Punk, Punk Rock, Hardcore, Thrash, Aussie, Australia, Old School, Alternative, Independent, Regression, Regression Fanzine, Fanzine, Emo, Bastard Squad, Bloody Sods, Bombscare, Charter 77, Legless, The Worst, Distorted Truth, Dayglo Abortions, Rule 303, Slick 46, Glen and the peanut Buttermen, A-Krop, Ardent, If Need Be, Kamikaze, Macauly, Nahende Vernichtung (Belgium), Off By Heart, Seconds From finishing, Sixty Miles an Hour, Arm The Insane, Bodies, Box of Fish, Charred Remains, Civil Dissident, Condemned, Cosmic Psychos, Depression, Dick Nasty, End Result, Exploding White Mice, Extremes, Fear and Loathing, Fifth Column, GASH, Godnose, Hard Corpuscles, Hard Ons, H-Block 101, Hi-End Audio, I Spit On Your Gravy, Justified Hatred, Macauly, Mad Flowers, Meanies, Mob Vengence, Mouthguard, Murder Murder Suicide,  NFL, No Escape, Perdition, Permanent Damage, Plonker, Polit Buro, Progression Cult, Psychotic Maniacs, Psychotic Turnbuckles, Quick and the Dead, Royal Flush, Scum, Slakjaw, Society's Victim, Skunks, Standard Union,  Start, Threshold Of Pain, Toe To Toe, Vicious, Vicious Circle Where’s The Pope, World War XXIV, Corporate Body, Manslaughter, Public Nuisance, Sick Things, Spew Forth, The Virgins, White Elephants, Z Cars, Zorros, Boys Next Door, Chosen Few, JAB, La Femme, Lethal Weapons, Negatives, Noisy Boys, Proles, Squadron Leader, Teenage Radio Stars, The Babeez, The News, The Reals, Tch Tch Tch, True Wheels, TV Kids, Wattage, XRayZ, Young Charlatans, The Melbourne Punk Directory, Reactor Records, Apito, DNA, Anti Climax, Bodies, Bootboys, Brady Bunch, Charred Remains, Civil Dissident, Corpse Grinders, Criminal Youth, Death Sentence, Depression, Dogs Of War, End Result, F.B.I., Fifth Column, Genocide, I Spit On Your Gravy, Jazz Sluts, Jehovah Pogo, Justified Hatred, M16, Mad Flowers, Murder Murder Suicide, No Escape, Non-Conformists, Out Of Order, Permanent Damage, Polit Buro, Psychotic Maniacs, Royal Flush, Society's Victim, Scum, The Mess, The Start, The Tribe, Vicious Circle, Young Offender, South Australia, Western Australia, Sydney, Queensland, Victoria, Melbourne, Decline, Street Punk, Gutter punk, Melbourne, Geelong, Victoria, New South Wales, Sydney, Queensland, Brisbane, South Australia, Adelaide, Western Australia, Perth, Aqua Nuggets, Beanfeast, Bone Crusher, The Affected, Butt Ugly, Damnation, Dweebs , Forcefed, Forgotten Generation, Fridge, Growing Concern, Labotomy Scars, Mouth, Nation of Hate, No Comply, Poppin Mammas, Providence, Seaweed Gorillas, Snark, Steadfast, Subzero, Tucknot, Two Years Old, Unclean Spirits, Walsh Street Cop Killers, Zambian Goatherders, A.S.V.V., Beanflipper, Bodyjar, Buzzbomb, Caustic Soda, Cretins Puddle, Devotchka, Fallout, Farenheit 451, 4Qm, Gameover, H-Block, Headcase, Kill, Kurgan, Magnacite, Mindsnare, Mid Youth Crisis, Mutiny, Myside, Next Step, No Grace, No Idea, Nihilistic View, Oddball, One Inch Punch, Scroungers, Self Reliance, Silpheed, Smut, Sphyzein, Stand Against, Trigger, Vicious Circle, Warsore, Without A Reason, Wrongbody.

