When The Birdmen Fly: Part Two

In Part One we looked at Radio Birdman’s formation and early career in Sydney, leaving them at the point when they had just released their first recorded music – 1976’s Burn My Eye EP and their 1977 debut long-player Radios Appear. They’d been effectively ostracised from a Sydney music scene unprepared for either their intense music or the band’s penchant for breaking down the inhibitions of their audiences with art instillations during their ever-incendiary gigs (which they called “offensives”), the members and their crew sometimes having to arm themselves with microphone stands whilst loading out from venues where Birdman or their ever-dancing fans had angered staff and patrons. They had set up their own home at the Oxford Tavern in Darlinghurst (initially in an attempt to put on a showcase for Lou Reed, whom Birdman guitarist/songwriter Deniz Tek had met at an airport press conference and garnished with a homemade Birdman t-shirt, although Reed eventually didn’t show) where they could hold their own soirees in the dingy upstairs bandroom, but this wasn’t going to prove a permanent solution, as the venue was logistically reaching breaking point as the band’s legend and popularity steadily rose.

At this juncture it should be noted that self-releasing their records with Trafalgar Studios – the Annandale studio that had embraced the band and allowed them to record their when there were no paying customers – as Trafalgar Records was an incredibly brave move. Brisbane band The Saints had released the first Australian independent single I’m Stranded mere weeks before Burn My Eye came out – the two events were so close they may as well have been concurrent – so they were basically entering uncharted waters by putting out their own records, and there was no established infrastructure to assist them to do so. Some import record shops would stock the records on consignment but otherwise they were selling them by mail order or out of the back of their cars after gigs. It did allow them to retain full control, and eventually Radios Appear (which had been recorded with a budget of $7,000) started to sell well enough for WEA to offer them a distribution deal, the record eventually debuting at #72 in the national album charts before rising to #35. Things were tracking quite nicely, and everything was being done on the band’s uncompromising terms.

It’s at this point that American music executive Seymour Stein enters the equation. The co-founder of Sire Records, Stein was an old school “record man”, who prided himself on being one step ahead of the latest musical trends, anticipating the coming zeitgeist and signing potential big players early. He’d become excited about ‘punk’ after discovering the Ramones (he signed them and released their debut self-titled album on Sire in 1976). He signed Talking Heads after seeing them at CBGBs, then The Pretenders, and before long he’d accumulated a roster in the States that included The Flamin’ Groovies, The Dead boys, Richard Hell & The Voivoids and The Replacements. From the UK he snapped up The cult, Aztec Camera and Echo & The Bunnymen, and it was probably around this stage that the traction that The Saints had quickly garnered in London dragged his attention to Australia. Stein flew to Australia to touch base with The Saints but his razor keen nose for new music inevitably led him to cross paths with Radio Birdman in their home-ground haunt. Anthony O’Grady described it thusly in the SMH back in 2007: “Stein, a charming maverick who would go on to discover Madonna and Talking Heads, was in Australia to check out The Saints. Fighting his way into the upstairs room at the Oxford Tavern on the corner of Oxford and Bourke Streets, he discovered Birdman playing to 400 people in a space that would comfortably hold 200. Stein ended up dancing on a table and offering the band a deal”. He later attended another gig at ANC TV Studio then met with the band in the control room at Trafalgar, where a deal was nutted out.

As we’ve seen Radio Birdman were a notoriously independent concern, where integrity was paramount. When producer Charles Fisher was pushing for input into their songs during one of their first meetings at Trafalgar, claiming that he could make an album track into a hit, Tek legendarily told him that they’d rather have “an obscure album track than a successful single we didn’t believe in”. With all of this in mind did they have any reservations on joining Sire after meeting the enthusiastic Stein?

