Do the manic: liner notes, 1998, 'Do the manic', EV Empire, Texas
The Chosen Few - Seminal Punk (Punk with semen???)
The Chosen Few, or more simply The Few, derived from a group of like-minded wannabe rock lovers from the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria in mid-1976. It was a combination of mateship, beer, aggro, beer, loud and fast music, beer and oh, beer. I should know - I was there. The original lineup that (via a convoluted and tortuous path) led to the Chosen Few, comprised two drummers, three guitarists, one utterly fucked-up-in-the-head bass player, singers various and several tight-thighed groupies. This lineup lasted around 3 minutes 49 seconds, just long enough to call itself Fourth Reich, buy some beer and self-destruct, gloriously, loudly and messily I wasn't part of the seminal outfit, but I knew about it because I used to leach most of the members, who were students at Mornington High School. This all occurred in early 1976.
The site for all this initial band activity was a farm in Moorooduc, a suburb if you will of Mornington. One of the guys, Bruce Friday, lived on the farm ("Airlie Farm") with his mum and dad and little brother. The guys had complete run of the place, including a barn to practice in and a bungalow to party in. The bungalow became known as The Premises and was the venue for some awesomely uninhibited parties. Unfortunately, one night the practicing and partying became confused (due possibly to beer), and the barn nearly burned down.
The original band fell apart (it was never really together -- I didn't play any gigs) resulting in the formation of Deathwish, a four-piece heavy metal band that played its first gig in August 1976. As the elder statesman (I had been in bands before as a singer). I "managed" this first lineup of Deathwish, but, after about three gigs, they arseholed the bass player, and told me "Ian, you're the, new bass player and, oh, there's a gig tonight." Fair enough, except for two things: I'd never played bass before (I only knew three chords on normal guitar; I used to be a fucking singer!), and I did not own a bass guitar. No problems! We went over to Mornington and swapped a slightly "warm" (er. stolen) guitar for an El Cheapo bass, and away we went.
Deathwish was influenced initially by Led Zap and all the others, but was inexorably drawn to old Oz rock (Masters Apprentices, Wild Cherries, etc.) because of its power and simplicity We were especially fond of local Oz heroes Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls. These guys played the fastest, loudest and meanest rock this side of the galaxy. Lobby had been a guitar hero in the Wild Cherries and achieved legend status in the Aztecs. We became hooked on power rock and we bought every record we could find that had Stooges, MC5, Amboy Dukes, etc. We also found some compilations of Detroit/Michigan rock from the 1960s and early 1970s that just blew us away (eg. Michigan Rocks and Nuggets compilation LPs). Budgie and Blue Oyster Cult were also big favorites, and from the latter we, included "The Red and the Black' in our set. Even though soon of this music was current or only five or six years I'd it had rarely been played in Australia (except for the Coloured Balls, and that was a style thing, as they played originals and souped up fifties rock 'n' roll); most local rock bands drew inspiration from British pop/rock.
A liking for US rock was not shared by all members of Deathwish: this led to a succession of singers, all of whom were arseholes, and who did riot understand the direction we wanted to follow. As a heavy metal-ish band, Deathwish had a style that was pretty widespread and acceptable at the time, but as we cranked the volume up and the music became leaner and faster; we tended to a narrower but more fanatical band of supporters. We were on the right track free, and that there had to be more to it than current Status Quo/Led Zep/Sabbath bands that dominated. However, some trend members would still have preferred to remain a commercially viable covers outfit.
By the second half of 1977 Deathwish was playing distinctive loud and stripped down, balls-to-the-wall rock. We did not know of any other band in Melbourne who played like we did. All the other bands that we loosely associated with were arrested to British Punk and some were not punk at all: La Femme, for example, were just glam rockers a la David Bowie. Sure, we liked some Brit punks, especially the Sex Pistols, but we didn't think it fit Australia - the Pistols had an apparently solid political stance as much as anything, but we didn't have a vicious class system and life wasn't all that bad. We heard about the Saints up in Brisbane, and we were impressed. We learned about half the first Saints album, and tried to play it louder and faster (especially "Demolition Girl" - if you can imagine this song played at about twice the speed, you'd get some idea of what we were about!).
Then one night late in 1977, Cal
and I went to Pier Rock in Frankston and saw Radio Birdman. Two things
really struck
us: firstly, their set was drawn
front exactly the same influences as ours (Stooges, MC5, Blue Oyster Cult
and
classic sixties rock), and secondly,
their attitude - they simply didn't give a fuck what you thought of them.
The
more you put them down, the louder,
faster and more aggressively they played. We thought we'd died and
gone to
heaven, because it confirmed our
belief that what we were doing was right. Naturally, we made ourselves
known and had
a damn fine, chat with Rob Younger.
