Retaliate First: Into the Maelstrom With Radio Birdman by Murray Englheart

By BRIAN GIFFIN

IN THE late 1980s, my passion for Australian rock music found me scouring record stores for the exciting independent bands I was reading about. No matter where I seemed to look however, there was always one that eluded me, a band whose music was never played in polite circles or heard on the radio, and whose records appeared to now be impossible to find, at least for someone with limited means. It was a band whose legend had already become a myth. That band was Radio Birdman.

I may have been about a decade too late to see the Birdman in flight, but for their biographer Murray Engleheart, the threat was real.

“Like Rose Tattoo and all that sort of stuff, I grew up with it. I wasn’t there at the very beginning of the Birdman thing, I came into it about ’78, but you’re reading about it, you’re hearing about it and so you sort of absorbed it all, rather than just coming into it two years ago.”

Engleheart’s exhaustive book on the band, Retaliate First, is a long overdue testimonial to a group that did, as the sub-title suggests, smash the rules of Australian rock and roll.

“They started something that literally changed the culture in this country,” says the writer emphatically. “They pretty much burst what became alternative music culture in Australia. They did it all themselves. They did their own gigs, they did their own records, they had to do their own poster art. The music they made was unbelievable. Powerful, celebratory, amazing rock and roll band, and needed to be captured, I think.”

In fascinating detail combining personal anecdotes, his own far-reaching knowledge of rock music and years of interviews with key players in the story, Engleheart builds a sweeping tale of the ambition and drive of a band determined to be themselves in an alien environment. Radio Birdman came into existence in a world where the influence of British heavy rock bands ruled the local landscape.

“They stepped into this void,” Engleheart explains, “and it’s been told about before but it’s actually true: back in about 1974/75, every guitar player wanted to be Ritchie Blackmore, and every singer wanted to be Robert Plant or Paul Rodgers, from Free. That was plenty much the template. The Birdman were just so far away different to that, and weren’t about to compromise whatsoever. So they’d get bookings, but because they never played the game, they’d never get return bookings and they slowly burned all their bridges behind them in Sydney.”

While Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple loomed large in the imagination of many a musician at the time, Turkish-American guitarist Deniz Tek was drawn to the mystique of Keith Richards and the power and theatrics of rockers like MC5, the Stooges, Alice Cooper and, significantly, Blue Öyster Cult. Singer Rob Younger had no desire to be Robert Plant. He had similar tastes to Tek, as well as an affinity for New York Dolls.They were, as Engleheart notes, the yin to the other’s yang and it was they who set the rules the band would live by – no compromise. Radio Birdman played what they wanted, as loud as they wanted. They dressed and behaved on stage exactly the way they wanted, and no one could change their minds.

“They never took a backward step,” Engleheart says of them. “They had their code of ethics and their agenda set from Day One. The industry at the time just wasn’t ready for that. They weren’t ready for anyone who wouldn’t turn down the volume. They weren’t ready for anyone who didn’t play the hits of the day, playing a music that most people had never heard of – the MC5 and the Stooges, which most people know about [now are] due to Radio Birdman’s efforts, I believe.”

Engleheart himself was drawn into the Radios’ maelstrom shortly before they crashed and burned during a disastrous UK tour in 1978. The opening pages of the book detail his early devotion to them and some of the hostility he faced as a fan of the band. In some way, Retaliate First is his story, too, and given his long decades of friendship with Younger and Tek, he had to be careful not to allow that to colour the work.

“It was a sort of help and sort of hindrance,” he admits, “because I do respect them both a great deal and the objectivity part of it you had to be mindful of the entire time.”

He doesn’t allow them to tell the whole tale. There are many other figures involved, most importantly Tek and Younger’s loyal lieutenant Pip Hoyle and the rest of the Birdmen – Warwick Gilbert, Ron Keely and Chris Masuak, the gunpowder that only added to the volatility of Radio Birdman as they destroyed venues and turned the conservative local industry on its head.

“That was part of their magic. There was friction in that band between a number of people, and that was the fire that drove them, really. If they were all – I think – if they were all buddies, that band wouldn’t have happened, or wouldn’t have worked. You’re talking about a group of guys who were very, very separate individuals. Totally different personalities, very different make-ups, and putting that all in the mix, you got a fire out of, but a certain combustion, too and they broke up in ’78 because it all just spilled over.”

Importantly, however, Retaliate First doesn’t just concentrate on that friction, which both the writer and Rob Younger contend was the main concern of Johnathan Sequeira’s 2017’s documentary Descent Into the Maelstrom. “That was the focus in that movie,” says Engleheart, “over the celebration of what the band achieved.”

With his book, Engleheart shows how the band’s tenacity, ruthlessness and independence sowed the seeds of the local punk scene and the establishment of an alternative cultural outlook.

“The book covers the beginning of punk rock, the beginning of import record stores, the beginning of Double J radio … there was a lot to be woven into it, and the characters of the guys themselves. That band – every band is, but those guys… the individuals that made up that chemistry were critical. That hadn’t been explored before, so I thought that was important to document.

“In their early audience,” he continues, “there were people who went on to be in the Sunnyboys, the Hoodoo Gurus, Divinyls, Died Pretty … All those seeds were there, and when Birdman reunited in ’96, Died Pretty were really popular, the Hoodoo Gurus were Oz Rock gods, as were the Sunnyboys, even though they’d taken a hiatus at that point. So what they were doing in the seventiess, despite all the opposition initially, was the sort of birthing of what was to come. It shaped the future. Dare Jenning, the founder member of the Mambo clothing line was in the thick of it. A lot of people saw Birdman putting on their own shows and making their own records, and thinking, maybe I can do that, go into film making, or become an artist. It was a pretty inspiring scene.”

Given how important they are, it seems strange that it’s taken someone 50 years to pull all the threads of Radio Birdman’s story together. Perhaps it’s because, as inspirational as they were, they were probably just too confrontational.

“It was a lot about attitude, and manner. They weren’t about to compromise. That’s why the book’s called Retaliate First. They were ready for a blue from the outset. They weren’t shifting their position, they weren’t changing anything. The industry just wasn’t used to that.”

Five decades later and Radio Birdman’s legacy resonates loudly into the present. Finally, completely and dramatically, Retaliate First gives the band its due across more than 400 pages, a vital and engaging portrait of an uncompromising Australia band that, by not changing, changed everything. Not just a book about a band, it’s the story of a phenomenon.

ORDER RETALIATE FIRST HERE.