Punk, Punk Rock, Hardcore, Thrash, Aussie, Australia, Old School, Alternative, Independent, Regression, Regression Fanzine, Fanzine, Emo, Bastard Squad, Bloody Sods, Bombscare, Charter 77, Legless, The Worst, Distorted Truth, Dayglo Abortions, Rule 303, Slick 46, Glen and the peanut Buttermen, A-Krop, Ardent, If Need Be, Kamikaze, Macauly, Nahende Vernichtung (Belgium), Off By Heart, Seconds From finishing, Sixty Miles an Hour, Arm The Insane, Bodies, Box of Fish, Charred Remains, Civil Dissident, Condemned, Cosmic Psychos, Depression, Dick Nasty, End Result, Exploding White Mice, Extremes, Fear and Loathing, Fifth Column, GASH, Godnose, Hard Corpuscles, Hard Ons, H-Block 101, Hi-End Audio, I Spit On Your Gravy, Justified Hatred, Macauly, Mad Flowers, Meanies, Mob Vengence, Mouthguard, Murder Murder Suicide,  NFL, No Escape, Perdition, Permanent DamaGeoff Sick, Sick Things, Legend Killers, terrorize, ge, Plonker, Polit Buro, Progression Cult, Psychotic Maniacs, Psychotic Turnbuckles, Quick and the Dead, Royal Flush, Scum, Slakjaw, Society's Victim, Skunks, Standard Union,  Start, Threshold Of Pain, Toe To Toe, Vicious, Vicious Circle Where’s The Pope, World War XXIV, Corporate Body, Manslaughter, Public Nuisance, Sick Things, Spew Forth, The Virgins, White Elephants, Z Cars, Zorros, Boys Next Door, Chosen Few, JAB, La Femme, Lethal Weapons, Negatives, Noisy Boys, Proles, Squadron Leader, Teenage Radio Stars, The Babeez, The News, The Reals, Tch Tch Tch, True Wheels, TV Kids, Wattage, XRayZ, Young Charlatans, The Melbourne Punk Directory, Reactor Records, Apito, DNA, Anti Climax, Bodies, Bootboys, Brady Bunch, Charred Remains, Civil Dissident, Corpse Grinders, Criminal Youth, Death Sentence, Depression, Dogs Of War, End Result, F.B.I., Fifth Column, Genocide, I Spit On Your Gravy, Jazz Sluts, Jehovah Pogo, Justified Hatred, M16, Mad Flowers, Murder Murder Suicide, No Escape, Non-Conformists, Out Of Order, Permanent Damage, Polit Buro, Psychotic Maniacs, Royal Flush, Society's Victim, Scum, The Mess, The Start, The Tribe, Vicious Circle, Young Offender, South Australia, Western Australia, Sydney, Queensland, Victoria, Melbourne, Decline, Street Punk, Gutter punk, Melbourne, Geelong, Victoria, New South Wales, Sydney, Queensland, Brisbane, South Australia, Adelaide, Western Australia, Perth, Aqua Nuggets, Beanfeast, Bone Crusher, The Affected, Butt Ugly, Damnation, Dweebs , Forcefed, Forgotten Generation, Fridge, Growing Concern, Labotomy Scars, Mouth, Nation of Hate, No Comply, Poppin Mammas, Providence, Seaweed Gorillas, Snark, Steadfast, Subzero, Tucknot, Two Years Old, Unclean Spirits, Walsh Street Cop Killers, Zambian Goatherders, A.S.V.V., Beanflipper, Bodyjar, Buzzbomb, Caustic Soda, Cretins Puddle, Devotchka, Fallout, Farenheit 451, 4Qm, Gameover, H-Block, Headcase, Kill, Kurgan, Magnacite, Mindsnare, Mid Youth Crisis, Mutiny, Myside, Next Step, No Grace, No Idea, Nihilistic View, Oddball, One Inch Punch, Scroungers, Self Reliance, Silpheed, Smut, Sphyzein, Stand Against, Trigger, Vicious Circle, Warsore, Without A Reason, Wrongbody.

Clinton Green

"Shame File Music"

www.shamefilemusic.com

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March 2009 - Just Released....

Available now for free download or on CDR

.........................................................

Clinton Green – a musical autobiography

(Clinton also produced the excellent M4 zine which will is featured under "Publications"...)

