THE BRISBANE SOUND

Scott Bradley Regan BMus, BMus (Hons)

DOCTORAL THESIS

By

CREATIVE WORKS

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Creative Industries Faculty

Queensland University of Technology

2019

Abstract

What is the Brisbane Sound, and what does it actually sound like?

Many cities are said to have their own musical ‘sound’, for example, the Liverpool

Sound (Cohen 1994), the Dunedin Sound (McLeay 1994; Mitchell 1996; Bannister 2006), and the Canterbury Sound (Bennett 2002). Brisbane, Australia is no different. Since the late 1970s, music journalists and other cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu 1984) have constructed the idea of a ‘Brisbane Sound’, and used it to consecrate a specific cohort of bands that emerged during the ‘five golden years’ of Brisbane music history, between 1978 and 1983. Yet, despite the cultural currency and prevalence of the trope in subcultural parlance, this so-called Brisbane Sound has remained entirely absent from existing scholarly literature about the local Brisbane music scene. This Doctoral Thesis by Creative

Works aims to remedy this gap, and in doing so, contributes new knowledge to our understanding of Brisbane popular music history and cultural memory. It also proposes a novel way of addressing the perennial conundrum of music’s ineffability, by using music to explain music.

I take an interdisciplinary approach to answer the question ‘what does the Brisbane

Sound sound like?’ by adapting methods from three key fields: cultural studies, popular musicology, and creative practice. First, I collate and analyse how the Brisbane Sound trope has been defined in media discourses over time. Second, I apply music analysis to a primary corpus of Brisbane Sound exemplars to verify and elucidate these claims, supporting my findings with audio examples. Finally, I use the above processes to inform my own creative practice of songwriting, performance, and recording, to produce five original songs that aim to sound like the Brisbane Sound.

The Brisbane Sound i Keywords

Agents, Australian Music, Bourdieu, Brisbane, Brisbane Music History, Brisbane

Sound, Creative Practice, Cultural Capital, Cultural Intermediaries, Cultural Memory,

Discourse Analysis, Habitus, Media Studies, Music Analysis, Music and Language, Music

Journalism, Music Performance, Music Production, Music Scenes, Music Subcultures,

Music-speak, Popular Music, Popular Musicology, Queensland, Rock Music, Songwriting.

ii The Brisbane Sound Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

QUT Verified Signature

The Brisbane Sound iii Acknowledgements

This research was funded by an Australian Post Graduate Award (APA) Scholarship

(2015-2018) and a Australian Government Research Training Program Stipend (RTP)

(2017-2019).

I would like to thank my primary supervisor, Dr Kiley Gaffney, for guiding me through every step, stumble and page of my journey as a post-graduate student. Thank you very much for your endless encouragement, knowledge, reading, editing, and patience.

Thanks also to my associate supervisor Dr John Willsteed for your dry wit, wisdom and insight into the scene; Dr Lachlan ‘Magoo’ Goold for mixing the recordings; and James

See for engineering, relentless cheeriness and willingness to chat anytime about anything other than this.

This thesis would not have been possible without the immense help, love and support of my extended family: John, Kay, Johnathan and Ita; Jeff and Es; Nathan and Kristina.

Special thanks to Lisa for the endless encouragement, meals and lifts. Finally, this thesis is dedicated to my best friend and darling wife, Erin. Thank you monka two one. We did it.

iv The Brisbane Sound Links to Supplementary Audio Data

Note to reader: this is a Thesis by Creative Works

A Thesis by Creative Works is a type of PhD that includes research in the form of artistic practice. The creative works component consists of five original songs that the author wrote, recorded and produced.

These Creative Works can be streamed^ via the author’s website, here: http://scottregan.com/research/phd-creative-works/

In addition, the music analyses in Chapter 7 are supplemented with audio listening examples, designed to be heard in correlation with reading the text and/or graphical notation. There are signposts within Chapter 7 that indicate to the reader when each audio clip should be played, for example:

Listen: Example 06—Heaven Says in 7/4 with Count (Verse)

These audio listening examples can be streamed via the following link: http://scottregan.com/research/phd-research/

^Note: These songs © Scott Regan 2018. All rights reserved. Please do not copy, share, broadcast or publicly perform these works in any way without authorised permission from the copyright holder.

The Brisbane Sound v Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i Keywords ...... ii Statement of Original Authorship...... iii Acknowledgements ...... iv Links to Supplementary Audio Data ...... v Table of Contents...... vi

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 Introductory Statement ...... 1 Prelude: It sounded so Brisbane… ...... 1 Thesis Type ...... 2 Research Questions ...... 3 Thesis Aims ...... 3 Problem Statement...... 6 The Creative Works ...... 9 Contribution to Knowledge ...... 10 Limitations and Scope ...... 10 Assumptions ...... 12 Does the Brisbane Sound really exist? ...... 13 Conclusion ...... 14

Chapter 2: Contextual and Literature Review ...... 15 Contextual Review ...... 15 Introducing Brisbane ...... 15 Scholarly and other Writing About Brisbane ...... 17 Temporal Framework of this Study ...... 18 Related Fields and Disciplines ...... 22 Cultural Studies and Subcultural Theory ...... 23 Popular Musicology...... 25 Music Scenes : Local, Translocal and Virtual ...... 26 Cultural Memory and Heritage ...... 28 Cultural Geography ...... 30 Literature about other ‘City Sounds’ ...... 33 The United Kingdom ...... 34 United States of America ...... 36 New Zealand ...... 38 The ‘Australian Sound’ ...... 39 The Oz Rock Sound...... 42 Australian City Sounds ...... 42 Conclusion ...... 45

Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework ...... 47 Introducing Pierre Bourdieu ...... 47 Habitus ...... 48 Linguistic Habitus ...... 50 Cultural Field ...... 51 Types of Capital ...... 53 Cultural Intermediaries ...... 54 Subcultural Capital vs. Mainstream Success ...... 58 vi The Brisbane Sound Language about Music ...... 58 Music and the Ineffable ...... 58 Dancing About Architecture ...... 61 Sound Language: Audio Engineering ...... 62 Genre and Style Theory ...... 63 Why do we Label Music? ...... 63 What are Music Genres? ...... 64 Music Genres vs Music-Styles ...... 64 The Invention of New Genre and Music-Style Labels ...... 66 Pop Music-Style Conventions ...... 68 The Basic Elements of Pop Songs ...... 69 Unconventional: The Concept of ‘Friction’ ...... 70 Conclusion...... 73

Chapter 4: Background ...... 75 Introducing the Cultural Intermediaries ...... 75 Andrew Stafford ...... 76 Noel Mengel ...... 78 Clinton Walker ...... 79 Donat Tahiraj ...... 80 David Pestorius...... 80 David Nichols ...... 83 Introducing the Brisbane Sound Bands...... 83 The Primary Corpus ...... 83 Birds of Tin ...... 85 Four Gods ...... 86 The Numbers/The Riptides ...... 86 The Apartments ...... 87 Out of Nowhere ...... 87 The Go-Betweens ...... 88 Weighting of The Go-Betweens in this Study ...... 90 That Striped Sunlight Sound ...... 91 That Striped Brisbane Sunlight Sound? ...... 95 That Striped Sunlight Sound Rebooted ...... 97 Conclusion...... 98

Chapter 5: Research Design ...... 101 Introduction ...... 101 Discourse Analysis ...... 101 Discourse Methodology ...... 102 Discourse and Power ...... 102 Discourse and Memory ...... 104 Discourse Methods ...... 106 Music Analysis ...... 110 Methodology and Methods ...... 110 Music Analysis as Notation ...... 111 Music About Language ...... 112 Music Analysis as Music ...... 112 Hans Keller’s ‘Functional Analysis’ ...... 113 Breaking Down a Pop-Rock Song...... 114 Pop-Rock Instrumentation: Moore’s (1993) Four Layers ...... 117 Pop-Rock Songs as a Process: Burns’ Tripartite Model ...... 119 Lyrical Analysis ...... 121 Conclusion...... 123

The Brisbane Sound vii Chapter 6: Discourse Analysis Findings ...... 125 Introduction ...... 125 Temporal Spread of Brisbane Sound Quotes ...... 125 The Brisbane Sound is Pop Music...... 126 The Brisbane Sound is Sunny...... 129 The Brisbane Sound is Naïve ...... 131 The Authenticity of Amateurism ...... 134 The Brisbane Sound is Fragile ...... 137 The Brisbane Sound is Thin ...... 140 Thin as a measure of frequency deficiency ...... 141 Thin as a measure of textual density...... 142 Thin as a result of performance style or technique ...... 142 The Brisbane Sound is unconventional rhythms ...... 143 Conclusion ...... 148

Chapter 7: Music Analysis Findings ...... 151 Introduction ...... 151 A (Brief) Analysis of the Brisbane Sound Lyrics ...... 151 Instrumentation of the Brisbane Sound ...... 152 The Primary Melodic Layer: Vocals ...... 153 Rhythmic and Metric Friction ...... 154 Not ‘Not in 4/4 time’?...... 163 Harmonic Friction ...... 167 The Loose Verse/Tight Chorus Model ...... 170 Recording: Performance Tempo ...... 171 The Drum Kit as a Melodic Layer ...... 173 The Brisbane Sound is Thin...... 177 Thin as a result of bass register ...... 177 Thin as a result of sparse bass playing ...... 180 Conclusion ...... 182

Chapter 8: The Creative Works ...... 185 Introduction ...... 185 The Songwriting Stage...... 187 Songwriting: The Melodic Layer ...... 187 Songwriting: Writing the Lyrics ...... 188 Songwriting: The Explicit Beat and Rhythm Layer ...... 189 Songwriting: The Harmonic Filler Layer ...... 190 Songwriting: Incorporating Friction ...... 191 Songwriting: Structure and Tempo Maps ...... 192 Recording the Creative Works ...... 194 Recording: Process and Technical Considerations ...... 194 Recording: Retaining the ‘Naïve’ Amateurism ...... 194 Recording: Approaches to recording a ‘band’ sound as an individual ...... 195 My Brisbane Sound Songs ...... 196 Stay Quiet ...... 196 Brisbane Girl ...... 197 Rendezvous...... 197 Hard to Know ...... 198 Someone for Everyone ...... 198 Mixing and Post-Production ...... 199 Conclusion ...... 199

Chapter 9: Conclusions...... 201 Introduction ...... 201 viii The Brisbane Sound Summary of Chapters ...... 202 The Existence of the Brisbane Sound? ...... 204 Gaps and Areas for Future Research ...... 207 Bridging the Gap ...... 210 Concluding Remarks ...... 211

References (Concordance Table) ...... 213

References (Thesis Body) ...... 219

Appendices ...... 237

The Brisbane Sound ix Chapter 1: Introduction

It’s a peculiar sound they make, unruly, unkempt and inept, irregular, above all, elusive. Much has been said, some things even written about this so-called Brisbane Sound. Scholars in tertiary institutions have compromised their posture, peering through magnifying glasses at blurred black and white photos, curled now and nibbled by silverfish and spiders. Others have patched cassette recordings through oscillators and refractors, pawing over longitudinal transverse waves, weighing up energy flux and density, messing with the very DNA of music, praying to come up with something, anything, in a futile attempt to identify what it was, or confirm that it even existed. The sceptics believe this to be smoke and delusion. Who knows who was right and who was wrong? You will just have to imagine this music now as very little of it to this day exists. Mostly it was mistreated and squandered, forgotten, used as bookmarks, left under beds, in glove boxes and outhouses, thrown out with the scraps, left on corners to fend for itself, limp-wristed jazz drumming and all, impertinent strumming, and stories of everyday things. No rock posturing to be found there. Who knows exactly what it meant or what came of it, and who really cares?

—Peter Loveday, infinitely distracting (personal blog, 17 December 2011)

Introductory Statement

Since the late 1970s journalists, music writers, and self-referential musicians have discussed, debated and bestowed the trope ‘Brisbane Sound’ to a select cohort of artists and their songs. However, contrary to the eloquent claim by Peter Loveday above, no published scholarly work currently exists that specifically discusses or analyses the Brisbane Sound. This thesis aims to address this research gap by first examining Brisbane Sound discourse in a variety of media; analysing and defining what the Brisbane Sound actually sounds like in music analysis terms; then recreating this Brisbane Sound in a new body of creative works.

Prelude: It sounded so Brisbane…

I have been writing and performing music in my hometown of Brisbane for almost two decades, most notably as a founding member of folk-rock collective The

The Brisbane Sound 1 Gin Club. My interest in this study can be traced to a pithy remark made by one of my band members during the making of our fifth studio album Southern Lights in early

2014. When it came to mix my song ‘Alcatraz’, Ben Salter remarked that “it sounded so Brisbane”. Salter is probably the most experienced and gifted musician I know, with a sublime intellect to match. As such I give a lot of credence to his perspective on music. Unfortunately, I did not have the foresight to interrogate him any further on the matter. But the idea that my song could sound like the city I grew up in continued to intrigue me. Later, I learned from my Associate Supervisor John Willsteed that the

‘Brisbane Sound’ was actually a ‘thing’ that people talked about. But regrettably, that

‘thing’ was not me. It did not designate a catchall term for all music made in Brisbane.

Nor did it apply to the most popular bands to emerge out of Brisbane as a corollary to their success. Rather, the Brisbane Sound described a distinct style of pop-rock music, made by a particular group of independent bands emerging from Brisbane between

1978 and 1983. This specificity meant that decoding the Brisbane Sound seemed like a tangible and achievable goal for a PhD project.

Thesis Type

This is a PhD Thesis by Creative Works. A thesis by creative works includes research in the form of artistic practice. Both the artefacts produced by this practice

(the creative works) and a traditional written component help answer the research question and contribute to the knowledge generated. These components are both examinable, but as a whole, rather than as individual items. The weighting of the following written thesis is 75 percent, and the creative works 25 percent.

My professional creative practice and expertise lie predominantly in songwriting, recording, and producing and popular music. As such, the examinable creative works component takes the form of five, original songs (as audio recordings)

2 The Brisbane Sound that I wrote, performed, recorded, and produced. The creation of these songs was informed by the research outlined in the following written document. As such they can be heard as aural findings that, along with this written document, help to answer the following research question:

Research Questions

This thesis primarily asks:

What does the Brisbane Sound sound like?

In order to answer the above question, a number of sub-questions need to be addressed:

• As a diachronic concept, how is the Brisbane Sound constructed through media discourses over time?

• Who used the label, and for what reasons?

• Which bands and songs did they attribute as having the Brisbane Sound?

• What are the internal musical features within these songs that these people claim connote the Brisbane Sound?

• Can these claims be verified through music analysis?

• Can music analyses locate other musical features or patterns in the music, not identified in the discourse?

• Can these internal musical features be used as a songwriting and production toolkit for new creative works that evoke the Brisbane Sound?

Thesis Aims

These questions inform a set of aims as follows:

The Brisbane Sound 3 1. Locate and collate public media discourses that contain the specific trope

Brisbane Sound,

2. Determine a primary corpus of recordings and artists said to exemplify the

Brisbane Sound,

3. Analyse how the term Brisbane Sound is defined and debated by people with

cultural power and legitimacy (the cultural intermediaries) via media

discourses,

4. Interrogate which of these claims point directly to songwriting, production and

technological strategies on the part of the Brisbane Sound bands,

5. Use music analysis to locate, validate or dispel these claims, especially those

that infer particular songwriting, production and music style conventions, and

6. Use the findings from the above processes to inform the creative practice of

writing, producing, and recording five original, new songs that sound like the

Brisbane Sound.

This thesis is structured in a way that roughly parallels the chronology of my research. The first stage of this thesis involved a historic survey of written and spoken media texts that specifically referred to the exact phrase ‘Brisbane Sound’. I established early that the trope was not in common parlance, however it did show up in local, subcultural discourses. These texts supported the anecdotal evidence from

Willsteed that the Brisbane Sound was a discrete concept attached to a particular temporal and cultural context. The texts mentioning this specific Brisbane Sound were predominantly found in music writing (as in music journalism or criticism), CD liner notes, web 2.0 discourses (such as blog posts and message boards), and documentaries

4 The Brisbane Sound about Brisbane’s music history. I began to discover that for some people, the concept of a Brisbane Sound had real, cultural implications and currency, intrinsic to the way a particular strain of Brisbane’s music history is remembered. I was also surprised by the specificity of its application, given the variety of musical ‘sounds’ and styles that the Brisbane music scene had produced over the last half-century. Yet, despite this specificity, few people managed to convincingly pinpoint what the Brisbane Sound actually sounded like.

Two main types of rhetoric emerged, which might be roughly categorised as implicit and explicit modalities of language about music. Most commonly, the

Brisbane Sound was described implicitly using associative or figurative language.

These represent one modality because in both cases, the music is described with reference to something other than itself. Associative language includes how sound is described with reference to other bands (i.e. citing their influences), and also in terms of established musical-style conventions such as folk, pop and pop-rock. Figurative language includes describing the sound via metaphors such as ‘sunny, ‘fragile’ and

‘naïve’. Yet this implicit language did little to evoke the sound of the Brisbane Sound in my head.

Occasionally people did use explicit language that pointed directly to the aural values of the actual music using musicological or technological language. By musicological language, I mean ways that people defined the Brisbane Sound by pointing out its musical features as a product of songwriting choices, for example by specifying particular melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, structural, and/or performance techniques. By technological language, I mean the ways people defined the sound in relation to specific types of instruments, equipment or technology (particularly, guitar and amplifier brands). For the sake of readability, I shall hereafter refer collectively to

The Brisbane Sound 5 this explicit musicological and technological language as ‘music-speak’. Surprisingly, unlike some other city-sounds, no one explicitly defined the Brisbane Sound in terms of its production values (approaches to recording, mixing and/or mastering) aside from the single quote “it was really under-produced” (Dadds interviewed in Wilson 1988).

Additionally, no particular studio producers or engineers were given credit for shaping—or even contributing to—the sound of the Brisbane Sound. This is a discovery I will return to later. For now, I will summarise the above by stating that music-speak points to explicit musical features that can be imagined (internally

‘heard’) as sound, compared to figurative or poetic language which requires some sort of decoding. In this way, music-speak provides a more direct and clearer path to answering the thesis question, what does the Brisbane Sound actually sound like?

Unfortunately, this type of language was used far less frequently than figurative or poetic language to describe the Brisbane Sound.

Problem Statement

This prevalence and reliance on figurative language led me to think about the ways language and music intersect. I discovered a broad field of studies that interrogated language and music, particularly how metaphors are used to describe and explain the meaning of music. I soon realised that it is not just the Brisbane Sound that people had difficulty defining in concrete musical terms. A clear problem statement emerged as follows:

Language is an inefficient and problematic way of explaining music as sound.

A vast body of literature about language and music suggests that the

‘ineffability’ of music has plagued philosophers for millennia. It seems to me that figurative language is not just poetic, it is essential, because music, as an aesthetic,

6 The Brisbane Sound aural phenomena, is very difficult to convey in words. Music-speak is somewhat more effective because it describes tangible functions or processes that can, perhaps, be imagined or replicated as sound. However, like any technical language, music-speak requires a specific linguistic competence—a set of specialised skills and knowledge— to convey and interpret it (Bourdieu 1991, 137). That is not to say that mastering the skills to interpret and communicate music-speak necessarily requires years of formal music theory training. A good deal of music professionals— musicians, producers, audio engineers and other music industry personnel—manage to acquire a significant level of competence in music-speak with little formalised music education but rather through autodidacticism, years of immersion in the field of music, or simply by doing music (what Small (1998) calls musicking). Nevertheless, for many others, music- speak remains an elusive and abstruse language system. On the other hand, lyrics to songs are based on a much more familiar and widespread language system. I suspect this is why so many semiotic analyses of music provide lyrical analyses but stop short of dissecting the music itself.

One of the ideological aims of this study is to avoid esotericism. Although I have studied musicology, it is hoped that my findings would be understood by a wide array of academic readers, including those who have not formally studied music. But how can I explain the Brisbane Sound music in a straightforward way, that has, as its foundation for analysis, other people’s inefficient and problematic explanations of the same thing? This thesis risks becoming a tautological Ouroboros that eats its own tail.

I provide a solution to the problems stated above in the following argument:

Music is best explained by music.

The Brisbane Sound 7 I argue that whilst a picture ‘may tell a thousand words’, music can tell several thousand. Accordingly, I have provided audio files that use music as sound to supplement and help explain pertinent examples or features of the Brisbane Sound identified in the music analysis (Chapter 6). Similarly, the five original songs (the creative works) could be heard as a sonic distillation of all the findings of this thesis.

Using music to explain music may seem novel, but this approach has a precedent. Hans

Keller’s belief that “the only valid commentary on music was music” formed the basis of his ‘Wordless Functional Analysis’ method (Walker 1986, 396). Keller composed original pieces of music, called ‘analytic interludes’, to help his listeners (on BBC radio) understand the hidden unity between the seemingly contrasting movements1 of an existing composition. Keller only applied his method to Western art music, specifically, the canonical string quartets by Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart, believing that most2 popular music was highly derivative, “trashy” and “primitive” (Keller 1994,

6). Nevertheless, popular musicologists have revisited Keller’s methodology in recent years, noting “the basic principle of using sound to demonstrate musical analysis would also seem suitable for the scrutiny of popular music recording” (Warner 2009,

138).

Accordingly, we can see how Keller’s basic methodology—‘music is best explained using music’—parallels that of this thesis, However, I do not wish to limit myself by contending (as Keller occasionally insisted) that words serve no purpose whatsoever. It seems wiser to approach the research question holistically using all the tools, resources, and languages at my disposal. To this end, whilst the creative works

1 A movement is a self-contained, discrete section of a larger piece of music. 2 With the notable exceptions The Beatles, whom he considered “highly original” (Keller 1994, 6).

8 The Brisbane Sound attached to this thesis could be thought of as an aural distillation of its findings, the written arguments that follow are integral to their understanding.

The Creative Works

The creative works consists of five original songs that I wrote and recorded during the last year of this thesis. The timeline of the creative works reflects the research design: findings in the discourse analysis informed the parameters of the music analysis, and the findings of the music analysis informed and guided the songwriting and production parameters to create new, original songs. As such, the original songs can be heard as an aural set of findings that supplement the written portions of this thesis. The chronological order of events can be shown by the following flow chart:

Discourse Discourse Discourse Corpus Music Music Songwriting Recording Gathering Analysis Findings Gathering Analysis Findings

At the present time, these creative works remain unpublished. This means their effectiveness for conveying and representing elements of the Brisbane Sound is difficult to verify and measure. Personally, I believe that the creative works sound like the Brisbane Sound. This is of course, just my subjective and potentially biased opinion. Hypothetically, a blind listening test of cultural intermediaries (music writers recognised as experts on the Brisbane Sound) could potentially rate these songs on how ‘Brisbane Sound’ they sound. However, the results of this hypothetical test would be biased and flawed, in part because all these people either already know me personally, or know about this project and its aims.

The Brisbane Sound 9 Contribution to Knowledge

This research contributes to the growing body of academic knowledge, understanding and history of the Brisbane popular music scene. Presently (2018),

Brisbane seems to be in a peak period of cultural memory making. These memories are expressed through ad hoc, personal websites (such as online blogs), popular literature texts and autobiographies, documentaries and government-backed cultural heritage initiatives (Strong, Cannizzo, and Rogers 2017). While this is happening, there remains a demonstrable need for further scholarly research into Brisbane music history (Bennett and Rogers 2014), particularly, I will argue, through a musicological lens that foregrounds the music itself. Until now, popular and scholarly accounts of

Brisbane music history have largely avoided discussing the actual recorded music produced within their contexts (see for example Stafford 2004; Nichols 1997; Rogers

2012; Bennett and Rogers 2014). In addition, I have found no published academic writing that addresses the specific concept of a Brisbane Sound.

The interdisciplinary nature of this thesis aims to bridge a gap that seems to persist between the cultural studies of popular music and popular musicology

(Middleton 1993). It does so by foregrounding the Brisbane Sound concept as a set of musical texts, but within the contextual framework of how, when, why and by whom the concept of a Brisbane Sound is constructed in public discourses. Compiling a corpus of Brisbane Sound exemplars and developing new interdisciplinary approaches to popular music analysis will also assist future academics and researchers from a number of fields.

Limitations and Scope

Despite the breadth of this thesis, its scope is intentionally limited. This is primarily a study of music as sound and secondarily a study of the discourse

10 The Brisbane Sound surrounding the sound. The findings from the discourse analysis drives and delimits the parameters for the music analysis. This means that certain, but no less important, aspects of the music and its sociocultural context receive limited attention. In the conclusion to this thesis (Chapter 9), I propose several directions that future studies could take to interrogate other aspects of the Brisbane Sound not developed in this thesis.

First, the temporal focus of this study is delimited to what might be called the original or early Brisbane Sound, which is defined as the period 1978-1983. For reasons I outline later, I have concentrated on studying the recorded music of six bands widely recognised as exemplifying the Brisbane Sound during this period. Certainly, a number of more recent bands have been attributed with the label Brisbane Sound, but they do not fall within the primary temporal framework of this present study.

The discourse predominantly defines the Brisbane Sound as a range of songwriting and performance choices. In order to locate the sound of the Brisbane

Sound, this thesis is primarily concerned with the musical aspects of the sound. This means I provide only a precursory analysis of the lyrics of the Brisbane Sound songs.

This thesis also avoids an in-depth analysis of the production, mixing, or post production values of the Brisbane Sound. I recognise that the production aesthetics or

“extra-musical” aspects of popular song recordings are widely, and increasingly, seen as fundamental to the reception of popular music (Bennett and Bates 2018, 2). Yet, the production values of the Brisbane Sound were rarely mentioned in the discourse.

Similarly, I could not find any quotes that identified the role of producers or sound engineers as contributing to or shaping the sound.

The Brisbane Sound 11 Although this thesis employs a cultural studies methodology, there is not an in depth focus on the politics of identity (gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity).

However, it is notable that the musicians and cultural intermediaries responsible for the creation of the Brisbane Sound are predominantly white, heteronormative and middle-class men. Nevertheless, a comprehensive analysis of the socio-cultural politics of the Brisbane Sound is outside the scope of this project, and is offered as another fertile area for further research.

Assumptions

This study is underpinned by some assumptions that the reader should take for granted. Over the past few decades, the following advancements in thinking have been given considerable space by many music scholars and are usually found in the introduction to recent popular music studies or popular musicology textbooks:

• That popular music, particularly in the form of recorded texts, is an area worthy of study, divorced from previous arguments and dichotomies about high and low culture (Middleton 2000, 4).

• That representing popular music need not rely on the restrictive parameters derived from traditional Western art systems (i.e. notation). Any graphical representation that ultimately aids the explanation of music as sound is valid, whatever form it takes (Middleton 2000, 5).

• That the aspects of popular music that are difficult to convey using traditional notation—such as performance, timbre, technological and studio production techniques—are no less important to the music’s meaning.

• The meaning of popular music texts ought not be isolated from their socio- cultural contexts.

12 The Brisbane Sound Does the Brisbane Sound really exist?

The currency and sociocultural value of the Brisbane Sound means it is often framed in absolutist ways. The Brisbane Sound is real insofar as it exists and is framed as real within and as a product of discourse. Rather than definitively trying to prove the Brisbane Sound’s existence or non-existence, I approach this question using interdisciplinary methods to interrogate how these power structures operate in public discourse to govern and maintain the meaning of the Brisbane Sound. My position is that music exists outside the realm of geography; the ‘meaning’ of music is not inherent and does not contain any literal geographical markers3. Also, I do not contend that the Brisbane Sound of 1978-1983 was necessarily distinct or peculiar to Brisbane.

Local music scenes and musicians are not hermetically sealed hubs of creativity; all popular music is trans-local, trans-temporal and much of it intertextual, influenced by global music practices and traditions.

Indeed, during this research journey, I discovered that music made in other post- punk scenes shared many of the musical features said to define the Brisbane Sound.

Once this research is published, it is hoped that scholars may draw on this data to compare it to other city-sounds that have already been thoroughly documented, such as the Dunedin Sound (see McLeay 1994; Mitchell 1996; Bannister 1999, 2006).

Nevertheless, the scope of this present study is driven by discourse, and that discourse tends to insulate and view the Brisbane Sound as a uniquely local phenomenon.

3 Except, perhaps, for lyrics that point to literal geographic places. The point is, music can evoke geography (accordions for France, Uillean pipes for Ireland). However, these evocations are all socially learned, experienced and relative to the listener’s sociocultural traditions and background.

The Brisbane Sound 13 Conclusion

In this introductory chapter, I have explained the steps I will take in order to answer the primary research question ‘What does the Brisbane Sound sound like?’ I approach this task using three distinct modes of academic inquiry—discourse analysis, music analysis and creative practice. All three approaches generate new and important knowledge to the fields of cultural studies and popular musicology, and contribute to our understanding of Brisbane music history and cultural memory making. I also used this introduction to stipulate the scope, limitations and assumptions that underpin this research. The next chapter—Chapter 2—first provides a contextual and literature review of Brisbane, followed by studies of several other cities known for having their own particular ‘city-sound’.

14 The Brisbane Sound

Chapter 2: Contextual and Literature Review

Contextual Review

Introducing Brisbane

Brisbane is the capital city of the state of Queensland on the east coast of

Australia. Brisbane was established by European settlers on land occupied by the indigenous Turrbal and Jagera peoples in the early 18th century. Over the past few decades, Brisbane city has grown steadily, and is currently Australia’s third most populous city (behind Sydney and Melbourne) with almost 2.44 million residents

(Brisbane City Council, 2018). Brisbane’s proximity to the equator results in a subtropical climate with typically long and warm summers and relatively short winters.

The narrative of Brisbane popular music is frequently framed with reference to the city’s sociocultural and political history. In 1976, the debut single of The Saints

‘(I’m) Stranded’ drew substantial praise from international music critics, particularly those in the United Kingdom. The single’s release was a “trigger for the commercial and academic interest” in Brisbane music (Willsteed 2011, 2). Despite this early recognition, for many years, Brisbane was considered a parochial, cultural backwater compared to the other major capital cities in Australia. This was in no small part due to the conservative politics of Queensland Premier Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen who maintained leadership from 1968-1987. The Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster labelled

Bjelke-Petersen “the kind of crypto-fascist, bird-brained conservative that every punk lead singer in the world could only dream of railing against” (2010, 186). Bjelke-

4 This figure is for the ‘Greater Brisbane Region’ that includes the suburbs outside of the metropolitan center.

The Brisbane Sound 15 Petersen’s Country (later National) Party was responsible for demolishing several culturally significant landmarks, including Cloudland, a large ballroom in Bowen Hills where several of the Brisbane Sound bands regularly performed until it was razed in

1982. A current affairs television broadcast, The Moonlight State (Masters 1987), exposed extensive Queensland police corruption and government collusion, prompting a royal commission that ultimately led to Bjelke-Petersen’s resignation in 1987.

The next year Brisbane hosted World Expo ’88, an international exhibition remembered as the “largest, longest and strangest” celebration of Australia’s bicentenary of European settlement (Ryan 2018, cover). Expo ’88 was widely regarded a catalyst for the city’s cultural maturation, transforming it from a “country town into a vibrant liveable city” (Ferres and Adair 2007, 3–4). During the 1990s a good number of Brisbane bands achieved national success, and importantly, elected to stay put rather than moving interstate to further their careers (see Regan 2014). By the mid-2000s, pop acts The Veronicas and Savage Garden had achieved unprecedented international commercial success. Concurrently, Brisbane residents began to retrospectively reimagine the value of their city’s cultural heritage, with Andrew Stafford remarking that by 2004 Brisbane had developed “a passionate love affair with itself” (2014, viii).

Brisbane also began to be recognised from the outside as a burgeoning hub of artistic talent and musical heritage (Flew, Ching, and Stafford 2001, 29; Whittle 2004;

Hoffmann 2007; Willsteed 2011, 1). Notably, in 2007, US Billboard magazine listed

Brisbane as one of the key global hotspots for live music (Eliezer 2007).

Over the last two decades, local governments have invested millions into South

Bank at the original site of Expo ’88, marketed as “Brisbane’s premier lifestyle and cultural destination” (Brisbane Marketing 2018). As well as attracting high-end boutique hotels and al fresco restaurants, South Bank now includes two museums, a

16 The Brisbane Sound human-made public beach, Queensland Performing Arts Complex (QPAC), and the

Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). The surrounding parklands also host several annual cultural and arts events, such as the Brisbane Festival and several International Food festivals.

Scholarly and other Writing About Brisbane

Despite the cultural maturation of Brisbane as noted above, rigorous academic studies of Brisbane popular music have only emerged in the past decade. My own honours thesis (Regan 2014) examined how middle-tier5 musicians felt an impetus to leave Brisbane and move to other capital cities to further their careers. Other academics have applied subcultural theory to Brisbane Chamber music (Burgess 2004); explored queer culture in the Brisbane club scene (Taylor 2008; 2012); diagnosed a “crisis” in the contemporary Brisbane Jazz scene (Rechniewski 2008) and observed the cultural production efforts of Brisbane’s small-scale independent record labels (Guglielmino

2014).

In recent years, Andy Bennett and Ian Rogers have published several papers that examine Brisbane’s music heritage through the lenses of scene theory and cultural memory. Ian Rogers’ doctoral thesis (2012) examined the career aspirations of

Brisbane indie rock musicians. Bennett and Rogers identified an “increasing interest” in Brisbane’s independent music heritage and how it is being archived online by a select number of local music fans, scholars, and scene participants (2014, 302).

Bennett and Rogers presented two case studies that represent an attempt to preserve the cultural memory of Brisbane music heritage. First, they described Brendan Eales’

5 I define a middle-tier musician as “one who has crossed an income threshold where they receive a significant portion of their income from music-related activities” (Regan 2014, 2).

The Brisbane Sound 17 Turn It Up!! Blog—an online library of hundreds of bootlegged live recordings of predominantly local bands (Eales n.d.). Second, the authors cited two independently produced video documentaries that illuminated the “micro-scenes” (Bennett and

Rogers 2014, 313) formed by Brisbane’s underground experimental bands6. The authors concluded that Brisbane’s cultural heritage largely remains “located in the memories of musicians, their associates and audiences, and in DIY collections and archives of individuals who occasionally stage ad hoc physical and digitised exhibitions” (Bennett and Rogers 2014, 304).

A pertinent example of this ‘collection’ of cultural memory was Dr John

Willsteed’s exhibition It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity, presented at the Brisbane

Powerhouse’s Visy Theatre in October 2015 (Brisbane Powerhouse 2015). Willsteed is my associate supervisor and for a time was a member of The Go-Betweens. His exhibition incorporated speeches drawn from personal memories as well as a collection of fanzines, Super 8 films, photography, artwork, posters and other ephemera that acted as a “’live’ documentary about Brisbane's music…and its impact”

(Moore 2015). Willsteed’s aim was to document the cultural memory of the “less successful bands and artists” that have so far been neglected in scholarly accounts of

Brisbane’s post-punk years (Willsteed quoted in T. Moore 2015). This exhibition formed the basis for a doctoral thesis by the same name, completed in 2017 (Willsteed

2017).

Temporal Framework of this Study

The Brisbane Sound appears like a loosely applied term that points to a number of distinct phases of music making in Brisbane. The first instance of the term can be

6 Eternal Soundcheck: The First Year (Kennedy 2010) and Brisbane 2012 (Watson 2012).

18 The Brisbane Sound traced to a Billboard article from April 3, 1965 in relation to a Brisbane-based band called The Reverbs:

Buddy Jack, president of Arlen [Records of Los Angeles] believes that the time has come for Americans to begin to accept the sounds that are coming out of Australia. It’s an extension of the British beat and he feels that the ‘Brisbane Sound’ will become as popular in the U.S. A the ‘Liverpool Sound’. (Billboard 1965, 16)

This article was intended to support the promotion of a single that was due to be released on Arlen Records in the United States. According to Ritchie Yorke7, who is credited with discovering and producing the band, the single never eventuated. In the

1960s, the ‘Liverpool Sound’ was liberally applied to any band that emanated from the

UK city as a marketing tool by proxy, effectively aligning a band’s sound and

7 Personal chat, April 2, 2016, at the Brisbane Rock’n’Roll Writer’s Festival. Ritchie had enthusiastically promised to provide more information about the history of the Reverbs, but sadly passed away in early 2017.

The Brisbane Sound 19 credibility with the phenomenally successful Beatles (Cohen 1994, 118). As Zion

(1990, 218) suggests, many “entrepreneurial” Australian bands tailored their style and sound to parallel those of the British beat phenomenon in an attempt to ride the coat tails of the ‘British invasion’ in the United States. Thus, by 1965 it would have been clear to Billboard’s readers exactly what the association with the ‘Liverpool Sound’ meant without any further clarification. Regardless, there is no other evidence of the trope Brisbane Sound being used around this time or for at least another decade. As such it appears to be an ad hoc reference and is considered an outlier to the rest of the data and the temporal focus of this research.

For many, the Brisbane Sound’s temporal boundaries are anchored to the chronology of The Go-Betweens. Thus, it is generally agreed that the start of the

Brisbane Sound coincided with the release of The Go-Betweens first 7” vinyl single

‘Lee Remick’/‘Karen’ in September 1978. By mid-1978, punk was ‘dead’ in Brisbane, according to cultural intermediary Clinton Walker who wrote (under the moniker Cee

Walker) at the time:

And the last laugh is ours—what these punks obviously don't realise is that their beloved punk that they evidently consider very hip—is dead—passé, redundant—and it's been that way for well over 6 months now. (Walker 1978, 24)

Semper Floreat is the student newspaper attached to the University of

Queensland, Brisbane. In the 1970s Semper acted as a critical political and cultural output for the Brisbane music scene with a strong affiliation to community radio station 4zzz. In an October 1978 article, Eric Cummings pointed to a turning point in the alternative music scene in Brisbane where alternative bands flourished.

The Summer of 77 in Brisbane saw the rise of a number of new and exciting bands whose one common ambition was to purge the town of disco muck and the hippie armchair disease. Naturally it didn't come off—the corporate muscle behind the Top 40 is such that

20 The Brisbane Sound any opposition is necessarily limited to those who have access to alternative music. Fortunately, Radio 4ZZZ-FM was able to promote real alternative music and anyone with any sense knew that this audience wanted live and living music—not the pulp that the regular promoters had been force-feeding us. (Cummings 1978, 23)

In the above quote, Cummings emphasises the support of 4zzz community radio station as crucial to the local music scene’s development. 4zzz began as a small-scale student radio station based at the University of Queensland, St Lucia in 1975, and in

1978, the station was granted a ‘full power’ license that enabled it to be transmitted in stereo on 102.1FM from a tower on Mt Coot-tha. This “FM revolution” this was seen as a massive boon for independent music making in Brisbane as the stronger FM signal enabled 4zzz to reach a far greater audience (Cameron 1978, 7).

In recent decades, the idea that the original Brisbane Sound began in 1978 and lasted for approximately five years became solidified in Brisbane’s cultural memory through public discourse. In 2008, a press release for David Pestorius’s The Brisbane

Sound exhibition stated it would “map the cross pollination between the indie and experimental music scenes and the art scene in Brisbane during the post-punk years,

1978-1983”. In articles that circulated the exhibition’s opening, some journalists cited this time span as fact:

The Brisbane Sound refers to a phenomenon that occurred in the years 1978 to 1983; the term was coined and used at the time by music writers. (Reilly 2008, 25)

Donat Tahiraj specifically refers to the Brisbane Sound as existing between “the five golden years of 1977-1982” (Tahiraj 2015, 91) and also refers to the “golden era of Brisbane music” (1978-1982) (Tahiraj 2010). Tahiraj’s reasoning for bracketing the

Brisbane Sound in these years is based on a number of crucial events in the independent Brisbane Music scene:

By 1983, The Go-Betweens had well and truly skipped town. The Pits (after a serious

The Brisbane Sound 21 amount of shows in 1982) imploded. As so did Xero. The Dum Dums moved to Sydney to only break up shortly after, and Antic Frantic bettered that by heading off to London. (Tahiraj 2010)

In summary, although it is generally agreed that the original Brisbane Sound began with the release of The Go-Betweens’ ‘Lee Remick’/‘Karen’ in 1978, the end date is less clear. Most commonly, people conflate its ending with significant changes that were happening in the Brisbane music scene around 1983, due to several bands either breaking up or leaving Brisbane to further their careers elsewhere. The other factor at play here, is that within five years many bands will organically start to develop and move away from their earliest sounds; by 1983, bands such as The Go-Betweens had not only honed their songwriting and performance craft, but also received record label investment to improve the recording and production qualities of their sound.

Essentially, this means that by 1983, the original Brisbane Sound’s sound had started to change. As the primary aim of this thesis is to fully interrogate the established concept of the original Brisbane Sound, rather than mapping its development various discursive and musical distortions, I have intentionally placed rigid temporal boundaries on what is being studied.

Related Fields and Disciplines

This thesis draws on and integrates a wide range of sociologically focused approaches. In the following section I outline some of the various fields this study intersects, with an emphasis on the ways these disciplines interrogate the relationship between music and place.

22 The Brisbane Sound Cultural Studies and Subcultural Theory

Despite numerous attempts, the discipline of cultural studies defies a simple or concise definition. This is in part because much cultural studies research is inexorably interdisciplinary. As Gilbert B. Rodman explains:

[Cultural studies scholars] don't share objects, methods, disciplinary frameworks, or theoretical underpinnings in any obvious way… it has no primary research object, theoretical framework, or methodological approach to call its own. As a result, there is nothing that works as a ‘close enough’ soundbite definition. (Rodman 2013, 343)

The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), founded in

Birmingham UK in 1964, is widely attributed with expounding the term ‘cultural studies’ and for establishing the framework for its theoretical application. From the

1970s until the early 2000s, the subcultural theory that came out of the CCCS was highly influential to the academic enquiry of music and youth cultures. Subcultural theory emerged out of the Chicago School of Sociology’s studies of youth gangs in

1920s Chicago, particularly societal understandings of these groups in relation to crime and violence (see Thrasher 1927; Shaw and McKay 1942; Cohen 1955). This emphasis on youth cultures, however, was more fully realised in the late 1970s through a number of important studies of youth subcultures undertaken by Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige,

Angela McRobbie and others at the CCCS (Cohen 1972; Hall and Jefferson 1976;

McRobbie and Garber 1976; Hebdige 1979). These studies described how working- class youth were drawn to, and circulated in, the urban subcultures of post-war Britain.

The CCCS’s Marxist approach focussed on how the working class were acutely affected by their lower status in a capitalist society and this in turn made them more likely to exhibit deviant or rebellious behaviour. The CCCS scholars saw the formation of subcultures, such as punks, teddy boys and mods, as an act of empowerment for the youth, providing a collective response and a means of coping with shared problems,

The Brisbane Sound 23 such as limited career prospects. Association and identification with a subculture also constituted a form of symbolic protest; rituals provided a way to express their anger and resist their parent culture or hegemonic capitalist values (see Hall and Jefferson

1976). The subcultures studied by the CCCS were often very visible, with a subculture’s style—including its fashion, argot, mannerisms and hairstyles— frequently analysed in relation to how they subverted the original meanings of everyday goods, symbols and signs. This was elaborated at length in Hebdige’s seminal study Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) whereby ‘spectacular’ subcultures—such as punks—were framed as bricoleurs for their eclectic appropriation and re-contextualisation of found objects (such as safety-pins) (Hebdige

1979). Despite being highly influential, the work of the CCCS has since faced ongoing criticism, in part for what or who they left out, notably, female subcultural participation was largely ignored (McRobbie 1990) as well as members who identified as queer

(Taylor 2012).

Many other of the CCCS’s central tenets have since been questioned, reconfigured, or dispensed with entirely. There is no room here to cover the breadth of responses and criticisms; summaries can be found in the introduction to many cultural studies of music handbooks or readers (see for example Bennett and Waksman 2015).

The most relevant criticism levelled at the CCCS is that they largely eschewed discussing or analysing popular music itself, despite it being recognised as intrinsic to the homology of many subcultures, such as their social rituals, identity, and style

(Hesmondhalgh 2005, 22; Laing 1985, x). One notable exception is Willis (1978), who in recognising the importance of rock and roll for the ‘motor-bikeboys’, made a parallel between the up-tempo ‘big beat’ and “aggression” of rock and the subculture’s social mores, attitudes and lifestyle (Willis 1978, 89-93).

24 The Brisbane Sound Since the CCCS’s nascent studies, a considerable body of cultural studies research has examined the sociological aspects of popular music production and reception. Over time, these cultural studies of music have become recognised as part of a sub-field called ‘popular music studies’, spearheaded by the International

Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). From its foundation in 1981,

IASPM called for its members to approach the study of popular music’s performance, production and reception as a truly interdisciplinary matter (Tagg 1985, 4). IASPM drew academics from a multitude of fields such as musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology, anthropology, history, media and journalism studies (Bennett and

Waksman 2015, 2). Nevertheless, some academics maintain that popular music studies—like the CCCS before it—continues to privilege the social, cultural, and political aspects of music over the sound of the music itself (Negus 1997, 4; Rodman

2015, 53).

Popular Musicology

Conversely, the music itself has been the primary foci for musicological analyses. In the case of popular musicology, and especially the emergent subfield of phonomusicology8, recordings have replaced notated scores as the primary texts of analysis. In 1994, the term ‘Popular Musicology’ was solidified as a field with the publication of a journal by the same name (Scott 2009, 1). Throughout the 1990s the field of popular musicology rapidly expanded as an increasing cohort of musicologists moved away from ‘traditional’ musicology, seen as too formalist and anachronistic.

