Kim Salmon And The Surrealists

With the imminent release of their first album in 12 years, Kim Salmon charts the Surrealists tempestuous journey with PATRICK EMERY.

In 1985, with The Scientists teetering on the edge of implosion in their adopted London residence, Kim Salmon was looking for a different artistic outlet. Taking inspiration from Tav Falco and Panther Burns, and utilising ideas that could be found sprinkled on The Scientists’ Human Jukebox album, Salmon began dipping his toe into the water for an artistic outlet away from The Scientists brand and style.

Back in Australia, Salmon enlisted the services of fellow Perth residents Brian Hooper (bass) and Tony Pola (drums) to round out the nascent Surrealists, recording the band’s debut album Hit Me With the Surreal Feel in 1988 for a measly $60. With the members living in different cities playing and recording was a sporadic affair, yet entirely consistent with Salmon’s intended modus operandi. After recording the second Surrealists album, Just Because You Can’t See It Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t There, Salmon, Hooper and Pola all found themselves living in Melbourne in the early 1990s.

Live, the Surrealists were a formidable proposition. Salmon and Hooper were often adorned in body-hugging polyester shirts; their wildly groomed hair sparkling with sweat, beer and other unidentified substances. After hints at greatness on 1991’s Essence, the Tony Cohen-produced Sin Factory (1993) became the apex of the band’s recording career. It was the catalyst for a rise in fortunes that ultimately led to a spot alongside Big Audio Dynamite on U2’s Zooropa tour.

Pola’s incarceration in the early 1990s saw him exit the band to be replaced by Greg Bainbridge. Never entirely comfortable with the recalibrated rhythm section, Hooper left shortly after to be replaced by Stu Thomas.

Finally, after releasing You Gotta Let Me Do My Own Thing in 1997, Salmon retired the Surrealists moniker. He spent the succeeding years juggling his solo activities with his eight-headed rock hydra SALMON, the alt-country outfit The Darling Downs (with Ron Peno) and the occasional Scientists reunion show and tour.

In 2006, Salmon was approached by the organisers of a festival in Spain to reform the original Surrealists. Unwilling to re-establish his artistic links with Hooper and Pola, Salmon decided to take up the offer with aid of Thomas and Phil Collings (who’d replaced Bainbridge in the dying days of the Surrealists).

The experiment worked. A few Melbourne gigs confirmed Salmon’s suspicion that the Surrealists still had something to say, and the seeds of a new album were sown. Next year will see the release of the first Surrealists album in 12 years, the auspiciously titled Grand Unifying Theory, out through Low Transit Industries in March.

The Making Of A Brand

When did you first conceive of the Surrealists?
It was 1985. Things were slowly imploding with the Scientists. I was in London and I had a few things on my mind anyway and I thought it would be a good idea to try and branch out into a solo career, I suppose. I’d put all this work into The Scientists and it was going to vanish. The Scientists were known as a band, rather than any individual, at that stage. I thought I’d get my name out there as a brand – the Salmon brand. I was thinking in the way that I thought I would make my name something so that at least if I did a lot of work I wouldn’t have to go back to scratch every time. These days people are suspicious of that sort of thing and practically every time you have a new record you have to have a new name for the project.

So the first show I did in that guise was me and a drum machine at a place called Cafe Des Artistes run by a guy called Gene October from the band Chelsea. Chelsea was a second wave punk rock band like Generation X or Slaughter and the Dogs. I played there, and it was a complete disaster, because I had a Doctor Rhythm [drum machine] and I panicked trying to play in time with it. I got a friend to bootleg me and I went about recording over the top of it using this really bad recording as the basis of it. The recording’s around somewhere, but I’ve never done anything with it. It’s got a Silver Apples tune on it (‘A Pox on You’), ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ (I did a kind of a Suicide/Alan Vega version of that song), and I think I did ‘Feel’ and ‘Blue Velvet’. I had a lot of those songs in my repertoire. I was very interested in that – I hate to use the word – “deconstructing” songs…

For the second gig I got a drummer called Nick Coombs, who was the drummer on Human Jukebox. We did stuff like ‘Sundown’, ‘Blue Velvet’, ‘J’Taime’, ‘Devil in Disguise’ – mostly covers – and a few originals like ‘Feel’ and ‘Shine’. It wasn’t that dissimilar to the sound of Human Jukebox. A lot of the ideas on Human Jukebox were ideas I brought with me to that session.

