FORTY years ago today the beginnings of what would become iconic group GANGgajang was starting to assemble in the downstairs garage of Brisbane musician Mark 'Cal' Callaghan.
Cal had moved to Sydney where he had had enough of slogging it out playing five nights a week with his band The Riptides and was working in a record store Red Eye Records.
The Angels drummer Graham “Buzz” Bidstrup had produced some of The Riptides recordings and the two found themselves working together again on the 1984 TV series Sweet and Sour.
“We were writing a couple of songs together for that TV show and were in the same orbit and literally lived around the corner from each other,” Cal said.
“We hung out a lot, played a bunch of tennis, started talking about music and bands.”
They ended up working with Buzz’s bandmate from The Angels, bass player Chris Bailey and Buzz’s wife Kayellen Bee.
“[Record producer] Mark Opitz was doing some pre-production for an album that he was going to be doing … I think it was with The Divinyls and he went into Rhino Studios in Sydney and he said to Buzz, ‘Can you come in and play some drums so I can work on some drum sounds’. So they went in there and they worked for a while and got this incredible drum sound and then Mark said to Buzz, ‘Okay, well the drums sound good, got something you want to record?’ So Buzz rang me and said ‘quick get in here’.
“We had this song that we were working on, which was still very formative. And so we just recorded the chords along with this incredible drum sound, the most amazing drum fragments, it sounded incredible and just acoustic guitars and one thing led to another and we added a vocal and suddenly we had Gimme Some Lovin’.”
The song served as the band’s debut single in November 1984 and with the addition of Geoffrey Stapleton on keyboards and guitar and Robbie James on lead guitar, GANGgajang was working in that downstairs garage on what would be their breakthrough self-titled debut album featuring the iconic single Sounds of Then (This is Australia).
Footage has surfaced recently of the band’s first rehearsals in “the shed” in Sydney.
“We called it the shed. I lived in a flat in Kirribilli, it was a block of six flats, you had to go up all these flights of stairs but on road level there was three garages across the front of it built into the sandstone rock the way Sydney is with a roller door and I got the lady in the flat to let me rent a garage and I built a studio in there.
"But it leaked and I had to build a separate roof over it but it still leaked. So then I had to put this black plastic sheeting up but I’d come down some days and there’d be a huge bulge in the ceiling where water had collected and I’d have to poke a hole in the plastic for the water to fall into a garbage bin and take it outside. It was mental, honestly.
“But I have fond memories of working in that shed. Through the day I’d be working at Red Eye Records and I’d come home and I’d go down there and work in the evenings and I’d pretty much knock off a demo of a song per night on my little eight track (recorder). In that period of around ’83 that was when I put the music and the lyrics together for Sounds of Then in that little shed and I still have that demo.”
GANGgajang in an early promotional photo with Kayellen Bee and Chris Bailey.
The band released their classic GANGgajang album in 1985, put out Gang Again in 1987 and have only put out two further studio albums over the years, Lingo in 1994 and Oceans and Deserts in 2002, but stuck together as the original line-up, marking their 40th year this year.
“When you play in a band there is that chemistry that just creates something and a good band needs to be more than the sum of the parts, that’s when you get something special. We were so lucky in that regard that apart from Chris, who passed away, it’s just the same guys, 40 years. It’s amazing,” Cal said.
“It’s like a family and you have your ups and downs but we because we’d all been in bands, where we’d all done that thing of getting in the back of the van and driving forever and sharing hotel rooms and driving each other crazy, right from when we first started with GANGgajang and we started touring, even though we could not afford it, we always had our own hotel rooms. It just meant that at the end of the day, you could close the door and that was that.
“That was why we call it GANGgajang because we wanted it to be a gang rather than a band, in the sense of doing things together when we could do things together and then doing our own things when we wanted to do our own things, working with different people and just keeping it on that level. When we come back and do GANG stuff, we’re all interested.”
GANGgajang play at SOPO Southport, Gold Coast on Friday, March 22, Lefty’s Music Hall in Brisbane on Saturday, March 23 and Sunshine Beach SLSC, Noosa, on Sunday, March 24.