Traditional musicology is primarily concerned with analysing music from the Western art canon (i.e. the ‘classical’ music by European composers from the Late Middle Ages

8 Phonomusicology is the study of music recordings with a particular emphasis on analysing production and recording techniques, rather than the formal aspects of the songs (see Bennett and Bates (2018)).

The Brisbane Sound 25 to the early twentieth century). Traditional musicology treated musical texts as autonomous objects severed from their context, such as “considerations of biography, patronage, place and dates” (Leppert and McClary 1987, xiii). Popular musicologists, on the other hand, endeavour to include or retain the sociocultural contexts that orbit the music under analysis (see for example Tagg 2013; Middleton 1993; A. Moore

1993, 2012; Brackett 2002; Walser 1993a).

Popular musicologists still frequently rely on traditional musicological methods such as notation, particularly for mapping the basic harmony, melody and rhythmic elements of a song. Importantly though, most popular musicologists now recognise that a song’s timbre, lyrics, vocal intonation, recording environment or other production techniques—aspects that are far less conducive to the methods of traditional analysis—are of equal importance to the meaning of songs (Brackett 1995,

28; Moore 2012). Notwithstanding such innovation, a common critique directed at all musicology is that its methods are esoteric; interpreting the findings requires a fluency in a specific “technical meta-language” (Brackett 2002, 66). With all this mind, I have attempted to make my music analysis chapter accessible to the broadest possible readership, by avoiding complex, technical jargon wherever possible and using audio examples to supplement the notated reductions.

Music Scenes : Local, Translocal and Virtual

Scene theory emerged as a more modern and flexible way to discuss musical practices, capable of replacing the ‘classic’ but anachronistic subcultural theory developed by the CCCS (Bennett and Rogers 2016, 13). Whereas subcultural theory implied a hermetically sealed, homogenous group, a key benefit of scene theory was that it accounted for the more realistic fluidity of youth and their engagement with music cultures. The term music ‘scene’ was first used by journalists to describe the

26 The Brisbane Sound culturally alternative identities associated with the jazz underworld in the 1940s. Will

Straw’s (1991) pivotal study of the emergent rock and dance music scenes in the

United States marked the genesis for serious academic interest into theorising music scenes as geographic spaces of musical activity. Straw’s definition of a music scene is frequently cited9 in popular music studies: “a cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross- fertilization” (Straw 1991, 373).

Bennett and Peterson (2004) defined music scenes as “the contexts in which clusters of producers, musicians, and fans collectively share their common musical tastes and collectively distinguish themselves from others” (2004, 1). This definition allowed for the identity shaping aspects of music, identified by the CCCS, without the misplaced or outdated emphasis on deviance and delinquency. Bennett and Peterson offered three categories of scenes: ‘local’, ‘translocal’ and ‘virtual’ (2004). Local scenes are self-evident, and reflect common or journalistic parlance, as musical practices that are “clustered around a specific geographic focus” (2004, 6). A translocal scene referred to multiple, disparate local scenes that shared similar values, styles, and tastes in music, and how scene members interacted through the sharing of music recordings, bands and fanzines (2004, 8-11). Translocal scenes accounted for how various music styles, like punk, can seemingly emerge simultaneously in various disparate geographic locations. Virtual scenes originally designated how music fans, scattered across vast geographic divides, were united by internet-based communication, such as social media, chat rooms, vlogs, message boards, etc. (2004,

9 As of June 2018, Google scholar attributes over 1000 citations to the paper (Straw 1991).

The Brisbane Sound 27 10-12). Clearly, Bennett and Peterson’s original sites of isolated virtual scene activity are now aged (they do not account for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on) but the theory is still relevant—virtual scenes can be viewed as mediated extensions to local and translocal music practices.

Cultural Memory and Heritage

Scene theory has expanded immeasurably in the past few decades due to its flexibility as a concept; it is impossible to account for all of its uses and applications.

However, Bennett and Rogers (2016, 34) argue that cultural memory is a crucial aspect missing from many scene studies, and that “situating the study of memory [should be] a primary concern for any scholar looking into scene”. This is relevant, because

Brisbane is currently in a peak of cultural memory and nostalgia, particularly for the period studied here (late 1970s—early 1980s). Brisbane’s current obsession with cultural memory-making and nostalgia reflects a global trend that first emerged in the

1970s and has since developed into entire memory industries through literature, documentaries, and personal memoirs via online blogs (Huyssen 2000, 24; Strong et al. 2017).

I have noted that none of the Brisbane Sound bands that are the focus of this study achieved significant commercial success. Yet, they have achieved a significant place in Brisbane’s cultural memory and heritage. In 2010, a new bridge spanning the

Brisbane River between the suburbs of Milton and West End was named the “Go

Between Bridge” [sic] by a popular vote. Bell (2010, 17) regarded the opening of Go

Between Bridge as “all that more important from a cultural perspective”:

It shows a newfound maturity in our city, a capital now willing to embrace the artistic and the aesthetic aspects of city life as much as the fiscal and fiduciary facets of metropolitan existence with which it was so besotted in earlier eras. (Bell 2010, 17)

28 The Brisbane Sound When recent bands or artists are asked to define the Brisbane Sound, they frequently point back to bands such as The Go-Betweens. This shows how the cultural memory of the Brisbane Sound is not reified only by the original participants in the scene, but also later generations of musicians through “retrospective cultural consecration” (Schmutz 2005). Several examples of this appear in the concordance table (Appendix B), but this answer from Screamfeeder’s Tim Steward is typical:

Interviewer: Back in 2012 you were commemorated on a plaque in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane and it talks about you and Screamfeeder ‘redefining the Brisbane Sound’. What are your thoughts on what the Brisbane Sound is?

Steward: I think pretty much everyone would agree that the Brisbane Sound always has a little bit of The Go-Betweens in it because, you know Queenslanders we’re kind of care- free, we don’t want to overthink things too much. (Neinaber 2015)

Screamfeeder were one of a handful of Brisbane bands that achieved mainstream success10 in the 1990s who did not relocate to other cities to further their careers ( see

Regan 2014). By attributing The Go-Betweens’ with his band’s success, Steward is enacting what Bourdieu would call a field-specific act of peer legitimation via the transference of symbolic capital. Also in the above quote, the interviewer mentions

The Valley Walk of Fame, a series of plaques installed in the main pedestrian mall of

Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. These plaques are intended11 to commemorate “some of

Queensland’s best-loved musical talent; the state’s homegrown music deities” (QMA

2018). Both these plaques, and Go Between Bridge, demonstrate how the Brisbane

Sound’s cultural memory has quite literally shaped the architecture of Brisbane city.

10 ‘Success’ is used here loosely and relative distinction to independent bands. For a detailed enquiry into the notions of independent success and aspiration in the Australian context, see Rogers (2012). 11 Academics have noted the arbitrariness of the selection process (Bennett and Rogers 2014, 307), resulting in a seemingly disparate group of awardees including my own band The Gin Club.

The Brisbane Sound 29 Over the last few years there has been an increase in scholarly literature that views music scenes through the lens of cultural memory. Although this present study is not primarily or independently a furtherance of work in this area, it does thoroughly map the Brisbane Sound as a diachronic, mediatized concept. It therefore provides cultural memory scholars a significant body of data. It is hoped that future cultural memory studies of Brisbane will now include space to discuss the Brisbane Sound, which has (until now) remained absent from academic literature.

Cultural Geography

Geography, as anyone from The Beatles to The Smiths will tell you, is central to pop music. A certain town or city will stamp its identity all over the music it produces as well as shaping the way its bands look and think. Imagine if the (Happy) Mondays had come from Tunbridge Wells. (Willmott 1994, 29)

Emerging in the 1960s, Cultural Geography is another academic field that looks at the concept of music and place. At the time, traditional geographers were dismissive of music geography research, a seemingly frivolous and unscientific sub-field of cultural geography (Carney 1990). Despite this, during the 1970s interest grew, and over the following two decades many articles were published by (typically younger) geographers attempting to break free of the objective restraints and methods of traditional geography (Carney 1990, 42). They explored using traditional, empirical methods to ‘map’ music making through analysing census data or lyrical analyses of songs about cities (for example, see Jarvis 1985). However, few music geographers had the aural skills and tools necessary to fully reconcile the relationship between the actual sound of the music and specific places.

For the field to progress, as Carney noted in 1990, “geographers need to open their ears to the auditory components of culture—the sounds of people and places” rather than just what they see (1990, 45). Carney also recognised that these studies

30 The Brisbane Sound were largely based on North American popular music traditions, and thus more research was required into the “stylistic variations of music around the world” (1990,

43). Echoing Carney’s call, Susan Smith implored geographers to follow musicology’s lead in reaching out to other disciplines to understand the sociological implications of their analysis of music as texts, stating that geographers should follow the “‘political turn’ in musicology to inform the ‘cultural turn’ in human geography, and vice versa”

(1994, 235). Smith noted that cultural geography still “remains devoted to the seeing world, or speaking about it, rather than listening or hearing”. For Smith, the avoidance of music analysis was “hardly surprising” as music was a particularly abstract concept that eluded most geographers (1994, 235). In concluding, Smith refrained from specifying an agenda for future research in her field but reiterated that as “modern musicology is pre-occupied with the importance of seeing as a supplement to hearing”, geographers should at least consider seeking “the converse” (1994, 238). Five years later, Lily Kong continued to rally against the neglect of popular music by “profoundly elitist” geographers who still disregarded popular music as an area worthy of study

(1995, 183). Kong also suggested a more sophisticated, interdisciplinary approach was required by incorporating the qualitative methods and theories of musical analysis from other fields (1995, 195).

Since Carney’s and Kong’s early studies, a steady increase in literature has emerged from geographers who integrate sociocultural perspectives. For example,

Halfacree and Kitchen combined geography with French sociologist Michel

Maffesoli’s concept of neo-tribes to explicate how Manchester musicians used their native city “as a resource to develop their art” (1996, 51). The geographers argued that in the late 1980s, Manchester based musicians developed a shared, or ‘tribal’ identity through a willingness to unambiguously reference their city in both their lyrics and

The Brisbane Sound 31 artwork. However, these studies, by now under the title of ‘cultural geography’, still avoided any attempt to analyse the music of these places as text.

In Australia, Connell and Gibson aimed to remedy what they saw as the

“neglected place of geography” in popular music studies (2003, x). Connell and

Gibson include a number of short case studies of cities or regions that are renowned for having their own ‘sound’ including Iceland, Dunedin and Bristol. On the surface, these case studies are directly comparable to the aims of this thesis. However, due to their brevity and lack of musical analysis, these city-sound links presented by Connell and Gibson seem tenuous. Ten years after Kong, Jazeel (2005) called again for geographers to incorporate more musicological methods in to their research:

Approaches attuned to musicological and ethnomusicological expertise holds the potential for genuine insights into the spatial politics of music. This approach requires… the employment of an awareness and technical knowledge of what musical practice is. For social scientists with little or no musical or musicological training (such as myself), this requires the building of new research networks and collaborations. (Jazeel 2005, 239)

Despite these calls, few cultural geographers have successfully incorporated musicological methods or collaborated with musicologists. On the other hand, scholars who originated in the discipline of popular musicology have had more success in crossing over to cultural geography. Adam Krims is the most notable to convincingly incorporate aspects of cultural geography in to their musicological studies. In the preface to Music and Urban Geography (2007), Krims stated:

In the course of presenting some of the work in this book to geographers, I was initially surprised to find that my approach, coming from music theory, actually addressed a number of the questions that they were asking, also in a new light … a theoretical approach from somebody trained to treat music as a certain kind of object (or activity) actually threw music and space into a new light for many of them. (2007, x)

32 The Brisbane Sound Krims combined musicological methods with cultural geography to analyse songs where the urban environment is represented, such as Downtown by Petula Clark.

By doing so, he aims to show how music production and urban culture influence — and are influenced by —the geographic space in which they are situated. Krims’ explains that attitudes towards the city as represented in its music also shift temporally.

For example, the societal values of mid-1960s New York that are represented in

Downtown are clearly different to the mid-1990s ghetto-rap of the same city.

Finally, it is worth noting here that despite the growing academic interest in cultural studies of Brisbane, to date I have not found any scholars who have applied a cultural geographic perspective to the city. This is despite the fact that Australia has some of the most cited cultural geographers including John Connell and Chris Gibson.

Literature about other ‘City Sounds’

Presently, I have found no scholarly writing that explicitly refers to the Brisbane

Sound. The following section outlines other scholarly literature that specifically discusses the attribution of a ‘sound’ to a particular city. The literature is organised broadly by geography and progresses more or less in order from global to local. The authors are mainly from the fields of cultural studies, cultural geography, and popular music studies. This list is not exhaustive: it is limited to urban cities of the Western world and I avoid studies of “global cities” such as London or New York (Sassen

1991). Instead I look at subjacent or “second tier” cities that— like Brisbane in relation to Melbourne or Sydney—negotiate issues of isolation whilst still seeming to punch above their weight in terms of cultural production.

The Brisbane Sound 33 The United Kingdom

Journalists originated the concept of the ‘Canterbury Sound’ in the late 1960s with reference to Canterbury jazz-rock band Wylde Flowers and its members’ successive solo projects such as Soft Machine, Caravan, and Hatfield and the North

(Bennett 2002, 87). The term was revived in the 1990s by geographically dispersed fans of Canterbury bands that communicated through ‘virtual scenes’12 (Bennett 2002,

90–92; see also Bennett and Peterson 2004). Bennett (2002) adapted Appadurai’s

(1990) concept of ‘scapes’ to describe how these fans created ‘mythscapes’ by including or excluding certain bands from the categorisation, and therefore “take an active role in the definition of the Canterbury Sound” (Bennett 2002, 93). Their authority to do so is implicit in their subjective tastes, a broad knowledge of the city’s musical heritage, and other acquired cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986). Bennett analysed empirical data from Calyx—a website dedicated to the Canterbury Sound13, a collection of Canterburied Sounds CDs, and Canterbury Sound fanzines. Some qualitative data was also collected through interviews with local record store owners and musicians, although the actual sound of the Canterbury Sound was largely absent in this paper.

In Manchester, geographers Halfacree and Kitchin (1996) adopted French sociologist Michel Maffesoli’s (1996) concept of neo-tribes (see also Bennett 1999) to trace the links between geography and local ‘indie’ music making. Firstly, the authors argued that Manchester-based bands utilised the linkages between identity and place “as a resource to develop their art” by embedding geographic references within

12 ‘Virtual scenes’ are internet-based fan communities. It is worth noting that Bennett is writing before the proliferation of social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook. 13 http://calyx.perso.neuf.fr/

34 The Brisbane Sound their musical texts (including its lyrics and artwork) (Halfacree and Kitchin 1996, 51).

Secondly, the authors noted these linkages are self-sustainable and not only perpetuated by these texts “but also by their marketing and coverage in the music press” (Halfacree and Kitchin 1996, 51–52). The trope ‘Madchester’ is cited as an example, originally propagated by magazines such as New Musical Express and

Melody Maker in the late 1980s, and applied to Manchester-based indie bands such as the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. During the mid-1990s ‘Britpop’ boom, the

Madchester trope was resurrected by the media and applied to bands such as Oasis and

The Charlatans (Halfacree and Kitchin 1996, 52; Wiseman-Trowse 2008, 165–66).

In Liverpool, journalists, record labels, and policy makers first constructed the trope ‘Liverpool Sound’ in the 1960s to capitalise on the success of The Beatles. Sara

Cohen’s ethnography of rock cultures of the city is particularly pertinent. In her most cited work, Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making, Cohen interviewed and observed two local rock bands in the mid to late 1980s in

“microsociological detail” as they rehearsed and recorded (1991a, 6). Cohen’s aim was to understand how musicians “originate within, interact with, and are inevitably affected by, the physical, social, political and economic factors which surround them”

(1991a, 342). Cohen’s methodology—studying the day-to-day lives of working musicians in relation to the social dynamics of a local rock music culture—has since become widely regarded as a pre-eminent and highly influential text in the field of popular music studies. Nevertheless, the sound of these bands was given limited space.

In a later work, Identity, Place and the ‘Liverpool Sound’ (1994), Cohen did explore how identity politics particular to Liverpool could be reflected in the music of the city. Cohen located the Liverpool Sound as a media construct, and noted how local

The Brisbane Sound 35 music journalists and critics continued to apply the trope for many years after The

Beatles had disbanded, although an analysis of these media texts is not provided.

Instead, the bulk of Cohen’s data is drawn from interviews with small groups14 of young rock musicians who were encouraged to discuss the existence and definition of the Liverpool Sound. The small sample size and somewhat ad-hoc data collection method limited its effectiveness, as many interviewees responded too broadly (“all the bands sound different” (1994, 124)), contradicting others and occasionally themselves.

Many respondents defined the Liverpool Sound by contrasting it with another city such as Manchester15, articulating their “oppositional identity” (Kruse 1993, 34. Italics in original). Some considered the ‘Manchester Sound’ (Halfacree and Kitchin 1996;

Cohen 1991b, 345) to be more influenced by technology and synthesisers compared with the acoustic ‘rawness’ of the Liverpool Sound. Inferred by this distinction is the allusion that their raw, unprocessed sound is more authentic than Manchester’s sound16.

United States of America

Defining one city’s sound in opposition to another city is common. In the United

States, Porcello (2005) explained how the two equally dominant country music hubs of Austin, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee have a “curious mixture of jealousy and moral superiority” to one another (2005, 111). Porcello spent six weeks as a participant observer in two recording sessions in Austin—considered the ‘live music capital of the world’. Porcello discovered that capturing a sense of ‘liveness’ in the studio was intrinsic to the Austin Sound and even inherent in a Texan musicians’ sense of identity

14 “about 15-20” (Cohen 1994, 121) 15 Cohen acknowledges this Liverpool-Manchester binary opposition is not unique to music—antagonism between the two cities is evident in other constructs of local identity such as football team allegiances.

16 For further discussion about authenticity and technology see also Frith 1986; Frith 1998, 210

36 The Brisbane Sound and ideology (compare Shank 1994). In contrast, Austin musicians regarded the slick production values associated with the Nashville Sound as the “antithesis of the Austin sound” as it lacked the “sense of liveness created out of textural participatory discrepancies” (Porcello 2005, 110-111). Here Porcello is employing Keil’s (1987) concept of ‘participatory discrepancies’, defined as “microvariations in temporal and intonational dimensions of musical performance” (Porcello 2002, 70). They describe the enigmatic affects of groove, feel and timbre intrinsic to the meaning of popular recorded music. Porcello notes that participatory discrepancies are difficult, if not impossible, to represent in traditional Western art music notation systems, and accordingly are largely absent from musicological analyses.

Marc Faris examined the relatively new17 ‘Chicago Sound’, that applies to both the “musical style and to a system of recording strategies and other paramusical features” (Faris 2004, 429). Unlike cities such as Liverpool, the Chicago Sound label is not propagated by journalists, the music industry, or other stakeholders wishing to capitalise on their city’s cultural production. Rather, the Chicago Sound is mostly used by fans and musicians “as a delimiting label” (Faris 2004, 429). Faris used musicological methods to compare three bands associated with the early 1990s

Chicago Sound, namely Slint, Shellac, and Jesus Lizard. Faris found that the influence of Steve Albini, a Chicago-based producer, was paramount to refining the style and production aesthetics of the Chicago Sound. Interestingly, Faris discovered that unconventional time signatures and rhythmic complexity is “one of the single most important shared musical features of the Chicago sound” (Faris 2004, 437). This is

17 i.e. Not to be confused with the older, ‘Chicago blues’ sound (see Grazian 2004)

The Brisbane Sound 37 pertinent as unconventional time signatures are a key musical feature said to define the

Brisbane Sound, as discussed in later chapters.

New Zealand

In New Zealand, the most notable city-sound relationship that has been identified by academics is that of the ‘Dunedin Sound’. The trope is usually applied to a number of bands on the Flying Nun record label that emerged in the early 1980s in the small town of Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island. Matthew Bannister was an original participant in the Dunedin Sound scene as a member of indie-pop band Sneaky

Feelings before beginning a career in academia. His writing of the scene is therefore particularly insightful, however highly subjective and personal. Bannister’s doctoral thesis, later published as a “personal reminiscence” (1999) is a detailed but often gloomy account due to its primary focus interpersonal, inter-band tensions and politics of the Dunedin Sound scene and Flying Nun records. Bannister doctoral thesis, published a book (2006) that challenged notions of hyper-masculinity that male indie- rock identities were typically framed. Yet, Bannister’s work dedicates limited space to the sound of the Dunedin Sound. He does suggest that the Dunedin Sound “was originally poppy – the Beatles, for instance, were incredibly important. The song was accorded centrality, as opposed to the image of the performer” (Bannister 1999, 102).

Production wise, Bannister claimed that the lack of bass frequencies in Flying Nun recordings was due to the “timidity of record cutting operat[ors]” (Bannister 1999,

58) who wanted to mitigate the potential for their records to skip, rather than being a songwriting or production aesthetic.

Colin McLeay (1994) merged aspects of social geography and cultural theory in his inquiry into the Dunedin Sound. McLeay cited secondary source quotations from musicians and other music industry professionals. A short textual analysis of a single

38 The Brisbane Sound video clip describes a band18 performing in inclement weather and “unglamorous” isolation (1994, 39). These images are said to solidify the mythology of Dunedin bands being representative of “‘pure’ music” (McLeay 1994, 39). However, McLeay deliberately avoided a close study of the actual sounds produced by these bands, arguing “the Dunedin sound … is not based on musical or lyrical attitudes, but on a cultural identity created by internal and external imaginations of place” (1994, 44).

This contrasts with a later study by Tony Mitchell (1996), who claimed that the bands associated with the Flying Nun label did in fact “share a range of identifiable musical and extra-musical features (melodic guitar ‘jangle’, often ‘low-fi’ [sic] production, lack of concern with image, lack of political or social comment in lyrics, pop inflections, etc.)” (Mitchell 1996, 218). However, Mitchell conceded these musical attributes “denote little that is geographically distinctive” (1996, 225).

The ‘Australian Sound’

Serious, academic studies of Australian popular music only emerged in the

1990s. In 1992 Perfect Beat emerged as the first scholarly journal to focus on and promote the distinctiveness of Australian (and later, indigenous Australian) popular music. In its first edition, Perfect Beat promised to “address the nature of Australian and Pacific music; the development of a range of alternatives to dominant styles of

Anglophone musics; the significance of new recording and music technologies; the role and function of music video in contemporary culture; and a range of other key issues” (Hayward 1992, i). It has been argued that many early studies were “deeply scarred by cultural cringe” (Stratton 2003, 331). For example, many early scholars denied the existence of a unique ‘Australian Sound’, arguing that Australian popular

18 Verlaine: Death and Maiden

The Brisbane Sound 39 music (particularly rock) since the 1950s had been, and remained, derivative and imitative of Anglo-American musical styles.

Zion (1989, 171) attributed this to a reluctance by record companies to

“encourag[e] innovation or originality” in early Australian acts such as Johnny

O’Keefe, who were attempting to compete with the global dominance of US and

British acts. Later studies recognised there could be no Australian sound without a greater assimilation of indigenous musical traditions (Zion 1989; Turner 1992;

Brabazon 2000, 102), or until Australian singers dropped the ubiquitous North

American accent and found their own voice (Shuker and Pickering 1994, 271;

Brabazon 2000, 100). These studies paralleled a turn in the broader cultural industries and policy making that reassessed the value of popular music as art; a move towards legitimising popular music as worthy of both study and funding (see Regev 1994;

Homan 2013).

Zion’s next study of the Australian Sound (1990) focused again on the success or failure of 1960s Australian rock and roll bands. Zion reinforced how Australian acts of this time tailored their sound for overseas markets, with success predicated on imitation and derivation of overseas styles (Zion 1989, 171). Specifically, he argued that bands such as the Easybeats were heavily influenced by the British rock’n’roll tradition, rather than that of the United States. Zion suggested although this “could” be explained by the influx of British immigrants in to Australia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was more likely to do with these artists wishing to ride on the coat-tails of Beatlemania. Thus, imitation was an intentional, “entrepreneurial” act (1990, 218) and as a result, any attempt to locate a specific Australian sound was futile (1990, 220).

Zion concluded by noting a number of (relatively) recent bands that seemingly bucked this trend:

40 The Brisbane Sound What Midnight Oil, and other groups such as Mental as Anything, Cold Chisel and Hunters and Collectors have shown, is that it is possible to be musically creative and build up a local following without simply imitating overseas groups. In this sense, popular music has grown up from the days, not so long ago, when success could depend on imitating a band from Liverpool. (Zion 1990, 222)

However, apart from a single reference to Peter Garrett’s “unmistakable

Australian accent”, Zion neglected to discuss how these bands were distinct from the

‘British’ sound of earlier examples (1990, 222). It seems to me that Zion’s appraisal reads more like a meta-rock criticism, and would have benefited greatly by including some level of musicological analysis to compare, contrast and ultimately support his claims of derivation and imitation.

Conversely, Jon Stratton (2003) argued against the idea that the Australian

Sound was simply derivative or imitative of British rock and roll. Stratton believed that there certainly was an Australian Sound, and that it was a product of an existing

Australian musical tradition combined with “English and Irish musical traditions… which had overlapped, merged and in other ways been transformed into a localised

Australian musical practice” (Stratton 2003, 335). As a cultural studies scholar,

Stratton does well to explicate these influences in musical terms, describing them as

“tradition[s] that valued melody, musical linearity and lyrical clarity” (2003, 343) that could be heard in early Australian rock bands such as Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs and the Easybeats. For example, he noted how the “melody, driving beat and anthemic chorus” of Thorpe’s Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy) “provided a template for Australian rock” that could be heard in more recent bands such as “Rose Tattoo,

The Angels, Midnight Oil, Cold Chisel, Australian Crawl, and, in the 2000s, You Am

I and Powderfinger” (Stratton 2003, 343). For Stratton, these ‘pub rock’ bands

“continued to blend melody with strong guitar riffs and a pounding beat” (2003, 343).

The Brisbane Sound 41 The Oz Rock Sound

What Stratton describes here as ‘pub rock’ is often used interchangeably with the trope ‘Oz Rock’. Like all the bands listed by Stratton above, this is a generic label that refers to inevitably white, hyper-masculine rock groups that evoke a predominantly working-class identity; groups of musicians whose formative careers were established by playing live on the Australian pub circuit. According to Shane

Homan (2008, 24) the sound of Oz Rock was “defined by rhythm guitar power chords, frantic vocals and manic lead guitar solos … the 4/4 monotony of bass, rhythm guitar and drum patterns fulfilled the demands of noisy pub environments and translated equally as well to cavernous stadium performances”. The Brisbane Sound bands were often considered the antithesis of Oz Rock, as evidenced in a quote by producer Tony

Cohen, who described a recording session with The Go-Betweens:

…but as it turned out, [The Go-Betweens] didn’t need any great Oz rock sound anyway! (Cohen quoted in Walker 1996, 96)

Australian City Sounds

Scholarly writing about the musical cultures and sounds of specific Australian cities only emerged at the turn of the millennium. Few articles specifically address the

‘sound’ of Australian cities, and thus there is a clear gap within which this current research resides. The one exception is Perth, the capital city of Western Australia.

Perth is a relevant case study here as in many ways its cultural, political and popular music heritage mirrors that of Brisbane (Stratton 2005, 44). Geographically speaking,

Perth is certainly far more isolated than Brisbane from the major capital cities of

Melbourne and Sydney. Yet both Perth and Brisbane are viewed as a cities that punch above their weight regarding their musical output, especially given their relatively

42 The Brisbane Sound small population and geographic isolation from these music industry hubs (Ballico

2013).

This isolation also meant that until the 1990s, both Perth and Brisbane shared an externally imposed sense of ‘otherness’, often denigrated as parochial, cultural backwaters (Stratton 2005, 36; Ballico 2013, 37). This fundamentally shaped how the musicians from this cities viewed, and identified with, their home town (Stratton 2005,

37–38). Like the Brisbane Sound, scholars have identified a number of iterations of a distinct Perth Sound. For Stratton (2005), the original Perth Sound began in the 1970s, spearheaded by bands such as From the Suburbs and The Scientists. Stratton imagines this early Perth Sound as “hard-edged while having a lighter, poppier element than that which characterised the Alternative Rock bands of the eastern inner cities” (Stratton 2005,

39). I use the word imagine here, because this article reads anecdotally, or as if this reification of the Perth Sound is Stratton’s own.

In the same year, Tara Brabazon published a collection of articles from postgraduate students affiliated with Murdoch University’s Popular Culture Collective

(Brabazon 2005). Its introduction states:

Probably, for marketing executives, the ‘Perth Sound’ is… a combination of a beach beat and jangly Rickenbacker19 knock offs… but the picture becomes more clouded when considering the diversity of genres of Perth acts who have achieved success. (Brabazon 2005, 14)

Many of the young writers took an ethnographic approach to studying the Perth music scene; their research is shaped by participant observation as members of the scene. As such, some articles read more as anecdotal or fan-based analyses rather than

19 Rickenbacker is a brand of electric guitar favoured by The Beatles, amongst others.

The Brisbane Sound 43 scholarly critique. Having said that, Carrie Kilpin’s (2005) article Writing the Perth

Music Scene is relevant here, as it emphasises the power that music journalists hold— despite the subjective nature of their positions and opinions—to shape scenes and local musical identity in a city such as Perth. As expected, Perth’s isolation from the Eastern capitals is a recurring theme in this collection. Interestingly, isolation is often framed as aiding, rather than hindering, musical creativity and innovation in Perth.

More recently, Trainer focused on Perth indie rock’s ‘coming of age’ in the mid

1990s (2015; see also Ballico 2013). Trainer undertook qualitative interviews with

(relatively) successful Perth-based musicians, band managers, promoters, and independent record store owners who were active at the time. Many participants rejected the idea of a 1990s Perth Sound, believing it to be a trope “perpetuated by the media” to facilitate the marketing of a coherent Perth aesthetic identity (Trainer 2015,

11). Nevertheless, band manager Dave Cutbush argues in the 1990s Perth bands

“carried on that tradition of the 80s power pop Perth sound, which was a real sound”

(Cutbush quoted in Trainer 2015, 3 emphasis added). Trainer reiterates Brabazon’s

(2005) theme of how Perth-based musicians navigate the hurdles of isolation. Viewing isolation, a source of inspiration and solidarity is similarly extolled in Brisbane-based accounts and is felt by many of the Brisbane based musicians of my study. Analogous to these adages of isolation were extramural views that considered Perth to be a

“conservative cultural backwater” (Trainer 2015, 1). This is particularly relevant, as we will see in the next Chapter, Brisbane, too, has a history of being viewed by other capital cities as being a parochially conservative, cultural backwater.

44 The Brisbane Sound Conclusion

The trajectory of Brisbane’s music heritage has traditionally been mapped against the ways it either responds to local politics, or alternatively, the way music practices and consumption effect changes to local policy. More recent studies have examined the city’s history through the lens of cultural memory and heritage. In this chapter, I outlined some of the key turning points in Brisbane’s cultural history, and some of the key studies about Brisbane music in the last two decades. This present study draws on theories and methodologies from a variety of sociology-based fields and disciplines, including cultural studies, popular musicology and creative practice.

What they have in common is the recognition that popular music texts are central to a society’s cultural identity and heritage.

The next half of this chapter explored the ways particular city-sounds have been appeared in scholarly literature. A considerable body of work has looked at particular city-sounds in the United Kingdom and the United States. More locally, scholars have uncovered the ‘Dunedin Sound’ and the ‘Australian’ or ‘Oz Rock Sound’. However, the literature regarding specific Australian city-sounds, such as Brisbane, is lacking.

This thesis aims to remedy this gap. In the next chapter, I establish the theoretical framework that underpins my approach to the matter.

The Brisbane Sound 45

Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework

Introducing Pierre Bourdieu

This thesis’ theoretical framework draws on concepts developed in the writing of twentieth-century French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In particular, I use

Bourdieu’s conception of ‘cultural intermediaries’ to categorise the people who have a.) contributed substantially to the discourse about the Brisbane Sound, and b.) whose contributions and voice are recognised as legitimate (authoritative). These key players are all music writers (i.e. music critics, music journalists, book authors) or self- referential musicians. I apply the word ‘agent’ as a broader label for anyone who has contributed an opinion, argument, or hypothesis regarding the meaning of the Brisbane

Sound (including cultural intermediaries), even if as a singular occurrence.

In Appendix B, I supply a concordance table that records diachronically what has been said about the Brisbane Sound in public media. Bourdieu’s theories can help illuminate why the Brisbane Sound has been discussed in such ways. Bourdieu was a prolific writer, and the many “open concepts” he developed over his academic career defy simplistic or reductionist definitions (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; for a comprehensive bibliography of Bourdieu’s published work, see Jen Webb, Schirato, and Danaher 2002, 199–202). Yet it is precisely the malleability of his concepts, and particularly, how they can be tailored to fit studies that concern matters of everyday life, that make them so popular and applicable to a wide variety of studies. In other words, Bourdieu’s theories are not prescriptive tools—they “can be defined, but only within the theoretical system they constitute, not in isolation” (Bourdieu and Wacquant

1992, 96). As such, this thesis does not proffer a ‘legitimate’ or reified interpretation

The Brisbane Sound 47 of Bourdieu’s concepts, but references them as required with concern to the subject at hand, that is, the way people talk about and attempt to explain the Brisbane Sound.

The fundamental argument that extends throughout Bourdieu’s writing is that power operates relationally, and in more nuanced ways, than just the exchange of economic resources (vis-à-vis Marxism). Thus, one’s class position in a society is not simply a product one’s access to economic capital (monetary wealth). Rather, class stratification is dynamic and related to the accumulation and exchange of several other forms of capital.

Bourdieu rarely engaged directly with music at a sociological or aesthetic level.

Nevertheless, over the past half-century, countless academic studies of popular music have employed Bourdieusian theory and terminology (see Prior 2011). Bourdieu’s published works are markedly repetitive and many of the concepts I cite are broached in multitudinous publications (Jenkins 2007, 168). As such, I have used italics to point to terms that can be found throughout his published work.

Habitus

Habitus was Bourdieu’s way of overcoming the sociological dualism of structure and agency. It allows for thinking about how agents (i.e. people with agency) think and act the way they do, whilst negotiating and solidifying their position in a structured society. Habitus accounts for how these structures are internalised, not only in one’s mind but also in one’s body. Bourdieu defines the habitus as:

systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organise practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively 'regulated' and 'regular' without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the

48 The Brisbane Sound product of the organising action of a conductor. (Bourdieu 1990, 53)

For Bourdieu, a person’s dispositions are more than just embodied habits or states of mind. It is a combination of one’s culturally and socially acquired knowledge, skills, mannerisms, aesthetic tastes, biases, predispositions, and so on, that are organised and internalised to shape a person’s view of the world. As a temporal system of “durable, transposable dispositions”, habitus reflects one’s historic social experiences (especially their upbringing) as well as one’s expectations for the future.

To extend Bourdieu’s orchestral musician metaphor above, when one’s habitus is ‘in tune’ with one’s position in a field they are said to be able to understand and conform to the unwritten ‘regulations’ that structure that field. Additionally, as one’s habitus is internalised and embodied, it is also self-evident and taken for granted—a person reacts to circumstances in a field at an intuitive and unconscious level.

As Bourdieu points out, some habituses20 are also transposable between fields albeit to varying degrees of suitability and success. For example, as a drummer, I think

I embody a lot of what would make a good boxer—hand and feet coordination, timing, speed and so on. On a pragmatic level I can envisage how years of learning rudiments—the varying patterns of left and right-handed strokes that act as the foundation of drumming pedagogy—could be translated directly to boxing’s system of combinations. I occasionally watch boxing on television and understand many of the rules of the game. Yet if I ever stepped foot in to the “complex microcosm” of a boxing gym it is very likely I would feel like a ‘fish out of water’—I have no experience of the way people in a boxing gym talk, their argot (slang) or any insider

20Although dictionaries suggest the word habitus can designate both the singular and plural, most translations of Bourdieu’s writing use habituses (for example Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 125).

The Brisbane Sound 49 experience in terms of what is or is not appropriate to talk about. I am unfamiliar with ways they might carry the body (hexis), the right time to express and reserve aggression and so on (Wacquant 2011, 84). Rather, the ‘fishbowls’ where I intuitively feel most at ease include the recording studio and the concert stage—social spaces that would probably feel similarly foreign for many boxers. I also have no interest in punching— or being punched in the face by—another human. In short, I have not acquired a

“pugilistic habitus” necessary to fit within the field of boxing (Wacquant 2011, 85).

Linguistic Habitus

To view the Brisbane Sound discourse through a Bourdieusian lens is to imagine it as a site of contested power relations. As expressions of one’s habitus, spoken and written language are used as strategic weapons to improve one’s position in the field.

This might seem bombastic, but for Bourdieu even seemingly innocuous statements

“[contain] the potentiality of an act of power” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 145). In this thesis, I first examine how people use language in attempting to explain what the

Brisbane Sound sounds like. One way of elucidating the conditions for such attempts is via Bourdieu’s concept of the linguistic habitus21. Linguistic habitus is a “set of socially constituted dispositions that imply a propensity to speak in certain ways and to utter determinate things… and as the social ability to adequately utilise this competence in a given situation” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 145). In other words, language only has meaning in context (Bourdieu 1977, 647).

This linguistic ‘sense of place’ governs the degree of constraint which a given field will bring to bear on the production of discourse, imposing silence or a hyper-controlled language on some people while allowing others the liberties of a language that is securely established. This means that competence, which is acquired in a social context and through practice, is inseparable from the practical mastery of situations in which this usage of

21 In some translations of Bourdieu’s writing, language habitus is sometimes used interchangeably with linguistic habitus e.g. Bourdieu 1977. For the sake of consistency, I only use linguistic.

50 The Brisbane Sound language is socially acceptable. (Bourdieu 1991, 82)

So, for Bourdieu, it is not so much one’s linguistic competencies that are powerful, but one’s ability and propensity to apply, or self-censor, one’s linguistic resources in the appropriate field (time and place). For instance, Porcello (2004) discussed the language used by sound engineers and producers in the recording studio.

Porcello observed that one’s mobility as a music producer is a political struggle contested, determined and reliant on one’s access to linguistic resources. Or in

Bourdieusian terms (1991), one’s linguistic habitus in the studio is directly attributable to one’s cultural or symbolic capital and vice versa. Becoming familiar with the technical jargon and being able to apply it convincingly in a studio environment is an essential learning curve for any aspiring sound engineer, as “one’s status as a professional is deeply tied to one’s competence with multiple linguistic resources”

(Porcello 2004, 735):

To participate fully, knowledgeably, and authoritatively in such conversations … requires competence both in knowing the linguistic resources and in being aware of what constitutes their appropriate and inappropriate use within both the professional community and the particular situated context. (Porcello 2004, 740)

The key point to gain from the above is that when people are asked to define the

Brisbane Sound, their answers are contingent to, and potentially mediated by, the circumstances of when the discourse takes place, where it is published (the platform) and their potential audience. Some pertinent examples of linguistic habitus being enacted are highlighted in the Discourse Analysis chapter that follows.

Cultural Field

The Brisbane Sound—as a concept that covers both music and media discourse—is produced in what Bourdieu labels “The Field of Cultural Production”

(1983; 1993). A field is the structured, social space that is organised by agents

The Brisbane Sound 51 competing for, exchanging, and pursuing desirable resources. Although the resources at stake in a field can include money and prestige, there are also more subtle or nuanced profits at stake, such as the perception of being ‘cool’, knowledgeable, or socially well- connected in their field (i.e. types of capital, see below). Bourdieu defines a field as:

a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions. These positions are objectively defined in their existence and in the determinations that they impose on their occupants, agents or institutions, by their present and potential situation in the structure of the distribution of species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective relations with other positions (domination, subordination, homology, etc.). (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 97)

So, the internal structures of a field are held together by ‘objective relations’ of power that exist between agents in the field. A common metaphor Bourdieu uses is to consider the field as a space where agents are ‘playing the game’, but a game that is constantly in a state of flux, with no clear end or ‘winner’. Each field and subfield is structured according to its own hierarchical designations of power, such as titles, awards, jobs and so on. Each field also has its own unwritten rules; conventions that are constituted in the habitus of agents within the field. In other words, fields have a specific internal ‘logic’ where agents jostle—often tacitly—for position and the advancement of their views, interests, representation or interpretation of the world (i.e. their habitus).

Bourdieu shows that artistic fields, like music, are peculiar in the sense that economic capital is not always (if ever) a main imperative for agents. Instead, the

“artistic field has constituted itself by rejecting or reversing the law of material profit”

(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 97-98). The field of cultural production is structured by two opposing poles—the autonomous and the heteronomous poles. At the autonomous end are situated those artistic (i.e. cultural production) endeavours that

52 The Brisbane Sound are purely aesthetic and not driven by desire for economic capital (‘art for art’s sake’ or having an ‘interest in disinterestedness’). Situated at the far end of the heteronomous pole would be artistic endeavours created purely for commercial and popular consumption, and therefore driven by economic conditions (thus in keeping with the

‘regular’ logic of other capitalist fields). As such, Bourdieu recognised that agents in cultural fields compete for more than just economic capital. Rather, an agent’s field position is determinable by their wealth in several other types of capital.

Types of Capital

Over the course of his writing, Bourdieu extended Marx’s work as it related to class mobility and economic capital. For Bourdieu, access to economic resources

(monetary wealth) was not enough to explain how the dominant classes of society retain positions of power. He augmented the common notion of capital to include three other main types: cultural, social and symbolic. Cultural capital is the aggregate of knowledge, skills, tastes, and material possessions. Bourdieu further differentiated that cultural capital exists in three subtypes—objectified, embodied and institutionalised.

Objectified cultural capital exists “in the form of cultural goods… [that] can be appropriated both materially… and symbolically” (1986, 247). Objectified cultural capital exists in material, tangible forms, for instance, the sum of the music instruments, books and vinyl record collections one possesses. Embodied cultural capital concerns the “long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body”, such as one’s tastes, ways of acting, and speaking (including their accent and argot) (Bourdieu 1986,

243). One’s habitus is therefore the physical embodiment of cultural capital.

Institutionalised cultural capital is the “institutional recognition” endowed on an individual as a result of formal education, such as academic degrees or other credentials (Bourdieu 1986, 241–52).

The Brisbane Sound 53 Bourdieu understood social capital to be “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” (Bourdieu

1986, 286). This is most evident in the Australian music industry, whereby the scale of one’s mobility is frequently relative to the breadth of their social and professional network (see, for example Rogers 2008). Or, to use a colloquialism, to succeed in the music business ‘it’s not what you know, but who you know’.

Symbolic capital, as “another name for distinction”, represents the aggregate of one’s cultural and social capital as manifested in publicly-recognised legitimacy, authority, prestige, honour and/or celebrity (Bourdieu 1991, 238). In cultural fields, elite agents possess the most symbolic capital and are therefore granted the authoritative position of determining what is legitimate culture. For instance, elite agents are positioned to consecrate what counts for art, and decide what does not.

Bourdieu also observed how the recognition of symbolic capital often appears natural and uncontested in a given society; class stratification was linked to the failure of a society to recognise the arbitrariness of symbolic capital.

All of the above dimensions of capital influence—and are informed by—a person’s societal position and access to other forms of capital. They accumulate in fields, and it is in fields where various forms of capital can be exchanged for economic capital (given the right conditions). For example, educational qualifications (symbolic capital) often leads to well-paid employment (economic capital).

Cultural Intermediaries

Bourdieu introduced the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ in Distinction (Bourdieu

1984) against the backdrop of an expanding consumer market in mid-20th century.

54 The Brisbane Sound This expansion necessitated a new category of occupations and agents—the taste- makers—who were situated between the producers of cultural objects and consumers.

Cultural intermediaries fulfilled this role, by “perform[ing] the tasks of gentle manipulation” of taste (Bourdieu 1984, 365). Bourdieu’s concern was how taste represented a form of cultural hegemony; how taste cultures legitimise, and make natural, class oppositions and social inequality within a given society. For Bourdieu, tastes are socially constructed, as opposed to being inherent. In the context of 1960s

France, Bourdieu’s broad ethnographic survey found that the Parisian dominant class, with higher educational capital and inherited social prestige, had the most power to shape and determine what counted for good taste within a given society. People with a taste for legitimate, elite culture, such as Western-art music, fine cuisine or abstract expressionist art, were most likely to be from—or be able to function within—the dominant class. This distinction also necessitated a distaste for anything too practical, as these were associated with the crude realities of everyday working-class life. With less access to education, the Provincial working-class developed predispositions for functional objects: they tended towards popular22 music, realist art (such as landscape paintings) and home-style cooking. Although the working-class might show an interest in legitimate culture, a lack of educational and cultural capital meant they could not fully understand it. For example, a majority of his working-class respondents claimed

“I love classical music but I don’t know much about it” (Bourdieu 1984, 336). This seemingly reinforced their class position and prevented the possibility of upward social mobility.

22 Bourdieu (1984, 365) cites Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ as an example.

The Brisbane Sound 55 As the middle-men and women situated between producers and consumers, cultural intermediaries are viewed as enablers for the commodification of products.

This means they generally work in publicity and promotion; constructing and increasing the market value of these cultural objects, services, performers, texts, and so on. In doing so they influence the market appeal of goods and services; they increasingly facilitate the generation of economic capital for the producers of these goods. As taste-makers, they define good taste—what is cool or fashionable, as well as bad taste—what is inferior or passé. But many people can make value judgements about what is cool and influence others—especially in the current age of social and

‘prosumer’ market economies. In this sense, anyone with access to the internet is potentially an amateur cultural intermediary.

