Clinton Walker - Stranded: The Secret History Of Australian Independent Music

The Hopetoun Hotel, Sydney, early 1990s (photo by Scott Wajon)

Contents

Preface to the new edition

For me this book is like a time capsule twice over. In a general sense, obviously, in that it goes back to the period it portrays, but also in a personal sense, because it takes me back to the person I was at the time I wrote it.

Stranded was written quite quicklyas if you couldnt tellin the mid-90s and published in 1996. I was coming off the success of my third book, Highway to Hell , ano, the biography of Bon Scott, my first long-form narrative book, and my publisher, PanMacmillan, just like any record company in the wake of a hit, said, Okay, so what about a follow-up?

Naturally Id given such a question almost no thought. It was a marvel, I reflect now, that Id pulled off Highway to Hell at all. Id just gotten married, was in my mid-thirties and had very consciously given up the Life. We had moved into a tiny semi in Sydneys inner-west and started having babies. To say it was an intense new phase of my life would be a gross understatement, but then it made sense after Id spent my twenties the way I did, as youll read in what follows; kicking the Life was the only way I was going to get out of that world alive...

Given the way the music scene was changing so sweepingly in the early 90sthe grunge revolution, apparentlyI thought the time was ripe to write something I had been thinking about. Id always been amused by the title Sonic Youth gave to their 1992 concert/tour movie: 1991: The Year Punk Broke . Because thats the way I felt too, the same as so many other people like me and the Youth whod been galvanised by the punk uprising of the late 70s and struggled through the entire 80s to finally, belatedly, see some sort of breakthrough, or change, start taking place in the early 90s.

My first two books, 1982s Inner City Sound and 1984s The Next Thing , were both very much here-and-now documents of the fermenting Australian post-punk independent underground. Both were effectively polemics in support or encouragement of that sceneand both were anthologies that I edited, collections of short-form stuff written by various other folks as well as myself. But now, having pulled off Highway to Hell , and with something of a resolution at hand to this sprawling history that Id lived through, I decided to try and write an extended narrative account of it.

Id read Jon Savages Englands Dreaming , of coursea great, great book and by far the best of a bunch that started coming out in the early 90s addressing the legacy of punk and its immediate aftermath. Later I harboured the illusion that I was also inspired by Please Kill Me , the American oral-history equivalent of Englands Dreaming and another great book, only to discover, when I double-checked the dates while preparing this edition of Stranded, that Please Kill Me didnt come out till 1997 after this book! I do remember, though, one book I read in the late 80s that had an enormous impact on me generally: City of Nets , Otto Friedrichs brilliant account of Hollywood in the 40s. It showed me there was a way you could juggle various, often divergent strands of narrative and tie them all into a coherent storylineif, and only if, you had a thesis that was sound in the first place. The story I saw in Stranded had that, and so I went ahead and tackled it, firing off the City of Nets model rather than Englands Dreaming .

The book was written, as I said, quite quicklyit had to be, since I was the at-home carer of two infantsbut that was possible because it was based so much on first-hand experience. But if the presence of this I caused a bit of consternation when the book first came out, I think that was very much a function of the way it was marketed, pitched as it was as a secret history rather than a personal one (secret history was a new literary buzzword at the time, after Donna Tarts novel The Secret History was published in 1992). It wasnt only that, though. It was also as if some (invested) readers resented the fact that I was present in the narrative at all. But I really couldnt have done it any other way. I felt that to leave me out would be to dupe the reader, to pretend I wasnt there, when I was. Its become one of the standard qualifications about music writing that, as Lester Bangs tells Cameron Crowe in Almost Famous , You cannot make friends with the rock stars. But how could you not in the very small world that was Darlinghurst in the 1980s, when we were all down in the trenches? I was thereand not just as a punter, or even just one of the scenes chroniclers, butits not immodest to claimas its chief chronicler. Id come not merely to appreciate but to take pride in Inner City Sound , because it had a big impact on the music that followed its publicationthe music whose growth is charted in these pages. It inspired not just music fans, but fans who became musicians themselves. Inner City Sound shaped my life! Ray Ahn of the Hard-Ons told me only recently when I spoke to him about this reissue. I remember thinking, back in the immediate wake of Stranded s original publication, What was I supposed to dowrite it from someone elses perspective? Not take advantage of the insider access I enjoyed?

The speed at which Stranded was written was reflected in its texture and tempo, and that quality was something I wanted to retain in this new edition, for better or worse. When I re-read it now, it feels racy in the extremea slalom-like skate over some frequently quite thin ice! Which is good, at least in terms of making for a narrative drive the reader will hopefully find compelling. But my refusal to tamper with the content and timbre of the book gets at a very important point that the reader coming to it now for the first time has to appreciate, something that relates to the time-capsule quality I started out talking about. To some degree, Stranded has to become a time-capsule twice over, maybe even thrice over, for the reader too. It has to be read with an awareness that it was written not in 2020 but in 1995, a quarter-century ago, its point of view that of a thirty-something recovering addict reflecting on what was then (his) very recent history. I say maybe even thrice over because, decades after writing it, and longer still after many of the events described in it, I see so much so very differently, and have had to find a way to accommodate that altered vision as well.

Former Rolling Stone publisher/editor Toby Creswell, a great friend and intellectual sparring partner, once said that in Stranded I had hijacked the narrative. (To which my response would bebut isnt that a good thing? If the standard aphorism about history is that it is written by the winners, doesnt hijacking it suggest that someone other than the winners is gaining a vital voice?) Other pundits proffered less polite put-downs. But given that Toby was one of the few consistently supportive editors I had in my entire two decades as a freelance journalisthe not only ran my stuff, he gave me a very long leashI can only assume he was playing his favored role as devils advocate. Nevertheless, he gave voice to a widespread sentiment.

I can see now that it was almost as if I was rewriting history while it was happening. And dont think I didnt suffer for it. For a rock critic to be actually critical in Australia in the 80s was, well, almost un-Australian! Whassmatter, dont you LOVE this industry? I have routinely been described as opinionated, but isnt that what a critic is supposed to be? Besides, how far wrong can I have gotten it ifwell, put it this way: when I wrote Stranded , I had a mere handful of books to draw on in addition to press clippings from the periodand two of them were my own! By 2020 that number had swelled exponentially: there are scores of books, almost a dozen documentary films, and heaven knows how many annotated box sets, anthologies and academic theses, journal articles and papers, not to mention all the reunion tours and tribute shows, Hall of Fame admissions, museum exhibitions, public monuments, benefits and memorial wakes and dedicated websites and facebook groups. And this for a field that was only ever (certainly by me) very vaguely defined?