The Moffs: ‘We Weren't Really An Inner-City Band’

Ahead of reunion shows in Sydney and Melbourne, AARON CURRAN talks to The Moffs’ guitarist/singer Tom Kazas about being a mod from Maroubra, Brian Eno, and how their best known single almost never was.

Recorded at Sydney’s Paradise Studios in February 1985, ‘Another Day in the Sun’ – the debut 7” from The Moffs – was the 12th single to be released by Citadel, a label founded by Radio Birdman alumnus John Needham that dominated Australian independent music in the mid-’80s. The young band – Tom Kazas on guitar and vocals, Nick Potts on organ, Alan Hislop on drums and David Byrnes on bass – had never been in a modern recording studio before, and this was to be their first proper release after a highly-regarded demo tape had secured initial interest in the group. The Moffs had built up a loyal, paisley-clad following, who came to shows at venues like the Strawberry Hills Hotel and Trade Union Club to hear the band’s distinctive amalgam of ’60s psychedelia and raw R&B, but the immediate and undisputed success of this haunting single surprised nonetheless. It went on to become one of the year’s biggest independent sellers.

However, suffering a fate much like that of their contemporaries and soon-to-be touring partners, Ups & Downs, the band appeared to lose momentum with later record releases, with audiences and record buyers seemingly unwilling to follow a group that was continually evolving and changing its sound.

The Moffs had parted amicably in 1989 with sold-out farewell gigs at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney and the Old Greek Theatre in Melbourne. More than 20 years later the band is back to play live shows in both cities in support of the newly released two CD anthology, The Moffs – The Collection, which is out now via Feel Presents.

So it’s great that The Moffs’ reunion shows are stretching to Melbourne as well as Sydney?
It's exciting. We were invited to play one Sydney show but knew it would be better doing shows in Melbourne as well, so now the run of three that we're doing seems like a nice package.

Tom, I'm always interested in learning what someone's first musical inspirations were, particularly if those inspirations were Australian bands.
To be honest, a lot of our inspiration came from overseas. But in terms of Australian influences I remember listening a lot to early Masters Apprentices and some of their late-’60s stuff too, the psychedelic era sound, 'Living in a Child's Dream'. But we scoured international stuff of the same era, particularly European and English stuff, the London late-’60s thing like Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, and a bunch of really obscure bands.

That kind of garage rock, freakbeat-era when many bands only ever made one or two singles before imploding?
Well, yeah, and you can compare that era with the time period just prior to The Moffs, so for us it was still a punk thing to release our own single. You were happy to just make one song, and if you could get a single together that was still a challenging and mildly subversive thing to do. The Moffs weren't really garage rock though, we didn't really go for dirty guitars the whole time.

Reading the liner notes to the new CD, it sounds like you guys were more connected into Sydney's burgeoning mod scene of the early-’80s than I ever would’ve guessed from listening to the band later on.
I got introduced to The Jam, The Clash and early punk stuff when I was 16 or so. The Jam primarily was an early influence. I would’ve been happy to get a ,od band together but our listening was quickly expanding, we started to go into different eras like late-’60s and early-’70s stuff, which had so much freedom in the music, the writing, the fashion, the approach. The freedom involved in composing and playing stuff in the parameters of that era was so exciting. It was also fun to dress up in the clothes and be a part of that. That psych stuff felt like it aligned more with my interests in the counterculture too: the subversive elements, the anti-war and political elements. I was born in the mid-’60s, so by osmosis I absorbed interests in some of that stuff. And of course we found many like-minded people in what we were doing with The Moffs, but the mod scene was certainly an earlier influence.

Tell us about how you made the transition from your first gigs to signing with Citadel?
We weren't really an inner-city band. We came from a small beach suburb [Maroubra in Sydney]. When we did our first demo tape [in 1984], I was just 19 … We were pretty young and weren't really aware of what a career in music was. But when we began doing gigs it very quickly started happening for us and the demo tape we did created some interest. Our manager of the time [former Scientists road manager Greg “Quick” Smyrell], who was more or less a friend, he was much more savvy, so he introduced us to Citadel, I'm sure. He certainly handled more of the mechanics [of signing]. Then we got to work with the producer who produced The Scientists' early stuff, we got him in to do our first single.

