Metalheads in the 80s: Robyn Way, Michael Sarantos, Kylie McLaren and Michael Keating
Featuring: Robyn Way, Michael Sarantos, Kylie McLaren and Michael Keating
Running time: 6 minutes
Transcript:
Robyn Way: [0:07] I got into heavy metal round about 1983, 84, I think. That would have been around the time that Iron Maiden toured with the Power Slave Tour. I remember, it was my first big heavy metal concert that I went, wow, this is fantastic. Previous to that I was probably more into punk and other things, but I kind of went into the metal scene round about then.
[0:30] The heavy metal subculture, to me, was all about music. That was why we were involved in it. It was identifying yourself through the music that you listened to. The bands that we enjoyed we would wear, like, shirts to identify ourselves as part of that subculture and as part of that whole metal scene.
Michael Sarrantos: [0:52] We were young. We were free thinkers. We were anti-religion. We were anti-establishment. We were anti-politics. We just wanted to do things on our own terms and we didn’t want to be told what to do. Plus the music was louder than everything else and it spoke to us. But turn about 17 or 18 I started joining bands and playing gigs and if I wasn’t playing a gig I’d be going to watch a friend’s band play or just going to see bands that we liked. And sometimes we would go and see two or three bands a night, depending on who was playing and where it was and stuff.
Robyn: [1:30] Heavy metal, to me, meant music. It was all about music, just music and the friends. Once I’d left school I moved to Sydney and through friends I did get a job in a record store in Sydney. Then through other connections did manage to meet a few favorite bands, either backstage or at certain parties. People like Bon Jovi, or Metallica, or DAD.
[1:58] Being a female in the very male-dominated subculture was actually quite good because you were one of the few females in a male-dominated subculture. And I think also because, you know, we were girls who were actually into the music, you know. There were a lot of girls there who just dressed up and looked great but weren’t really that into it. But we could actually hold our own in a conversation about what band was doing what and all that sort of thing.
[2:22] When I went to gigs, the dress style didn’t change, really, from what I wore day to day for work. Because you dressed for the music, it was all about the band t-shirts. Lots of black. Probably just layers, sort of tights and skirts and then the t-shirts. Lots of bracelets. Once I got into glam, so bracelets up to both elbows. Early 80s were white high tops, so you’d wear all black and then white high tops, which never made any sense, but then sort of yeah, black boots and black band t-shirts.
Michael: [2:58] Just black on black. Black jacket, metal t-shirt of your own choice. Black jeans, black runners. In those days the fans and the bands looked the same. Well, at least the thrash metal bands did, anyway.
Man 2: [3:14] I think everybody sort of looked the same, had the same kind of music, went to the same places. It was almost like a little tribe, I suppose. There was a tribal feel about it, I think. I sort of casually started listening I suppose in the late 70s. And then in the early 80s I think I discovered Iron Maiden and from then on I just sort of, well I’d always loved Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, things like that. So, I just got more and more into the scene, basically without even trying. I just sort of fell into it and a whole world opened up for me, I think.
[3:52] The glam rock scene in Sydney was probably a poor imitation of what it was like in LA. I think that kind of music, which I think had a lot to do with the AC/DC sound, back in the 70s, I think in Australia we kept that jeans and t-shirt, AC/DC image when it came to that kind of music. And even when I first started in the heavy metal scene, there was a bigger glam influence. Even I used to, my girlfriends and girls in particular used to dress me up a bit more as a glam rocker. Big boofy hair. But I always was more into a Black Sabbath look, I suppose.
Robyn: [4:40] The bands that brought it out of the underground were probably the new wave of British heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden and those sorts of bands. You know, Ozzy and what he was doing and all those sort of bands that came out of England. But the glam metal bands definitely in the states made it big. Made it really big. Like you’d have number one albums and you’d have top 10 singles and MTV would have heavy metal glam bands on rotation and it became a lot more acceptable.
[5:08] I guess it depends on the sort of genre of the heavy metal, you know, the angrier people got into the death metal stuff, which was kind of later than the 80s anyway. But at the time in the 80s when it was all about the hair and the big glam, it was a lot of show off and oh check me out look at me sort of people involved in the whole thing.
