March 18, 2012 · 6:58 pm

Hazy Space plays Childhood Problems

Hi, Tony here with my first post of the year.
 
This post is a tale of two cities, two bands, and one song (well, plus another one for good measure). After Trash Of All Nations had finally run its course back in the early nineties, Guy and I transformed its remnants into Childhood Problems. Such is ever the way with bands. The song, one of mine, was basically our theme song, and we would have played it most times we performed. When Childhood Problems performed our eponymous song, Guy used to to do a rap in the middle, with a few basic standard lines, then improvising to suit the occasion. It added a certain edge. I managed to find what appears to be some cover art by Guy for a Childhood Problems demo cassette tape. As far as I can see I don’t have a copy of it. Maybe with a bit of luck we’ll unearth one as we delve deeper into Guy’s archives. In small type at the bottom of the cover is the line “Live in our Living Room”. That would have been Guy’s place in Gibbon St in New Farm. When Guy’s grandmother who owned it died, it got tied up in probate for years, and Guy ended up living there for a fairly nominal rent for the best part of a decade. A modest sized cottage by today’s standards, it would have been built no later than the 1870’s. It was seriously run down, but it had real character. I have some great memories of that place.

John Sullivan and I formed Hazy Space out of the remnants of Beige SA in Adelaide towards the end of  2001 (see the June 2011 posting on this, also note the recurring theme of the regular mutation of bands). With the absence of Patrick O’Grady, who was the driving force behind Beige SA, we began to do more of my songs, as well as John’s original compositions. I did write a few new ones during the life of the band, but naturally we delved into my “back catalogue”. Like most bands doing their own original material, we did some covers too, but very much in our own style.
 

John Sullivan


From memory it was Gary aka Billy Nudgel (again see previous posting) who organised the recording session featured here, two or three hours with a friend of his who was keen to try out his new computer recording setup. The second song of mine was another one which we had played regularly in Childhood Problems, “Nobody Wants To Know You Anymore”. We also did one of John’s songs and one of Gary’s. I might post them up at a later stage, but John’s song in particular is done no real favours by the recording. As a general aside I have serious reservations about recording engineers who are not musicians. However I am thankful that we do at least have this recording.
 

Me and Patrick O'Grady in Beige SA


I have just recently been back to Adelaide for the first time in eight years after living there for almost six years up to September 2003. I stayed at Patrick’s place, then John’s, and generally had a great time. Thanks to you both for your hospitality. The main excuse for going down was an event for the Adelaide Fringe Festival 2012 celebrating a venue for local bands that Patrick organised  which started in 1974 and continued for some years. The do-it-yourself similarities with the Brisbane alternative music scene are striking. I will make this the subject of my next posting.
 

Club Contagious


I am including a couple of handbills from gigs at the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel. Club Contagious was a government sponsored monthly event especially for people with disabilities, some in wheelchairs, etc., others with intellectual disabilities. They always seemed to have a really good time, and the event generally had a really good positive vibe to it. We played there several times, both as Beige SA and as Hazy Space.The Balcony Bar gig we organised ourselves,  in 2000 as Beige SA and a year later in 2001 as Hazy Space. Life would be a lot easier for musicians if a few more pubs that were regular music venues were open to letting a band have a room on a Saturday night and keep the door, with the pub settling for the bar takings. I doubt if you could even do this at “The Guv” now.
 

The Second Balcony Bar Gig at "The Guv"


Finally here is the link to download the songs.
 

https://rapidshare.com/files/2844463022/hazy_space.rar

 

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October 21, 2011 · 11:06 am

Sweet Marijuana

Hi, Tony here. It’s been a while, but this posting at least follows on from the last one from Guy about his bust for a single joint. This song has a very basic theme – marijuana good, prohibition bad. Marijuana is back in the headlines with the arrest and possible jailing for years of a 14 year old Australian boy in Bali. What has really made my blood boil has been the comments from his fellow Australians on news sites, Q&A, etc., to the effect that if he has done the crime, he should do the time; ie it’s perfectly OK if he does six years or more in an Indonesian jail for a stick of pot.

