Tex Read online

  ‘HOW MUCH CHANGE HAVE YOU GOT FROM THAT TWENTY?’

  ‘Seven bucks,’ I proudly stated. What an idiot.

  ‘GIVE IT HERE.’

  ‘But . . .’

  The remaining seven dollars was gone. But hey, I had Alice, and despite the lessons John never became a very good dancer.

  SCHOOL’S OUT

  High school was St Joseph’s at Nudgee, one of those big thriving powerful Catholic schools full of rich graziers’ sons, sent there as boarders.

  Imagine that, living at school . . . it sends shivers down my spine, even today.

  At the main entrance was a statue of St Joseph, with three small holes in the middle of its back. Saint Joe was set high on a pedestal so it was difficult to do a ballistic autopsy, but the legend was that some kid in the ’50s came back to the school brandishing a gun, demanding one of the brothers come out and face justice. The brother wasn’t silly enough to do that, so before the kid was dragged away by the cops, St Joseph copped it instead.

  Whatever could have happened to that kid to make him want to do a thing like that?

  Look, before I go any further perhaps I should tell you this little story. One lunch time the usual sounds of school-ground shouts and chatter were interrupted by a boy running through the quadrangle wearing only school swimming speedos shouting at the top of his voice, ‘HE TOUCHED MY PENIS! HE TOUCHED MY PENIS!’ A Brother, let’s call him Brother Flannagen, had lured this lad into his living quarters for a ‘private photo session’. Brother Flannagen then went around to each class and explained that, yes, he had touched the boy’s penis, but was moving it ‘for photographic purposes’. I think in the porn industry they call that a ‘fluffer’.

  My school years were a stressful period for me in general. At about the age of 12, I’d had a massive growth spurt and seemingly overnight became freakishly tall and painfully skinny. A fact I was constantly reminded of by everyone from my grandmother to the football coach. I remember struggling with puberty on many levels. I had migraines and was extremely awkward. There was way too much going on in my head. Gradually my grades turned to shit.

  There was a very controlled, systematic use of violence at Nudgee. Boys were struck with this thing called a ‘gat’ in a very orderly corporal punishment kind of way. The brothers called it a strap, but we called it a ‘gat’. I don’t know why. It was an inch thick, two-inch wide, foot-long chunk of hard black plastic specifically designed for hitting young boys on the hands and buttocks. It was standard issue. Every Catholic brother had one. Some of them decorated the ‘gat’ with small stickers of religious icons, some lovingly bound theirs in leather.

  Those freaks were bad enough but nowhere near as bad as the free-form violence of the lay teachers. Where the brothers liked the ritualistic ‘six of the best’, the lay teachers included a number of psychopaths that at any moment could lose it and some kid would be grabbed by the hair and have their head beaten against the blackboard while the teacher screamed: ‘WHY CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND?!!?’

  We had this tech-drawing teacher who was notorious. We’ll call him Phil. He was probably in his mid-fifties, with a hair-trigger temper. A volcano ready to blow at any moment in the most unpredictable manner. I will never forget the day Phil was up at the blackboard, drawing something with chalk using his giant size T-square when someone dropped a pencil, moved a chair and bumped another kid’s desk, who then made some small verbal utterance.

  Without fully turning around and assessing the situation, Phil threw his giant T-square in the general direction of the disturbance. The T-square, not designed for flight, skimmed the heads of the first three rows then boomeranged upward and smashed through the large glass louvered windows, showering us all in broken glass.

  The year after, Phil had a stroke, right there in front of a class. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to see it.

  But you know what? He wasn’t the worst of them.

  I was on edge all the time. I couldn’t think straight when I was wondering what form of violence was going to happen next and whether it was going to involve me. I was having enough trouble coping with being that age as it was without the threat of being physically assaulted if I didn’t understand something – or dropped a pencil.

