“The world may turn but Plugs law is static; they are as they always have been, always will be, the Goddamnedest band in the world, and if you don’t know what that means, you’re never gonna learn. Where every other rock ’n’ roll band is a dead and hollow beast, having one-upped itself to extinction, Plug Uglies continue to move, not forward, but around, a vicious pacing back and forth, a vital oscillation that rock has lost.”
Simon Killalea 1991
Their first line-up in 1986 consisted of Johnny Gorman on rhythm guitar, Roger Norris on vocals, Tina Havelock Stevens on drums, Angus Douglas (ex Tactics) on lead guitar, and Wayne Baker on bass. They were as unstable as the 1830s New York street gang they were named after, and several line-up changes occurred early on. They settled for long enough to record six songs at Kings Row Studio in 1988. Producing the EP was Johnny’s brother, Michael Hiron from the Riptides. Before the songs were finally mixed, Johnny Gorman committed suicide.
Several months after John Gorman’s death, Michael Hiron and the other members of Plug Uglies decided to release the six track EP “Knock Me Your Lobes” as a way of documenting Johnny’s incredible songwriting. In late 1989 they recorded a sad, dark track called Johnny Panic. A twelve-inch single with Johnny Panic on the A-side was released with two live songs and an early demo on the B-side. It received regular airplay on 2JJJ, just as that station was morphing from a regional into a national network.
In 1991 the band decided it was time to do an album, so they recorded a demo on a 4-track machine with only three tracks working. In some ways it was the closest they ever got to capturing the energy of their live performances. Plug Uglies released one more single, the neo-country Pounding Grace. The flip side was a piece of bitter bubblegum entitled Grubby Supper from the Johnny Panic recording session. Everyone was tired. Michael Hiron decided to quit the band in late 1991. They played a farewell gig to a sold-out crowd at the Annadale Hotel in March 1992.
In 2000 the remaining Plug Uglies members started creating a collection of their best available songs '" as much for their own enjoyment as for anyone else. In March 2001, just as they were about to master the songs onto CD, Michael Hiron died and the project was put on hold. Now, the 19 track retrospective CD will be released in October 2005, almost twenty years since the first distorted sounds from a bedroom in inner city Sydney proclaimed the birth of the Plug Uglies.
REVIEWS:
"I never had the opportunity to see The Plug Uglies play live. An institution of sorts in their home city of Sydney, The Plug Uglies were infrequent visitors (at least that I can remember) to my city of birth, Adelaide. The name, and the reputation, is however very familiar. The comparison I’d make is with The Bedridden, originally from Adelaide and subsequently residents of Melbourne. The Bedridden were however a folk based rock band (which itself became stricken with internal strife, addiction and ultimately human tragedy); The Plug Uglies are (were) rock’n’roll in tradition and flavour but they share with The Bedridden an ability to impart on the audience a desire to get up and get down.
The Plug Uglies were a band with a considerable, and enthusiastic, live following; their recorded output was more sporadic '" a couple of EPs, some singles and a bunch of demos that never made the light of day (beyond the band’s devoted local following). Their peak period (the late 1980s and early 1990s) came at both the best and worst time '" on one hand it was the time of the growth of the national Triple J youth radio network (before that station became a parody of youth culture better suited to an episode of the Young Ones) and independent music began receiving gratuitous attention. Yet on the other hand that exposure only tended to increase the noise floor. Independent pub bands looking for commercial favour were a dime a dozen, and rose and fell like dot com companies in the late 1990s (who remembers Ratcat?)
Laughing Outlaw Records has now aggregated the band’s recorded and unreleased tunes for release on CD. It’s a very welcome addition to anyone’s catalogue of Australian music. The music isn’t groundbreaking '" it’s dominated by a frantic, skiffle rock with a tinge of gypsy folk excitement '" but Roger Norris’ voice is that of someone who can actually sing (as opposed to growl, shout, moan or screech). It’s not a particularly Bar-like reference point, but it reminds me strongly of UK fop-pop '80s star Lloyd Commotion '" except where Lloyd might’ve looked longingly into the distance while pondering love lost, Norris is on the table enjoying life while it stays sunny.
The CD comprises the band’s contemporaneous releases '" “Knock Me Your Lobes” (released on Waterfront in 1989), a few singles '" plus three tracks recorded live to air on (the pre-national) JJJ in 1989 and a bunch of tunes recorded in 1991. The latter tunes were intended to for release as an album, but unfortunately never made the light of day until now (Norris’ liner notes note that while shopping around for a possible label deal: “One guy told us to get the fuck out of his office and threw our tape in the bin. He went on to become a very successful record company executive.” I think I can guess who the person in question was '" as I’m sure most people can).
