Tim Rogers, You Am I & Detours

TIM ROGERS, YOU AM I & DETOURS - I’m in Love with that Song

 By Ian McFarlane

I’m searching for the best dressed young man around town. His name is Tim Rogers, lead singer, guitarist and ostensibly the leader of You Am I. He greets me with a warm smile and firm handshake. I take to his mix of stylish dishevelment and rakish charm immediately. In his new memoir Detours, Rogers refers to himself as like “... an oafish Quentin Crisp” and “lost in daydreams like a shaggy Walter Mitty”. I’ve always just liked the way he carries himself.

Detours is a delight, a very enjoyable reading experience. It covers a lot of ground. It’s lively, full of energy and humour, yet will occasionally dip into deep melancholy. It’s a mix of childhood memories, road stories and love notes to The Hurricane, ‘Stardust’, cricket, The Kick and close friendships. Above all, Tim’s wordplay is engaging. I wish I could come up with a simile the way his drip from the page... like honey from the hive (not bad, that’s a start!).

I’m not here, however, to talk to him about Detours. I’ve got another agenda. Some years ago I compiled a list of 29 songs by other bands that You Am I covered. I’ve long been fascinated by the whys and wherefores of a band such as You Am I recording other people’s songs. For mine, You Am I remains the most significant band that emerged from the early ’90s Australian alternative rock scene. The band is still relevant, still producing great albums (Porridge & Hotsauce is a riotous explosion of guitar grit and song writing swagger), still cutting it live, still going strong after 28 years.

Here’s the thing... as well as being a musician, author and sometime actor, a very versatile artist with a vast breadth of talent on which to draw, Tim Rogers is a song writer. I mean the guy can put a few words together. He has Detours to promote no less.

You Am I has released 10 studio albums, two live sets and numerous singles. Rogers has released five albums as solo projects... he’s probably written and recorded more than 200 of his own songs. So rather than focus on what makes Tim Rogers tick as a song writer, what sparks You Am I into action when they play his songs, here I am asking him what he likes about other song writers. And how is it that You Am I came to record so many songs by other bands early in the piece.

Tim doesn’t baulk at the prospect of me digging into that aspect of his career. So with a Bob Dylan and The Band box set on the shelf, a Kangaroos guernsey on the wall and a Bill Fay album on the stereo, we start. This is one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve been involved with. Thanks Tim.

Ian McFarlane: Thanks for your time Tim. Today I wanted to ask you about the song writers that you’ve admired over the years. I compiled a list of 29 songs by other bands that You Am I have released, either live or in the studio. That’s quite a tally.

Tim Rogers: And we’ve also played other things live, like the Nazz song ‘Open My Eyes’. We liked that song but I don’t think any of us were big Nazz fans until Davey Lane started getting into Todd Rundgren. He bought along a whole lot of Todd records that he played. And also because of the way Davey plays we were able to play different songs that were coverable. We did ‘Heart Of The City’ by Nick Lowe, couple of other Nick Lowe songs. We tried some Dave Edmunds songs. See because Davey is a very adept guitar player we could do these songs. Most of the things we’ve covered have been very rhythm guitar, bass guitar with the drums being featured because Rusty is such an amazing drummer. I’m quite a limited guitarist, no self-deprecation meant at all, it’s just the way it is. But yeah I can lean into it when I’ve got enough anger inside of me. We chose a lot of covers just because we could actually cover them. We do ‘Rumble’ by Link Wray a lot for soundcheck, 1) because it’s possibly the greatest instrumental ever and 2) it’s just three chords and the truth, you know. That’s really the only reason for doing it.

IMcF: That’s one of Jimmy Page’s all-time favourites...

TR: No doubt, there’s that moment where he’s dancing to ‘Rumble’ in It Might Get Loud, it’s beautiful. We’ve done ‘I’m A Man’ by the Spencer Davis Group live. If we thought about it and were a bit more cluey about it earlier on we wouldn’t have done the Who covers or Pretty Things covers because they’re very much ‘oh yeah, they’re obvious’ because it was very much that British R&B movement and what that became. So we didn’t think that much about it, we love that music, and it didn’t seem like there were a lot of bands playing that kind of music at the time. I remember we did a show with Kim Salmon and the Surrealists, well we did a tour with them, and after soundcheck Kim grabbed me and said ‘geez, I thought you were gonna do Nuggets sides 1, 2, 3 and 4 just then’, because we’d just go through the riffs and do the songs, nod at each other.

