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Music

Stream Early Recordings From 80s Australian Punks the Sunday Painters

The Wollongong bands unique sound is being recognised 20 years later with a reissue through What's Your Rupture records.

Wollongong in the late 70s was a rough and tough steel town. A bruising place with no shortage of pubs but not one independent record store.

But at Wollongong High School, Peter Raengel, a young fan of the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, and Television as well as Eno, Zappa and Beefheart, Swell Maps and the Pop Group, emerged with childhood friend and fellow guitarist Peter MacKinnon to form the Sunday Painters. They recruited a bassist (Kerrie Erwin—eventually replaced by Dennis Kennedy) and started to play around town.

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A long way from the inner city of Sydney or Melbourne, Wollongong’s post-punk scene was small, but self-reliant. Based around Raengel’s inventive and curious songwriting the Sunday Painters produced music that mixed art and politics and songs such as “Heart of a Siren“ and “I’m a Car Crash” were both punk and beautiful.

Their electro-punk cover of David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” received modest airplay on 2JJJ at the time, and jaunts to Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney (where they’d open for the Laughing Clowns) exposed them to a slightly wider audience but for the most part their LPs and tapes with hand made covers remained relatively obscure.

In recent years their early records fetch high prices on eBay and a newer though still small audience are drawn to the band's quirky songwriting and production that mixed DIY punk with weird electronic samples. They were a band that could marry the conventional with the experimental with one track sounding like a poppy Urinals with the snarl of X while others would throw in some industrial SPK like strangeness.

These sounds piqued the interest of Kevin Pederson from Brooklyn label What’s Your Rupture? and on an Australian visit a few years ago he travelled to Wollongong to talk to Peter MacKinnon about reissuing the album. The result is the vinyl retrospective In My Dreams, which collects the remastered first three EPs from 1979/’81 along with a bonus download of a live 1983 show at Melbourne’s Venetian Room.

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Peter Raengel passed away in 2008, Peter MacKinnon still lives in Wollongong and Dennis Kennedy is now based in Singapore where he answered questions about the band and the reissue.

Noisey: In an early interview Peter Raengel describes Sunday Painters as ‘demented pop’. Would you agree with this?
Dennis Kennedy: Demented in as much as we were a reflection of our environment; a steel town, low employment, hardship amongst our peers, families etc. It was Kill City basically. As pop, it was a great base/great place to be angry, distressed and excited. So yes, demented as the dictionary would paint us, seems to sum us up quite well.

How did other more traditional punk bands react to you?
Funnily enough we didn't really know many other traditional punk bands. I mean we weren't playing the local pubs each week and we were very (for want of a better word) closeted, practicing about once a week though. But when we played, often supporting others, we drew a range of reactions from sneers to rousing applause but we never had any concern about how others reacted to us, it was simply what we did. One of our faves was Canberra’s s *****, ***** (cough, cough) who appeared on the same Fast Forward cassette. We performed with them twice I believe, at St Peters Parish Hall and the Art Unit, we both had a great deal of respect for each other.

What were the old Gipps Street house parties in Wollongong like?
Well there were a few houses where parties seemed to be perpetual. "The Academy" on Corrimal St which mostly Uni students, mostly tripping, smoking and powder from at least '75 to '82. Gipp St was famous for great live gigs by Visitor, Mr. Touch & the Controlletti's, Sing Sing, A Family, The Pope's Electrocution, and many others. West St had the most bizarre times thanks to Fiona and Gaynor who were simply the most divine hosts and fans. The Dead Kennedy's almost played there one night in my honour after I got hit by a car, thanks guys! But it was The Plantroom, a community built restaurant on the main street of Wollongong that was our central "hub" as a community, everyone knew of it, frequented it and enjoyed it. it must have been made in the late 1940's it was gorgeous, it was truly a wonderful place, we played there a number of times with some of the aforementioned bands, even saw Crowded House there, although they were eating, not performing.

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You weren’t afraid to involve politics into your songs you and played benefit shows with names like Stop the Drop, Revolution Rock. Did the politics come from university?
Whilst there was a lot of involvement through Wollongong University, I doubt the politics stemmed from there. We were all pretty much "left of center" in those days and still are. Fraser's Kerr ousted Whitlam and then he and Howard fucked things up right royally for everyone. So given our location, Wollongong was the frontline. We were on the soundtrack for the Mary Callaghan film Greetings From Wollongong which picked up an award at Cannes and all our counter culture friends were involved in that in one way or another and dealing with all facets of Wollongong culture at that time.

One of the most interesting things about the band was it's changing sound from release to release.
When I first started Peter R's distortion "pedal" was an old Sony wood trimmed cassette deck. It was gloriously perverse. Our sound changed with the technology, Macca (Peter Mac) at one stage had a Gizmotron that was invented by 10CC's Godley and Crème. I was a guitarist first and foremost but started on bass after Kerrie quit, although soon enough we became a three piece, three guitar band with drum machine and backing tracks on tape and eventually just backing tracks and maybe a synth live on stage, the live portion was particularly suited, especially as we synced the drum machine to the strobe and our usual final number was “Rema Rema” by Rema Rema. so we would increase the speed as the song progressed up to blinding light!

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The live recording at the Venetian room is fantastic. What was that trip to Melbourne like?
The first trip was an insane. We arrived via bus and the roads everywhere were full of red sand and dust. It seemed like the winds had picked up the dry topsoil from the outback and literally dropped it on the city. So how fitting we named the tour “On the Beach” although we named it from Ava Gardner's comment about Melbourne being a great place to make a film about the end of the world during the filming of On The Beach. As for band interaction though we were either very insular by choice or segregated by bands that either didn't "get it" or were the donkeys following the rock n roll dollar carrot. We'd usually have a few cones, drop a few medislims (ephidrine) and drink a few bottles of stout to limber us up before a gig, some of them dollar chasers were real dicks, thankfully there were very few of them.

How did Peter’s death affect you personally and as a band?
At the time it was just intense loss. It hit Peter Mac much harder as they were school chums from the year dot. It has taken some time to understand life without Peter, particularly his cunning way with words. There is still room for the Painters longevity though, with other material in the offing such as practices, live tapes and reworkings after the next two releases are out later this year. Though as the "same" band, it's just not possible as Peter was the core. But my personal hope is to create collaborations and interpretations of our music and in particularly the lyrics, giving new life to all.

"In My Dreams" is available internationally through What's Your Rupture? and in Australia through RIP Society.