O, Song! Daily Links

This is a mix of mid-to-late 1990s Australian alternative rock that I threatened to make when I linked to my 1 Song A Day piece on Custard the other day. My rule for this compilation was five songs from each year, in chronological order, with two songs at most from each band. I’ve generally gone for very well known songs by very well known bands, with only a couple of songs that are relatively obscure. There are bands that probably should be on this mix - Grinspoon, Magic Dirt, and the Living End, for example - but whose albums I personally just never got around to buying, okay? Jeez. Stop complaining and make your own 90s mix if it matters that much to you!

(Edit: I have been informed that is not possible to cut the post if it is a link post. The wonders of tumblr! Sorry for making you scroll a lot if you don’t care about this!)

The mid-to-late 1990s were one of the healthiest times for Australian alternative rock. In Australia, the popularity of this music was driven very strongly by the national public-funded radio station Triple J. And by about 1995, you can see Triple J start to focus more solidly on alternative rock; before that it was more eclectic - it played Ace of Base as well as Nirvana. From 1996, Triple J was joined by a Saturday morning variety television show on public-funded ABC-TV called Recovery. Recovery (which also spawned a magazine) generally focused on alternative rock, and mixed up in-studio live footage, some music videos, and interviews (see an excruciating 1996 interview between Recovery’s Dylan Lewis and Rivers Cuomo, which is totally representative of the general awkwardness of every interview Dylan Lewis has ever done). There were also yearly alternative music festivals (Homebake, Livid, the Big Day Out, etc) which released compilation CDs and gave a lot of exposure to this music.

The spur for all this infrastructure behind a particular genre of music was ‘Tomorrow’ by Silverchair, which spent several weeks on top of the charts in 1994 and went on to international success. Triple J were amazed at the fervour of the reaction when they first started playing ‘Tomorrow’, and you get the impression that they decided to ride the bandwagon once they realised there was audience demand. As detailed in Craig Mathieson’s excellent 2000 book The Sell-In, Silverchair’s success spawned a record company bidding war for alternative rock bands, and renewed interest in actually marketing the alternative bands they had on their rosters. 

I personally got clued into this kind of music as a 13 year old when I watched the 1995 ARIAs, the Australian equivalent to the Grammys. There was a segment where the band TISM mimed their song ‘Greg! The Stop Sign!!’ crammed in a lift with various award presenters who were about to present awards, looking awkward. TISM, as you can see from the clip, performed whilst wearing balaclavas, and members had pseudonyms like Ron Hitler-Barassi (the actual Ron Barrassi being a football coach). As a 13 year old, this was very fascinating indeed - masked men harrassing celebrities in a lift, while singing lyrics like “sometime in the next 10,000 years, a comet’s gonna wipe out all trace of man/ I’m banking on it coming before my end of year exam”. When I went to buy the CD single at my local record store, it had a sticker on the front that said, ‘AS HEARD ON TRIPLE J’. I quickly discovered that, though a lot of Triple J’s playlist seemed pretty weird to me at first, that they also played a lot of the songs I liked the most. And, before too long, Triple J’s playlist didn’t seem so weird anymore. I remember seeing the names of some of the bands Triple J played, and thinking “is this too weird and scary for me?” and then actually hearing the music and thinking “oh, this is just pop music with loud guitars sung by regular-looking people”.

Anyway! Here’s the tracklist: 

1) You Am I - Cathy’s Clown (from Hi Fi Way, 1995). You Am I were like Gods astride the whole Triple J/Recovery scene. Their albums all debuted at #1 in the charts, they invariably got five star reviews everywhere they went, and the other bands in the scene clearly worshipped them (the ‘Chair’ in the name Silverchair allegedly came from the 1993 You Am I song ‘Berlin Chair’). The story of You Am I is quite similar to the story of Canada’s Sloan - both started off grungy, and gradually put more and more 60s/70s classic pop/rock in their sound. ‘Cathy’s Clown’ (not an Everlys cover) pretty much catches You Am I in the act of discovering their classic pop heart.

2) Custard - Apartment (from Wisenheimer, 1995). Custard were from Brisbane, and went to the university I now teach at. They had the alt-country leanings and odd guitar tunings of Pavement, and the punkish energy/nerdiness of, say, Pinkerton-era Weezer, and the (sometimes a little forced) wackiness of Ween. Dave McCormack, the lead singer, was/is an energetic showman, and you can hear him whooping and singing silly all over ‘Apartment’, one of their most successful songs.

