The Little Bands - Part 1:



The Little Bands scene was a sub-scene that occurred as a parallel to the more formalised Melbourne punk band scene. The first Little Band formed in 1979 after friends of the Primitive Calculators put together a temporary group to support The Boys Next Door at a venue called Hearts in Carlton. At the time members of the Calculators were living in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of North Fitzroy next door to fellow synth renegades WhirlyWirld. Both groups latched onto the idea of forming temporary, side-project bands that would play no more than two gigs, for no more than 15 minutes and share each other’s equipment — i.e. 'Little Bands'.

The most common manifestation was in the Little Band itself. A spontaneous and usually short lived but vibrant and fresh agglomeration of people, ideas and borrowed instruments would result in quick, intense and sharply focused performances of some material based on a new idea. In many cases, once expressed, these ideas would often be superseded by the next time the same people surfaced. It was a constantly turbulent melting pot of people, band names and sounds.



Soon a raft of Little Bands had started up and began to convene at both the Calculators’ and Whirlywirld’s twin terraces to use their equipment and rehearsal space. These resources were shared among the north of the river extended family and the spaces were in permanent use 24 hours a day as people rolled up to try things out. Over time other small collectives setup their own spaces , but the core group of people in and associated with these two bands were the nucleus of the Little Bands.



Made up of a circle of artists, art enthusiasts , spontaneous musicians, poets, performance artists and filmmakers, mostly of whom were dole recipients with a lot of spare time on their hands, Little Bands proliferated amid a haze of booze, weed and speed. In a milieu where ideas were considered more important than musical prowess, the bands often sounded quite terrible; these kids were sloppy, clangy and discordant. In turn, they could sound equally fantastic: a mixture of epileptic drum machine rhythms, stabbing synth lines and creepy/witty lyrics making for oddly compelling results.

"The little bands thing was just a bunch of like-minded people playing in an endless array of line-ups sort of apart from the Clifton Hill mob of David Chesworth and Philip Brophy. It was in some ways very anti of what they were doing. Philip Brophy was very against emotion in music, while the little bands thing was meant to be wild and chaotic and punk added into doing sort of art, experimental stuff, and not just electronic. A lot of the original participants were actually artists who applied the Dada sort of approach of their painting. It was the attitude and idealism of punk, but applied to a post-punk art type thing." ( John Murphy - Whirlywirld)