The Victims - Perth is a Culture Shock

THE VICTIMS - Perth is a Culture Shock!

THE VICTIMS - PERTH IS A CULTURE SHOCK!

By Ian McFarlane © 2020

Thanks to Dave Faulkner and David Laing

American label In The Red Records have issued The Victims compilation The Victims and their freshly recorded EP Horror Smash. With all this Victims activity going on, I was fortunate enough to conduct a lengthy interview with Dave Faulkner in May 2020, where he opens up about all things Victims related. But first, some background...

The late 1970s punk rock explosion spread its shock waves far and wide across Australia. The country’s most isolated city, Perth (Western Australia), was the centre of a small but vibrant punk scene. The Victims were Perth’s third punk band, following on from The Cheap Nasties (with Kim Salmon) and James Baker’s band The Geeks. The Victims only existed for ten months yet managed to release two of the landmark Aussie punk records.

Dave Faulkner aka Dave Flick (guitar, vocals; ex-Beagle Boys) and James Baker teamed up in May 1977, following a fortuitous meeting at a Cheap Nasties gig. With Rudolph V (real name Dave Cardwell) on bass they got underway. Their acknowledged mentors included US pioneers like the New York Dolls, The Stooges, Ramones and Flamin’ Groovies, plus UK pop primitives The Troggs. With their frantic, explosive sound backed by a solid melodic bent, The Victims became the premier punk band on the Perth scene. Faulkner played with equal parts precision, power and melody. Baker’s furious drumming was already legendary around Perth, his troglodyte thump setting the new three piece ahead of the pack.

The Victims staked out such punk haunts as the Governor Broome Hotel and Hernando’s Hideaway as their own. They consolidated their fierce live reputation with the release of one of the first Australian punk singles, ‘Television Addict’ b/w ‘(I’m) Flipped Out Over You’ (1,000 copies, issued February 1978).

‘Television Addict’ ranks with the first records by the likes of The Saints, Radio Birdman, The Leftovers, The Scientists, News and Fun Things as one of the great singles of the Aussie punk rock era. Just as ‘Television Addict’ hit the record shops, The Victims decided to break up. The band’s final recordings appeared as the five track EP, The Victims (500 copies; Studio Side - ‘I Understand’, ‘Open Your Eyes’, ‘High School Girls’ b/w Live Side - ‘T.V. Freak’, ‘Disco Junkies’), in July 1978. Some copies of the EP came in hand-drawn and painted sleeves which are ultra-rare and highly prized collector’s items. All the tracks from the single and the EP (plus the previously unissued ‘Perth is a Culture Shock’) were later compiled on the album All Loud on the Western Front (December 1989).

With the breakup of The Victims, Baker joined Kim Salmon’s band The Scientists where he remained until January 1981. Faulkner joined fellow Perth band Midget and the Farrellys, before travelling to the USA for an extended holiday. On the eve of his departure for the USA in early 1979, Faulkner reformed The Victims in order to play a farewell gig for their fans.

Following his return to Australia in late 1979, Faulkner joined fellow Perth band Manikins. At the end of 1980 he travelled to Sydney where he formed Le Hoodoo Gurus with Baker and Roddy Radalj (ex-Scientists, Rockets). Hoodoo Gurus have carved out a career as one of Australia’s most enduring bands and that’s a whole other story I hope to explore in the future. Baker went on to play with Beasts of Bourbon, The Dubrovniks and Satellite 5 among others.

The Victims’ legend has continued to grow over the years. The single and EP have been bootlegged as stand-alone 45s on several occasions while the individual tracks have all appeared on the bootleg compilations Murder Punk (Vols 1 and 2), Where Birdmen Flew and Where Birdmen Flew Revisited Vol. 1. In 2011 Japanese label 1977 Records reissued the single and EP as well as issuing the compilation Sleeping Dogs Lie in a Limited Edition of 300 CDs and 300 LPs (with a second print run of 100 copies). It combined all their studio recordings with the nine track ‘Bad Demo’ which had been recorded in a lounge room around August 1977. 1977 Records also issued a live album, Culture Shock (200 CDs, 200 LPs on black vinyl, 100 LPs on splatter vinyl). The eleven tracks had been recorded live to video at Hernando’s Hideaway on 5 January 1978, subsequently converted to digital for the release.

