Icons: The Scientists Pt 2

In the second half of his oral history of The Scientists’ early days, PATRICK EMERY gets band members Kim Salmon, James Baker, Boris Sujdovic and Rod Radalj to recount their first gig, their preferred venues and cover songs, their debut 7” and formative “Loft Tapes” and an unlikely appearance on TV’s ‘Countdown’. Photos by CANDY GOLDSMITH.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Baker: The first Scientists gig was at a friend’s party in North Perth – we played about 10 songs, eight originals and two covers. It was a fantastic gig.

Sudjovic: The style of music didn’t change when we became The Scientists, but the songs were better. Everyone got a bit better at what they were doing, but it was very similar.

Salmon: My memory is that we played ‘Pretty Girl’, ‘Born to Lose’, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, ‘Frantic Romantic’, ‘Walk the Plank’, ‘Don’t You Lie to Me’, ‘Baby You’re Not for Sale’, ‘She Said She Loves Me’, ‘Walk in the Room’, ‘There She Goes Again’ and ‘Shake Together Tonite’.

Radalj: I vaguely remember a party, but to tell the truth I don’t remember it in any detail!

While Perth had its own dedicated punk community, the city’s relatively small population – not to mention its geographical and culture remoteness – ensured the punk scene would remain small. The Scientists could rely on a reasonable crowd, but without ever threatening to break out of the narrow demographic confines of the local punk community.

Baker: There was enough of a punk scene to do a punk gig and get about 150 people to the gig, but I wouldn’t call it huge. There was never any gig when there was only two people – there was always a lot of people at Victims gigs.

Radalj: We were very unpopular! We didn’t fit the punk ideologies of the time – we weren’t singing political anthems. We had a small following, but popularity wasn’t a big thing. We were lucky to get a gig, whereas a band like The Manikins was extremely popular.

Salmon: It was a strange following, about 100 people, who tended to see different things in us – it wasn’t clear. I saw it from the beginning – the band was shockingly loud. If you can imagine pristine pop songs played in this incredibly raucous fashion, for lots of reasons – we wanted to rock, our abilities made the edges more blurry … it was quite ambiguous thing going on – some people saw it as more arty, some people saw it differently, some people thought we were political and some people thought we were pop, and other people hated us because we weren’t following some English blueprint like Joy Division or Public Image.

Radalj: It was a pretty small scene. It was probably more of a university crowd. I used to tell people to listen to punk stuff, and they weren’t interested, but years later I’d bump into them and they’d be listening to stuff like The Clash and telling me I was right, and that it was good stuff!

Baker: It varied a bit. Some people liked us. We had a residency at the Governor Broome. We’d get maybe 50 or 100 people, but not a huge following. It was hard to get gigs – we couldn’t get into any of the mainstream venues. We mainly played Hernando’s Hideaway and the Governor Broome, and the odd show somewhere else.

Sudjovic: I didn’t get the gigs so I don’t know how hard it was to get them – probably had to fight life and death for them. There’d be something happening somewhere – The Victims would be playing somewhere, or The Triffids or the Cheap Nasties. But there was no late-night gigs, so James decided to try and find a night club where punk bands could play, and he did – it was called Hernando’s Hideaway. He convinced this guy to put on these punk bands. So every weekend we had a club that we could go to and hang out till 4am. It was great.

“Fuck ’em: they could either take a day off work or go in with a hangover.”

Baker: Hernando’s Hideaway was a jazz club that had a licence til 3am, and we were the first rock band to play there with The Victims. I loved the idea of watching The Heartbreakers in New York and coming out of CBGB’s at 5 o’clock in the morning and the sun was up. I thought, ‘Fuck, this wouldn’t ever happen in Perth!’ But it worked against us in the end because no one would ever come to see us because we were on too late! But we couldn’t give a shit about that – fuck ’em: they could either take a day off work or go in with a hangover.

Sujdovic: There was one place we used to play called the Governor Broome in Northbridge – which is now the entertainment area of Perth – but back then it wasn’t. It was a great, great venue – just a pub where the punk bands played. They closed it down, and everyone was pissed off, and they knocked it down and it became a carpark where about 10 cars would park. It wasn’t even tarmac, it was gravel – the irony was that if they hadn’t knocked it down they’d have made 10 times as much money. But they didn’t listen to us punks! They closed it and knocked it down. I bet they’re ruing it now – “Fuck, we should’ve listened to the guy with the Mohawk haircut and dog collar!”