There are two main ways that cultural intermediaries are distinguishable from other agents (such as fans and/or casual observers). First, cultural intermediaries are usually considered experts in their given fields. Second, this prestige enables them to secure paid employment where cultural intermediation is (at least in part) their job. In

Bourdieusian terms, the agents’ field position enables the conversion of socially- recognised symbolic and cultural capital into economic capital, thus fulfilling the “real logic of the functioning of capital” (Bourdieu 1984, 54)”.

Bourdieu’s original, prototypical cultural intermediaries were those in the mass media industries, specifically “the producers of cultural programmes [sic] on TV and radio or the critics of ‘quality’ newspapers and magazines and all the writer-journalists and journalist-writers” (1984, 323-324). Since Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984), the term has been appropriated and applied by numerous disciplines to frame a much broader range of professionals. It is seen as an effective way to contextualise the work of anyone positioned between cultural producers (such as musicians) and cultural

56 The Brisbane Sound consumers (music fans). Thus, scholars have applied the term cultural intermediary to a plethora of music industry occupations (as noted in Negus 2002).

In this study, I apply the term cultural intermediary to those who have made significant contributions to the Brisbane Sound discourse and been recognised as such.

The majority of these agents are music journalists or critics, reflecting Bourdieu’s

“most typical” cultural intermediary (1984, 323-324). They are all considered experts in their fields, and have all been paid for writing about music including The Brisbane

Sound (albeit with varying degrees of circulation and readership). There are also several examples of these cultural intermediaries contributing via public forums, such as personal blogs and online news comments. Much like the Canterbury Sound, there is also a plethora of discourse about the Brisbane Sound in publicly accessible but hermeneutically contained virtual scenes (Bennett 2002). Indeed, some of the most provocative and at times argumentative discourse, which is often negotiated between the cultural intermediaries themselves, can be found in sites like The Go-Betweens’ official chat room23.

We can surmise that partly this is because they enjoy talking about the Brisbane

Sound, and are genuine fans of the music. Or as Bourdieu himself put it, they “sell so well because they believe in what they sell” (Bourdieu 1984, 365. Emphasis added).

This belief is inherent in the habitus of most cultural intermediaries, whatever their profession. As Maguire and Matthews explain:

If there is a single recurrent finding that echoes across [our] interviews, it is that cultural intermediaries often love (some of) what they do. That passion informs how they tell stories and construct frames for goods; it provides an embodied filter for identifying what is ‘good’ or at least saleable; it com-pensates for some of the disadvantages of their

23 http://go-betweens.org.uk/cgi-bin/chatroom/discus.cgi

The Brisbane Sound 57 occupational position. (Maguire and Matthews 2014, 11)

Subcultural Capital vs. Mainstream Success

As the above quote implies, cultural intermediaries are typically viewed as facilitators for the commodification of cultural products. Yet, none of the Brisbane

Sound bands ever became “mainstream” or achieved any significant commercial success (see Strong 2013). This is true even for The Go-Betweens, who were probably the most lauded Brisbane Sound band with the most numerous and devoted fans. In any story about the band, their failure to produce any hit records is a familiar theme

(for example, the first chapter of Nichols (2003) is devoted to this subject). This follows a typical theme found in many nostalgic or retrospective narratives about unsuccessful bands—if their initial aspirations, dreams and expectations are not met, their stories are retrospectively altered to project a disinterestedness in success and fortune. This is because in indie rock, “seeing oneself (or being seen) as one who is not searching for profit” is considered a virtue (Johnson 1993, 15; Hibbett 2005, 57).

This is not the place to question The Go-Betweens’ aspirations against their lack of mainstream success. The main point I wish to make, is that success in the Australian music industry is rarely judged in economic terms, but more often through the (often retrospective) recognition of peers and industry awards (see Rogers 2008). So, the success of the Brisbane Sound bands is not a measured in terms of economic capital, but rather the accumulation of symbolic and subcultural capital (Thornton 1995).

Language about Music

Music and the Ineffable

It is simply not possible to capture the essence of music in pen and ink on the surface of a page.

—Sher Ali Khan Lodi, 1681 (cited in Orsini and Schofield 2015, 415).

58 The Brisbane Sound Most music-writing fields and disciplines address the conundrum of music’s ineffability. In The Grain of the Voice, Roland Barthes (1978, 179) asked rhetorically,

“how, then, does language manage when it has to interpret music? Alas, it seems, very badly”. The general consensus is that “one cannot say with words what music says without them” (Feld 1984, 14). The following section outlines some of the key studies in language about music from a variety of fields.

Fox and Feld (1994) presented an overview of the relationship between music and language in scholarly writing and outlined the historical trajectory of four major predications: [1] music as language, [2] language in music, [3] music in language, and

[4] language about music. Studies that fall under the ‘music as language’ are those that treat music as a type of language. This approach gained favour with musicologists in the mid to late twentieth century, whereby methods and terminology derived from linguistics and communication studies are superimposed to music’s micro-structures.

The most prominent musicologist to literally view music as a language is Deryck

Cooke, who in The Language of Music (1959) presented a glossary of specific musical phrases and structures that he believed conveyed inherent emotional effects (Kemler

2001, 79). Leonard Bernstein also used a linguistic communication model for his guest lectures at Harvard University called The Unanswered Question24 (1976).

‘Language in music’ is fairly straightforward—it emphasises the

“phenomenological intertwining” of text setting (commonly referred to as lyrics) in music (Fox and Feld 1994, 27). ‘Music in language’ concerns mapping the parallel between prosody (patterns and stresses) in speech and those found in music. Finally,

24 These lectures, uploaded YouTube by several users, collectively total over a million views.

The Brisbane Sound 59 ‘language about music’ is what the Discourse Analysis (Chapter 5) of this thesis represents; the “attention to the omnipresence of aesthetic and technical discourses about music” (Fox and Feld 1994, 27).

Musicologists, in particular, are aware of the inefficiency of using words to describe music, despite this being a fundamental aspect of their professional practice

(often alongside notation). Cooke stated that “words are poor things, except in the hands of a poet. The emotional adjectives I have used above are only feeble labels to indicate the general feeling of the music” (1959, 30). Charles Seeger coined the phrase

“linguocentric predicament” to describe the impasse between speech and music. Like

Cooke, Seeger thought of music as a type a language, but one that expresses concepts far beyond the reach of normal communication (Seeger 1977). Susan McClary humoroursly acknowledged “I am once again committing the crime I think of as

‘effing the ineffable’” by attempting to “translate into words the kinds of experiences that music can render so effortlessly and that speech does so clumsily and ineffectively” (2012, 252). Tagg coined the neologism (one of many) “alogogenic”, to describe how music is “not conducive to expression in words” (2013, 120). Tagg also suggests ‘alogogenicity’ is a conundrum that may impede the broader acceptance of musicology-based studies:

Why [does music analysis] often seem to end up near the bottom of the academic heap? The short answer is that education and research… are largely language-based while music is a non-verbal system for mediating ideas. We may like to talk enthusiastically about our musical experiences and tastes but we are often at a loss when it comes to explaining why and how which sounds have what effect. (Tagg 2013, 40).

Tagg also thinks the disciplinary “gobbledygook” of musicology does not help matters, as it can potentially ostracise readers from outside the discipline (2013, 117).

Walser summarises the exasperation on the part of musicologists, and also implies how

60 The Brisbane Sound using music to explain music would appear a more efficient and less problematic endeavour:

We can use language to describe musical processes or effects, but we usually find that propositional statements about music are clumsy compared to the efficiency of the music itself, and the feeling persists that much remains unaccounted for, no matter how lengthy the explanation. (Walser 1993, 39)

This sentiment is obviously one that I agree with, with the hope that the audio examples and creative musical works attached to this thesis help fill in the gaps that words and notation inevitably leave out.

Dancing About Architecture

The most familiar maxim to frame the difficulties of using words to explain music is ‘writing [or talking] about music is like dancing about architecture’. The analogy’s antecedent can be traced as far back as 1918, when Moderwell argued

“writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics…there is no adequate vocabulary in ordinary language, and only a clumsy jargon in the speech of musicians”

(Moderwell 1918, 63-64). In its current form, the cliché has been credited to (amongst others) Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa, and Martin Mull. Jimmy Webb (1998) attributed it to Mull in an ironic epigraph to preface his songwriting manual Tunesmith. The underlying suggestion is that music and words are seemingly incommensurable domains of communication. Music writers typically offer pithy retorts such as ‘why can’t dancers be inspired by architecture?’, or ‘dancing mostly takes place within architecture!’ (as buildings). Infamously terse music critic Robert Christgau regarded people who use the analogy as “fools” (2005, 415). Of course, like all music critics,

Christgau’s career pivots on his ability to use words to describe music. Yet he conceded, in a way, by positing that music is a form of ‘magic’:

The Brisbane Sound 61 Of course, we can’t capture magic moments in words. But we can surround them, approximate them, evoke them, open a window on them, open a window for them – and if we get lucky, maybe even give them a shot of abracadabra. (Christgau 2005, 421)

Sound Language: Audio Engineering

Audio engineers and music producers also find describing music and audio in words problematic. These professions require a language system that is pragmatic rather than poetic, to effectively communicate with each other in the studio. Technical guides to audio production and engineering offer glossaries to explain the esoteric jargon commonly heard in studio environments (see for example Katz 2013; Robjohns and White 2018). iZotope, an audio-processing software company, published a

“Glossary of Common and Confusing Mixing Terms” on their website with the preface:

Audio terminology can be downright confusing. Even familiar words often take on new meanings when used to describe sound. If you’ve ever been on an audio forum, discussed a mix with a client, or read gear reviews, you’ve likely been pelted by a multitude of technical and descriptive terms…[In order to] communicate effectively with clients, engineers, and producers, you best learn the language! (Nichols 2018)

Despite the need for lucidity, many audio engineering terms are also metaphorical, such as ‘brickwall limiter’ (that prevents an audio signal’s amplitude from exceeding a defined level) and ‘warmth’ explained as “a tonal quality characterised by mild levels of even harmonic distortion” (Nichols 2017). Porcello addresses the difficulties of translating acoustic phenomena in speech by studying the dialogue that takes place between sound engineers and musicians (2004, 734). Porcello concluded that language is inefficient and inadequate to convey the intricacies of sound; studio engineers have no alternative “other than to use … vague metaphorical descriptions (for example, ‘warm’, ‘bright’, ‘boomy’)” (2004, 734). This is true,

Porcello argues, despite the necessary functionality, specificity and accuracy that is

62 The Brisbane Sound required to communicate effectively “where the goal of work is to control and craft sounds with great precision” (2004, 734). In other words, studio engineers and musicians are not interested in using figurative language as poetic devices to add

‘vividness’ to their discussions (see also Ortony 2001). Figurative language is simply necessary and unavoidable because literal words to describe these processes are limited and inefficient.

Genre and Style Theory

Why do we Label Music?

The Brisbane Sound is a label that categorises a particular type of music, from a particular place and at a particular time. This pithy statement belies the complexity of the words ‘label’, ‘category’ and ‘type’. Is the Brisbane Sound a genre? Or a style? A scene or a subculture? The discourse analysis will show how agents commonly attribute the label ‘pop’ to the Brisbane Sound. Furthermore, the discourse analysis will show how the Brisbane Sound is defined by agents as being unconventional. As a defining parameter, unconventional only makes sense if there is a tacit understanding of what is conventional. Pop is a term that denotes a set of musical style conventions.

Accordingly, we can assume that the agents are implicitly suggesting the Brisbane

Sound is unconventional in the ways that it deviates from the tacitly understood conventions of the pop music style. One of the aims of the music analysis chapter is to examine the validity of these claims. Prior to that though, we need to establish first, how genre and style labels like ‘pop music’ evolve, the difference between genres and styles, and make explicit some of the musical conventions of the pop music style.

In many ways, the evolution of the Brisbane Sound label mimics the pattern of genre creation, but misses a few key steps required to become socially accepted as a

The Brisbane Sound 63 fully-fledged, autonomous, genre or style label. The following section first establishes the difference between the terms music ‘style’ and music ‘genre’, and how these labels are applied and evolve. It then provides a brief overview of what is considered conventional in pop music style. This will then be used as a benchmark to contextualise the claims of unconventionality in the Brisbane Sound.

What are Music Genres?

Genre theory is complex and has been studied in relation to all forms of cultural production (Holt 2007, 1). In the music industries, generic labelling is inevitable: they are pragmatic and necessary categories that facilitate the marketing and sales process

(Frith 1998, 75; see also Negus 1999). Traditionally, genre-specific radio stations targeted niche audiences, independent record labels became associated with a particular genre, and record stores were sectioned into genre categories to act as a consumer guide. Today, there are still genre-specific music venues (EDM clubs and indie-rock venues) and several niche music magazines that either persevere with print or have transitioned to online platforms (for example NME). Today, digital streaming services like Spotify have developed algorithms to automatically categorise music by genre.

Music Genres vs Music-Styles

Problematically, the terms genre and style are often used interchangeably, both in common parlance and in academic accounts of music. In 2001 Allan F. Moore attempted to demarcate how both terms are used in scholarly writing, arguing that popular music studies scholars and musicologists “need… to be able to communicate unambiguously and on an equal footing” (2001, 433). Holt remained unconvinced, and maintained that for some music “it is hard to decide whether genre or style is the most appropriate term” (2007, 18). Shuker eschewed choosing either term by using a slash,

64 The Brisbane Sound for example, by labelling Glam Rock a “musical style/genre” (2011, 151). Following the dualist model proposed by Moore (2001), Scott (2009) is assertive and clear, stating:

… a genre is best conceived of as a category, such as blues, rock and country. Style can then be reserved for discussing the musical features that characterise different cultural features within a particular genre (for instance, psychedelic rock or hard rock). (Scott 2009, 5)

Franco Fabbri is the most frequently cited genre theorist in popular music studies. Fabbri also maintains that style indicates the musical features, compared to the broader sociocultural aspects of genre:

[Style is] a recurring arrangement of features in musical events which is typical of an individual (composer, performer), a group of musicians, a genre, a place, a period of time… style implies an emphasis on the musical code, while genre relates to all kinds of codes that are referred to in a musical event, so the two terms clearly cover different semantic fields. (Fabbri 1999, 8–9)

Fabbri’s definition suggests that music styles reflect the embodied habituses of particular musicians. Holt (2007, 2) agrees, arguing that styles25 are “not only ‘in the music’, but also in the minds and bodies of particular groups of people who share certain conventions”. Brackett also suggests that styles include the “characteristics that may be linked to a particular musician or recording and that participate in a socially recognised musical genre” (Brackett 2002, 65). However, Moore thinks that linking the definition of a style to individual personas is too specific, especially in the case of rock or pop bands, because “the production of the music is not an individual matter”

(1993, 237). Instead, Moore introduces the term idiolect to refer to performance style of individual musicians within groups (1993, 16; 2012, 120).

25 Holt uses the term genre. Such is the opacity of the two definitions.

The Brisbane Sound 65 In summary, style is a category that designates a set of common, musical idioms and conventions as they apply to music texts, and function within a socially recognised genre context. It is a music’s style that carries the musical features that are manifestations of songwriting, arranging and production choices. Music styles are contextualised within music genres. The pop-rock style can therefore be read as a subcategory within the broader meta-genre ‘popular music’.

Problematically, there is a legacy of eminent studies that use the word ‘style’ to refer to things more broadly than just the music as sound. Not least, the perennial influence of Hebdige’s (1979) conception of style as subcultural resistance. In

Hebdige’s seminal text Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), the music itself accounts for only a small factor in a homology of meanings (along with dress codes, hair styles, argot, ideology and so on). As a result, to discuss the musical features associated with a given genre, I find it useful to preface the word ‘style’ with the word

‘music-’.

The Invention of New Genre and Music-Style Labels

Like the concept of the Brisbane Sound, music-styles and genres are not inherent in music. New style and genre labels are created when multiple26 bands or artists are recognised as consistently, and repetitiously deviating from an already established genre or style and its associated musical conventions. The recognition is often bestowed on artists by cultural intermediaries such as music writers. Indeed, Frith

(1996, 298) suggests music critics in particular strive to be credited with the invention of new genre labels. Importantly though, for new labels to take hold, both the

26 It is extremely rare for an individual band or artist to singularly denote a music style, although every style will have “prototypical” examples, such as David Bowie for Glam Rock, or Nirvana for Grunge etc. (Moore 2012, 119-120)

66 The Brisbane Sound musicians and cultural intermediaries must be publicly recognised as influential or important (Fabbri 1999, 8; Holt 2007, 3). Or in Bourdieu’s way of speaking, the act of legitimation is co-dependent on both parties possessing the necessary capital resources.

Once a new genre and style label is invented, an “intersubjective27” consensus must be reached in regards to what it is, and to whom it applies (Moore 2012, 165).

This is a gradual process whereby definitions and delineations become refined through unstructured, tacit, social and/or industrial (i.e. music industry) processes. It means that definitions of particular genres and styles are almost always theoretically problematic and rarely fixed. Some music styles, like heavy metal, may appear to be fairly static, but their boundaries are actually dynamic and fluid (Walser 1993, 27).

The level of abstraction or prescription—how permeable or rigid the definitions are— also varies greatly between genres and styles. For instance, Fast (2009, 173) argues that trying to define a broad genre like ‘rock music’ is not only “futile” but “mistaken”.

This is because the genre of rock is in a continual state of flux, and its meaningful elements are continually adapted, developed, and discarded as new ‘rock’ music is created.

The above processes relate directly to the theme of this thesis. In many ways the evolution of the Brisbane Sound label mirrors the process of conceptualising a new genre or style. The Brisbane Sound is a label that some music writers claim to have invented. The concordance table shows how it has evolved over time, and how it has been applied to a select group of bands in a specific historical period. But the

27 …“i.e. as matters of shared subjectivity, rather than objective descriptions of how closely one track resembles a host of others” (Moore 2012, 165).

The Brisbane Sound 67 concordance table is deceptive in its breadth: despite the number of quotes I managed to collect, the Brisbane Sound label never became common parlance. I grew up in

Brisbane and have been actively involved in the music scene since my early twenties, yet I had never heard of the term until the start of this project. We could speculate that if the Brisbane Sound bands were more commercially successful, and if the cultural intermediaries had a greater and more mainstream audience, the Brisbane Sound may have become recognised as a unique music genre or style in its own right.

Pop Music-Style Conventions

In pop music there are no rules, as such, but there are implied rules. You can break them but only if you really know what you’re doing. (Trevor Horn, producer, interviewed in Warner 2003, 149)

Adorno famously and pessimistically argued that “the whole structure of

[popular] music is standardised, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardisation” (1941, 73). It is true that more or less all popular music follows a set of music-style conventions or “rules” (Fabbri 1982, 52). Frith posits that popular music criticism, in particular, only functions because there are tacit, sociocultural agreements as to the “rules” of any given music-style:

One thing all pop listeners do, whether as casual fans or professional critics, is to compare sounds—to that A is like B. Indeed, most pop criticism works via the implicit recognition of genre rules. (Frith 1987, 148)

Later, I will identify how agents classify the Brisbane Sound as being unconventional within a pop music-style. It is necessary to explicitly state some of pop music’s stylistic conventions so that they can be used as a “rule of thumb” to interrogate the agents’ claims through music analysis (Chapter 6) (Moore 2012, 51).

The following lists some of the conventional, stylistic idioms of pop music. For most

68 The Brisbane Sound readers these will seem self-evident as anyone who listens to popular music subconsciously ingrains many of these codes. For example, all listeners are tacitly aware, and expect popular music to be structurally repetitive. The vast majority of songs are structured according to a sequence of repetitive verses and choruses. The reason for its prevalence is because structural repetition aids the memory of listeners, memorable music is successful, and ultimately, repetitive music is enjoyable. But as songwriters, we rarely think about the why, it is ‘just the way things are done’. These innate stylistic idioms carry over to reception and intermediation—for instance, when an agent defines the Brisbane Sound, they hardly need to mention that the second verse sounds a lot like the first, but with different lyrics.

This list is composited from my own experience, as well as informed by definitions provided by Middleton (2000), Warner (2003, 9), Moore (1993; 2012), as well as non-academic songwriting guidebooks such as Webb (1998).

The Basic Elements of Pop Songs

Structure / Form

• Song duration is between two and a half and five minutes long

• Repetition at the beat, bar, phrase and section levels

• Phrase length mostly eight bars long (with occasional extensions or elisions)

• Songs are strophic: when the verses repeat, the music stays the same but the lyrics change. In choruses, both the music and the lyrics repeat.

• If intro, outro and instrumental solo sections are included, they are often instrumental versions (i.e. without vocals) of the verse or chorus sections

• Sometimes contain a singular bridge section that differs from the verse and chorus sections

Harmony / Chords

• Limited diatonic, functional harmonic palette

The Brisbane Sound 69 • Choruses will often differ to verses, but sometimes stay the same.

• Sections end in authentic (V-I, V-i) or plagal cadences (IV-I)

Instrumentation

Accords with Moore’s (2012) four functional layers:

• An explicit beat layer (drums)

• A functional bass layer (bass guitar/synth bass)

• A harmonic filler layer (guitars/pianos/organs/synths/backing vocals)

• A primary melodic layer (main vocal) and sometimes a secondary melodic layer (lead guitar, backing vocalist)

Melodic

• Mostly diatonic with few leaps

• Straightforward arcs

• Highest note achieved in the chorus

Rhythmic

• 4/4 time signature

• The rhythm of the bass guitar mirrors that of the kick drum

Unconventional: The Concept of ‘Friction’

Tacit knowledge of these conventions is so widespread that there is no need for agents to mention them when they try to describe popular music. Unsurprisingly then, agents often define the Brisbane Sound by locating ways it sounds unconventional.

‘Breaking the rules’ is a problematic analogy, yet it persists in much scholarly writing about music. It has oppressive connotations, and suggests creative agency is somehow governed by a hypothetical arbitrator.

70 The Brisbane Sound Importantly, as Moore (2012, 165) points out, the so-called ‘rules’ for how we categorise a music-style such as disco “are not written anywhere, they have no objective existence; they exist only in our head, and our experiences” (Moore 2012,

165; italics in original). Furthermore, if one were to write these rules down, they would soon become obsolete because the boundaries of all music-styles are dynamic and fluid

(Walser 1993, 27; Moore 2012, 8). Therefore, I prefer to substitute the notion of ‘rule- breaking’ with Moore’s (1993) concept of ‘friction’, introduced in reference to the subversive music-style of punk:

For many, punk seemed to signify rejection, whether of the excesses of stadium rock bands or of the standards of polite behaviour. This rejection was frequently realized through musical technique in terms of what is usually analysed as rule breaking, although I find it more helpful to think in terms of generating friction between a particular song and the conventions of a previously constituted style. (Moore 1993, 167)

In more recent writing, Moore clarified and expanded on his earlier position, stating that:

…the notion of ‘breaking’ rules seems to me problematic; I prefer to think in terms of ‘norms’ [rather] than ‘rules’. The notion of ‘breaking’ such rules is then replaced by the concept of the creation of friction between the accepted norms of a style and what actually happens in a particular track. (Moore 2012, 167)

Thus, friction is a form of tension and release, that only works because of a hypothetical, sociocultural set of stylistic norms against which friction is created.

Consequently, friction only exists as a relative phenomenon—there are no songs that can be one hundred percent friction against a particular style, or else they would have no relation to that style. Additionally, friction is commonly durational and temporary in relation to other structural elements within a song. These durations work at various levels, from macro, structural frictions (such as an entire verse) to micro frictions (such as a single note or beat). At the structural level, frictional verses typically release their

The Brisbane Sound 71 tension in choruses in what Temperley (2007) labels the “loose verse/tight chorus” model.

In Western art music, the phenomena of musical tension/release, stable/unstable, dissonance/consonance, and contrast/resolution have been idiomatic compositional devices since at least the Baroque period (Cooke 1959, 34). In popular music, some scholars have argued that most of the meaning in songs is found in the friction they create within particular music-style paradigms (Moore 1993, 167; Neale 2000, 165).

This means that understanding what counts for friction in a particular music-style is the key to understanding that style. This accounts for why the Brisbane Sound is often defined by the musical features of the sound that create friction against the norms of pop music, as located in Chapter 6.

In a broad sense, the concept of friction highlights a key paradox of popular music creativity and innovation: there are expectations—set by the music industry— that musicians and songwriters will create works and develop personas that are at once distinguishable by conforming to a pre-existing style taxonomy, yet sufficiently different enough to act as markers of distinction as originality. Toynbee (2000, 20) draws on Bourdieu to explain how musicians are positioned “at the centre of a radius of creativity”. A creative musician “identifies and selects music possibles [sic] within this radius according to her habitus, but also the rules of the field of musical production—conventions, techniques and so on”, but the options at their disposal “are tightly constrained in that the radius of creativity traverses a limited set of possibilities”

(2000, 20-21).

72 The Brisbane Sound Conclusion

The key to understanding power from a Bourdieusian perspective is to realise that people struggle for a variety of resources other than just monetary wealth. People have in their habitus—their internalised dispositions and external ways of acting, thinking and communicating—a lifetime of socially and culturally acquired tastes, knowledge, skills and worldview. They act on these habits subconsciously within their given field of expertise, whilst struggling for various forms of capital including social, cultural and symbolic capital. This helps explain why people take a position on the

Brisbane Sound and what they have to gain (apart from simply being paid). Cultural intermediaries are publicly recognised experts who use media discourses to shape the narrative of the Brisbane Sound by defining what it is and to which music it applies.

However, even experts often resort to figurative language to define the Brisbane

Sound, because music is by its very nature difficult to explain in words. Perhaps ironically, the music’s ineffability has been the topic of a great deal of literature since at least Plato, and continues to be problematic for music journalists and audio engineers and musicologists.

Perhaps this is part of why we find it necessary to attribute genre and style labels to music. Certainly, the music industries rely on genre and style labels to organise and compartmentalise music consumption. In academia and common parlance, the two terms are often used interchangeably. So for clarity, I suggest ‘genre’ ought to be reserved for the sociocultural contexts surrounding a particular ‘style’ of music.

However, the word ‘style’ also seems to carry with it a multiplicity of meanings, so in this chapter I find it necessary to introduce the compounded term ‘music-style’ to point directly to a set of common musical features.

The Brisbane Sound 73 Because an autonomous music-style label called the ‘Brisbane Sound’ never took hold, it remains an unconventional mode of pop-rock music. However, unconventional can only be understood relative to the conventions from which it is said to deviate. With this in mind, I outline some of the key musical features of the pop rock music-style. These include macro and micro repetition, strophic form, functional harmony, and 4/4 time. The chapter concluded by introducing Moore’s (1993; 2012) concept of ‘friction’ to account for how unconventional music like the Brisbane Sound subverts audience expectations.

The following chapter contextualises a later music analysis by providing background information about the key players in the Brisbane Sound discourse: the cultural intermediaries, and the Brisbane Sound bands.

74 The Brisbane Sound

Chapter 4: Background

Introducing the Cultural Intermediaries

The concordance table in Appendix B is a list of quotes by people that specifically mention the term Brisbane Sound. A simple tally of the number of quotes per person is a logical way to delimit and hone in on the ‘elite agents’ (i.e. cultural intermediaries) that produce the Brisbane Sound discourse. The following pie chart shows those cultural intermediaries with three or more28 quotes:

From the above chart we can see that Robert Forster and Clinton Walker have the most number of quotes attributed to them at nine each. Noel Mengel has seven, whilst Andrew Stafford and Donat Tahiraj have six each. Lastly, David Pestorius has

28 The concordance table includes four quotes with no identified author. As this data serves no purpose for the current task it has been eliminated from the above chart.

The Brisbane Sound 75 three. As I mentioned previously, cultural intermediaries are considered experts in their given fields but this assessment belies the complexity of how experts in the field of music writing are recognised as such. Like many creative fields, the accumulation of symbolic capital through institutional recognition (for example, a university degree in journalism) is largely inconsequential. Subcultural capital on the other hand—being

‘in the know’—often holds more credence.

Again, it is also important to recognise that all of the cultural intermediaries here are heteronormative, middle-class cisgender men. The concordance table shows it is uncommon for female voices to be asked to contribute to the meaning of the Brisbane

Sound, or if they are, they rarely get heard or published (at least in the media texts I found). This is a complex finding that speaks to the subjacent role of women in the music and media industries. I do not want to diminish this topic by glossing over it here, yet it deserves more space than the scope of this thesis allows. In Chapter 9:

Conclusions, I discuss plans for future research that is dedicated to this topic.

The following section gives some brief biographical details about the cultural intermediaries to contextualise their position in the field of music writing.

Andrew Stafford

Andrew Stafford’s seminal Pig City: From the Saints to Savage Garden (2004) provided one of the first historical accounts of the Brisbane popular music from the

1970s to the late 1990s. Stafford was born in Melbourne in 1971 and moved to

Brisbane in 1987. Pig City originated from his Master’s thesis in Creative Writing at

Queensland University of Technology and was reprinted in 2014 for its tenth anniversary. Stafford interviewed ninety-eight people for the book. including Clinton

Walker and Robert Forster, two of the other cultural intermediaries discussed here

76 The Brisbane Sound (Whittle 2004). Stafford’s writing has also been published in Rolling Stone, a music periodical that until its decline in print was considered the most legitimate and capable print platform for consecrating bands in the Bourdieusian sense (Jones and Featherly

2002, 19–20)

Stafford has also contributed music writing to other legitimate mass media outlets including the Guardian, Courier-Mail, Australian, Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. What is interesting to this project is that Andrew Stafford is the only cultural intermediary who has explicitly questioned the existence of a Brisbane Sound on several occasions:

[What do you think makes Brisbane music discussed in Pig City unique?] This implies there is a clearly defined "Brisbane Sound", which I don't think there is - the music to come out of here has always been too diverse for that, unlike Seattle, for example. (Stafford interviewed in City News 2004, 14).

I was very careful when I wrote the book not to suggest that there was in any way a Brisbane "sound". To me there's no such thing. Brisbane's two most influential and historically significant bands, the Saints and The Go-Betweens, are radically different in approach. It is impossible to generalise. (Stafford, comment on Birmingham 2007)

I don’t think geography had much to do with it at all actually, at least not if you mean the physical landscape. I reject utterly that there was ever a “Brisbane Sound”, although there are a few who like to claim there was. (Stafford interviewed in Newton 2014)

Stafford denies the Brisbane Sound by aligning himself with what I call the

‘heterogeneity argument’: that the range of bands that have come out of Brisbane is too diverse for such a category to work. This is the predominant line of thought for all agents who deny the Brisbane Sound (see also Spann 2010; Wallaby Beat 2014). The argument itself is incontrovertible: as I have stated, the Brisbane Sound only functions as a product of discourse. In this way, its reality as a concept entirely depends on, and is relative to, the perspective of each particular agent and how they frame its parameters.

The Brisbane Sound 77 Noel Mengel

Noel Mengel was born in Kingaroy, Queensland in 1957. Mengel began working as a journalist in 1980 after studying journalism at the University of Southern

Queensland. From 1990 until his retirement in 2015, Mengel was the chief music writer for Brisbane’s daily newspaper The Courier-Mail (published on Sunday as The

Sunday Mail). In 2016, Mengel’s career was honoured with the ‘Grant McLennan

Lifetime Achievement Award’ by Queensland’s music industry body QMusic. As a music writer, Mengel would have been granted the agency to express subjective opinions compared to other journalists at the Courier-Mail (Lindberg et al. 2005, 18–

19). Like the other cultural intermediaries, Mengel’s habitus is expressed in his writing—he is often reflexive and his articles buttressed with evidence of his cultural capital. For instance, Mengel notes that he was present at the genesis of The Go-

Betweens:

I saw The Go-Betweens more than any other band on the planet, from early shows… before the release of their first album, they had songs with a glow about them, a presence that set them apart. (Mengel 2006)

The ‘I was there in the beginning’ narrative is a common retrospective device used by music writers as a marker of authenticity and cultural capital. Mengel is also a musician, and in the early 1980s his band the Curiosity Shop would have shared the same stages as the Brisbane Sound bands. More relevant to this thesis, however, is how Mengel frequently ruminated on the existence of the Brisbane Sound in reviews for new music:

Was there ever such a thing as a Brisbane Sound? This writer, for one, always thought so, although was I just including all the bands I liked and excluding the others? Still, there is a link between a number of Brisbane's musical exports: short, sharp, energetic, strong melodies, interesting lyrics, a respect for classic pop songcraft. (Mengel 2009)

78 The Brisbane Sound In the above quote, Mengel broadcasts a seemingly unambiguous personal position before anchoring it to a question of personal taste in the type of statement

Bourdieu would suggest “classifies the classifier” (Bourdieu 1984, 6).

Clinton Walker

Clinton Walker describes himself as “an art school dropout and recovering rock critic” (Walker 2015a). Walker claims that the “new punk rock revolution”, spearheaded by Brisbane band the Saints, inspired him to begin a music writing career

(2015). Initially, Walker wrote music features and reviews for the University of

Queensland’s student newspaper Semper (under the moniker ‘Cee’ Walker), as well as fanzines SSuicide ALLey [sic], Pulp, and as the ‘Brisbane contributor’ to Adelaide’s

Roadrunner magazine. In recent years, Walker has been recruited as a talking head for several documentaries about Brisbane music history (for example, Meltzer 2008; Ou

2015; Stenders 2017).

Like Mengel, Walker was an active participant in the local scene within which the Brisbane Sound discourse is centred. Walker attended the first Go-Betweens show at Baroona hall in April 1978 and recalled the event in Roadrunner magazine:

During a break in the proceedings two fairly non-descript fellows took the stage— unannounced—and fumbled their way—drummerless—through two songs that were obviously the product of their own inexperienced hands. There was nothing particularly ‘good’ about their ‘performance’, but something in it impressed me. Probably it’s unique ‘style’. (Robertson 1980, 2:33)

Walkers Inner City Sound (1982)—described by Donat Tahiraj as “the punk and post-punk bible” (Tahiraj 2011)—collated much of his own previous writing and photography from 1976 to 1981. Significantly, Inner City Sound includes some of the earliest mentions of the Brisbane Sound (see concordance table). Indeed, Walker cites

The Brisbane Sound 79 Inner City Sound as a source to support his claim that Brisbane Sound was a trope that he invented:

I dubbed it all, in a fit of imagination, the Brisbane Sound. Rob and Grant called it the Striped Sunlight Sound. Both terms gained some currency. (Walker 2015b)

…the contested story of the so-called Brisbane Sound, a concept I invented. (Walker 2015a)

Donat Tahiraj

Donat Tahiraj is Brisbane-based music writer and co-founder of the Phase 4 record store in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. As an adjunct to the retail store, Tahiraj also runs the record label Late-Century Modern Recordings (LCMR) which specialises in re-releasing obscure or out of print vinyl recordings by Brisbane-based artists, including Brisbane Sound bands Birds of Tin and The Apartments. Like Mengel,

Tahiraj is also a musician who has played drums and guitar in a number of bands.

Tahiraj has written reviews for Brisbane street press Time Off and is frequently sought to provide comment or context to newspaper articles about Brisbane music history (for example, Elliot 2017, 4). Tahiraj references the Brisbane Sound in a coffee-table book about Australian 7” record sleeve artwork titled Product 45 (M. Bennett 2015). Online,

Tahiraj also maintains a personal blog titled licorice lounge: donat’s blog about music etc29[sic], and frequently contributes to threads on The Go-Betweens’ Message Board forum30.

David Pestorius

There are little biographic details about David Pestorius that can be ascertained through research. However, the ‘about’ section of his website31 and photographs

29 www.licoricelounge.com 30 go-betweens.org.uk/cgi-bin/chatroom/discus.cgi 31 http://www.davidpestorius.com/about.html

80 The Brisbane Sound indicate Pestorius was an active participant in the Brisbane Sound scene (Pestorius n.d.). Pestorius is a former barrister who transitioned to art curation in the 1990s, opening his first gallery in 1993. Pestorius volunteered during the early years of independent community radio station 4zzz, presenting a weekly show about new local releases from 1980 to 1982 (2015). After embarking on his art curation career,

Pestorius explored the crossover between visual art scenes and music scenes in

Australian cities. Most relevant to this thesis, Pestorius gave a lecture titled The

Brisbane Sound: fact or fiction? given at Griffith University’s Cultures of Popular

Music Seminar Series in 2008. An abstract of the lecture posted on The Go-Betweens’ website gives some insight in Pestorius’ reading of the scene:

The Brisbane Sound: fact or fiction?

In the early 1980s the term the Brisbane Sound began to gain a certain currency in what had by that time become a translocal independent music scene. That is to say, a network of inter-city associations and affinities, not just in Australia but internationally, involving so-called alternative popular music groups, DIY record labels, venues, promoters, universities, radio stations, record shops, critics, publications and, of course, fans. Yet from its inception the appellation the Brisbane Sound was subject to challenge, its ontological basis contested. Was there truly such a thing as the Brisbane Sound? Was it a genuine invention of critics who found something regionally distinctive and in line with rock ‘n’ roll parlance (e.g. the Mersey Sound, Boston Sound, etc.) tagged it accordingly? Or was it a kind of self-styling created by those whose interests it served to identify, galvanise and promote? Or was it a little bit of both? (Pestorius 2008a)

These questions remain pertinent and align with those addressed by this thesis.

Pestorius’ lecture was a preamble to an exhibition held at Brisbane’s Institute of

Modern Art (IMA) in early 2008 titled Is this the Brisbane Sound? The exhibition aimed to map the “cross-pollination between the indie and experimental music scenes and the art scene in Brisbane during the post-punk years, 1978–83” (Pestorius 2008c).

The Brisbane Sound 81

This exhibition consisted of paintings, hung alongside installations composed of wall-mounted cassette tapes, posters, fanzines, super 8 films, photographs and other ephemera. Considering the proposed scope of the project, it is notable that music did not seem to feature except for a four-minute video of Robert Forster performing in

1994 that acted “as a kind of soundtrack for the exhibition. Turned up so as to be audible in all four IMA gallery spaces” (Pestorius 2008c). Coinciding with the exhibition’s launch was a series of concerts curated by Robert Forster, Ed Kuepper

(The Saints) and Brisbane-based conceptual artist Eugene Carchesio. According to a post on The Go-Betweens’ message board, a 180-page catalogue for the Brisbane

Sound exhibition was ready in time for its opening but issues with the publisher

82 The Brisbane Sound prevented its release and have seemingly never been resolved (Pestorius 2008b). In

2010, Pestorius curated the Melbourne>

Gallery in Melbourne. Partly an extension of the 2008 Brisbane Sound, it also included subcultural ephemera Melbourne’s punk and post-punk era.

David Nichols

David Nichols was born in Melbourne in 1965 and began his music writing career with the self-published fanzine Distant Violins in 1980. Distant Violins was regularly produced until the mid-1980s and included articles and several interviews with the Brisbane Sound bands. From 1983-1991 Nichols was the feature editor for

Australian youth music magazine Smash Hits, and commissioned as a freelance music journalist for Rolling Stone and The Age. Yet it was Nichols’ particularly keen interest in The Go-Betweens that culminated in an eponymous biography (1997; 2003 revised

2nd edition), purported to be “the definitive account of the band’s history” (Ramadge

2012). Nichols’ most recent book Dig: Australian Rock and Pop Music 1960-1965

(2016) is far broader in its scope but includes several passages about Brisbane’s music history. Nichols was awarded a PhD in History at the University of Melbourne in 2001.

Like Tahiraj, Nichols frequently contributes to The Go-Betweens’ chat forum. Nichols has also played drums for several, independent Australian pop bands.

Introducing the Brisbane Sound Bands

The Primary Corpus

The Primary Corpus table in Appendix A is a table of songs released between

1978 – 1983 by bands attributed with exemplifying the Brisbane Sound in the discourse (details of this process are in Chapter 5). This broad pool was delimited to include only bands with three or more direct attributions, then again by those that

The Brisbane Sound 83 released music during the temporal framework 1978 – 198332. The year of release forms the first column of the table and is arranged in chronological order. Once this corpus was established, I then set about acquiring recordings of these songs so I could identify musical features through music analysis.

The above pie chart shows the percentage of attributions of the Brisbane Sound label per band. The ‘general’ category seems significant (30%), but indicates how the term is used casually, without specific reference to any particular band or artist.

The ‘other’ category is those bands or artists that released music after the temporal period. This percentage (7%) reflects how people have rehashed the trope in later decades, towards 1990s bands such as Screamfeeder, and more recently Jeremy

Neale and the Cairos.

32 Only bands remained, rather than individual artists. The word released here is important (rather than ‘recorded’). Several bands have since unearthed rare, contemporaneous out-takes, B-sides and so on, but these were ignored because the impact they may have had on the Brisbane Sound discourse is limited by their obscurity.

84 The Brisbane Sound The remaining percentages are the most relevant, contemporaneous Brisbane

Sound bands. In order of most to least they are The Go-Betweens (33%), Four Gods

(10%), The Apartments and Riptides (6%), Out of Nowhere and Birds of Tin (4%).

Each of these bands released music during the temporal focus of this study. Only one band, The Go-Betweens, released a full-length album. The rest released singles, usually in the format of 7” Vinyl EPs.

The following sections provide preliminary context for the bands in the primary corpus discography.

Birds of Tin

Birds of Tin’s only release was a four-song cassette titled Same Both Sides, released independently in December 1981. Birds of Tin was one of many short-lived bands led by Peter Loveday with others including The Supports, Mute 44, Antic

Frantic, the Sea Beas. Some members of Birds of Tin moved to London and became

Tiny Town. Bird of Tin are remarkable in the sense they are the first band to be associated with the Brisbane Sound label33. Ian Gray wrote in 1981:

The short-lived Birds of Tin created some excitement for a while. Rumoured to be ‘just like The Go-Betweens, only better’, they did lend credence to that band's theory that there is a "Brisbane Sound" and that they (The Go-Betweens) are it. Unlike the Go-Betweens, however, Birds of Tin did not have any driving ambition or talent for self-promotion. Their talent lay simply in their musicianship and the quality of their writing, although faced with the problem of having to come up with a complete set of material quickly, they did sound a bit repetitive at times. (Gray 1981, 6)

The members who performed on Same Both Sides were:

Year Song Title Vocals Guitar 1 Other Bass Drums

1981 Slothy Tank Peter Loveday Peter Loveday Tony Hayes Michael Elliot Keryn Henry

Rain Drops (Percussion)

33 Aside from the Reverbs in a 1965 Billboard article.

The Brisbane Sound 85 Think of the Future

Four Gods

Four Gods formed in Brisbane in the late 1970s, led by Andrew Wilson

(vocals/guitar), with Peter Morgan (guitar) and Keryn Henry (drums) as regular members. Their double-A side EP, ‘Enchanted House/Restless’ (1981) was recorded at M2 Studios in Sydney and was the last release by the Able Label (AB007). The name ‘Four Gods’ was inspired by lyrics from The Go-Betweens’ song ‘Karen’34

(Tahiraj 2005b). Four Gods were closely aligned with The Go-Betweens in other ways:

Wilson admitted to being “heavily influenced” by them, especially Robert Forster’s guitar style, which Wilson claimed “wasn’t very good when they started” (interviewed in Nichols 1983, 4). Two Go-Betweens members performed on ‘Enchanted

House/Restless’: Lindy Morrison filled in on drums for Henry who was unable to attend the session, and Grant McLennan played bass (credited on the EP under the pseudonym ‘Candice’) (“Amateurism” 2014; Nichols 2003, 113). Wilson also went to high school with Forster and shared a house with Clinton Walker (Nichols 2003, 45;

Tahiraj 2005a, 45). In 1999, Chapter Music reissued the Four God’s EP on a CD title

‘Amateurism’35, that also included three other Four Gods songs, and recordings by

Wilson’s later solo projects.

Year Song Title Vocals Guitar 1 Guitar 2 Bass Drums

1981 Enchanted Andrew Andrew Peter Morgan Grant Lindy House Wilson Wilson McLennan Morrison Restless

The Numbers/The Riptides

The band that eventually became known as The Riptides’ began in 1977 in

Brisbane under a variety of monikers led by Mark Callaghan. As The Numbers, they

34 Karen’s “She’s my god, she’s my god, she’s my g-o-d/She’s my god yeah” 35 For details, on this project see “The Making of Amateurism” (Nichols and Wadley 2011)

86 The Brisbane Sound released a three song EP ‘Sunset Strip/Magic Castle/Rules of Love’ (1978) on the Able

Label (AB003). To avoid confusion with a Sydney band also called the Numbers, in

1979 the band settled on the name The Riptides. In July of that year, The Riptides released a remixed version of the ‘Sunset Strip’ EP (AB004). In February 1980, The

Riptides released ‘Tomorrow’s Tears/Some Other Guy’ EP on the Fiat Label (Fiat 1)

In September 1982, ‘Hearts and Flowers/Sandarama’ EP was released through Regular

Records (RRSP 716). The Number/Riptides went through various line-up changes, but

Callaghan remained constant.

Year Song Vocals Guitar 1 Guitar 2 Bass Drums

1978/ Sunset Strip Mark Callaghan Allan Riley Scott Matheson Robert Vickers Dennis Cantwell

1979 Magic Castle

1980 Tomorrow's Tears Mark Callaghan Andrew Leitch Scott Matheson Mark Callaghan Dennis Cantwell

Some Other Guy

1982 Hearts and Flowers Mark Callaghan Mark Callaghan Michael Hiron Howard Shawcross Graeme Hutchinson

Sandarama

The Apartments

Peter Milton Walsh formed The Apartments in 1978 by and released a three song

EP ‘Return of the Hypnotist’ before disbanding in October 1979. During this period,

Walsh was briefly recruited as lead guitarist for The Go-Betweens in an effort

“enlarge” their sound, ahead of a deal with UK’s Beserkley Records (Forster 2016,

54). Walsh left The Go-Betweens when the deal fell through. In 1980, the original line- up of The Apartments was disbanded.