The local product, Nimbin 2000

The local product, Nimbin 2000

I wrote this song for a competition as part of the 2004 Nimbin Mardi Grass. There were three heats held in the Rainbow Café. The winner was decided by popular acclaim. At the end of my heat the two judges spent at least a quarter of an hour playing back their recording and checking the levels on the applause to try to split me and a Swedish duo. In the end the Swedish duo won out. Later on in the finals, they lost to a local entry, and finished as runners-up. Some months later I made this recording at my friend Kim’s place in the Valley. The set-up was fairly primitive – a Soundblaster gaming sound card and a headset mike, plus an old version of Cubase. This was the first time I had ever recorded on computer myself. It was of course a steep learning curve. I gave the finished song to a few friends, including in Nimbin the following year, but it was never circulated publicly or played on air. Recently, looking for things to add to this blog, I found the disk that had the original files on it, and I was able to remix it to at least get a better balanced result than my first effort.

Outside Parliament House October 1996

Both Guy and myself have been involved in campaigning for drug law reform over many years. The first time was in 1986, when the Bjelke-Petersen government introduced the Drugs Misuse Act. It had many draconian provisions, including mandatory life sentences for possession of two grams of cocaine or heroin. As a way of expressing my opposition to this particular piece of tyranny, I stood as an independent candidate in the Queensland state election of 1986. With about twenty supporters as company, including Guy, I was arrested in the Queen St Mall smoking what was actually a dummy joint (comfrey leaf), and became the first person to be charged under the new legislation. The charges were later dropped.

Later on, following the demise of Joh and the Nationals, Wayne Goss’s government started a process of reviewing the drug laws through the CJC (Criminal Justice Commission). In 1993, myself and two of my friends, John Jiggens and Dusan Bojic, started HEMP (Help End Marijuana Prohibition) to campaign for positive changes to the law. We were very active for a period of about four years, with numerous demonstrations, pickets, forums, public meetings, and concerts. Some of the demos were quite large, with over 2,000 people.

Cannabis Cup Nimbin 2000


The review process in 1993 got off  to a promising start with Phil Dickie, the journalist who had so much to do with bringing about the Fitzgerald Royal Commission, in charge of the process. An excellent discussion paper was released in July, followed by a series of well organised and well attended public meetings. Later Phil was replaced with no explanation by Dr David Brereton who authored the final report. Phil’s response to the report was he headlined “It’s criminal what they’re not doing”. He referred scathingly to the CJC’s “timid little report”. Clearly Brereton was the right man for the job. In the end some of the worst provisions of the Drugs Misuse Act such as the mandatory life sentences were changed, otherwise it was business as usual.

As a part of HEMP’s campaign I again ran as a candidate in the 1995 state election, along with Guy and two other HEMP members. At a large demo of over 2,000 I was arrested for the second time for smoking a joint in front of Parliament House. The first time is shown in the photo above. As part of his campaign Guy changed his name to Guy Freemarijuana. John and Nigel Quinlan used the same tactic in later election campaigns, including for the Federal senate. The powers that be hated this so much that later the federal government changed the election laws to stop this happening.

Judging the Cannabis Cup 2000

Although the campaign lost some of its intensity after ther first four years, people have continued to agitate around Australia on this issue, and stand candidates in elections. In early September I attended a demo in King George Square organised by a group of students etc. who have revived the old name of NORML. HEMP was registered as a federal party in 2004, and Guy and I ran for the senate in Queensland. They don’t make it easy for small parties, changing the rules whenever necessary, and HEMP was later deregistered, but just recently it has again been registered as a federal party.

I could rant endlessly about this issue, but let me just point out one piece of research (p. 114)  in the original CJC discussion paper which shows that 10 to 15% of cannabis users are upper white collar workers who make up 1.8% of arrests, 30% of users are lower white collar workers who make up 3.5% of arrests, 25% of users are blue collar workers who make up 14.7% of arrests, unskilled workers make up 5% of users and 19.3% of arrests, unemployed make up 5 to 15% of users and 46.1 % of arrests, and students make up 5 to 15% of users and 7.1% of arrests. In other words if you are part of the upper half or society, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. On the other hand, if you are poor, look out.

https://rapidshare.com/files/1005377826/sweetmj.mp3

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July 15, 2011 · 5:43 pm

It was on the table..

