Saturday 9 July 2011

STRANGER THAN FICTION

Melbourne City, 1998. I'm living in an inner city 'punk house' (whatever the fuck that means) All inhabitants of said house are doing normal punk things (waiting in vegan restaurants, protesting against Jabiluka mine...remember that shit?) as well as playing in punk bands. This dwelling was also a meet up spot/ crash pad/ party house so you can imagine the kind of patronage we used to cater for. Lots of interstate and international bands stayed there. hangers-on were part and parcel.
It was in this enviro that OPEN WOUND was born. Cliche as it sounds, we just wanted to play breakneck blast shit with tech as fuck riffs. Original lineup for the first couple of jams was Jay(One inch Punch/ Providence), Fab(Fallout), Roby and Rusty( Drunkard/Stand Against). For whatever reason, Rusty couldn't do it so I was asked to join. We jammed and jammed and jammed some more (to the massive displeasure of our neighbours...all 4 of us were unemployed, so what the fuck else were we gonna do?)
Pretty soon we had a workable set. We did shows left, right and centre and with bands of every sub-genre of punk. Really, I thought that was one of our strengths, I mean could you see BLOODDUSTER sharing a bill with PISSCHRIST?
It really came together that quick. The fact that all of our time was spent writing/rehearsing resulted in us getting tight as fuck. Seriously, 3-4 months after forming, Sean (NO DEAL RECORDS) is asking us to come to Sydney to play the annual HARDCORE SUPERBOWL. No doubt!-All of our favorite bands are playing.This would be the first of 2 east coast tours and 1 tour of Adelaide which was to be a hellish weekend that eventually broke the band up. The most ironic thing about this whole saga was that we did all of this,plus released the split cd with ANTIGAMA (Poland), the split 7 with CAPTAIN CLEANOFF and the STRANGLEHOLD 7" in the space of under TWO YEARS!!!
Pretty amazing considering this was a good decade before Broadband, Myspace and Facebook!
                                                     HARDCORE SUPERBOWL 1999
Thats me playing bass with the CHARLES BRONSON shirt, looking like a 15 year old Thai hooker.
Anyhoo, after disbanding, Jay and Roby formed THE KILL (still hands down my fave grindcore band), Fab would be integral in forming grindporn ledgends VAGINAL CARNAGE (R.I.P. Metal Chris) and I rediscovered underground hiphop and skated non stop.

P.S. As much as an ordeal as I made this sound, it was actually some of the funniest times of my life.
P.P.S. We all eventually found jobs and are now complicit, worthy contributors to society :)

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