Punk roots
Pete: My band The Scabs, after three gigs at the Oxford Funhouse, got booted out for actually having fun. We then did the unthinkable and started our own venue. Our singer Johnny Dole and I went to twenty pubs in one day, had a beer in each pub and got knocked back in every one. Then I remembered the Grand Hotel at Railway Square where we'd done a gig a couple of years before. We took our manager Ray (aka Butcher Brown, a disqualified pro wrestler) with us. No-one ever said no to Ray. Sure enough the publican said we could do whatever we wanted in the back room Friday and Saturday nights.
David: I was a fifteen-year-old kid from Campsie, I'd dropped out of school and I had a band, the Sadists, with friends who were all even younger than me. My plan to get us gigging was simple, I would go to a punk gig and ask the bands if I could play at the next show they were doing. I went looking for this gig in Alexandria where the punk band Filth were playing. Outside the front door I found Bob Short playing his guitar shirtless, with a chain for his guitar strap. Bob had this real long lead on his guitar. That was the gig where Filth threw rancid pig's blood at the audience and caused a stampede. I could hardly believe it. A couple of weeks later we played with them on the bill at Alexandria.
Pete: I first saw David at the Grand during a Scabs gig. He was standing in front of me cutting his chest with a beer can. Later at Forbes Street I remember him reading his lyrics from an exercise book. I was very impressed.
David: I was told Johnny Dole lived in Forbes Street Darlinghurst and I set off to find him, to ask him for a gig at the Grand. As I crossed Burton Street I saw this figure dressed in black, with greasy rocker hair. I asked him, 'Are you Johnny Dole?' He was on his way to buy milk and I tagged along. Pretty soon I was playing at the Grand and living at Forbes Street too.
Dan Rumour: I used to call Forbes Street 'Happytown'. I'd tell people, 'These are the good old days,' and when we released 'Charity' we decided the label should be Happytown Sounds.
David: Forbes Street was an amazing place at that time. The Urban Guerillas and Thought Criminals lived across the road. It seemed every other punk band was nearby. Mental As Anything lived in Forbes Street. There was even street tennis on weekends. Everybody shared musical equipment and helped with posters and gigs.
Dan: I remember David, in Forbes St, wrote a song called 'Write it in Blood' which suggested that if songwriters used their own blood to write their lyrics they might be a bit more selective and concise. He was young, 16, but he already took his craft seriously.
Peter: The Scabs broke up and David's younger brother John and his friend Lyndon, in the Sadists, weren't allowed out anymore - their parents had decided they were too young - so David and I and the singer from the Sadists, Andrew Campbell, formed the Broken Toys.
Dan: The Broken Toys were so young and so bloody good I went to all their gigs just to make sure that the guitars were tuned.
Peter: The Broken Toys played mostly at the Grand. There was no stage and the crowd was right on top of you. When the Grand was to be shut and demolished I remember David getting up and smashing the clock with his bass and busting what was left of it on the bar. It was a sort of destroy party.
David: The Broken Toys did a demo to take to Kim Foley, of all people, who was in town looking for acts. We went to meet him in a big hotel. He was completely insane. He spent the whole time telling filthy stories about the Runaways. We were there for an hour or so. While we were there the manager of Midnight Oil rang up to ask if he could meet with him. Fowley was shouting down the phone saying things like, 'I don't care if he's fucking seven feet tall, I don't care if he's fucking bald, I'm fucking seven feet tall. Is he any fucking good?' Me and Pete were laughing our arses off.
David: I was interviewed by Susanne Moore from the Daily Mirror. I told her how much I'd hated school, that 'it tries to destroy your imagination', and when she asked me what kind of music Broken Toys played I said, 'I play pop music.' The line in the article was, 'He looks punk but says he's pop.' At the next gig all hell broke loose. Everyone was accusing me of being pop, a traitor to the punk cause. Twenty or so of these concerned punks came to my flat to teach me a lesson and I answered the door in my pyjama bottoms, a knife in one hand and a spinning nunchucka in the other.
Post punk
David: After the Grand shut Peter went to London and I began working with Danny Rumour. Nehil from SPK was a bit of a fan and approached us to work with them. He admitted they couldn't write music but he was very interested in my earlier experiences as a press operator and metal worker. They wanted to make this industrial type music. We did some gigs and worked on those first two singles which became legendary. Unfortunately Nehil committed suicide soon after. He was a confused sort of character, like in that Conrad novel the Secret Agent. He always had a carry bag filled with important documents, and there was the strange feeling that at any moment we would all be blown to pieces. But those records are great, there was nothing quite like them in the world at that time.
