Escape: Australia’s Forgotten Metal Legends

With a towering frontman named ‘The Beast’ and a mountain of media coverage, mid-’80s metal act Escape had everything going for them. But the band fell apart before ever signing a record deal or cutting an album. TOM VALCANIS tells their story, ahead of an in-the-making documentary that ties them to Australia’s ‘folklore of failure’. Photos courtesy of Michael Kraaz.

Imagine Australia forgetting Powderfinger. Imagine forgetting Nick Cave. Imagine you and everyone you knew forgetting a band that dominated front pages of newspapers, radio shows and primetime television. Just imagine that. This was no dream for Australia’s greatest unsigned metal act, Escape.

Escape? Escape who?

Escape were an Australian shock metal band. From 1984 through 1987, they were the Australian metal band. A metal band on the minds of millions. A metal band led by John ‘The Beast’ Zisimou, standing six feet and six inches tall and weighing upwards of 200kg. A metal band clad in studded leather, sheepskins and horns. A metal band that wasn’t complete without playing shows on massive sets, roaring riffs and exploding pyrotechnics from beginning to end. A metal band that upended a hard-living stereotype, in the corner to knock drugs out of kids’ hands. A metal band that was described by Loud Magazine as “the media’s wet dream and a psychologist’s nightmare – or the Holy Grail.” A metal band that dominated our continent.

Escape formed in Gawler, 1984. A quiet regional town in the Barossa Valley. A universe away from the glitter of LA’s Sunset Strip, or the gloom of metal’s spiritual home in Birmingham, England.

Talking to John now, his voice belies an incredible presence. “We had no idea,” John says, shakily, about Escape’s origins. “We were going to start a punk-metal band with my brother, Tony. ‘I’d be Tony Decay,’ he’d say. Our first drummer Wayne found Motley Crue’s Too Fast for Love at the second-hand record shop. We’d laughed our heads off. It was only through following KISS film clips that we started wearing leathers and doing shows. We had no idea what to do.”

John the Beast transformed a shy 19-year-old trainee nurse into a fearsome and cheeky metal monster. Singer Robert ‘Bob’ Gillett, along with drummer Wayne Harrison and later Ari – whose last name no one in the band can remember – rounded out an act unleashing unstoppable and raw heavy-metal power across the country.

Mark ‘Spook’ Winders, a close friend of Tony and John, became their manager in May 1984. Not out of experience, but more because he was the oldest. “They played everywhere in Australia,” Mark begins. “They played from Ballan to Byron Bay. There was no Soundwaves or Big Day Outs you could chuck them on,” he laughs. “They achieved so much.”

Escape’s legend budded and grew quickly. By December of ’84, they were booking pubs in Melbourne. In March ’85, they were the first non-Victorian band to play the Metal for Melbourne Festival. According to Mark, a simple photo of John the Beast towering over a piled up Escape got punters in the door. They’d stand in awe of an uplifting Hollywood spectacle for the price of chips and beer.

“Our look was always going to be Vikings crossed with God knows what.”

“John and Tony were monoliths. I mean, you had to dress them in balaclavas and put horns on them,” singer Bob muses. “We were always going to have shit blow up on stage around them. Our look was always going to be Vikings crossed with God knows what. It was inevitable that our band would evolve into that theatrical rock.”

Bassist, and Beast’s brother, Tony described the show in Loud magazine as “full on, no holds barred. Bombs, blood, bolts, etc. Sort of like Edward Scissorhands meets Jenny Craig crossed with Hiroshima.”

“They made all of their own pyrotechnics," says Mark on the shows. They’d snap off car manifolds and exhausts and weld them to their guitars. “Lights going off ... the guitars would explode, shooting flames. Flashpods everywhere. Sometimes it would blow a hole in the costumes. It was just amazing.”

That’s what people saw, sometimes in the first 30 seconds. John and Tony towered above it all on risers the size of buses. Roadies would stand at attention, seamlessly changing over axes and letting off pyros with robotic precision. Sweat-sheened metalheads stood and felt the roar, roar, roar of Escape stirring them into rapture. Gunpowder smoke and confetti blasts would curl around punters’ upthrust horns.

“Sometimes we’d only play to three people,” The Beast adds. “But they’d be journalists from magazines and they’d write stories about us.”

Mark and the band worked frantically to slake the media’s thirst for Escape. “They would always be in the local paper and the local radio station would want them too,” Mark sketches out. “They’d play 21 shows in a block. They’d play the metal festivals at the time. The biggest show they played was in Paddington Town Hall in Sydney. That was huge.”

Come August 1985, venues could barely contain throngs of punters fiending for another hit. The Beast hijacked a This is Spinal Tap screening in a George Street, Sydney, and 300 fans mobbed the cinema. Cops came to fend them off.

