Stranded In Pig City

This historical record of the youth music scene, also known as the Subscene, was first compiled in 2024 with the assistance of many individuals, and it has been rebuilt here with the assistance of many more. The Brisbane Music Spew, Deadtrigger Records, Antidismal and the people of the scene were key to the first edition. This one owes its debts further back as well, to the people who wrote things down when nobody asked them to, because almost nothing in this book would be recoverable without them.

The first edition was written in September 2024, when the scene was declining but still alive, and it stopped at the present because the present hadn’t finished happening. It became the most read thing this magazine has ever published. It was also incomplete in ways I could only see later. It skimmed the decades before 2019 because I hadn’t done the digging yet, and it left one organisation out of the record entirely because its founder didn’t think he’d earned a place in it. Both of those are fixed in this edition. The history now runs from 1950 to the middle of 2026, which means it covers the death of the scene it was originally written to celebrate, and the first signs of what comes after.

I was inspired to write the original by Charles Bean, who wrote the ‘Official History’ of Australia in the First World War, a work I found ridiculous and dense and weirdly moving, mythology dressed up as record-keeping with a straight face. This is still our version of that. It is as accurate as I could make it, the conflicts in the record are flagged rather than smoothed over, and where the scene’s memory disagrees with the official version of events I have kept both, because if this scene has one tradition older than any band in it, it’s that the official history and the lived one never quite match.

There is one more thing to say about why this edition exists now. It got written in a quiet stretch, with not much going on and the scene I knew being slowly forgotten, by someone who is not getting any younger. At my age Kaleb had already been running Casualty for years. George was a scene legend. Ixara was recording and studying at Music Industry College, Braxton had the YMCA on the phone, and I was in my room with roughly the same problems and insecurities I arrived with two years ago, while most of the people who once mentored me have moved on to other things, gone quiet, got busy, or aren’t really in my life the way they used to be. I’m saying that plainly because the record should show what it costs to keep one. A history like this needs a circle of people behind it, and this edition was written alone.

The liner notes of a record I love say believe, belief, beyond. That is roughly the state it was written in.

From 1968 the state was run by Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a man so fascist that African dictators would fly in to gain inspiration from him. He held the police portfolio personally for a stretch, banned street marches outright in 1977, and kept a Special Branch that compiled dossiers on student radio volunteers. Walking through the city in a group of three could get you arrested for inciting a riot. The Valley had stopped being a shopping district and become a strip of empty buildings. The pubs had no live music to speak of; they were just regular old pubs except with more violent people, and women weren’t allowed in the front bars. You could have fired a cannon down Queen Street on a Saturday afternoon and not hit a living thing. For a teenager there was nothing to do and nowhere to go, and that combination turned out to be the most productive force in this city’s cultural history.

The first bands formed in suburban bedrooms and garages, kids imitating the harder rock and roll coming out of Detroit and New York. The Leftovers and Tex Deadly & the Dumdums from Sandgate, The Hardons, Kicks and Razar from Mt Gravatt, Colours, Pinups, Toy Watches and Skeletones out of Ipswich, and from Corinda, a band of state school kids called The Saints, who had been playing together since about 1973 under the name Kid Galahad and the Eternals. Ed Kuepper’s family had emigrated from Germany, Chris Bailey’s from Kenya by way of Belfast; they met at Oxley High in detention for having long hair and built their sound in a rented house at 4 Petrie Terrace. The city’s first response was not a review; at one early show a punter took enough offence at the sound to knock Bailey out cold onstage, and the band kept playing. None of these bands had a venue, a label, or anyone’s permission.

So they made their own. Rejected by the few mainstream venues that existed, the bands played converted houses and repurposed community halls that normally hosted tea dances. Rent was cheap; bands could hire half an empty warehouse floor for as little as $25, and the owners were usually so horrified by what they heard that a room, once gigged, was rarely available twice. The Saints turned the front room of 4 Petrie Terrace into a venue of its own, and after a disgruntled neighbour put a brick through the window, they boarded it up and painted CLUB 76 across the boards to make it official. The room barely fit the drum kit. The police station was across the road, and gigs were shut down constantly until the club was finally closed over a technicality about toilet counts. The early venue map filled out around it, The Curry Shop and the 279 Club in the city, Romeo’s and The Silver Dollar in the Valley, Paddington Hall up on the hill.

