Why Their DIY Ethos Was A Necessity, Not A Choice

Way back in 1983, Brisbane-bred but Sydney-based indie rockers The Riptides released what was ostensibly their debut album, only it wasn’t really. The Riptides (aka The Last Wave) was more of a hastily compiled anthology, which contained a handful of the tracks meant for their debut proper abetted by some singles and other random recordings. Not long after the collection’s release, The Riptides disbanded and the issue was pretty much forgotten.

One of the few to carry a torch for what should have been The Riptides’ debut long-player was the band’s frontman and chief songwriter Mark Callaghan. Callaghan — who would go on to ongoing success fronting the much-loved GANGgajang in the ‘80s and ‘90s — never forgot what should have been, and over the years never stopped agitating to somehow correct history. He found numerous obstacles in his way, however, not the least being the complete reluctance of the original record label to get involved.

Then suddenly last year, out of the blue, those hurdles were removed, freeing Callaghan to complete his labour of love and release into the world The Riptides’ debut album as it was originally intended to be heard. He collated the songs which had been recorded back in 1981 and 1982, had them completely remixed and then digitally remastered, added a swag of bonus material and the result is Tombs Of Gold, which was finally released in late 2014 in the precise manner envisaged by the band as the time of its creation. 

“I think it sounds great,” Callaghan smiles. “I’m biased, but it’s just good to be able to get all of the tracks mixed by one person at one time in the same sort of context. It was a real epic just getting the tapes and everything — I’ve been trying to get this to happen for about 30 years, and then out of the blue one day Martin Fabinyi, god bless him, from Regular Records rang up and said, ‘I want to give you those recordings back — for nothing!’ So I quickly wrote up an agreement and paid him one dollar — I didn’t even pay him that, to be honest — and he gave me these recordings back. Then I went and found all the multi-tracks with the help of a friend called Warren Barnett — who’s an absolute legend of the Australian music industry, he’s been doing it since God was a boy and knows where everything is, and he helped me find all the multi-track tapes. Then we had to bake the tapes and transfer them to digital.

“Back then when we did the recordings on multi-track they were encoded on this professional version of Dolby, so there was less hiss — wow, so modern — but then they had to be decoded as well when they came back off the tape. It ended up that I could only find nine working units of Dolby in all of Sydney, and of course you need 24 for a 24-track multi-track. So we had to do each track three times and then use the extra track for the bass drum each time, and then line it all up. So we did that, then transferred them to digital and for them mixed and re-mastered and it’s great, because it sounds all authentic and real but also really fresh — it sounds like it was done yesterday, it’s just awesome.”

Callaghan has no real idea what prompted the change of heart from Fabinyi, but he’s stoked that it happened.

“He said to me that he had a new job and he couldn’t be the director of any other company, so he was divesting himself of everything involved with Regular Records, which included all of our stuff,” he explains. “I couldn’t believe it, because I’d been trying to get these tapes for such a long time — I’d offered to buy them, I’d offered to put them out myself and pay him a percentage. We never got it together, but then out of the blue he got in touch.”

The Riptides had come to life in Brisbane back in 1978 and released their first EP Sunset Strip on The Go-Betweens’ Able Label, but had decamped to Sydney in 1980 where they existed for the remainder of their short career. The band contained numerous members who had tasted (or would later taste) success in other outfits, but as to why their debut album as intended never saw the light of day, Callaghan explains it was just down to the regular travails of being in a band.

“We just got sidetracked by line-up changes — that’s really what happened, and we lost momentum as a band,” he shrugs. “There was four of us in Brisbane, and we were all architecture students. One guy had one of those bonded scholarship deals, where you had to be an architect and work for the government because they’d paid for his studies — also he wanted to be an architect — so he stayed in Brisbane and kept studying. The other three of us moved to Sydney as soon as we could in early 1980 — it was awesome. We got shitloads of gigs — we must have played 150 shows in 1980 — and then we got a record deal, and it did get a little bit crazy living in the same house and driving in the same car. You’re young people with no experienced people to mentor you, and at that point Regular said that they didn’t want to use the guitar player on the recordings — they said he wasn’t good enough, which of course was rubbish when I look back; it was probably me that was the weakest player on bass — but that obviously created a bit of pressure in the band.

By the time we got the next line-up together and got out and started playing ... it wasn’t that great — by the end of 1982, early 1983, I just said, ‘Ah, enough. Enough’. 

