In praise of Stiff Richards...
This is a long time coming. I have been distributing the recordings of Stiff Richards to stores for probably something like four years now. My partner in the distribution racket assured me they had a fan base and would sell, I gave them a cursory listen and they 'rocked' in a manner I could handle and that was that. The goofy name had them pegged in my mind as some sort of Cosmic Psychos-style yob-rock outfit, of which we have many, and it placed them outside of the zone of my personal interest. Of course, I was completely wrong. I should also state that one shouldn't take any of this as spruiking of product, since the band sells plenty of records c/o their own momentum, and since their entire catalogue is currently out of print (at least in Australia), there is nothing to sell.
The self-titled debut
The band hail from the coastal area south of Melbourne known as Rye, roughly an hour out of town and a good place for a holiday, at least so far as I know. I'm not sure when they formed, though their first, self-titled LP was released in 2017. Originally issued on Stiff Records (their own brief outlet, not the UK pub-rock imprint, obviously), it has since been reissued several times on guitarist Arron Mawson's own Legless label. Since then, the band has released the Dig LP (or mini-LP - these albums are all fairly short and sharp) in 2019 and 2020's State Of Mind. The latter was when I really started to take notice - firstly, because I really took the album in and realised that the band were nothing like the outfit I imagined them to be, and also because it was obvious that this DIY group had a real following and I was the last, sad nimrod to really pay them the mind they're owed.
2019's Dig
This probably all sounds like a very clinical approach to a punk rock band whose style of music I'm trying to heap praise upon, but the context and my hopelessly belated appreciation of the band are like something I feel the need to confess. This is because the Stiff Richards are one motherfucker of a rock & roll band. Much like my recent appraisal of the latest Alien Nose Job album, my love of the band - amidst the usual sonic tosh I fill my days with: prog-rock, jazz-funk, hip-hop and other hyphenated forms - has had me appreciating full-blooded ROCK in the here and now, and reconnecting with my roots as a rocker. Again, deal with it.
2020's State Of Mind
What it is that the band does is not easy to pinpoint. There is an entire school of post-Eddy Current Suppression Ring rock music in Australia which has been the strongest undercurrent of garage-rock sounds here the past decade or more. This may sound like reductionism, but the influence of ECSR and their sound cannot be overestimated, and anyone paying attention knows it. I would say that the music of Stiff Richards is largely adjacent to this school of sound, but not necessarily of it. It's musically too aggressive, perhaps, but right now we're splitting hairs. I saw the band play live in June of last year at a packed John Curtin in Carlton, and I saddled myself right up at the front/left just as they started. I needed to witness the band up close to see if the fuss was worth it.
The crowd was mostly young, certainly much younger than me, and there was an encouraging number of females near the front and zero dickheaded behaviour. The entire venue erupted the moment they started, the twin-guitar sound had a much beefier quality to it than the spidery twang of their recordings, and they captured everything I have always loved about the Stooges, Black Flag and the Saints, whilst also eschewing some of the qualities of these bands, primarily machismo and hostility towards the audience. Singer Wolfgang Buckley is an engaging and electric presence, throwing himself into the audience, telling jokes and not being an jerk. The show had the musical dynamism of a 5-piece 'Flag and I didn't even get my ass kicked. The locked-in interplay of the rhythm section and the dual-guitar shredding had me grinning like a fool as I took in the tension-release nature of the music; the lyrics hitting home as a reflection of real life and not escapism.
Half-arsed photo I took of Wolfgang at the show
After the show, I chatted w/ the band briefly, lovely gents they be, as they were about to set off for a big string of summer European dates (their records are licensed to Drunken Sailor in the UK, though Brexit seemed to quash UK shows at the last minute, unfortunately), and I skipped out of there like I was walking on a goddamn cloud. It was the best live ROCK show I'd seen in close to a decade. It was everything a live rock & roll show should be, and it put a skip in my step for the next week. I raved to anyone within earshot of this transcendent experience I had, and some people even listened. The band don't need me to do their legwork - they have a sizeable audience both here and overseas which is all c/o their DIY hard work - but I felt a need to get this off my chest. There is nothing retrograde about Stiff Richards, nothing stupid, clumsy or flippant. They're some of the best practitioners of rock music on the whole damn planet. Sincere gushing for a rock band may seem a little gauche or embarrassing as we get older, but there's no reason why such enthusiasm should be seen as the sole domain of a young man's game.
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