Splendid Isolation - A John Dowler Retrospective
Originally published in Rhythms magazine (Issue #300, July-August 2020) A Sounds of the City Production
By Ian McFarlane © 2020
Photos courtesy of the John Dowler Collection and David Laing Publicity
Singer / songwriter JOHN DOWLER recently released his ninth album, 12 Stitches, the second with his current band, John Dowler’s Vanity Project. We look back at his career with Young Modern, The Zimmermen and beyond.
In 1988, John Dowler was at the metaphorical musical crossroads. He’d been fronting bands since 1974 and his band, The Zimmermen, had just signed a lucrative deal with Mushroom Records. Mushroom was one of the biggest labels in the land, having steered the likes of Skyhooks, Ol’ 55, The Sports, Renee Geyer, Split Enz and Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons to major success during the 1970s/early ’80s, then boasting an enviable roster of Jimmy Barnes, The Angels, Models, Hunters & Collectors, The Church and Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls. Oh yes, and they’d just signed a new pop starlet called Kylie Minogue.
Dowler was unsure of where his band fitted into the Mushroom scheme of things, and was convinced the label had no idea of how to promote his brand of American influenced jangly power pop. The band’s second album, Way Too Casual (April 1989), was a more consistent effort than the debut, Rivers of Corn (February 1987), containing some of his best songs to date: the single ‘What Really Hurts’, ‘Ties That Bind’ and ‘Corsican Dreams’. Somehow it fell through the cracks.
“Lobby Loyde produced the album and I think he got Michael Gudinski to sign us as a favour,” Dowler recalls. “We all thought it was a good idea to be on Mushroom but they didn’t really know what to do with us. They spent 20 grand on a film clip for the single and flew me up to Sydney for a day of press and radio interviews, but no one in the office up there knew who I was. At one stage Marty Willson-Piper from The Church walked in and they were all over him. So they stuck me in this board room with a phone to do these interviews. I felt like a fish out of water. One of the great things that came out of the Mushroom connection was that we got to support Neil Young in Adelaide.”
Dowler’s profile has rarely been commercially upfront (i.e. no Top 40 hits) but he remains a pop classicist in the mould of an Alex Chilton, a Gene Clark or a Brian Wilson. Obviously not as well known internationally – or even in Australia, for that matter – but his attention to song detail and presentation is such that the comparison stands.
Issued on Nic Dalton’s Half a Cow label, his new album with John Dowler’s Vanity Project, 12 Stitches, keeps up the melodic, jingle-jangle power pop quotient of his past but ups the ante with the tougher guitars and thumping back beat of the band: Justin Bowd (guitar), Mark McCartney (guitar), Stephen O’Prey (bass) and Michael Stranges (drums).
Accessible songs with lovelorn lyrics such as ‘Work of Art’ and ‘That’s Not Me’ vie for attention with angrier tunes such as ‘Centipede’ and ‘The Next Voice You Hear’. ‘Free of Wine’ features hilarious, tongue-twisting lines such as “crawling from the wreckage like a rusty terminator with an incandescent fear of flying”. The re-arrangement of the old Split Enz Phil Judd gem ‘Time for a Change’ boasts a jamming coda like Neil Young and Crazy Horse in full Zuma mode.
Before he joined his first band, Spare Change, in 1974, Adelaide-raised Dowler had spread his wings by living in London and Amsterdam. He’d been swept aside by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Donovan, John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, Cream, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac etc. and was keen to experience things first hand.
“I left school in December, 1968 and that same month I caught a ship to England. I got there in January 1969. All I did was see lots and lots of gigs. I did have to get a job to make a living but I saw Joe Cocker and the original Grease Band, Status Quo when they were still a psychedelic band, Dave Edmunds’ band Love Sculpture, Bakerloo Blues Line. I saw The Band, Crosby Stills Nash & Young and The Byrds, they all played at the Royal Albert Hall. I saw Lou Reed too, pre his Transformer days. I liked his first solo album and I was a huge Velvet Underground fan as well. I saw Spirit as a three piece, they were amazing. Randy California had so many effects on his guitar it was like a symphonic sound, and he was a really good singer as well.”
Dowler met fellow Adelaide travellers Graeme Perry and Chris Langman and having moved to Amsterdam they began laying plans to form a band. Back in Australia in 1973, Dowler was listening to Roxy Music, Big Star and the Flamin’ Groovies. With Perry (drums) and Langman (guitar) they formed Spare Change in 1974, having added Tony Murray (bass) and Robert Kretschmer (guitar).