After you came back to Australia you did a final tour with The Scientists before you picked up the Surrealists moniker again. Was it a seamless transition from The Scientists to the Surrealists?
Not in terms of the band. I had the same material, the same ideas and I was trying to do the same thing. It was really only that Brian Hooper happened to like the name that I had used. So when we were looking for something to call it, it was always going to have my name at the top and “something”. He thought that [Surrealists] was a good one so we used it.

Is it true that the first Surrealists album, Hit Me With the Surreal Feel, was recorded for a few hundred dollars?
It was $60! That was to record it; I didn’t really mix it. It was recorded on a four-track. The $60 was the cost of two rehearsals. I borrowed the tape. It could’ve been for nothing!

And you recorded it quickly because Brian and Tony were both about to leave Perth?
They both wanted to move to Sydney – it was the end of the band, basically. We’d done some shows around Perth in 1988 and that was sort of it, basically. So I thought we might as well record something. In true fashion, I managed to come up with a few songs before the session: ‘Bad Birth’ and ‘Surreal Feel’.

Essence seems to have more of an electronic aspect to it with songs like ‘Lightning Scary’, ‘A Pox On You’ and ‘Zero Blank’. What was influencing you then?
The same things as always, I suppose.

Were you still writing songs and giving them to Brian and Tony just before entering the recording session?
No, by that stage it was a real crack unit, as we liked to call it. We’d developed a real chemistry; it was there on Hit Me With the Surreal Feel. Once we started playing those songs we thought, “Oh wow, we’re awesome”, though not everyone agreed at the time! By the time we got to Sin Factory we’d managed to convince a few more people, and with the help of Tony Cohen’s production we managed to convince a few more people.

Is ‘I’m Keeping You Alive’ based on the story of Caligula?
That was part of it. It was a few things that I cobbled together. I’d read that book, John Fowler’s The Collector. He was keeping that woman alive. He controlled everything, everything was because he said so. I had that idea because I’d just read that book. And I had those spooky, heavy metal chords that somehow don’t come across on the recording. I think the sound is a bit light-on to be honest. It’s nicely enough recorded but when you compare it with the album before it, and Hit Me With the Surreal Feel, it’s a bit airy-fairy.

It’s not as dirty.
It’s not as dirty as Hit Me With the Surreal Feel and not as ballsy as Just Because You Can’t See It. Guitars sound brittle and empty and my voice sounds high like Johnny Young not deep and throaty like the white blues singer some people think I am, like Johnny Winter, straining away [laughs].

What’s the story behind ‘26 Good Words’, which is attributed to you and Tex?
Tex’s contribution to that song was to suggest that I put cheering in it! I was very generous giving credit for it, but Tex never asked for any credit for it. I played it in a van during a Beasts tour and he said I should have cheering at the end of each word. So that’s why his name is on it.

The Polydor Years

The next Surrealists album, Sin Factory is arguably your most popular record.
You wouldn’t have much of an argument. I think it sold 6000 copies. The best anything else that’s sold has been a couple of thousand copies.

Sin Factory has much more of a rock feel to it than the previous records, which seems partly the consequence of Tony Cohen’s production.
The previous three records were the product of us getting together and making a record at a particular time. They were very spontaneous affairs. We didn’t go in there with complete ideas – it wasn’t all worked out. It was a bit experimental and we didn’t know what was going to happen. I’d go in with lots of ideas but didn’t know how things would happen, and I’d use the recording process as a way of turning them into something. I really liked that, to be honest.

“We don’t need to hear about everyone’s mundane lives. People should try and create things based on ideas that are a bit more challenging than the dramas of their everyday existence.”

After Brian and Tony headed over to the eastern states we’d periodically get back together when I was over the side of the country, usually when I was playing with the Beasts of Bourbon. Just Because You Can’t See It… was the result of us doing shows to support Hit Me With the Surreal Feel and John Foy from Black Eye realising just what an entity we’d become and sending us into the studio with enough money to do a weekend’s worth of recording with whatever we had – a few songs, a few covers. ‘Melt’ was a bass riff that Hooper had – it’s a good riff, a really great groove, in fact – and I thought it was potentially a really good song. That’s how those records happened. Sin Factory wasn’t like those opportunistic events. Sin Factory was when we all lived in Melbourne, and we’d be playing around doing lots of shows. I think we’d done a tour supporting Henry Rollins by that stage. We’d supported Meat Puppets and loads of other bands. We supported just about every international act that came by: Bob Mould, Panther Burns.

