My small part in punk music history.
The music world, especially Pink Floyd fans, audiophiles, record producers and sound engineers all took note last week when the London auction house Bonhams announced it was selling off the EMI console used by Pink Floyd and Alan Parsons (their sound engineer at the time) to record their 1973 monster and one of the biggest selling and most influential records of all time, Dark Side Of The Moon. Recording consoles, whilst not as visible to the fans as the instruments musicians use, are every bit as important to the recording process, and so items such as this one are much sought after. But this isn’t a story about that particular console. Rather, it was just the catalyst that caused a major rift in my personal space/time continuum which I shall now attempt to explain:
As often happens, this kind of news item gets journalists thinking about similar stories they might uncover and write about while the topic is still current. It transpired that one such piece popped up just the other day, and into which I and a friend were immediately embroiled.
Now it sometimes also happens that you see something, perhaps just a glance, but you immediately know that you don’t actually want to know about that particular something, and you look quickly away, pretending you didn’t see it. You convince yourself that what you saw wasn’t what you initially thought it was, because if it was in fact what you thought it was, then there was almost certainly some very bad news waiting for you. This is what happened to me, and although I saw the item (an almost inconsequential local news story) several times, I managed to skim past it and pretend it had nothing to do with me. It was a simple piece about a lost recording console, accompanied by photos that rang alarm bells with me and which caused me to look away and to pretend that I hadn’t seen what I knew to be a very uncomfortable truth.
However, my friend Steve (the one who cycled 900 kilometres from Melbourne to Sydney, raising funds for kids with cancer after his own successful, but brutal battle with the disease) in this instance was my partner in crime, so to speak, and eventually made me fess up to what we had done. It’s not that we did anything illegal, or intentionally hurt anyone in any way, but rather that we missed one of those great opportunities that only very rarely, if ever, present themselves; a once in a lifetime chance, you might say. And it gets still worse, but first, I must take you back in time, to those early years following the release of Dark Side Of The Moon and the birth of the punk rock era…
The mid-1970s saw the unbridled proliferation of punk spreading rapidly across the planet, like something from the first chapter of a Stephen King novel. Bands such as The Sex Pistols and The Damned in the U.K., The Ramones in the U.S.A. and The Saints from Brisbane in Australia burst on to the scene with an impact not seen since the likes of Elvis Presley and The Beatles, later leading Sir Bob Geldof to comment that ‘rock music in the seventies was changed by three bands: the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and The Saints’.
It was The Saints first self-funded single, (I’m) Stranded that launched them as an ‘overnight’ success. They were in fact already an underground fixture in their home town of Brisbane where they played without a manager, and without ever playing the same venue twice due to always losing their ‘security bond’ (having booked the venue as a ‘dance band’) and routinely ending their gigs prematurely as a result of police intervention. It wasn’t that they were pointlessly violent or gobbing on their audiences as the Sex Pistols did, but rather they were incredibly loud and represented the groundswell of opinion that was bubbling away under Brisbane’s skin, that groundswell being in general unconventional and certainly not conformist, nor pretty. Brisbane, the capital city of the state of Queensland, had for years been drained of its lifeblood by the right-wing, dictatorial government in the form of the gerrymandered National Party Bjelke-Petersen regime, protected by and large by the loathsome and frighteningly corrupt police force, a 32-year reign of terror that was only ended following a Royal Commission, still many years hence, which saw the sacking of the government and the imprisonment of the Police Commissioner Terry Lewis. To say that the mood among the Queensland youth of the mid 1970s was ripe for the birth of Australian punk is, at least in hindsight, severely understated.
So it was that in 1976 four young men with attitude calling themselves The Saints wandered into Bruce Window Studios in Brisbane to book some studio time to record their first 7” single. The recording engineer on duty that day and for the recording was another young man named Mark Moffatt, and the record they produced was (I’m) Stranded, now a classic of the Australian music scene which launched the punk rock genre in this country and which still thrives today. They couldn’t find a label to take on their single, so set up their own, printing just 500 copies, with copies now almost impossible to find and fetching unprecedented sums on the collectors’ market. With its heavy, grinding ‘amps turned up to 11’ guitar riffs and flat, disinterested vocals, it immediately caught the attention of anti-establishment music fans everywhere. Sending most of the copies they had pressed to music industry magazines, especially in the U.K., they almost instantly found a strong following, the record being proclaimed ‘single of this and every week’ by the British Sounds Magazine. As a result they were quickly signed by a major record company and within a short timeframe became a global success.