More significantly, in 2017 Faulkner and Baker revived The Victims with bassist Ray Ahn from The Hard-Ons, and recorded a new EP, Horror Smash. Recorded and mixed in Perth (November 2017) and Sydney (January 2018) the four-track, 7" EP came out on American label In The Red Records in November 2019. In The Red also released the compilation The Victims on LP, packaged in a gatefold, foil-stamped, embossed cover, basically a reissue of Sleeping Dogs Lie. The band played gigs in 2017 and there are now plans for more recording sessions.

In Conversation With Dave Faulkner

Thanks for your time Dave. We’re talking today about The Victims. I’m familiar with the basic history of the band so I wanted to start with your pre-fame career. I believe you formed your first band, Savage Messiah, at high school?

Yes, that’s it, from the Ken Russell movie. Silly name for a bunch of Catholic schoolboys but at that time it was pretty rebellious (laughs). We weren’t really thinking that way. I used to go the State Reference Library in Perth, and I used to read these exotic European film books and there was one called Film Review, like an annual wrap up of European films. I love films and you’d see these photos of half naked people so it was kinda racy for a schoolboy.

I used to read the same kind of books in my local library in Melbourne.

Right, so I read about this Ken Russell film called Savage Messiah. It was about a French artist whose name actually eludes me (Ed: sculptor Henri Gaudier Brzeska). He was a bit of an iconoclast, a bit of a difficult character and Russell made this film. I just loved the name.

Then I guess after you’d left school you talked your way into the Perth blues band The Beagle Boys.

Before that I had a duo with Neil Fernandez. He was in Savage Messiah at school and went on to be in The Cheap Nasties and the Manikins. At school we’d play at high school socials, and we were cheap. We played songs that we all liked, T. Rex, Creedence, Deep Purple, Alice Cooper. Even though we were in this rock band we weren’t really friends at school. Neil was very associated with sports, he loved cricket. I wasn’t sporty at all, my group of friends were far away from the sports jocks types. We were kinda the outsiders.

Then we both went to university. I mean, I liked Neil but we weren’t mates. It was only at university that I became close friends with Neil. That’s where we met Kim Salmon. We met him through Ken Seymour actually. Ken I met through his sister, Sue Seymour. She was at university with me, we were actually in the university dramatic society together.

That was a very good meeting with Sue. Through her I met Ken and his best friend was Kim Salmon so we all became friends and we ended up jamming together occasionally and talking music. We’d go to the University Tavern, after uni, and drink cider and discuss music. Those days all the news you got about music was from the English papers. You didn’t pay attention to Countdown, that was nothing to do with what we liked. Everyone watched it of course, but we were into other things. We’d read Sounds and Melody Maker, New Musical Express. We’d get them like a month later because they were an overseas shipment.

We’d also get Rock Scene from New York and that’s how we’d read up on what was happening in music. That’s how we first started hearing about this scene at CBGBs in New York. That was at the end of ’75. We were desperate to hear this music, it sounded crazy and wild. The descriptions you’d read sounded savage. So we finally got to hear it when the Live at CBGBs album came out. I’m pretty certain it came out before the Ramones first album. It was a double album and it had bands like Tuff Darts, Mink DeVille.

The Dictators?

No, they weren’t on it but they’d been going for a while. Their first album was Go Girl Crazy and it had already come out but I didn’t know them until later. They’re a band that has not received their due as far as their importance to punk rock. The Ramones were influenced by The Dictators immensely. They did ‘California Sun’ like The Dictators, for god’s sake and stole ‘Surfin’ Bird’ from The Cramps. All a far cop I suppose. Then the Ramones influenced The Dictators back.

It’s interesting because Perth’s always painted as just Top 40 covers bands but there was a big blues scene in Perth in the ’70s. There was Sid Rumpo, Dave Hole, The Elks, Western Flyer.

Yeah, Dave Hole was the guy I was watching a lot in that ’75 era. We’d go to this hotel in Nedlands near the university, and he had a regular spot there and he was like our Rory Gallagher, he was a huge star. It still boggles my mind as to why he didn’t become a bigger star globally because he was insanely talented as a performer and player.

He’s an incredible player, I saw him play a few times over the years.