Hi, Guy here with a with a little tale about an afternoon many moons ago.

It was on the table..

It was 1.45 on a sunny Saturday Autumn afternoon and I was minding my own business. I had just smoked a joint and left a second on my kitchen table for when I finished doing some housework. Alas, I never got to smoke that joint.

Four eager young Detectives came bounding up my stairs waving a warrant,
and whilst in the consequent trash & search
they were unable to come up with my stash,
they DID manage to find that careless joint,
left lying on the kitchen table in plain view.

Well shit you got me. I’m a criminal.

*

*

The interview didn’t last very long. After quickly disposing of a series of ridiculous questions, we quickly got into a loop. Whenever they asked a pertinent question I merely answered by stating the obvious, that is I just repeated the mantra

“It was was on the kitchen table”

in answer to most of their questions. Inevitably they got tired and grumpy. You can sense their growing frustration on the tape. I like the way how, by quibbling over minor details, I was able to force them onto the defensive. “All I said to you,”she stuttered at one stage, in self-justificatory frustration. Hoho.

And so it soon ended. When asked if I had any further, final comment, I lent forward and mumbled, “Yes. Can I just say this has been a complete waste of everyone’s time.”

*

So there it was, about 3.30pm and they turned me back out onto the streets with a bail form and a cassette tape of the interview. The whole thing was no more than a nuisance, a small fine at worst, but still I was vaguely depressed. It really WAS all such a waste of time. Mine especially.

Then I had a Eureka moment. For I saw how I could turn the afternoons series of unfortunate events into an Anarchist Art Project worthy of Marcel Duchamp. I started to laugh wildly, startling passers by..

Racing home I had a quick joint from my stash and popped the interview tape into my Tascam 4-track cassette porta-studio. Working quickly I added a drum track, guitar, harmonica and effects to the vocals. By 5.30pm the musical assemblage was complete. It was time for stage two of my plan.

Strolling down to nearby Fortitude Valley, I made my way to local ratbag radio station 4-ZZZ just in time for Saturday nights regular “Request Show”, where subscribers to the station could ring up and request a song to be played. Walking unannounced into the studio, I told the announcer my story and persuaded him to play my “request”. He saw the humour and so it was that the first song played on the Request Show that night was “It was on the Table” while the announcer and I shared a smoke out the back.

The whole process of getting raided, arrested, interviewed, bailed, turning it into an art piece and getting played on the radio was a little over four hours. A good days work, I thought.

**

PS. Eventually I went to court and got something like 40hrs community service which I idled away making cups of tea in a community “neighbourhood centre”. And so, having paid my debt to society, I returned to plan even more daring crimes, and even more audacious Art. A big thank you to the QLD Police for their co-operation in this project.

**

https://rapidshare.com/files/2182980201/It_was_on_the_table.rar

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June 18, 2011 · 12:49 pm

Hazy Space

Two Million Too Many

Hi, Tony here with my first posting in ages. The truth is, I’ve almost run out of recordings that are good enough to bother posting up, but we’ll be hearing more from Guy soon as he dredges through his archives.

This song is basically a rant about the war on drugs, a peculiarly American form of tyranny disguised as benevolence, which they have managed to foist onto the rest of the world. The title refers to the number of prisoners in jail in the USA. The current figures according to the US Department of Justice are 208,118 federal, 1,405,622 state and 760,400 local prisoners, making a grand total of  2,374,140. To this you can add 4,203,967 adults on probation and 819,308 on parole. This means that more than one in a hundred adults in the USA are prisoners, almost a quarter of the world’s prison population. With the probation and parole figures, about one in thirty adults are under some form of correctional control. From 1980 to 2003 the number of prisoners quadrupled. Since then it has begun to plateau out. Along with tougher sentencing, the war on drugs has been a major contributing factor. The number of drug offenders in jail now is fourteen times more than in 1980. The war on drugs has also been used by the US government as a major tool for some of the more coercive and brutal aspects of its foreign policy. The word imperialism springs to mind.

