The SharpYoung Melbourne trio The Sharp came frighteningly close to capturing the zeitgeist for a hot minute there in the early ‘90s.
Working in complete contrast to what was happening around them at the time, the band’s off-kilter configuration – at the outset featuring Allan Caitlin (double bass/vocals), Charlie Rooke (guitar/vocals) and Piet Collins (drums) – uniform sartorial elegance, dual-vocalist attack and (most importantly) steady stream of catchy, retro-tinged bangers made them virtually ubiquitous for a while.
But then it all came to a crashing halt just a few years into what could, perhaps should, have been a decades-long journey.
Fortunately they squeezed a lot into those fateful few years, ticking off career boxes like signing to a major label, touring Europe and the States and even finding themselves the subject of a parody on TV comedy The Late Show (quite the badge of honour at the time).
But when The Sharp split in 1995 they left behind just two acclaimed studio albums – This Is The Sharp (1993) and Tripod (1994), both of which peaked at #13 on the ARIA Albums chart – three ARIA nominations, and a cache of broken dreams.
There were a couple of one-off reunions over the ensuing years, until in 2024 – the best part of 30 years after their heyday – when they decided to have another concerted crack at being a band.
With one of the band’s founding members, Caitlin, deigning to be involved – replaced by not one but two new members, including a recent inductee into the ARIA Hall Of Fame – The Sharp are back, and they’re determined to have just as much fun as they did the first time around.
“The reason why we didn't play for quite a while there was because Allan didn't want to do it anymore,” Rooke explains. “He really wasn't interested – he had some health issues, plus he had other projects on the go – and we just couldn’t talk him into it, so we asked if he’d mind us getting some other people in to let us play again and he was fine with that.
“Piet suggested we could get Scott Owen [of Australian rock legends The Living End] to play double bass – he’d played with him before – and Scott jumped at the chance, because he knew all the songs already and had been playing them for the last 20 years, he said. So that was good.
“We still needed to get another singer as well to replace Allan’s voice, so we had two singers, and that's when we found Louie [Lee Feltrin] – he has a nice high voice and he just sings so well. So we've had to get two guys in to replace poor Allan, because he wasn't easy to replace.
“Really though if it wasn't for Scott I'm not sure if we'd be doing this, because he knew all the songs already and he was so keen. It's not easy to find someone that plays double bass, let alone someone who's interested in The Sharp and wants to do it!”
Owen’s musical connection to The Sharp dates back to when The Runaway Boys – the covers band he played in with Chris Cheney prior to the pair forming The Living End – shared a bill with them in the early ‘90s, but as a fan it can be traced back even further.
“They played with us at the Royal Derby on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy – they were super young though and a little bit average back then, a little bit scrappy,” Rooke laughs. “But, you know, they were just learning their chops – they were pretty young.
"But Scott was telling me how he and Chris used to go up to [long defunct venue] The Club in Smith Street, Collingwood – we used to play there fairly regularly, we'd play there in the upstairs bar at one o'clock in the morning – apparently when they were underage Scott and Chris snuck in there when the place opened and they waited around for us until one o'clock in the morning to watch us. And apparently they were blown away, and that was one of their inspirations – one of their many inspirations – to do their band.
“Scott described it as like watching a cartoon! He said they were just blown away, because we used to jump off the bass and off the drum kit and fool about as well. We'd probably add a couple of drinks too, I'd say.”
The abandon with which they attacked live performance was clearly one of The Sharp’s strong points from the get-go, a noted calling card which fuelled their earliest endeavours.
“Yeah, it was all about the live energy,” Rooke smiles. “And also we were sort of doing our own thing rather than going the grunge way – we were going our own direction as well, which was quite rebellious at the time. We were an alternative band: our first release was a little single we did in ‘92, Love Your Head, so only PBS and RRR would play that, but they gave it a good thrashing and it made the charts. Community radio was where our heads were at back then anyway.
“Then we signed to East West prior to the Spinosity EP (1992), and that's when triple j picked it up, and they really made it bigger by picking that up because it was national radio. So it was a great time.”
The three mates had really stumbled upon a unique sound, one which found the ‘50s rock’n’roll and rockabilly vibes of their prior band 59 Sharp filtered through classic pop influences of legends like The Kinks, The Beatles, and The Easybeats.
But then in the live realms – and often on B-sides – they’d cover songs by the likes of Lou Reed, The Cure, Blondie, and Violent Femmes so there was an alternative bent to their sound as well, these disparate strands all melting together into one fun and energetic amalgam.
“We really liked the new wave stuff, but more the sort of punk-y end of new wave,” Rooke continues. “Violent Femmes were like a punk band with acoustic guitars so we liked them a lot for both the music and the lyrics – we were really drawn to the punk ethos, really.
“We definitely weren't fully rockabilly. In fact, when we tried to play rockabilly venues in the 59 Sharp days, they didn't really accept us because we weren't swinging enough for them – they couldn't do all their swing dance moves to us, because we were a bit too Buddy Holly or something. A bit too three-piece Buddy Holly.
