The Stabs
Frying innards, blowing speakers and buying Mum flowers to say sorry.
I nearly witnessed a murder onstage not long ago. The scene of the crime was Pony, and the attacker in question was a member of the Stabs. So, for that matter, was the almost-victim.
What was going on, you ask? The band was finishing their set, which consisted of a boozy half-hour’s worth of thumping, wailing and fuzz. Though I couldn’t tell you one line of any lyric I heard, or even one song title, I can tell you that it was loud and it was great and the guitar player was flailing about in such a manner that I was unsure whether the headstock of his instrument was going to connect with my face. The set concluded with the guitar player crotch-grinding the drum set and knocking it over, followed by the drummer standing up and throwing the ride cymbal down as violently as humanly possible at his band mate, right at his head, as he was lying on the stage. The room filled with feedback and applause, and I was sure the guitarist was dead.
I have easily seen a dozen onstage fights, but this particular instance of inter-band aggression stood out for its sheer ferocity. The drummer really let the guitar player have it. He threw that cymbal stand down hard. On the stage, amid the toppled drums, tangled cords and empty beer cups was a shard of broken cymbal the size of a business card. It’s sitting on my desk right now; I could cut a steak with it if I wanted to.
Yet, after a minute or so, the guitar player popped up from behind the ruins of the drum kit like nothing happened. He strode over the heap of drum wreckage – jug of beer in one hand, cigarette in the other – and walked offstage as casually as if he’d just come back from the loo. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t crippled. He should have been bleeding profusely.
The Stabs acted like it was just another day at the office. The drum-trashing and cymbal-throwing incident didn’t even merit discussion after the set. They just wrapped up their cables, dragged their amps and drums off the stage and sat around drinking beer and waiting for the next band.
The other bands that night? I tried to pay attention, but it was like trying to watch grass grow after you’ve just seen a car crash. Or maybe an erupting volcano. I left.
Random violence notwithstanding, there are worse things to do than lounge around drinking with the Stabs. They really are a nice bunch of guys, quite witty, actually, and they don’t pummel each other all that often. They are Brendan J. Noonan, a 26 year old who works as a barman at the Northcote Social Club; Mark Nelson, 27, who, until very recently, pressed records at the Corduroy vinyl plant (it was just sold to a hip-hop label); and Matt Gleeson, 34, host of the “Burning Vinyl” broadcast on 3CR. Being slightly older and slightly calmer, Matt gives the impression of being the most mature and level-headed of the three – until he insists that his name is actually “Buffy Tufnel.” (That’s actually how he’s identified on the band’s web site. The surname is an homage to Nigel Tufnel, the Jeff Beck-type character in ‘This Is Spinal Tap’. I don’t know what the “Buffy” means, and he’s not telling.)
Brendan plays a battered Fender Mustang and sings. Mark plays fuzz bass and also sings. Matt plays the drums – although “plays” is far too gentle a verb to describe what it is he does to them. Actually, he beats them like they owe him money. He plays the kit so hard that the sandbag he places in front of the kick drum isn’t heavy enough to hold it in place. Periodically, Matt must get up and adjust it between songs or else the kick drum will creep offstage and launch into the crowd.
I had the band over to conduct an “interview” one night, but to tell the truth there was not really much of interest on the tape when I listened back. All you really need to know to get a handle on the Stabs is this: they’re three serious music heads who have one foot planted firmly in the rock and roll gutter and the other in “some very unpalatable areas, like extreme noise, that we can all agree on,” which is how Matt summed it up.
All three of them grew up in houses with musical instruments in them. Luckily, they all discovered punk and other weird, forward-thinking music, or today they might sound like a ramshackle marching band or deranged Dixieland trio. Mark took organ and double-bass lessons, while Brendan learned the trombone and Matt played the euphonium (a seldom seen brass instrument somewhat like a tuba). Matt grew up in the country, in New South Wales “in a real redneck kind of town,” and was lucky enough to have a piano in his bedroom. “Even from as long as I can remember, I’d just go and hit it, go make noise,” Matt says. Which totally fits in with the way he plays drums.
Brendan took guitar lessons when he was around 13 or 14, but that didn’t last long. “We were just terrible students, and the teacher said, ‘Well, what do you want to learn?’ We said, ‘Teach us how to play “Stairway to Heaven.”’ We realized the end of the song had barre chords. After that, we quit the classes.”
