‘Quasimodo’s Dream’ is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploring the eclectic sounds of Dubbo-via-Sydney outfit The Reels, writes DOUG WALLEN.

If you only know The Reels from the 1981 single ‘Quasimodo’s Dream’, you’ve experienced just a fraction of the band’s greatness. Sandwiched between post-punk and new wave in the late ’70s, the Dubbo-via-Sydney act began playing cover songs, later emerged as Devo-esque pop eccentrics, and eventually wound up playing covers again. A self-titled first album in 1979 was produced by Mark Opitz (AC/DC, Cold Chisel, INXS) and 1981’s Quasimodo’s Dream saw a surge of synthesisers draw the focus away from guitar. Throughout a changing lineup and just as fluid a musical identity, The Reels were guided by frontman David Mason, son of New South Wales’ Liberal Party leader John Mason. Dreamy yet arch, Mason’s lyrics often mocked the grip of television and media had on the masses. At the same time, he often displayed an ear for bright choruses.

Musically, the band was tight and rubbery, with ska tinges in the early days and later those spine-tingling synths. Despite feeling like lost classics today, The Reels’ early singles didn’t achieve much traction on Australian charts at the time and overseas success never quite materialised. Still, you can hit up YouTube to see the film clips for ‘Prefab Heart’, ‘After The News’, ‘Shout And Deliver’, and others.

Always having a knack for transformative covers, the band dismantled such well-known songs as the post-Motown smash ‘Band Of Gold’, Jim Reeves’ country ditty ‘According To My Heart’ and Burt Bacharach’s ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’. Later, The Reels would score a surprise 1986 hit with an eerie, uber-slow take on Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’, used in the cult horror film Howling III and remixed at the time by Filthy Lucre.

And yet it’s ‘Quasimodo’s Dream’ that The Reels remain most known for. In 2001 the song was voted one of the 10 most influential Australian songs of the prior 75 years by the Australasian Performing Right Association. It in turn has been covered by Mick Harvey, Jimmy Little and Kate Ceberano, among others. As singles go, it’s an oddity, atmospheric yet sparsely arranged while drifting along like an errant chunk of asteroid. But again, that’s just the beginning of discovering The Reels. The band’s first two albums are brilliant, and the 1983 collection Unreel is a handy encapsulation of that initial era. In 2007, Mason stripped down many of the classic Reels songs for his catalogue-revisiting solo album Reelsville, which might be the best way to hear some of the songs outside YouTube. That’s because much of that catalogue is long since out of print.

Despite that, there’s life in The Reels yet. In 2008 the band reformed and played Sydney and Melbourne, including the Big Day Out last year. Down to three members from the line-up of those first two albums, the band today consists of Mason, drummer John Bliss and bassist Paul Abrahams. Bliss and Abrahams had both departed the band before its third album, but Bliss rejoined in 1985. Abrahams, however, went 23 years without playing in The Reels. As fate would have it, he is now the custodian of the band’s legacy, maintaining an archival website and reconnecting with old fans. In his time away from the band, he has worked with a slew of other musicians and taught guitar, bass and drums.

Still based in Sydney, Abrahams was kind enough to recount his time in The Reels – past and present – over the course of an open-ended phone conversation. We began at the beginning, around 1978, when a band once called the Native Sons and the Brucelanders became The Reels.

Did the name change from the Brucelanders to The Reels come after you signed to Mercury?
It kind of all happened at the same time. While we were organising the deal, our manager said it would be in our best interest to change the name. And we were going to change the repertoire as well.

What was the repertoire like prior to that?
What were the Brucelanders like? More like Steely Dan. They did a real big mixture of music, from R&B and soul to Steely Dan, Hall & Oates, and Burt Bacharach. A lot of covers but a lot of originals too. A lot of songs survived into The Reels.

Can you remember some that survived?
From the first album: ‘Love Will Find A Way’, ‘The Meeting’, ‘Go Away’, ‘Prefab Heart’.

Did those songs change much from the Brucelanders to The Reels?
Definitely. It would be like Burt Bacharach meeting Kraftwerk, mixed in with a little bit of Specials. So it was a total overhaul. But we were like that. When we rehearsed, we would try songs in a totally different format because we had the skills to do that. So we could try it as blues or as a ballad, or we could speed it up. We just took notice of what was going on in the market around us and decided to go with that sort of ska-pop [in the beginning].

Did you arrive at definitive versions of the songs?
Well, on that first album, on the main recording tapes, there’s two or three versions of each song. They’re very similar but different tempos. Colin Newham, who was the keyboard player/arranger, was pretty fastidious when it came to arrangements. He was the genius behind all of that.

