Even today I know guys who’ve been playing instruments for years who’ve never written one song. I guess it came naturally to me. Sure my first songs were pretty corny and unoriginal, but I had the audacity to impose my own ideas on four minutes of silence.

MY DARLING DAD had left me some money and I bought a brand new townhouse in the Canberra suburb of Rivett. Michele picked out all the carpets and colours and tiles and accessories. It was actually a lovely home though I never felt at home there. It was split-level, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a lovely courtyard garden. We had bright red carpet and stark pure white walls (not the slightly off-white the painter recommended) and black velvet furniture.

Michele was working in a bank and I was doing the public service thing – a complete fucking waste of my time and theirs. A bunch of boring empire-building guys in bad suits being little cogs in some great stupid machine. Fortunately for me there were a bunch of misfits there so I had company. I thought the public service was the most boring, pointless, phoney malarkey ever. And I was a thorn in their sides. They moved me around all over the place but everywhere I went I was a nuisance and I never did any work. I played cards, drove around in a government car, drank coffees at Gus’ cafe down the road (Canberra’s first sidewalk cafe) and snuck off to Impact Records where I was mates with the owners and got first pick of all the imported vinyl coming in.

You see Australians were slow to release overseas records, and many obscure and arty records were never released here at all. All my records were imports. They were better quality, better vinyl, had better covers with fold-out sleeves and included lyrics, which the Australian versions didn’t always have. I sought out records after having seen them reviewed or mentioned in the imported English and American papers and mags, like CREEM, NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Rock Scene. When I read about someone that sounded like my cup of tea, I would get down to the record store and order it in. So I’d be sitting at work and the guys at Impact would give me a call and I’d be down there like a shot to grab the stuff I wanted. As they opened their big box of records I would be diving in grabbing stuff that I wanted.

One day, not too long after I moved into the townhouse, I saw an ad for one of the first domestic four-track tape recorders ever released onto the Australian market – the TEAC 2240S, I think it was called. I arranged a loan with the bank for about $1500 and ordered one from a hi-fi store in Phillip just near where I lived. I can still remember getting the call that it’d come in. I remember the weather, and the shop, and going in there and picking up this wonderful machine. I also bought the little Model 2 TEAC mixing desk to go with it.

Over the next few weeks I figured the whole thing out. I stuck it in one of the spare bedrooms with the rest of my instruments and equipment: I had an Ibanez Les Paul bass, black with bright red strings; a gold Emperador Les Paul guitar I’d bought off Dave Scotland when I became the rhythm guitarist in Baby Grande; a cheap Aria 12-string guitar; a Roland drum machine, the second earliest one; a Roland ‘domestic’ synthesiser, which my dad had bought me to muck around with but I hadn’t liked; and a couple of pedals, fuzz and flange – but they were noisy primitive things and greedy battery suckers. I also had a Shure microphone I’d salvaged from Baby Grande and a mike stand and a few leads and cables. I was set to go. This new machine would enable me to overdub. It would allow me to jam with myself as I listened to the tracks I’d just laid down. I could record on track one and then play along to it on tracks two and three and then ‘bounce’ them all onto track four and start all over again. Sure there was loads of tape hiss and stuff but I could overdub with myself. I was in business!

This is where I really learnt how to write songs and where I began to turn into myself for the first time ever. For a long time before this I’d been writing the lyrics first and then trying to fit the music against them, which always felt like an arse-about way of doing things. So I started doing it the other way around. I’d write or create music and then I’d set the words to that after it became apparent to me what the music was suggesting. I virtually retired upstairs to that little spare room and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.

Since Baby Grande had broken up I had no social life. I’d drop Michele off at work in the morning, then I’d go into my job, and at night I’d come home and just head straight into the music making. I must’ve written hundreds of songs in that room. It was my obsession and it was my one joy … other than collecting records from Impact Records.