Is it the riffs or is it the actual song writing that you like? For example the Who’s version of Mose Allison’s ‘Young Man Blues’, the way you lean into that and the way you played it was just amazing. The Who version, have you seen their version from the Isle of Wight festival 1970? Just astonishing, isn’t it. But you guys just rip into it.

Oh yeah... Well, I didn’t hear the Mose Allison version until much later, 15 years ago, I’d heard the Who version 6,000 time before that and again with all the physical affectations and all the comparisons that can be made to that band, it may have been wiser not to have done it. Then again, when you’re playing at the Opera House, supporting Crowded House, what are you gonna do? Why would you cover your tracks when you had so much fun making the tracks? So to deny that you do love that music seems... and I probably haven’t listened to a Who record in a long while but they did make such a big impression on me.

Yes, so it was definitely of a period for you, where you had all that stuff buzzing around in your head. Whether it was The Pretty Things or The Kinks?

Yeah, all those records still sound aggressive, and a bit effeminate. It was that mix of aggression and the effeminacy that appealed to me and there are mistakes, and that appealed to us because there are things that go missing in songs when we record them sometimes. I don’t like to labour over them, whereas Andy actually might, he’s a bit more of a perfectionist than I am or Rusty. When Rusty joined the band, whenever it was, 1994, he played in this style and I thought ‘oh wow, we can sound like that now’, because of his playing style, the way he liked to represent his sound in the studio. We could say ‘get us the Shel Talmy sound’ and that was really exciting. The drummers I played with before, Jaimme and Mark, who were wonderful in their own way, they just didn’t have that skipping style and so I played guitar to suit their drums and they played drums to suit my guitar style and then when Rusty joined it was ‘hang on, this is all possible now’.

There’s definitely some of the earlier You Am I songs where these kinds of influences show through, whether it’s a Kinks kind of feel, that staccato thing.

Sure... absolutely. I only knew the Kinks singles as a kid. Then years later, we were living in New York about ’94 and I bought a bunch of mid-to-late ’60s Kinks records. They were great, it was a place for me to hide with, I could sit in a pub or at home and I could just drink beer and listen to those records. I didn’t grow up in England with those records, I wasn’t born in the post World War II period but I could go there with those records. I found something very affectionate in those songs that I wasn’t getting elsewhere. So the songs, and Ray, became huge to me. I wasn’t getting that from anywhere else. And I guess our contemporaries and friends at the time were getting a lot from music from the States, Sonic Youth and Pavement and Sebadoh. That kind of indie rock, for want of a better term, from America. I just didn’t feel as affectionately towards it really. I did like a lot of American music from the mid-’90s later, but things at the time just didn’t have tones that appealed to me, guitar sounds, bass sounds and drum sounds. And I didn’t even really care about any of the lyrics...

There’s a definite sound to those Kinks records, you can almost eat it.

Yeah, and I still drive myself around the country a lot to shows and I can put one of those albums on in the car, and other things from any era, and I still get that rush of joy. So I listen to ’30s, ’40s, ’50s jazz and ’50s, ’60s, early ’70s rock and roll and then come ’76/77, again production qualities just appealed to me from that time. I don’t know why production qualities appeal to people, it’s difficult to explain. Dr Oliver Sacks or the great Alex Ross (the music critic for The New Yorker) might have a musicological reason. You either get it or you don’t.

That’s right, do you need a reason to be able get it?

No, probably not, but being able to explain it isn’t so easy. I talk about it with my partner quite a lot because she had never listened to much rock and roll at all, she’s a little older than me and when I talk to her about how much I love the first five Aerosmith records and she will just nod her head. Those records have such a great sound, it’s just like everything’s under this thick layer of grease, like greasy America takeaway food. It has that great urban grit about it.