Beyond that amusing throw away anecdote Norris’ liner notes are an honest and humorous narrative of the band’s origins, playing history and subsequent activities. The humour is tinged with tragedy '" original guitarist John Gorman committed suicide in the late 1980s, and guitarist/bassist Michael Hiron died during conception of the CD release project '" and behind the stories of copious drinking lies the reality of a social lifestyle that probably became more physical habit that social pasttime. That lifestyle is depicted perfectly in “Dipsomania”:
When I woke up earlier this evening
it felt like my eyes were porcelain
This feeling, its familiar strangeness,
drove me back to drink again
It’s a theme that comes up elsewhere in the band’s songs '" “Mr Parkinson” (which seems to be a portrayal of an aging alcoholic in an inner city hostel), “Lumberjack Jack” '" and at a pinch (with some poetic licence and liberal imagination) you can see alcohol just about everywhere in the band’s songs (the “The Don” is noted as being recorded and mixed “in a drunken haze” '" the background noise confirms something was affecting the band’s psyche at the time). Yet that might suggest the Plug Uglies are nothing more than a drunken rabble '" which, based on the quality of the songs on this compilation '" is a very unfair (not to mention inaccurate) inference.
The band’s not always committed to rapid pace '" “The Body is Dirt” eases off consistent with the lyrics, a collection of vivid images that suggests an acid trip going off the rails, while “Sea Shanty” is reflective, bordering on morose. John Willsteed '" bass player in the latter era Go-Betweens appears (consciously or subconsciously) to have imparted his former band’s patented brand of post-punk pop on “Johnny Panic”. “Grubby Supper” has a ballsy rock beat that suggests the smile was begin to wear thin on the band’s individual and collective face(s) in favour a grim realisation that life in music wasn’t getting any easier.
The tunes from the ‘unreleased’ album of 1991 (especially “Hey Roy” and “Lumberjack Jack”) are a rollicking ride of fun-filled intensity '" Violent Femmes on a cocktail of beer, vodka chasers and amphetamines '" and it’s hardly surprising that the pace couldn’t be sustained. The final track “Pounding Grace” is ostensibly about catching a train; it might be pissweak pseudo-intellectual interpretation on my part, but the train story may well be a simple metaphor to describe a journey from nowhere to oblivion that mirrors the band’s artistic travels.
There’s a sense of entertainment, frivolity and excitement you get from the songs on this album '" but tinged with real life tragedy and the unavoidable flipside of human and social excess. This is a snapshot of a band that might have been bigger on the commercial and popular stage; but had it been so, its legend would not have been so large. This is a very welcome release, and a fitting tribute to the band’s legacy." 4 stars - I94 Bar Website
"“Father, forgive me, for I have grinned” - Knock Me Your Lobes 12”, EP Johnny Panic 12” and Pounding Grace 7”.
It’s so long ago now I doubt I could recall how I came to know of the Plug Uglies. I picked up a copy of Knock Me Your Lobes, their debut 12” in early 1990. I was 16 years old and I lived in the Western Suburbs of Sydney. I was making the transition from flirtations with metal, Dio, Ozzy, Iron Maiden, you know the drill to The Birthday Party, Velvet Underground bootlegs and local bands like Died Pretty. And I still have no bloody idea why I even bought it.
From a Kings Cross basement to the whitewashed walls of a suburban bedroom. I thrashed the hell out of those vinyls. I was smitten. I was bitten. I scribbled the erudite lyrics on school desks, in my HSC journal, wherever I figured a wider audience could see and appreciate it. I found a song of theirs on a largely lame Hopetoun compilation, Big Hope Little Town. It didn’t even last two minutes, but at least it had a photo of the band. I was young and immature and I thought they told the Truth, they had Soul, and if I were able to express it I would have done so in a shitty poem with Lots Of Capitalisation.
See: I assumed the band would be king. It didn’t occur to my sheltered existence that I may be one of only a couple hundred others to care about Plug Uglies. Did I really jump on a train into town after school one Tuesday afternoon, after reading of the release of Pounding Grace in the street press of the day, lest they sell out before I could get a copy? Surely I didn’t? But that is how I remember it. That is how popular I let myself believe the band were. By the time they had broken up I still wasn’t old enough to get into pubs.
The music itself, taken objectively (and why would you wanna do that?), is just simple inner city rock’n’roll. Shambolic pub beats, arcane and cerebral lyrics, a lack of soloing and instrumental flourishes. Unpretentious (mostly), modest and good to dance to (if you were given to such a vice). Which I wasn’t then, because, y’know, it was serious stuff. It had gravitas and gave me kudos and hell, I am glad the music has forgiven me for being such a shallow wanker 'cause I can shuffle now, right off this mortal coil and into the smallest, squalid room in god’s own house, as Roger would have it. Take off my jacket and shake away while I find my feet.
