When The Birdmen Fly: Part One

The title of this piece – When The Birdmen Fly – was originally the name of a single by a short-lived Brisbane band in the late-‘70s called the Fun Things. Clearly besotted enough by the Sydney godfathers of Australian rock’n’roll Radio Birdman to pen this tribute in their honour (as well as loosely cop their aesthetic), after their brief tenure the young members of the Fun Things went on to participate in a slew of other guitar bands; frontman Brad Shepherd went on to form The 31st (with Ron Peno of Died Pretty) and later help kickstart the Hoodoo Gurus, while he and his drummer brother Murray played in The Hitmen (Murray also playing with The Screaming Tribesmen alongside Fun Things’ bassist John Hartley) whilst guitarist Graeme Beavis went on to play in venerated Brisbane outfit The Apartments.

And this little trickle down of Radio Birdman’s influence into the next generation of Australian guitar bands was by no means unique to Brisbane (Birdman didn’t even venture north to Queensland at all during their initial tenure, the then school-age members of bands like the Fun Things were discovering them in magazines like RAM and possibly via then-nascent community radio station 4ZZZ). Bands owing a debt to Birdman were popping up all over Australia by the time the great outfit pulled up stumps in 1978, this new wave being enraptured as much by Birdman’s take-no-prisoners attitude and gang mentality as they were by their raucous, no-holds-barred music. The inaugural tenure of Radio Birdman was incredibly brief, and has now been recaptured in the definitive new collection, Radio Birdman (1974-1978) CD Boxset (reviewed by The Music).It was all triggered by the recent discovery of boxes of tapes from Trafalgar Studios, the Annandale studio were Radio Birdman recorded much of their early material.

“We didn’t have any idea that those tapes still existed anywhere,” explains Radio Birdman guitarist and chief songwriter Deniz Tek. “We thought that when Trafalgar Studios was sold that they’d been discarded or, I don’t know… whatever happens when a studio gets sold. The building where Trafalgar existed was demolished and a block of apartments has been built there, so we never realised that there would be any residual tapes, but somebody at Albert Studios – which is on the other side of the harbour, where AC/DC recorded and which was owned by Vanda & Young management; we never even recorded there – somebody from Albert rang John [Needham – Citadel Records/Radio Birdman manager] and said, ‘We’ve found some tapes in our archive room which we think might belong to you – do you want to come and see if you want any of it?’ We thought that maybe they’d found one or two boxes of tape or something, but we get there and it stacks up all the way to the ceiling! It was something like twenty boxes of two-inch 24-track tape, just astounding.”

“If a tape is that old you have to bake it in an oven to get the oxide to stick to the tape."

It wasn’t all plain sailing though, time had taken a toll on the tapes even thought they’d been residing in archival storage. “If a tape is that old you have to bake it in an oven to get the oxide to stick to the tape, otherwise when you try to run it through a tape machine and recording and playback heads the iron oxide just flakes off and falls down into the recorder because the tape is that old,” Tek continues. “But if you bake it at a certain temperature and a certain humidity for a certain number of hours it will stick on there for at least one more play through. So we baked them and ran them through and digitally transferred them as we did that last run through. Then I spent the next couple of months just going through everything and seeing what was on there that was worth doing anything with.

“It was fun and it was really interesting because I can’t even remember doing half of it. I would have never guessed that there were eight versions of Love Kills and six versions of Insane Alive and this kind of thing – we never thought that we would have done so much work, I just don’t remember it. So it was very, very interesting and some of the approaches and ideas to the songs are fascinating – I mean, obviously we’ve all been living with the original releases for so long that that’s the way we think about it, but when you actually hear some of the ideas it’s great. So it was fun and interesting and a bit scary – if you had way to much to drink and you can’t remember what you did last night and then somebody says that you did this and that and the other thing, and you’re, like, ‘Woah, really?’ It’s kind of like that.”

Radio Birdman’s frontman Rob Younger has a similarly hazy view of the original sessions.

“I don’t remember going through those songs and doing a lot of takes of them,” he admits. “I thought we used first or second takes for most of them, and I had no idea there was so much stuff in the vault. At least it justifies a boxset, having all of these things that people have never heard before, because we did put out all of the previously-released material as a vinyl boxset some time ago – I’m glad this has got a lot of new gear. I hope people like it and don’t think they’ve done their money when they shell out for it.”