What was I listening to in 1977–78? David Bowie, of course, always David Bowie. I was also digging a very obscure band called Metro whose single ‘Criminal World’ was covered by Bowie on Let’s Dance. I was listening to Patti and Television and all the good, bad and stupid new wave and punk records. I was listening to Steve Harley and the Doctors of Madness and Be Bop Deluxe. I was listening to Eno and taking note of everything he did. I was listening to Dylan and the Stones and The Who. And Big Star and the Raspberries. And anything experimental, weird or foreign.

Michele wasn’t really into any of this. She came home and made dinner and when I played her some music she stood in the doorway in case something came on TV that she didn’t want to miss. ‘Oh, that’s nice Dear,’ she’d say or something. I must admit I’d hoped she’d be a bit more interested in what I was doing but it didn’t really matter – I was obsessed and carried on regardless. At least my brother Russell was interested in listening to what I came up with. By then Russell was fifteen and growing into a real cool cat.

After a while, as I paid more attention to things, I started to get somewhere at last. My method was to put the drum machine on and jam with that even if it was something simple. I’d start on bass or a 12-string or synth (which was a monophonic; it could only play one note at a time) or electric guitar. It didn’t matter how I started, I always finished up with some good result. And from this I learnt to persevere with music and not give up on something immediately.

Of the hundreds of songs I recorded, only a fragment remain. Every song was ‘mastered’ onto a cassette and the cassettes broke and accumulated mould and they warped and all that. You can hear some of them on various bootlegs and on my own Addendaone. I had no reverb but I got a slap-back echo by putting the machine out of synch with itself. I learnt how to double track my voice and all about octave harmonies. I learnt about the pointillist method of making music – just one small thing at a time … and making use of every available minute in that spare room.

Eventually I wrote a song called ‘Chrome Injury’, which bears some resemblance to the ‘Chrome Injury’ on The Church’s first album. Even Michele came by my room and said, ‘That’s good!’ So I was making all this groovy music and I was convinced only the English press would like me and understand how tricky I was and lo, I decided I had to go to England. So I got three months off work with no pay (the bastards!) and me and Michele went off to England. We got married first, and when we arrived in London I thought this was truly where I wanted to be. I was thinking, why did my parents move me away from here? I immediately had my old childhood cockney accent back overnight (once again, check Addendaone for confirmation of said accent at age five!), and I lapped up the fashion and haircuts and the incredible feeling of being where the action was.

Michele and I stayed in London for a few weeks in some low-rent Australia Club place but I didn’t want to hang around with Aussies. We hired a tiny gutless Renault and drove around Britain all the way up to Scotland, which was forlorn and bleak in some parts and filled me with some gloomy thoughts. We drove through Wales and Devon and Cornwall and went to all the big cities and saw castles and cathedrals and all that sort of thing. Michele was a good companion, cheerful with a good sense of humour. She was looking at the fashion and thinking about doing it back in Australia. We had a good time mostly, but sometimes I was sad to note that two could feel more lonely than one.

Eventually we rented a horrible bedsit in a run-down big old house in some crumbling bit of Kensington; I’ve forgotten the name of the street now. It was a dark, damp, dank, squalid, unappealing hole that cost a small fortune. Every night this woman would vacuum upstairs at 3am and it sounded like a construction site. She’d wash up and argue with her husband in screeching Spanish while he cursed and bullied her, all in the wee small hours. His name was Tony del Toro, and when we complained he said ‘I am the bull!’

In London we went to see gigs and we saw some great ones: Japan at the Music Machine were brilliant. I learnt something that night listening to ‘Obscure Alternatives’, something about the chords all changing around the bass. They had some truly transcendent moments. We went to the Marquee Club and saw an amazingly good band called Dead Fingers Talk (a William Burroughs title). The lead guy Bobo Phoenix was a real star in a Lou Reed kind of way. I already had their album Storm the Reality Studios, produced by former Spider from Mars Mick Ronson.