Man 2: [5:27] I think with heavy metal, because the music was the most important part about the subculture, we really accepted anybody who felt the same way about the music as we did. So, it didn’t really matter what ethnic background or socio-economic strata you fit into as long as you liked the music and you were serious about the music, then you could go to a heavy metal concert and find a friend quite easily.
Skinheads in the 80s: Penny Newlove
Speaker: Penny Newlove
Running time: 6 minutes
Transcript:
[0:08] I used to hang around with punks in about 1980, mid-1980, at the Civic, and various other places, and I ran into an old friend who used to be a punk who said, ‘Oh come down to the Sussex.’ And of course we were quite daunted by this because you heard the Sussex had skinheads in it and it was really scary, even as a punk. It was like, ‘Oh my goodness!’ And he dragged me down there and, I guess, virtually, I never left, I just clicked with everybody down there. There were a lot of mods. There were skinheads, there were rude boys and rude girls, so it was a bit of a mix of different cultures.
[0:45] And there was just a small group of us, skinheads, and we were just really good friends. It was just a very tight knit little group. There were probably 20 of us. And because we were sort of deemed by society, deemed misfits, it was us against the world kind of a situation. It makes you feel a lot closer to each other, and that was all through 81. We lived and died together. We would be at the Sussex just about every night of the week. Stella and Dennis, who were the owners back then. We used call them ‘Mum and Dad’. It was our little joke. And they used to always refer to us as their children.
[1:23] And they used to, you know, do things, like, if we were broke they’d lend us money. They became part of our family, too. In the original year, all the different groups mingled together. They started a lot of physical fighting and stuff like that, so Stella and Dennis thought it was best to give us our own bar, so they opened up the very, very top bar for us. And got us a jukebox, so we all brought our own music in, so our jukebox was full of all the songs that we liked. And it actually broke up because of a fight between a few friends and Stella and Dennis actually barred us, so we all got thrown out.
[2:00] And that was when our group first fraction-ised, it split into skaskins and oiskins. And in England skinheads were very much defined by music and politics. And as skinheads evolved here, that started happening here. But back then when we were first starting, we were the only skinheads at the Sussex. We were it, so it didn’t matter what music you liked. We listened to all different kinds of music. As I said, ska, oi, we even listened to some punk stuff, you know. Politics was immaterial; it didn’t matter what your political beliefs were.
[2:40] I think a typical skinhead look from my period of time was, blue denim jeans, Doc Martens, if you had cherry red Doc Martens you wore yellow laces. If you had black Doc Martens, you had red laces. You wore braces, the skinnier the better. A Harrington was the must-have jacket, that came in red or black with tartan inside. A Crombie was another one, which was like a big black, I guess, duffel coat I’d describe it as. You wore – oh, a band t-shirt of some sort. A ska band, or some band that you followed. If you were lucky enough to get a Fred Perry, you had a Fred Perry or a Lonsdale top or a Ben Sherman which was a button up shirt with a button down collar.
[3:27] You just had your hair cropped short. In my day the girls just had their hair cropped short all over. But as the scene moved on, the girls started getting the fringe at the front and the side burns and the tails, which I ended up having. But in those sort of 1980-1981 period, it was just basically, it was just cropped all over. If you wanted to wear a skirt, you’d usually wear a tartan type – like a kilt or something like that. We used to go to the Trade Union Club late at night, when all the pubs would shut, because they would all shut around 12 o’clock in those days.
[4:00] So we used to go to either the Graphic Arts or the Trade Union Club. But it all depended on whether we were barred or not at the time. We used to get banned from a lot of places, so it became, ‘OK, now where do we go? Oh, we’ll go to the Teacher’s Club’. And then we’d get banned from the Teachers Club so then it would be, ‘Let’s go to…’
We ended up at this disco called Bruno’s that was in Crown Street. It was the most unlikely place for a group of skinheads; it must have looked hilarious. It had the big Grecian statues out the front.
[4:32] [laughter]
Penny: [4:33] It had the big lit-up discotheque flooring.
[4:35] [laughter]
Penny: [4:36] And we used to go there every night and they used to think the song for us was ‘The Swingers’.
[4:42] [laughter]
Penny: [4:43] Because it was punk.
[4:44] [laughter]
Penny: [4:46] And we always felt obliged to get up and dance to it for them.