Meanwhile, Matt Moffatt went on to became an equally successful musician and producer, and many years later began to wonder whatever happened to that recording console used to record the now iconic (I’m) Stranded. Recording consoles are big and expensive items, and don’t generally just ‘disappear’, because during their lifetime they will be used by a great many artists to record a great many songs and thus earn their place in recorded music history.
Matt made some initial enquiries and found that the console eventually left Brisbane, but drew a blank as to its final destination, and so put out a general call in the music industry to try and track it down, which all came to nought. But then came the Pink Floyd connection, which is where Steve and I come into it.
Some years after the recording of (I’m) Stranded, Mark Moffatt and The Saints had moved on to bigger and better things, as had Bruce Window and his studio. Bruce sold the old recording console that he had built himself to another recording engineer by the name of Nick Armstrong, who owned the only major recording studio in Hobart, where Steve and I lived, and where later we also worked together.
Nick used the console for a time at his studio in North Hobart, but eventually it outlived its usefulness, and in 1988 he upgraded to a bigger, more modern console in keeping with the times. Steve and I were young, keen audio guys, wanting to make our mark in the industry, but having little of our own equipment to work with. When we received word via our various connections that the old Armstrong console was up for grabs, we jumped at the chance. The deal was simple: we could have it, gratis, but it needed to be taken away by lunchtime that day. Gulp! Understand, this was in the day when simple four-track recorders and even tiny mixing consoles cost a fortune, and here, astonishingly, was a 24-track professional quality desk being given away, for nix. This just never happens, and so whatever the personal cost, we had to take up the offer.
Not believing our luck, we skived off work and high-tailed it to the Armstrong studios in Steve’s station wagon and had the desk procured and loaded into the car before anyone could change their minds. As we drove away with our prize threatening to break the rear axle of Steve’s vehicle, I looked at him and asked, ‘your place?’ He shook his head, and I couldn’t help but notice he was driving in the direction of my house with an air of quiet determination. ‘You’ve got the garage, mate’ was all he said and the decision was therefore made. How I’d explain the behemoth rendering the garage useless for its intended purpose I would somehow have to work out before seeing Mrs MLCMM later that evening.
Now at this point we had no idea of the console’s provenance and were blissfully ignorant of its role in the birth of the punk movement. So when we unloaded the beast and began to examine what we’d in fact laid our hands on, and it became very clear that it was, in fact, well beyond its years of useful service, the decision became one of weighing up whether or not we wanted a serviceable garage or instead, a space taken over by what was now dawning on us as being basically a pile of junk which was once a lovely mixing console, but which had been thrashed well beyond its expected lifespan and now largely and sadly useless to us.
The upshot was that the desk’s power supply was dead; the guts of the desk were corroded beyond repair, and to bring the beast back to life would take much time and energy, as well as cash and skill levels we simply didn’t possess. Thinking therefore that the desk had no great value, we reluctantly gutted it for the few serviceable parts we could and disposed of the chassis and many of the components at the local rubbish dump. Steve salvaged a few pieces and turned them into various bits and bobs, but the desk basically sat dismantled into several large containers in my garage where it remained for another year or so before we moved to Adelaide which necessitated the disposal of what remained of the desk, and thus it met its final demise at the McRobie’s Gully Waste Disposal site in South Hobart.
And that was the end of that, until just a few days ago. And then, and only then, was the full horror of what we had done revealed to us.
When we confessed to our crime, Mark Moffatt was gracious, telling us he had not in all honesty expected to find the console in one piece, and grateful at least for ‘closure’ to the story. But as we re-visited the saga of the band, and that astonishing, history-making song, with its significance and impact on so many other bands and musicians, we were left only with a massive weight of regret at an opportunity missed and now lost forever. The console would not have fetched the millions likely to be spent on Pink Floyd’s EMI desk, but an icon it was even so, and its rightful place in Australian music, and indeed the world’s punk movement history, is now lost because we simply didn’t know what we had our hands on.
The real question is this: would we have been better off remaining ignorant of the console’s place in music history, or is there something positive to be gained from knowing what we briefly had in our possession, despite the horrific ending?
If ever I work it out, I’ll let you know, but the console's demise, under 20 metres of landfill was perhaps a fitting, anarchic end for an icon of punk history.
March Too Much
