By the time Stafford had finished his first album I had already released my third. And prior to that I had already made my live noise debut opening for Heist. So much for Stafford’s “shock tactics.” In this short time I’d learned that I didn’t need those pretentious recording stunts anyway. I had a lifetime of my own inspiration to draw from. I settled on an unpretentious setup of electric guitar which I ran through a home-made signal splitter feeding out to a Tube Screamer and two Boss MT-2s. For amplification I used two shitty solid-state combo amps. I had found one of them at the tip and the other I’d stolen from His Majesty’s Theatre on Hay Street. With this setup I asked Dean for a gig and he said no but I didn’t need his permission. The White Sands had a power outlet on the long wall than ran along the side of the stage so that’s where I set up. On the carpet guerrilla-style. That was the real shock and awe. In-and-out with my noise music blast before any of those fucks had time to think. I shattered their illusions of brutality. Nothing the punks were doing compared to what I had come up with. And I did it all so fast it ripped the guts out of their whole punk identity. So for my third album I decided I would simply record in the style I'd used for that gig. And I called the album GET AIDS.
Some may find that title ironic given that I'm writing this post while I’m sick with some debilitating virus-type symptoms but this is my life now. That’s the reality of it. And it has been that way for a long time. And it’s not AIDS/HIV but a whole bunch of things combining in a really bad way.
In other words my shit’s fucked up.
But don’t feel sorry for me. This is the consequence of a hedonistic lifestyle which I have no regrets about living. I dedicated my life to noise which is about experiencing all. It’s about experiencing everything life has to offer. The good and especially the bad. That's the real harsh noise. So when I first started losing toes it didn’t bother me in the slightest.
Laugh about that all you want. Have you ever lost a toe? Have you even woken up and found one of your toes in between the couch cushions? How do you know how I’m supposed to feel about that?
I was just shocked it hadn’t happened sooner to be honest. That’s the reality of diabetes. And at least I had conviction and the guts to live that lifestyle. I did everything my way on tours all over the world. This was never a pose to me. I lived my life and I did more than pretty much any of you ever will.
And my current health reality has nothing to do with the reason I chose to call the third album GET AIDS. That was a sardonic recommendation to the Perth punks who are the biggest pack of preening fashion-conscious posers that have ever walked the earth and nothing I have seen has changed in the follow-up generations. They are still just white trust-fund kids who went to a PSA1 school and as a result of that have a fetish for self-delusion and bullying through the need to invent their own suffering after a lifetime of having everything they ever wanted. Their elitist mothers taught them well in the ways of self-delusion and gossip which is why instead of accepting the well-paying job they are guaranteed through daddy’s contact list they spend their twenties in the prolonged fantasy of a bullshit subculture that claims to be about individuality but is actually run like an exclusive club of bottom-rung obedience sold as violent nihilism.
And despite their pathetic working-class facade it costs money to be a punk. Those hairsprays and brothel creepers aren’t cheap. I lived with them and they spend more time on their appearance than a Serbian housewife. 80% of their day is spent preening and sewing new patches on their store-bought leather jackets. The rest of their time is spent in Forrest Place or outside the pub parading for the other punks.
And guess where all the money comes from to afford that lifestyle?2
This is how they maintain the illusion that they are anti-authority. Total self-absorption. They are the most self-absorbed people you will ever meet. Through a lifetime of having their failures erased by their rich parents they never learn about the real world through the consequences of their own fuck-ups. And because they have no idea of the reality of AIDS they probably would consider intentionally getting it if they thought it would help maintain their precious Sid-Vicious physiques which they idealise because it suggests the poverty image they aspire to but in reality never experienced. And they don’t need to go the AIDS route anyway as they have their own tried-and-true method for weight maintenance which is drug use. The punk’s drug of choice is heroin. E causes too much emotion. Speed is good for weight control but it causes too much aggression and there’s nothing a punk fears more than having to back up a big mouth. Which is how I managed to get away with so many of my guerrilla gigs. What were they going to do about it? Like they were going to stop me. Just like when I stole from them. I stole so many guitar pedals from the punks and when they noticed one of their pedals in my setup all I had to do was deny everything. Both of us knew that their daddy would buy them another one anyway so it was a victimless crime.
After the gig opening for Heist I would start advertising my intent weeks in advance by simply scribbling my name onto their posters. And despite signalling my intentions I was not prevented from playing any of these shows. Not a single one. In fact after about a month I noticed that the same punks who were originally against noise music claiming that they had wanted me to play their show all along.
It was fucking pathetic.
