MU MESONS

INTERVIEW BY CAROLINE BIRKETT & PETER HILL

The Mu Mesons are Jaimie Leonarder, Steve Couri, Dr William McCoy, Jeffrey Urquhart and Maxwell J Hudson. They hail basically from Sydney, play infrequently and musically, well, they are what Thug tried to be. They've been around since the dawn of time, and using another well worn phrase, are maybe the greatest thing since sliced bread, which of course, they eat a lot of.

CAROLINE: Well I'11 start by firing away with questions but if you want to talk about something else go right ahead.

MAX: Well you want our names? You know our names don't you. I'm Max, this is Bill.
JAMIE: William McCoy, but known around town as Dr Bill.
BILL: I met the doctor from the Asian File right, the book, when I was doing a course once. "Oh", I said "we'll have to work together." I didn't know what he was writing, crazy, when I was studying.

CAROLINE: Let's start off with the history of the band, you've been together 7 years.

ALL: Eight years.

CAROLINE: Tell us how you started?

MAX: I used to listen, I was lying in bed one morning about 3 o'clock, and I heard this real strange electronic music, so I went down, and when they announced the phone no. over the radio, I went up to the phone box, cause we didn't have the phone then, and I rang up the station. And that's how I got in touch with Jamie, and then I met him about a year later. I went to an experimental electronics concert at the Sydney University, and I went and met Jamie when he lived over at Petersham.
JAMIE: What happened actually there was, that night was the night we were putting Medical Tone Generators into patch bay, and because it was an FM station...

CAROLINE: Medical Tone?

JAMIE: Tone Generators, they just put out a very precise signal, and you can calibrate that. We were using 3 straight to the patch bay, and you can knock the circuit breakers off, and it went off air, it went dead so we got this phone call from Max.
MAX: I didn't know if it was real or a joke.
JAMIE: Max had been getting up at 3 every morning, and then going off to work at the railways. That's how Max and I met, and Bill used to sit in the foyer at the station, cause of Bill's Blue's background.
BILL: Oh yeah, I've been a singer since I was 17, before that I was a dancer, used to do all the stomp dancing in floor shows. I started when I was about 12 or 11 at a sideshow act. I used to be a spruiker at 12 years old. What's a spookhouse, there's something about it got me going.
JAMIE: So you used to work in a spookhouse?
BILL: Yeah.
STEVE: That's where the band started.

CAROLINE: What were you?

BILL: I was a young boy.

CAROLINE: You weren't the spook?

BILL: I was the spook. (laughs)
JAMIE: So that's basically how we met. Really it was from the radio station. We met Steve that way as well. It was 2MBSFM. At that time I was doing a programme called Sound Depravation, which Bill eventually became our featured artist on, he was our resident psychologist. He'd do the late night talkback. We couldn't get people on the air to actually talk back, but he'd phone up and counsel people who were lonely I spose, Bill?
BILL: Oh yeah, there's a lot of lonely people out there. I used to sit in clubs, used to sit in the Paradise Club people'd walk up to you and tell you their life story.

CAROLINE: You must have an open face.

BILL: Business men ... All sorts of people, in the Piccolo Bar .... incredible.

JAMIE: I think we can thank the doctor here for our wider audience appeal though, he certainly seems to rope in all sorts of people.
BILL: I love people, I've got a good heart.
MAX: When I first got in touch with Jamie on the radio station, he said do you do any music at all? and I said "Oh I haven't got any synthesisers yet, but I'm getting one". But I did a tape and sent it into the radio station called Glass Wood, just using a sugar bowl and a ruler. Just rubbed the ruler across the sugar bowl.
JAMIE: The flipside was your wife cooking vegetables....
MAX: Cooking vegetables on the stove, so I taped that.
JAMIE: So that was really the beginning of where we started.
BILL: Washing machine too, wasn't it?

CAROLINE: So you all realized you had something in common

STEVE: There was the time that we went to record the stingrays on the North Coast.