“We were doing songs by the MC5 (‘High School’, ‘Shakin’ Street’), the Flamin’ Groovies (‘Slow Death’) and Dylan. We did quite a few songs of his with a reggae feel ’cause some of the guys were really obsessed with Bob Marley as well. John Cale’s ‘Sky Patrol’. We did songs by Lou Reed, ‘Sweet Jane’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Waiting for the Man’, ‘Vicious’, all that. I guess we were contemporaries of Radio Birdman but we had a much wimpier sound. They were heavy, we were much more melodic and probably a lot more fiddly in our arrangements with too many time changes. By the time we moved over to Melbourne we’d started writing our own songs. I got to contribute a few lyrics but the songs were mostly written by Tony, Chris and Robert.
“We fitted right into the Melbourne scene, we got on really well with all the other bands. People liked the fact that we dressed really well. Other bands generally speaking weren’t sartorially... what can I say, they tended not to dress up, whereas we’d dress up really well. We had blazers and caps, we had back projections on stage and all sorts of stuff. Our music wasn’t really that great frankly. I think The Bleeding Hearts blew us off stage, they were an amazing live band. The Millionaires were pretty good too, they’d dress up and had good songs. The Sports were fabulous, an amazing band. The scene was fantastic back then, there were gigs every night of the week, huge crowds everywhere you’d play.”
Spare Change signed to Champagne Records, issuing the single ‘The Big Beat’ in November 1976. They recorded an album at Armstrongs, produced by Aztecs’ drummer Gil Matthews, but Dowler left and returned to Adelaide. The album was shelved (until 1979) while the other guys continued on as Parachute with Rick Grossman (bass; ex-Bleeding Hearts). Before he left Melbourne, however, Dowler met another aspiring song writer, Paul Kelly. Kelly’s career is a whole book in itself, so while he went on to play with the likes of High Rise Bombers, The Dots, The Coloured Girls / The Messengers and enjoy a long running solo career, the connection remained via the likes of Langman (who played in The Dots), Steve Connolly and Michael Barclay.
“With Spare Change, we were all living in a share house on Hoddle Street and a mutual friend of ours, Phil White, had given Paul our address. He pulled up one day having arrived from Adelaide. He played us a few songs and he sounded very much like Dylan. He slept on the floor in my room for a few weeks. He and Chris wrote ‘Fool’s Road’; it didn’t have enough verses so I wrote one more and got a co-credit. Likewise with ‘The Ballad of Good and Evil’ which Chris and I recorded later with The Glory Boys. Yeah, Paul had some great songs even then. We could tell that he was going to be great. I think he could tell too, so it was cool to have known him so early.”
Within a matter of months of his return to Adelaide in 1977, Dowler had his new band Young Modern on the road. Having derived the name from Young Modern, “Adelaide’s magazine for the younger set” (News-Review Publications, 1962-65), Dowler’s focus was strictly on a sixties sound. He imbued Young Modern’s music with a sprightly, tuneful and accessible pop sheen, in contrast to the harder edged kick of the emergent punk movement. The band members – Dowler, Vic Yates (guitar), Michael Jones (guitar), Andrew Richards (bass) and Mark Kohler (drums) – decked themselves out in sharp suits, white shirts and black ties. And Dowler was the first singer in Australia to adopt the blonde Brian Jones / Keith Relf haircut as a way of life!
“I loved that ’60s sound of ‘Shake Some Action’ by the Flamin’ Groovies so I was keen to do that melodic, Beatlesque type guitar sound. I met these young guys in a school band called Suggestion. They were playing things like Deep Purple, Cream, a pretty heavy sound. I sang a couple of songs with them. I was experienced in these things, I was 25 at that stage and they were all like 18 and just wanting to have a good time. I said, ‘look we can write our own songs, forget about this Deep Purple shit, we’re going to play lighter guitar sounds, be more melodic’.
“They sort of went along with it at first but one of the guitarists said ‘nah, I’m not gonna do that’. Then after about two weeks when everyone else had said yes he came back to the band. I didn’t have many tunes, the guitarist and bass player were the two guys who wrote most of the music. I wrote the words to the music and came up with the melodies sometimes, depending on what they had. It was just one of those really fortuitous things where everything clicked into place and within three months we had seven, eight songs.”
Young Modern played its first show on 26 November 1977, supporting Sydney legends Radio Birdman at Adelaide’s Unley Town Hall. There was the infamous gig review in Adelaide punk ’zine Street Fever which ran, “the support band, the Young Moderns, played to an audience of a single drunk swaying on the floor in time with the music (?). I didn’t like them either”.
