Why The Victims Fizzled Out So Quickly

Before Dave Faulkner became Oz rock royalty in the ‘80s with the Hoodoo Gurus, he cut his teeth in the late-‘70s Perth scene fronting seminal punk outfit The Victims. Then known as Dave Flick, he led the three-piece through a brief-but-dazzling tenure which spawned one 7” single – the classic Television Addict – and one EP before they split in mid-1978. Now Faulkner and founding Victims drummer James Baker – also a member of the early Gurus – are joining forces with long-term fan Ray Ahn (of the Hard-Ons fame) on bass to bring The Victims’ music back to life, in the guise of new outfit The Television Addicts. Following a late-2014 reunion in Perth, they’re bringing these songs to the east coast for the first time ever, finally overcoming the tyranny of distance that spawned tracks like Perth Is A Culture Shock.

“We never played outside of Perth with The Victims anyway, so it’s a very late-in-the-day tour,” Faulkner smiles of the semi-reunion. “James had been after me for quite a while to do this, and to be honest at first I was really hesitant because, (a) we didn’t want to work with the bass player, and (b) James and myself still had some weird issues to work out. He’s always been a little bit aggrieved about when we kicked him out of the Gurus – we haven’t really addressed that, but he seems to have made his peace about that to himself, which is the main thing.

"So, when he agreed to participate in the [Hoodoo Gurus retrospective] ‘Be My Guru’ show we did at Splendour In The Grass, where we got him and [former bassist] Clyde [Bramley] back, I thought that as my gesture of good faith I’d do The Victims like he wanted to do.

"So it wasn’t a bargain we made, but I thought, ‘Well, if he’s come on-board with this then I can certainly come on-board with that’.”

Has it been fun for Faulkner revisiting these songs from all those years ago?

“Oh absolutely! It’s funny how much I remembered of the lyrics, to be honest, because I didn’t have them written down everywhere and I listened to bad recordings of the songs and the words all started coming back to me, it was kind of cool. There was only one song that I still kinda can’t figure out – it’s a really fast one and I have no idea what the hell I’m singing,” he laughs. “I sorta know part of the lyrics, but I don’t know exactly every lyric that I sang back then because it was a really bad recording. I can’t fathom it, but it’s so fast that I could probably just sing gibberish and it wouldn’t matter anyway!”

And getting Ahn to fill in on bass was a no-brainer because the Hard-On has been a huge fan of The Victims forever, to the point of occasionally losing control of his bodily functions.

“It’s so funny, because we did the first [Hoodoo Gurus curated] Dig It Up! Show with the Hard-Ons – the first one where we played [Gurus’ 1984 debut] Stoneage Romeos, and had bands like The Sonics and Redd Kross, it was fantastic – and the Hard-Ons opened that tour,” Faulkner enthuses,  “and for the last show we did in Melbourne I wanted to play this song Be A Woman for The Sonics so we did it in the encore; I thought it would be a good song for them to do, and in fact they’ve recorded it on their new album, which is mind-blowing to me.

[Ray] told me a story about when he was standing side of stage [and hearing Television Addict live], and he said he was so excited that he thinks a little bit of wee came out!

"It’s a song by The Persian Rugs – when the Gurus broke up we [started a side project and] made an album called Turkish Delight (2003), and it contained this song called Be A Woman – and [The Sonics] recorded it for their new album which is coming out in March, which is very cool for me having one of my absolute idols playing one of my songs! Anyway, we played that song in the encore and then for some reason I said, ‘Let’s do Television Addict for the encore as well’, so we chucked that in and Ray was standing on the side of stage and he was beside himself! When I first asked him about joining The Television Addicts you could almost hear him fainting on the phone, so to speak – he was gobsmacked – and he told me a story about when he was standing side of stage [and hearing Television Addict live], and he said he was so excited that he thinks a little bit of wee came out!”

Speaking to The Music recently about the reformation of the earliest version of The Scientists, Kim Salmon painted a picture of Perth in the late ‘70s as being a very bleak place for music fans, a contention that Faulkner is quick to verify.

“It was; Perth is the most remote city on earth. I wrote about it in the liner notes for the [2011 The Victims compilation] Sleeping Dogs Lie album – the Japanese release – and how it’s thousands of miles away from Adelaide, the nearest city, and it’s closer to Indonesia than it is to bloody Sydney. It’s a really remote city and there’s a certain island mentality there – it’s a little bit insular – and there had been various bands in the ‘60s who had come out of Perth’s feisty little independent scene, with bands writing their own songs but also covers; like Johnny Young doing [1966 single as Johnny Young & Kompany] Cara-Lyn,” he laughs. “And there were bands like Bakery and Sid Rumpo in the ‘70s, but Perth never really had much of an original music scene, so it’s a bit like the snake who ate its own tail – eventually you run out of musical options too, especially if you’re doing something left of mainstream. You run out of people who’ll come and see you and support you – you burn out your audience and the bands tend to flicker into life and then die after about six months, certainly all the bands that I was in.

