Stranded

By Clinton Walker

The definitive book on Australian punk and post-punk music, long unavailable, now reissued in a much-expanded new edition with 175 photos.

STRANDED offers the inside story of the emergence of the Saints, the Birthday Party, the Laughing Clowns, the Go-Betweens, Nick Cave, the Moodists, the Scientists, and many more great Australian bands, told by a writer who witnessed it all first-hand.

 

"Much misunderstood on its original release in 1996, Stranded is just as contentious and compulsive nearly a quarter-century on. One part stoned memoir, nine parts hard-boiled history, it walks the low road and back streets, charting along the way a near-forgotten period of Australian music from post-punk to grunge."—ANDREW STAFFORD

 

"The appeal of the book lies in seeing Walker juggle narrative and economic history, biography and autobiography, interview and prose . . . [as he] traces Australian music's transition from a provincial cargo cult to a world power."— THE SUNDAY AGE

 

"What makes Walker's book so useful is that he writes not only of the musicians, but also of the venues, the promoters, the record stores and the community radio stations that together carved out a space within culture where it could turn back on itself and become an art. The ethos of this art was 'do it yourself' and Walker's book can be read as a field manual for doing it for yourself in any medium, not just music."—McKENZIE WARK, THE AUSTRALIAN 'HIGHER EDUCATION' 

 

"Part memoir, part scrapbook, part history, part gossip, all linked by Walker's passionate, sardonic commentary."— MARIE CLAIRE 

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Visible Spectrum
• Release date: Feb 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393770305

Clinton Walker

Clinton Walker is a Sydney-based writer the Sun-Herald has called the ‘best chronicler of Australian grass-roots culture.’ Born in Bendigo in rural Victoria in 1957, he has published ten books, worked extensively as a journalist and for television, and compiled and annotated a score of anthology CDs. His greatest hits include Inner City Sound (1981), Highway to Hell (1994), Buried Country (2000), Golden Miles (2005) and History Is Made at Night (2012).

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Preface to the new edition

For me this book is like a time capsule twice over. In a general sense, obviously, in that it goes back to the period it portrays, but also in a personal sense, because it takes me back to the person I was at the time I wrote it.

Stranded was written quite quickly—as if you couldn’t tell—in the mid-’90s and published in 1996. I was coming off the success of my third book, Highway to Hell, a—no, the—biography of Bon Scott, my first long-form narrative book, and my publisher, PanMacmillan, just like any record company in the wake of a hit, said, Okay, so what about a follow-up?

Naturally I’d given such a question almost no thought. It was a marvel, I reflect now, that I’d pulled off Highway to Hell at all. I’d just gotten married, was in my mid-thirties and had very consciously given up the Life. We had moved into a tiny semi in Sydney’s inner-west and started having babies. To say it was an intense new phase of my life would be a gross understatement, but then it made sense after I’d spent my twenties the way I did, as you’ll read in what follows; kicking the Life was the only way I was going to get out of that world alive . . .

Given the way the music scene was changing so sweepingly in the early ’90s—the grunge revolution, apparently—I thought the time was ripe to write something I had been thinking about. I’d always been amused by the title Sonic Youth gave to their 1992 concert/tour movie: 1991: The Year Punk Broke. Because that’s the way I felt too, the same as so many other people like me and the Youth who’d been galvanised by the punk uprising of the late ’70s and struggled through the entire ’80s to finally, belatedly, see some sort of breakthrough, or change, start taking place in the early ’90s.

My first two books, 1982’s Inner City Sound and 1984’s The Next Thing, were both very much here-and-now documents of the fermenting Australian post-punk independent underground. Both were effectively polemics in support or encouragement of that scene—and both were anthologies that I edited, collections of short-form stuff written by various other folks as well as myself. But now, having pulled off Highway to Hell, and with something of a resolution at hand to this sprawling history that I’d lived through, I decided to try and write an extended narrative account of it.

I’d read Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming, of course—a great, great book and by far the best of a bunch that started coming out in the early ’90s addressing the legacy of punk and its immediate aftermath. Later I harboured the illusion that I was also inspired by Please Kill Me, the American oral-history equivalent of England’s Dreaming and another great book, only to discover, when I double-checked the dates while preparing this edition of Stranded, that Please Kill Me didn’t come out till 1997—after this book! I do remember, though, one book I read in the late ’80s that had an enormous impact on me generally: City of Nets, Otto Friedrich’s brilliant account of Hollywood in the ’40s. It showed me there was a way you could juggle various, often divergent strands of narrative and tie them all into a coherent storyline—if, and only if, you had a thesis that was sound in the first place. The story I saw in Stranded had that, and so I went ahead and tackled it, firing off the City of Nets model rather than England’s Dreaming.

