Fifty years after their formation in Sydney, the vastly influential punk band Radio Birdman are preparing to call it a day, with a final series of Australian shows over winter culminating with a farewell gig in their home town.
But is this really goodbye? Songwriter and guitarist Deniz Tek isn’t making promises. “The rationale is to go out there and have at least one more Australian tour and say goodbye to the fans properly,” he says, but: “You never know for sure.” Singer Rob Younger isn’t much more definitive: “It’s supposed to be [the last tour], yeah. But, I mean, I wouldn’t want to sign anything in blood.”
Being in their early 70s doesn’t preclude Tek and Younger from going around again but with years between shows (the band last performed in 2019) it has to be unlikely.
Tek is calling via FaceTime from his home near Kona in Hawaii, where he and his wife, Ann, are spending their semi-retirement on a coffee and macadamia farm. A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, he emigrated to Australia as a medical student in 1972.
He is, to say the least, a man of many talents. Previously, he was a flight surgeon for the US navy (Tek is sometimes claimed to be the inspiration behind Val Kilmer’s “Iceman” character in Top Gun – Iceman being Tek’s call sign).
But Radio Birdman is at the core of his being. “I’ve been a guitar player for longer than I’ve been anything else,” he says. “Music has been the central part of my inner existence for as long as I can remember, and Radio Birdman is the fullest expression of that.”
Despite being a US citizen, Tek is a pivotal figure in Australian rock’n’roll. He wasn’t the only musician to be inspired by the sound and style of the Stooges and MC5 (in Brisbane, the Saints’ Ed Kuepper was another) but he was the only one to have seen them first-hand.
His band boasts a slim but deathless catalogue. Their first album, Radios Appear, was released independently in 1977 and was dedicated to the Stooges (Birdman’s name was taken from a misheard lyric in the band’s song 1970).
It featured a breathless cover of TV Eye, played at roughly twice the speed of the original, and provided a massive kick in the pants to a sluggish local scene, directly inspiring hundreds of bands including Midnight Oil, Sunnyboys, Died Pretty and Hoodoo Gurus.
Peter Garrett was one early convert, witnessing them up close in 1976 on their home turf in Darlinghurst. “The sound was laser-bright and ferocious, and frontman Rob Younger was riveting, stalking the tiny stage with a leonine fury,” he wrote in his memoir Big Blue Sky.
The band left for the UK and flamed out amid acrimony, recording just one more album, Living Eyes. They wouldn’t reform until 1996; a third studio album, Zeno Beach, was released a decade later with a new lineup. The band was belatedly inducted into the Aria Hall of Fame in 2007.
Few bands have based a five-decade career on such a small body of work. Still, Younger chuckles, “So many bands are described as legends and I wouldn’t give them the fucking time of day. They might have put out a hundred songs and none of them are any good!”
Younger’s distaste embodies the attitude of the band. From the beginning they courted confrontation, setting themselves up in direct opposition to the musical establishment, who hated them.
The feeling was mutual. “We paraded our contempt for various aspects of the music business to generate an adversarial vibe around the band,” Younger says proudly, on the phone from his home on the south coast of New South Wales.
“We were playing music that people really didn’t know and hadn’t been exposed to, so by getting flung out of places and getting pretty extreme reactions from people – I thought, well, we’re getting somewhere. I was buoyed by that.”
They were the ultimate band-as-gang, with their distinctive logo displayed on red-and-black flags bedecking the stage – and on armbands. It was a nod to Blue Öyster Cult, who had their own symbol, but this too went over the heads of audiences, who accused the band of being fascist sympathisers.
A song called New Race – intended to start a dance craze – didn’t help. Asked if there were any myths about Birdman he wanted to dispel, Tek’s reply is instant: “That we had any kind of rightwing political affiliation. We were just anti-authority, and that’s very different to how it’s been portrayed.”
The band is famously fractious: only Tek, Younger and keyboard player Pip Hoyle (who met Tek at medical school in Sydney) remain from the original, combustible combination. Second guitarist Chris Masuak, bassist and graphic designer Warwick Gilbert and drummer Ron Keeley are all gone.
Tek also rejects the notion that the band’s high-energy performances were rooted in the original group’s toxic personal dynamics. “I think it’s just destructive in the end,” he says. Asked his biggest regret about the group, there’s a lengthy pause. “I’d rather not say that publicly.”
But he is deeply proud of his band, particularly their live reputation. “What we were able to achieve on stage, which never really was captured fully on any of our studio albums – that energy was just amazing.”
Younger, for his part, hates talking about Radio Birdman’s legacy. “That notion that we were responsible for this or that, I think it’s a bit of a wank to acknowledge all that too fulsomely,” he says. “It’s nice to receive a compliment every now and again, but let’s not take it too far.”
Perhaps the band’s impact is best summed up by Hoyle, in a 2017 documentary that laid bare the external schisms that tore the band apart. “I don’t think there’s an Australian sound to Radio Birdman,” he said. “I think there’s a Radio Birdman sound to Australia.”
Radio Birdman’s final tour Birdman 5-0 kicks off in Melbourne on 21 June before dates in Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney. Tickets will be available from midday on Monday via Oztix
