An Interview with Garry Bradbury and Tom Ellard

Amey:

Amey Mazurek, the interviewer.

Garry:

Garry Bradbury, an active member of Severed Heads in the early '80s.

Tom:

Tom Ellard, the mainstay of Severed Heads.

Continued from Part 1...

Garry: Did you show her the cover for Blubberknife?
Tom: The Andrew Ekins cover? That was what we were going to call the next album Andrew Ekins' Greatest Hits...
Garry: ...He did the artwork and put his name on it. But what's really interesting is when they went to make the actual cassette, his name got on the cassette.
Tom: My, my. Look at all this. Hey there's some great ones in here.
Amey: So they thought it was, Andrew Ekins' Greatest Hits.
Tom: Yeah, Andrew Ekins' Greatest Hits.
Garry: It was a horrible bit of artwork as well.
Tom: Oh, it sort of was very '85.
Garry: But it would've looked alright if he hadn't - I mean, the layout is just so disgusting, you know?
Tom: A lot of little torn paper effects behind it and stuff. But it was good at the time anyway. We made about $200, and a television interview once.
Garry: Maggie said she's got one actually.
Tom: Has she?
Garry: But I think I've seen it before and it's not a very good one.
Tom: Yeah, but at least it's one.
Garry: Andrew "beer belly" probably has a better one.
Tom: Andrew "beer belly" probably has the best one.
Garry: Someone like Peter Doyle might have one, talk to him.
Tom: Yeah. I haven't seen Peter in ages.
Amey: Peter Doyle?
Tom: Peter Doyle, yeah.
Garry: Oh, he was a seminal figure.
Amey: Where have I heard of him?
Tom: As in semen.
Garry: There's lots of people who are Peter Doyle on this planet.
Tom: There's lots of Peter Doyles, the world is - it's like the merry men, "The world is filled with Peter Doyles!"
Garry: But the one we're on about, used to run a radio show at ten o'clock on Tuesday nights on triple-J, the local radio station, when it was Double-J. That was when it was only AM. But he used to play this electronic music and everyone would listen religiously -
Tom: You could just go listen to the Peter Doyle show... Tuesday night. Wednesday, you'd know the good record to buy. He played all this really f***ing great shit-
Amey: Just a - before you go any further - do you have a pair of headphones?
Tom: - low tone, which is better 'cause it doesn't cross over so much.
Amey: It does that all through the piece?
Tom: Yeah, Microcomposer moans over the whole f***ing thing - very record's got weeeep! at the beginning of it.
Amey: So you tried to fade that out as much as you could? -
Garry: No no.
Tom: You just had to leave it there. There's no way -
Garry: Intrinsic to the medium.
Tom: Yeah. It's sort of standard. On the CD it's worse, 'cause every sort of noise, every little nuance comes up. Oh, I can't believe that cover. Yeah, sticks out like dog's balls, don't you think so? No, um -
Garry: Hey, is the version of Goodbye Tonsils on Bulkhead the 12-inch off City?
Tom: Let me run that through my brain again - yes it is.
Garry: 'Cause I was thinking of - 'cause I saw a copy of the 12-inch in town, selling second-hand.
Tom: You have to buy a second-hand copy of your own f***ing projects!
Garry: Oh, I never got one.
Tom: You never got one!
Garry: No.
Tom: I should give you the test pressing or something. I don't think we got a test pressing.
Garry: It was the cover I liked. It was the only cover that turned out really nice.
Tom: Now - didn't they f***ing get the lettering wrong on that one? Remember it was supposed to have black edging around all the letters so you could read it?
Garry: It still looked all right.
Tom: It still looked okay, yeah. Yeah, this is Ink Records, you see. Great bunch. Great bunch of guys.
Garry: They ripped us off.
Tom: Particularly Paul Deering, he got ripped off most of all. He got ripped off beyond the measure! Beyond the pale, he got ripped off. We all stood up in a line and ripped him off one by one, and then Garry came up and hit him. Poor f***er.
Garry: Ah, yes, strictly off the record, of course.
Tom: Oh, no. It's, like, nothing too funny about it. It's just that he was involved heavily with that Slab record, and that was at the point where I think Dave, who ran Ink, ran into trouble. Before that he'd paid up reasonably well. So when I went over there, I managed to get 500 pounds out of him sort of reasonably. Remember he sent down 500 pounds every now and then?
Garry: Yeah.
Tom: And then they just stopped.
Garry: Yeah, after about the second payment.
Tom: Yeah, the second one came down and then just stopped, that was it.
Garry: And he had to send us something to keep getting tapes from us, and once he realised he wasn't going to get any more...
Tom: That was the end of that. See, that Slab Horror record's a bit of a pisser, too because, he was like, demanding that it come out, really. So Paul goes up to Brisbane for the holidays or something and then suddenly we got this phone call from England saying we gotta get this out -
Garry: No no! See, we knew when the deadline was. That was the thing. And we told Paul we had to have it ready by that date.
Tom: Yeah.
Garry: And Paul said, "Oh, well, I'm going up to Brisbane." And we said, "Well, it's your choice, you either stay here and help us mix it or go up to Brisbane."
Tom: Yeah. He went up to Brisbane.