Ah, yes: barre chords. For you non-musician types, barre chords are what let you play pretty much any song you want without the bother and complication of having to study the guitar for years. Instead of learning 20 or 30 chord shapes, you learn just two, and shift them up and down the neck. It’s the sound behind the Stooges, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Saints, et cetera – all blaring barre chords, and how they’re used and abused. About 99 per cent of your favourite bands wouldn’t exist right now if their guitarists had not discovered barre chords during their teen years. Brendan, in other words, learned pretty much everything he needed to know and then moved on.
Matt says he didn’t discover punk rock until after he left home. As a youngster, he “was a real musicologist, had heaps of vinyl,” but wasn’t aware of anything current that held his interest. Rural isolation meant that his radio could only spew forth Top 40 songs, and so he concluded “there wasn’t much worth listening to in the 80s.” In his late teens, however, Matt followed the time-honoured tradition of young bohemians everywhere – as soon as he was able, he left the country and moved to the city, in his case, Sydney. There, he saw Lubricated Goat and tons of other bands that were mining new territory at the beginnings of the post-punk era. “I was like, Jesus, this is nothing like anything in my record collection.”
Both Brendan and Mark cut their teeth around the Croydon scene, a well-known spawning ground to plenty of bands. Mark played bass and sang with the Blue Stripes (“We had our name long before the White Stripes,” he points out), who left behind a truly unhinged 7”, recorded live on 3CR in June 2001, titled, “because they say that cleanliness is next to godliness as an atheist i’ve always felt a certain obligation to reside in filth”. The single garnered international notice with a positive review in the Wire magazine – not bad for three wet-behind-the-ears punk-rock kids. (In some circles, the Wire’s imprimatur is an all-important stamp of cutting-edge cool. To Mark’s credit, he couldn’t give a shit.) Around the same time, Brendan played in Elixir 45 with two of Mark’s Blue Stripes cohorts. One thing led to another, bands came and went, and by 2003, Brendan and Mark decided to work together on a demo tape containing five of Brendan’s songs. “We just sort of needed a drummer, and we knew Matt,” Mark said, and that was that: the Stabs had formed. By May Day 2003, the Stabs were playing their first gig in Birmingham, at a venue better known for hosting teenage Oi! gigs than the Stabs’ particular brand of music. There were, by their own recollection, maybe 10 or 20 people there.
By the time they had their fourth show, the Stabs had played more gigs than rehearsals, and they’ve played fairly relentlessly ever since. Once, they showed up at a party sans instruments and performed as the Shabs, rocking out on borrowed household items. (“We’re no slouches with a bucket of nails and some sauce pans,” Matt says. “It was for an avant-garde crowd, so it went over fairly well, I think.”) Two years into it, they’ve done more than 100 shows and have toured New Zealand twice. To this day, says Mark, “I still think we’ve done more gigs than rehearsals.”
Their first single, the inaugural 7” on Michael Smith’s Weather Records imprint, contains ‘Wading’ and ‘That’s it’, two three-minute romps through fields of feedback and primal Stooge riffage; think of an angrier, fuzzier Mudhoney and you’ll be in close proximity. It’s a pretty good snapshot of their live show. They’re now recording an album-length work at the Birdland recording studio in Prahran, with Lindsay Gravina producing.
The Stabs are now making inroads into the US, where ex-Dirt Bombs drummer Ben Blackwell has pressed a Stabs 7” on his Detroit-based label, Cass Records. The sleeve, a silk-screened canvas, has a photo of the band from their 2004 New Zealand tour, taken in front of the same concert hall that the Pretty Things famously set ablaze in 1967. The photo hints at the Stabs’ custom of leaving carnage and destruction in their wake while on tour. As they prepared to head back to New Zealand earlier this year, Mark says, a friend of theirs “set out a challenge – anything less than what the Pretty Things did is insufficient … We tried our best.”
Even by Melbourne standards, where, it seems, everybody who’s in one band is in at least two or three others, the Stabs are extremely active musicians. Brendan and Mark both play in the Assassination Collective; Brendan plays in Archaic Forms; Matt is in Bowl of Dick, a feedback-drenched unit which, he says, “has light and shade and all of that but is basically me versus how loud I can get.” Mark performs with two or three other bands as well.
