40 years ago, at the beginning of 1984, young Sydney underground rockers Hoodoo Gurus released their debut album Stoneage Romeos on local indie Big Time Records, blissfully unaware that the 11-song collection would in time come to be regarded as a bona fide Oz rock classic.

Even upon their formation in 1981, the original membership was already alumni of bands the calibre of The Victims, The Scientists and XL Capri, so they were seasoned from the get-go, quickly forming a strong following on the thriving local scene with their thrilling fusion of punk and pop sensibilities and an overt love of all things trash culture

Originally calling themselves Le Hoodoo Gurus and favouring an unorthodox three guitars and drums line-up, as they moved slowly but surely towards their debut – dropping a stream of earworm singles, each of which would grace the album’s tracklist – they eventually bit the bullet, dropping an axe and adding a bass player to emerge as the more conventional outfit heard on Stoneage Romeos.

Founding frontman and chief songwriter, Dave Faulkner has just returned from the successful opening American leg of the Stoneage Romeos 40th Anniversary Tour – having battled, and ultimately defeated, a case of COVID picked up amidst the frivolities – and admits to some recent reflection on what his younger self and his mates achieved all those years ago.

“Oh, look, I’m always re-evaluating all the parts of our career and thinking about what we were doing and what I think of it now,” he smiles. “Mostly, you’re thinking of all the things that you are proud of, and at times, it’s almost like you pinch yourself and think, ‘Did that really happen?’

“You wonder how we managed to get that together, being so inexperienced and really just making a record for ourselves at the time. We didn’t think anyone else would particularly care, and they didn’t really for a while.

“It took about a year for that record to really pick up momentum as far as critical excitement. The album came out and people were, like, ‘Oh, very good, these guys have got a record out, very nice’. We were kind of well known in a sort of underground way, but we weren’t taken very seriously as being a contender, so to speak, for anything.

“People were much more focused on other acts and other records, and our album kind of slipped under their guard a little bit. Then after, as I say, about a year maybe – or certainly nine months or so – suddenly we started hearing these things of people saying what a wonderful record it was and how much they loved it.

“At first, it got sort of ‘pat on the head’ reviews, and then it became ‘pat on the back’ reviews.”

THE BAND

Faulkner admits that the evolution towards a more traditional band structure ultimately had a huge impact on Stoneage Romeos – with bassist Clyde Bramley filling the shows of axe-slinger Kimball Rendall and then Brad Shepherd taking over from Roddy Radalj on guitar – and explains how the final impetus for change stemmed from a most unlikely source.

“When we first formed,” he tells, “it was kind of us just saying, ‘Well, we’ll just be what we are, we don’t care, we’re not conforming to any stereotype, and if that’s what we’ve got, that’s what we’ve got’.

“So, we didn’t worry about not having a bass, but when we were playing around more and doing more shows and were playing with other bands, you’re feeling, like, ‘Gee, why doesn’t our stuff kind of quite land as hard as it should compared to what we’re hearing from the other bands on with us?’

“And you’ll laugh at this one, but the people that actually did tell us that we needed to change was the Glitter Band – Gary Glitter was here with the original Glitter Band touring in ’82, and we supported them out at the Stardust Lounge in Cabramatta.

“And the Glitter Band, those guys said to us flat out, ‘You guys need a bass guitar’. And we loved the Glitter Band, so we kind of went, ‘Oh, if they’re saying it, maybe they’re right’.

“So when Kimball decided to leave because he wanted to basically focus on film – because he’s a double threat and film was really his thing, and of course, it has been ever since – we thought, ‘Well, we’ve got to get a bass really. Let’s not just pretend now that we’ve got this gimmick to maintain’. It was, like, ‘What’s the real musical choice to make?’ and that was the bass.

“So we did that, and we were rehearsing funnily enough with Roddy Radalj still in the band – he hadn’t quit at that point – and he was talking it up, saying, ‘Oh, it’s really great, we’ve got a bass!’ And then he suddenly got cold feet; I think partly because he wanted to have his own band to be the star – because he had a bit of a following as a bit of a star in our band – so I think he wanted to kind of parlay that into being ‘the man’.

“But he did say one time – he denies it now, but I remember vividly – he actually said to me that ‘we’ve lost our gimmick’. He was worried about us losing our groovy audience – because we had a kind of a fashion-conscious audience in those early days, very early days – and he liked hanging with those people and felt like we might be making ourselves ‘too normal’ and that they might lose interest in us.

