The History of Perth Noise - Part Five
Freak Power
By early 1998 Perth Noise was doing what punk was supposed to do by actually providing an outlet for society’s scum to make a stand. And it only took about one year for that to happen. Not bad for a two-man operation funded entirely by Centrelink. That may seem unbelievable but don’t forget that I’m not like you. I have never wanted a long-term relationship or any of the other bullshit a person from straight society strives for. While you were worrying about dinner dates and the football I was actually making stuff. I was doing noise work all the time.
That’s almost thirty years of seeking the limits and then going further than that.
And Stafford was mostly the same when we began DRAGGING SENSATION together. I hear he’s married with children now. I feel sorry for his family. Somebody should look into what he has over them because I assure you it won’t be pretty behind closed doors. Because I know him better than anybody. I know his psychological makeup. It’s ill-equipped for family life. He should have shown a little more intestinal fortitude thirty years ago and recognised the potential he had at the time. But he couldn’t take that final leap of faith. He had the potential. He just lacked the guts. And he settled for mediocrity instead. He took the few small comforts that polite society was able to offer him rather than embrace his true calling of outsider status which is the real tragedy of the Perth Noise Scene as opposed to his betrayal of it years later which in reality was nothing more than the petty jealousies of a washed-up sellout. His slander job against the Perth Noise Scene was ultimately meaningless. The real tragedy is that he once embraced his outcast status but threw it all away. Because he had the ideal noise artist persona. He was just like us. It was just the two of us at the start but by early 1998 we were joined by others and despite all four of us bringing something different to the table we were all prime examples of the type of outsider that is well suited for noise music. All of us were easy to hate. And all four of us were deeply antagonistic by nature. It also didn’t hurt that we were some of the ugliest physical specimens that Perth had to offer. We were hated before we had even done anything simply because of how we looked. We were truly hideous unlike the so-called noise artists who were apparently making noise music before we did. The so-called artists who we were accused of ripping off who lack the experience of being a fundamental hate target.
Therefore they will never have an influence on the Perth Noise scene.
So-called noise artists like Boyd Rice and William Bennett with their bland Anglo facial features and upper-middle-class lifestyles and education are not noise to me. Even Merzbow with his refined Japanese cheek structure. All of them are acceptable people by the standards of polite society. They had pretty much every door open to them but they chose noise music as some kind of attention-seeking stunt. They are no different to the petit-bourgeois posuers of the Perth punk scene attempting to shock their emotionally absent parents. How could these types ever be an influence on us? We were the ones who were actually hated. Unlike our so-called influences we were hated simply because we existed. We were hated for our ugly faces so we didn’t have a choice in the matter. Anything we did was hated and feared anyway so noise music was natural for us and therefore an honest artistic expression at a fundamental level. I can admit that I enjoy Merzbow’s music but I honestly never heard any of it until years after DRAGGING SENSATION began. And I found it harder to take Merzbow seriously once I saw what he looked like. DRAGGING SENSATION kept it real in comparison. Our physical repulsiveness was part of an artist/pharmakos tradition that dated all the way back to Aesop1.
And the next addition to the DRAGGING SENSATION roster was definitely part of that tradition. Ryan “CLIVE” Czeladka had his own physical deformity that meant that he was never a part of polite society. Therefore it made sense that he was the first to sign with DRAGGING SENSATION outside of the original two. This guy was and still is the tallest person I’ve ever seen. He was a legitimate giant and this was in the days before KFC was dosing everyone with growth hormones which meant that he was simply a freak. He was also one of those fans with ideas for noise setups that I was starting to attract after my sets had finished but unlike the majority of them his ideas were actually decent. And despite his size he was just like me in that he couldn’t stand heirarchies. He came up through the punk scene like I did but our paths never crossed there as he was a bit younger and involved in the 80s-thrash-influenced skater scene that was based around Scarborough Senior High School. He had the reputation there for being a brutal enforcer of unity and equality like a proto-punk John Macias2 but after one of the bullies he bashed killed3 some other kids in proxy revenge he took a vow of non-violence and made sure that all future antagonism was directed towards himself. This vow became part of his noise performance which he had pretty much perfected by the time he made his live debut at the tape launch for the SUN CANCER IS AN ANGLO DISEASE release.