“Not really,” Tek explains. “I think we were ready to go overseas, and in those days that was the only way that that was going to happen. We liked the other stuff that was on Sire – they had the Ramones and The Dead Boys, and we loved those albums, so we thought, ‘Well, if they’re willing to do that stuff then they should be able to handle us without any problems.’ Just being independent isn’t necessarily a virtue in itself, it’s only a virtue if it lets you do things that you couldn’t do otherwise. Both Sire and Seymour seemed to be a connection that would just allow us to keep being ourselves and allow us to do what we would have been doing anyway but with more resources. We didn’t have any second thoughts about it, and we never really had a problem with Sire – they didn’t restrict what we were doing in any way until they folded as a company and dropped everybody, including us. When they went bankrupt they kept their top-selling for artists and dropped about twenty bands, including us while we were touring in the UK, and if that hadn’t have happened I think Sire would have been a good match for us. Seymour Stein had a good musical ear and I think he had a good heart too – he grew up being a guy at Red Bird Records that goes to get the coffee and brings the mail in and stuff like that, and he went from that to being the head of Sire and in all that time even though he made a lot of money I don’t think he ever lost his true love of music, and true love of the rock’n’roll. That’s what he’s about and more power to him.”

Stein wanted to release Radios Appear in the rest of the world (excluding Australia where it was already out independently on Trafalgar), and it was at this stage – some six or so months after the record had been out – that the band saw the opportunity to improve upon their initial album. They had some new songs which they laid down, they re-mixed and re-recorded some others, changed the front cover and ultimately emerged with a brand new document to best show off their wares to the rest of the world (the differences in the two versions of Radios Appear – The Trafalgar version and the Sire version – are explained in our boxset review.

“I think really that we got an offer from Sire to do a tour of America, as it was – which we didn’t, we ended up going to Europe – and that was going to be with the Ramones [in the States], but ended up being with The Flamin’ Groovies [in Europe],” singer Rob Younger recalls. “To do this they were going to put out a record, and because the original version of Radios Appear with the black cover had already been out a little while, we had a couple of new songs that we wanted to present. Plus there were a couple of mixes that we weren’t happy with or whatever, so we remixed a couple and put on a couple of new songs – we put on [13th Floor Elevators cover] You’re Gonna Miss Me because that had been put in the set by then, and we thought [The Stooges cover from Trafalgar version] TV Eye might have become a little passé by then for us. We’d been doing it a fair while. But for whatever reason we changed it and put out an updated version for the American market, and then a label here – Warners, I think – decided they’d distribute it, so that confused things a little bit. The original idea wasn’t to release the white Sire version in Australia, it just sort of happened.” It has to be said that the version of You’re Gonna Miss Me is a pretty great addition.

"I remember that concert very well because of the chaos factor and the damage that I ended up having to pay for."

“It’s pretty live actually,” Younger tells. “I think it’s got the live vocal on there and everything from memory. It’s really fast, which doesn’t actually serve the song too well in retrospect because the Elevators’ one’s about half the tempo of that, or two-thirds of it. But when you start out you think that you’re playing it more powerfully, or a tougher version of the song, merely by speeding it up – that was the general ‘punk ethos’ that existed then with most bands anyway at that time in music. Jack up the tempo and it will be tougher than the original.”

Obviously having two versions of the one album floating about at the same time isn’t ideal, but it must be remembered that Australia in the 1970s faced severe geographic isolation, and the lack of technology meant that there was a literal remove between Australia and the rest of the world which just doesn’t exist today.

“I guess at the time we thought that there was stuff that we should have done differently on the Trafalgar version,” Tek remembers. “It had been out for about six months but just on a local basis, and then we got the offer to do a worldwide release on Sire so I think we just suggested, ‘We’d like to do a few of these tracks over again, plus we have some new songs that we’d like to present so let’s do a different version for the overseas release. I guess at the time I thought that some of those songs could have been done better, but when I listen to it now I think [the Trafalgar version] stands up just fine as it was. I guess the band was evolving and we were playing differently, and so we wanted to present our most recent face to the world. By the time the Sire thing came along, to us the first album was old hat and we wanted to move ahead and do different stuff. I don’t see it as two different albums – I see it as two versions of the same album.”

It seems incredible that they’d written classic tracks like Aloha Steve & Danno, What Gives and Non-Stop Girls – some of the new tunes on the Sire version – in the brief period between the two releases. “Yeah,” Tek shrugs, “we were pretty productive in that time and coming up with a lot of new ideas.” The boxset also contains a heap of different demos and outtakes from the Sire version which were unearthed recently (see Part One).

