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.

Tom: I don't know how this whole thing fits together, this book, anyway.
Amey: We don't know either yet.
Tom: Yeah. So I mean, you've just gotta make sure you've got your input.
Garry: Yeah, I suppose so.
Tom: I mean, you've gotta feel like you've got your say about what you were trying to do and what your ideas were about and stuff, 'cause everyone knows I've had plenty of f---ing ideas to you...
Amey: Well, we started with getting involved through Matthew, and then -
Tom: Yeah, my brother, with the inflatable leopard-skin tights. You were strangely drawn to that -
Garry: The inflatable electric-skin tights?
Tom: Yeah, they were punks. I was too young for that.
Garry: Yeah. We used to hang around at the Grand Hotel, which was near Central Railway Station, drink black and tans, which is a combination of stout and -
Amey: Oh, yeah. It's fairly common.
Tom: And listen to the Clones.
Garry: No, they used to play at French's. We'd drink Scrumpy at French's, which is a really vile type of cider. Drink lots of that and go outside and throw up.
Tom: That was, like in 19--
Garry: --79.
Tom: 1979, at which stage I was doing that Ear Bitten record with Richard, you see, that's what was going on. We were both over in Mosman. (To Amey) You went over in Neutral Bay the other day? That's sort of by the zoo and stuff?
Garry: I'm a westie, I'm from the western suburbs. Bankstown boy. Except by that stage, I was living in town. It was like, I left home one Saturday night to go for a night out, and didn't come back for about a year. [Laughs]
Amey: So then you got involved in music. Did you have any instruments?
Garry: No. I had a cassette player. In '79 I used to just record things off the radio and layer them up and use kitchen appliances.
Tom: If you put a piece of cardboard over the record heads -
Garry: - you can just keep layering up sounds. Not the record head, the erase head. Or if you had two cassette players, you could just kind of record on one and blast it back at the other one, while you were yelling at the other one and stuff like that. You'd just do that half a dozen times until you'd have - and then you get out the vacuum cleaner - this is while you're parents aren't home. And then you'd get the blender, and the, um -
Tom: I've got the tape of this somewhere.
Garry: Lannington Lady, I called myself. Which I thought was very funny, I don't know why.
Tom: Of course, it was the time, you know, Throbbing Gristle was still (what?).
Garry: Lannington was an Australian cake with chocolate and coconut on the outside -
Tom: - you know, like Hamburger Lady, like the Throbbing Gristle song--
Garry: - Lannington Lady I thought was a bit more -
Tom: (sings) "Lannington Lady"
Garry: - ugly. [Laughs]
Tom: [Still singing] "Lannington Lady/She's got coconut on her arms on her legs"
Garry: "chocolate oozing out of every pore"
Tom: "he flashed on the carpets/he flashed on the floor."
Garry: And on that recording I gave you, I'm busy layering up noises and the phone starts ringing? So you hear this piece sort of going along and then the phone rings. So I pushed the pause button to answer the phone, then started up again.
Tom: So it goes eeep! krrh! feeor! like that where the edit is. So he's sending me tapes to put on this compilation I was doing, those compilation cassettes. At that time I had four cassette decks so I would play on one cassette deck and record on three, and then send them to the shops, you know, walk into the shops and "Here you go, here's 15 more..."
Garry: But Tom had a mixing desk of sorts, where he could properly sort of layer up sounds so it had inputs on the front and stuff. And he had a few instruments as well.
Tom: I had the Kawai 100F.
Garry: That's all you need. I can't believe, that you had it for a couple of years, I've had it for 13 years and only two days ago I figured out you could sequence it. That's amazing.
Tom: Well, when I was using that, I didn't have a sequencer, and it didn't work with the Roland one, you see. I tried -
Garry: Well it probably wouldn't!
Tom: No, I promised the SQ into it and it didn't work. Yeah, so something like the Korg thing.
Garry: Korg. That's strange.
Tom: Yeah. Korg must really kick some butt, yeah.
Garry: Oh, no, it's probably just that envelope setting you have to have to get it to work.
Tom: Yeah, right and fiddle around with it. 'Cause it wants to run sounds through it, you see, run sounds through the Kawai and back at them. And then you were in -
Garry: The Wet Taxis. Or -
Tom: They wanted me to join the Wet Taxis as a keyboard player and I wouldn't do it. I went to one of your gigs.
Garry: That's right.
Tom: He tried to convince me to join as a keyboard player and I said no.
Garry: By that stage we losing it, a few of us were anyway, I think.
Tom: Yeah?
Garry: 'Cause we were doing great songs like, um--
Tom: Fingernail Biter.
Garry: Fingernail Biter! "Bite on a fingernail -
Tom: - Bite bite bite on a fingernail/and he bit bit bit bit bloody stump!" Yeah, it was sort of lost.
