Hunters and Collectors Album thread

This was my introduction to the band, via MTV. I fell in love with the song instantly and eventually picked up the US version of the album (I love the cover art).

We saw some of their releases here in the US later than Australia - Human Frailty was 1987, Fate (the US version of What's A Few Men?) was 1988, and Ghost Nation was 1990.

 

I really like the band's early stuff and love Human Frailty. It's one of the best albums of the 1980s and miles better than what you'd think the band could achieve based on the rest of their output. After that, there's a slide into tired, tame dad-rock that I find depressing, though they could still pull out the odd great song now and again.

The focus on albums only in this thread has left out a LOT of important music from the early years, such as their first two EPs and the original single version of their best-known song, so here's a hasty roundup of their Australian non-album releases from 1982 to 1984, along with non-album tracks released on non-Australian singles:

1982


WORLD OF STONE EP:
World of Stone / Watcher / Loinclothing

Talking to a Stranger (Michael’s Version Edit #4763) 4.39 / Talking to a Stranger (Our Version) 7.18
Talking to a Stranger (Michael’s Version Edit #4763) 4.48 / Talking to a Stranger (Our Version) 7.30 Reissued 7”

Also a different 3.56 edit issued on UK 7”


PAYLOAD EP:
Towtruck / Droptank / Mouthtrap / Lumps of Lead

1983

Judas Sheep / Egg Heart 12” – both are album versions

Sway (3.58 edit) / Mr. Right (album version) 7”

1984

Betty’s Worry or The Slab / Carry Me 7” – both are album versions

Carry Me / Unbeliever UK 7”
Carry Me / Unbeliever / Follow Me No More UK 12” - A-side is album version, b-sides previously unreleased

Throw Your Arms Around Me / Unbeliever (live) 7” - A-side is a non-album studio version, b-side is an outtake from The Way to Go Out.

 

Throw Your Arms Around Me, The Unbeliever and Follow Me No More were recorded in Melbourne soon after (maybe before) The Jaws of Life came out. There was a big Rockabilly/lo fi scene that sprung up while the Hunters were in Germany ( Rockabilly bands were playing at 2AM in dance clubs and The Sun Sessions was being played on the local indie radio station) and they decided to record some songs live direct to digital. The problem was commercial radio refused to play them citing the recordings weren't up to broadcast quality. (for some stupid reason when The Unbeliever and Follow Me No More were released on CD, on the Mutations compilation, both songs were severely edited. The easiest way to get the full versions of these songs is on the UK Epic 12" of Carry Me)

 

They rehearsed, demoed and/or played live enough songs for a double album (Lots of which were uploaded onto the Human Frailty site) and live the songs slaughtered the studio versions (something went terribly wrong between writing the songs and recording them). Before they went to Germany they played a farewell gig upstairs at the Ballroom and anybody who saw that concert would have said the next album would have been their mainstream breakthrough instead of getting them kicked off Virgin records in the UK.

Sway and Curse had the makings of H&C classics.

 

Thank you sir, I am not familiar with the singles, predominantly because I am an album buyer. I was actually surprised that Throw your arms around me wasn't on an earlier album, because I knew they had done at least two versions of it.
The input is very much appreciated!

 

Cheers mate, always enjoy your input. If I make it that far through the box we'll get to the mutations disc

 

bump

 

Chris Johnston's stunning essay from the Horn Of Plenty box set is worth posting here. Some of the most wonderful and well-put things I've ever read about rock music from this country.

*

THE best place to start is on the road. It’s a code, meaning something other than what it is: “…trucks and beers and memories…”

Begin with an empty map of Australia. Pin it up on the back of a door. Then begin tracing the lines of your journeys onto it. Everything you know about life is there. Speed, violence, love, longing, nationhood. They’re songlines. Faultlines. Then eventually there’s no more map, nowhere else to go. At which point you know you have arrived.