STEVE: Using underwater mikes.
MAX: Yeah, I took them up to Evans Head, and there's a big sea wall. so what I did, I put the microphone in a plastic bag and the stingrays would come swimming past, and just drop it in the water and tape the sounds of the stingrays in the water.
JAMIE: Now that's innovative. The new technology is breaking barriers.
MAX: New technologies, now what else have I got at home?
JAMIE: Since then you've built a laboratory, it's gigantic.
MAX: 6 synthesisers.
JAMIE: It's formerly called the experimental kitchen.
MAX: Experimental kitchens of Dundas. I did a tape loop last week of the big storm.
BILL: I went astral travelling a couple of weeks ago ... after the storm. I said ohhhh... I go astral travelling in taxis... cost a bit of money.
MAX: Expensive way to astral travel.

CAROLINE: Do you get a special rate?

BILL: I don't play up. I have 5 dollars a day to live on.
MAX: That's his limit.
JAMIE: For how many years Bill, it's been a long time hasn't it.
BILL: Oh I went on the pension, I went on the pension in '75 I think, I was a labourer. I couldn't get a job so I went to John Forrest, I was singing with him, in those days we were all happy, you know what I mean, we had nothing and I've got nothing now and I'm happy.

CAROLINE: So getting back to the kitchen at Dundas, is this where backing tapes are made?

JAMIE: This is where sounds are acrewed. We all acrew different sounds.
MAX: We all do our own sounds, and we combine them all.

CAROLINE: So do you all get together to make the backing tapes? Is that a combined thing?

JAMIE: Yeah, it is a combined thing, though it's basically like all of us have got sets of equipment, although Bill here, he operates randomly, he doesn't even need to practice with us he's so in tune with us. The new songs he can pick up 10 seconds before we go on and perform. But if we can get together we do get together. Max has got his laboratory, it's very full of old analogue equipment.

MAX: I did a tape and took it over to Jamie's place today, it's called the Birth of the Mu Mesons, that was when I went under the name of the Mystical Church of the Holy Wilderness. That was me name before.

JAMIE: And what we do with these tapes is we pool them all together, and that's how we develop our backing tapes really. Mostly we use very old analogue equipment from the '60's.

MAX: I've got an old Indian musical instrument, I've got an old violin from Tibet, and then I've got another one that's just got 2 strings on it. You play the 2 strings I've got a really good piece of equipment, had it specially made up, one of me mates made it for me. We even named it, it's called the Maxotron Sequencer. It's a 2-track sequencer with a built in oscilator and a wave form built into it. And you can trigger the 2 sequencers at once on it.

JAMIE: And you use that in conjuction with a really old Roland Modular....

MAX: Yeah, Modular systems 100. It's got the keyboards and controls, and then you've got a huge modular system behind that. That connects into that (the Maxatron) and you have about 50 patch cords coming out of it. You patch all the different sounds in, you can have storms, guns, anything you like on it.

JAMIE: Basically Max and I stick to this low edge. We have this line for it, we're riding the wave of superceded technology, cause Max is a real bargain hunter. He can do us deals on equipment, knock it right down, get it very cheap.

MAX: 99c synthesiser we bought.

STEVE: We destroyed that though.

MAX: Yeah, we smashed that to pieces on stage and then set alight to it.

STEVE: It was working for a while.

JAMIE: That was one of our best deals.

MAX: Oh that's right, we got that drum machine for 20 bucks. There was 2 of them, you got one and I got one, the syncussion. You connect your drum machine up to the syncussion and it gives you electronic drums. I've got 2 oscillators and 2 wave forms on it.

JAMIE: And Steve sort of goes off into the higher tech, keeps us in touch with what's happening out there in the real world don't you, sampling and sequencing.

CAROLINE: But you don't use any of this equipment live?

JAMIE: Well we'd like to, we're building up to that

CAROLINE: So you're limited in what you can take to a show and set up.

JAMIE: Well it's all very heavy in terms of what technology is now,and it's also not adapted that easily to swing from patch to patch, so you can change rapidly from song to song, but what we can use we do try and use.