Bobo was a great performer too and even dressed up for a song I think was called ‘Harry’ – strange it never got released because it was the band’s most popular tune. We also saw Brian James from The Damned in a band called Tanz der Youth. We saw Cabaret Voltaire and the Doctors of Madness’s last ever gig, again at the Music Machine. They had a great tape too of Kid Strange introducing them – that really impressed me. TV Smith from the Adverts came out and sung some numbers. Boy it was exciting! The Doctors blew me away, and left me elevated like Japan had. I focused on what it was that I liked about their music and what methods they used to achieve that effect on me.

I was really beginning to turn into a little song-computing machine. Going over and over songs in my mind, picking them apart aspect by aspect, I began to see the mechanics of songs: strengths, weaknesses and sometimes the paradox of the weakness transmuted to strength. I listened in on the inner workings, the small sounds of tambourines and whispers. I took apart all the things that held it together, and I marvelled at the way small things could mean so much in music – like a little violin or a distant guitar or some hazy voices drifting over a lazy song.

One night we went to see a band called The Only Ones at some big gig in London. The place was packed to the rafters. I really loved The Only Ones’ first two records and their indie single with Vengeance Records called ‘Lovers of Today’. We grabbed a table and sat down early. A couple in their 70s asked if they could sit with us. The man was English with a really nice posh accent and the woman was Austrian or something. It turned out they were the parents of the lead singer and songwriter, Peter Perrett. We became very chatty with them and they told us all about Peter. After the gig they drove us back to our flat in their white Jaguar, or maybe it was a Daimler. They even gave us their phone number and I had visions of me and PP meeting up and writing songs together and stuff. I held on to the phone number for a month but was too nervous to call and try to set up a meeting. Eventually Michele rang ’em up, but we’d left it too long and the conversation fizzled out and we didn’t get invited around to PP’s parents’ house where he still lived apparently. The Only Ones were extremely disappointing live; I was far more interested in chatting to the old mum and dad. But we got some great Only Ones merch with the rose and the barbed-wire T-shirts!

While I was in London I bought a book that contained the names and addresses of every record company in England. So I had brought like 50 cassettes of songs with me and I sent them all out. And they all came back with the usual letter: ‘Sorry we do not feel this type of music suits our roster but thank you for sending it.’ Not one encouraging word from one person! My illusion of the English accepting me was well and truly shattered. I was a no one in London, hanging around in a pigsty bedsit in Kensington, trying to get involved in something, anything. London was a great big uncaring, dirty, tatty place with a few glamorous bits and a load of sordid rotten ugly bits. It was laughably expensive and I couldn’t find a way in. I had a nice house back in Australia and winter was coming on. The bedsit was shabby and threadbare and worse than all that it was cold. Even as you were having a bath or shower in the communal bathroom you had to feed the meter with ten-pence pieces! It was truly bullshit.

So we flew back to Canberra where we tried to big-note ourselves with all our London punk fashion. But still no one was interested! We marched around Garema Place in our zip-up shirts and snakeskin print Mod-Z Art pants, tottering about on our brothel creepers, me with dyed jet-black hair – which looked stupid and all fell out leaving me fearing I’d gone prematurely bald. But no one looked let alone understood what we were supposed to be.

I joined a band in Canberra called Tactics for five minutes until they kicked me back out. They were an awful racket with a guy called Dave with a squeaky voice who was trying to sing like Neil Young, but it was truly fingernails on the blackboard stuff. I was a total jumped-up turkey and Dave was a hopelessly untalented singer and writer with big pretensions to something … but what that was eluded me entirely. After they kicked me out Tactics moved to Sydney where they achieved some notoriety and even got played on the radio a bit. As soon as I got slightly famous Dave of the screechy voice was all over everything saying how he’d kicked me out of his hipper-than-thou band. He must’ve been fucking writhing in paroxysms of envy! It warmed the very cockles of my heart.

