Paul Kelly tells a tale of being in the tour van, where band members take turns playing DJ. “There’s leftover beer from the rider, maybe a bottle of wine … the anointed DJ sits up the front,” he explains. “Generally, they’re given a free run, but as at any nightclub, after a few drinks, people start calling out requests.

“You gotta have some Gurus on there,” a band member will inevitably yell. “Bittersweet. It’s classic.”

Bittersweet is the opening track on the Hoodoo Gurus’ second album, Mars Needs Guitars!, which was released 40 years ago.

It was a fast follow-up to the band’s 1984 debut Stoneage Romeos, and four decades on, it poses the ultimate question for every Gurus fan:

What’s the best Hoodoo Gurus album: Stoneage Romeos or Mars Needs Guitars!?

As with every Gurus album, it came loaded with pop culture references. The title was inspired by the 1967 B-grade sci-fi flick Mars Needs Women.

The movie also inspired the Frank Zappa instrumental Manx Needs Women. And M|A|R|R|S’ 1987 hit Pump Up The Volume included a line from the film’s original trailer: Mars … needs … women.

Mars Needs Guitars! was the beginning of the band’s enduring relationship with uber-producer Charles Fisher, who was also instrumental in the careers of Radio Birdman, Air Supply, Moving Pictures and Savage Garden.

Fisher frontloaded the album with hits. Side One of Mars is one of the strongest opening sides of any Aussie record. Not just a one-two punch, this was a knockout.

Bittersweet/ Poison Pen/ In The Wild/ Death Defying/ Like Wow – Wipeout.

Like, wow, wipeout, indeed. 

As the authors of The 100 Best Australian Albums asserted: “In vinyl terms, Side One of Mars Needs Guitars! is damned near perfect and certainly it represents the finest 18 minutes of the band’s recorded career.”

Like Wow – Wipeout remains the quintessential Gurus song. “A head-over-heels celebration of love and lust set to a stonking surf/sex beat that had everyone from Frankie Avalon fans to Gun Club devotees pulling out a beach blanket and go-go dancing,” was The 100 Best Australian Albums’ assessment.

But the song would have been buried as a B-side if not for Charles Fisher. He recognised its hit potential, insisting that Dave Faulkner come into the studio on a Saturday to put down the vocal.

Fisher remembers Faulkner’s indifference. “Why am I here? It’s a Saturday, the football’s on … and it’s just a B-side.”

“But I just thought that song had everything,” Fisher smiles.

Like Wow – Wipeout became the album’s biggest hit, rising to number 15 on the Australian charts.

The band dug working with Fisher. “We’re not troubled by notions of purity,” Faulkner said in 1985. “I don’t think that the most primitive way of doing something is necessarily the best. Whatever gimmicks or sounds that will make a song sound better are okay with me.”

Mars is a celebration of guitar rock. “The only keyboards on the album were the opening to Bittersweet,” Fisher points out, “where I had this idea of a helicopter arriving.”

Guitarist Brad Shepherd loved it. “It always reminded me of Apocalypse Now, with the helicopter blades spinning around in slow motion.” 

The Gurus dedicated the album to Jonathan Harris, Dr Zachary Smith in Lost In Space, who was fond of insulting the show’s beloved robot, regularly calling him a bubble-headed booby.

Death Defying reveals the genius of Dave Faulkner, how he can take a dark subject matter and turn it into a pop delight.

“All my friends are dead or they’re dying, and our laughter turns into crying,” he sings over a sweet pop arrangement.

A live review in The Music in 2017 revealed that Faulkner was addressing the AIDS crisis, which was striking down many of his friends.

A lot of people believed the album’s fourth and final single, Poison Pen, was a shot at the band’s former manager, Stuart Coupe, who is also one of Australia’s most prominent rock critics.

But Faulkner set the record straight in 2000. “The Gurus’ first manager, Stuart Coupe, wrongly thought that Poison Pen was written about him, probably because of his notoriety as a rock journalist and he had also been recently replaced [but] the song was about the fallout from a relationship that had turned bitter – with no ‘sweet’ attached.”

Like Stoneage Romeos, Mars Needs Guitars! topped the US college charts, and it was also the band’s commercial chart breakthrough, spending seven weeks in Billboard’s Top 200, peaking at number 140.

It was the Gurus’ first Top 10 album in Australia, rising to number five. It remains the band’s biggest-selling studio album, having gone triple platinum.

Mars took the Gurus from the inner-city to the suburbs. In 1985, Faulkner reflected: “We realised that you can get away with a lot more when you play at inner-city venues than you can in the suburbs. You can be really obscure or indulgent in that environment [the inner-city], and people will get off on it.

“Out in the suburbs, people are less aware of different forms of music. They won’t get the joke or pick up on the obscure reference, but they will appreciate a good song. They don’t want to meditate on the delicacies of the songwriting, though. They want the rush that music with real impact can give you.”

