Celebrating a half-century of The Suburbs with Dave Warner

WA’s pub laureate Dave Warner is set to celebrate 50 years of The Suburbs with an Australian tour that will wind up at Astor Theatre on Saturday, October 24. Tickets are on sale now. BOB GORDON chats to Dave Warner about his early music, touring across the country and celebrating a half-century of suburbia.

So, 50 years! Firstly, I’ve noted that there’s a once-in-a-lifetime appearance by your pre-Suburbs proto-punk outfit Pus happening at the Perth show?

Yes, touch wood. I think certainly some of the members will be there. I think John Negroponte is coming, but I’m not absolutely certain. I’m waiting on that. But you’ve got MJ Feeney and Nik Geronimus, Howie Johnson, and Jim Fisher, who played in the very early Pus concerts at the Octagon Theatre. It won’t be a big set, but it’ll be a tip of the hat to Pus, the formative band for me.

Moving onto The Suburbs… so after Pus, you were itching to leave Perth, so you went to the UK and did a bunch of writing over there. In terms of what the songs were, is The Suburbs, in a sense, borne from being away from what you were writing about?

I think it was probably more a case of refinement. In the past, there were a number of songs I’d written and performed—Suburban Boy, Girls Wank, Hot Crutch… New Age. So there were four or five songs that I was doing in Pus that were Suburbs songs, but also I was doing a lot of covers. Primarily The Fugs, and occasionally Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band or Mothers of Invention or something, even a couple of early Beatles songs that I felt fitted with the kind of energy level.

So when I got to England, really, what I did was go from having five songs and then writing songs on the keyboard in a little flat in Brixton where I was. They were all very largely different musical styles. And I thought, ‘What is it that’s common about these?’ and they were really all expressions of what it was like to be a young suburban Australian living in what we considered at that time a pretty ho-hum, mundane environment.

I already had Suburban Boy the song, and that’s when I thought, ‘Well, this is really what all these songs are about.’ For me, strength in popular music and songwriting comes from the veracity of it, and I thought if the songs are going to be strong and have real veracity, then they have to deal with the life—as boring as it seems—of what suburban Australian life is. So my songs tended to focus on the football, on television and on the local town hall production of Oklahoma. So I could use different musical styles but from the same conceptual point and the focus of that, and so I came up with the name Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs. That was really a declaration of ‘I’m from the suburbs, and this is what my music is’. So that’s how it came about.

Then you came back and met up with Johnny Leopard and Hayden, and Tony joined, and then you went into, I believe, months and months of rehearsal.

Yeah, in 1976, I came back, and I initially had this idea that I had all these songs I’d written and would put them into a little musical, a play. So the songs all had vignettes, kind of thematically related to them. Terry Serio did the play with me. He played one of the characters in it, and that was the band where I had Howie and Jim Fisher and Shane Bradshaw, who played with Last Chance Cafe. I had a bunch of people assembled, and I did the gig, and the reaction was really good. And so I then set about getting the band, and my mate at the local servo told me about Johnny Leopard. He wasn’t Johnny Leopard then; I gave him that name, and I tracked him down. And he’d seen Pus, and so he was into it. We got Hayden on board, and then Neil Howe, who was our early manager, told me, ‘Oh, there’s a drummer at the Uni Tavern every day,’ which was Stuart Davies Slate, and that’s how that came about. Then John Dennison, I’d known from years before, the keyboard player, he’d just finished his degree, and I said, ‘Do you want to do some music?’

We rehearsed all over summer at the Point Walter Camp at the old migrant hostel point, as they called it, which was those long huts. They were hot, but they were great for rehearsal.

I think we had about sixty-odd songs in the repertoire because I knew that to play in a small place like Perth, five days or six days a week, we weren’t going to get five or six different crowds of people. We were largely going to have the same crowd of people coming two or three times, and so I had lots of songs that could appeal to people, and we could break it into other bands like Dave & The Dugites… not to be confused with the later Dugites. Dave and the Dots was the name of my country band that we would do sort of fun country songs in. We wouldn’t do it every night, but we do that once every now and again, and Dave Mod & The Lambrettas was an idea that we did with Shane Bradshaw’s KatznJamma Kids. We pooled both bands, and we would do all Australian ‘60s songs. So those things that we had in addition to the basic Suburbs, and that gave us an opportunity to not have to repeat songs to the stage of boredom for people.

So once you hit the Perth stages initially, what was the momentum like?

It was instantly really good. I was confident that it would be, and in those days, you know, you’re brash and young, and you expect it to work, and so it did. So we started at The Red Lion, which was a pretty small venue, and that was successful. I went to the Victoria Hotel, where the Beagle Boys had built up a good following for sort of uni-oriented music, largely covers, but they were still an audience that would be a good one for us.

