in, under instructions to sing and not play guitar, and The Exterminators duly morphed into the Invaders. Kim was instantly enamoured of the Croatian guitar and bass player. ‘Kim seemed to like Roddy and I, maybe some romantic notion that we were like Ron and Scott Ashton or something. We were maybe a bit tougher looking or stood out. I don’t think it was because he was super impressed with the Exterminators first gig!’ (Boris Sujdovic). A review at the time noted, ‘It is hoped that the musically adept Salmon will be the cohesive factor the band appears to need. This band can only go up … They were a bunch of bumbling beginners and were very un-together. Kim joined … and they tightened up considerably … but were still a fair way from perfection.’1 The band forged a Stooges and New York Dolls sound, operating in the general musical location that Kim was looking for but without the chops to pull it off. The highlight of their act was an ode to Perth called Asshole of the Universe. The band were starting to sound promising, but the drummer John was always at loggerheads with Roddy and Boris, and by May 1978, he was ditched from the group.
Meanwhile, the Victims had petered out through a combination of boredom and internal unease. ‘In April 1978 they released a single, Television Addict/I’m Flipped Out Over You. This took most of Australia by surprise and generated some rave reviews. Even some of the British music papers were able to bring themselves to give it a favourable comment. 1000 copies were pressed, and it rapidly sold out. The group broke up the following month …’2 With James Baker now available, Kim swooped and asked him to join the Invaders on drums. James accepted, but knowing Kim’s guitar playing was going to waste, agreed to join on the condition that Kim play guitar. ‘So, we went around to Victim Manor, a squalid hippy joint that was basically a drop-in place for all of the vagrants in that scene. It was a rehearsal place and we had all our gear there.’
With James at the drums, things coalesced immediately. He offered some rough lyrics about a girl and mumbled an even rougher tune to match the words. Bouncing back and forth with James, Kim spun a melody around the words and assembled a couple of chords. ‘The combination of that and the punk racket of ragged two note bar chords and floor-tom-heavy drumbeats were like a collision between the Stooges and Herman’s Hermits.’3 With Kim back on guitar, the band now had a twin guitar attack. Whereas the Cheap Nasties had played with a counter point style — Neil Fernandes playing power chords and Kim stabbing noises over the top — Roddy and Kim played dual power chords, with Kim embellishing with arpeggios and creating a rich, jangly and distorted sound. ‘It struck me as something new I hadn’t heard, and we had a successful rehearsal. Straight away I heard a sound.’
Afterwards, with their instruments idle, the band hung out on the porch of Victim Manor, aware that something significant had occurred in the rehearsal room. This new sound seemed like a new band, not just a new version of the Invaders. As the Perth day dwindled, the four of them started throwing around potential band names. Kim was drawn towards a moniker that captured the sound he wanted: ‘primitive and hardly any chords and so moronic that it’s high art … so primitive that it turns into jazz, things getting thrashed into the ground.’ Against that lofty mission statement, James said ‘What about the Scientists? And that was it. It was never going to be anything else, and I was so happy that we’d found this name, we’ve got this new sound and the name just says it all, supremely ironic but sounds cool. That was it, the Scientists.’
•••
The Scientists set about forming their set list. James had a head full of songs that captured the freewheeling spirit of the Perth punk scene in contrast to the moodier atmosphere of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. ‘I don’t know how I came up with the lyrics, they’re supposed to be minimalist and rock and roll. And fun. They’re tongue in cheek’ (James Baker).
The song writing method of the new band was curious. James would invoke some lyrics and try to sing the tune to Kim, who then had to interpret the sound and create a fully realised song out of it. James is no singer, so Kim was really working off phrasing or collections of notes rather than a formed tune.
James would have these lyrics and he’d hand them to Kim and he’d say, ‘it kind of goes like this’. But James just can’t play an instrument so he’d kind of sing a drum beat in his head as the melody, it might have been an accident. He’d be humming a drum beat and Kim would think that was the melody. They kind of fumbled their way through it (Boris Sujdovic).
Bantering back and forth with James, Kim would keep refining the chords or melody or sound until it clicked with some version of what James heard in his head. ‘I couldn’t read his mind, but he thought I could because he didn’t know the difference! He knew it sounded good and then thought he must have written it! I always thought that was hilarious, because as soon as it was good he was like oh yeah, that’s it.’ James concurs, ‘That’s how we wrote songs, I’d give him the lyrics and a basic idea of how the song goes and he’d write the music. I’d give him my bastardised idea of a melody, and together we shaped it into a song.’ The end results sounded like a mash up of the Sex Pistols and New York Dolls, filtered through the Troggs — power pop punk noise.
However, there were some constraints. James’ lyrical themes had run their course, and by the time he arrived in the Scientists he’d moved from expressing social commentary to just expressing what he liked. Kim thought, ‘Great! We’re going to inherit this great font of lyrics, and this great cool guy with his stripy shirt and his Brian Jones haircut, he knows what he wants to do … brilliant, particularly the stuff in the Victims was great; comical kind of outrageous lyrics really. What I found was by the time he was in the Scientists it was a finite thing, it was sort of just the “girl” lyrics left, whereas before there was television and girls.’ This was not lost on a gig reviewer who witnessed the band in Adelaide 1979: ‘The lyrical content of some of the originals became somewhat monotonous after a while. The boy/girl line is fine, but the Scientists give it a hell of a beating.’4
However, Kim was impressed with his new band mate:
‘I think about James Baker, as far as I can tell everything he did was a post-modern pastiche of the past done with strong minimalist and pop sensibility. But that’s what I like and I’m projecting on to him. To him it’s just good rock and roll and he’d hate that description. He’s done it in a completely uncontrived way.’ James’ presence in the band was critical. He brought an unpretentious, simple style to the band that allowed Kim’s vision to take seed.
And he was the first in a line of drummers with whom Kim would collaborate to capture his sound.
Boris and Roddy were like big, Croatian punk rock kids in a candy store. From a standing start they were in the centre of the scene and revelled in every moment. ‘By this stage James was kind of a guru guy. He was a punk by 1972 and into the New York Dolls, driving around Perth all dressed up. Kim used to hang out, and he had his own thing going too … For Roddy and I it was great, all of a sudden we were with the rock stars. It was all excitement!’ (Boris Sujdovic). The Scientists rehearsed in earnest and soon hit the Perth scene with a splash, horrifying and impressing audiences in equal measure.
While Neil and Robbie’s new band the Manikins enjoyed a short while as the darlings of the scene, the Scientists were still out. Too loud, too arrogant, too British punk, too dandy. They just couldn’t engender the easy embrace of the scant Perth music establishments, so the Scientists took a leaf out of the Victims book (and the Saints and Birdman) by building up their own scene at the Governor Broome Hotel. With James providing the entrepreneurial spirit, they talked the Gov Broome’s owner into letting them play there for a small door charge. On the back of the Scientists blistering live shows, word got out and soon ‘we were reining supreme in that particular scene’. As the most authentic punk band around, their popularity grew, catering for the true believers. ‘If we played at a place that held 150 people, then 150 would be there … not super popular, but as popular as you could get in Perth’ (Boris Sujdovic). Tony Thewlis recalls watching Kim at these shows, thrashing out Teenage Dreamer at some Perth pub and