MAX: Yeah my big module system, I had to get an old table from down the rubbish tip because it weighs too much. It wouldn't sit on anything else. Now I've got an old sony tape recorder, an old student-teacher one. You know the big ones they used to use at the universities when they were taking lectures. It weighs a ton. We got them for $5 each. They were throwing them out so we bought up the lot at 5 bucks each. So we use them for tape loops, and it's 2-track and you can do a tape loop on it. When the tape loop comes out, you might have the tape loop you've done .... I've got one at home of a tape loop I did of radio frequencies, and while it's playing back you've got Tom Jones singing Green Green Grass of Home on the second track in the background.

CAROLINE: How did you come up with the name?

MAX: It comes from a French, the French back in the 30's, or was it later than that?

JAMIE: The actual 'Mu' I know of is a chemical.

MAX: Yeah atomic chemical.

JAMIE: Meson is a sub atomic particle that they've recently discovered in the last decade that they can't understand too well, because when it goes through matter it increases in volume, it doesn't decrease. But it also is the name of a restaurant that's down the end of this street. The El Meson Cocktail Bar, which we're considering going down to and introducing ourselves to the manager.

MAX: And then we've got a toy synthesiser called the Muson. It's got a built in sequencer. A little plastic toy synthesiser, it's got organ on one volume and synthesiser on the other one. You can have organ or volume It's got these little plastic pegs and they're colour coded. You pull each one out to operate the sequencer in it.

JAMIE: We were originally called the Mu Meson Antagonists, that was our first couple of performances at family barbeques, round the piano in the loungeroom, and then we went out.

MAX: And then we went out into the Picadilly.

JAMIE: We were afraid about going out there into the real world, scared, but we did it.

MAX: That was the night I came as the Masked, no what was I, The Monk, the Black Friar. I had a top of an oxy bottle and a giant bolt, and I'd walk around hitting the top of the oxy bottle. That was our gong, it'd go bonggg, cause you can get good reverb from it. I can get a lot of equipment, working on the railways. We can get a lot of equipment there, we can get 44 gallon drums for drums, cut out pieces of railway lines that you can hit and get good resonance from that. I love playing instruments the way that they're not meant to be played. Like get a Steinway Grand Piano, open the top, get inside of the strings and play it with a paddle pop stick.

CAROLINE: How many people do you know with Steinways that will let you get inside them?

MAX: We were at one for a week, I played one, naked on top of the Steinway. We got a film of me naked playing the Steinway.

PETER: With a paddle pop stick?

MAX: No just the kayboards this time.

CAROLINE: So was it hard to get your first show, or did you have some contacts?

JAMIE: No, we had a fair amount of interest through this programme that was basically Max, myself, Bill, Steve and our bass player Geoff, that was called The Strictly Chemical Point Of View. Bill would always do a rap session at the end of the show. We had a few people that respected us in some way or another through that. At one stage one person we knew did the blues show there had the connections with the Picadilly, before it was The Site. He said,"look we're desperate to stick you into this", and at that stage we were really concentrating on these film shows we were doing. We started off doing shows which were old bits of film which we'd dialogue in between and sing to. And so after the Picadilly we only did one other show really like that, apart from the Army of God show, which was Dilectric Cinema, at the Chauvel Cinema. That was like 36 trailer reels from obscure 50's horror and sci-fi juxtaposed with 20 short video cuts.

CAROLINE: So where do you get hold of that sort of stuff

JAMIE: Well that was stuff that we've been doing ourselves, we see ourselves as a unit encaptulating the lot, film, television.

STEVE: Multi media.

JAMIE: Accidental multi-media, nothing with us is so much pre-planned, although we've been working for the last 8 months, we haven't anything on building devices and more equipment to make shows look more spectacular.

MAX: Now I haven't got a car, I bring all my stuff over in black garbage bags to Jamie's place, and it's really trash.

