Features
Ups & Downs: ‘There Was Always The Chance We’d Be Big Rock Stars’
By Aaron Curran
Ups & Downs will reunite to launch a new anthology, ‘Out of the Darkness – Sleepless, Singles and Other Stories’, as part of the “On The Street” concert series tomorrow in Sydney. Greg Atkinson talks to AARON CURRAN about their early beginnings in Oxley, their signing to Mushroom and their “wilderness years”.
Over the past 30 years, Brisbane-born brothers Greg and Darren Atkinson have led a sweep of formidable bands – from the youthful power pop of 42nd Street to the chiming guitar-swell of Ups & Downs, the soaring Big Heavy Stuff to The Worker Bees, whose new album melds some of the best elements of their past with more textured arrangements and measured lyrics.
Ups & Downs were one of Australia’s best-known proponents of neo-psychedelic guitar pop in the 1980s, mixing ’60s elements (Byrds-ian jangle and harmonies) with more experimental and contemporary influences. With songs like ‘The Living Kind’ and ‘Lit by the Fuse’, they made an impression on local and US independent charts. But, after two years of recording delays brought about by a label change, the band lost momentum and split up in 1990. (They reformed in 2006 for the Pig City festival alongside the original line-up of The Saints.)
Supporting Ups & Downs this Saturday at The Annandale will be Knievel and also The Worker Bees, giving the audience a rare opportunity to see the brothers’ different projects back-to-back.
You've just released not one but two new albums, with Ups & Downs and Worker Bees. Can you tell us a bit about those?
Worker Bees was finished only recently while the Ups & Downs anthology has been in the pipeline for some time, so to have them both pop up together is quite apt as it represents almost the beginning of our musical career together, book-ended by where we are now. My hope is that people might learn about Worker Bees and not just take it as an extension of Ups & Downs, but will recognise it as something new and worthwhile that Darren and I have created now.
What prompted you to start recording again? Obviously you're family, so it's not like you haven't been in touch, but to actually make a decision to write and record together again.
Darren lives in Canberra and up until a few months back I was working for a company in the Blue Mountains. Part of my job for the past few years has been once every two weeks to drive to Canberra, and I would stay with my brother and his partner. So that went on for some time, then we thought, "Let's start doing some music, we've got this time together so let's use it for new music.” I had some tunes left over from Big Heavy Stuff days, as well as some new things I'd been writing. We started jamming and Darren had a crappy 8-track thing that kept breaking down so I convinced him to get his own studio gear because he's very good with that stuff. So it started to take shape from there. We scrapped a lot of stuff over time too. There was no great game plan or anything, other than deciding to make some music together.
So is the plan to keep both bands ongoing concerns, or is Worker Bees the focus once Saturday's Ups & Downs reunion show is out of the way?
Ups & Downs doesn't have a future in a real sense, it’ll be just a few live shows, though the paths of both bands are joined. Peter [Shaw, Ups & Downs' guitarist] plays on the Worker Bees album, while John Flade [guitarist, Ups & Downs] plays in the live band, so there is that direct connection. I don't know where Worker Bees' recordings will go from here though as I no longer need to go down to Canberra any more. So Darren and I might have to find a different process for working together. But I think it's a very powerful album we've made, both musically and lyrically. It wasn't a side project; once we got rolling we gave it total commitment, as much as we ever gave to Ups & Downs. I also have a project that I'm doing since I moved back to Sydney, called Theories of Everything. That's a different journey again.
Worker Bees is quite a textural album, lots of electronics and keyboards, and it definitely rewards repeated listening. It's not just Ups & Downs take two.
I think when musicians get to a certain age and stage ... you know I've grown from being a Next Big Thing to being a musician who's been around for a long time. To see opinion come around again where it seems now that some people think, "It should just be a guy playing acoustic guitar" or, "I just want to see roots music, with only 'real' instruments", whatever that means. That stuff's fine but it just doesn't appeal to me whatsoever. I have a love for new sounds, using technology and instruments for my own different journeys through music. So while Darren and I have a lot more life experience to bring to bear, when it came down to it we were still just two kids playing around with different elements like we were in Ups & Downs. That's the beauty of creativity, you don't feel like a couple of jaded old hacks, you feel like a couple of kids doing it all over again.
