The Stickmen/Man Made Stars

Everything about ’90s-era Tasmanian punk band The Stickmen set them apart. With their only two albums newly reissued, it’s high time for PATRICK EMERY’s in-depth reappraisal of their catalogue.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The relationship between the mainland Australian states (and, prior to federation, the states’ colonial antecedents) has been variously rich, strained and productive. In the 1880s the promoters of a mainland Gilbert & Sullivan production took legal action in the Tasmanian Supreme Court to stop a local production from taking place. With the plaintiff’s owning the licensing rights for the production in ‘Australia’, the defendants chose an unusual (and unsuccessful) legal tactic, arguing that Tasmania was not part of ‘Australia’.

A Tasmanian resident, Andrew Inglis Clark was arguably one of the most significant players in bringing about the federation of the Australian colonies into the Commonwealth; the Queensland federalist, Samuel Griffith, allegedly composed the Australian Constitution on a boat trip back to the mainland from Tasmania, armed with a bottle of scotch (which may explain some of the more perplexing drafting in the document).

In the relatively short rock ’n’ roll historical reference frame – commencing sometime in the mid-1950s – Tasmania remains a footnote at best. Some years ago I came across a copy of a reissue of Mouth’s Victim Chant. I had heard of neither the album, nor the band previously; one cursory listen and it was clear that this was a band that could be ranked alongside the SST stable and New York no-wave scene, and probably come out on top. Later on, Sea Scouts became one of those bands that appeared regularly in band genealogies, and in reverential tributes from Melbournians and Taswegians alike.

“Infected with the sense of subcultural alienation common to almost any regional centre.”

And then there’s The Stickmen. The story of The Stickmen is recounted in Troy Colvin’s excellent piece from last decade. The liner notes to the band’s recently reissued albums – an eponymous debut album from 1998 and the 1999 follow-up, Man Made Stars – convey the band’s history, in pithy and possibly sanitised terms: an inaugural show supporting Magic Dirt in Hobart in 1995; noisy, provocative and occasionally spell-binding live shows; a local cult following that defied and denied the disinterest of local media.

The band’s debut album, reissued on Richie Ramone’s Homeless Records, opens in frenetic fashion with ‘7000’: a fast-paced drumbeat underpins puddles of psychedelic guitar noise. A short break and, just in case you missed it, the instrumental track is back, jumping about your aural consciousness with the attitude of a tough guy spoiling for a fight. ‘Without a Clue’ is the discipline of The Mark of Cain infected with the sense of subcultural alienation common to almost any regional centre. ‘Strangeworld’ starts out bleak; is there a way out of this malaise? A punk melody appears; a vague hint of Television in the midst of the dialectic battle between Richard Hell’s nihilism and Tom Verlaine’s poetic sensibility.

The import of ‘No’ wanders between sharp rebuke and defensive antagonism. In the mid-1990s, Rage Against the Machine purported to capture the zeitgeist of youthful distrust of authority; stripped of the middle-class pretension that permeates such outdoor-festival rhetoric, ‘No’ is the discourse of the marginalised, pushed up against the wall of a grotty public house and screaming for survival. The comparatively tranquil ‘Wired Wrong’ explores the age-old nature versus nurture debate: can the human brain be hard-wired into nonconformity? And does that explain why the same brutal sounds that render one person’s aural consciousness an assaulted mess can be a splendid sonic landscape to another punter?

And the dam breaks – again – and ‘Who Said’ explodes with the naked ferocity of a one-inch punch: there’s something going on here, and only the truly tough of mind and pure of punk spirit can withstand it. ‘Night’ wanders out into the nocturnal expanse and ponders social dislocation and emotional turmoil. ‘Creep Inside’ is an amphetamine-spike car ride into the countryside, the bright lights of mundane urban existence fading into the distance. The pace is relentless, a deranged Dead Kennedy rhythm attack punctuated with the occasional power chord left over from a Black Sabbath-meets-Nirvana jam session.

“If someone doesn’t make a loud noise, all is lost.”