Let’s travel back in time a bit now, to around the era that Radio Birdman first coalesced in 1974. Deniz Tek had been born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and accordingly was massively influenced by bands he’d seen live like The Stooges, MC5 and The Rationals when he arrived in Sydney in 1972. He was soon playing around the Sydney scene in a band called TV Jones, which is where he first encountered a chap called Rob Younger who was fronting a similarly loud outfit called The Rats. It’s often claimed that Tek’s background in the Motor City was the main catalyst for the Radio Birdman aesthetic, and while it definitely played a role (and even features in the lyrics in places) this is in reality a gross over-simplification.

“It was integral to me, as a person and a guitar player and songwriter, but it was just one element of many that combined to make the band what it was,” Tek explains. “It wasn’t the chief thing. That was definitely part of it, but I think what I took from that was mainly the attitude rather than so much any particular style – it was more of a feeling and an attitude.

“Before we formed Radio Birdman, Rob and I were pretty good friends – in fact we were even sharing the same house – and he had a band called The Rats, and they were doing a lot of Velvet Underground and New York Dolls covers and things like that, which was pretty cutting-edge for the time; we’re talking 1973/’74. It was stuff that wasn’t being done by anybody else in Sydney, and the band I was in at the time as also doing stuff that was different so Rob brought his whole thing to it – it wasn’t like I told him what to do, we already had common ground and we went forward on the basis that I knew some stuff that he didn’t know and he knew a lot of stuff that I didn’t know, and we’d put it together.”

As Tek alludes, the scene in Sydney was a lot different to the music being played by these pre-Birdman outfits. It was a time when soft rock dominated the airwaves, blues was de rigueur in the pubs and disco was about to become omnipresent, a time where musical acumen seemed more important than passion and style over substance was the order of the day. The records which would soon influence Radio Birdman weren’t being played on the radio or stocked in the average record shop, so it was no wonder that Tek and Younger soon gravitated to each other’s orbits.

"The funny thing was that we were actually fairly well-accepted. We must have been fairly bloody awful."

“I wasn’t influenced by Deniz’s taste in music, because the first band I had – the imaginatively-titled The Rats, which I thought was a good name at the time – we didn’t have any of our own songs, which is where Deniz’s band had it over ours; they had their own songs, and an extensive bunch of covers they could draw on,” Younger recalls. “We just had one or two Velvets songs, and about half a dozen Dolls and Stooges and stuff. We tried playing some MC5 and Stones songs, but we couldn’t actually play them – we weren’t able to play them, we weren’t technically able because only Ron [Keeley – The Rats/Birdman drummer] had ever been in a band before, so that was difficult. But that was the sort of stuff we played. We were around for about one year – I think it was about seventeen gigs that we did. The funny thing was that we were actually fairly well-accepted. We must have been fairly bloody awful, but we didn’t polarise opinion in nearly the same way as Radio Birdman did, it seems. I think Radio Birdman came on more strongly perhaps, I’m not sure. But Deniz said [The Rats] were good – he liked us when we finally did gigs together and heard what we sounded like. I think he said it was pretty extreme, actually, but there wasn’t any jumping around or any of that business – it was the nature of the sound, I suppose.

“We got on really well. Music was the common ground – our contrasting work ethics wouldn’t have been common ground at all. I was interested in his take on things, so we were able to talk a lot about music. I can’t recall if I was actually living and finally sharing a place together in Darlinghurst – or just about to [move in together] – when he got slung out of his band, TV Jones. I was in the room when it happened, so immediately we decided to start something up for ourselves then – it was that day. But that was hilarious listening to those guys sack him! Actually I must have been living there, because I remember thinking, ‘Well, they can’t sling me out!’, so it must have been my place as well as Deniz’s. Anyway, they were telling him that he was ‘mister bad vibes’ onstage and how they wanted to play more commercial stuff, and ‘be a bit more like Hush’ I think was how they put it. And I liked Hush! But they said he needed to smile more and be more engaging, and the stuff that they were playing wasn’t really what they wanted to do. They’d sort of already brought in a guy who could sing and play guitar and all of this – a nice guy who was really rather milquetoast from memory.