Garry: And for some self-righteous reason, he went up to f***ing Brisbane and then never stopped bitching about it ever since!
Tom: So we had to send the master tape up in a reasonable hurry and then the f***ers didn't put it out until six months later on anyway. Standard for goods. It's better than two years, I'm at the two year level, and so it just keeps on going.
Garry: Oh, I've reached five years!
Amey: How did you all meet? How did you get together?
Garry: I met his brother at Uni.
Tom: My brother was a punk. That was he.
Garry: They would put all the little punkers together. I went up to his brother and I said, "Didn't I meet you at the David Bowie concert?" And... Oh, that's right, we were both doing fine arts, and we were both walking to a fine arts lecture. And we sat down in the back row of the lecture theatre and the lecture hall started filling up. It looked a bit weird because it was just all boys, right? All blokes, no women, and we thought, well, this is a bit odd. And they were throwing paper airplanes everywhere, and this is looking really strange. And then the lecturer came in and it was an engineering lecture, it wasn't fine arts.
Tom: So you knew you had a lot in common.
Garry: Yeah, we were at the wrong place. So we went off and got pissed instead.
Tom: So, like, he knew my brother.
Amey: And your brother's name is -
Tom: Matthew. And Matthew and Garry came around to my place. I was sort of wagging school or something, wearing my school uniform, and sitting around playing with shit, you know, that sort of thing.
Garry: Yes, we were both into Human League
Tom: Marie and Ed Lars Garcent. [?] Yeah, that's the stuff. He started going through my record collection like you did. "What have you got? Oh this is alright, that's shit." And so on. But around that time there was a lot of people sort of hanging around the place.
Garry: When we met, it was about six months before either of us started doing music together, I think, or something?
Tom: Well, there was a lot of influence going around. There was Peter Doyle shows, and the telly... And SPK were hanging around anyway, you weren't hanging around with SPK at that stage, were you?
Garry: Yeah, I knew Neil from SPK.
Tom: And, um, there was a lot of that sort of stuff going. Jonesy - Stephen Jones was out recording their practice shows, right? So everyone was like, there was plenty of people just hanging around.
Garry: He had a video of SPK in the '79 Biennial.
Tom: Did he?
Garry: Yeah.
Tom: That's right, I think so, that's right. I've seen that recently. We ran it through the Umatic so still plays reasonably well. Not all of it, but most of it plays okay.
Garry: That would be fun to have.
Tom: Well I'll get a copy of it.
Garry: It's all live music?
Tom: It's just SPK, like - it's really funny, because that -
Garry: You should get a copy of that and bootleg the shit out of it.
Tom: It already has been. Remember that guy in England? [...] So anyway, Sydney was just full of people doing shit and we just happened to connect up. Where was Paul? He just happened to be around the place or something.
Garry: He turned up to the Wet Taxis thing, back in 1980. That's how I met him. Kind of introduced himself. But, yeah, I started off in 1980 working with a band called the Wet Taxis. Then I heard through Matthew that Tom was putting out an EP with four bands on it and you could pay, how much was it? $100 or something?
Tom: $175 or something, yeah -
Garry: And you could have a quarter of this EP. Well, we'd only been together for about a week, so we did four songs in four minutes.
Tom: Yeah, it was a 7 inch. Well at that stage, my pressing plant -
Garry: I haven't got a copy of it!
Tom: - well, I'll give you 50 - our pressing plant -
Garry: Ah, it's great, it's got some lovely stuff on it!
Tom: No! All this shit? The Wet Taxis one's good, but some of the rest of it's pretty f***ing awful.
Garry: Oh, no no, me and Ian Andrews listened to it a few months ago -
Amey: What was the name of it? Was it under Dogfood?
Tom: No, no, Terse. Terse Tapes was our front, it was all cassettes and shit. And the Dogfood thing was, remember those manifestos I was pulling out of the cupboard the other night? Wrote some manifesto about music, it was like dog meat, and should only be treated like dog meat, and you should just can it and feed it to dogs, and that was all it was all about and shit. So that was a Terse record. And then in 1981 we were doing really well with, like, One Stop Shopping, was this cassette compilation that I did, which did quite well.
Garry: Did you show her one of these things?
Tom: Yeah, yeah.
Amey: Mmm-hm.
Tom: Got 20 of them left, that's about it.
Garry: Oh, here's my copy of Ear Bitten. It's got hairs stuck on it.
Tom: Oh your one's in great nick! My one's pretty, you know, bit of a mess.
Garry: Have you heard it?
Amey: I haven't heard it.
Garry: This is nice stuff.
Tom: [sings part of a cut] So that's one by Richard Fielding, on that one... sort of early Roland stuff, 100 notes, you could store 100 notes, and it would go, "beep-beep-beep-beep-bop-bop! - "
Garry: Which it did! [laughs]
Tom: Yeah, it was a sort of early attempt at a pop record and like, that's where I'm coming from, I suppose, I just keep on doing my f***ing poppy records and stuff, which Garry can't stand.

This interview is continued in part 3...