CAROLINE: What sort of influences do you have, not specifically musical?

JAMIE: Well it's a personal thing with all of us. I mean if I was to speak for Bill, it'd be a Jazz background, wouldn't it Bill, and plus an experience thing.

BILL: Oh, Blues, I'm still learning, you learn all your life.

JAMIE: And Bill's experience has come from the streets really, hasn't it, and 20 years of living on the drug Modocade... chemical straightjacket.

BILL: I had the same doctor as Johnny O'Keffe, when I was 15 or 16, hard doctor, lady doctor, psychiatrist. And I said to her I want to be a singer, and she said no you're not.

JAMIE: But that never stopped you did it.

BILL: Never stopped me, ha ha ha.

JAMIE: And what would your influences be Max, I mean you have to speak for yourself.

MAX: What music?

JAMIE: Anything wise.

MAX: Experimental electronics, finding sounds, using anything at all for sounds, household appliances, vacuum cleaners, chainsaws, anything.

JAMIE: Max is quite eclectic, he likes virtually any form of music.

MAX: Any type of music, Avant Garde, is that what you call it. Renaissance, yeah, Renaissance Avant Garde.

STEVE: Rococco?

MAX: Rococco.

JAMIE: Max too is like a living juke box, this man's memory really falls very strongly right from Catholic services, latin masses, right up to your 40's,50's and 60's tunes. You can virtually pick a song out of the blue and ask Max to sing it, and he can sing it word for word. So Max is a great fallback in terms of any ballads or passionate things. I've spent my nights trying to drain out haw much is in there, what's locked in that memory, but I've never succeeded.

STEVE: I'm eclectic too. I don't particularly listen to any bands, or styles, just draw one little bit out of this, or like sample hit, like that riff is good, or that sound, and also from technology. Messing up presets is nice. You get these pre-programmed things and you stick all the wrong sounds in and you come back new song ... easy.

PETER: What about you Jamie?

JAMIE: Well I suppose my stuff is just experimental. It's really people. I work as a therapist at the moment, with psychiatric patients, and that's where I get a lot of my exploration from, and I've spent years doing that sort of thing. That whole passion of people in a situation that they can't get out of, so that at the end of their life there is so much information and so much probably great wisdom that they've got locked in there, with no-one really interested to tap into that. A lot of the artists from the 'Meson House of Artists' are people from within those situations. A few are close friends of Bill's, who are very long term psychiatric patients, but very interesting people. Like Bruce Lacy, keyboardman.

PETER: Carl Hind?

JAMIE: Charl Hign, he lives where I work on Saturdays, which is the Mission Home. He's 84 years of age, and he's quite remarkable for his age really. He's always been a singer and stuff, and he'll probably kick the next concert off as well.

CAROLINE: So what makes you turn all those influences into the Mu Mesons and why? And what do you get out of it?

JAMIE: I'd say it's desperation, it runs through us all. We're very different, but we're all connected in the same way. Desperately want to express ourselves, and want to do something that's basically us that's as honest as we can. I find with people like Max and Bill that they cut away a lot of the tension and the persona very quickly, and drop it back to more of an honest expression of us. Because we're always running within a chaos, we're out of control and we can never really sit down and conceptualize exactly what we're going to do, because in the next couple of minutes someone within the band can do something completely opposite to what we've planned to be. And that could be something that we're more satisfied with than something we've conceptualized. So I'd say personally it's just an absolute desperation. It's nearly killed us for the last eight months, not being able to perform.

CAROLINE: But you don't play that often anyway.

JAMIE: I think we'd like to.

STEVE: We try.

BILL: I'm always working, on the street, on buses, and rapping with people and that.

JAMIE: It gets down to us that time and money are an ideal sort of thing. We couldn't if we tried, if we set out to make our sound an any way sellable, it just wouldn't work to begin with.

CAROLINE: The performance seems to be the biggest thing with you, but that doesn't mean the music's not saleable in itself.

STEVE: Well anything's saleable, but we're talking about amounts, commercial world and that stuff.

