Kim’s friend Brian shared a copy of the Stooge’s ‘Raw Power’, telling him it was ‘the heaviest and worst thing I’ve ever heard’. Kim loved its extremity. He read fervently about the Clash and the Buzzcocks and discovered the Modern Lovers. ‘I thought this has to be punk rock. If it isn’t, I’m calling it! The first Modern Lovers album became my universe for a few weeks. Jonathan Richman’s stance on the world was so unique, but something you could relate to. If you were having trouble finding your niche in the world, Jonathon Richman was a revelation.’ And then ‘there was the call from 78 Records (Perth’s best record shop) to tell me the Ramones LP was finally in! Bringing it home and putting the needle in the groove and hearing that mix of bubble gum, buzzsaw guitar, tribal drums and Joey Ramone’s Hey Ho Let’s Go was one of the perfect moments of my life.’2
While Kim was playing cabaret and discovering punk, Dave Faulkner had been playing blues with the Beagle Boys or with Neil Fernandes in a duo called ‘Dave & I’. The rest of the cast — assembled from the remnants of Moulin Rouge, the art faculty or Kim’s high school — had yet to commit to a musical direction when Kim rushed in and announced that punk was where it was at! Dave wasn’t going to be convinced, intoning loftily that he ‘needed some evidence’. But Neil Fernandes was intrigued, and Ken Seymour (aka Dan Dare) and Mark Betts — another lost soul from Embleton High school — were attracted to the ‘do it yourself’ ethos. Ken and Neil fell into the Stooges’ sound whole heartedly, and the Ramones laid a road map that the less accomplished players felt they could follow. Perth’s inaugural punk band, the Cheap Nasties, were set in motion.
The band (Kim and Neil on guitars, Ken on bass and Mark on drums) hung out and dissected punk. They set to writing songs and honing their sound, with an early and short-lived incarnation featuring Dave Faulkner as singer. He co-wrote two songs with Kim, including the band’s theme song Cheap and Nasty. ‘Dave wrote the words that I put it to an AC/DC sounding riff. Dave hates the words, but I still play it to this day.’ Gradually, a collection of granular, snotty and poppy songs emerged, complemented by songs from the New York Dolls, Stooges, Modern Lovers, Stones and the Kinks.
A minor scene was developing around this miscreant collective and their new sound. Blues or cover bands still dominated, but pockets of the new aesthetic were springing up elsewhere in Perth. Future Scientist Tony Thewlis recalls that around this time ‘you had a few people dressed as punks who hung around the Hay Street Mall, trying to sound English and wearing leather jackets in the 40 degree heat.’ In a bedroom over in East Perth, another group of would-be punks were forming under the moniker of The Geeks (or The Hitler Youth). Featuring Ross Buncle, Rudolph V (Dave Cardwell), ‘Lloyd’ and James Baker, the Geeks never made it out of the bedroom, but created their own brand of punk and would later contest the Cheap Nasties’ title as Perth’s first punk band. The Geeks incubated one of the towering figures of Perth music in James Baker, another lifelong Kim Salmon collaborator and friend.
The Rivervale Hotel, mid 1977 saw the Cheap Nasties, the world’s most remote punk band, debut in public. They opened for the blues band The Beagle Boys who were, to the Nasties’ surprise, very supportive of this abrasive new music. Suddenly a tiny, grubby piece of Perth culture exploded open to let the light in. The punk scene had operated covertly, with its various factions operating in total ignorance of each other, but with the Nasties’ first gig the veil of secrecy was lifted. The band played in front of a huge portrait of Nana Mouskouri that Kim had painted for a ‘Nana Night’ party. As they whirled through their songs, Kim tore into the painting, slashing it with a knife and defacing it with tomato sauce before turning the sauce bottle on the punters gathered at the front of the stage. The punks in Perth were few, but most of them were there that night, and they liked what they saw.
Two such punks, Roddy Radalj and Boris Sujdovic, didn’t take long to sense the change in atmosphere. Roddy and Boris were hung up on music. They had had their heads snapped round by the Stooges and were looking for more in the same vein. Both would feature in Kim Salmon bands, with Boris in particular standing beside Kim on stage for the next forty years.