The hard road is made of rock. There’s the sound of an engine now, a rumble big enough to break things down. Truck drivers out here on the edge live in hope and fear. These are the men who wear singlets and love their lonely children, hard men in shorts smelling flammable and dangerous. They hold secrets about where they’ve been and where they might one day go in their giant semi-trailer road trains which can cure but can also kill in the blink of a sunstroked eye.

Cry for your mother, cry for your father and drive on. Sing your tough songs as clouds gather blue. Speed toward the pinpoint horizon.

There’s road kill around, dead things. Wrecks. Gunshots in yellow signs. Sweat, roos and laughter under burning sun. Adelaide is 828 kilometres from the Westgate. That’s Australia out your window.

*

HUNTERS and Collectors fetishised the road. It held arcane codes for them, but it also held firm logic – it took them to the people who wanted to hear them play.

They were a rock ‘n’ roll band from Melbourne between 1981 and 1998 who did nine studio albums, three live records and three EPs. The band’s life spanned Bob Hawke, the new one-dollar coin, Crocodile Dundee, Keating and Kennett, Mabo & Wik and the beginnings of John Howard. The country prospered, recessed and then matured. It was also an era of great Australian music: Midnight Oil, the Angels, X, INXS and Paul Kelly. Mental as Anything. The Hoodoo Gurus, who formed in the same year.

But Hunters and Collectors had something else, right? Something extra. Some aspect or other. Hindsight is only now beginning to show us a few things about why they were perhaps the most powerfully Australian band of all, the Hunnas, expressing a genuine Australian sensibility and set of ideals.

Mostly, probably, it was to do with their utilitarian ways. Sometimes you got the sense that their instruments were actually tools and they had come to fix or build. The music was prone to fits of violence yet could also be impossibly precise. Vast emotions could be projected. But you got the distinct impression none would ever be wasted.

The shows were intense and definite. At their peak the band could fill every molecule of air in any venue in the country with a noise that was louder and clearer than anyone else. They were an orchestra: simple, strong and powerful yet suspicious of undue ceremony or fanfare. These are very Australian attributes. The trumpet from the famous brass section even played the The Last Post.

But the biggest link they had with this immense, merciless country was the road around it. Discipline and logistics were important, so the road was untroubling. A heightened Australian-ness emerged through their explorations – physical and mental – of the paths they travelled. It was a deep well of subject matter as well as a kind of talisman.

The trucks which took their gear around were integral to the way their minds worked and how their songs sounded because trucks are democratic and infallible. The band’s art came to be defined by the size of that truck. A three tonne show, an eight tonne band, a thirteen tonne tour. These were their charts.

They exerted control over Australia by having it covered. The rhythm of the road settled them. There’s a school of thought now, from the inside, that they didn’t make it huge overseas because the road felt different. It unsettled them. They had adapted perfectly instead to Australian conditions: the tarmac and line, the thirst and furnace of the pubs, the “…trucks and beers and memories…”

*

THE first anyone knew of this entity was Talking To A Stranger. That was the first proper single, in 1982. And while it wasn’t of the road as such, it did travel right to the perimeter.

It was inspired by a Charles Baudelaire poem called The Albatross in which the French poet imagines bored sailors doing odd, decadent things to a stranded seabird: the first line of both is “…souvent pour s’amuser les hommes d’equipage…” or, “…often to amuse themselves the men of the crew…” The sailors pluck the mystical bird and stick a pipe in its mouth. A baby talks to a stranger; Jesus is a black-eyed female.

It’s taboo and transgressive and about being an outsider. That’s what Baudelaire said as well. That he was stranded amongst imbeciles. The song stands similarly at the precipice looking at a circus of symbols in the beyond too frightened to participate. The album it was from, Hunters and Collectors, was urban-primitive because as well as the dark surrealism of Stranger it also documented a savage, post-industrial aftermath. Things had happened, you sensed that – a scorching, a flattening – and this was the result.

The band bashed on a steel tank – the ‘Wang’, a derelict hot-water cylinder – which was found discarded in blackberries in Melbourne somewhere and recycled into a conceptual and brilliant-sounding musical instrument. It was hit with a glockenspiel key on the two-beat and the four. Around this time the band had a shrunken head – a fetish object – on stage.

