Sydney, 1980. Such a long way from the sterility of Canberra. Suddenly I felt like I was finally part of something. Live music was exploding; there were gigs left, right and centre every night of the week. The pubs and clubs had flung open their doors and the place was rocking! I had popped up at the right time.

I DECIDED TO CALL the band The Church for a load of reasons. We picked the name from a long list of names, including Nylon Choir and The Satin Odyssey – imagine that?! But mainly I think that I really wanted to create a feeling of spirit, although I wouldn’t have put it in those terms in those days. And of course there was the David Bowie reference from Ziggy Stardust.

The Church’s first rehearsal was pretty damn good. I loved hearing the songs out loud with a drummer and another guitarist playing along. Nick’s drumming wasn’t bad and Peter was already playing the way he plays now. He had his sound and his style and his schtick. We didn’t sound a hundred miles away from what would become the Church sound of today. For the first time I could see the possibility of something eventuating from all this.

After a few more rehearsals we did our first few gigs. Nick hadn’t changed – he was still Nigel! He could vaguely see I was a good songwriter but he couldn’t get over the fact that he was ‘taking orders’ from a guy he could easily beat in a fight with one hand tied behind his back. I mean I’d ask him to play something and he’d kind of snarl at me like he was only just controlling his urge to give me a good smack around the head like in the old days at Lyneham High. His agenda was still intimidation. And it still worked.

Even though I’d started the band, Nick’s behaviour made me dread rehearsals. He made my life miserable. He nagged me, bullied me and sneered at me. It was like fucking Groundhog Day and I was carting this permanent high-school melodrama around with me. He was a truly rude and obnoxious sod. Still, we managed to do gigs. Someone mentioned Cream so I got a frilly shirt. I think Peter did too. Not Nick though. He had his cut-off black T-shirt so the world could see his tattoo of the axe man lifting his bloody axe and saying ‘Next?’

How were we as a three piece? Not that bad! We were playing in some club one night and a load of Peter’s friends came down to see us. Among them was Lucy and her young husband Marty fresh off the plane from England. We were all sitting backstage when they walked in – Marty was about 22 and had a tiger-skin jacket, tight black jeans, gym boots and long crimped hair. He looked like a missing member of Def Leppard. We chatted for about half an hour and then I asked him to join the band. He said yes.

Peter was bemused I’d asked a guy to join the band without hearing him play, but Nick was absolutely incensed. How dare I fuckin’ ask some unknown, untested wimp into our band because I liked his fuckin’ looks?! But I’d seen into the future and I knew Marty would help get this thing off the ground. Even if he couldn’t play the guitar … he looked like he could! Anyway, fortunately he could play the guitar. He wasn’t amazing but we already had Peter to play amazing stuff.

Peter was neither thrilled nor unhappy about Marty. He just got on with it. Peter and Marty famously have different styles and parts because Peter never interfered or gave advice on what Marty should play. When Marty asked him what the chords and parts were apparently Peter responded, ‘I had to work all this out for myself, so why don’t you work it all out for yourself too?’ From that day on Marty sorted himself out for parts and things to play. And up sprang The Church’s marvellous two-pronged guitar attack. Peter and Marty never wondered what the other was doing, they just fell in together, naturally.

Another good thing about Marty was Nick couldn’t stand him, so it took the heat off me a bit. From the first day Marty showed up Nick made his life a bloody misery. Funnily enough we both just accepted this behaviour; as though always being nervous and flinching and on the defensive was just how it was in a band.

Still, we carried on. Nick had a four-track machine the same as mine. We all figured we could do some fancy overdubbing with the two machines together. We recorded some backing tracks at a four-track studio in town and fled with the tapes to Nick’s garage where he lived on Forest Knoll Avenue in Bondi (which is just down from where I am writing at this very moment).