“I think the version of Love Kills that stars with a piano interlude is really great,” Tek enthuses. “Also I think the version of You’re Gonna Miss Me that was an outtake is outstanding, it’s got more energy and seems wilder than the one that got on the record and maybe it’s a better take, looking back on it now. There’s an interesting early version of Crying Sun, that we didn’t actually record for release purposes until we got to Rockfield for Living Eyes, but there’s a version of it in those sessions and it’s quite interesting how that evolved. Just different stuff. The cover of [MC5’s] Shakin’ Street is a bit polite for me and my tastes, but it’s a great song and it’s kind of a fun version.”

So by this time Stein has the new version of Radios Appear ready to drop on an unsuspecting world at large and is throwing around a lot of ideas to make this happen; eventually –as Younger alludes to above – they decided to break Radio Birdman in Europe first before tackling the States, and with this in mind a massive tour (including a run of shows with fellow Sire signees The Flamin’ Groovies) was organised for the UK and Europe – a schedule so long it was essentially tantamount to the band moving over there. But first there was the loose ends in Australia to tie up, and after a proposed tour supporting Iggy Pop was cancelled in November (Birdman did their own tour of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide instead) they then decided to farewell their hometown with a three-night run of shows at the Paddington Town Hall in December, 1977, unaware that these would be their last ever shows in Australia (during the band’s initial tenure at any rate).

The final show of the three at Paddington Town Hall has gone down in folklore as being not only one of Birdman’s best ever shows, but also for being one of the most chaotic gigs in Australian music history, and excitingly it was captured in a crystal-clear clear audio recording and has been released for the first time ever in its entirety in the new boxset (the boxset’s DVD also contains thrilling footage of a few songs as well, showcasing a packed room of youngsters dancing wildly with complete abandon, a sight sadly no longer seen at live music gigs).

“I remember that concert very well because of the chaos factor and the damage that I ended up having to pay for,” Tek recounts. “But at that show, I think how it happened, was that our producer either borrowed or rented the ABC’s mobile recording truck from Keith Walker of (at that time) Double J, and he got them to park that truck with an engineer inside out in the street outside Paddington Town Hall and they ran cables inside the hall and mic’d everything, so it was recorded on 16-track tape. One of the reasons that you don’t get a version of Aloha Steve & Danno on there is because the tape reel ran out in the middle of that song and they had to switch reels, so there wasn’t a version of that, but it went onto tape and the sound quality was pretty good.”

Does Tek remember it as being a particularly crazy night?

“Yeah, it was packed for one thing,” he recalls. “In those days there was no security and there were no bouncers – we put the show on ourselves, there was no promoter even or anything. We rented the Paddington Town Hall – our manager did – and just showed up and played, and the place was packed out and it more or less turned into a riot at the end of the night. Half of the PA columns had fallen over just from a mass of people running into it and smashing into it, it was like in a tsunami where all the water can just take things away – the people were just like this wave. After the show was over all of the windows of the place were smashed, and all of the cars along Oxford Street were smashed, and there was blood smears up and down the stairwell, to the point where we were thinking, ‘Woah, this is getting way too crazy’. That was our last show – we didn’t do any more shows after that in Australia, we moved to the UK.

"I think there were personal issues with some of the guys that were pretty difficult for them to deal with – not just personality issues but actually illness, an actual unwell-ness that played a part in it."

“I think it was just youthful energy and liberation, and not necessarily channelled in a productive way, but just too much energy and not being able to contain it. I guess, I dunno. I wasn’t part of the crowd, I was in the band. It wasn’t scary – we had stuff focused on

us [that night], but we were used to it. Confrontation was part of it, and we never shied away from it or were worried particularly by it. At one show Rob was decked by one of Rose Tattoo’s road crew – he just decked him – and people would throw stuff, and Rob would be in the crowd, and I’d be throwing my guitar down and jumping in the crowd to save him, and then ten minutes later we’d be in the crowd and then suddenly the crowd would be around us – there would be people on the stage just to dance and have a good time, and maybe grab a microphone and try to sing, or they would just be there to cause chaos – it was all part of it, and you just had to accept it. I guess to us causing a fuss and a conflict just seemed to go with what we were doing, and we were perfectly okay with that – we even sort of welcomed it – but when it got to the point of that much destruction like at the Paddington Town Hall show, it had crossed a line and we realised that we couldn’t be part of it.