David: The other project Dan and I were doing was the Ugly Mirrors. We wanted to do some sort of anti-punk band. We had just come out of the high energy punk era and we wanted to test the power of melody as opposed to volume. I bought some of the music and lyrics I'd written from the Broken Toys but the first song we wrote together was 'Puppets', and to us that represented our new direction. It was just the sort of music the punks would hate, soft, creepy and beautiful. I wanted the lyrics to be beautiful and dangerous, grim but playful. We were going for a kind of children's nightmare music box sound, a kind of tough Syd Barrett or the twisted side of 60's punk psychedelia. Restraint was the key.
Des: I have a memory of Dan walking into Forbes Street grumbling about punks and stating that his next band would be anti punk. I hooted or something. Sometime afterward David asked me to play bass and I cashed in my one-way ticket to London to buy an amp. That was April 1979.
David: Des and I were best friends. His brother Andy was in the Last Words, and we'd met at the Grand. I was young, 17, but Des was younger. We had common roots. Both our fathers came from the Liberties in Dublin, we both arrived on ships, and spent time in immigrant camps. I still feel for any poor bastard who had to deal with the two of us when we were on 'full'. Poor Nehil for example, at the SPK sessions, after doing his vocal, which was fine, foolishly asked us what we thought of it. Of course we said, 'It's OK, but not very manly.' The poor guy did it over and over again.
David: Our first gig was at a party on the North Shore. We set up in the loungeroom and started playing. We played very quietly and with great intensity. The quieter we played the quieter the audience became. Before long our sound was doing just what we wanted it to do. We knew right then we had a great group.
David: The Ugly Mirrors mostly played punk venues like Rags. When we took over the Thursday residency at the Civic from the Mentals it was like the next level. It was our first residency. To celebrate we changed the name to something we felt was more positive, Sekret Sekret. I was a really bad speller.
Peter: Fresh off the plane from London with one rehearsal I played the Civic. I made lots of mistakes but enjoyed the great songs, the feeling of being part of something special. Every rehearsal there were great new songs. David and Des tore around on motor scooters looking like movie stars in late 60's movies. I travelled in Danny's Datsun Bluebird with a borrowed guitar and amp. Colin drove an old truck packed with heavy black boxes that we carried up stairs all over the city. I felt blessed.
Des: Sydney at that time seemed to have a lot of op shops, which we raided. As it happened there was an abundance of paisley gear available. Back then no one would be caught dead wearing paisley. We started wearing it because it was plentiful, colourful and did not say punk rock. We earned the moniker of 'those paisley poofters' from Sydney's macho Detroit crowd. Some band once likened us to a packet of Columbines.
The music
David: There was no formula, there was just a lot of energy. We were taking things from all over the place. The song 'Charity', nearly all the lyrics come from things we used to hear trendy rich school girls say about us. 'Conversation so deep, oh yurh.' You can hear the venom in my voice, and the song 'Wear Glasses', showed our pet hate of uni students - 'Do nothing, learn something, be clever, wear glasses.' We were so cheeky and unrepentant. Des: We used to call serious arty bands 'triangle bands.' David: The riff from 'Wear Glasses', I remember at rehearsal it reminded us of something, I think it was the theme from Division Four. And one of our friends tried to convince me that my intro for NKJ was pinched from Jesus Christ Superstar.
Pete: We did our first single, Charity/Hope You Can. It had that 'chicken wire fence of sound' that a whole lot of city bands had. But we knew it was good. We were playing a lot of gigs. We had a residency at Frenches Monday and then Tuesday nights which we took over from Midnight Oil. The schoolgirls from Sydney High used to do their homework on the bar and then dance to the band.
Dan: Colin our drummer began touring, mixing for INXS. We used to rehearse at Des's place, where he lived with Jim Elliot and Ken Gormley. I remember Jim had just bought himself this little drum kit and he sat in for a rehearsal and after he said, 'I see your playing French's on Monday. It's good of Colin to drum now that he's with INXS.' 'He can't do it,' I replied. 'So who's drumming then?' 'We thought you could,' I told him. There was a silence then. Jim hadn't played in a band before.
