Johnny, you’ve been around a lot longer than most in today’s music business. I wonder what was it like when you were growing up listening to music. Do you have any early memories from when you started getting into music?
Well, not many, I picked up my first guitar in 1975 when I was about nine years old.
My mum, bless her, started me on piano lessons when she learnt from my kindergarten teacher I could sing in tune. But as the years wore on, I became more interested in guitar.
What was music, to you, like back then? What sort of stuff did you listen to that got you interest in the guitar?
Well, there were the establishment popular songs, and shows like Countdown, the commercial AM radio stations, and the K-Tel compilations like ‘Ripper’ and ‘Whopper’, which were popular in those years, before I picked up a guitar.
But for me, it was listening more to my brother’s record collection firstly.
He had The Beatles 1967–1970 the Blue Album, and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Then in 1975, Wish You Were Here. That was when I think I became interested most, around that time when all that came out.
You would have been still a young boy in 1975.
Yeah, I mean I was eight years old when FM radio started, when Triple Zed started broadcasting.
4ZZZ was kind of like Brisbane’s Double J radio.
The idea was it would appeal to listeners of alternative music and to broadcast mainly Australian content.
Did you listen to Triple Zed a lot back when it started?
My brother did. He taped stuff off 4ZZZ. Lou Reed’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal. That was a really early one I remember.
He would tape these tunes off Triple Zed onto cassette using the little AM/FM stereo radio cassette recorder we had.
Graham Parker and the Rumour was one act that seemed to be indicative or predominantly influential in those times.
How much of an effect would that have on you, do you think, things like Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal and Graham Parker?
Oh, heaps. I mean it just soaked in to me. There was always Triple Zed stuff coming through the radio onto cassette.
In ’76 and ’77, Triple Zed was playing punk, like Radio Birdman Radios Appear and (I’m) Stranded by The Saints.
Ultravox’s album “Ultravox!”, which used synthesizers, that was another one taped around those times. It was huge.
Back when there wasn’t any Internet for people to search music, to read up about what was coming out from there.
No. Well, no. My brother bought a subscription to the New Musical Express.
Because by the time things got to ’78, there was this explosion of new wave music and reading about it in the music papers was all anyone could do either to keep up with it or find out about it and what was going on.
My brother had been buying records like Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits, and Talking Heads: 77. Meanwhile, there were songs like “2-4-6-8 Motorway” by Tom Robinson Band, and then they put out “Power in the Darkness”, which also joined my brother’s album collection once it hit the shelves at Rocking Horse Records.
Were you listening to those albums then?
Oh, a lot, but there was so much else, because Siouxsie and the Banshees “Hong Kong Garden” in 1978 was also taped off 4ZZZ, as was X-Ray Spex “Germfree Adolescents” and Australian releases like Dave Warner’s From the Suburbs.
It was about this time I started teaching myself things on guitar, and I swapped my piano lessons for guitar lessons.
I was playing in a garage band with these mates of mine. I’d learn to play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and stuff on guitar.
The next year was when I started going to high school. In 1979. The year started with “Cool for Cats” in the charts.
UK Squeeze. Cool for Cats by Squeeze that was post-punk, new wave, which was in the moment, like Lena Lovich?
Like Lena Lovich. The next thing was that The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” album joined my brother’s collection. At about the same time “Seventeen Seconds” came out. 1980.
The thing was that my brother also had “More Songs about Buildings and Food” in his record collection, and I then started my own, and went and bought Talking Heads “Fear of Music” after I’d seen in the NME that it was out.
So were you moving more towards post-punk at this point?
I think that’s so, in 1979. I went and bought the Joy Division album “Closer”. I’d seen that in the NME too.
Was that what made you form The Goths later on, do you think?
Maybe. But when I was fourteen, I went to this Roxy Music concert at Festival Hall. That was in February 1981.
I was determined to start songwriting at that stage, which I’d started sometime around then. It was just that my early attempts didn’t seem to show much promise.
That’s interesting then how long did it take before you were writing songs?
A few years later. By the time I was going to college in 1984. I was writing songs, but none of them were very good.
But by 1987, I was forming The Goths. That really kick-started it.
You say you were writing with Percy, but were you writing individually as well at this stage?
My individual songwriting started to kick-in by about 1989. My songwriting became more complex and complete.
