Talking Tactics

After nearly a million line-up changes and a sojourn in Europe, Tactics are back. DAVID NICHOLS talks to lead tactician Dave Studdert about the genesis of the band.

Talking to Dave Studdert about Tactics, or most things, fills one (me) with a sense of wonder at a musical world that might have come to pass if he’d been given just a little more weaponry for his battalion.

Studdert’s band lasted from around ’78 to ’89 and thereabouts, and produced five (“or,” pipes up a pedant/collector, “six if you count, blah, blah.”) albums and a bunch of singles, most of which have been collected over two double CDs under the title The Sound of the Sound.

The first, issued last year, featured the group’s albums My Houdini and their, well, magnum opus Glebe, finally mixed properly and a true work of genius. The new compilation, released last week or something, includes another truly great album and possibly (hmm, it’s a close call between this and the first two) my favourite of theirs, the Blue and White Future Whale album from 1986.

Dave Studdert was the only constant in Tactics and wrote pretty much all the songs, sang them, played guitar and did a lot of logistical junk besides; it was his passion. The group was truly original and self-consciously so, within the punk/post-punk world they lived in. They started in Canberra and moved to Sydney, experienced nearly a million line-up changes and Studdert disappeared to Europe at the end of it. He now returns periodically and has currently reassembled a new kind of Tactics (featuring a number of former members) and is playing a little bit to promote the new record.

Rock history so often focuses on beginnings, which is a rather ahistorical approach when you think about it, but in many cases it probably stems from the fact that for most bands the beginning was the only time they were genuinely interesting. Tactics weren’t like that: the industry didn’t absorb them, though it’s interesting that their one real live major label release – the final album, The Great Gusto – isn’t represented on The Sound of the Sound at all – that’s how unhappy Studdert is with it in retrospect. So, endings can be pretty tawdry, perhaps. But beginnings – well – they are pretty interesting if people use them to strike up a manifesto, which is kind of what this band did.

“We were really on a mission.” Studdert says. “We were really looking for what it meant to live in Canberra and live in Australia. And we weren’t interested in things that sounded like other things. We were really, really devoted to doing something that spoke for us, you know. And we’d all come from very different backgrounds but me, Bob and Angus were very committed to that. And we worked really hard at it.

“And we were like, ‘I don’t want to do a song that sounds like The Damned … I don’t want to do a song that sounds like The Stooges …’ I think it was when the first or second Talking Heads album came out and I knew I could do that sort of stuff really easily, but I didn’t want to, so I stopped listening to the record. It was that sort of vibe. Even though I really liked the record. But I knew if I listened to it too much, the band would end up sounding like them. We were just really fixated on making something that had a really original voice, and really had a voice that we could recognise ourselves in.

“I mean I hadn’t originally come from Canberra,” he continues. “My dad was in the army and we moved around a lot. And he ended up in Canberra working at the defence headquarters. And he was very successful in the army, so he had quite a long career. I had kind of been there for about four months and then I was going to Sydney to go to university and when I dropped out of university I went back to Canberra for a while – then I went up to Townsville, then I went to Rockhampton, and I drove all around basically. I was working in meatworks and stuff. In Canberra I was doing some tiling and building service stations, it was all that sort of work, working jackhammers and stuff. None of the jobs lasted too long, but they put a bit of pocket money in my pocket – I was doing a lot of cleaning jobs.

“I knew I kind of didn’t want to be in the straight world. I couldn’t handle that at all, I didn’t like it. And I didn’t really have networks of people, because we moved around. I was just kind of looking for it on my own really, reading a lot, hunting around for poets and European stuff. I’d done quite well at university but in the end I got really bored ... I was going to the big library opposite the lake and reading all these Aboriginal song cycles, because you couldn’t find that stuff anywhere except in the libraries. Looking for something that wasn’t what I could see, really. Funding it all basically – I was probably 20, 21, 22 – I was doing these cleaning jobs. And in the end things just started to happen.

“The thing that always sustained it for me was how good the music sounded.”

“There was an import shop in Canberra, Impact, which imported a lot of records, and I used to hang around there and talk to people and people used to put ads up and bands started and Angus [Douglas] turned up, and he had a mate, and we got rid of the mate, you know… things just slowly developed.

“The kind of virtuality of white Australia is really evident in Canberra. There’s literally a line where the well-watered green lawns stop, and the brown hills start. And I really didn’t know anyone in Canberra so I was driving around a lot at night-time, that was pre-terrorist days so you could literally drive by the old Parliament House and round through all the government zone, where there never was anybody. And you just had this feeling that the whole thing was a bit of a hallucination, and it was that kind of situation where somehow you were born in this hallucination, which was supposed to represent the country that you could see but didn’t. And it just seemed like a really good metaphor for everything that was about white Australia, so that was the vibe that we were definitely trying to convey, and I mean a lot of the lyrics in ‘Buried Country’ I wrote while I was driving around the country outside Canberra.

