One man’s mission to win Radio Birdman’s rightful place in history

MUSIC/ BIOGRAPHY
Radio Birdman: Retaliate First
Murray Engleheart
Allen & Unwin, $36.99

You really had to see Radio Birdman. Maybe you have some other favourite band but nah, they’re not as good. “It really was a cult,” one eyewitness recalls inside these pages bristling with the extreme prejudice of hard rock devotion. “If you were a fan of Birdman, you pretty well weren’t allowed to like almost anything else.”

Full disclosure: I never saw Radio Birdman. Not on their original incendiary streak of 1975 to 1978 anyway. Not many did, in the grand scheme of things. The task of canonising this spiky frontline militia of Sydney’s underground revolution falls to a select few. Our prime minister swears by them. So does veteran rock writer Murray Engleheart.

It’s chiefly the author’s passion, throbbing like a pulsing jaw beneath the dramatic weight of his prose, that suspends disbelief on this latest death-or-glory mission to secure the Birdman cult its rightful place in history.

“Armed with microphone stands and equally steely self-belief, they steered towards the oncoming traffic in the local music industry,” he writes from inside a shower of blood and glass at one gig-turned-riot, “horrifying record companies, enraging bouncers, bewildering audiences, with desperate publicans reaching for the power kill switch.”

The portentous opening chapters read like a rock’n’roll Avengers Assemble. Detroit-raised guitarist, instigator and scary overachiever Deniz Tek is Captain America, arriving to slap us from our Billy Thorpe torpor with records by the Stooges, the MC5 and Alice Cooper hitherto unknown in our faded-denim backwater.

South Sydney misfit Rob Younger is blessed with similar auditory superpowers, plucking the New York Dolls and Blue Oyster Cult from way beyond the despised mainstream. “Rob would boo and express his displeasure” at local acts, according to bassist and graphic artist Warwick Gilbert. Arriving from Perth, jazz drummer Ron Keeley fastens his metaphorical cape for battle. Pip Hoyle is a classically trained pianist Tek befriends at UNSW medical school. Canadian guitarist Chris Masuak completes the combustible collective. Cue slow-motion turn to camera.

Just don’t expect them to smile. Despite the bonds of deadly serious musicianship, hair-raising live intensity and adherence to the sacred canon of proto-punk acts abovenamed (add the Doors, the Velvets, late ’60s Stones …), “few acts on the planet,” we learn, “ever held a torch of internal animosity quite as high”.

It’s a central irony of the fable because, even more than the “flamethrowing spirit” of the band itself, this is essentially a story of community. Many of the enraptured oral historians in Engleheart’s meticulously researched account revolve around the band’s “Fun House” on Sydney’s Oxford Street: a clubhouse/ venue that defined and guarded their elite outsider ethos.

Independence was sacrosanct: the seed of a nascent alternative to an industry dominated by Countdown, Mushroom and other lame stuff. Citadel, Phantom and Redeye Records; the Sunnyboys and the Died Pretty and Birdman spin-offs (the Hitmen, New Race, the New Christs, the Screaming Tribesmen …) cram a decades-long family tree as the author’s net strains to honour the legions who fought for the cause.

Many battles are lost. But by the time alternative rock prince Daniel Johns of Silverchair inducts the splintered and festering Radios into the mainstream-corporate hell of ARIA’s Hall of Fame in 2007, the war is clearly won. Even if the paramilitary theme that always attends this swashbuckling story remains … fraught.

Radio Birdman’s briefly adopted uniform of dark button-down shirts with red-and-black shoulder-patch logos was self-evidently a naïve mistake. But added to a penchant for German WWII lexicon and imagery, it conjured a dark aura that brought violence to the Fun House and lingering misconceptions to the legend.

Once more for the record, there are no neo-Nazis lurking in these ranks. In frank and fulsome interviews with the author, each band member evinces plenty of emotional intelligence and clarity perhaps, forgivably, lacking in younger days — as well as more humour than the audio-visual record might suggest.

“I could have been a stronger advocate for unity and cohesion,” Tek reflects with comical understatement on the autocratic album sessions in Wales that effectively ended the band. “I just wanted to get the job done — I was focused on the music and nothing else.”

If you were there, this “self-immolation as business model” strategy will probably make a perfectly righteous kind of sense. If you weren’t, well, don’t expect anyone to explain it to you. One of the things that makes the Radios story so remarkable is their indifference, at best, to the spirit of inclusion that helped rock’n’roll conquer the world.

On that score, Engleheart’s final words, adapted from notoriously uncompromising rock outsider Lou Reed, are unrepentant. “Their gig beats your entire festival.”

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