“And the funny thing was, of course, a lot of those people ended up graduating to house music and didn’t have live musicians in their world at all, anyway. They didn’t follow any bands after that. But for whatever reason, Rod went his own way, and so we had to replace Rod, and of course, that’s when Brad came in.

“I’d seen Brad playing with Clyde in a band called Super K, a bubblegum side project they had for a bit of fun. They’d played a few gigs, and they had an independent single out. I’d seen Brad in The Hitmen but hadn’t really paid much attention to him because Chris Masuak was the main guitarist, and I wasn’t a huge fan of the band.

“You know, they didn’t really sort of speak to me musically. I love that sort of hard rock and Detroit sound, but they just seemed, I don’t know, just a bridge too far for me.

“But when I saw Brad in Super K, I was knocked out by the flexibility he showed and the different styles he could play on guitar. He was singing Galveston, for example, and playing that twangy solo, and I was like, ‘God, this guy’s more than just a ripper, more than just a Detroit hard rocker guy!’

“He had a lot more colour in his tastes and his playing – and also seeing him singing as well. Obviously, he has a lot of charisma, and with all of those things together, I was just knocked out.

“So Clyde suggested asking Brad, and of course, he was still in The Hitmen, but we managed to coax him away because Brad was a fan of the Gurus. He actually saw our first gig, he was actually in the audience of our first show, and he’d been keeping tabs on us: we didn’t know any of this, but he wasn’t hard to convince, actually.”

THE SONGS

The Gurus at the time – the aforementioned trio augmented by the primal thump of founding drummer James Baker – looked like something from another dimension.

From a fashion perspective, they favoured an outlandishly retro-tinged mix of paisley, buckskin, goth and mod attire completely at odds with the prevailing ‘80s trends, an utterly distinctive hodge-lodge of styles that aesthetically set them far apart from the pack.

The band’s other outlying feature that became defining was its unbridled embrace of underground American pop culture – even the title Stoneage Romeos was taken from a ‘50s Three Stooges short film, while the album’s cartoon-ish cover was inspired by the ‘60s B-grade caveman romp One Million Years B.C. – which meant that to many more conservative pundits, the Gurus were virtually considered a novelty act.

“Yeah, that’s true,” Faulkner reflects. “That was why on the second album [1985’s Mars Needs Guitars], I deliberately chose to dial that down a hell of a lot, mainly because a lot of those early songs were written as goof-offs, so to speak.

“We’d have a flagon of wine and be playing records, and we’d write a song, and we didn’t give a rat’s what we were writing about. It was just for fun and often just us having a piss-take, you know? So all these crazy stories about girls being deceased and still being in love with them and cyclones and people going into volcanoes, all these things they were just written almost as a rebellion against being meaningful, really.

“But sometimes it got out of hand. There’s a song on the album called Arthur, for example: we wrote that as an excuse for not having a bass player when we started, a fictional account of our bass player who’d died.

“It’s such a stupid idea, but we’d write a song for something as silly as that – and that would be a song that would be like too good a song to not play – so you have this lyric that’s so disconnected to anything real, but it’s connected to some sort of mythology that we’re developing about ourselves.

“So I tried to kind of be a little bit more forthright in my songwriting later on, so that was a major change I made. There’s still lots of comedy and lightheartedness in our songs, always has been – and you can see it on our videos as well, that kind of captures that side of us nicely – but the actual music-making and creative side was always very serious.

“Though at the same time, we’re not… ‘po-faced gits’ is my favourite term to use. I don’t believe in being a ‘po-faced git’.”

Even the more conventional and sincere-sounding songs on Stoneage Romeos – such as the seemingly heartfelt love song I Want You Back – often came with a sting in the tail (that song transpired to be addressing a former bandmate rather than an erstwhile romantic partner).

“I mean as a songwriter every song you write is fiction anyway, nothing is literally the feeling that you’re describing,” the singer chuckles. “Even if you describe a story, you’re leaving out details that are important for brevity. So even if you try to keep it to ‘just the facts, man’ you’re still basically summarising and presenting it in a certain angle.

“So you write a song for different reasons, and you might have an actual sentiment that you’re trying to express, but you put it in a parable or a metaphor, and that was the case with that song: so it’s a real emotion, but it’s couched in a more conventional love story.

“But the sentiment is correct – you know, it’s about someone that’s gone and is talking trash about you. They used to be close to you, and now they’ve moved on, and you’re saying, ‘Oh, you’re gonna regret that; one day, you’ll wish you were back with me!’

