A Fond Farewell To The Victims

In 1977, James Baker (The Scientists, The Painkillers, Beasts of Bourbon), and Dave Faulkner (Hoodoo Gurus, The Manikins) teamed up, with Dave Cardwell on bass, to create one of the most memorable punk bands to come out of Australia, The Victims. Now over forty five years later The Victims are bidding farewell to the stage with a sold-out gig at the Rosemount Hotel this Saturday, June 10, with support from The Shakeys and The Volcanics. BOB GORDON spoke with Dave Faulkner about Perth’s punk pioneers and how it will feel to be hitting the stage one last time.

When you’ve played Victims shows over the last decade the articles always start with what Perth was like when you first formed the band with James Baker in 1977, the implication being that as the song suggested Perth was indeed a culture shock…

(Laughs) Yeah, it’s funny, obviously it’s not a world we really recognise anymore. Perth has changed so much. Everywhere has changed and we’re also much more connected now. We were really isolated back then, marooned almost.

There’s still a barrier, flying over the Nullarbor Plain is a bit of a chore and you know, it’s not cheap. So there’s still some obstacles living in WA compared to other places in the world. You know, it is a bit more difficult for people to get themselves out and amongst it. Certainly in musical terms, it costs a lot more money to work from here, and that’s always been true. I mean, The Victims weren’t interested in touring anywhere, we didn’t think anyone cared about the music we were playing, we really were totally have amusing ourselves and being you know, pretty silly and kind of against everyone else. It was almost a credo, we hated everything around us and didn’t belong to it. We didn’t want to associate ourselves and we poo-pooed everything and basically were very negative, really, And at the same time that amused us because it gave us a positive feeling of uplift because we felt so isolated and so overlooked, in a way.

Not just by the rest of the world – where all the music that we loved was happening, all that punk rock that we were so excited by, we couldn’t be part of that scene except vicariously through reading about it and buying the records on import – but also the people around us in the scene, the music that we saw all around us, we didn’t relate to it at all, and we felt like strangers in a strange land.

It’s interesting, though, because a part of The Victims lore is that it began with James Baker, travelling to London and New York, the hearts of the punk movement at the time, and walking amongst the giants…

With the Gods!  He was actually there at the very beginning, really, before it sort of broke out. It was the end of ‘76 and he went to Los Angeles first and then to New York.

And he went to CBGBs, and saw The Ramones and, you know, realised this is something he’d been looking for all his life, and he’d always loved the New York Dolls and New York scene, and he was very much into that scene before he left. And that was very much like a punk rock sort of thing back in the day as well because no one knew the New York Dolls back in Australia in the ‘70s when they were happening and wearing glam rock outfits in Perth was also really dangerous, just like wearing punk clothes.

Someone would punch your lights out just for looking feminine and wearing makeup and having your hair teased up and dyed which was what the glam rockers did and that’s what led to the punk rock scene in the UK as we know. A lot of it was followers of bands like Roxy Music and they just kind of went a bit more Gothic or whatever, darker in tone and a bit more nihilistic and that became punk rock fashion.

That reminds me of this great photo of Sid Vicious – pre-Sid Vicious – outside of concert with a David Bowie t-shirt on…

Right. Yeah, well we know that Steve Jones stole a guitar from a Bowie concert. I think it was a Bowie concert at the Rainbow. But they were fans, he just wanted to nick something because he was broke and it was an easy rort.

But they were fans of Bowie and that sort of stuff. So it didn’t really come out of a vacuum, but it but it was definitely connected to that kind of slightly edgier side of things rather than the classic guitar, pop/rock side of things is actually more than mainstream at that time. Glam rock was in its own way, a bit of a poking a tongue out at seriousness and pompousness in rock when it came along, and that was kind of like the teenagers reclaiming their music again. It’s how it felt at the time. I was very young myself, but I was right into Suzi Quatro and T-Rex and Slade.

James was a couple years older than me, so glam rock was almost like his first punk rock, and he was going around Perth in platform shoes and looking outrageous and people hated him. So he went to he went to the States – like I did a couple of years later – to connect to all the rock’n’roll he’d been reading about in magazines. He saw the Flamin’ Groovies in Los Angeles. He caught The Ramones and the CBGB’s scene in New York.

Then he went to London, and he was hanging out with that nascent punk scene there. Sid Vicious bought him a beer at a pub and he auditioned for The Clash. I mean, these are all things that happened to James and all because he knew what great music was, and he had a certain taste and so that led him into cool scenes.

And he came back to Perth, and he was someone that had actually seen all these things that we that we could only read about. He was kind of like Marco Polo to us, bringing spice from the Orient, you know? Certainly war stories! He’s a great musician, and a very stylish person. So those same instincts that guided him to find that music is the same thing made it so great to be in a band with him.