Stuck in Canberra, in the public service and with zero admirers of my music, I was in a really bad place. But there was a faint light up ahead. Michele had been thinking about clothes and fashion and printing and stuff. So she bought a sewing machine and I bought some silk-screening things and we set off to do our own line of clothes. Everyone said it couldn’t be done, but while I mucked around in my studio getting it together Michele mucked around on her sewing machine. And we figured out simple silk-screening together. We made about a hundred T-shirts printed with all the hip punk stuff we’d seen or bought in London – like Andy Warhol’s Marilyn prints, pictures of Keith with ‘junkie’ written in lurid green paint, album covers and stuff like that. We went to a big market stall in Canberra and sold a big fat nothing! No one even looked at our hip punk T-shirts. No one! It was as if we were invisible. What the fuck were we supposed to do? London had rejected us, Canberra had rejected us. Michele had one last suggestion: Sydney.

I’d always had a very funny relationship with Sydney. Melbourne I’d always liked but Sydney seemed like the biggest, hardest, fastest city I could imagine. It frightened me. The few times I’d been there I felt dwarfed. I wasn’t optimistic that Sydney would take us in but Michele knew of the Paddington Markets, which were situated around a church in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. So one night after work we chucked all our T-shirts and the clothes she was making in our car, and did the five-hour drive to Sydney, stopping only for cheese and asparagus toasted sandwiches in Mittagong on the way. We arrived at Michele’s grandmother’s house late that night and rose very, very early the next day to drive to the Uniting Church in Paddington. We got in a queue for ‘casuals’ and waited to be allotted a stall. How we envied the ‘permanents’ who were already setting up out there assured of their places! Luckily we got a spot … and by the end of the day we’d sold twelve T-shirts and made a bunch of friends. Which was weird because we didn’t have any friends in Canberra. We drove back thoughtfully that afternoon, knowing we’d have to leave our spacious townhouse in Canberra for Sydney’s grimier ambience.

My final year in Canberra was a strange time. I’d put on some weight in England so I began to jog around Lake Burley Griffin every lunchtime. Every day a Japanese guy came running the other way. And he’d communicate with me as he ran past, letting me know how his run was going. A shrug or a smile a grunt or a grim stare would be enough and would speak volumes to me. I felt like I had known this guy all my life.

After the run I’d have a shower and note the wonderful effect of those bloody endorphins kicking in as I sat back down in the office. Having demonstrated my disdain for the public service I was pretty much left alone and got away with doing hardly any work. Instead I read the Illuminatus! Trilogy and wrote song lyrics and even phoned some of my new pals in Sydney to talk. I ran around the lake every day and on Friday nights we’d drive up to Sydney, where we stayed with the grandmother and got up early to go to the Paddington Markets.

We started to get an identity there. We were ‘that young couple from Canberra’. I was 23 and Michele just twenty. ‘Those kids’, some fashionista at the markets once called us. People were buying our T-shirts and talking about the big Sloppy Joes Michele was making. We had friends and a reason to exist. People in Sydney rated us! They liked our clothes and also the cassettes I began to make. Finally we put our spacious red-and-white Canberra townhouse on the market and gave notice at our jobs.

At the same time, marijuana began to rear its trippy head. Quite formidably too. Soon it would become a permanent habit. I’d been smoking weed on and off for a few years but I’d never completely cottoned on to what was so damn great about it. Then I got into smoking pot and listening to Dark Side of the Moon stuff, listening to records, going ‘whoa, trippy man!’ and having these almost acid-like trips.

It was around 1978 that I began to realise that me and weed had a truly special relationship. It’s a delusion that many poor druggies fall under and, no doubt, many of my readers will shake their heads and tut tut tut and all that. But me and weed go back a long way now and the stuff rarely lets me down. I remember so clearly the night I realised how weed could be the answer to every question I asked. We’d just gotten back to Canberra after the long, arduous drive from Sydney. I was wired and nauseous and anxious about everything in my life. Could I really leave my safe little townhouse for the sordid streets of Sydney? I got into bed but I could feel something like a panic attack coming on. I went and sat in our living room and a voice told me to roll a joint. As the first sweet hit entered my lungs a feeling of wellbeing swept over me: my troubles melted away. I’d found a haven within my own mind. I picked up a guitar and strummed a boring old C chord. Suddenly, a world of sonic possibilities opened up. The panic and anxiety slipped away so I went up to my studio and knocked out a few songs on the spot, even more effortlessly than before. The pot was rewiring my brain and I was coming up with all kinds of new things.