JAMIE: Well that's something we're thinking of pushing this year, of getting out and networking a bit better.

MAX: I think what draws the audience, it's more of a shock really than anything. See Sydney's so used to the same thing over and over and over, you know. You go along and you either get Punk Rock at one gig, and then you'll go along and you'll get copies of SPK at another gig. And then you'll go along and some bloke will be trying to copy Johnny Farnham, or something like that. And they'll come along and they'll say whose the Mu Mesons, we'll go and check them out. And so they come along and they get a suprise because they've never experienced any thing like it, it's totally different from what's around today, and we don't copy nobody. We just do our own thing, and it's completely new.

CAROLINE: Are the songs about anything specific? What sort of things are they about?

MAX: Well that's a surprising part of it see, with the Mu Mesons, as I say, we're different, but the music you can dance to and we've even got vocals in a lot of our songs you know. Mostly we did music, but now we put a few old vocals in. This is what's surprising the audience, because they picture the Mu Mesons as different, but they don't expect vocals you know. We do all our own vocals you know. We did one called Bloodstained Track, which is a very popular one.

JAMIE: We do sing about the normal things, we're obsessed with love, we just can't seem to get off love at all, but it's all desperate love, we're all hopeless failures in love. We're all romantics, but we're hopeless at it, and we're desperate in terms of extressing the fact that we are hopeless.

STEVE: Songs like Bladder Love.

JAMIE: That's give up on the personality, no longer can we maintain this romanticism, we've got to start thinking about people's organs because maybe we'll get a better reaction if we consider their organs, than consider their personality. So it's that sort of thing, it's an absolute desperation. So one of the key factors is love and the other side we keep slipping into is our complete lust for old technology.

MAX: Oh we love it.

JAMIE: We're so obsessed with electricity, Steve here actually builds things like Tesla-Coils. We tried to operate one at the 'Army of God' concert and they wouldn't let us. They were too afraid that we'd start electrocuting people.

STEVE: Fire hazard.

JAMIE: Shooting electricity, like if your house got hit by lightning, but from a man-made source. So we either slip off love into electrons-

MAX: When they wouldn't allow us to use the Test-La-Coil we brought in a rap dancing pope, I came on stage dressed as the Pope and did a rap dance on stage.

JAMIE: What else do we sing about? You sing about your experiences on the street, don't you Bill.. One track's about your Aunt Mary.

BILL: Oh yeah, great lady.

JAMIE: Who you thought was Mary Magdeline.

BILL: Yeah, yeah, she was like that to me, oh you heard the song, she put me through school, she gave mum 2 houses, we were living in army homes. That was back in the 50's.

JAMIE: That's the track My Crucifiction is Your Conviction, all about Bill's Aunt Mary.

MAX: And they threw me out of the Railway Bible Class because I was reading the book of Revelations, and they reckoned it was evil, and I said well it's a Bible Class isn't it. So they threw me out of that cause that's the only book of the bible I read, the book of Revelations.

JAMIE: Nhw we do have a religious line that runs in there but it's totally directly opposed to any form of organised religion whatsoever, although we did get a write-up in the Catholic weekly, we have a contact in there.

CAROLINE: What, a review?

JAMIE: Of the Army of God concert basically. Where he was very confused and thought it was probably the greatest Christian epic he'd ever seen in his life. I mean we would not like to see it like that, but he believed it was a startling experience for him, and rebirthed his religious notions.

BILL: I'll probably line up a gig at the Salvation Army at Manly.

JAMIE: We like to perform anywhere we can.

CAROLINE: Dressing up and removing clothing and the other carry on?

STEVE: It's just something we do in normal life all the time.

JAMIE: Especially Max. You have a tendency to get hot don't you.

MAX: Hypothermia.

JAMIE: Max will just take off his clothes while having dinner or something and start singing.

CAROLINE: So it's just an extension of normal activity, it's not really a stage act at all.

MAX: No.

JAMIE: He can do it now for you if you wish.

