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Foreword

I first met David Nichols when he was a teen music fan in early 80s Melbourne. He was too young to get into the pubs my band the Moodists were mostly playing in but had started a fanzine and wrote about music and drew cartoons for it. If truth be told, having a teenage fanzine writer and illustrator on your case is a pretty cool situation to be in. He made us authentic, in a way.

In the intervening years he has continued to write about and engage with popular and unpopular music as a community radio broadcaster, an artist manager (very briefly) and as a musician himself. His writing was published in actual pop monthlies like Smash Hits and successful lifestyle advertising cultural wraparounds such as Rolling Stone Australia. He has experienced the limitations and constraints of the scene on the island and has continued to chase down rumours and will-o’-the-wisp reputations that occasionally spawn mad fevers in the compound and he’s brought a lot of them down to earth and into play here.

As he says in the introduction, it’s a large book and it obeys no logic other than what chance and the weather have given him to use, just this one time he has everything and everyone in his sights. He has given himself the power and conceit to set a grid and tempo to a larger story than anybody has attempted before. He also became an actual historian along the way too. A made guy.

This book has been years – decades – in the making. Stories you had to really get a feel for, otherwise they’d just come out all wrong. Just pale shadows of American or British stories. Mad characters like Johnny O’Keefe getting right up in your face and bellowing out of tune about how great they were. Just listen to the digital files now and it sounds all blustering and off-key, but if a writer could take you somewhere close to the race-track and you could smell the fumes on the audience’s breath too . . .

So many details that jump out at you in each chapter. Young British emigrés traveling on the same ships to Australia in the late 50s who emerge a decade later as flaming pop stars from different cities, still looking back at the world they’d been dragged away from. The Bee Gees in the dusty cowtown that was early 60s Brisbane and their precocious child talent contest rivals, Billy Thorpe and Lobby Loyde.

There’s also the endlessly repeated struggles for authenticity as “real” music is posited against “pop pap”. People fight that battle in the late 50s and the early 60s. Trad jazzers and folkies versus rock ’n’roll barbarians. People making their own instruments and clothes. Art vs. money. The technology dragging the floor out from under the players feet – constantly. The wider world flooding in and washing through the whole picture. The regional variations, the radio pumping out sounds as soon as the vinyl was baked in the pressing plants. Then TV opening up the pipelines as well. People mad for new shit! Then the New Zealanders coming in with their weird vowels – their poise and their brains and their drugs!

This text is dense and full of mad detail. David Nichols is deeply and widely interested in the characters and the choices they make or have to make in the scenes here. He’s got empathy and his own prejudices balancing all the while too. He admits at the start – it’s a Melbourne-centric story in many ways, but why not? If that’s the spot you were watching, reading and listening from for the most part?

I had a friend who was from the UK alternative 80s music world and he’d ended up happily in Melbourne and working in the scene in a music distribution admin type gig. He was a real music fan though. He continued to proudly love the most vegetable of prog, even when it stank to high heaven, at least in the knowing nostrils of the general music snobs that he had surrounded himself with. If the prog scene was a section of a Royal Botanic Gardens, he especially loved what would be known in lay terms as The Stinking Penis Plant Of That Peculiar World. Yes, King Crimson. We were talking upon matters musical one day and the theme was the relative merits of various books on the subject. By this time, the mid 90s, the field was growing by the day and you would have been right to wonder if the story was in danger of being told one too many times. It was getting to be all hearsay and rote tale telling. My friend James opined that for a music book to be considered good – in his not so humble opinion – the writer had to champion at least ONE act in it that just defied all known streams of thought as to what was considered to be good taste. The story or argument had to be built around one massive, gushing column of totally strange material. Some hopelessly untrendy, unknown, forgotten, degraded, weak and basically unstable piece of stuff. Past its use-by date. Uncultured, unpasteurized, unmediated junk. If that presence was held to be there, in the mind of the writer – and he used that presence to illuminate the dense jungle surrounds he was guiding us through – well it was an argument that was at the least worth giving an audient posture toward.

In this book, David Nichols has summoned many emanations of such a presence for us to give our attention to. A great piece of work in itself.

Thank you comrade. From a player. Someone had to wrestle this shit down. It will be a great challenge for someone in the future to pick up the trail for Volume Two.

Dave Graney,

Melbourne 2015