  Then at the age of 15 a light bulb suddenly turned on in my head. I thought, Wait a minute, this ain’t right, and the next time a teacher told me to put out my hand because they’d decided they needed to hurt me to educate me, I said: ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’

  I started questioning everything. They’d say, ‘God gave His only son Jesus to the world so He could die on the cross.’

  ‘Sir, why did Jesus have to die on the cross?’

  ‘ To free the world of sin.’

  ‘Really? So how’d that turn out?’

  Yes, I was a smartarse, but that came with my new state of mind. I could no longer take these people seriously after I’d realised, You’re not only wrong, you’re evil. From that moment I had a real sense that I was the calm, logical one in this situation. This became far more confusing and confronting to my teachers than if I’d been a wild child, screaming and throwing punches. I just looked at the teachers and said, ‘I’m not allowing you to hurt me any longer.’

  Once I wasn’t afraid anymore, the teachers lost their power over me.

  In the end the vocational officers and the teachers thought we all might be better off if I left school early. I had good results in Art and English and low scores in everything else. I was interested in music but the notion that I could be a musician or somehow work in the entertainment world was a fantasy everyone said you could never take seriously as an option.

  Back then the vocational officers at the school would look at your report card, have a quick chat and suggest a career: ‘Why not become a doctor?’ or ‘Your future is in finance . . . working the cash register at McDonald’s.’ It wasn’t an issue with a lot of these kids as when school finished they were just going back to help run their dads’ properties.

  My father didn’t expect me to follow him in any career sense, because there was no real tradition to continue on. He was a public servant working in a department at the airport.

  It wasn’t like he had a family business to pass on.

  Me? I had Art and English. That’s all I had a chance of kicking goals in. So what do they come up with for me as a career suggestion? Signwriting. They figured because it involved a paint brush and there’s letters and words involved that’s my go. After 10-and-a-bit years through the meat grinder of a Catholic boys’ school education, this was where I’d been led.

  The writing was on the wall.

  And it was misspelt and messy.

  GUITAR

  I’d been given my first guitar Christmas Day 1978.

  It was a cheap but functional acoustic. After fiddling and fumbling around with it for a month or two I decided I needed guitar lessons. I had grasped a couple of things. My brother Rob showed me how to do a two-fingered way of playing ‘Stepping Stone’ by The Monkees, and using the same technique I’d taught myself ‘Smoke on the Water’. But proper guitar lessons were the obvious next step.

  Music wasn’t part of any school curriculum. No way. This place didn’t even have a choir. So to get to lessons I had to leave school then come back. AT NIGHT. This was a huge deal. To actually go back to school for anything (other than vandalism) when you didn’t have to was crazy. You had to really want to learn an instrument to do that.

  But I took my acoustic guitar and went along for lessons. Catholic schools have a weird ominous vibe at the best of times, but at night, they are creepily silent.

  My guitar teacher was this enormous man – he must have been six foot six. A really tall, old fella that hunched over his guitar with incredibly distorted bulbous knuckles and yellow nicotine stains on the inside of his fingers. His hands were these arthritic, alarmingly grotesque-looking monster mitts. These are the hands we had to look at as he wheezed his instructions and we followed his lead.<
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  But he was grumpy and totally unenthusiastic about what he was there to do. This guy clearly didn’t like teaching music and I suspect he didn’t like hearing it either. He tried to show us stuff like ‘Yellow Submarine’ but the way he played it sounded nothing like ‘Yellow Submarine’ to me. He may have had the chords right but it was as if he’d never heard the song and had no instinct for melody whatsoever. It was ridiculous. I think I did three lessons with him and realised I had to walk away.

  ‘Why did you quit guitar lessons, Greg?’

  ‘Because I love music.’

  I kept the acoustic guitar but I rarely enjoyed it. It was a real struggle. Still is.

  My fingers hated it and I’m not an equipment kinda guy. To be a real guitar-strumming kind of fella you have to love your stuff, take that acoustic guitar out and polish it, even oil things, I think. I didn’t even like changing strings.