‘On the March’ is declarative, but the mission is unknown: is this punk rock’s version of Martin Luther’s list of demands nailed to the door of the church? Or is it simply celebratory, in keeping with punk rock’s institutionalised reluctance to engage in a genuine discourse with the dominant culture? ‘Ashtray’ is so heavy it almost hurts; it’s the morning after the intensity of the night before, and nothing’s changed. Yet ‘Youthful’ suggests the fight’s still to be had; if someone doesn’t make a loud noise, then all is lost.

In that context, the 2008 retrospective Who Said It Should Be Good? is part confrontation, part resignation: in the background can be heard faintly a few pages of academic commentary on economic matters, a distant construction of the institutions and discourse that renders The Stickmen’s music so stark in comparison. A wail of guitar cuts through and the song tears down the veneer of so-called domestic satisfaction. Who said it should be good, anyway?

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] An element of that hypercritical aspect can be found in the title of The Stickmen’s second album, Man Made Stars; later on in the record, the title track will pursue the duality of observation and criticism – are the sights and excitement apparent in our local culture really there, or is it some externally imposed contrivance? The opening track, ‘Field’, has all the opening allure of a Sonic Youth album entrance: a deft melody that threatens to mutates into psychotic noise; like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s caustic observations of the Jazz Age, it’s beautiful and it’s damned.

‘Maps of Places’ is the eye into the soul of The Stickmen. The drumbeat is threatening; the vocals are emphatic, verging on deranged. The psychology is peripatetic and the atmosphere drenched with frustration and despair. ‘Paradise’ lightens the mood, and we’re back where the album started; the guitar interlocks with the rhythm track like the wave forms from a cathode ray oscilloscope. Eventually the pattern breaks and chaos returns, itself a pattern of infinite complexity.

“Buildings are destroyed, fires are smouldering and there’s ne’er a glimmer of hope to be seen.”

‘Shoot to Kill’ is the Saturday night on the streets track: SE Hinton on the streets of Hobart, pounding the pavement in search of something, anything, to temper the anomie of existence. Again, the mesmerising simplicity gives way to a sonic frenzy, and order of a distorted type reigns supreme. The instrumental ‘Mary Anne Beck’ could be the album’s love song: it’s eerie and haunting, The Gun Club on a midnight prowl through frontier punk blues country, confronting the ghosts that guard the unsealed highways of the regional frontier. Be afraid, if you know what’s good for you.

‘City is Dead’ is self-explanatory: as the drums skip into action, and the guitar dances in the proverbial shadow, you know something is going to happen, and it will probably hit you hard. And it does: flailing guitars, machine-gun drumming and a sense that the city is truly dead, at least in its soul. ‘Measure Your Limbs’ drops the pace down and it’s almost post-apocalyptic: the buildings are destroyed, fires are smouldering and there’s ne’er a glimmer of hope to be seen. But destruction is the genesis of rebirth, and The Stickmen haven’t finished yet. Twice the moment breaks with a cataclysmic scream, and the sky is luminescent with anger.

‘Wait for You’ is laden with emotion; the narrator stares off across the ocean, watching memories fading, unsure if there will be another embrace but forever hopeful. ‘Floating Pawn’ is the epic finale: for seven minutes the track builds from sparseness into intensity, an occasionally violent tussle with inner demons. There’s a sense of John Lydon’s youthful alienation – not just in the brief reference to failed ’60s dreams – and the trappings of modern existence are as attractive as insipid community is to Jean-Paul Sartre (who, famously, associated hell with other people – an observation that renders social media in its appropriate light).

The Stickmen is a band that could probably only have existed for a discrete period of time, and within a claustrophobic geographical and cultural space. That such time and space existed in Hobart in the 1990s is something that should be celebrated.

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‘The Stickmen’ and ‘Man Made Stars’ are out now on digital and limited vinyl through Homeless. The Stickmen play a rare show this Sunday (Feb 16) at The Corner from 7:30pm with Love of Diagrams and Summer Flake supporting; tickets here. For further reading, see Troy D Colvin’s Stickmen features from 2006 and 2012 and Andy Hazel’s review of ‘Who Said It Has to Be Good?’.