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t expect Birdman fans to like us, you know,” is Dowler’s pithy comment now.
The band forged on, gradually becoming an Adelaide institution via their long-running residency at the Tivoli Hotel, a beautiful old pub on Pirie Street.
“We played there every Saturday night. We wouldn’t come on ’til one o’clock in the morning and we’d play two sets and we wouldn’t finish till 3.30. We started getting a huge following, big crowds, a really nice vibe. People would get pissed but there was never any trouble. We built up a huge following and then Dirty Pool in Sydney got interested in us because of the vibe the band had at the time.”
The Dirty Pool Agency also booked Cold Chisel, The Angels and Flowers. Making the move to Sydney was something of a wrench for the young musicians but they were willing to give it a go. Along the way they issued the classic power pop single ‘She’s Got the Money’ (produced by The Sports’ Stephen Cummings) and recorded a batch of demos that eventually appeared as the album Play Faster (December 1979). ‘She’s Got the Money’ features one of the great opening couplets in “She’s a high class girl from a broken home / She don’t spend too much time on her own”.
“We got gigs all the time, we’d be playing seven nights a week. We had our own lighting system, our own PA and truck, it was an expensive operation. We’d be supporting The Angels and they’d be raking in $20,000 a night. We’d get paid $100, and have to lug the gear in and out afterwards. Then we’d go down to Melbourne and people loved us. We played the Crystal Ballroom and Laurie Richards asked us to come back. He paid us $1,100 which was amazing, given that we normally got paid a hundred. We drove down from Sydney, headlined that Saturday night and it was absolutely packed, then drove back the next day.”
Playing regularly sharpened up the band’s stage craft and they were able to match it with all the other big, as well as up and coming, acts of the day such as Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons, Models, Eric Gradman Man & Machine etc. In fact, I saw them on a bill featuring the above three bands at RMIT’s Storey Hall (March 1979); it was a fabulous gig. They never got the chance to record many of their stage favourites, such as ‘New Wave’ and ‘Do You Care’.
Despite boundless promise and a swag of snappy, finely crafted pop songs on which to call, Young Modern failed to make an impact on a Sydney scene still besotted by the spectre of Radio Birdman and in which Cold Chisel, The Angels and The Radiators currently held court. The band broke up following a gig in July 1979.
“We’d been working so much we were pretty burnt out by then. I always seemed to have a bad throat and a bad cold. Michael had left and we got Mark Carroll in. He was a really good guitarist, probably the best musician in the band but it didn’t quite gel like we did with the old line-up. After six months he said, ‘no I’ve had enough, I’m going’. When he left I couldn’t face the idea of auditioning other people. I’d been newly married when we left for Sydney, we were living in abject poverty, it was a miserable existence. I thought ‘ah fuck it, time to move on’. I never liked Sydney, still don’t like it much really, it was a nice place to visit. So I moved to Melbourne.”
His next venture, The Glory Boys, was basically a Spare Change reunion with Langman, Kretschmer and Perry plus a young Nick Seymour on bass. Seymour left and the band was renamed Talk Show but soon fizzled out. Seymour went on to join Crowded House while Kretschmer became an integral part of Icehouse circa the massive selling Man of Colours album.
“I’d started writing my own songs, words and music, by then. I formed Everybody’s So Glad, wrote a lot of songs, rehearsed a lot, played about half a dozen gigs. Then I’d started recording a solo album with producer Martin Armiger. It looked likely at that stage it would come out and I thought I should get a band together and actually try and record stuff and that became The Zimmermen.”
The solo album languished unreleased but The Zimmermen (a pun on Bob Dylan’s real name) became a shining power pop beacon on a Melbourne scene dominated by The Birthday Party, Hunters & Collectors, Corpse Grinders and all manner of gothic, shockabilly and hard funk bands. There were regular line-up changes but the 1984 version of the band – Dowler, Michael Holmes (guitar; ex-Negatives, Man & Machine, Paul Kelly and the Dots, Fatal Attraction), Steve Connolly (guitar; ex-Cuban Heels), Peter Steele (bass; ex-Fatal Attraction) and Michael Barclay (drums; ex-Little Murders, Runners) – was a crack outfit playing a mix of Dowler and Connolly songs. An archival live album available on iTunes, Rivers of Q’uorn Live in the Suburbs 1984, displays their ability to deliver a vibrant mix of power pop and tough, country influenced rock. (The gig had been recorded in Quorn, a South Australian township just outside of Port Augusta, hence the pun in the title.)