Come December’s ‘Beast in the East’ tour, Escape truly smashed primetime. One of their early spots was on the Australian music show Sounds. “They had no film clip, no songs, no nothin’,” Mark describes. “There’s John the Beast, sitting there. Donnie Sutherland is interviewing him. This program would have Ronnie James Dio on there. This was the music program outside of Countdown.”

Interest in Escape snowballed. The boys, often in full metal regalia, appeared on The Midday Ray Martin Show, Simon Townshend’s WonderWorld, prestigious interview program Willesee and ABC TV’s Beatbox, to name a few. A cameo in madcap B-movie Rock ‘n’ Roll Cowboys was still to come.

“Back then, when TV stations closed overnight, sometimes they’d stay on for long weekends,” Mark says. “One time they had a metal night, and John the Beast co-hosted. So there he was on national TV.”

Readers of the Melbourne Sun saw John the Beast dominate the front page. “He rocked up in the newsroom in full dress,” Mark recounts. “People had no idea what was going on, the reporters and that.”

As 1986 raced toward ’87, Escape was impossible to ignore. The boys left Gawler for Sydney, taking full advantage of a seemingly everlasting media glow. While down in Melbourne, Mark took a call from the tour manager of blue-collar pub rockers Rose Tattoo. They demanded Escape headline a secret show at Richmond’s Central Club, in Melbourne’s inner south, that night.

“Rose Tattoo turned up. Angry Anderson said Escape was one of his favourite bands.”

“I’m like, get out of here!” Mark scoffs. “‘They’ll play a warm-up show, you guys will still headline and they’ll turn up unannounced,’ the manager said. I said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll see you there at four or whatever,’ and hung up. I told the boys [and] we all laughed. Then I got a call from the agent. ‘Did you get a call from so-and-so?’ I said yes. ‘Is that fair dinkum?’ He said yes! Bugger me, Rose Tattoo turned up. Angry Anderson actually said that Escape was one of his favourite bands.”

American hair metal singer Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P snuck into an Escape show while in Sydney. “He was very fresh, Blackie,” Mark proudly recalls. “John met him at a signing. He said he was in a band and he was playing that night. He actually turned up! He couldn’t stay long because people wouldn’t leave him alone. But he was there.”

Escape had national celebrity. Escape had tens of thousands of fans. Escape didn't even have a record. Or a deal to cut one.

Launching their national ‘Metamorphosis’ tour in November of that year, Escape’s expenses blew out. All their income funded the Sydney move, set construction and pyrotechnics. Add to that the transport, publicity, and roadies’ wages – $2,000 bought Escape one night’s show when the average weekly pay was about $410. Paying for show after show in advance meant a wallet-burning $20,000 recording cost was always out of reach. The Escape juggernaut kept afloat with bank loans and hopes high they’d clinch that elusive record contract.

“It was a full-time job to get all this stuff going,” Bob explains. “We were writing new songs and doing other things as well. We couldn’t work odd factory jobs anymore because we were all over the place.” The guys had to sign on for the dole. A necessary indignity.

“At one stage, John had to go into the social security office,” Mark recounts. He’s explaining to the officer that he needs to stay on the dole. And the officer’s just pointing to an article on him with the headline: ‘Local band makes good.’ They look at that and they think you’re rich and famous.”

Their star had almost risen to the very top. On the 13th of December 1986, Escape’s light was cruelly snuffed out.

The boys headed into the Melbourne leg of the ‘Metamorphosis’ tour. They were beaming. Driving from Sydney, they took “a wrong turn,” winding up in Shepparton, about 180 kilometres northeast of Melbourne. In the endless miles of morning, Mark was at the wheel.

“I don’t know how I came to be out of the car. I don’t know how I got thrown out.”

Mark pieces together what happened, still in disbelief 27 years later. “You had to be 25 or over to drive a Tarago [van],” Spook begins. “Because I was the oldest at 25,” he nervously chuckles, “I was driving. Now, if you can imagine, the Beast and his brother were both 24 stone [152kg] total. I usually never had them sitting in the front. They’d always sit in the back. We had to have all our production equipment, lights and that, following us in the truck behind. Everyone was awake and silly and carrying on!” He clears his throat and continues.

“At about nine in the morning, I pulled into Shepparton. It was an hour or so down the freeway into Melbourne. John asked if we could lay the seats back and make one big bed in the back of the Tarago. ‘We’re knackered,’ he said. ‘This is against the law’, I said. You all have to get up if I see a cop or something. Tony, for some reason, asked to sit in the front. Reluctantly, I let the big fella in the front. Within five minutes down the road, they’re all asleep. Ari reached over and turned the radio off. One minute I’m thinking about the gig,” he stumbles, “the next minute I must have closed my eyes.”

