OUT OF THE GAP

Brett Myers, guitarist and main songwriter of Died Pretty, is with vocalist Ron Peno, a survivor of the band's original line-up, indeed the original Died Pretty rose from the ashes of Brett's earlier band The End (1979-83).
 
In late 1986, just before their first UK dates, I spoke to Died Pretty's Ron Peno, and then keyboard player Frank Brunetti (see issue 19) - this interview with Brett Myers, conducted during a break in their lengthy 1989 European tour ties up a few loose ends and continues the story. There have been more personnel changes since the band was last here, one new album (Lost) has been released and another is due to be recorded soon in the UK - where Died Pretty have signed to the Beggars Banquet label.
 
Thanks to Died Pretty and their manager, John Needham, we are able to include alive version of 'Stoneage Cinderella' on this issues free 7-inch. The track, which is the first available recording to feature the latest line-up, and was taped on 4th April in Stockholm.
 
It was a pleasure to talk to Brett, who remains a ravenous music fan - during the couple of weeks he was staying in London I found him lurking at almost every gig I saw. To begin, I asked him about his experiences with The End, back in Brisbane, where it all began...

BOB: Tell me about The End, I've got that tape you did for Hot...
 
BM: Yeah, it's terrible - but the single's good; it 's upbeat, bit-of an English influence, I'm not distressed by hearing it even now. That was the first serious band I was in. I used to play in bands at school - then in 1976/7 all this great music started coming out...
 
BOB: From Australian bands?
 
BM: No, I started getting into the Stooges about '76, and through that the MC5. Then all the British punk stuff started coming out and the Ramones album; I'd got into the Velvets very heavily by this time. By 1978 there were some interesting bands happening in Brisbane, like the Go-Betweens, but no one was playing what I really liked, which was New York punk bands like Suicide, Pere Ubu and the Velvets. I wanted to do something like that, so I got a band together and we used to do lots of covers - half Velvets, Nico, John Cale and anything else from the Ronettes to Wire to Television to Pere Ubu.
 
Then I gradually started writing songs too, and they slipped in between the covers.
 
BOB: The other members were friends?
 
BM: Yeah, basically, two of us lived in the same street and the two others lived about 5O yards away -we were a suburban band, from a suburb called The Gap. Robert Forster (The Go-Betweens) and Brad Shepherd (Hoodoo Gurus) come from The Gap too. It's a very small area in the suburbs of Brisbane. We played at parties and then clubs, There was this one great club called The Silver Dollar, a transvestite bar, and they had rock bands on five nights a week which was just totally unheard of in Brisbane - you were lucky if you got one band on the weekend. The Fun Things would play there all the time, The 31st  (with Ron Peno) and the Riptides...
 
BOB: That's how you knew Ron Peno?
 
BM: Yes, I got to know him by seeing The 31st  performing. Eventually we (The End) got enough money together and made a single.
 
BOB: On your own label?
 
BM: It wasn't even that. We rang up EMI, sent a cheque with the tape and they posted us back 300 white label singles - then we screen printed fold-round covers. I was actually working at the only record store in town and sold them over the counter as well: a little cottage industry. It was released in October, 1981.
 
BOB: So how did the cassette out on Hot? That was presumably after the band had split?
 
BM: It was my idea, I had a lot of outtakes and live tapes and The End was really important to me - we'd been through two different line-ups and I'd written a lot of material. It seemed a shame that it should all disappear without any sort of record, apart from the single. Eventually we moved to Sydney with Colin (Barwick) and Jonathan (Lickliter) -who were the original drummer and bass player with Died Pretty; Ron (Peno) followed us down because The 31st  broke up; whenever he felt inclined he'd jump up onstage and do a few numbers with us. But eventually the End sort of petered out. I knew Frank (Brunetti) who was a journalist, and he was the catalyst - he suggested that Ron and I should get together with him... and so we did. We had a few hiccups along the way...

BOB: What sort of hiccups?

BM: Like Ron would continually not turn up for rehearsals. First it was just Frank and I, then Frank and I and Ron with a drum machine. Then we got in Rob Younger, who was a good friend, and he played drums with
us when we rehearsed. Then Ron got a bit more serious about it and we got Colin and Jonathan back in.

BOB: So through Rob Younger you had an introduction to Citadel?

BM: Not really. John Needham (Mr. Citadel) knew Ron from the Fun House days - it was a venue where Radio Birdman used to operate, and Ron's band (before the 3Ist), the Hellcats, were regularly a Birdman support band. John didn't have a particularly high opinion of Ron 's talents, but what changed his mind was that the Screaming Tribesmen released their single 'Igloo' on Citadel and John really loved it, he was subsequently shocked to discover that Ron had written half of the song and so this drastically altered his opinion of what Ron can do musically. So he said to Ron, 'if you ever do anything else with a band, come and see me first'. So the next band he had anything to do with was us. Originally we tried to get on Hot Records; Frank and I were opposed to Citadel for our first record, because we didn't want to be on a 'Detroit ' label - at that stage Citadel had released a few records and all of them were basically Radio Birdman derivatives, or related. Citadel's different now. But it still goes on to this day last week I saw Thee Hypnotics, in London they do it fantastically - they're the best band in that genre I've seen for ages but it's like cabaret level now, endless repetition of one or two musical ideas pushed to the nth degree. I mean look at Rob (Younger), who was the person that personified that sound, obviously he doesn't carry that on, The New Christs have got a totally different sound and I think it's great. Anyway, Hot didn't work out, and John Needham seemed like an honest type of guy and could put the record out quickly. We got Rob (Younger) to produce the record because he knew the band and, basically, he was the only person we knew who was a producer and would work for nothing (laughs), until the record sold.