BILL: No Max, got to get some tattoos.

JAMIE: Bill's got the classiest tattoos of the lot.

MAX: The eyes have it!

PETER: When I was a kid in Adelaide, there used to be a guy who used of come and drop his pants at the Nth Adelaide swimming pool, and he had eyes tattooed-on his arse, used to drop them in front of all the girls.

BILL: I used to clean a hamburger shop, Henry's at Manly Vale. They used to get me to do the floorshow, see I was mopping up and cleaning and they'd say show me your tatts. It was a set up, the coppers were going to get me once.

JAMIE: When it all started we weren't going to show anything of our basic physical nature, also we did an antibicentennial gig. The people that organized us thought we were a Hip-Hop band, and they got very shocked when Bill came on stage just in his boxer short pyjamas. They were quite upset and so they were yelling to pull us off the stage after the 3rd song, so Bill just thought, oh well now it's time to drop the daks. You must have done about 15 brown eyes at that show at least. I was quite pleased with that in the end because they're quite a militant bunch. They were so shocked they said nothing and let us go on and finish our set. We never got asked back.

MAX: Then we went to the seat of learning, where all the professors were, The Manning Bar, Sydney University. That was a great gig that one, had them all up dancing. That was where you came on as a magic pudding.

BILL: Oh yeah that's right. Yeah, I'd like to do more shows like that, give people some love and joy. You know what I mean.

MAX: We had the film of the Masked murderer, the crime fighter from the '50's, fighting crime on the streets, actually that's a secret.

JAMIE: It's an offshoot of Muson Industries.

PETER: Is that like a company Muson Industries?

JAMIE: Well we're hoping to pump out these short episodic cliff hangers, one a month, to be linked with the films we've got of our gigs which we'll eventually put out.

MAX: I want to use, in my next piece of music, the largest tape loop in New South Wales. Have it completely encircle the house. All around the hairspray cans, milk bottles, and just have it looping round and round and round. That would be terrific.

JAMIE: Next show we play we're to do more like a cabaret affair, we've got an Indian cabaret club singer, whose style is in the 60's stuff, Geoff, he has a special in playing funeral marches. He plays Hindu funeral marches all different nationalities, ethnic origin. So we've got him, we've got Milton McKee. These are all the Meson house of artists, basically people that we've been in touch with for quite some time, and Milton's coming down especially from Tamworth. He's just recorded his 2nd single, Spunky Monkey, with our favorite song an the flip-side, Nifty Nick, about the knicker nicker. He played it for me.

BILL: It's about a junkie, and he's a spunky monkey junkie.

JAMIE: And Nifty Nick on the flip. There's a whole story in our history to do with Milton, because Milton put out a quite controversial independent single at the time that the Azaria Chamberlain case was all up and he called it 'Lindy'. He sent a copy to her. He sent a copy to every radio station basically and no-one played it. He had quite a massive breakdown and ended up getting shock treatment after that, smashed most of the singles, but he had a couple left.

BILL: He's been off the booze for a year now, he wants to make it.

JAMIE: He's got a couple left and we finally played 'Lindy' for him on radio on A Strictly Chemical Point Of View. And ever since then when he's not in Tamworth he wants to cane down and he wants to perform with us. The only gig he's really done with us was the Army of God.

CAROLINE: Does he play Country music?

JAMIE: A spoons player, plays those big wooden salad spoons.

BILL: Yeah, they're all yobbos from out Canpbelltown way oh beautiful people.

JAMIE: The spoons player ended up in the band because he got married. He couldn't consumate the marriage because every night of the marriage for about 8 weeks he was drunk, totally drunk, so the wife kicked him out and now he's on the road with Milton, as part of the band.

PETER: So is it possible to get a copy of that single?

JAMIE: Yeah, that will be released pretty soon.

PETER: What about 'Lindy', is that available?

JAMIE: I've got a few copies of that hidden away, I'll play it for you.

BILL: Oh you'll love it!

