first encountered the Cheap Nasties at Steve’s, a blues pub in Perth. Kim recalls stepping off the stage to see ‘a pile of smashed glasses around the bottom of my mic stand having been chucked at me, some of them by Rod and his mates!’ After picking his way through the shattered beer glasses, Kim was confronted by the imposing Boris Sujdovic demanding to know why the band wasn’t playing the Stooges. No Fun, Search and Destroy and I Wanna be your Dog obviously weren’t enough! He wanted us to do more Stooges songs!’ Kim saw Boris and Rod around a lot after that, quickly becoming friends.
On that night the fifteen people in the audience were the fifteen punks and the fifteen people we stayed friends with. The Cheap Nasties sounded great! It was the usual story, everyone in the audience started playing. Out of the blue, Roddy got this saxophone and said I’m auditioning for a band, which turned out to be the Victims. He sounded like a demented Steve McKay ’cos he couldn’t play a note and they didn’t get him in. I started playing bass and Roddy soon realised guitar might be easier (Boris Sujdovic).
James Baker was another punk that Kim had seen around but not yet met. ‘I recalled seeing an ad with a photo round ’74 stuck up in 78 Records. It had two very glammy looking dudes with fancy writing saying what looked to me like “Slink City Boys” and they were looking for members. That always struck me as unusual for Perth. Thinking back, I wondered if they were “punk”.’3 James Baker, with an authentic Johnny Ramone hair-cut and signature striped tee, was also in attendance at the early shows. On meeting Kim, James recalls the affinity of a like-minded rock ‘n’ roll devotee.
James Baker is a revered figure in Perth (and Australian) music. He was an early pioneer having gone on a world sightseeing tour at age 16.
I lived in New York and London when all that music scene was happening, the Sex Pistols and all that … I met a lot of ’em, the Ramones, The Clash and the Damned, the Vibrators, Dictators, Blondie. My girlfriend at the time was the door girl at CBGBs and she introduced me to them all, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, and lots of people there. It was a very small scene then. I met DD, went to a party with Joey. So what I bought back was a few records yeah, but mainly the whole idea of ‘fuck em let’s make a rock ‘n’ roll band’ (James Baker).
James had already played in some bands in Perth in the early 70s including a Beatles cover band and the New York Dolls-ish Slink City Boys, and had nearly auditioned for the drummer’s job with The Clash after meeting Joe Strummer and Mick Jones on his rock ‘n’ roll world tour. He was, and remains, an affable and gregarious presence. He had the right look and his ‘powerful, furious drumming was legendary around Perth’.4 Add to this his firsthand, international experience with some of the legends of punk, he was someone to know. When James collided with Dave Faulkner at the Cheap Nasties gig, they immediately hit it off. In mid 1977, James left the Geeks (taking Randolph V with him) and formed a new band with Dave: The Victims. Armed with a bunch of songs James brought from The Geeks, the Victims set off at a fast pace, establishing themselves alongside the Cheap Nasties as the dominant forces in the Perth underground. But while the Cheap Nasties at that stage channelled the strong pop sensibility of British punk, the Victims produced to a barrage of atonal noise.
Kim, both friend and competitor of the band, watched them closely:
They all moved into a squalid fleapit of a house in East Perth. They cleaned out all the ‘hippy dirt’ from the previous residents and painted over all the bad art on the walls, dubbing the place ‘Victim Manor’. It took about a month for them to let the ‘Manor’ slide back to such a filthy state that none of them except for Rudolph could live there. There, they threw a party where they performed their first show and instantly became the darlings of ‘the scene’.
Over the next year, The Victims acted out a drama parallel to that of the Sex Pistols, being banned from various venues and the bass player cultivating a drug habit. They also managed to have a truly original interpretation of the punk sound. They left a couple of recordings, including the classic Television Addict. In time, due to having no regular venues to book them, The Victims found a jazz club called Hernando’s Hideaway and managed to secure a Wednesday night residency there. With a place to hang and for its new bands to play at (supporting The Victims), the ‘scene soon sucked up all kinds of dubious trash from the suburbs and grew.’5
During 1977 the Victims and Cheap Nasties dominated the landscape with inspired shows at the Governor Broome Hotel or Hernando’s, honing their unhinged craft, largely unaware of their place in the Australian music story. But elsewhere in Australia, the movement was unfolding rapidly.
In Sydney, Radio Birdman had released their ‘Burn My Eye’ EP and ‘Radios Appear’ album and, by April 1977, had largely departed the scene they’d spurned out of their Funhouse venue at the Oxford Tavern. By the end of the year, they had relocated, fatefully as it turned out, to the UK to record a follow up album and tour relentlessly. Numerous acts sprung up in their wake, including the Hellcats featuring Ron Peno, who would later have a unique and enduring role in Kim’s musical journey.
In Melbourne, the Boys Next Door had put together the elements of their explosive live show by the end of 1977, and were just around the corner from the arrival of the transformative Rowland S Howard. Gary Gray, who would go on to form the Sacred Cowboys, was starting to stir up his dark, maniacal cowboy punk sounds. 1977 Melbourne’s grim underground was supported by exceptional public radio 3RRR (soon to be joined by PBS) and developed by passionate entrepreneurs like Keith Glass and Bruce Milne, who would go on to run pivotal labels and record shops Missing Link and Au Go Go respectively. Bruce Milne and Au Go Go would soon collide with Kim Salmon, transforming both their destinies and catalysing the spread of Grunge’s early tentacles.
In Brisbane, the Saints had released their Stranded album at the start of 1977 and had a large profile on the East Coast and overseas. The acclaim they attracted early in their career did nothing to prevent unwanted attention from the notoriously leathery Brisbane police. Locked out of established venues, the Saints turned their dwelling at Petrie Terrace into their own venue, the 76 Club, but by mid-year were en route to the UK to commence their own battle with record labels and internal division.
Despite this remarkable surge of activity, very little trickled all the way over to the Australian west coast. Ross Buncle recalls:
No one in Perth had heard of Radio Birdman at that time, and we didn’t know of any other punk-style bands on the East Coast until way later. It seems incredible now, but without electronic communication networks shrinking the continent — or the world — to the easily manageable size it is today, we had no way of knowing what was going on over the Nullarbor until the first records were released, apart from actually going there. The first wave of the punk movement was over in Perth before anyone had heard of any Eastern States punk-style bands other than The Saints.6
Kim bluntly agrees with this view:
We were on the other side of the country and didn’t give a shit about Radio Birdman, the Saints, or the Boys Next Door. As far as we were concerned, we’d been doing punk as long on our own and didn’t need their input.7
Perth music was shaped by geographical and cultural forces that were quite distinct from the Eastern states, accentuated by its isolation. Thousands of kilometres and a two-hour time difference away, Perth music was largely insulated from the movement in the Eastern States and was taking its cues from sporadically available US or UK punk singles or magazine articles rather than from membership of a broader Australian punk scene. This isolation was an important factor in the evolution of Kim’s sound — a factor which former Black Flag singer and longtime fan Henry Rollins recognised.
It was listening to the Scientists decades ago that made me wonder if the sheer geographic placement of Australia had anything to do with how Kim makes music. I always had this romantic notion that albums
