these famous band names written everywhere. It’s really marvelous to play there. It’s a good stage – a great sounding stage.

Steve: Looking back now, even the Hope and Anchor is a hell of a place to have played. A lot of great bands played there – a lot of the pub rock bands and stuff like that.

Rob: Yeah, well I saw the Police there for 60p and there was only about 8 people in the crowd. They had no profile whatsoever. I actually didn’t like them much at all, though I thought the drummer was pretty shit hot.

Steve: But guys like Dr. Feelgood and Eddie and the Hotrods played there.

Rob: Yeah, but I never caught those.

Steve: On the second album, Living Eyes, you were in the middle of doing it when Sire dumped you and that led to the studio holding the tapes…can you talk about that?

Rob: Well, Deniz is the expert on this episode, because things went on in relation to this that I had no idea of at the time.

Deniz: All I know about that is that we recorded it at or around the time we were being dropped from Sire, so there was no release outlet for it at that moment. As far as payment of the studio I have no idea, but the studio did keep the tapes, so the tapes were available when it came time to do the remix in 1995. We were able to remix from the 24 track masters. The studio had maintained the tapes all that time.

Steve: How did you manage to pull out the tape that was used for the original release of Living Eyes?

Deniz: That was burned off a safety copy of the quarter inch tape.

Steve: So they knew you were taking it and they didn’t have any problem with that?

Deniz: No, they didn’t have any problem with that. But it was just a safety copy and was never meant to be used as a master. But we retained the rights to our stuff in Australia and New Zealand and Sire only had the copyright for the rest of the world for that record.

Steve: When did that first get released in Australia?

Deniz: 1981.

Steve: Was it on Traflagar?

Deniz: Yeah, Trafalgar. Or was it Warners?

Rob: Shit, I don’t remember. It might have been Warners.

Deniz: Trafalgar might have… no, I think it was Trafalgar, wasn’t it?

Rob: I’m sitting not too far from a copy of it, so maybe I can haul it out. I just remember the times when we were recording that, the morale of the band was pretty low. Deniz was producing the record, and he was down in the studio a lot of the time, but we were in the process of a lot of infighting back up the hill at the manor house. Socially we were disintegrating at the same time as we were putting this album together, so it was a pretty fraught time. I don’t have very pleasant memories of that particular recording.

Steve: Bands are pretty fragile things in general, so I think all the stresses you’d been through sound pretty tough.

Rob: Yeah, it was pretty hard at the time.

Steve: In hindsight, are there things you can see that might have been better, like if you had just bailed out on the tour altogether and not gone when things started to go bad, do you think that would have made a difference?

Rob: It’s kind of hard to say, isn’t it?

Deniz: I never thought of it. I think everything that happened was pretty inevitable. We were just on that path.

Steve: Can you talk about the sequence of events that led to the remixing of Living Eyes in the mid 90s.

Rob: I think it was the guy from Red Eye Records who went to some great lengths, but I wasn’t terribly involved in all that. But I know the tapes were in bad shape and they had to be baked and all that sort of thing that they do to tapes that have been sitting in one spot for 20 years or whatever it was. I don’t know what to think about whether it was a good idea to remix some of that stuff or not, but when you have the opportunity to do those things, it’s hard to resist, I suppose.

Steve: My own view is that it’s one of the rare cases where the remastering and remixing really made a noticeable difference. There’s so many things that come out remixed or remastered where my reaction is: I don’t see any difference that would matter to anybody.

Rob: Sometimes it can affect the atmosphere and does it in a very complementary way. Sometimes people think you can make a record a lot better just by tweaking the treble…all the tops and this sort of shit. I notice this from old records that are remastered into CDs, suddenly you can hear all this stuff around the cymbals and so forth and people for some reason equate that with being an improvement. But I think we’ve actually improved the atmosphere of the original stuff, so the remixes probably toughened up the songs, anyway.

We left a few little things out here and there. It might be interesting for people who were acquainted with the first releases to compare them. I know when I got a copy of that Raw Power remix, the relatively recent one, and saw what was left in as opposed to what was on the original release of that. It’s kind of fascinating to hear what a band will do when they’ve gained a measure of control over their stuff, and how they must feel in retrospect and decide "oh, I’m going to sling that out because I’d never liked that anyway", whatever it is.

Steve: The one I really notice the difference on is "Crying Sun". It seems like the balance between the keyboard and guitars has changed substantially from the original to the remix.

Rob: Yeah, well, with "Crying Sun", the original mixing of that was a very contentious episode, so we were probably pretty conscious in the remixing of that one and we made a distinct improvement.

Steve: How did the reissues lead into the reunion tours? Was the sequence of events that you did the two reissues and then the tours happened after that?

Deniz: Yeah, I think the reunion tour was about nine months later.

Steve: My understanding is that those tours were pretty fantastically successful, is that right?

Rob: We had a good time, particularly the first one. We played to huge crowds, because a lot of them were big festival gigs around the country. That was pretty good. I think the band represented itself pretty well. We played a lot of big shows and were able to hold a really big room, really get their attention, and deliver a great show. I had a great time, particularly on that first tour.

Steve: Were those the biggest shows you ever played?

Rob: Oh, yeah, by far.

Steve: Were you surprised that there was that much of demand to see you?

Deniz: Yeah, I was. I had no idea how it was going to go over. But there was a lot of interest. I guess that’s one of the advantages of obscurity, that it generates interest. I suppose that people are attracted to things that are generally unavailable and obscure.

Steve: It seems like since you’ve split up, the importance of the band continues to grows steadily throughout the years. There’s more and more bands that are influenced by Radio Birdman, and people just don’t stop talking about Radio Birdman, and so the interest seems to just constantly build.

Rob: It’s bound to die out one day!

Deniz: Splitting up was probably our best move ever.

Rob: You can’t be too obscure, or no one will ever want you to come back in the first place.

Steve: Well, what is there about Radio Birdman that gives you the most satisfaction when you look back…particular songs where you feel like you really nailed it, or shows that stand out…what is there that really makes you feel proud about having been in that band?

Rob: Well, for me, I’m gratified that people really regard the band as making a difference in their lives. That’s a good thing, and I feel good about…there was a certain feeling in about the first year or so of the band, I thought that we were doing something that carried a lot of meaning for me. It’s rather hard to describe. I think it comes from just being…well Deniz and I were very close, and we were pariahs. We went out and wherever we turned up with that band we caused some shit. To me it seemed like that had meaning in itself. I found it really gratifying. Acceptance is one thing, but somehow the feeling that you’re breaking some kind of new ground is a special feeling. I can still get in touch with that, and I rather cherish that.

Deniz: I’d echo what Rob just said. To me the early days of never knowing if you were going to get beaten up or have equipment busted or get banned from the place or chased by the police, and persevering and still doing the music that we wanted to do on our own terms, regardless. Even if it’s two songs and they pull the plug, we still never compromised in the early days. We never did anything that we didn’t want to do. And as far as I’m concerned, we really stuck it to the established order of the day as far as the music scene goes. And that’s what I find gratifying, much more so than any sales of reissues now or general acceptance.

I mean, I’m glad also that people get enjoyment out of it. Obviously that’s great, but I think that for me, what I look back on most fondly are those early days of hardship, really. We had something going that was worth fighting for.

Steve: What was different seems to have been the intensity of commitment that you had; when you compare that to other bands who were trying to find a way to get popular without having something they were sticking to that was what they wanted to do. That whole idea of commitment to your music was not there for most bands.