Year Song Title Vocals Guitar 1 Guitar 2 Bass Drums 1979 Help Peter Milton Walsh Peter Milton Walsh Michael O'Connell Peter Whitby Peter Martin Nobody Like You Refugee

Out of Nowhere

Out of Nowhere was one of Peter Milton Walsh’s post-Apartments bands, active from 1981—1982. Out of Nowhere released one EP titled ‘Remember, Remember/No

The Brisbane Sound 87 Resistance’ in 1982 through Prince Melon Records (PM015). They were, again, a short-lived project, and discourse about the band is scarce. Pestorius referred to Out of

Nowhere as “perhaps the most promising of the Brisbane Sound groups” (Hughes and

Croggon 2013, 260). Tahiraj cites their “epic and complex song-structures” (Tahiraj

2008). The EP songs are certainly atypically long, with ‘Remember/Remember’ almost 9 minutes long, and ‘No-Resistance’ over 5 minutes. Out of Nowhere are also unusual in their instrumentation; clarinet and saxophone used as lead instruments.

Year Song Title Vocals Guitar 1 Other Bass Drums

1982 Remember, Remember Peter Milton Peter Milton Tony Forde Joseph Jeffrey Walsh Walsh (Clarinet) Borkowski Wegener No Resistance Gary Warner (Sax)

The Go-Betweens

The Go-Betweens formed in 1977 originally as a duo of Robert Forster

(vocals/guitar) and Grant McLennan (vocals/bass). During their formative years, the pair enlisted a “flurry of drummers”, both live and for studio recordings (Forster 2014,

8). In 1980, Lindy Morrison was recruited from local band Zero (also known as

Xiro/Xero) and effectively became The Go-Betweens’ first full-time drummer, remaining until the band’s first break-up36 in December 1989. During the period studied here, The Go-Betweens released several 7” EP singles and were the only band to release a full-length album. The first 7” EP ‘Lee Remick/Karen’ (1978) was recorded at Sunshine studios in May, 1978 and became the inaugural release for the

Able Label (AB001). ‘People Say/Don’t Let Him Come Back’ followed in 1979

(AB005). In June 1980, during a sojourn to the United Kingdom, they recorded ‘I Need

Two Heads/Stop Before You Say It’ in Glasgow and released through Postcard

Records (Postcard 80-4). Following their return to Australia, the single ‘Your Turn,

36 Forster and McLennan relaunched The Go-Betweens’ from 2000-2006 (without Morrison).

88 The Brisbane Sound My Turn’/’World Weary’ was recorded in Sydney and released in 1981 through

Missing Link. Their first album Send Me A Lullaby (1981) was recorded in Melbourne and released later that year in two versions, for the Australian and UK markets, as eight and twelve songs respectively. The UK version included the single ‘Your Turn, My

Turn’, as well as three extra songs ‘The Girls Have Moved’, ‘Eight Pictures’ and

‘Arrow In A Box’. Their fifth stand-alone single, ‘Hammer the Hammer/By Chance’, was released in June 1982. Finally, the last release included in the corpus is their sixth single ‘Cattle and Cane/Heaven Says’. ‘By Chance’ and ‘Cattle and Cane’ both appeared on The Go-Betweens’ sophomore album Before Hollywood (1983).

However, whilst the release date of Before Hollywood falls within the corpus’ parameters, it is excluded for a number of reasons. For many agents, Before Hollywood represented a move away from the prototypical Brisbane Sound established on earlier recordings, “towards a lushed, more romantic style” (“Amateurism” 2014). This is evident in the production values also, with Forster noting how Before Hollywood producer John Brand was “looking for precision” compared to the more relaxed, ‘live sounding’ approach taken by Tony Cohen on Send Me A Lullaby (2016, 94, 111).

Year Song Title Vocals Guitar 1 Guitar 2 / Other Bass Drums 1978 Lee Remick Robert Forster Robert Forster Grant McLennan Dennis Cantwell Karen 1979 People Say Robert Forster Robert Forster Malcolm Kelly Grant McLennan Tim Mustafa Don't Let Him Come Back (Organ) 1980 I Need Two Heads Robert Forster Robert Forster Grant McLennan Grant McLennan Steven Daly Stop Before You Say It 1981 Your Turn, My Turn Robert Forster Robert Forster Dan Wallace-Crabbe Grant McLennan Lindy Morrison World Weary (Piano) 1981 One Thing Can Hold Us Robert Forster Robert Forster Lindy Morrison People Know Midnight to Neon Careless All About Strength Ride Hold Your Horses Grant McLennan It Could Be Anyone 1982 Hammer the Hammer Grant McLennan Robert Forster Grant McLennan Lindy Morrison By Chance Robert Forster 1983 Cattle and Cane Grant McLennan Robert Forster Grant McLennan Lindy Morrison Heaven Says

The Brisbane Sound 89 Weighting of The Go-Betweens in this Study

Early in this research project it became clear that much of the discourse about the Brisbane Sound was actually anchored to the sound and aesthetic of The Go-

Betweens. Statistically, The Go-Betweens are mentioned in one third (27) of all of the quotes in the concordance table (Appendix B). Excluding general references where no band or artist is specified, The Go-Betweens have more attributions to the Brisbane

Sound than the next band, Four Gods (8), by a factor of three and a third. It is true that

—relative to the other Brisbane Sound bands—The Go-Betweens achieved the greatest commercial success. This, and institutional structures, enabled the band to produce the most prolific output of recorded music texts, again relative to the other bands.

However, they were—and arguably still are—an ‘underground’ band with a subcultural or cult following. They never had any chart-topping hit songs and never became “mainstream” (compare S. Baker, Bennett, and Taylor 2013) but arguably their lack of commercial success in these terms is irrelevant. What they did accumulate over the last twenty to thirty years is high amounts of peer and public recognition, or what Bourdieu labels “specific” and “popular” legitimacy (1993, 50–51). This legitimation is complex and is linked to the narrative and cultural memory of

Brisbane’s music history.

In essence, the Brisbane Sound era begins and ends with The Go-Betweens and they are often treated like a metonym for the Sound. They may appear to be over- represented in the data compared to other bands, however, there is simply far more written and spoken about this band, and thus more data can be retrieved, analysed and discussed than any other Brisbane Sound band by a hefty degree. This over- representation should be read as a trend that is in keeping with data and consensus amongst the agents, rather than researcher bias based on preference or taste.

90 The Brisbane Sound That Striped Sunlight Sound

The Go-Betweens’ also came up with their own, original trope, the ‘Striped

Sunlight Sound’. This is often used synonymously or interchangeably with the

Brisbane Sound. The following quote from iconic Brisbane journalist Noel Mengel illustrates this confluence.

If ever there was a band that sounded like Brisbane - the striped sunlight sound they called it on the cover of their first single - it was The Go-Betweens. (Mengel 1999)

Early in my research I established that the phrase ‘Striped Sunlight Sound’ is often considered a synonym for the phrase ‘Brisbane Sound’. Sometimes the terms are conflated, resulting in something like the ‘Striped Brisbane Sunlight Sound’ and it is fair to assume that many people would consider the tropes to mean one and the same thing. The following section contextualises the term ‘Striped Sunlight Sound’.

The phrase, ‘Striped Sunlight Sound’, first appeared in a seemingly frivolous

‘dedication’ on the back cover of The Go-Betweens’ first single, ‘Lee Remick/Karen’

(1978):

This is dedicated to John Fogerty, Phil Ochs, Michael Cole, Natalie Wood and that striped sunlight sound. (The Go-Betweens 1978)

The Brisbane Sound 91 In 1981 Forster elaborated on the neologism in a hand-written ‘brochure’ for

Scottish record label Postcard:

Brisbane is anything but funky, merely persistent dry winds, the threat of a storm, and a form of music that hardly ever rises above these circumstances, hence that striped sunlight sound: guitar, bass, and drums producing a thin, vulnerable sound based on emotion and melody. Our answer to the tropics. (Postcard 1981, 5)

Forster claims the trope was inspired by a 1978 Playboy interview with Bob

Dylan (2016, 51). Dylan describes ‘Wild Mercury Sound’ from his 1960s records as being the “the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind”:

Dylan: It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound… That ethereal twilight light, you know. It's the sound of the street with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time, on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It's an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear. The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartments and the clinking of silverware and knives and forks and beating with leather straps. It's all-it's all there. Just lack of a jackhammer, you know. (Interviewed in Rosenbaum 1978, 61)

Forster: It was from that… I liked that Dylan named the sound, you know, and I couldn't think of anyone who had ever named their sound. I thought I would come up with something for our band. (Interviewed in Zuel 2015, 19)

Despite its glib origins, the Striped Sunlight Sound became a successful slogan for The Go-Betweens and soon became “widely used in any story about them” (Zuel

2015). On 6 August 2005, The Go-Betweens performed at the Tivoli Theatre in

Brisbane. The show was filmed, and a double DVD titled That Striped Sunlight Sound was released later that year. The first DVD contains the concert performance. The bonus disc, called ‘Acoustic Stories’, contains a video interview between Forster,

McLennan and cultural intermediary Noel Mengel. The interview takes place in the lounge room of a typical ‘Queenslander’ home—itself a potent symbol of Brisbane’s cultural identity (Brisbin 2011, 152)—and is interspersed with acoustic performances

92 The Brisbane Sound by the songwriting duo. Mengel’s first question is about the origins of the slogan.

Forster’s response is as follows:

It was a sound from necessity. It was just Grant and I, and a variety of drummers, for the first two years. I guess it was sort of like ‘nakedness’—it was a sound that was primitive; but it wasn’t in some sort of Melbourne dungeon, or a London dungeon. You can’t make that here. So, you couldn’t go for that enclosed, dark thing. You just had to basically embrace what was here. So, when you talk about the ‘Striped Sunlight Sound’, it was just that primitive sound in Brisbane. And all the elements [waves hand towards window] just had to come in. (Ashton 2005. My transcription)

Forster was not content with the reply he gave Mengel in this interview and later used the liner notes of the DVD to put forth a much lengthier answer to Mengel’s question and to clarify his initial response. This is a very long quote, but it serves a purpose to reproduce it here in full:

When Brisbane music journalist Noel Mengel came to interview us in August 2005 for what was to be The Acoustic Stories section of this DVD, his first question was about the "striped sunlight sound". Later, after the interview, we sat about chatting on prospective titles for the DVD and when Grant came up with "That Striped Sunlight Sound" we knew that was it. So what is it? The answer I gave Noel in the interview is rambling and not all that good. I waffle. The question had taken me a little by surprise. So I'd like to elaborate here and lay out what's on my mind. Because it's a phrase I've always liked, from a time in the band that still means a lot to me. The "striped sunlight sound" was a term Grant and I kicked around in 1978. It's no manifesto. It's a feeling. A feeling our own music gave us. We were trying to give it a name while at the same time trying to hint at, or indicate what was around us. It's a romantic phrase but it is abstract. It could be the sun coming through blinds as you play a record (so it's sun on the music). It could be the sun coming through as you practice in the lounge room of a large Brisbane house of a certain era. Film posters on the wall. Heavy old furniture. The colours associated with it to me have always been orange and yellow with a dash of white. It's the shimmer of a Fender guitar. Backed by groovy plunking bass and simple drums. It's harmonies and tough-minded pop songs. It's lying on a bed beside a window reading a book in the afternoon. It's sunshine imposing on inside darkness. That's Brisbane to me. Sunshine and darkness. And the glare you get at the airport when you arrive. And all this stuff I couldn't tell Noel because it's sweeping and poetic. I didn't want to start the interview like that. Just jumping out the window into impressionistic chatter. But I'll go on. It's the sun on a girl's shoulder length hair. It's the look on John Sebastian’s face on every Lovin' Spoonful album. It's the Talking Heads as a three piece in 75/76. Tina's flares. David's haircut. It's Buddy Holly in the desert the day they recorded "Maybe Baby". It's Bowie, not his music but the look of him. It's simplicity. And the dignity of driving around in a car with the windows down. It's before air-

The Brisbane Sound 93 conditioning but after the invention of the fully functional stereo system. It's t - shirts and jeans. It's Creedence. It's Bob. It's Chuck Berry. It's those that follow Petula Clark who I've always found to be grittier and more clear-minded than those who follow Dusty Springfield who I've always found to be a little dreamy and highly strung. And that's enough. (Forster 2005)

A generous reader might see Forster’s ‘impressionistic chatter’ as pure poetry capable of complex analogical leaps; or as an ekphrastic monologue—a ‘vivid’ memory act of synaesthetic imagination (Ortony 2001). Bourdieu suggests “stylistic elaborations” like these by their very nature reaffirm an agent’s distinction and authority on a matter (Bourdieu 1977, 649). Another, perhaps more cynical, view— but one in line with this thesis’ problem statement—is that Forster resorts to figurative language as he finds it difficult to offer a literal explanation of the sound as sound

(Zbikowski 2008, 502). Forster manages three lines that verge on functional music- speak with: “the shimmer of a Fender guitar. Backed by groovy plunking bass and simple drums. It's harmonies and tough-minded pop songs”. I am not suggesting

Forster is completely incapable of describing the actual sound using music-speak— but rather, perhaps he might be unwilling.

There are a few reasons why he might avoid such language. First, it is likely

Forster thinks the liner notes on a retrospective DVD is not the right context for music- speak. Second, the apprehension of making an ‘error’ in any musicological elaboration; displaying an incompetence at music-speak is potentially embarrassing.

Third, revealing a proficient musical-linguistic habitus could be incongruent with

Forster’s long held public persona as a ‘self-taught-post-punk-DIY-authentic’ musician (vis-à-vis the ‘Authenticity of Amateurism’—next section). In either case,

Forster’s recognition of what is at stake in using music-speak produces a “linguistic insecurity” that results in “self-surveillance and censorship” (Bourdieu 1977, 658).

94 The Brisbane Sound In press that followed the release of the DVD, journalists continued to ask

Forster and McLennan about the origins of the trope. In one article, Forster is paraphrased as stating it was “inspired by the effect of sunlight streaming through the louvres of a Toowong share-house while the band practised in the late 1970s and early

'80s” (Murdoch 2005).

That Striped Brisbane Sunlight Sound?

The first recorded instance of the phrase ‘Brisbane Sound’ is from a 1981 issue of X-Change fanzine about Birds of Tin:

The short-lived Birds of Tin created some excitement for a while. Rumoured to be ‘just like The Go-Betweens, only better’, they did lend to credence to that band's theory that there is a "Brisbane Sound" and that [The Go-Betweens] are it. (Gray 1981, 16)

We can infer that the “band’s theory” Gray refers to is actually the conceptualisation of the Striped Sunlight Sound. The phrase ‘Brisbane Sound’ is not otherwise used until Walker’s Inner City Sound in 1982. By 1988 the homologising of the terms appears determined. In a documentary for ABC’s Rock Arena titled

‘Brisbane Bands’, a number of musicians are asked to discuss the Brisbane Sound on camera. The response from Mark Callaghan (GANGgajang/Riptides) is probably the most compelling example of this coalescence in action. Callaghan muddles his words as he processes and delivers his response. In doing so he can be seen and heard conflating the two tropes:

The Brisbane Sound. That [raises eyebrows] Striped Bris-light, Brisbane Sound. Striped Sunlight Sound. I think that was a quote on the back of ah, Lee Remick from the Go-Bet… [Which] I thought was beautiful. ‘That Striped Sunlight Sound’. Which, to me describes the um, Brisbane music—its thinness, and it’s kind of um, the fact that it is sort of ephemeral. (Wilson 1988. My transcription)37

37 This conversation is currently viewable at https://youtu.be/pn4brNjEBdA?t=1m18s

The Brisbane Sound 95 In 1999 Mengel again consolidated the concepts, stating “if ever there was a band that sounded like Brisbane—the striped sunlight sound they called it on the cover of their first single—it was The Go-Betweens” (Mengel 1999). More recently, the trope has resurfaced in various films and books. In 2015, public service broadcaster

ABC-TV aired a documentary titled Stranded (2015), that depicted the evolution of punk as a response to the oppressive socio-political context of late-1970s Brisbane. At one point, narrator Neil Pigot can be heard summating the tropes as follows:

Songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan would go on to write some of our country’s most enduring songs about place. The Go-Betweens would define what became known as ‘The Brisbane Striped Sunlight Sound’. (Ou 2015, my transcription)

It is worth noting that this documentary was roundly criticised by cultural intermediaries like Nichols and Walker. Nichols wrote “to my mind it was an ill- thought-through fairytale, marred by elisions that oversimplified the fascinating world of Brisbane and the Saints in the late 1970s and thus distorted it” (Nichols 2016, 544).

Clinton Walker agreed—despite appearing in the documentary as a talking head— labelling it “a dog's breakfast that manages to pull off the difficult feat of taking great material and making a meal of it, or worse, missing the point altogether”. Walker then referred his readers to another cultural intermediaries’ work by stating “you’d do much better to read Andrew Stafford’s justly celebrated book Pig City—why didn’t they just make a film of that?” (Walker 2015c).

This is not the place to extend the criticism of the documentary any further, other than to say that being an ABC-TV production, its limited budget most likely impacted the quality of the research, resources, and production values. What is most relevant here is to consider why the cultural intermediaries (including those involved in its production) reacted in such a way. Ultimately, it is a question of legitimacy and sense

96 The Brisbane Sound of ownership of a scene and subcultural knowledge (compare Hibbett’s 2005 study of indie-rock). When the cultural intermediaries publicly and vociferously classify the documentary as inaccurate and distasteful, they are actually spotlighting and reinforcing their own cultural capital; they would have done a better job because they are legitimate and authoritative arbiters—even protectors—of knowledge about The

Saints and the late 1970s Brisbane music scene. What is more compelling is that although they compete within the same field and for the same capital resources, there is a sense of solidarity and mutual respect amongst these cultural intermediaries. So when external agents attempt to step into the field of Brisbane music history, any missteps or perceived misrepresentation of facts are seized upon. This carelessness is seen as diminishing the cultural importance—or near deification—of the subjects being misrepresented.

In his recent autobiography Grant and I, Forster (2016) elaborated further on the creation of the Striped Sunlight Sound. Once again Forster provides a synaesthetic poetic of its origin, and, once again, grafts the trope Brisbane Sound to the description:

[The Dylan Playboy interview] got me thinking of descriptions for our music. A few weeks later I came up with ‘that striped sunlight sound’… The phrase endured, and became a term for a bright, poppy Brisbane Sound with winsome or witty lyrics attached, which our first single helped to inspire. (Forster 2016, 51)

That Striped Sunlight Sound Rebooted

As a marker of Brisbane’s cultural memory, the Striped Sunlight Sound is a renascent classification that has been applied at an intergenerational level to new music. Stafford described the 1992 release of Custard’s Buttercup/Bedford EP as having a “lightness of touch [that] could hardly have been more refreshing. It was the striped sunlight sound all over again” (Stafford 2004, 243). Stafford also labelled contemporary artist Jeremy Neale as the most recent representative of the Sound:

The Brisbane Sound 97 The [Striped Sunlight] sound was bright, but dappled with shadows. It was a sound that encompassed everything from the Monkees to the Lovin' Spoonful to Jonathan Richman, of cult '70s group the Modern Lovers, onwards to Devo. In the 1990s, the representatives of this sound were Custard. Right now, it's Jeremy Neale, whose single In Stranger Times (featuring another Brisbane group, the all-female Go Violets) is my single of the year for 2013. (Stafford 2013)

The following year, Mengel concurred with Stafford’s consecration of Jeremy

Neale. Mengel also added Babaganouj—another recent band to emerge from the

Brisbane indie-rock scene—stating “with artists such as Jeremy Neale and Babaganouj coming through, that Brisbane striped sunlight sound is alive and well” (2014).

I cite these examples simply to provide context to the ways tropes such as the

Brisbane Sound evolve and become ingrained in a city’s cultural memory as permeable and fluid markers of distinction. Over time their application gets looser, and they start to tell us less about music and more about those who are still using them. It may be possible to trace a musical evolution, from the earliest Brisbane Sound through to these recent bands, but this remains beyond the scope of this study. As stated earlier, the primary focus of this project is the discourse and music of the original Brisbane Sound produced by six bands between 1978 and 1983. However, in Chapter 9: Conclusions,

I propose ways that a study of the trope over a longer period of time could be approached.

Conclusion

This chapter provides background information about two key groups: the people who are primarily responsible for constructing the concept of the Brisbane Sound, and the music and bands labelled as possessing the Brisbane Sound. I identified six key cultural intermediaries, based on the number of quotes attributed to them as well as their field position and cultural capital. I then established a primary corpus of Brisbane

98 The Brisbane Sound Sound bands and their songs. I showed how The Go-Betweens are not only considered the most prototypical Brisbane Sound band, they also constructed their own trope, the

‘Striped Sunlight Sound’ that is often used synonymously with the Brisbane Sound.

Explanations of this trope are romantic and poetic, but rarely pinpoint what it actually sounds like.

The following chapter outlines the research design for this thesis, the various methods and methodologies I use to approach the research question, and ways of approaching the analysis of popular songs by breaking them down into their constituent parts.

The Brisbane Sound 99

Chapter 5: Research Design

Introduction

In this thesis I approach the question ‘what does the Brisbane Sound sound like?’ using methods adapted from three fields: cultural studies, musicology and creative practice. Despite the breadth of this interdisciplinary approach, my ideological aim is to make the findings as accessible as possible to the broadest possible readership. The findings of the discourse analysis do not require the reader to possess a background in linguistics or communication studies. Similarly, although I am drawing on my education in musicology and applying musicological methods to my analyses, I make the findings more accessible by including music examples alongside basic notated reductions.

Discourse Analysis

The term ‘discourse’ carries many meanings, and discourse analyses have the potential of being “an excluding shibboleth which does little to make academic research accessible or relevant to people who do not work or study in the social sciences” (Baker and McEnery 2015, 3). This is one of the esoteric hazards I aim to avoid as part of my approach, so I work from the broad and accessible definition of discourse as “a group of statements which provides a language for talking about—a way of representing the knowledge about—a particular topic at a particular historical moment” (Hall 1997, 291).

The concordance table and discourse analysis show how, when and by whom the

Brisbane Sound is constructed, represented and maintained in various media platforms. I use the term media to refer holistically to all forms of written or spoken

The Brisbane Sound 101 communication as it appears in music journalism, music criticism, music reviews, biographical novels, liner notes for audio recordings, transcripts of audio and video interviews, video recordings, text-based posters and so on. The sources are mostly literary rather than oral. The few oral sources included are predominantly interviews with relevant agents from radio, television, or talking-heads for music documentaries.

For readability these have been transcribed in a basic, ‘naturalised’ way that excludes the complex coding systems seen in some linguistic analyses (syntax, phonetics, prosody, voice inflections, and so on). I acknowledge that spoken and written English language are not the only forms of communication, and that images and objects can also act as representational systems that carry meaning (Hall 1997, 1). However, the vast majority of representations of the Brisbane Sound are communicated through written and spoken English. Thus, this study largely omits analyses of visual imagery such as posters, album covers and video clips.

Discourse Methodology

The Discourse Analysis does not definitively answer the question ‘What is the

Brisbane Sound?’ As Hall (1997, 9) argues:

work in this area is bound to be interpretive—a debate between, not who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’, but between equally plausible, though sometimes competing and contested, meanings and interpretations… One soon discovers that meaning is not straightforward or transparent… It is a slippery customer, changing and shifting with context, usage and historical circumstances. It is therefore never finally fixed.

It is the subjectivity and ‘slipperiness’ of the Brisbane Sound’s meaning that have generated the discursive practices since the early 1980s.

Discourse and Power

Underpinning this approach are questions about the consequences of any discourse, such as ‘who benefits?’ and ‘who is potentially disempowered?’ This is a

102 The Brisbane Sound methodology commonly associated with Critical Discourse Analysis (or CDA) (Baker and McEnery 2015, 3). However, Bourdieu’s theories of capital are equally effective in illuminating how power operates in a discourse, especially in taken-for-granted ways. Bourdieu contends that by contributing to discourse, agents compete for, and exchange, various forms of capital. Each field values each form of capital differently.

The amount of power an agent possesses in a field is dependent on how much of the valued type of capital they have accrued (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 145).

In the Brisbane Sound discourse, there are a number of ways that power is accrued and expressed by the cultural intermediaries through their habituses. First, there is a dialectic between the majority of agents whose discursive practice implicitly promotes the existence of the Brisbane Sound, and a minority of agents that explicitly deny its existence according to the heterogeneity argument38. Bourdieu argues that for an agent to be afforded the power to consecrate something as ‘legitimate’ they must have accrued sufficient symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1991, 238). In this case, labelling a band or their music as representative of the Brisbane Sound is to legitimise it. Thus, power is possessed by the legitimators and expressed in the act of legitimation.

However, although the agents who deny the Brisbane Sound are in the minority, compared to the overwhelming majority of agents who promote its existence, this does not mean they possess less power or symbolic capital. Rather, it can be empowering to display an intellectually autonomous habitus—questioning the status quo acts as a marker of distinction (Bourdieu 1984).

38 The heterogeneity argument is that the range of bands that have come out of Brisbane is too diverse for such a category to work. See Andrew Stafford (previous chapter).

The Brisbane Sound 103 Discourse and Memory

Early in this project I planned to undertake primary source research in the form of semi-formal interviews with the some of the cultural intermediaries. This could produce new data, but also give agents the opportunity to clarify or expand the descriptions they had previously authored. I have acquired considerable social capital resources so accessing these people would not have been difficult and I was also granted the ethics approval to conduct interviews with human participants. However, as this thesis progressed, I decided to forgo this method of data collection and rely on

“naturally occurring” data from pre-existing, secondary sources (Baker and McEnery

2015, 4). The consequence of all this is that—for this type of historic research— primary interview data can distort or at best dilute the findings. So I have concentrated on gathering naturalistic, pre-existing and historical secondary sources of data instead.

Another benefit of this approach is that it bypasses any ethical concerns raised from interviewing human participants, because secondary discourse analysis “seldom has any effect on the subject being studied” (Babbie 2013, 342). It also means data can be gathered in a “flexible, ethically sensitive and unobtrusive” manner from inaccessible participants in publicly available online communities and forums (Kozinets 2002, 70).

Over time I understood that not only were interviews with primary sources unnecessary, but they may produce dubious or superfluous data. Kuipers (2014) discusses how interviewing cultural intermediaries in particular can be problematic:

Whereas interviews often are a good way to get confidential information or to uncover previously unarticulated meanings, interviews with cultural intermediaries often are very ‘front-stage’ affairs. It is difficult to get respondents away from the polished accounts they feel comfortable telling, and they are skilled at avoiding unwanted questions. (Kuipers 2014, 55)

104 The Brisbane Sound These subversions are enabled in the habitus of cultural intermediaries compared to the general public who are not competing for various capital resources. Cultural intermediaries are “salient memory agents who aspire to provide their own readings of the collective past” (Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg 2011, 10). But even the minds of salient memory agents are fallible. In the introduction to Dig: Australian Rock and

Pop Music 1960-1985 (2016) cultural intermediary David Nichols outlines the

“inherent weakness” on relying on an agent’s recollections about previously held positions or statements:

On a number of occasions, while seeking clarification on a particular statement from decades ago, I was told by a musician that they were actually teasing, joking with, or lying to the journalist in question. (Nichols 2016, 1)

I suggest that rather than ‘joking’, they are attempting to reconfigure how their individual cultural memory and mythscape is documented (Bennett and Rogers 2014,

304). As a cultural intermediary’s field position changes over time, so might their views on particular issues. If a cultural intermediary is also a cultural producer (for example, a self-referential musician such as Robert Forster), this presents another problem. John Caldwell (2008, 351) advises scholars to “remain appropriately skeptical” about gathering interview data from cultural producers as their responses will always carry an undercurrent of promotion and marketing (or ‘spin’). Cultural producers are likely to choose words carefully with the conscious understanding that what they say may impact the reception of whatever film or record they are currently promoting. Finally, as the Brisbane music industry is small and highly interconnected, it has come to my attention that many of the local cultural intermediaries are already aware of my thesis aims and objectives. This could bias their responses to provide me with ‘what I want to hear’ and also be altered to sound more authoritative, knowing that their opinions will be documented in an academic account of the Brisbane Sound.

The Brisbane Sound 105 With all this in mind, the following section details the methods and process I used for gathering naturally occurring data.

Discourse Methods

I took an inductive and flexible approach to the discourse—methods emerged purposively and were gradually refined, paralleling my development as an early career researcher. Over time I trialled and either committed to, or dispensed with, several online tools and software programs to assist in the data collection and management process.

I started by trawling the internet to locate data that was electronically readable.

I understood that many references to the early Brisbane Sound were made prior to the digital age. However, I still considered the internet to be the most useful resource for recent and also historic or archived contemporary references as well as being the most practical and familiar. Google’s advanced search located websites that contained the exact phrase Brisbane Sound by using double quotation marks [“Brisbane Sound”].

Each page was intuitively assessed for suitability by its title and short description

(otherwise known as a ‘snippet’) before proceeding to the collection phase.

Early on I discovered the trope ‘Striped Sunlight Sound’ was used as a synonym for ‘Brisbane Sound’. I replicated the search method detailed above to [“Striped

Sunlight Sound”]. This mostly resulted in websites that sold the eponymous DVD of a 2005 Go-Betweens concert. However, I did locate a few instances of the general concept ‘Brisbane is/has a Sound’ that the exact-phrase search missed. These were also added to the concordance table.

The Google advanced search produced numerous hits on online newspapers, niche music press, fan forums, blogs, and web 2.0 based commentary. Some references

106 The Brisbane Sound contained obsolete links—an increasingly common problem known as ‘link rot’. Most could be retrieved via the wayback machine Internet Archive.

I also searched through digitised copies of the two most important Brisbane street press magazines—Rave and Time Off , as well as local, national and international newspapers archives. Finally, I searched YouTube for interviews and documentaries related to the thesis topic and transcribed any relevant statements.

By the second year of the study, this data gathering reached the point of

‘saturation’ (Glaser and Strauss 1967, 61). By this I mean that collecting any more quotes about the Brisbane Sound would not contribute any additional information. The final quotes tally totalled 130 specific references from 88 sources dating from 1965 to

2017 (See Concordance Table Appendix B). Mason (2010, 1) suggests a sample of this size ensures that “most or all of the perceptions that might be important” are documented, but “there is a point of diminishing return to a qualitative sample—as the study goes on more data does not necessarily lead to more information”. Indeed, some quotes seemed to repeat or rework previous claims made by other agents.

The numbers above suggest a “quantitative flavour” but the final tally is largely immaterial (Baker and McEnery 2015, 2). Instead, like Mason (2010, 1) I argue that

“one occurrence of the data is potentially as useful as many” to understand the discourse. This is especially the case when we overlay Bourdieu’s theories of capital to assess a quote’s usefulness. For Bourdieu, the legitimised power of each agent’s

“linguistic utterances” are dependent on the symbolic capital that an agent possesses within the field (Thompson and Bourdieu 1991, 18). I also consider the structural legitimacy of the various media platforms through which these utterances are made.

For example, a single quote by a recognised cultural intermediary in a legitimated

The Brisbane Sound 107 platform such as Rolling Stone is qualitatively more ‘useful’ for my purposes than many quotes by casual observers in less recognised media platforms.

Relevant quotes were then arranged in a Concordance Table. A concordance table is “simply a table of all the occurrences of a word, phrase or other linguistic feature in a corpus, occurring with a few words of context either side” (Baker and

McEnery 2015, 2-3). Frequently, in any given article, interview, webpage and so on, direct references to the Brisbane Sound made up only a fraction the content. Thus, it was necessary to apply my own “subjective interpretation” to extract what padding was necessary to contextualise each reference (Hsieh and Shannon 2005, 1278). The average word count for these extracts is seventy-five. The longest extract contains five hundred and eight words, which is significantly greater than the next longest at two hundred and twenty-one words. This is because the longest extract is a protracted diatribe by one of the key cultural intermediaries, Robert Foster; its lengthiness is pertinent to the discussion. The shortest extract in the concordance table contains nine words.

I acknowledge the limitations of relying on internet-based sources for the majority of the data collection. References to the Brisbane Sound must be written or spoken, and recorded as text, audio or video in order to be collected and analysed. In recent years though, historic print media has been increasingly digitised and uploaded to the internet and is accessible to researchers such as myself either through established institutions and libraries, or by personal ‘DIY cultural archivists’ (Bennett and Rogers

2014). An example is the recently digitised versions of Roadrunner, an Australian rock magazine that “chronicled the glory days of Australian post-punk and ‘pub rock’ music in the period 1978-83” (Robertson 2017). In 2017, Donald Robertson, one of the

108 The Brisbane Sound magazine’s original editors, released all forty-eight issues from his own personal collection to the University of Wollongong for digital archiving and public access39.

Nevertheless, there is probably a significant amount of print media from the

Brisbane Sound period that has not been digitised. Furthermore, it is likely that the

Brisbane Sound was debated and mythologised in unrecorded personal conversations.

This is also implied in the way ‘so-called’ prefaces some Brisbane Sound quotes

(whilst also indicating the trope’s contentious nature) (for example, see Stafford, 2004;

Tahiraj 2008; Loveday, 2011). This can be seen in the quote below where Grant

McLennan refers to a conversation between himself and a fellow Brisbane Sound musician:

The Brisbane Sound thing—I was talking to Dave McCormack from Custard about this, and he was a big fan of The Go-Betweens, and there’s a lot of bands that dedicate themselves to songs basically. (McLennan interviewed in Walker 2005)

One of the key findings that supports this thesis’ problem statement—that language is an inefficient and problematic way of describing music as sound—is demonstrated in how prevalent figurative language is used to describe what the

Brisbane Sound sounds like. The metaphor is the most common linguistic device used in place of any explicit explanation of the sound40. This dissertation does not provide a survey of the vast and complex field of sociolinguistics or cognitive linguistics.

Metaphor theory alone is a massive field that dates back to at least Aristotle, who considered the mastery of metaphors in speech as ‘a mark of genius’. However, a brief

39 The digital editions of Roadrunner are currently available at http://ro.uow.edu.au/roadrunner/ 40 In this thesis, like Ortony (1975, 52), I refrain from making distinctions between metaphors and similes; I consider similes as a kind of metaphor.

The Brisbane Sound 109 overview of the term ‘conceptual metaphor’ is useful here to show how cultural intermediaries explain the Brisbane Sound in non-musical ways.

The most cited metaphor theorists are George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In their seminal study, Metaphors We Live By (1980b/2001), Lakoff and Johnson showed how everyday people use conceptual metaphors in everyday English language, often without even realising it. Due to the ineffable qualities of music, conceptual metaphors are common in music writing. When agents attempt to describe what the Brisbane

Sound sounds like, they frequently rely on conceptual metaphors. The most common conceptual metaphors are uses as sub-headings to structure the Discourse Analysis in

Chapter 5.

Music Analysis

Methodology and Methods

This thesis aims to locate and elucidate the most common claims about the

Brisbane Sound within the music. These most common claims are identified in the discourse analysis chapter and these serve as guidelines for the music analysis.

Brackett (1995, 18) posits that discourses offer the ideal tool for choosing what to emphasise in music analyses, as they “give us a clue as to what codes are activated by the song[s], and to the range of possible connotations”. Underlying this approach is the assumption that the agents who describe the Brisbane Sound know what they are talking about, and their claims are accurate.

I put forth that they do; this knowledge capital is reflected in the way many of them are commissioned to write or talk about music, from all sorts of places and musical sounds. The trouble is, music journalists, biographers and critics are not musicologists. So, whilst their descriptions of the Brisbane Sound music maybe

110 The Brisbane Sound guileless, they are usually figurative, and lack the explicit details of musical functions that music analyses are good at realising.

Part of the criticism of popular musicology is that its methods are esoteric. The technical jargon and “gobbledygook” that come with music analyses are highly exclusionary to those outside the discipline (Tagg 2013, 117). It doesn’t help matters that the methods and ‘languages’ that musicologists employ vary widely within the field itself. For example, there is traditional Western-art staff notation; reductive

Schenkerian analysis; graphic notation; computer assisted empirical (or quantitative) musicology; and, qualitative analysis of digital audio spectrograms, and many other methods. As a result, the findings of musicological studies remain abstruse to the majority of readers who lack formal musical training necessary to interpret them

(Brackett 2002, 65). Yet this does not have to be the case. I believe musicological outcomes can be better explained—and therefore understood by the majority of music scholars—by using music to explain music.

Music Analysis as Notation

The music analysis chapter includes some traditional notated reductions. The notated reductions are descriptive, rather than prescriptive. This essentially means they are not meant as directions for performance, as Western notation has been traditionally employed. Rather, they are my interpretations of an already given recorded performance. Using the Western staff notations is something that counters my ideological position of attempting to avoid esotericism at all turns. I acknowledge that for some readers who do not have the necessary training to interpret them, they will be meaningless. Notated transcriptions of recordings are already on the precipice of being meaningless because much of the meaning in popular recordings lies in what cannot be notated (Keil 1987, 87). When notation is used, it can only display data “in relative

The Brisbane Sound 111 terms, and [aspects such as] timbre, phrasing, and a whole host of minute inflections— that is, the way that music sounds… are conveyed even less accurately by Western notation” (Brackett 1995, 28). As such, it is used sparingly and premised on the fact that there are few better ways to convey certain types of musical features such as basic melodic functions. Where I can, I use graphical means to display pertinent musical features, rather than notation. This is especially useful to indicate rhythmic reductions of motifs or patterns. It is hoped that by graphically representing rhythm as a structure according to the more familiar rows and tables seen in spreadsheets, their understanding will be more apparent to readers unfamiliar with notation.

Music About Language

Music Analysis as Music

The thing that saves notation from being a futile exercise is when a reader has access to the music as sound, in order to compare. This still requires an elementary understanding of what the dots and lines of notation mean. However, being able to

‘hear’ a notated score, without any reference to music, is a competence that takes several years of training. This is the main reason the notated examples cited in music analysis are supported by musical examples as sound. These are in the form of short snippets of songs taken from the Brisbane Sound corpus that I re-recorded myself. I re-recorded them for a number of reasons. First, it is a pragmatic way of circumnavigating the need to obtain mechanical license permissions to include copyrighted music in this thesis. Second, some of the songs are obscure and rare41, and therefore inaccessible to most readers to employ as aural guides for the notated

41 Indeed, some of the rarest songs I analysed took me over a year to acquire. However, several are currently available on Spotify, should a reader wish to hear the original recordings.

112 The Brisbane Sound examples. The re-recordings serve to fill in for these songs. Third, reverse engineering the songs in order to re-record them proved to be an extremely insightful tool for music analysis.

Finally, this unlocked ‘codes’ within the Brisbane Sound that became an inspirational set of guidelines—a songwriting toolkit—for the formation of the creative works. The main aim of the creative works attached to this thesis is to act as aural findings. It does so by using music to identify and explain the codes that are identified in the music analysis, plus a plethora of other ‘hidden’ codes that written or notated forms of language fail to convey.

Hans Keller’s ‘Functional Analysis’

This methodology has a precedent in Hans Keller’s ‘Functional Analysis’.

Keller’s method aimed to show the inherent unity between seemingly disparate themes within a single work of music. He did so not by using words, but by composing new music that provided a ‘musical discussion’ of the original source. Keller explained his methodology as follows:

One of the main motives which made me develop a wordless method of musical analysis (functional analysis) was that I came to realise that the quality, and especially the comprehensiveness, of verbal analysis varies in inverse ration to its readability. Though writing (and speaking) words is part of my life, it seems ever more likely to me that functional analysis, in which nothing is said or read, everything played, is the one ideal way of writing about music. It is notes about notes, as literary criticism is words about words. (Keller 1994, 8)

Musicologist Philip Tagg has maintained a similar methodology by creating hundreds of videos that help explain—using audio-visual methods rather than notation—the examples he cites in his semiotic music analyses.

The Brisbane Sound 113 Breaking Down a Pop-Rock Song

Popular songs are holistic and complex carriers of aural semiotic meanings. Any method of analysis ultimately requires the analyst to breakdown a song into manageable, localised blocks of focus. The upside to analysing pop songs is that they are essentially built on sections that broadly repeat and narrowly change. Thus, presenting an analysis of a short pattern or motif can often serve as an of aural metonym for other sections of the song. The analysis of a recording can be imagined according to how it functions or evolves across three planes: the vertical, the horizontal and the plane of depth (i.e. front to back). The vertical plane covers how synchronic sounds are pitched and layered on a frequency scale from low to high42. For musicologists, the vertical plane primarily encompasses the domains of pitch, harmony and texture. Audio engineers also imagine sound on a vertical plane, as when they talk about using equalisation to adjust the ‘tops’ of a sound, boosting the low-mids, and so on.

The temporal domain can be thought of along a horizontal axis. Western minds are conditioned to imagining how something evolves chronologically from left to right, as on a graphical timeline or words on a page. A two-dimensional timeline is commonly used to represent the temporal attributes of music in editing or mixing software such as Pro Tools. The primary concern of musicologists on the horizontal plane is melodies. They only function as melodies, rather than discrete pitches of varying durations, because of the relation between those pitches and others over time.

42 Several scholars have noted that the way we attribute the values of ‘low’ and ‘high’ to pitches is a conceptual metaphor and has no bearing in reality. Possible theories as to why include relating how we hear certain sounds in nature, with high pitched birds being above us, and the low rumble of an earthquake being below us.

114 The Brisbane Sound Other temporally defined aspects include how a song is structured (its form), its tempo (beats per minute or BPM), its time signature(s) and rhythmic patterns. Form is simply “the order in which events happen” (Moore 2012, 51). On the large scale, form might designate how a song is structured according to a pattern of sections. Theses sections are typically labelled as introduction, verse, choruses, bridge, break, and outro/fadeout. Smaller rhythmic patterns are usually analysed at the bar (US measure), beat and sub-beat level. Some scholars have attempted analyses that drill down further.

Tagg (2013, 234) adapted Charles Seeger’s concept of the museme to connote the smallest musical unit that carries meaning. Keil (1987, 1994) showed how an affective

‘groove’ is predicated on infinitesimal rhythmic variations, or what he called

“participatory discrepancies”. However, because these micro-structures are virtually impossible to convey in words or notated music, they are largely avoided.

Phonomusicologists and sound engineers typically label the durational aspects of sound according to the parameters of its attack, decay, sustain and release (ADSR) times.

The vertical and horizontal planes are easy to imagine, but a song’s depth is slightly more abstract. Depth is a familiar concept for sound engineers, who routinely adjust the perceived43 depth of a sound source by understanding and manipulating concepts like the proximity effect, amplitude (volume) and various spatial effects such as reverb and delay. For example, a voice with no reverb (room sound) and preserved low frequencies will sound much ‘closer’ than a softer voice with a cathedral reverb

43 Again, like a high or low sound, depth in recorded music is only perceived as such. Sounds that appear closer or further are emitted from equidistant speakers or headphones.

The Brisbane Sound 115 and lack of bass frequencies. Depth has only recently become a concern for musicologists, pioneered by Allan F. Moore and his concept of the ‘soundbox’.

It should be remembered that we do not hear songs along these three planes.

Indeed, most of what makes the vertically structured pitches, harmony, frequencies, and texture meaningful is how, like melody and rhythm, they unfold in time and relative to what precedes and follows them. This is one of the key benefits of using music to explain music—all of the constituent musical codes can be presented at the same time, over time. Yet in order to make sense of a songs’ constituent parts, they need to be separated out and dealt with individually. These parts also require a system of organisation. There are a number of ways such studies have been structured.

Large-scale (book length) popular musicology texts deal with breaking down songs in different ways. Moore’s Song Means (2012) is divided in to chapters labelled

Shape, Form, Delivery, Style, Friction, and Persona. Shape covers instrumentation (or vertical layers), stereo field placement (soundbox) and timbre. Form concerns the horizontal, temporal aspects of songs such those discussed above. Delivery focuses mainly on melody, and, being a study of popular songs, melody as a vocal performance. Style is self-evident and can be informed by the “decision a band may make to play a song in, for instance, a ‘rock’ style rather than a ‘country’ style” (2012,

120). I find this interesting, because Moore maintains throughout the book that he is concerned with how listeners interpret music to mean something (reception) rather than emphasising the creative agency of musicians (production). Friction is the concept that is most relevant to my discussion, and is dealt with further below, but for now it relates to creative decisions that result in a schism between what listeners expect to hear, and how a song affectively disrupts those expectations. Persona focuses on the ‘idiolect’ of singers and their performance style.

116 The Brisbane Sound Pop-Rock Instrumentation: Moore’s (1993) Four Layers

In an earlier text, Moore (1993) provided a useful five-part model for breaking down how pop-rock songs are structured by examining the four main layers of instrumentation, and how these layers are placed in the ‘soundbox’—the spatial dimension—during recording and production. The four layers are the primary melodic, harmonic filler, functional bass, and the explicit beat layers. In a typical rock band, these layers accord to the specific roles that particular instruments and voices fulfil.

They may be arranged according to the following heuristic:

First, the ‘primary melodic layer’ is the main, memorable tune of a song. For the most part the melody is carried by a vocalist singing lyrics, but this layer is commonly, intermittently transferred to other instruments such as a lead guitar solo or riff.