The first song I wrote was for The Goths, “Wilderness”, in 1989. I recorded it too.
What was it do you think about your brand of songwriting that started finally to kick-in?
I think it was because I’d devised, a kind of, or a type of lyric writing based around a particular literary form, which was very much the sort of ghost story or horror novel, or fantasy.
I didn’t go into much detail around this, because I concentrated on a more freewheeling vibe to my writing, however, I picked up on a tale, from when the Shelley’s’ visited Lord Byron in Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, and their competition to write a horror story, which ultimately led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein and John Polidori writing “The Vampyre”. The episode has also since been laid on with a trowel, especially lately.
I just wanted to go back a bit to the eighties because there was so much music happening in that decade.
Yeah, well I’d thought of Punk as more a sort of celebration, or freedom, if you look at some of the really great musical acts like The Clash, and styles, like dub Reggae and Ska. I thought that refuelled the 80s scene.
But in a way, when the New Romantic era emerged, it saw a certain elitism emerge, along with all the synths and drum machines that took over, with fashion playing a role that just went with that kind of anti-establishment scene.
The era became the era of stuff, instead, and that had a massive impact. It was business, and music-making became very lucrative, formulaic and exclusive. It was fairly predictable that this was ‘the industry’ cashing in, dominating.
It went really quickly from seemingly evolved or developed independently, to ‘content deciding art’, rather than previously, the other way around, ‘art deciding content’.
What I did, and other too, was to rebel in a sense, and turn what’s now called ‘indie’, or underground, to take back control, take back the freedom, take back the scene, take back the celebration
Brit-pop did the same sort of thing, but there was lots of alternative music in that era, you had grunge in particular.
And when you entered the scene with “Wilderness” and a handful of other songs, you were flying a Post-punk flag.
Well, “Wilderness” was my first real standalone songwriting effort. It borrows from the dystopian fiction of Mary Shelley’s novel “The Last Man”. It’s akin to Kate Bush appearing with something borrowed from Emily Brontë.
In “The Last Man” specifically, there’s a passage in the novel where the protagonist fears he’s the last human left on Earth. The poem “Darkness” by Lord Byron was another place I borrowed the idea for Wilderness from.
What was it specifically that interested you about that literature, from that period?
The thing that interested me was that last-man themed works were popular in early nineteenth century romanticism.
So much so, in fact, I think, that the idea had become overused and unoriginal, and trite. It’s a bit postmodern.
“Wilderness”, and the nine other songs I wrote after that, developed each year, to a point I could write a song like “Tree” in 1993.
“Tree” was more about the time that things were coming to an end, and it came to an end in 1993. I’d grown tired. Venues were bigger and I didn’t have a front of house PA system.
You also captured all your songs for a studio recording about that time.
Well the first album, Lost Art, came out in 1991, so I spent time in 92 and 93 recording Creature Feature and Evocations. I hung out with a whole different set for quite a few years before I went travelling.
I went into the studio at Shepherd’s Bush in London, The Masbro, in 1997. At the time it was a recording studio.
There were successful bands about the place at the time, the likes of Gomez, but I never got very far there at all.
I decided I’d have to develop a longer-term plan to expand my options, so I made mp3’s of everything.
When I came back, I finally began work on producing those recordings, starting in 2013, I re-made Lost Art, Creature Feature and Evocations.
I’d only recorded my first song by myself, “Wilderness”, a couple of months before I wrote “Midnight” in ’89.
With your new album what is your focus on the recording?
“Weather Being”, as an LP, focusses much more on my singing and songwriting.
The environment in which I began my songwriting was the late eighties. But “Weather Being” reflects the changes that were going on in Brisbane and popular music at the time.
The songs on “Weather Being” are very autobiographical, very personal. “Midnight” was personal. “Put It On” was personal. “Citadel” was personal. I’ve always been on that kick really.
I see myself first and foremost as a recording artist. Songwriting is my main activity, with records being the most direct way to communicate with listeners.
At the same time, people associate you with that 80s/90s time when you played all those gigs.
People also associate that period in Brisbane with things that were going on in the place at the time.
It was a very ropy city back then, in the 80s, there was a lot of illegal prostitution and gambling, police corruption.
It was the 80s of “the moonlight state”. There were a lot that finally had to be addressed leading up to the 90s, and everything suddenly spilled out.