In the 1980s The Scientists would recalibrate their sound into a darker, proto-grunge aesthetic. But in 1978, The Scientists took its musical cues from the Detroit rock sounds of The Stooges, the MC5 and early Alice Cooper. Baker’s interest in ’60s bands such as The Troggs infused the band’s sound with a latent pop sensibility.

Sujdovic: I don’t know if people overseas are familiar with the early Scientists. We do get a lot of young kids at our gigs, and maybe they don’t know about this lineup. Even when we play in London it’s not full of old Aussie guys on their holidays! A lot of them are young English kids – maybe they’d be a bit surprised.

In songs such as ‘Girl’ and ‘That Girl’, Baker’s lyrics celebrated the adolescent simplicity of ’60s pop, while ‘I’ll Walk the Plank for You Baby’ nodded toward The Ramones’ patented suburban banality.

Baker: I’d give Kim the lyrics and some idea of how I’d like it to go and he’d write the melody and the music. I was just influenced by the lyrics of my favourite ’60s bands, and maybe the Ramones – ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’ and stuff like that.

Salmon: I found [James’ lyrics] problematic a little bit sometimes, but James thought it was a bit Jonathan Richman and that’s what he wrote so that’s what we did. Because it was so simple, it was so direct and there were these songs with ‘girl’ in it, it was OK. I was just a bit scared it was a bit like Herman’s Hermits, and the irony might not have been quite obvious as it seemed to James – though he might not have thought it was ironic. But he wasn’t trying to be like Johnny Young, which was always my fear!

Radalj: James’ lyrics were very important. James would spend his whole day writing those lyrics, and Kim was pretty good at getting the music to it, and then we’d start rehearsing it. We used to rehearse every day of the week because we basically had nothing else to do.

Sujdovic: James was a massive fan of The Troggs, as well as the Sex Pistols and The Heartbreakers. All those primitive beats fitted in well with the lyrics he was writing – that’s why there’s a lot of that girl stuff, I guess.

Baker: At the time we were influenced by the Flamin’ Groovies and The Heartbreakers, even those influences are not really heard on our records. And I guess also some of the ’60s stuff like The Troggs, even though we don’t sound a lot like that either.

Salmon: We had some really definite ideas about how to rock. I think I had two amps slaved up, and I think Boris did too. I had the extra amp for when I did a solo. Poor Rod just had one 100-watt amp! The way ‘Personality Crisis’ starts – to use that cliché – it just hits the ground running. I wanted us to start our first gig ever like that – bang! Like every time I’ve seen The Stooges – that’s what I wanted to do, though whether we managed to do that I don’t know!

Baker: In Perth the actual punks didn’t like us because we were a bit more rock ’n’ roll-orientated than The Victims, and a lot of the punks had missed out on The Victims – they might say they were there, but a lot of them weren’t. So it was a different following we got after The Victims.

Salmon: Live, the sound was very Detroit rock – it was manic, it was mayhem, it was rock ’n’ roll. That band never really got recorded properly. Because we got more accomplished musicians in the band, and the vocal harmonies seemed to make the band seem more tame. If you have a listen to ‘Shake Together Tonight’, ‘I Bet You’re Lying’ – if you listen closely you can hear it underneath the pop melodies. But we always wanted to have those melodies because that was how James and I wrote.

“That pink album isn’t a true representation of what The Scientists were back then.”

Sujdovic: Even the songs on that [self-titled] pink album [from 1981] are pretty pop. The Scientists were never pop, or power pop. That pink album isn’t a true representation of what The Scientists were back then.

Salmon: We wrote ‘Pretty Girl’ and ‘Frantic Romantic’ in the first session. Some of the other early songs were ‘Girl, Walk the Plank’; we commandeered The Victims’ song ‘I’m Looking for You’; ‘Baby You’re Not for Sale’ – which kind of added to that idea that we were more arty than Heartbreakers’ balls-to-the-wall, straight-out rock. That song was a strange piece that went on for about 15 minutes, but never got recorded – it had about two chords and was very repetitious. It sounds a lot like Pere Ubu’s ‘Final Solution’ and a Roxy Music song that I wasn’t listening to at that time. It sounded a bit like a love song but had a few non-sequiturs in there.

Salmon: We had a few weird covers – we played ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and we were sent to Coventry for doing that! Some things were what you’d expect – we were trying to sound a bit like The Heartbreakers and the Flamin’ Groovies … not the Beatle-sounding Flamin’ Groovies but a hard-rocking, Southern-rocking thing. We did ‘Slow Death’, a version of a Chuck Berry song ‘Don’t You Lie to Me’, but it was modelled on the Flamin’ Groovies who modelled theirs on The Rolling Stones. We did ‘Walk in the Room’ by The Searchers, a Velvet Underground song – ‘There She Goes Again’.

