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Electronic music CD Audio Space Research - Signals through the Static "Damn fine... Anyone who enjoys the more experimental side of Kraftwerk will find this album rather pleasurable" - Modern Dance magazine Details and MP3s

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: We did Blubberknife and stuff. The idea there was to do the next record, which was going to be--well, next cassette, we were doing these things as cassettes, now, I'd lost all the money on those records. So we started working on another cassette called Since the Accident, although we didn't quite know what it was called then. The problem was, he and I'd been working together for a couple of years now, and it'd been really hard work, and so we had to pick a fight about something. It was like the Franklin Dam.
Garry: I can't remember.
Tom: He can't remember. Both full of Cooper's sparkling ale -
Garry: No I think it was white wine that night.
Tom: [Laughs] Warm white wine, and too much work and stuff and so we had a fight. I said, there was a building of a dam in Tasmania he was saying was an abomination, I was saying but you have to analyse whether it's an abomination or not and he was going, "No! It just is!" And it just sort of went up and up and up and up -
Garry: And then it was "Get out of here!!"
Tom: "Get out of here! I don't want to see your ugly face ever again!" So me and Simon Knuckey - no, it was before Deering - Since the Accident, but before Deering, it was after you'd gone that Deering came along -
Garry: When we split up, you had a show to do that week, wasn't it?
Tom: Something like that.
Garry: Didn't you get Deering in on that?
Tom: I think so. Bad move.
Garry: Except that Deering was kind of dragged in as kind of a cardboard cut-out replacement of me.
Tom: Yeah. So we did the gigs and stuff like that. I was working at this gallery called Art Unit, over in Alexandria...
Garry: Oh yeah, we'd done some good -
Tom: - gigs there.
Garry: How many times had we played there, a couple of times?
Tom: It ended up being four times -
Garry: Yeah, you played there a few times -
Tom: We did a good gig at this gallery.
Garry: There are some good posters for Art Unit things, which I've still got some, are they still around?
Tom: I think I've got a few.
Garry: I should actually look through and see what I've got.
Tom: See what we've got. We could make you copies of it and stuff.
Garry: They made really good posters.
Tom: Well, so it was a gallery, but they put gigs on just to have a toast, on painting nights. The problem with that is they were really unrespectful of musicians. Musicians would come and they would just use them to advertise their visual arts stuff. But anyway, it doesn't matter.
Garry: And they'd always have benefits. So it would be an Art Unit benefit, and everyone knew you were just giving these junkies money.
Tom: Unfortunately, yeah. Oh, I didn't know, I was really naive.
Garry: It was just some sort of charity or what. F---.
Tom: Yeah. So I'm working with Deering at that stage and doing gigs. And that's like, City Slab Horror was recorded in a sort of cupboard space at Art Unit, I mean I'm talking about something where you have to walk in with your head down.
Garry: Yeah, it was about that tall, it was like a -
Tom: Projection booth. And then we had my studio -
Garry: Really? Did you record most of it there?
Tom: Yeah. Well, it was really horrible being cooped up in a room with Paul -
Garry: Actually, it was something we should mention, like the recording like Blubberknife and Since the Accident was all set up in Tom's bedroom at his parent's place over in Mosman, called Balmoral Beach.
Tom: So you had a really nice atmosphere over there.
Garry: Yeah, it was really kind of, it was nice to record - to catch a ferry over there, then catch a bus, it was really quite sort of pleasant.
Tom: And then to go from that to like a cupboard in Alexandria, to do City Slab Horror, it's quite a difference.
Garry: But also the thing about that house was, well Tom's parents'd go to Asia a bit and they'd bring back cassettes of bits of gamelan or Indian film music and stuff. There'd always be funny bits and pieces of music just sort of lying around. We used to raid the cupboards under the old stereo downstairs. If we ran out of ideas we'd go down there and grab some crummy old record or -
Tom: [?] fan club -
Garry: Richard Burton reciting [?] Milkwood.
