Tactics
The Sound Of The Sound Vol 2

Sydney can be a confusing place to get around. The streets are a tangle and the buildings are always changing. It seems like every block in the city is being reinvented, all the time. When the developers can't knock a building down, they scoop out the guts and build something else inside the facade. Highways and train lines and walkways spill over each other at odd angles. Some areas feel like a collage artwork, with cut-outs from different periods stuck here and there on the canvas.

There is an aside in the liner notes of The Sound Of The Sound Vol 2, the compilation documenting the second life of post-punk band Tactics in Sydney, in which singer David Studdert describes scrubbing the sidewalk of an old arcade near George St that has since been built over. A record executive walks past with his wife and child and doesn't notice him. You could take it at face value as a statement about the relationship between artist and management, but there is something else to it as well.

I have been writing lately (here and here) about the "other underground" of Sydney circa 1980 – that group of experimental and electronic bands long forgotten by the history books, but who are woven into the concrete and glass fabric of Sydney itself. From Voigt/465's illegal performance between the pylons of the Darling Harbour construction site to Studdert on his knees, scraping the grit from between pebbles in some arcade long since swallowed up by the ever-shifting city, the ghosts of these artists haunt Sydney's music scene in 2008 more than the shadow of a hundred Radio Birdmen.

Vol 2 charts the years between 1984 and '88, after Studdert returned to the city and formed a new line up of the band. The story and the music go off in opposite directions. Musically the songs are smoother and more pop-oriented, than those on earlier – and vastly underrated – albums My Houdini and Glebe, though they're hardly mainstream. At times, things get self-referential – see 'Lismore Toenail (Post-Modern Bush Ballad #4)' and the short live snippet titled 'I Know I Know I Like Tactics Too' – while third album Blue And White Future Whale lacks the frantic staccato rhythm that drives the band's earlier work. The best tracks are the two '84 singles and their B-sides recorded at EMI, 'Coat-tails', 'Fatman', 'Committee Of Love' and 'Shark-Bed Rally'. The second disc, rather than containing the band's last album The Great Gusto – of which Studdert is clearly not a fan – is made up of aimless outtakes and live recordings.

"It sounds like laughter, freedom and joy to me," Studdert writes of the four EMI tracks in the notes. But while the songs were becoming more upbeat, things behind the scenes were a mess. Between the two line-ups Studdert began drinking and the only other remaining founding member, guitarist Angus Douglas, turned to chasing drugs as a full-time pursuit. After Blue And White Future Whale, Studdert shrank into the suburbs and a string of shitkicker jobs no one else wanted, before half-heartedly returning to make The Great Gusto for probably the only decent paycheck he ever received. Three days after mixing the album he left for Europe on a one-way ticket. The Sound Of The Sound Vol 1 is required listening, Vol 2 is for those still wanting more.

by Andrew Ramadge