INTERVIEW: DAVE WARNER – September 2026

INTERVIEW: DAVE WARNER – September 2026
By Shane Pinnegar  

Dave Warner and his band From the Suburbs may not be as ubiquitous as others formed in the ‘70s, but he’s achieved something the likes of Skyhooks, Jo Jo Zep & The Falcons, et al couldn’t: remained active recording and touring sporadically through five decades, and still boasts a fanbase strong enough to do another lap of the country celebrating fifty years of Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs. 50 Strong!

Dave boasts a successful parallel career as a writer, including fifteen successful crime novels, a few movies (Cut, Garage Days, Roll) and many episodes of television (McLeod’s Daughters, Packed To The Rafters, Rescue Special Ops) and mini series (Canal Road, INXS: Never Tear Us Apart), but it’s the band we’re here to talk about today.

Dave formed The Suburbs (as they are affectionally known) in 1976 after the demise of his first band Pus – Australia’s very first punk band. If Perth was a bit too conservative in those days for a riotous punk band playing covers of such counter-culture bands as The Fugs and their signature tune Throbbing Knob, the scene was ripe for the newly minted Suburbs’ Suburban Rock!

Debut album Mug’s Game was licensed to Mushroom records and went gold, and was followed by three more albums: Free Kicks, Correct Weight and This Is My Planet, scoring multiple appearances on Australia’s answer to Top Of The Pops, Countdown, minor hits for Suburban Boy, Kookaburra Girl, Nothing To Lose, Wimbledon and Million Miles From Home, and even had a book and film made about him and the band.

Through the late 80’s Dave revived the band for various tours and released a couple more records: Meanwhile In The Suburbs with Skyhooks bassist and songwriter Greg Macainsh in 1988, Surplus & Dearth in 1993 and When in 2016.

With Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs doing another lap of gigs around Australia to celebrate the ’50 Strong’ anniversary, I dialled Dave up on Zoom and embarked on an exploration cherry picking through significant entries in his storied musical career, finding out more about the high and low lights of Warner and The Suburbs.

DAVE WARNER’S FROM THE SUBURBS 50 STRONG TOUR DATES:

• SYDNEY – Friday October 9, The Bridge Hotel, Rozelle
• BRISBANE – Saturday October 10, Black Bear Lodge, Fortitude Valley
• TWEED HEADS – Sunday October 11 (Afternoon), Tweed Heads Civic Centre
• MELBOURNE – Saturday October 17, MEMO Music Hall, St Kilda
• PERTH – Saturday October 24, Astor Theatre, Mt Lawley – including an appearance by PUS for the first time in fifty years!!

Dave Warner: Oh, look, I like the way that the Warner albums are showing there in the background behind you.

100% ROCK: I had to show them off, you know. Look, 50 years strong, that’s quite the milestone. You must be pretty excited.

DW: Yeah, well, it’s, I tell you, I’m pretty exhausted trying to book all these airfares, accommodations, gear, cars – it’s been a huge logistical thing already. So, fingers crossed.

100% ROCK: Yeah, no doubt. I’m assuming rehearsals, a lot of that is being done like this on Zoom and stuff?

DW: I haven’t done any rehearsals yet. So, we’ve got about five days in October before we kick off. The guys in Perth have met together to do a bit and then Tony and Bill over here have done a little bit. But it’s a little bit hard because we’ve got the three guitars this time, so until we get into the rehearsal room and work out what works and what might not work, we can’t kind of get into the rest of the stuff. People can individually learn what the songs are, but hopefully we’ve got it crammed into about four days and then stay healthy for three weeks. That’s our challenge.

100% ROCK: Well, it must be a big challenge in the sense that you don’t play together regularly, plus every time you have come out in recent years, often the lineups are different and you’ve got different guests coming in. So I’m assuming that that musical chemistry doesn’t just happen magically by itself – you have to work at it a little bit and make sure everyone knows what they’re doing in relation to each other?

