BLOGGER’S NOTE: I began writing this as a thing about seeing the reformed Radio Birdman play in London in June, but, realising I didn’t have much of interest to say on the subject beyond “well, they’ve got a lot older but they still put on a good show… I liked the songs… it was fun”, I thought I’d rework it and instead just talk about how much I like the band’s ‘classic era’ stuff. Popsters be warned, much talk of a ‘rockist’ nature follows.

It may be somewhat of a minority position within non-meathead musical discourse, but over the past five years or so, I’ve increasingly found myself wanting to make the case for Australia’s Radio Birdman as a really great band.

This ties in rather neatly with the fact that, during the same period, my approach to music has become increasingly utilitarian. No longer as strongly fixated on getting a personal, emotional catharsis from music as I once was, I’ve increasingly been spending my time delving into the ‘engine room’ of what actually makes it work (rhythm, instrumental interplay, tones & recording techniques), enjoying stuff that just keeps said engine running, getting me from A to B with a certain amount of finesse. And, within the sphere of standard issue guitar rock, there is little that delivers on that promise with quite the vigour of Radio Birdman in their prime.

Though often characterised as ‘punk’ or ‘garage’ by vestige of the time and place from which they emerged, Birdman can more accurately classified I think as simply playing rock music. Whilst most bands playing rock-qua-rock from the late ‘70s onwards have found themselves adopting a stance of lunkheaded conservatism though (not necessarily a criticism in this context), I think RB are one of the few who succeeded in hitting all of that music’s allotted pleasure points whilst still tweaking the parameters enough to establish their own unique blueprint, creating a body of work that, whilst admittedly mechanical in its “getting the bloody job done” formalism, nonetheless remains refreshing, characterful, intermittently exhilarating and – what’s the word I’m looking for here? – ‘awesome’, yeah, I think that’s the one.

Factor in the group’s uncanny knack for producing memorable, stadium-ready rock songs at such a pace that their years of peak creativity in the late ‘70s yielded more certified, grade A bangers than can crammed onto 80 minutes of greatest hits CD, and, in my opinion at least, you have a band who deserve to be placed alongside such hallowed purveyors of post-’76 rock action as Dead Moon, Dinosaur Jr or Motorhead, rather than amid the ranks of somewhat less inspired Aus-rock pounders who followed in their wake.

As the aforementioned pounders frequently demonstrated, bands that adhere to the Detroit High Energy template that Radio Birdman understandably hold dear have a tendency to dissolve into lumpen parody pretty damn quickly if they do it anything less than brilliantly. Needless to say, very few of them do it brilliantly. Perhaps not even Radio Birdman do it brilliantly. Crank the MC5’s ‘Skunk (Sonically Speaking)’ on your headphones sometime and tell me, in all honesty, is there anyone left in the world who can do it brilliantly?

So: to my mind, the two quantifiable factors that helped Birdman duck this bullet and establish their own sound were *momentum* and *efficiency*.

For the former, and to some extent the latter too, we need to begin by offering thanks to drummer Ron Keeley, who I think ranks alongside Hawkwind’s Simon King as the most indomitable rock time-keeper of the ‘70s. To not put too finer point on it,, the main innovation that Radio Birdman brought to the Stooges/MC5 formula was SPEED. Refusing to fall back on an ol’ bluesy chug, the band adopted a post-’76 punk RPM right out of the gate and barely eased off the throttle for a second through their first few years of operation.

OK, so we’re not exactly talking Minor Threat here, but for a band playing this kind of riffola rock music, Radio Birdman are FAST, and Keeley just never lets up. No faux-caveman tom-tom bullshit or sub-Bonham bombast from this cat – even on the band’s occasional tough love ‘ballads’ and even rarer psychedelic detours, he keeps up a relentless chk-chk-chk on the hi-hat, elevating potentially sloppy material into a slick power-glide that sees potential bad ideas or moments of self-indulgence fading in the rear-view mirror before they’ve had time to really make a stink. (See their first album’s requisite ‘quiet number’ ‘Love Kills’ or ‘weird wig-out’ ‘Man With Golden Helmet’ for perfect examples.)

