Can't Stop It!

couple of years ago I decided I wanted to put out a compilation of Australian post-punk bands from the late 70's and early 80's. I've always been a fan of that period of music. It seems to me to be a time when bands began to do away with much of the posturing and belligerence of 1976 punk, keeping its best principals (anyone can be in a band, passion is more important than technique, etc) and using them to explore and experiment.

British groups such as The Raincoats, This Heat, The Slits, and their American counterparts The Bush Tetras, The Contortions, and ESG, are some of my favourite bands ever. All of these bands are very well loved and respected around the world, comprehensively reissued, the subject of books, magazine articles, and theses.

As well as loving those bands I also loved Australian bands like Voigt/465, Essendon Airport, and The Primitive Calculators. Where was the respect and attention due to them? They were just as good and in many cases better than their overseas contemporaries. But their music had been almost forgotten, overlooked, and never reissued.

I'm by no means an expert on Australian post-punk music. I didn't live through the times - I was only four in 1978. I didn't even live in Australia until 1980. But I had picked up enough great records from the time to realise there was a fantastic compilation dying to be made.

I asked my friend David Nichols to help me. David is old enough to have been going to see bands and buying records in the early 80's, plus he is a real post-punk / new wave enthusiast like myself. On top of that he is a journalist and used to run his own record label, so I knew he was ideally qualified to help me out. We made a list of our favourite bands. The next step was to track them down.

For some bands this was not difficult. Philip Brophy from

is a lecturer at RMIT. Dave Graney from the Moodists is an Australian celebrity, and David had interviewed him a number of times. David Chesworth from Essendon Airport is a noted composer and leads the David Chesworth Ensemble.

Other bands proved to be more difficult to find. Most of the people in the bands on Can't Stop It! don't play music anymore. Many of them had not been heard of for more than a decade.

Slowly, though, people came up with phone numbers, email addresses, and other leads. I scoured phone books ringing everyone with the right surname until I found who I was looking for, or at least their aunt. Once I had gotten in contact with one band, they would have phone numbers or email addresses for other bands that they were friends with, and the compilation got rolling from there. For the most part everyone was very helpful and happy to be involved.

Once we had gotten in touch with bands and got them involved in the project the next thing was to get a master of their track. This is where things got complicated. A lot of bands had lost the reel to reel masters of their records decades ago, or had kept them under the house and let mould grow on them. Others did not even have a single copy of their own record. Of course some people were incredibly organised and had already transferred their masters to DAT or CD for safekeeping years ago.

Many bands transferred their track to CD themselves, some using our interest in one of their tracks as an excuse to go into a studio and transfer their other recordings too. Sometimes, though, this took a while to happen. I got used to gently reminding people every now and then to get their track to me. Other bands had no access to mastering studios or preferred to leave it up to me, and either sent me their reel to reels or an unplayed copy of the record.

David owns an old four track reel to reel player which he has had restored to good condition. I hauled that to Birdland studios in Prahran for Ron Rude to remix his original multitrack tapes of "Piano Piano", his 1980 single. The tapes were in pristine condition and the session went without a hitch. He also had the 2 track masters for the Fabulous Marquises' single "Honeymoons" which he had recorded. That tape was ruined, the sound fading in and out, the tape sticking to the heads of the machine as it passed along.

Steven Williams from The Particles sent me a quarter inch master that had been sweltering in a box somewhere on the Gold Coast for who knows how long, and had grown strange white patches all over it. Lindsay Gravina at Birdland struggled with the tape for a couple of hours to produce a mixdown that sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a bucket of water. Steven had also sent a test pressing that he said was unplayed. It too had peculiar mouldy marks all over it and was very crackly. Eventually I got a good clean copy of the single from another member, Stephen O'Neil.

Vinyl transfers were done at my friend Andrew Withycombe's home studio. We transferred everything straight onto CD with no EQing, postponing those decisions until the mastering stage. One or two tracks did not sound right from these transfers, so I borrowed a minidisc recorder and did transfers from my record players at home, which were later dumped onto computer. It's amazing the difference a different record player and amplifier can make. For example

's "One Note Song" was transferred to digital via three different record player/amplifier combinations, and the best sounding transfer chosen.

Once I had CD-Rs of every track the final mastering and compiling began. This was done with Greg Wadley at Spill Studios (Greg's bedroom). Greg has recorded and mastered many records for Chapter before and I was confident he would do a good job. Plus he was in one of the bands on the compilation, The Pits, so I knew he'd have an interest in making it sound as good as possible.

We spent a lot of time discussing our approach to mastering the CD. My main standpoint was that I wanted the songs to sound as they did on the original records. Those records were the reason I had wanted to do the compilation in the first place. I was not interested in fiddling with them to make them sound "contemporary".

In reality this turned out to be a large grey area. To make the compilation work as a whole, the volume of each track had to be comparable, but boosting or limiting volume changed the sound of a track. Because we were using vinyl records as masters for a lot of the tracks, there was a certain amount of hiss and crackle that had to be dealt with, but using a vinyl noise reducer plug-in changed the sound of the track. A handful of the tracks were taken from cassettes, but removing tape hiss changed the sound of the track. These were the kinds of issues we were faced with.

We resigned ourselves to accepting a certain amount of surface noise as inevitable. Crackle reduction plug-ins on sound editing software just don't seem to be advanced enough to totally remove crackle without altering the sound of a recording noticeably. As the liner notes say, a little bit of crackle adds character.

After much shuffling of the running order, a couple of last minute track substitutions (for various reasons, both Makers Of The Dead Travel Fast and

originally contributed tracks other than those that ended up on the compilation) and countless work-in-progress CD-Rs that are still lying around in my house, Greg, David and I ended up with a compilation that we were all happy with.

Josh Petherick designed fantastic cover artwork for the comp. It looked like a million dollars. The two of us spent a lot of time together working out how to wrap text in Illustrator, to lay out the booklet liner notes.

I had scanned the record covers I had for the tracks on the compilation, and was going to lay them out all together on the inlay under the CD, with a clear tray so that they could be admired. But Josh's artwork was designed to work with a white tray. In the end I decided I liked the idea that people could find the covers under a white cd tray for themselves.

Putting the CD in to get manufactured was very nerve wracking. With so much work having gone into it, and with so many bands and people involved in the project, I was very scared that I had forgotten something or done something wrong. It was very difficult to let go. I had never put together a CD like this before, and had also never laid out CD artwork myself at home before.

Of course when it came back from the manufacturers there were little things I wasn't happy with (the front cover, back cover and on-cd artwork are all meant to be the same colour for a start!), but they were small enough not to take away from the satisfaction of actually having a finished CD in my hands, nearly two years after I first started putting it together.