THE MISSING LINKS
DRIVING YOU INSANE
by James Russell

I don't know what it is, but there seems to be a minor bit of activity at the moment on the reissuing front, at least in regards to obscure 1960s Australian rock music. Buggered if I know what the reason for it all is, but it seems to be the case. 1960s Oz rock is something I know little to nothing about with a few exceptions. And, with similarly few exceptions, what little contact I've had with Australian music before the Saints gave us punk in 1976 has been uninspiring. I mean, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs doing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow"? For the love of God, that's completely incomprehensible to me, how such a thing could've happened, even in this country in 1964 or thereabouts. Most of what I've heard has seemed pretty badly dated and highly derivative of English/American models, and not worth giving house room to. Russell Morris's splendidly whacked out "Real Thing" from 1969 is one of the exceptions to the rule-it's got "1960s" stamped all over it, to be sure, and the presence of Johnny Young and Molly Meldrum in the credits would probably normally count against it, but I think it stands up in a rather lovely way-but there's not many of them.

At any rate, one band to suddenly find themselves available again are the Missing Links, whose complete works are available on CD from Nic Dalton's Half A Cow (as an album called Driving You Insane). I only heard about them for the first time maybe about three years ago, read an article by Stuart Coupe in which he called their lone self-titled album one of his ten best Australian albums ever, making reference to their contemporary reputation as "Australia's wildest band" and to the fact that mint original copies of their album fetch around $2000. Not bad at all, especially for a band I'd never heard of. So when HAC issued the thing on CD for the first time recently along with assorted extra tracks, I took more of an interest than I normally might've done.

The booklet accompanying the album features a very long and detailed history of the band, through all of its lineups between 1964 and 1966, and attests to their reputation and extreme strangeness for the period. One member was supposed to have the longest hair of any man in Sydney at the time. Another member occasionally kept a rifle on stage to protect them from their audiences, who would frequently attack them. Following a TV appearance, when irate viewers rang to complain about the outrage the band had caused by simply being visible, the band themselves took many of the calls. The music probably didn't win them many fans among the conservative establishment either.

In this post-Marilyn Manson age, and even after the soon-to-follow excesses of the 1970s when the hair quickly got bigger and badder, it all seems a bit tame, but no doubt they must've seemed a lot weirder at the time. (Sign of how different times were then: according to the liner notes, the band recorded live shows for 2UW and 2SM. Anyone who knows what those stations are like in the 1990s will no doubt join me in agreeing that they'd never get to do that these days.) In many ways, though, their story could be seen as paralleling more than a few Australian bands, even to this day: humble beginnings, struggling to achieve success under some pretty adverse circumstances, single EP or album released-how many bands never even get that far?-but scuppered by poor distribution (only about five hundred copies of the album were pressed), ending in the band's disintegration through neglect and disillusionment. It's a notable fact that very few Australian bands seem to live long enough to simply expire from old age. The Links were no exception to this general rule, imploding after only about two years of existence.

How much of their "Australia's wildest band" reputation survives on disc? The sad truth is, probably not much. But what else should we have expected? After all, studios do tend to dilute a band's live attack, and '60s bands especially rarely sound as sweaty on record as they may have done live. However extreme the Links may have been on stage, the surviving studio record doesn't really bear witness to it; there's some surprisingly abrasive noises locked in those grooves, some lovely amplifier hum and feedback, but on stage it must've been a different affair. The album apparently had no producer as such as well. How much more lo-fi do you want?

For pure shittiness of sound, The Missing Links adequately rivals the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat. Unfortunately, since the original tapes for almost all these tracks have disappeared-of the 28 tracks on the disc, 18 have had to be dubbed from the few mint condition vinyl copies still existing-I don't suppose the album will ever get the remix and remastering it could desperately do with. To HAC's credit, you can only very rarely discern surface noise from the original discs, but it certainly doesn't help with the sound quality. It's an album probably best played on average sound systems than really good ones; it sounded a bit better on my computer's CD-ROM than on my stereo.

What of the music itself? Here we're dealing with some relatively standard 1960s-period white-boy R&B, with a roughly equal split between covers and original songs, said originals being somewhat derivative of their foreign models, but by and large it's good stuff, and they play it with enough style and competence to keep it interesting. As 1965 was still the age of the sub-3 minute pop song they pretty much keep within that limit, except for their rendition of Bo Diddley's "Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut", probably the high point of the album, which goes for five and a quarter minutes.

If the length of the tune was remarkable for the time, the actual performance, with its squeals of feedback and alarming string-scraping sounds, must have frightened the few people in 1965 who would've heard it. The album ends with the same track played in reverse; apparently the band were fascinated by the sound it made while being rewound on the tape machine, so decided to put the backwards version on the album too, pre-empting the Stone Roses by nearly a quarter of a century (this was also before the Beatles discovered the joys of backwards tapes). Before doing that, though, they split the backwards song into two halves and released it as both sides of a single before the album came out. This would be a pretty damn stupid move these days, so 34 years ago it must've seemed like career suicide.

The original album is the main attraction on the compilation. Alongside it you'll find a single B-side which was left off the album, plus four tracks released on an EP only two weeks after the band split in April 1966 (four months after the album was released). In addition, you get both sides of the band's very first single, which was actually recorded by an entirely different line-up-in the five months between the release of the first and second singles, a string of changes meant the band who recorded the album was entirely different to the band who recorded that first single; only the name, reputation and hair were unchanged-and also some unreleased stuff by this first line-up. There's also a few tracks from the Showmen, the band that provided the latter-day Links with a couple of members, and also a TV performance by a post-Links band formed by two other band members called Running Jumping Standing Still. This other material is probably more historically than musically interesting, not bad but not terribly exciting, but since almost all of it comes from original tapes it sounds much better than the album does. And the accompanying booklet does a splendid job of giving you the history.

So, the Missing Links in their entirety. Derivative? Yes, I've already said that. Dated? Pretty much. Not even You Am I do the old-fashioned '60s rock stuff quite like that. Enjoyable? Hell yes. I don't know whether or not it's a great album per se, but if you're willing and able to make the necessary adjustments for the period-this is 1960s Australian rock we're dealing with here, with all that this description entails-then it's a disc that should still provide some entertainment and interest. All told, Driving You Insane is a tidy bit of work on the part of Half A Cow, all praise to them for making the Missing Links' recorded remains even partially fit for human consumption as they have done-and let's face it, it'll cost you rather less than the several thousand bucks you'd have to shell out for the original vinyl…