I started buying Sydney, Australia’s B Side around 1987, and it was an authoritative sherpa for me through the wilds & weeds of that era’s Australian underground. Independent US record stores were getting a lot of this stuff in stock at the time, so it wasn’t all that tough for me to find Scientists records, or any- & everything on the Aberrant, Citadel, Au Go Go, Waterfront, Greasy Pop, Red Eye and Black Eye labels, money permitting of course, of which I had little. Today I’m pretty ready to assert that the underground writ large, myself included, still hasn’t quite come to terms with how fertile this period was across Australia, particularly around the years 1984-86. This is where my recently-procured copy of B Side #11 lands, right in the middle of 1985. 

 For context, I just listened online to two records enthusiastically discussed here – Salamander Jim’s low-end, rumbling, psych noise-damaged “Black Star”, and The Moffs’ guitar-drenched paisley-psych 45 “Another Day in the Sun”. They’re great! It’s far more likely I just haven’t paid attention to any revivals of this stuff, since there are a ton of comps out there like this one. Anyway, Simon Lonergan and his crack team at B-Side were doing all the documentation in real time. I liken this fanzine to the UK’s Bucketful of Brains, but built instead around lowdown & dirty Australian bands with big hair and bad attitudes, as well as the more punk-oriented and as opposed to jangle-driven psych. It was the tenor of the times, as they say.

  If you’re like me, your eye was perhaps caught by B-Side #11’s promise of “Byron Coley on the State of the U.S.A.”. Coley’s “The State of American Noise Part 1” starts with an opening salvo positing that stupid Americans are ignoring the likes of the greatness he’s about to wax poetically about, which we probably were. This comes down to 4 key bands: Dredd Foole & The Din, Raunch Hands, Butthole Surfers and the Leaving Trains. The Trains’ debut LP Well Down Blue Highway “represents the culmination o’ years spent drunkenly tryin’ t’ find the Northwest Passage between The Damned and Creedence Clearwater Revival”. After describing them and the adjacent band To Damascus, he says “Now ya know more about these jerks than 99.99% of the American people. How’s it feel?”. Byron Coley sticking the landing, as usual. This is also the article in which Coley first wrote that Jello Biafra turned his nose up at the Butthole Surfers when he first saw them and said they were “too weird” – a statement that really stuck in Biafra’s craw for years afterward. Fun!

Tex Perkins (who was in Salamander Jim along with Kim Salmon) has a good interview here – he was better known as “Greg” at the time – which includes ruminations on his jealousy of the more popular Beasts of Bourbon; trouble with the cops; and the fact that he’s now about to start playing with Pat Bag and Kid Congo in Fur Bible. They haven’t even started the band yet, nor even told him what kind of music they’re going to be doing – he just wants to make sure it doesn’t sound anything like the Gun Club nor the Beasts of Bourbon. Well, maybe a little. 

There are also a slew of interviews with the likes of the Celibate Rifles, who just had that first LP and a 45 out at this point. A year later they’d have records that were easily procured at Aron’s and Zed in LA, and which became pretty beloved by me & my Radio Birdman-loving pals. (I don’t have them anymore and haven’t heard the band in decades). Other chats are with The Shindiggers, Decline of the Reptiles, 21 Faces, Harem Scarem, and American Eugene Chadbourne, who’s just come to town and won a handful of converts down under. 

The excitement of the age is real, and you can feel it in the big Melbourne “scene report” by David Laing and Trevor Block. They’re shooting the proverbial shit back and forth about bands like “Behind The Magnolia Curtain” and Murphy’s Hardware, who supposedly play live in matching Hawaiian shirts. Who wouldn’t be excited, am I right? And as a result of reading this blog post, you now know more about these jerks from 1985 than 99.99% of the Australian people. How’s it feel?