The book was written, as I said, quite quickly—it had to be, since I was the at-home carer of two infants‚but that was possible because it was based so much on first-hand experience. But if the presence of this ‘I’ caused a bit of consternation when the book first came out, I think that was very much a function of the way it was marketed, pitched as it was as a ‘secret history’ rather than a personal one (‘secret history’ was a new literary buzzword at the time, after Donna Tart’s novel The Secret History was published in 1992). It wasn’t only that, though. It was also as if some (invested) readers resented the fact that I was present in the narrative at all. But I really couldn’t have done it any other way. I felt that to leave me out would be to dupe the reader, to pretend I wasn’t there, when I was. It’s become one of the standard qualifications about music writing that, as ‘Lester Bangs’ tells ‘Cameron Crowe’ in Almost Famous, You cannot make friends with the rock stars. But how could you not in the very small world that was Darlinghurst in the 1980s, when we were all down in the ­trenches? I was there—and not just as a punter, or even just one of the scene’s chroniclers, but—it’s not immodest to claim—as its chief chronicler. I’d come not merely to appreciate but to take pride in Inner City Sound, because it had a big impact on the music that followed its publication—the music whose growth is charted in these pages. It inspired not just music fans, but fans who became musicians themselves. "Inner City Sound shaped my life!" Ray Ahn of the Hard-Ons told me only recently when I spoke to him about this reissue. I remember thinking, back in the immediate wake of Stranded’s original publication, What was I supposed to do—write it from someone else’s perspective? Not take advantage of the insider access I enjoyed?

The speed at which Stranded was written was reflected in its texture and tempo, and that quality was something I wanted to retain in this new edition, for better or worse. When I re-read it now, it feels racy in the extreme—a slalom-like skate over some frequently quite thin ice! Which is good, at least in terms of making for a narrative drive the reader will hopefully find compelling. But my refusal to tamper with the content and timbre of the book gets at a very important point that the reader coming to it now for the first time has to appreciate, something that relates to the time-capsule quality I started out talking about. To some degree, Stranded has to become a time-capsule twice over, maybe even thrice over, for the reader too. It has to be read with an awareness that it was written not in 2020 but in 1995, a quarter-­century ago, its point of view that of a thirty-something recovering addict reflecting on what was then (his) very recent history. I say maybe even thrice over because, decades after writing it, and longer still after many of the events described in it, I see so much so very differently, and have had to find a way to accommodate that altered vision as well.

Former Rolling Stone publisher/editor Toby Creswell, a great friend and intellectual sparring partner, once said that in Stranded I had ‘hijacked the narrative’. (To which my response would be—but isn’t that a good thing? If the standard aphorism about history is that it is written by the winners, doesn’t hijacking it suggest that someone other than the winners is gaining a vital voice?) Other pundits proffered less polite put-downs. But given that Toby was one of the few consistently supportive editors I had in my entire two decades as a freelance journalist—he not only ran my stuff, he gave me a very long leash—I can only assume he was playing his favored role as devil’s advocate. Nevertheless, he gave voice to a widespread sentiment.

I can see now that it was almost as if I was rewriting history while it was happening. And don’t think I didn’t suffer for it. For a rock critic to be actually critical in Australia in the ’80s was, well, almost un-Australian! Whassmatter, don’t you LOVE this industry? I have routinely been described as ‘opinionated’, but isn’t that what a critic is supposed to be? Besides, how far wrong can I have gotten it if—well, put it this way: when I wrote Stranded, I had a mere handful of books to draw on in addition to press clippings from the period—and two of them were my own! By 2020 that number had swelled exponentially: there are scores of books, almost a dozen documentary films, and heaven knows how many annotated box sets, anthologies and academic theses, journal articles and papers, not to mention all the reunion tours and tribute shows, Hall of Fame admissions, museum exhibitions, public monuments, benefits and memorial wakes and dedicated websites and facebook groups. And this for a field that was only ever (certainly by me) very vaguely defined?