The songs we demoed included a couple that would end up on our first record: ‘Chrome Injury’ was on there I remember. They were pretty good; I felt sure that whoever heard this stuff would like it – it was new wave and old school at the same time. Peter was already doing his echoey chorus thang. Marty was jingle-jangling a bit. I was doing sing speak and playing a fretless bass for some stupid reason. I mean, the fretless looked good and sometimes sounded good but my singing must’ve been out of tune a lot playing that thing. I must have been always a little bit sharp or flat. But people were impressed and that was the main objective, in my books at least, in those days.

Peter wasted no time in taking the tape to a guy called Chris Gilbey who’d starting managing the record company ATV/Northern Songs in Australia. Chris’d had a bit of a colourful career and had managed The Saints for a while. Now he had these nice offices in North Sydney and his brother-in-law working for him. Legend has it that Peter took the tape to the office but Chris was too busy to listen to it so Don Bruner, the brother-in-law, piped up and said, ‘Come into my office, I’ll listen to it.’ After a few minutes Gilbey asked what the music was coming through the wall. It was The Church.

The next day I went in to see Chris and walked out of there with my head swirling around. I had no idea songwriters got their own payments or did their own separate deals – I hadn’t been writing songs for money; I’d had no idea that’s where all the money was!

Gilbey was a great motivational music-biz guy. He had a great sense of humour and was fun to be with most of the time. And he could see I had the potential to write a good tune so he nurtured my talent and gave me some guidance. But my initial deal with him was totally fucked up and set the precedent for most of the rest of the deals I ever did. I got a $500 advance and we shared the songwriting split 50/50. It’d be hard to find a worse deal unless you go back to the Tin Pan Alley days – not that I knew that at the time. Anyway, I spent my advance on a garbage bag full of marijuana I bought from a horticulturist called Rod from Hurstville.

For those oblivious to the music-biz economy this is how it works. For each record released in whatever format the songwriter(s) make a certain fixed percentage. Say, I dunno, ten per cent of the record? (Don’t quote me!) The songwriter usually also does a deal with a publisher, whose job it is to collect money and also hawk the writer’s songs around. For this service the songwriter gives the publisher a split of the take. The law had been changed in the 70s so publishers couldn’t take more than 50 per cent, so Gilbey had given me the most basic deal there was. Eventually he signed the other geezers in the band up to the same lousy deal: the usual split in those days was 75/25. He sure wasn’t doing us any favours.

Gilbey had also recently done a deal with EMI to reactivate the Parlophone label in Australia, and so we were signed to The Beatles’ record label and their publishing company. It was an auspicious start! We were gonna make an album in a big studio and Gilbey was gonna give us another advance to buy some new gear. We also got a road manager … but he immediately formed an alliance with Nick because they both thought AC/DC were the best band in the world. I never really cared for them, especially not after Bon died.

So this new road manager and Nick decided the band would be better off without me because I couldn’t really sing or play bass properly. They complained I had no microphone technique. They were, however, going to allow me to remain as the songwriter because I could, after all, write songs. How decent of them! Peter was bemused by their attempted coup. Marty came to me and told me what they were planning. I complained to Gilbey, who immediately put the conspirators back in their place but it was a never-ending battle. The way they spoke to me and Marty was just fucking unbelievable! Rudeness and threats. And the road manager and our wives immediately hated each other; he even forbade them from coming into our dressing rooms, citing some half-baked idea about girls being turned off if they knew we were married.

By this stage we’d been jump-started on the circuit because we had a record deal. There was an old adage in Sydney that you couldn’t get a gig without a record deal and you couldn’t get a record deal without gigs. So it was like a Buddhist puzzle to penetrate and reconcile the paradox. But we had gone another route: we’d made a very good demo. I’d written some articulate, modern, classic songs and we had Peter’s brilliant guitar work. Oh and we were all OK looking.

So we were on the circuit, the famous Aussie pub circuit. In mid 1980 we were the opening act for just about everyone you can think of. Then one night it finally happened. We were at the Rydalmere Family Inn opening for a band called Mi-Sex. I’d written a song called ‘Is This Where You Live’, which had a long slow beginning and went on for about eight minutes before a frantic guitar-heavy ending. I was singing when I realised that the audience were actually listening to my song. They weren’t impatient for the next band to come on. They were rapt in my song and our band and our music. Peter picked up on it and was even more flashy and illustrative with his huge chorus echo sound. Marty opened up his playing too. And I began to be that character that I’d always wanted to be.

