Sydney’s stoneage romeos the HOODOO GURUS are set to sweep the galaxy. LYNDEN BARBER pins down head Guru Dave Faulkner.
Article published in NME, 18th November, 1985
The Hoodoo Gurus | Marsupials Bagged | CIVILISATION. Here it is, a symbol of better days amongst the high rise hiatus that is downtown Sydney. The perfectly preserved art deco corridors of the Dymocks Building are the host to establishments rather than businesses, emporia rather than shops, and appear to be dusted every day.
Quite what Bigtime Records, independent daddy to weirdsvilles like the Hoodoo Gurus, is doing here seems uncertain. But the patrons of the beauty salon down the way must be used to them by now. Used to figures like this . . .
Moonbug-eyed and Kirk Douglas-dimpled, Dave Faulkner presents an image of defiant non-glossiness — with time warp thrown in just for kicks. Right now he looks as if he’s just dragged himself through the wardrobe department of some ’60s teensploitation flick backwards in a wholly successful attempt at making some kind of impact on the world at large. Like, dig the pyjama top, Dave.
“I deliberately didn’t wear a paisley today — I was going to, then I thought, Fuck, that’s so obvious.”
Quite. As for the woolly mutha of a mohair sweater and greyish two-tone suede boots seemingly purloined from Peter Tork’s dustbin, politeness forbids further comment. But that’s Dave — the Hoodoo Gurus’ songbook made flesh, blood and mohair.
AUSTRALIANS SHOULD have good reason to be suspicious of such garb. The whole country is crawling with rotten garage bands with names like the Moffs, the Stems, the Psychedelic Turnbuckles, etc, whose idea of the peak of human achievement in the 20th Century must be something like the first album by the Strawberry Alarm Clock.
And it would be easy to assume that this man before me is another piece of psychedelic navel-fluff. Wrong.
The Hoodoo Gurus | Marsupials Bagged
This man is a troubled artist. His problem is one we all share — after 30 years of popular music, every possible angle, and attitude on love in particular and life in general has been so commonly used and abused that the subject matter of most songs has turned into fossilised matter, leaving, if we still desire to breathe the fresh air of new ideas, only the songs themselves to write about.
And having written the ultimate song about other songs in ‘(Let’s All) Turn On’, the opening track on the Gurus’ utterly brilliant debut album ‘Stoneage Romeos’ — which, if you have any sense at all, you would have bought when it came out on Demon last year — the problem is where to go next. Without becoming a parody of a parody. Without casting a cynical jinx over everything by being too smartarse for your own (and everyone else’s) good.
Maybe the only place to go next is backwards. To embrace the cliches and invest them with new life. But for some people even this has problems. They just cannot resist taking the piss.
Mars Needs Guitars!
This, says Dave Faulkner, singer, guitarist, giver of great interviews, wearer of naff buckskin fringe jackets and troubled artist, has happened with the group’s new LP, ‘Mars Needs Guitars!’ (released in England on Chrysalis).
Ostensibly we’re here to talk about this record. ‘Mars’, with its quintessential Gurus title and spunky selection of pure pop. is a record it’s easy to like, but not one that makes the listener marvel as much as ‘Stoneage Romeos’. There seems to be a new-found seriousness lurking amongst the glee, whereas before they were just pretending to be serious. Or so you thought, listening to a song like ‘My Girl’ —until the uncomfortable feeling arose that a deliciously dumb line like “My girl don’t love me” was being delivered with something alarmingly akin to emotional sincerity.
“I felt a little bit on the last album that some of the songs, like ‘My Girl’, a lot of people took that as a serious song and reacted to it that way,” begins Faulkner. “In a way I wrote it as a joke originally, the song was just a pastiche. When we did it I wanted to make it more like a true sentiment as well as laughing at itself, taking the sentiment so seriously — this sap that’s got left in the dance hall. It was-trying to present that predicament.