Stoneage Romeos starts in incredible fashion with the frenetic rush of Let’s All Turn On – a manifesto of sorts, reeling off a cavalcade of classic rock songs that were formative to the Gurus -. While it’s widely considered one of the great opening gambits in rock’n’roll, Faulkner explains that the propulsive song nearly didn’t even make the final cut.

“It’s funny because that song was originally put out on the b-side of [1983 single] Tojo,” he recalls. “The album is unique in one regard in that we made it as a series of singles first and we didn’t actually make an album until halfway through the process, where it was, like, ‘Okay you can finish it off now and go and record a whole bunch more songs’.

“But early on, it was just, like, ‘You can go and make a single and go out and do a tour on that. Then you can release another single’. And the first one was Tojo – I mean [1982 single] Leilani had come out from the first line-up, but the first single from after Clyde and Brad joined was Tojo – and that b-side was Let’s All Turn On.

“So we at that time didn’t even necessarily know if that was going to be on the album because we often left b-sides off. In fact we had to be persuaded to put that on the album, to be honest.

“Because we thought that we don’t really wanna sell the same song to people twice, we felt bad. And we thought that with the singles, really the b-sides were for the early adopters, so to speak – the people that were our fans – we wanted to kind of let them have something special.

“And that’s why, for example, [1983 single My Girl’s b-side] Be My Guru wasn’t on the record, because that’s an amazing song, and it really should have been on the album, to be honest. You know, it belongs just as much as Let’s All Turn On or anything, really.

“But that was the reason we’d leave songs off. And that was one that was in danger of being left off. So it’s funny that we were kind of persuaded by the record label, which at that time was a very small little label called Big Time Records.”

THE SESSIONS

Stoneage Romeos was recorded at Trafalgar Studios in Sydney with producer Alan Thorne – who, after cutting his teeth with commercial acts such as Air Supply, Renee Geyer and Moving Pictures, had become the go-to man for the burgeoning Sydney underground, overseeing recordings for bands such as The Hitmen, New Race, The Lime Spiders and Died Pretty – and Faulkner remembers there being an element of friction regarding the balance of artistic and commercial concerns.

“I mean, this music was kind of new,” he shrugs. “The Australian model in the late-70s [and] early-‘80s was that you had Radio Birdman and stuff on the fringes, but the mainstream was kind of safe. And that was the model that they sort of tried to impose on us. Not telling us what to play or anything; it’s just that the sort of sounds Alan was pulling – which were beautiful sounds – were a little bit lighter than what we played onstage.

“And we didn’t have enough experience to really just stand our ground or even to know what we needed to ask for. And also, we probably didn’t help by being so excited and pretty much  throwing the kitchen sink on there.

“We were just putting on all these synths, overdubs and harmonies and little bits of percussion and all these things that are lovely little ear-ticklers, but they can dilute the impact of the song. Sometimes, you’ve got to keep it simple and just belt it out, and we might’ve over-decorated things and made it a bit fruitier, so to speak. You know, added a bit more flavour and colour or something.

“But what did happen at the end of the process, when the record was finished, we were a little bit disappointed in a few of the mixes. We thought they were way too light because these are rock songs. And so we kind of had a bit of a pow-wow with the record company – as I said, a small little label – and they gave us permission to go and remix a song; the first one was Death Ship. We just thought that was way too smooth, and it should have had a bit more fire to it.

“So we remixed that, and they said, ‘Oh, that sounds alright, yeah, that’s good, you can do another one’. And I think the second song we did was In The Echo Chamber – which they were a little bit less excited by, but we were happier – and we made it much more obnoxious and kind of ugly.

“And then we were given permission to do one more, and we went in – and this is my recollection, we might have done Arthur as well, I can’t remember exactly, there [were] a few anyway – but the last straw definitely was Dig It Up, where we went in and we threw all these echoes and reverbs and things on there and made it just a nightmarish scenario audio-wise and they just said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve gone too far now! That’s it, the record’s finished!’

“Yeah, so the Dig It Up mix, we didn’t get to improve that one, so to speak, because we took it too far, enough that they rejected our mix and said, ‘That’s the end of the album, this is going out as it is.’

“So I think we probably remixed at least three songs, and we were happy with that because Death Ship definitely needed it, and so did …Echo Chamber: they just felt a little bit softer than they should have. Of course, we couldn’t make it into something it wasn’t, but it just gave a bit more energy for us.

“And I think the record still sounds great; I’m not saying Alan did a bad job with it. It’s just everything artistic – whether making a record or making a film – they’re all collaborations, and you’ve got to kind of make compromises to each other. And it was limited by what we were capable of doing as musicians, too. He made a silk purse out of our sow’s ear.