Importantly, though, Moore maintains that pitch, in the traditional musicological sense of the word, is not the “primary domain” in pop-rock (1993, 238). What Moore means is that analysing and notating a song’s melody in terms of its discrete pitches tells us little about how a pop-rock song’s melody carries meaning. Far more illuminating is

The Brisbane Sound 117 the vocal register (range), expression of the singer, the tone and timbre of their voice that carries the melody, rather than the melody itself or even the lyrics (Frith 1987,

143; Moore 1993, 225). Yet these qualities are also the most ineffable: those of us who have heard Rod Stewart sing can ‘hear’ the distinctive texture of his voice in our heads, for example. But to describe these qualities to someone who has never heard him sing, we must rely on vague adjectives like ‘raspy’, doing little to communicate the sound we hear to their head.

Second, the ‘functional bass layer’ is monophonic (one note at a time), and usually serves to reinforce the lowest (root) notes of chords established by the harmonic filler layer (e.g. guitar) and is usually played on a bass guitar. Thus, the bass typically fills out the lower frequencies of a band’s sound.

Third, the ‘explicit beat layer’ provides the rhythmic foundation and is usually played on a drum kit. Because the drum kit is played by a single musician, it is regarded as a single instrument even though it is technically a group of individual, (ostensibly) un-pitched, drums and cymbals. The rhythmic pattern of the beat layer’s kick44 drum typically synchronises with the bass layer.

Fourth, the ‘harmonic filler layer’ is the polyphonic (or chordal) accompaniment to the melodic layer and is most typically established by rhythm guitarists in rock (and rock’s derivatives). Of course, in pop music, it is also common for the harmonic filler layer to be established by pianists (such as Elton John). The choice of instruments for the harmonic filler layer, Moore suggests (2012, 21), may have “the greatest impact on the attribution of a particular style by any naive listener”. But the harmonic filler

44 The terms ‘kick’ and ‘bass’ drum are equivalent.

118 The Brisbane Sound layer is also very commonly stacked—it may be comprised of a combination of guitars, pianos, organs or other keyboard instruments, vocal harmonies, brass sections, string quartets and even entire orchestral arrangements (Moore 2012, 21).

However, it is not just the aggregate of the layers that results in how a song sounds, but crucially, how those instruments are placed in the four-dimensional sonic space. Moore terms these dimensions ‘soundbox’—“a heuristic model of the way sound-source location works in recordings, acting as a virtual spatial ‘enclosure’ for the mapping of sources” (Moore 2012, 31). We perceive the placement of layers in a stereo recording from left to right according to how they are panned (the stereo image) and also in terms of distance and depth. Therefore, the density of a song—its thickness or thinness—is also determined by the placement of the layers in the soundbox. A thin sounding song may have a soundbox with many textural “holes” in it (Moore 2012,

35ff.).

Pop-Rock Songs as a Process: Burns’ Tripartite Model

I also find Burns’ tripartite45 of the musical, performance and production processes of the recorded popular song particularly appealing and accessible (1987,

2–3). Burns created a list to support his (now relatively aged) study of pop music

‘hooks’, but they work beyond this narrow scope. I am drawn to them because his categories frame and mirror the three stages of a song’s development (songwriting, recording as performance, production). I am, after all, a songwriter and a producer as well as an academic, so my natural inclination is towards heuristic systems that are

45 In Burns’ original paper, these three groupings are further divided into “song-as-idea” (songwriting) and “the eventual product made from the idea” (performance and production) (1987, 18). Burns (1987, 18) admits these distinctions are “imperfect” but I consider them superfluous, and their boundaries problematic. Many bands (most famously, U2) write and record songs concurrently. This also ignores the role of the creative recording producer, who is often involved in re-writing or editing ‘songs as ideas’. So, I think the three subcategories of music, performance, and production are sufficient.

The Brisbane Sound 119 based on the development of songs, rather than ways they are received (for a discussion of this dichotomy see Zagorski-Thomas 2014, 26-29). Viewing music as a process rather than a product reflects Small concept of ‘musicking’ (Small 1998). But Burn’s concepts are not obscured by such neologisms or analytic language that has no relationship to how musicians and producers talk.

I transposed Burns’ three lists into a Venn-like schematic diagram to emphasise that the three elements should not be considered discrete creative processes—in reality, many of the elements overlap. I have also added a few key attributes to each category in the schematic that Burns overlooked.

Songwriting • Rhythm • Melody • Harmony • Lyrics • Structure (Form)

Performance Production • Frequency spectrum • Instrumentation/technology • Editing • Idiolect • Mixing • Competence • Stereo Image • Tempo • Depth • Performance dynamics • Effects • Performance fragility • Output format

Pop-rock songs generally begin in the songwriting bubble—also known as the

‘demo’ writing stage—where an artist or band come up with the initial ideas for a song.

It is widely known that the mechanics and order of this process vary, to the point where it is now a music journalism cliché to ask a songwriter whether they start with a melody, chord progression or lyrics. A ballpark tempo is also usually determined.

120 The Brisbane Sound Songs are edited: musical and lyrical ideas are refined, rearranged or dispensed with entirely. Many songwriters record this process in some format for later reference.

The performance bubble begins in a rehearsal studio prior to the final performances in the recording studio. Instrumentation is decided (perhaps also specific brands or types). It is helpful to think of the performance bubble as the difference between an original song recording (or live performance) and a cover version by other artists. The songwriting bubble may be consistent between the two versions, but the end product will be different, due to idiolect, competence, fragility and physiology.

Dynamics—how loud and soft instruments or sections are relative to one another—are also a critical part of how songwriting is realised through performance.

The production bubble is usually the third and final stage of the pop song process, when the songwriting and performance stages are realised as a (usually stereo) audio recording. In music styles such as folk, rock, jazz and country, the aim is often to simulate the sound of a live performance through panning46 and effects (such as reverb). However, the production bubble is now frequently and increasingly used as a songwriting and performance tool, such that the bubble boundaries of modern pop music may be entirely blurred.

Lyrical Analysis

Throughout this thesis I have reiterated that the primary focus of this project is what the Brisbane Sound sounds like. With this in mind, I have actively chosen to limit my focus to the musical aspects of the sound, and do not provide a detailed account of

46 For example, when panning—the placement of instruments across the stereo field from left to right—some mix engineers will ‘place’ a drumkit as if a (right handed) drummer is actually facing the listener, with their hi-hat on the right, and floor tom to the left. Similarly, guitars are often panned more to the right or left, to simulate the placement of these performers on a stage.

The Brisbane Sound 121 the lyrics. Popular music studies and subcultural studies of music mostly focus on the sociological aspects of music; when there is a direct engagement with the music, it tends to extend only as far as the lyrics. This can be attributed to the relative ease of using language to interpret language, compared to the incommensurate domain of sound.

Music analyses require a particular set of listening skills and other technical competencies. If a scholar does not have a background as musicologist or musician, it is entirely natural that they defer to the accessible and familiar language of lyrics as their primary focus; the music’s “persistent ineffability …[means] that many commentators write as if it is merely a pleasant backdrop to the lyrics” (Moore 1993,

225). This project is my attempt to bridge the gap between popular musicology and popular music studies by concentrating on the musicological components of the

Brisbane Sound and presenting these findings as music.

In regards to music and place, cultural geographers, for instance, will frequently use textual analysis of lyrics to try to locate and map geographic themes. Jarvis, an early music geographer, recognised the problems with this approach, noting that lyrics are “often deliberately obscured or obscure” (Jarvis 1985, 99). Obscurities in lyrics cannot be uncovered through any analytic method, field or instrument. This is because lyricist(s) themselves are often the only people who can adequately interpret or explain their intended meaning—if one even exists.

Regarding my own habitus as a music listener, I tend to hear and find meaning in the music first, then only later respond to the lyrics. This is a common trait, Walser explains (1993):

Many people talk about the ‘meaning’ of a song when what they are really discussing is

122 The Brisbane Sound only the song’s lyrics. But verbal meanings are only a fraction of whatever it is that makes musicians and fans respond to and care about popular music. (Walser 1993, 26)

This may be seen as a shortcoming for some readers. I have friends who claim much of what the Brisbane Sound means to them is in the lyrics, and should be at the forefront of any analysis. I interpret these statements as the following: a.) The Brisbane

Sound is largely The Go-Betweens sound b.) I really like The Go-Betweens, c.) what

I value most about The Go-Betweens is their lyrics. c.) therefore, the lyrics of the

Brisbane Sound is the most important, and should take precedent over the music. If accurate, there are a number of flaws with this reasoning. Most obviously, the Brisbane

Sound applies to the songs of multiple songwriters. Even if it were just The Go-

Betweens, the label only accounts for their songs from 1978-1983. Many of these early songs lacked the lyrical sophistication and poetry typically associated with their later musical output. Finally, several authors—including the cultural intermediaries—have already written extensively about The Go-Betweens’ lyrics, and it seems my own subjective interpretation would be superfluous to these accounts (for example, see

Forster 2014a, 2016; Mulvey 2016; Forster 2009, 2014b; Nichols 1997, 2003, 2016;

Stafford 2004, 2014; Neumann 2008).

Conclusion

This chapter provided details about the research design of this thesis and the two main modes of analysis in which I approach the research question, discourse and music analysis. Discourse analysis is useful to find out what people proclaim the Brisbane

Sound to be in public forms of media, and when they say it. Bourdieu’s theories help us understand why people make such claims, ultimately as an expression of power in an effort to accrue different types of capital. It is largely this struggle and maintenance of capital that makes data gathering from primary source human participants

The Brisbane Sound 123 problematic. So I decided to collect and analyse existing, historical discourse, then arranged this data into a Concordance Table for analysis.

Embedded into the research design of this thesis is the aim to make my findings accessible to scholars from multiple disciplines, not simply those with a musical background. This is why I introduce the concept of using music to explain music, by using audio examples to supplement the musical analyses, citing the precedent set by

Hans Keller. This helps avoid the criticism typically levelled at musicological analyses, that they require a specific technical language to interpret the findings.

Next, I began the process of breaking down pop songs into typical musical functions, horizontal structures and space. One way to imagine the vertical space is through Moore’s four layers of instrumentation: the primary melodic layer, the harmonic filler layer, the functional bass and explicit beat layers. During mixing, these layers are then placed in a hypothetical four-dimensional space called the ‘soundbox’.

Even the simplest sounding pop songs are complex art forms, the realisation of a series of creative decisions, individual and collective skills, knowledge and technological processes. To understand how they work, it helps to break them down into four layers that exist in a hypothetical soundbox, constructed through three non- discrete stages of songwriting, performance and production.

Finally, I provided some basis for why lyric analyses are for the most part absent from the music analysis methods in this thesis, not least that a considerable body of literature exists that already studies the lyrics of The Go-Betweens. The next chapter—

Chapter 6—outlines the findings from the Discourse Analysis stage of this thesis.

124 The Brisbane Sound Chapter 6: Discourse Analysis Findings

Introduction

The following chapter delivers findings of the way the Brisbane Sound has been constructed in public media discourses by cultural intermediaries and other agents.

Pertinent passages from the discourse are found in the Concordance Table in Appendix

B. It shows how agents frequently use figurative language to describe the Brisbane

Sound. Many of these are conceptual metaphors with the Brisbane Sound acting as the target domain and figurative language as the source (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980a).

In these cases, the sub-headings are structured according to these mappings. Where the language is more explicit, in the sense that it points to musical features of the Brisbane

Sound, it is usually by identifying ways the Brisbane Sound is unconventional. This is a relative label that only carries meaning because of the implicitly understood ‘norms’ or conventions of the pop rock music-style within which it is framed.

Temporal Spread of Brisbane Sound Quotes

Excluding a 1965 article about the Reverbs, the chronology of specific references to the Brisbane Sound discovered during the collection phase spans from

1981 to 2015. This timeline is represented by a column chart in Appendix C. The spike at 2004 is significant. There are two probable reasons for this, which can be considered sociocultural and technological conditions. Around 2004 there was a seismic shift in internet use, sometimes referred to as Web 2.0, whereby for the first time, user- generated content proliferated the internet. Discourse about music accelerated rapidly throughout the web via fan communities, forums and social networking platforms such as Myspace. At the time these platforms were recognised by popular music scholars and introduced the label ‘virtual scenes’ (see Bennett and Peterson (2004). This meant

The Brisbane Sound 125 that discussions about the Brisbane Sound, which might have once been confined to ephemeral personal conversations, suddenly became public, digitally archived, and thus retrievable discourses. This technological shift partly accounts for the higher frequency of all quotes that I could locate from 2004, relative to previous years.

Also, in 2004 the first edition of Stafford’s Pig City: From the Saints to Savage

Garden was published. The book’s timing was key to its considerable success—it represented a change in the attitude of Brisbanites47 who were beginning to see their city’s cultural heritage as worthy of retrospection. Indeed—as Stafford remarks in the foreword to the tenth anniversary edition—by 2004 Brisbane had shaken off its stigma as a cultural backwater and had entered into “a passionate love affair with itself”

(Stafford 2014).

The following sections isolate specific and frequent ways that agents use language to describe the Brisbane Sound. The below findings are mostly structured according to common themes and trends identified within the discourse, and as such, the discussion does not necessarily reflect the chronology of quotes as arranged in the concordance table. Each section begins with a selection of pertinent, exemplary quotes from the Concordance Table to provide easier reference for the discussion that follows.

The Brisbane Sound is Pop Music

Light delicate pop (Walker 1982, 66).

Folky post-punk pop (Walker 1982, 50.

Modern pop (Walker 1982, 66).

47 Brisbanites is a ‘demonym’—a collective term for the residents of a city such as Brisbane.

126 The Brisbane Sound Folksy, 1960s-influenced pop-rock (Walker 1985, 43).

Pop music (McLennan interviewed in Walker 2005, 2005).

Bright, poppy approach (Mengel 2006, 52).

An almost sub-genre of post-punk (Tahiraj 2007).

A willingness to experiment within the pop song format (Mengel 2008).

A respect for classic pop song craft (Mengel 2009, 46).

Rock’n’roll almost down to its bare bones (Forster interviewed in Mengel 2013a)

The above quotes draw attention to some of the music-styles that the Brisbane

Sound is associated. Folky and folksy, in these contexts, implies an emphasis on melodic songs in a singer/songwriter tradition, rather than connoting associations with traditional folklore, bush-ballads, or the acoustic-based protest music of the 1960s folk revival. Since the 1990s, this type of folk is more likely to be called ‘indie’ or ‘indie- folk’. Indie began as a shortened term for ‘independent’ artists not attached to a major label but broadened to encompass “a kind of revisionary folk movement—something in the ‘bad’ voice tradition of Bob Dylan and Neil Young, though less politically charged and more self-deprecating, attaining through lyrical depth and minimal production a sound that is conscientiously ‘backwoods’ or ‘bedroom’” (Hibbett 2005,

59).

Post-punk is a broad term that primarily acts as a temporal distinction for music that emerged in a number of trans-local scenes during the years 1978-1984 (Reynolds

2005). This implies a very broad range of music, which is why few scholars have attempted to define the music-style of post-punk in any specific terms. Simon

Reynolds (2005, 3) proffered the following quote; I reproduce it in full here, as many

The Brisbane Sound 127 of the attributes are remarkably similar to ways the Brisbane Sound has been described:

[Guitarists] favoured angularity, a clean and brittle spikiness. For the most part they shunned solos, apart from brief bursts of lead integrated with more rhythm-oriented playing. Instead of a ‘fat’ sound, players… preferred ‘skinny rhythm guitar… This more compact, scrawny style of playing didn’t fill every corner of the soundscape. Bands tried to do innovative things with structure, too. [They] broke up the flow with a stop-start anti- groove approach—a nervous, twitchy style dubbed ‘geometric jerky quickstep by NME writer Miles. Drummers… avoided the clichés of heavy rock and developed new rhythm patterns that were starker and often ‘inverted’ in feel. Tom-toms were typically used to create a kind of tumbling ‘tribal’ propulsion. The bass abandoned its hitherto inconspicuous supportive role and stepped forward as the lead instrument voice, fulfilling a melodic function even as it pushed the groove.

Although the Brisbane Sound is post-punk, in a temporal sense, it is most often labelled as ‘pop music’. The history of popular music scholarship abounds with protracted discussions and arguments surrounding the definition of ‘popular music’, as well as the ideological (high and low, or elitist/populist art), political, and authenticity (especially vs. ‘rock’). I will avoid adding to these ontological dichotomies and instead refer the reader to the introduction of a recent popular music studies text (for instance, see Bennett and Waksman 2015). In keeping with my methodology of foregrounding the music as object of analysis, I will, however, make a distinction between ‘popular music’ and ‘pop’ music. Pop music is one music-style within the meta-genre of popular music. Pop music therefore evokes a set of musical style conventions, whereas popular music suggests that it is too broad for such distinctions. My position also means that pop music is not necessarily commercially

‘popular’ music: pop music is made in the bedroom studios of thousands of young musicians every day, yet it may never be heard by anyone other than its creator48.

48 That is not to say that people who write pop music don’t have the ambition to become popular. It is likely that most do, and those who say they don’t, masquerade with an ‘authentic’ disinterestedness (Bourdieu 1993, 40).

128 The Brisbane Sound Yet ‘pop’ still infers an incredibly broad range of music-style. This is perhaps why many of the above labels are actually multiple, concatenated style labels. I think it is safe—in line with the agents’ views—to condense the Brisbane Sound labels down to ‘pop-rock’ (as per Walker 1985, 43). Pop rock is still a broad category but suggests a combination of a ‘poppy’ approach to songwriting within the standard rock band format (drums, electric bass and guitar(s), and vocals).

The Brisbane Sound is Sunny

It’s like running water off thin, white strips of aluminium. It’s just running off. It’s open fields, it’s sunlight … and maybe, in a moment of daring, it suggests a lost, primitive civilisation. It’s sunlight, it’s horses, it’s Indians on horses. (Forster 1979, quoted in Nichols 1997, 7)

The Brisbane music scene at the moment can easily be divided into two distinctly different camps. There is the loud, grungy guitar based bands of Screamfeeder ilk and then there is the more introspective, sunny Brisbane Sound. (Bull 1993, 15)

It was very sort of sunny. (Forster quoted in Walker 1996, 58)

[By 1978,] punk, in its clichéd pseudo-anarchic form, was virtually extinct. The Go- Betweens were to become part of the next phase, creating a softer, smoother sound more in keeping with Brisbane's energy-sapping climate [compared to The Saints]. (Cockington 2001, 218)

The first quotation above is from one of the earliest interviews with The Go-

Betweens that took place in January 1979 at local independent radio station 4ZZZ FM

(although according to Nichols (1997, 7) this interview did not make it to air). Robert

Forster used the metaphor ‘sunlight’ twice within a longer chain of metaphors to describe their music, a nod to the Striped Sunlight Sound dedication on the cover of their first EP released a year prior. As evidenced above, the Brisbane Sound is also commonly referred to as sunny. As sunlight makes no audible sound, sun/sunny/sunlight represents a complex conceptual metaphor in the form of ‘cross- domain synaesthesis’ (Tagg 2013, 62). Thus, it requires significant cognitive ‘leaps’

The Brisbane Sound 129 to equate the sensory domains we do experience with the sun (sight and temperature) with the “incommensurate” sound domain of ‘music’ (Zbikowski 2009, 96). As such it is not possible to directly interpret or translate this language in to music-speak. We can picture “short-sleeved shirt and short-wearing” musicians and how it may imply a relaxed approach to songwriting and production (Beat 2014). However, it is hard to imagine how Brisbane’s climate directly impacts the sound in any significant way. It would be interesting to compare music made in Brisbane to that of a similar climate, such as Sao Paolo, Brazil, but that is beyond the scope of the present study. The Saints were a band who produced music in the same city, in the same studio and ergo the same climate as The Go-Betweens but the latter represents the Brisbane Sound and the former does not. The reason the sun metaphor is so prevalent is not because it ‘sounds like’ anything, but because Brisbane’s identity—and by extension the whole of

Queensland—has been inextricably linked to its subtropical climate since Queensland separated from New South Wales in 1859 (Astley 1976, 253). In 1959 an anthem titled

‘The Sunshine State’ was commissioned to celebrate the centenary (Dingle 2010).

130 The Brisbane Sound The Sunshine State slogan helped shape Queensland as a brand—it can still be seen on vehicle license plates and tourism campaigns today (Glover and Cunningham

2003, 18; Salisbury 2013). In Queensland fiction writing, sunny weather themes are so prevalent that it has become something of a ‘tropical cliché’ (Astley 1976, 258;

Carson 2011). Describing the music as sunny/sun/sunlight is simply another way of grafting the music to place; it evokes a whole history of Brisbane’s cultural identity and place making being tied to its climate.

The Brisbane Sound is Naïve

Robert Forster’s songwriting had developed a lot in the year since Lee Remick. People Say was a subtler, more ‘sophisticated’ —and although the band had hardly become ‘better musicians’ they’d lost none of their ‘naïve charm’ or their ability to concisely impart their intentions… Be it due to naivety, or whatever, the Go Betweens do have an unusual approach. For instance, the roles of the band's two guitars are more or less inverted— Robert Forster's guitar is very much a r[h]ythm instrument, while Grant McLennan's bass assumes the lead. (Walker 1979, 33)

Perhaps the one characteristic that distinguishes Brisbane bands from all others is an innocence verging on naiveté. (Hutson and Sawford 1988, 7)

The territory is familiar enough - bright, jangling guitars and songs of sweet and sometimes naïve regret. This might once have been called the Brisbane Sound. (Mengel 2000)

[The Striped Sunlight Sound describes] not just The Go-Betweens themselves, but an entire strain of Brisbane indie-rock history that was fey, wry, self-conscious and naïve all at once. (Stafford 2013)

There's a certain naïveté and charm to it I guess. It's a folk-rock sound—it's a Brisbane folk-rock sound. (Forster interviewed in Bell 2015)

When the Brisbane Sound is described as naïve we can surmise that agents hear it as ‘amateurish’—the music displays a level of musical ineptitude and inexperience.

But critics often temper the disparaging overtones that come with such labels with words like ‘innocence’ and ‘charm’. Or, like Clinton Walker says in an early Go-

The Brisbane Sound 131 Betweens review “despite their obvious lack of instrumental virtuosity, they’re still very effective musically” (Walker 1979, 33). More recently Tim Steward suggested that The Go-Betweens’ “naïve approach to their songwriting… is what made them so endearing” (interviewed in Nienaber 2015). The underlying implication is that the

Brisbane Sound musicians are unpretentious and unaffected: amateurism equates to honesty and thus musical competence is impervious to criticism.

One of the earliest music critics to comment on The Go-Betweens’ ‘cracked rank amateurism’ was a critic from British music magazine NME. In reviewing Send Me A

Lullaby Dave Hill suggest “‘primitive’ might be an apt adjective. It describes both the rough beauty of their lyrics, and the way in which they play” (Hill 1982). Figurative language of this type overlaps with visual art terminology. For instance, ‘naïve art’ is a term used to designate art that is created by someone who lacks, or more provocatively intentionally rejects the formal training that a master might undergo in an art school or academy. Naïve art is sometimes referred to as “primitive art” and represents an aesthetic that values “directness and simplicity”(Walker 1992, 167).

Encarnacao (2013, 70, 79) suggests that in music ‘naïveté’ is also equated to

“unschooledness” [sic].

So, naïveté as amateurism is linked to a lack of formal music training and the limits of an autodidactic approach to learning an instrument. Bourdieu posited the cultural capital of autodidacts, compared to objectified cultural capital in the form of formal degrees or qualifications, is less stable and “may be called into question at any time” (Bourdieu 1986, 247). However, Bourdieu’s writing is a product of his time, and more recently, amateurism is something that the Brisbane Sound musicians have not only frequently acknowledged, but appear to claim as a valid ideology and way of

132 The Brisbane Sound practice. In 1999 Andrew Wilson from the Four Gods released a retrospective compilation of his entire musical output from 1980-1987 simply titled ‘Amateurism’.

In issue six of David Nichols’ Distant Violins fanzine, Andrew Wilson admitted to being “heavily influenced” by The Go-Betweens, and in part inspired by Robert

Forster’s “ability on guitar, which wasn’t very good when they started” (Nichols

1983a, 4). In issue eight, Leigh Bradshaw from Tiny Town (née Birds of Tin) also admitted “our ambition is to make records. We are none of us virtuosos and we know our limitations but we experiment widely within our own perameters [sic]” (Nichols

1983b, 2). In any narrative about The Go-Betweens’ early years, Robert Forster has continually promulgated the idea that he taught his musically inexperienced friend

Grant McLennan how to play the bass guitar. Lindy Morrison reflected that Forster and McLennan “were as technically inefficient on their guitars as I was on drums… so I guess we grew together as musicians” (Meltzer 2008). Morrison also described how during an early Go-Betweens performance in northern Sydney, the bands’ musical ineptitude resulted in them being “thrown off the stage”:

The manager just came and said ‘you can’t play’, you know. He didn’t realise it was hip not to be able to play [laughs]. (Morrison interviewed in Appel 2001)

The Brisbane Sound 133 Morrison’s assertion that a lack of technical musicianship was ‘hip’ is telling.

With its origins in jazz subcultural parlance, ‘hipness’, like cool, is a measure of

(sub)cultural capital (Thornton 1995, 164). In the field of music, the subjective cultural capital value that a society places on musical competence is dependent on both genre and temporal context. At one extreme, instrumental virtuosity is lauded and even expected in musicians. The emphasis on technical virtuosity in 20th century heavy metal and progressive rock has been well documented (Walser 1993; Kahn-Harris

2007). Folk music (like many folk traditions) seems to reside in the middle-ground; as the “music of the people” amateurism is generally accepted as natural (Encarnacao

2013, 199). At the other extreme, “bad musicianship” is “actually welcomed” in several genres and virtuosity is dismissed as artifice (Frith 1998, 57). In the mid-1970s punk was one such movement that foregrounded amateurism as an aesthetic and ideological virtue. The Brisbane Sound emerged during the tail-end of the original punk movement, and the precedent set by punk helps explain why claims of amateurism and auto-didacticism proliferate the Brisbane Sound discourse: they validate narratives of authenticity and legitimacy (Bourdieu 1993, 39).

The Authenticity of Amateurism

Much has been written about punk orthodoxy—a trans-local aesthetic and ideology that emerged in the mid-1970s out of New York and London. The Saints from

Brisbane are also frequently cited as one of the progenitors of the punk rock sound, with Bob Geldoff notoriously proclaiming that “rock music in the seventies was changed by three bands—The [Sex] Pistols, The Ramones and The Saints” (Geldoff quoted in Willsteed 2015). Ideologically, punk espoused an autonomous, do-it- yourself attitude that was seen to back the means of production and thus acted as a direct affront to the capitalist hegemony of the pop music industry (Hebdige 1979;

134 The Brisbane Sound Frith 1980, 69). This manifested in the rise of independent record labels, self- distribution channels, fanzines and other handmade ephemera such as flyers and posters. Punk lyrics often contained overtly political themes reminiscent of the 1960s folk revival (Moore 2012, 150). Hebdige (1979) imagined the ‘spectacular’ style of punk as a signifying practice— style became a form of resistance to the socio- economic conditions that faced post-war youth in Britain.

Although the Brisbane Sound musicians were not punks, they did inhabit and socialise in the local punk scene (see Bennett and Peterson 2004). Lindy Morrison has described how she met the Apartment’s Peter Milton Walsh “although he was on the margins of that scene as much as Robert [Forster] and Grant [McLennan] from The

Go-Betweens were. None of them were ever punks but they did hang around”

(Morrison quoted in Aaron 2015). By mid-1978 the punk movement was considered

“dead” in many cities including Brisbane (Walker 1978, 24). Despite its apparent ephemerality, the punk approach to musicianship (or lack thereof) persisted and had a sustained influence on Brisbane Sound musicians. Musically, punk musicians valued simplicity over complexity and considered instrumental virtuosity as artificial. Punk music provided an “anti-musical backlash” to the ostentatious production values of popular commercial music, particularly Disco and art (or progressive) rock (Moore

2012, 149). Because disco was not intended to be performed live, it was seen as symptomatic of a larger problem—that DJs could replace musicians and make live music venues redundant (Warner 2003, 47). In January 1977, Punk zine Sideburns49

(Moon 1977, 1:2) published the following graphic that demonstrated the fingering for

49 Authors including Dick Hebdige have frequently, but incorrectly, credited the fanzine Sniffin’ Glue as the original source for this graphic.

The Brisbane Sound 135 three basic guitar chord shapes A, E and G (all major) with the caption ‘now form a band’.

Hebdige (1979, 112) thought that the diagram represented “the single most inspired item of propaganda produced by the [punk] subculture—the definitive statement of punk’s do-it-yourself philosophy”. Geographically, punk’s formation was heterogenous. In New York, many writers attribute punk’s emergence to the

“decadent/libertarian” example set by 1960s garage bands including The Velvet

Underground (Moore 2012, 149; see also Prinz 2014, 583). The Velvet Underground’s influence on punk was immortalised in the first edition of Punk Magazine (1976) that featured Lou Reed on the cover (Prinz 2014, 584). Robert Forster (2009, 246) cites the do-it-yourself aesthetic of The Velvet Underground as “very inspiring in a town like

Brisbane” :

They were the first band I’d ever heard who wrote songs better than they could play them. Before the Velvets, almost every band I knew was more proficient on their instruments than they were at songwriting… I’d found a band that had managed to reverse rock history. No years of cover versions behind them. No neatly rounded Beatle-esque chords. But songs. And this is exactly what The Go-Betweens tried to do at the start: we wanted to be

136 The Brisbane Sound a band that wrote great songs—but could barely play them. This was partly due to our primitive musical ability, but also because to us it seemed noble and perverse—an attempt to upset the normal balance of rock’n’roll between what songs you had and how good you were on your instruments. (Forster 2009, 244. Italics in original).

The above quote is loaded with unsupported generalisations but it achieves two main goals. First, it stymies any criticism related to The Go-Betweens’ musical abilities by implying that amateurism was an intentional strategy. When Forster refers to “no neatly rounded Beatle-esque chords” he is referring to the latently sophisticated harmonic progressions that distinguished and elevated the music of the Beatles above their contemporaries from around 1964 onward (see Moore 2012, 137). Rather—like the diagram in Sideburns—Forster implies that having a limited palette of chords to draw on is hardly a hindrance. The Velvet Underground’s interest in disinterestedness became a “noble and perverse” model to follow (Bourdieu 1993, 40; Forster 2009,

244). Second, Forster proposes that one’s songwriting prowess is inversely proportionate to the amount of time one spends learning an instrument. This fairly dubious claim ennobles the craft of songwriting over instrumental proficiency to, again, nullify any criticisms about the latter. It is important to recognise that the above quote is relatively recent, and as such, we could read that Forster is retrospectively constructing an idealised personal narrative or ‘cultural memory’ (Bennett and Rogers

2014, 304). However his position is consistent with a statement made thirty years prior:

Whenever anyone picks up a guitar, they can do two things — they can either be a guitarist, or a songwriter. Very rarely is there a combination of the two. I want to be a songwriter, and Grant does too. So we just don't sit down and practise guitar; whenever we sit down with guitars it's writing songs. (Forster quoted in Walker 1979, 33)

The Brisbane Sound is Fragile

‘Lee Remick’ was the first in a string of singles on the Able Label, run by Damien Nelson, that defined the light, fragile 'Brisbane Sound’. (Walker 1996, 58)

The music of these groups shared a fragile, sparse quality that some dubbed the Brisbane

The Brisbane Sound 137 Sound. (Stafford 2004, 95)

Very fragile, thin, deconstructed. (Pestorius interviewed in Boland 2010)

[The Go-Betweens were inspired by Velvet Underground’s] beautiful, fragile sound that Grant and I tried to capture at rehearsal in out darkened lounge room in Toowong. (Forster 2009, 247).

‘Delicate’ and ‘fragile’ are terms usually defined as the qualities of being easily broken or damaged (OED 2018). They are also used to describe a person’s weak, sensitive dispositions of mind—perhaps even someone on the precipice of insanity. I am concerned with how the metaphor fragile has been studied in relation to music.

Cohen (1997, 26) describes how one Liverpool Sound guitarist “holds his guitar high up to his chest… in a manner that conveys youthful fragility and earnestness”. Cohen’s observation of fragility is impressionistic, and implies more about youth than music; the height at which a guitar is strung has little to no impact on its sound.

Other music scholars have used fragile as an adjective to describe the emotive qualities of a singer’s vocal performance. Encarnacao describes how the “tremulous quality” of Will Oldham’s voice results in a “rawness and fragility, and if there is an element of amateurism, there is also a powerful intimacy” (2013, 183). Encarnacao makes a crucial link here—when a singer’s amateurism is perceived as fragile and vulnerable, it engenders intimacy with the listener. However, Goldin-Perschbacher

(2007) also described the vulnerability in Jeff Buckley’s “transgendered vocality” as fragile. This is noteworthy because Buckley was widely regarded as being— technically—an exceptionally talented singer. This raises the questions of intentionality of fragility in vocal performances.

Epstein (2017) identified ten types of fragility in music: performative, material, acoustic, structural, notational, psychological, temporal, tuning, spatial, and

138 The Brisbane Sound multidimensional fragility. Epstein’s context was fragility in Western-art music live performance, and so not all of these categories are applicable to popular music.

Performative fragility is when it sounds like a performance by an individual musician has the potential to fail. Although interpreting this is certainly subjective, competent listeners and professional musicians can hear when a fellow musician performs at the far edges of his or her ability due to micro-inflections of rhythmic instability, or what

Keil labels “participatory discrepancies” (1987). Micro nuances like these are, of course, nearly impossible to represent with traditional notation, and certainly troublesome to explain in words. Performative fragility can provoke empathy and sound endearing to the listener, as per Encarnacao’s assessment of Will Oldham’s voice (2013, 183). Related to this is Structural fragility—when musicians in a band do not sound ‘in sync’ with each other; they fall out of time or play at different tempos.

As the ‘keepers of the groove’, drummers and bass players typically endeavour to lock into each other’s time to preclude structural fragility (Moore 1993, 239; Weisethaunet

2001, 103). In recent years, digital editing ‘in the box’ (i.e. computer) has become entirely normative, and as a result, structural fragility is frequently ameliorated via a process called quantisation.

Temporal fragility refers to unexpected or dramatic shifts in a song’s sectional flow, tempo, or duration. Temporal fragility has been used in popular music as a strategy to inject temporal interest in a song since at least The Beatles’ (1967) ‘A Day

In The Life’, with its incongruous but highly affective bridge section. Tuning fragility is heard when a performed note sounds sharper or flatter than the equal temperament50 expected by the listener. In popular music, being slightly out of tune does not

50 Equal temperament is simply the standard twelve-note tuning system used in most Western music, demonstrable by the eight white and five black keys in a piano octave.

The Brisbane Sound 139 necessarily provoke a negative response and can be endearing (Keil 1987, 275).

Conversely, these days, if a singing performance sounds too in tune because pitch correction is audible—if it ‘sounds auto-tuned51’—it connotes artifice and inauthenticity.

The Brisbane Sound is Thin

We really like that thin, vulnerable, acoustic sound. (Forster quoted in Walker 1979, 33)

Which to me describes Brisbane music: its thinness. (Mark Callaghan quoted in Wilson 1988)

The thing that struck us about the Brisbane Sound, it was really thin. (Mark Dadds interviewed in Wilson 1988)

Very fragile, thin, deconstructed. (David Pestorius interviewed in Boland 2010)

Like much of the discourse surrounding the Brisbane Sound, the origins of the metaphor ‘thin’ in relation to the Brisbane Sound can be found in descriptions of the early music of The Go-Betweens. Peter Milton Walsh (The Apartments/Out of

Nowhere) described The Go-Betweens in 1978 as:

A group of three (guitar, bass, drums) producing all original material made for listening. This is not a dance band—and deliberately so. The sound is thin, watery, and melodic… A spare, cabaret sound. (Walsh 1978, 23)

Likewise, in a Roadrunner ‘year in review’ article about the Brisbane music scene in 1978, The Go-Betweens’ first single is featured:

After so many years of rigor mortis, 1978 finally saw some signs of life in the Brisbane music scene… Anyone who has heard [The Go-Betweens’] ‘Lee Remick’/‘Karen’ single will easily recall their thin-sounding pop with its sixties flavour, one of the most interesting

51 Technically, Auto-Tune is the brand name of the pitch correction software made by Antares Audio Technologies. There are several other companies that have produced similar products with commensurable audible outcomes, but ‘auto-tune’ remains the generic idiom in popular culture for any pitch correction, regardless of which program was actually used in the process.

140 The Brisbane Sound Australian records of the past 12 months. (Matheson 1979, 10)

A year later, Matheson again referred to The Go-Betweens’ “thin sounding pop songs” as he bemoaned the diaspora or disbandment of many Brisbane bands throughout 1979 (Matheson 1979b, 33). On the same page, Walker’s article about The

Go-Betweens’ stated the “thin, vulnerable, acoustic sound” that Forster strives for in his music is epitomised in the Lee Remick/Karen single (Walker 1979, 33). In 1981,

Forster again framed the Striped Sunlight Sound as “guitar, bass, and drums producing a thin, vulnerable sound based on emotion and melody. Our answer to the tropics”

(Postcard 1981, 5). For Pestorius The Go-Betweens’ third single, ‘I Need Two

Heads/Stop Before You Say It’ was “quite a deviation from the ‘Lee Remick’ and

‘People Say’ period… the sound is thinner, and more distinctly their own” (Pestorius

1981, 13). By 1988 ‘thin’ was used to reference not only to The Go-Betweens but also the Brisbane Sound in general (see Dadds and Callaghan in Wilson 1988). Curiously, the metaphor seems to have fallen out of favour until 2010 when Pestorius revived it in an interview supporting the Melbourne>

Thin as a measure of frequency deficiency

Thin is also commonly heard in sound engineering and production environments; sound engineering glossaries or dictionaries52 define ‘thin’ as a sound that lacks low frequencies. The respected mastering engineer Bob Katz is more specific, stating that a thin sound indicates “a deficiency in the range from roughly 75 to 600 Hz” (2013, 47). So, in this setting, thin is not used as a poetic device but used instead to convey practical information that can be directly interpreted in relation to

52 For example, see http://www.testing1212.co.uk/t, or https://www.recordingconnection.com/glossary/t/

The Brisbane Sound 141 the measurable frequencies of sound. Porcello uses the example of ‘thin’ to explain how it is necessary on a pragmatic level to be able to translate metaphors into actual studio practices:

If, for example, a guitarist tells an engineer that her sound is too 'thin', the engineer must be able to translate that spatial metaphor for sound into a corresponding spatio-temporal concept, also expressed via metaphor: timbre, or, the complex map of simultaneously sounding vibrations per second. This spatio-temporal metaphor translates sound into assignable numbers: frequency, or Hz (a metaphor directly encoding only the temporal parameter). Inside the world of this second metaphor, the engineer can turn to an equalizer and increase or diminish specific frequencies to alter the sound. Take away some 800- 1100s (Hz), add some 150-300s, and retranslate into a spatial metaphor: the guitar now sounds more 'full'. To be an effective engineer, one must be able to move comfortably among all these metaphors (and across their levels of technicality) and be able to relate them proficiently to the acoustic phenomena in question. (Porcello 2004, 739)

Thin as a measure of textual density

Thin can also imply a sparsity of vertical textures in a recording. In the simplest terms this means there are minimal instruments, vocal parts or an absence of effects53 that are heard simultaneously over time (i.e. horizontal axis). Minimal is another relative term, compared to what? Again, we have an arbitrary parameter that only exists because of implicitly understood, normative aspects of popular songs. Moore’s four layers (2012, 20-21), as outlined in Chapter 5 are useful starting points for establishing these conventions.

Thin as a result of performance style or technique

A thin sound can result from the way an instrument is performed. This is especially so for the bass guitar—playing the bass in its upper register (i.e. higher frets) stifles the normative ’function’ of the functional bass layer as the root-note reinforcement of the harmonic filler layer. Related to this, we can also imagine how

53 Especially effects such as reverberation: a capella recording of a single voice in a cathedral may actually sound quite dense as the reverb effectively fills out the textural space

142 The Brisbane Sound the effect of playing bass on the comparatively (literally) thinnest strings produces a thinner tone. Moore (2012, 81) suggests that avoiding the root note of the chord is a common tendency among bass players “with a prominent DIY approach—there is almost a sense in which it is by nature transgressive”. This is highly relevant to our discussion, as the next Chapter (Music Analysis Findings) will show, upper-register playing was a common technique of the Brisbane Sound bass guitar players. I have noted previously that Clinton Walker described, in an early live review of The Go-

Betweens, how “due to naivety, or whatever” Grant McLennan played bass more like an electric lead guitar (Walker 1979, 33). Two years later, McLennan recognised this about his playing during an interview with Fast Forward magazine:

I still don’t really play bass in the traditional sense of playing bass, you know keeping the rhythm. It was always, take what I play on the acoustic guitar lead wise, transpose it to the bass, with a few minor adjustments, and I’ve got my bass line. (Maine 1981)

The concept of transferring lead guitar-type melodies to the bass guitar was novel but had a precedent. Moore (2012, 81) describes this type of bass playing as

“mobile” as opposed to “static” whereby the bassist just follows the root notes of the chords. The most famous proponent of this technique is Paul McCartney (The

Beatles/Wings). McCartney reflected on his method with producer George Martin:

Martin: The significant thing about your bass playing in the early days was that you played tunes with it.

McCartney: Yes, because of writing songs at the same time… instead of just playing like the guys in cabaret where they just rooted all the chords, I got interested in this idea of counter melodies in the bass. Having been a guitarist, it was quite easy to switch on to the electric bass; it’s just the bottom four notes of the guitar really. (McCartney and Martin 1983, 157)

The Brisbane Sound is unconventional rhythms

[Peter Loveday’s] two groups, Birds of Tin and Antic Frantic followed [the Brisbane] sound of inspired lyricism and unconventional rhythms. (Tahiraj 2007, 35)

The Brisbane Sound 143 [A] common disregard for the simple 4/4, 'meat and potatoes' approach in time-keeping. (Tahiraj 2008)

The songs slowed down and had a certain fragility of sound while embracing unconventional rhythms. (Mengel 2008)

They were often polyrhythmic and not 4/4 time. (Pestorius interviewed in Boland 2010)

A light, fragile way of playing with an almost strict avoidance of 4/4 drumming for the most part. (Tahiraj 2017)

Agents commonly define the Brisbane Sound as containing unconventional rhythms and/or time signatures (US meters). Whereas the previous descriptors discussed are figurative, this differs in that it is an explicitly musicological point of reference to the actual sound. Labelling music ‘unconventional’ only works because there is an implicit understanding of what counts as prototypically conventional for that particular music-style (Moore 2012, 119). For instance, complex rhythms and time signature changes are so common in early 1980s thrash metal that they are considered conventional (Walser 1993, 14). As a result, music critics and other cultural intermediaries writing about metal rarely draw attention to them (Walser 1993, 41).

But we have seen how the Brisbane Sound is considered to belong to the pop-rock music style. Unlike thrash metal, irregular time signatures and other rhythmic frictions are unconventional, and therefore become distinctive markers of meaning.

The international press drew attention to the “eccentric rhythmic rambles” of

The Go-Betweens as early as 1982 (Hill 1982). In a live review of a 1983 gig in New

York, Jon Pareles anchored the music to associations with that city’s ‘new-wave rock’ but highlighted unusual rhythmic structures as what made The Go-Betweens unique:

But The Go-Betweens added their own twist to the new-wave basics. While the songs chugged along neatly, they threatened to trip up dancers, since they'd often add or subtract a beat from standard rock patterns. Yet the band made the odd meters seem as natural as

144 The Brisbane Sound they were tricky. (Pareles 1984, 31)

Identifying unusual rhythmic structures as foundational to The Go-Betweens’ aesthetic became commonplace in any writing about the band. This is especially the case from when Lindy Morrison joined as the band’s first full-time drummer in 1980.

Lindy’s idiosyncratic drumming style became a touchstone for reviewers and other people who were trying to make sense of the band’s sound. Interestingly though, labelling unusual rhythmic structures as a signature of the Brisbane Sound as a whole is a relatively recent. The first cultural intermediary to solidify a link between the

Brisbane Sound and unusual rhythms is Tahiraj in 2007 (above). In proceeding years, the classification was reinforced by cultural intermediaries Mengel and Pestorius.

But why is it largely avoided as a classificatory aspect of the Brisbane Sound for almost two decades? There are two possible reasons. First, music writers are often what Tagg (2013) calls “non-musos”. Music critics in particular were expected to be

“anti-academic” (Lindberg et al. 2005, 269); a “straight consumer guide” where esoteric musicological language risks being “cut by the subeditors as pretentious”

(Frith 2002, 239). From a Bourdieusian perspective, declaring musical-linguistic habitus is not appropriate within the field of music criticism. Musicology then is incompatible with music criticism; there exists a lack of congruence between the habitus of a music critic and the field within which they practice (Thompson and

Bourdieu 1991, 17). Music critics censor their writing not in an attempt to suppress or restrict musicological discourse, but censor in the sense that they write in a field where

“one must observe the forms and formalities of that field” (Bourdieu and Thompson

1991, 20). Second, applying musicological language accurately (therefore convincingly) requires a specific set of musico-linguistic competencies (Feld and Fox

1994). Misuse or inaccurate application of such language is a potential source of

The Brisbane Sound 145 embarrassment for music writers with no musicological background. Tahiraj is a drummer and drummers think about music rhythmically. Tahiraj’s acumen in this regard enabled him to identify and confidently apply the label.

