Take It Out On You

Geelong’s volatile punk band Bored! – which included past and future members of GOD and Powder Monkeys – see their 1990 mini-album reissued in all its ferocious power, writes TIM SCOTT.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Geelong 1989. Local garage rockers Bored! had released some impressive singles and a debut LP, Negative Waves, that channeled the sonic maelstrom of MC5, The Stooges and Coloured Balls and wrapped it all up like a flannelette shirt tied tightly around a waist.

Europe was on the horizon, with the band’s German label Glitterhouse offering a tour if they could provide an album. But first guitarist/vocalist Dave Thomas, guitarist John Nolan and drummer Justin ‘Buzz’ Munday needed to find a replacement for bassist Grant Gardner (father of Billy and Zane from Geelong bands Ausmuteants, The Living Eyes and Wet Blankets), whose interest in surfing at the time outweighed being in a band.

They did well. Stepping in was Tim Hemensley, whose band GOD had just broken up. Here was someone who Nolan mentions in Take It Out on You’s reissue liner notes was ‘dangerous’. Loud, opinionated, knowledgeable and supremely talented, Hemensly was to add extra thrust to the band’s already formidable sound.

You can hear it straight from the album’s opening track ‘Conquest’. A beast of a song. Backed by the twin guitars, Hemensley unleashes a guttural howl of “Working on a factory floor” that brings to mind the power of early Rose Tattoo (Hemensley guested on the band’s cover of the Tatt’s ‘Remedy’ on the first album) and The Dead Boys. It is simply one of the best Australian punk songs ever.

Originally released on Dave Laing’s Dogmeat label in 1990 and the only recording of the Hemensley-era lineup, Take It Out on You was a true mini-album – like others Dogmeat seemed to be releasing at the time. There are only four originals (two each from Hemensley and Thomas, in a kind of Grant Hart/Bob Mould relationship) plus Tim singing a cover of Sex Pistols’ ‘Satellite’ and Thomas jamming the 10-minute ‘Final Solution’, a song written by Rocket from the Tombs but this take coming from Cleveland proto-punks Pere Ubu’s version of the song.

“The feel of US hardcore and punk through a Geelong/Surf Coast filter of long hair, ripped jeans and scuffed-to-shit Converse All-Stars.”

But what it lacks in length, Take It Out on You makes up in pure and authoritative power. Thomas’s ‘Mr Ten Percent’, about a guy who was offering to manage the band at the time, has a guitar buzz and wah wah that seemed to flow in the Geelong water system of the time. Taking the feel of US hardcore and punk but kicking it through a Geelong/Surf Coast filter of long hair, ripped jeans and scuffed-to-shit Converse All-Stars. And plenty of volume.

The title track inexplicably ends abruptly – “Hemmo fucking with people’s heads,” explains Desperate Records’ Dave Lang, who reissued the album. Long unavailable, this 180-gram vinyl edition comes newly remastered by Mikey Young and features rare and never-before-published photos and liner notes by Dave Thomas and John Nolan.

The band made it to Europe. The tour was wild. They played one more show, returned home and then called it quits on this lineup. Some say that their debut Negative Waves was the best Bored! album. It’s real good, but to listen to songs like ‘Take It Out on You’, ‘Conquest’ and ‘Motherfuckin Motherfucker’ is to hear a ferocious power that I don’t think has yet been topped in Australian punk.

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Bored!’s ‘Take It Out on You’ reissue is out now through Desperate Records.