To look at it another way: In 2001 APRA (the Australian Performing Rights Association, the umbrella body that represents the interests of music publishers and their songwriter clients in this country) published a list of the all-time ‘Top 30 Australian Songs’. With the Easybeats’ ‘Friday on My Mind’ predictably at the top, rightly with almost no argument, the list nevertheless provoked much discussion, which of course was the whole idea. But one thing that struck me that didn’t get much attention was the disjunction between the songs on the list that were hits in their time and those that weren’t. Most of them had been hit singles, many of them Number 1s; the majority of the others had been turntable hits—key tracks on chart-topping albums. But there were a handful of songs on the list that had very definitely not been hits—in the column of the table devoted to each record’s highest chart position they showed a desultory blank or at best a very high number. With the exception of a couple of wild cards (‘Quasimodo’s Dream’ and ‘My Island Home’), four of those non-hits were by artists who play crucial roles in the pages that follow: the Saints’ ‘Stranded’, the Go-Betweens’ ‘Cattle and Cane’, Nick Cave’s ‘Ship Song’ and the Triffids’ ‘Wide Open Road’. Of those four, only ‘Wide Open Road’ even charted, reaching the dizzying heights of Number 64!

Maybe that’s the best way to encapsulate what this book is about, and why it had to be written: because these were always great songs, yet they were spurned at the time—and with such extreme prejudice that if they weren’t simply crushed, their creators were at least forced into exile.

Stranded is not so much about how and why these artists and their music were spurned the way they were—that would just be giving fresh oxygen to a long-expired argument—it’s more about how they persisted, survived, and ultimately, happily, got their due (though not before more than a few had become casualties). It’s a story with an arc that conforms precisely to the classic hero’s journey—the casting-out from the garden, the quest beyond, the triumphant homecoming. Or in this case: starting out stranded in the suburbs, then being stranded outside your homeland, then the ultimate return. The prophet without honour in their own country remains an irresistible romantic ­archetype, but I can’t help wondering: how come Jimmy Barnes didn’t have to go through that? Or Peter Garrett? Or Michael Hutchence?

I say in my preface to the 1996 edition that it was not my intention to define punk in this book (even as it effectively does that via an accumulation of detail). It might be more to the point, I see now, to define independent. So here’s a shot at it. There are essentially three tiers to the record business: the majors, the major-distributed independent labels, and the independently distributed independent labels. Stranded’s interest is the third category; these labels and the music they released constituted the latest wave in a long tradition of grass-roots independent initiatives that challenged the established order with a new sound or aesthetic. They were following in the footsteps of labels such as Sunshine, Clarion, Spin and Go!/In, which transformed the Australian scene in the ’60s, and Fable, Sparmac, Havoc, Sweet Peach and Mushroom, which transformed it again in the early ’70s. The crucial difference this time was that as the labels covered in Stranded—from Missing Link to Citadel—tried to rise up the food-chain that is the inescapable reality of the music industry, they were frozen out. Unlike labels such as Regular, DeLuxe or Big Time, who were conceived around the same time but had major-label P&D (pressing and distribution) deals and thus enjoyed markedly greater acceptance from the outset.

That’s why a number of acts that sprang pretty directly out of punk—the Hoodoo Gurus, Hunters & Collectors, the Models, Do-Re-Mi, even Icehouse, or the Church—didn’t make the cut here. Their crossover to the mainstream was via these ­major-affiliated indies or directly via the majors themselves (Big Time, Mushroom, Mushroom, Virgin, Regular and EMI, respectively).

Of course, there were hardly any bands that weren’t affected by punk to some degree, but I had no interest in covering those that had merely changed their act. Almost overnight, the erstwhile Farm ditched their Jethro Tull covers and became Midnight Oil, while the Keystone Angels cut their hair, donned leather jackets and dropped the ‘Keystone’. In any case, the Angels were basically a boogie band, and if there’s one thing that even generic buzzsaw punk wasn’t, it wasn’t 12-bar-bluesy in the least. In fact, it was this extension of one of the few rules the Velvet Underground had—as Lou Reed recounted many times: ‘No blues licks’—it was this abandonment of the last shreds of the blues that so distinguished punk rock, that and the fact that its song lyrics avoided opulence and riddles of the Dylan type in favour of the spare gutter poetry of the aforementioned Reed or Iggy. So there, by default, is a definition of punk as a genre.

If you want to know about bands like the Oils and the Angels, Oz Crawl and the Divinyls, and other icons of pub rock in the ’80s, there are plenty of other places you can go to find out, like the orthodox histories. That was always part of my thinking as a jobbing critic anyway: that as these major-aided bands went on to mainstream success—including some, like the Gurus and the Hunters, for whom I retain a qualified fondness—they certainly didn’t need me to champion them any more!

Many independent labels have always grown out of record stores, and the labels that make up a cast of (secondary) characters in their own right throughout Stranded—Missing Link, Phantom, Au Go Go, Waterfront, Hot, Red Eye and Half-A-Cow—conform to that archetype. If I were to define independent that way, I’d maybe get a lot less argument! It might be best of all, though, simply to say: it’s about the labels that worked not from the top down but from the bottom up, inspired by the almost seditious DIY ethic of punk rock.