  A few years later I got myself an electric guitar and that’s when things came alive. A one hundred dollar Audition brand in dark mahogany with a black scratchplate. With an electric guitar all I had to do was hit one string and let it ring and it sounded good. If I added reverb and/or distortion, well fuck me!

  Chords came later. I actually don’t think I played a chord until I was about 10 years into my musical career. I mean, I was a singer after all.

  1980

  Nineteen-eighty was a big year for me.

  Not only did I quit school that year but I re-evaluated my whole personal aesthetic in regard to how I dressed and what music I listened to. For a 15-year-old those two things are extremely important and intrinsically linked.

  I had been listening to rock’n’roll records of my choosing for a few years, but being a school kid, I’d never dressed the part. Or maybe I had. I mean what did a Led Zeppelin fan wear anyway? If it was a Golden breed t-shirt, flared jeans and a pair of thongs, then I had pretty much nailed it.

  But mainly due to the access to and influence of my brother Rob’s record collection, I was slowly TURNING PUNK.

  It helped that some of the bands I’d been listening to during my early teens had been releasing pretty awful albums. Led Zep’s In Through The Out Door sounded soft and over-produced – a tired flabbier shadow of their epic former selves. And Kiss, who I’d loved just two years before, had put out what I still believe to be one of the worst records in the history of rock, Unmasked.

  Just five years earlier, before the phenomenal success of their disco hits, Kiss were a band Brisbane kids knew very little about. There was a mystique about Kiss. They seemed weird and dangerous. Bad kids had Kiss albums – kids that got into trouble a lot, kids you’d find smoking behind the tennis sheds. We would pore over the album covers exchanging often bullshit information:

  ‘See that blood coming out of Gene Simmons’ mouth? That’s just after he’d bitten the head off a white dove!’

  ‘Really? Woah!’

  ‘And he’s had a cow’s tongue transplant.’

  ‘Faarrk.’

  Kiss fans’ loyalty had been tested with the previous album Dynasty but Unmasked – typified by the disgustingly awful dribble of the single ‘Shandi’ – was so bad that it tipped me over. I was out.

  Pink Floyd still had me believing in the worth of classic rock with the magnificent torrent of bile that is The Wall but that was really the last hurrah from the old guard. Bands like Devo, the Dead Kennedys and the Ramones seemed a lot more fun.

  I went to three big rock concerts in 1980: The Ramones, AC/DC and Kiss. Even though I had already written Kiss off and moved on, I couldn’t help myself. I had to have one last look. And what I saw was four clowns with fireworks and a light show.

  Worse, the concert at Lang Park in Brisbane wasn’t full of bad kids, but LITTLE kids! Literally, mums and dads and their seven-year-old daughters. This was the last straw – it was monumentally lame.

  I also went to see AC/DC on their Back in Black tour. I didn’t see them as part of the boring old-fart brigade. They were incredible. I’d never had music physically pummel me like theirs did. It was very, very, very loud but it didn’t kill my ears, it hit me squarely in the body. Absolutely exhilarating.

  The Ramones at Festival Hall was an eye-opener. Thousands of people in full punk regalia packed the room. This was Brisbane in 1980. Where the fuck did they all come from?! I’d never before or since seen so many leather jackets in one place.

  The Ramones kicked my face in! 1–2–3–4! Bang! 1–2–3–4! Bang!

  On it went.

  My mind was made up. I would cut my hair and ask Mum to take ALL my jeans in. No more flares, no more Hawaiian shirts, no more old-fart bands.

  Shortly after this gig I spent the afternoon at my friend Ben’s place piercing my ear. Using an ice cube as a way to dull my earlobe, he put a wine cork behind it and poked a safety pin through. He was no expert and it took what seemed like hours. It was painful and messy. Blood everywhere.

  When my mother saw it she flipped and kicked me out. Twenty-four hours later she begged me to come back. Well, in truth, she insisted I come home. A compromise was met when I opted for a real ear ring instead of a safety pin.

  I had a girlfriend at the time. But two weeks after my punk transformation, it was over.

  That hurt, but there was no going back now.