Mars Needs Guitars! was the first Gurus album for drummer Mark Kingsmill, who had replaced James Baker. He joined Faulkner, Shepherd and bass player Clyde Bramley.

Shepherd assumed lead vocal duties for the title track, a garage rock gem, which featured a nod to the band’s debut: “I’m a Stoneage Romeo, I got a space-age Juliet/ We make primitive loving ’cause I ain’t got a TV set.”

Though Side Two doesn’t quite match the brilliance of the opening salvo – how could it? – it does feature some underrated offerings, including the rollicking Hayride To Hell and the poptastic Show Some Emotion.

Charles Fisher says he wanted Side One to take the band into the mainstream, while Side Two was “for the fans”.

The Cashbox review of the record called it “evidence of an impressive group to watch – excellent dynamics and songwriting shine through on nearly every cut”.

The Gurus and Mars Needs Guitars! influenced a stack of artists; everyone from Paul Kelly to the Uncanny X-Men.

Brian Mannix saw the Gurus at Adelaide’s Thebarton Theatre. “I was pretty impressed. They were a guitar band like us. They had a great sense of ’60s melody and pop, but sounded tough and rocking. I felt they were playing a style that wasn’t too far from what we should aspire to on our next album.”

Inspired by the Gurus, Mannix wrote a song called I’m On Heat for the X-Men. He said it sounded like “The Monkees on steroids”.

“I was aspiring towards tough ’60s melodies played with punk aggression,” Mannix explains. “I liked what the Hoodoo Gurus were doing.”

For Yahoo Serious’ second movie, Reckless Kelly, Paul Kelly wrote a new song called God’s Hotel, taking some Nick Cave lyrics and “making up a tune to them over the chords to Bittersweet by the Hoodoo Gurus”. Yahoo Serious didn’t want it, so Kelly placed the track on his 1994 album Wanted Man.

With Mars Needs Guitars!, Hoodoo Gurus inked a major US deal with Elektra, which surprised Dave Faulkner. In 1985, he told the editors of The Big Australian Rock Book: “I’m obviously very happy about it, but I find it quite confusing, and surprising, that we’ve been signed to a major American label. Most of the music I listen to that’s come out of America has come out on a really small label, so for us to sign to a big label is a bit strange. But people laugh when I say that. They tell me they don’t realise how special we are.”

Elektra’s involvement led to the band’s ill-fated third album, Blow Your Cool! The label teamed the band with legendary Australian producer Mark Opitz (The Angels, Cold Chisel, INXS, Divinyls). But they didn’t click. 

Explaining the experience of making that record, Opitz quoted Metallica’s James Hetfield: “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Then it’s fun and games you can’t see anymore.”

“We ended up sounding like an ’80s pop group, which is not what we ever were,” Faulkner says. “We didn’t belong in any time zone.”

“My brief from Elektra was to take the Gurus to the next level,” Opitz explains. “The label wanted to cross them over from college radio to pop radio. They also believed that a more commercial sound would turn the band into a bigger touring act. The label saw a stadium future for the band.

“Dave hated the sound of the record,” Opitz adds, “but Elektra loved it. So what could I do? I couldn’t undermix the album. I also wanted to make the best album we could, one that would give the band a shot at stardom in the US.”

Despite their differences, the producer remains a big fan. “I still cite Dave as an example when I’m talking to young artists about songwriting. Like Don Walker, Dave knows how to tell a story with his lyrics. He’s one of the finest lyricists Australia has produced.”

Though Blow Your Cool! featured the band’s biggest hit, What’s My Scene, it was a misfire. But 40 years on, Mars Needs Guitars! is a timeless classic. 

The 2005 deluxe edition came with liner notes by Melbourne musician Roderick Kempton (who’s better known as Wally Meanie from The Meanies and Even). “To say I fell in love big time would be an understatement,” Kempton wrote, recalling hearing the Gurus for the first time after a workmate at the local supermarket gave him a tape containing the band’s first two albums.

“Those songs, the sound, the look … quite frankly, the Hoodoo Gurus were a major musical benchmark for me and quite a few of my mates, especially at the time of the release of Mars Needs Guitars!”

The band is doing a one-off Mars show – at Manly’s Night At The Barracks on Friday, September 19, with special guests Dallas Crane – to celebrate the album’s 40th anniversary.

For me, it’s the Gurus’ greatest album (though if you reckon it’s Stoneage Romeos, I’m not going to argue). I was 15 when I first put the Mars cassette into my tape player. It was like an explosion going off in my head. It blew my teenage mind. Cool but commercial. Alternative, but so infectious. I was gone the moment I laid eyes on you. I still get goosebumps whenever I play the record.

As Billboard noted when Mars Needs Guitars! was released, it’s “a bottomless bag of pop hooks”.

Hoodoo Gurus will celebrate Mars Needs Guitars! as part of Manly’s Night At The Barracks series this September. You can find tickets here.