I’m with you there on those Aerosmith albums. When I was growing up a lot of what I was listening to was ’70s English music, whether it was Bowie or Bolan, Roxy Music or the Stones, or that heavy sound of Led Zep, Sabbath, Deep Purple. This was pre-punk. And lots of Aussie bands, so about the only American bands that my friends and I really liked were Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, a bit of Blue Oyster Cult. Those records appealed to me. Then later on I discovered, you know, Iggy and the Stooges, New York Dolls, Lou Reed and the MC5, once again this was before the late ’70s punk thing took off.

Records by Aerosmith and the original Alice Cooper band had bite and snarl to them and that sleaze and grease under it all. Aerosmith songs are great, there’s a complexity there, a very high attention to melody and harmony as well as the heaviness. Yeah, I just love them. The first three songs the band ever covered were ‘All Set To Go’ by The Hard-Ons, ‘Sweet Emotion’ by Aerosmith and a song by American band Gangrene, But our first bass player, Nik, was finding the bass to ‘Sweet Emotion’ a bit difficult; it’s a tough one, getting that groove. Well we might have covered them more often because Davey likes Aerosmith but Andy and Rusty aren’t into them.

This is what I like about the connections, what you like, it doesn’t necessarily show through in your music. I would never have guessed your fondness for Aerosmith, it’s not really there in your sound. So when you recorded covers was it a way of just getting things down quickly?

Yeah, it was just about getting them down quickly.

‘She’s So Fine’ by The Easybeats, ‘Making Time’ by Creation, ‘Search And Destroy’ by Iggy and the Stooges... Probably still my favourite album of all time is Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges, the original ‘Bowie’ mix...

Oh sure, for me it would only be matched by High Time by the MC5. See, there’s a lot that You Am I will listen to and love but we wouldn’t cover because we know when we sound at our best. And when we’re making records we try to challenge and stretch that, but we’re quite impatient, between Rusty and I.

‘I Can Hear the Grass Grow’ by The Move... Roy Wood, what a song writer! Do you like The Move?

Yeah, the big three for Davey and I would be The Move, Creation and The Pretty Things. I remember one time we were playing a support to the Lemonheads in Wolverhampton and before the gig Rusty and I were having a pint and this little bloke came up to us, right up between us and said (affects English midlands accent) ‘I knows where Roy Wood lives’ and then just walked off (laughs). No idea who he was! So while we were working on our own songs they were the things we could just get drunk to and play. Just do it for dancing and for fun. It might be when we’re working on the complexity of song writing and trying to stretch ourselves. So, covers were things to be done quickly and simply. We wouldn’t worry about missing a few chords here and there. I think we even simplified a bunch of Stooges songs just to get them happening.

Ron Asheton and James Williamson, both just incredible guitar players, they know what not to play as much as what to play. Then you’ve got Todd Rundgren, he has such a great attention to detail, some of his songs are very complex. Like ‘Open My Eyes’, it’s only about two and a half minutes long but it’s got several distinct sections, when it goes into that melodic Beach Boys section and then it comes back in with that crunching riff, amazing, just staggering.

Yeah, Davey got to play a support slot to Todd a couple of years ago and at the time Todd was just wanting to play his blues and R&B material... It was very important to me that Davey got to have a good time playing with Todd, he’s such a big fan. Davey got to spend a bit of time together with Todd and he was wonderful but I think Davey was wanting him to stretch out live. Todd wasn’t interested.

I saw Todd play at the Corner Hotel on that tour and he was incredible. He did all the blues stuff but fortunately he finished with versions of ‘Open My Eyes’ and ‘Can We Still Be Friends’. So he did give a nod to the audience with some of his classics, like ‘okay, here’s a couple that you might know’.

Right, he does seem to have lost a bit of the curmudgeonly side of nature that he’s known for... Andy Partridge of XTC might have something to say about that maybe.

But what a brilliant album though, the one XTC album that Todd produced, I love it. So he produced one album by Badfinger, one album by the New York Dolls, one album by Fanny, one album by XTC, everyone hated him because he was so hard to work with, so demanding. He did manage to do two Grand Funk albums. But surprisingly, people don’t realise how big a role he played in Bat Out Of Hell by Meatloaf. He helped fund it, he produced it, he played guitar. I believe that he didn’t charge for the production work but he worked out a percentage deal of the royalties, so I guess he’s done as well out of the deal as Jim Steinman or Meatloaf.

