Pig City Read online

  ‘Impeccably researched and passionately presented, Pig City is the work of a committed writer and fan. It’s also a rare achievement: a rock book that sheds light on more than just a wall of sound.’

  The Bulletin

  ‘A definitive written history that ascertains why Brisbane has proved such a fertile breeding ground for musical talent, placing it in perspective to the city’s growth and changing political climate.’

  Time Off

  ‘Stafford graphically sketches the violence and paranoia [of Brisbane’s history] in an economic, sober and gripping style, neatly weaving touching personal reminiscences into his narrative.’

  The Courier-Mail

  ‘Exceptionally researched and compellingly written, Pig City is first-rate cultural analysis that sets a benchmark for future studies of Australian popular music.’

  The Swine

  ‘It is the discussion of the political environment and its effects on Brisbane music that gives Pig City the depth that makes it more than a rock’n’roll indulgence and creates interest for readers who have no connection with Brisbane and its underground.’

  The Age

  ‘This is an absorbing, entertaining and well-researched story told with vitality and passion.’

  Australian Bookseller & Publisher

  Born in Melbourne in 1971, Andrew Stafford has worked as a freelance writer, university tutor and occasional environmental consultant. Because none of these things is especially lucrative, you may also find him behind the wheel of a cab. You can find Andrew online at

  www.andrewstaffordblog.com, or on Twitter as @staffo_sez.

  contents

  Author’s note (2014 edition)

  Author’s note (2006 edition)

  Introduction (2004 edition)

  PINEAPPLES FROM THE DAWN OF TIME (1971–1979)

  1. A Million People Staying Low

  Brisbane (Security City)

  2. Guerrilla Radio

  The difficult birth of 4ZZZ

  3. The Most Primitive Band in the World

  The Saints

  4. The Striped Sunlight Sound

  The Go-Betweens

  5. Task Force versus the Brisbane Punks

  Early punk on the Brisbane scene

  6. Swept Away

  The Riptides; the Apartments

  UPS AND DOWNS (1980–1989)

  7. Last of the Leather Age

  The Fun Things; the 31st; the End; the Screaming Tribesmen

  8. Everybody Moves

  The bands leave home

  9. Brisbane Blacks

  Aboriginal rock

  10. Too Much Acid

  Sydney or the bush

  11. SS Brigade

  The eviction of 4ZZZ

  12. Cyclone Hits Expo

  The impact of the Livid Festival

  AFFIRMATION (1990–2000)

  13. Rock Against Work!

  The Brisbane scene post-National Party

  14. Spring Hill Fair

  The Custard collective

  15. Black Ticket Day

  4ZZZ in the 1990s

  16. The Human Jukebox

  Regurgitator

  17. New Suburban Fables

  Powderfinger

  18. Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World

  Savage Garden

  Epilogue – No, Your Product

  Notes

  Appendix – Cast of Characters

  Bibliography

  Permissions

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Picture section

  Imprint page

  author’s note – the wrong road

  Since Pig City’s initial publication in October 2004, many things have happened. Let’s start with the freezing over of hell: yes, in 2007, the classic original line-up of the Saints – Ed Kuepper, Chris Bailey and Ivor Hay, sans only bass player Kym Bradshaw – reformed, initially for a one-off show in Brisbane, then for a national series of festival performances.

  Following the tragically early death of Grant McLennan in May 2006, the Go-Betweens had a new Brisbane bridge named after them. A young female pop duo called the Veronicas swept all before them, cracking the US top 20 in February 2009. Powderfinger, after a two-decade run, broke up. Darren Hayes came out. (Betcha didn’t see that one coming.) Then again, that last development aside, who could have predicted any of these things? Not me, that’s for sure.