[4:49] [laughter]
Penny: [4:50] It’s so funny. I think we were really weird, we didn’t give a damn what people thought, but we still felt obliged to dance for those people when they put that song on. And once again, you know, one night we trashed the toilets and we got barred from there. Next time we turned up, they were all out on the street with kitchen knives and cleavers and stuff like that.
[5:07] [laughter]
Penny: [5:08] We got chased down the street. That kind of thing happened to us. So skinheads were portrayed in the media and it was us, like it was our group. And it was usually because of some fight or riot that we were involved in at the time. So, it would have been portrayed very negative. And we were portrayed as thugs and we were very indignant about it. But, looking back, we were, you know. So I think the media labeled us probably fairly correctly, actually. But at the time we were really indignant about it and we used to get picked on by police and that sort of thing.
[5:46] You’d walk down the street and you’d get hassled just simply because you were dressed a certain way, which we took great umbrage at that. But looking at it as an adult, it’s like, ‘Well, duh, you know?’
[5:56] [laughter]
Penny: [5:57] Of course it’s going to happen. And I think that’s what a lot of it is, I think a lot of people who get involved in subcultures, whether they know this at the time, I think you do it so you can be identified and be an individual. It defines me, this is who I am, and I think it’s with maturity that you suddenly go, ‘I’m me; I don’t need a label or a thing to tell people who I am.’
Mods in the 80s: Beccy Connell, Sara Wichall, Gary Hosie, Jonathon Browne and Kirstin Sibley
Speakers: Beccy Connell, Sara Wichall, Gary Hosie, Jonathon Browne and Kirstin Sibley
Running time: 9min
Transcript:
Beccy Connell: [0:08] It started in England in the early 1960s, I guess. A bunch of working class, mainly boys, I’ve got to say, who got into Jazz, modern Jazz, and hence the name ‘modernist’. And with that came the continental Italian look and so that idea of looking sharp and dressing to impress each other as opposed to going out to impress girls. And it just started from there. So they’d just be suburban kids, they’d hook up and then they’d come into the city and they’d have share houses, and then, you know, invariably would be the hangout and then more people would hook up. And there were, I guess, mod suburbs, like Newtown, there were a lot of mod houses. Glebe at some stages.
Sarah Wichall: [0:53] I came out from England and ended up at Maroubra Bay High, which is a predominately surf school. I remember walking into school the first day and being called a punk, which was a massive offensive word to call me, being a mod. So I got into a few scraps the first day at school. But they accepted me; they were interested into what it was all about… the whole clothing, the attitude – there is an attitude to being a mod down to what you would wear – 14 inch bottom trousers, inch above the ankles, Winkle Pickers, suits had to be four-button – it was very much attention to detail.
Sarah Wichall cont’d: [1:27] So I came out here and everyone was running around with zinc on their noses and swallowing bronzing tablets so they had a tan. And I came out from England this pale creature wearing Fred Perry’s, tartan mini skirt, Winkle Pickers and running around on scooters.
Jonathon Browne: [1:42] In Parramatta in the early 80s, it was sort of flannelette shirts and ugg boots and, you know – it was just so different to be wearing Winkle Pickers and five-inch side-vents, and three buttons, and one-inch lapels. Then I drifted to the city, it was like four of us, really. It was a huge mod scene in Parramatta. And we went, ‘You know what, we’re just getting the shit kicked out of us on a daily basis – let’s move to the city’. So we did.
Kristin Sibley: [2:05] I lived in various mod households and there was one in Newtown at the back of the performing arts school and one in Station Street, we called Mutant Manor. It was this huge Victorian pile with like six bedrooms. And people would just arrive on your doorstep at two or three in the morning whether you’d gone out or not and expect to kind of be let in and have a bit of a party there. There was Ferndale Street, and that was, yeah, a different crowd again, but there was various mod households and we just kind of partied a lot, yeah. [laughter]
Gary Hosie: [2:38] I guess it was based on pleasure. It wasn’t based on politics or poverty or, you know, like the whole punk think supposedly – economic, social – you know, sort of response. It was about having a good time, listening to good music, dressing up sharp. And to do those things, you effectively needed a job, so you needed to be relatively responsible. So we, in fact, had more freedom, because we could go from a pub to the swishiest bar at the Hilton Hotel without having to change our clothes. So we had total freedom.
