in this stinking rotten bin
It was gruelling work. John drove the band hard, playing long sets with new songs each night from a repertoire that stretched to well over two hundred. It was a quick education for Kim. ‘I saw a lot and I played a lot and we played new songs I’d hardly heard. I learned to make something up and play what suited the song, the beginning of the salvage operation.’ The seedy environment and nefarious characters of the Tavern were always entertaining, but the grime was starting to rub off on Kim and before too long he was looking for the fire escape.
Show me the way, outa here with its strippers and hookers and drunken old sailors
And over-dressed pimps in purple suits who could use a better tailor
And all the has beens and never were all destined to loseStill trying to hang onto their dreams by feeding them with too much booze
After a few months, Kim left Troubled Waters with a glowing reference from John, which, alongside the reputation Kim had built on stage, ensured a solid year’s well-paid work as a gun for hire on the cabaret circuit. ‘I had learned a trade and I could do it, so why not? I was like a carpenter — it was fun, but work. I was adaptable and played different styles; I was the casual relief guitarist. It was like session playing. No one ever asked me to play sessions thereafter, except years later I got $200 for playing Jews Harp on a Tex Don and Charlie record.’
The countless hours on the Tarantella Tavern stage had given Kim a super charged education in negotiating the darker laneways of the music business. It had elevated his playing, sharpened his eye for detail, and implanted a shrewd song-writing nous. And Shine, the song the Tavern produced, remains one of the finest moments of Kim’s live solo shows.
You shine like a torch
You’re so outta place
I bet you’re just a dream
In fact, I suspect your appearance here
Has got a reason for being
You’re here to shine.
•••
Punk. It discovered Kim through the New Musical Express. Still contemplating his unformed identity, Kim read an article in NME titled Are you alive to the jive of 75?, Charles Shaar Murray’s grubby portrayal of the gloomy underworld of New York’s CBGBs. Kim was electrified. ‘That was the world that I belonged in. When I read that, I knew! I was looking for somewhere to land from my spaceship and it was CBGBs. I’d made connection with Ground Control; I wasn’t floating in my tin can any more.’
Gulping in as much punk music as he could, Kim scoured Perth’s record shops for anything that sounded right. ‘The common factor was that people had exotic names — Blondie, Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine. It was just like an enchanted world. It was all black, black and white and dark. It wasn’t coloured. It was dingy. Pretty much then, my mind was made up that that was the direction I was going.’ By hitching himself to the punk wagon so early, Kim was ahead of most and at the forefront of a new force in Australian music. Isolated in Perth, he didn’t have any sense of who was doing what elsewhere in the country, but renowned musicologist Ian McFarlane recognised that Kim was one of the first Australians to ‘embrace wholeheartedly the emergent punk phenomenon of the mid-to-late 70s.’1
Kim’s friend Brian shared a copy of the Stooge’s ‘Raw Power’, telling him it was ‘the heaviest and worst thing I’ve ever heard’. Kim loved its extremity. He read fervently about the Clash and the Buzzcocks and discovered the Modern Lovers. ‘I thought this has to be punk rock. If it isn’t, I’m calling it! The first Modern Lovers album became my universe for a few weeks. Jonathan Richman’s stance on the world was so unique, but something you could relate to. If you were having trouble finding your niche in the world, Jonathon Richman was a revelation.’ And then ‘there was the call from 78 Records (Perth’s best record shop) to tell me the Ramones LP was finally in! Bringing it home and putting the needle in the groove and hearing that mix of bubble gum, buzzsaw guitar, tribal drums and Joey Ramone’s Hey Ho Let’s Go was one of the perfect moments of my life.’2
While Kim was playing cabaret and discovering punk, Dave Faulkner had been playing blues with the Beagle Boys or with Neil Fernandes in a duo called ‘Dave & I’. The rest of the cast — assembled from the remnants of Moulin Rouge, the art faculty or Kim’s high school — had yet to commit to a musical direction when Kim rushed in and announced that punk was where it was at! Dave wasn’t going to be convinced, intoning loftily that he ‘needed some evidence’. But Neil Fernandes was intrigued, and Ken Seymour (aka Dan Dare) and Mark Betts — another lost soul from Embleton High school — were attracted to the ‘do it yourself’ ethos. Ken and Neil fell into the Stooges’ sound whole heartedly, and the Ramones laid a road map that the less accomplished players felt they could follow. Perth’s inaugural punk band, the Cheap Nasties, were set in motion.
The band (Kim and Neil on guitars, Ken on bass and Mark on drums) hung out and dissected punk. They set to writing songs and honing their sound, with an early and short-lived incarnation featuring Dave Faulkner as singer. He co-wrote two songs with Kim, including the band’s theme song Cheap and Nasty. ‘Dave wrote the words that I put it to an AC/DC sounding riff. Dave hates the words, but I still play it to this day.’ Gradually, a collection of granular, snotty and poppy songs emerged, complemented by songs from the New York Dolls, Stooges, Modern Lovers, Stones and the Kinks.
A minor scene was developing around this miscreant collective and their new sound. Blues or cover bands still dominated, but pockets of the new aesthetic were springing up elsewhere in Perth. Future Scientist Tony Thewlis recalls that around this time ‘you had a few people dressed as punks who hung around the Hay Street Mall, trying to sound English and wearing leather jackets in the 40 degree heat.’ In a bedroom over in East Perth, another group of would-be punks were forming under the moniker of The Geeks (or The Hitler Youth). Featuring Ross Buncle, Rudolph V (Dave Cardwell), ‘Lloyd’ and James Baker, the Geeks never made it out of the bedroom, but created their own brand of punk and would later contest the Cheap Nasties’ title as Perth’s first punk band. The Geeks incubated one of the towering figures of Perth music in James Baker, another lifelong Kim Salmon collaborator and friend.
The Rivervale Hotel, mid 1977 saw the Cheap Nasties, the world’s most remote punk band, debut in public. They opened for the blues band The Beagle Boys who were, to the Nasties’ surprise, very supportive of this abrasive new music. Suddenly a tiny, grubby piece of Perth culture exploded open to let the light in. The punk scene had operated covertly, with its various factions operating in total ignorance of each other, but with the Nasties’ first gig the veil of secrecy was lifted. The band played in front of a huge portrait of Nana Mouskouri that Kim had painted for a ‘Nana Night’ party. As they whirled through their songs, Kim tore into the painting, slashing it with a knife and defacing it with tomato sauce before turning the sauce bottle on the punters gathered at the front of the stage. The punks in Perth were few, but most of them were there that night, and they liked what they saw.
Two such punks, Roddy Radalj and Boris Sujdovic, didn’t take long to sense the change in atmosphere. Roddy and Boris were hung up on music. They had had their heads snapped round by the Stooges and were looking for more in the same vein. Both would feature in Kim Salmon bands, with Boris in particular standing beside Kim on stage for the next forty years.
Me and my mate Roddy were just bored teenagers in Fremantle. We started getting into jazz, we dabbled with that for about a month. There used to be this jazz venue and we could get port and lemonade for 30 cents, so we thought, fuck this is pretty good! Then all of a sudden we heard punk rock … there was a fledging Perth punk scene of two bands and fifteen to twenty fans. We went to a hotel in the city on a Tuesday night and
