This will only be up for a limited time. If you like it I suggest you seek out and buy 'A Savage Affection' The Philisteins remastered compilation, a collection of their three albums 'Bloody Convicts', 'Some Kind' and 'Lifestyles of the Wretched and Forgettable' with bonus rehearsal tape recording.

I don't know how The Philisteins missed being noticed by the mainstream of Australian music? They exist as evidence that with all the talent, skill and determination in the world even the best laid plans more often than not go 'splat'.

At least we can still listen to how gloriously they did that and if you've never heard them before consider yourself very lucky. I do.

http://historyofaussiemusic.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-philisteins.html

The Philisteins- A Savage Affair CD#1

Could It Be Me?-The Philisteins-Bloody Convicts (1988) (from A Savage Affection comp)

Another classic from the under-rated, hardly noticed, but magnificent 'Philisteins'. This is a song for people who need to be told more than once, (which is why I like it).

'Some Kind' from The Philisteins 'Some Kind' album from the compilation 'A Savage Affection'

Experiment in Mood 1 demo

Experiment in Mood 2 demo

Wednesday Winter

Guy and the boys belt out another undisputed championship effort of rock and roll musicianship.

Freeloaders- 'Public Gallery' from 'Through the Sound Barrier'

How could anyone ever have possibly overlooked this?

Freeloaders- 'Not For Real' from 'Through the Sound Barrier'

Freeloaders- 'Let's Talk About Drugs' from 'Through the Sound Barrier'

Fifty Six

 A red dish cloth hangs waiting in anticipation to animate the apparent stillness by slipping from his fingers to the rug. 
 The occasionally flickering fluorescent street lamps in the open window before him stretch away to meet with the cubes of light which are the windows of the industrial, night shift, sewing rooms. 
This is a scene which the cheapest of rooms in discount city hotels often over look. 
The heat is stifling giving to the middle of the night the intensity of a summer afternoon. 
The sleeping waiter has successfully napped in a vacant room many times before. Recovering from the day light excesses of previously unknown pay cheque indulgences. 
His Mother and uncle arranged with the manager, a family friend, for him to work in the hotel. 
An offer which under the circumstances he felt obliged to accept even though he hated working. 
The mini-bar door is ajar and the cans and miniature bottles have been carefully arranged around it on the floor to give the impression that it is in the process of being restocked. 
The only discernible movement in the hallway is the flutter of the faulty elevator light and our imagination's silently stalking and examining the key holes, wafting through the filaments of hallway lamps and walls, made from compressed words. What ever time of night it is no one knows.
   The patterns on the wings of a moth contained an encoded communiqué. Meandering ringlets of mist buffeted it as it broke through into the sun’s streams at the mouth of the mine shaft, having risen from the bottom where it had been released from a jar previously discovered washed up on a rarely visited secluded beach. It was there in the headlines of the next morning’s newspaper. Blueprints shot across the spines of the yew trees from the car headlights at the front of the driveway, accompanied by the sound of the soft crunch of gravel on a curving turn...


Amongst Clouds

   A Wednesday. It had been raining solidly for a week. The creek just down the hill was so swollen with water from the non stop rain pounding down upon the grey mist wrapped and concealed like a flurry of cold dust upon mountain. It was so full of one way moving water that it had almost breached the highest lips of its banks. If you sat on the little wooden bridge beneath the willows and let your legs hang over the edge, the water that was moving at such an intense speed beneath your feet was so close below that it was as though you were flying through the waters as they rushed bits of branch and rubbish and white frothing columns of bounding froth shapes. The coldest of winter days was upon us also. Use the blue bar.
Turning the lever, ace, space-diamond scared of the dark boy. 
He was alone there and didn't even consider that, sort of with a whole lot of people who weren't there, in a way. 
Afterwards, she drank some tins of beer. Made you know, tattoo graffiti. 
I was going to go and visit you at the zoo, I miss you, still, the heart's-wing heated steam, brought to you through the burning of the Alexandrian Libraries to heat their baths. 
Resolved to not tell you anything, but could not stop myself, where ever they are today.
I was trying to tell you about whatever happened, using crafted miniature action figures. 
Filling out a space on the form with the ambiguous question box. Open windows where the curtains billowed out into the street. Lost the note. splinter, green snow here, buried strings of lights. Hoisting the purple, silk, diamantine- reflecting satin flags in which our coded message was embroidered in a language foreign to those over whom we had to, upon this very dawn, defend against... 
The light of the day was that metallic orange, wet, with a glare of earthen clay orange. 
Cold wind, gold metal powder gilt dawn, orange frosted light of another day no one warned you was coming. 
The sun warm again upon your face relieving the chill shiny on their surfaces as the equatorial light bathes all. 
These straining flags, their surfaces, and again, against the long, black shadows, across the wooden floor boards of this corridor filled with identically the same doorway entrances. 
Each may or may not be opened. 
You may sit in the hallway, (contrary to popular belief).
The International Date line declares that it is indeed, not yet day time, in Peru. 
(Just in case).