Amey: Where did that appear, anywhere?
Garry: That's when they threw me out of the band. He [Tom] put out a cassette of it.
Tom: I made a cassette of it.
Garry: Taxidermy, it was called. That's a good title.
Tom: It's got a picture of Sally Fields as the Flying Nun on the front of it.
Garry: I've got that at home, actually... See, there was a whole little network of import shops around town that everyone would go into on a Thursday night or a Saturday morning just to see what was new, what had come in from -
Tom: Back when there was new things.
Garry: Yeah. So all the independent releases would get released through the import shops as well. There was one in particular called The Record Plant, which used to carry all the Terse Tapes stuff.
Tom: Yeah, until the Human League album came out. [Waitress brings desserts] ... Yeah, you'd go into this record shop, and there was a f---ing wall display, you know?
Garry: Display of Terse Tapes products.
Tom: ... So can you imagine, I've taken all these stupid cassettes to this shop in town which was sort of groovy, like, "We've got all the latest import records," they were taking all these stupid pictures and sticking them up on the wall.
Garry: Very encouraging. [Amey laughs] It was!
Tom: It was. It was great.
Amey: Yeah, there's this place in Seattle [...] where, it's like, art fags run it. And they have import CDs and all this kind of stuff, and they outlet some local indies. They pissed off a friend of mine, 'cause he was taking some tapes in there , and the one moment they would be like, "Oh we're so happy to see you," and the next moment they'd be treating him like shit.
Tom: Yeah, well that's the thing, like, Australia is very much worried about what goes on overseas. And the funny thing about Seattle is that all of a sudden it's become the centre of things. And as far as our people are concerned, I don't think we've ever had that here, not like Seattle. Not like a world-wide recognition.
Garry: No.
Amey: Not like lots of labels oozing out your ears.
Tom: But when you got thrown out of Wet Taxis, during Hiroshima Chair, wasn't it?
Garry: They sat me down one day, and very calmly sort of told me that they really didn't want to work with me anymore. All I did was boss them around and play horrible cassettes at them anyway. I did nothing, except kind of put Simon's - the guitarist, he had a drum machine, and I just used to grab all his effects pedals and put the drum machine through it. Which made some pretty wild noises. But him and his brother, they were like, musicians, and I was like an anti-musician, sort of. But I soon got over that and started just working on my own stuff. I'd record stuff 'round at Tom's on 4 track. That's when I started up the Twitchering Machine stuff with Vesna as well. Just doing bits and pieces at parties and pubs.
Tom: Er, '81?
Garry: Yeah, that was '81 by that stage, and then Hiroshima Chair started up, who were a fun bunch of guys.
Tom: Remember those pictures I showed you of that guy, Garth? And the Asian girl, Lin?
Garry: She's sort of half-Japanese looking. Her mother was in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped, actually. Although a few miles out of town, anyway. But, um [a baby in the cafe squalls loudly] yeah, Hiroshima Chair, they were um - [Tom mutters "Shut up" at the source of the interruption] - they played live about four times, which was more than enough [laughs].
Tom: Well, you saw the poster, Hiroshima Chair and Severed Heads?
Amey: Yeah.
Tom: At Exiles Gallery, which was above the shop on Oxford Street, and we just made it up on the spot sort of stuff. They had a set, we just made it up.
Garry: Except our set consisted of a whole lot of drum machine presets, and we even made it up over the top of that. For some reason it was deemed admirable to be totally kind of, not even spontaneous, just kind of gormless, you know, totally without any idea of what it was you were doing.
Tom: That Throbbing Gristle sort of thing, make it up on the spot.
Garry: Yes, we were very psychick.
Tom: With a "K".
Garry: But it was more to do with the effects of Cooper's sparkling ale than anything else. It's like Hiroshima Chair were a document on the effects of Cooper's sparkling ale.
Tom: But see like, so -
Garry: You ever had Cooper's sparkling ale?
Amey: Nope.
Tom: No, naw you haven't.
Garry: Maniac soup, it's this sort of chunky beer, sort of made in South Australia.
Amey: Cooper's Stout?
Garry: Yeah.
Amey: I think I've actually had it in a can.
Garry: Oh yeah?
Amey: Yeah. They have it on draft?
Garry: Oh yeah, it's not the same, though, in the bottles. They actually brew it in the bottles, don't they? That's the idea.
Tom: Yeah.
Garry: Yeah. Anyway.
Tom: I'm trying to pin a loose stem. So in 1981, the gig at Exiles Gallery, there was a guy who ran that called Sasumu, he was Japanese and Garth and Lin knew him or something like that.
[Small section omitted - KB]
Tom: [Garth] was the one who had the spleen in the bottle.
Garry: No, it was a large intestine.
Tom: Right, yeah.
