Palimpsest

Essendon Airport’s only full-length release finally gets the reissue treatment. Words by HANNAH BROOKS.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Take the plastic overlay off the cover of Palimpsest and you’re left with curtains parted on an empty stage and a few heads in a front row looking at a blue nothingness. It’s a cute cover, faithfully replicated from the original 1982 screen-printed vinyl pressing of the album, but beyond that it illustrates how I felt about the history of Australian music for a long time: that something was missing.

Like many people around my age, I was introduced to Essendon Airport via Chapter Music’s 2001 Can’t Stop It: Australian Post-Punk 1978–1982 compilation. At the time it was a revelation: here were the Australian bands I had been looking for. Bands whose sounds and attitudes were stitched together by bits of sand and vegemite and strung out to dry as some kind of offering on a skeletal hills hoist. Of course there were the better known acts - The Birthday Party, Go Betweens, The Saints - but discovering bands such as Essendon Airport was like being introduced to a whole new side of the family: a bevy of weird aunts and uncles that would let me sip their beer and pinch their cigarettes without telling my parents. These previously undocumented groups made this big, open country feel a little less lonely.

Essendon Airport were active during the years 1978 to 1983. Beginning as a Melbourne duo of David Chesworth and Robert Goodge, their first sounds were sparse guitar/keyboard/drum machine explorations, recorded on the fantastic Sonic Investigations Of the Trivial EP, also reissued by Chapter in 2002. It’s been said of Australia’s post-punk era, again by Chapter, that it was “perhaps the first time that Australian musicians felt confident enough to ignore overseas trends and create their own musical identities”. Essendon Airport’s small but significant recorded output is testament to that. Instead of looking over their shoulders, Chesworth and Goodge looked at themselves and their surrounds, naming their band after Melbourne’s second airport near the suburb of Niddrie, where they grew up.

“Instead of looking over their shoulders, Chesworth and Goodge looked at themselves and their surrounds.”

By the time they recorded Palimpsest, their one and only full-length album, Essendon Airport had grown fatter in sound and numbers. Drummer Paul Fletcher was added to the mix, followed by saxophonist Ian Cox and something close to funk became their destination. Recorded in 1981 at Latrobe University for free – Chesworth, a tutor, had a key to the eight-track studio – Palimpsest is an album of 14 warped and hypnotic tracks. Beginning with the burping synth of ‘Correct Pitch?’ and its sardonic spoken word “cliche one”, “cliche two” vocals, the album moves into Arabian Nights sax on second track ‘No Quarter’ and from there goes everywhere. For a progressive post-punk album it’s incredibly well balanced: it’s funky and fun yet bizarre enough to make listening an adventure and also smart yet cheeky. Any time Palimpsest gets close to lifting its brows too high, something playfully inane brings it right back down to street level.

And then there’s disc two. For this 30th-anniversary reissue, Chapter has included a whole disc’s worth of bonus live and unreleased studio recordings, divided into sections showcasing Essendon Airport at its different stages – as a duo, quartet and finally as a robust quintet with the addition of bassist Barbara Hogarth in 1982. These 18 tracks document a band moving through its evolutionary ebbs and flows, culminating with five songs from their final performance, recorded as a RRR live to air, before the band broke up in 1983.

Breaking up is one of the things that bands do best and, while it’s tempting to lament and wonder what could have done if they’d stuck together rather than half the band shacking up with Kate Ceberano, we thankfully have Palimpsest, and a history that doesn’t look or feel so empty anymore.

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‘Palimpsest’ is out now through Chapter Music.