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Good Reading : June 2015
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GOOD READING JUNE 2015 27 out ‘Nicole, have my babies!’ She quipped: ‘I’ve had quite enough, thank you’ before rolling unperturbed into the next song. When Dave came on stage, the Suburban Soldiers went wild. The highlight of his set – apart from his hit ‘Suburban Boy’– hadtobe ‘Half Time at the Football’, a seven-minute satirical saga detailing the sexual escapades of a bunch of suburban girls left home alone while their parents are off at the AFL. Delivered as a monologue spoken over a chunky guitar r iff, it’s the story of a group of suburban boys knocking on the door of the unsupervised girls. Next thing you know, the teenagers are going at it on the lounge room floor. Dave’s speak-singing became increasingly fast paced as he reached the climax of the song, where he describes the horror of the old lady next door as she pokes her head through the window to see the fornicating teenagers surrounded by flames, which have been sparked by the friction of their rapidly gyrating posteriors on the carpet. Mortified, she staggers and falls into the thorns of her rose garden while Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott throw punches at each other on the street. Did I mention that Dave was influenced by absurdist theatre? ‘In the Pus days I had a lot of literary influences, and we all loved Frank Zappa,’ Dave tells me. ‘We thought he was one of the coolest anti-pop people out there. On the back of one of his albums he credited all these people he really liked, and Harold Pinter was on there, so we read all his plays, which were very Theatre of the Absurd. A big influence on Pus was also a band called the Fugs; they were part of the New York beat-poem generation. They’d do all these outrageous songs – ‘Nova Slum Goddess’, ‘Boobs a Lot’, ‘I Couldn’t Get High’ – and they were banned in most places. But they were great intellectuals celebrating pop culture and taking the piss out of it at the same time. That’s what Pus came out of.’ Dave wrote all the songs for both of his bands, creating different onstage personas for himself. For his first public show with Pus, he enlisted the help of his grandmother, who made him a Thor costume. Deciding that costume was ‘a bit twee’ for a punk rocker, he slipped into Grim Reaper mode, sporting all-black clothes and a wolfish grin. This proved to be a popular persona for Dave, who, after living and writing in England for a year, heralded his return to Australia in 1977 with a concert he called ‘Grim’s Back: But are the Screamers?’ It was around this time that he formed his second band, Dave Warner’s From the Suburbs, and released the song ‘Suburban Boy’, which would go on to become his most popular record. Singing from the perspective of an everyday citizen from the suburban sprawl in an unabashed ocker accent was a novel approach to Australian songwriting. ‘In those days Australian suburbia was so incredibly boring,’ says Dave, who grew up in Bicton, a suburb of Perth. ‘So when I sang ‘Suburban Boy’, that was going in the face of everything Australia had ever done artistically. Everyone either claimed some outback identity or some kind of false city identity, but no-one acknowledged the suburbs, even though 98 per cent of Australians lived there.’ Much of Dave’s other writing seems to reflect this focus on everyday Australian life, especially his work as a screenwr iter for ‘... no-one acknowledged the suburbs, even though 98 per cent of Australians lived there.’ AUTHOR PROFILE 1 have my babies!’ came on stage, the Suburban Soldiers of the Absurd. A big influence on Pus was also a band called the Fugs; they were part of the New York beat-poem generation. They’d do all these outrageous songs – ‘Nova Slum Goddess’, ‘Boobs a Lot’, ‘I Couldn’t Get High’ – and they were banned in most places. But they were great intellectuals celebrating pop culture and taking the piss out himself. For his first public show with Pus, he AUTHOR PROFILE 1 Dave Warner
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