The Best Record You’ve Never Heard: Billiam dusts off a buried relic of Aussie power pop
In the feverish corners of Australia’s garage punk underground, Melbourne miscreant Billiam has been whirring away with whirlwind prolificacy across the best part of a decade.
Surrounding the centre of Billiam’s hooky lo-fi can be found Billiam’s Synth Explosion, Disco Junk, NTSC PAL, The Incredible Basic Bongo Band, there’s a Billiam for anybody, and it’s likely longtime fans were listening along to his many tentacled guises before even realising who was the brains behind the punk attack. Through his disparate creative jumps can always be gleaned a razor-sharp riff thumper or eggy keyboard line that wriggles in your inner bag of earworms with maddening itch.
A good tune goes a long way for our Bill. It’s no surprise, then, that the “Autism-Core” twitch punker holds an honest-of-god affection for Australia’s power pop heritage, as well as standing as something of a walking encyclopaedia of the punk and new wave canon Down Under.
Catching up with Billiam not long after the unleashing of his Open Comma Vault odds and ends compilation, we were fortunate enough to get the word on the one record that deserves far more attention than it’s used to, and demands a spin, pronto.
Billiam discussing Boys’ eponymous debut
“I’m going to recommend the incredibly generically named power pop band Boys and their incredible debut self-titled LP from 1981.
“Boys hailed from Western Australia and were signed to the indie label Parole Records. I was introduced to this record by my mate Lach, who sent our entire friendship group in a frenzy as we all tried to find copies of it in rapid succession.
“The record is as tight and sugary as you could ever desire for a power pop band to make, launching right out the gate with the onomatopoeic ‘Weoh Weoh Weoh’, a song I find regularly buried in the corner of my mind. Lead songwriter Paul McCarthy knows how to write a tight set of words and music, despite not playing anything on the record
“’Same Game’ is a fantastic little tragedy number that pairs nicely with one of the singles, ‘Hurt Me Babe’. ‘Waiting All Night’ is a fantastic up-tempo blast of energy, and ‘When You’re Lonely’ makes me want to punch holes in the drywall; it gets me so excited.
“Boys would go to release one more LP without Paul McCarthy, that’s entirely unremarkable, they’d go on to split up shortly after their second record went nowhere. Australia in the late ‘70s to early ‘80s was a fantastic place to form a fantastic band that would go nowhere. Very rarely would Aus music ever get exported outside of the state you made it in, let alone outside of the country.
“If anyone reading this runs a reissue label, I can guarantee you could sell 500 copies if you marketed this record right; it’s a license to print money.”
Soul Jazz Records, you reading this? It’s incredible to think that Boys’ power pop reach never extended at least nationally, wielding the crackling brew of The Cars and a little The Knack that feels assured to have dominated the Billboard Hot 100 in another universe.
With pub rock swagger but as keen a grasp of songcraft, there’s something inescapably Aussie about 1981’s Boys, from Brent Lucanus’ Perth-baked vocal croon to the right side of cartoon escapism in their garage bluster. While over in the country’s West, Boys orbit a fantastically rich moment in Aussie punk, when the new wave landed on the Australian underground with a plume of fiercely inventive groups, from Sydney’s Radio Birdman to the entire ‘Little Band’ scene across Melbourne’s St Kilda and Fitzroy area.
It’s little wonder that Billiam’s such a fan, as well as a keen excavator of Boys’ buried legacy. Here’s hoping that sorely-needed reissue project arrives much sooner than later, pushing the Boys LP to the alternative stature it belongs.
