You love his angry, paranoid rants in the pages of the ‘zine. Now UNBELIEVABLY Bad’s resident bullshit-slayer The Greasy Belcher hits the ether stream to bring you the highlights of a dangerous life…

Hi Low Bodybags,
Since pissing off up the Gold Coast six months ago I’ve had a huge burst of creative energy. The only problem is that 99% percent of it never leaves the confines of my head because I’m too muted to pick up a pen or fumble around with a computer.

When I’m laying in the garden at 3am staring upwards at a blanket of stars and wrapped in a coat of Aeroguard or Mortein I’m often paralysed by amazing revelations about the nature of this reality and the life cycles of the universe. I’m able to visualise working models and interpretations describing how there are underlying oceans of energy softly aligning to create the baseless fabric of this vision. I shift my perspective through the invisible blur created by my alternate realities as they coexist in a superimposition of deviating frequencies.

I often think about how the linage of our ancestry is being used like a meat tunnel by DNA searching for a keyhole the will one day open a door to the purely spiritual domain. Then I piss my pants laughing at the absurdity of other people’s lives as they sweat out their existences in dull offices eating microwaved foods, performing poor renditions of last night’s Footy Show sketches and talking about politics as if there’s any choice in this totalitarian lockdown.

I know I’m approaching what others have named insanity, like a mushroom addicted monkey marveling at the symbols flashing behind his eyes, but in truth I no longer give a fuck because I’m through having my head shacked to the edge of this blinkered animal food trough. I’ve decided not to worry about saving a pile of money so a crowd of bankster clowns can asset-strip my bare arse and give me a public flogging if I make it to 60. The illusion we’ve had pumped into our heads since birth is a lie, try turning off your TV and shunning newspapers for six months and that illusion will fall like water-adhered wallpaper drying off the walls in your house, but enough about that for now.

On Saturday night I staggered up the stairs of The Coolangatta Hotel to witness The Cruel Sea perform a rare gig. I can’t exactly say I was expecting to have my bollocks blown off after reading a brief Tex Perkins interview in a local rag in which he intimated something along the lines of “sometimes you get an offer you can’t refuse.” In other words, I’m just here for the fucking money. That said, I am a big fan of Tex Perkins and I worship the Beasts above all others. So anyway, it’s half an hour till they come on stage and I’m seven rows back from the bar and highly pissed off with the lack of staff serving drinks. Firstly I get some drunk fake-titted iguana-skinned platinum blonde slapper attempt to cajole me into buying her a drink; then I get some drunk-fuck-tattooed-surf-granddad in a Celibate Rifles T-shirt heave past me waving his arm at the barmaid as if she’s short-changed him and he’s needed at the bar. It was obviously a ruse and I was happy to let the little arsehole through safe in the knowledge he would be tripping over my boot with his hands full of rum and coke in about five minutes. Then the prick gets his drinks and attempts to con the bar staff into handing back change of a $50 and causes a scene that takes 10 minutes, two bouncers and some CCTV reviewing to settle. When I eventually get back to standpoint with the beers I find my cohorts in the same spot against a back wall — but now with two surfer dicks with heads the size of alien nerd scientists standing directly between us and any possible view. Basically what I’m saying is the place was full of cunts.

So then the DJ pulls the faders down and the stage lights up, on walk The Cruel Sea minus Tex and they immediately launch into the amazing instrumental rocker “4”. I’m boshing my head up and down thinking, “Fuck Me! I never realised this track is as good as almost anything (Jamaican studio one keyboard king) Jackie Mittoo has ever done.”  Then Tex ambles onto the stage and the show gets underway for real, well actually it doesn’t. They cut straight to the hits but for some reason it’s gone a bit flat. Maybe I’m smoking too much weed but I can really sense when an artist carries the wrong kind of energy into a performance. Tex really seemed not to give a fuck about the audience, and, in truth, I can’t say I blamed him. It is, after all, a pretty much impossible ask to expect a seasoned pro / perpetual artistic force to get excited about performing 20-year-old songs to a bunch of drunk surf wankers and rubber-titted dunces who think wearing a T-shirt from a different band of the same era is a good enough effort. So the gig rolls on “and the hits keep coming”, but there’s fuck-all energy coming out of Tex and I’m momentarily amused to notice he’s wearing the kind of tracksuit shorts usually reserved for sitting on beanbags and playing video games. In fairness it can’t have been that bad because in no time at all they took their bows and exited the stage.