Can I take you back a few years to when you and Darren were growing up together in Oxley [Queensland], your earliest musical memories? What were the first songs you played together, what were the first bands you saw live?
Well Oxley was a hotbed of musical creativity. [The Saints’] Ed Kuepper lived in the next street, and around the corner was Robert Vickers who played bass in The Go-Betweens. Though they were older than us, Ed was on a different planet to us really. But Darren and I, we started out playing metal. Then came an interest in Cheap Trick's pop sensibility, then Joe Jackson and The Police started to influence our rhythmic ideas, so we were just exploring our own interests and incorporating different elements. The songs we started writing as a result, most of them were pretty bad, but your first batch of songs usually are unless you're a child prodigy. And Darren and I certainly didn't have to worry about that! [Laughs]
Darren's written great liner notes for the new Ups and Down anthology, including this great quote: "Our first single was a kind of mission statement for the band, one side dark and moody, the other driving jangling pop - we were called Ups & Downs after all. This musical duality described the band till the end of our career.” Now that's a great way to describe the band but sounds quite studied and planned. Was the band's sound and aesthetic that intentional or more organic than that?
It was far more organic, while we had some intentions it wasn't that planned out. We were inspired by other bands; we wanted to sound like them, even if they might have been unconscious intentions. But as you get older, your influences look fairly obvious and what we were doing was seeing bands like The Church, Hoodoo Gurus, but probably The Church in particular, they were an influence for the whole band. They took a ’60s aesthetic but added so much more to it, that was magical and had a contemporary feel, it wasn't just looking backwards. They were taking things from English ’80s band, as we were too. While still getting thrown in with the jangly pop, Paisley Underground US thing. This was pre-REM days. Later I would go back and forth from England to America in my tastes and I guess that would influence the whole band. So the first single embodied that duality, loving pop music and harmonies, but feeling a bit more discordant in some spots and getting a bit of space in the music.
The band's first three singles were quite successful, getting to the top of the Australian independent charts, and you ended up on the Waterfront Records label for some of those. Did the band ever contemplate staying on an indie label or was it always the intention to sign with a major?
Oh look, I think in the back of our minds there was always the chance we’d be big rock stars, so a major has appeal to accomplish that. But at Waterfront, there was a guy called Chris Dunn who I connected with. I met him when he worked behind the counter at Phantom Records before Waterfront. He knew I was a mad music obsessive and he was as mad as I was, so he was only too willing to pass on his recommendations to me. I brought 'The Perfect Crime' single to him and he loved it, he could hear things that he loved in music in our band, so the relationship went from there. The first pressing of 'The Perfect Crime’ single came out on our own Basket Case label, but later was reissued by the guys at Waterfront. But we took on, for better or worse, the guy who had managed The Go-Betweens, Clive Miller. And his interest was very much to get us on a major, to get us away from Waterfront. He saw Waterfront as being too working class, too small and urban, just not enough money. He said that we were setting our sights too low and you know, we were young, we said sure, whatever.
Re-reading old Ups & Downs' reviews, I was struggling to find any that didn't use the adjectives “jangly” or 'ethereal' to define you. Did you get end up getting the shits with those kinds of uniform descriptions?
Oh look, certain words become exciting at the time and perhaps overused. Also some journalists would use the same words as an insult, "Just what we need, another jangly fucking pop band." But perhaps those words were used to define a sound that brought a fresh sound to Sydney, for those who were sick to death of a certain guitar sound that had dominated to some extent, and they welcomed bands like Ups & Downs who were doing something different and had energy that wasn't just about testosterone, even though we probably had our fair share of that sometimes.
So you're talking about that post-Birdman, Detroit-influenced guitar sound yes?
That's right, yes, even though there were some good bands, intelligent bands in that circle too. But there was a lot of "meathead-ery" that a number of bands and journalists were sick to death of. That sound was just over-represented in Sydney, it needed to be balanced by perhaps a more thoughtful sound, with less obvious elements. Ups & Downs was perhaps the more accessible side of bands in Sydney who did that.
So you signed to Truetone and the Sleepless mini-album was released that did really well. On it was the cover of [Neil Diamond's] 'Solitary Man', which you were pressured to release as a single, though the band pushed back and it wasn't released. Did it get to the point where you regretted recording the song?