Either way, barely before the book’s narrative has passed its first act, I’ve already lost a lot of faith in the ideology of being ‘independent’. As the Triffids’ David McComb told me around 2000:

Considering we were, you know, on a major label in Britain, we never had any desire to fly the indy flag, for several reasons. One of them was that we had had experience of indy labels, and unlike the propaganda spread by the indy side of town, there were just as many arseholes who ran indy labels as there were running major labels. So it wasn’t like the cavalry riding to your rescue. As I’m sure everyone is aware now, since so many accepted rules and regulations have been broken down by groups like Nirvana, it’s not satisfactory to divide groups on the basis of indy—good/major—bad, that’s just . . . you know, I think everyone knows that’s the oversimplification of the century.

He couldn’t have got it more right! And that revelation hit me pretty quickly too. What’s more, ‘indy’ evolved to become effectively a stand-in term for a musical genre the same way ‘punk’ did. I unashamedly loathed the Doc Martens ’n’ mohawks stereotype that punk so pathetically declined into, and I was equally disgusted by the encroaching limitation that ‘independent’ quickly amounted to nothing but boy bands armed with ‘jangly’ guitars. I mean, the C86 thing? Give me a break! (These days it means almost nothing at all: only recently I saw on the internet one of those endless lists that proffered the 30 essential Australian indy tracks. I was completely bemused by it, extending as it did from Midnight Oil to Thelma Plum with lots of twee folksiness, quirky pop and terminally dull angst-ridden plod-rock in between—but not even a single Eddie Current Suppression Ring! I could discern no common elements whatsoever, and certainly no lo-fi DIY-ness, in the tracks on that list, so what’s the point any more anyway?)

In terms of who was in or out, I kept shifting the goalposts as it suited me, I admit. My critics may say—and they did—that Stranded was just all about my mates. Which is true to a large extent. But how or why should I write about anything other than my experience? Especially when it included insider access to so many aspiring stars who turned out to be the ones whose songs were retrospectively recognized by APRA, the ones now getting films made about them and getting bridges, parks and city laneways named after them.

If I’m struck as much by what the book leaves out as what it packs in, I’m also aware now that a lot of what it leaves out was not only eligible according to my shifting criteria, it was also stuff that I liked. It’s not just your favorites that are missing, plenty of mine are too! So you were a fan of, what? The Stems? The Moffs? The Wreckery? The Lime Spiders? The Passengers? Painters & Dockers? I Spit On Your Gravy? The Psychotic Turnbuckles? The Vaginabillies? Soggy Porridge? Well, I was a fan of Tactics, the Wet Taxis, Equal Local, the Primitive Calculators, the Sunday Painters, Essendon Airport, the Feral Dinosaurs, the Lucky Dinosaurs, the Craven Fops, Crown of Thorns, Asteroid B-612, Love Me—most of them are hardly covered here either. Which of course was one of the great challenges the book’s narrative presented from the outset: as it progresses, it expands, and it becomes less a question of what to put in as what has to be left out.¹

There is so much else from my musical life during the period that isn’t here either. I touch on some of the most pivotal events I experienced outside the book’s frame only to the extent that they fed back into the frame and changed my perceptions and philosophy of music generally. I don’t regret most of the omissions, or my general intemperance, but there are things I do regret. Such as having to leave out a few of my favorite Australian acts of the period bar none, due to their contractual ties to the majors—bands like the Reels, Mental As Anything, or Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls. The Mentals are for me one of the greatest Australian bands ever—and they don’t have a song in that APRA list, which to me is an even greater outrage than ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’ being included or the Scientists’ ‘We Had Love’ being omitted.

There are some wrongs that I felt had to be redressed, however, now that I had the luxury of being able to do so. For example, the way I could devote two full pages to a mea culpa on the Lipstick Killers—although I can understand why I did, because that was sort of breaking news—at the expense of other bands who were just as good if not better (perhaps because to me that was old news). The way such redress could be provided, I concluded (in cahoots with my magnificent editor Steve Connell), was via footnotes.

A series of footnotes running all the way through this new edition of Stranded—some mini-epics, some a single sentence—offer a means for me to address the ways in which I feel so differently now about so many things. It would have been wrong not to correct the factual errors in the original book, at least as far as I can identify them, but it would also have short-changed the reader if I had failed to offer an adjustment of the perspectives to the extent that I can now see them, or see different perspectives much more clearly.