Garry: The Hiroshima Chair studio had a large intestine on the mantelpiece, in formaldehyde, which leaked. So the whole place just stank of formaldehyde at all times.
Tom: So at this stage I've managed to get a four track tape recorder. So I started doing the Dogfood records thing because the Terse Tapes thing, like the wall things up in the shops and stuff, it was pretty small scale but it was reasonably thick. And we'd get in write-ups in like the Financial Times.
Garry: And Ear Bitten sold pretty well.
Tom: Well, no actually, most of them went in that fire, remember? [Garry laughs] "The one that burned."
Garry: They kind of went, anyway.
Tom: Yeah, it went. We got rid of them anyway. So I thought I'd start up a record company. And so the first release was Clean, I think it was number one. Number two was, Slugf---ers they were called.
Garry: There was kind of a version of the Slugf---ers, who were the Rhythmyx Chymps.
Tom: You know those two bands on Ear Bitten? Well it's the same band, 'cause we got to know them by sharing that record.
Garry: The Slugf---ers were -
Tom: A mess.
Garry: Yeah. By the time they'd come 'round to do that album, they'd sort of been influenced by Lord Dub. But before that, they were just like a really awful punk band. Their sort of bearded singer, who used to wear pyjamas and a bandage on his head on-stage -
Tom: And flippers and goggles sometimes. They're now lecturing in philosophy at Toulouse University in France.
Amey: There was a band in Houston called Squat Thrust who did kind of the same things.
Tom: It's that sort of band, you know, yeah.
Garry: And John the guitarist, who was about seven foot tall -
Tom: Yeah, eight foot tall.
Garry: Real sweet guy, very -
Tom: Real nice. See the thing was the Slugf---ers had done two EPs before that. And they'd done about 1000 copies of each, really easily. So I paid for their record because, I thought, we'll only press 400 or 500 of them and backorder it.
Garry: One of their EPs, they'd recorded their master tape the wrong way, and it only had one channel on it, the left hand channel. And they took that in to get it pressed, and the guy who pressed it told them it was alright, he'd kind of mono it. But he didn't, so when they got all the EPs back, it was just only one channel. So they wrote this big blurb on the cover about how it was a new process.
Tom: Yeah, that sort of band.
Garry: So it wasn't just monophonic, it was like, triophonic or something because you've got mono and stereo at the same time.
Tom: And the third one was the Negative Reaction record, it was that sort of a, "We are miserable and we come from Yugoslavia/pretty cocky elbow sleeping at the bar," that sort of stuff, yeah.
Garry: "My life is measured out in empty strawberry milk containers," was one of their lines, as I remember.
Tom: Something like that.
Garry: They had a real bit hangup with T.S. Eliot and Apocalypse Now.
Tom: Sure did.
Garry: They were two things that they lifted all their ideas from, The Wasteland and Apocalypse Now... They must've had the Reader's Digest version or something.
Tom: What I was trying to do with Dogfood was try and sort of like start up a label that was somehow Sydney alternative label. I mean you had lots of rock labels and stuff like that. And, of course that failed abysmally because I had no idea of what I was doing. The fourth album had Hiroshima Chair on one side, and Culturcide on the other. See, we had put out Pere Webb's record before that, and it was -
Garry: Cassette -
Tom: We put out cassette, yeah. So I wanted to put it out, it was great music, I wanted to put it out on record.
Garry: But the thing was, um, but firstly the Hiroshima Chair thing wound up being half an album because we basically had enough of each other by the time. He meant to record a whole one, and we sort of drew apart and so I ran out of ideas. So we wound up with Culturcide on the other side.
Tom: Yeah, I think I put Culturcide up, my name with Culturcide on the other side.
Garry: But the problem with all those albums anyway, the reason they didn't sell, was none of the bands really played live. I mean, to sell albums, I think you've got to have a bit of a (life on), Well it would've helped anyway.
Tom: I had this really morantic idea, mix of moron and romance, morantic idea that you would put out these records and you'd put them in all the record shops and stuff and people would go, "Oh, that's really" -
Garry: "Oh, that's a good record!"
Tom: "That's an interesting record, I'll have a look at that." Point number one was like, the Slugf---ers broke up, they did the album and broke up, Hiroshima Chair broke up, Negative Reaction broke up. That was it! All the bands said, "Well, we've got albums out now, we can break up." And I also stupidly thought that if you had a certain amount of money, if you pressed the records, got them out and done and everything like that, and the manufacturing was done, then that was done. But unfortunately the budgeting of the advertising should be at least half of your budget. I mean if I put five grand on pressing, I should at least spend five grand on advertising.
Garry: But you haven't got a hope if the bands don't play live, either. I mean, that's how people get to hear about them, really.
