The State Oppres(s)es
More nostalgic hints from a past…
Wish I could say I remember this gig, but I don't. I don't even remember what year it was (it has to be 1980, according to the calendar). I do remember a knock-down argument with Angus while he was doing the artwork for the poster about how to spell "oppresses" (the sort of thing he and I took very seriously in those days). He won (the original slogan was in Spanish and taken with the drawing from a poster in a history of the Spanish Civil War we found in the Anarchist bookshop in King Street, I think). And I think I remember postering the bloody thing all over Chippendale, Glebe, and Redfern late one cold night… (postering has to be one of the unsung stories of the era. Dirty, dangerous, illegal, tiring as hell, and — as far as we could tell — absolutely essential).
(Part of Punk (and Later)).
10 Comments:
i must have been there but can hardly think of what it might have been like. n-lets then tactics?? cripes.
A night of anarchic High Seriousness, I'm sure :-).
Actually, if it's the night I sort-of vaguely almost remember(ish), the Slug Fuckers set devolved into a mess of people up the front banging things like hammers, etc., and may have included a short set from the legendary (ha!) Strange Powers of Elvis beforehand.
But I'm probably remembering some other Slug Fuckers gig...
john laidler (slugs guitarist) can't remember the night either. haven't heard from tim v (n-let) as yet.
This gets better and better -- a long-treasured memento of a gig no one (least of all me, except in the vaguest terms, if at all) can remember... was it always like that? :-)
tim v can remember it very well - the n-lets had a crash on the way to the gig and so tim was in hospital all night with possible sinal injuries and so they didn't play. another slugfucker has it all mixed up with other gigs at the time so, yes, maybe it never really happened.
Wow -- that rings a (very vague) bell. Do the Pell Mellers have any memories of this?
But the mystery deepens -- take a look at the left hand corner of this pic ...
no word from pel mel (ha ha)
and that photo is from my house in bourke street!! we had lots of old posters up on the wall though.
I just thought it was funny that the only other place (that I can remember, at least) that I've seen that damn poster is in a photo of your place, circa 1980 (the Italian Day or whatever it is up on the website). The phrase "small world" keeps coming to mind :-).
(Actually, when this discussion started I couldn't remember where I'd seen the bloody thing before, but suddenly remembered I'd seen it while browsing your site fairly recently).
And if you ever get word from China...
the word from china is that no-one has any memory of it at all. i think we can now safely assume that it wasn't a night where maximum rock'n'roll was reached..
Ah, there's always been something odd about my lack of memory of that gig -- combined with pretty specific memories of the making of the poster itself (which I unwittingly dragged across 25 years and three continents until I rediscovered it deep in an old box a few years ago...). A memento of something that almost certainly never happend -- kinda typical, I guess.
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