When I was writing songs in 1987, everything got aired, the long-term, systemic political corruption and abuse of power that resulted in politicians charged with crimes, and a Police Commissioner charged with corruption.
Special Branch was named as agent provocateurs who incited violence. Public anger boiled over. The government was defeated in the December 1989 election.
Things took a sizeable shift.
The opposition came to power for the first time in more than thirty years. It was the exact same moment I first started playing at the Bohemian.
The previous government had stood on the rapid demolition and rebuilding of Brisbane’s inner city. Demolition was the order of the day, and overnight demolitions were commonplace.
Entire streets of houses at a time would be removed for development in the mid to late 80s. Landmark heritage buildings were demolished overnight and scrapped.
Some sixty city buildings, many of them heritage, were destroyed. The government strategy appeared to be purchase the sites and demolished the buildings in the small hours. But that brought on public objection.
The new 1989 government legislated to protect the city’s heritage finally in 1992.
Plenty of artists had performed at Cloudland before its demolition in 1982.
Not many people know in 1958, Buddy Holly played three of his six Australian concerts at Cloudland.
Jerry Lee Lewis performed too at Cloudland on the 3rd of February 1958.
In that 70s/80s period there were a lot of names we are a lot more familiar with.
Split Enz, XTC, The Sports, Cold Chisel, The Stray Cats, The Saints, Australian Crawl, Echo & the Bunnymen, Midnight Oil, UB40, The Go-Betweens, The Clash. To name some.
Everything of Cloudland was demolished and scraped. Its chandeliers, its tiered seating, its domed sky lights, all of its rich decorative detail.
Brisbane was devastated, especially the ex-servicemen and women who remembered their R & R there from fighting in WW2.
The site was subsequently developed into an apartment complex. I think that’s why Brisbane has become known as “the demolition capital of Australia”. Buildings that are 100 years old can be knocked down without notice.
Other demolished buildings included Festival Hall, Trades Hall, The Canberra Hotel, Her Majesty’s Theatre, Regent’s Theatre, The Theatre Royal and the Tivoli Theatre. Even the Wharf Street Congregational Church wasn’t spared.
Yet the cultural environment in the city slowly started to expand and diversify. From 1990 on, more of a civil society began to show in everyday culture.
It wasn’t quite “Swinging Brisbane”, yet it had begun to wipe off its tarnished reputation as “the vice capital”.
In 1990, as you said, music was at a similar crossroads of diverse styles.
The re-orientation began with rebuilding civil rights for sexuality and gender identity in 1991. Youth culture in Brisbane at the time was a mix of offered values and a more inclined subculture.
There was a surge of activity re-making and reforming with Brisbane’s alternative music scene, once it had hollowed out through the 80s.
You said there were a lot of goths around the nightclubs at night when you played
The dress style of gothic nightclubs was occurring against the grain of the dominant media I think.
By writing songs about gothic literature I’d read, I was respecting long-established written history passed down from one generation to another. I’d wanted to do something interesting and inspiring, as a statement, and I still do.
Because I grew up in the late 60s and early 70s, I experienced a sense of the 1960s/70s art-student popular movement. I wasn’t ever far from Flower Power, hallucinogenics and psychedelia.
What characterised youth culture back in that era?
Youth culture in Brisbane back in the 80s was a mix. There was this dialectic between consumerism and culture.
It was signified by things like gothic dress style. It felt to me like a new cultural era.
It wasn’t so much divided, the way that the 60s counter-culture was from the establishment. We were living from mass culture by day to subculture by night.
I was an otherwise clean-cut boy playing music in a grimy club in the city, often all night long.
I was self-centred, individualistic, idealistic, satirical, choosy and irreverent. I was hyperrealist, writing songs of characters in fiction, and making the songs into records.
I created a pastiche that reinvented an atmosphere or style of old. My timing coincided with the period directly after the Bjelke-Petersen era.
What were the big changes afoot in those time?
A new wave of gender equality moves started to roll out in 1990. Anti-homosexuality laws for men that had been retained from 1895 were repealed.
I remember how the scene in Fortitude Valley and around really was thriving. People had more a spring in their step.
All the bars and clubs were pumping. And, actually, Brisbane’s never really looked back from that moment.