One of the great things about vinyl LPs is how large they are—you can
always see who’s carrying one. Unlike MP3s, they have a physical presence and,
unlike CDs, they don’t fit into a school bag. An album is conspicuous and back
in high school it was easy to see not only who was into music, but who was
listening to what.
Which is how, in 1978, I became friends with Peter Raengel. He was three
years older, but we were both at Wollongong High School and deeply into music.
At the time, the school was designated “academically selective”, which might
sound grand, but in practice meant that it had a disproportionate allotment of
teenage oddballs. I remember Peter at school, always with an album or two, and
always willing to talk records. I still remember the first cassette he made for
me—it had Spiral Scratch on one side and some of
Keith Hudson’s heavy dub on the other.
Music was hard to find in that pre-internet age. Everywhere, perhaps,
but especially in Wollongong, which was so isolated. We were stuck between the
beaches and the Illawarra escarpment and 80 kilometres from Sydney down a rail
line that wasn’t even electrified. There were two local radio stations, but
neither played anything related to the punk explosion in London and New York.
Sydney’s 2JJ only flickered through
to Wollongong in the wee hours, and there wasn’t even a community radio
station. The overseas music magazines, like NME and ZigZag, took months to arrive by
sea mail, and good luck finding the music they promoted—Wollongong didn’t have
an independent record store.
Which would probably not have surprised anyone. By the late 1970s, after a 30-year post-war boom in coal and steel, Wollongong had become so industrial that it was regularly caricatured in popular TV comedies like The Aunty Jack Show and The Norman Gunston Show as the bastion of Australia’s gormless working class.
Despite these obstacles, or perhaps because of them, Peter had an
amazing record collection. He was avid in finding records and was deeply taken
with the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith and Television. He also had a great
sense of the ridiculous, and there was always space in his collection for the
Dictators, the Ramones and the Blue Oyster Cult. Equally, he had a passion for
more elaborate music—King Crimson, Captain Beefheart, Nico, Van der Graaf
Generator, Eno and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Nothing was
off-limits.
Then the whole explosion of punk and post-punk—the Scritti Politti EPs,
Gang of Four, the first Human League single, the Pop Group, Swell Maps, Johnny
Moped, the Normal, the Slits, the Fall, the Mekons, Joy Division, the Clash,
Magazine, the Buzzcocks, PIL, Wire, Devo, Throbbing Gristle….Rippling with
ideas, it was all wonderful, exciting, thrilling stuff—and how it reverberated
across the world to Wollongong!
Sometimes these records could be found on trips to specialist shops in
Sydney; other times we got them from mail order companies that issued
catalogues. If the records had been deleted, we hunted for them in second-hand
stores. Looking back, it seems charming, but it was also cash-consuming hard
work and usually involved delayed gratification. If you ordered a record
through the post, it might take a month to be delivered, and there was always
the dread that it would arrive warped.
It’s probably because it took such commitment to acquire the records
that we became so obsessed with them. Almost every weekend Peter would come
over to listen to, and talk about, music for hour after hour. We treated the
records with reverence, cherishing the covers, liner notes, and any extras that
were included, (Peter especially loved messages inscribed into the run-off
grooves.) To hold one was to be conscious of the vast distance it had
travelled—from London, New York, Manchester or Edinburgh.
It was from this world of adolescent obsession that the Sunday Painters
emerged. Peter MacKinnon was a fellow guitar-playing Wollongong High School
student. The two Peters had been friends since childhood and played together as
a garage band called Winged Death, working up embryonic songs like “Moloch’s
Tower”, which I remember as an unstructured mess of distorted guitars. But
their first public performance came as the Rex Pistols at the school’s 1978
farewell assembly. Peter loved puns and couldn’t resist that our headmaster was
Rex Cook. Separately, Peter also occupied himself in a more electronic
collaboration with Bruce Ellis, which he called the Art Throbs.
The Peters recruited a bass player (Kerrie Irwin—eventually replaced by
Dennis Kennedy) and started to play at places like the Ironworkers’ Club,
sharing bills with such Wollongong bands as Visitor and Nik Nok Nar. Another
favourite haunt was the Coke Ovens, an abandoned commercial bakery underneath a
shop on Crown Street. Wollongong’s post-punk scene was small but always
self-reliant.
Making and releasing records was the temper of the times, and Terminal
Records (in keeping with Melbourne’s Suicide,and Brisbane’s Fatal, if also
suggestive of connective possibilities) became the catchall for what we were
doing. The records were pressed in
tiny runs at EMI Custom, and the covers were handmade—Peter glued and wrote on
each of the 250 sleeves for the second single (“Rebel Rebel”) himself. The
follow-up, Three Kinds of Escapism, was conceived as a triple
A-side (well, the Mekons had proclaimed one of their singles to be a double
A-side…), and the cover design allowed listeners to select for themselves which
song they wanted on the front. It seemed a logical progression from DIY to
CIY—Choose It Yourself.
While I didn’t play an instrument, I was endlessly enthusiastic,
contributed suggestions, and did a lot of the running around to get the first
few records out. I would mail the records to the independent stores we
knew—Impact in Canberra, Rocking Horse in Brisbane, and White Rider in Perth,
to name a few. Incredibly, they always sent back cheques. The Australian
independent record scene flourished on the honest goodwill of kindred spirits.
In 1982 I started university and became interested in other things. Peter and I gradually
drifted apart, but the band continued to perform in Wollongong, Canberra,
Sydney and Melbourne, releasing two LPs and a slew of tapes by the mid-1980s.
Eventually I moved from Wollongong and hadn’t seen Peter for many years
when, in 2008, the news came that he had died.
This is music from a place that has ceased to exist. Through the 1980s
and 1990s, industrial Wollongong declined and eventually there were more
students at the University of Wollongong than workers at the steelworks.
Transport and communications improved, the internet arrived, everyone became
more connected and everything grew more accessible. The rail line was
electrified and the Ironworkers’ Club went broke. And little by little the Illawarra’s
distinctive industrial identity faded away. Today, Wollongong can feel like
just more of Sydney’s suburban sprawl.
When I listen to this music now, more than three decades on, I hear
Peter’s response to the place he lived in and the music he was listening to.
Post-punk was nothing if not an insistent invitation—nagging, even—to
participate, but because he and his fellow Painters were in provincial
Wollongong, removed from the cliques and fads of inner-city Sydney, Peter was
free to gather everything he loved—the Velvets, King Crimson, the Pistols,
Throbbing Gristle—into that response and produce fiercely idiosyncratic yet
inclusive music.
In Peter’s songs, I hear both his curiosity and sense of fun. They’re
full of his inventiveness and seriousness of purpose. My favourite remains
“Flesh”. While loops, samples, and found sounds are now commonplace, they
weren’t in the early 1980s. Peter took the moaning that drives the song from a
pornographic film, but what makes it powerful is that he embedded it into the very
structure of the song. It is not a piece of self-conscious electronic
weirdness, with arid beeps and plops serving as mere sound effects, but an
up-and-at-‘em rock song. It’s the best evidence of the Sunday Painters’
ambition to marry the conventional and the experimental, and still a strident
challenge to move, to think, to integrate - and to act.
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