The Shower Scene From Psycho blazed a trail through the ’80s with their exaggerated concept of bubblegum pop gone bad, writes DOUG WALLEN.

Never heard of the Shower Scene From Psycho? For shame. Understandable, though. Spanning most of the ’80s, the bizarre Melbourne outfit played its final show in 1991. The band continued with a tweaked lineup until 2000, but the ’90s saw the remaining members exclusively hole up in the studio. But with Omni’s loving release of the two-disc, 40-song retrospective Exploding Hits!: The Complete Recordings 1982-2000, the full range of the band’s genius has been unearthed once and for all. Half the songs were previously unreleased, at least physically, and it won’t surprise fans to learn that much of the Shower Scene’s ’80s output consisted of covers. In fact, the trio dared to conquer such classics as ‘Spicks And Specks’, ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, not to mention others that were never immortalised on tape.

Often dubbed “post-psych” for their exaggerated concept of bubblegum pop gone to seed, the band was the work of singer/keyboardist Simon Grounds, guitarist “Feedback Jack” Bloom and bassist/keyboardist Tim Costigan in their original incarnation. Grounds and Bloom mostly worked alone in the ’90s, with Grounds recording other acts in Melbourne since the ‘80s, including the Underground Lovers, royalchord, Snout, Bird Blobs, Laura Jean, Kes Band and GOD. That makes perfect sense when considering the assorted technical feats Grounds pulled off in The Shower Scene, whether bending his voice to girlish heights, rewiring children’s toys, or harnessing the power of a Theremin he built himself. Those quirky earmarks, combined with the manic blur of cartoonish covers and lurid originals, make for dense, bristling results.

As Grounds himself concedes, the retrospective’s 40 songs are best broached in quick, abbreviated revisits rather than one extended listening session. “It does get a bit full-on if you try to hear the whole thing in one sitting,” he warns. “The band always had that thing where, because we were into extremes and examining the history of the colourful pop single, it’s almost a one-song-at-a-time experience. It can get a bit psychotic.”

Expounding by phone, Grounds outlined, among other things, how his “idea band” executed so many of its singular ideas and why the Shower Scene won’t be joining contemporaries the Primitive Calculators on the crowded reunion circuit.

What’s it like having all these songs collected in one release?
It’s great. Our recorded work was scattered all over. Quite a few of our singles didn’t even exist in physical form. We used to do radio-only releases where we’d prepare songs for different public radio stations and release them as cuts just for that station with little station IDs. Other things have only existed on flexi discs and on anthologies and compilations here and there. Also, there’s almost 20 years between the first recordings and the last. To have them all in one place in a physical form is a really good feeling.

The band was famous for its cover songs, and apparently there were many more that you never recorded.
We had a deep repertoire. We didn’t actually end up recording all that much, even though we had our own studio.

What are some that weren’t recorded?
I should have made a list, but I remember we did a show for the 20th anniversary of the “Summer of Love” in 1987 where we did a 45-minute medley of about 70 psychedelic songs. Some of the songs only got a few bars in. That was a nonstop medley. We had other [covers], like ‘Paranoid’ by Black Sabbath and ‘Workin’ For The Man’ by Roy Orbison.

Did you start doing covers before writing originals?
Well, the original central idea of the band was doing classic pop covers, mostly ’60s and ’70s things, and deconstructing them and reconstructing them in a way that was really influenced by cartoons. The way that cartoons took life and simplified it and then exaggerated that simplified version right back up again. We were always really taken with that. It was an idea band, like most of the bands in the scene at the time. We really liked putting things in unexpected contexts, juxtaposing unexpected sounds and kind of sledge-hammering things out in extreme ways. One of the reasons we did the pop covers – especially bubblegum, which we loved, and songs that people had in their heads – was so we could do interesting things with them and play with rhythm and sound and continuity. We could get quite experimental and keep the audience with us, because somehow the songs would still be rolling along in people’s heads, their memories filling in the gaps.

How was it approaching your own songs after getting under the skin of other people’s?
Well, we’d all come from bands that had been doing original songs for quite a while before that. Even with The Shower Scene, we were mixing the covers and the originals right from the start. It wasn’t that weird or different. One of the central ideas was that it’s what you did with the music that’s the original thing, rather than the song itself. We came from a scene in the Melbourne inner-city in the early ’80s where, on reflection, I realise it was very much a DIY scene, but that phrase didn’t exist back then. It was really an art-rock scene, even though nobody ever thought of it that way at the time. There was a sense that if you were going to do a band, there was no point unless it was a completely new, distinctive take on the music. Everything had to sound completely different from everything else. It’s almost like the covers was just a Trojan Horse way of us getting in and doing our out-there kind of things. But it was mostly driven by the fact that we were all huge fans of classic pop, particularly ’60s and early ’70s commercial bubblegum pop.

“We really liked putting things in unexpected contexts, juxtaposing unexpected sounds and kind of sledge-hammering things out in extreme ways.”

Even the band’s basic setup was quite unique.
Yes. I had a keyboard rig that was always based on an Italian electric organ at the core. Then I had all sorts of other synths and strange noisemaking devices and a Theremin.

And even toys and things that you rewired?
I used to do quite a bit of what you’d call circuit-bending now. I used to use children’s toys. I worked out how to wire them up into the rig, and also things that I could put my voice through that came from toy shops. We also used cassette-based loops for our sound effects. This was before sampling existed, so we had an analogue sampling setup. I had a little mixer on my organ with tiny faders, and each fader would have a sound-effects loop going on it. So we were able to recreate the stuff we were doing in the studio. And the rhythm section was based on a drum machine and the bass on a Casio keyboard. We had all our Casios modified by a guy who put heaps more flexibility into the sound. He modified our drum machines as well.