We even made arrangements to go up
to Sydney, as guests of various members of Radio Birdman, and play at their
venue, the Oxford Funhouse. Our
singer at that time, confirming our opinion that you are what you eat (and
he
obviously ate a lot of cunts!),
announced that he, didn't want to go to Sydney. This led to a humungus
bust-up, with
the singer and one guitarist leaving.
It took me a few weeks, but I finally persuaded the remaining members to
stick together because we were the
engine room of the band, and we had something worthwhile to promote.
We eventually formed a new three-piece
band - still called Deathwish: Cal McAlpine (drums), Bruce Friday aka Fred
(guitar) and Ian Cunningham (me,
on bass). We all took a turn at vocals and played several gigs as
a three-piece.
Our sets consisted of large doses
of Stooges, MC5, Masters Apprentices, Wild Cherries, Saints, Pistols, Coloured
Balls,
Ramones and originals. We
were well-received (eg at a Somers Yacht Club dance, we blew the very young
crowd of two
or three hundred away, particularly
when we did our souped-up version of "God Save the Queen"), but we felt
we were not
a complete unit: we were looking
for our own Iggy. This was around November or December 1977.
We found him in Ian Weaver.
What impressed us about Ian was that he could scream really loudly, and
when he sang, he
sort of drooled and dribbled a lot,
and his nose ran. He was also a tad unstable, moody, a poofteenth
overweight and
fairly slovenly. What more could
you desire in a lead singer? Mostly, he dug lggy and the MC5 and what we
wore doing. He
was in our movie. He saw where
we were coming from, et fucking cetera. We gave Ian all our lyrics
(probably on
Thursday), only about songs and
said 'Learn these, cunt, we're practicing on Saturday." He did. We recorded
that session, and it is the first half of the collection known as the Bungalow
Tape. Copies available at the door, ladies and gentlemen!
On stage, Ian was amazing.
He would use, this crappy old mike stand with a goose, neck extension that
always collapsed under his own weight, forcing him to sing from a half
crouch. His trousers always locked as if gravity was winning, his zippers
would explode (probably because he was loading an enormous fat!) and his
shirt would hang like a wet rag on a fence. He would pump his legs frantically,
his whole body world gyrate and spasm and then he would swing the mike,
stand all over the place while screaming his guts out and sweating like
a pig. Sometimes he stood absolutely motionless for what seemed like
ages, just staring at someone or something in the audience (or something
in his head, heaven forbid!). Then he would explode into convulsive
action, as though experiencing a fit. He scared the fuck out of me,
so god knows what the punters thought of him. But he wad charismatic, in
that you had to watch him, because you never knew what he, would do next.
Often he
did nothing extraordinary (by his
standards), but there was that element of menace and instability.
On the other hand, Fred (or Fear as he was known in the band) was quite staid. He just stood to one side, looked cute, and played incredibly fast, and, thrash guitar. He, never ever seemed to be, played hard, but he effortlessly produced a wall of sound from his El Cheapo Strat copy. He also broke more strings than John McEnroe, and he always got his guitar lead looped around something, ending in a sudden silence as all guitar cut out, followed by generally helpful comments like "Jesus, Fred, you fuckin' idiot! Plug your fuckin' lead in, you dumb cunt!" Don't be mistaken: calling a fellow band member a "dumb cunt" was OK; just never ever call hint a "fag" as this would lead to instant retribution. Cal's stage persona was pretty much determined by his being fixed behind his drum kit. Cal was a big lad, so we called him Trainpacker, after those sumo-like station attendants used at Japanese railway stations. He really did flail those, sticks and laid down a murderously solid beat. He rarely made mistakes, except when indulging in herbal remedies. Then he was hopeless. When "normal' he, was a shit hot drummer.
Then we have your humble narrator, Because we played such stripped-down rock, I tended to play a cross between bass and rhythm guitar. I mostly strummed the melody (if there was one!), and made sure that there was a loud filler in lead breaks. Mostly I stooged around backstage and occasionally lay down for a little nap while Fear displayed his histrionics. I wrote most of the lyrics, and with Cal provided nearly all our original material.
Once we had a decent set of songs under our collective belt, we started playing around Melbourne, or anywhere we could get a gig. The problem was, there were fuck all gigs available. Most of the regular venues were "owned' by established booking agencies or record companies, who didn't want to know about anything that even loosely resembled punk. Consequently, we played parties in backyards and anywhere we could find an audience.
This would have been early 1978,
and we had connected up with a guy from Mushroom Records called Barry Earl.
Barry was organizing bands onto the Suicide Label (a subsidiary Mushroom
-- it had to be, they shared premises and phone numbers). At his suggestion,
we decided to discard the name Deathwish (fuck knows why, it had heaps
of credibility, especially for the Suicide Label!) and so we settled on
The Chosen Few, The Chosen Few was a far better name than one
Barry suggested he wanted us to
become The Young Savages.