Tom: Or like The Pilgrim's Progress, like that, "Lower than the grave," although you probably don't know that -
Amey: Yeah I do.
Tom: Oh that's right, you've got that one. But it would be just a cassette sitting in the corner, "Oh yeah we'll stick that in."
Amey: Did that come out on an album?
Tom: It was on Blubberknife.
Amey: Okay, well now, see, I don't have the cassette of Blubberknife. I've got that on a videotape. (If I've Told You Once I've Told You 1000 Times, PAL format).
Tom: Yeah, you've got that.
Amey: It's like third or fourth generation.
Garry: Well, that might be the sort of thing you want to put on the CD, if you put the CD out.
Tom: I don't know what we're going to do, retro things? I thought we were going to do -
Garry: Do new things?
Tom: I think so. I think, do new things in the spirit of the old things.
Garry: Well, I thought we should probably put some really early things, and really bizarre things...
Tom: It's just this sort of history-mongering thing, sort of goes a bit -
Garry: Well, maybe half old stuff and half new stuff.
Amey: Naw, maybe -
Garry: New stuff? Okay.
Tom: I think, new stuff, but new stuff in the sort of like, on the basis of you're not having to do it like a commercial bloody record.
Garry: Right on.
Tom: Where you're not having to convince Volition and Nettwerk and all that sort of stuff. So we gotta get past '83. So I'm working with -
Garry: Oh, I haven't told my story yet!
Tom: Yeah. Alright. It's all this cake.
Garry: Okay, downstairs at Tom's house we find Boris Karloff reading The Ghost of Sleepy Hollow. You think, "Ah! F--k, lyrics, yes!" So we run upstairs, pull it out of the cover, and inside the cover was Tom Jones Live in Las Vegas.
Tom: Yeah.
Garry: No. Oh, no, it was just so funny, we laughed and laughed, didn't we?
Tom: We didn't use it though.
Garry: No. But it seemed kind of apt, because it's kind of, the whole idea of -
Tom: Well, it sums it up. There was a lot of stuff like that, the tape loops going 'round and 'round, "What are we going to stick on this now that it's rotating? We gotta get something."
Garry: And of course, it's sort of a dissociation thing as well. You don't try to think of what's appropriate, you just try any sort of garbage. Which is probably an important point, actually, in terms of what we were sort of doing, whether we thought we were just actually appropriating sounds, or whether we , um...
Tom: They were appropriating us? Or were they just appropriating themselves? It was inappropriate!
Garry: No no, we -
Tom: It was inappropriate!
Garry: We were rehabilitating a huge amount of garbage, that's what we thought we were doing!
Tom: Reclamation, sound reclamation works.
Garry: So we wouldn't say, "Oh that's a good noise, let's use that." We were just saying, "Oh, let's see what happens," and keep the interesting bits, and ignore the uninteresting bits, you know.
... I think we should probably discuss more of about we were actually doing and where we got the ideas to actually - instead of not worrying about whether we could play as musicians or not, just the idea of actually taking sounds and sticking them together. I mean, 'cause it's something we just take for granted, but I think a lot of people sort of wonder whether how we got the idea to just kind of loop things, and why we thought that was an interesting thing to do, rather than actually try and construct songs.
Tom: You can't explain that, though. I mean, it is interesting, or it's -
Garry: Oh, no, in hindsight I think we can. I mean, I don't do too much of that, but it's, um -
Tom: Whatever you think's an important thing, I mean, I've had my say over and over again for pretty much a year.
Amey: [To Garry] Have you had any ideas on it?
Garry: Well, I remember Neil from SPK used to slag us off back in 1982, and say that what we were doing was just a really bad sort of pop art kind of ploy. He seemed to think we were just kind of lifting sounds the way that pop artists would kind of lift images, and we were just kind of treating sounds like images.
Tom: [Grinning] I think he was giving us too much credit!
Garry: I do too.
Tom: You'd just run downstairs and get that Tom Jones record out of the Sleepy Hollow cover, and you just go, "Here! Stick this on! Stick this on!"
