Dave Warner thought “someone was taking the piss” when he got the phone call that changed his life.
By the mid-‘70s Warner had already built a local following in Perth through his punk-adjacent band Pus. But, when that band mutated into the zeitgeist-capturing Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs, his music started garnering interest outside Western Australia.
50 years later, the musician-author-screenwriter clearly recalls the circumstances leading up to the call.
“Well, what happened was quite early on in about early 1977 or mid-1977, I recorded at the Victoria Hotel [in Subiaco]. A guy I knew who played in a band said, ‘Look, I've got this mobile eight-track machine, do you want to do a recording session?’ I said, ‘Yeah, record one of the gigs.’
“So we recorded a gig live, and I did these room-marked blank tapes that I just started selling at the gigs. You know, originally we did them for our purpose, but there was such demand for them… I was ordering these tapes from EMI, who were doing them in Melbourne, and selling 50 tapes a gig.
“And a number of those found their way to the east. And then there was also a couple of people working out of Perth at that time, one of them, Peter Grace, who knew Michael Gudinski, and he was singing our praises to Michael.
“And I remember one day I was sitting in the lounge room, the phone rang, and I picked up the phone and he said, ‘Oh, it's Michael Gudinski here.’ And I thought it was someone taking the piss.”
But far from taking the piss, it was indeed the late Michael Gudinski calling – the country’s most influential music industry entrepreneur and label owner. And, he was to become a key player in Warner’s career.
Despite other companies sniffing around, Warner chose to go with Gudinski’s Mushroom label.
“We had interest from a couple of other labels, but Mushroom were the ones that I thought were the best fit, and some of the bigger labels weren't interested in us because I was slagging off all their artists. So there was no chance that they were going to be interested.”
Warner headed to Melbourne and met with Gudinski, “He picked me up in his green Celica, and we went and saw Richard Clapton and Stars gig at the Dallas Brooks Hall [a now demolished 2,000-capacity venue in East Melbourne], and it was great. And I walked in and saw them, and I thought, ‘Oh, shit, we've got to lift our game. These guys are really good.’”
Once signed to Mushroom, Gudinski backed Warner and the band’s very non-commercial approach to the recording of their debut album Mug’s Game.
“That album…” recalls Warner, “was conceptually based rather than, ‘Oh, this is a riff I like and I want to play that kind of boogie music or hard rock music.’ It was all about the concept of expressing in music what it was like to be a young suburban Australian.
“The idea of that cover art, if you look at it, it looks like it's me sitting at a table in a pub with a jug and chips, you know, like a typical Friday evening in Australia. When you open it up, you see I'm actually part of an art exhibition which was at the Uni of WA. They sat me in a thing so it was like a living art exhibit.
“And we had the Mugs Game actual game within that album [the album’s inner sleeve was a playable board game with instructions]. So it was, for those people who watch Seinfeld, a bit like Kramer with his coffee table book [a coffee table book about coffee tables that was also a coffee table].
“So we were thinking all the time of how we can get this across conceptually, you know, as to what we're doing. So we never looked at ourselves as just a band playing music. We kind of looked at ourselves as part of a whole creative, artistic Australian expression movement that was booming at the time we're starting.”
Front and inner sleeve of Dave Warner's Mug's Game. (Credit: Mushroom)
Released in 1978, Mug’s Game was a mixture of pub rock, porto-new wave, alternative cabaret and satirical spoken word.
It was like nothing else being produced in Australia at the time, it was bridging a change in the scene from early ‘70s art rock to the late ‘70s punk explosion. The album not only charted nationally it also spawned the influential and catchy Top 40 hit, Suburban Boy.
It was that song that introduced Warner to a wider audience as it not only caught the attention of radio programmers but also the video for the song was seen on popular weekend music TV shows Countdown and Sounds.
Warner reflects on the reaction to the song, “It really gave me some kind of national recognition, I suppose. I actually wrote the song way back in 1972 and used to play it occasionally in my first band, Pus, in Perth. And then I went and recorded a demo in the UK.
“And I came back with this whole idea of Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs being a band that reflected the Australian lifestyle at the time – that myself and all my friends and people that I knew were living. Which was a pretty boring, mundane suburban lifestyle. And Suburban Boy was almost like that. It was like the masthead for that whole idea of what I call suburban rock.
“What was great was, I think for people who, especially younger people who couldn't get to pubs or even see us live, it gave us an exposure and, you know, it gave us a chance to really increase our popularity and to play in cities that wouldn't have otherwise known about us.”
Inner sleeve of Dave Warner's Mug's Game. (Credit: Mushroom)
Don’t Forget About Pus
As Warner takes his From The Suburbs band out on tour to celebrate 50 years, he plans for the final show in hometown Perth to also feature a reunion of his earlier band Pus.