The films Mad Max and Mad Max 2 were also part of the Australian cultural uprising then. Mad Max and Hunters and Collectors are both the same kind of red-dirt voodoo concerned with a post-apocalyptic survival instinct, totems and pagan demons, industrial waste, nuclear fallout, feral children, big engines, no petrol and bad, bad animals.

American author Cormac McCarthy wrote a terrifying post-9/11 novel two years ago called The Road. It inhabited the very same space. His people were “refugees shrouded up in their clothing” wearing “masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators.” They were ferals and scavengers, and a sacred, scared father-and-son picking from the bones of mankind, taking shelter in primitiveness after the fall.

They pushed carts up a road because the road was all that was left. Maybe it took them to the sea, maybe not. Their heads were like skulls, their eyes bright in the bone. Skulls, bone, eyes. Dreams and nightmares out there on the perimeter, on the isolated highway. They were “creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland,” McCarthy wrote. “The frailty of everything is revealed at last.”

*

THE frailty of everything is revealed at last. That’s a line so beautiful and so conclusive that it should have been on Human Frailty, Hunters and Collectors’ fourth album, of 1986.

This is the one that most people would cite as the band’s masterpiece. There is nothing surplus on it, not one note, not one breath. It also broadens many of their central metaphors into an emotional directness about how men and women react to one another – in both a global and personal sense.

The artwork is a modified version of the ancient Greek symbol for medicine, the caduceus, which suggests a certain anatomical correctness, a healing hand. It’s also a rock’n’roll symbol, a tattoo, but rendered in a careful, craftsmanlike way. On the back is a photograph of male and female hands interlocked against a cobalt blue sky, suggesting that even in the harsh light of the Great Southern Land love will save the day.

There is no death-mask, no totem, There is, however, on the accompanying Living Daylight EP, a song about mining and men called Inside A Fireball – “…bromide, sulphide, oxide, slag…” – set in old Broken Hill. But it could easily also be set today over West in the open-cut wealth.

The Australian resources boom means a transient workforce, where men from all over go in to work the heavy trucks and graders and flatten the land and dig the biggest holes in the world. Then these men hit the pole-dancer pubs at night in, say, Port Hedland, where they’re living for six to eight months earning four grand a week and they have no responsibility to the place. They owe it nothing except their labour.

The whole notion of community vanishes in clouds of dust. There’s people to fix diesel engines but no one to run the local footy club. The love has gone. It’s as if the scars in the ground and the slag visible from the road are nothing but the debris of humanity. A reminder of the fate that befell men and women.

Hunters and Collectors’ tradesmanlike, working class sensibility had emerged; their utilitarian streak. The core of the band formed out of universities, which meant they romanticised the Left and ideas of compassion, welfare and equality. The caduceus implied that. The songs were hard and powerful yet also tender and enlightened, and implied a kind of ‘workers playtime’ view of socialism where from noble toil came truth.

Human Frailty’s opening phrase, in the song Say Goodbye, has a man coming home from “three months of constant grind and travel.” It’s as if he’s an explorer, a Sturt or a Stuart, back from a failed quest to some mythical inland sea. Or in the contemporary context, a cashed-up tradie returned from the resources boom.

Soon he’s “snivelling and crawling around to my girlfriend’s house” where she “ground her finger into my breastbone.” Then in that famous gender-bending but somehow unifying creed of Hunters-era of Oz-Rock, she said: “You don’t make me feel like I’m a woman anymore.”

His love, or his ability to at least express it, had been stolen. The vast distances out there had put miles between him and the closest beating heart. Still, he clawed it back in Throw Your Arms Around Me, the most sexual, beautiful man’s love song written in this country. It seemed to go way beyond mere blood and love into a kind of religious lust, a born-again desire to kiss her in those unnamed “four places” – the four points of the cross.