It was a great night. Probably one of my favourite ever shows. CLIVE opened with what became his signature style. His setup was minimal. He simply knelt on the floor with one arm stretched out like he was Jesus and with the other hand he would bash himself in the head and face with the microphone. It sounds simple but that was deceptive as most people didn’t realise he was actually able to deftly manipulate feedback through the microphone due to the sheer size of his hands. So all these elements together really pissed people off. It was highly antagonisitic which is what DRAGGING SENSATION had embraced by this time. We were embracing our persecution. It’s fine if you want to hate us. We’ll make it easy for you.
We are the plague of Perth.
We are the threat.
There were more of us now and we had grown beyond your control.
You need to understand that Perth was ripe for this. In the mid-1990s the whole city was gripped by its fear of the weird. Perth was never a place where it was safe to be classified with outsider status but by the 90s it went to a whole other level of danger. In my opinion it started when Western Australia finally legalised homosexual sex acts but with an age of consent that was higher than the age for hetero sex4. Therefore this attempt at equality still sent the message that homosexuality was a deviance that preyed on innocent young people who needed protection. I admit that this is all speculation on my part as LGBT hate crimes were not recorded by WA police5 at the time and I can’t even rely on my own anecdotal evidence as I was not aware of my own bisexuality until years later. But the early 90s were the years that I do recall an increase in the random abuse I received on the streets simply for being the person that I was.
Bashed because I was a “freak”.
“Freak” being the catch-all term in the 90s for those deemed undesirable and dangerous because they couldn’t or wouldn’t fit in with the established youth styles of the time. If you were white you most likely lived within easy distance of the beach and were therefore a “surfie”. If you hated the beach or were working class and/or non-white you were either a “rocker/bogan”6 or you were a freak. Punks were upper-middle-class whites who hated the beach and were therefore allied with the bogans by default despite their higher class status and their own self-delusions of freakhood. The high rate of UK immigration further strengthened the perception of bogan/punk alignment as the English imported the worst of their National Front style7 skinhead culture which meant their ignorant and mentally limited version of punk was the one that took hold in the minds of the masses. And I was never going to fit in with that. And I wasn’t white Anglo-Saxon either so I could never be a surfie and I couldn’t afford to live near the beach anyway. And I was too weird and too smart to fit in with the bogan crowd and I wasn’t macho enough either. But I didn’t care. I hated them all. DRAGGING SENSATION targeted all of these groups eventually but as we were living in deep bogan territory at the time it was natural that we targeted the bogan fears and prejudices first which is why in late 1997 I released the STEAK tape which was intended to trigger the deep homophobia that typified the bogans of Perth in the 90s.
For this release we mimicked the poster tactics of the Australian Nationalist Movement by taking advantage of Stafford’s Centrelink photocopier privileges to flood the eastern suburbs with provocative posters of our own. But our campaign was different in that rather than seeking the support of the white suburbanite we were trying to make them fear and hate us. Our posters had clear slogans like I AM HUMAN ERROR or I AM THE PICKLE. My personal favourite was the one we used to promote the STEAK (1997) release which simply said GET SOME MEAT INTO YA.
It’s hard to get across how dangerous this was. If people thought of you as a freak by the mid-90s it was enough to make you a target of violent “retribution.” Freaks had gone from being merely distasteful to being the human embodiment of a very serious threat to public safety within the small minds of white suburbia. It started with the bombing8 of the French Consulate in June 1995 by two young dyed-hair environmentalists which brought the fear of political violence from the TV news to the sleepy Perth suburb of West Perth. And the Port Arthur Massacre9 by a blonde long-haired social misfit in April 1996 brought the fear of freaks to the very top of the national agenda.
By coincidence I had been sporting a long bleach-blonde surfer cut like Martin Bryant’s in the years before the Port Arthur shooting which was just my way of pissing off the rockers, the surfers and the punks all at the same time. I had actually begun doing this during the last few years of my punk phase. But after Port Arthur this hairstyle became incredibly dangerous. I didn’t care though. I was already a hate target. I was going to be bashed anyway so I thought it was better to show no fear while doing it with some style.