 Hazy Space was a duo I played in in Adelaide for two years from mid 2001 to mid 2003. The other half of the duo was was synthesiser player John Sullivan. Prior to that we were both members of Patrick O’Grady’s group Beige, but when Patrick fell ill and wasn’t able to continue we decided to continue on as a duo and became Hazy Space. For a while we had Mr Billy Nudgel on vocals as well, from memory for about six months. John had a practice room set up in his home at Grange, and we used to get together once a week to rehearse, maybe twice if we had a gig. At least half of those would have been at “The Guv”, The Governor Hindmarsh Hotel in Hindmarsh, a venue that was, and still is, the heart and soul of the live music scene in Adelaide. I also remember playing at two or three pubs in the city, and I’ve still got a handbill that shows that one of those was the Directors Hotel in Gouger St. That was for Scala, a venue dedicated specifically to original music (there’s never enough of those). We also played a couple of times at Rob Scott’s bookshop Bookends, in Unley.

John used to write his own songs, and his musical background and tastes (techno, with more than a hint of disco) were very different to mine, which made for  some strong contrasts in our sets. On my songs I would be playing rhythm guitar, but on John’s songs I was able to feature as a soloist on alto sax or lead guitar. We did do some covers as well, but very much in our own way.

John’s setup evolved over time and got quite interesting in the end. He’d made his own synth stand, starting with the traditional ironing board with an extra shelf built on top, with his old Yamaha synth on the bottom, and the more recently acquired Casio MZ 2000 on top (by most accounts perhaps the best ever Casio keyboard, it even had a floppy disk drive for MIDI files ,which was unusual then). He also had a small MIDI box he used for strings and the like, a Korg Trinity rack unit which had a really great sound, and an old Roland drum machine (like there weren’t enough drums already in the two keyboards and the Trinity). He also had a small Yamaha mono box which was actually designed to be used with a wind controller, which John had also bought. This was a synth that you blew like a sax, a very interesting instrument, and as the sax player I was the one who got to play it. But John developed a taste for using the box (tone generator, for those who must use the correct jargon) as a solo voice from one of the keyboards, and after that I didn’t get a look-in on the wind controller too often. As though all this wasn’t enough, he also had a long low box he’d built that he used to perch his stool on top of. This was his stomp box, and a mike was fitted underneath for maximum effect. The number of leads running around a setup like this was rather daunting, on top of which you can add the internal switching with these different units all talking to each other. I did learn a thing or two about synths and MIDI though.

The song was recorded in the practice room in a single take on John’s old reel to reel two track. We then took the tape to community radio station 5UV (now Radio Adelaide), where we overdubbed John, myself and Billy on the chorus, and converted it into CD format. I paid to have about 30 CDs made up with the label printed on (so easy these days, not so then) and circulated them in October 2001 to the usual community radio stations, etc.  Oh, and on this occasion I did the cover art myself. Thanks especially to John Sullivan for the memories.

https://rapidshare.com/files/790319923/2_Million_2_Many.rar

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April 1, 2011 · 10:24 am

“The 4 Hit Packet”

Hi, Guy here with my second blog on Trash Of All Nations.

Trash of All Nations

“The 4 Hit Packet”

Recorded July/August 1987 in St Kilda, Melbourne. Packaged in brown paper.

personnel:

Guy Katz; Guitars, vocals, percussion, pinball machine
Fats Parameter; Guitar, saxophone, harmonica
John Treason; bass
Ingrid X; drums

content

Side 1: Raining in Penang
Cage in Your Heart
Side2: Bad Scenes (in the Dressing Room)
Dirty Little River

It’s not easy for me to listen to this record, for it takes me back to a time which was not very happy at all. To paraphrase William S Burroughs, it’s like stepping back into a poisoned river from which I was lucky to escape. Never mind, let’s go for a splash…

It was 1987. The cold war was in its final phase. Most of Trash had drifted down to Melbourne in dribs and drabs, escaping from the horrendous atmosphere of oppression that was Queensland in the last days of the Bjelke Peterson regime. It was no place for anarchists. We were basically cultural if not political exiles, and exiles are rarely happy people, being generally beset by anger, powerlessness and despair.