“But apart from all that, on that level, pretty much the idea of what people wanted to see was just Top 40 music in the pub and the only scene apart from that cover band world was the blues scene, and that was pretty independent and feisty and in the groovier part of town. They all listened to their Howlin’ Wolf and Leadbelly albums, and I’d actually played in one of those bands earlier before The Victims – I was playing keyboards then, I’d failed first year of university and went straight into this blues band. They were really good, but sadly I sorta squandered the opportunity to fully immerse myself in the blues – I knew a bit about it, but those guys were only a couple of years older than me and already experts, so I kick myself now for not digging deeper into their record collections at the time. I found it all subsequently, of course.

That was another chip on our shoulder as well; on top of being in Australia, we were also in part of Australia that even the bands that did come to the country wouldn’t get to.

"But, apart from those two scenes, there was nothing to speak of in terms of original music, and certainly punk rock was this outsider music completely – no one was interested in that, and it wasn’t on radio and was seen as fairly unpleasant. Rock’n’roll is a hard sell at the best of times – let alone something as obnoxious and in your face as punk rock – so we just made our fun, and booked our own venues, found places we could play, booked some halls and played at parties. We just really amused ourselves – we had no expectation that anyone else in the world would even know that we existed.

“We were just trying to make the best of a bad situation where we were, and feeling angry that we were sort of cut off from the music that we loved. If someone like the Ramones came [to Australia] they’d never play in Western Australia – they didn’t have the funding, or it wasn’t commercial enough to get across there – so that was another chip on our shoulder as well; on top of being in Australia, we were also in part of Australia that even the bands that did come to the country wouldn’t get to. Of course there were cool import shops where we used to get all our records from – we had to wait six weeks for the shipments to arrive, but they were good shops. They weren’t necessarily punk fans but they could appreciate that people were buying records off them, so they got ‘em in for us. It was definitely well-supported by the cool stores.”

Faulkner mentions the Ramones as if they were harbingers of something special, which, of course, they totally were at the time.

“Well, for me, that [1976 self-titled] Ramones album was the one that really sort of changed everything – it did for everyone, really,” he admits. “It changed the London scene completely; before that they were into glam rock and Bowie – all of the punks in London were reformed Bowie and Roxy Music listeners, really. That Ramones album was a complete revelation, and it basically threw everything into focus; the reason why people said prog rock was rubbish was because it just went on and on and on and they were singing about elks and it was really pretend grandiose classical music in disguise, and we’d be, like, ‘You know what, this isn’t really what we need! We need something a bit more dynamic and to the point’.

"And the Ramones were also the first ones to write those kind of madcap, deeply ironic lyrics where they sound stupid on the surface but are really kind of smart – that was something that was missing from music as well, that ‘devil may care’ approach and street smarts. They had that in spades. And they had the pop smarts as well – melodically speaking it was all Beach Boys melodies with buzzsaw guitar, which was all they could play and why they played like that, but which sounded fantastic and was all that they needed to do. They taught us all of those very same lessons – they went there first and showed us how to do it.”

Influences aside, the creative core of The Victims – Faulkner and Baker – stumbled upon a unique writing style early on, utlising the idiosyncratic style that Baker had forged in his earlier band The Geeks (many of whose songs ended up in The Victims’ early repertoire) whereby Baker would sing the melodies to his bandmate who would then help turn them into traditional song structures.

“This is a very controversial area, because there was a dispute many years later about the writing of the songs – we credited them all to The Victims, but there were some songs that James had written earlier with a guy called Ross Bunkle from the previous band [The Geeks],” Faulkner explains. “They never played live but had written a number of songs – including some really good ones – and we recorded a few of them. But James would sing the songs to me, and I’m sure he did the same to Ross early – and some of them may have been ones he’d already written with Ross, so Ross had already interpreted James’ riffy singing, which was pretty tone deaf. So at first I bought into the idea that James just knew these songs, but I realised later that he must have had some help on some of these and those were the ones that ended up being Bunkle/Baker compositions.

"But the songs that he wrote with me were in a similar vein, where he’d sing the idea for a melody and I’d kind of interpret it, but he wasn’t really singing notes – it was more rhythm, and you’d kind of get an idea but you’d end up changing it all and make it sound interesting to you. So there was a bit of give and take. But the best thing that James contributed in the end was those Ramones-y ‘dumb/smart’ lyrics – he had a lot of that, he loved songs about teenagers and romance and stuff like that. He just loved writing about teeny-bopper sort of stuff, and parodying in a sense that corny sentiment but at the same time reveling in it because it’s simple and it’s joyful to sing about that stuff instead of how the world’s fucked. We were singing about liking high school girls. I always found that song a little bit weird personally, but it’s a nice tune. I feel like Roman Polanski singing it now, or maybe Woody Allen.”

The single Television Addict ended up taking on a life of its own over the decades, covered by bands such as The Hellacopters, The Bronx and You Am I – did they realise it was a stayer when they were writing that one?