M4 Link

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 Timeline

 1990: KAOS (bass, drums, vocals)

1991-3: Punchbag (guitar)

1991-present: Undecisive God (guitar, bass, vocals, effects, samples)

1993-4: NeTE (bass)

1994-6: Kill (guitar, vocals)

2001: Behind Closed Doors Ensemble (guitar, bass)

2001-present: The Unnameable (guitar, bass, vocals, effects, samples

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I was a late starter.  In 1990 I was 18 years-old and doing HSC at High School.  I had been a big music fan from a young age, and had had many dreams of gracing the stage.  My best friend Kevin bought a Hurricane guitar with a practice amp and a Boss overdrive pedal from a friend, but he later decided to take up the bass so I bought the guitar equipment off him for about $100 - $150 all up (I still have the guitar and the pedal and use them to this day.  Lord knows where that little amp is now).  So the guitar sat around at my place, as I had no idea how to play it and have always been too proud for things like lessons (much to my subsequent regret).  In the meantime, Kevin had acquired a drum kit as well as a bass and amp.  His parents had moved to another town for work and left the house to Kevin and his brother.  Empty house, teenagers, a lot of musical equipment that we didn’t know how to play.  The result was KAOS.

 KAOS was Kevin and I, with occasional cameos from other friends, making as much distorted noise as possible, recorded on a tape deck.  We never used guitar, instead favouring the bass played through the Boss overdrive pedal.  The material ranged from extremely silly noisecore “renditions” of glam metal hits to extreme noise jams with distorted bass and drums.  Neither of us had any idea of how to play drums, but the bass sound we generated was quite interesting, and Kevin had fantastic grindcore-style vocals.  I was beginning to get interested in Sonic Youth at the time, so feedback and aggressive attacks on the bass was high on the agenda.  KAOS was purely for our own fun, and out of several hours of recordings I culled the best onto a cassette release called “We Do Not Have Speech Impediments”, the first release on my fledgling SHAME FILE label.  We only ever played live once, and that was at a very lightly-attended party on New Years Eve 1990, with a drum machine.

By this time, I was working out how to do some basic things on the guitar.  I read a few books and some friends showed me some basic chords and riffs.  Wayne Duncan (who I latter played with in NeTE) was good enough to show me the chords for specific songs I wanted to work out how to play.  I remember Metallica’s “To Live is to Die” and Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”.  There was also a really useful article in Maximum Rock’n’Roll ‘zine explaining bar chords.  I had some basic knowledge of music theory from high school (although I failed music in Year 8!), so I understood time signatures and bars, and could read music in a pinch.  Kevin was getting bass lessons, so we started doing some serious (as opposed to KAOS) jamming together.  We were both really into the local hardcore punk scene and wanted to get a band together.  I remember us jamming one time in his garage, the sound reverberating off the concrete floor and metal walls, doing our version of the Hard-Ons “All Set to Go”, and I still have a tape of us playing our very first original, entitled “Grunt”.  We were both into Adelaide hardcore band Grunter, who at that time played super-fast and aggressive, and “Grunt” was our instrumental attempt to play in that style.  It had three chords and a quite embarrassing guitar solo. We called our fledgling band Fatburner, after some weight-loss ad we saw somewhere. 

We started fishing around for people interested in playing drums or singing.  It was 1991 and I moved to Geelong to attend Deakin University.  I was sharing a house with a few people, one of whom was Steve Dickie.  Steve was into similar kinds of music, like the Hard-Ons, Rollins Band and Husker Du, and had played drums before.  He didn’t own a kit at the time, but as Kevin already had one it seemed worth giving him a shot.  We had a jam at Kevin’s and it was good.  Well, none of us could really play that well, but we were on at similar level and wanted to play similar music, so that was good.  I think we played Misfits “Last Caress”, maybe Black Sabbath’s “Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath”, and jammed some of the riffs Kevin and I had that would soon turn into our first few originals.  Steve arranged to purchase the drums from Kevin and we were in business.

The three of us practiced for a few months at Kevin’s house, slowly improving along the way.  We were writing songs, too, individually and as a band, as well as covers from the likes of Misfits, Hard-Ons and Meanies.  I remember one time we were playing “Last Caress”, when a friend of Kevin’s brother who was in the house at the time poked his head in the door with a surprised look on his face and said, “that sounded good!”.  He was probably used to hearing KAOS.  We looked at each other with big stupid grins and played it again.  That was one of our few encores.

We asked around our friends for anyone interested in singing, and got some interest from another local Melton guy, Duncan Wall.  Kevin knew Duncan best, and I was familiar with him from high school (he was a year or two older) and also knew his younger brother.  Duncan was/is a tall, gangly guy with long blonde curly hair, more into death/black metal bands like Venom than the stuff we were playing.  Still he was interested, so he came around for jam.