I turned a corner. I was no longer the pudgy public servant slobbering over some other group’s records, nor the stoned screen-printer from Paddo market. I was becoming the aloof, disdainful pop star as epitomised by Peter Cook in Bedazzled. The distant, cold star in a bubble of narcissism that is fascinating as all get out. Here is the point where I started to become the angular fey ninny that would slay Australia for four minutes.

But I had problems too. It wasn’t working out with Michele. We had to split up. She was bossing me around and always cross-examining me about everything. The final blow came one night when I’d just gotten in from an exhausting day of rehearsing and bumping in. As I was eating my dinner she was coaching me on how I was gonna go in and demand this and that from Gilbey.

‘What are you gonna say, Steven, when you see him tomorrow?’ she demanded. I repeated whatever it was she told me to say. ‘Yes but let me hear the way you’re gonna say it!’ Michele demanded.

So there I was rehearsing how I’m gonna tell Gilbey off when a voice in my head says, ‘Fuck this, you gotta split up with her!’ And that voice was always right. From then on in I was just waiting for the right time to leave her.

We threw ourselves into recording and opening gigs for anyone who’d have us. We opened for INXS – I’ve still got a letter from their manager Chris Murphy castigating us for not hanging around for a load-out one night in Avalon. Hutch was already a star, even then. It was only a matter of time … though personally I thought their music was a bit rinky-dink, a bit nursery rhyme or something. Michael was one of the only guys I ever met who had real charisma. Even up close in a dressing room or in a car park he had that indefinable thing.

We also opened for Cold Chisel. I remember it was a fucking excruciatingly hot afternoon gig and in frustration Barnsey chucked a full can of beer at the windows that wouldn’t open. We opened for Midnight Oil and Men at Work.

And we were in the studio recording at every opportunity. Our first album. It’s hard to listen to now actually; I had some serious vocal posturing going on there and it all sounds pretty out of tune. The guitars are too heavy and too rock’n’roll for me. And the drumming is plodding and boring, which is kind of ironic given Nick was constantly rubbishing Marty and me and bragging about how he could do it better!

Here’s an amusing anecdote: Nick was left-handed and couldn’t play our instruments, which (understandably) frustrated him. One day I was doing a bass overdub and Nick was in the control room going ‘no no no no!’ But he couldn’t show me what the ‘right’ thing was because he didn’t have a left-handed bass to play, did he? So he said, ‘Fuck it, I’m going home to get my own bass!’ But by the time he arrived back I’d gotten lucky and nailed the bass part by myself. Then a little later on Marty is doing a guitar part. Nick is bitching from the moment Marty starts tuning up. It’s an intense and manic tirade of abuse loaded with words like ‘fuckin’ and ‘mongrel’ and ‘hopeless’. But he can’t show Marty how to do it properly because ‘fuckin’, fuck it!’ Marty’s guitar is the wrong way around for him, isn’t it? So off he goes home to get his own guitar! Again, by the time he gets back we’ve laid the guitar part down on tape without his help. Then a few hours later I get on the piano and he starts up again about my (admittedly) mediocre playing. Only Nick didn’t phrase it that way. It was still 1968 in his mind, and he still thought bullying was everything. Anyway he’s ranting on about my piano playing and Chris Gilbey says, ‘I think Nick’s gonna go home and get his own piano,’ and the whole place burst into laughter – all except me and Marty who were the objects of Nick’s intimidation.

Why do I dwell on this? Because I’d worked hard at being a musician for ten years and just when I should have been having some fun I had this macho, pathetic, childish goose ruining every single occasion. Whether it was having our photo taken or at a gig the guy was a relentless bad-vibe merchant. I loathed him so much and I was so frightened of him.