There was a two-minute encore from the darkness before the tides of the cruel sea came ripping back to give the crusty surfers one last decent wave to ride home on. Tex raised his drink and exalted, “Free beer, the only reason we came here.” My interpretation was, “I think paradise has turned you all into morons. We have nothing in common other than a love of alcohol, but fuck it the cheque’s cleared and I’m in a good mood.” They finished the set with four excellent and high-energy renditions of Cruel Sea classics. Tex got into it at last and only interrupted the flow to take a public dump on Peter Garrett and confess a long held dislike for “the bloke”. At last he was talking without a thin veil and speaking from the heart. That’s where the gig ended, on a high.

The trip home was worth noting and filing under “fuck this place, never again.” The bouncers sealed off four of the five exits causing a huge clusterfuck of drunk idiots bouncing off each other shouting, “Where’s the toilet, and which way out?” When we eventually got through the bacterial swarm we realised it was all in order to herd us towards the waiting police to serve as some kind of precautionary preemptive subliminal warning. It was a futile attempt at crowd control as 20 yards around the corner the shirtless mohawked V8 super-car knob-ends were tossing empty VB cans from the back of one moving ute to another. We quietly made our way back to the car sifting though a disrupted jigsaw of pissed old tarts crudely stumbling from cheap Chinese eateries shrieking their way down the street. I made it home in one piece thanks to the luxury of a designated driver and proceeded to have a swim, get high and think about clarity of the night’s sky above. It was turning out to be a decent weekend, which brings me back to Friday.

I’ve hovered about the music scene for a while in various places, as a manager for a band in Dublin, a roadie for jerk in Sydney, as a sometime contributor to different publications with written pieces of shite like this under different pseudonyms for years. I’ve also recorded a ton of stuff and been in and out of a few bands from time to time – but for many various reasons nothing much ever comes of it. To name a few reasons: I can’t remember lyrics and prefer to make shit up and move on; I don’t like most people; there’s always on bloke in a band who’s a fucking tit with off-putting ideas or embarrassing delusions of grandeur… Put simply, musically I’m most at home locked in an empty warehouse for the night on the piss with four good mates, ranting out freestyle lyrics and inventing evolving scenarios and stories as we go. Sometimes each track will thematically link to the previous spontaneous jam and the night’s session evolves into a lost theatrical opus. It’s great fun.

On Friday we set up for a session despite missing our rhythm guitar player. Luckily I brought my bass and Rowie (lead) had a spare amp in his van. We downed a few beers and waited around for Stak to show up with his bass rig for an hour or before he called from a roadside 80 kilometers away to inform us the car he’d just bought had blown up 20 minutes from the seller’s house and he would not be making it anytime soon. We we’re fucking about with our drummer on bass when a bloke named Russell walked past the warehouse on his way home from the pub and asked if he could have a beer and hang out. He inched over to the drum kit and started bashing skins, and before anyone knew what the fuck was happening the boys jammed out a riff. I started rambling out lyrics and the beginnings of a song was somehow birthed there and then from the ashes of a cigarette hanging from the jaws of defeat.

Musically I know my voice sounds like the neighbors fighting, but fuck it, that’s what I like to do. Lyrically I’m ranting about being in love with an absolute cunt of a bird who runs over your heart in a tank before telling you to fuck off down “The Beaten Track” of forlorn lovers and gullible arseholes drowning in her wake. We’ve all been there.

Click here to download Beaten Track.

I’m actually beginning to have delusional aspirations of grandeur for this band myself and for the first time ever my copilot is on exactly the same wavelength. Just now I told him I’ll design a logo for the ‘Heartless Bastards’ – and he said, “Brilliant marketing idea! – T-shirts, bandanas, coffee mugs, stubbie coolers and microphone shaped dildos for the ladies.”

Greasy

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Greasy Belcher interviewed Henry Rollins for the latest edition of UNBELIEVABLY Bad, onsale now.