Ten songs of blistering teenage slime, screaming guitars screech in and out of the chorus, drums bash relentlessly, and that special Australian something you can’t ever put your finger on. It’s trashy, raw, and brutal punk slop at it’s finest … such raw phenomenal stuff. But remember, this isn’t for the weak or the elderly, and it’s definitely not for audiophiles, but it will now sit alongside … The Saints I’m Stranded, and Radio Birdman’s Radios Appear albums in OZ punk history.10
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Kim was by now firmly down the path to his future self, and affecting the right rock ‘n’ roll regalia to invoke this was demanding serious attention, with mixed results. ‘My experiments in style had gone awry. I had a Tony Barber hair do. I would go to op shops and buy leopard skin shirts and wear ladies’ clothes and look stupid. I got my mum to make me some vinyl pants, but they were thick and sweaty, and my shoes filled with sweat and created their own ecosystem.’ Sister Megan remembers Kim sporting a pink, yellow and red gaberdine suit with stove pipe trousers. ‘No one could fathom standing next to him at the traffic lights!’
Kim’s sartorial sensibility was emblematic of the cracks beginning to form in the Cheap Nasties, and he was dissatisfied with the band’s direction. ‘They weren’t going to be punk enough for me, the idea of new wave came along and that’s where Neil was very comfortable, the idea of a white shirt and tie and jacket … I railed against it and wanted to do my own thing.’ The band’s ideas compressed, consolidating the frenzied palette of Kim’s early song writing and performance style into a more refined but milder proposition. Kim’s internal edict of originality above all else grated against the new direction, and his natural tendency to stay on the outside built distance between him and the rest of the band.
The Cheap Nasties had emerged from a virtual void of home grown influence, succeeding in spite of the turgid local music scene and sparked by the sounds of overseas punk. They raced into the Australian punk future, playing live shows that were ragged, loud and alive. Propelled by the sometimes complementary, sometimes competing internal forces, the band were short lived but earned their place in punk history. ‘The compromise of directions no doubt stifled the band’s potential … As one might expect of a band that was pursuing something unknown, there was more than one idea of what that thing was.’11
In December 1977, the Cheap Nasties gathered for rehearsal in a studio set in the bushy hills outside Perth. Conditions were perfect, but the rehearsal broke down as the Nasties started arguing again, one fight too many. Realising they didn’t have to do this anymore, they broke up. But it was really Kim that was cut adrift. ‘Within a few weeks they reformed without me! They were looking for a name and their new identity, and I was a shag on a rock. There was a scene there that I probably brought to the town, and there I was … shut out of my own party.’
In the wake of the Cheap Nasties gig months earlier, Roddy Radalj and Boris Sujdovic formed The Exterminators along with two other Perth musos, Johnno Rawlings and Mark Demetrius. ‘I think we only did one show, and we just did basic punky stuff. Mark the singer was a kind of journalist guy and he’d write all these lyrics about how fucked Perth was,’ Boris recalls. ‘It was real basic stuff — we could hardly play a note.’
It was 1978, and with the Cheap Nasties in recess Kim was at a loose end. ‘I don’t know if he took pity on me but Rod Radalj decided he’d let me play in his band.’ With Mark Demetrius excused from vocal duties Kim was invited in, under instructions to sing and not play guitar, and The Exterminators duly morphed into the Invaders. Kim was instantly enamoured of the Croatian guitar and bass player. ‘Kim seemed to like Roddy and I, maybe some romantic notion that we were like Ron and Scott Ashton or something. We were maybe a bit tougher looking or stood out. I don’t think it was because he was super impressed with the Exterminators first gig!’ (Boris Sujdovic). A review at the time noted, ‘It is hoped that the musically adept Salmon will be the cohesive factor the band appears to need. This band can only go up … They were a bunch of bumbling beginners and were very un-together. Kim joined … and they tightened up considerably … but were still a fair way from perfection.’1 The band forged a Stooges and New York Dolls sound, operating in the general musical location that Kim was looking for but without the chops to pull it off. The highlight of their act was an ode to Perth called Asshole of the Universe. The band were starting to sound promising, but the drummer John was always at loggerheads with Roddy and Boris, and by May 1978, he was ditched from the group.
Meanwhile, the Victims had petered out through a combination of boredom and internal unease. ‘In April 1978 they released a single, Television Addict/I’m Flipped Out Over You. This took most of Australia by surprise and generated some rave reviews. Even some of the British music papers were able to bring themselves to give it a favourable comment. 1000 copies were pressed, and it rapidly sold out. The group broke up the following month …’2 With James Baker now available, Kim swooped and asked him to join the Invaders on drums. James accepted, but knowing Kim’s guitar playing was going to waste, agreed to join on the condition that Kim play guitar. ‘So, we went around to Victim Manor, a squalid hippy joint that was basically a drop-in place for all of the vagrants in that scene. It was a rehearsal place and we had all our gear there.’
With James at the drums, things coalesced immediately. He offered some rough lyrics about a girl and mumbled an even rougher tune to match the words. Bouncing back and forth with James, Kim spun a melody around the words and assembled a couple of chords. ‘The combination of that and the punk racket of ragged two note bar chords and floor-tom-heavy drumbeats were like a collision between the Stooges and Herman’s Hermits.’3 With Kim back on guitar, the band now had a twin guitar attack. Whereas the Cheap Nasties had played with a counter point style — Neil Fernandes playing power chords and Kim stabbing noises over the top — Roddy and Kim played dual power chords, with Kim embellishing with arpeggios and creating a rich, jangly and distorted sound. ‘It struck me as something new I hadn’t heard, and we had a successful rehearsal. Straight away I heard a sound.’
Afterwards, with their instruments idle, the band hung out on the porch of Victim Manor, aware that something significant had occurred in the rehearsal room. This new sound seemed like a new band, not just a new version of the Invaders. As the Perth day dwindled, the four of them started throwing around potential band names. Kim was drawn towards a moniker that captured the sound he wanted: ‘primitive and hardly any chords and so moronic that it’s high art … so primitive that it turns into jazz, things getting thrashed into the ground.’ Against that lofty mission statement, James said ‘What about the Scientists? And that was it. It was never going to be anything else, and I was so happy that we’d found this name, we’ve got this new sound and the name just says it all, supremely ironic but sounds cool. That was it, the Scientists.’
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The Scientists set about forming their set list. James had a head full of songs that captured the freewheeling spirit of the Perth punk scene in contrast to the moodier atmosphere of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. ‘I don’t know how I came up with the lyrics, they’re supposed to be minimalist and rock and roll. And fun. They’re tongue in cheek’ (James Baker).
The song writing method of the new band was curious. James would invoke some lyrics and try to sing the tune to Kim, who then had to interpret the sound and create a fully realised song out of it. James is no singer, so Kim was really working off phrasing or collections of notes rather than a formed tune.
James would have these lyrics and he’d hand them to Kim and he’d say, ‘it kind of goes like this’. But James just can’t play an instrument so he’d kind of sing a drum beat in his head as the melody, it might have been an accident. He’d be humming a drum beat and Kim would think that was the melody. They kind of fumbled their way through it (Boris Sujdovic).