The Little Bands - Part 1:

The 'Little Bands' scene was a sub-scene that occurred as a parallel to the more formalised Melbourne punk band scene from 1979-1980.  

At the time, members of Melbourne experimental synth-punk band Primitive Calculators, were living in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of North Fitzroy next door to fellow synth renegades Whirlywirld. Both groups latched onto the idea of forming temporary, side-project bands that would play no more than two gigs, for no more than 15 minutes and share each other’s equipment — i.e., 'Little Bands'. Note: Despite some confusion, Primitive Calculators and Whirlywirld were not a Little Band.

Soon a raft of individuals began to convene at both the Calculators’ and Whirlywirld’s twin terraces to use their equipment and rehearsal space. These resources were shared among ‘extended family’ and the spaces were in constant use, for most of the day and late into the night, as friends rolled up to try things out. Over time other small collectives set up their own spaces, but the core group of people in and associated with Primitive Calculators and Whirlywirld were the nucleus of the Little Bands.

The Little Band itself was a spontaneous and usually short-lived but vibrant and fresh agglomeration of people, ideas and borrowed instruments that would result in quick, intense and sharply focused performances of some material based on a new idea. In many cases, once expressed, these ideas would often be superseded by the next time the same people surfaced. It was a constantly turbulent melting pot of people, band names and sounds. 

Made up of a circle of artists, art enthusiasts, spontaneous musicians, poets, performance artists and filmmakers, mostly of whom were dole recipients with a lot of spare time on their hands, Little Bands proliferated amid a haze of booze, weed and speed. In a milieu where ideas were considered more important than musical prowess, the bands would sometimes sound clangy and discordant. In turn, they could sound equally fantastic: a mixture of angular, urgent drum machine rhythms, stabbing synth lines and creepy/witty lyrics making for oddly compelling results.

The Primitive Calculators decided to use their friends as support acts, as life was much simpler setting up only one band's equipment during gigs and the Calculators only had a 30-minute set. All the members of the Primitive Calculators also formed their own Little Band or played in other Little Bands. 

The first ‘Little Band’ were called The Leapfrogs and formed when Dave Light from the Primitive Calculators, got together with Lee Smith, from MYL, Mark Ryan and Jules Taylor, who was working at Climax Records. They did not play live until September 1979 at Climax Records, then again in October 1979, at a Primitive Calculators and Little Bands night at the Champion Hotel, Fitzroy with The Take, Too Fat to Fit Thru the Door and Ronnie and the Rhythm Boys. 

Other friends of the Primitive Calculators, Marcus Bergner and Marie Hoy, performed as Too Fat to Fit Thru the Door, after Nick Cave dared them to perform live, with Marcus singing whilst blindfolded and Marie playing a drum machine. They played between the support band and the Boys Next Door at a gig at the Crystal Ballroom, St. Kilda in August 1979.

"The Little Bands thing was just a bunch of like-minded people playing in an endless array of line-ups sort of apart from the Clifton Hill mob of David Chesworth and Philip Brophy. It was in some ways very anti of what they were doing. Philip Brophy was very against emotion in music, while the little bands thing was meant to be wild and chaotic and punk added into doing sort of art, experimental stuff, and not just electronic. A lot of the original participants were actually artists who applied the Dada sort of approach of their painting. It was the attitude and idealism of punk but applied to a post-punk art type thing." (John Murphy)

"We just told everybody we know, why don’t you get a band together? It’s really easy; you can knock up a band in five minutes, and then throw it out the window. The idea just seemed to take off." (Stuart Grant)

“Playing in four bands in a six-month period was great fun. I got to sing in a couple of those bands, playing bass in another. You felt like you could do anything.” (DeniseR)

The Little Bands performed occasionally, with Little Bands nights being held at the Champion Hotel, Fitzroy, and occasional migrations to North Melbourne and St Kilda.  In December 1979 a local record shop owner, Max Robenstone of Climax Records in Gertrude Street Fitzroy, along with Alan Bamford, helped to pay for the production of the 'Little Bands' EP, featuring The Take, Ronnie and the Rhythm Boys, Morpions and Too Fat to Fit Through the Door, as well as a Primitive Calculators single. Each band member paid $20 for the recording of the EP.

Little Bands member and radio announcer Alan Bamford also recorded many of the Little Bands gigs on a SONY ¼ track reel to reel tape recorder using a Shure 58 mic on a stand positioned in the air next to the mixing desk. These tapes were then broadcast immediately after gigs on his 12am – 2am Friday night slot on community radio 3RRRFM. 

"John Murphy had a radio show on 3RRR which I helped out with. When he got tired of doing it, I took over and created a more permanent show. The period I did it intensely was 1980. I didn’t have much money and so I would go into the 3RRR newsroom and act like I was doing something journalistic for them, bulk erase half a dozen spools of tape and walk out, and that’s what I used for the show. I Never told them about it, I mean they were for bulk erase, but I didn’t own them, and I didn’t have permission to use them." (Alan Bamford)

The Little Bands gigs were often mixed by The Boys Next Door mixer, Groper (real name Steven Colgan). Groper had his own sound system, and he was completely cool with the prospect of 12 to 15 bands a night, all playing different instrument setups for 10 minutes, and managed to sort acceptable sound with no sound check with great ease. These recordings owe an immense debt to his skill.

“We started playing in the little bands scene and our name was just plucked out of the air. There were about 14 of us and we were totally tuneless, but there was a rule that if you could play an instrument you couldn’t play in the band.   Although supposedly anyone could play, there was a hierarchy in the little bands, and basically we were down the bottom, but we had enthusiasm." (Roland & Crusader)

"... We played our first public appearance; it was all part of the first little band’s night at the Champion Hotel. We had nothing rehearsed and we had to go on second. There were ten bands in all. We had ten to fifteen minutes.  We started with ‘I Suffer for My Art'. Terry got the rhythm wrong, Paul forgot the lyrics and none of us could hear ourselves, so basically we made a racket." (Jim Buck)

“Experimentation was in the air, everybody sort of had all these instruments, and these boxes and things and synthesizers – you get a whole lot of people in a room and it just comes out different.”(Frank Lovece)