Pete: When Jim joined we were about to record 'New King Jack'. NKJ was one of David's songs he brought in on guitar and we all worked on. I remember Des and David telling the engineer they wanted the record to sound like a girl in a fur coat in an MG. The guy just looked confused but we pulled it off. That was an indie hit and we started headlining the Rock Garden and the Trade Union Club. We performed NKJ and were interviewed on Donny Sutherland's show. I was so nervous I could only just speak.
David: On 'Sounds' on National TV I declared to Donny Sutherland I would rather stay independent. The useless fucker nearly swallowed his teeth. He couldn't comprehend that someone could say anything other then they wanted to be signed by one of the big companies. I wanted to kill him because he didn't even speak to us when it went to an ad break. He just sipped his whiskey and looked the other way. When it came back on air, he was all smiles again. The guy was so fake.
Des: We were recording the follow up to NKJ. We were maybe halfway through when the plug was pulled at Basilisk. We did some demos with Lobby Lloyd. They were rough but he was optimistic he could land us a deal with Mushroom's White label which was almost independent enough for us. We were approached by Malcolm Green from Split Enz with an offer to produce us but we stuck with Lobby. But Lobby's pitching process took about six months by which time a few of us were seriously questioning the life - we were broke and tired and it seemed to be going nowhere.
Pete: David and I had a meeting with Harbour Agency. David had this phobia about lifts and tunnels, they really freaked him out, and Harbour was way up in this office block. I couldn't even get him in the lift. So I went up and told them he was on his way up, by the stairs, 21 floors, but he never showed. So I went down again and he was still there, he couldn't even get in the stairwell. In the end I did the meeting on my own, and they signed us. They started giving us all these gigs in Bexley and Parramatta, places like that. We'd been working 2 or 3 nights a week in the city but they expected us to work our arses off, 5 or 6 nights a week, all over the place. We couldn't do it.
Des: That was definitely a precondition of any contract - tour the beer barns. Our experience outside the city wasn't great. With INXS at Caringbah having our mix sabotaged, this gig on the Gold Coast with the neon-light nipple on the wall, a Brisbane pub where all these leather-clad cops showed up outside with head-cracking looks on their faces.
David: Getting Sekret to tour was like trying to get a cat to take a bath. The ones of us who weren't phobic were lazy. It was like trying to get Woody Allen out of New York.
Meltdown
Jim Elliot: In the beginning of '82 the band was becoming extremely unstable and after one particularly bad gig with the Sunny Boys at Selinas we knew that was it. Some of the others had to go away for a while to ... well, you know 'rest' ...
David: I was very tired by then. My nerves were completely gone. I think it was rest or die. I'd been playing without a break for five years, I just needed a holiday, some time off from the band.
Pete: Lobby was still working. He rang about us supporting the Sunny Boys on a national tour. I really wanted to do it but maybe everyone else knew what would happen. Lobby also rang about signing with Mushroom's White label. I think they'd just signed Hunters and Collectors and they wanted us. I was ready to take it and I was stalling Lobby for a few days, waiting, thinking the guys would change their minds.
David: We just couldn't do it anymore ... like our minds went a bit funny. But it wasn't as if things were going bad, because things were going great.
Des: When the band split David, Danny and I ended up living in a yoga centre in Newtown. Doc Neeson from the Angels was staying there too, in the bunk next to mine. He was a nice bloke. We'd jam sometimes.
Des: About a year later Danny and David reformed the band and I found myself listening to Jim and David on JJJ. The interviewer, for some reason, asked where I was and David said, 'Oh, he's at home.' That probably sparked my desire to play again, but this time on guitar, with our friend Ken Gormley on bass. That band was different. We were described as having 'gone humble'. We became consciously, if not aggressively, normal.
David: The new band put out two great singles, 'White Stick' and 'Just to Love You'. But it was like our 'Let it Be' period, you know - we wrote our own songs, recorded separately, didn't know where each other lived, that sort of thing. In the end Danny wanted to leave and live in the country. Before Sekret finished I'd put out my own solo single, Give It Up. Then after, I did a whole 'indie' solo album, Landlord Green, something Sekret Sekret should have done a couple of times. I was 22 years old at the end of Sekret, an age a lot of musicians would be starting their first 'real' band. It had happened really fast.
Edited from a google group by John Sommerville.