Ladder in the Clouds

The eighth, and final track from legendary Tasmanian expatriate band 'The Philisteins'.

Appearing in 1988, this collection of rippers constituted their second release and first vinyl EP on Greasy Pop records, the criminally ignored, 'Bloody Convicts'. 

This number, as with all the musical output of Robert Guy Adrian Lucas, is destined to one day become a well-placed, expertly cut, gem of the rarest kind in the Australian post-punk, psychedelia, garage-rock-revival genre crown as it always should have been.

This mix, taken from the compilation, 'The Philisteins-A Savage Affection: 1986–1992', was released in December 2007 by Off the Hip and was expertly re-engineered by Ernie Oppenheimer.

According to Guy, he was inspired to compose this song after one day in 1986 visiting me at my flat in Warwick street north Hobart and, whilst he looked from my solitary bedroom window under the influence of numerous recently-quaffed cones of opium-laced hashish, he witnessed an hallucinatory vision in which a swarm of gigantic mechanical locusts descended from the ever present clouds above the central business district of Hobart city. to gorge themselves upon the tall, white painted, (broken), clock-housing tower of the T&G building.

I did wonder what it was that caused him that day to abruptly leave in such a hurry, and after you've heard this, you too will know exactly why...

The Philisteins- A Savage Affa

Apeshit Metal Locusts (Eating a City)

The songs that belong to The Freeloaders and are here as a tribute to the memory of Guy Lucas- musical luminary, inspiration, wit, and a dynamic and propulsive force on the Australian independent music scene, bursting out of the garage in a veritable paint-cannon spray of psychedelic sounds and left to an an undeserved obscurity. 
He has left us way too soon.
 All of the songs of mine were recorded using Audacity, the free, open-source, cross-platform, sound editing program and were all, in them main, constructed from guitar parts which I recorded at home on an XP windows pc..
Where samples have been used i have made an effort to credit their origins.
   I decided to start to try and create 'songs' when i suffered an illness that left me visually impaired for a year or so, during which time i realised fairly early on that my future hopes as a successful visual artist weren't looking too good at that point and perhaps i should try to find success in some other field equally as difficult and nigh on impossible to succeed in as a way of receiving public notoriety and in making a living.
   It is impossible for any artist to create a truly great piece of work unless they are creating it solely for their own personal satisfaction with no regard for the reception it might have amongst others. 
    This is what makes the artist so often seem 'weird' and 'crazy' to people who do not understand the process of artistic creation and what inevitably must lie at its fundamentalist core, the dismissal of  the value for praise and esteem in the eyes of the society within which the artist finds their self living, and because of this indelible notion this is so often their source of the artists' isolation and alienation.
    The genius of the artists work is inevitable, since they are catering to their own tastes and so, when successful at this, they cannot fail to create a masterpiece.
   It was Gustav Flaubert who wrote that if a writer were to approach the act of writing of a novel with absolute and complete honesty then it would be impossible for that writer to fail and to not create a masterpiece.
The true artist, therefore, is born, not made. The true artist can fall into a puddle of mud and will walk away having created a work of Art., and though the skills of the artist must be honed and refined by the ongoing practice of those abilities, they may lie dormant (even if needs be, for years) and yet will always resurface undiminished. Sometimes they will be even greater for their fresh approach, unrestrained by what has perhaps become to them 'de rigeur' and a threat to thread what is repetitive, unoriginal and stale into their work.
   These inherent qualities,which make the true artist what they are, exist in the exact opposite, and often in greater proportions in what the sociopathic, fame-seeker and the 'wannabe' exhibit as their work and through it quite obviously hold so dear. 
   A single moment of observation exposes the evidence in it that a desire to be  greatly esteemed , honoured, (to the pint of being worshiped) and remunerated to a far greater extent than is fair and  just sadly, screams with the howling chorus barks of rabid dogs through the narcissism in their work so very obviously.displays.
This is not Art.
   In the field of artistic creation, my personal motto  is this:
'If you're going to try and go for the impossible, then you might as well set your sights on everything!'

Brett Hernan

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