DW: Yeah, we will on this one. Usually it’s relative, the last couple of tours have been very much the kind of 1977 to ’78 suburbs lineup of Howie, Paul Noonan, John Dennison, Tony Durant and myself. And that is pretty good because we worked a long time together and we were doing a much smaller selection of the songs. But for this, I wanted, you know, The Suburbs have been in existence 50 years, so I wanted to have a good spread of the songs and other ones from different periods as well. And so therefore that does involve more people. And also, John Dennison couldn’t do this tour, so we’ve got Phil Bennett doing keyboards. He’ll be great.

And Sam Musca doing guitar because I felt on the last couple of Suburbs things that we’ve done, with one guitar – Tony [Durant]’s a great guitarist – and while one guitar works well on most of the tracks, there’s just a couple where I thought, oh gee, I really miss, say Kangaroo Hop, I really miss that second guitar, or on Suburban Boy, the other guitar in the break. And so, it’s just a few things like that where I thought, let’s get another guitarist, so Sam Musca’s coming in.

Generally, look, Howie [Johnstone]’s great, he’s a complete dynamo, he’s been there from the start and he’ll kick us all into shape, and he’s got a few new songs that he has to deal with. Although at the Perth gig, we’ll have Lloyd Gyi who played drums on those, Lloyd’s coming over and he’ll play any of those songs, which will probably be in the first set. So look, it’s a smorgasbord. We’ve even got some Pus happening too!

100% ROCK: Yes, I’m a bit excited about that, mate. You must find it humorous, the slight absurdity of grown men getting together to play a song like Throbbing Knob some 54 odd years after you wrote it?

DW: Well, the thing was, I kind of was aware of the absurdity, even in those days. And that was one of the things about Pus. I mean, while we were punk – well, proto punk – there were certain things that we were really full on with and we approached it like The Troggs or early Kinks and very wild… Iggy and the Stooges, even, who I’d never seen but had read about. But there was also a self-awareness that even then it was a bit ridiculous in some ways, that this was going on at the same time. And so we would do Monzo dog songs?? as well. So I guess that was the element that was a bit different to Pus and our version of garage proto-punk to how the Sex Pistols seem to take themselves very seriously. And so, yeah, there’s an element of that all the time. But certainly now, as you say, 50 years on, we’re old guys, look, we’ll be struggling to get up on stage half the time, I think, literally [laughs]. So yeah, whether we can manage the bob and the dip, the dance move of Throbbing Knob, that will still to be seen!

100% ROCK: Well, this will be interesting and one of the highlights, I’m sure it’ll be. You’re going to be doing stuff from throughout your career. And the thing that I’ve always admired since I started coming seeing you play in some of the reunion tours in the 80’s, when I was just about old enough to get into pubs and whatnot, going back through those first four albums of everything plus everything you’ve done since, all of your music is just so diverse. I mean, you’ve got your pub rock anthems, you’ve got some heartfelt ballads, you’ve got really sweet and tender songs, and then you’ve got Girls Wank and Hot Crotch and all that sort of stuff. Was it always a conscious effort to not be stuck by boundaries and rules of the industry, so to speak?

DW: Yeah, I think it wasn’t a deliberate… it was a conscious effort, but not a deliberate one. What happened was I would just sit there and songs would come out. I’ve got the songbook coming out soon [available now, folks LINK] with [the lyrics to] 400 odd songs and not every one ended up being played live. I might play them for my own enjoyment or some of them may not have been good enough anyway, but a lot of them are still in the book because it’s kind of good to say, ‘Oh, here, this is where it is.’

But for me, what happened was, I always liked all these diverse styles, like the old-fashioned Top 40 AM radio, whether it was a country song or a hard rock Kinks song, followed by Eric Burdon and the Animals, or a psychedelic song. And it was really when I was in England in 1976, So in Pus, I kind of restricted the [songs] to being pretty much hard rock or as we said, some of the things that had a little bit of send-up humour in them.