JAMIE: The percussion is quite innovative, it's everything from teapots to-

BILL: Oh Campbell .... John Campbell or someone is playing guitar, sort of bluesy, sort of Avant Garde.

JAMIE: Lindy Chamberlain loved it. She wrote a letter back. He sent a copy to her while she was in prison, she really liked it, but none of the radio stations would play it.

CAROLINE: Anti-dingo is it?

JAMIE: It's pro-Lindy, but it's just saying God will answer any question about this.

MAX: Don't you cry Lindy.

JAMIE: So no-one should speculate on what happened here.

PETER: So do you get any government funding?

JAMIE: We get no funding whatsoever, we're actually virtually opposed to any form of funding. Our feelings are that with this riding the wave of superseded tech-nology, everyone should be able to express themselves in any whatever way they feel without any training or tutoring whatsoever. None of us have gone through any musical training, maybe Bill's the one that's really musically trained.

BILL: Oh, I worked for a year under John Forrest, he used to be up at Paddington...

JAMIE: We've had a few films we've tried to get people to do.... but no, complete rejection. This last film we made, which was a secret but the cat's out of the bag now. We're thinking of doing a series of 12 of them, that's basically just musicals, set in different parts of Sydney. It was made in 2 days, edited on the 'Mesive machines and the budget was $40. 25 dollars of that was the tape and the rest went on props. So we consider it to be one of the lowest budget films ever made, if not 'the' lowest budget film. Couldn't even afford to hire a tripod, so everything's handheld.

STEVE: Films, showing them at gigs.

JAMIE: I think it's very difficult to show any sort of film in a hotel environment to begin with, to get people to concentrate. We've just emassed so much material and e're just virtually sitting back and seeing if we can put it all together and start releasing it really cheaply to the public on an independent video label, that's possibly linked to this record label that we hope to get together.

PETER: You're going to form your own record label?

JAMIE: Well we'll be putting out people like, in the future, down the track, because we can't speculate too much on this, but these people like Milton McKee, and comps with those people on it.

STEVE: Yeah, a whole load of people that are doing there own thing.

MAX: I've got a special effects that we use with our cameras.

JAMIE: These people that'd fit on this label don't really slot in anywhere. It's not very easy for them to get any airplay or any recognition because it might be that whole confrontation of mental illness, or age, or style. We've sort of taken that under the umbrells of 'Meson', of what acts we really want to support and get back out to the people. And there is something to do with that in the therapudic sense. That whole therapudic nature of giving those people something to create towards. Bruce Lacy's a classic example.

BILL: He works on his music all the time.

JAMIE: Because of the basic inspiration he got initially in at MBS and stuff....

BILL: Yeah, gave him a break....

JAMIE: And he has quite strong side effects to his modocade, he's quite psychotic all the time.

BILL: He's on 100 mls. a week.

JAMIE: Once he plays the piano the side effects virtually instantly disappear, not all of them, but the majority. As soon as he stops playing they're back again.

MAX: What about that special effects gadget I bought for the Mu Mesons, $1.29 kaleidoscope, plastic one. I bought it at Woolworths. I got you one and I got two. Strap it on the front of the lens of the camera, this is a little one, a little small one you know, they sell them up at Paddington Markets. The little tiny wooden ones, they're about that high, yeah they sell them at Woolworths and they're $1.29, and they're $8.00 each at Paddington, same thing. So we use them for special effects.

JAMIE: So that's our approach, because we can't afford to operate in any other way basically. But we find the accident works far more beautifully for us working around those limitations.

MAX: You can even go to Tandy's and get a good keyboard for $89.00. 100 different sounds on it. Got a new one out.

JAMIE: But we prefer to pick one up even cheaper...

MAX: Cheaper than that even.

BILL: Oh yeah.

JAMIE: Maybe not operating properly.

MAX: Don't matter ... ha ha... even half a keyboard would do it.

BILL: I've got a mate whose got half a piano and he plays it, oh beautiful guy.