“And then two of the guys, Andrew [Leitch] and Dennis [Cantwell], decided that they didn’t want to have Scott [Matheson] in the band any more, and I sat on the fence — which was dumb, but I was young — so they essentially kicked Scott out. Then we got Michael Hiron from Brisbane, and that was the four-piece that did most of the recordings that you’re listening to. So we lost all of our momentum while we replaced Scott and got a new guy and rehearsed, then we went and recorded — so again we were in the studio and not sitting around the place — and then we were going to go on tour for the EP that came out, then Andrew and Dennis turned up and said, ‘Actually, we don’t want to be in a band anymore, we want to go travelling’. So that was a real bummer — suddenly I was the only original guy, and it took me and Michael months to find three replacements, because we needed to replace both the guitar and keyboards that Andrew had played. So we needed to get a keyboard player and a guitarist and a drummer, and it took us months and months.

“Time had moved on by the time we got the next line-up together and got out and started playing, and it wasn’t that great — by the end of 1982, early 1983, I just said, ‘Ah, enough. Enough’. So we stopped. We got back and did a reunion gig in Brisbane in about 1986 for 4ZZZ, and we recorded that for the live album [Resurfaced], and we did a tour to support that. Then we did a couple of gigs and made an album as The Riptides in the mid-‘90s — I thought I’d use that name again, but it wasn’t fated to be — and then we did the Pig City festival in Brisbane a few years back and one more thing for the University of Queensland’s hundredth birthday — which was a bit of a puppet show — and that was it. But the band was always great live. At the end of the day, it was just losing that momentum.”

“Oh you had to — you just had to,” Callaghan recalls. “Nowadays in the modern world you can be connected to the world from anywhere, but back then there was no way [to survive in Brisbane] — you had to move to Sydney or Melbourne, one or the other. The Go-Betweens went to Melbourne and we came to Sydney. Everyone did it; if you were in Adelaide you went to Melbourne, if you were in Perth you came east. There was only two places you could be if you were serious about music.

“In fact, what happened with us was that we came to Sydney to do some gigs for a weekend that our, inverted commas, 'agent' had booked for us from Brisbane and we got there and there were no gigs — there was one, but there were more people on the stage than there were in the audience, and the other two gigs didn’t exist at all. I still remember waking up on a Saturday morning in a place we were staying at on Bondi Beach and the four of us went and got breakfast and we said, ‘You know, if we’re serious, we have to move to Sydney’. We all agreed and — this is the type of guys we were — just went, ‘Let’s do it — now’. Me and Scott went and got the paper and looked for a house, and we all gave Dennis our keys and he drove to Brisbane in the van and picked up all of our stuff from our house and brought it down — I just never went back. The next time I went back to Brisbane was when I was touring with The Riptides.

“There was just so much going on in Sydney and it was amazing — compared to Brisbane, where we’d be playing one or two places like our residency at the Brisbane Hotel and the Cloudland gigs and the Queens Hotel (which is gone now) where ZZZ used to run their gigs at, that was all really good but it was limited. There weren’t that many places to play, whereas in Sydney there were all these groovy inner-city pubs and then all of these big barns in the suburbs that you’d graduate to.

"With a lot of rooms back then, say someone said, ‘Do you want to play at the Sylvania Hotel?’ and you’d never played there before, you’d say ‘What’s the bottom line?’ which meant ‘how many people would be there anyway?’ — these venues used to have an audience who would be there anyway, it didn’t matter who was playing because that’s just what they did. You’d go out and the room would have a hundred people in it who’d all paid the cover charge without even knowing who the bands were — they didn’t care because that’s just what they did — so you’ve got a chance there to impress those people. That’s really why we had to do it, plus all of the record companies were [in Sydney] — they had state reps up north, but none of the reps were charged with trying to find new bands, all of the A&R guys were in Sydney.”

I don’t know what we were thinking when we did the mixes for those [early recordings] originally because they’re just stupid — it’s just us having a party in the studio and you can hardly hear the music.

Was it discouraging when Regular put out the anthology collection that many assumed was the actual Riptides debut?