That jam is probably my first great music memory.  It sounded fantastic at the time to all of us (although the recording I have doesn’t quite match the memory).  I think we played “Last Caress” and a couple or originals we had written.  Hearing one of my originals “Samantha” played by a full band with vocals for the first time was a real thrill; a song I had written came to life.  It was probably the first or second song I ever wrote, and close to the best rock/pop tune I would ever compose.  Despite what the tape I have sounds like, it was a magic moment.  We all seemed to fit together.  We had written songs and we were playing them.  We were laughing and giggling in between songs, like we were high or something.  We were in a band.  In hindsight, I think a great friendship began between the four of us at the moment as well.

We rehearsed for a few more months and wrote some more songs.  For a while we called ourselves Street Trash, after one of Kevin and mine’s favourite films at the time.  We moved our rehearsal space from inside Kevin’s house out to his garage.  There was a punching bag in there, and that seemed good enough reason to change our name to Punchbag, and it stuck.  There was also a mirror in the garage that we noticed Kevin was rather found of using to check himself out whilst he played, which we constantly ribbed him about.  We recorded a demo on a four track that belonged to Mark Hodges, who I knew through Wayne Duncan.  Mark would later join Punchbag, but at this point he and Wayne recorded four songs for us.  Gareth, Duncan’s brother, did some backing vocals on the demo as well.  We recorded it in Kevin’s lounge room.  When Duncan joined the band, he bought his friend Mick Leslie, who went on to become our unofficial roadie and mysterious fifth member.

In October 1991 we played our first gig at a Battle of the Bands held at the Sarah Sands Hotel in Brunswick.  The gig was a total disaster, and even now I laugh when I listen to the tape.  We were last on and Duncan was laying drunk underneath the pool table when it was our turn.  We managed to get him on stage to grunt out what may or may not have been lyrics.  Steve dropped a drumstick in the middle of a little drum solo bit in “Punchbag Paranioa” and didn’t have a spare one to hand.  I remember him looking desperately at me as he tried to play out the song with one stick.  Duncan’s brother Gareth (whose name did come up originally as a potential drummer) jumped on stage, picked up the dropped stick and worked the ride with it at the song’s climax.  In between songs, Duncan uttered immortal lines that became legendary amongst us.  “We’re gonna fuck up a Hard-Ons song now”, “Now watch us fuck up a song we wrote our selves” and “God help us…”  And I broke the first of many guitar strings that would perish at my hands throughout my career.  The audience were in stitches.  We didn’t win, but we had done it.  I know Kevin and I felt quite euphoric at the end, although I think Steve was a bit upset about it all.  I didn’t know if we would go on, but we did have a great time.  And now it was official, we were a real band.

We kept going; we were having fun!  The four of us were quite good friend now, and we’d often socialise together, too.  I’ve heard others say that that is the great thing about your first band; the friendship.  We played more gigs around Melbourne, got a bit more confident in what we were doing, improved a lot on that first gig, too.  Although we were far from the darlings of the local scene, we got a pleasant surprise when a guy I knew said he wanted to do a record with us.  Brett Rattray was a South African guy now living in Melbourne who ran a hardcore punk label called Swan Records.  He saw us live and loved us (as Mark would later say in a radio interview, “Luckily one or our one or so fans happens to have a record label”).  Nothing was concrete, and it would probably be a way off, but we were very excited about the prospect.

Unfortunately, things within the band were not going as well as they had been in the beginning.  Rehearsals were becoming quite tense, as Kevin seemed to be constantly directing nasty comments at Steve, and myself to a lesser extent.  He was getting along famously with Duncan.  I felt the situation was getting intolerable.  It was especially upsetting for me because Kevin and I had been friends for so long.  It wasn’t only the remarks, but Kevin’s commitment to the band was also questionable.  We would be waiting in his garage to start rehearsing, and he would be mucking around inside his house.  When we did get started, he didn’t seem that interested in playing well, either.  After rehearsal one day, I said to both Steve and Duncan that I wanted to speak to them after and we arranged to meet at the local Hungry Jacks (“meeting at Hungry Jacks” also became part of the Punchbag lexicon.  Later, we even wrote an extremely offensive song about the dubious contents of the Whopper entitled “Coathanger Cuisine”).  I said to Steve and Duncan that I was thinking about leaving the band, largely because of Kevin.  I was very surprised when they said the band would fall apart without me, and they both agreed it was Kevin who had to go.  I was especially surprised that Duncan agreed to this; although Duncan had copped none of Kevin’s verbal abuse, he had still seen what was going on and was not happy about it.