“We thought that we’d go to the UK for six months and then go to America for six months on tour and then record the next album, and then by the time we got back things would have settled down and we’d figure out a way to do shows where it would be less volatile. I mean, we would want the music to still be volatile, but we’d want some form of protection for people and for property.”

Younger also remembers the last Paddington Town Hall show as being relatively explosive.

“I remember certain aspects of it,” he posits. “I remember a guy spitting at me towards the front so I jumped off to clock him. I’m not actually a violent person or a tough person – I couldn’t knock shit off a shovel – but I never liked this guy and he was spitting at me from the dance floor, so I thought, ‘Fuck this!’ I think Deniz called somebody else out during the gig, you can hear that on the record. So I remember things that happened, and I remember things that went wrong in some of the songs – I can remember quite a bit about it. I was told that people were chucking chairs from the hall though the windows and out into the street and stuff like that – the lovely old Town Hall. I remember most gigs – once somebody mentions the name of a place that I’ve played I can kind of picture the place from the stage. I have played thousands of gigs, and I remember a hell of a lot of them. Incidentally, at that gig we did a version of Aloha Steve & Danno, but because the tape in the mobile unit ran out during the song we lost twenty or so seconds – we had a listen to the version we’ve got without the missing verse, and we thought, ‘Fuck it, nope, don’t put it on the record’. It sounded funny without the missing part so we decided not to put it on. And that’s the only one where I participated in the writing, so I’ve done myself out of some royalties there.

“That was the last Australian show, and that’s probably why there were so many people there – because there were quite a lot of people turned away from that one. The last few shows that we did in Australia were really well-attended – that doesn’t reflect our popularity that much, at the time we used to stage [gigs] as events and they were really spread out, plus we had brilliant supports.”

So in February 1978 Radio Birdman set off for the tour of their lives, only on their return to Australia they wouldn’t be coming back as bandmates. Despite things going so well for them at home they basically hit a brick-wall of apathy and even antipathy from UK crowds and pundits. Punk was de rigueur at the time and despite Radio Birdman’s fierce DIY ethics and primal music they just weren’t punk musically (what punk band has keyboards and twin guitars and showers solos amidst complex arrangements?), and their long hair and refusal to adopt punk fashion also counted against them in the notoriously fickle scene. They were scary to straights and certainly volatile, but still not punk rockers.

And then the all important support from Sire and Stein – which was basically what lured them into this overseas predicament – began to evaporate. Stein’s passion for discovering new artists obviously led to the label’s downfall, as he had signed too many punk and new wave bands from all over the planet who were cool but just didn’t shift mountains of units so the label was struggling financially. The Birdman tour had been organised by promoter Ed Bicknell (then Dire Straits manager) – 40 or 50 shows around England and Wales in 20 weeks, plus a few in Europe – who’d been recommended by Phillips; the Polygram subsidiary which Birdman were on (Polygram being Sire’s European distributors). Suddenly, however, Sire split from Polygram at the very commencement of the tour leaving Birdman with no real relationship with Polygram except for all of the albums they had sitting in boxes in warehouses (which stayed there anyway even as the tour somehow went ahead). Stein purportedly saw Birdman in one of these early London shows and was disappointed that they’d dropped the uniforms that they’d briefly adopted and had been wearing when he’d seen them in Sydney, and before long Birdman were dropped completely from Sire as well (along with the entire roster except for a couple of cash cows and figureheads), making a terrible situation exponentially worse. Soon cracks were starting to show in the band’s usually united façade, as personality clashes rose to the surface in the close confines and were magnified by this horrendous run of ill fortune.

“Yeah, it was pretty tough in those days,” Tek reflects. “I think there were personal issues with some of the guys that were pretty difficult for them to deal with – not just personality issues but actually illness, an actual unwell-ness that played a part in it. And it just hadn’t gone as well for us in the UK as we would have hoped – we didn’t expect to run into all of this anti-Australian bias over there. We weren’t really prepared for that, and we knew that a lot of the negative reviews were quite unfair because you could tell from reading some of the live reviews that the person who wrote the review wasn’t even at the show. Or maybe they were at the show for one or two songs and then they left, and you can tell that from reading it, yet they would then write an extremely negative review in NME or Sounds. And you’re not meant to read your reviews or worry about the, but we did and it all just added up. We didn’t fit punk fashion either – we went over there and played all of these punk clubs, and in the UK punk was more of a fashion than a musical style. You had to have the right hair and the right clothing and the right piercings in the right body parts and all of this stuff, and we never cared about any of that stuff. We pre-dated punk anyway and we didn’t consider ourselves to be a punk band anyway – we thought we were just a rock’n’roll band – but we got over there and we were judged by the standards of punk aesthetics, which was not why we were up there playing music.

