The Godfathers Of Aus New Wave Return

Melbourne, 1974. While the rest of the city was getting into the whole glam-pop thing, the bad boys like Coloured Balls were pummelling corner pubs full of 'sharpies' - young working-class men from the suburbs. Their younger brothers were emulating the style. Some of them, though, were still getting into glam. By 1978, four of these youngsters would meld the worlds of glam, sharpie and punk to create an incendiary musical force that, for just a moment, burned more brightly than their middle-class art school contemporaries The Birthday Party.

“I was a sharpie,” La Femme guitarist Brett Walker admits, recalling the genesis of La Femme, “but I'd given it away and become a ladies hairdresser and I was into Roxy Music and Blondie. I'd given the guitar away a bit but then I realised the new wave/punk thing was coming on line and I saw an ad in [Melbourne-based weekly rock magazine] Juke magazine – ex-Teenage Radio Stars looking for lead guitarist.”

Bass player Peter Kidd and drummer Graham Schiavello – had quit the Teenage Radio Stars when the band, then still called The Spread, signed to Mushroom's short-lived 'punk' offshoot label Suicide. Kidd and Schiavello had run in a sharpie gang that included singer Chane Chane and the three had in fact played in an early band together. With the addition of Walker, La Femme was born.

“We were [seminal indie punk label] Missing Link's first signing and their first major release through Channel 7 Records,” Walker shares. “We were the only unsigned act ever to appear on Countdown in its history and opened the doors for a lot of new wave bands.” That was on the strength of 1979 debut single Chelsea Kids, which was promptly banned by radio. “But at that point we'd been working seven nights a week and were all pretty burnt out – we were only eighteen/nineteen. Our home base was the Crystal Ballroom in St Kilda, and it was us, Teenage Radio Stars and The Boys Next Door every Friday and Saturday night, throwing punches at each other in the bandroom,” Walker laughs, “because we all wanted to headline.”

The constant gigging, along with the usual problems associated with early success and too little experience, saw the band gradually fall apart. There was a reunion of sorts in 2007 when a remastered and expanded edition of their only album La Femme was released by Aztec Music, but that only featured singer Chane Chane. This time the original line-up are back together.

“We were asked to headline at the Bananas reunion,” Walker recalls the event, in October last year, celebrating the iconic St Kilda venue of that name from the early '80s. “We've done four major shows since, so we're back on line now, we're all really rockin'. It's sounding fantastic, we're all young at heart, we're ready to go.

“And now we've got about six major new wave/punk bands that are happening at the moment and they all want to work with us, so we're gonna be putting a five- or six-band show together and [will] try and run it every month with the Godfathers Of New Wave/Punk, La Femme,” Walker boasts, before stressing: “I don't know if we're the godfathers, but we're certainly the pioneers.”