  Other events have conspired to date the original book in unexpected ways. A few words, then, are in order – as well as a spoiler alert, since in introducing this new edition it’s practically impossible to avoid picking up where I left off. A couple of things from this book’s conclusion, in particular, seem unintentionally prescient: back in 2004, a new lord mayor, Campbell Newman, was promising to build no less than five tunnels under the city. ‘He may yet be serious,’ I wrote. Ten years later, Brisbane now has three, with a fourth near completion and a fifth in the pipeline.

  Newman, of course, is now the state premier. ‘If liberty’s price really is eternal vigilance, our collective amnesia will ensure we see Bjelke-Petersen’s like again,’ I wrote, rather portentously, in a note to this book’s second edition. We didn’t have long to wait.

  Pig City certainly touched a nerve in its home town, and it was supposed to. Brisbane was, after all, the main character in a book populated by them, and the ‘slatternly, ugly’ city David Malouf once described in Johnno had grown up – as the book’s original blurb over-confidently bragged. I’m not so sure about that now. These days I’m more inclined to describe Brisbane as a city experiencing growing pains. But at the time of the book’s initial publication, the Queensland capital was in the middle of a passionate love affair with itself.

  By 2004, Brisbane’s new self-image – and the image it projected to the rest of the world – was of a confident modern metropolis. Of course, this process had begun as early as World Expo ’88. But that was at the time of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, the anti-corruption purge that ultimately did far more to modernise the political, social and judicial affairs of the state. Queensland had to step out of the darkness of the Moonlight State, as the now-legendary Four Corners episode dubbed it in 1987, before it could afford to bask in the sunshine.

  The rhetoric had changed. Suddenly, no one seemed to want to talk about the weather any more. ‘It wasn’t just beautiful one day and perfect the next. Frankly, it was hot out there,’ I wrote in Pig City’s conclusion – implying that the state, or at least the capital, was finally developing an inner life to match its bountiful natural beauty.

  I wasn’t the only one waxing lyrical on this theme. ‘Yes, Brisbane, you can go to the ball,’ wrote demographer Bernard Salt in The Australian in 2005. The city, he said, had undergone a makeover. In an article headlined ‘Brisbane: it’s booming, it’s brilliant, it’s downright sexy’, Salt opined that the suburban, monocultural city parodied in the term Brisvegas had acquired an edgy new market segment – attracted, apparently, by minimally fitted-out restaurants and a burgeoning creative arts scene, dating back not to the Saints, but to the arrival of Movie World on the Gold Coast in 1988.

  I’m not so sure about that, but that’s not to say there has not been genuine progress. The opening of the justly lauded Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) has arguably given Brisbane its first world-class cultural landmark. Political advances, too, have reflected a changing cultural landscape. For a time, Queensland supplied an extraordinary trifecta: the country’s Prime Minister (Kevin Rudd), Treasurer (Wayne Swan) and Australia’s first female Governor-General (Quentin Bryce). If the seat of
power remains in Canberra, then the wellspring, at least briefly, seemed to be situated north of the Tweed.

  Perhaps most notably, in September 2007, the state’s first female premier, Anna Bligh, was sworn in. Bligh took over the premiership from Peter Beattie, who served four electoral terms before relinquishing his post. At that point, Labor had been in power for all but two of the last 20 years, furthering an old Queensland tradition of dominant incumbent parties ruling more or less unhindered by impotent oppositions. And a lack of effective opposition in government leads inevitably to complacency, to administrative decay, to bad decision-making, and to corruption.

  Bligh won her first election as leader comfortably in March 2009, becoming the first popularly elected female premier in Australia in the process. A few months later Tony Fitzgerald QC, on the 20th anniversary of the handing down of his celebrated report into political and police corruption, declared that Queensland had ‘joined the mainstream of political malpractice’ and was slipping back to the dark old days. ‘Access can now be purchased, patronage is dispensed, mates and supporters are appointed and retired politicians exploit their connections to obtain “success fees” for deals between business and government,’ he wrote. ‘Neither side of politics is interested in these issues except for short-term political advantage as each enjoys or plots impatiently for its turn at the privileges and opportunities which accompany power.’