So just as the original edition of the book juxtaposed a core of retrospective storytelling—oral history and analysis looking back on the period in question in hindsight, however short-term—with occasional quotes from the period itself (like flashbacks), this new edition adds a third layer via these extensive footnotes. Like it’s a remix of the original release, an extended 12-inch version of it.

I used to joke that if I ever did redo Stranded—part of the reason it’s happening now is that the groundswell of demand that’s always been there has finally been matched by technology—it would be after the model of J. M. Coetzee’s 2007 novel Diary of a Bad Year, in which three entirely separate texts ran parallel to one another. I thought it would be good to do something similar—to run the original text on the left-hand pages, and the truth, I’d laugh, on the right. And indeed it’s boiled down to something not unlike that.

Most writers are delighted when one of their backlist titles returns to print, and one of those delights, for authors of non-fiction, is not surprisingly the opportunity to correct mistakes. And Stranded certainly contained quite a few—errors of fact, but also what I now see as errors of judgment. This is in the nature of history, or rather historiography: it is an ongoing enquiry, and at every step of the way, it goes or should go beyond the previous step, even if sometimes it has to take a step back or sideways for every two forward. This is what has happened in the further investigation of this field via the flood of books, films and other documents I mentioned earlier.

Errors of fact in the original edition of Stranded are corrected in the text itself; occasionally I have also (invisibly) injected a sentence or two into the body copy to provide additional background or context, which seems all the more important after so much time has passed. Whereas what I now see as errors of judgment or analysis remain in the text but are addressed in footnotes. These footnotes often expand on points underexplored in the original text, or indicate omissions and oversights. Call it the 20/20 hindsight that’s possible in 2020. The oral history component has also been bolstered by material drawn from additional interviews (for a film) that I conducted not long after the original publication of the book.

And the illustrations? Some classic ones carry over from ’96, but there is also new visual material that refreshes as well as expands the book. The formatting of the original edition never quite worked, was at times confusing, so that’s a(nother) flaw I’m delighted to rectify this time, with a design generally that I think now just sings.² Really, I’m just chuffed that Stranded’s ‘hijacking of the narrative’ has proved to be so prescient that it’s coming back to life again now, almost a quarter-century after it was first published. It’s the sort of affirmation a writer needs to keep going.

The scene and the Life were a surrogate family for so many of us who’d cut all our original ties and set sail in perilous and uncharted waters. It wasn’t a careerist move, at least not for me. I was just living the dream, as the cliché goes, now that I can articulate it, and everything I did was underwritten by being on the dole, as everybody was. We considered the dole an ersatz study grant, the kind of cultural funding that was otherwise denied to us lowlife scum as opposed to highbrow ballet dancers and symphony orchestra musicians. It was a tight-knit circle and, like the music itself, one that kept on turning, expanding, contracting, splintering, intersecting, with much feuding, bed-hopping, back-stabbing and needle-sharing. But always coming back to connections and values forged in the late ’70s. That’s a lot of what Stranded is about. I was just lucky to survive—something else I can only now appreciate—and I’m not being melodramatic in the slightest. But if on a couple of occasions in the ’80s I crossed over to the other side and came back, I like to think I’ve taken that experience and turned it into knowledge that now just makes me stronger.

When English writer Simon Reynolds published his history of post-punk, Rip It Up and Start Again, in 2005, I was disappointed to find it was biased towards the UK and US in exactly the way that had always infuriated me, and against which I had attempted to deploy my writing as a corrective. But at least he had the diplomacy to apologise for ‘having regretfully decided not to grapple with European post-punk or Australia’s fascinating deep underground scene’. Whereas the much more recent American TV documentary series Punk paid not even lip service to an Australian scene that not only punched above its weight but also put to shame all that So-Cal hardcore crap that the series eulogised.

Australia had consistently done a strong line in post-war pop and cheese that exported well, from Frank Ifield through the Seekers and the Bee Gees to Peter Allan and Olivia Newton-John. Our great rock acts, however—from the Easybeats through the Loved Ones and Masters Apprentices to Daddy Cool and beyond—all met their individual Gallipolis overseas. Uncannily, again, before INXS or Crowded House made a sustained breakthrough in America, it was the stars of this book that changed all that. As Mick Houghton wrote in British magazine Uncut in 2005: ‘No-one took Australian music seriously until 1984, when the combined impact of Nick Cave, the Go-Betweens and the Triffids suggested the odd gem coming from Down Under had been no fluke.’

I don’t need to beg approval from some foreign source—that would be to succumb to that syndrome according to which, as Nick Cave told Mick Geyer, ‘Australia still needed America or England to tell them what was good’—which is merely another extension of the great Australian cultural cringe that has impeded so much artistic endeavour in this country and still does. I am out for more than lip service; I want full equity. Because it still doesn’t seem to be forthcoming.