“It was pretty disappointing — they just didn’t want to spend any money. It was the same when we did most of the recordings as well — we were doing midnight-to-dawn sessions on the cheap, and it was really thrown together. They asked me to write some liner notes, which I did — I probably shouldn’t have — but at that stage it was better than nothing. Then as time goes on you start to wonder whether it actually was better than nothing,” Callaghan laughs. “Maybe nothing might have been better. Look, it’s still got four or five songs on there which are also on this new record, and they still sound pretty good — Hearts And Flowers and Only Time sound good, although they sound a lot better now. A couple of them, like Riptide and Shake It, I don’t know what we were thinking when we did the mixes for those originally because they’re just stupid — it’s just us having a party in the studio and you can hardly hear the music. I just turned off all those dumb sound effects which were happening on the backing vocals tracks, and mixed the records like they should be mixed — rock’n’roll music.”

The Riptides possessed such a distinctive sound which was incredibly urgent and melodic and rife waith hooks — what was inspiring them musically back in the day?

“We were total punk kids and new wave kids, but we were pop too — we loved pop,” Callaghan offers. “We loved The Beatles and the Stones and all of the punk bands from the UK. The main thing about us was that we all learnt together. None of us had played, except for Andrew. [Founding member] Allen Riley was a player as well, but the drummer, Dennis, myself and Scott decided to form a band before we could really play an instrument. We said, ‘This punk stuff’s great, anyone can have a go!’ That was the only thing about punk music, you didn’t need to be a really good player. Dennis decided to be a drummer because he knew someone with a drum kit that he could borrow, and we just learnt as we went. We all learnt together, and something happened along the way where individually we couldn’t play very well but as a unit it was okay when we played live.”

Did the songwriting come quickly as well?

“Oh yeah, the whole point in a sense was to tell your own stories,” Callaghan continues. “[The band’s first single and most enduring song] 77 Sunset Strip was about the second song that I ever wrote, and Rules Of Love was probably third or fourth — we hit the ground running. Same with Scott — Scott was a great songwriter and had some really terrific songs. We used to do quite a lot of his songs in the set, and that’s a regret that I have that we didn’t record more of his songs.”

Importantly, the songs on Tombs Of Gold have been remixed from the ground up by Rick Will (Johnny Cash, No Doubt, Hunters & Collectors) rather than just given a token once-over.

“Absolutely, it’s not just remastered — it’s remixed from the ground up, as if someone was mixing the album for the first time,” Callaghan enthuses. “I think it sounds really great — it was all recorded in analogue, of course, which makes it sound terrific anyway, done with old mics and old analogue mixing consoles. Then the digital touches gives it an extra grooviness at the end of the process, so it’s cool. I’m very happy.”

Has the process given Callaghan the chance to reflect on how much he achieved musically with The Riptides in a comparatively brief period of time?

“I have reflected on that,” he concedes, “and the more that I know now having worked in the business and signed bands and worked with bands and run publishing companies and worked in record companies, I’m aware how unique that combination of the first couple of Riptides’ line-ups really was. We had an incredible energy, and we did everything ourselves. The architecture course we did at the time was much more like a really broad-based design course — or even an art course — so for instance we did all of our own photography; we took the photos, developed them in darkrooms. We did all of our own posters — made the screens and printed them ourselves. We built our own PA system in the woodwork shop, and one of the guys in our course was an electronics expert, so he actually built a mixing desk — it’s amazing when I think about it now!

"Then we had to carry all that around so we just bought a truck — one of the guys got his parents to go guarantor on a van and we bought a van and we were fully set up. We played constantly and drove all over the place, just did it all ourselves. What do you do next? You make a record. How do you do that? I dunno, I guess you need a studio. We’d look in the Yellow Pages for a recording studio, ring them and say, ‘We want to record a song,’ and then we’d just go in and work it out as we go. How do you make a record sleeve? We’d just ring around and find out and just make it happen. Incredible.”

And with the Pledge Music campaign which helped them raise the funds for the Tombs Of Gold project and the fact that this allowed them to release the album themselves, an element of that DIY spirit remains with The Riptides to this day.

“Totally, there really is,” the singer smiles. “The whole Pledge Music thing was awesome — I could email everyone who made a pledge and actually thank them in person. Every single person, how cool’s that? Sometimes it would be people I knew from years ago and we’d get back in touch; it was great. I got quite a shock that there was still so much goodwill out there, we got to our target in two-and-a-half weeks or something. We should have had a higher target! But it’s all good — it’s a complete labour of love, so I’m just glad to have it done.”