Julian Teakle

Lynchpin of Hobart’s music scene Julian Teakle speaks to REN? SCHAEFER about his various projects including The Frustrations, The Native Cats and The Bad Luck Charms, and his continual championing of Tassie’s fertile underground through his radio show and a recent compliation.

For many music afficionados on Australia’s mainland, the name Julian Teakle is synonymous with Hobart’s independent music scene. In the mid-1990s, Teakle formed the iconic punk rock duo The Frustrations, pre-empting a whole wave of roughshod bass-less two-pieces. Based briefly in Melbourne, the guitarist returned to his native Tasmania, putting together The Bad Luck Charms and, most recently, The Native Cats.

Teakle is a tireless promoter of all things Hobart, working as a presenter at Edge Radio and having recently started his own record label, Rough Skies, whose first release, Community*, is a compilation of current local music. As much as legendary ?90s compilations like *Mess* and *Puppet Show* documented a transient and largely underappreciated underground music scene in Tasmania, *Community is a proud signal, not just to the rest of the country, but the whole world, that something is brewing down there on the apple isle – and it’s not just Cascade Pale Ale.

It’s time to get a bit of a history lesson from a man who is as passionate about his contemporaries? music as he is about his own.

Julian, you grew up in Hobart in the 1990s, which was a particularly fertile time for Tasmanian music. What are some of your memories of that time?
I remember seeing a lot of bands do their first shows who went onto greater success: all the different versions of the Sea Scouts (who I, like every other person in Hobart, had a go at playing drums for); the original line-up of The Nation Blue; 50 Million Clowns; Legends of Motorsport; The Stickmen; and Little Ugly Girls. What I really try to keep a grasp of though are the genius bands that never really went further than playing in Hobart – Faulnis, Surgery, HMAS, Terracehead, Crunchy, Blag Salute, The Gentlemen. All of these bands represent a specific time in my past and I draw inspiration from their successes and failures.

I suppose it was at this time that I realised that the local bands, which I had been seeing from when I was 17, could be as exciting and relevant as anything in my record collection. Even more so, I guess, because I could relate to the people in local bands more.

What do you think were the factors that gave rise to this unique era?
When I first came into the Hobart scene, around 1992, it was dominated by ex-private school/inner-city types who seemed wary of me when they found out I was from such feared suburbs as Chigwell and Claremont. I find it funny in reflection that a lot of people who railed against bigotry in areas like sexism, homophobia and racism were prejudiced against people from different social backgrounds. One of the great things about music though, is that it can break down these barriers and give people, who may not have a lot in common in some ways, a chance to connect in other ways. Consequently, the music scene at the time became a real mix of misfits from different backgrounds. Of course, not everybody got on all the time. In fact, it was quite antagonistic between various people at various points, but there seemed to be also some vague, unifying purpose that drew us together to get involved in music and other art forms.

One of the big catalysts for bringing people together in the Hobart underground scene were the Hyperactive all-ages shows that started in 1992. I went to the first one in the basement of the Ship Hotel with some mates. Being from the northern suburbs, I didn’t know any people there, so it was a revelation when I saw Brent ?Sloth? Punshon playing drums with Little Ugly Girls. We went to the same northern suburbs high school as I and it made a real impact seeing this guy play in this scene I felt quite isolated from.

The Hyperactive shows happened sporadically over the next two years, giving a lot of new bands a platform to introduce themselves to young Hobart punters, who themselves were getting an education in going to see bands and hiding goonbags. The last Hyperactive show on Xmas Eve in 1994 was Mouth’s last gig. Looking back, that show was a real ?Year Zero? point for what was going to happen in Hobart in terms of the people playing and the people going to shows. A lot of people who were slightly older than me had been living on the mainland, specifically Melbourne, but had gotten shat with that experience and started to move back to Hobart. This was probably around ?94 or ?95. I was part of a younger crew, aged around 18-19, who were doing our first gigs around then. One of the first connections that was made was that Sloth taught Sean Bailey from 50 Million Clowns to play drums for a while.

Hobart, it should be noted, was pretty economically fucked at the time, which was good if you were a scummy musician on the dole. Rent was cheap in the inner-city, which allowed a few sharehouses to have dedicated practice-rooms. It was a lot easier being on the dole in those days as well.

I think there was a period during the mid-?90s where people weren’t necessarily moving to Melbourne or elsewhere in their late teens or early 20s. Instead, they were getting their cultural sustenance from what was going on in Hobart. You didn’t feel that you were missing out on anything going on over on the mainland. In fact, a lot of us were a bit dubious of the mainland music culture. We always had bands coming down here thinking they were ?blowing our minds? with their tedious, fucking rock moves and that we’d never seen anything in this town like what these idiots were trying to foist on us. Music that was really hyped, by supposedly reputable sources, just turned out to be the emperor’s new fucking cargo pants. From all this, you could sense Hobart’s musical identity emerging, but like most small scenes, things very easily stall, or fall apart, or just change when people move away and new people with different perspectives fill that void.