Garry: But it was always a matter of a special kind of art through having to be resourceful to make up for, kind of - well, it wasn't to make up for anything, but it was...
Amey: You said you were more interested in the technique, the ideas behind what you actually put on there, I mean, it wasn't - you weren't sitting there analysing what you were putting on there and saying, "Well, what would go good with this?" You would kind of just slap things on there, and -
Tom: Well -
Garry: Not, actually, thinking consciously about why we were using a certain sound. But I think there was a whole lot of sort of mental luggage that came with the whole business of why we were doing it.
Tom: An aesthetic.
Garry: Yeah. Or just an attitude towards -
Tom: I mean, it just seemed right. I mean, as you were saying before, how there's all this shit hanging around my parents' house -
Garry: Yeah.
Tom: Now obviously I don't know what you had grown up with -
Garry: TV.
Tom: - but you came into it with an attitude which was - yeah, but everyone grows up with TV and everyone sits there going "Ar-ar-ar-arh" and records with it.
Garry: Yup.
Tom: And I don't know why, but I've got one of those Ping Pong (early Telstar video game) things on my television, like you were talking about the other night -
Amey: Yeah.
Tom: And the thing I wanted to do was detune it so it would make these f---in' funny little lines go all over the screen, you know? And like, I don't know if you bought them like that, but certainly it's an attitude you've got really young, of like pulling apart, sort of.
Garry: So you're thinking, like, soundwise, it was a matter of pulling, like, the sounds apart and sticking them back together?
Tom: I just think, no matter how much we could've discussed these things--
Garry: Which we did!
Tom: We did, we did discuss them, but it was from this shared sort of viewpoint. It was like, "Yeah." You'd go "Yeah!" and I'd go "Yeah."
Garry: Or we'd just go, "Oh, that's good!"
Tom: Yeah. It would just be in there, you know. I don't know whether you could -
Garry: You wouldn't justify it, you'd just go, "Oh that's cool." T &
Garry: [simultaneously] "That's cool, yeah."
Tom: You'd just find a tape with, like, "Membranes are a a symptom of brain depolarisation blah blah," and you'd go, yeah, that's just fantastic, stick that on, you know?
Amey: Did you ever think about an audience or anything like that?
Tom: No-o! That was the whole thing.
Garry: No, it was always going to have to be after the fact.
Tom: Well, it was always, if you're talking about '82, '81 stuff, it's always in the context of a live performance anyway.
Garry: So we were kind of thinking about an audience, but we'd play with the idea, I think.
Tom: Well, you'd just say, what can we get away with this?
Garry: Like, we were going to do one concert, which a few pieces were sort of - it was a concert that never happened, but it was gonna be, we were going to turn this stage into a kind of cathedral. The theme for the show was "God," basically, and all the songs were "God-songs" really. 'Cause we did a lot of sampling of the King's College Choir and shit like that.
Tom: Yeah, I had a King's College Choir record. I want to make clear, though, there wasn't a concept, we didn't sit down and say, "We'll do a 'God' show because we want to illustrate this or that point of religion or God" -
Garry: Oh, no, nothing like that!
Tom: It was all, like, "This stuff is good. It's got a feel to it that we should really roll," you know? And slides of stained glass windows and stuff, just because it would give you a feeling and an association -
Garry: Just an interesting idea anyway.
Tom: But some people would associate it, everyone would associate it differently. Every audience member was going to get some different feeling out of it. When they were done finding that, it would just be, they would take it themselves.
Garry: Just playing with ideas of "God," just musical ideas of "God" anyway. I had a whole bunch of those crummy records, remember, which were, a friend of mine got given in a pub. Brassiere in Rome was made up from that.
Amey: Friend of mine thought that was a sample of Frank Zappa for some reason.
Tom: Hardly.
Garry: Oh, no. It was just some crummy record a friend of mine got given in a pub of just all this really insipid American fundamentalist sort of shit.