We then made one of the decisions I regret most in my musical life – that we would kick Kevin out of the band.  In retrospect, my regret doesn’t lay particularly with the fact that we kicked him out, but that we didn’t give him a warning.  We didn’t give him a chance.  We didn’t confront him and say, “Look, we are not happy with what you are doing, we need you to change.”  Instead, we snuck around behind his back.  I suggested Mark Hodges as a replacement, as I knew he was an accomplished bass player, as well as a better musician than the rest of us.  I spoke to Mark and he was interested, and he and I went over a few riffs together so he could slot in quickly once Kevin was gone.  Meanwhile, we went on rehearsing with Kevin as if nothing was wrong.  When what the three of us knew would be our last rehearsal was finished, we all invented some pretence on which to take our gear home with us, as we usually left most of it at Kevin’s.  Duncan had got the job of breaking the news to Kevin, largely because Kevin practically idolised him and treated Steve and I with such disdain now.  Duncan went and told him, then rang me straight after the deed was done.  He told me that he apportioned the blame to me and Steve, and Duncan was just going along because he still wanted to be in the band.   Of course, that wasn’t the case, but I didn’t begrudge Duncan one bit for that fiction; he was the only one who had the guts to confront Kevin.  Duncan told me on the phone that Kevin was really mad and said he was going to ‘come around and get me’, or words to that effect.  I remember sitting in my lounge room that afternoon, looking out the window with a sick, hollow feeling in my stomach, waiting for Kevin.  He never came, and I didn’t see him again for over a year.

Given the way he was acting, I don’t think Kevin would have mended his ways had we given him the chance.  I’m sure many have been kicked out of bands for much less without warning.  But with that act, I threw away a friendship of about six years, without giving it a chance of survival.  And it was purely because of cowardice that I didn’t want to confront Kevin.  Maybe our friendship was over before that, though, given the fact that we were no longer getting on anymore.

Mark settled into the line up quite comfortably, and we were a happy little band once again.  For a while I was a bit concerned that Duncan and Mark would not get on.  Mark was a skinny, pale gothic-looking kid (only 17 at the time, I think).  He was also a vegan.  Given Duncan’s hard-drinking, heavy metal lifestyle, I wondered how they would get on (he would totally freak out in the presence of another friend of mine who was a goth).  But we all got along famously, which was probably helped by Mark attempting to match Duncan’s dope and Stone’s Ginger Wine intake on one or two occasions; with results which were disastrous for Mark, but hilarious for the rest of us.  I never thought someone could actually turn green until I witnessed Mark’s complexion do so late one night in Geelong.  In retrospect, we were probably pretty rough on the new kid for a while there.  I remember that same night (a freezing Geelong winter’s eve) he stumbled outside to throw up.  We realised about an hour later he hadn’t returned and found him outside unconscious on the grass.  So we put him in the bath for the night, lest he throw up anymore.  He was also the butt of regular vegan jokes (“You can’t eat those potato chips, an animal might’ve pissed on ‘em” – he seemed to live on potato chips).  His fearless substance abuse seemed to impress Duncan and overcome any doubts he may have had about Mark’s strange vegan ways.  Another night on the way to Geelong’s Barwon Club for a gig, Steve and I were in one car and Duncan and Mark in another (the latter smoking spliffs as they drove).  Steve and I drove through a booze bus in the main street of Geelong.  We looked behind to see that Duncan and Mark had been pulled up.  We arrived at the Barwon Club, thinking they had been busted for sure.  Yet they pulled up soon after.  Duncan said they’d butted their spliffs, and the cop had asked “You been drinking tonight?”  Duncan had answered “Nah”, and that had been it.  They were both off their heads.

