Primal Scream is back in Australia for the first time in six years this month, on the back of recent albums "More Light" (2013) and "Chaosmosis" (2016) but focussing on their 30-year back catalogue.

Co-founding member and guitarist ANDREW INNES spoke to the I-94 Bar's EARL O'NEILL this week and expounded on a handful of topics that are close to his heart...

My First Records

My mum used to come home with a big pile of seven-inch singles that were a bit beaten up. I think they were ex-jukebox; all sorts of things, Beatles and Stones but strange country and western records, comedy records...so I was exposed to wide spectrum of music. Apparently before I could read I could tell which song it was by the colour of the label and the shape of the words.

FLASHBACK: September 21, 2004 - Short-lived but incredibly influential, Sydney's Sunnyboys were one of the first 1980s Australian bands to bridge the commercial gap between inner-city hipness and a wider audience. Coalescing from the ranks of several inner-Sydney bands whose brief existences spanned the turn of the decade (more on that later), they bobbed their heads up on an exploding music scene with a debut EP on the Phantom label. 

Mixing gritty '60s-influenced rock songs with the "wise beyond his years" melancholic lyricism and exuberant pop hooks of songwriter-guitarist Jeremy Oxley, they almost immediately signed to a major label and hit national status with their self-titled debut album.

_{Down to Kill: Onetime Filth bassist Martin Joyce with future Lipstick Killers Peter Tillman. Mark Taylor and Dave Taylor.}

FLASHBACK: May 29, 2001 - Sydney music fans are in for a special treat. On May 11, one of the best bands of the late 1970s and early '80s Sydney "Detroit" scene, the Lipstick Killers, re-form for one show only. 

The occasion is a benefit for their original drummer David Taylor, who has been tragically injured in a car accident.

Taylor was also a member of the seminal punk group that spawned the Lipstick Killers, the Psychsurgeons, who were as raw and confrontational as bands come. As regular support to Radio Birdman at the latter's Oxford Funhouse (along with the Hellcats, fronted by Died Pretty singer Ron Peno), they grabbed what shows they could in a still resistant Sydney scene. That was until their singer Paul Gearside was set upon - mid gig - by a pack of Hell's Angels. He departed and the band picked up Peter Tillman, frontman for the even more extreme Filth. A change of band name later and the Lipstick Killers were born.

FLASHBACK: First posted October 16, 1999: It's been quite an odyssey for Wayne Kramer. From 1964 to 1972, he was point man and Fender guitar terrorist for the legendary MC5, the Ur-American garage band turned psychedelic radicals whose high-energy jams prefigured much of the next 30 years of rock and roll dementia.

Kramer sat out a couple of years at the end of the 70s in Federal penitentiary on a drug charge, but resumed his career when he landed back on the street in 1979, playing in Gang War with Johnny Thunders, recording with Was (Not Was) and others.

Then in 1995, when a lot of people had written him off, he roared back into action with an album on Epitaph entitled "The Hard Stuff". Since then there have been three more Epitaph albums and a plethora of side projects.

Brother Wayne joined me at the bar on three different occasions, twice from his home in Hollywood, California and once from the L.A. studio where he's currently producing an album for Damned founder member and former Iggy Pop sideman Brian James.

_{Ed Kuepper. Photo by Richard Sharman of Blackshadow Photography.} 

Posted October 29, 2008:  If the thought of re-convening the classic mid-'70s Saints line-up presents more problems than formulating a lasting Middle Eastern peace plan, the organisers of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival series must be among international diplomacy's canniest operators.

The improbable becomes reality in January 2009 when ATP establishes an Australian beachhead, with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds curating and the Saints a feature act.

Yes, you read right. The Saints. Not any old Saints or even The Aints. The Kuepper-Bailey Saints, fercrissake, will be part of a varied and eclectic line-up over three locations and four days.

Ex-Ramones and Voidoids drummer, author and sc-fi fan Marky Ramone starts his first Australian tour in almost a decade this week. Marky Ramone's Blitzkrieg reprises the back catalogue of the Ramones with Marky driving the backbeat behind a crew of hand-picked punk rock players.

Pete Howlett of Adelaide band The Pro-Tools was given the chance to pitch him 10 questions. Here's the result.