We have a song on our studio/improv album which is coming out 11-11-24 called 1985. When I say “song” its a piece of music with words. A single bass line with drums that Clare and I recorded into a single mic along with four other improvised pieces one day in May before we left the house to do some live shows in QLD, NSW and WA and South Australia. (We played every state with a different bass player so it was like forming a new band at each turn). The live shows were for our album (strangely)(emotional) which came out in April. It’s now October.
I’m just trying to set a timeline here.
As we finished (strangely)(emotional) and got it into production, Clare suggested that I should do an album that was more about words. More speaking and less concerned with tight pop songs. (We generally try to make our songs short, tight, energetic packets of sound and words. Old school ideas of creating moments full of bounce, textures and drama. We try, but don’t always succeed. I find it hard to get songs in at under three minutes.)
Clare suggested this because I was writing more songs. We already had another recorded and a project started with Marty Casey in Fremantle.
The song 1985 is just under 10 minutes long. We sent it to our guitarist Stuart Perera and he flew in some amazing guitar playing that totally transformed it. He just played these chord changes into it and lit the thing up. No editing involved or anything , still the same bass line, drums and vocal, he just played around and over that bass line and changed the key of it at times. Just by the voicings he was playing.
Anyway, it’s a song called 1985 and about the period around 1985. Its not literal in a personal or rational, journalistic way. In it’s way, it’s trying to appproach the year before. Which had a long buildup to it and then there was the aftermath. Which we are in now, and have been for a while.
I then thought I could write up my actual experiences of 1985 here. For YOU. For somebody!
We had been in the UK from October 1983 to late 1984. We had released an album of our Melbourne recordings on Red Flame Records, recorded and released an album Thirstys Calling for them and started work on a follow up. We did a performance for a television company at the Camden Palace at about 10 am in the morning for which we got paid enough to travel to the USA to play dates in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles and then continue on to Australia where we toured the country opening for PIL. We were all in our 20s and that kind of action and movement is quite thrilling and addictive at that age. We were in Australia but our minds were definitely set on the northern hemisphere, to which we intended to return as we had unfinished business there. As a band, we drank a lot of beer and didnt really venture out of ourselves at all. We didn’t make the scene. We didn’t really rate the scene. The Australian one was full of paisley shirts. We hung out with our friends and did our shows. (Pretty much been our game plan ever since as well).
Something happened with our label Red Flame being bought by Virgin so they could get one act on the label and we ended up staying in Australia until May. In Melbourne Clare and I spent quite a bit of time with Mark Seymour (Hunters And Collectors) and his then girlfriend, May, and he was starting to play the song Throw Your Arms Around Me at the time. I was still a drinker and remember ribbing him over a meal one night about the line “I will kiss you in four places…”. Very rude of me. Crude and annoying. We played two shows at the Yugal Soccer Club in Sydney and the Central Club and Seaview Ballroom in Melbourne and then left Australia. Our guitarist Mick Turner had had enough and stayed in Melbourne.
In April Clare and I had gotten married in Adelaide and yes a lot of our mates travelled over for the wedding. All the Feral Dinosaurs (Jim White, Jim Shugg, Conway Savage, Nick Danyi) , Mark and May and yes… a whole cast of family and friends.
We arrived in London and found a place to live in Islington and did a show at Dingwalls in Camden Lock. We had no return tickets.
We played other shows and looked for a new deal. We did a second session for the John Peel show on the BBC. A few gigs around London here and there. We played places like Dingwalls, the Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park, The Cricketers Arms at the Oval, Croydon Underground and the Half Moon In Herne Hill. The latter was on July 15th which was the whole day and night of Live Aid. Also on the bill was a Faces/Stones type band called The Queer Boys. We also played at Loughborough Uni and Acklam Hall in West London.
Red Flame released the tracks we had begun for them the previous year. I was mad at the time because thats how I thought you should behave toward authority but in retrospect its some of the best work we ever did. Six songs called Double Life. Red Flame always put us in a brilliant studio called LIvingstone in Wood Green.
I had met Alan McGee before as he ran a fanzine and was sometimes around at Red Flame. He now had a label called Creation and I had heard the Jesus and Mary Chain whilst back in Melbourne. I met Joe Foster , his partner at the label at a coffee bar in Soho and then again met him and Alan in Kings Cross. They were into working with us.
I better speed this up…
from my crude , tiny diary of the time…
sept 4th - met w/ Creation
sept 9th - Steve Miller was at a Crime and City Solution gig at Mean Fiddler and we were at the Jesus and Mary Chain “riot” at the Electric Ballroom. Alan had said they had the next day free in at Alaska studio and we should record a single.
sept 10th recorded Justice and Money too/ You've got Your Story / Take us all Home at Alaska w/ Adam Peters and Mick Harvey guesting. (Alaska was not as good as Livingstone - the studio in Wood Green that Red Flame had put us into. It was right under Waterloo station and was dark, dank and hot.)
Dec 17th - leave for Holland
Dec 18th Groningen
Dec 19th Deventer
Dec 20th Amsterdam
Dec 22nd Utrecht
Dec 23rd FERRY back to the UK.
Then that was it for Chris Walsh, our bass player who returned to Melbourne before Christmas. We were close with Peter Milton Walsh from the Apartments and did a couple of shows with two guitars and no bass. I loved it but Peter was his own man.
Anyway, during this time I had started working at temporary jobs in London and really enjoyed having some income and just living in the big dirty, cold furnace of a metropolis. I loved Soho and the Fleet st/Clerkenwell areas where Creation had started out. I loved the tube and the buses and smoking cigarettes and drinking Spanish wine and the desparation and the soft light of the place.
