Introduction: Something in the Water

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[PB 10.2 (2009) 137-143] Perfect Beat (print) ISSN 1038-2909 doi:10.1558/prbt.v10i2.137 Perfect Beat (online) ISSN 1836-0343

Denis Crowdy and Mark Evans Introduction: Something in the Water

Denis Crowdy is a Senior Lecturer in Music at Department of Media, Music and Macquarie University. His research has focused Cultural Studies on the popular music of Melanesia, and he has Macquarie University published literature on topics including local NSW 2109 stringband, local rock/reggae, and the tradition- Australia al/jazz-rock fusion band Sanguma (from PNG). [email protected] He is currently involved in an extensive, government funded research project exploring the music industries of Melanesia.

Mark Evans is Head of Media, Music and Cultural Department of Media, Music and Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is Cultural Studies author of Open Up The Doors: Music in the Modern Macquarie University Church (2006) and co-editor of Perfect Beat. Ryde, NSW 2109 Australia [email protected]

This extended introduction to volume 10.2 of Perfect Beat revolves around an Aus- tralian documentary entitled Something in the Water (dir. Aidan O’Bryan 2008). The discussion is based on emails received by the authors concerning the film, which we quote at length below. The discussion is an example of the dialogue Perfect Beat is seeking to foster amongst the academic community and wider readership. To this end, we take this opportunity to remind readers that smaller contributions (up to 3000 words) to the ‘Riffs’ section of the journal are still welcome, and may well be a suitable place to comment on issues within contemporary culture in the Pacific region. The discussion below follows neatly from the previous special issue of the journal on television sound in the Pacific. There it was noted that there is much still to be studied and dissected from sound in television, particularly in programmes devoted to music (see Evans 2009): music-based documentaries and music video programmes being two of the clearest examples. Furthermore, the aesthetic construction of documentary sound is an area only just beginning to receive important exposure. As noted, this editorial is inspired by emails received by the authors in relation to the documentary Something in the Water. The catalyst was an unsolicited

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW. 138 Perfect Beat email from Dave Warner. Warner is a pivotal figure not only in West Australian music history but also in Australia’s rock heritage. In 2005 Perfect Beat published an article by Jon Stratton that explored Warner’s influence on the development of the rock scene in Western Australia, and was particularly concerned with Warner’s exclusion from popular histories of Australian rock music. Stratton, who has also published in Perfect Beat about the Perth ‘sound’ and its relation to other cities around Australia (see Stratton 2008), was invited to respond to Warner’s email and the documentary generally. An edited version of his responses has been inter- polated into Warner’s observations below. Something in the Water is a feature-length documentary that explores the historical and contemporary rock music scene in Western Australia. As writer and director Aidan O’Bryan stated:

It dawned on me that it was going to be a pretty special time for WA music and maybe it was time that someone actually made the Perth music doco that people had been talking about ever since Jebediah burst onto the scene (http:// isolatedsounds.wordpress.com/sept08sitw/, accessed 4 June 2008).

The documentary was produced by Janelle Landers for WBMC1 and premiered in Mt Lawley, Western Australia, on 7 February 2008. The independent production received no government funding2 and, importantly for the discussion below, creative decisions belonged solely to O’Bryan and Landers:

The film cost a lot of money but in the end it was really nice to have complete creative control over what we were doing and how we were doing it. The only deadlines and restrictions we had were the ones we made ourselves and in the end we only had to make ourselves happy with the final cut (ibid.).

Following a limited cinema release, a 55-minute version of the film was shown on ABC television on 13 May 2009.3 General reception to the film has been posi- tive and often quite parochial. Perth’s Drum Media wrote:

We went to the sold-out gala premiere last Thursday for Something In The Water and we must say, bravo! Never before have we looked at the big screen with such a sense of pride. So many of Perth’s finest bands and knowledgeable industry heads were featured that you have to feel proud and damn lucky to be a Western Australian music lover…it’s a must see full-length doco on the big screen (http://www.somethinginthewater.com.au/news.htm, accessed 4 June 2009).

1. WBMC describes itself as a collaborative production company creating youth-orientated work primarily for television, radio and the internet. 2. The budget for the film was reported to be around AUD $100,000, excluding self-funded trips overseas and marketing expenses (see Christmass 2008: 41). 3. An extended version, with extra interview footage, is due for DVD and online release later in 2009.

Others spoke favorably of the mix of material present in the film: ‘The documentary is an engaging pastiche of candid interviews and live footage, including some astonishing footage from Ye Olde Times’ (O’Shea 2008: n.p.). But it was the depth of this historical angle that also produced the most concern from critics and participants alike. As Jon Stratton4 noted, the film has ‘some great material in it—lots of good interviews and some very good footage of early punk groups in Perth. There is, though, so much that is missing’. It was these absences that compelled Dave Warner5 to initiate a detailed response to the film.