But by the time I got to England, I was writing all these other style songs and songs that I’d written but not played in Pus, like Campus Days and Lonely Sailor. I thought, ‘oh gee, I’d really like to do all of these songs because they’re all still a reflection of how I’ve interpreted the world around me.’ And ultimately, I figured that the thread that held all these things together was exactly that, was kind of my take on being a creature in suburban Australian life in the 1970s and that creature being like a young suburban guy primarily. And I felt that because the music was kind of conceptually driven rather than instrumentally driven, so I didn’t go, oh, that’s a great riff and I’ll repeat it in nine different ways, which lots of bands do and nothing wrong with that… In fact, I generally probably have more success than my approach, which is, well, how does this song relate to me, to my life and how does it relate to people out there?

So, as you say, the music that I do is diverse, but it all in the end comes from me in one way or another. It’s either emotions that I’ve felt, or it might be even humorous stuff that’s crossed my mind, or absurd things that I’ve thought about. But linking all of those is the Laminex table, the Wheaties box and footy. So all of those things somehow or other combine to, I don’t know… produce this great soup and then, you know, you ladle it out in individual songs. But it keeps it fresh in my brain, anyway, and I’m glad that people respond.

100% ROCK: And of course the, I guess irony for want of a better word, is that if you had done what was expected of you and played radio friendly, family friendly songs with no rude words in them or anything like that, you may have just vanished off the radar years and years ago, and no one would even remember who you were now, but because you were so individual and so different, here you are, 50 years Strong!

DW: Well, of course, I might not have got arrested – that was the other thing. I might’ve been more successful. I mean, ironically, while I’m well known in Perth, I think rock history has written Dave Warner and the Suburbs out – which is something I’ll have a little bit of fun about at the concerts, I’m sure. Because you realise that most of what Australian – let’s say, new, not old style populist rock history but what I would say is new wave punk history – you realise is ultimately is written by a handful of people who were hanging around the eastern suburbs of Sydney in the early 1980s, five or six years after the Suburbs and 10 years after what Pus was doing.

Now they really have no idea what they’re talking about when they talk about the origins of punk and new wave and a lot of the stuff that they thought was groundbreaking, we’d done it six or seven years before. But you won’t find any mention of Pus or Dave Warner in this stuff, which is bizarre.

But fortunately, because we always had such a strong live presence, especially in WA, we’ve got a lot of fans who understand and recognise that and who will be there to celebrate. And I have to say we’ve got fans too in other places, Queensland – not that we even played that often. We’ve got a really strong loyal following there too. And, you know, Melbourne and Sydney, especially up in the far suburbs of Sydney, Sefton and places out the west, they liked us.

But it’s, you know, who knows what may have happened if we’d have been, I would have liked to have been a bit more commercially successful, Shane. I certainly would have liked to have, I do envy bands that came along a little bit later and through the agencies of things like Triple J. with a similar profile to what we have, have been able to establish a presence overseas in Europe or in American markets. That would have been great. I would have loved that for the band. And I think if they’d have seen Johnny Leopard play, he’d be hanging out there with Jagger and Richards and all of them because he was an extraordinary showman. Yeah, and the Suburbs live had that over a lot of other bands. You know, I think we were an exciting band to watch and that was, yeah, a huge proportion of that was Leppo, Johnny’s just an incredible fella.

100% ROCK: Yes, he’s much missed, I am forever thankful I got to see him at a handful of those gigs like Wimpbusters and so on in the 80’s. One thing that I find very interesting is that those first four Suburbs albums, you didn’t get a traditional record deal. You licensed them to Mushroom, so you retained ownership and they’re still yours now, which was very forward thinking for the time.

