Is Nothing Sacred
A mate and member of Melbourne's underground music scene moves on
(Please excuse the indulgence here, this is more Et Al than Cricket. I’m feeling a bit sad and nostalgic this weekend)
There were few more menacing bands getting around Melbourne in the early 1980s than the Sacred Cowboys.
Garry Gray leered and strutted malevolently at the front of the stage. Eyes hidden behind dark glasses, cigarette dangling from a lip curled in a constant sneer. Leaning into the audience. The rest of the band lurking behind like a street gang, ready to climb in if things kicked off. Johnny drumming furiously, Terry’s tongue sticking out and collar up as he slashed at the guitar, Mark and Andrew wrangling the slithering bass guitars (plural).
They were one of the few bands of the time where people hung back from the stage out of a sense of caution. Only the foolhardy would want to be front and centre, but there were a few around who’d try it on with Gray.
Once the cigarette was ground into the face of a punter who pushed it too far. Another time Gray disappeared into the wings at a Sydney show. The angry, metallic whine of a motor inserted itself into the music as he re-emerged in a shower of sparks, a chainsaw held high. Terrified people screamed and fell back in alarm as he leapt from the stage and chased an even more terrified man through the crowd to the back of the room.
Those who saw it said it was like a scene from the Texas Chainsaw Masacre.
Gray apparently explained the situation before continuing the show. Said it had been a long time coming for that particular “fan” and reassured everybody that the chain was removed from the saw. Nobody was going to lose a limb, but some had presumably lost control of bodily functions.
I think I was disappointed to hear his explanation.
The threat of violence was not contained to the “performance” alone. One night Gray got distracted on the hunt for something or other in the back streets of town and arrived late to a gig. One of the band members was so annoyed he greeted the singer with a fist in the face. Fair to say it was a tense gig that night.
The other most memorable performance by the Cowboys followed the night Nick Cave returned to town with his band Man or Myth on New Year’s eve 1983 and played the Seaview Ballroom. When that show finished we spilled out into an abandoned building in the back streets. It might have been an old carpark. Fires burned in 44 gallon drums and the seediest people you’d ever seen (my people) gathered on the first level to watch the Cowboys at their malevolent best. It was one of those nights you start to think you have invented, but apparently it happened.
The only comparable band I’d seen back then was (up until their dissolution) the Birthday Party. Both shared a lurching, grinding rhythm section and that buzzsaw guitar that threatened to shred your eardrums.
Another of the more memorable Cowboys gigs was in the Student Union building at Melbourne University. Hunters and Collectors were the headline act and provided the PA system which they owned and cherished. Somebody in the Cowboys, I think it was Ian Forrest, had kicked at a foldback monitor over some issue and a violent scuffle kicked off on stage between he and the Hunter’s roadies (from membory it was a guy called Stig who shared a house with my best friend at the time Duncan).
The Cowboys played past their allotted time and insisted on playing more. The impatient Hunters’ crew pulled the plug on their sound and the opening bars of their song, Talking to a Stranger, came over the PA. Some of the band walked off but Gray stood defiantly on the stage edge and launched into an angry and apt version of ‘Is Nothing Sacred’ that he shouted over the top of the Hunters signature tune of the time.
He made his point.
We’d catch them everytime they played from 1982 on. Initially they were covering the dirtiest of tunes from other catalogues: Alex Chilton’s Bangkok, Suicide’s Rocket USA, Doors’ 5 to 1, Modern Lovers’ Pablo Picasso, Dylan’s Route 66, Creedence’s Run Through the Jungle. As noted, they had two bass guitarists, so every track had a subterranean rumbled. They started adding their own tracks too; Nailed to the Cross, Limbo Jig, Twisted Nerve, Strip Cell, Pay for it in the Next Life …
The recorded songs rarely matched the intensity of the live shows but a CD, Sacred Cowboys 1982-1985, included a live show from the Seaview Ballroom which gives some sense of it.
This footage of them playing Strip Cell (I think its from the Seaview Ballroom show) captures them just as I remember.
Molly Meldrum called them “the worse group I’ve seen in the past five years” and while there were times it felt like the chaos would get the better of them, we loved that and it made it even better when it all come together.
They challenged Meldrum to give them a run on Countdown and he agreed. It was not the best of their songs and tbh it all came across a little lame, but it was the past and we were young.
Barely 19, I was thrilled by their darkness at a time when synth pop was big and pretty excited when I connected with another Bendigo boy, Peter Chellew, and discovered that he shared a house in Drummond St with his girlfriend (Gail Gash) and one of the members of the band.