Amey: There's lots of that.
Garry: Like hyper Pat Boone sort of -
Tom: First track on Since the Accident, Voices of a Million Angels The reason it's going "an-jayyls" is 'cause the record's got an extra hole in it...
Garry: Stuff like that.
Tom: So a lot of that Since the Accident stuff came out of a live-to-air that we did on 2NBS FM, which was based around the "God" stuff. And tracks like Voices of a Million Angels and Brassiere In Rome are from that -
Amey: Now what did you use to record it? You said you recorded that live?
Tom: No, we recorded it for live stuff.
Garry: They were our backing tapes. We'd prepared backing tapes -
Tom: But at that stage I'd actually gotten an eight track tape recorder, because there was this deal going on at a shop in town. If you bring them a four track tape recorder in any condition you could get them to trade it in. No, actually, I had fallen down the stairs with the four track tape recorder. I was out there with SPK people, like, I'm walking down the stairs with this four track and I go "Soaah!" Smash! Crash! Bash!
Garry: A few things went tumbling that night! The projector fell off of -
Tom: No no no! Not the SPK live stuff, no, when we played live with them at Stranded.
Garry: Why? Did it tumble off you?
Tom: I fell down the stairs carrying that thing!
Garry: Oh! Alright. [Laughs]
Tom: And I lasted for that gig and then the next thing I do, I went into bloody whatever it was in town and traded it in on an eight track. They said, "Oh, it's looking a bit dented," and I said, "Ah, I've been using it live, mate," - "Right, live music, mate, yeah, live music, right." Yeah, it was fine, you know. God, I had like these bruising all up and down me, then -
Amey: How did you fall down the stairs?!
Tom: I slipped and fell! Like imagine you carrying this four track machine, and your feet go woo! underneath you and you end up bang! crash! smash! bash!
Amey: Ow.
Tom: Yeah, it was really painful. [Dramatic]I was in agony!
Garry: [Laughs] Was I there?
Tom: Yeah!
Garry: I was probably there.
Tom: No, no, what, before the gig? No, it was one of those nights where I had to get all my shit in the car, drive over your place, pick up your shit, get you to the gig -
Garry: Yeah, Tom was always the one with the car.
Tom: Yeah. With the station wagon. Got rid of that.
Garry: You didn't have it by that stage?
Tom: Yeah I did.
Garry: No, no, you had your little car then, didn't you?
Tom: Naw, I dunno.
Garry: Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Tom: Later on, when Garry and Paul were working together, on Go Back To Your Precious Wife and Son -
Amey: Oh, yeah?
Garry: Deering had his own little brainstorm, called Go Back To Your Precious Wife and Son.
Tom: Which is a great name for a band.
Garry: It is fantastic. And I think he played live once, and I played with him, and we played loops.
Tom: What a disaster.
Garry: It was the loudest thing I've ever heard in my life. The sound check was just superb, it was like the gates of hell opening up.. .It was just totally unreasonable, anyway. Which was definitely appropriate for that sort of music. And, uh, what were you going to say about?
Tom: Oh, it was just Paul was playing live at some warehouse in town -
Garry: Ah, the Exposimo [?] thing?
Tom: Yeah, the usual bloody thing.
Garry: Oh, it was a nightmare.
Tom: Yeah, usual sort of thing, where I'd made this deal with the other guys, I said, "I don't want to work with you guys anymore but you can still use my equipment, and I'll still sort of, yeah, help you out with shit like that. It's just I don't want to work with you, I still want you guys to work, but I just don't want to have that" - so Garry's still doing all his stuff. And Paul sort of came around a bit, and I basically said I'd help him out with all this stuff. But like this gig came around and I sort of ferried him. It was one of those nights where I'd got all the gear in the bloody car and put it down at the base of this place, and some truck just came backing, "eh!-eh!-eh!-eh! - "
Garry: (talking over Tom) Slowly backed into the car! And it went crunch!