Ray Ahn: You see history books on punk and stuff, and the Saints get ignored a lot. If it wasn’t for the Birthday Party, there’d be pretty much no Goth scene in England, but that’s hardly ever recognized. Or the Scientists, for instance, they pretty much kick-started the grunge thing in Seattle. Mudhoney, the first band over there, worshipped the Scientists. To me Australian music has always been like that; we’ve always been the forerunners of things like that and we’ve just never had any recognition for it. I find that quite criminal.

I’m not sure Nick Cave would be so eager to claim credit for his role in the genesis of the god-awful Goth movement, but Ray’s contention is generally on the money, I think, and there is an extensive footnote later in this book to hammer home these specific claims for the Scientists.

This is very much a white male story—there’s no getting away from that. But although I refuse to retroactively distort historical reality to fit a present-day political agenda, it’s worth pointing out that punk, with the egalitarianism of the DIY ethic at its heart, did encourage more women to step into roles beyond that of the archetypal chick singer, and many of those female drummers, bassists and other instrumentalists will walk through the following pages. My bias towards a band like the Go-Betweens, too, was obviously a vote against the unrelenting macho of not just pub rock but also the more hard-rock aspects of the independent sector. People of colour are thin on the ground here, however—even as the Hard-Ons crashed through that particular barrier—and although there was a renaissance in Australian Aboriginal music during the same period that Stranded spans, and I was myself deeply involved in that, it’s a very different type of story, barely related to the one at hand; for that reason I covered it in two of my other books, Buried Country and Deadly Woman Blues. At the same time—and this has to be noted too—there was an idiot fringe comprising violent Nazi skinheads, especially into the immediate post-punk period; that was just one reason I was never partial to the mod or ska revivals, or even the hardcore push when it started coming through. As for LGBTQI folks, there were certainly plenty of gay men and gay women on the scene, but the men at least tended not to come out until later, as they got older, in line with the social norms of the day. AIDS, of course, was a cruel leveller that exposed gay men and also IV-drug users, and there were plenty of both in the independent scene (I was one myself); they suffered from the prejudice of others for that, and more than a few paid the ultimate price.

As my old friend, the late, great Celibate Rifles’ front-man Damien Lovelock once put it, ‘Let’s make some new mistakes/I’m sick of all the old ones’. Well, Stranded might be little more than a catalogue of all those same old mistakes—great music torn apart by ego, drugs and money—but at least there was a lot of great music made along the way.

To me the book now seems a bit of a mess, but it still seems to be called for, despite all its volatility and flaws. I had a lot of fun reacquainting myself with it and I hope that you will too, whether you are revisiting it or encountering it for the first time. I hope as well that if you don’t know all the music, artists and labels that are its subject, you will be pleased to be turned on to them. That was always the idea.

The author at the Sedition exhibition, East Sydney Tech, 2019 (photo by Andrew Leavold).

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1 Exactly why I never granted the XL Capris entry to my punky pantheon I can’t remember. They certainly satisfied many preconditions—like, they were a DIY outfit who could hardly play at first, and they released their recordings on their own label (Axle). Maybe I thought they were just a novelty act, given that their debut single was a cover of Tommy Leonetti’s Channel 7 signature song My City of Sydney and other of their songs (such as Where is Hank? and Skylab) were jokey to say the least. But they were a fine band, whose members all went on to even greater things, so yeah, my bad.

2 You can also find Stranded playlists on both YouTube and Spotify. Listen to the tracks on Spotify as you read the book, then sit back and watch the videos on YouTube! There are yet more extra features on my website at clintonwalker.com.au.

Preface to the first edition (1996)

They say it’s a mark of an idea whose time has come when different people in different places start thinking the same thing at the same time. Before punk was given that name in the mid-1970s, pockets of people all over the world were reacting against the burnt-out afterlife of the ’60s, homing in on the same outlaw sources in order to restart rock’n’roll along new lines.

The trouble was, the movement was so small, apparently so radical, so threatening to the baby boomers who ran rock’n’roll, that it never really stood a chance. This was especially true in Australia, where the music industry was still immature, its local bosses still largely controlled by their colonial parent companies in London and New York.

But twenty years after the event, punk—or at least the fallout from punk—has changed the face of rock’n’roll. Just as surely as grunge died along with Kurt Cobain, punk died with Sid Vicious in February 1979. But with the do-it-yourself ethic at its heart, its impact snowballed over the course of the ’80s, and by the early ’90s the dam wall of denial erected by the major record companies could no longer hold. As American indy rock pioneers Sonic Youth put it, 1991: The Year Punk Broke.