In actual fact, for Sin Factory we went into the studio with hardly any songs but because the playing was so much tighter, we had a producer and we had four good songs, it just goes to show. If you look at the first two records we probably had stronger songs. If you look at the set I play now, it’s probably four songs off Sin Factory and a whole lot more off everywhere else.

I’ve always wondered whether there was a narrative continuity between the first four songs – ‘I Fell’, ‘Gravity’, ‘Feel’ and ‘Desensitised’ – on Sin Factory.
Maybe, but it’s certainly not intended. I think back to the Surrealists in those days and I think the songwriting was all over the place.

After Tony Pola left to be replaced by Greg Bainbridge, do you think Greg and Brian ever gelled as a rhythm section?
Maybe sometimes, but not most of the time. It was like when Bill Ward couldn’t deal with it when Ozzy Osbourne left and was replaced by Ronnie James Dio! In some ways it was a really good band because it was stable to replicate what was there before. But maybe people weren’t convinced, and I wasn’t completely convinced and Brian wasn’t convinced. I think Brian eventually left because he really never adapted to the change. Who knows? He left anyway, and when we got Stu Thomas it all started happening again.

I’ve read that you weren’t entirely happy with the self-titled album you released in 1995. Is that still the case?
I think there are probably more good songs on it than Sin Factory. But it’s starting to get into an area that I’m not really comfortable with because I was very conscious of the fact that it’d been very hard to come up with the songs on Sin Factory. It seemed like things were starting to happen for the band. The sort of songs that I was writing were because I was desperate to write stuff. I think that desperation shows on it. I was drawing things in from my real life – it was becoming a bit close to the diary entry thing. It’s kind of boring, and it’s not really what making art is all about. We don’t need to hear about everyone’s mundane lives. People should try and create things based on ideas that are a bit more challenging than the dramas of their everyday existence.

What was it like supporting U2 on their Zooropa tour around that time?
I remember that I didn’t have my Telecaster. I had a ’70s white Strat, which got thankfully stolen from me [laughs]. So I was playing the wrong guitar, and with that strange line-up it was never going to gel in that big way. Things weren’t fitting, that’s what I think. Any other band that would’ve toured with that band [U2] – whether they were gelling or not – would’ve managed to use that platform to go onto greater heights. But that wasn’t going to happen for us. I think there were some forces working against us, to be honest. I think the fact that we were on the same label as the Beasts of Bourbon really worked against us. Had I had my time over again I would have maybe cut it off at the Axeman’s Jazz, and not done any more time with that band, or maybe just done the first three albums.

Just being on Polydor, they just made all these decisions that just worked against us. It was quite clear they didn’t really want us. As an example, The New York Dolls were offered a deal with the same label as Alice Cooper was on. [David] Johannsen turned it down, because he said they just wanted them on the label so they wouldn’t pose any threat to Alice Cooper. The Surrealists were a pretty mighty band live. I can remember touring with Iggy Pop, and someone from Iggy’s band saying at dinner, “You guys were awesome!” and Tex saying, “Yeah, we know they’re fuckin’ awesome!” [Laughs]

There was a quotation affixed to the cover of your self-titled album describing the band as creating “ugly hateful music for ugly hateful people”. What did you think of that description?
That was a review – it was David Messer. I remember it because you don’t get reviews like that very often, with one star. I thought at least it wasn’t a three star review, or a two star review – it wasn’t saying, “This is a competent album, while not as good as the predecessor album.” It was a total pasting. I felt uncomfortable with the out-and-out attacking nature of it, but I didn’t think, “Oh, no.” I’d been in the game long enough to deal with that sort of criticism.