I was mightily impressed with pot’s ability to amplify my creativity. It did it then and it still does it now. I don’t care about the law or the morals or what anyone thinks about it; I’ve written over a thousand songs on pot. It’s working for me, I tell you that. If I wanna paint a picture or even write my frickin’ memoirs, I smoke a joint. I don’t sit around watching TV, eating toast and guzzling sodas. I don’t play video games and I don’t go crazy on the weed either. I work. Hard. Pot is my companion: the joker in the pack.

Could I have done all this without pot? Sure, but pot made it a lot easier and a lot more fun. I can’t see that changing either. I’ll be smoking as long as I’m creating. It’s worked pretty well so far – I knocked out every one of those songs you like!

But kids, don’t do this at home! I don’t believe pot is good for young minds. I was lucky that I was about 22 when I seriously started smoking weed every day. I even smoked it at work … and then wrote a computer program to write poetry. Unfortunately the big boss caught me and closed it down before I got too many poems done. And so I finished out my ‘daze’ in the public service stoned out on endorphins from running and from visits to my car for a quick puff ! What a caper!

After we sold our place in Canberra, Michele and I got a place in Rozelle in Sydney’s inner west. It was a bleak industrial landscape of disused power stations and little terraced houses all blackened in soot and other nasty stuff. I felt this would give me some grimy authenticity. Here I magically changed from pudgy public servant to skinny urban poet and fixer of coolness. Our place was a dark and dingy two-storey house with a tiny back garden, a filthy old blackened fireplace and an even filthier basement that flooded in the rain. It smelt of mould, and there were cockroaches, mosquitoes and flies and fleas. It was a long way from our roomy split-level in Canberra.

I silk-screened under the house while Michele sewed like the clappers upstairs. In some ways we were already drifting apart; I really admired her ‘savage’ work ethic but she was very bossy and hardline. She didn’t really care about my music: she was focused on sewing and designing and paying the bills.

One day we went out to a material shop and Michele bought up cheap all these little offcuts of this terry towelling material and asked me to silk-screen something different on each bit. Then she took those bits and sewed ’em up into these new Sloppy Joes. Each one was totally unique. And bang! They sold like hot cakes. We were even selling to big fashion shops in Sydney like Black Vanity.

Life began to get faster and stranger for me in Sydney. We’d take LSD and roam through the Callan Park loony bin, which was still operating back then. We’d work on our clothes and drive around Sydney buying material and delivering the clothes. I snorted coke and tried pills. I made lots of new friends who’d all pile over to my house every Saturday night after the markets. We’d smoke dope, and I’d play my new friends the music I was working on. And for the first time ever people were beginning to see that maybe I was on the right track after all.

I covered the walls of my front room studio with pictures from magazines: a wallpaper of weird scenes. And with and without an audience I banged out even more songs that were steadily improving all the time. Many of the songs on the first Church album were written there in a mad prolific rush. But what could I do with all that on my own?

And then one afternoon Peter Koppes walked by our stall at Paddington Markets. He had another guy with him who turned out to be Nigel Murray, who was now calling himself Nick Ward. Remember the bully-kid from my school? He’d taken the name of one of his main victims (a big, strange-looking kid with a weird head). That was the real Nick Ward. Anyway, Nigel/Nick wandered off contemptuously when he realised who I was.

It turned out Peter was in a band called Limazine and Nick was their drummer. They were based in Sydney but included a bunch of old Canberra boys, like Mike Hamer, who was actually a very good singer. Limazine were doing OK; they had gigs and had even been to Melbourne and Adelaide. I admit I was envious. Melbourne and Adelaide? Wow! What lucky devils. I talked Peter into coming over to check out my new recordings and very soon we started rerecording some of them with Peter playing guitar. Man, that cat could reinterpret my songs and have ’em come out all improved. This time we knew we were onto something; we could hear it in the songs. This was the true genesis of all the ideas that would become The Church as you know and hopefully love it. It sounded good!