In that sense, punk was to rock as be-bop was to jazz. Be-bop too was initially decried as elitist, esoteric musicians’ music. But once jazz crossed that threshold, there was no turning back. What we couldn’t have anticipated, however, was that the baby boomers would resist punk’s reinvention of rock’n’roll with a vehemence almost greater than that with which their square parents had resisted Elvis and Little Richard a generation earlier.

That the most dramatic shift in pop aesthetics since the early ’60s should have taken 15 years to reach the mainstream, at a time when the exchange of information and turnover of ideas was happening at unprecedented speed, is part of the reason I wrote Stranded.

I don’t wish to try and define punk. That’s not what this book is about, although the tenets of DIY independence inform every page. Stranded is more about a certain coming of age in Australian popular culture and music, about a generation of artists and their agents of change (independent labels) who came through the ground zero created by punk’s seismic blast in the late ’70s, persisted in the face of every kind of resistance, and eventually, belatedly, found broad acceptance in the early ’90s.

Prior to the Saints and Radio Birdman, Australian rock’n’roll had always looked overseas for pointers. But in prefiguring punk, despite their isolation, the Saints and Birdman weren’t just light years ahead of other Australian bands, they were streets ahead of most bands ­anywhere. They should receive their due as innovators on a par with the acts that emerged in New York in the mid-’70s—Patti Smith, Television, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads—all of whom predated the earliest English punk bands who entrenched a certain ­safety-pin stereotype that persists to this day, whether the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned or the Buzzcocks.

Corporate/stadium rockers from this period such as Jimmy Barnes or Midnight Oil or INXS may never cease to be eulogised. But it’s the artists who passed through punk’s fire, who were apparently so radical that they were stranded in the underground in their home country, or even forced into exile in Europe, who continue to grow in stature.

In 1995, when Silverchair got together with You Am I’s Tim Rogers to close the annual ARIA Awards (at which the two bands had cleaned up), they performed a version of the Radio Birdman anthem ‘New Race’, thus completing a circle. Not ‘Flame Trees’ or ‘Beds Are Burning’, but something from an entirely different, outlaw ­aesthetic. And even though most of the amassed music industry heavies still didn’t get it, they went desperately scrabbling to catch up with a change that had been twenty years in the offing.

That several generations of Australian musicians overcame not only isolation but active hostility is what this book is really all about. That the likes of Nick Cave, Ed Kuepper, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, Dave McComb, Kim Salmon and Tex Perkins can remain vital elder statesmen when so many of their counterparts overseas long ago faded into obscurity or descended into self-parody not only proves that rock can be an adult form, but says even more for this unique Australian phenomenon. I mean, whatever happened to the Damned? Or Tom Verlaine? Richard Hell? Howard Devoto? The Cure may have survived, thrived even, and New Order too (and the Cramps, the B52’s and DEVO)—but Echo and the Bunnymen? The Teardrop Explodes? U2 should probably be counted among this post-punk number too—but U2 were not better than, say, the Triffids. Nor were Aztec Camera or R.E.M. better than the Go-Betweens. Sydney’s X were better than LA’s X. The Primitive Calculators were every bit as good if not better than Suicide, and the Severed Heads outlasted Cabaret Voltaire. The Beasts of Bourbon? There was no band anywhere like the Beasts of Bourbon in the late ’80s, and there was no band anywhere—ever—like the Laughing Clowns. Died Pretty were better than the Dream Syndicate. By the early ’90s, the Cruel Sea had surpassed the great Los Lobos as the best bar band in the world, and that’s no faint praise. Tim Rogers was writing way better songs than Oasis. And the list goes on.

The orthodox histories of Australian music recount that the early ’80s were a golden era, the pub rock boom. I was working as a freelance rock journalist in Sydney at the time, having started out writing for punk fanzines, and there was so much exciting going on in the already clearly marked out inner-city underground music scene that I was all but oblivious to Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil, the Angels and all the rest of what was going on in the suburban beer barns.

In 1981 I edited my first book—a scrapbook, essentially, called Inner City Sound, which documented the first five years of that underground scene. Later in the ’80s a lot of people asked me if or when I was going to publish a follow-up (most people, myself included, tend to forget my 1984 effort, The Next Thing, but it’s not that bad!). It wasn’t until the early ’90s that the idea made sense. By that time, the cycle that had begun in the late ’70s was finally completed, and I could see a resolution, or an ending.