Yeah, there’s a version around of just Todd’s mix, it’s incredible.

I realise we’re jumping around all over the place... but you’ve done ‘Live With Me’ by the Stones, ‘Looking For A Kiss’ by the New York Dolls, ‘White And Lazy’ by The Replacements... just classic rock and roll songs. What did The Replacements mean to you?

They were the second big important band to me. When I saw a video of theirs in 1984, the song ‘Bastards Of Young’, and I heard them, saw them and I thought I need that record. So I went to the record store the next day and managed to buy two Residents records because I didn’t know the difference. I got them off John Encarnaco, a friend of mine who worked in the record shop, a musician up in Sydney, he’s never let me forget that... I quickly realised this isn’t the band that I wanted. They’re huge to me. Now Davey likes them; Rusty or Andy not so much. So we got asked to contribute something to a Replacements tribute record. Then it seemed legitimate for me to ask the band to do a Replacements cover. If I get the feeling that the other guys aren’t so much into the song as I am I’ll just leave it. Keeping a band together and keeping your friends is sort of more important than insisting ‘I want to do this Grand Funk song’. For people as opinionated as us... we’ll leave those Tangerine Dream covers for someone else.

What about The Clash, were they as important to you as other bands?

Ah, I loved certain aspects of The Clash, I love certain songs and vast swathes of albums but they weren’t as important to me as The Replacements. I know they were to Rusty for a while. During soundcheck we’ve done things like ‘I Fought The Law’ (originally done by the Bobby Fuller Four) and we’ve done a version of ‘London Calling’ live.

The Clash were a great band, it was that era when I latched onto the likes of the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Jam, The Clash. London Calling is a classic album.

Yeah, sure. I probably love The Clash more as a visual thing, that look they had. Then their experiments with dub and reggae, I love that aspect of them as much as the power behind the songs. Oh, we did ‘Brand New Cadillac’ with Chris Cheney of The Living End on one of the Big Day Out tours.

I think The Clash had a reverence for early rock and roll as much as anything. I’m sure they loved the sound of that stuff. Joe Strummer in particular.

A band like that didn’t shy away from the things they loved. They might have started out with that punk intent but that quickly went out the window.

So The Replacements was an instant thing for you, it was just bang, that’s the band for me!

Absolutely. I could listen to the Stones music when I was an 11 year old and I liked that but I didn’t have access to anything beyond what was commercial at that time. But getting access to a Stones record at that age did seem like the most sexually charged thing for a young kid. Then by the time I was 15, The Replacements hit me real big.

So where did you hear things like The Move, or The Pretty Things. How did you discover them?

When we started touring regularly, it was through friends and other bands that I got to hear some other things. And my friend Goose from Box the Jesuit, I got to play with them, and he’d play me different things. And Brad Shepherd from the Gurus and Tex Perkins. Just bands we’d tour with. We’d end up at parties and there’d be records playing. You’d always be looking for booze and searching out any skerrick of powder I could get my hands on but I’d always notice what was being played. And where to begin with The Pretty Things? Parachute is still my favourite album by them and the ‘lost’ single ‘Summertime’ is the fuckin’ gas.

And then I started to hear The Gun Club, Green On Red, Dream Syndicate, all that American underground stuff we came across from touring the States. Before that, when we first started out we tried to play American hardcore, that sound. Jaimme and my best friend Nik, who was the bass player, they loved hardcore and punk rock. But see, I was a different kind of guitar player obsessed by a different era so I could never really play like those hardcore bands. They wanted to go for that totally distorted sound, but I wanted to get into that clean guitar sound, I wanted to hear the clang of a major chord. That was the sound for me.

You’ve done ‘Fox On The Run’ by the Sweet. Also, at first I was thinking you didn’t cover many Australian bands, but you’ve done ‘All I Wanna Do Is Rock’ by Daddy Cool, a couple of Easybeats songs, you’ve done the Hoodoo Gurus’ ‘Tojo’ and AC/DC ‘Dirty Deeds’.