Yeah, he had a bit of success on Alligator Records but it didn’t quite translate. He should be seen as another Stevie Ray Vaughan in my mind, you know. It’s a fairly specialised genre slide guitar but man, what a player.

He’s got that unusual technique because he plays it over the top of the fret board.

Right, and a great singer. So the blues thing... The Beagle Boys, I used to see them play because they’d formed long before I joined them. Robert Searls came from Sid Rumpo, so he’d been around. Sid Rumpo had broken up, and he came back to Perth a little bit tail between his legs, I suppose. He formed The Beagle Boys purely out of passion, he loved blues and R&B and that was his dream band. He was in his late 20s and I was still just 18 when I’d joined. They had Michael Fagan on harmonica, he was an incredible musician, one of the greatest harmonica players I’ve ever heard.

So I’d been listening to blues, I loved things like John Mayall but I was listening to punk music by the time I joined The Beagle Boys. We’d got hold of the Ramones’ first album by then. I’d had a little flirtation with The Cheap Nasties, had a few rehearsals with them but then I quit in this fit of pique. That was my moment of high dudgeon. I was a keyboard player at this point. I went to a junk shop and bought a cheap guitar, it was a Maya, I think it cost me about 80 bucks. Like an SG copy, and that was my guitar I played in The Victims. It took me about a year to learn.

So I kinda talked my way into The Beagle Boys. I went to one of their rehearsals. The bass player, Phil Bailey, I knew his girlfriend from uni and I went around to their share house. No one took any notice of me so I just sat down on the couch and just watched them rehearse while they were all playing around me. They were correcting themselves, you know, ‘the timing on that was wrong, do it this way’. I couldn’t hear any difference but they seemed to know what they were doing. My ears weren’t that finely attuned to all the nuances they were hearing. I was a very raw musician at that point, self taught keyboard player. They finished rehearsing about half an hour later and they started packing up and no one’s talking to me which was kind of awkward (laughs).

They were getting ready to go to a gig that night and I thought ‘jeez I better say something’. I said to the drummer ‘I hear you’re looking for a keyboard player’, and he looked at me funny and like ‘right, so you’re a keyboard player’. They were a really uptight band, Robert was very motivated and talented. They were all dedicated blues fans and they had their own scene, they were quite well known, stars in their own right. So it was quite unusual for them to give me the time of day really.

That just gave me an entrée. They gave me an audition and I got the gig. They asked me at the time ‘what kind of music do you like?’ and I said ‘punk rock’ and they went ‘what’s that?’. Anyway, I was teaching myself guitar all the way through The Beagle Boys. They were a professional band, they were making enough money to pay themselves a small wage each week. I was 18 and I had a paying gig, I was enjoying it. I probably squandered the opportunity to benefit from all their incredible knowledge because they had incredible record collections. There were things that took me decades to get my hands on and others that I got around to discovering for myself, it was all there. But you know, things like the first Damned album had came out. I didn’t really care about checking out early Howlin’ Wolf or Slim Harpo or whoever. I sorta did, I played it and liked it but my mind was occupied with punk. Ramones songs and playing guitar.

So you got your guitar chops down, so tell us about meeting James Baker who was quite a catalyst for the whole scene.

Totally. Well, The Cheap Nasties had got to the point where they wanted to do a gig and that was early ’77, April maybe, at the Rivervale Hotel and it was billed as a ‘Punk Rock’ show. There was another band called Wrok Bottom, I might have that wrong. Anyway, they thought of themselves as being edgy, they thought they were kinda punks themselves, they related to the street scene. So they put on this ‘Punk Rock’ show and advertised it as such. So anyone who was interested in punk rock went; ‘Great! There’s other people into punk rock, someone else knows about it!’. There weren’t that many people but they all came to this show and James was one of those. Of course I was there because I knew The Cheap Nasties anyway. So we struck up a conversation and pretty much straight away decided to form a band.

I get the feeling that his knowledge seemed to be beyond everyone else at that point.

