STUMBLEFUCK
Interview with Stumblefuck the guitarist responsible for the sick sounds heard in RUPTURE, MOB 48, BEAST IN HEAT, KOMPOST, CONTROLLED BY FEAR and THE FLIDIOTS amongst others.
I can’t remember... In the womb?… In my past life/lives?… Early teens I guess? I’ve always been a huge Alice Cooper fan tho’ since day one, due to the corrupting influence of an older brother. He had tons of ‘70s hard rock vinyl, Sabbath, Led Zep etc, but it was Alice Cooper, particularly “Love It To Death” that did the major damage.
I was playing guitar in my bedroom all the time and listening to punk and really wanted to have a jam. I knew this guy Kevin who suggested phoning this guy he knew named Andrew (later to be known as Gus Chamber) who lived way down in the inbred “middle-class” southern suburb of Kelmscott and who also (apparently) wanted to be in a band (as a vocalist).
So I called him up and this nervous paranoid voice was like “W-w-who is it? W-wh-what do ya want?”, but after explaining myself he brightened up and was suddenly hell-chatty and enthusiastic! So anyway, to cut a long story short, we ended up forming CONTROLLED BY FEAR (more popularly known as CONTROLLED BY BEER), with Kevin’s brother Neal on bass and one of Gus’s school mates, named Matt (aka Mouse), on drums.
(We took our name from a FEAR OF GOD song – a band that we were into at the time (although now I personally hate Erich’s guts! What a fag!))… Anyway. None of us really knew how to play our instruments, but it was fun wasted times and we played a load of gigs.
During one of our mid-week rehearsals, a couple other of Gus’s old Kelmscott schoomates rocked up. One of them was this guy Mark (soon to be known exclusively as Zombo). He had some of his artwork in the car and showed us all. I was impressed. He was a friendly young chap who played some bass guitar, so when C.B.F. dissolved, me & Gus naturally roped him in to our new band RUPTURE.
After that very first phone call to Gus, a jam was organized with me on guitar, Gus on vocals, Kevin (who had given me Gus’s number) on bass, and this guy Henry on drums. I’m not sure how I knew Henry or how he came to be drumming? He had been in other punk/wave bands since he was 14 or so (eg CIRCLE OF CONFUSION). The jam went OK, but it was the only jam we ever had! A bit later Henry called me up and asked if I wanted to jam with another band. He was drumming, this dreadlocked acid-freak called Duey was singing, and a guy named Pete on bass. This came to be KOMPOST and although we jammed quite a lot, we never played a gig. Anyway this started to fizzle out, and then me & Gus hooked up again and started CONTROLLED BY FEAR.
Me & Gus were hanging at punk gigs & stuff and he was introducing me to a shitload of Scandinavian punk. Anyway, C.B.F. lasted a year or so and then broke up, and me & Gus went on to immediately form RUPTURE, with this Polish immigrant freak named Darek on drums, and of corpse Zombo on bass.
RUPTURE formed in ‘89 – me, Gus, Zombo & Darek. We used to jam in Darek’s bedroom at his mum’s house way up in the northern suburbs ha! It must’ve been explosively loud and yet Darek’s mum was very good about it all, hardly ever complained about the noise. The music was crusty/grind I guess, tho’ probably from lack of talent than any conscious deliberation. It was Gus who was always urging us to “Play faster! Faster!”
We had a cheap 8-track studio booked around Xmas in 1990. Meanwhile Gus took off in a car full of punks to Sydney or Melbourne or somewhere, fuck knows where. He said he’d be back in time to record but never did. So we roped in Kim (PESTILENCE/RESOLUTE) on vocals. It was always just a temporary fill-in tho’, we never had any plans to kick Gus out or anything, tho’ we mighta been a bit annoyed with him at the time… Also it was both Kim & Zombo singing on that EP, with added growls by Darek.
Pens up arseholes, Jehova Witness parents, Kim on acid running up and down his street naked… sheesh it was terrible! Me & Zombo were living there. Zombo soon left, and I followed not long after. Kim was OK but he was a true freak and it was a bit scary living there alone with him. You never knew what would happen next. Kim and Gus were at each others’ throats, however. I don’t know how or why, but they ended up hating each others’ guts. I think it was Gus dishing it out mostly, a constant avalanch of abuse & belittling. There must’ve been more to this, but neither me nor Zombo got the full story. Who knows, maybe Kim Pen-Arse did the ol’ pen trick and tried to shove it in Gus’s mouth? (I would understand the hate, in that case)!