It was awkward one day when we both turned up to rehearsal and no one else was there. He was so in contempt of my hopelessness he could barely talk to me. Eventually I started tooling around on a little riff and song I’d made up that morning – strangely enough it’d been helped along just a little by Michele, who ’d been anxious to go out and see to her rag trade stuff and needed me to drive her. I was sitting there saying ‘not yet, I’m working on a song.’ So she sat down and helped me put it all together. Anyway, I’m mucking around on the bass and singing the song and Nick jumped on the drums in a rare spirit of co-operation and actually said he thought the song was good.

By the time Marty and Peter arrived we had a good version all worked out. The two guitarists figured it all out pretty quickly and when our new road manager Kent Gorell strolled into our rehearsal space he declared the song a hit! Chris Gilbey came on down and instantly agreed: ‘It’s a fucking hit!’ He was delighted. Everyone was. But I didn’t see what was so special about ‘The Unguarded Moment’.

(I forgot to mention – because it wasn’t worth remembering – that sometime during this period EMI released ‘She Never Said’ as a single and it pretty well disappeared without a trace, except for one or two lukewarm reviews. It was all my worst dreams come true.)

We stuck ‘The Unguarded Moment’ on our album pretty much at the last minute. Chris Gilbey then did two things: one of which was brilliant and the other stupid. The brilliant thing was he got Bob Clearmountain to mix our record. The stupid thing is he got a friend of his called Christopher French to make a video for us. French thought making a video would be easy seeing as he was a director of commercials for perfume and soap. Surely it wasn’t such a big jump?

But it would turn out to be one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in show biz. French had seen this whizz-bang new film gimmick that made everything blurry. The concept of our video was that we were four colours joining up walking along like blobs. My colour was grey. Peter’s was Lincoln green, head to toe. Marty’s was pale blue. And Nick’s was errr … black cut-off T-shirt, as usual. So French marched us around Kings Cross on a blazing hot day as we colours searched for each other. I got incredibly sunburnt. My nose looked like a red traffic light. Then we went into a studio and he applied every rock video cliché that he could think of only more clumsily and awkwardly than they had ever been applied before. Think of a Queen tribute band in your dad’s garage shot with an iPhone that has fogged with mediocrity and you’ve some idea of what it was like.

After we watched it at EMI I was so incensed that I told Gilbey and all the horrified EMI staff to bin the video forever. I ranted and raved and threatened to break my contract with all of them if that bilge ever saw airtime. Despite all that eventually a moron at EMI leaked it out, apparently thinking he was doing us a favour. So that awful video with Nick in it is still actually extant. You can find it on YouTube to this day, and I still hate its clichéd amateur-hour guts!

After that experience it was with some trepidation that we attempted our first tour of anywhere other than Sydney, and it just happened to be Melbourne. I drove down in the big truck full of gear with Kent Gorell, who was also our sound guy. We had a bag full of the worst weed in the world but we kept on smoking away at it. It was the middle of summer and it was hot and dry. Nick had been telling Marty and me how we wouldn’t survive being on tour because we didn’t have the right stuff. Things were rapidly reaching a head and he really was ruining it for all of us with his constant jeers and intimidation.

But when we got to Melbourne it was Nick who had the week-long panic attack and locked himself in his room. Only Spot the roadie could coax him out of there to play the gigs each night. (Spot, of course, eventually had an album named after him: A Quick Smoke at Spot’s). We impressed a few punters in Melbourne but quickly learnt it was gonna be a long hard slog to the top.

It was an eventful trip: I met a load of the old guard of Aussie rockers in the hotel where we stayed, called Macy’s. There were the guys going up and the guys coming down the ladder, and they all stayed at this hotel in Melbourne. We smoked our bag of tepid weed and strummed guitars and jammed with the people roaming the halls at 4am. There was speed being snorted by roadies and many bleeding nostrils. There was Nick springing his girlfriend with another man in flagrante delicto. ‘He jumped up and I saw his bar and everything!’ he told us sadly.