If there’s one thing that tends to torpedo yr archetypal rock band, it’s their tendency to HANG AROUND. You know the kind of thing - pain-stakingly drawing out each riff, each lyric, each decaying power chord and drum fill, letting it hang in the air as if they’re waiting for someone to pat them on the back and congratulate them on their genius before they finally move onto the next bit of their stupid song. Lord preserve us. There have been a few bands over the years who can muster enough leverage to justify this kind of bombast. Most cannot, and should not. It is an all-too-easy alternative to actually, y’know, rocking, and it was likely this sense of having their time as listeners WASTED (as opposed to the much-ballyhooed boogeyman of prog-rock twiddling) that likely drove so many fans away from rock-qua-rock into the arms of the post-’76 punk-qua-punk whose ascent Radio Birdman happily coincided with.

Not that the rest of RB really NEEDED Keeley’s golden kick pedal to save them from this sorry fate though I should make clear, and that brings us neatly to the second point on our agenda - the band’s *efficient* approach to the business of rockage.

Radio Birdman are remarkable as a six piece band whose performances betray no hint of star performer / ego trip issues. A band like the ‘5 may have thrived on one-upmanship and displays of individual virtuosity, but with Birdman, everything feeds into the whole. No ‘star turns’, no dominant personalities crashing against each other – even vocalist Rob Younger seems content seems content to step back, keep his Iggy-lite antics in check and enunciate clearly (CLEAR ENUNCIATION! Yeah, that’s what we want in our rock n’ roll!), playing his allotted part in a band that often operates like one giant rhythm section.

Beyond it’s obvious musical benefits, this gospel of efficiency could, perhaps, at a stretch, be extended to embrace the band’s entire philosophy.

“In the late '70s, I used to get highly criticised for being a medical student,” lead guitarist Deniz Tek said in a 2006 interview I happened to stumble upon this morning. “I was called out for not being committed to music, because I wasn't sitting around on a couch watching television, shooting up heroin all day when I wasn't playing. In the strange world that we lived in, that was commitment.”

Whilst I can’t speak for the other members of the band’s original line-up, this commitment to living a productive life and, y’know, DOING STUFF is definitely something that feeds into the momentum of their music. Radio Birdman's love for The Stooges and The ‘5 is not in question, but the unspoken question behind a listen to their definitive ‘Radios Appear’ album seems to be: well, yeah, but imagine how great those guys could have been if they’d dropped all the slovenly drug addict “it’s only rock n roll man” bullshit and actually tightened the fuck up?

If the result admittedly loses a lot of rough edges, and certainly can't hold a candle to the tormented genius of something like ‘Funhouse’, it still makes for consistently exhilarating rock music that’s liable to stay in circulation long after most of the more, uh, ‘lifestyle’ based Stooge imitators have crashed and burned.

I love the way that the band are arrayed on the cover of ‘Radios Appear’ - uniformed in black with the (brilliantly meaningless) band insignia stitched to their shoulders – an apolitical army assembled purely to aid the delivery of rock n’ roll. Tek may stand front and centre as main songwriter and nominal leader (not to mention the guy with the coolest looking guitar), but on the record itself, he wisely resists the urge to dominate. Keeping his Asheton-worthy Awesome Lead Guitar Shit concise and melodic, he only occasionally busts out into full-blown wildness, and rarely denies his comrades the chance to shine behind him. Vis-à-vis my point about bombast above, there’s something kinda exciting about a guitarist who’s confident enough to give you a bit less of what he’s capable of, isn’t there? It makes his short, controlled bursts of fuzz and wah all the more thrilling before he ploughs his energies back into the song.



Here’s a fun fact for you: when he wasn’t busy playing Asheton-worthy Awesome Lead Guitar Shit with the best band in Australia, Tek was (and presumably still is?) a fully qualified ER surgeon, specializing in “emergency and aerospace medicine”. This line of work led to him co-piloting experimental aircraft for the US Navy during the ‘80s - an assignment for which he used the call-sign “Ice-Man”, thus allegedly inspiring the character of the same name in ‘Top Gun’. Qualms re: toadying for the military-industrial complex aside, I think we have a pretty good example here if a guy who’s living the dream.

This dedication to an exciting lifestyle is perhaps reflected not only in Radio Birdman’s velocity, but also in Tek’s song-writing and guitar-playing, as his lead riffs and central melodies circle back again and again toward the kind of delightful, surf-derived stings that one can easily imagine soundtracking a particularly exhilarating car chase, or the opening credits of the best cop show you’ve never seen (probably featuring a speedboat).

