As the celebrated Radio Birdman get ready for the upcoming Five-O tour (seven dates in June), I spoke with frontman Rob Younger.
Ian McFarlane: Thanks for your time Rob. It’s all happening, you’ve got the Birdman Five-O tour coming up but before we get onto that I wanted to make mention of George Munoz’s book Radio Birdman When the Birdmen Flew: An Illustrated History came out last year and there’s Murray Engleheart’s book coming out this year. Did you have much to do with either?
Rob Younger: Murray interviewed me on quite a few occasions, and there were text messages as there were with everyone else involved with the band. With George’s book, I didn’t even know it was coming out ‘til it was out.
George is a long-time Birdman fan...
Yeah, more an acquaintance of Chris Masuak and Johnny Kannis when I first met him. From the Maroubra area where they went to high school.
I think it’s a beautiful looking production, very respectful of the band.
I haven’t really looked in it. I’ve seen it, someone showed me a few pages. There are a hell of a lot of photos in there.
We have the Birdman 50th anniversary coming up. Who came up with the idea for a Five-O tour? I’m guessing it might have been Deniz?
Well, actually I don’t know but that’s quite possible. At least between Deniz and John, our manager. Deniz has probably got more of a sense of occasion than I do. They asked me to be involved and it would have been churlish to knock it on the head. I’m happy to have a gig, go out and play shows.
You can have any kind of anniversary, I guess, but 50th does dovetail nicely because you have the brains behind the promotion for the tour coming up with Birdman Five-O; it conjures up Hawaii Five-O and ‘Aloha Steve and Danno’.
Yeah, ties in pretty well. That was probably Deniz. We’ve got some great support bands too, the Hard-Ons, Civic, the Hits, you should check them out.
When the suggestion does come up for a new tour, do you feel reluctant at first or do you say yes immediately?
It was immediate on this occasion.
The line-up you have now with Jim Dickson and Dave Kettley has been together for a long time now.
We did the 2017 tour of the Eastern States with Died Pretty and we also did couple of European tours.
I saw you guys at the Melbourne gig at the Croxton Band room, that was a phenomenal gig. Dave Graney and Clare Moore opened with Died Pretty in between, a classic night. It was very sad news of Ron Peno dying.
That was awful, very sad. He was such a great guy, a fabulous talent. We always got on well. I can’t say more than enough of how much I admired Died Pretty, a fantastic band. I spoke to him on the phone a couple of weeks before he died, it was just dreadful hearing him that way, I carried that around with me for a long time.
At least they got the live album out before he died. And John’s reissuing the Birdman Live at Paddington Town Hall 1977 on Citadel to coincide with the tour. I’ve got the CD version that came with the box set but hadn’t seen it on record before.
It’s been recut for this new pressing, so you’ll get a bit more level on the record. We weren’t completely happy last time. I approved the new test pressing the other day. It is louder though I don’t know that it sounds better. The sound seemed to jump off the turntable a bit more, which is what you want with a good record. It’s an intangible thing with a good hot cut, it seems to have a bit more depth. It’s been the bane of my life, local pressings sounding shit compared with the overseas equivalents.
A couple of recent album reissues that I thought sounded amazing were the Master’s Apprentices’ Choice Cuts and A Toast to Panama Red. They seemed to be cut well, and they had been remastered by Don Bartley.
Right, and I happened to be in Studio 301 a few years ago when he was working on that. I can’t remember why I was in there that time; I regularly check on things I’m involved with. So he was doing that and they sounded fabulous. They were a great band. I had the singles, and I mostly preferred the Astor period, which was better as far as I’m concerned. That Mick Bower period was fantastic. But yeah, Don’s great. He has a great ear and he knows what to do to get things right. He has his own techniques, one of which he explained to me. He doesn’t just go in there and put the music up loud or do the bare minimum. He aims to get the best out of it without changing the nature of the music. He maintains the flavour and makes sure the record sounds powerful. And hoping that the musicians would also think so. He saved my bacon on countless occasions.
So the new cut of Live is excellent?
Yeah, but it is a live album. With our band everyone’s moving around. I’m jumping around, not always perfectly on mic. But the general balance is good. And the overall performance was good. There are some great songs on there. Ripping guitar playing from Deniz.
Birdman at the peak of your powers...
Sure, it was a memorable night. It was the last show before we went off to Europe, in the earliest incarnation of the band. But I’ll put the band we’ve got now up against that one any day. We do it to our own standard and I’m perfectly happy with all that. The one thing you can’t do after you break up is then reform years later and be shithouse. You need to honour the original precepts from when you started out. We were always banging on about high energy jams and all that sort of thing. So that’s the criterion we established but it’s a salient one, so we gotta honour that. You can’t come back and just stand around like statues and be hopeless. And we’ve got really good support bands. You can’t go on after the Hard-Ons and be lame. You’ve gotta back yourself cos bands like that are fucking good. And now that they’ve got Tim Rogers singing, he’s a great performer, a great musician; I’m looking forward to seeing them.
