My Pal, by God (7" on Butcher's Hook)

What the label says about My Pal, by God:

GOD

It’s just after 2am at Ding Dong Lounge, a large live music venue situated upstairs from a nondescript doorway, located down a laneway in the heart of Melbourne’s Chinatown. The bands have finished well over an hour ago, but the venue is still busy, even filling up more as people arrive in dribs and drabs from other gigs around the city.

Inside, the sweat drips down the walls. A massive throng at the bar remains static while the stage and dance floor heave to the DJ playing music emanating from a booth tucked away next to the bar. An already electric atmosphere suddenly becomes convulsive, however, as the DJ slides the cross fader up to herald the ringing, opening notes of arguably the best Aussie rock song ever written.

The song’s name? ‘My Pal’. The band? A bunch of snotty-nosed 15- and 16-year old punks who – already Melbourne music scene veterans – had decided, with sheer teen audacity, to call themselves God. Seventeen years after they released this raw recording, with its almost inaudible vocals, it remains an Australian classic.

God formed in 1986. Sean Greenway and Matty Whittle (on guitar and drums respectively) had played in a band called Foot and Mouth as barely pubescent teens, having a minor hit with ‘Hector the Cat’. Tim Hemensley (bass) was already notorious from his time as a pre-teen tyrant fronting Royal Flush, who made the front page of the Melbourne tits’n’arse’n’scandal rag Truth when, as a ten year old, he almost got St. Kilda’s Prince of Wales Hotel closed down. Completed by pint-sized frontman and guitarist Joel Silbersher, they set about rehearsing at a kindergarten on Hoddle Street, Abbotsford.

Their first single, ‘My Pal’ was released in January 1988 on 7” through Au Go-Go. It quickly became an underground classic, topping the independent singles chart for months. Chiming lead guitars picked out a classic lead riff, backed up by driving bass and changing tempo that belied the age (although not the considerable experience) of these musicians.

And Silbersher’s paen to teenage alienation and negotiating the difficult path of friendships carried a vocal that would have done a two-pack, bottle-of-bourbon-a-day southern American bluesman proud – a deep, gruff vocal buried in the mix that just allowed the listener to decipher the raw teenage angst that has formed the basis for so much of the best rock’n’roll.

It was also very much an off-the-cuff recording. Matty Whittle remembers: “The recording of ‘My Pal’ was initially intended as a demo, I think. That was done at Simon Grounds’ studio in Abbotsford, which was just eight track at the time. I think Joel’s dad pretty much paid for that. It was a very cheap recording. But anyway, that ended up being the finished product.”

Yet God, and particularly ‘My Pal’, arguably became an albatross around collective necks of the band’s members, the memories of four skinny, bare-chested teenagers mixing it with the best of them a sight ¬– and sound – never to be equalled in the minds of many. Bruce Milne, of record label Infidelity, signed God in 1987 to Au Go-Go records to put out ‘My Pal’, a song he first heard on a tape when the young Joel Silbersher – a Saturday morning regular at Au Go-Go – brought in a tape of his new band, God, with an early recording of the song. “I loved it, it was fantastic,” he recalls. “It’s a song … almost like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or something, it was something that just summed up … it just felt amazing and it sounded great. I just wanted to put it out.”

The single was followed by a mini-LP, Rock Is Hell. Milne, who put it out on Au Go-Go, admits that the four different covers that it came in were not entirely the marketing gimmick they were decried as at the time, revealing that they only happened because “none of the band could agree on a record cover.” Their final record – and only full-length album release – For Lovers Only was a post-mortem release in 1989, the band having decided to play their last gigs as the pressings were received.

Receiving a mixed reception on its release, For Lovers Only served as a testament to a band well ahead of many of their peers and left the inevitable question of what might have been. It also was a fulfilling epitaph for a band who were frequently erratic, playing shows that served as inspiration to many other Australian bands with their sense of danger and unpredictability – and a healthy sense of self-deprecating humour. As Sean Greenway commented on For Lovers Only’s release: “For Lovers Only is not representative of the band because it's good.”

