The Spirit of Use No Hooks Lives On
Marisa Stirpe, Denise Grant, and Wendy Morrissey rehearsing with Use No Hooks,1983. Photo: Wendy Morrissey.
“I couldn’t understand why people would want it. I had walked away from it and forgotten it,” said Mick who founded the band back in ‘79.
Forgotten for many years, their lost tape recordings were dug up a few years ago and released on vinyl, for the first time, this year on local label Chapter Music. Drawing inspiration and influences from many sources, Use No Hooks’ music was always unpredictable. Existing in six different incarnations, with band members varying from three to ten, Use No Hooks were known for relentless experimentation and frequent line-up changes.
Playing off the backend of the punk movement, in local pubs like the Tote Hotel, audiences were up for anything new. Under Mick’s guidance the band tested a variety of styles on punters including interpretations of surf-rock, soul, funk, jazz, blues and even some experimental ‘audio art’.
Left: Phil Nichols, Andre Schuster, and Matt Errey rehearsing with Use No Hooks,1983. Photo: Wendy Morrissey.
Right: Michael Charles with Use No Hooks, live Sydney 1981. Photo: Phil Turnbull.
Listen to the full Bleus Conversations podcast interview with Use No Hooks
It wasn’t until 1983, the year Stuart joined the band, that they found their defining disco-punk sound. Inspired by various punk bands, disco icons like Nile Rogers, and rap legends like Grandmaster Flash, their music was a harmonious crossover of all these genres, resulting in something truly unique. Packed full of colloquialisms and Australianisms, their songs were an outright political statement.
Is their recent resurgence possibly explained by the enduring political commentary in Mick’s lyrics, making their songs just as relevant in this new millennium?
“Well... if they are (still relevant), that’s a very sad situation to be in,” Mick said.
Use No Hooks precursor Sample Only at the Champion Hotel, Fitzroy, 1980: Mick Earls, Steve Bourke, Arne Hanna.
Their anti-work anthem, Do The Job was unearthed in 2007 and heard in London nightclubs after it was bootlegged by Psychemagik in 2013. It also inspired a Melbourne club night of the same name. Full of idioms, the song features Stuart and the band’s backing in singers chorusing “bump your way up to the top, get your head down, arse up, back straight, keep your mind on the job”.
Mick, who wrote the lyrics, was highlighting the drudgery of work and the everyday rhetoric used by politicians in the media, namely prime minister Malcolm Fraser who claimed life wasn’t meant to be easy. Stuart, who sung the lyrics, describes them as a “harkening to the utter, jargon-filled emptiness of the period”. Decades later, with our current leaders asserting empty catch-phrases like ‘‘jobs and growth '’ and ‘have a go to get a go’, you can’t help but think not much has changed.
It’s these ever-present clichés, found throughout Use No Hooks’ lyrics, which make them pertinent in today’s context.
Their music embodies a proud middle finger, stuck up high in the face of our work obsessed society; a rejection of a culture that prioritises our jobs, regarded as our core identity and purpose, over life’s other pursuits.
This spirit also makes their music refreshing to the 21st century ear, conditioned to hearing blame game political messaging designed to sow division between the ‘hard working’ and ‘dole-bludging’ members of society.
Looking back, Mick and Stuart reflect on their young adult years spent living on the dole with a brazen righteousness. They saw the government unemployment subsidy as an arts grant for their creative endeavours. According to them, you could live comfortably on the dole and there was no stigma attached.
“You could rent a shop, with four bedrooms in Fitzroy in the late 1970s for $80 a week and if you had four or five people, all getting $40 plus a week on the dole, you could pay the rent, drink every night, use drugs, go out, eat well and have a great life,” said Stuart.
This lifestyle has had a lasting effect on Stuart; “It’s given me a sense of entitlement that persists to this day,” he joked.
He described this sense of entitlement as a result of coming of age in the era of Gough Whitlam. A period where Australia went from a conversative and moralistic backwater to become a forward thinking, prosperous nation. While the rest of the world was in the grips of a global recession, Whitlam’s economic leadership saw Australia weather the worst of the storm. In his short three year term as prime minister, Whitlam introduced many progressive policies, championing Indigenous land rights, equal pay for women, and free university, among many other achievements.
Meanwhile, in the U.K. and U.S., after a post war boom, their economies were stagnating. In the venues and concert halls, anger was brewing and a sociocultural revolution was boiling over. With its ideas of anarchy and DIY radicalism, punk music was loud, obscene and wholly political. As a counterculture movement, punk was a left-leaning ideological reaction to conversatism, which they believe had failed young people. Youth unemployment and disdain for the conversative ruling class was worn as a badge of honour seen in the ripped up clothes, garbage bags, safety pins, and mohawks. This movement made its way to Australia, albeit a watered down version.
“Punk in Melbourne was only about the fashion movement. The original Melbourne punk bands, the music was shit. And the punk ethos wasn’t there because they were all spoilt, middle class rich kids. All it was was a fashion scene,” said Stuart.
Mick Earls with Use No Hooks, live Sydney 1981. Photo: Phil Turnbull
In the post-punk years of the early 80s, the western world had entered the Reagan and Thatcher era. A few years earlier, Gough Whitlam had been famously sacked by the Governor General and was replaced by Malcolm Fraser’s conservative Liberal government. To add insult to injury, audiences had grown tired of punk music. The promise of a revolution was quashed.
“My impression of that period of time was completely dominated by the failure of punk that I had been idealistic and foolish enough in the 1970s to think if we made enough horrible noise music, it would get into people and liberate them from the strictures and structures of their day-to-day lives and they would realise that there was a whole better way to live,” said Stuart.
For Mick, he was less motivated by the failure of punk but rather the idea that music could liberate people.
“(We believed) music could move people to change, to take control of their own lives and decide how they wanted to live,” he said.
The band spent those years living in share houses in Melbourne’s inner city suburbs. They were active members in the ‘little bands’ scene which was documented in the 1986 film Dogs in Space starring Hutchence from INXS.
“The little bands was an attempt to make some kind of authentic music that was an expression of a meaningful punk ethos,” said Stuart. The bands shared ideas and philosophies but also rehearsal space, band members and equipment.
“We had all these people that would come round and use our equipment and so there were bands rehearsing in this shopfront nearly 24 hours a day, taking ampethamines and making stupid worthless music,” said Stuart about his old share house on Nicholson Street in Fitzroy.
Mick and Stuart describe the Use No Hooks era as disposable; something they threw out and forgot about. Yet all these years later, Use No Hooks has stood the test of time and its spirit lives on, finding new audiences at home and abroad.
Use No Hooks 1983. Photo: Wendy Morrissey.