Whatever the case, if we assume for now that unusual rhythms are an inherent property of the Brisbane Sound we move now from the simple classification of ‘what’ to the investigatory question of ‘why’? For Tahiraj, it comes down to the idiolect and agency of drummers that performed in Brisbane Sound bands, in particular Lindy

Morrison of The Go-Betweens and how she influenced the other bands that surrounded her:

Lindy Morrison[’s] drumming style in both Zero and The Go-Betweens became a huge influence upon Clare McKenna and Keryn Henry's common disregard for the simple 4/4, 'meat and potatoes' approach in time-keeping. (Tahiraj 2008)

In 1983 Leigh Bradshaw, keyboardist for Peter Loveday’s bands (Birds of

Tin/Antic Frantic/Tiny Town) wrote to David Nichols’ Distant Violins fanzine:

We are none of us virtuosos and we know our limitations but we experiment widely within our own perameters [sic]. Our sound is heavily rythm [sic] based. We like unusual rythms because they are unexpected. This attitude is not likely to win us any friends on the dance floor but that is not what we want. (Nichols 1983b, 2)

Later, Loveday attributed this to the agency of his drummers:

I guess what we were trying to do was not sound like a rock band. Geoffrey Titley [Supports and Antic Frantic drummer] and Keryn Henry [drummer from Birds of Tin] played their own unique rhythms, and I guess the rest of the music accommodated that. (Tahiraj 2007, 35)

In an early interview, Lindy Morrison cited her previous drumming in Zero as a precedent for the unusual drumming patterns she brought to The Go-Betweens:

My drumming was very influenced by Robert [Forster] because he used to sit there just playing songs over and over again while I tried out new rhythms and patterns. The last

146 The Brisbane Sound year Zero worked on the business of doing bizarre drumming styles and bizarre rhythms. Really bizarre…We used to have gaps in the songs that you had to count seven beats in, then play four beats, then have a gap of six, then play three, then a gap of five, then play two. All mathematically worked out. So then I joined the Go Betweens and started playing a backbeat and not having to do silly things. The trouble was it had become a part of me to do silly things, which is why my drumming is idiosyncratic with the Go Betweens in many ways. On Send Me a Lullaby there are lots of strange drumbeats, things that a normal drummer wouldn’t play. (Brunetti 1984, 43)

Lindy Morrison later argued that the early Go-Betweens’ songs were unintentionally written and presented to the band in unconventional time signatures partly due to the incompetence of songwriters Forster and McLennan. The following quote also suggests that previous drummers like Bruce Anthon would have recognised the idiosyncratic songwriting but manipulated the songs in to conventional 4/4 time in rehearsals and pre-production.

I knew their times were weird. They didn’t know how to count. They had no sense of timing. I taught them—I’d sit there going “one and two and three and four”. You can understand why they hate me! When I started in the band, I asked Bruce Anthon what he did about the timing. He said, ‘Oh you just play through it, and eventually they straighten it out.’ I thought, ‘I’m not going to do that—it’s too nice’. (Morrison quoted in Nichols 2003, 123)

This suggests that the predilection Lindy had in terms of playing unconventional rhythms and time signatures was in large part a matter of retaining the unconventional songwriting of Forster and McLennan rather than composing her drum parts in such a way. This theory is supported by comments Morrison made on the pre-production stage of Cattle and Cane, a song often discussed in relation to its unusual time signature:

The verse is an eleven-beat phrase: a bar of five, a bar of two, a bar of four. And then the chorus is 4/4. [I worked] it out from a cassette tape, playing it over and over again. The whole beauty of the group was the simplicity of the music, the early naiveté. Grant and Robert were writing in strange time [signatures]—because they didn’t know they were strange times. (Morrison interviewed in Fricke 2012)

The Brisbane Sound 147 Morrison also cites music industry expectations as a reason later Go-Betweens recordings (particularly those on 16 Lovers Lane) conformed to standard “blocks of four” structures:

Now ‘Clouds’. I had a beautiful kick drum part for that. It’s a three and a half bar verse. Which is really unusual. That’s why it wasn’t a single. It should have been a single. That was a bit of a push in the band from some quarters, that that was the single after ’Streets of Your Town’ instead of [Quiet Heart]… It should have been Clouds. But it had a three and a half - three and a half bar verse! No way! [Shouts] No way can you do that in pop. Well, because [sarcastic, shouting] ‘Listeners have an expectation! And their expectation that everything fits square! It’s all blocks of four! Go out of the block of four and you’re done brother! You won’t get a record deal! (Meltzer et al 2008).

Glenn Thompson, who played drums for The Go-Betweens from 2000 to 2006, also suggests it was the two songwriters’ “very creative sense of musical time” that was the impetus:

It’s hard to play Lindy’s odd-time signature drum parts, but I’m rarely required to play drums on ‘Cattle and Cane’. I think those peculiarities come from Robert and Grant writing music around vocal phrases. Although it must be said that Robert has a very “creative” sense of musical time. If the band all start together on a song that Robert has counted in, it’s a miracle. (Thompson quoted in Nichols 2003, 259)

Conclusion

This chapter dealt with the specific ways that agents used language to describe the Brisbane Sound through either figurative language or music-speak. This chapter began by establishing a timeline for how the trope Brisbane Sound appeared in media discourses. This shows how the Brisbane Sound is a diachronic definition, gradually developed and retrospectively refined.

By analysing this evolution, we can see that ‘pop rock’ emerged as the most appropriate, overarching music-style label. I then identified several conceptual metaphors frequently used to describe the sound. Part of analysing this discourse is interpreting how such figurative language points to specific musical functions.

148 The Brisbane Sound Relatively speaking, the most abstruse metaphor is ‘sunny’ or ‘sunlight’. This speaks to how Brisbane’s cultural identity is inexorably linked with its climate, as well as indirectly pointing to the Striped Sunlight Sound. ‘Naïve’ implies amateurism, which in a post-punk context carries value and helps construct the illusion of authenticity.

‘Fragile’ can imply several things in relation to musical performance, as well as song forms and instable tempos. ‘Thin’ is one of the earliest and recurring metaphors to be associated with the Brisbane Sound. It can suggest a lack of low frequencies, a sparsity of vertical textures, or melodic and sparse bass guitar playing on the upper range of the instrument.

Lastly, I showed how the Brisbane Sound is said to employ unconventional rhythms and time signatures. This language is easier to interpret and understand in relation to musical functions. However, we are reminded again that ‘unconventional’ is relative to our implicit understanding of pop rock conventions.

The aim of this chapter was to unpack the ways the Brisbane Sound has been defined in discourse. To do so, it was necessary to isolate and compartmentalise the language to provide a logical structure for the reader. However, I think it is important to remember that the Brisbane Sound is considered the composite of all of these factors. Burn’s schematic (explained in Chapter 5) is a useful way of reconstituting these concepts by classifying them into the domains of songwriting, performance and production. The Brisbane Sound, as it exists in discourse, occupies the centre. The boundaries of these bubbles overlap because so do many processes in the modern

The Brisbane Sound 149 production of songs. Performance habituses can inform songwriting, as can instruments54 and technology.

Songwriting • Pop music-style conventions • Unconventional rhythms • Unconventional time-signatures • Simplicity

Production Performance • Thin sounding • Instrumentation & • Under-produced Technology • Autonomous agency • Melodic drums and bass. • Idolect/Habitus • Naïvety • Delicate/light

So far, we have located the Brisbane Sound in written and spoken texts. In the next chapter, I look for evidence of these claims in the actual music itself.

54 Like many other songwriters, I will sometimes overcome writer’s block by simply picking up a different type or model of the instrument that I normally play. Even slight changes to the physiological, body-instrument relationship can be enough to begin a song.

150 The Brisbane Sound

Chapter 7: Music Analysis Findings

Introduction

The Brisbane Sound can be heard as a collection of songs that largely follow many of the conventions of pop-rock music within the context of the temporal period

1978-1983. Two bands, The Apartments and The Riptides, were consistently conventional in their songwriting approach. Nevertheless, the way the Brisbane Sound deviates from these conventions—what Moore (1993, 2012) calls ‘frictions’—are the primary flags agents use to define what the Brisbane Sound sounds like. As such, identifying and explicating these frictions in the corpus forms the primary impetus for the following analyses. First, I briefly outline some of the conventional musical features that are common to the entire corpus. Second, I concentrate on highlighting some pertinent examples of the features identified in the discourse analysis, with particular emphasis on those elements which contain pop-rock frictions.

The music analyses that follow are supplemented by audio examples. These examples can be found online here:

http://scottregan.com/research/phd-research/

The below chapter has signposts that indicate when each listening example should be played.

A (Brief) Analysis of the Brisbane Sound Lyrics

Despite my reservations about lyrical analyses studies of music (Chapter 5), I will outline some general thoughts and precursory observations about the lyrics of the

The Brisbane Sound 151 Brisbane Sound. Two songs contain abstract lyrics with no discernible theme (“Slothy

Tank” and “Rain Drops”, both by Birds of Tin), and one song is an instrumental with no lyrics “Sandarama” by The Riptides. Interestingly, only one song in the corpus,

“Lee Remick” by The Go-Betweens, makes a single explicit reference to Brisbane in its opening verse (She comes from Ireland / She's very beautiful / I come from Brisbane

/ I'm quite plain). Two early songs by the Riptides, “Sunset Strip” and “Magic

Castle”—influenced by 1960s surf rock (such as The Beach Boys)—contain geographic referents to the Gold Coast, a one hour drive south of Brisbane. The rest of the songs are about mundane, every-day things in the style of Jonathan Richman or

Scott Walker. 37 out of the 39 songs (95%) based on the narrative of either interpersonal relationships (31) or personal reflection (4) based on themes of fleeting or nascent heteronormative relationships. These songs imply romance of youth, as such these lyrics in part account for the metaphor of ‘naivety’ located in the discourse.

In any case, such narratives are commonplace in pop-rock, and so are unremarkable.

Instrumentation of the Brisbane Sound

Moore suggests that instrumentation is a key marker of a music style for an audience (2012, 192). Almost all of the songs in the corpus follow the typical, conventional model of instrumentation for a pop-rock band, as indicated by Moore’s four layers (1993). Every song has electric guitar(s) in the harmonic filler layer, bass guitar as the functional bass layer, and a drum kit as the explicit beat layer. The Go-

Betweens’ ‘Cattle and Cane’(1983) is the first song (chronologically) to introduce the acoustic guitars as a harmonic filler instrument. However, acoustic guitars are entirely normative in pop-rock music-styles. The only band in the corpus that deviates from convention in a significant way is Out Of Nowhere, whereby the primary melodic and harmonic filler layers feature saxophone and clarinet in addition to electric guitars.

152 The Brisbane Sound The Primary Melodic Layer: Vocals

Every song in the corpus has a male vocalist as the primary melodic layer. In my view, the register a singer uses (their range) and their expression can tell us more about how the primary melodic layer functions in pop-rock music than the notated melodies.

As such, I have created a chart that indicates the melodic vocal ranges for each song in the corpus. This can be viewed in Appendix D. The vertical (Y) axis shows the range of every song’s melody in relation to a standard piano roll with the octave ranges of

C2 to C5. These are colour coded to represent the singer of each song, as indicated by the colours and legend at the bottom of the chart (x axis). (Note that The Riptide’s

‘Sandarama’ is not represented as it is instrumental, with no lead vocal melodic layer).

In pop-rock music, the vocal range of male singers tends to occupy what is called the ‘tenor’ range, from approximately B2 to C5. The chart indicates few singers that utilise the upper notes of this range. What is interesting, though, is that several songs by Wilson, Loveday and Walsh pivot around the baritone and bass registers. As it implies “an impression of less energy and greater comfort”, it is likely to be used by jazz ‘crooners’, but is unconventional in much pop music; (Moore 1993, 45).

The vocal range chart also gives us some clues into each bands’ melodic development over time. For instance, the two songs on The Go-Betweens’ first single,

‘Lee Remick/Karen’ share a very limited melodic range from E3—B3. Relative to the keys of the songs, this means that the melodies are constructed with a total of only five notes. In the case of ‘Lee Remick’, the melody is limited to E, F#, G#, A, and B).

The basic five-note verse melody can be represented by the following arc:

E ● ● ● ● ● ● F# ● ● ● G# ● ● ● ●

The Brisbane Sound 153 A ● B ●

Over time, their melodic range increases, indicating a more sophisticated approach to melody in their songwriting. The song with the greatest melodic range is

‘No Resistance’ by Out of Nowhere, sung by Peter Milton Walsh. The song marks an interesting turn in Walsh’s approach to singing—the mean average of the melodic curve hovers in a much lower register than the melodies sung in his previous band The

Apartments.

Rhythmic and Metric Friction

When I was ten years old I started learning the drums and kept up weekly tuition for the following eight years. Over this period was taught how to read and perform complex, notated time signatures and rhythmic patterns, including those most common to pop-rock music, but also the more complex Latin-Cuban dance beats and even

Indian Carnatic patterns. This background situates me as a competent listener able to identify and transcribe rhythmic patterns across a wide variety of musical-style contexts. I mention this because identifying time-signatures could be considered a subjective and relative process. Any music analyst who works with recordings as the primary text, rather than notated scores, must make a judgement about how a bar is divided by beats, and which beats are emphasised in a way that signals a downbeat

(the first beat of a new bar). The way the analyst hears the stressed beats in a song ultimately determines how the analyst interprets its time signature.

Time signatures are represented in notation by two numbers stacked on top of one another like this: . The top number in a time signature indicates how many beats are in a bar, and the bottom number indicates the note value (i.e. relative length) of these beats. Although time signatures are not technically fractions, it is entirely

154 The Brisbane Sound normative and acceptable to represent the numbers in running text with a slash, for example 4/4 (Donahue 2010, 40). A bar of 4/4 (pronounced four-four) suggests a bar made up of four crotchet-length beats. Since 4/4 fits with the “regular periodicity” of music made to accompany dance, it has been an omnipresent convention in Western music since at least the Baroque period (Tagg 2013, 286). Indeed, its use is so historically prevalent that it is sometimes designated in notation with a C for ‘common time’.

It is worth remembering here that much of the musical elements that are said to define the Brisbane Sound were not actually unique to the music made in Brisbane.

Clearly, in other locales in the same period, a number of post-punk bands were experimenting with unconventionality in their songwriting, including ways to incorporate odd time signatures. Notable international examples include: Devo’s

‘Jocko Homo’ (1977) in 7/8; The Stranglers’ ‘Peasant in the Big Shitty’ (1978) in 9/4, and ‘Golden Brown’ (1982) in 6/8 and 7/855. All of which were highly influential and undoubtedly56 influenced the Brisbane Sound songwriters to some extent.

However, regardless of emergent scenes and sounds in other locales, in an

Australian context, the Brisbane Sound’s unconventional time signatures were unusual enough to be distinctive. Indeed, the Brisbane Sound is made meaningful through such distinctions. With this in mind, the following section identifies those Brisbane Sound songs which deviate from the standard 4/4 time signature convention.

55 ‘Golden Brown’ could also be heard as predominantly a waltz in 3/4 with occasional 4/4 extensions. Such is the subjectivity of metric analysis. 56 Lindy Morrison recently said she practiced songs by The Stranglers in Zero (her band prior to joining The Go-Betweens) (Morrison 2018).

The Brisbane Sound 155 Thirty, out of the thirty-eight songs in the primary corpus, are in 4/4 time for their entire duration. The first song to deviate from standard 4/4 time was The Go-

Betweens’ ‘Your Turn, My Turn’ (1981) which could be interpreted as 6/8, or simply a triplet feel over a standard 4/4 beat. In either case it remains conventional; 6/8 is one of the four commonest time signatures in Western Music (along with 4/4, 2/4 and 3/4)

(Tagg 2013, 293). There are also a number of songs excluded from the tally that could be interpreted as having sections of 6/4. An early example is the ‘stop-time’ solo guitar motif in The Go-Betweens’ ‘Karen’ (1978). However, I interpret these as 2/4

‘extensions’ to a 4/4 bar, and are again, used so frequently in popular music as to be considered normative (Moore 2012, 62).

Listen: Example 01—‘Karen’ 6/4 with Count (Intro)

The first song to employ truly unconventional time signatures is The Go-

Betweens’ ‘One Thing Can Hold Us’ (1981), track one on their debut album Send Me a Lullaby. The song’s introduction and verses are in 7/4, the choruses in 4/4, and the bridge is in 6/4. The introductory 7/4 verse pattern is complicated further by a syncopated rhythm that accents every fourth quaver, giving it a triplet feel.

Syncopation is when accented (i.e. stressed) beats do not coincide with the regular beats of a bar. Syncopation is not unusual in popular music—it was the basic rhythmic principle of early-twentieth century ragtime and eventually became

“fundamental to the syntax of popular song” (Moore 2012, 68). The commonest

156 The Brisbane Sound syncopation in pop music is when we hear three sub-beats in the space of two normal beats. In musicology this 3:2 ratio is often called a hemiola. Typically, consecutive groups of three-beat motifs are appended by a group of two beats that “miraculously”

(and mathematically) returns the accent to the first beat of the following bar (Moore

2012,69). Some popular music examples that implement this ‘miracle’ include:

Example: the ‘Aah…’ build up in the bridge section of Twist and Shout by the

Beatles

3+3+2 = 8/8 or one bar of 4/4

Example: ‘I’ve Got Rhythm…

2+3+3+3+3+2 = 16/16 or two bars of 4/4

Example: the melodic hook in the chorus of ‘Days’ by The Gin Club.

3+3+3+3+2+2 = 16/16 or two bars of 4/4

The Brisbane Sound 157 So, the 7/4 in the introduction and verses of The Go-Betweens’ ‘One Thing Can

Hold Us’ (1981) can be heard as a variation on this basic rhythmic device—it is an additional grouping of three that produces the irregular time signature of 7/4 .

3+3+3+3+2 =14/14 or one bar of 7/4

In the introduction, the rhythm guitar accents the first note of each of the four groups of three quaver pulses. These accents coincide with a subtle change to the chord’s harmonic function, achieved by simply lifting and placing the middle finger of the fretting hand in time with the accents (as indicated in the tablature below). In the listening examples, I have included a count so that the time signature is more aurally apparent:

Listen: Example 02—‘One Thing Can Hold Us’ 7/4 with Count (Intro)

Notated reduction of the introduction to ‘One Thing Can Hold Us’

As the introduction continues, the rhythm guitar part is joined by the kick drum and then the bass guitar, reinforcing the same syncopated pattern.

Listen: Example 03—‘One Thing Can Hold Us’ All (Intro)

In the first verse, the vocal melody and lead guitar enters following the same pattern of 3s and 2s.

158 The Brisbane Sound

The friction created in the first verse by the irregular time signature and syncopation is released in the pre-chorus and chorus of the song, whereby the rhythm returns to a more familiar, straight beat over 4/4 (Moore 2012, 171-172). After this (at

1:02) there is an instrumental version of the first verse. However, underneath the harmonic and bass layers maintaining the syncopated 7/4 pattern, the drums revert to a standard rock beat in 4/4 with a 3/4 extension, as indicated in the diagram below:

Listen: Example 04—‘One Thing Can Hold Us’ Straight Drum Feel

These alternating metric structures could be interpreted as a polyrhythm, supporting Pestorius’s claim (Boland 2010).

The next song to employ irregular time signatures is the structurally complex

‘Midnight to Neon’, the third song on the same album. The 5/4 introduction is first established on the drums for two bars with quavers in both hands on the snare and floor tom, with accents and kick drum on beats 1, 3, 4, 5. The drums are then joined by an atonal repeating guitar riff before the bass mirrors the guitar part in a lower register.

Listen: Example 05—‘Midnight to Neon’ with count (Intro)

Notated reduction of the introduction to ‘Midnight to Zeon’:

The Brisbane Sound 159

Following the introduction, the verse pattern to ‘Midnight to Neon’ is two bars of 4/4 then one bar of 6/4. The chorus, again releases metric friction by keeping to the conventional 4/4. Finally, the outro is in 3/4.

The Go-Betweens’ song ‘By Chance’ originally appeared as side B to the single

‘Hammer the Hammer’, released in 1982. It was subsequently re-recorded to be included on their second album Before Hollywood, released in May 1983. In both versions, the song is predominantly in 4/4, however the verse and instrumental breaks are based on a six beat pattern. Theses can either be interpreted as 6/4, or as 4/4 with normative 2/4 extensions.

‘Heaven Says’ was released in 1983 as the B side to ‘Cattle and Cane’. The song has an asymmetrical structure that can be heard as two distinct sections. The first half of the song (from 0:00 to 1:20) consists of 28 bars in 7/4. The last 98 bars of ‘Heaven

Says’ (from 1:20 onwards), although syncopated, is actually in 4/4. In the initial 7/4 pattern, the first four beats are accented by the guitar strumming a chromatically shifting chord progression, in time with bass and kick drum crotchets. The second part of the bar starts with an off-beat syncopation before solidifying beat seven, as indicated below:

160 The Brisbane Sound Listen: Example 06—Heaven Says in 7/4 with Count (Verse)

Notated reduction of the verse pattern to ‘Heaven Says’:

Undoubtedly, the song with irregular time signatures that receives the most attention from agents in discourse surrounding the Brisbane Sound is The Go-

Betweens’ ‘Cattle and Cane’, released as a single in February 1983 ahead of their second album Before Hollywood. ‘Cattle and Cane’ was one of the most commercially successful for the group, reaching number four in the UK independent charts in 1983.

As such it is often used as a touchstone for cultural intermediaries wishing to highlight the seemingly veiled complexity of The Go-Betweens’ music. David Nichols called it

“a bizarre timing experiment” (2003, 124). Robert Forster regards it as “one of the most distinctive beats in rock” (2016, 113). In the comments section of a book review for Forster’s autobiography Grant and I, Andrew Stafford countered a commenter’s criticism of The Go-Betweens by stating:

Try keeping time to the rhythm of Cattle And Cane and see how far you get before your arms and legs get all in a tangle. (Stafford 2016)

The song’s introduction and verse are based on an eleven-beat pattern. This is certainly rare and therefore unconventional in pop music. When I first heard this song,

The Brisbane Sound 161 I counted it as being a combination of 6/4 then 5/4, with the melody ‘I recall’ being an anacrusis (pickup) to beat one of the first bar, as notated below:

Listen: Example 07—‘Cattle and Cane’ with My Count

Notated reduction of my initial interpretation of ‘Cattle and Cane’s’ verse time signature:

However, drummer Lindy Morrison has maintained that there is no anacrusis to the start of the verse, and that the cyclical eleven beat phrase is actually made up of “a bar of 5[/4], then a bar of 2[/4], then a bar of 4[/4]” (Morrison and Ford 2014), as per the following notated melody reduction:

The following diagram is a representation of the eleven-beat drum groove, with the assumption that there is no anacrusis, as per Morrison’s interpretation. Note that as per the standard rock beat, when counted this way, beats two and four are emphasised by the snare drum and beats one and three by the kick:

Graphical reduction of the verse drumming pattern to The Go-Betweens’ ‘Cattle and Cane’:

162 The Brisbane Sound

The following listening example is the same recorded performance but with the count shifted to align with Morrison’s:

Listen: Example 08—‘Cattle and Cane’ with Morrison’s Count

In any case, both interpretations add up to an eleven-beat cycle. This exemplifies the often subjective nature of interpreting irregular time signatures.

Not ‘Not in 4/4 time’?

As stated above, less than twenty percent of the total number of songs in the

Brisbane Sound corpus are not in 4/4 time, which seem somewhat insignificant considering the generalisations made by the cultural intermediaries. However, even within this minority, the songs will often capitulate to a standard 4/4 beat for certain sections of the songs (especially the pre-chorus and chorus. This ‘loose verse/tight chorus’ model is discussed in more detail in the next section). If we drill down further to the beat level57 to exclude the total of all of the beats that are in 4/4 time, the percentage of irregular time signatures drops even further to roughly 8% (1399) of the total beats (17189).

57 Percentage of irregular beats is worked out by multiplying the number of bars in a particular time signature in each song by the numerator of those time signatures. It is necessary to tally the irregularities at the beat level rather than the bar level, as a simple tally of bars does not account for the metric length of each bar. For example, a single bar of 6/4 is equivalent to 1.5 bars of 4/4. Using the bar level as a temporal designation is also a more practical way of discussing what occurs in a song over time than timecode, as “while pretty precise, this method bears no relation at all to the measurement of time the recording itself makes” (Moore 2012, 51).

The Brisbane Sound 163

There are two likely reasons why the statistics seem to counter the claims that the Brisbane Sound was often ‘not in 4/4 time’. First, like much of the discourse surrounding the Brisbane Sound, The Go-Betweens’ music becomes the benchmark or metonym for the concept as a whole. The Go-Betweens’ certainly did employ some irregular time signatures, but not as often during the period studied here as the discourse analysis would suggest. Second, what the cultural intermediaries regard as being ‘not’ in 4/4 time actually is. The deception for an untrained listener lies in the way the conventional backbeat associated with a standard 4/4 rhythm is disrupted. To explain, following Moore (2012, 51), I will use the “standard rock beat” as the conventional baseline, or “rule of thumb”, to highlight unconventional deviations:

The standard rock beat implies a bar consisting of four beats. The kick drum can be heard on the first and third of these, the snare drum on the second and fourth and, in many cases, sticks used on the hi-hat (foot cymbal) subdivide each beat into two. (Moore 2012, 52)

The following diagram is a basic representation of the standard rock beat pervasive in most styles of rock and pop music.

Listen: Example 09—The ‘Standard’ Rock Beat

Graphical reduction of the ‘Standard Rock Beat’:

164 The Brisbane Sound

The above diagram represents two bars, with each bar made up of four beats (in grey). The kick drum (filled circle) emphasises beats one and three, and the snare

(diamond) emphasises beats two and four. This snare pattern is often referred to as the

‘back beat’. The hi-hat is played on all four beats and commonly on the sub-beats. In drumming vernacular, these sub-beats are counted as ‘and’ (e.g. one ‘and’ two ‘and’ three ‘and’ four ‘and’). In the above diagram the ‘and’ is designated with a + symbol.

Often, a drummer will vary the pattern by adding sub-beats on the kick, as per the

‘and’ of beat three in bar two of the example above. Additionally, she may include snare hits on sub-beats at a lower volume (called ‘ghost notes’). Subtle variation and additions like this are so common as to be considered conventional within the standard rock beat paradigm. The hi-hat is commonly opened (open circle) on the ‘and’ of four at the end of phrases, or in the case of disco (and subsequently many forms of EDM), on every sub-beat. It is also normative for this pattern to be played on the hi-hat during verses, then transferred to the ride cymbal for choruses. The vast majority of pop-rock in 4/4 follows the general pattern of emphasis as indicated above. Indeed, much of the

Brisbane Sound corpus conforms to this standard.

However, there are some interesting examples in the corpus whereby the pattern of emphasis on the drums—whilst remaining within the parameters of the standard 4/4 time signature—manages to produce a rhythmic foundation that sounds unconventional. This is usually achieved by shifting the snare to a sub-beat, subverting the listener’s expectation of the standard rock beat paradigm. The Birds of Tin’s ‘Day

The Brisbane Sound 165 at the Beach’ (1981) is a pertinent example. The song’s introduction is based around a two-bar drum loop that can be represented graphically as such:

Listen: Example 10—‘Day at the Beach’ Drums (Intro)

‘Day at the Beach’ begins with the drums playing the above pattern twice in isolation. In the first bar, neither back beat is emphasised in the standard way by the snare drum. Instead the snare drum is dragged forward by half a beat to the ‘and’ of one, and back half a beat to the ‘and’ of three. This pattern is certainly unusual and— quite possibly—entirely unique. The second bar capitulates to the familiar, standard rock beat pattern of emphasis, acting as a kind of small-scale metric friction release.

The drums are then joined by a sporadic, syncopated four-bar bass line and a frenetic muted rhythm guitar part.

Listen: Example 11—'Day at the Beach’ (Drums, Guitar and Bass)

The combination of a drum pattern without a solid back-beat, and the syncopated, sparse bass line, may sound to some listeners that it is not in 4/4 time.

However, if we superimpose a 4 beat count on top of the music example, the regular

4/4 metric structure becomes apparent:

Listen: Example 12—‘Day at the Beach’ Intro (with Count)

Likewise, the drum pattern on Four Gods’ ‘Restless’ (1981) also deviates from the standard back beat convention whilst overall conforming to a standard 4/4 time signature:

166 The Brisbane Sound Listen: Example 13—‘Restless’ Drum Pattern (with Count)

In this example, neither the snare nor the kick drum emphasises beat four of the first bar or beat two of the second bar. In the second bar, the kick drum instead emphasises every sub-beat, again resulting in an unnerving and unstable rhythmic pattern.

Harmonic Friction

The Brisbane Sound bands frequently employed harmonic dissonance, or friction, as a creative device. This is not something that is specifically addressed in the discourse but may be implied through metaphors such as ‘angular’ and even

‘unconventional’. Harmonic friction is when the melodic and harmonic layers sound like they are clashing—that they do not seem to fit well together. Very basically, people who have grown up listening to music that is based on the Western twelve-note diatonic system (aka the vast majority of popular music) have enculturated an organised system of harmonic and tonal functions that goes as far back as he 16th

Century CE.

The Baroque period composers established a set of functional harmonic and tonal norms, (indeed ‘rules’ in some cases), that have carried through to present day music making, known as diatonic tonal function. Essentially this means we have been conditioned to hearing music that pivots around a stable key or ‘tonic’ in a song at any given moment. When music is said to be ‘consonant’, it relates to how melodies and chords function according to these norms, relative to the tonic, and thus flow together

The Brisbane Sound 167 in a way that sounds ‘normal’ to our ears. When music sounds ‘dissonant’, it seems to disrupt the stability of the tonic and sound ‘weird’ or ‘unconventional’.

Its absence from the discourse is hardly surprising, as harmonic friction is probably the most abstract and complex domain in popular songs. Most people can hear harmonic dissonance, especially when it is isolated; if you play any two immediately adjacent notes (i.e. a semitone interval), on a piano, it will sound ‘weird’ to the average listener.

Listen: Example 14—Semitone Dissonance

This interval, the diatonic semitone, is the most harmonically dissonant combination of notes in the Western, twelve-note diatonic harmony. The tension created by pedalling between these two notes is used affectively in the ‘Jaws’ theme.

Another dissonant interval that appears in the Brisbane Sound corpus is known as the

‘Tritone’. This interval, made up of notes that span six semitones, is colloquially called the ‘devil’s interval’ for its unstable dissonance and was intentionally avoided in

Western art music from the medieval period to the end of the Renaissance.58

Listen: Example 15—Tritone Dissonance

58 There is a common belief that Baroque composers, who were mainly commissioned to write church music, would be excommunicated if they used this interval. However, music historians have largely dismissed this as a folk tale.

168 The Brisbane Sound Being able to locate these frictions within the sonic complexity of a song by a full band is more difficult and requires a higher degree of listening skills. Knowing how to correctly locate and identify how they work requires a specialised skill set acquired through years of training in formal music theory.

Examples of dissonance such of these can be located in the corpus. Of course, the Brisbane Sound musicians, most likely, did not think of how their chords and melodies ‘functioned’ in relation to these norms. Songwriters, like listeners, have a subconscious intuition as to what sounds stable (functional or consonant) and what creates tension and release They may have consciously attempted to find chords and melodies that sound ‘weird’ together, but not thought about how they sound weird.

In the verse to Four Gods’ ‘Restless, the tonality of the vocal melody (B minor) clashes with the tonality established by the bass guitar (E). The chord in the electric guitar is very dissonant on its own, containing a semitone interval, and a tritone.

Combined they create a very unsettling friction between all three parts.

Listen: Example 16—‘Restless’ Dissonance (Verse)

The Brisbane Sound 169 However, in the choruses that follow this dissonance, the harmonic and melodic function of the instruments is consonant. All three harmonic instruments (the vocals, the bass and the guitar) play nicely together within the functional ‘rules’ of the home key (D minor). Thus, tension created by the unstable, weird sounding verse patterns is released.

Listen: Example 17—‘Restless’ Full Band (Chorus)

The Loose Verse/Tight Chorus Model

Much of the friction heard in the Brisbane Sound follows this pattern of tension and release at a structural level. Temperley (2007) calls this the “loose verse/tight chorus” model. This means that whilst the verses are clearly unconventional, this friction, as a creative mode of tension, is released by having conventional, frictionless choruses, thus relieving the tension. Three types of friction are typically set up in the verses and released in the chorus: melodic fragility in the vocals; harmonic dissonance in the guitars and bass and vocals; and rhythmic or metric friction in the drums as either unconventional time signatures, more subtle variations or subversions of the

170 The Brisbane Sound standard rock beat, or both. All of these frictions are most clearly evident in the

‘Restless’ example by Four Gods above, but can also be heard in the music of Birds of Tin and later Go-Betweens songs.

Recording: Performance Tempo

Tempo is one of the categories that is a crossover between songwriting and performance. A general tempo idea is imagined in the song’s formative stages but is not actually set until a recording is performed. I include discussion of tempo fluctuation in this section because the tempo of a song (measured in beats per minute or BPM) is influenced most by the explicit beat layer (usually the drummer).

In general, the tempos found in the songs of the Brisbane Sound corpus are typical of rock. I say typical of rock here—rather than pop—because the tempo is rarely strict. Pop music is more likely to be recorded to a click (metronome) and is therefore more likely to maintain a steady tempo. If tempo fluctuations do occur in pop music, it is intentional and affective. For instance, it is a common pop production device to ‘step up’ the tempo of a chorus section by a quantifiable but subtle amount to provide an additional sense of energy. The quantisation of pop music is often raised in discussions of authenticity and technological artifice, but I refrain from discussing such issues here. In the Brisbane Sound, like a lot of rock, the tempo often wanders slightly, which implies that the songs were not recorded to a click and adds a sense of liveness to the recordings. Frequently the tempo will gradually increase over the course of the whole song, again a typical phenomenon of live recordings.

This is not a factor that has been raised in the discourse, but there are some interesting examples that have presented themselves from the music analysis that are worth discussing here. Appendix E presents the average tempo of every song in the

The Brisbane Sound 171 corpus. Most striking, compared to the rest of the corpus, is the speed of the songs on the first two releases by The Riptides averages 210 beats per minute. This frenetic pace is indicative of the 1960s surf-rock style that the early Riptides emulated. In contrast, their last single in the corpus, ‘Hearts and Flowers/Sandarama’ is much more in keeping with the rest of the corpus, averaging 135 beats per minute. When compared with the lower register singing of Callaghan in the vocal range chart, it is clear that the later Riptides songs represent a seismic, quantifiable shift in their music-style.

Another tempo anomaly can be heard (and measured) in The Go-Betweens’

‘Karen’, as represented in the following chart:

The variable nature of the tempo in the first two thirds of the song is unremarkable: they indicate fairly normal fluctuations that can be heard in pop-rock songs that are not recorded to a click track. The spikes that correspond in the pre- chorus are commensurate with how Morrison, like many drummers, will speed up certain sections of songs to add energy and temporal interest, such as prior to a chorus.

However, the most striking aspect of the above graph is the gradual but significant rise in tempo from bars 105-133 (end), peaking at 165 beats per minute prior to the final chorus (outro). This rise is not indicative of random fluctuations within the song’s

172 The Brisbane Sound regular ‘groove’. Rather, it indicates a conscious, collective and aesthetic songwriting decision to finish the song by using a dramatic increase in tempo.

The Drum Kit as a Melodic Layer

In a 1988 ABC documentary about Brisbane bands, The Sharks’ lead singer

Mark Dadds made quite a specific claim about the Brisbane Sound as being a style of drumming performance:

The drummer—instead of providing that really thump sound that comes from, you know American disco or whatever, would really… the tradition of The Who where they would play melodies around the tom-toms. (Dadds 1988)

Dadds compared the Brisbane Sound drumming to that of Keith Moon from The

Who. In a Rolling Stone article following Moon’s untimely death, bass player John

Entwistle described how “[Moon] made the drums sing… his breaks were melodic, because he tried to play with everyone in the band at once” (quoted in Marsh 1978).

The suggestion is that both Moon and the Brisbane Sound drummers frequently broaden the ordinary time-keeping function of the drums to become a creative and aesthetic feature in and of itself. Or, imagined through Moore’s paradigmatic layers, the drums are augmented from the explicit beat layer to become another melodic layer.

Melodic in this sense is partially metaphorical; although drum shells do have a fundamental frequency and drum skins are tuneable, drums and cymbals are nominally and ostensibly unpitched instruments (Moore 2012, 20).

‘Fills’ are the flourishes drummers frequently employ at the end of sections to signal the beginning of a new phrase. Fills are typically performed across the snare and tom-toms of a drum kit, although snare-only fills are also very common. In common parlance, these rhythmic devices are often mistakenly referred to as ‘drum rolls’. However, the term ‘roll’ should technically be reserved for the specific,

The Brisbane Sound 173 sustained technique of performing multiple bounces with single, alternating strokes59.

On a snare drum. this creates a sustained ‘buzz’ sound that is a key characteristic in military/marching band music or to build anticipation at an awards ceremony. On the other hand, fills are short—usually less than one bar—interruptions to the underlying back beat. They usually occur in the last bar of a phrase and lead in to the downbeat of the next section, which itself is typically articulated with a crash cymbal. Dadds is suggesting that like Keith Moon, the Brisbane Sound drummers elevate the humble drum fill from a common rhythmic and structural signpost to a more creative,

‘melodic’ device. This also implies that the drummers incorporate longer than normal fills around the pitched tom-toms in place of the standard time-keeping back beat. I have found several examples of this taking place in the Brisbane Sound corpus and these are outlined below. As fills often contain semi-quavers (sixteenth notes, or 1/4 of a regular beat), it is necessary to divide the columns in graphical representation by half again to represent these note values.

In the instrumental break (beginning at 01:02) of The Go-Betweens’ ‘World

Weary’ (1981), drummer Lindy Morrison performs four semi-quaver beats on the rack

(high) tom then alternates quavers between the snare and rack/floor toms. This is repeated three and a half times, ending on beat 3 of the fourth bar.

Listen: Example 18—‘World Weary’ Drums Solo (Inst Break)

59 This is simplistic, and there are variations, but they should not concern us here.

174 The Brisbane Sound In traditional notation, the basic rhythm of this feature fill would be notated as such:

This motif appears a number of other times in the corpus. It can be heard in the instrumental break (beginning at 01:32) of Birds of Tin’s ‘Slothy Tank’ (1981). In this instance, drummer Keryn Henry begins the pattern on the snare, followed by quaver hits on each tom-tom, and finishing with two quaver hits on the ride cymbal on beat four. This motif is repeated four times before the off-beat verse pattern resumes.

Listen: Example 19—‘Slothy Tank’ Drum Solo (Inst Break)

A similar pattern can be heard in the pre-choruses and instrumental breaks of

The Go-Betweens’ ‘Ride’ (1981):

Listen: Example 20—‘Ride’ Drums (Pre-Chorus)

The Brisbane Sound 175 In the first pre-chorus of ‘Ride’ (starting at 0:28), the pattern is repeated eight times, with slight variations of which drums Morrison strikes in beats 2 through to 4.

These variations most likely correspond to where the right hand moves, as indicated by the assumed right-left-right-left sticking pattern in the above diagram.

The same pattern can be heard during the choruses of The Go-Betweens’ ‘One

Thing Can Hold Us’. The pattern often includes the beat one semiquavers carried over to beat three as well. In the first instrumental chorus, the pattern is contained to the snare drum, providing a driving, march like beat underneath the syncopated bass and rhythm guitar patterns:

Listen: Example 21—‘One Thing Can Hold Us’ (Chorus)

1 2 3 4 Snare ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

In the final chorus (outro) the pattern is performed on the rack tom.

The above examples are not isolated—they inform a set of generalisations we can make about the drumming style of the Brisbane Sound. Virtually all of the fills and ‘melodic’ rhythmic patterns in the corpus are single-stroke, meaning the drummers do not execute rudiments, flams or rolls. The shortest durational unit is the semiquaver.

Semiquavers are usually in groups no longer than four at a time. Additionally, snare syncopation and other deviations from the standard rock beat are made explicit; there are very few (if any) ghost notes. This could reflect a lack of formal training—these are generally taught only after the basic single-stroke technique has been mastered.

176 The Brisbane Sound However, that claim is hard to substantiate, and it could be argued equally that the drummers restricted their rhythmic palette for stylistic and creative purposes60.

The Brisbane Sound is Thin

The most important questions to ask of timbre, and that contribute to the way timbre signifies, again concern deviations from implicit norms. Such modifications tend to operate on various continua: from ‘harsher’ to ‘smoother’, from ‘thinner’ to ‘thicker’, from ‘more distanced’ (i.e. controlled) to ‘more indulgent’ (Moore 2012, 45).

In the previous chapter I established that a ‘thin’ sound may be the result of a bass performance style whereby the functional bass layer effectively abdicates its role as the chordal root and provider of harmonic bass frequencies. The following section highlights some germane examples of this stylistic trait from the Brisbane Sound corpus.

Thin as a result of bass register

‘Don’t Let Him Come Back’ was released in 1979 as the B side to The Go-

Betweens’ first single ‘People Say’. The was reportedly the first McLennan/Forster co-write to be recorded (Forster 2016, 55) and germinated from a bass riff of

McLennan:

Initially of course, I was playing bass. So most of the things I was doing were kind of riffy things, so the logical thing to do was then put a melody to that riff. [Don’t Let Him Come Back] was a bass riff of mine that Robert turned in to a sort of Dylan pastiche. (McLennan interviewed in Mengel 2005)

The following is a notated reduction of the verse and chorus of ‘Don’t Let Him

Come Back’:

60 An adage frequently heard in Brisbane musician parlance is ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’ i.e. the most tasteful performance choices are rarely the most complicated

The Brisbane Sound 177

Listen: Example 22—‘Don’t Let Him Come Back’ Original Bass

(Verse/Chorus)

The register that McLennan utilises is atypically high. This choice of register is not necessitated by the range of the bass guitar. The following is the notated range of a bass guitar in standard E-A-D-G tuning. [Note the sound produced is actually an octave lower. Also, the highest note is approximate and relative to the instruments design and extended playing techniques. The lowest playable note on the other hand— the open E string— is fixed.]

Hypothetically, McLennan could have performed the entire song down a whole octave and still have it fit well within this range. This means the part could have instead been performed on a six-string electric or acoustic guitar. The following is a notated representation of the original part if it was performed in the register an octave lower.

We could speculate that most bass players would in fact play it this way by default:

178 The Brisbane Sound Listen: Example 23—‘Don’t Let Him Come Back’ Low Bass (Verse/Chorus)

The bass part for Birds of Tin’s ‘Rain drops’ (1981), performed by Michael

Elliot, is also notable for its use of the higher register. However, in this case the lowest note (D, third line of bass clef) prevents the part being directly transposable down an octave:

Listen: Example 24—‘Rain Drops’ Bass (Verse/Chorus)

The second song on The Go-Betweens’ Send Me a Lullaby (1981) ‘People

Know’ also features several sections performed by McLennan in an unconventionally high bass register. The introduction to the song begins in a typical range, with

McLennan posting the root notes of the chords. However, during the verses and choruses, the bass line shifts up, providing a more or less direct parallel of the vocal melody in both motion and register:

Listen: Example 25—‘People Know’ Thin Bass

The Brisbane Sound 179

All of the above examples contribute to the effect of a thin sounding song, as there are no other pitched instruments filling out the low bass frequencies. The above examples highlight how a thin sound can be the product of pitch choice and confining the performance to upper frets. So far, we have been imagining thin as a lack of bass frequencies that result from upper register playing on a vertical, static axis, as represented by this intentionally simplistic diagram:

Thin as a result of sparse bass playing

But a thin sound can also result from the bass guitar not filling out the bass frequencies temporally, or in other words imagined over time on a horizontal axis. The bass playing is not ‘busy’—few notes are played per bar, and the notes that are played are short articulations. Thus, the low frequencies that are present are not sustained. In

180 The Brisbane Sound music theory this type of shortened, detached articulation is known as ‘staccato’ and is indicated in notation by a dot above or below the note. A prime example of this sparse, staccato bass playing can be heard in the introduction and verses of Birds of

Tin’s ‘Day at the Beach’ (1981). I have included the drum pattern in the following listening example to give a clearer sense of the temporal space the bass is leaving:

Listen: Example 26—‘Day at the Beach’ Sparse Bass

Notated reduction of the bass part of Birds of Tin’s ‘Day at the Beach’:

Finally, thinness can be observed as a combination of both upper-register bass playing and sparsity or economy of played notes. In the verse pattern to The Go-

Betweens’ ‘The Girls Have Moved’ (1981, UK edition of Send Me A Lullaby),

McLennan’s register is normative, occupying the first (lowest) octave of the bass guitar’s range. However, these notes are infrequent and short articulations. In the song’s chorus, the notes are sustained and/or more frequent, but the register is an octave higher.

Listen: Example 27—‘The Girls Have Moved’ Sparse Bass (Verse)

Listen: Example 28—‘The Girls Have Moved’ Bass (Chorus)

The Brisbane Sound 181 Conclusion

The main concern for this chapter was to take what is said to define the Brisbane

Sound in discourse, and see if this is realised in the music itself. On the surface, this analysis shows that the majority of the music conforms to the conventions of the pop rock music-style; the instrumentation is mostly unremarkable, as are the song forms, and use of repetition. The male singers did tend to sing in a lower than typical range though, pivoting around the baritone and bass registers.