The north of her, the south, east and west. Were those four places also a kind of compass? A bodily roadmap, the roads best travelled? There was a sense in the song that he didn’t exactly know which specific way to go. He could only “come for her at nightime”, in the dark. Yet, in the end, he got what he was looking for. ‘He’ being the Everyman of Australia. But he didn’t always. In fact, he rarely did; he was always looking, always on a quest, and usually left wanting.

Faraway Man from What’s A Few Men? (the title of which came from a line in Albert Facey’s autobiography A Fortunate Life) which came not long after Human Frailty, is also about a quest, about hope and wanting. The Everyman figure here is trapped in a workplace – a system – where he is forced into “waiting for Sunday, and I hear the wind blow…”

There’s a character in David Ireland’s novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner called not Faraway Man but Far Away Places. He’s a boilersuit worker at a refinery. He imagines these places far away, he dreams of them and of the better life they would bring. “A few sheep, fruit trees, bit of a garden. Christ it was a glorious dream! It was freedom. Freedom? It was isolation and that was better.”

The novel was published in 1972 just as the Whitlam Labor government was elected. The Australia in it was represented vividly by the refinery, a barren, repressive place. It literally fuelled the country’s growing sense of autogeddon: cars everywhere, roads to nowhere. The workers inside were dehumanised, imprisoned in a kind of Guantanamo of the mind where entropic meaninglessness and futility invaded every movement, every thought, even every hope and dream.

The imperatives of industry and the ceaseless demand for fuel always dashed mere human hopes. Far Away Places soon realises that ”the world was made for other people”, that he’s not equipped or able to escape. He’s too busy making fuel so that others can travel the roads. “A pay packet stops you from dying,” he says. “It doesn’t teach you to live.”

These were themes that Hunters and Collectors would return to again and again right up until their final album Juggernaut in 1998. A lot of Cut and Demon Flower – like the Elliot Pearlman novel Three Dollars, written in the same economically harsh early-to-mid 90’s era in Melbourne – walk with the individual victims of recession and corporate greed. In that book, and in the songs, these people have a face; we see them.

Mostly, though, these themes were expressed through a longing based on the conflict between nature, humanity and industry. Ghost Nation perhaps said this most clearly through ideas of surveillance and isolation. The song When The River Runs Dry issued a stark warning about losing perspective, taunting those who wanted material wealth to “turn your back on mother nature.” Here was a place, it said, of middle class excess in a McMansion Blubberland where everything – children, cars, TV screens and the devotion to ‘prosperity’ – was obese.

This was all well before the current panic over climate change. The sun is hotter. There’s less water. They were prescient warnings. The desert is expanding, the nothingness grows. With songs like this Hunters and Collectors went out to the beyond, to the emptiness, into a Russell Drysdale street, or assumed the position of the Arthur Boyd figure – in his painting Orange Tree,Book and Bound Figure, from 1978 – hands tied, on his knees beneath the last fruiting tree, all knowledge discarded, all experience scorched and existential.

An old Australian writer called Bill Harney – a troubled, restless man born in north Queensland, a soldier on the Western Front in World War One – wrote in his poem West Of Alice, in the 1950’s, that mother nature had in fact already gone. And with it, he proposed, all the good dreams.

This was a poem of the road, of cutting the roads, making roads. It smells of diesel. A grader cutting a path through the dirt, building yet also destroying, a “ramping, stamping fiend” which “goes roaring through the land; the tyres grind and the steel blade cuts the pads where camels trod and claws at the ground of a stony mound where tribesmen praised their God.”

Harney has a staunch Everyman named Sam driving the thing, the engine roaring, the past denied, the future a gamble. “And I sing my song as we plunge along to the chatter of wheel and steel…”

*

THE best place to start, the best place to end: The Road. For years Hunters and Collectors would start their shows with the sound of it, the chatter of wheel and steel. They had a recording of a monster V-16 engine roaring into life and they’d play it at high volume as the house lights were killed.