The Qld anarchists hooked up with the Melbourne Anarchist squatting movement, and Trash of All Nations had fetched up in a rather nice squat in St Kilda. A fireplace in every room and you could crawl thru a hole in the back fence to get to the beach. Nevertheless, away from our native land a kind of moral malaise seized us. Half the band were on smak and the other half were drunk. Aside from the squats no venue was interested in putting on a Brisbane anarchist band. There was much madness, overdoses and an attack by a skinhead with a meat cleaver. I think the song “Bad Scenes in the Dressing Room” on side two sums up the general vibe nicely.

So in an effort to get things going again I decided we had better put out a record. Give us all a project to raise morale.

So I sold my beloved record collection and my childhood coin collection to raise the money to hire a recording studio and get 500 records pressed. Perhaps I should have kept the coins and records, who can say? Still the die was cast.

Trash in Melbourne squat 1987

We used the old gambit of cutting recording costs by hooking up with a “sound engineering student” at one of those dodgy “Audio-engineering colleges” with him passing us off as a recording project for his assessment. His name was Tony as I recall. Anyhoo, the usual studio battle then took place between the engineer who thought he was a producer and the band that had its own ideas.

One of the major problems with this record was the lack of a drummer. Oh we had a drummer all right, it was just she couldn’t drum. Ingrid turned up at the squat one night when we were sans drummer, and told us she used to drum in a girl punk band in Paris called Nitro-Glycerine. Cool, we thought, and signed her up on the spot.

Later, on further inquiry, it transpired that Nitro-Glycerine had only ever had one rehearsal and one gig before disintegrating. But by the time we worked out what her drumming skills were really like, it was too late. No-one had the heart to sack her and besides the bass-player wanted to bonk her. So we solved the problem when recording by mixing the drums right down so you couldn’t really hear them, except for the occasional splashes of cymbals we left for a bit of colour. So it goes.

Thus the percussion duties on the first track, “Raining in Penang” largely fell to me, banging away with a stick on an empty beer bottle. At least I could keep time and helped create a sparse, minimalist feel.. On the plus side also Tony’s evocative saxaphone curlicues did much to create the mood in this song.

Sadly Linda Loop was no longer with us by this stage, and her trumpet was sadly missed, but Tony Kneipp (aka Fats Parameter) filled in ably wherever called for. Tony was the multi-instramentalist on this recording, playing sax, lead guitar and harmonica. His harp-playing on our Jailhouse blues number, Cage in Your Heart, written in the shadow of the Boggo Road jail riots, really blew up a storm while I wailed and raved. Yes, despite the lurching, shambolic drums I feel the band really kicked out the jams on that track. Nice and raw.

“Dirty Little River” my eco-protest song about the polluted toxicity of the Brisbane River (still relevant, sadly, in 2011) has a completely different sound than the other three tracks. It sounds like it was recorded live in a particularly sleazy night-club.

What happened was we decided to horrify the college-trained engineering student sitting at the desk by doing the opposite of everything he’d been taught was right. Thus instead of going directly thru the desk for a nice hygienic signal we plugged the microphones into a guitar amp and did the vocals and sax thru that at the same time to get a nice gritty sound. Then we recorded me playing a pin-ball machine and dubbed that over the top. And we put the bass thru a dirty old fuzz box. How we laughed. Personally I think it worked. I like my yelping vocals on this track and the reference to that old convict era ballad, “Moreton Bay”

I organised a tour to promote the record and that was when the band really disintegrated.

(Some day I’ll tell you the story of that tour. Perhaps when the statutes of limitations on various crimes have expired.) While our previous records had done well in the alternative charts this one was like poison. No shows to promote it. No-one reviewed it. No shop wanted to stock it. Perhaps designing a cover to resemble a folded up packet of heroin, and calling it the Four Hit Packet was a marketing mistake. We thought it funny (laughs to self).

Trash back in Brisbane, last incarnation 1989

This was pretty much the end of Trash, although we did reform back in Brisbane briefly in the early nineties. Then we decided to stop flogging that horse and Tony & I went on to form Childhood Problems. After that I’d had enough of music and bands and I went back to poetry, writing and art and occasionally making sounds to go with my poems which is where I started and is where I’m at today.