DW: Look, I would have been quite happy to have done a traditional deal if they’d been offering a reasonable percentage. My argument with them at that stage was we had those little clear cassettes, people who used to come to the Suburbs gigs will remember them. Originally, I think I did 25 or 50 cassettes from a mobile 8 track recording that a guy named Tim Lambert did, who’s now, I believe, a really top professor or something in a medical field. And Tim had this little combi van set up to do mobile 8 track recordings, and he said, why don’t we record some tracks which we did at the Victoria Hotel?

I just took [the cassettes] and started to sell a few and the demand was so great that we just kept pumping them out, never even put a cover on them. And they ended up in Victoria and New South Wales so that before we even toured there, people knew about the band and there was this big vibe building. And I was selling, I don’t know, a couple of hundred of these a week. And so I would, when the different record labels came to me – and there was only a few that were really interested… Wizard was interested, Michael Gudinsky [at Mushroom] was interested, Warners probably would have been David Sinclair, though, and he had just signed Loaded Dice and Cold Chisel – he loved The Suburbs, but he couldn’t sign us after he’d signed those two. Some of the other ones were probably who might have represented Little River Band or Sherbet probably weren’t that interested in The Suburbs.

They weren’t able to offer us a deal that was really in keeping with what we deserved, given what we’d already shown what we had in terms of a following. And so the only way we could do it was to do a lease deal, so I fronted up the money for the first two albums and we took it from there. I mean, the downside of that was that because Mushroom weren’t getting as much from the deals as what they were from, say, The Sports or JoJo Zep & The Falcons, or whoever, then I think they were less inclined to spend dollars on promotion or recording extra things like videos and stuff. We didn’t get the top end of the deal generally, although people like Gary Ashley who worked at Mushroom were tremendously helpful and he really helped us do a great video for Suburban Boy, which still stands up to this day.

100% ROCK: Yes, and obviously that was shown on Countdown, as was Kookaburra Girl. Plus you did your one in person appearance on Countdown for, I think, Nothing To Lose. Speaking from personal experience, when I did some backpacking in Europe and America and Canada and whatnot, I found my travels really gave me a much stronger sense of my Australian-ness. Did you feel the same? You said you were in England in ’76.

DW: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I think that that distance does enable you to look back and to get things really in perspective, and I found it highly useful. I think it’s one of the reasons that I was so productive in the time that I was there – plus you’re going through huge changes and emotional changes. You’re on your own for the first time. You get dumped by your girlfriend and you’re in a different foreign place. You’ve got no money other than your savings. You haven’t got a job. So, there’s a whole lot going on, but certainly I think in terms of looking in a kind of macro way about Australia, it was a great a great gift to be able to do that.

100% ROCK: Absolutely. And talking of film, your younger fans may not realise that you had your own little documentary doing the rounds in the, I think it was the early 80’s, with Warner in the Wild, which is a fascinating look at the slog of touring in regional areas. How did that come about?

DW: Well, David Gray, the late David Gray, was at uni with me and Dave played guitar and sang a bit as well and he would come and see the band – and he was fascinated by the fact that I was singing songs that were particularly West Australian, really. He liked that, and so he got together a bunch of other quite young people who were Suburbs fans and I think he got some money from his dad – who I think may have been a dentist – to start doing a film.

And so we did a movie produced by Wendy Campbell, a film producer out of Adelaide and Victoria – Warner in the Wild. It was the This is My Planet tour, and [we went] up to places like Dampier and Port Hedland. And it is fascinating! And a few years ago Greg Macainsh, actually, from Skyhooks – who’s a filmmaker himself – he suggested that it would be great to go up and redo kind of the tour and then intercut the two things, which would have been great… but we just couldn’t manage it, we couldn’t afford it, and didn’t put it together. But it’s terrific to actually have that document there, well shot, well recorded by top people, on the smell of an oily rag. And certainly, as you say, getting locked out of cars, the axle breaking on the tour bus before we’d even reached Geraldton, all classic things.