So in 1977 you formed The Victims with James and Rudolph V (Dave Cardwell, bass). It burnt brightly, briefly. Which means it also happened quickly…

Yes, it did. We probably played for about seven or eight months, perhaps the whole career of the band. To be honest that was sort of the lifespan of most things you did in Perth in those days because there was no way to grow. There were no new audiences, no new hills to climb in terms of venues. Certainly, with the punk rock scene, we very much had to make do with what we could find ourselves. It was very much a self-starting scene, and we created venues, we pioneered venues. James got the Governor Broome Hotel opened up to bands and then later on he found Hernando’s Hideaway, this little restaurant in the back of East Perth which became a rock’n’roll venue afterwards for many years. The first time we played there was on a Wednesday night. You’d get the door. It was a quiet night for the restaurant, so they let us have a gig.

Did they know what they were wading into?

No, that didn’t have any idea, but at the same time the punk rock scene… most people thought it’s a bunch of Hells Angels creating mayhem, but it wasn’t you know? It was people that liked music and music always soothes the savage breast. People are excited, and they get their energy out in a constructive way, listening to music. It’s only the drunks in the streets that don’t go to see music that are the ones who cause trouble in Northbridge or wherever you might be in the world. People who go to see bands that are having fun are actually doing something constructive and positive with their energy.

The punk rock scene was the same, we were all friends. It wasn’t like people coming in to ‘get rid of the punks.’ I mean, certainly there were skinheads that tried to bash us up and sometimes they’d come to gigs and create mayhem. And that did happen, you know, mainly when we played other venues like when we occasionally played a gig in a normal hotel.

It wasn’t about trying to become notorious… it was an independent music scene and people forget, this was really the beginning of alternative music everywhere.  At the time that punk was happening the alternative music scene in Perth really was the blues and folk scene.

You know, all the cool people that felt like they were better than listening to the commercial Top 40 or whatever cover band. They had their own sort of cover bands, I guess, but that was more sophisticated or lesser travelled stuff and a genre that not many people were into. So that was their core music, and their subculture – but there was no subculture of independent, original music. No one was writing their own songs in those days.

Perth had a history of bands in the ‘60s and ‘70s that had done their own music, but by and large, it was very much gone. No one was doing it. And the attitude was, for the public at large, it seemed to be that if a song was any good, it’d be on the radio. ‘So I haven’t heard it before it can’t be any good. I don’t want to hear it now.’ So they didn’t want to know, they only wanted to hear what they already knew and liked.

It couldn’t be good if it came from Perth, if someone wrote a song here. Which of course, when you think of that nowadays, it’s impossible to imagine that mindset because so many amazing artists have come out of Perth and out of other places, that people don’t even question that anymore, that some great artist could just pop up out of anywhere.

But back then there really was an attitude of, ‘no, it’s just not possible. I don’t care and I don’t really want to know.’ And so the punk scene, we wrote our own songs as well, we knew we know no one’s gonna care about us or want to hear it. And we had no illusions, or ambitions. We had none of those things! We really wanted to enjoy ourselves because we were young and full of energy and just had to do something to express ourselves.

You put Television Addict out as a single what was like the local vibe for that song?

It was an independent single sold in cool record shops. An independent punk record, so most people never saw it. It wasn’t like someone from 6PR or whatever station played it, or Musgroves Record Shop had it for sale, you couldn’t find it there. No one had ever heard of it.

The people that came to our gigs would know because we’d sell it there and they knew the cool shops. ‘That’s where we buy our records, they’ll stock it.’ And it was the same around Australia. That’s just how it worked, the scene was purely word of mouth. You’d walk into a shop, and you’d go, ‘look they’ve got this one in now, I’ve heard about this group, I read about them. Here’s their single, I’ll listen to that.’ That’s how it worked, it was all word of mouth. There was no internet.

Yes, there were fanzines and that was kind of like a way of publicising yourselves and getting the word out to like-minded people. But it was really very homespun and cottage industry, and no one in Perth noticed that we had a single as far as I could tell anyway, and we didn’t even look to see if they’d noticed because we didn’t see them either. They were not on our radar. We didn’t care who they were or what they thought of us. We had our own scene and our own fun, and we were just doing that.

We were just amazed to actually have a record out, because it was financially kind of ambitious. Luckily, we had a fan whose parents had a bit of cash, and they gave him money to do his hobby and fund this Victims single. So I think it was like $1,000, which paid for recording and pressing and when we sold those we said, ‘Do you want your money back?’ he said, ‘no, make another one. Let’s make an EP.’ And that’s what we chose to do, we made an EP. That’s how it worked. You know, without that person, we would never have had a record. No one would probably be talking to me today about this group because we would have been long forgotten.