  THE IDIOT

  I first heard Iggy Pop’s The Idiot when my brother played it on our family stereo.

  I’m pretty sure I didn’t like it. But it intrigued me. I’d never heard anything remotely like it before. I looked at the cover, a black-and-white photo of a weird-looking guy on a beach at night. It was all grey and blurry and so was the music. I could feel a simultaneous attraction and repulsion. What was happening to me?

  I’d felt this way once before. One night the family was watching Countdown while preparing for Sunday night dinner. Molly announced ‘and now a new group, big in England, it’s racing up the charts over there. My mates, The Sex Pistols with “Anarchy in the UK”.’

  ‘I AM AN ANTICHRRRIST.’

  ‘Good lord, turn that rubbish off!’ said my mother and my father. Click. I stood for a moment staring at the blank screen. I had to see more. There was a tiny portable television in the end room. I casually sauntered down there and closed the door behind me. I quickly turned on the portable and its tiny black-and-white screen came to life. Flicking the channels to the ABC I managed to catch the last minute of this much reviled act. A battle raged inside my 12-year-old soul. REPULSION AND ATTRACTION AT THE VERY SAME MOMENT. Yuck . . . but yes!

  The Idiot gave me that same feeling. Robert played this record quite a lot at first but then not so much. I hadn’t heard it for a few years when I played it again for myself in 1980. Dense with mystery and atmosphere, The Idiot throbs and grinds with electronic drones, rock drums and sludgy wah wah guitar. Iggy mostly sings in a strange monotone baritone but occasionally lets rip with an anguished scream.

  I didn’t own this copy of The Idiot, The Idiot owned ME. It had a deep and lasting effect and taught me many things, even how to sing. The song ‘Dum Dum Boys’ was why I called The Dum Dums, The Dum Dums.

  Oh, and just because in May of that year, this record had been on the turntable of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis when he was found hanged, doesn’t mean it’s depressing, but do be careful.

  A PLACE CALLED BAD

  Queensland in the early ’80s was a pretty silly place.

  People go on about Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the police state but if you ask me Bjelke-Petersen was a product of Queensland. Not the other way around. Queensland got what it deserved. Most people loved him. The people who didn’t like the way he ran the state made a noise but they were a small minority. From what I could sense the majority of people accepted the situation and liked things the way they were. And it wasn’t just the government and police. For me and plenty of others the general population was out to get you too.

  There was a definite conservative, and dare I say it, apartheid feel about Bris
bane in those days. It felt old and straight and regimented. Barren of colour or culture, and for most people, that was just lovely. For the ones that didn’t think it was okay – usually gays, students and Aboriginal people – it was intolerable and repressive. Not many people got publicly angry about it but the ones who did got VERY angry. There was an attitude of resistance. It was the perfect atmosphere for breeding anti-establishment revolutionaries. I mean, lefties love a struggle, and here we had the most right-wing regressive government in Australia, so really, it was perfect. Each side justified the other’s existence – the authorities could say, ‘Look at those scumbags!’ and the protesters could say, ‘Look at those fascists’. Everyone’s happy.

  In those days kids like me would always get abused walking down the street and were regularly beaten up. That was just a fact of life. If I was alone on a train late at night and a bunch of guys got on I knew I was gonna cop a beating. They were going to lay into me until we got to the next stop.

  Then start again when the train kept-a-rollin’.

  It wasn’t a skinhead thing or anything like that. It was just late 1970s, early 1980s Brisbane yobs. Guys in singlets and flared jeans and thongs. There was no tribal subculture thing to it. These guys were just cunts. And it was something you had to be aware of all the time. Cunts were everywhere.

  And this was way before I chose to express myself with an alternative look. I got beat up before I was a punk and when I was a punk. Being beaten up for being a punk was better, at least there was a reason. All you had to do was have short hair and wear gym boots and you were singled out. People in cars would yell and scream serious abuse. You didn’t have to be strutting around with a pink mohawk to get people going. All you had to be was just the tiniest bit different and you were in for it.