Citadel Records recently released a two-disc anthology collecting almost two decades of solo releases from Radio Birdman founder and guitarist Deniz Tek. If Deniz Tek: The Citadel Years has fans excited (and it does), the planned October release of an eight-disc Radio Birdman box set, featuring re-mastered versions of all the albums, including alternate versions, plus session outtakes and a legendary live performance in full, will see them climbing the walls.
The band’s fans are notoriously excitable and their habit of punching the air en masse to express their enthusiasm was certainly a factor when it came to small-minded critics alleging the band were either fascists or fascist sympathisers. In his wonderfully exhaustive history of punk rock, Babylon’s Burning, Clinton Heylin notes, “the sight of a whole Birdman audience saluting like extras from Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will would become another stick with which to beat the band”.
Heylin’s tome is particularly noteworthy for granting pioneer status to a pair of bands that somehow transcended the geographic and cultural isolation of early ‘70s Australia to become key figures in the development of punk rock. With Radio Birdman in Sydney and the Saints hailing from Brisbane, the bands developed independent even of each other, yet once Tek became aware of their existence, he recognised the Queenslanders as fellow travellers. The live show included in the upcoming box set is from December 12, 1977 at Paddington Town Hall, which would be the only time that the two bands shared a stage and is famous for an onstage outburst from the Saints vocalist Chris Bailey.
“Yeah, famous or infamous, depending on how you saw it. They really stuck it in us on that show. We went to a lot of trouble to help them get shows, and a practice room, and equipment on loan. We were trying to be their pals, we thought ‘these guys are sort of kindred spirits from up north, and it’s so great that a band like this is coming to Sydney, and they’re our allies’, and they get up there on that show at Paddington Town Hall and Chris Bailey says ‘next up is Hitler Youth’, and his sister goes berserk and rips our flag down. It was a bizarre night. We were the furthest thing from Nazis you could imagine, we were more like anarchists than Nazis.”
The band had developed an aesthetic approach that undoubtedly fed the misperception. An enigmatic logo was reproduced on everything from album artwork to armbands to stage backdrops, and at times the band almost dressed in uniform, as at the Paddington Town Hall show.
“We had our big symbol and our flags and stuff, which was an idea we more or less copied from the early Blue Öyster Cult. It’s good to have a logo, so we came up with that logo. For a short time we had shirts, which were army shirts that were dyed grey and had our arm patch on the sleeve, and I think we lasted probably about two months wearing those, but that was right around the time of that Paddington Town Hall show. We did that more or less as a put-on, because a journalist from Rolling Stone had written this huge article about the band, all in military terms, and we thought that was pretty funny, so we bought these shirts at the surplus store.”
While it remains a mystery how the Saints developed such a vital sound in the backwater that was early-’70s Brisbane, it is easier to trace the antecedents of Radio Birdman’s sound. Singer Rob Younger was a devotee of international underground sounds, which was not an easy thing to be in early-‘70s Australia, while Deniz was in Sydney attending university, having grown up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The home to bands such as the MC5, Stooges and Alice Cooper, Ann Arbor was a vital component of the proto-punk equation, and Deniz had spent the late-‘60s soaking up the local flavour. Curiously, the Epiphone guitar with which he was pictured on the cover of the band’s debut long-player Radios Appear also had its links to the Ann Arbor scene.