Here is the accident the whole story runs on. Queensland’s liquor laws were so strict that almost none of these rooms could operate as licensed venues, which meant there was nothing legal to stop a fourteen year old walking in. Nobody designed an all ages scene. A draconian licensing regime left a door open, and fifty years of kids have been walking through it since. The other piece of luck arrived in December 1975, when a Whitlam-era community radio program put 4ZZZ on air from inside the University of Queensland, behind the one fence the police couldn’t easily cross. The station was broke from the day it launched, paid its staff in nothing, gave its announcers complete freedom, and started running gigs on the university grounds. A Brisbane kid could now hear the records the rest of the city had banned, and find out where the bands were playing, on the same frequency.

‘(I’m) Stranded’ itself was older than its session; Kuepper had the first verse and chorus by early 1974, written on the last train out of the city to his parents’ place in Oxley. In June 1976 The Saints booked a session at Bruce Window’s jingle studio in West End with their own money, two hundred dollars, and miked the guitars down a concrete hallway to get the wall of sound they were after.

The guitar is tuned slightly flat. In 1976 there was nothing accurate enough to tune off, so the wrongness got pressed into the record and stayed there as the sound. Put it on now and you can hear the tape buzz, the nerves of four kids giving it everything to get it down before the moment passed; then the crackle, then Kuepper’s buzzsaw just blasting out in all its jagged glory without needing any permission to do so. Bailey snarls over the top of it, a voice with Elvis somewhere in it and an authority it has no business having, a kid who plainly did not feel had the right to say any of this and said it anyway. From the first bar you can hear that they felt stranded. Everyone in Brisbane feels stranded. Everyone feels stranded; that is the whole trick of the thing, but by the end of the song, The Saints make damn sure who’s really stranded. Indeed, the cruel half of it is that the message gets stranded too, the truest things always said where nobody is listening. It still goes off, fifty years cold. Raw, in your face, not 1976 and not now. It sounds like the first time somebody stood up in this city and cast no shadow, and said it anyway.

Thanks to drummer Ivor Hay’s insider knowledge of how cheap it was to press records, they pressed five hundred copies themselves, on a label they invented called Fatal Records, of the song a near-unanimous straw poll had settled on as the single, ‘(I’m) Stranded’, the obvious choice that nobody at the time could have told you the reason for. They threw the leftovers down for people to dance on. They posted the rest to every music paper on Earth, the press kit carrying the band’s own motto, it’s better to be a Saint than a sap. That was September 1976, weeks ahead of anything the Sex Pistols had managed to get into the shops. The UK paper Sounds ran it as ‘Single of This and Every Week’ and called Australian record companies idiots for passing on it; John Peel played it on the BBC in December. At home the reception was thinner, and the record of it survives in the station’s own paper.

Triple Zed had pledged in the first edition of Radio Times to support ‘Australian bands in general and local bands in particular’, and the Saints sorely tested that pledge; within months the station was at war with itself over punk, one side hearing the future, the other hearing ‘incoherent, aggressive rubbish’, and a full year after ‘Stranded’ the announcers’ best-of list still ran to Steely Dan, Joan Armatrading and Linda Ronstadt. In fairness the station may genuinely have been the first in the world to put punk to air, off test pressings a former station-hand posted home from London. The Saints themselves it played late and grudgingly, whatever gets remembered now. Four kids from the western suburbs, ignored by every label in the country, had cut one of the first independent punk singles in the world and been declared the future of music by the British press before most of Brisbane knew they existed. ‘This Perfect Day’ went to number 34 on the UK charts the following year. On 3 April 1977 The Saints played an iconic co-headline show with Radio Birdman at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney, and within the year both bands had decamped to the UK.