War had been declared on freaks anyway.
Their fear of us was the only weapon we had so of course we were going to use it. Because that was what DRAGGING SENSATION was all about. In less than six months from late 1997 to early 1998 we released eight tapes and organised at least 2-3 shows per month while continuing with our poster campaign which made it one of the most prolific times in DRAGGING SENSATION history. And everything we did was done to stoke the fear and disgust of the stupid spoilt dumb-fucks of Perth.
In February 1998 we held a joint tape launch for SURFER by CONRAD MOLECH and FLOP UNION by WILLY BOG at the Whitesands in Scarborough which at the time was surfie central. We did that because we wanted them all there. We committed to our biggest poster campaign ever to promote the show. We targeted almost everywhere north of the river which meant that on the actual night we had a crowd of surfies wanting to bash us for making fun of them and a crowd of bogans wanting to bash us because they thought we were the surfies! And when they saw how big CLIVE was they wisely decided to bash themselves instead in an old fashioned surfie/bogan war! I didn’t even get to perform my set that night as the police came to shut everything down early but I still say that my orchestration of this event is one of my biggest artistic achievements.
This was also around the time when I knew for certain that we were being monitored by the WA Police and this show and the aftermath had a lot to do with it. Carloads of surfies and bogans roaming the streets looking for freaks to bash. A lot of innocent people were targeted. The dreadlocked Phillip Walsham10 died later that same month when he mysteriously “fell” from a freeway overpass at Stirling Train Station after receiving multiple kicks to the head in a case of mistaken identity by a carload of hateful bogan drunks. We later received a visit from a couple of detectives after that incident who tried to blame us for what had happened to Walsham that night.
They were also very suspicious of Shane “DYSTOPIA” Brunet who around this time became the fourth signing to the DRAGGING SENSATION roster. His police interest was unrelated to the Walsham matter and entirely due to his father and uncle who were patched outlaw-bikie-club members. And as DYSTOPIA was now living with us at DRAGGING SENSATION HQ the police actually accused us of storing illegal guns when in reality it was me who was being targeted by gun nuts because of my Martin Bryant hairstyle. I lost count of the number of times I had cars pull over beside me with the driver flashing a piece because they assumed I was supportive of the new post-Port Arthur gun laws11 and was trying to antagonise them12 with my hair. On more than one occasion I actually had one of these fucks shoot at the ground near my feet while demanding that I dance for them. But despite these and other assorted threats we still did pretty much what we wanted to do. It was only the police who were able to slow us down during this period and that was only because they had warned the pubs that we relied on for shows that they would have “issues” with their liquor license if they continued to book us. So we couldn’t play the pubs for a while. It took us about a month to get another couple of shows lined up which we did in community halls that we booked in Don Ottway’s name. The first was the DISCO tape launch we held at Crimea Hall which was the home base of the Morley Eagles Baseball Club.
This was DYSTOPIA’S live debut. He was the first member of DRAGGING SENSATION without punk-scene affiliations. Like me he was bisexual and deeply loud and proud of that fact. So while his bikie family didn’t disown him they still had a hard time accepting him into the bikie world because of his queerness and his weak physical condition in general that was caused by severe scoliosis. He didn’t care though. He was an old-school pansy and proud of it. He looked everyone in the eye and stared down every threat. He was genuinely tough and if I could criticise him for anything it’s that he never embraced his queer identity in his noise persona. He could put on a pretty amazing live show but. Years later when I got access to Youtube and saw Masonna perform for the first time it reminded me of what DYSTOPIA was doing in Perth in the late 90s. I’m not sure what his bikie and bikie-affiliate relatives thought of his live show or DRAGGING SENSATION in general but I do know that they were able to quietly help us out on occasion when things got too hot.
The Tuesday after the DISCO launch was the joint tape launch of CLIVE’S debut I DID NOTHING WRONG and my next tape called SAUSAGES.
