Nine Parts Water, One Part Sand. Douglas Galbraith
the next year, The Victims acted out a drama parallel to that of the Sex Pistols, being banned from various venues and the bass player cultivating a drug habit. They also managed to have a truly original interpretation of the punk sound. They left a couple of recordings, including the classic Television Addict. In time, due to having no regular venues to book them, The Victims found a jazz club called Hernando’s Hideaway and managed to secure a Wednesday night residency there. With a place to hang and for its new bands to play at (supporting The Victims), the ‘scene soon sucked up all kinds of dubious trash from the suburbs and grew.’5
During 1977 the Victims and Cheap Nasties dominated the landscape with inspired shows at the Governor Broome Hotel or Hernando’s, honing their unhinged craft, largely unaware of their place in the Australian music story. But elsewhere in Australia, the movement was unfolding rapidly.
In Sydney, Radio Birdman had released their ‘Burn My Eye’ EP and ‘Radios Appear’ album and, by April 1977, had largely departed the scene they’d spurned out of their Funhouse venue at the Oxford Tavern. By the end of the year, they had relocated, fatefully as it turned out, to the UK to record a follow up album and tour relentlessly. Numerous acts sprung up in their wake, including the Hellcats featuring Ron Peno, who would later have a unique and enduring role in Kim’s musical journey.
In Melbourne, the Boys Next Door had put together the elements of their explosive live show by the end of 1977, and were just around the corner from the arrival of the transformative Rowland S Howard. Gary Gray, who would go on to form the Sacred Cowboys, was starting to stir up his dark, maniacal cowboy punk sounds. 1977 Melbourne’s grim underground was supported by exceptional public radio 3RRR (soon to be joined by PBS) and developed by passionate entrepreneurs like Keith Glass and Bruce Milne, who would go on to run pivotal labels and record shops Missing Link and Au Go Go respectively. Bruce Milne and Au Go Go would soon collide with Kim Salmon, transforming both their destinies and catalysing the spread of Grunge’s early tentacles.
In Brisbane, the Saints had released their Stranded album at the start of 1977 and had a large profile on the East Coast and overseas. The acclaim they attracted early in their career did nothing to prevent unwanted attention from the notoriously leathery Brisbane police. Locked out of established venues, the Saints turned their dwelling at Petrie Terrace into their own venue, the 76 Club, but by mid-year were en route to the UK to commence their own battle with record labels and internal division.
Despite this remarkable surge of activity, very little trickled all the way over to the Australian west coast. Ross Buncle recalls:
No one in Perth had heard of Radio Birdman at that time, and we didn’t know of any other punk-style bands on the East Coast until way later. It seems incredible now, but without electronic communication networks shrinking the continent — or the world — to the easily manageable size it is today, we had no way of knowing what was going on over the Nullarbor until the first records were released, apart from actually going there. The first wave of the punk movement was over in Perth before anyone had heard of any Eastern States punk-style bands other than The Saints.6
Kim bluntly agrees with this view:
We were on the other side of the country and didn’t give a shit about Radio Birdman, the Saints, or the Boys Next Door. As far as we were concerned, we’d been doing punk as long on our own and didn’t need their input.7
Perth music was shaped by geographical and cultural forces that were quite distinct from the Eastern states, accentuated by its isolation. Thousands of kilometres and a two-hour time difference away, Perth music was largely insulated from the movement in the Eastern States and was taking its cues from sporadically available US or UK punk singles or magazine articles rather than from membership of a broader Australian punk scene. This isolation was an important factor in the evolution of Kim’s sound — a factor which former Black Flag singer and longtime fan Henry Rollins recognised.
It was listening to the Scientists decades ago that made me wonder if the sheer geographic placement of Australia had anything to do with how Kim makes music. I always had this romantic notion that albums would wash up on the shores of Australia and people like Kim would find them, source the one record player for hundreds of miles, and dig the sounds at their most pure and potent form, free of commercial sensibility and corporate compromise (Henry Rollins).
The sunlit lifestyle and slow politics also left a mark. If the Saints were responding to political oppression and police brutality in Brisbane, the motivation for the Perth based Cheap Nasties came from a more straightforward source. ‘There wasn’t a political dimension, a social fabric that we were rebelling against. It was just that we were drawn to the music rather than rebelling against something’ (Neil Fernandes). The Perth scene was musically active and socially comfortable, not hung up on politics or social conditions. Ross Buncle from The Geeks recalls, ‘We had no such issues. Even if you were unemployed, life wasn’t too bad in the dumb sun of the lucky country way out west. We loved to complain, of course, but our dissatisfaction didn’t really amount to much. I think it is a fair call that we were generally pretty hedonistic, and self-focused.’8
The song writing in the Cheap Nasties and Victims reflected this. James Baker, the Victim’s primary lyric writer, was concerned mainly with girls and TV, and even if their most effective song Television Addict held a dark message, it was still after all about spending time ‘in front of the window of the world’. The Cheap Nasties too steered clear of disaffection and the simplicity of punk rock coalesced successfully into Kim and Neil Fernandes’ early songs.
Neil’s aspirations were never to have complexity in his music. I learned a bit from Neil and we quickly got into competition with each other. I learned to push his buttons and shit stir him until he was never calm around me! Our song writing process was one of us would bring an idea and the other would disparage it … and then add bits to it. And they all benefited from that, they were water tight by the end. We wrote together, and left no shit bits in. I thought he was a fantastic guy, a sweet even tempered laid-back guy, generous nice bloke to this day.
Neil remembers the collaboration on one of his songs, Hit and Run, which was written in a warm major key but embellished with an edgy Kim Salmon lead break — played in a minor key! ‘It was magical that he could have thought of that, distorting this song’ (Neil Fernandes).
The first phase of the Cheap Nasties was, according to Neil, ‘unquestionably Kim’s band’, with Kim as the driving force, singer and main song writer. To Neil, it was clear that Kim was absolutely single minded that music would be his life’s calling. Gradually, Neil exerted more influence as his song writing developed. Kim and Neil shared vocal duties and the Nasties gigs were fast, fun and shambolic.
At Kim’s urging, the band absorbed his friend from art school, singing aspirant, Robbie Porritt (aka Robbie Art), who through sheer will and bluff assumed vocal duties. ‘He was fully formed, one of those cats who knew the score. He was so ahead of the curve he had his own jargon.’ By July 1977, Robbie was in front singing Kim and Neil’s songs, and the Cheap Nasties evolved further. Robbie was drenched in charisma and won over the small but animated audiences. The Cheap Nasties storm trooped their way through the disorganised haze of Perth’s punk vista, leaving the old establishment in a pile of dust.
In what would be their last show, the band were hired by the police department for an end-of-year party to which an uninvited biker gang showed up and raised the stakes. During a break between sets, one of the bikers gave Kim a beer that he razed in one gulp. ‘They were all round me. I think they didn’t approve of a squirt like me trying to look tough in a leather jacket. Anyway, the guy then handed me a beer glass full of tequila which I downed. He was smirking at me and then handed me a jug of beer which I then attempted to down. I don’t remember the rest …’9
‘The rest’ involved singer Robbie heading to the emergency department with a split lip and cut forehead following an errant punch from one of the bikers during the Salmon induced melee. A completely bombed Kim Salmon went to his singer’s defence but dented the biker’s brio not even a little given his state of drunkenness. The Cheap Nasties final gig ended, literally, with a bang.
Sometime in the year of 1977, the band bunkered down with a mixing