Jonathon Browne: [3:12] Went to a pub called the Sussex, which sadly isn’t there any more. It was run by a woman called Stella Marinos, who was just the most amazing woman ever. She took me under her wing – because I was only 17 at the time – she knew I was too young to be in a pub. So it was just like, ‘Love, when the wallopers come around, just duck out the back’. Like, ‘Yeah, OK’.
Sarah Wichall: [3:33] The wonderful thing about Stella was, she would always look out for the kids, supported the bands going through, again, The Allniters were one, The Sets. We were just looking for our own little niche, but also I think it was a lot better of us being in there and looked after by her than out on the streets. She was a wonderful, wonderful lady.
Gary Hosie: [3:52] A lot of people that I’ve met over the years, since those early 80s mod days, have come up to me and talked about sort of the influence that, The Sets, my band, had on them, and how they still remember the lyrics of the songs to this day. Even though we never put out a record, and we never released the lyrics, they learned them singing along live.
Gary Hosie cont’d:[4:13] And those songs expressed how they felt, because we were mods and they were mods. My brother and I were not drug takers, we didn’t want the scene to be a drug-taking scene. We weren’t successful because in the end, drugs became a part of it and drugs ruined it. But, you know, for us, projecting that by being the example and singing about it in our songs was what we wanted to do. We wrote about what the mods were doing, and what had happened.
Kristin Sibley: [4:45] Thursday night was definitely out to the hip hop club. And out till four in the morning, then get up, go to work. I think I was working at DJ’s at the time. And, you know, get up, having had two hours of sleep. And Saturday was always get up as early as possible, go to Newtown, tour the op shops. And the markets, you know, Balmain Markets or Paddington Markets and try and find a fab new outfit. That was kind of the girls’ aim – was always new clothes, new clothes, you know.
Beccy Connell: [5:11] Cute little dresses… boots, go-go boots, ski pants and little Winkle Picker, Mary Jane shoes and things like that.
Sarah Wichall: [5:19] A lot of the time you would customise your own clothing. If you saw a particular check that you liked, or maybe you would just get the collar buttoned down if it was the correct length, so you’d just take it to a tailor, get it altered. The old 60s dresses, the girls used to like go out and hunt them down. The majority at the time, I mean we were always about a size eight or 10 back then, so you’d have to take it along to a seamstress and have to take it in for you, you’d adjust it. If the material was great, you’d make it the way you wanted it to be… Peter Pan collar, anything like that. So a lot of customising went on. A lot of customising, because you just had to find what was, initially, the ‘right kind of look’, but then adapt it so it would be ‘the look’.
Gary Hosie: [5:59] I mean, the suit was generally, it was a three-button suit with a three-inch lapel. Relatively short lapel, two buttons done up, third button not, quite often with flaps on the pockets, six-inch vents on the back. The leg was fairly narrow, although not necessarily absolute leg clingingly tight, but maybe about a 12-, 13-inch bottom.
Jonathon Browne: [6:25] For the first probably two years it was op shop stuff, until I’d had saved enough to get my first suit made and that was like something special. We used to wear brogues if we knew we were going to be in a fight that night. Particularly with the skinheads, who used to wear Doc Martens which is sort of like boxing gloves on your feet. Whereas brogues were sort of, harder, and could do more damage.
Beccy Connell: [6:49] Really heavy black eye makeup. Normally, no lipstick or if it is a lipstick, it’s just a pale, pale pink or a white lipstick – so it’s all about accentuating the eyes…. False eye lashes….
Sarah Wichall: [7:01] The more black and heavier the eyes, the better. Predominately black bobs, or you get a lot of girls coming in would have kiss curls down here and a bit of a bouffant at the back – which is a great look until you’ve got to stick a helmet on it, and then kind of like loses its effect, so to say. But they used to make helmets back in the 60s for the girls who had back-combs and they used to have a little bump above it. And, of course, you’d be able to get out and your hair would still look perfect.
Gary Hosie: [7:24] I’ve got a scooter to this day, which I ride to work all the time. And I think that, you know, you fall in love with them. You know? A scooter was designed so that a bloke could have his wife on the back. The panels are there to stop the dresses getting caught in the chain. To my way of thinking, they were perfectly designed for a couple to ride around on. You know? And I just love them. You know, I love looking at them… I love riding them – but they were not easy to find back in those days. You know, you had to seek out second-hand ones, and often get them restored. So, you had a passion for it – you had to. Because you had to find them, maintain them, learn how to start them when they wouldn’t start. You know? So, there’s a real love thing there, you know. They’re fantastic.