Guy Katz, ex guitarist. (Thank god that’s over!)

http://rapidshare.com/files/455338209/4_Hit_Packet.rar

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November 20, 2010 · 2:33 pm

Say Goodbye To The Queen

Hi, Tony here.

I recorded this song in October 1999, shortly before the referendum on the republic. It is essentially reflecting on a basic irony – while we were still getting into a collective lather over whether we should finally assert our full independence from Britain, in reality our allegiance and subservience has long since been transferred to the USA. The recent debate over our role in the war in Afghanistan has once again highlighted this.

This seems a good time to post this up as the media gets into a lather about the engagement of Will and Kate and the impending spectacle of their royal wedding (with constant invocations of the ghost of Lady Di).

The prospect of King William of Australia has already galvanised the republican debate again, although we are unlikely to have another referendum soon. I suspect there is very little enthusiasm for a King Charles of Australia, or a King William of Australia, but neither is there any widespread feeling that a change is urgently needed. The referendum in 1999 was of course set up by Howard to fail, and to postpone change for as long as possible.

For those who want Australia to be a republic, naturally I agree, and the sooner the better, but as I commented at the time, just as importantly, Australia badly needs a Bill of Rights. We also need a much more independent foreign policy.

At the time I recorded this I was living in Adelaide. I recorded it at Big Cactus Studios, a small studio upstairs in the beautiful old Grace Emily Hotel in Waymouth St, a well-known venue for live music.

I had a couple of dozen CDs printed with the above logo, pinched from the 20c coin, under the name Fats Parameter, and circulated them to community radio stations (and Aunty) around the country. Basically this was a throwaway ditty for the occasion, with a short use-by date, and of necessity produced in some haste. But I was happy with the song, so here it is.

http://rapidshare.com/files/431949999/Say_Goodbye_To_The_Queen.rar

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November 5, 2010 · 8:50 am

THE TAPELOOPS – “Fire in Heaven”

Hi, it’s Guy here with my second posting on this blog.

THE TAPELOOPS – “Fire in Heaven”
4 track e.p., released 1984.
track list; Side 1., Working for the Government/ The Landlord Said
Side 2., I’ve been to Heaven/ Luv Song.
Guy Kats; vocals, geetar. Linda Loop; vocals, trumpet, percussion,
keyboards. John Treason, bass, percussion. Scott O Keefe, drums.

This was the Tapeloop’s first vinyl artifact, although we’d been selling our independently produced cassettes since our inception in January 1981. Our early material tended to the experimental and avant-garde, but by the time of this record our musical skills had deteriorated to your basic three chord thrash. The same thing happened to Split Enz. (This is what happens when you play lots of gigs in pubs, kiddies. You end up doing only your faster, ‘rock’ type songs in order to appease the beer swilling proles.)

Be that as it may, by the time of this recording we had replaced our zither with an electric guitar, the plastic trumpet with a real one, and the percussion flower pots with a real snare and hi-hat. John Treason had been working with the Original Duo of me and Linda Loop for a long time, and we had of late been going through a series of our friends looking for someone who could keep a beat in some sort of fashion. This process ended with Scott O’Keefe occupying the drummers stool until the Tapeloops morphed into Trash of All Nations.

We hired a small recording studio (can’t remember the name), whose main attraction was that they didn’t mind if we smoked pot in the studio. Unfortunately the owner/engineer came with the mixing desk as part of the package. He wanted to play at being producer and he had his own ideas on how we should sound. So the recording became a battle of wills between his efforts to try and make us sound like everybody else, and our pig-headed insistence on doing things in our own primitive fashion. For one thing our primitive/perverse collection of drums and objects masquerading as a drumkit appalled him. He wasn’t impressed with our self-taught drummer’s style either. Our politics also were a mystery to him.

Our politics were a mystery to him

The main problem, from my point of view, was that he had no idea how I wanted my guitar to sound. Not understanding the swamp/grunge aesthetic, he methodically stripped away the lovely wash of lower range frequencies I employed that played such a large part in establishing our “sound” on stage. Alas I was too much of a novice in the studio to be able to seize control, and as a result the guitar on this record is nothing like our live sound at the time.