Do you know what the set list will be? The regular songs? Zeno Beach songs again?
Yeah, we’ve been doing that, four or five songs from that album. It won’t be utterly different from the previous tours. With originals we’ve really only got three albums of material, so it’s not a real lot. But we don’t want to go out with the mind set of trying to reinvent ourselves, to try and acquaint people with stuff they don’t know. They want to see Radio Birdman and I think we can still play the shit out of any of our songs. A lot of the longer ones – not the two and a half minute tight ones – they do breathe a little bit. They do have enough difference each time we play them to be able to say it’s not always the bloody same. We don’t rehearse things down to the most minute detail. It’s not choreographed in any way. We are what we are. We work well with what we’ve got and we stick to that.
In the photo that accompanies the promotional material you all look pretty fit, so hopefully you’re match ready. (Note: the photo is circa the previous tour of 2017.)
(Laughs)... I hope so! We haven’t played together as a band since well before Covid, so I don’t know how match fit we actually are. Deniz lives in Hawaii so he can’t be out here rehearsing, so we might get five rehearsals in which is usually enough. We’re not by any sense road hardened, like saying if you’re touring Europe and playing every night. I really like doing that, I don’t get stale on that stuff. I really knuckle down and become part of the machine. That’s not what this tour is about, so we’re just gonna throw ourselves in and I don’t think there’s gonna be much wrong.
Photo copyright Anne Laurent
Deniz is still recording and touring, collaborating with different people, releasing new material. What’s the state of play for you with the New Christs?
Well, we’re still going. Since Covid the policy has been to play outdoor shows, so little festivals. But there aren’t too many of those. We’ve got one up in Newcastle, in April actually, called Hell Nation. As it happens, we’re headlining so we’ve gotta be on the money. New Christs is a very enjoyable band to play in. We all get along famously, and we’ve got a lot of songs. The current line-up we overlap with Radio Birdman with three members, me, Jim and Dave. The other guitarist, Brent Williams, has been with us for ages. We have Paul Larsen on drums, he’s played with Ed Kuepper, Jim Moginie, Celibate Rifles so he’s been around for the long haul. A lovely guy and a great drummer. So it’s a decent group; we’ve done some fabulous shows in Europe over the years.
We’re gonna try and record a new album soon. We’re getting together more frequently now, we’re gonna write new songs. I haven’t written a song for bloody ages. I tend to write out of necessity, I’m not what you’d call a natural songwriter with songs just popping out of your head. Some people seem like natural conduits for these ideas, wherever they come from. If something’s coming up I start putting things together, new lyrics. I rely on other people to come up with ideas as well.
Well, you have been a prolific songwriter over the years...
Hmm, if you look at the whole you wouldn’t say I’m prolific. The songs have added up now but the New Christs have only had five albums in over 30 years. A few more singles.
So, as part of the Radio Birdman promo push for the Five-O tour, it reads “legendary outsiders and Hall of Famers Radio Birdman...”. What does that mean to you?
Very little. When we started out, we got a lot of knockbacks from promoters. No one was terribly interested in us. We got a lot of rejections, slung out of venues, so we set up our own gigs. Naturally I had a bee in my bonnet about the industry, just personally, for a long time. When the ARIA thing came up, I thought ‘fuck this...’. But I was talked into it. I don’t want to sound churlish against people who think the band’s good or worthy, at least you’re appreciated. It’s not about that, I just thought this is the industry bestowing an accolade when my impression is essentially it’s a bunch of bullshit. I am glad we got the award. Mine’s on the mantlepiece. Actually, the morning after the ceremony, when my bag came down the luggage carrier at Sydney airport, cos it’s a very sharp object it had poked its way through my suitcase. Just this sharp spike sticking out. I should have taken a photo; it would have made a great record cover. This really nice bag and it was rooted after that.
Then later on we got a challenge from the original publishers of the Hawaii Five-O theme song, saying that we weren’t able to collect royalties for ‘Aloha Steve and Danno’ which has the theme built into it. They’ve lost the paperwork, even though I know it was approved at the time. And three or four Australian record companies have administered that song, distributed it and benefitted from it but they wouldn’t come to the party to defend us. Our right to use it was legitimate from the start but the royalties have been held in abeyance for a few years now. I’ve been told it will never get sorted. I’m not trying to be a pariah or anything like that, upholding any high moral ground. I just mean from my point of view I don’t really owe the industry anything, in a very broad sense.
To finish our chat, what new sounds have been rocking your world?
I don’t buy a lot of new records, so I’m not so hip on what’s happening. I still like pop and rock ‘n’ roll and there are still a lot of bands around playing that, if I ever got to hear them. Having said that, I really like RVG, they got some good songs. Civic are a cool band. I like what I’ve heard by the Cable Ties. My mate James McCann and his band the JJ McCann Transmission, they’re pretty good. I’ve worked with James. I like bands like the Chats, they’ve landed a lot of supports for overseas bands.