Chris Logan?
Yeah Chris, that's right. I remember John Needham, who was running Citadel, there was a misunderstanding. He thought we were going to be like a Chicago electric blues band, because we had wild blues harmonica and we did play some that ’60s Blues Invasion sound on our earliest stuff. So he had the wrong impression apparently.

The band’s first single, 'Another Day in the Sun', has become a cult classic and is fondly remembered by many. What do you remember about writing and recording the song?
Well, I remember absolutely not wanting to do it for our first single. I would have much preferred a couple of songs that ended up appearing on the mini-album, our next release. So to be honest, while I thought it was a fine song, it was just one among many. But there were others who disagreed with me ... like [Feel Presents’] Tim Pittman, who is still very much involved in The Moffs' history and has put out the new CD anthology of ours. He was one of the people who said at the time, "No boys, it has got to be 'Another Day in the Sun'.” So I was happy to go along with their suggestion. I could see the charm of the thing, but I wanted to do the seven-minute version of 'I Once Knew' instead, and I don't think anybody else accepted that, maybe just as well in the end.

When we did the demo tape, it was fine but it was rushed. But ‘Another Day in the Sun’ was the first time we went into a full extensive recording studio [with producer Nick Logan and engineer Tom Colly]. That was pretty mindblowing ... the aura, the atmosphere. It was just great. There's a really successful feeling captured in the recording as well. That's why I've stayed loyal to the same kind of simple but classic production since then … It was so well-produced, I remember being really happy with it, and the b-side 'Clarodomineaux' as well. We knew we had something and time has borne that out.

I was surprised when I again read in the liner notes of the new CD that 'Another Day in the Sun' was more influenced by Brian Eno than ’60s psychedelia. I should say initially surprised, because then it kind of clicked that it reminded me of one of Eno's almost-instrumentals from Here Come the Warm Jets.
Well that's perceptive of you because yes, 'Another Day in the Sun' was directly inspired by the song 'On Some Faraway Beach' on that Eno album. If you look at the form of that, it has a very long instrumental passage with a voice that comes in just near the end, which is exactly what happens in our song too. You'll notice as well that on both there's a very limited set of chords that just keeps cycling around. So I was surprised when people told me, “Wow what a psychedelic song”, because that wasn't in our minds – it seems to have been projected onto it.

There were inklings to that form on 'Horto', a song from The Moffs’ original demo tape, which is a long instrumental too with vocals at the end. It was a form that I loved but didn't want to overdo it, I never wanted to repeat and write a song like it again. But as for Brian Eno, you'll notice that later Moffs had textural, instrumental stuff which I think was still influenced by him.

It felt like every time I went to somebody's house in the mid- to late-’80s, there was a copy of ‘Another Day in the Sun’ by the record player. Do you know how many you actually sold? Was it as many as it felt?
It's impossible to know. We never got any figures really. But to answer your question, yes, I think it probably did sell as many as it felt! I remember those years in the ’80s without much money, but the royalties of that single used to pay for the registration of my car annually, which I always thought was some measure of success. [Laughs] There were a lot of sales in Europe. Citadel, as we know, was an accomplished label and they were moving a hell of a lot of records. It was on the back of that success that allowed us to ask Citadel for quite a bit of money to make our debut album Labyrinth. It wasn't a small advance. I think we earned our keep for a bit and it did proliferate, it got onto a lot of peoples' turntables which was really gratifying.

The single had amazing reviews, like being named record of the year in influential fanzine Bucketful of Brains.
That is the most glowing review The Moffs ever got, yeah.

But was such praise a burden to match? Did the initial success put pressure on your ability to follow it up?
Yeah, in the beginning, in a way it did. I was just watching an interview with John Cleese where he was talking about how the bar is raised so high by your past glories it becomes nigh on impossible to match. People who do it, who can keep it going, are lauded and so they should be. Though that wasn't really it for us, not as much as stylistically we were changing, and we also had personnel changes which sapped momentum from the band's career. I think the mini-album was a good record, though for a lot of people it wasn't what the single was and didn’t meet their expectations. But we were trying to experiment, to keep moving. The thing was that The Moffs kept changing. If you listen chronologically to our records, when you get to Labyrinth at the end, that's very different from our early stuff.

But hey it's fine to get bad reviews as well as good. Some of the later reviews are really quite comical. It was fantastic writing. The wholesale praise for the first single certainly didn't last for our whole career and I can see why. The production on the mini-album, I don't think we were entirely successful, but I stand by the songs. They were there at the beginning of The Moffs and they'll be there at the shows in a few weeks. We weren't too worried, we managed to tour and kept moving really.

