Spdfgh
Hailing from Sydney's western suburbs, where they started playing together at Campbelltown High School in 1990, Spdfgh were laughed at and not taken seriously at all in their hometown of Campbelltown. After the hurtful isolation dealt out by their home crowd, Spdfgh decided to take their love to Sydney town. The band members began introducing themselves to the city's groups. Not by playing the venues, mind, but by the novel approach of following other bands around and delivering an impromptu acoustic set backstage or at soundcheck time.
Though their initial repertoire consisted of a range of cover versions from acts like Sonic Youth and the Cure, the band credits those Sydney bands that they 'stalked' as a main source of inspiration . An early tape given to Half A Cow was titled "the We Want To Play With Smudge demo" and showed the melodic potential of Spdfgh and included a cover of a Breeders tune. JJJ's Richard Kingsmill graciously agreed to play the band's demo on air, after Tania rang up the station to read out her High 5 on his show one night, taking the opportunity to plug her young band.
Originally mining the power-pop vein, as evidenced on their "Grassroots" EP which was recorded in late 1994 for a shoe-string budget, which is quite noticable production-wise but suited the band's style at the time, capturing a greatness in its simplicity. While the band were waiting for "Grassroots" to be released, Dirt Records have the honour of putting out Spdfgh's debut release, a 7 inch of "Nightime" which came out in mid -1994, the song taken from sessions recorded for the "Grassroots" EP.
"Grassroots" was released at the beginning of 1995 and contained 5 tracks intercut with spooky backwards talking. Dirt Records released the "Grassroots" EP in the US and Puncture magazine from the US descibed the EP as "the bastard offspring of Mudhoney and The Cannanes." The band quickly gained attention in other countries and early releases included a split-single called 'Gay Pride' (along with Pansy Division, Chumbawumba and others) on UK hardcore label Rugger Bugger which included an early demo record of a song called "Sweet" (Liz on guitar and vocals, also on the Dirt 7 inch).
The band's expanded vision became a little clearer on the stunning "Leave Me Like This" LP which, while based in guitars & drums, showed a leaning towards hip hop, groove & all things funky. The album was also released in the US on New York-based Dirt Records. Three singles were released from the album "Wikky's Ode" , "Give Me Time" and "The Pseudo Blues".
Spdfgh got their songs into some Australian high-profile films with "Steal Mine" being included in the movie and soundtrack album of "Love And Other Catastrophes" and "Hey Freaky Stripper" and "Gun" included in "The Well". The first pressing of "Leave Me Like This" included "Small Mercy", a limited edition cd of an extra 5 songs which was recorded over the hot summer of December 1995 on Nic's four track and showed a more laidback side to the Spds. Another unreleased track, "Hide" billed as Liz Payne And Spdfgh, appeared on the now deleted "Heard It Through The Bovine" Half a Cow promotional compilation along with a re-mix of "Wikky's Ode". On the side, Tania went on a national tour playing bass for Godstar on the ill-fated "Coastal" tour in September 1995 and in 1996-97 Kim became a 'roving reporter' for the popular ABC youth-orientated Recovery programme. Tania also was the cover star for Linda Jaivin's book "Rock n Roll Babes From Outer Space" and members of the band played at the book launch in October, 1997.
When guitarist Liz left (going on to form Rocket with Brad from Gerling and Jamie from Blue Bottle Kiss on drums), recruiting Sally Russell from Sydney band Lustre 4 (Sally wrote "You Made Me" on Leave Me Like This and Tania re-paid the favour by giving a song to Lustre 4 and played bass for them for a while), who played a few shows with the band until her commitments to Lustre 4 made it impossible to continue. Just prior to the release of "Leave Me Like This", a permanent replacement was found in Christina Hannaford, who was discovered when she jumped up on stage at a 'secret' You Am I show at the Annandale Hotel in Sydney.
But Christina's stay with the band proved to be short-lived. Her song "Pretty" on the "Small Mercy" bonus disc and additional recording on "The Pseudo Blues" single was all the contributions she made to the band. Throughout most of 1996, despite a resistance to promoting their album by touring up and down the East Coast (standard for most bands with an album through a major), Spdfgh played a handful of shows (the 1996 Big Day Out being a very exceptional show), a JJJ live session and a national tour of Australia with Frente and The Spinanes. "The Pseudo Blues" cd single (the final single lifted off "Leave Me Like This") was released in late 1996 to coincide with the Frente tour with two mixes of the title track and a beautiful re-working of "Wikky's Ode" showed some of the new direction the girls were heading in. Tony Wall and Marc Scully of Gift Productions re-mixed the single.
Incorporating members of the male sex into the band for the first time, Spdfgh began operating more as a collective in late 1996 and into the following year with their very infrequent shows sometimes having up to seven people on stage. With Tania switching to guitar, new boy bass-player Lee Grupetta (ex-The Affected, who had to travel up from Melbourne), and Elise Kelly and Josh Morris on extra guitar and keyboards made this a drastically different but very impressive new Spdfgh. Their final show, supporting Elastica at Sydney's Metro in January 1997, had Kim and Tania in one song out front on the stage, sans guitars, rapping to a new song while squirting water pistols at each other!
Sadly, sometime in early 1997, Spdfgh quietly dis-banded. Kim and Tania toyed around with idea of continuing, possibly under a new name, and some new recordings were made and tapes sent over to producer Mark Saunders in New York for re-mixing but the band and label weren't completely happy with the results. It was all a little too late as by this time Half A Cow had left their deal with Mercury (therefore had no money to inject into the roster for about a year) and the remnants of Spdfgh had decided to move onto other projects. A huge loss to music, Spdfgh were a truly great band who had an original sound and style and were impossible to make comparisons to.
- Information from
- Record number
- 1179
- References
-
- http://www.halfacow.com.au/courtesy of Half A Cow Records
- Updated
- 21 April 2003
- To cite this page
- http://nla.gov.au/nla.cs-ma-NAMO~1179