Tom: - "krrh!" [both laugh] And then we've got all this stuff in the -
Amey: When was this now?
Tom: '84 or something, yeah.
Garry: That was awful.
Tom: Yeah, it was an awful night, and I was having a very bad time -
Garry: It was an awful year, really.
Tom: - and he was having a very bad thing about something, you know.
Garry: The security guards tried to shove us down, as well. These were the people who'd been hired as the bodyguards for the night to sort of keep the public at bay, but they kind of turned on the performers! There was someone who'd hired them, it was one of the artists who'd done paintings, she was more worried about her paintings. But then she decided she didn't like how loud we were, so she told these people to make us turn our music down, which was absolutely absurd. And I nearly got beaten up by one of those guys, remember?
Tom: Yeah - oh, it was just one of those nights.
Garry: It was just appalling.
Tom: It was just appalling, and then Garry got -
Garry: I had a nervous breakdown and kind of -
Tom: Yeah, in the middle of it, and smashed all the equipment. [Garry laughs] But what was really good about it was -
Garry: I only smashed my cassette player!
Tom: That's right! No no no, there were other things dented and stuff as well. But I liked the way you were, "AAAHHH!!" and then he was really good, 'cause you go, smash! smash! smash!, really bust, right? But the thing was, it was only your own gear that got smashed. It was like, you'd sort of go, "Nope, that belongs to somebody else." Smash! smash! smash! It was a very considerate nervous breakdown! I remember thinking that at the time, you know?
Garry: Yeah.
Tom: It was so much work and so little appreciation, that was the thing that always got you down.
Garry: Yeah, always.
Tom: The tensions in the band would always be because, you'd go to all this trouble to put all this stuff together and haul all this stuff, all these stairs and stuff, and these people would go, [shrugs] you know?
Amey: Yeah, well that still kind of happens.
Tom: Clan Analogue, yeah.
Amey: I read an interview with with Blixa Bargeld, he brought it up, he said with industrial music, it changes completely the idea of a venue, for clubs. I mean you actually have to turn down certain clubs 'cause they can't set up what you want.
Tom: Yeah. Well, you just took whatever you want. I mean, you still take whatever you can get, I should say. It's still a bit like that. After you find a club around the place, then you really gotta go for it.
Garry: We were always pretty compact anyway.
Tom: Oh yeah.
Garry: We just used to have our own desk onstage, and we'd put a left-right signal onto the PA.
Tom: I mean, that's the funny thing that the Heads, even now, fits all in one suitcase sort of thing, you know. Like, I've never lost me appreciation of having to lug your own gear up and down stairs and stuff like that. And I'm like touring with these bands like Boxcar's got this flatbed truck full of stuff. And I come up to the airport, right, with one suitcase and that's all my gear, 'cause I'm just used to, you know, you're the bunny who's going to have to lug it.
Garry: I was a performance back in '87, it was really a huge thing going on down at the Gunnery down in Woolloomoolloo, when I said, "Call it an evening of luggage." And they said, "Oh, that's good." They didn't know what I meant, and when the actual night went on, I said, "See, this is what I mean." 'Cause it took about two days to set up and unpack. It was just a nightmare.
Tom: That one worked really well, though.
Garry: Oh, it was a brilliant night, I think.
Tom: How many performers, 20 or 30?
Garry: Yeah, 20 or 30 different bands, from [sarders?] and cabarets and installations.
Amey: Where was this?
Garry: It was over in Woolloomoolloo, which is right down on the harbour.
Tom: It's an old naval base, which had people squatting in it.
Garry: Yeah, it was a big squat. I lived in it for about -
Amey: Oh, like an artist's commune kind of thing.
Garry: Yeah. It was kind of divided by the navy and the state government. No one was sure who owned it, which was handy. It went for about four or five years.
Amey: So it's not around anymore.
Garry: Some artist-bureaucrats have taken it over, turned into a proper kind of art gallery space. In other words it's completely sort of useless and redundant.