Often referred to as punk, Pus actually existed in an era just before punk defined a new musical generation. Pus were harder to define as one particular genre.
“There was no original music scene at all in Perth when I started,” explains Warner. “So there were a couple of bands like Bakery, who were well known, and Sid Rumpo, a blues boogie band, who formed in Perth and then came to Melbourne and recorded for Mushroom.
“But at the time I was playing in Perth, nobody was playing more than one original song in their set. And when I say nobody, probably three bands might have had one original song. So I created the band Pus.
“We borrowed from people like The Fugs and The Mothers Of Invention, The Bonzo Dog Band [aka The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band], and I had probably five or six original songs, one of which was Suburban Boy, Hot Crutch, Throbbing Knob.
“This is well before the Sex Pistols and that kind of punk. And the only reference to punk at that time really was the Detroit punk, Iggy & The Stooges and MC5. And I'd read about them via magazines that you could buy, but I hadn't heard any of the music – their records hadn't actually hit [Perth].
“But I really liked the idea of Iggy or the Stooges gouging himself with drumsticks and smashing up mic stands. So even though I hadn't heard that, I had that in the back of my mind. So the idea with Pus was to be anti-whatever – what was cool at the time, which was that kind of laid-back California musicianship.
“So it was very garage, and that was the kind of thrust of it. But we weren't as honed as what Sex Pistols was. Like, we – you know, I did spit. I used to gob on – even before then, I'd gob on the ceiling and smash mic stands. But also, I'd do torch numbers and some humour numbers, sort of like Bonzos as well.
“So we occupied more of the space that The Fugs and the Mothers do where it was kind of in your face, but there was an element of humour. There was an element of self-knowing. What we're doing is kind of, in a way, ridiculous, but deliberately so. That's kind of the difference, rather than taking ourselves 100% seriously.”
The Pus gig at Perth’s Astor Theatre will be the first time the band have reunited on stage since 1975.
Rockin’ The Suburbs
Warner continued to push boundaries with From The Suburbs. Having performed original material at a time when Perth’s live scene was awash with covers bands, Warner did something else not typical of the times – he made no attempt to soften his broad Aussie accent.
And although on the other side of the country Skyhooks were creating songs about local culture (Balwyn Calling, Toorak Cowboy, Carlton), it was still a rarity when Warner started penning tunes about life in Perth’s suburban wasteland.
Warner emphasises that singing about local culture “was really important”. He continues, “It's kind of what I saw – I didn't think there was any point aping what had been done overseas or internationally. And, I had read, I think, Greil Marcus and an old Nick Cohn [book] Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom…
“[What] they'd said is the most powerful kind of popular music comes when you're talking about it within your own culture. And so I started to do things like Suburban Boy. And the first time I heard Skyhooks I went, ‘Oh, shit, these guys are already doing what we're doing.’
“But it was quite revolutionary because when we were playing, bands like The Easybeats were doing Show Me The Way To St Louis [St Louis] and Axiom were doing Arkansas Grass. So it was really important to me that the music had what I call veracity, and veracity for me was, I guess, particularly that idea of representing who you were, even if it was boring.”
An Arresting Development
Decades later and Warner is now also an accomplished author and screenwriter. He has written a string of crime novels, the most recent being 2023’s award-winning Summer Of Blood.
Warner has also penned non-fiction books about sport and music, including 25 Years Of Mushroom Music (published in 1998). He has written for both TV and film.
His Cut screenplay was adapted into a movie featuring both Kylie Minogue and Molly Ringwald in 2000 and in 2002 his Garage Days script about a struggling band was made into a film by director Alex Proyas (The Crow).
For TV, he not only wrote for the innovative series Going Home (a scripted drama that was written, shot and screened the same day) but he also contributed to smash hit shows McLeod’s Daughters and Packed To The Rafters.
This almost-mainstream acceptance is a long way from his days getting arrested for publicly performing ‘obscene songs’. With the arrest having taken place in the pre-internet days of the late ‘70s details of the incident are hard to come by.
But, as Warner remembers it, there was more to it than just the police taking offence to his music, “There was a huge campaign in Western Australia led by The West Australian newspaper, which was about the carnage on the roads.
“You know, it was always ‘carnage on the road’. Not ‘deaths on the roads’, ‘carnage’. [The campaign] said carnage on the roads was caused by young people going to these big pubs. And, there were thousands of cars in the car park and they were all the cause.
“So the cops over in WA, quite illegally really, sort of perverted a clause that they had, because at that stage there was no random breath testing. And, they perverted a clause that they had where they could put up roadblocks for escaped convicts. And they set roadblocks up all around the big hotels. And then after about two weeks, they triumphantly said how they had, the figures showed – The West Australian came out on the front page – yes, these young people were, you know, how many drunks there were.