We were the best of friends again, and many other great times ensued.  Our music was on the improve with the addition of Mark as well.  Much tighter.  We were all developing as musicians to some extent.  I was very much into the guitar styles of Greg Ginn and Sonic Youth.  Punchbag would never set the world on fire, though.  One time we played very late at night at the Barwon Club at a private party and were turned off halfway through the second song.  I remember being extremely drunk, stumbling around and barely able to stand up – I don’t think the others were much better.  We started with the GG Allin song “You’ll never tame me”, I remember thinking it wasn’t loud enough and cranking the amp up all the way – I could barely play the guitar, though.  Another time we played during the day at Deakin Uni outside the caff, and we were turned off on the orders of the Head of Commerce or something.  We were always very proud of such things.  At the other extreme, we once got an encore in front of a crowd of about 500 people in my home town of Melton when we played support to the Meanies and Spiderbait.  It wasn’t that enthusiastic an encore from the crowd really, and the fact that Spiderbait hadn’t yet turned up also had some say in our decision to play another song or two.  Generally, people really weren’t that interested in us.  Listening back to our tapes, I can’t really blame them.  Most of us were still learning our instruments, and our music was unremarkable, straight forward hardcore punk with the occasional melody.  Eventually, this would wear us down, but whilst we were having fun together it didn’t seem to matter all that much.  There was always the hope that our popularity would improve.

Early in 1993 we drove up to Canberra for a couple of gigs with local acts Bladder Spasms and Precursor.  No one liked us and we had a ball.  I think we all look back on that trip fondly.  We never did get that EP done with Swan Records.  Instead, Brett wanted to do a compilation 7” featuring Punchbag.  We went into Atlantis Studios in Melbourne to record a few tracks for Brett to choose from.  We had a producer lined up in our occasional mixer, Madame Jenny Lash, but she didn’t turn up so we had to go it alone with the engineer.  We did three songs through the early hours of the morning, and I think we were all quite overwhelmed by the experience of studio recording (a first for all of us, I think).  I was really impressed with Duncan’s vocals; you could tell he had been practicing.  I had a few stressful moments when my guitar kept going out of tune and I couldn’t get the timing right on one part of “Samantha”.  I was feeling like the real amateur in that professional setting, but fortunately the engineer was very good and didn’t make me feel like I shouldn’t be there.  I remember saying to him, “I’m not really much of a guitarist”, and he replied, “Look, you’re here, you’ve come this far, don’t worry about it”.  The song “Ultra Violence” ended up on the compilation, which was entitled “Silence is Guilty”.  We also had some other tracks on other cassette and CD compilations, and I released a tape of some dubious bits and pieces posthumously; that was the extent our release list.

We had a gig at the Arthouse in Melbourne for my 21^st birthday, and by this time I had seen Kevin again and things were OK between us, although we would never be best friends again.  He came to the gig, but left before we played.  I remember I told him I felt really bad about the way things had ended.

Around mid 1993 things began to peter out.  We were losing interest in rehearsing and the lack of audience response was wearing us down.  We decided to take a few months off then regroup in a few months and see if we were refreshed enough to continue.  By this time, I think Mark and Steve had another band going in Devotchka, and I also had other musical pursuits.  We regrouped around November 1993 and decided that was it.  What money we had made was split between us and Punchbag was over.

Whilst playing in Punchbag I had also begun other musical pursuits.  Since around 1992 I had been recording solo experimental guitar sounds on a walkman for no particular reason other than I liked the sounds.  Even though my first major band was a traditional punk hardcore band, experimental music has always been an interest.  These early recordings were lengthy workouts exploring different guitar sounds, like manipulating feedback and using a 9 volt batter as a slide around the pick ups.  Around March 1993, I also started playing in a two piece band with Wayne Duncan.  Wayne had been recording solo material on a four track (that belonged to Mark Hodges) for a while under the moniker of Rabid Love Child.  The idea was to recruit myself to enable this material to be played live (a drum machine had always been used), but Wayne was a prolific songwriter and we soon had a lot of new material as well.  To reflect this we took the name Dereks Don’t Run, a line from the much-loved movie Bad Taste.  Wayne played guitar and sang as well as programming the drum machine, and I played bass (I bought a bass guitar off my girlfriend of the time).  We played extremely down-tuned (to A) heavy industrial music in the style of Godflesh.  It was really Wayne’s project and I largely did what I was told, but that appealed to me after being one of the main instigator’s in Punchbag.  I was also quite excited about the music we were making, and it was good to follow on straight into that when Punchbag finished.  After playing a couple of pleasing gigs, which also bought some good responses from critics (just about a first for me after Punchbag!), Wayne wanted to change the name as he felt Dereks Don’t Run didn’t suit the mood of the band, which he wanted to be serious and dark.  He came up with the abstract name of Nete.  Soon after we went through the first of several major style changes, as Wayne decided he no longer wanted to play guitar and instead concentrate on vocals.  Yet we remained a two piece with just bass and drum machine, later with some sequenced synth.  The music was sparse yet aggressive, with the bass still down-tuned (this time only to D) and ultra distorted.  We played a great gig at the Barwon Club in Geelong one night.  I remember feeling that everything was clicking, everything was working – it was a great experience; one which I’d never really had with Punchbag.  Wayne was getting more into gothic music, which was influencing his song writing and performances as he took to wearing bondage gear and gothic make up on stage.  During this time we recorded a self-titled cassette.  We made 100 copies, which sold out in a few months.