We got asked to do most of those songs, for various projects. There were things like the Idiot Box and Dirty Deeds soundtracks, we were asked to work on those. It is a wonder why we didn’t do a Scientists song or two, for example. I don’t know. We could have done ‘Blood Red River’, ‘We Had Love’, ‘Swampland’ of course... there are probably 20 songs we could have done. The Scientists were important to me as a teenager. We did do ‘Television Addict’ by The Victims.

‘Blood Red River’ is such a eerie song, it sends shivers down my spine every time I hear that. Nothing’s overplayed yet it’s so powerful and there’s that twang that they’ve got on the guitars...

Oh yeah. Maybe I could do that song now because I’ve lived a bit. If I had tried that was I was 21 it wouldn’t have worked. Kim and his voice always seemed so grown up to me. I’d never lived like that. Like I love the Beasts Of Bourbon, and we’ve done a couple of Beasts songs with Tex singing, but I can’t sing like that. We did ‘Drop Out’ for the Idiot Box soundtrack, but we’ve done a bunch of live things with Perko. There’s no finesse to their songs, we don’t want that. So we got asked to do ‘All I Wanna Do Is Rock’ for some soundtrack thing, either a film or a TV show, but it never got used. We had it there so we stuck it on the ‘Berlin Chair’ CD single as a B-side.

‘Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You’ by Bob Dylan...

I was doing a solo tour with Greg Hitchcock, he played with us for a while. Again, it was just something we chose to do during soundcheck, there wasn’t a lot of thought put into recording it. That move from G to A-flat is an unusual one.

Now a couple of unusual ones, you do a snippet of ‘I Just Want To Make Love To You’ and ‘Ramblin’ Rose’ on the live album ‘...Saturday Night, ’Round Ten’.

Oh yeah, we love the MC5. We’re doing a bunch of songs from High Time just instrumentally now. Rusty has rekindled his love affair with the drumming of Dennis Thompson. We’re doing snippets of ‘Over And Over’ and ‘Looking At You’. We’ve tried to do a version of ‘Skunk (Sonically Speaking)’, once again just soundcheck things. I was doing some songs by the Canadian band Rush, I love a bunch of Rush albums. Our PA guy loves them too. I think I’ve found Australia’s biggest Rush fan and he plays their albums over the PA. I can listen to anything from 2112 or Power Windows, Caress Of Steel. A couple of my best mates in high school loved Rush, so I got into them too. I like things like ‘Working Man’ and ‘Spirit Of Radio’. I love Rush, they’re very interesting musicians. And when you meet other Rush fans, they’re like ‘wow’.

Any Rush influence doesn’t show in your music but I can see why Rusty would like Dennis Thompson’s drumming, he was a phenomenal player. That power drive he got on ‘Looking At You’.

Rusty’s interests are so eclectic and he has a real ear for quality production too. But then again, when we get a few drinks into us that’s the kind of stuff we want to play. All the esoteric stuff gets thrown to back of the room and we just want to play hard and fast. I don’t think we’ll ever do a proper cover of one of their songs, we just love them too much. When we get asked to do covers we just come up with something that we can do quickly. So it’s less by design really than something to do at the end of a session.

So in recent years you’ve done less covers. Was that a conscious decision?

Yeah, it was a conscious thing. We were mining the same well too much and we were consistently getting compared to the bands we loved, so I wanted to write differently and take our music elsewhere. Sometimes really well and sometimes not at all. I wanted to try and grow as a band.

Porridge & Hotsauce

I think Porridge & Hotsauce is my favourite of your albums.

That’s mine too, I love that album.

One of the things I wanted to mention, Davey’s influence is really starting to shine through.

Oh yeah.

You can tell the stuff that he likes. Some of the songs sound to me like a mix of Mott the Hoople and The Raspberries, Cheap Trick and the Faces, but done in that You Am I style. His songs on the album are excellent.

Sure. See I said to the other guys, ‘c’mon, I want you to write some songs and let’s chuck them all into the pot and see what happens’. They’re probably musically smarter than me in some ways, but because I started writing the songs for the band that’s just how it’s evolved. I think I can write okay for the band but the other guys are very smart musically in ways that I’m not. So why not tap into that, I’m not didactic about everything at all. At a time I was, maybe the mid-’90s but now I’m not. If you’re in a band with Davey why wouldn’t you let him come forward. He’s such a sweet guy that in the past he would just stay in the background.