He was like our Marco Polo, with tales of the exotic east, you know. He’d already been overseas. He set off maybe the beginning of ’76 and he went to Los Angeles, New York and then to London. So he was right there at the beginning of the London punk scene. He went to the 100 Club to see the Sex Pistols, he auditioned for the Clash and they wanted him to join, but obviously he had to come back because he’d run out of money. One of those things, like sliding doors. He went as a glam rocker because he’d been into the Dolls and he had his hair teased and coloured, stuff like that. He got to LA and I think it was there that he decided to get rid of that look. For some reason, and you’d have to ask him about this, but he bought a Beatles suit and started wearing the Brian Jones haircut, which pretty much became his trademark after that. He went to New York and went to Max’s Kansas City and saw the Flamin’ Groovies, the Ramones and stuff like that. He must have gone to CBGBs, I don’t remember him mentioning that specifically.

So he was very knowledgeable and he had that primitive drum beat that suited your purposes naturally.

His favourite bands were #1 the Dolls and #2 The Troggs. He loved the Groovies, but Reg Presley and Johnny Thunders, they were his icons.

There was that punk groundswell in Perth, it happened in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and elsewhere, anyone from there will tell you originally there was a very small scene. So when was The Victims’ first official gig and where did you play?

Our first gig was at our house, Victim Manor. It wasn’t literally a squat but we were renting this cheap house, it was in an industrial area, in east Perth, near the big railway yards at Claisebrook. We were surround by light industry, it was quite a derelict area, not now, but it was then. So at night there’d be no one around except us and some drunks, homeless people on the street. We could play to our heart’s content, we could make a racket and no one cared. That was our house. We just threw a party, just word of mouth and all these people turned up and that’s what it was, our first show.

I can’t remember our first official gig, it might have been the Governor Broome hotel. James liked a beer and he went to this watering hotel, in Northbridge, and he just saw this little stage in the corner of the room and they didn’t have bands on so he approached the publican about putting on a gig on a Sunday afternoon. We’d take the door and he’d keep the bar and that’s what happened. We had four Sundays in a row as a residency. The party at Victim Manor, that was the birth of The Victims’ punk scene, lots of people came to that gig which was the nucleus of the scene. But, um, the Governor Broome was a bit more official and it ended up being the place to go. Then we started playing at Hernando’s Hideaway, this was a Spanish restaurant located in an alley and the owner, Andy, let us take over Wednesday nights and that became The Victims’ home.

It’s like The Saints in Brisbane, before they headed over to London. They had their own Club 76 in their terrace house. They’d been playing gigs there because they couldn’t get gigs anywhere else. There are parallels.

We knew that we weren’t going to get gigs in proper venues. We didn’t want to, we didn’t relate to that scene, we weren’t out to convert people and become well known. We were just having fun and trying to get away with it. We didn’t want to be around people who didn’t understand us. People had to find The Victims for themselves and lots of people did. We weren’t looking to reach out for anyone.

So how did you come to record the first single?

I guess we wanted to do some proper recordings because we’d done this bad demo, we just set up in a lounge room and we had the mixer for The Beagle Boys, Vin, record us. Vin had bought the PA and a truck for The Beagle Boys but then the band broke up and it left him at a loose end. He ended up forming his own sound company and was very successful for many years doing that. Because of my acquaintance through The Beagle Boys he’d mix The Victims. So through Vin we got a reel-to-reel tape recorder and set up with a desk in someone’s house and decided to record a demo. We didn’t know what we were doing and it was pretty rugged. That was the first stuff we recorded, the songs on the B-side of the album, the compilation album we’ve released on In The Red Records.

Following that you actually went into a studio to record the single.

What happened, one of the fans of the band, Tony Watson, he actually came from a fairly nice area, like Claremont or something. His parents were well off so he asked them for some money to record his favourite band. It was about $3,000, that included pressing 1,000 copies. He said he wanted to make a record, He loved the band and he wanted us to do the record. We went into Sweetcorn Studios and made ‘Television Addict’. We did three songs, blasted it out, it didn’t really have that much finesse about it. We just knew that we wanted to be powerful and somehow we lucked out. We had an engineer who did a great job. Every step of the way because that single was just perfect.

Absolutely, you’ve hit the nail on the head, it’s a classic of Aussie punk. I love the story line of the kid that got thrown away. I started at uni in ’79, and I was doing sociology and one of the big things at the time was about the influence of TV and the effects on kids’ behaviour. There were all sorts of studies and books written about that subject. So it was a very timely release.