It was a hell of a primal sound, pistons of violence breathing fuel like a beast coming to. It was so real it was practically documentary and in many ways it heralded the core meaning of the band. Can you imagine it? Everymen opening their killer live shows to adoring crowds who knew all the words with an amplified V-16. Just to get things going. To focus the punters.

The Road. The codes.

There’s the sound of an engine, a rumble big enough to break things down. Truck drivers out here on the edge live in hope and fear. These are the men who wear singlets and love their lonely children, hard men in shorts smelling flammable and dangerous. They hold secrets about where they’ve been and where they might one day go in their giant semi-trailer road trains which can cure but also kill in the blink of a sunstroked eye.

In 1983 Hunters and Collectors went to autobahned Germany – a place where the spectre of the road looms as large as it does in Australia – to record their third album, The Jaws of Life. They were using a studio once used by the great Krautrock band Can, who had made a song called Hunters and Collectors, but that’s another story. What were really important here were two things: a towtruck and an Australian murderer named Douglas Crabbe.

The V-16 recording that would become so important – a constant signifier of the band’s ambitious intent and also a direct point of contact between band and audience – came from that German towtruck after the band recorded the sound of it firing into life. It seemed to fit with the kinds of things they were thinking about at the time. A song called Towtruck, originally on the Payload EP, was later re-released with a new version of The Jaws of Life: “…drove this organ round the big country… the distortion was incredible…”

Then news of Crabbe reached them via a newspaper clipping from home: a killer truck, a weapon of mass destruction, a potent symbol of what can go so utterly wrong in the psychogeography of Australia. The story of Douglas John Edwin Crabbe – and the towtruck engine — became 42 Wheels, the opening song from Jaws.

Crabbe was 36 at the time, in ’83, an outback man. His machine was a 25-ton Mack truck. One hot August night that year he was at a remote pub at Yulara, up in the Territory. He was pissed, and he was going the grope, and then he was refused service. He had priors for assault and fighting with police – and had been driving trucks through the nothingness since he was 14 so had in a sense been driven mad by all that he had seen from the cabin – but this time something snapped.

He got up on the bar and started ranting and raving. Then he went and got his enormous truck, unhitched one of the two trailers as if to somehow lessen the carnage he was about to impart, and drove it at full speed from 500 metres away into the pub, destroying the building with force which was likened to an “explosion”, killing five and seriously injuring sixteen.

It was just after 1am, the dead of night. They found him later as the sun rose out in the desert, among the saltbush and the scrub, on the red dirt, running from the road and the grim meaning of it all. Crabbe was charged with murder and is in prison until 2019.

From that moment certain things were clear.

Hunters and Collectors would be heavy and big and serious.

They would deal not only in songs and shows and such but also detailed, evocative expositions into aspects of Australian culture which went right to the heart of things. Things such as speed & violence, scale and power and love & longing. They would raise issues of nationhood and ask what all those ‘Australian’ things meant.

And they would leave a songline as a memento. A clue to the code. “All trucks and beers and memories,” the songline said, “spread out on the road.”



(c) Chris Johnston, 2008

 

You're welcome. I'd definitely recommend tracking down those early EPs, as they constitute another entire early album. Most of that material is available in the Horn of Plenty set. Here's a guide to sources:

WORLD OF STONE EP, PAYLOAD EP- Cargo Cult CD - Horn of Plenty box

Talking to a Stranger (Michael’s Version Edit #4763) 4.39 / Talking to a Stranger (Our Version) 7.18 - first edition single only

Talking to a Stranger (Michael’s Version Edit #4763) 4.48 - original single only
(I think the 7.30 'Our Version' is identical to the album mix. )

Talking to a Stranger (UK 3.56 edit) – Collected Works CD

Sway (3.58 edit) - 7” only

Unbeliever - original UK 7” or 12"only (Mutations CD contains a 4.48 edit of the much longer original)
(The version of 'Follow Me No More' on the same single isn't the studio recording, but the live one from The Way to Go Out.)

