Legendary ’70s Perth punk group The Victims, who introduced the world to both Dave Faulkner and his original drumming partner in the Hoodoo Gurus, James Baker (who also co-founded The Scientists, The Beasts of Bourbon and more), are set to say a final farewell with shows in Melbourne and Sydney this coming weekend.
Since regrouping in late 2014 with #1 fan Ray Ahn of the Hard-Ons on bass, The Victims have released two new 7” vinyl records (an E.P. and the new single), as well as an anthology of their ’70s classics, all on In The Red, and played a handful of shows on both coasts.
But now the time has come to finally say goodbye. A Perth farewell show, played in front of hundreds of heaving fans at the Rosemount back in June, was so great that plans were put into effect straight away to get the group over to Sydney and Melbourne. It just wouldn’t have been fair to fans in both cities otherwise – including a new generation of ’70s punk loving kids who need to see what the fuss is all about.
We caught up with Dave Faulkner to discuss the ’70s punk scene that brought light to The Victims, as well as hearing his excitement as he talks about the live music scene in Perth, back in the day.
Dave: Hey hello!
Sean: Hi Dave, it’s Sean from The Rockpit in Perth. How are you?
Dave: Good thanks Sean. How are you?
Sean: Great thanks. Thank you ever so much for your time.
Dave: My pleasure.
Sean: Are you currently in Perth or are you back over on the east coast?
Dave: I was just in Perth until Saturday. I was there for two weeks. I was rehearsing with James actually.
Sean: How was that?
Dave: It was very good… it was great actually fantastic.
Sean: So, as we all know now you are closing in on the final ever shows for The Victims. How does that feel after so many years?
Dave: It’s starting to feel very real now. I mean, well you know we didn’t play for so many years… decades in fact. We had over about the last ten years or so, we kind of just came and went and did the odd shows here and there but you know the time has come, unfortunately where we’ve got to really just say, “that’s it”, we can’t push it further than what we’re physically capable of doing.
Sean: Well, you say come and go but the reception every time you came back was absolutely incredible. Sold out venues across the country. It’s incredible that even as recently as June here in Perth, when you came back to play to a sold out Rosemount Hotel, the fans flocked to see and hear the music.
Dave: It was incredible, yeah. We had fun. I mean, you know, well the band, for whatever reason, has got a bit of reputation and it’s likely we have appeared to embarrass ourselves [laughs]. We have played gigs and people still think it’s worth coming to see us, so we’re happy about that.
Sean: Wonderful to hear. Well, I see Brunswick Ballroom and Crowbar Sydney are the dates and we’re going to get those up with all the links… which I’m expecting have already sold out so there’s probably no point [laughs].
Dave: Well I hope so because it really is the very last time ever. They may even be some people who have never seen us before who may venture out on one of those nights. So, better late than never [laughs].
Sean: Well, if I could take you right back to those days back in ’77, and what an absolute era it was. I was seven years old. I was living back in the UK where I’m from. ‘God Save the Queen’ was out by the Sex Pistols. It was just an absolute thriving amount of music coming out around the world. And, of course, then The Victims were born.