Last week I sat back to watch a program on the ABC that had been overdue for twenty years—a documentary on the vibrant WA music scene… I thought it was going to be about current day bands but my ears pricked up when I saw talking heads spouting on about the late 70s in Perth. The time of The Suburbs. But curiosity slowly turned to annoyance and then outright anger as my band Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs, was completely ignored. Instead I heard how punk acts like The Victims and Cheap’n’Nasties brought original music to cover band city. The fact is, as anybody living in Perth at that time would know, The Suburbs were filling venues all over the city with my original music, WA music, while those bands were playing mainly cover songs from the New York Dolls or The Ramones. Yes the guys in those bands went on to make their own major contributions to the Australian original music scene and they deserve to be recognized for it. But if you want to talk about punk then my band Pus was at the Governor Broome Hotel back in 1974, playing our version of punk before The Saints, or even The Sex Pistols. Fifty percent of our repertoire might have come from The Fugs, Velvets or The Who but the set included original material like ‘Hot Crotch’, ‘Girls Wank’, ‘Campus Days’ and ‘Suburban Boy’. And yes The Triffids celebrated WA, and I love The Triffids, but if you want to talk about celebrating WA then what about ‘African Summer’, ‘Bicton Breezes’, ‘Old Stock Rd’, ‘Living in WA’ and a heap of other tracks I had written and/or recorded well before? Just because nobody in JJJ’s collective memory has a clue about what was really going down in Perth in 1977 is no excuse for this sloppiness.

In assessing Warner’s attack we must pause to consider the justification for this position. After all, as O’Bryan noted:

The only couple of bad things that people have said have been things like ‘Why isn’t Bon Scott in it more?’ or ‘Why isn’t my band in it?’ or things like that. We knew we couldn’t include everything and everyone but so far most people have been really happy (http://isolatedsounds.wordpress.com/sept08sitw/, accessed 4 June 2008).

Stratton, however, agrees that Warner deserved his place in the documentary and has largely been written out of Australian popular music history. In an earlier

4. This, and all subsequent quotes from Stratton, come from an email to the authors, 22 May 2009 unless otherwise indicated. 5. This, and all subsequent quotes from Warner, come from an email to the authors, 21 May 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009. 140 Perfect Beat article that seeks to discover the reasons for this omission, Stratton notes that: ‘Warner comes over as an anomalous figure, the pioneer of alternative rock in Perth and simultaneously a champion of the suburbs, albeit a sometimes ambiva- lent one’ (2005: 37). Rather than any sinister intent on behalf of the filmmakers, Stratton believes they merely ‘tried to do too much… I [also] thought it was only going to be about present-day groups. However, at some point, the filmmakers realized that there is this great history to popular music in WA and so a whole lot more material was put in [including] more interviews, for example with James Baker’. Pip Christmass reported that:

Realising the Perth phenomenon extended back well beyond their own acquaintance with the local scene, O’Bryan and Landers employed researcher Steph Kretowicz to take a step back in time, so that the documentary travels from the observations of Johnny Young and Rolf Harris (Perth’s first No. 1 recording artists in the 1960s), to the Hoodoo Gurus’ Dave Faulkner and INXS’ Perth-born Farriss brothers, to the crop of emerging and breakthrough talents (2008: 41).

Although the scope of the project continued to grow, unfortunately for Warner the extra material did not include reference to his pioneering work with The Suburbs:

At the time when The Suburbs began playing there were no original bands able to fill a room. I believe we were the first band to successfully break through that barrier, although Western Flyer was around the same time with a solid following and a lot of original material, albeit a different style. Along with Loaded Dice we introduced bands being paid a ‘retainer’ fee at hotels plus getting to keep the cover charge. This was fundamental in securing some financial resources for local bands and superior to the Eastern States situation where bands played for a fixed fee, or took the door at their own risk (Dave Warner).

Something in the Water does cover a lot of territory. In seeking to cover over four decades of rock in Western Australia it references, interviews and/or features music from the following acts:

Abbe May & The Rockin’ Pneumonia Dugites, The Gyroscope Adam Said Galore Effigy Halogen Ammonia Eleventh He Reaches London Header Avenues, The End Of Fashion Institut Polaire Baby Animals Eskimo Joe Jebediah Birds Of Tokyo Eurogliders John Butler Trio Blackeyed Susans, The Farriss Brothers, The Johnny Young Bob Evans Fourth Floor Collapse Karnivool Cinema Prague Fuzz, The Kill Devil Hills, The

Le Hoodoo Gurus Rolf Harris Supernaut Little Birdy Rosemary Beads, The Triffids, The Manikins, The Schvendes Tucker B’s New Rules For Boats Scientists Valentines, The Painkillers, The Sex Panther Victims, The Panda Band, The Sleepy Jackson, The Waifs, The Panics, The Snowman Yummy Fur Preytells, The Stems, The Red Jezebel Sugar Army