100% ROCK: Yes, it was – actually I’m overdue another re-watch. I haven’t seen it in a while. And earlier you mentioned getting arrested. Now, again, younger fans may not realise that in the mid-80’s around your Wimpbuster tours, I think it might have been, you became a trailblazer against obscenity laws, putting you in the same bracket as the likes of Rodney Rude, Angry Anderson in 1983, he got pinched for saying naughty words and inciting a riot, which was dismissed as well, and even Molly Meldrum was arrested for saying the F-word at a nightclub here in Perth – which put you in some esteemed company, I guess. But was that a stressful time? Did you ever think that you might’ve ended up in jail?

DW: Halfway through the trial, my lawyer, Matt Zilko, turned to me – I’d been to uni with Matt – and Matt said, ‘the only question,’ – ‘cos we could see the hostility from Magistrate Buck –

100% ROCK: Yes, the perfect name for him, right?

DW: Yeah, great name that I was able to use in some things… And Matt turned to me and whispered, ‘the only question is whether you’re going to be put in jail or be given a fine.’ Because he felt we had no chance at that stage. And yeah, I was the first, I think I was the first one. And then they were so emboldened by their prosecution of me that they then took on Rodney Rude, as you said, Angry Anderson, Molly – Molly got off saying he told people to get down and funk!

100% ROCK: ‘Get funked,’ I think it was, something like that, yeah.

DW: …and Rodney Rude eventually took them to the Supreme Court or wherever and won. And that finally killed off this pursuit. But really what triggered it with me, I think, was that I had been warned very early on in the Victoria Hotel days [in the late 1970’s], by Liquor and Gaming [Police]: watch your language, that sort of thing. Nothing had happened for the next four, five years.

Back then .008 was the [alcohol breath testing] rule in Western Australia at that stage [the rest of the country was .005] – and there was no random breath testing. And the way that the police got around this was really quite duplicitous: they created the roadblock. And the roadblock was only supposed to be if you’ve got escaped fugitives or something, but they created this roadblock after a huge campaign by The West Australian [daily newspaper] that carnage on our road was being caused by young people going to pubs. So they created these roadblocks all around the big suburban hotels and would then breathalyse people coming out of that saying that they had the right to do it.

And after that, this campaign went on for a few weeks and then eventually The West trumpeted that this campaign was successful and it proved the point because of that, all these thousands of young people were getting drunk and creating carnage on our roads. Until I looked at the stats – and having done psychology and statistics – I looked at it and went, well, hang on, you’re saying that most of these people, they took the stats as being 26 and under. And I thought, there’s not that many 25, 26 year olds even going to pubs. It’s got to be, it was more like maybe 23 and under. And these things were only set up around the [big] hotels, not anywhere else, so in actual fact, the catchment area [was skewed].

Anyway, I wrote a letter to the West saying that their statistics, if anything, proved that young people were less likely to be drink drivers than older people who weren’t going to the hotels. And the response was within a week to have the Liquor and Gaming Squad come down and bust me for, you know, saying some bad words.

100% ROCK: In 1981, your old mate and bandmate Alan Howard published a book about you: Dave Warner: Suburban Boy. Was that surreal? There’s a book about you on a shelf somewhere in a bookstore. I mean, does that stroke the ego a little bit there?

DW: Look, it was a bit surreal. And Al Howard, who we’re talking about – Wild Scrote, I nicknamed him – he was kind of a formative member of Pus, but never actually played in Pus except for a couple of one-offs at the Octagon theatre. But Al was my schoolmate and we wrote Hot Crotch together and had lots of excitement together. And Al was looking for something to do. He really wanted to do it, and I said, ‘yeah, look, go ahead and do it.’

I remember when I lobbed in Victoria and met Red Symons the first time. I think the first thing that Red Symons said in that very droll way of his was ‘You’re the only person I know who’ve had a book written about them before they’ve actually ever done anything.’

So, look, it was a bit surreal, but it was fun in a way to have my mate Al involved again. I wish he was still around. [Rock in Peace Alan Howard]

100% ROCK: Yeah, we all do. So, you mentioned this lyrics book you’re putting the finishing touches on right now, which is tying together lyrics of pretty much every song you’ve written. Is that about legacy, I guess, for you doing this project?