Dave: Yeah, well, we were listening to all that stuff, obviously. The first rumblings we heard was in the music press. There was an article about this club called CBGBs. It was a report from New York in NME, I think. This writer had been raving about this place as well as bands like The Ramones, and Television and Blondie and we read him describe it as punk rock and we just thought what the hell is that? So our imaginations began running wild and it was a few months at least… maybe even four or five months before we actually got to hear The Ramones album, which finally came out in early ’76. We had already started playing in a band called Cheap Nasties back then, but only for a few rehearsals… That was Kim Salmon and Neil Fernandes who finally became The Manekins, who I finally joined a couple of years later, when I came back to Perth after I travelled for a year. Originally there was an album called ‘Live at CBGBs’, a double live album recorded there. And it was none of those bands that we’d heard about. There’s other bands there, including some that we’d seen on the back of a New York Dolls cover, the band called The Miami’s, but also there’s a band called The Shirts and, you know, different bands like that. And we were thinking, well, it doesn’t quite sound like what the description was, of buzzsaw guitars and songs about beating on people with a the baseball bat. But we basically started playing some of those songs, like Mink DeVille was on there and a couple of other bands. And, you know, it was a good record, but it wasn’t quite what I imagined. And then we heard the Ramones. And suddenly it all became very clear. This was what they were talking about. This was punk rock. And of course, later on, you know, then The Damned came out. And of course, The Saints and The Sex Pistols. And, you know, it was kind of like a snowball really, like an avalanche of music suddenly from all these bands sort of that are flourishing in the corners of the world that, you know, suddenly found, a common vision, which I guess were based on the Stooges and ’60s punk and a bit of glamour. And, you know, there was a lot of glam rock and Roxy music, in the case of the British scene. You know, there were people that followed those bands and kind of coalesced into the punk sort of followers. And it was just a strange thing that just came out of nowhere. And we were so excited by it. And the sounds and this music was so high energy. And the music, you know, the lyrics were so tongue-in-cheek a lot. The lyrics were funny or angry. And, you know, there was so much colour and energy in the scene. We just wanted to do our own thing and be part of it. We felt completely isolated in Perth, so far away from any records or any bands that we wanted to see. And, you know, we just didn’t think of anything other than purely amusing ourselves. And here we are all these years later, people sort of talking about that little record we made and still talking about us as much as they talk about any other artists that we love.
Sean; It really is incredible. And, of course, back then, and you’ll have to excuse me, because of my English background, it’s an era where I’m still connecting all the dots, which I absolutely love to do, especially with Australian music. The one thing I love about The Rockpit is that I’ve got to speak to so many incredible, what I call historians of the Australian music scene, of which you are one. And, you know, back then in the 70s, it was very much ACDC, The Angels, all these rock bands, Cold Chisel, you know, The Easy Beats. It was a vibrant time in this country’s musical history.
Dave: In a way bands like Cold Chisel and AC/DC didn’t even exist yet, as far as I was concerned. They were glimmers in their creators eyes but their records hadn’t been heard of yet. The bands we were surrounded by in Perth at the time were mainly cover bands doing Top 40 stuff or your Eagles songs, or whatever and the alternative scene in Perth was the Blues scene -I was actually in a Blues band at one point, before The Victims. I was teaching myself guitar and at the time I was playing keyboards in this Blues band but I bought a cheap guitar off a junk shop wall and I was teaching my self to play and to write songs and then when I met James (Baker) at a punk gig, which was a Cheap Nasties gig around mid-’77, suddenly there were all these people that came out of the woodwork and, you know, we thought we were the only people in the world who liked this music and then suddenly there are dozens of us. It’s a bit like the story of the Manchester gig for the Sex Pistols with all the different people in the audience there but they all formed bands. And that is a similar way to how we all found each other. We were so isolated here in Perth we could never even imagine people would know about us here.
Sean: And, of course, something very, very sad, as well as The Victims closing up with these final two shows, is the number of venues that you’d have played back then that are no longer around anymore in Perth.
Dave: Well, yes and no. We had no idea of making it back then, certainly not a career or anything like that. We literally did it to amuse ourselves. We found our own venues. James was particularly good at that. He got us our first paid gig in Northbridge in a pub called the Governor Broome Hotel. They never had bands on. They had a tiny stage in the corner but no one ever used it and so James was having a beer there after work one day and he just asked the owner if he could bring his band in to play there, and we would take the door. We hired the PA in and we played there four weeks in a row – we might have been kicked out after that, I can’t remember what happened [laughs] so we had to find another venue, which this time was an Italian restaurant, behind a bank in East Perth – it was called Hernando’s Hideaway. We used to pick one night a week when it was a quiet night for the restaurant and turn it into a gig. It was licensed so we could have beer on sale… it was a proper gig. That became a proper venue, as did the Governor Broome. They got the idea that it might work, you know, so they both started having other bands on there too. Hernando’s was quite the place for a fairly long time too… It was very much a part of the independent, original band scene. But The Victims certainly pioneered those venues, particularly Hernando’s, which was our home. We played a couple of odd places and got into all sorts of strife with people unplugging us, some hating us and others trying to beat us up [laughs] and those sorts of things were out there in the real world so to speak, and not normally at our own gigs. But, yeah, apart from that, we also would hire the occasional hall and put on a gig there. We had like some sort of happening when someone put up projections on the walls. There was kind of just this great nexus of different people who were just excited by this music. And it was also, you know, it was photography, it was, you know, fashion. There was so many things all at the same time were really being changed by this, you know, nexus of music and art and just the energy in this whole scene kind of spread through the arts and different people would sort of come and sort of try and contribute. And so we have our own sort of in a sense, happenings, whatever you want to call it, like Andy Warhol exploiting Classic Inevitable that he had back with the Velvet Underground in the 60s. You know, we had something similar, our own version of that. So they’re the venues we played. We weren’t a band that was trying to, you know, get known and gather an audience because we just thought no one else in Perth could care less about this music. And we didn’t like the other bands that were around so we didn’t want to play with anyone else that was outside our scene because we just thought they were squares. We didn’t get it, you know, to use an old hipster term, we just didn’t relate. And we’d had no idea that there would possibly be ever anyone else interested in this music. We knew there were people, obviously we had our own fanzines and we had other fanzines around Australia and around the world and, of course, the music press. And we were getting, the rumblings of other scenes happening elsewhere, the Melbourne scene, the Sydney scene, you know, and Brisbane, of course. We knew there were people out doing what we were doing but the idea that we would somehow be able to connect up and, you know, and make ourselves known in these faraway places was beyond our means or our vision.