Sujdovic: I’d say we didn’t fit into a natural category. It was a really exciting time – it just seemed to happen all of a sudden, this explosion of music. It seemed like punk had only been around for five minutes and Kim and James were almost getting bored with it and trying to do songs that would piss a lot of the punks off – we’d do covers all of a sudden, like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and a couple of other songs that’d really piss the punks off. So punk had only been around for five minutes and we were trying to be not part of the crowd. The Scientists have always been doing that – always fighting against things, nonstop. Fighting everything – not so much authority, but going against the grain.

Radalj: We used to pick a cover that we liked. We used to do Plastic Bertrand’s ‘Jet Boy Jet Girl’, ‘She’s Cracked’ by The Modern Lovers. We did a couple of weirdo ones that’d get up people’s noses.

Baker: I can only remember playing ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ twice – it wasn’t a huge part of our set. We did a lot of covers, but we’d only play them once or twice and then we’d get sick of them, and learn a different one that we liked.

Sujdovic: It’s very easy to slip into that corporate image. It goes from being an underground thing, and then a couple of bands get successful and then record companies appear and it becomes a formula and all of a sudden everyone’s dressing the same – it’s easy to slip into that. But The Scientists were never going to get caught up in that. So almost as soon as we started we were trying to step away from it – maybe we shouldn’t have, and maybe we could’ve enjoyed it more [Laughs].

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The only known recording of the first lineup of The Scientists was made in a loft upstairs from a flat where Radalj was living. Lost for many years, the recordings would eventually surface a few years ago, with a couple of songs appearing on a compilation issued by Bang! Records. Another song, ‘Baby You’re Not For Sale’, has recently appeared on a compilation of Perth punk bands.

Salmon: Friends of ours in another band called The Sailors, I think, one of them decided to mix us. It went through a desk, but straight to a cassette.

Baker: That was a flat on Newcastle Street in Perth. Our friend had a four-track. I think Rod was living there. We went along one night and the tape sounds pretty good. That was “The Loft Tapes.” Apart from that no one’s ever recorded us properly – though there’s a video out that has a reasonable sound quality on it.

Salmon: The loft was this place where both Rod and I ended up living. It was upstairs flat above some shops next to a busy road at the beginning of the freeway in North Perth, or Northbridge – probably the arse end of Northbridge. It basically shat the cars out onto the freeway!

“There was always more to us than that pop sensibility. There was no blueprint we went by.”

Radalj: Those tapes went missing for years. One of them just came out on a compilation – ‘Baby You’re Not For Sale’. That was us at our best – there was no pop sensibility in that; that was more of a Velvet Underground two-chord dirge that went over the top. So there was always more to us than that pop sensibility. We just decided to play the stuff that we liked. There was no blueprint we went by.

Sujdovic: We recorded about eight songs, and I was on there. That didn’t get released, but that was the first recordings of The Scientists. We recorded that stuff in the loft. I think we’d been going for about a year, and had played about 20 or 30 gigs by that time.

Salmon: A couple of songs from the loft tapes ended up on a Bang! record. And ‘Baby You’re Not For Sale’ is on a compilation that just came out. That’s about it as far as I’m aware of – that’s what there is from that band.

Sujdovic: I don’t think there’s anything else lying around. Kim might know of some stuff – maybe on cassette. I’ve got a whole bunch of cassettes, but I don’t know where they are – there might be something on them. I don’t know – can you still play cassettes?

Radalj and Sujdovic left The Scientists in late 1978. Sujdovic was the first to leave – for reasons that remain clouded in hazy memories – to be replaced by Dennis Byrne. Radalj stuck around long enough to feature on the band’s first official recording, the ‘Frantic Romantic’ 7”, before leaving to team up with Sujdovic in The Rockets. Sujdovic would eventually rejoin the revived Scientists in the early 1980s, as well as joining with Baker in the first lineup of Beasts of Bourbon. Sujdovic also reunited with Radalj in the Dubrovniks. Having established his notorious pattern of leaving bands early in their tenure, Radalj formed and promptly left Le Hoodoo Gurus, The Johnnys and the Dubrovniks (which took its name from the birthplace of Radalj and Sujdovic).