We were always really aware that with rock bands, the core of what defined their sound was the character of the rhythm section. With this cartoon-oriented idea we had behind the band, we got the rhythm section down to where it was really rigid and highly structured, and the bass keyboard and drum machine would always be playing really tightly and sharply in time with the basic structure of the sound. It was an anti-feel kind of thing taken to the point where it became quite extreme. Then of course we had Feedback Jack playing guitar. He was our secret weapon. He was such a colourful and powerful guitar player that there was always this rock’n’roll heart to what we did, despite all the electronica.

Is it true that you built your Theremin yourself?
Yes. This is back before the revival of the Theremin. Very few people knew what it was at that stage. I found an article in an old Australia Electronics magazine called “Make Your Own Weird Music Machine”. It had the circuit for it, and I made my own from this article. From memory, it was pretty well the only one around for quite a while in the Melbourne music scene. Thankfully, a few years later, people started catching onto the Theremin around the world and it’s had a real revival since then. Wonderful machine.

And at the time you obviously knew it from the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’.
Oh, I knew all about the Theremin, just because of an interest in avant garde music. I knew about its history going back to the ’30s. Yeah, that was part of my rig. I used to have it set up so I could play it with one hand. I could just lunge at it and have a great Theremin moment on the fly. But we used it a lot in recordings. I used to play it in quite extended ways in the studio.

Was it mostly you singing in the band, with all those vocal effects?
Most of the lead vocals was me. All the high-voiced stuff, that characteristic vocal sound, comes from me. I can sing high; I’ve always had quite a range. We were really attracted to that bubblegum idea of the vocal being an inherently androgynous thing. That high, pure singing really fit with that. And also, just going for those high notes seemed to fit with going for extremes in everything we did. It was all about pushing things as far as they would go. But I also used to enjoy using effects, especially in the studio, in unusual ways. We used to play around with speed change quite a bit in that subtle way that the Beatles used to use speed change just to get a different angle on the sound.

It really does sound like a woman singing.
That was a very common impression when people first heard our stuff. That’s something that worked really well, that almost inhuman thing we used to be able to get with the singing. It was hard to pin down where it’s coming from. We used to do some quite radical vocal effects as well. Our first B-side, ‘Why Me?’, was pushing the voice to that chipmunk level and singing in a kind of imaginary language.

Did you enjoy misleading people in a way?
Oh, yeah. It was all twisting things and getting some mystery into what the ear was hearing. We used to like to combine sounds in unusual ways and get sonics that you couldn’t comfortably identify. One of the core things of the band was to be fun, but we were also into edgy and dangerous as well. We liked that sense of mixing up the fun of pop with the violence of avant garde music. Mixing the two together in a way where it wasn’t one or the other but all one. It was all to do with getting away from what’s comfortable, but trying to keep it enticing and inherently pop at the same time. That’s one reason why we really stayed with melody, particularly with the vocals. We loved to keep that strong, hook-ridden melody, because that would keep it fun even when we were able to get bizarre and dangerous-sounding. That’s what we were trying to do, anyway. We succeeded sometimes better than others.

I read that the band played its final show in 1991 but continued to record until 2000.
There were two main eras of the band. The first was all through the ’80s. That’s when we were playing live really intensively all around the country. We had this strong physical presence. That was mostly the original three-piece. In the last couple of years we had different lineups. That finished in ’91. We took a break for a few years and then me and Feedback Jack got back together and started recording. We didn’t put a live act together. I think Feedback Jack would’ve really liked to but I didn’t want to. I was just really into recording. I was creatively satisfied just doing that. The music was a lot darker in that second stage. In a way it was a reflection of the times it was being done in. The ’80s stuff was colourful and deconstructionist and reflective of pop culture. The ’90s stuff got a lot more psychological and political and introspective. But we were still playing with the same core ideas the band always had. It’s pretty identifiable as coming from the same line, even though some of that stuff is a lot darker and thicker and less pop-oriented.

With the return of some of your one-time contemporaries, like the Primitive Calculators, have you entertained the idea of reuniting?
There’s been lots of retrospectives and re-releases [from] bands like Blue Ruin and the Moodists and so on. Most of those bands have pulled together a live lineup to go with the re-release, and some of them have kept going. The Primitive Calculators have found a whole new life after being brought back almost by chance. We thought about it but just decided not to do it. It didn’t feel right to me, creatively. Everything we’ve always done has come from a very organic place. To me there was something about the idea of putting together a live lineup, just because we were doing this wonderful collection of the band’s recording career, [that] didn’t feel right. It didn’t really fit with the spirit of what the band had been about. There is a reason for the record to exist on its own terms with its own logic. To me it feels right just being a historical record. Although once again, I think Jack would have loved to play live. He does have a rock’n’roll heart. But we’ve all got other things going on as well.

I was wondering how much you still follow the Melbourne music scene and if you see the band’s legacy in many bands today.
I’m not sure. I’m very much part of the Melbourne music scene now because the main thing I do is recording and production. The things we were doing at the time, recording ourselves in a very DIY way and reflecting popular culture through a kind of tortured mirror, I’ve see that happening in other bands over the years. But I don’t think it’s because they were influenced by us. We were a bit of a bizarre anomaly. Audiences tended to react to us like that at the time too. It was a love it or hate it thing. It was definitely a really 1980s thing. If you look at other bands internationally at the same time [and playing] for similar reasons, [there’s] Devo and things like that. It was very much a time to do things that were new but reflected the larger world outside the music world.

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Exploding Hits!: The Complete Recordings 1982-2000 is out now on the Omni Recording Corporation.