Still Living Dangerously

During their initial tenure in the '80s, Sydney outfit The Johnnys were one of the mainstays of the then-lucrative pub circuit, earning a formidable reputation for their hard-living as much as their country-influenced take on rock'n'roll and penchant for cowboy attire. They didn't become massive sensations like some of their contemporaries at the time, but they were favourites of many for both their killer live sets and their strong recorded output, their raft of singles and pair of studio albums – 1986's Highlights Of A Dangerous Life and 1988's Grown Up Wrong – still taking pride of place in many record collections today.

They worked incredibly hard for most of the decade, but pulled up stumps on the band as a full-time concern in 1989, playing since then only sporadically for special occasions, although you'd never tell it from seeing these shows in action. Their performance this weekend in Brisbane may even be their last ever show in these parts – in the current guise, anyway.

“We're actually going to play a private party for someone's 50th birthday – someone who was very close to the band,” explains frontman Spencer P. Jones of the impetus for this gig. “That sort of led to us thinking, 'Well, we're all going to be in Brisbane that weekend, maybe we should do a gig on the Saturday night?', and I rang Geoff Corbett from SixFtHick and said to him, 'How plausible is it for us to do a gig?', and he was keen and said, 'Leave it with me!' so that's what's happened.

“It's been on the cards for a while, but I wasn't really interested in going down that avenue again unless we had new material, so this will probably be the last of the shows where we play the 'greatest hits' – I'm really only interested in doing new stuff. So if the band are thinking the same way, then I think the next thing we do is make a record. It's been a long time for me and I've got a whole lot of other things that I have on the go, so I'd really only be interested in kinda taking it out on the road if we make a record, that's where I'm coming from. As I say, at this gig we'll do all the hits and everything, but it's the last time that we'll do something in that format.”

The Johnnys were flagged as innovators of the 'cow punk' genre, but Jones concedes that this was merely them continuing an existing tradition, even if it did inadvertently lead to him joining up with Tex Perkins for their infamous outfit, Beasts Of Bourbon.

“We were already doing that in Melbourne, before I was asked to join the early Johnnys I was in a band called Country Killed where we'd all wear cowboy hats and matching western shirts,” he recalls. “I've been described as a 'cow punk pioneer', and I've got an interview from when I was in the Cuban Heels in 1979 where the guy asked me where I thought music was headed, and I actually said, 'Cow punk!' without realising that four years later I'd be in The Johnnys. But there was a lot of stuff like that happening back then – Tex Deadly & The Dum Dums were cow punk if you like, because they were onto the same thing and doing Johnny Cash covers. And here we have Tex now and he's really gone for it with [stage production] The Man In Black!”

The Johnnys' success was about much more than mere gimmickry though, the band touring incredibly hard even amidst a scene where hard work was considered a badge of honour.

“Oh yeah, I think we had trees named after us on the Hume Highway,” Jones laughs. “In 1986 we did the most gigs of any band on the books of Premier Artists, the most anyone had done in a year. The record at that time had been held by The Radiators, and in '86 we actually beat them by 15 gigs. And it wasn't a deliberate thing – we weren't out to do the most gigs – it's just how it panned out. We did about 318 shows, and we still had a couple of months off! Back then you could come down to Melbourne on a Friday, rehearse Countdown on Friday morning, play lunchtime at Melbourne Uni, film Countdown on Friday arvo, fly back to Sydney do a support for Jimmy Barnes at Sydney Uni and then do a 1am show at the Kardomah Cafe. There was a lot of lunchtime gigs back then at various educational facilities, and it was possible to do two or three shows a day in some cases. And I'm not talking about multi-line-ups and twenty-minute sets, I'm talking about an hour-and-a-quarter on-stage each one.”

The Johnnys repertoire was always split fairly evenly between originals and random covers – on which they'd impart their own distinctive twist – and Jones explains that this was as much due to necessity as design.

“Well it was about fifty/fifty – I really only embraced songwriting towards the end of that band, and then my songs started creeping into the Beasts Of Bourbon material, and now I've got seven solo albums!” he smiles. “I was just a very average guitar player with very little ambition, but as we went I thought, 'Hey, this can't be that hard!' so I slowly got into writing songs, but in a very public way and a very amateurish way – I think at age fifty-five, I've finally got it, I've finally figured out how to write a song.

“Anything that worked for us was worth doing, and none of us had embraced the concept of songwriting yet, so we did covers because we hadn't written enough of our own. That's just how it was. (There's Going To Be A) Showdown [the Archie Bell & The Drells song made famous by New York Dolls] was a cover, Motorbikin' [by Chris Spedding] was a cover, Anything Could Happen [by The Clean] was a cover – in fact it's funny, those guys in The Clean really loved our version. We were all massive music fans and obsessed over stuff that we liked, it just seemed normal for us to play these great songs.”

And favourite memories? Spencer sure has a few...

“Yeah, sure!” he enthuses. “Neil Young watching an entire show from the side of stage and telling us how great we were and how fantastic the guitars sounded! He said [adopts Neil Young drawl], 'It sure ain't country, but it sure is good! I hope you guys get lucky tonight!' Playing with John Lydon was cool – he really liked us too. Plus [playing with] Iggy Pop, people like that. We lucked out and kicked a few goals. Co-hosting Countdown was good. We played hard but we played fair, and had some pretty cool adventures, and you can't really ask for much more than that at the end of the day.”

The Johnnys will be playing the following shows:

Saturday 15 September - Prince Of Wales, Brisbane QLD