“Well, I've done statistics at uni in my psychology degree. So I actually wrote a letter to The West in which I pointed out the statistics, contrary to what they said, considering that the only places that had these roadblocks outside the big hotels, not anywhere else. And the fact that the percentages they were talking about were people 26 and under.
“And I said, well, there's not that many people over the age of about 23, 24 going to pubs. So anyway, I basically destroyed their argument and said that it didn't prove what they were doing. In fact, it proved that probably most drunk drivers were the ones who weren't going to the pubs.
“And, within a week the cops came and arrested me. It was fairly traumatic in one way, like the cops turned up and they had turned up at gigs before and said, ‘Oh, you're not supposed to use that language.’ They were heavies, they were liquor and gaming cops.”
Warner then laughs, adding that his next run in with police in Victoria had a very different outcome.
“What I do remember of the Mushroom tenth anniversary party, Michael Gudinski and Mushroom had Luna Park in Melbourne [Australia Day long weekend in 1982]. They'd hired all the Mushroom artists and friends to have a fun night type of thing. So we're all there doing different stuff.
“And, I remember I was playing pinball, so I was still a bit fazed about this [arrest]. And I saw two cops walking towards me and I was just by myself. There was no one else around. I thought, ‘Oh, God, no, what's this going to be about? Now, they're coming to hassle me in Melbourne. I'm not even playing, I've come over to do one song at the concert.’
“They came up and they said, ‘You're Dave Warner, aren't you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And they said, ‘Oh, yeah, we heard you got busted in Perth. We heard that was political.’ They were actually fans.”
“I Like To Be Uncool”
Warner is also standing by the lyrical content of his early material. He still performs songs from his Mug’s Game as is.
Lead track Convict Street, a satirical take on toxic patriotic culture, includes both a racial and homophobic slur in the lyrics. Warner is adamant that he will not “self-censor”.
“I don't think they upset my fans,” he muses. “You know, they like them. And I don't revise. I don't revise anything of mine. My stuff is a really accurate reflection of the time. It's very largely satirical. But I don't want to throw that down people's throats.
“I’m against the whole idea that we dictate what people can think about what they sing and listen to. I hate that kind of didacticism. And so even if people are getting the wrong end of the stick, I think, you know, that's not my role. I write the song for what it is to me. But once you put something out there, everything can mean something different for someone else, you know. You know, so I'll never self-censor, put it that way.
“The Suburbs always take the approach of bands like The Fugs and Frank Zappa. You know, whatever the kind of current status, I like to ruffle those feathers. And so, you know, the current status is, you know, whatever that's reflected, I like to be uncool.
“So we'll definitely be uncool. And I think there'll be quite a few old Suburbs fans who want to be uncool with us.”
Just A Suburban Band
Being uncool with Warner on the 50 Years Strong tour will be a variety of players who appeared in different line-ups over the years.
The band has released five studio albums, the most recent being 2016’s When (it features songs about Facebook and Snapchat). He has collected together musicians who have contributed to the different configurations of the band.
This From The Suburbs line-up will be made up of original drummer Howie Johnstone and original guitarist Tony Durant while bass duties will swap between Phil Bailey (with the band since 1980) and Paul Noonan (from the Mug’s Game era and ex-The Dugites) plus new members Sam Musca on guitar and Phil Bennett on keyboards. Different shows will also feature guest appearances from other past Suburbanites.
“So we've actually a number of us from the original Suburbs,” says Warner. “The rest of us have been playing relatively regularly, like every couple of years. We've been doing some gigs, especially in the last few years. And so for this tour, that was going to be the basis of it… I think overall there's about 14 or 15 people who will be on stage at some time on the tour, but not all at the same gig.”
And, don’t expect Warner to be slowing down with his creative output. “I'm still writing books,” he promises. “I’m still writing films and plays, trying to get them up. That's kind of what I like. I love playing live, I like recording. I'm just finishing up a new album with my sort of roots outfit Rude Crew, [it] will be the second album of that. So I don't stop… Anything that I kind of like to consume I also like to generate.”
Tickets to Dave Warner’s 50th Anniversary tour are on sale now.
Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs – 50 Years Strong
Friday, October 9th – The Bridge Hotel, Sydney, NSW
Saturday, October 10th – Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane, QLD
Sunday, October 11th – Tweed Heads Civic Centre, Tweed Heads, NSW (Arvo Show)
Saturday, October 17th – MEMO Music Hall, Melbourne, VIC
Saturday, October 24th – Astor Theatre, Perth, WA
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