Right, well it was a specific story about Ronnie Zamora, this 15-year-old kid and his lawyers tried to mount this defence against murder. He was watching Kojak, so he claimed, and there was some murder and he decided ‘I’ll go and kill the neighbour, just like I’ve seen on TV’. He went and murdered his neighbour and he said ‘it wasn’t my fault, the TV hypnotised me, it was temporary insanity’. So he was copying this thing on Kojak, so it was called the Kojak Defence.

In The Victims we all loved television. James and I had a common love of TV sitcoms and all the names of the shows in ‘TV Freak’, they’re all the shows I loved. James wrote the lyrics, but I loved all those shows. I was the typical latch key kid, both my parents worked and I’d come home from school, let myself in and just plop in front of the TV and watch sitcoms non-stop from 3.30 ’til 7.30 at night. You probably had the same experience (Ed: Yes!).

You’d watch McHale’s Navy, all the old black and white shows. The Munsters, The Honeymooners, It's About Time, Car 54 Where are You?, Get Smart, Gilligan’s Island. On the ABC you’d watch F Troop and My Favourite Martian while the news was on the other channels, you know. They were all things we loved. So when this kid Ronnie Zamora started this Kojak Defence, we were horrified, ‘how could they besmirch television!’. So James wrote that lyric in defence of TV.

It’s brilliant! Then once the single came out it created a lot of interest but it wasn’t too long after that the band broke up. And you got the EP out as well, but before we got on to that tell us about what the band was like live?

Well, we knew we were good, we were the real thing and we felt like it. We were as happy as pigs in shit. We had our own scene, we were a good band and we had lots of friends that would come and see us play, a regular gathering of the tribes, or whatever you want to call it. We loved all the other bands that were playing with us, some were kinda crappy, but we loved the bands and the people who were in them and it was all one big community.

So the scene was real to us and everyone was equal and the audience was just as important and people in the audience formed their own bands and they’d be on the same bill or you’d go and see their shows.

One of your most high profile fans was a young David McComb who wrote a glowing review of the band which got printed in RAM.

Yeah, we met all those guys, they were still in Year 10 I think when they started coming to see The Victims. David and Alsy had their band Blok Music going by then. I love that Blok Music tape, I still have it. David was very prolific even then. We actually got invited to his house for a party. Once again they came from a nice area, similar to the guy who invested in the band for ‘Television Addict’. It was in Nedlands. So they were private school boys who came from a wealthy neighbourhood. They had this party and they invited all these punk rockers, that was the scene they were in to and we were their friends. And the parents were horrified, it was like the Hell’s Angels had turned up. They were frightened out of their wits for the kids, ‘who are these people? what sort of influence are they having on our kids’ lives?’.

David was obviously a brilliant song writer even then, just one of those people that pops up, could be anywhere. David in particular was a Victims fan and we’d buy their cassette tapes, from White Rider Music. They changed the name to The Triffids and we’d buy those tapes as well. In the early days they reminded me of The Modern Lovers.

I loved that first Modern Lovers album, it had a big influence. Recorded 1971, didn’t come out until ’76. That was another one of those albums that was like the gospel of the new music. And a link to the Velvet Underground who were part of what shaped everything afterwards. We all listened to White Light/White Heat, and also Funhouse by The Stooges. I was drawn more to the American bands. The Ramones blazed the trail and everyone else followed. There’s no fucking doubt that without the Ramones, none of this would have happened. Of the English punk bands I loved the Buzzcocks and The Damned. The Ramones were a big touchstone for them.

Fortunately I’ve got a copy of the single. I don’t have the EP but I do have All Loud on the Western Front which Timberyard issued in 1989. It’s got the extra track, ‘Perth is a Culture Shock’. How did that come about?

That album... I was approached about that and I didn’t say I didn’t want it to happen but there was never any fucking agreement, they never paid me any money. So that was kind of a screw-up. I don’t mind that it came out. I mean, The Victims have been bootlegged a lot.

God yeah, you’re on those Murder Punk and Where Birdmen Flew bootlegs, I’ve got all them.

Someone actually did a reissue of the single, an actual recreation, got it pressed up, they copied everything down to the label and the thing they did which I thought was very respectful was they made the label yellow. That was some American label. That was fine, I thought ‘that’s cool’. At least they didn’t try and pass it off as one of the original 1,000 copies. But I’m sure that’s been done as well.