Where did the name The Reels come from?
Um, I don’t know who’s going to get credit for this. [Laughs] I think it could have come from our manager.

Besides the ska-pop thing, did you identify yourselves as a new wave band?
Yeah. It was right around post-punk and there was Double J, which was the only independent radio station that was operating. It’s now triple j and now national. Back then it was only in Sydney. We were close friends with one of the DJs on there, Sammy Collins. She used to spin a lot of new stuff. She was breaking The Police, The Specials, Joy Division … she had a room full of records that mainstream radio wasn’t playing at all. So we got excited by that, things like The Cure and Talking Heads. We got influenced by all of that.

“Rose Tattoo were big fans … They took us out [as support] to play Parramatta Jail once. That was pretty scary.”

Were you also influenced by Devo?
Yeah, but not [too much]. We were influenced by a lot of things. It just so happened that because we went for the bright clothes, people used to latch onto that. But I think for us, it was our response against wearing black, which is what everybody else was doing. And about the same time, there was a bit of a mod movement happening with the Jam. So the clothing was more like that: cool, mod, colourful. There were a lot of people that liked punk but didn’t necessarily like that movement, because it was quite aggressive, quite violent, where it came from. When it hit places like Sydney, it was just a fashion. But you did have your diehard punks, who didn’t like us. They used to come out with bottles and stuff and throw things at us. [Laughs]

How were you received by audiences in general around the time of the first album?
We had a great following in Sydney. It was really thriving. There was a lot of small, underground venues. There was a big mixture between your straight rock and roll bands like The Angels and Cold Chisel and then inner-city bands. You had thousands of people from the age of 18 to 30 congregating and living around Darlinghurst, Surry Hills, Kings Cross, Woolloomooloo, because there was very cheap housing there. It was before it was developed. A lot of arthouses and warehouses and little recording studios. It was just a real beehive.

You mentioned the Angels and Cold Chisel, and your first album was recorded with Mark Opitz, who worked with both of those bands. He also engineered AC/DC’s Powerage prior to working on your record. What did he bring to that first album?
It was great. There was a slight little clash because he was from an era where, when you recorded a band, you got the band up in the recording band and went for it. We wanted to introduce and try new things. I recorded the bass in the control room and we did a lot of overdubbing. So for me and probably for John [Bliss], the drummer, the albums don’t really capture the band live at all.

None of the albums, or just that first one?
None of the albums were recorded live. Well, actually, for the first album we went up to a farm in Dubbo and took a mobile 16-track van with Mark Opitz. We stayed up there and recorded maybe two or three takes of every song. When we brought that back down to Alberts Studio in Sydney, we pulled them up and kept what we thought was good. So if things weren’t sitting right, we might redo things and overdub. So probably the first album is the most live. Everything after that was done via overdubbing.

And it was after the first album that The Reels became focused more on synthesisers?
Yes. Around about that time, synthesisers started to become more automated. The early synths that we used, you couldn’t program them at all. So when we played live, you had to remember the settings and tweak them as you played. Then I think Roland brought out the Jupiter, which had a few presets. So synthesisers kind of became the thing for us. We didn’t dispense with guitars completely, but we added another keyboard player, Karen [Ansel]. She used to make clothes as well. We’d have clothes specifically made for each tour. It was pretty unique. Quasimodo’s Dream came along and we couldn’t really afford to buy keyboard stands. And they took up a lot of room. So we took ironing boards, which was quite relevant to the song ‘Kitchen Man’, y’know. We would do unusual things like have aprons sent out for promotion. We were probably a little bit kitsch then.

There is a kitsch quality to the band’s choice of covers, as well as some of the originals.
Well, we got signed to Mercury, which was a subsidiary of Polydor, a major label. And even though it’s probably a good thing to be part of a label, I don’t think we were mainstream music at all. We weren’t going to be Top 40. If we were, it’d be some sort of fluke. We should have gone with a smaller label. We actually did get offered to sign with Virgin back then, but we couldn’t get out of our contract. Polydor just didn’t know what to do with us, especially here [in Australia]. Because who did they have: Elton John, Rod Stewart. Who are the Reels? Some left-of-field ska band. But we did it because we were young, bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed. It was like, sign to a label and you can make it.