Tom: Mmm. Unless you're Madonna, but, you know. And then we had this problem, like, the Hiroshima Chair album had lots of pornography on it. And I took it into all these shops, and there was this record shop [details omitted - KB] rang me up and they said, "You come here and you take all these records out of my shop right now. And I've also rung every other shop in Sydney and I've told them to get rid of those records as well." The Hiroshima Chair album was the one that had pornography on it, right? You see? But what all the record shops did was that they took all their Dogfood records off the shelves and gave them back to me. You see what I mean? Every Dogfood record got pulled from the shelves and sent back. So the next thing I did, I did a deal with Musicland distribution in Melbourne to distribute nationally on a sell or return thing. So I sent them down a box of about a hundred copies, to Melbourne.
Garry: And bon voyage! It's like we never heard from them again.
Tom: And what happened, yeah! Yeah, about after a month they sent them all back. They hadn't even tried, they just put them in their warehouse, charged me, and then sent them back - damaged. So we lost a hundred that way. It was just like a real mess. And so, um -
Garry: Oh, I didn't even know you got them back.
Tom: Oh, yeah. I got them back, but the record, they're all torn up. It was sent surface mail and trodden on.
Garry: Never know what happened to the ones that were in the record plant, remember? I went in there once, and Frank, who worked there, he went, "Oh here Garry, take these," and gave me a big stack of LPs and I could just carry them, and I went, "No no I don't want them!"
Tom: It was a mess.
Garry: "Here, take them back!" He sort of shoved them away under the counter again.
Tom: So it was a total disaster. Anyway, Dogfood records were a total disaster, and -
Garry: Not bad records.
Tom: - Hiroshima Chair was over and stuff. So we got to the point where he (Garry) was trying to find something to do -
Garry: Well, we'd worked together on the Hiroshima Chair album.
Tom: I took my four track around there and stuck it sort of next to the big intestine, and he'd play and record and drink Cooper's sparkling ale.
Garry: So I just started going 'round to his place after that and just started recording things.
Tom: Well we started working on live tracks, 'cause I was bitching about how none of the bands would play live. You see, "Who'll play live?" "I'll play live! Wicked!" So we put these live backing tapes together and started doing gigs around the place, with SPK and other bands like that, or by ourselves. And Garry knew shitloads of people, he knew people who had gigs here and there and stuff. And so Blubberknife is basically -
Garry: The result of that.
Tom: The result of that period, '82. Went down to Melbourne, that was a great gig wasn't it?
Garry: The Killioni Club -
Tom: [Laughs] Sorry!
Garry: It's all his fault. He sort of arranged it on the phone, thinking, "Ah these people sound good! Oh yeah great." So we catch the train down to Melbourne, with suitcases full of funny old tape recorders and stuff.
Tom: There were these other guys, drove down there.
Garry: That's right.
Tom: With a lot of the gear, Jones, Atkinson and that lot drove down there, remember?
Garry: Yeah.
Tom: Yeah, right.
Garry: We get to Melbourne and we find this place, and it's tucked away in Flinders Lane, a little lane down there. And it's like it used to be an old nightclub or something, long been kind of derelict. There were these people living in one side of it and they weren't really even running it as a venue. It was just kind of occasionally used for bands. But anyway, we arrived, got talking to them and asked them what they'd done for publicity and they hadn't done a single thing. And we were supposed to be playing that night and so, one of them went down to Missing Link, the big record store in Melbourne at that stage, and put a notice that he'd written in blue biro up on the notice board at Missing Link and that was it! That was the whole publicity for the Severed Heads tour of Melbourne!
Tom: In 1982, yeah.
Garry: So I think we got--
Tom: Eighty people both nights, no, 80 people each night.
Garry: Eighty people?
Tom: Eighty people.
Garry: I didn't think we'd had that many!
Tom: Yeah, we did! Most of them left by the time -
Garry: We came on.
Tom: Yeah, oh yeah, but - 80 people wasn't an awful -
Garry: I only remember looking out and seeing about half a dozen.
Tom: In other words, the place held about 500 people.
Garry: Oh much more than that.
Tom: About 800 people maybe. It was just like, amazing. So that was the first gig he and I worked together on.
Garry: It was a good show, really nice set. And we had the stage sectioned off with barbed wire.
Tom: Well, that wasn't our idea, that was theirs.
Garry: And we had all our equipment piled up so you could just see us sort of peeking over the top of it.
Tom: I have a video of it.
Garry: You've still got it?
Tom: Yeah, I've got a Betamax video.
Garry: On one side of the stage are these two inflatable dolls that we had, with microphones stands shoved in their mouths, just standing there.
Tom: The one he was molesting [referring to an old Polaroid] -
Garry: They were backing singers. So we kind of looked like Abba.
Tom: Yeah, that was the idea anyway. But it got better, we did gigs around the place and stuff.
Garry: That was painful.

The interview is concluded in Part 4...