“I think the line about ‘white birds, wet fields’ was a literal report of what I saw. Certainly the one about ‘through the hills I can see your headlights’ is another one. So, I was writing one song at a time, taking a huge amount of time to do it, because I wanted them to be dead right. And kind of basically trying to ward off all the fears that it was too late, I couldn’t do it, I had never done it before, what made me think I could do it now – da de da de da de dah – and, ‘Why don’t you go and get a real job?’ kind of stuff, which was basically coming from pretty much everywhere around me.

“And the people who Bob [Whittle, the group’s original drummer] hung around with all went to this School Without Walls, which turned out as far as I could see a whole bunch of semi-literate drug dealers and rather petulant ego-ridden individuals, who were kind of the right wing’s worst ideas of Doctor Spock’s experimentation. And they were still walking around with bells on their ankles. This is 1977, ’78, because the ’60s hadn’t really finished in Canberra. And they all thought Bob was crazy for playing with us and they thought we were crazy for doing it, and we’d never get anywhere. Pretty much everybody in Canberra hated my voice, told me so … it was just small town shit, basically.

“But what also happened was once we started playing gigs, more people started getting involved in the whole scene, and they were just doing paint-by-numbers versions of [The Stooges’] ‘I Wanna be Your Dog’ and they ended up drawing more friends than we did, and so we decided we’d had enough of Canberra, and we’d played Sydney a few times by this point and gone down really well, so we just decided we were all going to Sydney, so I went round the bass player’s house and talked his mum into it. I was a bit older than all of these people, I was 25. Then we just loaded up the station wagon and all went up to Sydney. We went to see Flowers a couple of times, this is before they became Icehouse, and realised we were really loose. So we started practicing about four hours a day, five days a week and of course because there were four of us and we were all alone in a big city, we were all quite good friends with each other and there weren’t any distractions, so after about four or five months we got really great.”

Studdert figures the band had a little less than a year in which they were leaders of the scene, and it started to fall away because of outside factors. By the early 1980s, Tactics had detached from their first manager, Marie Ryan, and hooked up with another, Roger Grierson, who ran the Green record label with Stuart Coupe.

Studdert: “I was going to make records, and put them out. I wasn’t going to make an album and have EMI sit on it for three years. So I was really anxious to record as much as we could, put it out as quickly as we could. Roger Grierson came along, had the money and wanted to do it. Him and Stuart pissed me around in the end I had to throw Stuart Coupe into a wall to get him to pay $400 towards the cost of My Houdini. I had to be really firm with people, but I was pretty determined, really.

“We never played that many big gigs with anybody who was going to draw more than who our fans already were. So it became really difficult to expand the fan base, because we never got any opportunities to play with those sort of people. I don’t think we ever played a gig with the Birthday Party – thank Christ – and I don’t think we ever played a gig with a big band from the same scene who was bigger than us.”

By the time of Blue and White Future Whale in the mid-80s, the group was almost completely different, retaining only Angus Douglas and, of course, Studdert. Nicky Baruch was on vocals and keyboards and Snajik on bass.

“Virtually every gig that we played with the band that’s on Volume 2, the Nicky-Snajik band, we just ran our own gigs, and the people who turned up were the people who really loved us and that was it. We rarely got interested but ignorant bystanders who could be converted, we tended to play to the converted all the time. We’d still draw pretty well, 450-500 people when we put on our own gigs, but we’d never get across to a wider audience. We were always a bit left-field.”

It wasn’t going to work, or at least, it didn’t. By the time of their final album, Studdert “was trying to tone certain things down, and trying to make a record that could get us through the door … We were always pushed in that direction on the Great Gusto, because Rog literally said if you let me produce the record I’ll give you a songwriting advance. And at this point, I’d been 10 years at it and was completely broke and felt like I needed a bit of money. I got a 100,000.

“The ’80s were a time when there was a lot of bullshit and hype – almost as much as the ’90s. I was working very hard keeping the band together and doing stuff, I was living on my nerves and there was a certain amount of cynicism and anger about what was going on around me. The thing that always sustained it for me was how good the music sounded.”

Studdert is still passionate and proud about his old band, and he’s happy to be doing it again, in a limited fashion. Some clips, one old and some new, are on YouTube. Check it out. And buy those CDs. They are too good.

Studdert: “The playing’s been fantastic. We’ve done a couple of parties, and we did the Hoey … we’re doing some recording with Wayne Connolly – it’s all a pretty fruitful kind of trip and I’m really diggin’ it.”

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