3) TISM - Greg The Stop Sign (from Machiavelli And The Four Seasons, 1995). I already discussed this one above, but in case the balaclavas, album title and harrassment of celebrities didn’t clue you in, TISM were a very serious band. In fact, TISM stands for ‘This Is Serious Mum’, just to make sure you realise that they are serious. TISM often had better song titles than songs (track 1 on their first album was called ‘I’m Interested In Apathy’) but ‘Greg! The Stop Sign!!’ is catchy (I have no idea whether the chorus ripping off ‘Let The Sunshine In’ is intentional/ironic, but probably), with some killer lines.

4) Ammonia - Drugs (from Mint 400, 1995). This song was a hit in the US, right? If you’re American, it may well be the only song you know from this compilation. It’s a catchy bit of fluff with a soft-loud dynamic, but I remember hearing this song as a 13 year old and thinking that calling a song ‘Drugs’ was deliciously naughty. Ammonia’s second album Eleventh Avenue was recorded with Dave Fridmann, and is a much more sober/mature/well-constructed album, but this still has an agreeable energy to it.

5) Tumbleweed - Nothin’ To Do With The Weather (from Galactaphonic, 1995). Tumbleweed came from a small town to the south of Sydney called Wollongong, and their reputation wasn’t so much ‘tumble’ as ‘weed’ - when I first heard of Kyuss being described as ‘stoner rock’, my response was ‘oh, they sound like Tumbleweed?’. As a teenager, I didn’t really understand all this, but when I moved to Wollongong to go to uni, I eventually got the picture; Wollongong is a small working-class kind of town with a big industry that no longer employs a tenth of the employees that it used to, and Tumbleweed pretty well sum up the ennui of such a place.

6) Pollyanna - Lemonsuck (from Longplayer, 1996). Pollyanna’s Wikipedia entry compares them to Husker Du or Sugar, but while the sound isn’t too far away from that, the tone of their music is different; there’s something about the female backing vocals and the way Matt Handley uses chords that makes Pollyanna sound reassuring where Bob Mould sounds embittered. And ‘Lemonsuck’ has a killer chorus, and a killer riff in the verses, at least as far as I’m concerned. I recently had a discussion on Facebook about the relative merits of sucking on lemons compared to sucking on limes after someone posted this song; I gather the metaphorical difference is the extent and size of the sourness. 

7) Regurgitator - I Sucked A Lot Of Cock To Get Where I Can (from Tu Plang, 1996). Regurgitator must have been a nightmare for their record company. They were clearly terribly talented, so much so that they couldn’t decide what genre they wanted to play, and they were unable to take the whole thing very seriously. So on their first EP they were doing what now sounds like nu-metal - Quan, the lead singer, rapped over metal riffs. But by the time their album came out, they were bored of that. So ‘I Sucked A Lot Of Cock…’ has a punk sound to it and proper singing instead of rapping, and the lyrics make fun of the fact that a major label was silly enough to sign them for lots of money. When Quan sings ‘just keep rinsing out again and again’, it’s a Lady MacBeth-style reaction to the artistic blood on his hands, trying to negotiate between his artistic whims and the desires of the record company.

8) Spiderbait - Buy Me A Pony (from Ivy And The Big Apples, 1996). Spiderbait were a fairly established indie band that had been snapped up by a major in the wake of Silverchair, and ‘Buy Me A Pony’, like Regurgitator’s ‘I Sucked A Lot Of Cock…’ took the piss out of the industry, biting the hand that feeds it. Kram, Spiderbait’s drummer/singer, sings the lyrics from the perspective of the record company executive courting the band: “you’re almost on your way to popularity and we’ll teach to you play with icy stare and punk rock hair and beatnik flare”. But before long “we just received a call/ we’ll have to dump you all/ but don’t you try to pass us by/ cos we own you until we’re through/ and there’s so many round like you”. For such a snarky record-industry-focused song, it was also a massive success (this song was voted as #1 in Triple J’s yearly Hottest 100 poll in 1996); I guess that being a band in the grip of the record industry is probably a lot like being a teenager living in society. Or maybe Spiderbait’s guitar sound is just awesome - it’s so fuzzy that it sort of sounds like a needle

9) Deadstar - Don’t It Get You Down (from Milk, 1996). Listening to Milk, you can sort of tell that Deadstar had figured out that distorted guitars were in; this is basically a conventional pop song that’s had the recording conventions of the mid-1990s applied to it. The guitars don’t sound integral to the songs in the way they do for, say, Spiderbait. But it’s a great song, with several hooks and a great vocal performance from Caroline Kennedy. (Deadstar’s other creative presence was Barry Palmer, who had been in a very successful 1980s rock band called Hunters and Collectors, and who after Deadstar found a career as a successful producer.)