Tom: The sort of place which has got Apple Macintoshes on every desk and everyone's shuffling paper back and forth deciding arts administration things.
Garry: And who's going to exhibit there next, you know.
Amey: ...What are we up to? I think we're up to the bit where we've kind of, you've gone your own separate way in about '84-'85.
Tom: In '85 I went to England, and started doing my sort of Bigot period, you know? Big Bigot sort of stuff. At this point in my own head, I started thinking, you know... All this sort of industrial stuff, like Slab, was really good, it was excellent. But I just really wanted to move into some other thing. Partly also 'cause I wasn't good at it. I'm not as cluey as other people except for music clueiness, concrete stuff. So Bigot is like some extra time to get into something else. I played to him [Garry] and he said, "Oh, it's just sounds like a lot of drums, like machine guns or something."
Garry: I don't remember what I said.
Tom: He didn't think much of it.
Garry: Naw. What did I do? I did a bit of stuff towards the end of 1984, then I didn't really make music again until - I had a couple of years off, really. Started up again in '86, did some work with Ian Andrews and John Jacobs, a thing called Transmission Impossible, which was a live-to-air broadcast. Did that for a while, then started up - got my equipment organised and started recording again, and did a batch of work from about '87 through '89, which wound up being that album that hasn't been released. And lots of bits and pieces of live work. Directed a few videos for the Heads, and a few other things.
Tom: Canine.
Amey: Yeah, I saw a few of those clips last night.
Garry: Videos are fun to make. They're kind of stressful, but they're just a real lark.
Tom: Canine was a very stressful video. You were going to punch somebody, or somebody was going to punch you at one stage.
Garry: When? Where?
Tom: In Canine!
Garry: I wasn't going to punch anyone!
Tom: Brad Miller forgot to take his lens cap off or something -
Garry: No, that was -
Tom: - and he was running around the place yelling "F--- I hate you f---!"
Garry: Oh, right, well, that was, we'd set up this shoot, right, which involved getting a whole thing full of mud so that Tom could mud wrestle a grand piano. And then Brad [...], who's a friend of mine, he'd offered before, he said, "Oh, do you want me to operate the camera for you?" And he was in Sydney College of the Arts, where we'd got the camera from. And I said, "Yeah yeah, that'd be great." So he turns up, and of course I assumed he knew how to use the f---ing camera. He turned up, he didn't have a clue! He didn't know the first thing about it.
Tom: But there was another camera there.
Garry: And he started sort of going, "Oh, this isn't running," and started bashing the shit out of the camera because one of the filters was sort of half on or something.
Tom: So Canine's actually a bit of a salvage job when you look at how much footage you have on it.
Garry: They all are! I think that most music videos are salvage jobs, just sort of film as much crap as you can and -
Tom: Same with Big Car, I mean, all that footage with the costumes and stuff, I think about 30 seconds of that came out, didn't it?
Garry: Yeah, that's it. You do a month's preproduction, do a shoot one day and then you wind up with, like, well this obviously shows I'm not very good at it, because I'd only wind up with about two minutes of stuff, out of which only about 30 seconds is useful.
Tom: Mind you, having somebody dressed in a hamburger costume isn't.
Garry: But it does look good.
Tom: It does, yeah.
Garry: But I just wish we'd got more footage out of all that effort.
Tom: I think the fact that everyone was pissed out of their mind by about two in the afternoon didn't help.
Garry: Oh, I wasn't pissed out of my mind!
Tom: You were getting there.
Garry: No, no.
Tom: Just when the filming was getting going, you know, everyone, "More beer! More beer!"
Garry: That's right, you'd get this huge elaborate shoot set up and you'd go, "Now we need beer!" Or, "Now we need a hamburger!"
Tom: "We need a hamburger!" He didn't have the hamburger ready.
Garry: "Right. Somebody go get a hamburger from Charlie's Fish and Chips Cafe." And somebody went down, came back and said, "I'm sorry, they're closed." And I said, "Well, that's no good, we gotta have a hamburger from somewhere!"