Beccy Connell: [8:16] Just love the look. I mean, I haven’t really shaken it off since I was, you know, 15. I like the way the boys look. You know, tall, skinny mod boy with tight, white Levis, hipsters and short crew cuts – Nothing better! I love the fashion, I love the history from that time. You know, and that’s looking back at it from a nostalgic point of view. I know that actually living it is a different thing, but you know? I just love it.
Punks in the 80s: Jane Dambrauskas, Susan Sunandar and Mark Ritchie
Speakers: Jane Dambrauskas, Susan Sunandar and Mark Ritchie
Running time: 8 minutes 30 seconds
Transcript:
Jane Dambrauskas: [0:08] I suppose it was late 1979 when I was at school, just before I left school, I had seen the Sex Pistols on television and I thought that was very different because they were swearing and vomiting and that was a really bad thing. It was something interesting and out the ordinary. But the biggest influence for me getting into the punk scene was the fact that I’d written for a position to be a photographer with the Sydney Morning Herald or the Telegraph at that time.
Jane cont’d: [0:39] And they actually knocked me back because I was a girl because at that time there were still the ‘women’s jobs’ and ‘men’s jobs’. And it sort of shattered my idea of what I was going to do with my life, because I knew I didn’t want to be a secretary or any of these basic role models that women should be.
Jane cont’d: [0:56] And I suppose the alternative punk came up, and I knew some people that were interested in it and we just went into Sydney and found some posters, and found some bands playing, and that’s how we got into it really.
Mark Ritchie: [1:08] You use the Sex Pistols as a – who I’ve always considered, like, as a catalyst band. They’re a band – they are considered the earlier of the UK punk bands anyway. They sort of opened your eyes. And I thought, ‘Hey, this is something. This is what I’ve been waiting for. This really gets to me.’
Mark cont’d: [1:26] I’d look around at the normal way everything goes around and it’s sort of, ‘Why do I have to mosey along like everybody else and go to the cul-de-sac, get my Hills Hoist, my Colorbond fence? This is just not what I want. And then when I met people, other people who are in the punk scene and I thought, ‘I can relate to this a lot more.’
Susan Sunandar: [1:49] Well, I became a punk when I first saw the Sex Pistols on TV singing ‘Anarchy’ in the UK. I know I thought, ‘Wow! This is what I’ve been waiting for.’ It’s different with different punks. Some people are very much into the political side of it and ‘We’re going to change the world.’ And some of them are just into, ‘I want to have a really good time and have fun.’
Susan cont’d: [2:13] But it always, I suppose it was always political in a way because no one agrees with the way governments, and you know, huge corporations, are running the world for their own ends really.
Jane: [2:27] To be identified as a punk, you needed to dress like a punk because that’s how you were identified. So I suppose the clothing was a way of identifying who was a punk and who wasn’t a punk. Because you, sort of wanted to hang around with punks because they thought like you did. Zippers were really big. There were certain things that were big in the punk scene.
Susan: [2:49] Op shop stuff…. Used to like animal prints, lots of zips. I know the zips were all over the clothing and it was practical. It was so you could put things in your pockets, zip it up and it doesn’t matter how pissed you got and rolling around and whatever, you’re not going to lose things. It was all for a reason. It wasn’t just a fashion statement.
Mark: [3:07] Punk hair went from being very short to being very big. And – being short haired was – I generally kept mine very short – and it was always easier that way because you could dye it and bleach it. You could change it a lot.
Susan: [3:22] I used to back-comb it…. blow dry your hair after you’ve put hairspray in so the hairspray would sort of melt and set – set like rock, really. That was sort of the early 80s people were doing that with their hair. And always bright colours, different colours because it makes you feel good looking at yourself with coloured hair – it was ‘colour therapy’. [laughs]
Jane: [3:47] Black, all black. And I suppose it was some ideas of the punk bands as well, and ideas of other people and what they were doing. Safety pins were actually not that big in the Sydney punk scene because the safety pins had passed by the time it hit our shores. And we had a little bit of our own identity.