The band's tunes nearly always carried an air of high drama, as if Norris were in an endless stream of confession or despair. He managed to channel the spirit and God help me for the use of it, poetry of his heroes, Kerouac, Burroughs and Lowry, over the top of a band still feeling the effect of a decade influenced by The Gun Club and The Boys Next Door. It was never his band but it was always his pulpit. It was street theatre for those who hated theatre. Classic couplets sprayed from the guitar rave-ups,
“And if drinking ain’t your cup of tea,
well that’s okay, I said, ‘cos Jesus ain’t my cup of gin”, or
“The dignity of work is like
A trench that’s six feet deep”.
Perhaps it was this as much as the tense, wild-eyed delivery that made Plug Uglies the band it was okay to take that little bit more seriously. I didn’t need any extra invitation, obviously.
Swansong and sole 7” release, Pounding Grace is the real jewel in this collection. Sublime slide guitar playing takes the edge off the usual jittery beat (too many amphetamines, coffee and existential energy, one imagines) and builds an almost funereal mood as Norris delivers the “carve now, carve away” refrain almost as if he has run out of breath. Or patience. Or the will to fight it. A fable that sees the agnostic meet his maker, Pounding Grace was a serious oversight on the Tales From The Australian Underground compilation of a few years back. Whereas other bands would don trench coats and be photographed smoking pensively on a foggy moor '" in effect that is how muted and earnest the song could be read '" the beauty of the band was quite the opposite. A bunch of raggedy inner city kids, they instead chose to embrace the misery of life by grabbing some ales, getting fucked up and dancing away into the night. Fuck it, they say, let’s live while we can and laugh in the face of it all. And then tomorrow the day can address me like a sinner.
And the band knew a thing or two about misery. Formed by Norris and original guitarist Johnny Gorman (after a beery afternoon playing The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Never Understand single repeatedly), it is Gorman who graces the cover of the first EP. By the time it was released he had hung himself and the band didn’t know what to do. Highlight of the set The Body Is Dirt was never intended for the Lobes EP but soon found its way into the chocolaty grooves as a sort of farewell to Gorman. His brother Michael Hiron replaced him. And In one of the universe’s more callous jokes, Hiron died just as the disc compiling all their work was to be released in 1991.
Lead track from the EP, Dipsomania (The Drinking Song) '" perhaps I came to know of the band through seeing the video on Rage at some godawful hour '" features Tina Stevens’ skittish double time drumming. There is almost a cow punk feel toward the end of the track, what with Norris whooping it up over the top of Gorman’s firebrand gunslinging guitar, recorded with maximum treble. It’s a trick repeated numerous times over the course of the two sides. There are more ‘traditional’ rockers in the set, but all feature Stevens’ relentless kick drum and Mark Lock’s overwhelming bass (he once trod the boards with Died Pretty; though soon to be replaced by John Willstead, who once tippy-toed around in The Go-Betweens, avoiding getting between Robert and Grant lest he cop an errant blow). Quite some line up, for sure.
By the time Hiron was in he had dragged with him Clem Lukey (Pineapples From The Dawn of Time) and it began the era of Plug Uglies that produced those mini-epics that the band are (rather, should, and will be) so loved for.
As for the vibe of the twelve or so officially released tunes? Imagine the Velvets during their rave-up era (around the time of Loaded, I guess) but without the ironic chirpiness of tunes such as Who Loves The Sun. And then marry that with an Exile On Main St Rolling Stones but, here’s the thing, it is not Gram Parsons sitting on the window of a French manor getting fucked up with Keith Richards. It isn't his blue-eyed harmonies at all. Instead it is Townes' Van Zandt I see over there, his bitter and jarring reflections, his self-destruct button aimed at every chorus line. Ceilings will crack and people as well, you see. Of course, they sound nothing like that, I am just trying to give you a road map you may be able to refer to. They sound, instead, like Plug Uglies. No one else did nor has since.
Tight Sydney alley ways, a Labor government, nothing to watch on television, hanging with mates, “before fringe culture was considered profitable” (Norris’ own words). A sense of trying to define what is important without letting go of the one vital ingredient that most bands miss '" you are just a fucking rock group. There’s no Brass Buttons in the Plug Uglies world, there is only an uncaring eternal eye in the sky and we flounder between future and past. Heading straight for the dirt, so let’s pour another one, and another one, and celebrate life while we have a still tenuous hold on it.
For those of you who were never there, or didn’t heed the call, Laughing Outlaw are about to release that long awaited disc compiling it all. The tragedy of Plug Uglies, for me, has always been that it felt unresolved. As if they just fell off the edge of the world somewhere around Abercrombie St, with so much promise and their best work just emerging. Those mini-epics of Johnny Panic and Pounding Grace, still fresh on the lathe, gave a hint as to where they were heading. And while this may be a highly digested version of a Plug Uglies spray which weaves in and out of my notebooks, you’d be an idiot to miss the point: Maybe the greatest band you never heard." - Faster Louder Website
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