  In July 2008, the state divisions of the Liberal and National Parties merged to form the LNP. Individually, each faced insoluble issues – the National Party’s declining rural base and perennial infighting among the Queensland Liberals. It was this new entity, led by the Nationals’ Lawrence Springborg, that Bligh defeated the following year, with a reduced but still sizeable majority. The end, however, was at hand.

  It was Bligh’s decision to privatise five government-owned corporations in the wake of the global financial crisis that finally saw substantial portions of her own constituency abandon both her and the ALP. All the LNP needed was a figure that appeared credible to voters east of the Great Dividing Range. While Bligh’s poll numbers bounced in January 2011 during her stewardship of Brisbane’s worst floods since 1974, it was Newman – the Liberal lord mayor standing next to her at television conferences for much of that awful week – who suddenly appeared as a viable alternative.

  Newman challenged for, and was granted, the LNP leadership three months later, before he even had a seat to call his own in the state parliament. But while he was forced into a relatively tough battle to win Ashgrove, in Brisbane’s comfortable inner west, the rest of the city – and state – turned on Labor with a vengeance in the election of March 2012. The wipe-out was unprecedented: Labor was reduced from 51 seats to seven in a parliament of 89. These were depths that the party had not plumbed even when handicapped by a grossly distorted electoral system. With almost no opposition, and no senate to act as a handbrake, the scale of Newman’s victory ensured him almost untrammelled power.

  There is simply too much to talk about, and not enough space, to go into extended detail about how that power has been used since Newman’s government took office. Suffice to say that in no instance has it been abused more obnoxiously than in its confected war on bikies.

  It started as a classic moral panic. In September 2013, a score was very publicly settled outside a Gold Coast restaurant between rival members of the Bandidos and Finks. There was a brawl. Four police officers were injured. The state’s inexperienced Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Jarrod Bleijie, decided that conventional existing laws of affray and assault were inadequate to deal with the perceived threat to public safety. New legislation was required, and so the Vicious Lawless Association Disestablishment (VLAD) Act 2013 was born.

  There was no irony to be found in the fantastically Orwellian title. Under the Act, any associate of a bikie gang found guilty of the most minor offences covered under the legislation would face a mandatory jail term of 15 years on top of the original sentence. For gang office holders, 25 years. Twenty-three hours a day would be spent in solitary confinement in a bikie-only prison especially commissioned for the task. In an extra twist of pointless humiliation, male prisoners would wear shocking pink overalls, supposedly as an additional affront to their masculinity.

  This is not a joke. As of March 2014, over 600 gang members and associates have been arrested under the Act, which prohibits three or more bikies from publicly associating. They include the so-called Yandina Five – five men in club colours enjoying a beer at the Yandina Hotel on the Sunshine Coast – as well as five Victorian men who stopped for an ice-cream on the Gold Coast. They also include a librarian, never charged with a criminal offence in her life, observed having a beer with her bikie partner and another friend in a pub in Dayboro, less than an hour’s drive north-west of Brisbane.

  ‘Take off your colours, get a real job, act like decent, law-abiding human beings and become proper citizens in the state of Queensland and you won’t have to go to jail,’ Newman said. His police minister, Jack Dempsey, added an additional note of reassurance: ‘People need to know when they go to bed at night and the darkness of the evening comes over, that they can sleep safely in their beds.’

  In one of the most celebrated moments of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, the last witness to appear before the commission, former premier Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, was asked to describe his understanding of the doctrine of the separation of powers. The doctrine is an ancient democratic cornerstone that seeks to divide the roles of the executive, the parliament and the judiciary, in order to avoid one arm grasping sole power. Bjelke-Petersen simply had no idea. Neither did Russell Cooper, who led the National Party to defeat in the 1989 state election.

