dave laing

You may know Melbourne's Dave Laing from many places. He’s been a record label head for decades, with his own Grown Up Wrong and Dog Meat labels, home to such influential bands as Powder Monkeys, Bored! and Hoss, and more recently Lipstick Killers, Screaming Tribesmen and Flamin’ Groovies. 

He’s also worked with the likes of  The Pretty Things, The Imperial Dogs, Dead Moon, The Cheater Slicks, Billy Childish & Thee Headcoats, The Devil Dogs, Teengenerate, The Real Kids, the Screamin’ Mee-Mees, The Barracudas, the Jeff Dahl Group, The New Bomb Turks and Chris D.

What you may not know is that he's a power pop freak - one who doesn't merely trudge through the record crates, either. These days he's a music publicist and (again) runs the two labels that he started way back in the 1980s. He's also an occasional music writer for Ugly Things and elsewhere.

Last year UK label Cherry Red released one of those astonishing box sets that they excel at. “'I Wanna Be A Teen Again! - American Power Pop, 1980-1989”. It was curated by the very same Dave Laing, who also wrote the liner notes and publicised it.

Ahead of the premiere Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney screenings of “20 YEARS IN THE CRYPT: EMBEDDED ON TOUR WITH DEAD MOON” I ask:

"WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T EVERYBODY WHO WAS PART OF SYDNEY'S '80S GARAGE SCENE GO HOG-WILD FOR DEAD MOON, THE BAND LED THROUGHOUT THE '90S BY FRED COLE OF THE LOLLIPOP SHOPPE???"

That's the question. It's been on my mind for 30+ years.. 

Does anyone have an answer?

More than any city in the world I reckon, Sydney's music scene from the end of the '70s through a good chunk of the '80s, was heavily into '60s American punk/garage rock, and the “Pebbles” series of compilations in particular.

The likes of the Lime Spiders and the Wet Taxis (and numerous others) tapped that material to the point that Kim Salmon in the Scientists' Sydney days used to complain about all the “Pebbles covers bands”. 

Maybe it's because by the end of the '80s that scene in Sydney was kinda dead. I dunno. But when Dead Moon appeared with their first album in 1989, they should have been a Sydney garage-rocker's wet dream.

_{Simon Juliff flanked by Jimm Sfeftos (left) and Joel Silbersher with Greg Bainbridge on drums.} 

Simon Juliff might be the best Australian songwriter you’ve never heard of.

Not that he’d ever be so egotistical as to suggest that. Or that it’d be easy to find evidence of Juliff’s songwriting. Indeed Juliff’s career is as sporadic as it is enigmatically impressive.

Juliff formed his first band, The Evil Dead, in his teenage years in hometown Melbourne, in the shadows of more prolific and now legendary Melbourne bands such as GOD, Powder Monkeys and Hoss, vehicles for Juliff’s high school friends Tim Hemensley and Joel Silbersher. Some years later Juliff joined with his younger brother Felix, bass player Dave Bryan and future Dan Sultan collaborator Scott Wilson in the three-guitar, country ’n’ rock band The Roys. 

Their ranks included Sultan for a while on drums and they released two criminally underappreciated records on Bruce Milne’s Infidelity Recordsbefore fading from view.

It would be more than a decade before Juliff’s songwriting rose to the surface again, this time via long-time fan and Dog Meat Records boss, Dave Laing. Indeed Laing was so impressed with Juliff’s unrecorded material that he decided to release his debut solo album, "Stars", on the rejuvenated Dog Meat label.

Patrick Emeryspoke to Juliff about his origins as a musician and recent re-emergence.

The long-awaited anthology of material by Australia’s legendary Lipstick Killers finally arrives on CD and LP on Grown Up Wrong! Records on June 25.

“Strange Flash – Studio & Live ‘78-‘81” as a double-LP will include the original 1979 “Hindu Gods of Love”/”Shakedown USA” single, the posthumous “Sockman/Pensioner Pie’ 45 plus additional studio masters from the same ’78 session; an unreleased album-length 1980 demo session recorded by Australian guitar god Lobby Loyde; and the near-complete LA show that comprised the original live album “Mesmeriser”.

The “Mesmeriser” tracks will add additional tunes and subtract a couple that one band member wasn’t happy with.The set features liner notes by Ugly Things contributor and Grown Up Wrong! Records’ Dave Laing, some killer pix and flyers and repro’s of the stunning Lipstick Killers posters designed by highly collectable Sydney poster artist John Foy, and a piece by Byron Coley.

The LPs will be a run of 500 copies on orange vinyl an 500 on black.

The double-CD includes adds a near complete live show recorded in Adelaide in 1978, some of which was released on a handmade cassette by members of the band in the mid-‘80s, and a couple of the tracks of which appeared on a very limited run 45 also released by the band in later years. But a good chunk of it has never been heard - and it is wild.

As ethereal and otherworldly as when it came out on CD in 1995, “Tendrils” continues to defy easy categorisation on LP.

It was the first album for the pairing of Joel Silbersher (Hoss, GOD et al) and Charlie Owen (New Christs, Beasts of Bourbon and, again, many more) and married seemingly disparate guitar approaches to restrained vocals against an background of minimal percussion.

By then, Joel and Charlie were two of the so-called underground’s best-known players. Owen was - and still is - a consummate guitar player’s player and had had national success with the Beasts; Silbersher was the diminutive and cocky ex-GOD rocker whose current band, Hoss, seemed poised for much bigger things. He should be internationally lauded to thsi day. Putting them together in a studio was always going to produce something interesting.

Out now on Dave Laing's always great Grown Up Wrong label from Australia: archival albums from bona fide '70s Tasmanian popstars and Beatles freaks Beathoven and long-lost 1979-'80 Sydney powerpop outfit The Breakers.

Beathoven’s “Beathoven at Pascoe Vale High” and The Breakers’ “Night After Night” are out on vinyl now with CD editions due in May. The CDs include numerous extra tracks, and all can be ordered here.