The Hoodoo Gurus | Marsupials Bagged
“And I was trying with this album to avoid that dichotomy: Is he trying to make fun of the love or is he really in love? I’ve tried to be a bit straighter, because I wanted to actually communicate with people more directly rather than infer things that may not have been there. I didn’t want them to be joke songs.”
What? One raises the interrogative eyebrow high. Songs with titles like ‘Hayride To Hell’ and ‘Like Wow — Wipeout’ and ‘Mars Needs Guitars!’ and lines like “I’m a stoneage Romeo, I’ve got a spaceage Juliet / We’ll make primitive loving ‘cos we ain’tt got a TV set” are meant to be serious?
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with exuberance.” counters a straightfaced Faulkner. “I just don’t wanna actually be writing songs that are about songs. I wanna write songs. It’s like Wenders was saying about Paris, Texas. he wanted to make a movie itself rather than a movie that reflected other Hollywood movies and traditions of film-making. He’s done that, remaking film techniques, whatever, or showing up how film works, in the same way the last album showed up how pop songs work. ‘My Girl’ is a classic, it just rips apart the whole genre of pop songs, but at the same time is one.”
That word girl
HOODOO GURUS AS post-modernist pop group? It could almost fit. Contemporary literature is marked by an increasing trend towards self-conscious reflection. Writers will write about writing, about writers, about the very act of writing. Much as Faulkner has written pop songs that comment on other pop songs: or written ditties like ‘Mars Needs Guitars!’ whose subject is the Hoodoo Gurus. And done it without a hint of the portentousness of ‘That Word Girl’ . . .
You could say that a fault of modern music, indeed of the age, is that we’ve all become so self-conscious about everything, that it’s become harder to appreciate simple pleasures, harder to approach pop in the same naive way that people did when Lulu was belting out ‘Shout’.
“I agree entirely,” nods Faulkner. “You can’t have the past back —I don’t want those old values back. But I do want songs to be songs, and not just vacant mental space, you know, like a crossword puzzle or something. I like it to be like a good book, at least.
“Some of those corny old songs do say a lot, regardless of the cliched nature of their construction and their lyrics, they still somehow seem to strike a target. I respect a lot of the old songwriters — Irving Berlin, people like that — who were able to toss off a lyric the way other people could eat fast food, and yet still put a more cogent sentiment into it that will still stand up today. I admire that sort of technique and that art.”
The Hoodoo Gurus | Marsupials Bagged
Beneath all this is a man who just wants to write classic pop records. and unlike most who talk about perfect pop, has the nous and inspiration to achieve his goal.
IN THEIR HOMELAND they have become pop stars and on their own terms. This year they were given an award by Countdown, the Aussie equivalent of Top Of The Pops, for ‘Stoneage Romeos’ (Debut Album Of The Year) though without any history of support for the group from the programme-makers.
The award can best be explained as a belated act of contrition. Like every other Australian group to have made a recent mark overseas (not counting one-hit blunders like Men At Work), the Gurus have done it themselves — inadvertently exposing the perpetual crisis of taste in the Aussie majors’ A&R departments.
Last year, while the big companies were showering money on no-hope mediocrities at home, the Gurus were successfully touring the States (‘I Want You Back’ became the seventh most performed song on the influential US college radio circuit in ’84). EMI handle the distribution of their records, but that, according to Bigtime, is as far as major interest has ever travelled.
American / European tour
A few days before the start of the Gurus’ second US tour (to be followed by a visit to England and Europe) they play a farewell bash inside the vast concrete shell of the Sydney Entertainment Centre for kids not old enough to see them in pubs and clubs. I enter feeling 30 and leave feeling 13. Banks of kids doing . . . the Jitterbug! the Hootenanny! the Mashed Potato! Simultaneously.
The scene is like films you’ve seen of the NME poll awards ceremony circa 1964. Mad screaming. A Gary Glitter cover. Even madder screaming. A lone red flag stitched with ‘DAVE’ flies from the terraces. The Hoodoo Gurus sound positively great, of course. No more nightmares about Madonna. Never again will I curse the taste of the modern 12-year-old. In the words of Andrew Partridge: This is pop.
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