The next Surrealists album, You Gotta Let Me Do My Own Thing, seemed to have a completely different thing from the band’s original sound, and a completely different band. In hindsight was that really a Surrealists record?
Yeah, absolutely. Just in the way we went about it. You couldn’t get more of a Surrealists album. I’ve spent the last 10 years hanging shit on it for being all over the place, but what I’ve realised is that’s our indie rock statement – everything about it is indie rock, whereas our early albums weren’t really like that. When I say indie, I mean like it is now. It was a record where we thought, “Screw the record companies, we don’t need them. Screw the engineers, we don’t need them. Screw this and that.” [Laughs]

It was very much a record about the way we put it together. It’s got the feeling of something that was recorded at someone’s house, which is a nice thing to have. It was done very ad hoc, but we didn’t let that stop us from throwing every idea at it that came our way into the equation. Stu was a big part of that – they’re mostly my ideas, but he had the musical ability that allowed him to score parts, with the occasional liberty.

Why did you decide to drop the Surrealists moniker in favour of The Business for your next record?
It was turning into something different. The songs were becoming really crafted. They seemed more like pop songs, like “surreal” songs. It just didn’t seem right. Having fluked a bit of airplay with triple j with [side project] Antenna I thought we might be able to follow-up on that, and losing the Surrealists moniker might help with that.

Resurrection

So why did you decide to resurrect the Surrealists?
I wasn’t really interested in it … Someone at a Spanish festival offered me some money for the Surrealists and I thought, “What do they mean by that?” I wasn’t going to get back with Brian and Tony, for various reasons. I wasn’t prepared to re-visit that particular time. There are jobs that you’ve had, relationships that you’ve had and you don’t need to go back to them. Some things give you really bad vibes, and can be really bad for your health. If certain things were just going to bring back baggage full of cans of worms, then you don’t have to go back to it. I’d have to be offered enough money to pay off my house, and even then I’d be questioning it because I’d have a rank time.

There’s a whole bunch of things that stand in the way. It’s not even necessarily the individual people, it’s the whole package. I’ve gone back to various things and regretted it so many times. There are some things I can go back to, and some things I can’t.

Having decided to play the Spanish festival with Stu Thomas and Phil Collings, why did you decide to keep going with the resuscitated Surrealists?
When I got it together and heard those guys playing that material, to my ears it resurrected what we’d had. It was back, and it was better than ever. I really felt passionate about it. I was getting the idea for new material – to take all the ideas that were hinted at in the past and push them to the limit, and record an album in very much in the same way and spirit we originally did. People are doubtful until they actually witness it, and then generally they’re converted.

Is the record still coming out on Bang! in Europe?
Yes, it’s coming out on vinyl on Bang!.

How did you come to release the record on Low Transit Industries?
I wanted to have a label locally that could do a certain amount of promo and put some energy into it, which is what would happen with Bang! here. It’d get a certain amount of promo in a Basque country, but here it’s really a non-entity. So I put the feelers out and my gut reaction was to go with Low Transit.

How would you describe the album in artistic terms – does it return to where the Surrealists started?
It’s not really going back, it’s continuing. We do things that I’ve never done before and that I’ve always wanted to do. Things that are implied on Human Jukebox and on songs like ‘Revhead’, and on Hit Me With the Surreal Feel, the more out-there things on that album … I got Mike Stranges [Ripe] to produce it, because I really think he’s got the makings of a producer … I set about writing material over 2008 and showing ideas to the band so they would know what was expected. But I didn’t formulate it completely so they basically had the map, but not complete songs. Mike recorded it over three or four days, and it’s completely live. Mike also made suggestions while we were playing. He’d say, “Why don’t you make this song twice as long?”, or, “That ending you’re doing is really great. Why don’t you extend it?” So that’s what we’ve done. There’s an instrumental piece that was 12 minutes long which is now 24 minutes long because we just kept on ending it. It’s like a space voyage…

With this new album there’s the 24-minute piece – and some people won’t be able to deal with that, so it’s got the songs as well. We pieced it all together and then assembled it as a proper album. I wanted to have it titled Grand Unifying Theory Parts 1 and 2, a nice pretentious title [laughs] … For me this particular album has more in common with Can than MC5, though there’s a couple of songs that people will associate with the MC5.

Finally, what do you say to people who always ask if Brian and Tony will be playing with you in the Surrealists again?
People are doing that less and less. I don’t like people trying to box me into something in the past. Get over it – I’m doing something new. Open your ears up a bit and you’ll realise what’s going on now is pretty good. You’ll be finding eventually that this is the record you’ll be comparing stuff to.

+

Kim Salmon and The Surrealists will perform alongside Warped, Legends of Motorsport and No Through Road at the Low Transit Industries Christmas Show at The Corner Hotel on December 23. More information here.