interview

Q: Listening to your album, Bukka White’s Memphis Hot Shoes” comes to mind. Does he have any influence on you?
A: I like Bukka. He plays fast & jumpy. Bukka got teeth.

Q: How did you come up with the idea of wearing a helmet?
A: It just feels right. Try it. (more…)

THE SCIENTISTS ? ?PISSED ON ANOTHER PLANET?

Recently a scientist (a real one) asked me what the deal was with the Scientists early stuff. He liked everything post “Swampland” but wasn’t sure about the lyrics in all those early songs with titles like “That Girl”, “Girl” and “Pretty Girl”. My answer was that I didn’t write those lyrics. The songs were written thus: James Baker, the original Scientists drummer, would announce that he had a song and “sing” the lyrics for me to play back to him. From his atonal renderings I would invent a melody with an appropriate chord sequence and perform it, to which he would say, “Yeah, that’s how it goes” or, “No, not like that”, if he didn’t like it. In defence of James’ lyrics, the “girl songs” were part of his celebration of rock and roll of which dumb lyrics were, as far as we were concerned, “de rigueur” along with other things not normally revered, like playing too loud, posturing and “not giving a shit”. (more…)

bio AMG

To look at the career of the Scientists is, in essence, to look at the career of Kim Salmon, one of the most vibrant musical talents to emerge from Australia in the 1970s. Not that he was the only one. Nick Cave, for example, may have made more of a splash outside of the country, but Salmon is arguably just as important ? if not more influential. His first group, formed in 1976, was the Cheap Nasties ? which already gives some indication of his distinctive “trash” aesthetic (? la the Trashmen, the Ramones, etc.). The Nasties were the first punk band to emerge from the remote city of Perth in Western Australia. Salmon has claimed they really weren’t much good, but they did give birth to the Perth punk scene ? from which many of Australia’s finest musicians would emerge. When the Nasties came to an end the following year, Salmon went on to join the Invaders. The Scientists rose from the ashes of this (also unrecorded) band in 1978. The lineup included Salmon on guitar and vocals, Boris Sujdovic on bass, Rod Radalj on guitar, and James Baker, from the Victims, on drums and lyrics. Membership in the Scientists would mutate several times over the years (Dennis Byrne, for instance, would soon assume bass duties). (more…)

fat possum bio

When Bob Log III was a child, he lost his left hand in a boating accident. It was soon replaced with a monkey paw, and a new guitar style was born.

It’s my own personal style, see,” Log says, “the paw moves much quicker than a normal hand, so my real hand has to flop around a lot to compensate.” (more…)

Nomeansno: but Yes means Yes

by Kortney Jmaeff (April 2003)

When uttering the words “Best Canadian Power Trio”, most plebian Canucks would primarily envisage Rush. For my money, however, the throaty bellows, funky distorted bass lines and battle-axe guitar choppings of Nomeansno slay Geddy’s cat-in-in-a-lawnmower vocals, cheesy magniloquent synthesizers, sci-fi dungeon and dragon ramblings any day of the week.
For over two decades, Victorian trio Nomeansno have journeyed the globe, recorded over 10 albums, and spawned a cult side group, the Slapshot and the Ramones inspired Hanson Brothers. A band that has the tenaciousness to cover both a Ramones and a Miles Davis song on the same release deserves a scrupulous perusal. (more…)