Rare is the night in Melbourne when I have gone to a decent gig and not seen at least one of the Stabs in the crowd. They are relentless music fans. On a recent night, they caught one four-band bill in Fitzroy and then, at the end of the night, when the bar was shutting down and nearly everyone else was gathering their coats and heading home, they took a taxi downtown to catch a 2 am set by the Witch Hats, with whom they had just played three nights prior.
Matt also hosts gigs at his home in Thornbury, with the front room facing the street serving as the performance space. Sometimes, the Bird Blobs or Beisbol or any number of the city’s other like-minded bands practice there. The last time he threw a show there, in February, people were playing and drinking until eight the next morning.
They pretty much have a we’ll-play-anywhere philosophy. “It’s a great way to see bands,” says Matt. “One of the best things about being in a band is, when you’ve got no money and you can’t afford to see a band, you can call those bands up and say, ‘Let’s do a show together.’ Not only do you get to see them, you get free beer.”
Mark’s unswerving fandom spurred him to form his own record label, Saucerlike Recordings, which has put out releases by Nic Rizili’s brilliant Menstruation Sisters, the porn-themed electronic artist Tabby, avant-garde chamber musician Jon Rose and George W. Bush (not the intellectually-challenged US president, but the punk band, whose 7” contains, among its treasures, a Germs cover and piece titled ‘You took my political virginity and never returned my calls.’) His omnipresence in the city’s music scene is also earning him some mainstream attention as well. Last year, Mark brought Sonic Youth to Corduroy to record a direct-to-acetate session, an event that recently drew notice from the Age newspaper. The Sonic Youth recordings, to be released under the name Melbourne Direct, will be issued as a double-LP on Saucerlike in the coming weeks.
The Stabs’ performances tend to be shambolic and intense. This may or may not have something to do with a huge appetite for drugs and alcohol. I have rarely seen any of them without a beer in hand. Matt has played with “Insert Drugs Here Please” written above the hole in the front skin of his kick drum. How much is usually contributed by audience members? “Not nearly enough,” Matt says. “Once, there was half an eccy that I swallowed straight away.”
The drinking and the associated instrument-hurling – not to mention the need for extreme volume – translate into frequent equipment mishaps. Mark’s bass amp died mid-set the last time I saw them. The gig before that, the strap on his bass fell off, forcing him to play one-handed for a good bit of the song while he tried to get his shit together. Brendan plays through two distortion pedals, but not all the time, because he trips over them and unplugs them. Drums are knocked over and thrown. For a band of their size, Matt said, “we have one hell of a repair bill.”
The wrecking of the stage and the blowing up of the amps and the collapsing and screaming and drinking perhaps all spring from the same impulse. It comes from wanting more volume, more action, more intensity. More. More. More. All the time, always, until the goal is achieved. It’s what Rimbaud was talking about with his “derangement of the senses” bit, with the exhausting of the poisons and the suffering and madness, etc., though the Stabs would laugh at anyone who compared their aesthetic to that of a dead French poet. Nevertheless, there’s a case to be made that that’s what’s going on here. It’s why Mark turns his amp up until the innards fry and the speakers blow, why Matt insists that he needs to feel the walls rattling when he plays or else “it just sucks,” why Brendan and Mark, when they’re on tour, climb to the top of a construction crane to get the perfect view of Auckland. Never mind that they were arrested before the tour really even began, or that they were a vomiting mess, staggering down the main drag in Auckland, puking on people and swiping orange juice and newspapers on their way to court, or even that the judge imposed a ridiculous sentence on them (they had to, among other indignities, buy their mums $45 worth of flowers to apologize for embarrassing them … and then show the court a receipt.) It’s all worth it, in other words, if the gig blows minds. Who cares if the drummer tries to kill you? Or if you smash your own ride cymbal to splinters while trying to kill the guitarist?
This all makes total sense when Brendan sums things up over beers one night. Playing music, he explains at some length, “is an affliction.”
“I don’t even enjoy playing that much,” he said. “I’m in a state of panic while we play and I’m relieved once it’s over. But then – then I just want to keep doing it. Why would you do something that makes you feel like that?”
The Stabs’ latest seven-inch, “The Woods/The Rain” b/w “6FT Rodent” can be obtained through Cass Records, 3424 Bishop, Detroit MI, 48224, USA, or at Cass Records. Their first single, “Wading” b/w “That’s It”, is available through Weather Records.
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