In fact, I think we knocked on the doors of about 25-30 pubs, and almost all said no, but we got a gig there at the Vic, and then Albert’s Tavern. Loaded Dice had been playing there, and we got to know those boys, and they put us on too, and they were the first two gigs. And then from there, we were able to play at Shenton Park and the Raffles and other pubs and get gigs from that. Yeah, it was a strong reaction right from the beginning.

So when did you first make forays over East?

That was February of 1978. We had done really well here. We’d recorded a little eight-track. Tim Lambert, who was in a band, Good Horse, had a little eight-track mobile van and recorded shows at the Vic Hotel and the Shenton Park. And I just released them on a plain cassette with no artwork, but they sold like hotcakes at the gigs, and a lot of them found their way over East. And at the same time, a couple of people who worked over in the Melbourne rock scene, particularly Peter Grace, who was at 6PR at that stage and knew Michael Gudinski. He rang Gudinsky and said, ‘Hey, you know this band’s pretty hot. You should get onto them.’

So we had some recording interest, and we’d gone, to an extent, about as far as we could in Perth, so we headed over there in ’78. Our first tour, and Tony Durant, who had recorded with me on the original demos in 1976 in London, agreed to come out and join us. Literally, we picked him up at Tullamarine, did two rehearsals and played our first gig.

Those were the days…

Yes! So that was the gig where Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Band were at Bananas in St Kilda. It was literally our first or second gig with Tony, and they really loved the band. I gave them some cassettes, and they played it on the tour bus all the way through, and that was good because when someone asked Bob about Australian bands that he knew or liked, he mentioned The Suburbs and Richard Clapton. So that was a good bonus too.

I remember seeing the clip for Suburban Boy on Countdown when I was 12, and it was a big deal. Did that, combined with all the East Coast gigging, set things into a new mode?

Yeah, the Mug’s Game album went gold really quickly, and because I’d recorded a number of the tracks live, I wanted to get the second album out fairly quickly. So Free Kicks came out fairly quickly, but unfortunately, we hit the bloody truck drivers’ strike, which was a real bugger. So our tour for Free Kicks was early 1979, and we had no merch with us to sell during the gigs at all. So that was a bit of a disappointment.

Look, it happened very quickly, and we played through, but by the end of about 1979, we were pretty exhausted because of travelling from Perth—especially in those days on the Hume Highway. We’d go for six weeks, equivalent to other bands heading overseas for four or five weeks, and so then we were all tired. There were also a number of the guys who wanted to do other things with their lives. So by the end of ’79, there was only really myself and Howie Johnstone, who wanted to do full-time Suburbs stuff at that point. Tony was heading back to London. John Dennison joined film school. Leopard wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he wanted a break, and then he ended up doing other bits and pieces. So things reshaped from then on and off. We’ve all ended up still playing together until we lost Leopard. Not continuously, but on and off to this day, with other musicians coming in and out of the lineup and joining us.

The notion of going around Australia on a tour celebrating 50 years of The Suburbs—how do you feel about it?

Well, it’s a lot of hard work. I can tell you that. I think it’s about 30 individual airfares for 14 people or so from four different states, and so it’s a lot of hard work in that sense. And a fair amount of stress. Is anybody going to get sick or whatever? You know, we’re not spring chickens out there, and so there’s that part of it.

But the other part of it is really looking forward to just having the opportunity to celebrate the band and the milestone with my friends in the band and my friends in the audience.  We have a very, very loyal audience around the place, and initially I was thinking of just doing Perth but then people kept saying to me, ‘Oh, you’re not going to do Sydney?’ or ‘Come to Melbourne’. So I thought, ‘Oh heck, we’re doing it even if we don’t make any money or if it costs me a bit of money; let’s do all the ones that make sense.’ So we’ve ended up doing five dates, and we’ll do Brisbane and the Tweed, as well as Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, and hopefully we’ll still be strong and pumping at the end of it.

I know there’s a lot ahead of you, but what are your plans after it?

Well, I think I’ll take a break from doing any big tour because I really will need it. So next year I’ll be concentrating on writing books again, primarily. Hopefully, I’ll do some library stuff with Tony. He and I really enjoy these book and music evenings that we do at libraries around the place, and we get really good crowds. People enjoy it. They respond well to the music, and the music works thematically with the books that I talk about.

So hopefully, we’ll do those, and maybe one or two shows, but nothing of the scale of this. So yeah, if I’m still going strong, it’ll be writing, and I’ve got a couple of musical plays that I’ve been working on over time, and they’re coming together. So that may end up occupying my time, too.

Dave Warner and The Suburbs play Astor Theatre on Saturday, October 24, 2026. Tickets are on sale now from ticketek.com