No, not really, maybe at the time we got the shits that those around us seemed more excited about a cover than some of our own songs. But that was probably our own preciousness and naiveté too. We thought it was a great version, and from the commercial aspect of things our manager and label were trying to make us bigger and they thought it would help. When you're on a major, they're trying to make you bigger, that's the game plan and it makes sense. Why would you sign with a major if that's not your intention? But we felt that releasing 'Solitary Man' as a single would typecast us in a certain way. So we compromised and released an el cheapo video instead, which didn't do much. But look, if I could have an alternative reality now, I'd love to see what happened if we had released it as a single. Now that I'm less precious about that stuff! [Laughs]
There was two years between Sleepless and your next release, which in the new CD liner notes Darren calls ‘The Wilderness Years’. Why did you leave Truetone and go to Mushroom, which I believe was the main cause of the delay?
I'm going to point my finger at the manager again, he's the easiest one to scapegoat [laughs]. Our contract had a clause in it that could be challenged because we weren't going to make as much money as our manager thought we could. He saw an opportunity while we were flavour of the month and things were going very well for us to do better than what we had. The loophole was a way around the contract. Truetone were offered the opportunity to re-negotiate but they declined, so our manager shopped us around and came up with Mushroom, which had mixed results.
Mushroom had had a lot of success and seemed to have a sense of independence about them, but by the time we signed [in 1988] I think they were getting more corporate and less about artist development than they had been back when [Michael] Gudinski has been directly involved with the label. Paul Kelly, Hunters and Collectors ... musicians like that benefited directly from his long-term support. But as he moved further away from the artistic side of Mushroom, it started to be more about signing bands that already had that credibility or would sell right from the outset. Also the person who signed us to Mushroom left shortly after, which is quite often the death knell for a band as the person that understands the band the best is gone. So that was a big issue.
But perhaps the real problem is that we lost our musical thread across those years, because we had a period of creativity that wasn't able to be explored properly, then recorded and released. The album on Mushroom [Underneath The Watchful Eye] was a real mishmash; it was hard to breathe on that album, too much congestion. We attempted to combine the different aspects of the band, our earlier sound along with the newer directions, but our audience who hadn't heard from us for a couple of years couldn't entirely connect with what they heard.
Darren writes that there were some great songs lost over those two years, that were only recorded on 4-track. Is there any chance they could make it out into the world via your website or something? We've had such difficulty finding our old masters, I really don't know. Some of those songs we've just got on cassette. We did talk at one point about doing an extra disc with the new compilation, where we could put rare tracks, b-sides and unreleased stuff out too. I guess we'll just see what the interest is like. It's more that those lost songs had potential that we never had the chance to develop, and we never got the chance to get feedback on them from our fans. If the internet had existed in those days, we just would have put them out on our website and said fuck the record companies, let's just share what we're doing right now.
“If the internet had existed in those days, we just would have put them out on our website and said fuck the record companies, let's just share what we're doing right now.”
That might have acted as a bridge between the earlier audience you had, and those who liked what they heard when songs like 'Lit By the Fuse' and 'Moments Away' came out on Mushroom?
Exactly. But you know, what we should have done when we had success overseas, when ‘Sleepless’ was high up on the US College Charts, was just go and spend some time over there and have a little bit of fun with that popularity, not just stay in a rehearsal room for two years. While it probably wouldn't have gone much further, we should have taken the chance. But our manager had already done that with The Go-Betweens and he wasn’t really prepared to go over there and sleep two or three to a room in flats with cockroaches again. He didn’t want to live out of a suitcase in shitty hotel rooms and I was easily talked into that, as I had kids here and didn’t want to leave them behind.
Big Heavy Stuff was your next band after Ups & Downs. Was that band name a bit of a mission statement for what you wanted to do next? Put the jangly guitars down, make a bit of noise?
Yeah, and we were influenced by other things happening at the time ... My Bloody Valentine ... that was a key influence next. Noisier, more experimentation.
So Ups & Downs are playing this Saturday night at the Annandale. What should people expect?
They can expect to see a band really enjoying playing those songs again. Lots of energy, probably with a little less of the bullshit that might once have crept in. A little less of the hair as well! [Laughs] Less of the worry about our careers too, instead just finding energy and excitement in the songs, putting that across to people and hopefully they'll enjoy it in the same way, what it is in the present and not just what it was in the past.
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