VARIOUS ARTISTS

CAN'T STOP IT AUSTRALIAN POST-PUNK 1978-82 CHAPTER CD

BY BLEDDYN BUTCHER

During the seventies, Australian pop tastes were defined by the Ozrock monsters (AC/DC, Cold Chisel and Dragon) who filled the suburban beer barns; and, for light entertainment, by Countdown, the hugely influential weekly pop programme hosted by Ian 'Molly' Meldrum. This was compulsive, car-crash viewing. Everyone watched. Meldrum was an atrocious interviewer, utterly inarticulate and shamelessly obsequious. Watching him blunder through an hour of primetime every Sunday evening was a kind of national penance, an appalled self-mortification, proof against pretentiousness.

The recent six-hour television ABC documentary on the history of Australian rock'n'roll Long Way To the Top preserves for rueful posterity one of the pivotal moments in the show's history: Prince Charles is, for reasons unclear, the edition's star guest. Stunned by Meldrum's tortuous burbling, Charles asks, "Don't you have one of those teleprompters?" When the heir to the British throne is sharper than the nation's topmost pop picker, you know you've got a problem. Change had to come.

In fact, it already had. The dead-end desert island defiance of the Saints' self-pressed "(I'm) Standed" had been named Single of the Week in Sounds late in 1976, pipping "Anarchy in the UK" at the punk post. The floodgates opened.

As elsewhere, Australian punks had to battle not only entrenched interests but also each other. This militancy made for fiercely divisive scenes and awkward, exclusive codes which, in turn, provided frightening variety. Can't Stop It! collects twenty early examples of the local response to the Year Zero imperative. It is by no means definitive. Almost all the tracks are entirely obscure. Better known exports like The Birthday Party, the Go-Betweens and the Laughing Clowns are not represented, though their influence is often felt. Similarly, the Perth punk scene, a hotbed of melodic contention and frantic romance, is completely ignored: the early recordings of West Australian bands like the Scientists, the Victims, the Manikins and the early Triffids made less of a virtue of sheer perversity.

Even so, this collection shows the extraordinary diversity of local initiatives. In the three Eastern states capitals, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, malcontents drew on a variety of alien sources - Detroit, Bowie/Eno, Krautrock and CBGBs: all kosher now, of course - when mixing their own explosive cocktails. As with any period of frantic experiment, there were mixed results.

The first track, the noisy squall of the Moodists' debut "Gone Dead", is propelled by Chris Walsh's lumbering bass and has an insolent voodoo groove which recalls the Stooges. If not quite a classic, its offhanded swagger does show the killing confidence which would eventually endear David Graney to all discerning Australians. Walsh also propels the Fabulous Marquises' "Honeymoons", with equally compelling effect: the cynical lyric is swept under a sweet keyboard wash while the bass obsessively frets. Ash Wednesday's 'Love By Numbers' is gleefully conceptual, a tedious intonation interrupted by a dreamy melodic sigh: he's now a touring member of Einsturzende Neubauten.

Elsewhere, and especially in Sydney, attaining unloveliness sometimes seemed the primary purpose. Whatever the pretext, the herky-jerky rhythms and squawking vocals of Voigt 465's "Voices A Drama" haven't worn well. Nor has the robotic arthouse deliberation of "Sweat and Babble", by their successors, the Tame Omearas. Another offshoot, Wild West, is far more impressive: "We Can Do" has fat, insistent, almost funky bass and a spacious production which blends noise, competing voices and distracted whistling into a stomp which recalls the Pop Group. "Pony Club" by the Limp, featuring Judy and Jane McGee, refugees from Pel Mel, is stranger yet. It employs the clipped diction, möbius keyboards and nautical soundings of space odyssey to describe the loneliness of the reluctant ponygirl! It's actually unsettling.

The Makers Of The Dead Travel Fast were another group of Sydney experimentalists with a gob-stopping name. Constructed largely from rattling piano, kitchen cutlery and synthesised whitterings, "The Dumb Waiters", their slice of social comment, is both catchy and sardonic, more Madness than Cabaret Voltaire. The Particles aspired to the condition of bubblegum (or, perhaps, Blu-tak) but the whispy, murmurous 'Apricot's Dream' is nowhere near annoying enough. The Slugfuckers, also from Sydney, plied a more prosaic trade: "Cacophony" posts fair warning of its honking, distorted contents, another raucous Stooges' retread with the sole aim, seemingly, of "making me shit in my pants".

Melbourne's experimentalists were less melodramatic and more compelling. With "Lamp That", instrumental sextet Equal Local fused woolly distorted beats and stray cat guitars to angular jazz-rock grooves with high-stepping effect. "How Low Can You Go?" by Essendon Airport, an early vehicle for composer David Chesworth, is a hypnotic exercise for guitar, synthesiser and minimal cellophane snare which has the clarity of hypothesis.

The glyphic (pronounced "tch tch tch", as Skippy says when Sonny's slow on the uptake) contribute "One Note Song", which starts out as a mad thrash and develops into the sort of demented burlesque Goran Bregovic wrote for Underground. It is, apparently, only one of the many versions of this wordless and, allegedly, monotonous "song".

Brisbane was different again. With the reviled and pugnacious Kiwi grandee, Joh Bjelke Petersen, then Australia's most deeply conservative political force, running the State, how could it not be? Xero's "The Girls" is a strident feminist curse, the sound of restless civilians registering deep-seated disturbance. It makes for uncomfortable listening. The Apartments' first single "Help" is far prettier. Brisk and ringing with a stricken lyric, it's perfectly poppy. Peter Milton Walsh's battered romantic persona, the literate little boy lost who'll sing shyly for his supper, is already in place, already affecting. It wasn't a hit. The Pits' "Words" is blithely absurdist. Unlike the more portentous tracks here - Ron Rude's "Piano Piano", for instance, a wretched prediction of eighties pop - it's essentially playful, glad to experiment.

Happily, experiment is this collection's strongest suit. Although the execution is occasionally clumsy, some of the strategies evolved are ingenious. And some proved prescient.

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