I’ve also got those albums that came out on the Japanese label 1977 Records, Sleeping Dogs Lie and the live Culture Shock. Were you involved in that? How did they get hold of that?

We were involved in that, unfortunately once again, there was no money. The guy screwed us over. It was very strange, we were shocked by this. This Japanese guy was a huge punk fan, he’s a well known person in the punk scene, which was cool. We got some copies, that was it, but no money. He came to Perth, we were doing the Television Addicts reunion at that point, he came and saw us, we took him sightseeing, took him up to The Pinnacles (a scenic area with unusual rock formations, a couple of hours north of Perth) and all that sort of stuff. Basically, he burnt us. And being Japanese that manifested in him basically being unable to stand the shame so he didn’t talk to us and he didn’t do anything for us. It’s like having an enemy now, because his dishonour is apparent to us so he can’t deal with us. So it was a really bad thing in so many ways, being taken advantage of, having someone who we thought was a good person that we had a good relationship with, someone that now doesn’t want to know us, has done nothing for us. Horrible.

That’s a shame, because he’s got the original demos on one side of the album.

That’s right, we trusted this guy and gave him everything. Then he said ‘can I put out the live album?’. We went ‘what live album?’. He said ‘the video you did at Hernando’s’. He converted that into a live album. Not a sausage our way, we never even got a copy of that one. I did the liner notes for the compilation, so I was collaborating completely with him. That was a big aggravation between David Cardwell and James and myself. We informed him that there was no money and somehow he interpreted that as James and I had kept all this money, not given him his share. He started writing hideous things on Facebook, it was just awful.

I’m sorry I brought up this subject, we’d better flick past this episode, because it sounds like you’re quite happy with the In The Red reissue.

Oh yeah, Larry is wonderful. He’s got a great label, he’s a great person, couldn’t be nicer. We’re happy to say that down to him it’s sold out quickly. He’s getting another pressing done. Larry’s an upright citizen, more power to him. He does it purely because he’s a fan. That’s why he did it in the first place, he just wanted to hear this music on his label, have it be heard by the people. He was really excited by the idea of doing the new EP. It wasn’t like we had to twist his arm, like ‘you gotta have this one too’. He was happy to have that.

So before we get to the EP, I’m wondering how is it that these overseas guys are rediscovering this music that is over 40 years old. It just keeps re-appearing, new lots of people seem to discover it. What is it about the music or the band that fascinates people? Is it the legend? The actual music itself? The aesthetic? I don’t know. In your mind why does it keep reoccurring and people say ‘fark, I gotta reissue this’?

Well three things. Firstly, they’re good records. That’s undeniable in my opinion. People can still enjoy the music and not just the original artefact. It’s actually good music. Secondly, The Victims were real, we weren’t created, we weren’t fake, we were doing it for real. And we felt it, we lived it and we meant it. We still do. That’s how we felt about music and we put everything into it. Young men, that explosion of testosterone, all that pent up energy was just all there. Number three, you’re right, there’s a huge curiosity factor, like ‘how did this fuckin’ happen in Perth, at that time?’. People just don’t understand and I don’t blame them because I don’t understand it either. Perth was very conservative and still is in many ways.

And the isolation of Perth. Complete isolation and the fact that... it took a while for The Victims to get going but we were fans of punk music from the get-go, before there was a fuckin’ record. We read about it, loved it and got it. We were elated about what it actually sounded like, it was exciting and new and we wanted to be part of it. Being in Perth it wasn’t easy but we eventually did do things and made it clear that we understood what we were doing, in our own way. It wasn’t designed, it was pure accident because the record came out because someone threw some money our way. We may never have been heard of again, like some little news clipping, there was this little band apparently playing back then, around the same time as Birdman and The Saints. Luckily we had the records to show the evidence and that blazed the trail for us.

I’ve got a funny story I can tell. I went to New York in 1979. James had already done his overseas thing in ’76. All of us were a couple of years younger than James. We loved his lyrics to things like ‘Culture Shock’ and we approved of that, so it was like ‘okay, let’s get the hell out of Perth and see the world’. We’re trapped here, that feeling of isolation. So I travelled in ’79. I was 21 years old. Basically I spent 10 months away. I went to New York for five months. I did some other trips away. I saw all those other great bands like The Cramps, The B-52s, The Fleshtones. I’d gone to London first and I saw the Buzzcocks. I saw The Specials when I came back through London. It was a complete musical odyssey, like James had done three years earlier.

