The Little Bands - Part 1:
The 'Little Bands' scene was a sub-scene
that occurred as a parallel to the more formalised Melbourne punk band scene. The
first Little Band formed in 1979 after friends of the Primitive Calculators put
together a temporary group to support a gig with The Boys Next Door at a venue
called Hearts in Carlton.
At the time members of the Calculators were living in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of North Fitzroy
next door to fellow synth renegades WhirlyWirld. Both groups latched
onto the idea of forming temporary, side-project bands that would play no more
than two gigs, for no more than 15 minutes and share each other’s equipment — i.e., 'Little Bands'.
Friends of the Calculators used the bands equipment and practiced in their front room of their house in Nicholson Street, North Fitzroy, for most of the day and late into the night. The Calculators decided to use their friends as support acts, as life was much simpler setting up only one band's equipment during gigs and the Calculators only had a 30-minute set. All of the members of the Primitive Calculators also formed their own little band or played in other little bands.
The most common
manifestation was in the Little Band itself. A spontaneous and usually short- lived but vibrant and fresh agglomeration of people, ideas and borrowed
instruments would result in quick, intense and sharply focused performances of
some material based on a new idea. In many cases, once
expressed, these ideas would often be superseded by the next time the same
people surfaced. It was a constantly turbulent melting pot of people, band names and
sounds.
Soon a raft of Little Bands had started up and began to convene at both the Calculators’ and Whirlywirld’s twin terraces to use their
equipment and rehearsal space. These resources were shared among the north
of the river extended family and the spaces were in permanent use 24 hours a
day as people rolled up to try things out. Over time other small collectives
set up their own spaces, but the core group of people in and associated with
these two bands were the nucleus of the Little Bands.
Made up of a circle of artists, art enthusiasts, spontaneous musicians, poets, performance
artists and filmmakers, mostly of whom were dole recipients with a lot of
spare time on their hands, Little Bands proliferated amid a haze of booze,
weed and speed. In a milieu where ideas were considered more important than
musical prowess, the bands often sounded quite terrible; these kids were
sloppy, clangy and discordant. In turn, they could sound equally fantastic: a
mixture of epileptic drum machine rhythms, stabbing synth lines and
creepy/witty lyrics making for oddly compelling results.
"The little bands
thing was just a bunch of like-minded people
playing in an endless array of line-ups sort of apart from the Clifton Hill mob
of David Chesworth and Philip Brophy. It was in some ways very anti
of what they were doing. Philip Brophy was very against emotion in music, while
the little bands thing was meant to be wild and chaotic and punk added into
doing sort of art, experimental stuff, and not just electronic. A lot of the
original participants were actually artists who applied the Dada sort of approach
of their painting. It was the attitude and idealism of punk but applied to a
post-punk art type thing." (John Murphy - Whirlywirld)
"We just told everybody we know, why don’t you get a band
together? It’s really easy; you can knock up a band in five minutes, and then
throw it out the window. The idea just seemed to take off." (Stuart Grant - Primitive
Calculators)