Even more agreeably, the band’s lyrics tend to follow suit, building up fragmentary images of a kind of high speed action movie dreamland, in which oblique references to the glories of mid-west American rock n’ roll mix with vignettes of highway chaos, aerial dog-fights and criminal escapades – a kind of super-charged escapism that never quite cops out and gives us the full story, but just drops random images of stylized macho glory hither and thither to delightful effect, the way a good rock n’ roll song should.

Birdman’s signature tune ‘Aloha Steve & Danno’ – an extended tribute to TV’s ‘Hawaii 5-0’ – very much sets the scene in this respect. Anyone who still holding on to some kind of illusion regarding rock’s supposedly inherent radical / anti-authoritarian stance may feel a tad conflicted hearing a boisterous Birdman crowd chanting “book him Danno, Murder One!”, but it’s all in good fun, and happily the rest of their catalogue is scattered with some of the most fantastically unlikely declarations and stupid/genius lyrical non-sequiturs heard this side of Blue Oyster Cult or prime-era Misfits. Their use of numbers and technical specifics is particularly good I think – like Chuck Berry jacked up after reading too many spy novels or something.

“Feel my hand across your lip / got a P38 with a loaded clip”

“Seven four, taking me away / I'll never make it back to the USA”

“Sunlight flashing through the window nearly drove me blind / just like the light on the front of that twelve-oh five”

“Dark cloud of espionage / hangs over fair Hawaii”

“On the third day of the seventh month / we will ride the highway!”

“Walking in on rivers of sorrow / riding to hell on rails of fear!”

I could go on. Maybe opinions will differ, but what can I say - as a lifelong fan of pulp fiction and violent comic book nonsense, this kind of stuff just delights me.

Regarding band’s persistent lyrical references to Detroit and the American Mid-West, I had previously assumed that they were simply so infatuated with the mystique of Detroit Rock City that they’d started writing songs about living there, but the minimal amount of research undertaken for this post reveals that Deniz Tek was actually born and raised in Stooge ground zero Ann Arbor, MI, and only relocated to Sydney to attend medical college in 1972, presumably meaning that he got to experience the glory days of his band’s heroes first hand as a young man – a source of inspiration / nostalgia that he clearly drew upon heavily for some of his best grown up lyrics.

The aforementioned ‘Love Kills’ is a particularly pertinent example of this, a baleful, somewhat BOC-ish tune that may-or-may-not draw upon the legends of Iggy’s early relationship with Nico, spilling lines that are somewhat more troubled and evocative than the admittedly slightly daft concerns of the bulk of Birdman’s lyrics (quoting seems excessive, but read ‘em in full from Tek’s own typewriter here).

Taking a rather different tack, the height of Birdman’s Detroit-mania perhaps comes on another of my favourite tunes, the somewhat deranged ‘I-94’, whose peculiarities I’ll leave you to figure out for yourself, merely noting that I have rarely encountered such a fine set of brilliantly stupid rock n’ roll lyrics.

So what does all this add up to? I dunno…. seems like the time for a concluding paragraph, but I’ve not really got one to hand. Hopefully I’ve made my essential points clearly enough in all the rambling above, and my usual technique of ending with an ill-conceived, hand-wringing emotional entreaty of some kind doesn’t quite seem to fit the bill.

Radio Birdman won’t change your life. They’re not trying to. Like a custom car mechanic or electrical engineer, their intention is to take familiar elements that have rarely sat alongside each other, and combine them into a slick, streamlined package that delivers what it promises.

You want some rock music today? Forget those millionaires still creakily stomping around festival stages hawking their ever-diminishing legacies. (In fact, whilst you’re at it, probably best conveniently ignore the fact that cynics might accuse RB of doing exactly that of recent.)

I’ve got some rock music for you right here – it’s a CD called ‘Essential Radio Birdman 1974-78’ that Sub-Pop put out in 2001. It contains most of their best recordings remixed/remastered to great effect, and if you like listening to music whilst walking, running, driving and doing things, it’ll stay in your ears longer than most other stuff; wherever you’re going, it’ll get you from A to B with a smile on your face, and there’s a lot to be said for that.

Labels: Radio Birdman