How did the album Quasimodo’s Dream do?
What happened was we wanted ‘Quasimodo’ to be the [lead] single. But the record company brought out two singles before that. So the album didn’t really do as well as we’d hoped. When we brought [the single ‘Quasimodo’s Dream’] out, it basically flopped. It was a bit of a flopper. [Laughs] But the other part of that equation was that radio wasn’t really required to play a certain percentage of Australian music. So it was kind of like who you knew back then. And most of the programmers didn’t think that we fitted in, which is probably right. We weren’t, as far as I’m concerned, a commercial Top 40 band. But I think, had we had a chance to operate overseas under a different label, we might have been able to gather more fans and do more. But we kind of got stuck here with a major label that didn’t know what to do with us.

Did The Reels tour the States while you were in the band? No. They went there a bit later. I left after Quasimodo’s Dream. John and Colin left and they brought in a new drummer. It wasn’t really the same band for me, so I left. And Karen left. So they went around as a three-piece with taped backing. I think they brought out [1983’s] Pitt Street Farmers [EP] and went to the States then. And Dave got sick [with hepatitis] around that time and had to stop playing [for a time].

So you were in The Reels when they covered ‘Band Of Gold’ but not when they covered ‘Bad Moon Rising’?
That’s right. They couldn’t find me [to join the reconstituted lineup]. Only in 2008 did they find me again. I kind of disappeared. While they were doing ‘Bad Moon Rising’ [in 1986], I was living in the inner-city and playing in other bands. I was playing drums and playing with people like Peter Blakely and Wendy Matthews.

Was ‘Band Of Gold’ just part of that repertoire of covers the band had at that time?
Yeah. There were a few special cover songs we did, but we didn’t record all of them. We also used to do [Len Barry's '1-2-3']; it was quite fast and full-on. Anything that came into our sights got put up to about 200 beats per minute. [Laughs] We’d play as fast as possible. We’d slaughter any song, but musically. But ‘Band Of Gold’, I used to like that. The recording’s good too.

The Reels made film clips for a lot of their singles. Do you have any specific memories from those?
Well, it was only the fact that we were signed to a major label that we got to do those clips, which was good. All I remember about it is having to wake up early and go to the studio and put a whole lot of make-up on and looking like a dick. [Laughs] As far as I’m concerned, in most of those clips we look like dicks. There’s one I really liked, and that’s for [the Jim Reeves cover] ‘According To My Heart’. We did that with a student film crew. That was good. I liked it.

Wasn’t that song included on Quasimodo’s Dream against the band’s wishes?
Yeah, because that was on [the Christmas-timed 1980 EP] Five Great Gift Ideas From The Reels. The EP has an original, ‘The Bombs Dropped On Xmas’, which is kind of this Russian Christmas song. ‘Band Of Gold’ and [the Boxtops cover] ‘Neon Rainbow’ are on there, and ‘You Got Soul’, which we still do now.

I was curious about the short instrumental ‘Rupert Murdoch’ on Quasimodo’s Dream.
I wasn’t part of the making of that, but Rupert Murdoch was probably in the news quite a bit. David liked to be a bit political. ‘Media Themes’, the B-side of ‘After The News’, [is comprised of] three little tracks, [including] ‘Rupert Murdoch’.

Several of Dave’s songs mock telephones, television, the media, and other ways people communicate. How much discussion of his lyrics was there with the rest of the band?
None at all. We just played his songs. He didn’t discuss them. We didn’t co-write. There might have been the odd co-write with [guitarist/keyboardist] Craig Hooper or just a matter of sharing the royalties a bit. But he did his thing and I didn’t really take that much notice of the lyrics, to tell you the truth. Especially early on, when I found out from David that they didn’t actually mean anything. There’s a lot of writers like that who write snippets that people can latch onto and get an emotion from, but they intentionally don’t [make it about anything specific].

When you recorded the song ‘Quasimodo’s Dream’, did you have a feeling that you had something special?
I did. I remember recording it and listening back to it on playback in the studio and thinking this song has been polished up really good. But I liked a lot of the material, for different reasons. Some of it was great live. It might not have been the best song, but it was great live.

Are there any recordings or videos of the band live?
Well, I’ve just finished building the blog-slash-website. I’ve put as much stuff as I’ve found. I’ve put all the film clips up there, and there’s some live video recorded in the ’80s from Rock Arena from triple j. That’s them as a three-piece. Unfortunately, we don’t have anything live from the original band. There’s a couple of fan videos up there from recent gigs. In 2008 they reformed and it was Colin, Dave and John. Then I joined up and Colin left, because he just doesn’t really like playing live. He’s had a few problems with his arms, being able to perform properly. The guy is like an octopus anyway. We’ll play four or five things at once. He was playing bass with his feet and doing two keyboards [at the same time], like Rick Wakeman or something. So I joined, and it’s great to actually have the real original rhythm section, because that was kind of the heart of the band back then.