Throw Your Arms Around Me (single version) - Spare Parts CD - Horn of Plenty box set

Unbeliever (live) - 7” only (though this live recording also features on the DVD of The Way to Go Out, though in a different mix, if I recall correctly)

 

The Way To Go Out
Probably the first Hunnas song I ever heard. The introduction was also the theme music for an Australian concert show, called Rock Arena. This is a great song and covers a lot of territory within in limited space. Certainly a big development of the band is on display on this album.


Lyrics
Well the air was so light it fell like a feather
Fell down upon the land where the people walked
Well I ran and I ran from one house to another
I sweated out the fear that the boss-god taught

I saw a rusty old woman giving birth in the gutter
I went down upon my knees when the little tacker talked

And the way to go out was in a bottle of fear
In a body of anger and a gut full of beer
And the way to go out was in a bottle of fear
In a body of anger and a gut full of beer

And Mt Nameless was listening, listening, listening, listening
Mt Nameless was listening

Well her hair was so light it fell like a feather
Fell down upon the line in the people's court
And she walked though the door with her hands tied together
Spitting on the faces that the boss-god bought

And that rusty old woman's giving birth in the gutter
I went down upon my knees when the little tacker talked

And Mt Nameless was listening, listening, listening, listening
Mt Nameless was listening

And the way to go out
The way to go out, the way to go out
The way to go out was clear

 

I couldn't give it to you
Another great song here. The band certainly knew how to arrange their songs and they manage to keep them tight yet with a freedom within themselves.


Lyrics
(I've lost my tweezers)

At this late stage of the game you cannot tell
If it is night or if it's daytime
And I've come around to your door
To muck around and make mince-meat of your life

And beneath the glow of your back porch light
You were passing like a thing possessed

And snap, snap, snap
Your teeth are chewing on my daily routine

Yeah I couldn't give it up, and I couldn't if I tried
When I saw a scared nation yelling inside
Yeah I couldn't give it up, and I couldn't if I tried
I was underneath the floor, I was trying to hide
Trying to hide

At this late stage of the game you cannot tell
If it is night or if it's daytime
And I've come around to your door
To muck around and make mince-meat of your life

And there was a whole nation crowded inside
With tongues of fire dancing on their skulls
And every door, every manhole sealed up tight

And pretty soon I realised
Here was the perfect space inside
And I couldn't give it to you if I tried!
I couldn't give it to you if I tried!

 

It's Early Days Yet
This song bounces along nicely. One of the things that has stood out to me doing these critical listens is how good the rhythm section of Archer and Falconer is. It's not something I have really paid attention to before!


Lyrics
An uncertain spotlight is shining on you
An uncertain spotlight is burning for you

I lit it up with an engine, now its rolling for you
And a thousand little golden eyes are watching over the hillside

Into this valley of discontent
Let everybody see them trees untwisted

You may think the night is over
And you may think this dream is finished
Well you may think that big daddy's claw
Has already thrown the switch

It's early days yet Jack, it's early days
It's early days

An uncertain spotlight is shining on you
An uncertain spotlight is burning for you
It's early days yet Jack, it's early days

You'll be cleaning your scars soon
You'll be living in a Savlon world
You'll be giving orders and taking them too
Just like them aging gunrunners do

An uncertain spotlight is shining on you

 

I Believe
Having heard this song so often I am kind of surprised I never realised this was a Ray Charles song.... oh dear ... I always thought something was familar about it. I guess the Hunnas arrangements have a tendency to sound like them and nobody else. A great version!


Lyrics
One of these days, and it won't be long
You're gonna look for me and I'll be gone
Because I believe
I said I believe right now
Well I believed to my soul
You're trying to make a fool out of me
When you're going around with your head so high
I think I'm gonna have to use my rod
Because I believe
I said I believe right now
Well I believed to my soul
You're trying to make a fool out of me
Last night you were dreaming and I heard you say
Oh Johnny!
When you know my name is Ray
That's why I believe
I said I believe right now
Well I believed to my soul
You're trying to make a fool out of me
I believe it
You're trying to make a fool out of me

 

Easy Reference guide

The band - Hunters and Collectors Album thread
- Hunters and Collectors Album thread