“I listened to the album recently, and I’m still very, very impressed with the way it sounds. I think it’s lively and it’s colourful, and you couldn’t have asked for a better album”.

THE LEGACY

Once Stoneage Romeos found its audience, the momentum just kept building; the Gurus not only finding themselves all over the radio and then on the mainstream charts – the album reaching #29 upon release on its way to Gold accreditation – but also winning Best Debut Album at the 1984 Countdown Awards.

Further afield, Stoneage Romeos was released in the States through A&M Records and became a smash hit on college radio, topping the Alternative/College Albums Chart for four consecutive weeks and laying the platform for the band’s future successes in that toughest of markets.

Today, Stoneage Romeos isn’t just considered one of the great Oz rock debuts of all time – in the conversation alongside classics such as The Saints’ (I’m) Stranded, Radio Birdman’s Radios Appear and the Sunnyboys self-titled effort – it’s also viewed by many as one of the great Aussie albums, period (for example, it was ranked #28 in respected 2010 tome ‘The 100 Best Australian Albums’ by John O’Donnell, Toby Creswell and Craig Mathieson).

Faulkner admits they had no inkling at the time that their fledgling record would one day be held in such high esteem.

“We just knew we loved it,” he smiles. “You know, we made a record for ourselves. And we had no imagination that we were going to make anything more than this one record, so it was just a matter of ‘do what you can right now’.

“And then playing it on tour – as I said, we had a bit of life following this point, we’d been building up with singles and the tours and stuff, and we were doing well – but then obviously that just kept growing, and the album was part of that.

“But it was kind of so incremental that you didn’t really notice at the time like the frog boiling in water – you just start it on cold, and it doesn’t jump out.

“We didn’t notice that success and that fame – that reputation, whatever – all those things gathering around us. It was just, ‘that’s our record, we’ve done that, now we’re doing this’. It’s only when you kind of get it reflected back to you from other people that you sort of realise, ‘Oh right, yeah, okay, this person’s really kind of serious when they’re saying these things about how much they love this record’. So you learn it that way rather than looking at yourself and going, ‘Huh, what a good boy am I, look what I did!’ You don’t think of it like that.

“And we had a healthy scepticism about a lot of things – we’ve never been kind of industry players in that regard. We’re not everyone’s buddy, and that’s probably been a little bit to our cost because we haven’t built those bridges and become everyone’s mate.

“But we come from that punk background – all of us were in punk rock bands – and that was always based on a healthy disregard for convention and for what’s popular wisdom at the time. Punk was the antithesis of what was meant to be successful. Of course, it did become successful through bands like us and beyond – you know, like Nirvana, blah, blah, blah – but at the time, and in a sense, it was always like this, but it was just music we are making because we want to do this, not because it’s gonna be good for our career.

“Even though people probably think that I wrote pop songs or something to have a hit. I just wrote the songs I wrote, and they happened to be memorable and have good melodies and lyrics that make sense and with a message that some people liked, so you’re connected to people. But it wasn’t like I ever wrote a song thinking, like, ‘Here’s the next single’.

“And that’s true of Stoneage Romeos, as well. Yes, there’s singles on there – My Girl, Tojo, Leilani, I Want You Back – but for us, the other songs are just as important, and we wrote those songs with just the same intention as we wrote anything that had more, as it turns out, commercial appeal after the event. They were just songs.

“I like pop songs, I like rock songs, I like this, that, and the other, you know? The Buzzcocksare one of my favourite groups, same as the Ramones – that’s the definition of melodic hooks to me, both those bands, and if I can have that in my music, I’m happy.”

Faulkner admits that the Gurus’ jump from the underground towards the brighter lights of the commercial realms didn’t come without its share of pushback from mid-‘80s scenesters.

“Totally, of course,” he grins. “Because a lot of people that were in our same vicinity, so to speak, had their own little bands or bigger bands and were jealous as hell. It’s pretty fair to say Nirvana was the changing point where suddenly you could be successful and be cool, like, it’s not automatically disqualifying having had some success.

“But prior to that, there was very much a knee-jerk reaction, like, ‘You don’t deserve that success, and you’ve done the wrong thing to get it’. It’s really just people being envious and resentful. Doing well was not considered kosher.

“You mentioned the Sunnyboys earlier; they were ahead of us, and they had hits, and we loved the Sunnyboys and never thought, ‘Gee, now they’re sold out because they had a hit’. Alone With You is a great song; why wouldn’t it be a hit? Of course, it should be, you know?