Indeed, it is not the inclusions that Warner takes issue with:

Let me be clear, I think all the bands featured on that program like The Stems, The Hoodoos and The Scientists are terrific bands and if this was purely a film about the director’s personal tastes, who would care? But this purported to be a documentary about the nature and originality of WA music, and surely the onus is on the filmmakers to have some accuracy, some sense of scope. My album Mugs Game went gold in 1978—written and performed by West Austral- ians with material specifically about Australia and WA in particular. This was unheard of. That year I won the Ram magazine songwriter of the year, with material conceived and cooked in suburban Perth. Before Mushroom picked me up I had my own label Bicton Records whose label logo was a football in the middle of a laminex table. The Suburbs celebrated art from the mundane long before it became cool… So on any number of levels, The Suburbs should have rated a mention on a show about late 70s Perth original music…when a documentary is made, specifically about what was the core of my collective body of work, a body of work that still holds up, and when that program does not have one single mention of my music then it’s time to say Enough. Hate my music, sure. But don’t ignore it.

It was not only Warner’s personal omission that raised his ire:

[What about] the antics of the late Johnny Leopard, one of the most exhila- rating stage performers anywhere, ever? The Leopard had bands like The Stranglers bowing at his feet. How can you talk about the vitality of the Perth scene without referencing him?… Of course, other original bands (like The Dugites and Stockings) who came later, also didn’t seem to rate a mention on this show.

One of the accusations directed towards the filmmakers is that they have not grown up with the cultural knowledge of Western Australia’s—and especially Perth’s—musical history. Warner believes that this ‘Eastern’commentary is often to blame for mis- or under-representation of the Perth music scene: ‘You don’t expect them [Eastern Australian commentators] to get it right, to understand what was going down in Perth in the mid-seventies and how far ahead of the Sydney scene in particular it was’. There were, however, Murdoch University graduates involved in the film, and even O’Bryan has resided in Perth for some time. Stratton

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009. 142 Perfect Beat feels that age might also have played an important role, noting that ‘the director of Something in the Water and his assistants are all quite young’, the implication being that they simply do not have the cultural capital necessary to represent the rock music history of Perth. Yet overall, Stratton sees the absence of Warner in Something in the Water as a result of the film’s

uncritical acceptance of the dominant Australian rock history. This uncritical acceptance was, I suspect, a consequence of the purpose of the film getting to some extent lost in the filmmakers’ realization of the untapped wealth of people and footage available. This also meant that the film’s trajectory, although fairly historical in narrative, actually began with the present and worked backwards— which may be another reason for the absence of Warner, because his influence is quite subterranean today.

The fact that Stratton’s work on the Perth scene from the era covered in the documentary was not found by those researching the documentary is more than simply a case of poor research (a Google search for ‘Perth popular music research’ uncovers a range of Stratton’s articles, for example), it speaks to how journals like Perfect Beat communicate to a wider audience. As popular music studies courses at universities in the region expand, perhaps more of an effort is needed to place material detailing local histories in undergraduate reading lists. There are many questions that arise from this dialogue. The most obvious concerns the subject matter of the film itself: what is it that has produced so many influential rock acts from Perth? Here the documentary offers useful arguments about Perth’s vibrancy being partly due to the distance from the rest of Australia, though rather than positing a one-size-fits-all approach, it allows individual artists to speak for themselves. Other questions revolve around our construction of rock histories: what is in and what is out? How is it that we as academics, filmmakers, music supervisors, or marketers, decide what is essential to our cultural history and what gets left out? History is of course an ever-developing discourse influenced by a complex interaction between context, politics and purpose. Recent histories, however, allow a more active debate involving those present at the time. Histories with a more music industry focus run the risk of missing that most active element of popular music—the live gig and the live following. One of the editors (Crowdy) clearly remembers Dave Warner in action in the suburban beer-barns of Perth and can attest to his following as noted by Stratton (2005). Success in the recording industry and prominence beyond the local to the national and international does not necessarily reflect the scene at the time and the impact of musicians such as Dave Warner on a series of generations of West Australians.

References Christmass, Pip. 2008. ‘Western Front’. West Weekend Magazine, 2 February: 40–1. Evans, Mark. 2009. ‘Dialing In: Television Sound in the Pacific Region’. Perfect Beat 10/1: 5–13. O’Shea, Ben. 2008. ‘Doing It For Ourselves’. Drum Media (Perth), 28 January (http://www. somethinginthewater.com.au/images/news/pdf/Drum.pdf, accessed 4 June 2009). Stratton, Jon. 2005. ‘Pissed on Another Planet’. Perfect Beat 7/2: 36–60. —2008. ‘Brian Poole and the Tremeloes or the Yardbirds: Comparing Popular Music in Perth and Adelaide in the Early 1960s’. Perfect Beat 9/1: 60–77.