“No, it’s just like every song you write – you don’t really know,” Faulkner smiles. “Every song you write you think is a great song, and you’re writing it for yourself – you don’t worry about how it’s going to be received by other people, we didn’t even think of that. You’re just amusing yourself. But with that song I do remember having the riff first – I had those chords in that order and it kinda excited me. I don’t remember exactly how we got that melody – whether James yelled that melody out or whether I sang that melody and he wrote the words – but The Victims always talked about television a lot. James was a big television addict, and I am too, and we like a lot of the same shows; it’s why he sings in that song TV Freak that he wrote with Ross Bunkle about all the shows he likes, his favourites like Top Cat and Get Smart.

"We had that in common to be honest – for us, television was almost a bit of a religion so we were happy to sing about it! And when that criminal case came up with the ‘Kojak murders’ – where this guy claimed that he’d been inspired to kill his next door neighbour because of something he’d seen on Kojak earlier that night – we thought that was appalling! He was slandering television and blaming television for something that was his own fault, his own fucked up idea, so that’s why we wrote that song – we were defending television’s integrity. That’s why I’m singing ‘we’re not dumb’, because we’re not dumb – we watch television, but we know that it’s television and not real life!”

Speaking of Faulkner’s TV fixation, this scribe remembers a photo of the early Hoodoo Gurus in the States when they had the opportunity to meet Don Adams – the actor who played Maxwell Smart in the immortal Get Smart series – and you have never seen a happier looking bunch of long-haired rockers in your life.

“That’s true, we finally met Don Adams!” Faulkner guffaws. “For us that was like Ray finally seeing Television Addict onstage, maybe a little wee came out for us as well! There were all of these young kids on the set – he was in this show called Check It Out that was set in a supermarket, and it was being shot in Canada because it used to be cheaper up there to make TV programs. He was like the boss of the supermarket and all of the check-out chicks were the main characters – it was a bit like Are You Being Served? or something, I dunno – but all of these young actresses and actors were looking at us like we were lunatics, like, ‘Why is this band paying homage to this old guy, this washed up has-been?’ We were acting like we were meeting the Queen, genuflecting.”

We ended up not liking the third Victim very much and didn’t want to have anything to do with him – and also I wanted to get the hell out of Perth.

Back to The Victims – given that they seemed to hit the ground running creatively and conjure these long-lasting songs in such a relatively small time, why did the band peter out so quickly?

“There were personnel problems – we ended up not liking the third Victim very much and didn’t want to have anything to do with him – and also I wanted to get the hell out of Perth,” Faulkner muses. “James had already been in the punk scene when it was beginning – he’d been to New York and London, and had hung around with Sid Vicious and people like that, he’d auditioned for The Clash. James already had an incredible story, and living in Perth and loving punk music and being so pissed off all the time about the fact that we were stuck there and couldn’t enjoy where it was all happening, everyone just wanted to get the hell out and go see it for themselves. I ended up getting a job and saving some money, and eventually I did save enough money to get away and I travelled for about a year – most of 1979 – and then I came back and formed Le Hoodoo Gurus after that little learning experience.

“The Victims weren’t that popular – we had our own fans and we did our own shows, but eventually we would have run out of steam. I don’t know, we just stopped and then James went and formed The Scientists with Kim and that was fantastic.”

And now that they finally have the chance to bring these Victims songs to the eastern seaboard for the first time – better late than never – Faulkner is champing at the bit to get back amongst it.

“I think you’re going to enjoy it,” he enthuses. “I just know that we’re going to play better than we did in Perth [last year on the first reunion show], and that was good enough for most people but it wasn’t good enough for me – I want to go a bit more full-on. I had a few technical problems that night – my strings were breaking and I didn’t have a good enough guitar.

When The Victims broke a string we’d stop the set and change the string and then come back and start playing again – there was no spare guitar bullshit or roadies!

"One funny story out of that gig though – the original guitar that I played on Television Addict was a $60 SG copy that I’d found in a junk shop, and it only had five strings – I never had the high E on it – and at the show one of our old punk fans had ended up with that old guitar somehow, I don’t know how he got it and what had happened, but he gave it back to me! He just said, ‘Here, this is yours’! So I’ve just had it restored in a sense – I put a new pickup put on it, because the old one was really crappy.

"I don’t know if it was always like that and I’d never noticed, because when The Victims broke a string we’d stop the set and change the string and then come back and start playing again – there was no spare guitar bullshit or roadies! And that was sorta what happened in Perth, I broke a string and didn’t have a proper spare guitar – I had one but it didn’t match, and the sound was all over the place and I found it difficult to play, it was a real nightmare actually for me. but I’ve got that guitar back now and I’m intending on making it the main guitar for the show – I’ll just see what happens, I’m going to try it out in rehearsal first. But it’s all in working order now, it sounds and feels great so I’m rapt.

"I know it’s my guitar because there’s a big bolt holding up the whammy bar – I could hardly play so the idea of using the whammy bar was far too technical, so I just took it off and put a big bolt there to hold it up instead of the spring. That bolt’s still there – my guitar luthier skills have stood the test of time. It’s mine alright, and they put new tuning pegs on there so it’s got six strings now, but that’s alright.”