RADIO BIRDMAN: The Big 5-Oh (2024)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

ROB Younger preempts the first line of conversation almost as soon as he answers the phone. 

“I notice there’s other people celebrating the 50th something-or-other,” he says in his dry, laconic way. “In 1974 there must have been something – an aligning of the planets, or something in the water.”

Adelaide’s Orange became Cold Chisel that year and another band from that city, The Keystone Angels, had just formed. Bon Scott joined AC/DC and in Brisbane, Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper of the Saints wrote “I’m Stranded”, hailed as Australia’s first punk single when it was finally released two years later. It could be said, then, that 1974 has considerable relevance and importance as a kind of Year Zero for several bands that would go on to have important roles on the Australia music scene. 

“Well,” Younger begins with a wry chuckle, “that all depends on if you like the groups, I suppose. But there was really something going on around that time.” 

Younger and guitarist Deniz Tek crossed paths as members of The Rats and TV Jones, respectively. Both had fostered a love for guitar-driven American rock. Tek had grown up surrounded by it in his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan; Younger had discovered it through exposure in magazines. Neither of them were very interested in what was happening on the music scene at the time. 

“It looked like something might occur when he got slung out of his group and my group broke up. We just got together.”

Tek and Younger brought in drummer Ron Keeley and bassist Carl Rourke from the Rats and found Pip Hoyle on keys. Radio Birdman was formed, and they were nothing like anything else in Sydney at the time.

“There was a lot of British rock coming up … of course Sabbath and Zeppelin had been around for a while, but it was really a lot of bands playing Free and things like that,” the singer says. “I’m not putting any of those bands down. I like a few things by those bands. Led Zeppelin were a cool band, but I just didn’t go for that style of singing personally. It wasn’t speaking to me very much. They weren’t talking about things that I might be able to relate to much in my life. It was a lot of blues cliches and shit. If Robert Plant has trouble with a woman,” he chuckles drily, “he’s got to ramble!”

Radio Birdman weren’t much about rambling on. They were musical outlaws, a band with a sound, look and attitude that directly challenged the established mainstream. They took over Darlinghurst’s Oxford Tavern and built their own scene from it because no one else wanted to know them. Their music was hard, fast and uncompromising and came from a place that was almost completely alien to local audiences. Critics tended to make quite a lot of the fact that it was so American, specifically Detroit-inspired.

“The Detroit thing stuck to us, probably a bit too much,” Younger suggests. “We dedicated our first album to the Stooges, so that was reinforcing that notion too. But they were inspiring!”

While the Motor City Rock sound was seen to be Radio Birdman’s defining characteristic, there were broader influences at play. New York Dolls had been a direct influence on Younger in his previous band The Rats. Tracks like “Hand of Law” and “Descent Into the Maelstrom” boasted surf rock sensibilities, Blue Öyster Cult inspired the title of the album and a line of lyrics in the song “Do the Pop”, and the brooding, keyboard-heavy “Man With Golden Helmet” was a take on the Doors, a song Tek had written in high school just before his first visit to Australia.

“Deniz wrote that when he was 14, with a schoolmate,” Younger explains. “The title comes from the co-writer, who wrote some of the lines, and Deniz wrote some of the lines, and the music. It’s not slow but it’s downbeat and it’s got a lot of keys in it. It was a good song but it wasn’t typical of the set. It was mostly fast stuff.”

“We’ve never been a really heavy band,” he continues, conversationally. “It was rock and occasionally pop, which of course the Doors were, and a lot of bands were. ‘Pop’ became a dirty word for a while. People tended to sneer at it, but great bands like the Stones had their pop songs.” 

Radio Birdman’s energy and rebellious spirit led to them being labelled as a punk band, and certainly as far as being a reactionary force that helped to establish an independent music scene in Australia at a time when there was none, that classification is fair enough.

“What a lot of the punks were saying around about that time, ‘76 or so,” Younger says, “was that the big super groups like Led Zeppelin didn’t speak to them. They were way above their audience, only played huge venues, and what they were writing about lyrically wasn’t really about people’s lives. That really became a part of what people wanted, lyrics that spoke to them. Punk came out of that, a reaction to that.”

It was also more than that. For Younger there was frustration with radio’s shift in direction, too. Programmers were no longer interested in playing music for younger people. It was only Double J that had an ear for anything remotely edgy.

“[Punk],” he goes on, “was an energy, also, and a reaction to really mediocre radio, because it really was bland. After glam died out in the early 70s, it really turned to shit. I think, anyway. Instead of playing music for the teenagers, or at least the people who had their heads oriented that way, they started playing music for a demographic. They kept recycling the same old ideas. Punk music wasn’t being played on the radio in Australia, except on Double J, and only here and there. And of course it got co-opted by the record industry anyway and people started complaining about that, so they had to change the name of it, so it became New Wave and then it became post-punk, and then it was this and then it was that. Instead of listening to the actual music and deciding what’s good and what’s not.” 

Age hasn’t tempered Rob Younger’s disdain for the attitudes and machinations of the music industry or the media surrounding it even if, half a century later, the media and the industry see Radio Birdman in a far more respectful light. Radios Appear constantly makes the cut of music media’s ‘best of Australian’ lists. Their music still doesn’t get played on the radio, though.  

The band is celebrating their 50-year milestone with an Australia tour that began last weekend with shows in Melbourne and Adelaide. Radio Birdman: Retaliate First, a 400 plus page tome about the band from esteemed rock writer Murray Engleheart, is set to make its timely appearance next week. 

“The first time I met Murray for the book was in a pub in Surry Hills about six or seven years ago,” Younger recalls. “Long before COVID, and all that stuff. There’s lots of interviews. He talked to people I barely remember. And there’s a lot of strange things that’s come back from these people that I’ve not heard about. I had to ask myself ‘was I really an arsehole?’ There were some things that I would say weren’t about me, but apparently, it was.”

He talks about the book far more warmly than he does about Jonathan Sequeira’s 2017 feature-length documentary Descent Into the Maelstrom. 

“While there were certain aspects I liked about the documentary…,” he begins with a pause that indicates a head shake or an eye-roll. “I liked the way the sound was mastered. It was really loud. Everything about that side of it was really good, but there was a lot of moaning and groaning about what happened in the original days of the band. A lot of it was just a platform for people to have a whinge. If I’d known it was going to be like that, I’d’ve fired a few salvos off myself.” 

He clearly doesn’t have time for what might be perceived as scuttlebutt or grumbling, but more than that, he feels that the film didn’t do enough to champion the band’s success.

“It’s much better to keep your powder dry than to shoot your mouth off. I know a lot of people who have said things in interviews they’ve regretted later. I think that film should have been more about a celebration of our achievement on our own terms. We came up with something that people are still interested in. Not the whole world, but certain people are still following us 50 years later. It’s all right [the film] but I think it could have done without some people speaking on our behalf.”

Fifty years ago, Radio Birdman found their voice and raised it in an environment of hostility to their cause. The environment is far more receptive now, but they still speak loudly and pugnaciously on their own terms.

All remaining shows on Radio Birdman’s tour are sold out.