All members of God went on to other projects, some with more success than others (although that depends how you measure success in the Australian music industry). Tim Hemensley joined seminal Geelong band Bored! before defecting to form the legendary Powder Monkeys with John Nolan. Joel Silbersher has been involved in many projects, including Hoss; Sean went on to form The Freeloaders, then later the Yes Men; while Matty saw time in Patterson’s Curse, Sauce and Offal Pump.

God have remained a benchmark in the Australian music scene: a benchmark of how to write a classic Australian song, how to be outrageous on stage and off, and how to break up, reputation intact and with an almost unrivalled legacy (and this from a band that played for barely two years).

The legacy of God is also overshadowed by tragedy, Sean Greenway and Tim Hemensley dying of heroin overdoses in 2000 and 2003 respectively. Yet their legacy is deeply admired by many local acts with bands such as Magic Dirt and The Specimens covering ‘My Pal’.

The larrikin spirit of Aussie rock’n’roll, so admirably defined by Bon Scott-era AC/DC, was ever-present in teenage tearaways God. Stories of what they had done by the time they were all 16 would put many music veterans twice their age to shame. Whittle states, rather bluntly, “We liked pissing people off.”

Sources who won’t go on the record recall a gig the band played to a hall full of kids in Melbourne’s north. Naturally, the place was overcrowded and the boys in blue decided to attend and shut it down. God had only played a handful of songs before the police approached the stage and demanded the band cease and desist.

Joel managed to talk the police into letting them play two more songs. As the police walked away, a drunk Tim Hemensley approached the mike, shouting, “Don’t you turn your fucking backs on me!” to the departing police officers. The police promptly shut down the gig and arrested band members who had to be bailed out, in very rock’n’roll fashion, by parents.

God were very talented musicians, but did little to let that get in the way of their punk ethos. God’s one-time manager, Trevor Block, expresses his simultaneous reverence for and frustration with the band. “They could play. One of the most annoying things about working with them was Joel would drop a guitar and pick up another one because he’d broken a string, but then Matty would go to pick up that guitar for the next song. It’s like ‘Matty, that’s got a broken string, you’re meant to be playing bass.’ Because they rotated.” God were never limited by their prescribed band roles, often swapping instruments between songs.

They were also very much a band of their time, influenced by the LA punk scene and bands like The Germs and X. Although all very proficient musicians, ability was often left to hide in the shadows. Whittle summarises the career of God very succinctly: “We played about 70 gigs. They were either shithouse or fantastic. There wasn’t much middle ground.” Alcohol played a large part on their performances as well: “We were still discovering our tolerance for alcohol,” Whittle observes.

He recalls a gig at (long defunct) The Venue in St. Kilda. “We were supporting The Screaming Tribesmen. Their roadies had been giving us a hard time. Then Joel realised there was no one at the bar … Joel couldn’t stand up (after that) – he played most of the gig lying on the ground.”

God are a difficult band to summarise. Despite their then youth, they have maintained a mythology around them in Australia, and particularly Melbourne, which this article will do nothing to dispel. They were simultaneously terrifyingly young, talented and ill-disciplined – the triumvirate of rock’n’roll. Whittle’s honest recollections of their gigs testify to this. “Even the good ones had some degree of chaos. There was always some dicky guitar lead, a distortion pedal with a flat battery, changing broken strings mid-gig, someone else's amp we were blowing up.”

It was also possible that God were destined to never break through in America or overseas. Many people thought they were too different. Not just different as a band, but so different as people – four frontmen who would frequently agree to disagree. But in this chaos reigned a spirit of rock’n’roll rarely matched in Australia. Block concurs, from a slightly different perspective: “They were a bit of a novelty, but once you get over the idea, ‘the lead singer’s only 16’ they were a ******* good band. Having said that though, they could be an atrocious, ill-disciplined, argumentative bunch of … blokes. Like any band.”

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  -   Published on Saturday, September 10 2005 by Jim Murray.

 Howdy Folks
just want to make it clear up for auction is a 7" black vinyl single in mint condition sleeve and record
all the best