The third and final stage of Nete saw Wayne take us to an almost fully-fledged goth band.  We recruited a guitarist named Neil, and I had to stop distorting my bass.  Wayne wrote a new batch of more traditional gothic rock songs, which were still pretty good even though I was never a big goth fan.  We only played one gig with this line up before the band died the quiet death from lack of interest in 1994.

Around that same time I got a hold of the four track Wayne had been using to record a bunch of my experimental solo guitar stuff.  I decided to release the best of this on two cassettes I released that year under the moniker of Undecisive God.  This was the beginning of a long-standing interest I’ve had in experimental guitar playing and recording which persists to today, and is now my major musical interest.  Many of these recordings have been based around so-called malfunctions and sound imperfections in my guitar.  Through a mixture of curiosity and necessity, I’ve often actively explored these sounds in my work.

After a short lay off from playing in bands, I got a new three piece outfit together called Kill.  Joining me was Mark Hodges on bass again and Jason “Snorklebender” Dutton on drums, a big-hitting drummer who had played with metal bands like Christ Bait and Archeron.  I took up the guitar again and defaulted to vocals.  I wanted Kill to be a noisy rock band, influenced by the sounds of King Snake Roost, feedtime and bands like that with liberal lashings of ‘Sabbath-influenced riffing.  We rehearsed and played for a couple of years but never really got anywhere as far as a following was concerned.  I thought the music was pretty good; really chaotic and noisy; but I was obviously in the extreme minority.  In the rehearsal room I started to feel a bit insecure about my playing as Mark was studying music and was a much more technically-accomplished player than me, which on one or two occasions resulted in some uncustomary tension between Mark and me in rehearsal.  My shitty equipment was also becoming a problem (and still is to this day).  Although the three of us mostly got along well, there wasn’t the same sense of excitement and fun that there was with Punchbag.  I remember reading somewhere Dave Thomas from Bored! saying that you should always try and stick at your first band as long as you can, as it is usually the best time you’ll have.  Although Kill was undoubtedly musically superior to Punchbag, we all had a ball in the latter band.

In 1996 we were all losing interest.  A lot of the new material we were writing was quite complicated to play, with varying timings for instance.  I felt that we would probably have to increase our rehearsal schedule to achieve the level of musical competence we were aiming for.  As we were really struggling to maintain our interest in our current schedule of about once a fortnight rehearsals, this was not looking likely.  The inevitable questions rose in my mind about whether so much effort would be worth it in the view that we had no real following to speak of.  I was working full time and getting married in a few months as well.  Once again, the band just petered out.

Over the next three years I had an unplanned hiatus from music.  As well as marrying, we bought a house and became parents.  The recording equipment I had been using for Undecisive God material broke down and could not be repaired, and I was devoting most of my free time to writing.  But in 1999 I came across some old Undecisive God recordings and was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked them.  I decided to put out another cassette (“Purple Silk, Yellowed Clothes”), sent it off to a few old contacts and got a pleasing response.  Then I purchased a new four track recorder and resumed recording my experimental guitar pieces with a vengeance.  Over the next two years a recorded a large amount of new material ranging from noise to ambient to explorations of guitar sound.  Two more cassettes were released over that time, “Prodigal” and “(_the_war_against_sleep_”) (the latter on Slovakian label Black Orchid).  I also did a remote collaboration with Brisbane’s Andrew Kettle.  We discussed things via email and sent each other audio beds to play over.  The result was the “Digilogue” mini CD. 