“So we had enough of a mutual interest and common ground in music to probably entertain the idea that if anything screwed up with our bands then we could probably get together. I think The Rats broke up probably only within a couple of weeks of him getting slung out of his group – it seemed like that anyway. He might have been a little hurt by the rejection from some of these guys he’d been playing with for quite a while, but he knew they were berks and that they were fucking clueless – that was obvious, and he may well have been aware of that. Personally I didn’t like these people terribly much, but I was getting along well with Deniz. Although maybe The Rats broke up first, because I vaguely remember auditioning for his group, and I remember them not liking me. Which is fair enough – and they might not have liked me as a person either – because I know that I was a shit singer, I was just starting out. I learned to sing when I heard David Johansen basically and thought, ‘Fuck, surely I can do that?’ – that was my earliest thing, the Dolls got me going – but I was just barking the lyrics. We didn’t have monitors in our little rehearsal rooms in the houses or at the local rehearsal studio really, and I was just trying to yell above the sound of loud guitars and drums – and it doesn’t help you to learn how to sing. Perhaps a year later when I was auditioning for those sods I probably sounded like shit! It’s easy enough to go, ‘Oh well, they didn’t understand me’ and where I was coming from and all of that, but I don’t think that was the case – they probably thought it sounded like shit and that they could get a better singer. And the world’s a better place for their wisdom.”

And according to Younger, once they actually got together as Radio Birdman the songs started flowing thick and fast.

"He might have been a little hurt by the rejection from some of these guys he’d been playing with for quite a while, but he knew they were berks and that they were fucking clueless."

“Well, Deniz already a few [songs],” he continues. “He had a song called Eskimo Pies that he adapted then to become I-94. There were a few songs like Monday Morning Gunk which TV Jones had played, and we just changed around a little bit I think. I think he did Snake in the other band too, but then he came up with a bunch of songs really quickly once we decided to do something. Like I said, if Deniz sets his mind to do something then he’ll do it and he’ll do it pretty fast – it’s always been his way. I remember him going off to study medicine at NSW Uni during the day, working in the computer room there at night for a bit of spare change, writing songs while he was there at work and then coming home early in the morning with a new song! I remember his presenting Smith & Wesson [Blues] that way, showing me the song and then going back to uni! He didn’t even have any sleep! And he seemed to do this a lot, although I assume he did get sleep at different times. But we built a repertoire fairly quickly. I had no participation in this really at all. He did encourage me to write words and stuff – he never excluded me from the process – but I never really did anything. Pretty much all of the songs came from him.”

Tek, Younger and Keeley were joined in the band by Pip Hoyle on keys (a medical student friend of Tek’s who had occasionally plated in TV Jones), and ex-Rats bassist Carl Rorke (soon to be replaced on bass by Rats guitarist Warwick Gilbert). Hoyle later briefly left the band and was replaced by young guitarist Chris Masuak to boost the band’s onstage sound, but when he returned later they retained Masuak as well, thus forming the band’s “classic” six-piece line-up.

According to Toby Creswell’s extensive (and excellent) liner notes from the boxset, the early Birdman repertoire was not only eclectic, but managed to shine a huge light on where the band was coming from musically;

“The early Birdman repertoire featured a variety of material besides their Stooges, BOC and MC5 covers; Cold Turkey (Plastic Ono Band), Radioactivity (Kraftwerk), Route 66 (Bobby Troup via the Rolling Stones), Surf City and Deadman’s Curve (Jan and Dean), Stranded In The Jungle (the Cadets), LA Woman and Love Her Madly (The Doors), Time Won’t Let Me (The Outsiders), Don’t Look Back (The Remains), Let The Kids Dance (Bo Diddley), Walk Don’t Run (The Ventures via the Pink Fairies version), Ballad Of Dwight Frye (Alice Cooper), California Sun (the Rivieras) and heaps of others, obscure and otherwise. There’s as much surf music in the mix as there is the Stooges.”

Birdman’s music was primal but not brutal – there was too much else going on, and they had well-defined pop sensibility that only grew in stature as the band progressed – and they’d soon built up a rabid following with their fearsome live shows and penchant for incorporating abstract performance art into proceedings. They purportedly vowed early on play every gig as if their lives depended on it, yet they soon became notorious outsiders, forced to basically start their own scene in inner-city Sydney to even facilitate gigs at all. Did it feel like they were swimming against the mainstream tide?

“I didn’t think we were musically,” Younger reflects. “I knew we were playing stuff that other bands weren’t playing, particularly – there was a lot of British heavy rock and a lot of blues stuff around Sydney at the time, and we thought that most of what was going down was shit. But we just went out and played this stuff, and we got kicked out of places a lot of times. Partially it was the way we looked and the way we had a small following of people that we’d drag around – this is when we finally went out into the suburbs – but they’d just dance, for Christ’s sake! They wouldn’t wreck the place or anything like that, but we sort of all got slung out en masse. There must have been something that people took exception to, the venue owners and so forth, and the people that would walk out or yell a request that was never going to happen, whatever it was.