DW: Yeah, I think so. I try to examine that in the foreword of the book and say, well, why am I doing it? Is it just kind of hubris? And look, for me, it’s that I think songs are written in part for [the writer’s] own satisfaction. But songs largely are written to communicate, as a way to communicate something. And so I figure that, look, I’ve written all these songs, many of them I think are quite nice, but I was either too young to do anything, I wasn’t recording or didn’t have a band. And so for me, I get some satisfaction out of it. And I thought, I’m going to do a book. I’m going to put them all in there. And if a song communicates, finds a little target audience with one person or two people, then it’s done its work for me.

Otherwise, the song, it feels kind of like unfinished business. It’s a song that only I’m [aware of], it’s just for me. Well, you know, to me, that’s not really what songs are about. Songs are about communicating on some level of emotion. And someone, once it hits them, a song takes on what it means to them in a completely different way – it might be very different to what I thought about it [when I wrote it].

And what I’ve done in conjunction with that and we’ll be doing is on my website, is pretty much every song – there’s over 400 songs – and pretty much every one you’ll be able to go on there and either get a stream of it or there’ll be some way that you can hear the song. So, if you’ve never heard the song and you thought, ‘oh, I wonder what that actually sounds like,’ you’ll be able to hear it.

Most of them – or a great deal of them – had been recorded either in proper release form or demo form where – for just a couple of them – I’m just sitting at the little keyboard over here and clinking away. And then a few of the others that I’ve written with, especially some of the ones I’ve written with Martin Cilia, which I always thought could have been for other artists. So, I’ve used AI on those ones and from that I’ve done a little demo myself and then I put that in, and that gives people an idea of how I heard the song in my head and how ultimately I would have liked it to have been heard.

So anyway, people will be able to do that. I don’t know that there’ll be thousands rushing out to get the book or listen to the tune, Shane, but they’re there and I’ll feel that my duty as the songwriter has been done to do those and to put them in a situation where people can look at them and get something from them.

100% ROCK: Now, you mentioned using AI to flesh out some of this music. AI is a bit of a contentious subject nowadays. Was it a difficult decision as to whether or not to use it in this case?

DW: Look, it wasn’t difficult for me. I can understand the angst around it. Like everybody else as a creator, I’m as affected both as a writer – a songwriter and an author. But the two things that I know for sure is you’re not going to stop it. It’s not going to stop. No matter what musicians or authors want to do, they will not be able to stop AI and other people using it. The other thing that I’ve found is that it can be a really, really useful tool. So people are going to use it in different ways.

I don’t sit there and say, write a song for me about such and such. I actually write the song in a traditional way: I sit at the keyboard and I work out the chords and I sing it into my phone, which is the good thing. And then I give [the AI] some direction. So for me, I would never – there’s no way I would ever be able in time to record all these songs and I would never be able to afford to pay for them to be recorded and certainly not at the level of production that you’d want to hear.

So, for me, I find it very useful in that way, especially for songs that there’s no way that I could possibly do otherwise. And I figure, well, I’ve been 50 years in the business, I’ve got 150, 200 songs recorded. And so, for me, it’s not that hard of decision because people can choose not to listen to them if they want to.

I don’t know where we go with AI. I believe that you’ve just got to look upon it as another tool, the same as sampling, the same as synthesizers when they came in, same as computers over typewriters. I think if there’s still an intelligence and an emotional heart driving the material, then it’s just rendering it as if you’ve got a whole lot of session musicians at your disposal. That’s the way that I use it – it’s different to other people. I think the challenge will be for artists is that a lot of people are going to go, why do we bother to listen to you? I can just tell it to create my own songs. And we don’t have any control. The artists don’t have any control over that.