Well we kinda moved on from Darek, who was struggling a bit with the velocity we wanted to go, and found Mike (aka AK-47), who we knew to be a total blender-core drummer from his drumming in RESOLUTE (with Kim ha). That’s when everything suddenly went turbo-speed. Also Gus had gone over east a bit of a peace-punk, but for some reason he came back more an angry nihilistic lunatic and suddenly wanted to write lyrics exclusively about making fun of the “punk scene”. Maybe he got ostracized by the cliquey scene over east, who knows? But it was a good thing, because our lyrics definitely improved. Also throw a huge pile of magic mushrooms into the mix and Gus was “irrepairably damaged”!
We were pretty much rejected by the Perth “punk scene”, but that didn’t bother us because a lot of that folk ending up going back to their rich parents & became the upwardly-mobile poofs they always really were. Meanwhile, a whole new crowd started coming to gigs. This young nihilistic booze-and-drug-fuelled skater-punk crowd took a liking to our songs, so there were a lot of crew carrying their skateboards around everywhere ha ha. Some of ‘em formed pretty cool bands themselves, like BROWN DEMON and HEIST…
Dunno? I guess we were all writing letters and swapping tapes with various freaks around the world, and hooking up with other bands of similar ilk was kinda just a natural thing to happen. I remember writing to Bob from DROP DEAD back then and getting a letter back which was like “How the fuck did you hear about us?”… Who knows. There were tons of record labels willing to put up the funds for a release. Zombo was hanging with Duey (from KOMPOST) a lot, and they had this idea for a band called BEAST IN HEAT and asked me to join them.
MOB 48 was just me, Zombo, Gus & a cheap-ass Roland drum machine (and whoever else happened to drop in), just pure alcohol-and-drug fuelled 4-track mayhem… Recording MOB 48 songs at 3am in the morning totally wired was a fun thing to do. (Need I say, we were heavily influenced by MOB 47… but we were of corpse one step further ha ha)!
I remember, me & Gus saw a classified ad in the newspaper for this 4-track recorder and we both drove up to check it out and ended up buying it for $70 bucks or so. It was some no-name thing with multi-coloured knobs, like lollies, but it pulled an OK sound and we recorded Righteousfuck on that thing. Later on, we would all put in some money for a studio here & there. Then we met up with Al “Dr Alien” Smith from Bergerk Studios (formerly Death Rooster Studio), who seemed to “click” with us and pull a good sound from us. He was in an experimental noise band himself (called SWAPMEAT), so there was some like-mindedness there from the start, plus he was a professionally-trained studio engineer.
Meanwhile, I’d traded that shitty no-name 4-track in and upgraded to a nice Yamaha 4-track machine, and continued to pump out recordings… I had other gear too, like graphic EQ decks and reverb racks etc… (Let’s just say I bought ‘em very cheap heh!).
“Hundskit” was my 4-track recorder. I think Gus made up the name? He was so big on Swedish-core that he even bought a big Swedish-English dictionary and was learning Swedish words & grammar etc and translating all these Swedish punk EP lyrics. There was this label “Birdskit Records”, and Gus got the idea “Hey Stumbles you should call your 4-track recordings ‘Hundskit Studios’” – (ie Dogshit Studios). I happily complied. I recorded tons of other bands with my 4-track – IMPACT WINTER, FUCKEN BASTARDS, THE RATS, ZITBASTARD, CHICKENSHIT, DEAD BABIES IN VOMIT, MOB 48 of corpse… to name a few.
Sometimes we simply “clicked” on stage and it was like we all were tunnelled into this weird dimension where everyone just “knew” what everyone else was doing, and it was (mostly) flawless and powerful and precision execution. This was particularly the case when playing live with AK-47 (probably because we were all speeding off our tits!). But most of the time, a RUPTURE gig was just drunken nonsense – funny tho’, the audience seemed to always enjoy the show! We played with tons of bands, incl a support with CARCASS. Too many bands to list, really. Ah, they all sucked mostly (incl COCKARSE). ELF & THE GOON GUTS were cool (more in hindsight). I really dig that band nowadays!