I was in New York and I was in a place called Bleecker Bob’s, this really famous record shop, the White Light of New York. And he’s famously a kind of a ‘Soup Nazi’ character, very irascible, a very difficult man. And I’d had some of the singles sent over to me in New York. I wanted to give some copies to friends, I got maybe ten copies sent to me by James. I’d met the dB’s and people like that, I was friends with them. I went into Bleecker Bob’s with this little bundle of 45s under my arm. I was looking through the records. I was listening to a lot of ’60s punk at that point, so I was looking at ? (Question Mark) and the Mysterians albums, Paul Revere and the Raiders.

He looked at me and he says in this gruff voice, ‘what’s that under your arm?’, ‘what’s that you got?’, ‘give it to me’. So I gave him a copy of ‘Television Addict’ and he played about 30 second of it and he said ‘I’ll take 20!’. So that was how it got to be stocked in Bleecker Bob’s in New York in 1979. I’m sure that was how The Victims ended up being more well known. Obviously we’d been known in Australia but Bob was connected to everybody, he knew Lenny Kaye and all those people.

Here’s a thought... what if Lenny Kaye had picked up a copy?

I don’t know but I do know that John Holmstrom, one of the guys who did Punk magazine... maybe this was a couple of years later, he was right into the hardcore scene by then. At CBGBs it was one hardcore band after another, it was horrible to me actually. I guess ’82, ’83. There was this hardcore magazine and they had this listening party of all these punk singles and for some reason someone had put ‘Television Addict’ in there, and he was like ‘nah, I don’t get this’ (laughs). If it was Legs McNeil I’d be worried, but John’s an artist, he’s not a fuckin’ musician. A cool guy but I don’t take his view on music.

Dave, let’s talk about how you got the new EP Horror Smash going. What prompted you and James and Ray to get together?

Well, basically James had been asking me for a long time to do some Victims shows and I kept saying no for one reason or another, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. James and I had had huge misunderstanding and difficulties since I’d kicked him out of the Gurus. This was a huge thing, it happened decades ago, I had hoped he’d settled down about that. We never actually discussed it believe it or not. At one point he just brushed it aside and said ‘that’s alright’, he didn’t want to dwell on it. The simple answer, obviously we’d been cordial and friendly for a long time but I couldn’t see a way of doing it because The Victims had broken up because of David Cardwell, we didn’t like him. I couldn’t see a way of working with him again.

In 2011 I had an idea for the Hoodoo Gurus 30th anniversary. I mentioned to James, ‘let’s do a Gurus reunion where we get all the old members back’. We’d get all the line-ups to play and we’d do this big tour and have fun, you know. And he said ‘oh, I don’t know’. I said ‘don’t make your mind up now, I’ll come around and we’ll talk about it and explain what I’m thinking’. I was supposed to see him the next day and when I rang him he just said ‘no, I don’t want to talk about it’. He’d been quite friendly up to this point and I thought, ‘well, gee’ and he’d been wanting me to do a Victims reunion as well and I said ‘well fuck, you won’t even discuss this, you don’t even want to hear about it’. I just thought ‘you want to be free to hold this big grudge and don’t want to be part of this yet you want to be able to like me as the guy from The Victims but want to hate me as the guy from the Hoodoo Gurus, I’m only one person, I can’t be both’.

I let it go for a couple of years. I’d see James but we’d say nothing. He actually came up to me at a gig, a Scientists show in Sydney, he said ‘you know that Hoodoo Gurus idea, I’ll do it’ and so we did this thing at the Vivid Festival (in Sydney) a few years ago, maybe five years ago. As soon as he did that I thought ‘well, gee, I have to do a Victims show, if he’s come this far to meet me half way, I’ve gotta meet him as well’. Then when I said ‘let’s do a Victims show’, he said ‘well, let’s get Ray Ahn to play bass’ and I went ‘oh, of course we should do that!’. He’s a huge fan and he’s also a fuckin’ legend, it was just ridiculous. So all things happen in their own time I guess, ’cos that was perfect to get Ray in the band, it was ideal.