MAX: You ever see anyone whose gota piano frame lying around, give us a ring.

PETER: Oh they're pretty hard to find.

MAX: Just the guts of 'em you know.

BILL: I've seen Herbie Hancock play at the Town Hall and he's gone experimental. I laughed at him, I couldn't help it, I just rejoiced. I mean, what's going on? Experimental?

JAMIE: Have you ever heard of the 'Melotron'. It's what we use sometimes. It's a very old keyboard sampler basic ally, but every key connects to a tape loop that runs over a tape head. So there might be 36 keys with 36 tape loops, that you can actually get to play both sides of the tape, so you're recording 2 different sounds on it. There's a lot of flexibility with that. the later model was on 'Obetron' but they were only ever custom built, and they weigh a fair amount.

PETER: And you've got one?

JAMIE: We've got access to one, and we're purchasing another one.

MAX: If you put them in an upstairs room they're likely to come through the roof they're that heavy.

JAMIE: They're about the size of a fridge.

CAROLINE:So have you got plans to play more?

JAMIE: We'd like to, it's just a matter of organization for us. And because of our eratic natures pulling us together.

STEVE: Getting together's really hard.

JAMIE: It's something we've definitely had planned for this year. A total assault, do as much as we can as quickly as we can, we're sitting on a hell of a lot of material and every time we get together to rehearse, we end up making new material. And we keep swinging off in totally different veins and we couldn't pin down what style we're getting to.

STEVE: Before touring somewhere it'd be nice to say , here's this. We'd like to record a cassette.

JAMIE: So we're in the midst of trying to finish that off and we're trying to do it as well as we can. We're trying to do a 24 track recording and have a 12" by June or something.

CAROLINE: So are you still working at 2MBS FM?

JAMIE: No, I've stopped there for a while to concentrate on these things basically. Possibly we might do another radio show together but our main priority's the band these days.

PETER: Are you still working for the railways?

MAX: Yeah, I've got a computer in me office now and I just put the work sheets through. The blokes give me work sheets of the jobs they do. They're all numbered, you don't actually write the job they do you just put the number on it. I just feed it into the computer and put 8 hours, that's their working time, or 4 hours maybe overtime. I just put that in and that all goes through to Chullora on the main big computer. They've got these great big reel to reel things that that all goes on you know.

PETER: So that's pretty Hi-tech?

MAX: Yeah, only takes me about an hour to put that through the computer and then the rest of the day I play Space Invaders or Golf games. Then I might pull a book out on psychic research and have a read of that, or a few Hari Krishna books in there that they give me to read.

JAMIE: Hopefully this year we'll spin it. We've been after this big gig at the railway workshop cafeteria Christmas party. It's like 500 to 1000 people, probably be our biggest audience ever. Hopefully this year we'll spin it. Max has performed there solo.

MAX: Yeah, sang two songs and I got paid $20. Ten dollars a song.

BILL: I used to go. in talent quests when I was a kid.

CAROLINE: So you're not really fussed about who you perform to?

JAMIE: No, we'd like to perform to lots of different groups of people, that's one of our main aims, try to get an RSL act together within the vein of those songs. The Painters & Dockers were interested in us at one stage. We were going to sort of sing Frankie Lane songs for them. I think they were getting a little bit worried.

PETER: There was a theatre group that the railways sponsored in Adelaide. They .weren't very good. They were given a workshop to rehearse in.

CAROLINE: I know someone whose a member of a "railway" band. They've got their owm carriage to rehearse in.

JAMIE: You were going to get a carriage at one stage weren't you Max, to torch behind us.

MAX: Yeah, have it burning in the background, but then we've got that other performance space underneath Katingal, that's the workshop they call Katingal, 6th Section. There's a workshop underneath, and it's a great big storage area and there's nothing stored there. It's just vacant, you just go in there and the acoustics are fabulous. And we get down in there and get out of the way of the bosses in there. My boss has got a little portable bar-b-que, and he cooks me breakfast every morning, fried prawns.

THE END