Well, AK-47 developed tendonitis and had to have 6 months off. I guess we got impatient and asked Dean (aka “Pasqualez”/aka “Poofsqualez”) to drum for us. He was a powerful fast drummer who certainly added a lot of muscle to the drum sounds. He toured Melbourne with us, but when we got back we kicked him out. I dunno, I guess he just didn’t fit in to our drunken idiot wavelength or something. I remember in Melbourne with him, we were getting tanked before a big gig supporting BRUTAL TRUTH, and he got all huffy and wouldn’t join in, thinking we were all gonna be too pissed to play. He was sitting at the front door gazing out at the passing cars, and shaking his head saying “I can’t wait to get back home and polish my dad’s yacht”. YUPPIE FAG! He was also complaining heaps about money, and how much he was spending. Me, Zombo & Gus were starving at times, living on a couple of dim sims a day, and he’d rock up with some Chinese banquet that he wouldn’t share. I found a bank slip he’d left on the floor and it said “$999”. I queried this with him (as he’d been whinging non-stop about money), and he replied that yes, he’d broken his $1000 budget and was pissed off about it.
Anyway… From Poofsqualez we got this young skater guy/smack-head named Brad (aka “Dick Diamond”) on drums. He was a fellow wastoid, if not a little strange… He was always bringing up some new NWO/Illuminati/Freemason conspiracy into the conversation, which could get a trifle annoying at times.
Dr Alien Smith recorded that on his mobile 16-track reel-to-reel at some rehearsal studio. I was fucking off to Melbourne with my girlfriend the next week or so, so it was pretty rushed (although we had been jamming out those fuckin’ songs for what seemed like fucking years!) Also I was using a shitty borrowed Fender Strat (hate ‘em!) so I wasn’t getting the nice warm Ibanez humbucker sound I was used to. I wasn’t there for the mixdown (I was in Melbourne), and so I had no say in it, but I was never terribly happy with the sound… Fuck it, it’s past history. (Sheesh, the place falls apart without me…!).
One thing I do remember about that recording session… I was having these intense “dissociative states” all the way through it, I felt like I was outside my body, it was fucking weird and I had to leave the room quite often and go sit outside for a spell. I’m not sure any of the others had any idea I was having these weird fits. I was kinda panicky, thinking I had a brain tumour or something!? Anyway, I came to Melbourne with my missus, and I was still having these weird dissociative experiences. Acid flashbacks? Who knows. But they soon faded away and have never came back since.
And so, after Cunt Of God, I moved to Melbourne, and a year later Gus & Zombo rocked up, and we hooked in Brendan (aka “Number 5”) – we knew him from staying at his house on our earlier Melbourne tour.
There were a couple of gigs, incl a support for DAYGLO ABORTIONS, and then me & Zombo pulled the plug and quit RUPTURE. Shortly after that, Gus was dead.
We had a recording under our belt that Brendan had done for us (he worked at a TV studio and had access to their studio after-hours). All the instruments were done, but Gus had only done 3 songs (rough vocal takes). After he died, Brendan just sat on this recording and wouldn’t release it to us. It took a LOT of pressure/threats to finally get hold of it. And from there, we were fortunate enough to get Jeff Clayton from ANTISEEN and The Boss from THE NERDS to put vocals down on half the songs each. (Thanks to Monkey Motherfucker/THE NERDS & Carlos/Scarey Records for organizing this!!! MAJOR effort by those guys!!!).
Anyway… You asked me which drummer I liked the best. I’ll say Darek, our first drummer. He was always “one of us” and we had plenty of good laughs together. And I’ve recently got back in touch with that Polish freak, which has been way-cool. But yeah, Mike AK-47 was always, technically, the best drummer we ever had. His drumming was just so damn precise!! He was amazing. We called him “Mortein spraycan formula” because his fast cymbal thrashes literally “hissed”, like spraying flyspray ha ha…
Well I guess we were just writing about our experiences. Tho’ it was Gus who got into the smack in a big way… well, bigger than me or Zombo ever did… Smack definitely wasn’t agreeable with him, but he did however write a load of cool poetic junky lyrics while living in the Melbourne smackie scene – which we later put to song. He came back to Perth with all those lyrics, ended up OD’ing, and together with our gentle persuasion (fist to face) decided to get off the smack. Naturally he turned to pills and alcohol. By the time he was in Melbourne again he was a raging liver-damaged alcoholic (in hindsight, with heart disease too).
I call it natural evolution. The fastcore stuff was cool I guess but we were growing a bit bored with it – also it was such hard work ha ha. We wanted to play songs that didn’t take such a toll on our drunkenness & retarded mental states & flailing health & fitness ha ha. Also, I should add, we were mostly listening to fucked-up punk rock too – not so much the ballistic-core we had grown up with. So it was natural that we should start to play more minimalist 2-chord punkers ha ha!
