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Allen (bass): Rick and I met at Westmead Boys Home in Sydney’s western suburbs in 1969. We were in forth form at school and about 15 or 16 years old. Rick had come from the southern suburbs of Sydney, and I had come from Country New South Wales on the far north coast. We fooled around on acoustic guitars at school, nothing too serious. After school we went our separate ways for study and career, but stayed in touch. Five or 6 years later we both ended up working part-time at Kentucky Fried Chicken making salads. I was at art school and Rick… I can’t remember what he was doing. In the late 70s we started going to see bands together. After a while we said, "We can do this," and so feedtime was born. We didn’t like the glam rock or the disco things that were happening at the time, so we decided to do something for ourselves. We both meet Tom (drummer) later, in the early 80s, after feedtime had started playing around a bit.
Rick (guitar): We met Tom… I dunno… maybe 1980? He played double bass with a crew called The Real Fucking Idiots. feedtime lost its first lot of drummers, and Tom had at one time said that he'd play if we came up short. I didn’t know he had never played drums in his life. I went to his and (the vocalist for Real Fucking Idiots) Minda’s apartment one day and she directed me to a room through a closed cupboard where Tom was busy fibreglassing his double bass back together after an unfortunate incident. With the fume levels in the room my already jellied eyes were fast becoming globs of liquefaction, so I got straight to the point: "You wanna play drums in feedtime?" and he said "Ah OK."
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Allen: I couldn’t speak on the climate of Australian music, as my exposure was quite limited. We liked to see [Sydney’s] X, Rose Tattoo, Lipstick Killers, and Ward 13. Our other exposure came from bands we played with at various venues. Bands like Painkillers, Real Fucking Idiots, Itchy Rat, and many, many more.
Rick: The folk and blues scene was pretty vibrant. I couldn’t bear to listen to electrically-operated stuff, and it was a stretch for me to even give people like Mississippi Fred Mcdowell the right to be heard, simply because I didn’t like electric guitar. Any influence on me came from listening to people like Willie Mctell, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Reverend Gary Davis, Huddie Leadbetter, Willy Johnson and Cajun, and most notably the Balfa Freres. As we went merrily through the next years, I got to hear and, to my great delight, see people like Tom Waits, Leo Kottke, Leon Redbone, Duck Baker, Johnny Shines, Little Brother Montgomery, Ellen Macilwaine, Sweet Honey In The Rock, The Birmingham Sunlights, Australia’s X, and Rose Tattoo.

Rick: It wasn’t so much scary considering everything that I had known, but you still had to carry your own presence or you’d easily get cut down by someone or other. They were pretty intense sessions that attracted intense people.
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Allen: I think our first gig was at the Lord Roberts Hotel in Darlinghurst in inner Sydney. We played by ourselves for probably three sets. That was with the first feedtime drummer, David. The reaction from the punters who came to see us was OK. A group that used this place as their drinking hole was less warm. Fuck—a blizzard in fact. Rick and I thought this was the start and finish of a great band, murdered at their first gig, we felt lucky to have walked away unscathed.
Rick: There was an incident with some patch-holder crew and it got pretty rough. I sat down with them—with Allen at my back, which was very brave of him—and the president and I discussed various options like me being beaten into unconsciousness for being disrespectful, or all the gear being destroyed. Anyway, by some stroke of luck I managed to put a stop to the threats and we left there chastened but still in one physical piece; though my feelings were hurt. Things never got better though. There was always some sort of trouble with skinheads or other assorted assholes in Sydney back then.So I guess gigs didn’t come too often?
Allen: We were not heavily booked in the early days. In fact, we were never heavily booked. We were not really part of any scene.
Rick: Gigs did not come quickly and I don’t really remember much anyway. French’s was a nice place to play. The carpet downstairs would suck at your feet and was always sticky with unknown substances. After a while, we ended up just wanting to play all night at various dives by ourselves because we were looking for something inside the noise that couldn’t be achieved by playing in front of people. The music had to be played for itself and into itself… I guess to find each essential rhythm.