For the most part, Stranded follows a cast of characters whose point of entry, like mine, was late ’70s punk rock. I knew many of them well, and the book is therefore inevitably to some extent personal. This was one reason for my unease in approaching the project —because doing it honestly would require also writing about myself. I was never such a thoroughgoing practitioner of New Journalism that I totally escaped the old-school journos’ terror of the ‘I’. But then I accepted the fact that I was in a privileged position to tell this story, because I had an insider’s access to so much that most don’t ever get to see.

Everything fanned out from the late ’70s, from the Saints and Radio Birdman. At a time in the mid-’90s when Australia trails only America and Britain as a supplier of rock product to the world market, it’s difficult to convey what the music scene was like in this country before they kicked down the door. There was no free street press, no public radio, no independent labels. It was a mainstream monopoly, a monoculture. There was nothing except Countdown and the charts.

To describe the full extent of the scene’s growth while maintaining a coherent narrative thrust; to set personal interests against a broader historical perspective; to retain a focus on the main characters against the ever-increasing number who followed in their wake; to juxtapose real-time action with analysis after the fact—all this required a complicated balancing act, and I only hope I pulled it off.

At the outset I briefly thought I could simply stitch together swathes of my previously published journalism into a passable book. It quickly became apparent, of course, that such recycling would be grossly inadequate. Not only because the present tense of that writing is obviously long gone, but also because it would rule out the possibility of reflection, on my part and that of the participants. I needed to go back and interview many people I’d interviewed many times before, and to all of them I extend my gratitude. And to refresh my sometimes addled memory, I needed to refer back not just to my own writing but also that of other journalists in newspapers and magazines like RAM, Rolling Stone, Roadrunner, Vox, Tension, the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Adelaide Advertiser, Virgin Press, On the Street and Stiletto. Naturally I couldn’t have done it without help from the great Australian fanzines of the era either: Spurt, B-Side, Trousers in Action, DNA, Distant Violins, Resistant Harmony, Lemon, and the retrozines From the Vault and Prehistoric Sounds, as well as Pulp, which Bruce Milne and I published ourselves.

I arrived at a format that I think offers the best of both worlds. Most of the text is new—my own prose and new interview material— but it is interspersed with occasional interjections from the past (flashbacks), including excerpts of my journalism from the period. My hope is that this nicely balances hindsight with the mood of the times—its optimism and determination, but also its occasional naivety and delusions.

The formatting works like this: the pages unfold with a clear distinction between my narrative (printed in serif type, like the paragraph you’re reading now) and the oral history provided by the book’s cast of characters (in sans serif type, set off as block quotes).

When the narrative cuts to one of these oral-history quotes offered in retrospect, in the interviews I conducted with those characters for the book, it will look like this:

Chris Bailey: It was just Eddie Cochrane riffs, tarted up by a bunch of yobs who couldn’t play too good.

When it cuts to something one of the characters said back in the day, like a flashback, it will likewise be offset as a block quote in sans serif type, but also italicized, like this:

Robert Forster: I think, by the time we leave, we’ll have got everything we can out of Brisbane, which is, hopefully, some sort of style. And then be able to go to England with a fairly individual, ‘incubated’ sound, and set of ideas, and hopefully it’ll be quite fresh.

Similarly, when my narrative incorporates something I wrote back in the day, it too is italicized (in serif type). If it continues for more than a line or two, it is also indented and set off as a block quote, and will look like this:

The new may often be resisted in Australia, but it’s still pretty certain that, directly or indirectly, a group like the Scientists (will have) more creative effect in the long term than a dozen Real Lifes.

I like the way that real-time thinking and hindsight can either clash or form a sort of continuum. It illustrates the way history can be revised or rewritten. And Stranded is, for better or worse, simply my version of a history.

Part I

PREHISTORIC SOUNDS

The ’70s

It’s a social change that’s important. It’s not just a change in musical direction like the late ’60s to the early ’70s, from Woodstock to Black Sabbath. Not many people understand it. A lot of people are scared of it.

—Ed Kuepper, 1977

The author, Brisbane, 1974, having just seen Lou Reed, although looking more like a Coloured Ball (photo by Meg Kaye)

The Saints at Petrie Terrace, 1976 (photo by Joe Borkowski)

1 / Nights in Venice

I grew up in a house without music. The uncarpeted hard, cold boards on the floors of my childhood home in suburban Melbourne during the ’60s have come to represent, in my mind, an austerity which was typical of Australian post-war life. There were no pictures on the walls, no books on shelves. No music singing.

The ’60s meant nothing to me directly. This is just one reason I reject the ‘baby boomer’ tag. While I admit I probably belong to the tail end of that birthrate bulge, having been born in 1957, the fact is that as a teenager I rebelled against my symbolic older