“So there were a lot of factors that went into what I would say was the malaise of the band at that time, and not least of it was the fact that we knew what was going on with Sire, and that we’d had our support withdrawn from us at that point. We didn’t think that they’d actually betrayed us, but we thought that it was pretty unfortunate that the company had folded right at the time when we needed the boost. We were playing six cities a week for months, and we’d go to some place like Sheffield or Liverpool or Manchester and play and win a few people over and get a few people really enthusiastic about seeing the band, and they’d come to you after the

show and say, ‘Man, you guys are a really great band, when are you going to record? Are you thinking about doing an album?’ And of course all of this time the album’s sitting in warehouses and not being distributed anywhere – just sitting in a warehouse in a box – and so you’d play in a city and the album wouldn’t be available there.”

Somehow amidst all of this mayhem and rising acrimony, the band managed to set aside some time and head to Rockfield Studios in Wales to record a group of songs which would (eventually) constitute their second album (third if you count the two versions of their debut), Living Eyes (how this managed to transpire amidst the madness will be recounted in Part Three).

“The attitude when we were recording at Rockfield was pretty down,” Tek remembers of the sessions. “Having said that, we did have some fun there too. After the recording session of the day finished we would be having drinks, and we had our portable record player so we’d be listening to singles that we’d bought and hanging out with most of us having a pretty good time. It was a completely opposite recording experience [than we’d experienced before], like, ‘Okay, you’re going to be in the studio for three weeks and you’re going to live in the studio for three weeks’. At Rockfield they have like a bunkhouse where the band lives – everyone has got their own room, it’s not like you’re actually in a bunk – but they have a band house and they have the recording studio house, and they’re in this old medieval farm buildings in the middle of nowhere so you’d just stay there; the first week is rhythm tracks and the second week is overdubs and the third week is mixing. It was mid-tour too, so a nice break to stay somewhere for a period of time.”

But after this semi-idyllic recording hiatus it was back on the road, where tension remained high (the European tour van was infamously dubbed ‘The Van Of Hate’) and things just kept going wrong. For all intents and purposes, and despite his obvious good intentions, Seymour Stein left Radio Birdman hung out to dry in the UK with no financial (or moral) support, and this was the spark that set the tinder aflame, magnifying the internal dissent already rife within the band to breaking point. They initially soldiered on, even when The Flamin’ Groovies’ frontman Cyril Jordan drunkenly slashed his arm on a champagne bottle he was drinking from, leading them to withdraw from the tour and the cancellation of certain key dates. It wasn’t all bad, however; Birdman randomly got to open for Van Halen at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, and some of the UK shows managed to be as incendiary as their Aussie before them. At one show in particular at the Hope And Anchor, Birdman supposedly killed it, being called out for three encores for the first time ever (this is funnily enough the show Tek referred to above where they were slagged in NME despite the writer only staying for three songs and clearly cribbing his review from the set-list, referring to all the tracks by their abbreviated in-band titles).

A great account of Birdman’s demise can be found in Vivien Johnson’s 1992 tome Radio Birdman, but Rolling Stone senior editor and revered music critic David Fricke summed it up nicely in his liner notes to the 2001 Sub Pop compilation The Essential Radio Birdman; “…when they walked away from it all in June, 1978 bidding fuck you to an ignorant Britain and the music business at large with a last blast of flamethrower love at Oxford University – Radio Birdman did it like righteous samurai. They had spent four years punching out ceilings, preaching the gospel of a new rock’n’roll built atop the music’s cardinal truths; mayhem, communion, liberation. It was time for the bleeding to stop and the world to catch up”.

Radio Birdman were over, and it seemed to have a certain symmetry that their last show was at Oxford University given how much time they’d spent at the Oxford Tavern. But, as things, transpired, there was a little bit of bite left in the old dog, it would just take them a few years to work that out.