Susan: [4:06] I never wore things like cutup denims or cutup jeans because if you’re wearing clothes that are falling apart, they’ve got to occur like that. You don’t want cutup a good pair of clothing. You want something to last. You used to get these weekend punks cutting holes all in their clothes and you’re thinking, you’ve missed the whole point, really.
Mark: [4:29] Jeans were just a pair of old Levi’s that gradually wore away with age. Didn’t really care about them. Just patched them up, as rips come along, we’d just patched and then patched. And because you used to wear them pretty tight, with zips up the back so they’re easier to get on and off. Spray painted – painted on.
Jane: [4:56] The paintings on here was done by a fellow that I knew over here in Australia but I actually can’t remember his name. This is a band called Crass. They were quite… I would say – how would you say the head of the anarchists when anarchists don’t really have a head? But I would say they were the most influential out of the anarchist pack. But it was all about identifying as punk. Everyone had a leather jacket and studs were a big piece of it.
Jane: [5:26] It’s a bit old. Every Friday and Saturday night you’d be out, going and seeing a band and having a drink. The Civic Hotel was very big. We use to hang out there a lot Friday and Saturday nights. The lady behind the bar was very good to us. She would allow us to have bands in the back room. I suppose for her too, she made a lot of money because all the punks would come there and you’d have 100 or 200 people there buying drinks on Friday night.
Jane cont’d: [5:52] There wasn’t any drama, there wasn’t any fights. She sort of was a bit of mother figure I would say, almost. We just wanted to have a drink and have a yarn and talk to people. So I’d say the Civic Hotel was the biggest. It wasn’t the only one. Before that it was Chequers. You’d go to Civic and then you’d walk up to French’s at Darlinghurst, which was a grotty old cesspit, I’ve got to say.
Jane cont’d: [6:14] And we’d go there and you’d have the certain places you’d hang out, because if you walked into a normal pub, for want of a better way of saying it, looking like how you would dress, which was outrageous at the time, you’d more than likely get beat up or thrown out of there. So you wanted to hang around like-minded people.
Susan: [6:33] A lot of the pubs you’d go to for a while would be, like old men’s drinking pubs, who were sort of running out of custom, so they’d let punks drink there for a while till they got sick of us – boost the sales a bit, I suppose.
Jane: [6:46] Sussex Hotel was seen as a mods pub… and the mods hung where they hung…and the punks hung where they hung… and the skinheads hung where they hung…and we didn’t actually get on very well with each other. Punks were quite passive; mods were quite passive. Skinheads hung around with the punks, but they weren’t part of the punk scene because they were so aggressive.
Mark: [7:08] A lot of the little tribes – you’d have inter-tribe gatherings so to speak. On the weekends, you’d have like football matches between the punks and the skins, and the mods and rockers, and things – they’d have little football matches and picnics and things like that. But at night it was [makes growling sound]. ‘Mod, let’s go to a mod stomp,’ or something like that. It was silly because they were friends during the day, and during the week, but Friday, Saturday nights was growl at each other and posturing.
Jane: [7:33] In a way, mainstream society made you a sub-culture, because they wouldn’t be involved with you. And at the same time you identified more with the people in that culture than you did with people outside of that culture. I’d like to call us free thinkers. You know? It was about our life and how we conducted ourselves and the idea of discussing politics that weren’t mainstream or Conservative or Liberal or Labor. We were into anarchist thinking.
Jane cont’d: [8:00] Not everyone of the punk scene was into that, but there was a lot of thought about that – freedom of expression, being who you wanted to be. But I can’t really remember getting that involved with Australian politics actually. We were too busy partying, having a good time, experiencing our teenage life with a peer group that we enjoyed.
Goths in the 80s: Jodie Meidling, Rachel Black, David Kendall
Speakers: Jodie Meidling, Rachel Black and David Kendall
Running time: 11 minutes
Transcript:
Jodie Meidling: [0:08] I think I became a Goth when I was about 13. And the reason that I became a Goth was because I lived in the western suburbs of Sydney. I didn’t fit in. I knew from a young age that I didn’t fit in anywhere.