A few weeks later we were doing a gig in some little town south of Sydney when Nick called in to pick up Marty to take him to the gig. Nick refused to bring Lucy, Marty’s wife, along in his car so Marty refused to go to the gig. We did the gig as a three piece, which didn’t please Peter or me at all. But Nick was thrilled and used it as an opportunity to agitate against Marty and try to have him booted out. He couldn’t see that it was him who had to go. We’d all had a gutful.

The next gig we did was at the Governor’s Pleasure in Sydney, where Marty and Nick argued about the incident. Nick got physical and starting kneeing Marty, and then Lucy jumped on his back screaming and flailing. We did one more gig with him before we told him to get out. After the gig Nick and I drove back together and he was so sad and dejected he almost talked me into having him back in the group. What can I say, I’m a big softy! I was prepared to give him once last chance. But at the after-gig get-together at Peter’s flat in Bondi Nick was bullying people and being aggressive and even I could see he was never going to change. He was only in the group for a year but, boy, he made a massively negative impression on us. He became part of our in-band folklore and we all did impressions of him – even people who joined the band much, much later were doing impressions of our impressions of him. But by Christ it was a huge relief when he was finally gone.

Though then we needed a new drummer. Marty had a friend who was about 27 at the time, which was one year older than me. He was an amiable guy, not bad looking, and he’d played drums in a few bands. He was a sweet guy with a nice wife and everyone liked him so he seemed a shoo-in. I just wanted to give him the gig and be done with it.

Someone, however, wisely insisted we advertise for the job. So we stuck a few ads in the paper and one day Marty got a call. The guy asked our ages and when Marty said I was 26, the guy on the other end exclaimed, ‘26! Whatever happened to teenage rock?!’ That hurt me a little I must admit. Just how old was this guy then? It turned out he was eighteen and he was coming to the audition. I was determined to hate him.

We held the audition at a big rehearsal complex in Paddington. I can still see the room and I remember the names of the other bands rehearsing there that day. All drummers were instructed to bring their own gear. There was our mate, the nice guy who was the shoo-in: he was tall and had long dark hair and looked a bit like us already, I thought. There were a few nondescript blokes and there was this kid dressed like a skinhead – with the boots and braces and the whole lot. What a total turkey! It was very uncool, in my considered opinion. Yes, it was the teenager. He looked about fourteen and had a big head, although he was undoubtedly handsome. When he introduced himself as President Camembert I fucking wanted to throttle him. There was no way he was going to join this band.

Eventually our mate with the dark hair has his turn on the drums. We’re playing songs like ‘The Unguarded Moment’ and ‘For a Moment We’re Strangers’. You know, early Church power-pop numbers. I’m a bit disappointed in the guy even though I want to give him the job anyway. I’ve never really known a lot about drumming but I could tell he was tired and rusty and uninspiring – he seemed worn out just playing a couple of songs.

The cocky kid had somehow gotten into the other guy’s audition and was mocking him and giggling at his ineptitude. He was a complete little loudmouth nuisance. When our friend got off the kit after his underwhelming performance the kid jumped on his kit.

‘You were supposed to bring your own kit!’ I snapped.

The kid shrugged. Whatever. OK, for the first song I pulled out a brand new song I’d written called ‘Too Fast for You’. It was a tricky little number with stops and starts and places for Keith Moon–type drumming. The kid nailed the song and then some! With effortless aplomb and a weird, fascinating way of playing, the kid brought my song to life in a way I’d never heard. Way beyond Nick’s plodding old-school drumming. We played a few more songs and the kid demolished every one in an explosion of boundless energy and enthusiasm. Still, I hated the little bastard for being so clever … and I didn’t want him in the group.

Outside the room Peter said, ‘I’m voting for the president!’ And we all laughed. I couldn’t deny he was the most brilliant drummer I’d ever seen. I didn’t know how the fuck we’d ever get on, but I knew he couldn’t be any worse than Nigel Fuckin’ Nick Bloody Murray Ward.

‘What’s his real name, anyway?’ I asked. It was Richard Ploog.