Friction by way of unconventional time signatures was not heard in the Brisbane

Sound until 1981, when The Go-Betweens released their first full-length album Send

Me a Lullaby. Their songs ‘One Thing Can Hold Us’ and ‘Heaven Says’ incorporate an unusual 7/4 time signature, coupled with syncopation; ‘Midnight to Neon’ begins in 5/4 followed by a complex pattern of metric and structural friction; and ‘Cattle and

Cane’ is notorious for its cyclical eleven-beat verse. These metric frictions are typically released once we get to the chorus sections, where the songs revert back to the more familiar territory of 4/4. These aspects go some way to support the claims uncovered in the discourse analysis. Yet, many songs are actually in 4/4, but with a displaced back-beat that barely resembles a standard rock beat. In alignment with discourse, thin sounding is certainly found, identified as a tendency for bass players to perform sparsely and in the upper register of their instrument.

In addition, this music analysis located several Brisbane Sound idiosyncrasies that were not specified in the discourse, including harmonic friction and dissonance; tempo fluctuations; the ‘loose verse/tight chorus’ approach to song forms; and single- stroke fills around the drumkit, with semiquavers as the maximum subdivision.

182 The Brisbane Sound The next chapter explains how the musical features identified above guided the creation of five original songs that aim to replicate the sound of the Brisbane Sound.

This chapter is predominantly exegetical, but in explaining and reflecting on my methods, I also make several observations and informed assumptions about how the

Brisbane Sound songwriters may have approached their craft. In this sense it can be read as an extension to this present chapter’s findings.

The Brisbane Sound 183

Chapter 8: The Creative Works

Introduction

This Thesis by Creative Works includes an examinable, creative component in the form of five, original recordings that aim to sound like the Brisbane Sound. The songs included with this project are the outcome of a number of creative processes.

Primarily, and perhaps most evidently, they represent a conscious and intentional implementation of the sonic and musical features identified in the previous chapters.

In theory then, these outcomes should be replicable by other musician-scholars.

However, there is also an undeniable level of tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966) embodied in the songs. In my professional practice as a songwriter, my music fits within the same overarching pop-rock paradigms as that of the Brisbane Sound. Or, in

Bourdieu’s terms, my songs are situated in the same field to that of the Brisbane Sound; a field with its own musical idioms and expectations, that I have embodied in my musical habitus through two decades of songwriting, production and listening to music

(as both a music producer and fan).

Additionally, as I have listened to the corpus actively and passively for the past three years, there is likely a level of subconscious inculcation and tacit processing of some other musical features that can be found in The Brisbane Sound corpus, that I did not explicitly state in the music analysis section, or overlooked in sections that follow. As Polanyi states, tacit knowledge accounts for how “we can know more than we can tell” (1966, 4; italics in original). This is especially so when we consider that

‘telling’ what we know about the music we hear using language and/or graphical

The Brisbane Sound 185 transcription (such as notation) is inefficient and problematic (as established in

Chapter 3).

Finally, and arguably, there is an intangible element to songwriting that defies theorising. This romantic idea of the mystical, inspired songwriter, akin to the traditional Greek-Platonic muse, has been criticised and dispelled by post-Modern scholarship (see McIntyre 2011), paralleling the move away from the similarly problematic romantic notion of ‘authenticity’. This is not the place to argue for the reversal of such conclusions, or even to revisit the topic. Granted, perhaps in the public context of responding to a journalist’s (or even an ethnographer’s) questions about their approach to their craft, such answers warrant scepticism as they could be seen as maintaining the artist’s own myth and cultural capital as the romantic, inspired auteur.

However, I can speak about my own experience, and draw on private discussions with some of my closest musical friends that original song ideas do simply ‘come’ to us spontaneously and unexpectedly. In these contexts, and given our close and honest relationships, there is no cultural capital incentive to perpetuate myths.

These songs are entirely non-collaborative. This is worth noting because the original Brisbane Sound was really the sound produced by a number of bands, bands that had multiple members who all (in varying degrees and capacities) contributed to the songwriting and production of their songs. It is likely that a good portion of the corpus songs noted in earlier chapters were composed in what Finnegan (1989, 178) labelled the “prior-composition through practice mode”: members first composed musical ideas as individuals (a riff, chord progression, an interesting beat and so on) then presented them to the rest of the band at practice (rehearsal). However, these

“snatch[es]” require the collective input and effort from all members, sometimes over

186 The Brisbane Sound the course of several weeks or months61, to develop fully into songs ready for the recording studio (Finnegan 1989, 178). This is a process that is similar to the way we develop songs in my band The Gin Club62, but the main point to make here is that I did not have a band for this project. The implications and ramifications of being the sole-author and performer of works that are intended to sound like a collective of contributors is a topic worthy of its own study. For now, it should be noted that I developed and recorded each part with conscious aim of mimicking or synthesising the ‘groove’, fit, sound and—most importantly—an arrangement that a full band would otherwise organically bring to a record.

The Songwriting Stage

Songwriting: The Melodic Layer

The songs began life as demos that I created in my home studio. This environment provides a pragmatic way to quickly record and workshop new ideas and explore their potential without having to relocate from my usual office space. The other benefit of producing home demo versions means that once they are taken to a professional recording studio, the time (and money) spent recording is optimised and efficient63.

When developing ideas on the guitar, I would often just plug an electric guitar directly into my DAW (Digital Audio Interface) and press record on Pro Tools, then experiment whilst entering a state of creative “flow” (Csíkszentmihályi 1990). It would

61 as Finnegan observed with Milton Keynes rock band Basically Brian (1989, 178-179).

62 Although due to time and distance, The Gin Club rarely ever rehearses, and instead we rely on experience and skill to develop our parts for songs efficiently in the recording studio. 63 Professional, large format recording studios are costly; stories of exorbitant and protracted recording sessions are well known (e.g. the notorious Guns’n’Roses’ album Chinese Democracy). As a post-graduate student I had free access to QUT’s studios. Nevertheless, as a shared facility, time spent needed to be rationalised and used efficiently.

The Brisbane Sound 187 often require several minutes ‘noodling’ on a guitar before I developed a riff or chord progression that I would intuitively decide was worthy of further development, and perhaps the basis for a song. When this occurred I would pause recording, cut the region that contained the germane part, and paste it on a separate track for later reference. This spontaneous and intuitive approach to considering, responding to and culling ideas, whilst in the process of undertaking creative practice, is what Schön

(1983) refers to as ‘reflection-in-action’. Other times, I would not initially realise I had recorded anything interesting until I re-listened to the noodling at a later date

(analogous to Schön’s ‘reflection-on-action’ (1983)).

When outside of my home studio, I used my iPhone’s Voice Memo application to record ideas. The Voice Memo’s value is its ability to capture—and later prompt remembrance of—spontaneous and often fleeting bursts of creativity (what the creative practice literature commonly refers to as ‘light bulb’ or ‘eureka!’ moments).

For this purpose its low fidelity is inconsequential. The memos captured basic, and generally short, melodic and/or lyrical motifs that I sang, hummed, or played on a guitar (if at hand). Vocal melodies were rarely accompanied by useable lyrics and were instead carried by nonsense words or humming (called non-lexical vocables).

Songwriting: Writing the Lyrics

The actual lyrics for the creative works developed more gradually than the melodies and were refined over time. This paralleled my professional songwriting practice, whereby my lyrics are sometimes only finalised minutes before a studio recording session. The aim was to represent the themes, subject position, and the (more abstract) ‘naivety’ found in the original Brisbane Sound lyrics. Following this, the most common theme in my songs is nascent or fleeting interpersonal/romantic relationships associated with adolescence.

188 The Brisbane Sound Two songs contain explicit, local geographic or cultural themes specific to

Brisbane. Perhaps certain listeners will consider these a simple or facile strategy to inject ‘the Brisbane’ into my Brisbane Sound. However, the original Brisbane Sound lyricists tended to write about the mundane experiences of their everyday life, so local references were perhaps inevitable. The Go-Betweens’ first single, “Lee Remick”

(1978), locates Brisbane in its opening verse64. This is a noteworthy precedent because

“Lee Remick” holds a high amount of cultural currency as a prime example of the early Brisbane Sound.

In my song “Brisbane Girl”, the local reference is self-evident in its title and chorus hook. The chorus also quotes an obsolete65 Queensland tourism slogan,

“Beautiful one day, perfect the next”. Additionally, its bridge refers to Riverfire—a popular, public fireworks display that marks the end of the annual Brisbane Festival— as a metaphor for elation. Whilst both the slogan and Riverfire carry cultural and nostalgic meanings for many local residents, these referents would be opaque or abstract for non-locals. The song, “Rendezvous” contains a specific reference to

Trammie’s Corner, a lookout and youth meeting point in the inner north-western suburb of Paddington.

Songwriting: The Explicit Beat and Rhythm Layer

The discourse analysis carried out in the earlier stages of this project established a common belief that unconventional time signatures were a key musical signature of the Brisbane Sound. The music analysis supported this, revealing that approximately twenty percent (or one in five) of the songs in the corpus had sections that deviated

64 She comes from Ireland / She’s very beautiful / I come from Brisbane /And I’m quite plain 65 Although the slogan ran continually from 1998 to 2010, it was briefly rehashed for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

The Brisbane Sound 189 from the conventional 4/4 time. All these songs were by The Go-Betweens, and the most cited example in the narrative that orbits their music was the song “Cattle And

Cane”, which has a very unique eleven-beat verse pattern. Given the above, I decided that one of my five songs should include a verse that also had an eleven-beat cycle.

However, in my professional career, I have rarely composed songs in anything other than 4/4, other than a few in the entirely normative 3/4 (or waltz time). As such I struggled to intuitively formulate a melody or chord progression that adhered to such a ‘foreign’ cycle of beats. So I began by first constructing an eleven-beat drum loop in

Pro Tools (using a virtual drum kit triggered by MIDI notes). After repeated listens the pattern became ingrained in my subconscious, familiar and predictable. This meant I could experiment with chord progressions and melodies without having to also think about its underlying beat.

Songwriting: The Harmonic Filler Layer

In general, the Brisbane Sound utilised a smaller range of chords than I would normally employ in my songwriting. I consciously made an effort to simplify my guitar playing, and put self-imposed limits on the range of chords at my disposal. The

Brisbane Sound was not punk music, but it did replicate one of the main tenets of the punk and folk traditions: you did not need to know a lot of chords to start a band and make music (as per the Sideburns fanzine three chord diagram). This meant there was probably little incentive to master more chords than was absolutely necessary to write songs. It is also likely that the songwriters had not learned to play, or mastered the physiology of playing, an extended range of chords. I have not accrued evidence to support this claim66, but I can draw on my own experience. For example when I first

66 The idea that songs are largely a product of gestures, habitus or “the practical exigencies of technique” (Monelle 1992, 60) is an interesting topic for future research but will not be explored further here.

190 The Brisbane Sound taught myself the guitar and began writing songs, I remember how the ‘open’ guitar chords—C, D/Dm, E/Em, G, and A/Am—were relatively easy to master. Barre chords such as F and Bm required greater dexterity and finger strength, and were therefore much more difficult to play, and moreover, incorporate into original songs. So as a beginner songwriter, I only wrote songs that used open chords. It is conceivable that the Brisbane Sound musicians experienced a similar hurdle and limitation, and thus, I tried to use a limited range of chords as a creative constraint.

Songwriting: Incorporating Friction

However, the limited range of chords did not mean the Brisbane Sound lacked harmonic complexity. This is because the guitarists would often make slight adaptions to common chord shapes to create unusual (atonal) sounding chords (technically referred to as ‘extended’ chords). I followed this model, by starting with simple

(triadic) chords then moving one finger to a different position until I found a chord that sounded dissonant and tonally unstable. What I was seeking here was a combination of dissonance and playability. With this in mind, I also tried to restrain how much my left (fretting) hand moved around the fretboard, careful to avoid dexterous or complex fingering, shapes and scales, and all in all tried to simplify my playing while still coming up with original ideas. Thus, I frequently used highly dissonant diatonic semitones as, being only one fret apart on the guitar neck, they are easy to play. This approach to intentionally seeking ‘weird’ sounding guitar riffs and chords was, again, an intuitive and instinctive process. I let my fingers move in shapes on the fretboard without consciously thinking about what notes I was playing. I was creating non- functional harmonic dissonance, but at the time I did not think of it like that, in fact I tried to avoid overthinking every stage. This intuitive approach most likely paralleled that of the Brisbane Sound musicians, who received little to no formal music

The Brisbane Sound 191 education, especially in the Western art tradition of functional/non-functional harmony.

Once a sufficient body of discrete sections was composed and demoed, it was time to arrange them into a structure.

Songwriting: Structure and Tempo Maps

In my view, two key temporal parameters—the structure (form) of a song, and its tempo (or tempi, if we include its fluctuations)—are a critical aspect any song’s aesthetic. Despite this claim, rock criticism, which is largely based on making value judgements about pop song aesthetics, rarely draws attention to these elements.

Popular musicologists do frequently acknowledge a song’s structure and tempi, but I propose that this probably reflects how these aspects are the most easy to measure and thus quantify, rather than symbolising their semiotic or aesthetic significance.67

During the music analysis phase of this project, I created mock ups (re- recordings) of the corpus songs to present pertinent findings as audio examples. Part of this process was creating ‘groove’ maps in Pro Tools that revealed each song’s tempo and its fluctuations over time. This facilitated the creation of mock ups that adhered exactly to the original tempi. Markers that designated the start and end of each section within a song (intro, verse, chorus and so on) were also added. These steps not only revealed a given song’s tempi, groove and structure, but also identified patterns within and across the corpus.

67 During the music analysis, I personally felt reassured by such ’objective’ measures whilst otherwise approaching the songs with a subjective or qualitative methodology.

192 The Brisbane Sound For example, a common structural device shared over many songs in the corpus was that the harmonic and rhythmic frictions were almost always contained within the verses, and their tension released in the choruses by capitulating to the more common

4/4 time signature and harmonically stable chords (following what Temperley (2007) labelled the ‘Loose Verse/Tight Chorus’ model). I also noted a common structural device whereby several songs had large sections with no vocal or other melodic layer

(such as a solo instrument) and were instead carried solely by the song’s rhythm and groove. Often, these were simply instrumental versions of the verse and choruses, used to bridge between the vocal sections. Other times, they were standalone grooves with no vocal-led equivalent.

I realised I could use the pre-existing arrangements located when creating the mock ups as templates for my original songs to mirror. This meant that not only were my song structures reflective of valid precedents, but that the task of arranging my songs was expedited. Given that these tempo maps in Pro Tools trigger the click

(metronome) count, it also meant that—in theory—my songs could be recorded in a way that included the exact same tempo fluctuations as the source songs. I say in theory, because during the actual practice of recording my songs this became somewhat problematic (outlined below).

After the basic arrangements were completed, in my home studio I recorded

‘scratch’ (temporary) rhythmic guitar, bass and vocal parts that would act as guides for the next stage, recording the drums in a large format studio.

The Brisbane Sound 193 Recording the Creative Works

Recording: Process and Technical Considerations

The five original songs were recorded over three days in April 2018 at QUT’s

Skyline Studio A with the help of sound engineer, James See. As I was the sole performer for every instrument, each part had to be overdubbed (played one at a time), rather than recorded ‘live’ and simultaneously. When recording a band in this way, it is practical and common to first record the drums, as they determine the foundational groove and tempo of the song over which other instruments can be based. The main live room had excessive and undesirable reverberance, so we recorded the drums in a smaller adjacent room. After setting up the drums and its microphones, James sent the scratch guitar and bass parts to the drum headphones along with a click (metronome) track that followed each song’s pre-existing groove template. The drums is the instrument for which I am the most proficient, nevertheless, each song required an average of four full takes before I was satisfied with the performance.

On the second day, I tracked the electric guitar parts (typically three: lead guitar, rhythm guitar and bass guitar) directly into the Pro Tools session using a DI (direct injection) box whilst listening to the drum recordings. As I am less competent on guitar, these recordings often needed to be stopped, rewound a few bars, and started again.

Recording: Retaining the ‘Naïve’ Amateurism

However, as much as possible, I wanted to capture a level of spontaneity in the performances, so any minor mistakes were left in. This was to replicate how the original Brisbane Sound was recorded. At the time, bands recorded using tape machines rather than computers and so micro-editing was not feasible (although certainly possible in the hands of a skilful tape splicer). Also, there would have been

194 The Brisbane Sound an economic imperative to reduce the time spent in a costly professional studio as well as how much physical tape was used. All these factors meant that before the digital age, it was necessary for independent musicians to be content with ‘good enough’ performances, and this ethos was something I was conscious to replicate whilst tracking my parts.

Recording: Approaches to recording a ‘band’ sound as an individual

Recording the guitar parts through a DI unit (direct input) rather than an amplifier allowed for what is called ‘re-amping’; the direct, unprocessed guitar parts are sent out of the DAW (in an infinite loop, if necessary) via a standard guitar lead.

This meant I could audition different types of amplifiers and adjust their settings without ever needing to pick up a guitar. This also meant that despite every guitar part—namely, the rhythm, rhythm double, lead guitar and bass guitar parts— being recorded individually, they could be re-amped simultaneously in order to introduce a desirable level of ‘spill’. Spill occurs when the sound from one source leaks into the microphones set up to record others. A small amount of spill is inevitable when any band records ‘live’ together in the same or adjacent rooms. Although this usually is undesirable, I knew that including some spill was a crucial part in making my songs sound like they were produced by a Brisbane Sound band, rather than a single-artist who performed multiple overdubs. To achieve this, I placed each guitar amplifier in its own room with their doors left open.

On the other hand, vocal recordings are almost always overdubbed to avoid spill68. With this in mind, on the third day, I recorded the vocal and backing vocal parts

68 Vocal microphones (condensers) are particularly sensitive to spill, and spill is difficult to remove with editing. When post-processing is applied to the vocal (such as compression) the spill in vocal tracks is also effected, which complicates the task of mixing. As such, steps are usually made to mitigate or minimise the spill in vocal recordings, such as overdubbing and using closed-back (isolation) headphones.

The Brisbane Sound 195 in an isolated room, using headphones to minimise any spill from the rhythm section tracks. Each song was approached with a different vocal persona, delivery and performance that attempted to carry or replicate the differing idiolects of the original

Brisbane Sound musicians.

My Brisbane Sound Songs

The above sections outlined some of the broad approaches taken towards the songwriting and recording of the creative works. In the following sections, I detail some pertinent features of each song in the creative works.

Stay Quiet

“Stay Quiet” began as a repetitive, discordant guitar riff. A music analysis would locate tritone dissonance here, but again I did not think of it in this way, it came naturally. This was transposed down two frets to create the harmonic sequence that filled the verse. The arrangement includes long instrumental sections with no vocals, a typical feature of the corpus songs. The song is in the conventional 4/4 time signature.

However, in the verse, the strong snare on beat two, found in the standard rock beat, is shifted to beat one. In the instrumental ‘stompy’ section at 1:30, the drums do not keep very good time, and in places, the guitars also fall out of time with each other and the drums. This was intentionally sloppy performance that I avoided correcting in editing. This retained a sense of ‘fragility’; the groove sounds like it may fall apart.

The fills on the drums were limited to semi-quavers, and often around the toms, representative of ‘melodic’ drumming. The verse bass repeats an atypically high, thin sounding motif. The harmonic and rhythmic friction established in the verses is released in the chorus (the loose verse/tight chorus model).

196 The Brisbane Sound Brisbane Girl

“Brisbane Girl” aimed to represent the early songs of The Riptides. This sound is basically a 1960s surf-rock pastiche, but at an unusually high tempo of approximately 200 beats per minute. It features a catchy pentatonic guitar riff, performed in octaves over two Fender Telecasters. The rhythm guitar part is stabby and syncopated, the chords are cut short in what is sometimes called a ‘habanera’ rhythmic motif. The harmony here is entirely functional, in the sense that the chord progression is conventional and familiar to pop-rock, firmly establishing a single key or tonal centre. The overall performance, especially the drums, is much tighter than the other songs, in keeping with the comparatively high skillset of the early Riptides.

The vocal persona and phasing is the most confident in its delivery, rehearsed, and in an intentionally higher register to reflect the early singing persona of Mark Callaghan.

This song also features confident and sophisticated backing vocal harmony parts, uncommon in much of the corpus except for the Riptides.

Rendezvous

“Rendezvous” was built on the existing tempo and structure map of The Go

Betweens’ “People Say” (1979). Unlike “People Say” however, the structure of

“Rendezvous” is based on a tripartite model common in songs by The Apartments.

The chord progression to the verse is simple and cyclical, intentionally limited to mostly three chords alternating in sequence. The chorus is also fairly conventional in its harmony, taking influence from 1960s pop, as the Brisbane Sound artists did. Like

“People Say” by The Go-Betweens, the verse has a nine bar structure, or in another words, a typical eight bar structure with a one bar extension. A drum fill is used as a rhythmic cadence, signalling the next section. The vocals to “Rendezvous” adopt an

The Brisbane Sound 197 affected persona with a mixture of strong and weak articulation. Several phrases break, representing vocal fragility.

Hard to Know

The most prominent aspect of “Hard to Know” is the verse established on an eleven-beat cycle. This could be counted as 11/4 or more likely 6/4 + 5/4. As is typical for the arrangement of The Go-Betweens, the pattern is first established by the drums on the kick and ride, then the layers are added gradually. The bass line in the verse is high, sparse, thin and melodic. The rhythm guitars also play chord shapes in the upper register (higher frets). The lack of bass frequencies intended to produce thinness in the harmonic and bass filler layer. The verse vocals aimed to convey a sense of amateurism, unsure of the melody and lacking confidence in their delivery. I tried to sing it like I was figuring out the song as it was being recorded, so the verse melody wavers over the beats. The chorus releases friction in both its harmony and its rhythm, back to the familiar 4/4. The vocals, in turn, sound more assured and confident. In later verses, the vocals seem to have figured out the unusual time signature.

Someone for Everyone

The introduction and bridge sections of “Someone For Everyone” follows an unconventional 6/4 time signature. This time, an atonal melodic pattern is established first on lead guitar and then bass, before the drums enter on kick, snare and floor tom.

The double-tracked vocal persona and vocal range is the lowest of all five songs

(baritone), with a full-throated ‘crooner’ style persona (Moore 2001, 57). Again, the friction of harmonic dissonance is released in chorus which reverts back to the familiar functional harmony. This song contains periods of stop time, this is where the drums drop out for a period (such as the instrumental break at 1:42). The fills on the drums are kept to single stroke, semiquaver rolls on the snare and around the toms. The tempo

198 The Brisbane Sound of the song fluctuates, with a slight ramp in the choruses. In the outro (2:39), the 6/4 pattern is maintained on the guitars but the drums maintain the standard 4/4 rock beat established in the tight chorus, creating a polyrhythm.

Mixing and Post-Production

These songs were mixed by iconic Brisbane mix engineer and producer Dr

Lachlan ‘Magoo’ Goold in three days, with my guidance. Because references to recording and production are almost entirely absent from the discourse surrounding the Brisbane Sound, the mixing and post-production stages were largely driven by our intuition and experience. I supplied Magoo with the corpus songs as a brief for mixing.

The aim was not to mimic the songs, but to replicate the general vibe of the recordings and production aesthetics. Like the approach to the recording, these songs were mixed quickly, with very few recalls or edits. This was to simulate the limited time these bands, in the early stages of their careers, had in the studio. Effects and processing were kept to a minimum. Although much of the processing was done using plugin emulations (software), these were modelled on hardware that would have been accessible between 1978 and 1983.

Conclusion

These songs were for the most part a pleasure to write, perform and record. I did not feel restricted by the data, in fact, setting creative constraints in such a way actually does the inverse. With a limited creative palette, the process of writing and producing songs becomes a more straightforward task. Adopting a Brisbane Sound mindset also developed in me a strange affinity with the original Brisbane Sound songwriters, bass players, drummers, singers, guitarists and others, most of whom I have never met.

Getting away from the books and LED screens, back to making real music, holding

The Brisbane Sound 199 real instruments, also made me have a new appreciation for the original songs. As I write this conclusion, I am listening to my five songs for the first time in several months. This time has given me the opportunity to forget about the analysis, the tracking, the edits, and the mixing. From a research perspective, I am very happy with the outcome. I have no plans to release these songs until this thesis is completely finalised and published, so I have few other people to base my clearly biased opinions on, however I do at this stage feel like I managed to capture the essence of the Brisbane

Sound in five original sound recordings. Above all, I am surprised to learn that I quite like them. I hope that you do, too.

200 The Brisbane Sound Chapter 9: Conclusions

Introduction

Music is the arrangement of sounds, and sounds—physics tells us—are simply audible waves of air pressure. This means there is no inherent meaning to music; we, as humans continually invent and reinvent the meanings we give to it. Nevertheless, to a great deal of the population, the meanings we ascribe to popular music mean a great deal. The Brisbane Sound is one such meaning. The Brisbane Sound is a social and cultural construction, but it is certainly real, in so far as it exists in discourse, local memories, and the way it shapes the identities of Brisbane musicians, music writers, and fans. For people who were participants in the original Brisbane Sound scene, The

Brisbane Sound was an important part of shaping their past and present identities. For many cultural intermediaries, their cultural capital, ageing identity, and consequentially their career trajectories are anchored to the existence of the concept, how it is defined, and its cultural value. Thus, they are invested in the Brisbane Sound’s continual propagation and dissemination in public media as a real, tangible and legitimate concept.

Nevertheless, people hear much more in music than they can say using words.

Perhaps fortuitously, the Brisbane Sound’s simplicity means its elements require less unpacking. This makes it relatively simple for people such as cultural intermediaries to identify and label the major conative musical elements. This, in turn, facilitates the dissemination of these ideas, producing discourse. It also makes it a relatively straightforward process, for a musician like myself, to identify, unpack and then rearrange these elements into original music that retains the conative parts.

The Brisbane Sound 201 Summary of Chapters

In the introductory chapter, I presented the initial idea that precipitated this study, along with the rationale, thesis type, aims, problem statement and contribution to knowledge. I set to answer a concise, yet ambitious, primary research question, in asking: ‘What does the Brisbane Sound sound like?’ This question was then delimited by a range of assumptions, limitations, and the scope of this thesis. At the end of

Chapter 1, I established a precursory position on the ‘existence’ of the Brisbane Sound.

I will return to this point shortly.

In Chapter 2, I established the geographical context for this study and outlined the various disciplines that it intersects. From the field of cultural studies, particularly, the writing of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I set out to view the Brisbane Sound as a site of power relations and exchanges; a discursive field in which agents compete for various types of capital by defining, delimiting, and in a few instances, contesting its existence through a heterogeneity argument. I then highlighted some influential scholarly literature about the Brisbane music scene, followed by a review of the literature that has addressed other city-sound relationships.

In Chapter 3, I explained some of Bourdieu’s key theories, focusing on the concept of the cultural intermediary. I then referred to several studies that supported my claim that language is an inefficient and problematic way of explaining music as sound. Following this, I briefly covered why we categorise music using use genre and style labels, established the difference between the two terms, then described some basic pop music-style conventions.

In Chapter 4, I began by introducing the six cultural intermediaries who maintained the Brisbane Sound discourse. I then provided some information about six

202 The Brisbane Sound bands that were considered the original purveyors of the Brisbane Sound, namely,

Birds of Tin, Out of Nowhere, The Apartments, The Riptides Four Gods and The Go-

Betweens.

In Chapter 5, I explained the research design for the written parts of this thesis, including the methodology behind both discourse and music analyses, and proposed a potential solution to the problem of music’s ineffability with music about language. I then discussed several ways a pop-rock song can be analysed by first identifying its constituent parts. These included viewing a song in terms of its horizontal and vertical planes, via Moore’s system of four layers, and as a tripartite process of songwriting, performance, and production.

The Discourse Analysis in Chapter 6, analysed the ways the Brisbane Sound has been constructed in media discourses over time. The Brisbane Sound was described as

‘sunny’; as a relatively naïve or amateur way of performing; fragile; and thin sounding.

It was broadly categorised as pop-rock; and narrowly by certain deviations from pop- rock conventions, including unusual rhythms and time signatures. The discourse also showed that the Brisbane Sound remains largely a phenomenon of local subcultural parlance. Interestingly, unlike in other cities such as Liverpool, it appears local governments, tourism, and the music industry are yet to explicitly use the Brisbane

Sound trope as a marketing tool. The Brisbane Sound is, however, indirectly implicated in local cultural heritage and identity, as evidenced in the naming of the Go

Between Bridge [sic], and Screamfeeder’s plaque in the Valley Walk of Fame.

In Chapter 7, I applied music analysis to the corpus and located all the musical elements described in the discourse. I also identified all-male vocalists who favoured lower registers; harmonic friction (or dissonance); rhythmic friction; ‘melodic’

The Brisbane Sound 203 drumming; thin as upper register and sparse bass guitar playing; syncopated drumming with a displaced back-beat; the ‘loose-verse/tight-chorus’ model; and fluctuations in tempo.

In Chapter 8, I explained my methods and approach to writing, performing and recording the five original songs attached to this thesis as Creative Works, presented as an aural distillation of the findings from this document.

The Go-Betweens Sound?

Although the Brisbane Sound is attributed to music by several bands, much of what is said about the Brisbane Sound is really about the early sound of The Go-

Betweens. This is evidenced in how over time their own trope, the Striped Sunlight

Sound, became used as a synonym for the Brisbane Sound. In the cultural memory of

Brisbane music, The Go-Betweens sound has become the Brisbane Sound.

Why was it then not simply known as The Go-Betweens Sound? Some city- sounds are conceived around the most successful band, with others lumped in through sheer emulation (for example, The Beatles and the original Liverpool Sound). Yet, the

Brisbane Sound label was being used before it was obvious that The Go-Betweens would become the most successful proponents of the sound (for instance, see Gray

1981; Walker 1982). And people did recognise a variety of songwriting and performance elements common in the music produced by a number of bands.

It is important to remember that these elements were identified in discourse that was published across almost four decades. The more recent definitions of the Brisbane

Sound could be considered retrospective cultural consecrations (Schmutz 2005).

Cultural memories are not fossil records; they are amorphous, diachronic constructs with meanings that are rarely fixed. For music critics in particular, these meanings may

204 The Brisbane Sound be tailored to fit a given narrative, or simply to fit the available copy-space. Weak or ephemeral meanings may be dispensed with and forgotten, whilst cogent and eloquent definitions may produce salient, lasting cultural memories. So perhaps, as The Go-

Between gradually became recognised as the most iconic Brisbane Sound band, the meaning of the Brisbane Sound morphed into what was essentially The Go-Betweens sound. This may also account for why all the musical features said to connote the

Brisbane Sound—for example, unconventional time signatures, melodic bass playing and naivety as amateurism—can be found in the music of The Go-Betweens, but not always in the music of other Brisbane Sound bands.

In any case, The Brisbane Sound is the composite, holistic arrangement of the musical features in songs. As I have mentioned previously, taken individually, these elements can be found in multiple styles and sounds, across time, from various other cities around the world. To illustrate this point, I will briefly compare the Brisbane

Sound to “Paranoid Android” from Radiohead’s third album OK Computer (1996).

Like the Brisbane Sound, the song is classified as pop-rock. During its bridge (at

02:11), there is a high-register, melodic, bass solo over an unconventional seven-beat cycle (or 7/4). Yet despite these shared features, it is unlikely that “Paranoid Android” would ever be confused with being the Brisbane Sound. There are two key reasons for this, which summarise some of the main findings of this thesis:

a.) There is a lot more going on, in both its production and arrangement. This

renders the Brisbane Sound(-ish) elements of the song unremarkable. The

point to make here is it demonstrates that the Brisbane Sound is relatively

simple music. This means its individual parts are easier to isolate, categorise,

and name, thus translate well as connotative labels for defining the whole.

The Brisbane Sound 205 b.) Radiohead are not from Brisbane. This is not frivolous; the implications are

far-reaching and complex. The Brisbane Sound is not unique to Brisbane,

but it matters not, for Brisbane is entrenched not only in its name, but how it

is understood to exist.

Indeed, we have seen how the Brisbane Sound exhibited many of the features of the broader post-punk movement as identified by Reynolds (2005), and the Chicago

Sound identified by Faris (2004). This is hardly surprising, because music scenes are not hermetically sealed containers of activity and creativity69. Rather, like many developed cities, Brisbane’s music scene has always been influenced by local, trans- local and ‘glocal’ practices (Robertson 1995; Bennett and Peterson 2004). Popular music making is also trans-temporal, in the sense that all musicians draw on a lifetime of influences and traditions acquired through active listening, inactive hearing, socialisation, collaboration, and ancestry. All songs are constructed from subconsciously borrowed (or, at worst blatantly stolen), ideas from songs from other places and times.

Does this mean that any idea of a city-sound is essentially a myth? In part, perhaps. However, I can think of several reasons why small local music scenes, like

Brisbane, can in fact produce musical practices and sounds that are shared across multiple bands whilst at the same time being uniquely local. Musicians from other bands are often friends first and musical colleagues second. They inspire each other: they talk about music and songs; they learn, lend or steal certain tricks; they show each other fancy chords and unusual rhythms. They share instruments, tour vans, and

69 Indeed, the seemingly rigid, impermeable boundaries of traditional (CCCS) subcultural theory is a key reason almost all scholars have moved to the more flexible concept of music scenes, and to a lesser extent, neo-tribes (see Bennett 1999).

206 The Brisbane Sound occasionally share members, influencing each other’s world views and constructing each other’s habituses. There is always an element of local competition too. The ‘best’ group sets a benchmark for performance, a level of technical proficiency and songcraft worth aspiring to, or alternatively model a level of complacency and laziness (‘he doesn’t bother to warm up before a show, so I won’t either’). Simply through osmosis, musicians in small local scenes instil in each other a certain level of musical and performance homogeneity. Finally, they often share stages and therefore audiences. In amongst the audience are budding cultural intermediaries, immersed in this collective music making experience, taking notes and identifying these common threads. They are categorising, making a label for what they hear, and a city-sound is born.

Gaps and Areas for Future Research

Despite the breadth of this thesis, there remains some gaps, and tangents, for future research. Prior to me undertaking this research, little was known about the

Brisbane Sound outside of a small subculture of fans and biographers. The discourse that I did find tended to isolate and insulate the Brisbane Sound, inferring that it was a uniquely localised phenomenon. Future work could be done that explores how trans- temporal and trans-local sounds from other scenes and times influenced or is reflected in the Brisbane Sound. Obviously, studying the cross-fertilisation of a sound it is necessary to first collect a sufficient body of data about each individual scene in question. The completion of this insulated scene study allows future researchers the opportunity to use this data to realise the implications of multiple city-sounds that include Brisbane.

I have noted that the musicians and cultural intermediaries responsible for the creation of the Brisbane Sound are predominantly white, heteronormative, and middle- class men. A brief glance of the concordance table will show that female voices are

The Brisbane Sound 207 rarely asked to contribute their ideas about the Brisbane Sound, or when they do, they do not get heard. At the 2018 KISMIF70 popular music conference in Porto, Portugal,

I presented a paper titled “Female Drummer Wanted” (Regan 2018, forthcoming). This preliminary research showed that in any narrative about the band, Robert Forster and

Grant McLennan’s plan of recruiting a female drummer is always mentioned. Forster himself claims he simply wanted to replicate the gender dynamics of Mod Squad or

Jules and Jim (Forster quoted in Stafford 2004, 84; Forster 2014, 8; Forster 2016, 53), as well as being inspired by the precedent set by Moe Tucker and The Velvet

Underground. However, there are potential tokenistic implications worth exploring, including overtly rejecting the ‘oz rock’, masculine model and seeking subcultural capital through proffering an attitude of “inverted sexism” (Nichols 2013, 96). In 1980

Lindy Morrison became The Go-Betweens’ first female member and first full-time drummer, producing a key sonic signature of the Brisbane Sound, namely her

“common disregard for the simple 4/4, ‘meat and potatoes’ approach in time-keeping”

(Tahiraj 2008). It is important to recognise that every quote above is by a man. In the near future, my supervisor Dr Kiley Gaffney and I plan to view the Brisbane Sound as a site of political struggle for women and non-binary identities, particularly the female members of The Go-Betweens. The main thing is that future research in this area should place female voices (such as Morrison’s) front and centre, and prioritise their agency.

Next, this thesis focused on the songwriting and performance aspects of the

Brisbane Sound. Although the role of the producer or mix engineer is entirely absent from the discourse, studying the recordings from a production and mixing perspective

70 ‘Keep it Simple, Make it Fast’ https://www.kismifconference.com/en/

208 The Brisbane Sound could certainly yield different or greater insights into the sound of the Brisbane Sound.

I propose this topic for future research, taking insights from the emergent field of phonomusicology, researching the studios used, and if possible, some qualitative interviews with mix engineers or producers who were present during the recordings.

Another research tangent would be to extend the temporal boundaries of this thesis beyond the ‘original’ Brisbane Sound (from 1978 to 1983). As the Concordance

Table and the Timeline in Appendix C shows, the Brisbane Sound trope continues to be used at a seemingly intergenerational level. Specifically, two later phases are the mid-1990s with a number of music writers citing Custard and Screamfeeder as proponents of the Brisbane Sound, and the mid 2010s with Babaganouj and Jeremy

Neale also having multiple attributions. Lastly, in June 2014, The Cairos were labelled the “latest champions of the Brisbane Sound” on the cover of Brisbane street press The

Music (Bell 2014).

I can say though, being familiar with the music of these artists, that the further we get away from the original Brisbane Sound period, the more tenuous the links become in relation to the original sound. This implies that the Brisbane Sound is no longer used in reference to particular musicological or production functions within texts. Rather, it is attributed more vaguely to a few tightly-knit alternative indie-pop artists from the Brisbane music scene who share similar habituses and field positions

(and indeed, often stages and audiences). This implies that the Brisbane Sound has now primarily become a means of consolidating existing narratives of cultural memory by cultural intermediaries, who are continually, and increasingly, looking for ways to renegotiate their cultural capital assets. Redeploying the Brisbane Sound is not only a reflexive act of nostalgia: it signals relevance and replenishes the cultural currency of their ageing identities in the increasingly narrow field of music writing (and

The Brisbane Sound 209 endangered, see Thackray 2016). Of course, it is possible that the trope is rehashed

“rather lazily” simply to fulfil their “journalistic urge to pigeonhole” (Halfacree and

Kitchin 1996, 52).

Another possible tangent for future research could be to analyse other city- sounds using the design of this thesis: discourse analysis that informs music analysis, with both (potentially) informing creative practice. Of the current existing city-sound studies, very few interrogate the musical aspects of the sound in question. However, the manual methods I used to capture the discourse are probably only fitting for similarly sized, subjacent or isolated cities, as the quantity of discourse about these cities is naturally moderated in correlation with its population and music scene. It is possible to study the sound of larger ‘global’ cities through discourse analysis, but the sheer quantity of media texts may require either a team of researchers or computational qualitative software to identify patterns in the data. I propose future research begins with other subjacent Australian capital cities. Perth, in particular, seems fitting for further research using this model, given the existing scholarly literature that has already emerged that defines several iterations of the Perth Sound.

Bridging the Gap

In 1993 Middleton called for scholars from popular music studies and musicology “bridge the gap” between the two fields, by situating and interrogating the sound of the music firmly within its sociocultural context. It would appear to me that a gap still exists, and this thesis is my attempt at addressing the divide. Still, I believe for cultural studies of music in general, the sound of the music itself ought to be more central, or at least supplement, the context of the music being studied. I acknowledge that not all popular music studies scholars are musicians, musicologists or have training in music theory. Popular music studies could collaborate more with

210 The Brisbane Sound musicology and vice versa, in alignment with IASPM’s original aim of being truly interdisciplinary. The findings of such collaborations should, wherever possible, avoid technical jargon and be expressed with every-day language. Included findings could be supplemented with audio examples71, as I have done here. Both approaches avoid the trap of esotericism typically levelled at musicology, and open their findings to the widest possible readership, including ‘non-musos’ (Tagg 2013).

Concluding Remarks

The Brisbane Sound is now entrenched in the cultural memory of Brisbane music history. These cultural memories are not long lost, historical narratives—they are being written (and rewritten) today by reflexive participants. New texts referencing the

Brisbane Sound are continually produced. Robert Forster released an autobiography

Grant and I in 2016. In January 2017, The Apartments first EP Return of the Hypnotist

(1979) was re-released by Donat Tahiraj’s record label LCMR. Three of The Go-

Betweens’ original members recently staged and toured a “contemporary reimagining” of their album 16 Lovers Lane to celebrate its 30th anniversary (QPAC 2017). A documentary about The Go-Betweens titled Right Here debuted at the Sydney Film

Festival in June 2017 (Stenders 2017).

Prior to beginning this research project in 2015, I had never heard of the Brisbane

Sound. I had hardly even heard much about The Go-Betweens. In September 2018 The

Guardian Australia newspaper ran an online poll labelled “Songs of Brisbane:

Guardian Australia's celebration of the past, present and future of music in Brisbane”

(Spring 2018). The Go-Betweens took out the first and third place with “Streets of

71 It is looking increasingly likely that stereo audio will remain the primary vehicle for the transmission of music as sound for the foreseeable future. If video, or 3D, immersive virtual reality becomes the normative mode of listening, then such methods could be adapted to include visual representations of the music also.

The Brisbane Sound 211 Your Town” (1988) and “Cattle and Cane” (1983) respectively. Second place went to

The Saints (I’m) Stranded (1977). If there was a prize for the number of direct messages and tags from friends and some strangers linking to this poll and the surrounding articles, I would have certainly won.

In Australia, the cultural heritage industries are booming (Strong, Cannizzo, and

Rogers 2017). In Brisbane, cultural memory making for the period studied here seems to only be growing. Young Brisbane musicians continue to cite Brisbane Sound bands as influential to their music. At the same time, the baby-boomers who participated in the Brisbane Sound continually lean on the cultural memory of that scene to shape their ageing identities. Our personal memories, though, do not survive us, so it is up to researchers and libraries to capture these memories before they are lost forever.

Finally, at the time of writing, the five original songs that accompany this thesis have not been released, performed in public, or reviewed by music critics. Or, in

Bourdieu’s terms, the songs are yet to be legitimated by the field. However, once this thesis and its creative works are published, I have no doubt that further discourse about the Brisbane Sound will be generated. Thus, the spiral of meaning will continue. It would appear the conclusion of this research is only the beginning.

212 The Brisbane Sound References (Concordance Table)

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The Brisbane Sound 213 ———. 2016. Grant & I: Inside and Outside The Go-Betweens. Melbourne: Penguin Random House Australia.