And we are The Victims. We played and it was the same energy with the same spirit that we always had. It’s a new line-up and we’re all older but all the other bullshit was gone. When it came to getting the songs down, writing new ones, it’s all there. We’re playing better than ever. We had a gig a couple of years ago at Mojos in Fremantle, and that was the best Victims gig ever, certainly in the way we played. Obviously gigs back in the day were in the chaos of punk rock and people doing crazy shit, that whole energy thing. As far as what we were doing and how it felt, it was as good as anything we ever did in the band, at any point.

That was why the idea of doing the EP was very easy. I’d always had a bee in my bonnet about these songs that never got recorded properly, things like ‘Horror Smash’. If I had my one time over again I would have squeezed that $3,000 into recording a whole album for that ‘Television Addict’ session, just record everything properly. Bang it all out, put on a couple of overdubs and put it out as an album, it would have been awesome. But it never happened.

Then there was the thing with Ross Buncle who’d been with James in The Geeks before The Victims formed. He’d written the music and James had written the words. When James came to us he said he’d written all these songs, but it turned out that he co-wrote them with Ross. They were all his inspiration... because he’d sing these melodies to me, like ‘here’s the tune’ and (because James wasn’t much of a singer) it would sound like one note and I’d interpret that and make the song. James did the same thing with Kim in The Scientists. It gave us inspiration and I’d thought ‘well, he did write those songs’ but it turned out that Ross wrote these great riffs and James would sing the notes of these riffs (to me).

So there was this brouhaha years later where Ross was saying ‘The Victims stole all my songs’, blah blah blah, as if we knew what publishing was at the time. The credits on the single and EP were just The Victims, like the Ramones, we didn’t think this is a legal statement and that we’re stealing someone’s music; ‘we’re The Victims, these are our songs’. So it was only later that I thought ‘well, maybe James did have some help with some of those songs’. Things like ‘(I’m) Flipped Out Over You’, I loved that, that’s why we recorded it but at the same time, if I’d have known I’d be like what other songs are there? I could do without this bullshit. We weren’t doing it because we thought we’d get famous, and to make money, we didn’t think we’d get a crack at the big time. We got the money back from the single but the band was breaking up and we said ‘thanks Tony for that money, it’s wonderful, here it is’ and he said ‘no, no, I want you to make another record’. So that’s when we made the EP. The band was in the process of breaking up, it was on shaky ground and we had actually broken up by the time we got the EP back.

I loved the fact that you did some individual covers of the original EP.

Yeah, it was Ken Seymour, Mark Betts and myself. We were sharing a house at that time and Mark was very artistic and I was pretty good at art when I was a kid, everyone thought I was going to be an artist, not a musician when I was growing up. Music was just something I did but it ended up becoming my career. So the three of us did some of the covers, I did most of them, the others helped. We did collages, all these different techniques. Also for the ‘Television Addict’ single we’d done the rubber stamp for the band name. We thought we should make a cover and we went and bought some cheap rubber stamp sets from Coles. We didn’t even buy enough so we had to stamp some more letters individually. We left a gap and stamped those letters with a different colour. Making a virtue out of a necessity, so that’s why there’s two different colours on the cover of The Victims single. So we had the same idea of doing hand-made covers for the EP, but of course we ran out of puff after a while, we did about 200 covers I guess, certainly not 500.

So, are you planning on doing some more shows with James and Ray?

Yes, of course, after all this COVID-19 stuff. We were supposed to have been doing some gigs right now, but that went out the window.

Well I’m glad you got the new stuff out.

There are two more songs laying around actually. We recorded them at the same session, so we’ll release that as a single for Record Store Day next year. That’s the plan. I mean Larry will do it on In The Red, but who knows if we’ll be able to do any gigs at that stage but that’s the plan at the moment.

Thanks so much for your time Dave, we’ve covered a lot of territory, really enjoyed your insights. What are you doing with the Gurus at the moment?

We’ll be rehearsing soon and we’ll be recording two new singles. It’s funny, before the lockdown we started rehearsals and these songs just popped right out, obvious A-sides. We’ll be doing one for October and then one for March next year. We did that one called ‘Answered Prayers’ in December last year, that was pretty cool. We’re gonna do an album next year, that’s our plan. Hopefully we’re not forced to separate again and have to hide in our holes. It’s the 40th anniversary of the Gurus next year so we’ll do something around that for sure.