  Days after the VLAD laws were enacted, Campbell Newman was interviewed on a local radio station, and similarly grilled as to his understanding of the doctrine. ‘It’s more of an American thing,’ he said. ‘My understanding is very clearly parliament is supreme because the parliament is the manifestation of the will of the people.’ Newman’s contempt for the judiciary was made plain when he described lawyers acting for bikies as ‘hired guns’ who were part of a ‘criminal gang machine’.

  Once again, Queensland has come full circle. Tony Fitzgerald (and his senior counsel assisting at his inquiry, Gary Crooke) entered the fray, writing despairingly of seeing the state’s fragile democratic foundations traduced: ‘Almost all politicians, even those who care only for ideology and power and who regard both democracy and “ordinary people” with contempt, claim to represent and speak for those “ordinary people” . . . Arrogant, ill-informed politicians who cynically misuse the power of the state for personal or political benefit are a far greater threat to democracy than criminals, even organised gangs,’ he wrote for the ABC in February 2014.

  If you’re picking up Pig City for the first time, all of the above may seem like an odd way to introduce a book ostensibly about music. But it was never just about that. The story of the Bjelke-Petersen government, and the strange intersection of art and politics in Queensland, is an enduring tale, and a cautionary one, too: of how easily and quickly a liberal democracy can decay into a quasi-fascist state. But Pig City was also meant as a triumphant, culture-driven coming-of-age story – we weren’t supposed to be back here.

  I’m not the same person I was when I wrote this book. It’s for that reason as much as anything that I’ve resisted the temptation to substantially revise it (other than excising the instantly obsolete soundtrack/discography that rounded out earlier editions – there’s not much you can’t find out about the collected works of the bands contained herein, and plenty more besides, via Google, iTunes, YouTube and eBay). And much as the scene now is stronger than it ever was, it’s for another, younger writer to document it.

  Pig City only ever aimed to spotlight a particular period of Brisbane’s history; it was never intended to be a rolling chronicle. I’m happy to let it be – a slightly naive, opti
mistic snapshot of a time and place that’s long passed. But the faint echo of history repeating itself may make for somewhat eerie reading.

  – AS

  July 2014

  author’s note

  When I first began contemplating a book on Brisbane’s music history, one question was at the centre of my curiosity. To what degree did growing up in Queensland – especially the Queensland not only ruled, but defined by its premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, from 1968 to 1987 – influence the outlook and output of Brisbane’s artists, writers and especially musicians? The answer was more complicated than it appeared, and dictated that Pig City would ultimately be less a book about music than it was about my (adopted) home town.

  Of course, I wanted to pay tribute to the bands, most of whom had received short shrift in other Australian music accounts. Far more important, though, was the realisation that an entire generation had grown up since Bjelke-Petersen’s fall from grace, and memories of the fallen dictator had softened. He did, we were told ad nauseam, ‘great things for Queensland’. Yet his resignation from parliament in 1987 could scarcely have been more ignominious – his administration discredited; his party dead in the water; his state a laughing stock; and Joh himself soon to face serious criminal charges.

  Political scientist Paul Reynolds once observed that ‘Queensland is where populism came to die’. Peter Charlton, in his 1983 book State Of Mind, countered that if this was the case, ‘it has been an unconscionable time dying’. Charlton was paraphrasing Charles II, but he may easily have used the same words 22 years later to describe the passing of Joh Bjelke-Petersen on 23 April 2005. As media reports described Joh slipping in and out of consciousness during his last days, a friend quipped that this was final proof that ‘the devil didn’t want him either’.

  Plenty of Queenslanders would have appreciated more of this kind of honesty. We are taught not to speak ill of the dead, but too often this leads to cowardice and hypocrisy when assessing the legacy of public figures: had death come to Joh 10 years earlier, it would have been unthinkable for the event to be marked by a state funeral – an honour granted by premier Peter Beattie at the request of the deceased’s family and broadcast live around the state by three television stations.