Jodie cont’d: [0:22] I was into reading ‘Wuthering Heights’, and other people were into reading ‘Dolly’. So you really had no connection with them. You couldn’t sit down and say, ‘Well I’m actually reading this really great gothic novel at the moment.’ And I didn’t want to wear the same clothes as everyone else or listen to their music.
Jodie cont’d: [0:41] And when I was about 13, my family was living in an apartment, and my bedroom used to look down onto the driveway. And the woman who lived in the adjoining apartment, I used to see her coming and going, obviously, going to work and coming home and going out clubbing, and she just looked amazing. She wore the right clothes. She had amazing hairstyles. I just really wanted to meet her desperately, but I didn’t know how. I was only young and shy.
Jodie cont’d: [1:08] And before I got to meet her, she would play a song called ‘Leave in Silence’ by Depeche Mode. And the lyrics to it were that you couldn’t handle your life any more and you just wanted to leave. And that’s how I felt. I just felt no connection with anything. And I couldn’t understand, but this music was the connection. And I would actually physically lean up against the wall to hear her play this particular album.
David Kendall: [1:37] I think the 80s, for a lot of people that were there at the time, was finding out about the different styles of music, the journey from being in the 70s growing up in the suburbs, discovering that fifth and sixth form at school.
David cont’d: [1:44] It was like there is all this other stuff out there. And they were the people I tried to actually capture in the years that I was actually doing nightclubs, and come along and have a journey with us.
David cont’d: [2:07] And, ‘Ah, you might like Depeche Mode. Well try this, try this, try this.’ And a lot of those people, I’m actually still quite good friends with, that came on that sort of journey, the musical journey of discovering that Jimmy Barnes wasn’t the only thing that was played.
Jodie: [2:24] I think in the 80s it was a bunch of people who came together who didn’t fit in; people wanting to wear black and enjoy the dark side of life. And whilst it seems depressing to the outside world, to us it wasn’t necessarily like that. We enjoyed writing, and listening to music was just a huge passion.
Jodie cont’d: [2:44] And of course, there were, for me, darker sides to it, including things like being interested in sort of death, and murder, and that sort of thing, and crime, and true crime. So for some reason, it all melted together. Now not every Goth is into that, and they weren’t. It may have just been the music or the fashion that they were interested in. But I think the thing that joined us all together was the fact that we didn’t fit in and we were different.
Rachel Black: [3:12] I guess when I was at school, all the people that were creative hung out together. There were a few punks, a few Goths, not very many on the Gold Coast. Yeah. I liked to wear things that were quite different. Everyone wore fluoro boardshorts, and surf clothes, and bikinis, and I preferred black, and stripes, and more fun stuff.
Rachel cont’d: [3:37] So I guess it was kind of the freaky people all hung out together. But back then, it wasn’t called Goths, they were called Swampies, which was old ripped fishnets, ripped clothes, skirts, Winkle Pickers, and teased up hair. It was all very much like you crawled out of the swamp.
Jodie: [3:56] With clothes and that kind of thing then, it was just black, really. It was great. If you were a little bit quirky, you could wear something a bit colourful on top of that. So you might wear a long black – velvet jackets were really in if you could get a velvet long jacket, and black pants, and lots of things like lace, and silk, just anything you could get your hands on.
Rachel: [4:19] The velvet dress that I made, it was inspired by a cheongsam that someone wore. I think it was black and it had a dragon all down the arm. It was something glittery and I thought it was so beautiful having something so plain with sequins on it and under the light, it shines. So that’s the first thing I saw that inspired me for that dress.
Rachel cont’d: [4:43] And then, of course, Morticia Adams. So it was a cross between the two. And I was really into amethysts, and feathers, and nature. So when I made the dress, it was done by doing the Gladwrap trick, and then the tape, and then chopping for the seams to find the shape of my body, hand sewing it together.
Rachel cont’d: [5:02] The fabric was actually a curtain from an op shop. And the sequins on the arm were all hand done. And all the beading on the arms were things I bought, like little necklaces and things I bought at op shops, and the feathers I bought at Lincraft or something like that. And amethyst as well.
Rachel cont’d: [5:21] And I had the long train. It fitted nicely, so you got a nice cleavage. The train went, I think, about one or two metres long, but I had a little arm piece so I could wear it. The only inspiration I had was from old books, the old medieval dresses – things like that. And then also maybe seeing ‘The Young Ones’ and ‘The Damned’ on TV or a CD of Souixsie and the Banshees.