100% ROCK: I think that if you’re not asking it to write a song for you…

DW: No, I’m not. But I think the challenge is going to be that lots of people are going to do that, and then are they going to listen to our songs or they’re just going to listen to their own? So that’s a curious thing.

100% ROCK: I’m sure it will get “better” – and I don’t want to use that word technically – but at the moment, AI writing and music, it’s mostly soulless. It doesn’t have that human spark to it in what I’ve heard or seen, but I’m sure it will evolve and it will get more and more difficult to tell the difference, which is a bit scary..,

But moving on… are you still a suburban boy at heart?

DW: Oh, absolutely. And I think most Australians are still suburban. I think our aspirations are still very much the same. Yes, we might go out to have a Bangladeshi meal or something, but most Australians, wherever they’re from, and I’m not just talking about people of my generation, I’m talking about the whole flock of Australians who’ve come from diverse countries in the last 20 years especially. I think the aspirations are still the same: They want a nice house. They want a car that doesn’t let them down. If possible on a hot day, a swimming pool in the backyard – that’d be pretty good. But if not, to be able to get to a public swimming pool that’s close by.

And for younger Australians, look, Australians always want to travel. People of my generation wanted to do that, but it’s probably a little bit easier and more realistic now for younger Australians without that much money to go overseas. So, I think all the sorts of things we wanted to do in my day are still there. I think we’re still largely a suburban country. But within that, other cultural things shift. But the suburbs remain, you know, that kind of great middle-class Australia still drives the country.

100% ROCK: ‘Take note students of Australian identity,’ as you once wrote!

DW: Exactly, yeah.

100% ROCK: To finish up, what are a few of the biggest personal achievements or greatest moments in your musical career for you? Like, what do you cherish the most from all these memories?

DW: Well, I’ll do it two ways. In achievements, I think the thing that I’m proudest about is that I think I created or have created a music that is mine. I used to say – before this term got used in a different way – I used to say it’s indigenous music. It was uniquely Australian music. And that’s still it… a lot of people say that they write original music, but what’s original music if you’re just sounding like the last David Bowie album? David Bowie is original – you’re not if you sound like him. Yes, you’ve written that song yourself, but is it unique?

So in terms of achievements, I think my music is unique and it has stood the test of time. Maybe it hasn’t broadened and been fabulous, but there’s not many tracks of mine you look at and go, ‘oh, that sucks,’ or ‘it doesn’t work.’ Even the ones that people go, ‘oh, you can’t say that anymore,’ are more relevant. You take a Convict Streak or a Hot Crotch or something, they’re more relevant than ever because, [sarcastically] ‘oh, we can’t say that sort of stuff now.’

In terms of the fond memories, great memories from past from the days of climbing in through the window at the Governor Broome Hotel as our stage entrance, playing to 20 people in the audience and I’d be halfway through a song, gobbing on the ceiling and smashing the microphone stand up and the paper boy would come in with the Sunday Times [newspaper] and John Pitcher, our mate, would go and buy the Sunday Times and read it as we were finishing the climactic bit of Sweet Jane.

And the times on stage with Tony Durant and Johnny Leopard, Howie and Paul or whoever’s been playing bass, John Dennison on keyboards – a very old friend of mine. Those days are cherished. And the tough times on the road – 10 hours on the Hume Highway, getting out with three bucks in your pocket for a Goldie Burger, as the Golden Fleece burgers were called. They’re cherished in a strange way too.

And finally, the people who’ve been fans who have actually become friends. I’ve seen children grow up and met the kids, you know… that’s a really, really satisfying thing to be able to connect with people – not just once, but over a long period of time.

100% ROCK: Fantastic. It’s always a pleasure, Dave. Thanks for your time, mate. And looking forward to the end of October.

DW: Yeah, I’ve just got to stay healthy to get through it all, and the rest of the band.

100% ROCK: I’m sure you’ll be fine, mate, as always. Have an excellent day. Thank you.

DW: Thanks, Shano. See you, mate.

 

Category: Interviews