Sujdovic: I got booted out, probably because I was a dickhead, but I look at it differently [Laughs]. It wasn’t nasty – we were still friends. They went through a couple of lineup changes and recorded that pink album. A lot of the seeds of that pink album were sowed just after we recorded that stuff in the loft. So even though I wasn’t on the pink album, a lot of that stuff was already to go when I left.

“We were trying to work out what we needed, why didn’t people like us – we were being pathetic. The band was not that popular – Perth had rejected us.”

Salmon: It was one of those awful situations when there are three members of a four-piece band getting together and the band is unhappy with the state of things and the other member is not there, and that member happened to be Boris. If it wasn’t him it would’ve been Rod, and I think Rod possibly could see that. We were trying to work out what we needed, why didn’t people like us – we were being pathetic. The band was not that popular – Perth had rejected us. It was like being rejected by your parents – desperate children trying to seek their parents’ approval, when we should’ve just said “Fuck off” and run away from home, which I think we should have done – and which we did eventually, and Boris came back into the band!

Baker: I guess Boris and Rod just got sick of it and they wanted to do other stuff. That lineup wasn’t together too long.

Radalj: Boris left, and ’cause I liked hanging out with Boris, I left, and we formed The Rockets. I didn’t get Boris out the band – he’s kicked me out of a few bands! Who knows now – everyone’s got a different story!

Salmon: I can’t speak for Roddy, but I always imagine that he didn’t feel too good about that, but he left soon afterwards, and he probably felt better about being in a band with his mate Boris.

Sujdovic: We were still friends after I left. I know I must’ve seen them after I left, but I can’t remember.

Radalj: I was working in this shop in London, and these guys had broken into Virgin Records and they had a box with about 30 copies of the first Scientists single, ‘Frantic Romantic’. I couldn’t believe it! I said, “I’m on that record!”

It was around this time that The Scientists’ fortunes seemed to change. Ben Juniper replaced Radalj on guitar, and new bassist Ian Sharples contributed the lyrics to ‘Pissed on Another Planet’. The Scientists undertook two East Coast tours (with a pit stop in Adelaide), neither of which are remembered in particularly flattering terms. But on the second tour Salmon did achieve a childhood ambition when The Scientists appeared on ‘Countdown’, miming ‘Last Night’ to an audience of excited, if bemused, teenagers.

“He was too much of a Beatles fan, so he had to go.”

Salmon: Things started to pick up for us a bit. We needed another guitarist, and I basically got the first guitarist I could, which was Ben Juniper, who I knew could play guitar reasonably well, and he could sing as well. But he was too much of a Beatles fan, so eventually he had to go. We went with what we came natural and that was this poppy direction.

The lineup that toured the East Coast was the same. We had a bass player after we sacked Boris called Dennis Byrne who was just not for us, and he ended up leaving – we didn’t sack him. [Then] a guy called Ian Sharples, who was the brother of James’ girlfriend. Ian was pretty good at putting together rhyming couplets and had a bit of a literary bent. I was grateful to have songs that weren’t just three syllables ending in ‘girl’ – though I did like James’ songwriting, but it was good to do something else. Ian wrote the words to ‘Pissed on Another Planet’. So the lineup that went to the East Coast was me, James, Ben Juniper and Ian Sharples.

Sujdovic: That first lineup didn’t play outside of Perth, but after they recorded the pink album they travelled to Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne – and did that thing on Countdown – and came back to Perth and were trying to get gigs by saying they’d been on Countdown, and all the promoters were saying “Bullshit!” [Laughs]

Baker: The tours were fucking awful because we played with shithouse bands and we had no money. We played on Countdown, which was a big deal because I think we were the first Perth band to play on Countdown – The Scientists, of all bands! Some bands over here like The Dugites were dying to do that sort of shit, but I’m pretty sure we were the first Perth band. It didn’t mean a whole lot to us at the time, it was just a bit of a fun.

“I don’t know how we ended up on Countdown.”

But the rest of the tours – we did two two-week tours and they stuck us with bands like Jimmy & The Boys and Midnight Oil, and we weren’t suited to that. I think we played one gig with The Boys Next Door at the Crystal Ballroom, which was fantastic, and one gig with the Lipstick Killers in Sydney, which was good too. There were a couple of pub gigs in Melbourne, and a couple of good punk gigs in Adelaide on the way through, but mostly it was being stuck out in the suburbs playing gigs with bands who were fucking boring.

Salmon: I don’t know how we ended up on Countdown. Somehow a copy of the single ended up in Molly Meldrum’s hands, and to his credit the show wasn’t as formatted as things became later in the ABC. When we were over there, about a week out from the show we heard we were going to be on the show, so it happened very quickly.

