In the first installment of his new column, Double Take, ANDREW RAMADGE looks at two interconnected Australian works.

Razar
‘Task Force’/‘Stamp Out Disco’
7" Single
1978

Andrew Stafford
Pig City
Book
2004

“Righto you kids, I heard you swearing, I’m putting you awaaaay…”

So begins Razar’s debut single ‘Task Force’, its opening line spoken in the character of an ocker cop issuing a warning over the squeal of a guitar, before the song proper kicks off. It’s a trashy punk rock track with a catchy melody and a sing-along chorus about how wonderful the police are: “Task Force! Task Force! How we love you! The sirens above you! We think you’re tops! You undercover cops!”

If The Saints captured the insecurity felt by Queenslanders on the world stage with ‘(I’m) Stranded’ in 1976, then ‘Task Force’ – released two years later – captured the anxiety of their backyard. It was a satirical love song to the police, specifically the Queensland Police Task Force, a special squad charged with keeping the kids under control and shutting down punk shows in Brisbane. They excelled at both. Promoter Dave Darling remembers, of trying to put on bands at the time: “Nine out of 10 of them I don’t think ever made the final song.”

The Task Force would send plain-clothes officers into punk shows to wait for one of these offences to occur and then intervene, sometimes with disastrous results. At one infamous Razar gig at Colossus Hall in June 1979, an officer tried to arrest The Leftovers singer Warren Lamond while he was spouting obscenities on stage. Several people intervened and laid into the cop – one account says “roughed up”, another says they “kicked the fuck out of him”. He returned with reinforcements and several paddy wagons. 25 people were arrested.

On first glance, all this might sound like just another story of youngsters kicking against The Man – but the problem wasn’t confined to the punk scene. Since at least the late 1960s, Queensland as a whole had recorded the lowest rates of public respect for police in the country, according to a report from the Australian Institute of Criminology. It also recorded the lowest number of requests for help made by the public to police, the lowest satisfaction with the outcome of those requests, and – perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not – the highest rate of gun ownership for reasons of self-protection than anywhere else in Australia.

This is the Queensland that Andrew Stafford’s Pig City dives into. Named after another ode to the police – ‘Pig City’ by The Parameters – it is ostensibly a history of the Brisbane music scene. However, the book’s opening pages make clear that it is as much about politics as pop. The first paragraphs of the first chapter describe the break-up of a protest against South Africa’s apartheid laws during the Springboks’ tour of 1971:

When the cops finally catch up with the fleeing Gray, one of them hoists him by the hair and tells him: “If I ever see you at a demonstration again, I’m going to kill you.”

The first few chapters of Pig City follow the genesis of famous Brisbane bands like The Saints and The Go-Betweens and the turbulent birth of radio station 4ZZZ, as well as describing the rising political tension that formed their backdrop and finally culminated, 10 years later, with a Royal Commission into police corruption. The Fitzgerald Inquiry, as it was dubbed, led to the end of the National Party government that had ruled the state for three decades. Former police commissioner Terry Lewis was charged with corruption and sentenced to 14 years in jail. Former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen was charged with perjury and corruption, but escaped conviction after a hung jury.

After the “metamorphosis” of Brisbane into a venue for the World Expo ’88 and the purges of the Fitzgerald Inquiry a few years later, Stafford describes the city as going into a sort of hibernation. But behind the scenes, a new generation of musicians were getting ready to take the stage. Much of book’s second half describes the rise of pop bands such as Regurgitator and Powderfinger, who would breathe new life into the city’s music scene in the 1990s and attain mainstream success without having to relocate to Sydney or London.

In contrast to the Brisbane punks of the late 1970s – whose raisons d’etre were so intrinsically connected to public life, who were inspired by clashes on the streets – the story of these bands, as told by Stafford, often takes place indoors. Powderfinger’s Bernard Fanning remembers the greatest sense of community during the time was formed not on the street, but inside the old Target warehouse in Fortitude Valley where up to 10 bands lived, rehearsed and shared ideas with each other.

It's perhaps this hint of looking inwards that makes me picture the final chapter of Pig City the way I do – as a fairytale born in the bedroom of a teenage boy listening to his favourite records through headphones. The story it tells is about as different as you can get from the tales of punks and police that open the book. It's about two kids from the working-class suburbs of greater Brisbane who suddenly become the biggest pop stars in the world before burning out just as quickly, and who moved more than 25 million records under the name Savage Garden.

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Andrew Ramadge is a Sydney-based journalist and long-time 'M+N' contributor. His column appears monthly.