This was the first show without WILLY BOG and in hindsight it was the first sign that Stafford was starting to wimp out. He made some excuse at the time about it being a “work night” but that had never bothered him before so I suspect that the real reason was that the heat was starting to get to him. He did turn up for the opening set but he didn’t stay for the whole night. And he was the only one who left early because despite it being a “work night” this show got one of the biggest turnouts yet because we had somehow managed to book the Mt Lawley Bowling Club whose central location made it accessible for most of Perth. My memory is a bit sketchy but I assume we used Don Ottway’s senior credentials to trick the club into renting us their clubrooms. That was a big mistake on their part. Noise-music fans and senior’s beer prices were a pretty dangerous mix and we never managed to book that room again.
This was probably the end of our glory period. We continued to perform sporadic shows for about another six months in random venues. Mostly community halls we booked under fake names. We lost so much money on security deposits it wasn’t funny but it was all worth it at the end of the day because they were some of the best shows we ever did. From late-1997 to early-1999 we had done what we wanted. Then the few venues that ever hosted Perth Noise decided to collectively put us on the blacklist. I blame the police for that. Because every one of those venues had made money off us in the past. Controversy sells. So the problem was obviously the police harassment. It had become so bad that we had no choice but to slow things down and collectively focus on new material instead. It meant that the excellent I FINALLY GOT THAT PLACE OUT OF MY FUTURE by DYSTOPIA was unable to get the tape launch it deserved.
The slowdown didn’t stop the harrassment though. Somehow our names got out. Our address and phone number as well. To this day I still blame the police for this even though the phone calls were just funny. My only regret was that my recordings of them were lost. They were just full of empty threats. None of us were bothered by these phone calls. The most stressful thing about them was making sure you got the tape recorder ready in time. The home intrusions were a different story though. Minor assaults but worst of all was the damage to our equipment and our recording archive which was the real way to get back at us. This was the only concern in my opinion. I wasn’t worried about anything else. The same couldn’t be said about Stafford however. The whole thing was too much for him to handle. He moved out. He said the intruders and the anonymous letters and phone calls to his boss were affecting his work performance. I had a hard time respecting that decision but we still needed his access to the photocopiers so that was that. There was nothing we could do about it. Of course we didn’t go to the police. They were the ones who had started all this and they only helped the straight white population anyway. It has always been this way in Perth. Look at what the ANM got away with for years. It was only the collateral damage of their bombings that forced the police to do anything. This was confirmed by the ANM police informant who was told by police that “[the ANM] shouldn’t have bombed the restaurants. Everything else [they] did was ok.”13
This was the city we were dealing with.
The blacklisting almost crippled us financially. Because organising the shows was pretty much our only access to alcohol and walking-around money. And to make things worse were the drastic changes to the dole by John Howard’s government at around the same period of time which not only reduced our main source of income but the income of the majority of our customers. It meant that if DRAGGING SENSATION was going to survive we needed to make some changes to our operation and we found that not all of us had the guts to do what was necessary.
Compton, T. Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
CLIVE resembled the late LA punk singer John Macias in more ways that one which I will demonstrate in later chapters.
I think the only thing CLIVE did wrong in bashing Jeremy McLaughlin was that he didn’t finish the job given that McLaughlin killed again (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-23/mclaughlin-guilty-of-murder-of-teen/4647026) in New Zealand after he’d served his WA jail term for the killing of Phillip Vidot.
I would argue that this omission from the records was deliberate.
The distinction between rockers and bogans remains a contentious issue but as far as I can tell it all comes down to the age of the speaker as both words essentially identify the same type of person. I noticed that this change occurred in the late 80s/early 90s [i.e. if you came of age prior to this you would indentify as a rocker but if you began bashing freaks by about 1990 you would identify as a bogan]. It really doesn’t matter what you call them though and I couldn’t care less if they are offended by that because they are all a bunch of mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers.
Paul Daley; Duncan Graham; Gary Tippe (18 June 1995). "The French Consulate: the fallout". News. Sunday Age. p. 14.
I was trying to antagonise them but this had nothing to do with the gun buy-back. The reason I was trying to antagonise them was because I detested their social group of middle-aged bogans as a whole.
Bradbury, D. Nazi Supergrass. Point Clare NSW: Anthony Buckley Films Pty Ltd. 1993.