I’ll compress some stuff here. We had always been quite tight with the Go betweens and the Triffids and Kim Salmon also lived in London but he had a young family. We lived in a building with Rowland Howard and Genevieve at first landing in the UK (in a squat that Robert and Lindy threw us the keys to) but in 1985/86 it was Harry Howard and Janet Austin we were close to. Mick Harvey and Katy Beale were very sociable, as were Bleddyn Butcher and Jude Toohey. There was a painter from Koln called Stoya who I loved to hang out with and his exotic partner Minoux worked in the live music scene with band like the Butthole Surfers. (She said they took all their gear to their first London show via the tube). I also loved to spend time with Epic Soundtracks who later joined Crime and the City Solution and These Immortal Souls. He was a mad record collector and worked at a vinyl trading shop in Islington. Everything he had went on records.
We lived in a lovely squat near Sadlers Wells Theatre with a friend I met on a job called Pascal, a French man. Then we rented privately around the N19 area for several years.
David McClymont, formerly of Orange Juice joined us on bass.
In 1986 we recorded and released an EP for TIM/Abstract records. This featured Louise Elliott from the Laughing Clowns on sax. We recorded and released a final EP on the same label in 1987.
We played in London and occasionally outside it and did two more tours of Northern Europe.
By 1988 - having bought an acoustic guitar from Robert Forster for 20 quid- I was writing complete songs by myself and demoing them with Mark Fitzgibbon. Our last show as the Moodists featured Mark on keys and David McClymont and Malcolm Ross - both from Orange Juice- on bass and guitar respectively. Victor Van Vugt was behind the desk for all those recordings.
I started writing this to tell a literal story of the 1980s. Our 1980s. I have been searching here for a definitive 80’s moment to impress somebody. But it was all my perspective, I guess. That somebody probably will not be impressed! Perhaps I think the worst of somebodies?
Sure, we played on the same day as Live Aid in a pub. We missed that!
A great 80s moment was going to see Zodiac Mindwarp open for Motorhead. Zodiac couldn’t come across to a real metal crowd. Though we were there for him and preferred their part of the show. Thank you Zodiac. You flamed on!
Somewhere there we heard London talk about a band called The Swans. Apparently they were “really slow and really loud”. I was never going to like that but eventually saw them and yes they were all that and the singer was wearing a nappy but the opening act had been Mark Stewart and the Maffia who were thrilling and full of energy and fire. So again, I much preferred the opening act.
I don’t know which year it was of 1985 or 1986 but we went up in a bus with a bunch of music people to Manchester to either the third or fourth birthday party of the Hacienda Nightclub. (we had played there a year or so earlier) The bus came back the same night. The driver seemed quite drunk. I think Ruth Polsky was on the bus. She had booked that tour of the USA. She booked every one of the post punk acts into her club in NYC, The Danceteria. She was killed by a car in New York in September 1986. A great loss, she made things happen. (We had played at the Danceteria, they were filming Desperately Seeking Susan there at the time and Alan Vega was also living in the building). Tracy Pew died November 6th 1986. Poor guy was only 28 years old! His absence affected a lot of peoples trajectory from then on. A great guy, a smart guy. Who knows what he could have done?
There was also a party at Claude from the Haciendas London flat and Karl Burns from the Fall was fixing to fight me and Genesis P Orridge was making googoo eyes at Clare from across the room.
One of the first London bands we would go to see were the Pogues- before they had recorded anything - at the Pindar Of Wakefield in Kings Cross (later called the Water Rats. It had been Lenins fave London pub). They pretty much played only to their family and friends. Our mixer, Victor Van Vugt did their front of house after they began to venture to places outside of London.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds did their first warm up gig opening for the Moodists at the Fridge in Brixton in early ‘84. Michael Hutchence was there, sucking up to Nick so hard the rest of the Bad Seeds came into our band room to get away from the grisly scene. Mark Seymour was with us, he was on his way back to Australia, having recorded the next Hunters And Collectors album, Jaws Of Life, with Conny Planck in Cologne.
But I think the peak 80s London moment was on April 26th 1986.
We went along to the Clarendon Ballroom to see the Butthole Surfers. A long running venue which we had been to before. It seemed even darker and dingier than ever. Hardly any lights were in the band room. We stayed in the bar. Robert Forster came in. He had split up with Lindy and was with a date. He was wearing a kind of Mary Poppins cape and was acting pretty loose. Jim, William and Douglas from the Jesus and Mary Chain all walked in together. They bought pints and huddled around them at a table. Just a scrum of overcoats and frizzed up hair. The Butthole Surfers came on, the sound was all muffled - not that overpowering. It was as if they were only using whatever PA and lights were in the room and hadn’t added anything extra. But Gibby Hayes appeared like a totally demonic figure with his hair all platted and at the end of each platt was a wild, burning flame. His hair was on fire!
One of the greatest entrances I have ever seen.
Oh, and Chernobyl went off on the same day as well.
You Can Preorder a digital copy of our new album I PASSED THROUGH MINOR CHORD IN A MORNING here.
You also buy a t shirt with the digital album.
PS … eventually we found an audience in Australia that mostly didn’t view us through a lens or window that was fashioned or directed from any of this furious activity. And we didn’t see it as our thing to draw them back to consider any of it. Our biggest and most emblematic song eventually became one from 1995 called Rock N Roll Is Where I Hide.