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The Brisbane Sound 235

Appendices

Appendix A: The Brisbane Sound Primary Corpus

Year Band Title Side Song Title 1978 Sep The Go-Betweens Lee Remick A Lee Remick B Karen 1978/ Sep The Numbers / Sunset Strip A Sunset Strip 1979 Jul The Riptides B1 Magic Castle B2 Rules of Love 1979 May The Go-Betweens People Say A People Say B Don't Let Him Come Back 1979 Oct The Apartments Return of the Hypnotist A Help B1 Nobody Like You B2 Refugee 1980 Feb The Riptides Tomorrow's Tears A Tomorrow's Tears B Some Other Guy 1980 Jun The Go-Betweens I Need Two Heads A I Need Two Heads B Stop Before You Say It 1981 Jul The Go-Betweens Your Turn, My Turn A Your Turn, My Turn B World Weary 1981 Sep Four Gods Enchanted House A Enchanted House AA Restless 1981 Dec Birds of Tin Same Both Sides A1 Slothy Tank A2 Rain Drops B1 Think of the Future B2 Day at the Beach 1981 Nov The Go-Betweens Send Me A Lullaby A1 One Thing Can Hold Us A2 People Know A3 Midnight to Neon A4 Careless B1 All About Strength B2 Ride B3 Hold Your Horses B4 It Could Be Anyone 1982 Jun The Go-Betweens Hammer The Hammer A Hammer the Hammer B By Chance 1982 July Out of Nowhere Remember, Remember A Remember, Remember B No Resistance 1982 Sep The Riptides Hearts and Flowers A Hearts and Flowers B Sandarama 1983 Feb The Go-Betweens Cattle and Cane A Cattle and Cane B Heaven Says

The Brisbane Sound 237

Appendix B: Concordance (Quotes) Table

# Year Agent Band / Artist Extract Source

01 1981 Gray, Ian Birds of Tin; The short-lived Birds of Tin created some excitement The Go- for a while. Rumoured to be "just like the Go- (Gray 1981, 16) Betweens Betweens, only better," they did lend to credence to X-Change fanzine that band's theory that there is a "Brisbane Sound" and that they (the Go-Betweens) are it. 02 1982 Walker, Clinton The Go- The Go-Betweens gathered immediate acclaim with (Walker 1982, 50) Betweens their debut single, the folky post-punk pop of "Lee Inner City Sound Remick," which was surely the first example of the Brisbane Sound. 03 1982 Walker, Clinton The Poles The Poles were inspired to take up music by the Saints, (Walker 1982, 66) and took it from there themselves, to become another Inner City Sound slant on the Brisbane Sound. They were probably best described as "a wonderful slice of modern pop halfway between the Shadows and the Saints". 04 1982 Walker, Clinton The The Apartments set was dominated by covers of 60's (Walker 1982, 66) Apartments hits, but they were interpreted distinctively and the Inner City Sound band's own material was plainly excellent. Their "Return of the Hypnotist" EP was another fine example of the Brisbane Sound. 05 1982 Walker, Clinton Four Gods The Four Gods became the latest purveyors of the (Walker 1982, 139) Brisbane Sound early in the year with their light Inner City Sound delicate pop. 06 1985 Walker, Clinton JFK and the The beginnings of John Kenndey's [sic] career only (Walker 1985, 43) Cuban Crisis vaguely suggested arriving at his present musical The Age (Melbourne) persona. Kennedy was initially frontman for a Brisbane band cutely called JFK and the Cuban Crisis. A not-so- distant cousin of the legendary Brisbane Sound (as defined by the early Go Betweens), proffering a folksy, 1960s-influenced pop-rock, the Cuban Crisis broke up in Sydney after failing to crack the mainstream. An album by the band was released posthumously, which at least pointed to Kennedy's potential as a tunesmith. 07 1988 Hutson, Doug [General, no But if the Saints were the vanguard and the inspiration (Hutson and Sawford and Sawford, explicit of much that was to subsequently emerge musically 1988, 7) Gavin reference] from Brisbane, they hardly mark the parameters of Out of the Unknown: what has since been labelled (largely by over zealous Brisbane Bands 1976- journalists) the 'Brisbane Sound'. It's highly debatable 1988 whether stylistically there is such a thing as the Time Off Brisbane Sound, and one look at the sheer range of music that the city has produced—hardcore thrash, essential punk, hard rock, classic pop, new wave rock, high-tech synth and black funk to name but a few— suggests that it's a pretty futile exercise to look for common musical themes…. perhaps the one characteristic that distinguishes Brisbane bands from all others is an innocence verging on naiveté, coupled with a burning belief and conviction that what they were doing was not only worthwhile, but vital. 08 1988 Callaghan, Mark [General, no The Brisbane Sound… That Striped Brisbane Sound. (Wilson 1988) explicit ‘Striped Sunlight Sound’. I think that was a quote on Brisbane Bands reference] the back of Lee Remick from the Go-Bet[weens which] Documentary (ABC TV) I thought was beautiful. ‘That Striped Sunlight Sound’. Which to me describes Brisbane music: its thinness, and it’s kind of um… the fact that it is sort of ephemeral 09 1988 Dadds, Mark [General, no The thing that struck us about the Brisbane Sound, it (Wilson 1988) explicit was really thin and it was really under-produced. It Brisbane Bands reference] was the way people would play their instruments - the Documentary (ABC TV) guitarist would just plug straight in to the amp – there was no gadgetry or anything like that. The guitar was usually out of tune [laughs]. The drummer – instead of providing that really thump sound that comes from, you know American disco or whatever, would really… the tradition of The Who where they would play melodies around the tom-toms and the bass would

The Brisbane Sound 239 thrash. And it would produce this really thin rhythmic sound

10 1993 Bull, Stephen Splat Acrobat The Brisbane music scene at the moment can easily be (Bull 1993, 15) divided into two distinctly different camps. There is Review in Semper the loud, grungy guitar based bands of Screamfeeder Floreat (UQ Union ilk and then there is the more introspective, sunny magazine) Brisbane Sound. 11 1996 Walker, Clinton The Go- ‘Lee Remick’ was the first in a string of singles on the (Walker 1996, 58) Betweens Able Label, run by Damien Nelson, that defined the Stranded light, fragile ‘Brisbane Sound’ 12 1996 Forster, Robert The Go- [Forster] We were playing these Vase amplifiers, (Walker 1996, 58) Betweens which were these Brisbane-made amps, very trebly, Stranded lots of reverb, and we didn’t have keyboards, we just had bass, guitar and drums and lots of harmonies, people singing together – it was very sort of sunny, living in Toowong houses, Auchenflower, short hair, you might wear a turtleneck in winter – it was that sort of feeling. Loving the Monkees but also the Velvet Underground. 13 1999 Mengel, Noel The Go- If ever there was a band that sounded like Brisbane - (Mengel 1999) Betweens the striped sunlight sound they called it on the cover The Courier-Mail of their first single - it was The Go-Betweens 14 1999 Clark, Terry [General, no There were 600 bands that were trying to come up (Blake 1999, 14) explicit with a 'Brisbane Sound', a mix of grunge and techno. The Australian reference] Now that grunge has died out, that has stopped and bands are playing what they want. In every track [Regurgitator] are taking the piss out of something. Even the album name, Unit, is taking the piss out of the record executives, who call CDs units. 15 2000 Mengel, Noel The Mabels The territory is familiar enough - bright, jangling (Mengel 2000) guitars and songs of sweet and sometimes naive The Courier-Mail regret. This might once have been called the Brisbane Sound but these days is more often found among acts on the Melbourne-based Candle label like Ruck Rover and this quartet 16 2001 Cockington, The Go- [By 1978,] punk, in its clichéd pseudo-anarchic form, (Cockington 2001, 218) James Betweens was virtually extinct. The Go-Betweens were to become part of the next phase, creating a softer, Long Way to The Top - smoother sound more in keeping with Brisbane’s companion book to the energy-sapping climate [compared to The Saints]” ABC TV series 17 2002 Molitorisz, Sacha [General, no Is there a Brisbane Sound or style? How about a (Molitorisz 2002, 12) explicit Sydney sound or style? These questions arose at the Sydney Morning Herald reference] Annandale, where Speedstar, a young five-piece from Queensland, were supporting local stayers Bluebottle Kiss. It's not just north v south, it's youth v experience too. 18 2004 Stafford, Andrew [General, no [What do you think makes Brisbane music discussed in (City News 2004, 14) explicit Pig City unique?] This implies there is a clearly defined reference] "Brisbane Sound", which I don't think there is - the music to come out of here has always been too diverse for that, unlike Seattle, for example. 19 2004 Stafford, Andrew Four Gods; The Alongside [The Riptides and the Apartments], several (Stafford 2004, 300) Apartments; other recordings round out the so-called 'Brisbane Pig City The Humans; Sound' of the late '70s/early '80s: The Four Gods, The Poles; The Enchanted House 7" (1981); The Humans, Teen Idol 7" Riptides; The (1979); The Poles, Over And Beyond 7" (1981); The Sharks; The Sharks, Freud 7" (1980); The Swell Guys, Songs 7" Swell Guys; Toy (1980); Toy Watches, Too Long 7" (1980) Watches 20 2004 Stafford, Andrew Four Gods; The Although several Brisbane bands released (Stafford 2004, 95) Apartments; independent singles throughout 1978, the Able Label Pig City The Go- was the first local label to cater for a number of like- Betweens; The minded acts. Its six singles and four bands — the Go- Riptides Betweens, the Riptides, the Apartments and the short lived Four Gods — came to represent an entire aesthetic: romantic, yearning, undeniably self- conscious. The music of these groups shared a fragile,

240 The Brisbane Sound sparse quality that some dubbed the Brisbane Sound. Being barely able to play was a mere technicality that need not interfere with one's breadth of vision.

21 2005 Forster, Robert The Go- Forster says the name [of the live DVD ¬– That Striped (Murdoch 2005, 24) Betweens Sunlight Sound –] offers an insight into The Go- The Courier-Mail Betweens' local history – inspired by the effect of sunlight streaming through the louvres of a Toowong share-house while the band practised in the late 1970s and early '80s 22 2005 McLennan, Grant The Go- I think right from the start that simplicity—that (Ashton 2005) Betweens ‘striped sunlight’ clarity and stuff, that comes from Transcript of a video pop music. We used to do lots of [The] Monkees interview that covers in Robert’s bedroom, as well as Jonathan accompany That Striped Richman and the occasional Bob Dylan stuff. But lots Sunlight Sound DVD of Monkees and that was always simple and direct. So (2005) as far as I’m concerned, that’s where the pop side of things came from. I always thought we were a pop band. 23 2005 Forster, Robert General In 1978 when we put out our first single "Lee Remick / (Forster 2005) Karen", we dedicated it to the "striped sunlight Liner notes from That sound". When Brisbane music journalist Noel Mengel Striped Sunlight Sound came to interview us in August 2005 for what was to DVD, be The Acoustic Stories section of this DVD, his first question was about the "striped sunlight sound". Later, after the interview, we sat about chatting on prospective titles for the DVD and when Grant came up with "That Striped Sunlight Sound" we knew that was it. So what is it? The answer I gave Noel in the interview is rambling and not all that good. I waffle. The question had taken me a little by surprise. So I'd like to elaborate here and lay out what's on my mind. Because it's a phrase I've always liked, from a time in the band that still means a lot to me. The "striped sunlight sound" was a term Grant and I kicked around in 1978. It's no manifesto. It's a feeling. A feeling our own music gave us. We were trying to give it a name while at the same time trying to hint at, or indicate what was around us. It's a romantic phrase but it is abstract. It could be the sun coming through blinds as you play a record (so it's sun on the music). It could be the sun coming through as you practice in the loungeroom of a large Brisbane house of a certain era. Film posters on the wall. Heavy old furniture. The colours associated with it to me have always been orange and yellow with a dash of white. It's the shimmer of a Fender guitar. Backed by groovy plunking bass and simple drums. It's harmonies and tough-minded pop songs. It's lying on a bed beside a window reading a book in the afternoon. It's sunshine imposing on inside darkness. That's Brisbane to me. Sunshine and darkness. And the glare you get at the airport when you arrive. And all this stuff I couldn't tell Noel because it's sweeping and poetic. I didn't want to start the interview like that. Just jumping out the window into impressionistic chatter. But I'll go on. It's the sun on a girl's shoulder length hair. It's the look on John Sebastian’s face on every Lovin' Spoonful album. It's the Talking Heads as a three piece in 75 / 76. Tina's flares. David's haircut. It's Buddy Holly in the desert the day they recorded "Maybe Baby". It's Bowie, not his music but the look of him. It's simplicity. And the dignity of driving around in a car with the windows down. It's before air-conditioning but after the invention of the fully functional stereo system. It's t - shirts and jeans. It's Creedence. It's Bob. It's Chuck Berry. It's those that follow Petula Clark who I've always found to be grittier and more clear-minded than those who follow Dusty Springfield who I've always found to be a little dreamy and highly strung.

The Brisbane Sound 241 And that's enough. Robert Forster August 8 Brisbane 2005.

24 2005 Forster, Robert The Go- It was a sound from necessity. It was just Grant and I, (Ashton 2005) Betweens and a variety of drummers, for the first two years. I Transcript of a video guess it was sort of like ‘nakedness’—it was a sound interview that that was primitive; but it wasn’t in some sort of accompany That Striped Melbourne dungeon, or a London dungeon. You can’t Sunlight Sound DVD make that hear. So you couldn’t go for that enclosed, (2005) dark thing. You just had to basically embrace what was here. So when you talk about the ‘Striped Sunlight Sound’, it was just that primitive sound in Brisbane. And all the elements [waves hand towards window] just had to come in 25 2005 Tahiraj, Donat The Go- Powerful opener ‘Here Comes A City’ is one part (Tahiraj 2005a) Betweens homage to Talking Heads’ 1979 track ‘Life During Review of Ocean’s Wartime’ and another part late 70s/early 80s Brisbane Apart, Time Off Sound (which, in itself, was essentially influenced by Talking Heads and Bob Dylan, stuck together with bubblegum). If intelligent lyricisms and lucid guitar melodies were adored by the commercial world, this song would top the charts 26 2005 McLennan, Grant The Go- The Brisbane Sound thing I was talking to Dave (Walker 2005) Betweens McCormack from Custard about this, and he was a big fan of the Go-Betweens, and there’s a lot of bands Transcript of an that dedicate themselves to songs basically, so there’s interview by Clinton not a lot of flash, not a lot of soloing, it’s play the song Walker for a proposed and have lyrics that you think mean something, there’s video accompaniment a sense of humour, there’s also a lightness of touch to the 2005 reissue of sometimes, there’s a subtlety there, you know, we Inner City Sound. The don’t have a Superjesus but Powderfinger can DVD never eventuated. hammer it as hard as anyone, but there’s a melody. I More information here: think in general melody is very important to Brisbane groups, but the Brisbane Sound is still in your face set http://www.clintonwalk up in your lounge room, like I’ve been going to some er.com.au/inner-city- parties and you can set up in your lounge room and video.html just play and its exactly like it was in 1978, same Vase amps, little drum kits, little mics hanging from coat hangers and people doing the frug, I love it, you know, it’s lovely. 27 2005 Tahiraj, Donat Four Gods The Four Gods, a name taken from the lyrics of The (Tahiraj 2005b) Go-Betweens song 'Karen' She's my God, she's my God, she's my G.O.D., she's my God were actually a Notes from a curated three-piece. Featuring architecture students, guitarists playlist for 4zzz Andrew Wilson and Peter Morgan and drummer Keryn Henry, the band played what critics at the time coined "The Brisbane Sound." 28 2005 Nichols, David Four Gods; The Tiny Town started out as a band called The Supports, (Nichols 2005) Apartments; contemporaries and friends of the GoBs, probably Posted on the Go- The Riptides; some of the same attitude and ideals, went through a Betweens Message Tiny Town few permutations and names, moved to Britain and Board started releasing stuff as Tiny Town... from memory a flexidisc, two singles, a 12" EP and an LP, all very good. Certainly a Brisbane Sound, as much as The Apartments or Four Gods did. Or the Riptides for that matter. 29 2006 Hammond, The Go- In short: Raw debut that helped define "the Brisbane (Hammond 2006, 14) Graeme Betweens Sound"… One Thing Can Hold Us shows drummer Review of Send Me A Lindy Morrison at her staccato best, Eight Pictures is a Lullaby

242 The Brisbane Sound dark, sprawling beast and It Could Be Anyone has a sweeping energy that powers the album to a close. 30 2006 Mengel, Noel The Go- Is there a Brisbane Sound? Not any more, although (Mengel 2006, 52) Betweens; The there was once: a bright, poppy approach (The Go- The Courier-Mail Zebras Betweens being the best-known example), a sound more lately associated with Glasgow. But Brisbane five-piece The Zebras certainly have that sound, with clean, distortion-free guitars jangling merrily amid pop tunes as summery as a stroll under the jacarandas in New Farm Park. Or Bardon, where this home-recorded little treat was captured.” 31 2007 Walker, Clinton [General, no As Pig City [live concert] approaches, spare a thought (Walker 2007) explicit for the absent pioneers who preceded even the Saints, The Courier-Mail reference] setting a tone -- an attitude and a spirit that still defines Brisbane music sooner than any limiting idea of a Brisbane Sound genre. If we are to remember the Pineapples From the Dawn of Time, we shouldn't forget the Purple Hearts, Matt Taylor, Tony Worsley, Ivan Dayman, David Bentley, Marlene Cummins, Glenn Wheatley, Dave Tice, Carol Lloyde -- the list could go on. Clearly, this is a history that's still being written. 32 2007 Hadley, Mick [General, no I refer to Clinton Walker's article "A school of rock (Hadley 2007) explicit lesson" (Perspectives, July 12). In the murky chronicles The Courier-Mail reference] of Brisbane rock history, may I add a few pioneers to Walker's list. There were two venue owners who helped kickstart the "Brisbane Sound". The first was the exotic entrepreneur Peter Hackworth. In 1964, Hackworth extended the Primitive Coffee Lounge, in Queen St, into a launch stage for many local bands, including the Bee Gees. The second was Adrian Redmond, mine host of the legendary Red Orb. This was a hot bed, in current parlance, of garage punk blues bands, many heading for Melbourne for national recognition. Finally, I would pay tribute to a few musicians. They were in the Brisbane Coloured Balls Band, whose players were world class: Peter Miles (drums), Bob Dames (bass), Sam Shannon (vocals) and Robbie van Delft (guitar and flute). Hopefully, these and many more will one day be included in the prologue to Andrew Stafford's seminal book, Pig City. Mick Hadley (Purple Hearts), Paddington 33 2007 Stafford, Andrew [General, no I was very careful when I wrote the book not to (Birmingham 2007) explicit suggest that there was in any way a Brisbane "sound". reference] To me there's no such thing. Brisbane's two most Public comment on a influential and historically significant bands, the Saints blog post by John and the Go-Betweens, are radically different in Birmingham at the approach. It is impossible to generalise. The likes of Brisbane Times Powderfinger, Savage Garden and the Bee Gees (who were only here for about five minutes) sound nothing less than international to me; they could have come from anywhere. That leaves lyrics as the main way in which we can identify a home grown band. And I do have some favourites. In fact, I agree with JB: while Pig City was a signature song about a particular time in Brisbane (and a catchy title for a book besides), the Go-Betweens' Streets of Your Town is, for me, this city's definitive tune.” 34 2007 Tahiraj, Donat Birds of Tin, In the early part of the [1980s], Loveday's music (Tahiraj 2007, 35) Antic Frantic developed into a crucial part of the Brisbane Sound - an almost sub-genre of post punk music that's unique Review of Loveday's to this city. It's a sound that is synonymous with the Room at the Inn, Time likes of The Apartments, Out of Nowhere and The Go- Off 15/08/2007, page Betweens. His two groups, Birds of Tin and Antic 35 Frantic followed this sound of inspired lyricism and unconventional rhythms that was far removed from UK-punk or Detroit rock-inspired sound which permeated through Brisbane at the time. "I'm not sure exactly why we played that way," Loveday says. "I guess what we were trying to do was not sound like a rock band. Geoffrey Titley [Supports and Antic Frantic drummer] and Keryn Henry [drummer from Birds of

The Brisbane Sound 243 Tin] played their own unique rhythms, and I guess the rest of the music accommodated that. I can't really think of a clear influence as to where we got that sound from"... His latest album, this year's Room at the Inn, finds Loveday continuing his song-writing craft, while still sounding remarkably Brisbane. "We recorded it very quickly and live on a four-track tape machine and on a Sunday and it certainly sounds like it, it has a very warm sound to it."

35 2008 Pestorius, David General In the early 1980s the term the Brisbane Sound began (Pestorius 2008) to gain a certain currency in what had by that time become a translocal independent music scene. That is Lecture Abstract for to say, a network of inter-city associations and "The Brisbane Sound: affinities, not just in Australia but internationally, fact or fiction?" held at involving so-called alternative popular music groups, Griffith University, 27 DIY record labels, venues, promoters, universities, October 2008. radio stations, record shops, critics, publications and, of course, fans. Yet from its inception the appellation the Brisbane Sound was subject to challenge, its ontological basis contested. Was there truly such a thing as the Brisbane Sound? Was it a genuine invention of critics who found something regionally distinctive and in line with rock ‘n’ roll parlance (eg. the Mersey Sound, Boston Sound, etc.) tagged it accordingly? Or was it a kind of self-styling created by those whose interests it served to identify, galvanise and promote? Or was it a little bit of both? 36 2008 Neal, Sarah Halfway [Halfway is] a band that should be touring the world (Neal 2008) with that Brisbane Sound… It's such a big sound, Adelaide Now melodic, very musical and the songs are so well- written. 37 2008 O'Reilly, Justine Four Gods; The Brisbane Sound refers to a phenomenon that (Reilly 2008, 25) Laughing occurred in the years 1978 to 1983; the term was Brisbane News Clowns; Out of coined and used at the time by music writers. It Nowhere; The involved a group of creative individuals - some of them Go-Betweens; were musicians, forming such groups as The Go- Zero; Betweens, Ed Kuepper's Laughing Clowns, Zero, Out of Nowhere and Four Gods. 38 2008 Tahiraj, Donat The Laughing The influence of Laughing Clowns on the Brisbane (Tahiraj 2008) Clowns Sound can be heard in the rhythmic guitar playing of Excerpt from the Robert Forster, to Out Of Nowhere’s epic and complex Brisbane Sound song-structures, and the likes of Lindy Morrison — catalogue whose drumming style in both Zero and the Go- (unpublished). Betweens became a huge influence upon Clare McKenna and Keryn Henry’s common disregard for the simple 4/4, ‘meat and potatoes’ approach in time- keeping. 39 2008 Mengel, Noel Birds of Tin; Was there ever such a thing as a 'Brisbane Sound'? (Mengel 2008) Four Gods; I Certainly bands like Talking Heads and Television had a The Courier-Mail Heart strong influence on the local scene and, closer to Hiroshima; Out home, Ed Kuepper's Laughing Clowns, which was of Nowhere; based in Sydney but had a strong Brisbane contingent. The Go- There were elements that connected bands such as Betweens The Go-Betweens, Out of Nowhere, The Four Gods and Birds of Tin, replacing the buzzsaw guitars of punk with a willingness to experiment within the pop song format. The songs slowed down and had a certain fragility of sound while embracing unconventional rhythms. And, if possible, the bands broke down the male domain of rock 'n' roll with the inclusion of women. But Brisbane was still an oppressive, big country town that young, creative, ambitious people needed to escape. Many participants soon did. But something must have stayed in the air: that unmistakable Brisbane Sound is there in a new crop of bands such as I Heart Hiroshima. 40 2009 Surgeoner, Yves Klein Blue Between playing LA's infamous Viper Room and giving (Surgeoner 2009) Rachel small town America a taste of the Brisbane Sound, Four Thousand Blog Yves Klein Blue have also released their debut album Ragged and Ecstatic.

244 The Brisbane Sound 41 2009 Mengel, Noel The Go- Was there ever such a thing as a Brisbane Sound? This (Mengel 2009, 46) Betweens; The writer, for one, always thought so, although was I just The Courier-Mail Riptides; The including all the bands I liked and excluding the Saints; Ups and others? Still, there is a link between a number of Downs; Yves Brisbane's musical exports: short, sharp, energetic, Klein Blue strong melodies, interesting lyrics, a respect for classic pop songcraft. That holds true for bands as diverse as The Saints, The Go-Betweens, Riptides and Ups and Downs. Here is another band that fits right in with that aesthetic, Yves Klein Blue. They have a pop heart too. It's not about how big it sounds or a killer guitar solo. It's about songs and the ideas they can convey. As last year's indie-recorded Draw Attention To Themselves EP demonstrated, they have plenty of both 42 2010 Morrissey, Tim John Steel [And then there’s that Brisbane Sound, as Tim (Hook 2010) Singers continues] Brisbane, musically, always had a unique BMA Magazine sound. Dry vocals, pop oriented, but also trebly guitars straight into the amp and wiry little guitar licks; bands like Up’s and Downs, the Apartments, the Go- Betweens. [It’s that last band that has made the biggest impression on the John Steel Singers.] The Go- Betweens always quoted Brisbane suburbs or things about the area and it was always great that this pretty successful band were still quoting Brisbane suburbs. 43 2010 Pestorius, David The Go- [David Pestorius, says the Go-Betweens mostly (Boland 2010) Betweens defined the Brisbane Sound, which was] very fragile, Weekend Australian, thin, deconstructed...They were often polyrhythmic Canberra and not 4/4 time, and their influence is heard today in outfits like [Scotland's] Belle and Sebastian. 44 2010 English, Lawrence [General, no [He said even his work from the frozen continent (Moore 2010) explicit formed his own little piece of the "Brisbane Sound" Brisbane Times reference] jigsaw, a piece that Brisbane would have a chance to hear in one of his aural soundscapes in the urban jungle of the CBD's Spencer Lane]. For me, this Brisbane Sound is about the flexibility to respond to things you are interested in as an artist. And there is a lot of stuff happening. 45 2010 Forster, Robert The Go- [One of the original members of the Go-Betweens, (Boland 2010) Betweens Robert Forster, describes the Brisbane Sound typified Weekend Australian, by his band - it had big hits with Cattle and Cane, Canberra Spring Rain and Streets of Your Town - as sensitive] Our influences were partly the first flush of New York punk rock, the Ramones and some 60s bands as well. 46 2010 Coyte, Matt Halfway; The [Plus] 1 records has a knack for two things - signing (Coyte 2010) Gin Club distinctly Brisbane Sounding bands, and signing bands Rolling Stone that require more than one tour bus. Halfway, like label mates the Gin Club, have eight members and they make lush pastoral rock music that brings to mind the Go-Betweens. Unsurprising considering the record is produced by Robert Forster & engineered by indie rock veteran Wayne Connolly. 47 2010 Spann, Craig [General, no I don't think there is a Brisbane Sound and to me this (Moore 2010) explicit is personified by all these labels - with Lawrence doing Brisbane Times reference] what [he does] with Room 40 - you have Pinnacles with jazz, you have Turkeyneck doing garage rock and you have Dew Process doing indie stuff… All this stuff coming out of Brisbane that sounds nothing like anything else. And I have always always thought Brisbane has been a fusion town and to me there is no Brisbane Sound. 48 2011 Morrissey, Tim John Steel [Does it have anything to do with The Go-Betweens (Levin 2011) Singers casting a reasonably long shadow over the city?] Mess + Noise There’s definitely a bit of that. There’s that idea that there’s a Brisbane Sound: a trebly guitar straight into the amp. Bands like The Apartments or the Ups and Downs … and Custard as well. Some people think the weather influences how a band sounds – I don’t know if that has anything to do with it. 49 2011 English, Lawrence General [Which Brisbane before you have been an inspiration (English 2011, 31) (musically or otherwise)?] I grew up in the 90s Time Off enjoying that revival of the Brisbane Sound, but if I

The Brisbane Sound 245 had to look over my shoulder to some acts, I’d imagine people like DNE are the folks who inspire most. 50 2011 Thompson, Little Lovers It was a bit of a homage [to the Melniks]. Brisbane’s (Yates 2011, 23) Wintah always been a part of me and my musical influence is Time Off heavily Brisbane-oriented. I really dig that Brisbane Sound, the Striped Sunlight Sound, which is what Grant McLennan used to call it 51 2011 Loveday, Peter General It’s a peculiar sound they make, unruly, unkempt and (Loveday 2011) inept, irregular, above all, elusive. Much has been said, Personal blog entry some things even written about this so-called Brisbane Sound. Scholars in tertiary institutions have compromised their posture, peering through magnifying glasses at blurred black and white photos, curled now and nibbled by silverfish and spiders. Others have patched cassette recordings through oscillators and refractors, pawing over longitudinal transverse waves, weighing up energy flux and density, messing with the very DNA of music, praying to come up with something, anything, in a futile attempt to identify what it was, or confirm that it even existed. The sceptics believe this to be smoke and delusion. Who knows who was right and who was wrong? You will just have to imagine this music now as very little of it to this day exists. Mostly it was mistreated and squandered, forgotten, used as bookmarks, left under beds, in glove boxes and outhouses, thrown out with the scraps, left on corners to fend for itself, limp-wristed jazz drumming and all, impertinent strumming, and stories of everyday things. No rock posturing to be found there. Who knows exactly what it meant or what came of it, and who really cares? 52 2011 Rowe, Zan Ball Park Music Over the past few months we've been charmed by a (Rowe 2011) new band outta Brisbane called Ball Park Music. Their Triple J website catchy songs are reminiscent of a very Brisbane Sound from the 90's, and they played our Ausmusic Month party in Brisbane back in November, joined by one of their clear influences - Dave McCormack of Custard - on stage. 53 2011 Bradbeer, Eagle & The Straight away people were saying we have a ‘Brisbane (Bell 2011, 16) Richard Worm Sound’, and we’re totally cool with that – some of our Time Off favourite bands are from Brisbane. Eagle and Bris-Beat go hand in hand 54 2011 Nichols, David Four Gods; The The Four Gods were part of the milieu that produced (Nichols and Wadley Go-Betweens the early '80s Brisbane Sound — the most famous 2011) exponents of which were the Go-Betweens. Tape Op Magazine 55 2011 No Author [General, no What does Brisbane Sound like to you? The Museum (MX Brisbane 2011, 15) explicit of Brisbane is calling for three song choices that MX Magazine reference] residents and visitors think describe what it's like to live in and visit Brisbane. The call is part of the Somewhere in the City: Urban Narratives by Robert Brownhall exhibition. Updates about popular or interesting song choices will be posted on council's Facebook and Twitter accounts for comment. The most popular choice will be announced towards the end of the exhibition, which is open at MoB until July 31. The exhibition records the changing face of Brisbane during one of the most dynamic periods of its history. MoB is located on the ground floor of 157 Ann St and is open 10am-5pm, seven days a week. Admission is free. To submit your songs or for more information, visit www.museumofbrisbane.com.au or phone 3403 8888. 56 2012 Steward, Tim [General, no [As a conglomerate of musicians that have been (Visman 2012) explicit playing under various monikers for many years, would The Au Review reference] you say there‘s something quintessential about Brisbane’s sound?] That’s a good question, but probably fairly hard to answer! I know - and like - a slice of the pie chart of Brisbane bands, but I’m an old guy, I’ve been around the block too many times already, there’s so much music I don’t get a chance to

246 The Brisbane Sound hear, (or I simply don’t like. You’re not gonna get me into death metal, it’s not gonna happen. Same with funk, forget it). Brisbane’s rammed with talented people making great music of all genres.. all I’m saying is that I’m not on top of it like I used to be. 57 2012 Rawson, Sharnee [General, no Brisbane has nurtured some of Australia's most (Rawson 2012, 12) explicit distinctive and diverse musical talent, from indie rock Brisbane News reference] gods Powderfinger and Custard to quirky pop divas Kate Miller-Heidke and Megan Washington. The city's reputation - fortified by talent showcases such as the Valley Fiesta (Oct 26-28) and last month's Big Sound, which drew 120 bands and industry heavyweights for the nation's largest music business conference - is well served by a new crop of young artists, who weave folk music with "dream pop" and rock influences to create a distinctive, genreblurring Brisbane Sound. 58 2012 No Author Let's Go Naked The band released a six track mini LP, ‘Everything’ in (“Biography” 2012) 1986… The album found Let’s Go Naked as supposed Band Website exponents of the ‘Brisbane Sound’ (whatever that might be…) with unorthodox arrangements, an angular driven guitar style and incorporating keyboards on some of the tracks. 59 2012 Havercroft, Chris Biro; The bands [sic] front-man Wintah Thompson is the son (Havercroft 2012, 31) Cunnigham; of the Custard and Go-Betweens drummer, and has a X-Press Magazine Little Lovers penchant for the lo-fi Brisbane Sound that was the signature of outfits like Cunningham and Biro. 60 2012 Hammond, Melodie The uncluttered arrangements have an '80s Brisbane (Hammond 2012, 87) Graeme Nelson Sound to them, while breathy female harmonies Review of Nelson’s ‘To reinforce the beautiful voice of Nelson. the Dollhouse’ 61 2013 Forster, Robert The Go- [Audience Question: I just wanted to know… I’m a (Mengel 2013a) Betweens really big fan of the song Karen… I just wanted to know how you came up with that ‘sound’ – that sound Transcript of interview is nothing that anyone had done in Brisbane at that by Noel Mengel for time. So what’s the process when you make that kind Live! at the State Library of sound – is that just you guys getting together and of Queensland just jamming or…] No no – the sound is rock’n’roll almost down to its bare bones. It was just rhythm guitar and bass, and very simple drums. And it was just a pure sound. Obviously, you know, we were listening to bands like the Velvet Underground, and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers and things like that. But it was just a very primitive. It was just bare bones. And we were playing through these amplifiers called Vase amps that were made in Brisbane. It’s very much a Brisbane Sound. There were these amps that everyone played through – that’s the technical side of it. One other thing – it’s practising in houses as well. We weren’t practising in practice rooms with P.A.s and stuff like that. A lot of the ‘Brisbane Sound’ that Noel was talking about before comes from also playing in lounge rooms – it’s a lounge room sound. It’s a Red Hill/Paddington lounge room sound. 62 2013 Pearson, Ross [General, no [If one followed the independent music scene in (Kejriwal 2013) explicit Australia, the fact that bands there are making happier Deccan Herald reference] music than in other parts of the world would be apparent. Explaining this trend, Ross says,] A lot of bands have the same vibe as we do. But that's the Brisbane Sound. I guess it's just the laid-back lifestyle. The weather's really good and everyone's usually in a good mood, which reflects in the songwriting. For instance, you wouldn't hear this kind of music in London. In Brisbane, we wake up every morning and the sun is out and there's nothing to complain about. 63 2013 Stafford, Andrew Custard; Brisbane pop legends the Go-Betweens famously (Stafford 2013) Jeremy Neale; dedicated their first single, Lee Remick, to “John Brisbane Times The-Go Fogerty, Phil Ochs, Michael Cole, Natalie Wood and Betweens that striped sunlight sound”. That last phrase stuck – describing not just the Go-Betweens themselves, but an entire strain of Brisbane indie-rock history that was fey, wry, self-conscious and naive all at once. The

The Brisbane Sound 247 sound was bright, but dappled with shadows. It was a sound that encompassed everything from the Monkees to the Lovin' Spoonful to Jonathan Richman, of cult '70s group the Modern Lovers, onwards to Devo. In the 1990s, the representatives of this sound were Custard. Right now, it's Jeremy Neale, whose single In Stranger Times (featuring another Brisbane group, the all-female Go Violets) is my single of the year for 2013. It'll take one hell of a track to replace it 64 2013 Mengel, Noel George George’s diverse musical influences (opera, jazz and (Mengel 2013b) underground rock) heralded a new maturity in The Brisbane Times Brisbane’s sound.

65 2013 Rodino, Gonzalo General I think the talent we have is the best in Australia. I (Meale 2013) don't understand why we don’t have that reputation Scene Magazine when all these great bands are coming out of Brisbane every year. Internationally, I think our music is probably more original, and I know that California has that Californian sound and they've got that west coast sound. But I think Brisbane has a sound. I don't think Sydney or Melbourne have a sound. But yeah, it’s really identifiable. 66 2013 Pestorius, David Out of Perhaps the most promising of the Brisbane Sound (Hughes and Croggon Nowhere groups, [was] Peter Milton Walsh's Out of Nowhere. 2013, 260) Impresario: Paul Taylor, The Melbourne Years, 1981-1984 67 2014 Stafford, Andrew [General, no [Did you find a common mood or creative state of (Newton 2014) explicit mind exclusive to Brisbane linked in with all of the Heavy and Weird blog reference] bands and artists you interviewed or do you think that the only common connector was the geography of it all?] I don’t think geography had much to do with it at all actually, at least not if you mean the physical landscape. I reject utterly that there was ever a “Brisbane Sound”, although there are a few who like to claim there was. 68 2014 Kendall, Lili General [Tell us how your hometown affects your sound]. Well (Michelmore 2014) I guess Brisbane has its own little sound, a lot of the It’s my kind of scene bands and artists out of Brisbane have this quality to blog their music that you could almost recognise as not only an Australian sound but a Brisbane Sound. I love Brisbane music but I don’t think that is my music. 69 2014 White, Spencer [General, no [There is a definite Brisbane indie ‘sound’ – how easy (FBi Radio 2014) explicit is it to be different?] I don’t know if there is a distinct Interview with White reference] Brisbane indie sound… I’d probably say if we were (Morning Harvey) for getting inspiration or influence from anywhere it FBI Radio website would mostly be from overseas but I’ve always been attracted to 80’s and 90’s independent bands, particularly Australian. So I don’t think it’s very hard to be or sound different. 70 2014 Mengel, Noel Babaganouj; If you ever loved The Go-Betweens’ Lee Remick or The (Mengel 2014, 9) Jeremy Neale; Riptides 77 Sunset Strip, your heart will be gladdened The Courier-Mail The Creases; by The Creases. New single Static Lines keeps up the The Go- quality. With artists such as Jeremy Neale and Betweens; The Babaganouj coming through, that Brisbane striped Riptides sunlight sound is alive and well. 71 2014 Quirk, Graham [General, no Music is infused into Brisbane’s DNA. We are home to (Brisbane Marketing explicit some of the most influential Australian bands over the 2014) reference] past 30 years including: The Go-Betweens, Website Powderfinger and more recently Ball Park Music and Kate Miller-Heidke. Music is integral to Brisbane’s offering as Australia’s new world city, and I want residents and tourists to take time out to enjoy our unique Brisbane Sound.

248 The Brisbane Sound 72 2014 Scott, Tim Thigh Master Pay back takes precedence on the new 7” single Head (Scott 2014) of the Witch from Brisbane band Thigh Master - a Tenth Court Blog hook laden guitar pop gem that sounds as if it had just erupted from some sealed off tomb of the ghosts of Indie Pop past. The band combines Memphis garage with Kiwi jangle in a way that sounds distinctly Brisbane; yes, that striped sunlight sound, reflecting back from the muddy waters of the Brisbane River.

73 2014 Beat, Wallaby Antic Frantic; We’ve long been dubious about a Brisbane Sound – a (Beat 2014) Birds of Tin; twee, thin shouldered, short-sleeved shirt and short- Wallaby Beat Blog C.C.C.; Dog Fish wearing light pop. Sure, post ’83 there was a bunch of Cat Bird; Leap bands that could be viewed as having taken the Go- In The Dark; Betweens ball and run with it (to use a completely Let's Go Naked; non-apt sporting analogy) – Let's Go Naked, Leap In Tangled The Dark, Birds Of Tin, Antic Frantic, Dog Fish Cat Bird, Shoelaces; The Too Green For Summer, Tangled Shoelaces and others. Go-Betweens; But prior to that the sounds of Brisbane were way too Too Green For varied for us to find much of a common denominator Summer (world class punk rock aside). The Striped Sunlight Sound of the first two Go-betweens always seemed a one-off. CCC though, at least on parts of their LP, showcase a lethargic, sun-affected whimsy that makes us at least reconsider our stance. Songs about cordial, the Golden Circle cannery (which every Brisbane schoolchild visited at least once), lollies and other childhood signposts make us wonder if those mid-80s era bands were actually riffing off copies of this record found at op-shops rather than Send Me A Lullabye and Before Hollywood. Probably not. 74 2015 Forster, Robert The Go- [Forster's description of the band's sound as (Zuel 2015) Betweens "that striped sunlight sound" - soon widely used in any Sydney Morning Herald story about them - was not merely coincidentally close to Dylan's description of his mid-'60s style as that "wild mercury sound”] It was from that. I'd read that Playboy interview and I thought we needed something like that for our band. I'd liked that Dylan named the sound, you know, and I couldn't think of anyone who had ever named their sound. I thought I would come up with something for our band. 75 2015 Tahiraj, Donat [General, no [In the late 1970s,] being able to mimic the guitar (Tahiraj 2015, 90) explicit histrionics of Richie Blackmore or Jimmy Page defined reference] you as a real guitar player - and with a Vase amp and a Japanese copy of a Gibson or Fender, you were part of the Brisbane Sound.

76 2015 Walker, Clinton The About a year after “Lee Remick,” “People Say” was (Walker 2015b) Apartments; released, in mid-1979. It was the third release on The Liner notes for ‘G’ The Go- Go-Betweens’ Able Label, complete with classic cover stands for Go- Betweens; The art by Grant, and recorded at Sunshine Studios in Betweens’ Numbers Brisbane with Tim Mustafa on drums. After “Lee Remick,” Able put out an EP called Sunset Strip by The Numbers (whose line-up then numbered future Go- Betweens’ bassist Robert Vickers), and then around the same time as “People Say,” put out an EP called Return of the Hypnotist by the Apartments, the band led by Peter Milton Walsh. I dubbed it all, in a fit of imagination, the Brisbane Sound. Rob and Grant called it the Striped Sunlight Sound. Both terms gained some currency. 77 2015 Nienaber, Caitlin Screamfeeder In 2012, musician Tim Steward had a plaque with his (Nienaber 2015) name on it cemented into the ground in Brisbane’s Transcript of Fortitude Valley. It was to recognise his contribution to introduction to shaping “the Brisbane Sound” in bands like Interview with Tim Screamfeeder, The Whats and The Madmen. Steward on RTRFM 92.1 78 2015 Bell, Steve Robert Forster It's almost as if the album represents a return to the (Bell 2015) mythical "striped sunlight sound" that runs through so themusic.com.au much of the Brisbane music of yesteryear (and today), and which to an extent became The Go-Betweens' calling card.

The Brisbane Sound 249 79 2015 O'Driscoll, Natalie Screamfeeder Nineties indie rock stalwarts and proponents of the (O’Driscoll 2015, 13) "Brisbane Sound" Screamfeeder are back with a re- Blank Gold Coast release of all their classic albums on vinyl. 80 2015 No Author The Go- Songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan (Ou 2015) Betweens would go on to write some of our country’s most Stranded - ABC TV enduring songs about place. The Go-Betweens would documentary released define what became known as ‘The Brisbane Striped 15/09/2015 Sunlight Sound’ 81 2015 Walker, Clinton [General, no The contested story of the so-called Brisbane Sound (Walker 2015a) explicit [which is a] a concept I invented. Author’s website reference] 82 2015 Forster, Robert Robert Forster There's a sort of lightness to Brisbane — we're not (Bell 2015) living in Berlin, we're not living in Warsaw, we're not in Brooklyn. It's not that type of music that inspires me Interview with Steve here; it's more of a melodic, poppy feel that I get here Bell for at times. It's like driving through [Brisbane suburb] themusic.com.au Bardon — that's what the album's like…It's interesting because I didn't even notice it — I didn't even think about it — but one or two people have mentioned [it being reminiscent of the Striped Sunlight Sound] … Not journalists; friends that I know, and it's like I can see it but perhaps I'm too close to it to really know. But there is something there, especially with Let Me Imagine You — there's a certain naivete and charm to it I guess. It's a folk-rock sound — it's a Brisbane folk- rock sound — and I described it like that many years ago, and I can still see how it applies to what I do at times. It's still there, it's just in my DNA. 83 2015 Jones, Ann The Riptides We were pretty much in awe of some of these songs (Ou 2015) because they really had a great sound—and a great Stranded - ABC TV Brisbane Sound. documentary released 15/09/2015 84 2015 Steward, Tim Screamfeeder [Nienaber] You've also been commemorated, it was (Nienaber 2015) back in 2012 you were commorated on a plaque in Transcript of interview Fortitude Valley in Brisbane, which is really nice. That on RTRFM 92.1 must have been cool. [Steward] It was really nice. I was stoked! [laughs]. [Nienaber] And I read what is on the plaque and it talks about you and Screamfeeder 'redefining the Brisbane Sound'. What are your thoughts on what the Brisbane Sound is? [Steward] Ah well I think pretty much everyone would agree that the Brisbane Sound always has a little bit of The Go- Betweens in it because, you know Queenslanders we're kind of care-free, we don't want to overthink things too much. So, The Go-Betweens had this really nice, naive approach to their songwriting. Which is what made them so endearing. And nothing was too overworked or overthought. And I think, you know if you run in to trouble with writing or if you're having a creative block or something like that the only answer and the only way out is to go simple and don't overthink things. And I've always fallen back on that. And I think it's sort of, you know what has become my thing as well. 85 2017 Lipput, Henry The Bats But what I can do is mention how they might have (Lipput 2017) been influenced by, as well as influenced, their contemporaries. In the case of The Bats, there were— CoolDad Music Blog and in some cases still are— bands in New Zealand, Australia, and the UK that came up at about the same time in the 1980s: The Chills, The Go-Betweens, and Teenage Fanclub. And you can still hear it in the music of The Bats (and in recent releases from The Chills and Teenage Fanclub). For one, there's that jangly, chiming guitar sound from Down Under bands, something that Robert Forster of The Go-Betweens described as "that striped sunlight sound." The Deep Set has that sound on many of the songs; but, like Teenage Fanclub's most recent album, there's also a sense of melancholy and maturity.

250 The Brisbane Sound 86 2017 Martin, Toby Custard Do you think there’s an “Australian sound”? (Switgerry 2017) Something(s) that distinguish it – be it landscape, Super World Indie Tunes colonisation, climate etc. that has an influence? Blog The million dollar question! Well, I think the old cliché about Australian music being spacious because there is heaps of space here is pretty spurious. Most Australians live in cities, and while there is spacious music, there is also small, claustrophobic music. I think those stereotypes come from what people look for when they write about music. But I think scenes certainly develop in Australia. And because of its distance from the rest of the world (apart from New Zealand) maybe those scenes are quiet distinct. But also I think sometimes it’s more specific than an ‘Australian’ sound. I think there is a strong ‘Melbourne’ sound (Dick Diver, Twerps etc.), and I think there has often been a ‘Sydney’ sound (Half A Cow bands in the 90s for instance) and there has been periods of a ‘Brisbane’ sound (Custard etc. in the 90s). So yeah, it’s often more localised than national. 87 2017 Forster, Robert The Go- A few weeks [after reading the Dylan interview] I came (Forster 2016, 51) Betweens up with ‘that striped sunlight sound’. It was a Brisbane Grant and I thing, to do with sun slanting in through windows onto objects in a room, and the feelings that evoked. Years before, I’d taken photos of the Suzuki [nylon string guitar - Forster’s first instrument] leaning against a wall with the sun on its honey-coloured body, and somehow this fitted the music The Go-Betweens made. We stuck this description on the sleeve of our single as an answer to an imagined interview. The phrase endured, and became a term for a bright, poppy Brisbane Sound with winsome or witty lyrics attached, which our first single helped to inspire. 88 2017 Tahiraj, Donat The Go- Along the punk cognoscenti were pockets of more (Tahiraj 2017) Betweens; The poppy groups including (and not exclusive to) The Go- Numbers; The Betweens, The Numbers and the Supports who shared Promotional Blurb for Supports; Birds punk rock stages across the halls and pubs of Brisbane. the 2017 re-release of of Tin The least-documented and lauded of the Birds of Tin's 'Same aforementioned groups were the Supports - a band Both Sides' EP through who in their brief existence had its members later LCMR appear in London's DIY punk masters, the Desperate Bicycles, The Toesuckers, Mute 44 and the Sea Bees. Singer-songwriter Peter Loveday appeared in these local groups, developing a highly localised craft known to by some and debated by others as 'the Brisbane Sound' - a light, fragile way of playing with an almost strict avoidance of 4/4 drumming for the most part.

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Appendix C: Brisbane Sound Quotes Over Time

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6

5 Number of Attributions Year per Attributions of Number 4 3 2 1

0

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Year

The Brisbane Sound 253 Appendix D: Vocal (Melodic) Ranges of the Brisbane Sound Corpus

254 The Brisbane Sound

Appendix E: Approximate Tempos of the Brisbane Sound Corpus

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The Brisbane Sound 257