“So that was my attitude always – the Ramones should have been hits, and the Buzzcocks, they should have been as big as fucking Pink Floyd! I don’t know.”

Building on the perfect platform provided them by their debut, over the ensuing decades, Hoodoo Gurus became one of Australia’s favourite and most successful bands, releasing ten acclaimed albums over the journey and earning a deserved reputation as a fearsome live proposition.

And given the recent outpouring of love for the 40th anniversary of Stoneage Romeos and the accompanying tours, Faulkner is acutely aware of the high esteem his band is held in today by hordes of music lovers all around the world.

“I’m completely aware of that love,” he concedes humbly. “Charles Fisher, who is a very good friend as well as a great producer who worked with us on three albums – he did Mars Needs Guitars and a couple of others – he was interviewed recently, and he said that bands and artists eventually find their level, that their audience finds them if they’re given time and not prevented by other forces.

“So, we were always, in that sense, a people’s band – the people made us a success and have kept us there.”

Hoodoo Gurus begin their Stoneage Romeos 40th anniversary tour in November. You can find the remaining tickets to the shows here. The 40th anniversary edition of the album is available here.

HOODOO GURUS

BACK TO THE STONEAGE AUSTRALIAN TOUR

Wednesday, 13 November 2024 – Anita’s Theatre, Thirroul NSW

With special guests: Tumbleweed – NEW SHOW

Thursday, 14 November 2024 – Anita’s Theatre, Thirroul NSW

With special guests: Tumbleweed – SOLD OUT

Friday, 15 November 2024 – Civic Theatre, Newcastle NSW

With special guests: Dallas Crane – SOLD OUT

Saturday, 16 November 2024 – The Entertainment Grounds, Gosford NSW

With special guests: GANGgajang, Spy V Spy and Allniters – LIMITED TICKETS

Wednesday, 20 November 2024 – The Forum Theatre, Melbourne VIC

With special guests: The Hard-Ons

Thursday, 21 November 2024 – The Forum, Melbourne VIC – SOLD OUT

Friday, 22 November 2024 – The Palais Theatre, Melbourne VIC

With special guests: Dallas Crane – SOLD OUT

Saturday, 23 November 2024 – Hindley St Music Hall, Adelaide SA

With special guests: Dallas Crane – SOLD OUT

Thursday, 28 November 2024 – Llewellyn Hall, Canberra ACT

With special guests: Spy v Spy – SOLD OUT

Friday, 29 November 2024 – Sydney Coliseum Theatre, Rooty Hill NSW

With special guests: Spy v Spy – LIMITED TICKETS

Saturday, 30 November 2024 – Enmore Theatre, Sydney NSW

With special guests: Tumbleweed – SOLD OUT

Sunday, 1 December 2024 – Enmore Theatre, Sydney NSW

With special guests: Tumbleweed – SOLD OUT

Thursday, 5 December 2024 – Eaton’s Hill Hotel, Brisbane QLD

With special guests: Screamfeeder – LIMITED TICKETS

Friday, 6 December 2024 – The Station, Sunshine Coast QLD

With special guests: Screamfeeder – SOLD OUT

Saturday, 7 December 2024 – The Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane QLD

With special guests: Screamfeeder – SOLD OUT

Sunday, 8 December 2024 – Miami Marketta, Gold Coast QLD

With special guests: Screamfeeder – SOLD OUT

Thursday, 12 December 2024 – Astor Theatre, Perth WA

With special guests: Rinehearts – SOLD OUT

Friday, 13 December 2024 – Astor Theatre, Perth WA

With special guests: Rinehearts – SOLD OUT

Sunday, 15 December 2024 – Astor Theatre, Perth WA

With special guests: Datura4

Wednesday, 22 January 2025 – Ulumbarra Theatre, Bendigo VIC

With special guests: Magic Dirt

Thursday, 23 January 2025 – Costa Hall, Geelong VIC

With special guests: Magic Dirt

Friday, 31 January 2025 – The Station, Sunshine Coast QLD

With special guests: Magic Dirt

Saturday, 1 February 2025 – Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane Qld

With special guests: Magic Dirt

Sunday, 2 February 2025 – Miami Marketta, Gold Coast QLD

With special guests: Magic Dirt

Friday, 7 February 2025 – Toronto Hotel, Newcastle NSW

With special guests: Spy V Spy

Saturday, 8 February 2025 – Selina’s, Coogee Bay/Sydney NSW

With special guests: The Hard-Ons