Ilsa movies, mainly I guess… And Gestapo’s Last Orgy, The Beast In Heat, etc etc… People call it “nazi-themed”, but it isn’t, it’s “nazi-movie-themed”. It’s all tongue-in-cheek nonsense. Anyone who takes it seriously DESERVES to take it seriously!
I personally like the HEADCLEANERS cover, and the 2 Killed By Death covers we did (“Job” and “What The Fuck”). And NIHILISTICS “Love And Kisses” was always fun to play live. I was never much of a SOCIAL DISTORTION fan (Zombo and Gus were), but I did like the attitude behind that particular song of theirs (“Anti-Fashion”).
Different moods, different tastes, different days… wherever my mood takes me. I like the songs from “Boys, Nuns, Beerbottles & Cunts” CD, I guess (for me) they have the best sound & riffs etc. But I like the 4-track stuff we did with Brad Diamond too (eg “Hate Makes The World Go Round” EP etc) – they had a pretty good sound too. “Sex, Drugs & Rupture” is OK too, as far as our “fastcore” shit goes. Shit, I dunno.
Well basically Gus just dropped dead, alone, in Smith Street in Collingwood. Heart attack! In hindsight I do remember him mentioning weird feelings in his chest when we were wasted a few times. I didn’t think too much of it – we all get palpitations & weird physical sensations from time to time. Obviously he had an undiagnosed medical condition that ended up killing him. At least it was sudden for him – the best way to go! R.I.P. my brother!!! Apparently when his folks came over to clean up his belongings etc there was a half-bottle of Jim Beam beside his bed. Also (apparently) he’d just scored a job, at a bakery down the street from the Smith Street pub he was living at.
Yeah as I explained earlier, we had this recording we’d just done (“courtesy” of our drummer Brendan), and Gus had only put down “rough” vocals on 3 of the songs – (we ended up using those 3 takes anyway). “I’m The Man” came out on the split w/ANTISEEN, and “Normaloid Void” and “Vegetable Cunt Fun” were supposed to come out on a split EP w/NIHILISTICS, but Brad/First Blood Family Records fucked it up and it never happened. I think he had high hopes for his new label (after the demise of his great Rhetoric Records), but sadly succumbed back to his junky ways and fucked it all up. Shame about that. Anyway, we ended up using “Vegetable Cunt Fun” on the split 5” w/EXTORTION. The rest of the songs we split in half, and Jeff Clayton from ANTISEEN sang one lot, and The Boss from the NERDS sang the other half.
Well I guess that song “Normaloid Void” hasn’t really been released yet (just on the RUPTURE/NIHILISTICS test pressing heh!)… (Who wants to buy it from me heh heh?)… There are no other unreleased songs (but maybe lots of unreleased rehearsal & live shit). There was a 4-track recording of just 3 or 4 songs that we did with Brad Diamond, that strangely disappeared tho’. Those songs were re-recorded later (“Repulsal” was one of them), but the original recording sounded cool I remember, with guitar in one speaker and bass in the other (true RAMONES style ha!)… Pity… As for future releases, there is always something happening… tho’ it gets longer & longer for it to happen… As for bootlegs? Who the fuck knows? I heard there was a “Corrupture” bootleg floating around Europe many years ago? And just recently, Erich & Thomas from Off The Disk Records in Switzerland released a boxset of early OTD 7” EPs (including our “Righteousfuck” EP) which me or Zombo never got one copy of. There’s a 5” coming out from Perth (Rest In Punk Records) and a split 7” with EMPIRE FALLS from U.S.
Hopefully our split w/OPPOSITION PARTY from Singapore will finally happen one of these fucking days, it’s been way too long in the making. Hate Ape Productions is supposedly bringing that one out. It’s kinda embarassing because our mate Francis from OPPOSITION PARTY went to a lot of trouble organizing their songs & also the brilliant front cover art for this release, and now, 3 years later… pffft. Same ol’ story, really.
Personally I got totally sick of the whole band thing – that’s why I quit Rupture in the first place. It just wasn’t fun any more. I still enjoy getting drunk & stoned and making up music tho’. Zombo has his band THRILLKILLERS which play quite a few gigs.
I have no plans for the future at all. One day it would be nice to not have to work. So maybe scamming some sort of pension is a vague future “plan” in my head… But then that entails doctors, shrinks etc… and I basically can’t be fucked. I’ll probably end up killing myself more than likely. Just a matter of “when?”.