I wasn’t surprised though. It was simply punks indulging in the self-serving revisionism and cognitive dissonance they are famous for. Because they don’t have the guts to admit to anybody let alone themselves that they lack the power to control their own lineups. Rather than admit they have no control I noticed them claiming that my addition was proof that their specific sub-scene of punk was the most extreme of all the punk sub-genres which was simply the mental gymnastics required to justify their imagined place at the top of the hierarchy when I did what I wanted anyway. Because in a few short months I'd done so many of these guerrilla gigs I've long since lost count of them all. And in a very short period of time Perth Noise had become a bragging point for these losers even though deep down they were disgusted by what I was doing. But no matter how much they were disgusted with noise they despised themselves most of all. The d-beat automatons and their disdain of the “blues-based” scumfuc scene. The scumfucs laughing at the 80s hardcore kids. The hardcore kids and their pathetic attempts to standover the Ramones geeks. The punks were so obsessed with their precious divisions and hierarchies they were blind to someone like me who was actually above it all. I simply had to turn up and do what I wanted before they simply gave up and invited me in. Which was a mistake as old as time. Because if they wanted to maintain their precious hierarchy they should have kept me on the outside. They should have showed a little intestinal fortitude and kept me as a scapegoat like the rest of society was able to do but they didn’t have the guts for it.
Punks are nothing but high society’s fuck-ups.
And they were so blinded by their pathetic scene warfare they invited me in despite the danger I posed. Both in an existential sense and the interpersonal. And in the case of one of the more odious scumfucs it proved to be very dangerous indeed. I won’t give his name but this "scumfuc" loser can trace his ancestry all the way back to the squattocracy3 and his uncle was a high-profile minister in the Richard Court cabinet4. During the Richard Court years his parents mysteriously got richer despite the droughts of the 90s affecting agricultural land prices5. How does that happen without some serious fucking corruption? And of course this "scumfuc" tried to keep his family wealth a secret. It may sound absurd but this kind of secrecy wasn’t hard before I got involved in the scene. Before I arrived nobody talked about this stuff. And almost every Perth punk has a story of secret privileges which meant that to even suggest to a punk that they had any family whatsoever is a taboo akin to telling somebody from straight society that they look a bit like the milkman.
But the punks do have families.
And not only are their families not punk they aren’t even working class.
This is the secret shame of almost every single punk in Perth. And this particular "scumfuc" I’m referring to was even more ashamed than most and his desperate attempt to cover it up was a persona he stole from GG Allin, Johnny Thunders and Axl Rose in equal parts. This swine actually sprayed “LEGALISE MURDER” on the back of his leather jacket. And to make it worse he would actually spend upwards of $100 per fortnight on hair maintenance alone and then have the gall to say he was a natural blonde and not the curly-head "ranga" redhead that he actually was. He may have been somewhat successful at hiding the red hair but he had no such luck hiding the recessive chin and pig snout which are the telltale facial signs of white privilege. And perhaps the biggest privilege indicator of all which was his actual behaviour. Because you can wear any costume you like but you can't change the way you behave when your guard is down after dealing with a strong personality like mine. Situations like these always reveal the fakes. And I remember one night in particular walking from Carr House to a show at the Norwood6 with this GG wannabe. He liked to tell people that he lived at Carr House but despite being there all the time I don’t think he ever once stayed overnight and he definitely never moved any of his stuff out of the private flat his parents owned near UWA. Anyway, on the night I’m referring to we were walking towards Hyde Park when we found an unconscious man in the middle of the Lake Street roundabout. This guy was bleeding heavily from a wound to the head and being Aboriginal he was difficult to notice in the dark. And our scumfuc “friend” didn’t even want to call an ambulance for this guy. He said he couldn’t wait for it because Billy Spirits was already at the Norwood holding for him. And when I pressed some DRAGGING SENSATION t-shirts on the guy's wound to stop the bleeding my so-called “punk” friend actually made some comment about diseases.
This coming from a guy with an acknowledged junk habit.
You can’t make this shit up.
Which brings up another truth about punks. It’s important to remember that they are deeply racist. This is because they are raised in a different social class. They are aware that racism is not cool however which is why every punk will sew at least one reggae patch on their store bought jacket or bondage pants. And this guy was no exception. He had an “I AM THE UPSETTER” patch. But when push came to shove his true racial hang-ups were revealed that night. And in response to his cowardice I later went out of my way to infect him with all sorts of pathogens without him knowing about it.
Cold Sore virus.
Hep A.
Typhoid.
Whatever I had he was going to get in the short time I would remain at that pathetic share house. Or “squat” as he liked to call it. Even though he never lived there.
And he wasn’t the only bourgeois pseudo-punk that inseminated themselves into the Carr House scene either. Another pathetic specimen who I won’t name moved into Carr House at around the same time and quickly tacked up framed letters from GG Allin onto the lounge room wall. And they weren’t even letters sent to him. He actually bought them from somebody in Sydney who ran a punk mail-order. So I did the natural thing and wiped my ass with them and this so-called “scumfuc” actually called the police about it. Charges were threatened but later dropped which was a rare legal win for DRAGGING SENSATION7.
