Hunters and Collectors - Hunters and Collectors, vinyl (rel.1982)

It was a wasteland in the burbs I was stumbling and skulking through in my misfit adolescence, particularly if you had greater, or alternative expectations than the dominant paradigm. Music was a means of finding some sound that mirrored where my mind was at, or heading towards - it gave me a life-line. Better still, a horizon - or at the very least, an ephemeral hope. The predominant sounds being listened to by the crowd I was running with were Rose Tattoo, AC/DC, The Angels, Midnight Oil, Australian Crawl, Meatloaf and INXS. The appreciation of much of this music while undoubtedly the stuff of bonding for so many, didn't really do it for me - it was listened to within days and nights of sober and drunken swagger - a clumsy, artless continuum of macho bonding that compromised the individual in ways that haunted my self-loathing measurably. It was a dead-end for a kid looking for something else.

 

There were other sounds available however. Alternatives. Coming from a place that wasn't in step with predictable themes. To be sure, some of the aforementioned bands were amongst the alternatives and the themes, while predictable, were presented with an oblique skew. When you were lucky, one or two of your friends shared the same musical interest. Validation - bonding. Madness. The Clash. The Jam. Talking Heads. Goanna. Strange Tenants. Sex Pistols. Jean Michel Jarre. The Dugites.

Previously in Hear and Now, I mentioned that I came across Shriekback who were a kind of musical saviour within the cultural landscape I was in. Well, another band that got my sinapses popping in no small way was Hunters & Collectors. Again, my introduction was through television, Countdown this time - it was one of a few glimpses into some of the more intriguing sounds coming out of the 80's that Countdown shared. The clip was for their second single and first from the album, Talking to a Stranger (note: unfortunately I had some linkage for the clip but it was taken down) Whether surfing with cans in my beanbag or dancing my arse off when I had the house to myself - here was escape. And connection. And here's the thing, it still sounds great some 35 years later. Uhuh - really fucking old!

In their early phase H&C had a sound that was a funky, arty, post-punky beast that eventually morphed into their latter, and more popular, punchy pub-rock sound. The album was a twin lp release, featuring a 33⅓ album and a 12" 45. It greets you with a cut-up cover of hoodoo skullness, industrial girders and fuzzed focus skyline. It's a gatefold - more of the same primitive-industrial superimposing inside - outback road-train, trunk, vine, dinosaur skull, city skyline silhouette, rolling stock dump-pile - now & then stuff. Industrial stuff. Tribal culture stuff. Primitive iconography.

The 12 " was two songs - Tender Kinder Baby and Run, Run, Run. The latter was a 9 minute slab of  guitar - cutting, stabbing the space, thunking funk bass, vocals declaiming, escaping, an external or internal controlling overself. It develops into a swirling thrall of intensity and orgied dissonance, replete with a tribal chanting chorus - riding upon an Adam and the Antsesque percussive theme. There was no lack of similarity to the music the Birthday Party ( albeit more funk than loaded rabid mongrel), being thumped out here, particularly in the bass playing of John Archer. And the guitar playing - was it Mark Seymour or Ray Tosti-Gueira? Dunno.

The title song brought me to new place - Talking To A Stranger was post-punk heaven. It's a lithe, funky cyclic repetition of trance inducing hallucinate to lose oneself in - it demanded you rip the rug to shreds. It ended in a chugging mass of  fuck yeahness till being catapulted into an equally gone freak-out mess in Alligator Engine. Again, you were lost in a primitive-modern sound jungle, swooped by otherworldly sounds, haunting the mix. Peak extension. Sweat.

God fearing, good living - Skin of Our Teeth begins as a sparse gas cylinder strike with skittering keys. Rudimentary guitar motif - practice like, twangs. All sparse. Mark's shout-song incantation provides another motif. Slowly. Slowly. Until, escapes inevitability necessitates a groove, to lose the shackle. Hiccupping, stumbling, we're launched on thermals as the world burns below - to where. Ahh. 

Scream Who thumps a more rugged rockwise funked way forward from the go-get - beasting the mix. Slipping into delicacies via the poly-rhythms of Junket Head, well, ok, momentarily - it gets raucus. Deliriously raucus, it slips into order briefly. Boo Boo Kiss is a bunch of loose, taught uptightness - kinda claustrophobic. Mocking torture. Like dancing joyward, drunk as fuck, and falling, unable to get feetwise - you dance lying down, like the Gong Show's worm maestros. Out of sync. Frustrated. You're tired. Kinda over it all. Clunk. Whistlewise out.

You could dance yourself totally silly to this - all that who you were disappeared - gone for a moment. Joy. Sheer fucking joy.

On this album and ep, Hunters and Collectors were:
John Archer, Geoff Crosby, Doug Falconer, Robert Miles, Greg Perano, Mark Seymour and Raymond Tosti-Gueira.

Engineered by Tony Cohen except Boo Boo Kiss, by Jim Barton.

Released on White Label Records 1982.