Part One - Quimble

My friends and I had been to school in Brisbane together, dropped out of university together, got drunk and all lost our virginity on the same night at an exceptionally memorable party. Much of that party did not feature in my own memory but I was told I was no longer a child. We all worked as shelf stackers at one of the big supermarkets in Brisbane, Australia.

In the evenings before we went to work, we practised our music in a genuine garage on the small farm where Terry, our lead guitarist, lived. We did covers of hard rock songs and a bit of Goth music and had already played at a few parties and birthdays around the area.

Our biggest problem originally was that we did not have a name for the band and had endless arguments about this. We had invented stupid names for our few gigs but none had stuck. How could something so simple be so hard? Then, one day, we were having our usual heated discussion when Bruce, the rhythm guitarist shouted “Why the hell do we quimble all the time over this! Sorry. I meant quibble.” We all looked at each other and Terry told him he was a genius and so, the band was now to be known as Quimble. We worked hard at our playing and started to get some regular gigs along the Gold Coast tourist strip, playing five nights a week in different venues. We did well enough to leave our employment and concentrate on being stars.

After a couple of nights when a couple of the band were less than professional and the venue owners complained, we made a solemn pact to stay off the booze on working nights and things went well for a few months. We started getting gigs in Brisbane itself which was good as we didn’t have such a long drive to get home in the early hours. We found that our repertoire of hard rock with a little bit of goth rock did well but it was our good list of sixties to eighties songs and a solid section of twelve bar blues usually got everyone dancing. We started getting attention from the promoters, the newspapers and the girls. I, for one was having the time of my life.

I suppose I had better introduce us at this point. I am Stuart Simpson and I play bass. We have Terry Jenkins on lead guitar, Bruce Anderson on rhythm and vocals, and our drummer was Steve Franks. Although we did some of the Goth music, we could not replace Steve and his drum kit for an electronic version that was not as annoying as he owned our band transport, an aging Transit that was well past its use by date.

One night, at a gig on the Gold Coast, a particularly noteworthy girl was out front and dancing by herself. She was noteworthy because she was a full blown Goth girl, not a common sight among the tourists. At the end of our set she came up to us and asked us if we did more Goth songs and we told her we did but they did not go down well in these venues.

She told us that she was called Lesley Craven and not only played keyboards but sang as well. She wanted to join us at one of our practise sessions and try out her singing. We had got our own list down pat so readily agreed to let her try out her voice with us the following Friday afternoon. We gave her the garage address and she was smiling as she left us.

On that Friday afternoon she brought her keyboard and amplifier and we worked through our Goth list, most of which she knew. We stayed in the gentle Goth vein; a bit of Siouxsie and the Banshees, some Cure for the old stuff and some Evanescence, Velvet Underground and Alice Cooper for the more modern to hard rock. We did love Nick Cave songs, especially his Birthday Party era of the early eighties. As the afternoon progressed we came to realise that she was really good and made a significant difference to our sound. As we packed up we talked to her about joining us and told her that she would have to fit in with the rock and cover stuff as that was where the money was at the moment. She thought about it for a while and said she would try to lower herself to our musical level but warned us that she would try to get us playing more Goth.

A few weeks passed by and she worked really hard to pick up the rest of our repertoire and, when she finally joined us on stage, we became a very successful band in the local area. Bruce had been busy writing new songs and we gave him the opportunity to try a couple out. We were all surprised at how good they sounded so we started to put them into our set. One night a promoter took us aside after the gig and told us that a friend of his had a studio and wanted us to record two tracks for a single. We did the recording session and, a few weeks later, heard ourselves on the radio. It was an amazing experience and we had a little celebratory drink.

After a few weeks we heard that our record had been picked up by radio stations interstate and we were told that we now needed to have our own agent. We chose a local guy, Adrian Southcliffe, who managed a few other bands and he got us a good regular gig in Ipswich, a town a bit out of Brisbane. We were signed for every Friday and Saturday evening for three months and it was interesting as we needed to make sure we mixed up our playlist so we didn’t sound the same every night. For a bit of fun we put in more of the tuneful Goth songs. It is no good doing the hard-core ones as revellers do not like it when you hit them with a dirge about death and disaster when they are out clubbing. We knew that there are places where this sort of music was played but knew of no places in Australia at this turn of the century.

At the end of the engagement he got us into a two month gig in Brisbane city and one thing I noticed was that he was bringing Lesley to the venue and taking her home. Six weeks into this gig he announced that we were booked to do a tour around the country. He showed us a poster he had produced with a picture of Lesley to the left and the rest of us with our instruments on the right. Above us was the words; ‘Goth Rock Chick Lesley and her Band Quimble’. The last two words were under the rest and there was a blank space for a sticker showing the place and date of the show. When we complained that we were the original band members and she was an extra person he told us that we had only got ahead because of her in the band and to suck it up. Also, at this time, we went back into the studio and recorded an EP called “Goth Quimble” with the four songs being ‘Black Lipped Lovely’, ‘Pale Face’, ‘She Wears my Ring (In her Nose)’ and ‘What Chu Lookin’ At?’

We were mollified by the news of the country tour. The route was down to Sydney for a week, on to Canberra for a week and then down to Melbourne for two weeks. There was an option to go to Adelaide but the promoter did not think the extra five hundred miles each way would be worth it. The return trip was up to Bendigo and then to Wagga Wagga before finishing in Tamworth. He had organised a van that would do the journey and arranged cheap lodgings for us all. We had two weeks off after the Brisbane gig and then got ourselves ready to leave on the Wednesday to drive to Sydney.

The gigs went well; our having a new record out helped in getting fans through the doors. The distances we travelled were daunting, having never been outside of Queensland before, unless you call going across the border at the bottom of the Gold Coast; something we did every year to get two new years in an hour apart, due to daylight saving in one state and no daylight saving in the other. We played to pretty big crowds everywhere and the general rock songs went well. Melbourne was happy with the Goth songs and we did play our singles and the EP tracks at every gig.

When we finished the tour and handed the truck back we were at a loose end for a couple of weeks and Adrian finally got us a month at a pub in Toowoomba. During this period he hit us with a bombshell. He had been in touch with a promoter in England and we would be going to the UK for a tour of the Goth festivals and other venues in the English summer. Goth was still very strong in the UK and they thought we would be able to draw some crowds being a bit of a novelty. I did not think we would be a novelty as there had been lots of Aussie bands in the UK who did well, but who was I to question their ideas if it meant a trip to the Old Country.

Marianne G 2020