Tom: And it was really cold by the time I was eating it. You know the bit where I'm eating it right? It had already been used by the dancers and all that sort of stuff already, you see, it was cold. And then there was the car, I've already talked about the car with the cucumber slices.
Garry: [Laughs] Wait on! Wait on! I heard a thing on the news the other week about somebody taking their car to a car wash, and the car had been really badly damaged and smashed up. And then I remembered what my original idea for the video for Big Car was, which was, I was going to strap Tom to the front of the car, looking in th rough the windscreen of the car, and we'd sit inside the car with the camera, and get him to lip-sync the song as we drove it through the car wash! [Laughs] It would be like, Tom going into the car wash, and then all this sort of mangled bits of bone had to come through the windscreen [I'm assuming Garry's idea is Tom gets chewed up by the car wash? Garry couldn't stop laughing through his description, hmm.- AM] It would've been interesting! [Still laughing]
Tom: Interesting, yes. [Smiling] So you could see why I'd sort of agreed to be strapped onto the back of this flatbed truck and driven around the city in that toy car -
Garry: And then it rained. And it rained again, and it rained again. It just rained the whole time we'd decided to do it.
Amey: And then you had second thoughts.
Tom: I had second thoughts, but I had first thoughts about it. But he was determined, but it kept on raining, so that was the end of that one.
Garry: Oh, dear.
Tom: But the other one came out good.
Garry: Well, the second version of Big Car, I hate the first version.
Tom: Amey saw "the mayor" walking by, "one dollar one dollar one dollar."
Garry: Oh, right.
Tom: Yes, so he's in there too. I suppose you should mention Richard.
Garry: Yeah, Richard Boulton and Simm Steel, co-produced, I suppose, Canine, with me.
Tom: Well, Simm's in the piano costume. Richard's throwing the paper plates at her.
Garry: The piano mud-wrestling scene, there was a great thing on Channel 9, was a show which was called Current Affair, which was, like, their big current affairs show. Community television was starting up here with a few sort of, like, practice broadcasts. And they had an item on Current Affair talking about community television around the world. And they specifically went on about Italian television, and how it was just a whole lot of pornography, a complete heap of crap, and how community television was just garbage. And the people at Metro Television didn't know this was the slant of the item they were doing. So when Current Affair asked for examples of all this stuff they were going to broadcast, they just gave them all sorts of stuff. And of course, Current Affair picked the most ludicrous stuff they could find, and just presented it as examples of the garbage that was going to be on community television. And so they had the mud-wrestling scene, with Tom mud-wrestling Simm and the voice-over said, "And what would the public think of this artistic effort?" [Laughs]
Tom: "Horse ends!"
Garry: Can you imagine -
Tom: "Whaaugh!"
Garry: - all these people sitting at home going, "That's disgraceful! What a waste of public money! Taxpayer's money down the drain!"
Amey: I think more likely it would be like, "What?"
Tom: Yeah. "What." That was the second take as well.
Garry: The first one wasn't as exciting, was it?
Tom: Rebuilding that piano cost you. So yeah, Garry's been doing his own stuff.
Garry: There's lots of divergent bits and pieces, little -
Tom: You haven't got a mind for marketing yourself.
Garry: No, I'm sort of focussing on one thing. I've had a whole lot of stuff from the last few years that's kind of in various stages of near completion. So I'm trying to kind of focus right now and get another kind of package together. I think it might wind up being a double cassette with two different kinds of stuff, like my cycling kind of, not ambient, but more freeform stuff, and on the other cassette would be more my kind of thump-thump sort of poppy stuff. Although not much of is as straightforward as that. That thing should be finished through in the next few months. That's why I've recently converted my bedroom into what we saw [the studio].
Amey: Would you be publishing, would you be doing it yourself?
Garry: Yeah, I'll just put out the cassette myself, and then I'll send it around the place, see if anyone's interested.
Tom: You never know.
Garry: You never know.