The sound was often quite stripped down, and you had these rubbery synths and rubbery rhythm section.
Yeah, rubbery … syncopated. We did that intentionally, because with everyone else back then, especially in rock’n’roll, the bass kind of just mumbles along. So we decided we would make the bass definitive. It would often play opposite to the drum. There was this tension between the drums and the bass. When we pulled it off, it would just create this momentum that was quite amazing. We’ve had other musos come along and say, “We don’t know how you do that.” Having to pick up the bass and play it after more than 20 years, I’ve had to kind of relearn it. Those original bass lines I used to play on a smaller bass, on a six-string Fender, which was a rare bass back then. I think the Cure used one. It gets a very twangy sound. But I used it as a regular bass and I’d play quite fast lines. But now that I’m playing it on [a regular bass], it’s quite hard work for an old man. [Laughs]

What’s the status right now of The Reels playing more shows?
We’d love to play more shows. But it’s hard trying to get work, competing with everyone else. Things like Big Day Out aren’t really our thing. We’re trying to organise a gig in June or July at the Oxford Art Factory [in Sydney]. When we play live now, the set is like a showcase of everything The Reels have done. We cover everything from the early Devo-ish stuff to [the] Burt Bacharach[-esque] stuff. We play a few songs off that first album. We play ‘Go Away’, but it’s done with an acoustic guitar. It sounds really nice. Some of those songs, Dave originally wrote on piano. When you slow them down to like half the tempo [of past recordings], the melody really comes out. You kind of miss it when you speed it up. Now we can mix things up and do things different.

What’s the status of the albums in terms of availability? Have they been reissued?
No. I think Unreel is available on CD. I think what happened was – and I don’t know the full story here – only songs from the first two albums survived in terms of the master tapes. Most of it got destroyed. Most of the recording tapes were found in a room that had been flooded with water, so they’re lost. But I think there were master tapes dug up of most of the singles and whatever is on that Unreel [compilation] album.

I think David recently put together a demo tape, which he sent to the record company, but I’m not sure if they’re going to do anything. David is probably interested more in working with other people. He wants to stretch what he wants to do. He’s probably interested in singing more down-tempo, quieter music with a more interesting kind of beat. More loungey or jazzy.

How long have you been working on the history on The Reels for the website?
Since I got back with the band, so a bit over a year. I put up a Facebook account and found all these people I knew back in the ’80s. It’s gradually building.

Have you come across anything that has surprised you since rejoining The Reels?
One of the things that has happened is my children got to see us play. That’s quite amazing because my son is 17 and my daughter is 16. My son came down to the Big Day Out in Melbourne and carried my bass and was quite blown away. And my daughter came along to the one in Sydney. She was right in the front standing there with her mouth open. [Big Day Out] was weird because people would show up that you hadn’t seen in years. Or people in other bands. Red Wiggle was there. He’s a big fan of ours. [Laughs] And that band on the show RocKwiz [The RocKwiz Orchestra], they were big fans. The Reels always had that. Within the industry, other bands always liked us. As far as fans go, we always attracted odd people, people who were into music in a different sort of way. But we weren’t loud on stage. We played very quiet because we understood it would sound better. Consequently, we would go and do shows with bands like Midnight Oil, and boy they were loud. That was the funny part: Midnight Oil and Rose Tattoo were big fans. Especially Rose Tattoo. They took us out [as support] to play Parramatta Jail once. That was pretty scary. [Laughs]

But all those rock’n’roll bands that we sort of parodied in lyrics actually really liked us because we dared to be different. And the only way you could expand your fan base out of the inner-city was to go out and play in those huge hotel barns. And we had to go out with another band. We’d get sent out west with Cold Chisel, and you’d think you were going to get beaten up. Or we’d do a country tour. God knows what people thought of us then. We probably just looked like a gay band. Back in the late ’70s, those punk and new wave moments were only in the inner-city, the fashion and all of that. We’d got out there [in the country] and we were so bizarre, I think people avoided us. Colin Newham would get around in whatever took his fancy. He once bought himself a pair of really bright yellow snow boots and wore them the rest of the tour. So he’d have these boots on and these little hot pants with the arse falling out and a bright red prison shirt. And he had a golden mohawk. How weird’s that? [Laughs]

The Reels: A Discography

The Reels (1979)
Quasimodo's Dream (1981)
Beautiful (1982)
Neighbors (1988) Reelsville (2007)