Sean: And, of course, you mentioned Hernando’s, which is where the live album was recorded, I see.
Dave: Yes, yes. They had a live album that we never got paid for [laughs]. We’ve had quite a few things like that happen over the years, you know, people re-shipping our stuff as bootlegs. Sometimes we’ve agreed to do something but they just haven’t paid us, you know, so it’s been weird. But now we’re very happy with In The Red Records. They’ve been, like, knights in shining armour in that regard. They’ve got all our stuff out there now and it’s legit. It’s legal and they’re wonderful. They’re good people and we love Larry Hardy who runs that label. He’s a very cool guy and his heart’s in the right place. He does it for the music and the money is something he knows is important to the artists as well because the little there is, we’d like to have our share.
Sean: And, of course, you’re coming to the end of those shows but with you saying that, it’s wonderful that those are registered forever and locked in for all to hear for end of time.
Dave: Absolutely. And, you know, that’s why we want to reissue the album. I think he might even be doing it on the pressing album, the original singles and EP on the B-side. So, yeah, he’s very motivated and, you know, he just loves the music and he just wants to spread the word.
Sean: Fantastic. And, of course, your creative juices have never stopped flowing with the wonderful back catalogue and songbook of the Hoodoo Gurus. But this must be just so nice to put that on the back burner to go out and rip these songs out again. Before I lose you, Dave, could I just ask a couple of general questions just to finish with?
Dave: Sure.
Sean: My restaurant question. I always like to ask if you could invite three musicians dead or alive to join you for a bit of dinner, who would you like to have sit with you for the evening?
Dave: Are you kidding me? [laughs] Well, you know, Professor Longhair is someone I’ve always regretted not seeing. I had a chance to see him but went to see Johnny Thunders instead. I was such a huge fan of the heartbreakers. Someone else, let me see. Well, why not Billie Holiday and I’ll go for Joe Meek, there you go.
Sean: What a wonderful table with some names that have never been in my restaurant before, so thank you. What was the last album you listened to?
Dave: Oh dear, I’m trying to think. I played Elton John. There we go. I mean, that’s the last CD I played. We’ll take that one. We’ll take that one.
Sean: And the easiest question last, if you could be credited with writing any song ever written, what song would you choose?
Dave: Oh God, I would say an old classic from the 40s or 50s, you know? I’ve always love the song ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ as for you, so I think that’s what I would pick. It was first done as a jazz song and then later as a do-whop song. A brilliant bit of song writing and very simple and I love that. It’s not necessarily the most, you know, complicated song but people will say that’s the ultimate song.
Sean: Wonderful stuff. Dave, I can’t thank you enough for your time. I really appreciate it. And next time you’re in Perth, I’d love to catch up if you’re ever around for a cold beer or a cup of tea.
Dave: I’d love that Sean. Thank you very much. Yeah. Look forward to it. it. Thanks ever so much. Take care.
Sean: Have a fantastic night on those two shows. Thanks a lot, mate.
Dave: Good on you. Bye.