The Perth Punk scene was full of cretins like these. But even though DRAGGING SENSATION sprang from an almost universally pathetic punk scene the first noise music fans in Perth actually migrated from there which proved to be another negative consequences of them "inviting" me in. They lost all their best prospects to noise. Meg Vitnell was the first defector. She is one of the coolest people I have ever met and definitely one of the bravest. She was there for my noise debut at the White Sands and when everyone took their first steps back in fear towards the toilets she stepped up to the front.
She loved it. And she was the biggest defender against anyone who dared say anything bad about noise. That was because she couldn’t suffer idiots and cowards which meant most of her fellow punks. She simply had no time for your bullshit. One of my favourite Meg memories is when she trashed the Halloween “punk” show at Shenton Park Hotel. She was a total noise freak by then and only went to the show to cause trouble. Blood Drop had already begun their set by the time Meg had arrived and she signalled her disgust at the whole thing by busting the piñata hanging above the stage onto the singer’s face. They had planned to do the piñata much later in the evening but Meg ruined it. She even stomped most of the chocolates before anyone could eat them.
No I’m not making this up.
They actually had a fucking piñata.
And Meg was one of the few who saw through this type of shit. She was disgusted by the idea of “punk” Halloween. The idea that punk was just an “alternative” version of straight society rather than against the idea of society as a whole which is what it was supposed to be. Her response to the piñata should have been the norm. But the Perth Noise Scene was formed in a time period when bullshit like this was accepted.
“Punk” Halloween gigs.
“Punk” Christmas gigs.
Funnily enough they never had a punk mother’s day gig though.
Punk “Labour Day” was the worst. All the spoilt brats of the ruling class waving their red flags and Eureka stars at some bullshit picnic show at Hyde Park8.
Meg summed it up best by pouring a cup of piss all over their fucking BBQ.
I love Meg. For years I had to put aside a copy of every new DRAGGING SENSATION release for her. She was our biggest supporter in the early years.
In terms of other notable supporters from the earliest days Riley was the only other one. He wasn’t that tough though. And he was even less imaginative than Stafford. He was at every one of the early 1997 gigs however so it’s important that he gets recorded here.
By mid-May 1997 Stafford finally submitted the master tape for his first release. It was much too late to actually participate in the first batch of noise gigs though. I did those alone. True to the crippling self-doubt that was behind all of his future bullshit and slander he called me later that same night to say that there were flaws in the mix and he needed more time but I vetoed that decision. By that stage I had finally learned that in terms of artistic intuition Stafford was not to be trusted and what he’d given me was good enough despite a few trite moments.
I let him call it what he wanted. WASH STATUE AND SATAY CRUMB whatever the fuck that was. Years later I learned that it was from one of the psychotic ramblings he’d secretly recorded of Centrelink recipients he was supposed to be helping so I probably should have followed my instincts and vetoed that decision as well. He also insisted on being billed as WILLY BOG and his artistic justifications for this were also flimsy which is why I wasn’t surprised to learn years later that the name wasn’t for art reasons like he said but simply because he wanted to remain incognito as he was afraid of his boss finding out what he was doing.
How piss weak is that?
As for the actual musical content it was mostly a noise collage of radio and found sounds. Although I admit that he does have a good ear for bullshit9 I never told him that I had already done something similar when I was in primary school by selling secret recordings I’d made of some of the teachers although admittedly my recordings were not part of an explicit artistic statement like his were. My tapes were simply a way of settling scores and causing psychological harm to certain teachers for the abuse I’d received from them which is infinitely more moral than recording mentally-ill welfare recipients like Stafford did. The recordings were good for what they were though and in the scheme of Perth music in the 90s it was an excellent statement. Alone it probably doesn’t stand up but as a counterpoint for what I was doing it was perfect. And it meant that the Perth Noise Scene was finally more than just me. We now had multiple artists and could call ourselves a scene. Plus we had infiltrated the punk scene and were stealing the best of their fans.
By now an outbreak had started and it was time to spread the disease.
The wider Perth community needed to prepare for a plague.
Nb. If anyone can help out with their own memories of CONRAD guerrilla gigs from this period please leave a comment. It would be good to get all this on the record.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Schools_Association which are the oldest and most expensive private schools in the state.
Their rich parents.
Richard Court is the WA posterboy for spoilt rich-fuck nepotism. He literally inherited the blue-ribbon Seat of Nedlands from his father who was in power himself for almost 30 years. This says everything you need to know about those in his latterday circle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Court#Early_life
Everything you ever heard about the Hyde Park Hotel is actually true about the Norwood: https://perthvoiceinteractive.com/2023/04/06/rocky-start-for-norwood/
The police harrassment of the Perth Noise Scene will be examined in later chapters.
This was at Hyde Park itself and not the overrated pub.
Which explains how he successfully built an audience for his online slander years later.
thanks for this conrad
lol serbian housewives