You kept moving on tour too and saw quite a bit of the country – often going to Queensland, Victoria, around NSW - but I imagine you did it on a budget?
All of us were unemployed, we were on the Government Musicians' Benefit as we used to call it. It was a pretty frugal existence, you couldn't just keep playing your local gigs as you couldn't get the same people out too often. We often came to Melbourne. It sometimes felt we were better liked down there than in Sydney. We used to go to northern NSW, Brisbane, Adelaide ... it was life in the back of a van, not that attractive, but live was were we were at, so it had to be done. What was recorded was one thing, but the band clearly had a dynamic onstage that was more than the sum of its parts. Some of us were fairly flamboyant players ... people would stand in front of Smiley watching his bass licks.

That was what it was about – a live unpredictable energy – but that also meant sometimes playing some pretty crappy gigs. The nature of what we were trying to do – trying to improvise large sections, allowing spontaneity – connected us more with audiences too, we weren't just trying to reproduce simple songs, we tried to embellish or reinvent them night to night. I find that when I'm an audience member that's what I find interesting and exciting and I'm sure our audiences were likewise. Apart from when they were sitting on the floor with their eyes closed.

You've said the band kept changing, how did your songwriting change over those years?
As a songwriter I was aware of the contemporary UK scene, things like Echo and The Bunnymen, The Smiths, The Cure, that stuff was getting absorbed. I wanted to push The Moffs more in that direction. Some of those influences turn up more on Labyrinth. The early Moffs stuff is more ’60s-sounding but from ‘The Traveller’ and into Labyrinth that was more contemporary ‘80s, more atmospheric. Instrumental, textural, I think that's an ’80s kind of thing, using guitars as pure texture. So we were trying to do that as well. But in terms of writing I saw the need to move that forward, I think we got part of the way but didn't complete that.

Why didn't you all move to England? Would things have gone differently for The Moffs if you'd made it overseas?
Yeah, I think so but we didn't have a manager for the second half of our career. I think there were certain reasons for that. One was that the band was staunchly independent, left over from a punk attitude and me, or us, wanting to control things. And even though we were on Citadel we weren't like their other bands so we felt that they didn't totally understand us, so there was no one else to latch onto so we persevered on our own. Maybe we were hard to manage anyway. [Laughs] We certainly didn't attract the kind of person that wanted to do it. So We didn't have the right support and couldn't afford it in the end. Also it's a lifestyle commitment. But our influence did get to Europe, we heard from people there.

“The royalties of that single used to pay for the registration of my car annually, which I always thought was some measure of success.”

So The Moffs were getting fan mail? People were getting in touch from overseas? When I speak to bands from the ’80s there seemed to be a lot of post going on, a lot of letters getting sent.
There were, I still have some of them. Of course, lovely things happened, some guy in Greece was a painter and he painted individual images for all the songs and sent them to me. Even recently in 2008 we had a call from someone wanting to take the Moffs to Europe but hey, for whatever reason it didn't happen. But we've always had a lot of interest and sales in European countries. Labyrinth was first made on CD by Germans. The English were into it. So it's a love affair of sorts from afar, it's not quite unrequited love but it's good to know we had some attention over there. I even saw a Moffs album in the window of a record store in San Francisco when I was traveling there a few years ago.

What words do you have for those thinking of coming to your shows in Sydney or Melbourne?
The idea this time was not to play a retrospective of our whole career. I very much wanted to focus on a particular sound, one thing, not many. It seemed too optimistic to adequately cover an ever-changing five-year career in a one hour set. So we had the idea of just doing the early stuff, with the original players, to connect to a sound that we had but not maybe for long enough. Reconnecting with that sound. This is why we're doing the stuff just from 1985 or so, not the later stuff.

So we'll be hearing the first singles, the mini-LP?
And stuff prior to that from the demo tape. I think that's something valid and special. Really enjoying a specific aspect of what we were, instead of just doing covers of our different selves across the ages. [Laughs]

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‘The Moffs – The Collection’ is out now on Feel Presents.

TOUR DATES:

Fri, Sep 23 – The Sandringham Hotel, Sydney, NSW
Fri, Oct 7 – Caravan Music Club, Melbourne, VIC
Sat, Oct 8 – Corner Hotel, Melbourne, VIC