At the end of 1984 Connolly and Barclay left to join the Paul Kelly Band. “Yeah, well, Paul poached them basically,” reveals Dowler. “Things were going well, we’d written new songs and had started recording an album. Paul talked them into going to Sydney with him and they became The Coloured Girls. So ‘Don’t Go to Sydney’ sort of came out of that. The song’s not about them, but the title came out of all that. It just gave me a chance to vent about Sydney.”
Peter Tulloch (ex-Wrecked Jets) came in as Connolly’s replacement and the band finished recording the album, Rivers of Corn, eventually issued on Au Go Go in February 1987. The single ‘Don’t Go to Sydney’ (December 1985) was an instant classic, an exceptional slice of harmony-drenched guitar pop with vitriolic lyrics (“Don’t go to Sydney baby / it’s a city without a heart”). It became one of the most successful independent singles of 1986; even Sydneysiders loved it!
Reviews were upbeat:
“Protest song of the year!... this is a sublime pop song” (Richard Guilliat, The Age); “The Zimmermen’s ‘Don’t Go to Sydney’ is a lot more than just this summer’s best single” (David Laing, B-Side); “Well written song with all the right ingredients... they also earn a nomination for the best group name for 1986” (Al Webb, Juke).
The album included more of their stage favourites, such as Dowler’s ‘I Like to Fight With My Wife’, ‘Ordinary Man’ and ‘I Shall Return’ and Tulloch’s ‘Happy Heart’. The band presented quite a stoic image on stage, content to let the music do the talking. Only Holmes played up his part, with leather gear, low-slung guitar and throwing all sorts of shapes and moves. The Keith Richards of the band, maybe?
“More like the Ariel Bender of the band!” Dowler cracks. “He was great, right into all that. He was the only person I’ve played with who wore leather trousers. And that was his regular street gear.”
I first interviewed Dowler around the release of Rivers of Corn. We got into a rave about the importance of the ‘song’. As we finished up, he pressed a cassette into my hand containing Big Star’s #1 Record and Radio City. He said “You need to listen to this”. He was furthering my musical education. When I reminded him of this event, he said “Yes, I was known for doing that kind of thing”.
Dowler pulled the plug on The Zimmermen in early 1990. There were a number of mitigating factors, one being, says Dowler, that he was sick and tired of the guitarists always playing so loud! He assembled a collection of recordings, going back to his aborted solo album plus a cover of Alex Chilton’s ‘Holocaust’ recorded with The Sunset Strip, which he put out as the album Low Society (1993). He had a band called O’Hara’s Playboys for a while, then there was a brief Glory Boys reunion around 2003. In 2006 Aztec Records released Young Modern’s Play Faster 25th Anniversary Edition, combined with a couple of reunions which resulted in the studio album How Insensitive (on Mick Thomas’ Croxton label, 2006) and the live album Live at the Grace Emily 22.12.2010 (on Grown Up Wrong!, 2011). English writer Kris Needs wrote in Shindig magazine, “Captured live last year but sounding like it could have been recorded back in their day, such is the energy and passion... of course, Young Modern most recall the Flamin’ Groovies which can never be a bad thing”.
The singer linked up with guitarist Mark McCartney and together they assembled the Vanity Project in 2015. Debut album Splendid Isolation came out in September 2017. Featuring a mix of new tunes from Dowler (‘Off the Coast of Me’) and guitarist Justin Bowd (‘The Untouchable’), plus covers of Lowell George’s ‘I’m the One’ and Terence Boylan’s ‘Don’t Blame it on My Wife’, the album also presented three leftover Zimmermen compositions, Tulloch’s ‘Sentimental’ and the Dowler / Holmes co-writes ‘Dark is the Night’ and ‘Something Good’ which originally had been lined up for a prospective third album.
In my review at thirdstonepress.com.au (Archives) I described Splendid Isolation as “a thing of genuine beauty. With his plaintive, sorrow-laden voice gliding effortlessly over an enticing run of songs, Dowler has crafted an album brimming with jangle pop chime, folk rock melodies and rawer power pop moves”.
John Dowler’s Vanity Project keeps him busy for now. Songs still drive his desires. He’s always believed in the power of the song. As he sings in ‘Ties That Bind’, “This is the recipe we choose in the fullness of time / An overpowering sense of trust in the ties that bind”.