And he’s such a talented player. I’ve seen him play with his own projects a lot, like when he plays with Ash and Woolfie, he can play like Syd Barrett, or other times he’ll be like Ronnie Wood in the Faces. When he used to play with Jim Keays, he’d play the Masters stuff beautifully. And he loves ELO, he’s such an unheralded player.

He’s very versatile but next year he’ll be playing differently. I think it’s largely to do with his personality. He’s probably my closest mate. When we tour we share rooms a lot and we’ll talk a lot and discuss music. He’s just a very considerate guy. If he was more of a cunt people might actually notice him more, but that’s absolutely not in his nature. It’s not his way of getting through to people. He’s genuinely a very sweet natured person. I get asked a lot, ‘is there something behind that personae?’. And there’s absolutely not.

As a songwriter, do you feel you still have to prove yourself?

Oh yeah (whispers). Completely. It can be complex. If I woke up one day and somebody asked me to write a song, I’d have no idea of where to start. But next day I might wake and think I could write anything. I could write for the Queensland ballet. I could write songs for NRBQ. So it’s a mystery to me, completely, but I know how good it feels to write something of worth and something that moves you. So there’s proving it to myself and then there’s proving it to my band mates. Despite all evidence to the contrary I’m very, very ambitious. I have a lot of peers that are extraordinarily successful. I have ambitions to be known for my song writing. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could just write for the thrill of it, and I do write for the thrill of it, but I also have ambitions for song writing success. To that end I won’t kill myself over a song.

John Prine once said ‘I’d leave a good song for a sandwich’. I’d leave a good song for a picture of a sandwich. But, geez when you’re on to a good thing and the imagery comes together and the word play comes together and the music comes together it’s the greatest joy I’ve known. And I want to keep doing that. I hope there’s still plenty left in the tank, and even when people stop listening I’ll keep writing for pleasure. I decided to write a straight country song the other day, just for the hell of it, and it was like trying to make a chair. That artistic rush of putting a good song together is what excites me. There’s not just one way of writing a song. Whether it’s starting with the lyrics first and then putting the music to the lyrics, or the other way around, it can be different every time. You don’t have to stick to one set way. But then again, trying to write a song with that verse/chorus, verse/chorus, bridge, double chorus and out can be a challenge. It’s getting it right. I might say to myself ‘hey, why don’t you try and discipline yourself and really craft something’, rather than just letting the muse go dancing and see what comes up.

Of some of the bands you’ve covered, are there any song writers that you still consider to be right up there, whether it’s Ray Davies, or Pete Townshend, or Iggy Pop, or Paul Westerberg?

They’re all still huge to me. I might not listen to them much anymore, but at the time they were all hugely important to me. I’ll never forget they’re all still a huge part of my heart. Um, I saw Ray Davies last year in Hampstead, he was just walking along the street. I don’t know him personally, I have met him a couple of times, but I didn’t want to say anything to him. I just wanted to wish him peace and I thought the greatest gift I could give him was to just watch him pass by, rather than rushing up to him to bow down to him. My missus couldn’t believe it, she said ‘there’s Ray Davies, don’t you want to talk to him?’. I said ‘I just want happiness for him’, the cranky old bugger that he is. I did have a wonderful afternoon one time with Ray Davies and photographer Tony Mott, drinking red wine and talking about cricket. That’s what I treasure.