There is a picture to go with the sound. Late that year a filmmaker named Russell Mulcahy, years before he would help invent the music video and shoot ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, took the band into the Illawarra Building, a condemned 1887 terrace on Petrie Terrace, and filmed a clip for the single. Kuepper had painted the title across the wall over the fireplace; that fireplace, with the words still on it, is the cover of the first album. The clip opens on the drummer, Ivor Hay, kicking the front door in. That is the whole story in one shot, a band nobody would book and a house the city had condemned, and the first thing that happens is a boot through the door. The liquor laws had left one door open by accident; the Saints kicked this one in on purpose, and the gap has not closed since.

The UK adventure burned fast. Bassist Kym Bradshaw was gone within months, pushed out, a replacement conveniently within arm’s reach; he resurfaced in a mod outfit that turned down every label that came knocking, and is forgotten now. Three albums came inside eighteen months, each stranger and better than the last, and when the touring stopped the original band effectively ended with it; Kuepper was back in Brisbane by that December. Hindsight has settled where the peak actually was; the boarded-up front room on Petrie Terrace and the two hundred dollars at Window’s, the stretch when nobody knew what they had and everybody there somehow did, which is why that era is the stuff of legend and the London years are a footnote to it.

By the last record, Prehistoric Sounds, the sound had drifted homeward, a saxophone where there had only been distortion, Brisbane in the title of one of the songs. A band that started by trying to leave ended up writing the place down.

There is a last irony in the name. The band that recorded ‘(I’m) Stranded’ ended up stranded for real in London, the one place the song could not land the way it landed here; at home it stopped being a complaint and became permission. The Saints lived up to the name, burnt out and never faded away, and because they had posted those five hundred singles to every paper on Earth, the story survived to be retold, which is the only way any scene survives its founders. Some delinquents from the wrong side of town had proved it could be done. Radio Birdman proved it again, the Birthday Party after them, even the Go-Betweens’ UQ art kids, and nearly every one of them learned the same thing too late, that the real peak was at home, starting the revolution nobody got yet.

But the scene they started didn’t leave with them. From 1978 to 1980 it was arguably at its peak, with Razar, The Leftovers and The Sharks playing to crowds that now looked recognisably punk. The police responded in kind. The Task Force, plain-clothes squads who never quite dressed right for the gigs they were raiding, ended as many as nine gigs in ten before the last song; in January 1978 thirty officers with dogs raided a Hamilton Hall show with thirty punters in it. Audience members spent nights in the watchhouse for the crime of attendance. Rocking Horse Records was raided for stocking Sex Pistols records; the shop’s owner, Warwick Vere, still tells it first-hand, the police swearing at him as they charged the record with being obscene, threatening him, and the whole thing fizzling out to what he calls a pisstake, the older scene heads having long since learned not to trust them. And when the Dead Kennedys came through, their drummer was arrested for the colour of his skin. Razar wrote ‘Task Force’ about the squad sent to shut them up, which means the unit’s most permanent achievement is a punk single named after it. Brisbane was the only city in Australia where going to a gig could get you arrested, and it did not kill the scene. There is nothing a sixteen year old wants more than the thing the police are scared of.

Fifty years on, the same shop still carries the scene’s paper. When a teenager came into Rocking Horse restocking a rebrand zine called Subscene, a Piss Off frontman on the cover, Vere looked up from the till and asked what it was, then talked his staff through how rock-and-roll papers had once been everywhere, how a policed underground used to find out where the bands were playing in the only way it could. He asked if the kid was really the one behind it. He said he loved Radio Birdman and remembered bands like that playing, and told the kid to speak up, his hearing shot from a lifetime of loud gigs. He said the magazine was raw and on point, that the Piss Off interview made him laugh, that he could see the work in it. He was going to read it. He found it fucking cool. The same counter, the same kind of kid, the same scene crossing it, half a century apart.