I watched Countdown religiously – it was just something you did. It was an absolute institution whether you loved or hated it. I had a friend in high school and we were talking about what a rock ’n’ roll star was, and one of the things a rock ’n’ roll star did was go on Countdown. So I said, “I’m going to go on Countdown” and a couple of years after I’d been on Countdown I saw this guy for the first time in ages and he said, “Hey, you always said you were going to go on Countdown and you were!” He was impressed – it was the measure of a being a rock ’n’ roll star.

By 1980 The Scientists were getting nowhere fast – especially in the band’s hometown. When bass player Ian Sharples announced that he’d had enough, Baker and Salmon decided to call it quits. Baker moved to Sydney and formed Le Hoodoo Gurus with former Victims contemporary Dave Faulkner and Radalj. Salmon followed shortly after, and revived The Scientists in the wake of the Cramps vibe he’d recently embraced.

Salmon: We broke up in about 1980. We got rid of Ben – he didn’t work for us. We went to a three-piece because there was a dearth of guitarists. We had this idea some Johnny Thunders lookalike would come through the door drinking Courvoisier cognac! The band had sharpened up a lot by simplifying it, and we had a little bit of a resurgence in popularity but it wasn’t enough to stop Ian and James coming around to my place one day in Perth to say that they’d had enough, and we couldn’t do it anymore. So that was it – the band broke up.

Baker: I guess we broke up because we were all dressed up with nowhere to go. The bass player decided he didn’t want to do it anymore, and I don’t think Kim and I were going to go through another lineup change. I’d had enough of Perth, and it wasn’t time to change, so I moved to Sydney to do the Gurus.

The Scientists would release their first album, colloquially referred to as “The Pink Album,” after the band had ceased to be a going concern.

Baker: When Boris left we got another bass player in, and that didn’t change anything that much. When Rod left – I don’t think he liked [the new bass player] much – and then we got Ben Juniper, and that was the ‘Last Night’, ‘Pissed on Another Planet’ era, which was interesting and good in a way. And then the final lineup was a three-piece, which was good in a different way.

Salmon: We recorded that album posthumously, which is why the production isn’t great – we just let it happen. I think the guitar sounds great, but if we’d spent more time the drums, the bass and my vocals would’ve sounded great. I listen to it now and it’s definitely a product of its time. It’s not one that I’m ashamed of – it’s got a bit of that English post-punk sound, even though that’s not what we were trying to sound like, or even bands like The Vibrators or the Buzzcocks.

Guitar-wise, that record’s very tight, and not close to what we sounded live. But it does have that pop sensibility – but when had Rod and Boris, that ragged sensibility, the feedback, it was very much like The Heartbreakers, actually a bit wilder than The Heartbreakers. But the pink album reflects the songwriting of that time – it’s the same repertoire.

“I became obsessed by The Velvet Underground again – but more ‘Sister Ray’ than ‘Sunday Morning’.”

After a few years of this, and struggling, someone played this cassette with this howling feedback and some lunatic out the front and I thought “That’s the kind of music – it’s not The Stooges, so what the fuck is it?” And it was The Cramps. I became obsessed by The Cramps and The Stooges again and The Velvet Underground again – but more ‘Sister Ray’ Velvet Underground than ‘Sunday Morning’ Velvet Underground. That was what had got me kicked out of the Cheap Nasties originally. And that was what The Scientists became known for. A lot of people don’t know about the original Scientists.

The original members of The Scientists stayed in contact over the years, occasionally playing in the same band. The Scientists would become known for the dirty, grungy sound typified by ‘We Had Love’, ‘Swampland’ and ‘Murderess in a Purple Dress’. For the past 10 years The Scientists – Salmon, Sujdovic, Tony Thewlis and Leanne Chock – have played the occasional national and international festival gig. The reformation of the original Beasts of Bourbon lineup for the Melbourne leg of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in February 2013 – and subsequent shows after that, and the Low Road lineup of the Beasts – provided the catalyst for a one-off reunion of the original Scientists lineup in Perth in late 2013.

Baker: I guess we just sat down and talked about it at the Beasts of Bourbon reunion – if they could do it, we could do it! I didn’t think it would happen because I didn’t think Kim would be into it.

Sujdovic: I’ve been friends with Roddy for all that time. But it’s never occurred to anyone that this lineup should get together. The ‘Swampland’ lineup has been playing on and off for the past four or five years, and that was The Scientists. We were playing all over the world playing festivals, and it never occurred to anyone that this lineup should get together until it was realised it was 35 years since we’d first played.