Rachel cont’d: [5:50] I don’t know. I came up with a lot of styles that I hadn’t seen anyone else wearing, which was kind of nice because I wasn’t corrupted by anything.
Jodie: [6:00] I got this crucifix at the Easter show in the 80s. This probably only cost me a couple of dollars at the time, but it has stayed with me. And it’s quite sentimental; I take this with me to every Depeche Mode concert that I ever go to overseas.
Jodie cont’d: [6:14] I think that Goths do identify with a lot of religious symbolism, and when you look at a lot of crosses and crucifixes, they’ve very much got a gothic design to them. I think that’s got a lot to do with why we like that sort of look, that whole thing.
Jodie cont’d: [6:33] I grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney, which did not have any tolerance for anyone who was different. I remember the first time I ever went to Newtown. I just felt when I walked along King Street that I had arrived. I was home. Everybody there was accepting; you could wear whatever you want. Nobody picked on you, nobody said anything. In fact, you just melted into everybody else.
Jodie cont’d: [6:54] It was very difficult to catch public transport dressed up, so I used to have to take all of my things in a bag and then usually get dressed at a railway station toilets, and get your makeup on and all that stuff, which was difficult. And even sometimes just that short trip from Central Station to where you had to go could be quite scary, because people would just be staring at you and talking about you and saying nasty things.
Jodie cont’d: [7:21] I was thinking about it, and the most fun that we would have would be getting ready at someone’s house. So we felt safe there and we didn’t have to go get ready at a toilet block at the railway station. We were able to really relax, play our music up loud, get dressed. And that was more fun than actually getting to the club.
Jodie cont’d: [7:41] But in terms of clubbing, in the early 80s before there were any Goth clubs, we all joined together. So it was gay and rockabilly, mods, punks, Goths, everybody all in the same place. The first place that I did go to was the Exchange Hotel on Oxford Street. And I remember going to Propaganda and the Cardoma Cafe. Very different venues. They had a lot of bands at the Cardoma Cafe.
Jodie cont’d: [8:11] But Propaganda was this really dark place. I remember being really frightened to go there because the really cool people went there.
David: [8:20] It was the start of the Goth clubs. The nice thing about that period was we all were experimenting, including myself, about where you actually fitted in that whole music scene. That alternative music scene was all clumped in together. At Propaganda, we definitely played left of centre. And it would cover rock and roll, rockabilly, psychobilly, Goth, indie, Australian independent, everything else that other people weren’t playing, really.
Jodie: [8:54] And I was always scared that if you got knocked back and you had to stand out the front, if the style enforcer said that you couldn’t get in, it was the worst possible torture and that you’d just have to go home. And I was always scared, thinking, do I look cool enough? Are they going to let me in?
Jodie cont’d: [9:09] And then once I was inside it was like, oh, I’ve made it. I’m here. I’ve done it. And then really enjoying just looking at other people and what they were wearing and then going home and trying to copy it. [laughs]
Jodie cont’d: [9:18] When I heard that there was going to be a very specific Goth club opening up at Site, at Kings Cross in Victoria Street, I was just so excited. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was the best thing that was ever going to happen.
David: [9:34] The start of Sanctuary was about me meeting up with Wally. She’d come to Propaganda once, had a look at it and said, ‘Oh, this is really cool.’ But of course that closed. And Wally actually was working in the Soho Bar, part of the Site, and suggested to the owners that she could actually start up a club on a Saturday night that would fill their midnight licence requirements. She approached me and said, ‘Look, do you want to DJ at this club?’
Jodie: [10:03] And I remember the first song that we heard on the dance floor was ‘She Sells Sanctuary’ by The Cult. I’m going to cry. That just changed everything. I just felt like I had walked in – to home. And everybody there was wearing the same things and everybody was around the same age. We just instantly made friends with people that I’m still friends with today.
Jodie cont’d: [10:23] Goth is an open community where you can be whoever you want to be. It doesn’t matter how you present yourself. Even if you don’t wear the right things, it didn’t matter, and I learnt that as I went along. It’s such an open and beautiful community. There’s no judgment, and that’s why it meant so much to me. That you could wear anything and be whoever you wanted to be, and there was absolutely no judgment at all.