Me and my mate Roddy were just bored teenagers in Fremantle. We started getting into jazz, we dabbled with that for about a month. There used to be this jazz venue and we could get port and lemonade for 30 cents, so we thought, fuck this is pretty good! Then all of a sudden we heard punk rock … there was a fledging Perth punk scene of two bands and fifteen to twenty fans. We went to a hotel in the city on a Tuesday night and saw the Cheap Nasties and that’s when I first met Kim. And that’s when it all started (Boris Sujdovic).
They first encountered the Cheap Nasties at Steve’s, a blues pub in Perth. Kim recalls stepping off the stage to see ‘a pile of smashed glasses around the bottom of my mic stand having been chucked at me, some of them by Rod and his mates!’ After picking his way through the shattered beer glasses, Kim was confronted by the imposing Boris Sujdovic demanding to know why the band wasn’t playing the Stooges. No Fun, Search and Destroy and I Wanna be your Dog obviously weren’t enough! He wanted us to do more Stooges songs!’ Kim saw Boris and Rod around a lot after that, quickly becoming friends.
On that night the fifteen people in the audience were the fifteen punks and the fifteen people we stayed friends with. The Cheap Nasties sounded great! It was the usual story, everyone in the audience started playing. Out of the blue, Roddy got this saxophone and said I’m auditioning for a band, which turned out to be the Victims. He sounded like a demented Steve McKay ’cos he couldn’t play a note and they didn’t get him in. I started playing bass and Roddy soon realised guitar might be easier (Boris Sujdovic).
James Baker was another punk that Kim had seen around but not yet met. ‘I recalled seeing an ad with a photo round ’74 stuck up in 78 Records. It had two very glammy looking dudes with fancy writing saying what looked to me like “Slink City Boys” and they were looking for members. That always struck me as unusual for Perth. Thinking back, I wondered if they were “punk”.’3 James Baker, with an authentic Johnny Ramone hair-cut and signature striped tee, was also in attendance at the early shows. On meeting Kim, James recalls the affinity of a like-minded rock ‘n’ roll devotee.
James Baker is a revered figure in Perth (and Australian) music. He was an early pioneer having gone on a world sightseeing tour at age 16.
I lived in New York and London when all that music scene was happening, the Sex Pistols and all that … I met a lot of ’em, the Ramones, The Clash and the Damned, the Vibrators, Dictators, Blondie. My girlfriend at the time was the door girl at CBGBs and she introduced me to them all, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, and lots of people there. It was a very small scene then. I met DD, went to a party with Joey. So what I bought back was a few records yeah, but mainly the whole idea of ‘fuck em let’s make a rock ‘n’ roll band’ (James Baker).
James had already played in some bands in Perth in the early 70s including a Beatles cover band and the New York Dolls-ish Slink City Boys, and had nearly auditioned for the drummer’s job with The Clash after meeting Joe Strummer and Mick Jones on his rock ‘n’ roll world tour. He was, and remains, an affable and gregarious presence. He had the right look and his ‘powerful, furious drumming was legendary around Perth’.4 Add to this his firsthand, international experience with some of the legends of punk, he was someone to know. When James collided with Dave Faulkner at the Cheap Nasties gig, they immediately hit it off. In mid 1977, James left the Geeks (taking Randolph V with him) and formed a new band with Dave: The Victims. Armed with a bunch of songs James brought from The Geeks, the Victims set off at a fast pace, establishing themselves alongside the Cheap Nasties as the dominant forces in the Perth underground. But while the Cheap Nasties at that stage channelled the strong pop sensibility of British punk, the Victims produced to a barrage of atonal noise.
Kim, both friend and competitor of the band, watched them closely:
They all moved into a squalid fleapit of a house in East Perth. They cleaned out all the ‘hippy dirt’ from the previous residents and painted over all the bad art on the walls, dubbing the place ‘Victim Manor’. It took about a month for them to let the ‘Manor’ slide back to such a filthy state that none of them except for Rudolph could live there. There, they threw a party where they performed