Playing Workin 4 da Govt at the old Arcadia Hotel with Lin on geetar. We liked to swap instruments.

Nonetheless, ignoring my expectations of what I wanted it to sound like, and dealing instead with the actuality, it has to be said that this recording is not without its charms, in particular the songs on side one where the fabulous Mz Linda Loop (known to her groupies as “the Cockroach Girl” handled the vocal chores. Possibly this is because we spent more time working on those tracks. By the time it came to record the songs that I sang on (Heaven & Luv Song) we were running out of money so we kinda of rushed through it. As a result I’ve never been happy with them frankly. Worked well live running the two songs together and it starts well I feel on the record, but the mix doesn’t build the energy levels up to a sufficent peak. John Treason’s bass sounds really good, as does Linda Loop’s trumpet and my voice is ok too, but the overall mix just doesn’t gel.

Tapeloops live underground at Macs. Being unable to count, we used visual cues.

Really we should have taken more time and added more layers, built up the sound, etc but “Time is Money (Bastard)” as an old girlfriend used to say, so instead we just mixed down what we had at the end of the studio time. Possibly we should have just released a two track single, but we wanted to give people as much material as possible for their money. In this digital age none of these considerations would come up.

I still like the songs on side one though, both “Working for the Government” and “The Landlord Said”. “Working for the Government”‘s Cramp-esque Hillbilly 12-bar workout with its chirpy-political motormouth spiel was always popular at our gigs, while “The Landlord  Said” has a strange, limping industrial charm that builds relentlessly into a fervent pandemonic crescendo, complete with what sounds to me like a wailing cover of the Star Trek theme thrown in over the top. Linda denies this and says its actually a descending fifth harmonic to the bassline, or something like that. She’s the real musician. I was more of a sound artist who liked making different noises. Never could tune a guitar by ear. Well, not the guitar I had, which cost about eighty dollars secondhand. I bought it off a man in Fortitude Valley, out of the back of a station-wagon, one Saturday morning, as I recollect. Seems a bit dodgy now I think about it. Never did stay in tune long, even with new strings and machine-heads. I stuck paste jewels and gee-gaws all over it so no-one would steal it. My strategy worked. Years later when we were on tour in Sydney the locals stole everything from the band’s van except my guitar. It was just too ugly.

Back then in Brisbane there was nothing to do but hang around.

Incidently, my other guitar was REALLY ugly. A freak Frankenstein’s monster of a thing from someone’s twisted nightmare of a basement-workshop. Some pervert had taken a Maton guitar and ‘done things to it’. The rusty mutant pickups that had been put in stuck out like the bolts on Herman Munster’s neck, The bridge looked like it was made from a dead man’s dentures and for some reason the sides had been ripped out and replaced with paddle pop sticks, thickly lacquered over. In fact lacquer had been poured over the whole assemblage in an attempt to give it a unifying aesthetic.

It crackled and buzzed and was unusable for anything except playing slide on one or two songs. Ah I loved that guitar. All ‘real’ guitarists looked at it with horror. (you can hear it today on the Trash of All Nations song, “Coffins of Gold” available of course on the A Records site.
http://arecordsbrisbane.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/they-call-us-trash/

Interesting historical sidebar; When we sent the TRASH master tapes to the EMI factory in Sydney to be pressed, they rang us back in a panic, saying that there was this terrible crackling noise at the start of the tape and did we want them to remove it? Oh no, I said, its supposed to be like that. Its just me plugging my awful guitar in. So they left the sound in. But you could tell it bugged them.

Getting back to the record, I am responsible for most of the lyric content, but Linda wrote the words for The Landlord Said, so she is responsible for the lines about worms. As for the lyrics to Luv Song, my only excuse is that I was in Luv, or a reasonable fascimile thereof. Lyrics for Heaven? I was probably on some sort of drug.

We printed the cover out on a photocopy machine and sat around for weeks with our friends colouring them all in, in wildly different styles. Thus no two covers were the same. I’ll include here pictures of the cover both colored in and a plain version so you can colour it in yourself if you like.

Well, I know you young folk don’t have long attention spans so I’ll stop writing now. Bye.

http://rapidshare.com/files/428815372/tapeloops.rar

Guy

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