Hunters and Collectors 1982 - Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 1 Talking to a stranger Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 2 Alligator Engine Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 3 Skin of our teeth Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 4 Scream who Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 5 Junket Head Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 6 BooBoo kiss Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 7 Tender Kinder Baby Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 8 Run run run Hunters and Collectors Album thread

World of stone & Payload EP's 1982 Hunters and Collectors Album thread

The Fireman's Curse 1983 - Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 1 Prologue Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 2 Curse Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 3 Fish Roar Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 4 Blind Snake Sundae Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 5 Mr right Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 6 Sway Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 7 Judas sheep Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 8 Eggheart Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 9 Drinking bomb Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 10 Epilogue Hunters and Collectors Album thread

The Jaws Of Life 1984 - Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 1 42 wheels Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 2 Holding down a d Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 3 The way to go out Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 4 I couldn't give it to you Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 5 It's early days yet Hunters and Collectors Album thread
track 6 I believe Hunters and Collectors Album thread

Horn Of Plenty (box set) essay - Hunters and Collectors Album thread

 

The Jaws of Life, 1984. Again produced by Conny Plank in Cologne. After they left (or were dropped from) Virgin, their records became harder to find in my area. So this album, apparently released in Aug 84, I did not stumble upon until maybe November in a record store. Instant purchase.

A slight change in sound towards more accessibility. The funk influences are now more or less gone, with more of a guitar and organ based rock sound. Still though with that tremendous rhythm section driving things. In many ways, I think this album is the one that has aged the best. Its lo-fi approach, and still alternative edge, makes it IMO timeless. It may be my favourite album of theirs. The Slab is a classic as is their take on I Believe. 42 Wheels an effective opener and closer Little Chalkie one of their best moments on record.

The B-side Follow me no more could have been on the album, it's that good IMO.

I don't own any of the CD's, only the vinyls. But it always bothered me that the CD version of this album was enhanced with the Payload EP. That EP should have been on the first album, or Fireman's Curse. Chronologically way off here.

 

It gets worse. The Living Daylights EP was added to either Human Frailty or What's a Few Men depending on the country.

 

to me the only problem with the cd format started when artists or record companies decided that an album must contain 70-80 minutes of music. This started a trend of there often being too much filler and songs that would not have made it onto an album pre-eighty four were suddenly on albums. When the re-issue series' started to get firing, suddenly albums had a heap of extra tracks added for some kind of apparent value. More often than not when I am listening to one of these cd's the "bonus tracks" don't even get listened to.
With Cold Chisel, who I love, I never listened to the bonus tracks tacked onto the end of the albums in the re-issue series', but when I bought the Teenage Love album, an album dedicated to those songs, I loved it.
I think that's another reason I am not generally a fan of greatest hits/best of packages, because it is hard to make them sound like a coherent album.

 

Betty's Worry or The Slab
I may be completely wrong, but i think this song is about giving a woman oral pleasure. Please correct me if I'm wrong folks.
Anyhow whether because of/or in spite of this, this is a great song and i find the chorus very sing alongable lol (just to start creating words). This is among my favourite tracks on the album and has a great feel throughout.


Lyrics
I was looking to see some dreams drip from your fingers
I was working in that lonely place where memory lingers
If there were words, if there was hair that I could drag you back with
If there was one single little hook that I could break your back with
Here we go
Oh yeah
Better get my head down there
Oh where?
Down there in that cavern where heaven grows
It's somewhere down there between daytime and the dark
And I'm gonna sweat beneath the light of a warm world
Oh yeah
Better get my head down there
Oh where?
Down there in that cavern where heaven grows
Out here in the street, naked in front of God and everyone
I'm beginning to see daylight yawning down there
And I'm just sitting here waiting for things to come
Cram that page baby, you know I'm marvellous
You think I'm sweating like this just for fun?
And hey I know it's true but I just can't say it
Say it, say it
Hey I know it's true but I just can't say it
Say it, say it
All right, all right!
Just one touch
And everything will be all right

 

Hayley's Doorstep
This song starts out quietly and with a reflective feel. In some ways it is father/mother to two of my favourite songs on the next album. It is a nice open arrangement and that suits this song well. A lot of space for Seymour to express his ever improving vocals. I always liked his voice, but he was starting to write with vocals in mind and therefor pitch the songs correctly, and he was also learning how to emote better with his vocals (in my opinion anyhow).