In 2000 I began putting together a compilation CD entitled “Behind Closed Doors: Australian Home-Recorded Experiments”.  In April 2001, I organised a launch for this CD, featuring a number of the contributing artists collaborating together live, including myself.  After this a few of us continued to play live together under the title of Behind Closed Doors Ensemble.  I played guitar and bass, Andrew McIntosh (of The Scroungers and N.FIOS/Screwtape) played synth, Alex and Frank (of Fenetik) played laptop and vocals respectively.  We had a handful of gigs and did some rough recordings before Alex and Frank lost interest in the project.  It was always a pretty casual affair.

In 2001, I also released the first full-length Undecisive God CD, featuring some new recordings and a couple of older favourites from previous releases.  I was also briefly reunited with Steve Dickie of Punchbag, who played drums on two tracks.  I was very happy with how this CD came out and I still think it contains some of my best work.

On the side I was also doing some collaborative recording with Andrew McIntosh towards the idea of releasing dark experimental tribute to the writer H.P. Lovecraft, acting as soundtracks for his stories.  This became The Unnameable.  It was good to be working with someone else again.  We released the “But of that, I will not speak…” CD, and are currently working on some new material.  We have also been approached to do soundtrack work on two separate Lovecraft-related short films, which is very exciting.  I have always wanted to do soundtracks. 

The Behind Closed Doors launch was the first time I had played live since Kill ended in 1996, and I continued to play occasional solo gigs as Undecisive God.  These have usually been low-key affairs, and sometimes quite stressful due to low turnouts and technical problems related to my old equipment.  Often I will play on a week night with other more traditional rock acts.  I used to think this was a good thing; breaking down the barriers, etc; but lately I have been wondering if it is worth all the stress.  There seems to be an experimental scene (or even several scenes) in Melbourne that has gigs and attracts crowds, and I would like to get involved in some of that.  But it is strange how alienated I end up feeling at such events.  In some ways I think I have excluded myself from such scenes deliberately, and there is also the fact that I am older than most other people involved, have a full time job and family, etc.  Undecisive God is a very introverted journey.

In 2002 I began some collaborative recording with Scott Sinclair from Brisbane.  I met Scott when I played at Small Black Box in 2001 (a Brisbane experimental music club), which Scott was helping organise.  That was probably one of the best shows I’ve ever played, certainly the best solo one.  The sound was good; no part due to the fact that I was using a borrowed amp and not my shitty old one, and everything just seemed to fit together.  It was also great that my father was there, who lives in Brisbane.  Scott is one of those few people who really like what I do, and has even said to me lately that I have influenced how he plays guitar, which is really flattering.  He was in Melbourne in October 2002 and we recorded some improvisations together, and did some more in May 2003.  We play material with both of us on guitar, and then with he on samples and me on guitar.  It’s a real thrill to play with another guitarist, something I’ve rarely done as even the bands I used to be in didn’t have a second guitarist.  During his May 2002 visit we also played live together, which was punctuated by another technical breakdown on my behalf, although I think we did manage to salvage some decent moments.

In 2002 I also did collaboration with James Smith, who goes under the name of W.I.T.  Two short remixes of each others work was released on a business card CDR entitled “The Modern Discourse”.  We did some other recordings as well they may one day appear elsewhere.

Recently, my trusty four track recorder has taken a back seat as I’ve been using multi-track software for recording.  I am still learning how to use it properly, but am finding it worthwhile just for the more dynamic sound quality and the end of tape hiss.  I have also been recording straight to mini disc then patching it into the PC.  I am finding this is quite significantly changing the way I create music.  Whereas with the four track it was a quite simple process of laying down one track at a time then overdubs and perhaps adding some effects on the mix down, when using software things can go in any order really.  The amount of virtual tracks available is huge as well.

So that is the story so far.  I continue to record, which is still a great pleasure for me.  There are more Undecisive God releases due soon, and no doubt that project will continue to be ongoing.  I’m excited about the collaborative work I’ve been doing with The Unnameable and Scott Sinclair, and more will come of those projects in the next year or so.  Hopefully I can get up to Brisbane again soon and do more work with Scott.  I do miss playing in a band, and my secret vice is listening to rock music (I am really into Iggy and the Stooges at the moment) and would like to play that kind of music in a band again, but I don’t know if I have the energy/time/ability to put in all the thankless hours of rehearsal again.  That is a young man’s game, or at least a professional musician’s.  I’ve never had any illusions about making a living out of music.  But it remains one of the great joys in my life; to create music that expresses the inexpressible.

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Clintons Great Website is at:  www.shamefilemusic.com

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