?I’ve seen the brilliant, bloody-minded music that’s come from this town in the past and know that even with everything working against it sometimes, great music will continue to come from this town.?

Like many other bands at the time, your band The Frustrations made the move across to Melbourne, but eventually you decided to return to Hobart. Why was that?
We had a pretty good run with releases and shows on the mainland when we were still living in Hobart and I guess that was one of the reasons we decided to make the move to Melbourne. Due to a lot of personal shit going on with band members, the wheels kind of came off in the three years we were there. In what turned out to be our last year together [2003], we seemed to be slowly getting it back together. We recorded what I feel was one of the best documents of our songwriting with [engineer] Neil Thomason and Tim Picone from Unstable Ape Records offered to put it out. Unfortunately, just after we finished mixing the album, The Frustrations? drummer Mike Harris and I had a pretty bad argument on the phone and the band ended there.

About a month or so later my grandfather died, which hit me pretty hard, so I suppose that set me on a course to be closer to my family in Hobart. I was pretty sick of my job and I had a few friends who worked in libraries, so I applied for a library technician course at Hobart TAFE. Also, Edge Radio had started in Hobart and I really wanted to be involved with that after all the stuff I’d learnt among the music scene in Melbourne.

After the demise of The Frustrations, you collaborated with music critic Everett True. How did that come about?
Actually, the stuff with Everett happened while the Frustrations were still around. David Nichols (Huon, ex-The Cannanes) asked me if I wanted to do some music with him and Everett True, who was living in Melbourne at the time. I had been a fan of True’s sometimes scathing and funny reviews and articles in Melody Maker. We met at David’s house and wrote and recorded an album over about two days, with Mia Schoen (Sleepy Township) and Everett’s partner Charlotte. The album came out eventually on a small San Francisco label, which was made even more exciting because Peter Bagge (Hate, The Bradleys) did the cover art.

The great thing about the project was coming up with songs on the spot. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but we just ploughed through it and it was very liberating. We did another batch of songs when Everett was in Melbourne on holidays in 2002, one of which appeared on a Kill Rock Stars compilation. The songs were only ever played once live, when Everett and I did a show supporting The Dirtbombs in Brighton, when I went to the UK on holidays. It got filmed by Swedish MTV, as they were doing a story on him and his magazine Careless Talk Cost Lives at the time. It was weird trying to remember these songs on a crappy acoustic guitar. We had literally only played them once or twice, in Everett’s kitchen, when this Swedish MTV crew filmed us.

Your band The Bad Luck Charms were poppier than The Frustrations. How did this musical shift occur?
We had all played in noisier and/or rockier bands and felt like doing something different. Having played music in various forms for some time, there was an inevitable development in our songwriting skills and we had a desire to push it further. Lisa Rime, Matt Moller and I wanted to combine the energy and intensity of the bands we had grown up with in Hobart with an attempt at a more melodic style. If you play music long enough you develop new tricks. Combine these with some old moves and ?ka pow!? – you have something resembling the Bad Luck Charms.

During their relatively brief existence, The Bad Luck Charms released quite a lot of material. What magic formula led you to be so prolific?
We had to have good time management with the band, because Lisa has two kids and worked parttime, and Matt and I both worked full time. So we used the time we had very constructively, practiced every week and were always working on new material. We knew the band had a finite life, because Matt had informed us early on he was planning to go overseas at some point. We didn’t want to put all this work into it and not have it documented properly. Luckily, a few people were running good, affordable home studios, like the Cross brothers and Anthony Rochester in his legendary Winter Palace studio, so we got a lot of work documented. I’d seen many other Hobart bands not get properly recorded or released, including bands I’d been in, and had no desire to have nothing to show for all this work.

The packaging of The Bad Luck Charms CDs was very distinctive. Can you tell me something about the artist who designed the covers, Simon James?
Simon James is a talented arsehole. I feel privileged and mildly disturbed to have been able to work with this precocious little fucker on our artwork. We were lucky to work with the same artist on most of our images, as I always admired and was inspired by bands that had this strong combination of visual and musical aesthetics, like Black Flag or The Smiths. Simon also does these amazing, intricate, perverse comics. God help us if he ever becomes successful and is able to realise his damaged Launceston-inspired art/music/performance dreams on a larger stage. He could easily become the Australian Daniel Clowes, and knowing the insane little prick, he probably will.