10) The Fauves - Self Abuser (from Future Spa, 1996). The lead singer from the Fauves famously admitted in an interview that, even though he’d been a rock star for a couple of years, he was still a virgin, and not really out of choice. Opinion at the time seemed divided as to whether this was the truth or just a ploy to get groupies. But, whichever way, you get the impression that he probably knew quite alot about ‘self abuse’, and it’s a sweet song in a lot of ways, encouraging the teenagers of Australia to not feel like losers because of their self-lovin’ ways.

11) Jebediah - Leaving Home (from Slightly Odway, 1996). Kevin Mitchell’s voice may be an acquired taste? It’s pretty nasal. But Triple J made you acquire that taste quickly enough, because they flogged Jebediah, and they were very successful for a while there. They seemed to incessantly play all-ages shows and festivals and support slots to international bands; even though I wasn’t as into Jebediah as some other bands, they were at one point the band I’d seen live the most. When I got older and heard more American indie music from the early 1990s (Superchunk, for example), I was surprised to find out how much some of it sounded like Jebediah to me. 

12) Sidewinder - Titanic Days (from Tangerine, 1997). Sidewinder started out as a shoegaze-style band in the early 1990s, but gradually acquired more pop hooks, and more diverse influences. It’s not quite as obvious on ‘Titanic Days’ as on some other tracks on the album, but Tangerine in general often sounds like Sidewinder heard the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Setting Sun’ and wanted to make their shoegazey guitar band sound as gigantic and psychedelic as that song. Noel Gallagher/Oasis had the same motivation for Be Here Now but to my ears ‘Titanic Days’ is much more successful at this than, say, ‘D’You Know What I Mean’, possibly because it has twice as much substance in half the length? (though I’m sure the length of the lines of substances were quite large during the making of Be Here Now…)

13) Big Heavy Stuff - May (from Maximum Sincere, 1997). Something about Greg Atkinson’s voice and the sound of Big Heavy Stuff radiates a keen intelligence and integrity; the lyrics of ‘May’ seem like Atkinson going back and forth trying to figure out exactly how some of his faults work. Incidentally, the drummer from Big Heavy Stuff is a lovely guy called Nick Kennedy who now works at the best-indie-record-store-in-Sydney-by-a-mile, Red Eye (he still drums - I’ve played on stage with him a few times). The last time I stopped into Red Eye, I bought a Verlaines album, Hallelujah All The Way Home, which prompted him to very enthusiastically discuss their apparently-much-neglected later discography and the lead singer’s recent solo albums. And I think you can also hear that level of music nerdery in Big Heavy Stuff’s music, in a good way.

14) Custaro - Music Is, Crap (from We Have The Technology, 1997): Written and sung by Custard’s drummer Glenn Thompson (who later played in the Go-Betweens, and, erm, my band Lazy Susan), the song’s chorus points out that music is crap as far as aliens are concerned. Elsewhere in the song, Thompson points out that music genre doesn’t matter: whether you like rock, pop, or metal, aliens don’t give a shit. It all sounds like crap to them. And considering that our ears developed for a specific environmental niche that aliens are unlikely to share, it is scientifically likely that aliens will think that music in general is crap. The logical corollary of Thompson’s argument is that, considering the cosmos, music is a silly thing to be interested in, and that we should do something more useful with our lives rather than play and listen to music. Yet, you know that Thompson doesn’t actually believe music is crap. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be singing the song, would he?

15). Regurgitator - ! (The Song Formerly Known As) (from Unit, 1997). Yup, the same band that in 1995 was doing nu-metal, in 1996 was doing sarcastic punk, in 1997 went Prince. Unit, in general, showed Regurgitator’s love of the synth sounds of the 1980s, and Unit is very ahead of its time - after all, there was a lot of Prince in MGMT. But for a song so danceable, the joke is that the lyrics are about how much Quan hates nightclubs and live venues; he’d rather dance in ugly pants in the comfort of his loungeroom in suburbia. Except that it’s only a joke on the surface, underneath it’s a sweet love song.