Photo by: Ian McFarlane

Songs by other bands released by You Am I

Compiled by Ian McFarlane

1. ALL I WANNA DO IS ROCK (Ross Wilson) - Berlin Chair (CD single 1994) Originally recorded by Mighty Kong and Daddy Cool
2. I CAN’T EXPLAIN (Pete Townshend) - Berlin Chair (CD single 1994) Originally recorded by The Who
3. I’M SO TIRED (Lennon/McCartney) - Jaimme’s Got A Gal (CD single 1994) Originally recorded by The Beatles
4. GREEN SILVER (Daisygrinders) - Swapping Spit (shared single 1994) Originally recorded by The Daisygrinders
5. IN THE STREET (Chris Bell/Alex Chilton) - Cathy’s Clown (CD single 1995) Originally recorded by Big Star
6. YOUNG MAN BLUES (Mose Allison) (Live) - Jewels and Bullets (CD single 1995) and Live Electrified 3 (2015) Originally recorded by Mose Allison and The Who
7. MY FRIEND JACK (Smoke) - Mr Milk (CD single 1995) Originally recorded by The Smoke
8. SHE’S SO FINE (Vanda/Young) (Live) - Beat Party! (Live bonus CD with Hourly Daily 1996) Originally recorded by The Easybeats
9. MAKIN’ TIME (Pickett/Phillips) (Live) - Beat Party! (Live bonus CD with Hourly Daily 1996) Originally recorded by Creation
10. SEARCH AND DESTROY (Iggy Pop/James Williamson) (Live) - Beat Party! (Live bonus CD with Hourly Daily 1996) Originally recorded by Iggy & the Stooges
11. I’LL MAKE YOU HAPPY (Vanda/Young) - Good Mornin’ (CD single 1996) Originally recorded by The Easybeats
12. TELEVISION ADDICT (Dave Faulkner) - Idiot Box (soundtrack CD 1997) Originally recorded by The Victims
13. DROP OUT (K. Salmon/J. Baker) - Degenerate Boy (CD single from Idiot Box soundtrack, 1997) Originally recorded by Beasts of Bourbon
14. CIRCLES (P. Townshend) - Tuesday (CD single 1997) Originally recorded by The Who and Fleur De Lys
15. TONIGHT I’LL BE STAYING HERE WITH YOU (Bob Dylan) - Tuesday (CD single 1997) Originally recorded by Bob Dylan
16. I CAN HEAR THE GRASS GROW (Roy Wood) - Trike (CD single, 1997) Originally recorded by The Move
17. (There’s Gonna Be A) SHOWDOWN (K. Gamble/L. Huff) - Trike (CD single, 1997) Originally recorded by Archie Bell & the Drells and New York Dolls

18. LIVE WITH ME (Jagger/Richards) (Live) - Radio Settee (Live bonus CD with #4 Record, 1998) Originally recorded by The Rolling Stones
19. LOOKING FOR A KISS (Johnny Thunders) (Live) - Radio Settee (Live bonus CD with #4 Record, 1998) Originally recorded by New York Dolls
20. FOX ON THE RUN (B. Connolly/S. Priest/A. Scott) (Live) - Radio Settee (Live bonus CD with #4 Record, 1998) Originally recorded by Sweet
21. MIDNIGHT TO SIX MAN (Taylor/Stirling/May) - Heavy Heart (CD single 1998) Originally recorded by The Pretty Things
22. SHE’S SO FINE (Vanda/Young) (Studio) - Heavy Heart (CD single 1998) Originally recorded by The Easybeats

23. WHITE AND LAZY (Paul Westerberg) - I’m in Love with That Song: An Australian Tribute to The Replacements (CD compilation 1999) and Kick A Hole In The Sky (CD single 2001) Originally recorded by The Replacements
24. I JUST WANT TO MAKE LOVE TO YOU (Willie Dixon) (Live excerpt in Trike) - ‘…Saturday Night, ’Round Ten’ (Live CD 1999) Originally recorded by Muddy Waters, Foghat... and others
25. RAMBLIN’ ROSE (Wilkin/Burch) (Live) - ‘…Saturday Night, ’Round Ten’ (Live CD 1999) Originally recorded by MC5
26. DIRTY DEEDS DONE DIRT CHEAP (Young/Young/Scott) - Dirty Deeds (film soundtrack 2002) You Am I with Tex Perkins. Originally recorded by AC/DC
27. MADE MY BED, GONNA LIE IN IT (George Young) - Dirty Deeds (film soundtrack 2002) You Am I with Phil Jameson. Originally recorded by The Easybeats
28. TOJO (Dave Faulkner) - Stoneage Cameos (2005) Originally recorded by Hoodoo Gurus
29. HOUNDOG (Don Walker) - Standing on the Outside The Songs of Cold Chisel (2007) Originally recorded by Cold Chisel