Andrew Picouleau played the four string bass with them at the time alongside former Models member, Mark Ferrie, who played six string. Johnny Crash, another former member of the Models, rounded out the rhythm section on drums. I reckon he didn’t have any cymbals on his kit and restricted his drumming to hitting the skins and programming an electronic drum, but I could be wrong. Johnny was an intense and unsettling character, he seemed always on edge and word once filtered back from one of their ill-fated tours of Sydney that he had thrown a spanner into the works by hocking his drum kit. He was later replaced by a series of drummers including Stephan Fidock of The Reels and even Paul Hester of Crowded House.
Johnny, Stephan and Paul are all no longer with us. Paul was such a sweet man and his death rocked us all, he was always hooning around St Kilda in his old car, waving and smiling and never letting on to casual acquaintances how hard it all was for him. I didn’t know Stephan all that well, but I had loved The Reels.
They say you should never meet your heroes and that’s almost true here. Andrew, somewhat disappointingly, turned out to be a sweetheart. A gentle man who occupied the front room in the row of double story terraces with his girlfriend Margaret.
“In reality we’re all just a bunch of whimps,” he told me one day when I mentioned the bands confrontational image. It was kind of disappointing to hear, but I didn’t let it deconstruct my fantasy version of the outfit.
I spent a lot of time in that house in Drummond St, listening to music on a portable cassette player and watching television well into the early morning. The only food we ever prepared were nachos with cheese. We drank instant coffee and cheap tea, sinking lower into the second hand furniture as the night went on. It became the centre of my life. Chellew, was known to us as Jerklew (he was later a founding member of the King Jerklews) and he had an old Volkswagen Bug that we’d pile into to attend gigs. One night outside the Jump Club on Smith St Collingwood the door flew open and the front seat passenger went rolling out onto the road as he pulled a U turn.
I liked Andrew. We were all young, but I was the youngest, sometimes we went on waterskiing adventures, sometimes we had small parties, mostly we went to gigs and lay around. I was at uni and had a job working part time in a pub, I think me and Margaret were the only employed people in our friendship group. We were often hungry. And always dishevelled.
Given this is supposed to be cricket related let me tell you about the matches we’d play against the kids from the Commission flats over the back fence of the Drummond St house. Most of my mates were enthusiastic but awful players, Andrew included.
On one day he resolved to become a fast bowler and so came in off a long run determined to fling it down. Alas he tripped over his feet and it was him not the ball that travelled down the concrete ‘pitch’ at pace. We wet ourselves laughing, he writhed in pain from what turned out to be a broken arm having broken his arm. The Cowboys were forced to take a spell while he recovered. Another afternoon we played a game on an ground near the Junction Oval with Melbourne bands up against a Sydney crew who were in town. There were members of The Models, the Cowboys, possibly X, and a few others whose names have been forgotten.
I caught up with Peter Chellew last week in Melbourne having hardly seeing him over the past two decades. We had a good chat around a fire pit in the back of a house of our mutual friend, Alex, and we talked of the old days.
Peter had, coincidentally, been to see the latest iteration of the Cowboys with Alex.
A few days later Peter texted to say that Andrew had died. Andrew and I had lost contact over the years. He’d left the band around the time a serious drug bust saw one of them sent off for correction and had gone back and finished university.
He married Margaret, got a job at a university and they bought a house in the suburbs which I remember visiting.
And now he is gone, leaving her and two kids behind. Taken too young.
The Cowboys were not his only band. If you are really into your independent music you might know The Metronomes, a minimalist do it yourself electronic outfit who started recording in 1979 and kicked on over the years. Another former member of the Models, Ash Wednesday, was one third of that trio and an early member of the Cowboys.
I’ve had a cringe memory of the time Andrew insisted I join the band he and Margaret were forming. I was not a musician’s toenail, but he was insistent and so I reluctantly showed up and we attempted a few country covers. I quit ahead of the next rehearsal and they were disappointed, but I think not as disappointed as they would have been had they relied on my musicianship.
For a while Andrew was sitting in with Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes and we’d get along to those gigs at some pub somewhere on Brunswick St, but it was those lurching, intimidating Cowboys gigs I remember best.
That, and Andrew’s kind, smiling face.
My thoughts are with Margaret and their children.
Beautiful work, Peter. Enjoyable and moving in equal measure. Thank you, and my condolences.
I’m with Margaret and Andrew-you would have been great, in a Kid Congo kind of way. I’d love to know the tunes you auditioned with.
“Deluxe Service Station” is a great ear worm. I wore out the mix tape I had it on.
“And the Lord is our auto-pilot”.
R. I. P. Andrew
What a fantastic piece. I had never heard of these bands but Peter has captured the feel, the times and the places so brilliantly. Wonderful read.