BOB: When was it that you started to gig?

BM: We played our first gig in mid '83. At first, we were actually called something stupid like Final Solution. Died Pretty were a little inconsistent, to say the least, when we played live. Ron was very, very nervous, he was insecure about his abilities and a lot of the time he'd get 'fortified' for stage performances - and so would the rest of the band to a certain extent. We did about 20/30 shows before we made the first single - John Needham told me that he used to take them round to the shops and people heard it and didn't believe it was us playing on it, they thought we'd got session men in, because their opinion of us was so bad, like 'this isn't them -it's a studio job; I've seen 'em, they're hopeless!' But really it was a very natural record to make, we did about 2 or 3 takes of each song; Ron had trouble with the vocal on 'Out Of The Unknown' so eventually we just sung it together and it worked out fine.

BOB: How did you feel about swapping from doing all of the singing yourself, in The End, to Died Pretty where Ron sings 90 percent?

BM: I'd never been in a band where I wasn't the singer and guitarist, and at the end of any set I be totally physically drained and covered in sweat, completely fagged out. Then after we played with Died Pretty, it was ridiculous, I was just playing guitar and finished the set and felt great. I couldn't believe the difference! Ron and I tend to compete for attention, he'll yell and roll on the floor and I'll play as loud as I can, and it was fun in that way and it makes it more interesting for the audience. Basically, I was happy for him to do it.

BOB: But you do sing the occasional song, how do you decide who'll sing what?

BM: Invariably the songs I sing are the ones where I've written the lyrics as well. Most of the songs I write, I don't write any lyrics to, and Ron isn't comfortable singing other people's lyrics, even the covers and stuff so the songs I end up singing are ones I've written lyrics for, or covers.

BOB: I noticed there are a couple of co-writers credited on your songs -there's M Atkinson (Stoneage Cinderella) and S Simpson (Springenfall); I assume that's Meera Atkinson who has an LP out on Citadel?

BM: You have been doing your homework, haven't you?! Yeah, that's right and Samantha Simpson is Ron's girlfriend actually. Whenever we go to record an album, Ron goes into a frenzy of worry. He never writes a lyric until a maximum of two weeks before we record. But he has an idea of what it's about and will constantly rework the Iyrics until it's time to record and them once it's recorded it invariably always stays exactly the same. I wrote two songs on the Meera Atkinson album ('This Is The Planet' Citadel CITLP505, that also features, amongst others, Ron Peno) - basically she's a poetess but was also interested in forming a band. We did one live performance which was fun, but she's very nervous, so instead she made the record. There's a great song called 'Green Blood', that Rob Younger wrote.

BOB: Reverting to that End tape for a moment, there are two tracks that eventually became Died Pretty songs -'Lost' and 'Just Skin'...

BM: There may be one more on the next record. The lyrics are exactly the same on 'Lost', but on 'Just Skin' they're a little bit different; it's just a different band's interpretation. That's the thing about Died Pretty when we play live: there's no huge division between old and new material, we can play the first song we ever did, 'Out Of The Unknown', or a song we wrote last week.

BOB: Do you think you're strait-jacketed by your sound?

BM: There's an incredible variety in the stuff we do; we do pretty soft ballads, really raucous loud jarring songs, three minute pop songs plus everything else in between. I guess it's the force of the band that welds it all together; it's good that we've got our own sound. There isn't much happening in Australia at the moment -Porcelain Bus are a good band and I like the Hummingbirds Mitch Easter flew out to Australia and produced their new record -and Ed Kuepper. The Go-Betweens are still great, but with some bands like that, you don't consider them 'Australian' anymore.

BOB: More an international band?

BM: Yeah.

BOB: How close do you think Died Pretty are to escaping being just an 'Australian' band?

BM: I'm not against being an 'Australian' band, I'm not breaking my neck to get out of the place, but Europe is equally important to us as Australia.

BOB: What can you tell me about the recent changes to the line-up of the band? What happened to Frank Brunetti and Mark Locke?

BM: When we came back from overseas (1987), Mark made it clear he didn't enjoy touring and wasn't having a good time. We came to a mutual decision to part company. Took us a long time to find someone and we had an album to do, 'Lost', so we asked Mark back in to do the sessions but he wasn't a fulltime member then. After the album we found Steve Clark, who fits in really well. He was in a Sydney band called The Glass who made one single ('My World/When It's Raining', Purple Records 1986). Frank was more complicated - that was a really hard time - put it this way, there were things that made it hard to work with him, it came to the stage where there would either be no band, or a band without Frank; so there was a band without Frank. So we got John Hoey, who's from Queensland.

BOB: From the show I saw at The Greyhound (May '89), it didn't sound as though John was trying to emulate Frank's approach on the keyboards?

BM: No, John is more musically adept than Frank. He's a fuller player - he uses two hands for a start! Nothing against Frank, because he did make us sound different. There was a transition period after 'Lost', we recorded a single called 'Everybody Moves' (which the band were playing as early as their first overseas tour in '86) while Frank was still in the band but with Steve on bass. The other side is 'In Love Prison' - a title that Ron regrets to this day! The next thing is a new album but we need to find a producer first.

BOB: In fact, shortly after I spoke to Brett, he left for France to produce a band there himself. Died Pretty's latest single 'Everybody Moves' is another excellent Myers/Peno composition which bodes well for the forthcoming LP - let's hope that search for a producer is a short and satisfactory one. The recent 'Lost' album is now readily available in Europe via Beggars Banquet, so you really have no excuse for missing out on one of Australia's most distinguished bands - go to it!

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