Salmon: Last year was the year for reformations! I think Boris got the idea when I was in the Beasts of Bourbon thing with James. So we thought maybe we should get Roddy and do the original Scientists. I’ve stayed in contact with Rod, he’s a nice bloke – they’re all nice blokes.

Radalj: It might have been Boris’s idea, or James’. We’ve still each other around – I’ve got up and played songs with The Painkillers in Perth.

Sujdovic: I don’t know how it came about. We did a radio interview in Perth for the 35th anniversary, and they asked why we hadn’t thought of it doing it before – it wasn’t like we thought it would never happen, it was just that we hadn’t thought of doing it. It only dawned on someone – James might’ve mentioned it to me that it was 35 years since we played originally. I might’ve said, “Why don’t we do a gig?” but it had never occurred to anyone before. But when we had a reason for doing it, and we couldn’t see any reason for not doing it, then we decided to do it. When you think about, 35 years is a fucking long time!

*The reunion show, at The Bakery in the inner-north Perth suburb of Northbridge, was a massive success. *

Baker: The gig we did in Perth was fantastic – the band was probably better than the band that played the party back in 1978. The songs still stand up.

Salmon: We did two days of rehearsing including the day of the night, which I don’t think you should do. But I enjoyed the gig. It was the most rocking of all the bands that I’ve been in, and that includes the dark and primitive Scientists and the Beasts of Bourbon. But it was probably the least musical, despite the melodies!

“We had three rehearsals but I could’ve played without rehearsing. The songs are just stuck inside your head.”

Sujdovic: I hadn’t really listened to the music a lot for while, but before we did the gig in Perth last year I had to learn it all again. It was good fun to play and learn. There were a couple of songs that I wasn’t happy about, but on the whole after 35 years I enjoyed playing the songs again. You can sit back and listen to a song, but when you have to learn it, and play it 15 or 20 times, that’s when you really know if you fucking hate a song or not! [Laughs] But it was also refreshing because they’re basically just ’70s punk songs – it’s great opportunity to play those songs, because it’s great fun.

Baker: We had three rehearsals but really I could’ve played the songs without rehearsing. The songs are just stuck inside your head.

Radalj: We worked really hard on it. They’re great songs – really well written, well crafted, great to play. It was funny that once we started to learn them, it all came back really quickly. We had quite a few rehearsals. By the time we got to the show we were right on the money. There were still a few rough edges, but none of us are perfectionists!

Sujdovic: How do you judge a gig? It was packed, and we played pretty good, and everyone seemed to like it. So I guess it was a good gig. I enjoyed it, but that doesn’t mean that it was a good gig! [Laughs]

The success of the Bakery show kindled the interest of East Coast promoters. Within a few weeks, shows in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne (and Perth) were being organised.

Salmon: The Perth show went so well. That night James suggested we might do some East Coast shows. So it just went from there, and it’s happening.

“Beasts of Bourbon can be a hard lot to get along with, but The Scientists was no drama.”

Baker: We all had such a good time, and it worked so well. The Beasts of Bourbon can be a hard lot to get along with sometimes, but The Scientists was no drama. We had a ball so we decided to take it to the East Coast.

Sujdovic: I half suspected that’d happen because even before we played the gig in Perth we were offered a gig in Brisbane. So it was in the back of my mind that it’d happen, but it wasn’t planned originally for that to happen. After the show in Perth we thought about the gig in Brisbane, so if you’re going to do that, you might as well do Sydney and Melbourne.

Radalj: It was supposed to be that one-off ‘cause it was the 35th anniversary, and then a few people started to get interested, and then it snowballed.

Baker: Of all the bands, I didn’t think that this band would get back together – I didn’t think I’d be part of any Scientists reunion. But even The Victims are getting back together – so weird things do happen.

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The Scientists’ 35th anniversary tour finishes this week; dates below. Tickets via Oxtix. Read the first half of the interview here.

Thurs, March 27 – Hi-Fi, Brisbane, QLD [w/Hits + Bad//Dreems]
Fri, March 28 – The Factory Theatre, Sydney, NSW [w/Bad//Dreems + Ruined Fortune]
Sat, March 29 – Howler, Melbourne, VIC [w/Bittersweet Kicks + Drunk Mums]
Sun, March 30 – The Gov, Adelaide, SA [w/The Pro Tools + Bad//Dreems]