Lyrics
Here is change's basement house
Here is adventure for seven years
But I never could swallow a sinner's pride
And it filled her face with tears
And every Monday morning she spreads her arms across the table
She spreads a mess of living at my feet
But I never could swallow a sinner's pride
And the food she makes me eat
Waiting on Hayley's doorstep
Behind two bloodshot eyes
The stale taste of wasted gunshot
Slap back across the sky
Waiting on Hayley's doorstep
I heard she's coming home
She'll get that pain inside again
And it's me who'll point the bone
And every Monday morning she spreads her arms across the table
She spreads a mess of living at my feet
But I never could swallow a sinner's pride
And the food she makes me eat
Waiting on Hayley's doorstep
Behind two bloodshot eyes
The stale taste, the stale taste of wasted gunshot
Slap back across the sky
Waiting on Hayley's doorstep
I heard she's coming home
She'll get, she'll get that pain inside again
And it's me who'll point the bone

 

The instrumental played in between songs in that video is an early version of The Finger.

 

Red Lane
Starting with a pulsating base and a quiet vocal, we gradually build in intensity to the end of the first chorus and the whole band kicks in. We then have a very long instrumental section that pumps with dramatic tension and leads into the outro.


Lyrics
I drove you down the dirty track
Heard you hissing in the Red lane
Come on you thirsty little pilgrim
We're moving house again
Make your back get longer
You'll see it sweat behind a barrow
And if this trip gets any longer
Better keep it lean and narrow
Yeah I could handle a bit of justice
That razor's never too cold to swallow
Forty days and nights of cutting it close
Just to keep the Red lane hollow
So drive me down the Red lane
Let me hear you hissing in the dirty track
I'm going to run away so far this time
And I'm never coming back
I drove you down the dirty track
Heard you hissing in the Red lane
So come on you thirsty little pilgrim
We're moving house again
Go down in the Red lane

 

Carry Me
Another song that points towards the next album. Some quite dynamic music that ebbs and flows with the vocals.


Lyrics
My overcoat is hung and I'm too far gone to see
When the last drinks bell is rung you can carry me
Carry me
Carry me, push me through the door
Shovel me up when I'm sinking to this tear stained floor
Carry me
And sometimes I go over
Over the bar I'll go
Sometimes the pole is only one inch short
And sometimes I go over and you get me on a barrel
And your careful and your loving hands get caught
So carry me
Carry me
But I'm sorry if I showed you
How to lift this truck up off the ground
Yeah I'm not sorry if I moved ten tonnes or more
And I'm not sorry if I showed you how to wriggle round and round
As long as you could push me through the door
So if my overcoat is hung and I'm too far gone to see
And the last drinks bell is rung you can carry me
Carry me

 

Little Chalkie
Another pulsating bass that leads us through the song. Another great vocal from Seymour and another great song from the band.
I have to say that this thread has if nothing else given me a better appreciation of this album, and the two previous. I always thought they were pretty good, but have tended to go straight for Human Frailty ... Which will be out next album.


Lyrics
Here comes a ringing testimonial
Here comes the saddest song you've ever heard
From somewhere else, somewhere good
In a warehouse painted red

Around my house, around my table
And I will testify, testify when I'm able.

Everybody in this town is sleeping
Little Chalkie's gone out west to score
Passing by the metho's gate she dropped something
'Cos our town doesn't stand there anymore

And my town, it is a teacher
All trucks and beers and memories spread out on the road
And my town is a leader of children
To where caution is a long wide load
Long wide load.

You love me good, you work me hard
Three letters and a smile on a little white card
Oh yay, oh yay, oh there you lay
Lying in the road on Debt Collectors day