“But we were more into bands like The Stone Roses later on – they were a big influence, actually, you can hear it in the bones of songs like Talking Sly. That shuffle of theirs worked well with my guitar playing, and then we sort of modified the guitar playing into other territories as well. So really it was the punk ethos, ultimately.
“We always thought you should do your own thing. If you're gonna try and make it don’t try to jump on a bandwagon or something, just do your own thing. And all you can do is hope for the best, nothing's guaranteed. That's just the music industry, isn't it, back then especially.”
Rooke, with just a tinge of regret, goes on to explain the factors which led to The Sharp pulling up stumps in ’95 whilst still seemingly at the top of their game.
“There were a number of reasons really,” he reflects. “I would have liked to have kept going personally, but Allan kind of had enough and Piet had definitely had enough.
“We’d already done a bit of touring in Europe, and we had a tour manager there – he was an American guy based in Berlin for about ten years, and he’d loved us when he’d seen us in Berlin and Hamburg when we’d toured through there with a few English bands.
“He said he wanted to get us on tour with a lot of other bands that were coming through Europe from America – he’d toured Pearl Jam and Nirvana through all of Europe at that stage, though obviously that’s not who he was thinking – so he was really keen to get us to move there.
“So Warner Brothers lined up all these releases throughout Europe in about 14 different countries – and I think Japan as well – so we were about to go and move and live in Berlin and base ourselves there for six months and just do a lot of touring: the full ‘bring the girlfriend’ kind of deal.
“But the idea of that sort of horrified Piet, I think. He just didn’t want to tour anymore, and then he was offered a job to work on [TV soap opera] Neighbours as a writer, and he took that. I wanted to kill him, but that's all right, that's the way it goes.
“We were about to go over in a month or two, and so we would have had to replace the drummer to keep that setup we had going,” he continues. “We had to get a drummer really fast, which is really almost impossible. When you go to tour Europe, you've got to have a really confident drummer, someone you really know. It would take a long time to replace Piet, you couldn’t just do it overnight.
“So we had to pull the pin on the move, which was so upsetting. Because really, when you're an Australian band, you really want to make it overseas, that's the whole point. You want to do it in Australia, of course, but you want to come back heroes after you’ve conquered overseas, you know?
“We’d gotten a five star write up in Hamburg. We played in a venue near [famous club strip] the Grosse Freiheit where The Beatles played back in the day, and someone from this magazine saw our gig and were totally blown away and gave us the greatest review – the record company read it out to us because we didn't read German. They compared us to The Beatles and things, it was wild. And that's a big thing for the Hamburg people to say that, so it was really lining up. The stars were lining up there.
“But anyway, we were trying to look for another drummer,” he continues. “We just couldn't find the right drummer and after a while Allan just sort of got a bit tired of it, I think, and eventually he just didn't want to do it anymore. Just like that we were done.”
But now they’re back. Since reforming as a four-piece in 2024 The Sharp have already released new music in the form of the 4 EP (2025), which allowed them to transcend the mere nostalgia aspect of their earlier reformations.
“Yeah, we wanted to do something in the now, definitely, rather than just living in the past,” Rooke admits. “The new stuff is a bit rawer, obviously Louie and Scott are gonna have an influence on the sound, aren't they? So it's not gonna be exactly the same, it’s gonna have a different thing in there somehow. It's still Piet and I and we’ve both changed too over the years, you just evolve.
“But the live shows have been going great guns. Our music has definitely been finding new ears because the parents who used to play it when their kids were growing up, like when they were sleeping in the back of the car or something, they remember and they're coming out as well, strangely enough. So it's still reaching some people, that’s awesome.
“And, of course, there's always the stalwarts, the people that we used to see on tours years ago. They always want photographs and things, so it's a great event, I love it. After the gig I'm sort of inundated with us doing selfies and things, it’s so much fun. Almost like we never went away.”
And their next run of shows, the Live & Loud Tour, is being recorded for posterity and will be released later this year as new live album The Sharp – Live & Loud.
“We’re going to record the two shows we’re doing in Melbourne at St Kilda Bowls Club,” Rooke enthuses. “We’ve got a great guy recording us and we're gonna do a matinee show for the underage fans and then an evening show as well – we’ll record them both and see how it turns out. It’s live, anything can happen.
“We want to throw some new material in there too, just for something extra – I've just got to have a bit of a think as to what it will be. We're having a rehearsal next week to work on a couple of songs, so we’ll see how that goes. It’s just about trying to catch that live energy we were talking about before, it’s like such an important thing.
“But the tour is going to be a blast – if it’s like recent shows it will be so much fun. As a group we always have a lot of fun, actually. We have a lot of fun playing together and touring, we always have a ball. We sort of hang out and socialise together as well. This second phase is just an all round pleasure, really.”
Tickets to The Sharp’s Live & Loud Tour are on sale now.
The Sharp – Live & Loud Tour 2026
Saturday, September 12th – St Kilda Bowling Club, St Kilda, VIC (Afternoon Show, All Ages)
Saturday, September 12th – St Kilda Bowling Club, St Kilda, VIC (Evening Show, 18+)
Friday, December 4th – The Bridge Hotel, Rozelle, NSW
Saturday, December 5th – King St Warehouse, Newcastle, NSW
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