"There was a lot of British heavy rock and a lot of blues stuff around Sydney at the time, and we thought that most of what was going down was shit."

“We took a pride in standing outside those expectations, and that really helped – it brought attention to the band. If everyone loves you that’s a problem, isn’t it? Back then it would have been, because it would have meant that we were just fitting into the current musical landscape such, and it was pretty bland. There were a lot of blues bands playing reverential versions of Muddy Waters and stuff like that. Not kicking the shit out of them, just playing them, like, ‘This is the information that we’ve received from the Gods, and we’ve got to treat it with great respect!’ But we were out there playing the rock’n’roll music that we liked, that we were turned onto and probably wasn’t typical of what other bands were playing around the place at the time.”

It got to the point where Radio Birdman were basically forced to start their own scene and venue, and soon operations were centred around the dingy upstairs room at the Oxford Hotel in Darlinghurst. They put on all of their own gigs in that greatest of DIY manners, and soon were booking shows for other bands as well. When they later rechristened the venue the Oxford Funhouse (another Stooges name-check) in early 1977, a flyer distributed to bands looking for gigs described the room thusly;

“The Funhouse is Sydney’s only genuine rock’n’roll venue. We are having trouble finding good bands to book. To us a good band is energetic, exciting, innovative (or unashamedly derivative) playing rock’n’roll with real manic fervor.”

This was followed by a manifesto of sorts about what they were not looking for in bands, which basically boiled down to three broad traits; being boring, wearing dumb clothes or being gear nerds. With Birdman it was always about the music, even from the start. They did introduce the infamous Birdman symbol (to be discussed in Pt III) which helped abet their steadily growing notoriety, but nothing was ever done at the expense of the tunes.

Naturally with all of this bubbling away it was time to record some of this music that Birdman were winning people with on the live front, and this is where Trafalgar Studios comes into the equation. Having access to the studio (albeit fettered by availability) was almost like an early version of a band having their own studio set-up, something almost unheard of back in the ‘70s when studios were still as a rule prohibitively expensive.

"We didn’t have any money but they liked us."

“Trafalgar was a working business and they had to pay the rent,” Tek remembers. “They were doing mostly advertising stuff and songs for TV ads and things like that, and I guess they had a few clients from the major record labels who would send their clients in to do demos or maybe even finished recordings – I’m not sure at that point – but they had to earn money anyway. We didn’t have any money but they liked us, and Charles Fisher and Michael McMartin wanted to help us out so we could record there but only if they didn’t have a paying customer that day. So when the studio was free – there wasn’t anything going on in the studio – we could come in and load our stuff in there and work for one day or two days. Sometimes if it was on a weekend we would actually work all afternoon and into the evening, and then we’d pack up the stuff in our truck and go play a show and then come back the next morning – we’d tear everything down and then set everything back up again. So it was a really slow process – these days you take a whole day just to set up a drumkit and get drum sounds in the studio, but in those days it wasn’t like that, it would just be, ‘Yeah, throw some mics up, whatever works!’ We had to get it done quickly because we had to get as much done as possible in the time we were allowed to be in there, and because it was done piecemeal – in bits and pieces – it was over a probably six or eight month period that we recorded that first album. That’s probably another reason why I don’t remember a lot of it. It was so haphazard, but eventually it finally took shape. I guess one of the good things about no working to a deadline was that we weren’t under pressure to come up with anything by a certain date so we could just keep trying stuff until we found a way to make it work.”

Soon they were recording in earnest, and the next phase was described in the pamphlet for the Powerhouse’s Birdman archive exhibit as follows;

“In October 1976 Radio Birdman released their debut recording, the EP Burn My Eye, which was recorded at Trafalgar Studios, Annandale. The record was a limited private pressing which originally could be purchased only by mail order from the Radio Birdman Fan Club, through an advertisement in RAM. Along with The Saints' (I'm) Stranded, Burn My Eye is credited as one of the first independently released records in Australia. In the same months, the band toured extensively throughout Sydney and New South Wales on their 'Blitzkrieg' tour, having to fit their shows around the schedules of Tek and Hoyle, who were both studying medicine at university. In July 1977 Radio Birdman released their first LP, Radios Appear, which included the single New Race (with Hoyle re-joining the band soon after the release). Before the release Radio Birdman toured Melbourne in March for their 'Radios Appear' tour.”

The Radio Birdman juggernaut was up and running, but they were soon to cross paths with an American record label exec named Seymour Stein, and the band’s destiny would be irrevocably transformed.