You’ve decided to resurrect The Bad Luck Charms. Will that be an ongoing thing? If so, are there plans to tour outside of Tasmania?
Matt lives in Copenhagen now, so we’re just doing a one-off show in Hobart while he’s on holidays here and launch the live album of our last show from September 2007. I’d like to continue doing The Bad Luck Charms if and when Matt comes back. I always thought we had at least one more album left in us and it would be nice to play other cities with the band.

You’re collaborating with another Hobart musician, Peter Escott, in The Native Cats. How did you hook up with him?
I saw Pete do one of his solo piano shows when he moved back from Edinburgh. We got chatting afterwards and realised we had a lot in common, musically. He played some shows with The Bad Luck Charms and then we got him to co-write and sing on one of the songs on Rant & Drift.

When The Bad Luck Charms ended, I had a week off work and was house sitting for my folks in Claremont. I brought out my cassette 4-track, some instruments and some garden tools from my folks? shed and wrote and recorded the basic tracks for about four of the songs that ended up on Always On. Matt Moller had lent Pete his bass. Pete had the intention of learning to play it, but I nicked it to write these songs. I gave Pete the songs to write lyrics to and then we started writing together eventually. We did our first gig on Australia Day, 2008.

The use of minimal instrumentation probably stems from only having four tracks to work with on the demos. Also, Pete and I don’t have cars and we can’t be arsed moving around heaps of other band members and equipment

The Native Cats is quite a different beast to your other musical projects. For starters you play bass and don’t sing, yet your musical personality is all over this band. You also use a drum machine. What inspired you to go in this direction?
Maybe laziness? I guess I just wanted to approach a musical project from a different angle, avoid being the focus of attention. Let some other poor sap take the bullet. Pete writes better lyrics than me and faster. It was amazing when Anthony Rochester and I were recording the parts for ?The Image of Annie & Ivan?, slowly building the song up over an afternoon and Pete was in the corner with his notepad and then when we were ready for him to do the vocals, he nailed it in one take. Now I can grow my beard and live out my Peter Hook fantasies.

I just wanted to do something that wasn’t ?rock music?, but also wasn’t taking the obvious ?rock dude doing electronica? path. It’s a bit of headfuck not having someone human to play against for the first time, but it’s also nice to know this drummer won’t leave me for whatever reason, unless we leave him on the bus or something.

Apart from playing in bands, you are a great supporter of local music, with a long-running radio program on Hobart’s Edge Radio, and a new record label, Rough Skies, which both focus on the local community. What keeps you so enthusiastic about Hobart’s music scene?
I’ve seen the brilliant, bloody-minded music that’s come from this town in the past and know that even with everything working against it sometimes, great music will continue to come from this town. Maybe everyone in the world won’t hear it and it’ll only be known to 50-100 people, but this music will mean more to this group of people than the entire recorded output of Coldplay or Kings of Leon ever will.

In a lot of ways the Hobart music scene is the most genuinely healthy in years, at least in support infrastructure, with the Brisbane Hotel, the Alley Cat Bar, Tommy Gun Records and Edge Radio. We can’t afford to become complacent though, because I’ve seen how easily things can fall apart here. It’s a fragile balance of the right people being in the right place at the right time. One person moving to Melbourne can seriously affect a whole bunch of things and people in the music scene here. That’s how small the scene is down here, but I think we weather things like that a little better these days.

Rough Skies? first release is a compilation of current Hobart music, entitled Community. Why did you feel it was necessary to compile these artists and how did you go about selecting them?
Primarily, it was always about great songs and how to get them to an audience who may never hear them otherwise. I asked most of the artists for specific songs, so it was more of a curatorial process than just a simple compiling process. I just wanted something strong, that I could send to the mainland and overseas and make some small difference to the way Hobart people perceive the music coming from their town, and how people outside perceive our music.

I get frustrated with people saying, ?I never knew this type of music came from Tasmania?, when you and your friends know this type of music has been coming from Hobart for decades, it just has never gotten past Federal Street. It’s satisfying to know it’s having some effect, but there’s still a long way to go.

Finally, do you think Hobart will always provide you with enough inspiration and impetus to remain there?

There’s plenty to be jaded and cynical about in Hobart, but I think it should be just as much inspiration to fight against that shit. I think the thing is that Hobart constantly surprises me when it throws up interesting stuff and that’s what keeps it vibrant for me. It pushes you to ?make your own fun? and seek cultural stimulation and inspiration beyond music, which you can channel back into the music. It comes back to that kind of teenage struggle of dealing with not being at the centre of the universe. Keep searching and connecting, or fuck off to Melbourne.

+