Those things sound good too. For a very young band that you were at that stage they don’t sound like you were being dragged along in the wrong direction; it just sounds like you sounded.

Exactly. Not a particularly polished sound but almost a funky sound.

The other songs that are on the lost album are two track recordings in your bedroom or something. Did you have a friend that brought a deck over or something like that?

Yeah, exactly. It was a little mixer on cassette and he had microphones. He was a friend who had been in a studio and it was really, “Wham-bam” you were on the mat. This was done in my bedroom where we used to practice and write all of the songs. It was like having a friend come over and just go, “Hey, I’m gonna tape. Just set up, I’m gonna tape your whole set.” Which was really good, for a songwriter like myself, to hear back all of the songs I’d written. I just got to that one step removed that was really nice and I’ve always liked that way of recording. Just sort of playing live.

I’ve heard there were some other bootlegs or something ofeven more early stuff that was unreleased.

There’s a bootleg record as well, that our record label put out and that was put out extensively in the states and it was quite embarrassing because it was like our first album, which is not particularly strong anyway and we were so hungry, this is fast-forwarding to 1980 or 1981 but we were doing demos for our album and we recorded the album in July and we threw a number of songs we didn’t put on the album and so he sort of had this other recording in a way. It was all just done in one day. It was done in a different studio in Brisbane. More of a demo studio.

Not very professional? After that, you worked with Tony Cohen in Australia.

He did Send Me a Lullaby, our first album. When I went back to Brisbane to do the album back in Sunshine Studios in ‘92, Tony did that too. So I went back to my first day at the studio and I went back to my first ever producer.

How did you hook up with Tony?

He did those early ‘80s Missing Link records. Tony was doing everybody. Tony did the Birthday Party, and the Birthday Party were on this label too, and so Tony was the only guy seemingly under the age of 30 in Australia who was adventurous in the recording studio and was sympathetic. He was very good also. So Tony made a lot of records and recorded the Birthday Party and we had heard what Tony had done with them so we were happy to work with Tony.

You were songwriters and that’s where the focus of the band. Through the 80s, one of the most horrible recording eras that I can think of, you managed to maintain a pretty good natural sound. You kept things down-to-earth sounding, like a real record, not using big huge gated drums or terrible things that were popular at the moment. And to that end, it’s only a handful of producers, like John Brand and Richard Preston that you used quite a bit. How did you hook up with them in the first place?

Very good point you’ve made which not many people realize, and I appreciate you making that observation.

The records hold up now.

Yeah, because it’s true! And everything you’ve said about the 80s... don’t forget we were in London which was where some of the most hideous crimes that were ever committed to recording. We could have easily turned into the Thompson Twins. But John Brand... we were in London in 1982, signed to Rough Trade records, who were a great label at the time, and they picked us up after the first album, after working with Tony Cohen engineering. And we came up to London. This was gonna be our big album and we were not happy with our first album, we didn’t particularly like it. But somehow we got a deal out of it. So we were very much, “We’ve got to make a great second album”. And we really wanted to. John had worked with a lot of Virgin records, in the late ‘80s, had done a lot of engineering on, I can’t remember the groups, but it was a time of the Simple Minds, XTC, that whole sort of Virgin records in the late 70s, when they were a big label. And John had got tired of that and wanted to produce and he made a quite astounding jump. He just went to the biggest indie and the most well-known indie in town, Rough Trade and said, “Hey, I’m a commercial engineer...”. He used to work at the Manor, where all the stuff was done up in Oxford in a huge big studio. And he was just working with all the budgets that were fifty thousand pounds, a hundred thousand pounds and he said to Rough Trade, “You know, I’m commercial, I’ve worked with Virgin, I’ve worked in big studios, I wanna produce, I’d like to work with some bands and with you.” and they played him some stuff and the first album that he did was an Aztec Camera album. And we were friends with Roddy [Frame of Aztec Camera] and everything and then they said, “Well, the Go-Betweens are gonna make a record, do you want to do them too?” And he came to one of our practice sessions, liked what he heard and so John did us too [Before Hollywood]. He had this deal where we went down to this place called ICC, down in Eastbourne, which is a Christian studio and in a way it was a little bit like Sunshine... a funky one-room, not too big control room, I can’t remember what desk, good mic collection and really cheap, like two thousand quid a week, like four thousand dollars a week. We did the album there and he was great. He was the first person, ever, who worked, when we were rehearsing, walked into our rehearsal room and taped us, and then came back the next day and had the whole songs written out.