16). You Am I - Heavy Heart (from #4 Record, 1998): So You Am I started off grungy, and ended up somewhere near power pop. And, well, the version of #4 Record I have has a bonus disc called Radio Settee, and Tim Rogers did always want to be a Big Star. But ‘Heavy Heart’ would be a beautiful ballad whoever it sounded like; it’s a devastating, mopey, break-up song, full of keenly observed lyrics: he feels ‘like a waterlogged ball that no-one wants to kick around anymore’, and, as far as he’s concerned, his heart is ‘just a low rent paying, palpitating pulp under my shirt’.

17) Snout - Circle High And Wide (from Circle High And Wide, 1998): I love the misdirection at the start of the song. At first it sounds like hushed folk, as singer Ross McLennan sings softly, ‘still we fly, fly, fly’. But as he continues, ‘hey hey hey, my my my’, the tension in the song builds and builds, until the song explodes into Snout’s regular style - they have the punky energy, mod style, and melodic touch of The Jam, but Snout are also funky in a way that The Jam are not, with syncopated grooves and the occasional drum fill/breakbeat that you could imagine a hip-hop producer delighting in discovering.

18) Hot Rollers - Wickerman’s Shoes (from Hot Rollers, 1998). One mark of a ‘scene’, a musical movement, is collaborations between musicians from different bands; think of Temple Of The Dog, the Monsters of Folk, or Tinted Windows. And the Hot Rollers were one of these; they were Richie Lewis, lead singer of Tumbleweed, and Kram, the singer/drummer in Spiderbait. The Hot Rollers’ album is pretty hit and miss, but ‘Wickerman’s Shoes’ is one of the hits - Richie’s droning stoner vocals combined with Kram’s more pop instincts just works.

19) Happyland - Don’t You Know Who I Am? (from Welcome To Happyland, 1998): I’ve sort of misrepresented Spiderbait by calling Kram the singer/drummer; he shared vocal duties with Janet English, the bassplayer, and she sung some of their more notable songs (e.g., ‘Calypso’, which was a top 20 single). Happyland was her equivalent 1998 side-project with Quan from Regurgitator (her boyfriend at the time). It combines Regurgitators synth-sound fixation of the time with her child-like sing-songy vocals, and there’s something great about hearing such a child-like voice singing lines like ‘he’s smoking crack with Billy’.

20) Powderfinger - Already Gone (from Internationalist, 1998). Powderfinger first tasted success in 1996 with a song called ‘Pick You Up’, which was moody grunge-lite, musically reminiscent of Pearl Jam (if they ever met, I’m sure Pearl Jam and Powderfinger would have fights about who was the biggest Neil Young fan, while My Morning Jacket smirked in the corner), though Bernard Fanning’s vocals are higher-pitched than Vedder’s, with more soul singer affectations. On Internationalist, Powderfinger expanded their sound in a variety of directions, becoming more explicitly political here, simpler there, and anthemic over there, etc. ‘Already Gone’ is appealingly simple and Beatlesque, but elsewhere on Internationalist, Powderfinger discovered the formula for anthemic rock that would a) make them phenomenally successful and b) would mark the end of the Australian alternative era. On Internationalist, Powderfinger discovered how to make music that would appeal to both Triple J types and people with more commercial tastes. When they sharpened and expanded this mainstream appeal on the follow up to Internationalist, called Odyssey Number Five, they scored one of the biggest selling albums in Australia in the 2000s. This ultimately meant that the sound of alternative rock filtered into the mainstream, and wasn’t ‘ours’ anymore. In 1998, for example, there was a band called Eskimo Joe who sounded like Weezer - their first successful song was even called ‘Sweater’; two years later, in 2000 (like Powderfinger) they were aiming for combination alternative/mainstream success, making lush, well-produced pop. And, as I grew older and alternative rock lost more and more of its novelty, my musical tastes had slowly moved from alternative rock to music which more or less deliberately eschewed loud distorted guitars. Radiohead’s Kid A, for example, seemed like the right thing at the right time to me.

Many of these bands kept at it, mind you - Spiderbait had a #1 hit in 2004 with a cover of ‘Black Betty’, Regurgitator recorded an album inside a bubble in public square in Melbourne for a cable TV channel, You Am I are now an institution - but they no longer felt like part of a scene. The Fauves were dropped by their label in 1999, and their lead singer ended up with an agony aunt segment on JJJ (they still release independent albums). Bands like Pollyanna and Snout released albums in 2001 and Triple J didn’t bother adding them to the playlist, and so quietly disbanded. Kevin Mitchell from Jebediah first started a solo career playing Jon Brion-influenced pop, and eventually joined a CSNYesque 4-singer-songwriting harmony group project. David McCormack from Custard now writes jingles for TV. And so it goes.