So you brought the EP out in 1978 – self-titled AKA, No Thanks To The Human Turd…

Yeah it was all very controversial, and there’s much water under the bridge since then. There were all sorts of petty jealousies and feuds and there’s not much point in raking over old history about those things. The EP was the last thing we did and we kind of broke up before it even came out. We recorded it and then some personal stuff went down which was not kosher. We didn’t like what was going down and we decided, ‘let’s just stop.’ And it took so long to press then that the EP came out after we broke up. Two months is a long time in rock’n’roll, certainly back then. We did one reunion or farewell show (at Hernando’s Hideaway) before I went overseas.

I came back and played in The Mannikins for a while, and I loved that band, but it was Neil’s (Fernandez) group and he was torn between university studies and being a musician and in the end he fell on the side of university and became a very successful public servant. He didn’t want to follow the rock’n’roll dream of just playing music and I knew that I had to get to Sydney or Melbourne to do that, because it wasn’t possible then to have a full career in Perth. There were no record companies, and no one would pay any attention to you at that time.

So for me the thing to do was move to Sydney in 1980. A few months later I formed Le Hoodoo Gurus and James joined a bit later in early 1981.

And the rest is history…

Yeah, it’s all our history and that was a pivotal moment for both of us and obviously my career, personally. That’s what I’ve done ever since.

Fast forward to the eventual reunion as The Television Addicts in 2014. I’m led to believe that spawned from the Hoodoo Gurus Be My Guru tour where James got up to play with you?

What happened was basically James and I… as is very well known, James got sacked from the Hoodoo Gurus and there was a lot of bad blood because of that. And to this day there’s a stigma about all that, and a lot of people have their own opinions and I have mine.

So for many years James and I weren’t really speaking. Then we were, then we sort of became social again with friends and I’d been playing with different things and bumped into him at gigs, and I’d say, ‘let me know if you ever want to do a show with the Hoodoo Gurus again.’

I think I had the idea for Be My Guru, and at first, he was quite against it, he said, ‘no I wouldn’t do that.’ Because, you know, it was a lot of difficult memories for him and a lot of pain and things from that time.  But he wanted to do a Victims reunion. I said, ‘come on, in my mind you can’t be my friend in The Victims and my enemy in the Hoodoo Gurus. I’m one person, either you like me, or you hate me, but you’ve got to make your mind up. I don’t want to do that.’

Eventually, James off his own bat, maybe a year or two later, said, ‘that Hoodoo Gurus idea, I’d like to do that.’ Now it wasn’t a condition, but I said, ‘well then let’s do a Victims thing as well.’

So in a sense it was 50/50, we came to each other’s combination in a way that wasn’t any sort of bargain or deal. It was just that James one day kind of decided, ‘You know what? I would enjoy doing that.’ And I thought given he’s done that, and he’s been talking about this Victims thing for a while, it’d be churlish of me and kind of mean not to do the same thing back. So we did and it was a lot of fun, obviously.

It was obviously a lot of water under the bridge and memory affects all those things, but it was really nice. And obviously we did it as the Television Addicts because we thought, ‘well, we don’t have the original Victims so let’s call it something else, so we don’t pretend to be something.’ But then obviously, we thought, ‘Dammit, it is the fucking Victims!’ (laughs). It’s James and me and it’s close enough.

And of course, Ray Ahn from the Hard-Ons on bass. The Victims’ biggest fan actually joined the band…

Ray is so fantastic. He’s a Victims devotee. When he was 14 or 15, years after the band had broken up, he found The Victims single in a record shop. He was blown away, and he made his own Victims t-shirt.

And he would be on tour with the Hard-Ons or the different things he was working on, his different bands. And James as a passionate music fan would go and see lots of bands, and he’d talk to James about The Victims all the time. And so when it came time for us to do this show, he was the obvious choice, you know? And it’s stayed that way ever since.

So the last shows we did were quite a long time ago now unfortunately. 2017, I think, was the last time we played. We did that recording, the Horror Smash EP, which is also where the new single is coming from. We did two extra songs we didn’t release on that EP. We recorded six songs at the same time.

We were planning on doing a tour in 2020 when the EP came out with the re-release of the original Victims recordings as well. But of course, COVID was happening, and we couldn’t do anything. So that kind of went very cold. So we were just sitting on our arse doing nothing and watching paint dry since then.

And now it seems like, well, let’s just give it one more go-round. Have a bit of fun and put a bow on top of it, so to speak. Or a cherry on top, do a gig, and release these last two tracks and say, ‘see you later, we’ve had fun.’

We’ll do it one more time with feeling… (laughs) and try and get it right for once!