John remembers it far too well. “It was all weird. We did all this stuff that we never did, like Tony in the front and that. If we didn’t do this stuff, who knows what would’ve happened. The car rolled twice. It flipped up, hit a tree and ended up back down on its wheels. I don’t know how I came to be out of the car. I don’t know how I got thrown out.”

Bob recalls sleeping in the back and the others “thrown out of the side window.” He says, “Mark and Tony were held together by the seatbelts. That’s what kept them alive more than anything else did. We all got quite badly injured, John especially so. Luckily, a nurse on her way to the local hospital called for help and an ambulance came along not too long after that.”

John’s first conscious moment saw him waking up in hospital. “They said Goulburn Valley hospital, but it seemed closer to Melbourne. I have no memory of how long I was there. They flew me back to Adelaide on the 22nd of December, which is my Dad’s birthday. I was hallucinating the whole way.”

“Mark insists the ‘strongest thing I ever took were those No-Doz things.’”

Mark insists the “strongest thing I ever took were those No-Doz things.” He thinks a while. “That was the basic end of it.”

John’s first discharge from hospital saw him readmitted the same day. They braced his leg; it developed gangrene. John faced a cascade of surgeries, ulcers and deep-vein thrombosis in the months and years after.

“There was a lot of infighting between us,” John says, wavering on the aftermath. “Band members wanted control of the band, Spook wanted control of the band. I was in a hospital bed not knowing what was going on. Half of the band was in Sydney, half of the band’s in Adelaide. People were like, ‘John, you’ve got to take care of it,’ and I’m like, ‘What? I’m just trying to get better here.’”

Fans and visitors filled John’s hospital days, gleaning what he could about Escape’s fate. In early 1987, Tony and Bob resettled in Adelaide alongside John. Drummer Ari, according to Mark, “disappeared off the face of the Earth.” His replacement, Andy Cienciala, figured he returned home to Indonesia. Mark cleaved to promoters and booking agents back in Sydney, wishing for their recovery.

By June 1987, John regained some health. Not much, but enough to steer Escape’s anti-drugs campaign. Buzz hadn’t completely faded; their efforts filled column inches in local papers and held the admiration of parents. National current affairs program The 7:30 Report picked up the story too. The band itched to get back on the road. While waiting, Andy says, the band was “rehearsing constantly. They had a vision and they did whatever they could to get the results for that vision.” As for performances, The Beast could manage a few shows and no more. The Beast in John had gone.

“Someone else tried to pick them up, but it didn’t work,” concedes Mark. “They came back for a bit, but it didn’t last very long at all.”

Inactivity proved lethal. Their ledger glowed and glowed red. By the end of 1987, these equal partners still owed $100,000 in bank loans. Escape were offered plum appearance fees – $5,000 in some cases – but the band was too broken to entertain the notion, let alone crowds. The media deserted them and Australia soon followed.

Now, John the Beast marks time in the town where Escape began. In his room he stays, save “going in and out for treatment.” He ekes out a life with Tony’s help. John is proud of Tony, now a construction business owner and father, rich in the love of his daughters. “He still plays,” John says. “He just realised you’re not gonna conquer the world.”

After the break-up, John and Tony briefly formed metal band Blistered Palms. Bob made his way to Scotland, entering event management and trucking. Now he teaches English in Southeast Asia. Andy still drums in an Adelaide grunge rock band, Imogen Brave.

They’re still good friends, bearing no animus toward Mark. “That’s why they call it an accident, mate,” John quips.

Why did we forget? How could we forget?

Apart from fading press clippings and snippets of film masked in dust and cupboards, the scant traces of Escape’s music was never found. No demos, no records, nothing.

“They did one cassette, one recording,” Mark offers. “But it went missing. We don’t know where that’s gone. All we have are photos and grainy video footage.”

Canberra-based filmmaker and diehard metalhead Michael Kraaz seized upon what memories remain. In 2012 he started producing a crowd-funded documentary entitled Escape: The Great Unsigned. It’s a story that Michael couldn’t let go of.

“It’s a very Australian story,” Michael says, summing up the Escape saga. “In Australia, we have a folklore of failure. Ned Kelly. Him and his mates take on the cops in tin helmets. They fail. A couple of morons try to cross the Nullarbor in camels. They fail. Bunch of mates try and invade Turkey. They fail. A bunch of mates from Gawler try to put on the greatest heavy metal band ever. They fail. But to us, they’re all heroes.”

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For updates on the Escape documentary, see its Facebook page. Head here to contribute to its Pozible campaign. Read more of Tom Valcanis’ writing on his blog.