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I have no idea why it took so long to do a record. It might have been that we weren’t satisfied with the power generation that was needed. There was a pretty good review done by a couple of philosophers in May ‘84 about a gig at the Central Markets Hotel. They said we were "Literally a black hole where the future of the world is being decided. A Little Shop of Horrors where all the merchandise has gone and only pain is for sale." Tongue in cheek but in truth they sort of nailed something about the time and place. They went on to speak about Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Artauds’ Two Manifestos for the Theatre of Cruelty. So, I suppose we must have read this and thought "It must be nearly time to make a record." Apart from that, we just wanted to listen to something listenable. It was pretty much like "Let’s do something that we wanna hear instead of a bunch of other shit that we don’t."

feedtime didn’t fall in with anything anywhere. We were the lame devil despised at every fucking turn for years it seemed. We got friendly with the Painkillers, Queen Anne’s Revenge, and some of the Rough Justice crew, but that’s about it i think .I’ve heard stories of feedtime shows where the audience was encouraged to join in with kazoos and stuff. Why?
I think because feedtime was a band of the people, for the people, and I wanted it to be a voice for those who might not have one. I wanted to encourage participation from interested persons—especially friends like Adrian, who played sax, and Jeff, who played harmonica. They understood the song was the most important thing. That usually made part of the audience unhappy, others not so much, and others were right happy about it. In retrospect, maybe it wasn’t always a good idea, but inside the recording side of things it was great to try. These good people gave truth to an acknowledgement that it is the fool who takes to himself the respect accorded the position; the position in this case being the song or noise accompanying a few words.
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The first demise of feedtime came about from an accretion in me of unpleasant life experiences and a lack of adequate life skills for dealing with them. Also, a lack of societal avenues of fixing the problem that didn’t lead to incarceration. Sustained hatred of some things can produce an unbalanced person, and that’s what happened with me. I felt that I had to stop altogether and decided to try to remake my being. A small religious group was part of this effort. My associates from the streets knew that it had to be done, so they just stood alongside to watch me die or not. I had to stop studying martial arts, because I was refining an already adequately equipped mind that was intent on being unafraid to kill or of being killed. The howl of feedtime had to stop too. I have likened it to a course of antibiotics or chemotherapy, where you simply cannot do some of the things you’re used to doing if you want to get better. Of course, there’s always a chance that this therapy won’t work, but if you gotta go do it, then best be gettin' on with it.What else did you do after feedtime broke up?
I drank myself into a coma every night, and every available day as well. Maintaining my friendships with the street people I held dear helped a lot. I left the religious group after a couple of completely unsuccessful years of trying, but at least I got to teach some clueless religious people about the Bluesmen and their songs. Throughout that time I was still listening to things like Wayne DZ's alternative music show on Sydney’s 2SER, so I was able to stay somewhat in touch with music through his mad and expert shows .
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Allen and I just wanted to play something. Originally we thought the name "Critter" would best represent our efforts. I didn’t want to play existing feedtime stuff anymore, but thought that another lot of songs might come about from nothing. I didn’t know about AmRep until our manager, Mark Henderson, sent some stuff to Tom Hazelmyer a couple years into Critter. After a while, Allen wanted to call it feedtime because he and I had been the starting crew.Why did you guys decide to get the classic line-up back together for the SS 10 Festival?
My immediate response to (SS Records head honcho) Scott Sorrano’s e-mail was to check out the SS catalogue, and it looked right. I had already been completely and everlastingly impressed with the International Favorites thing he put at the end of the third issue of his fanzine, Z-Gun. The range of stuff in there was simply stellar. I figured since he offered to pay for the crew to come over, I owed the guys a trip. I know it sounds strange, but I want to play feedtime on US soil as a way to say thanks for the music the States provided me.If you could eradicate one musician or group or style of music from the world, what would it be?
I wouldn't eliminate anything. But if a theoretical blade was being held at my nuts, I guess I would eradicate my part in feedtime. That is the only thing that I have contributed to the soundscape, so it is the only thing that I can reasonably uncontribute.feedtime will be playing the second night of the S.S. 10 Festival with Lamps, Nothing People, and Wounded Lion at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. For more info go to http://www.ssten.com/.TONY RETTMAN
