IT’S SCIENCE. IT’S SURREAL. IT’S THE SIBILANCE OF KIM SALMON
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
KIM SALMON APPEARS on my screen intact, in motion, but not, I assure him, infected by any filters adding bunny ears, cat whiskers or fish scales. Dignity is appropriate for the man who emerged from the most isolated punk scene of all in late ‘70s Perth to become a force of nature, and whose early swamp-rock take on life after punk was to spawn a decade and a half later – for better and worse – the more earnest, less thrilling grunge movement.
Yes, somehow that mega selling, decade-defining scene that created and dressed with far less adventure than what the man himself was doing. But don’t blame him.
Though maybe I am being presumptuous here and that is actually what Salmon would like. Has he ever contemplated putting on a costume to perform in any one of the groups from the significant number he has graced, such as Scientists, Kim Salmon and the Surrealists, Beasts Of Bourbon, Darling Downs or Smoked Salmon?
“Well, it’s been suggested that with Smoked Salmon [who have bit of 7” vinyl out now ahead of a mid-year album] that we have those fish heads that we have in some of our film clips,” he says. “The label asked me if I was going to do that, but they are suffocating and hot and a health hazard.”
Yeah, no doubt OH&S is the only thing holding him back. And maybe the fact it would be difficult to make out lyrics.
“You certainly couldn’t lip read with those things,” he concedes. “I do like the idea of sometimes of coordinating the dress of a band though. But quite often people will say, ‘what about free expression?’ and you’ll say to them, sure, but you’ll look like the hippie who met us at the bus stop or something, you’ll look stupid.”
Hey, if you want free expression, form your own band. That’s what Frank Zappa said. That’s what Salmon did, beginning with Scientists in 1978, after a couple of short-lived Perth punk bands. Then came The Surrealists when Scientists collapsed in on itself. Then Beast Of Bourbon, and so on … and on and on actually. If you’re finding it hard to keep up, to help, Salmon currently is working up a tour featuring iterations of both Scientists and Surrealists for a mega sibilant show labelled Surreal Science.
Not a small show, with films projected across all the sets and a catalogue of 160 songs. Not a small band, with three drummers, two guitarists, two bass players, two vocalists, pulling in the likes of ex/current foils like guitarist Tony Thewlis, bassplayers Boris Sujdovic and Stu Thomas, drummers Clare Moore, Greg Bainbridge and Phil Collings.
More on that in a minute, but first, if that Zappa nugget is one lesson Salmon can point to after nearly 50 years in this lark – incidentally it is 38 years since the release of the first Surrealists’ album, Hit Me With The Surreal Feel, now being reissued on the LA label, In The Red, who also put out The Saints’ Stranded box set – I wonder if there is still something for him to learn from hearing Surreal Feel? Or for that matter, the other history revisited moment we’re getting from In The Red this year, a live Scientists album from the 2017 reformation tour, The Definitive Article.
Does he listen to it with fresh ears wondering, what were we doing? What does it mean to me now? Or is it too familiar and he can’t separate himself from it?
“All of the above,” Salmon says. “It has been that over the years, because Scientists is one of those things that haunted me, so I might as well accept it. And I do, I embrace it now. It was the same with the Surrealists really. When I was a lot closer in time to those things, I was a bit ‘ah, I’ve moved on from that’, and I’d feel a little bit shy about it or sheepish or embarrassed or something. But with a bit more detachment and objectivity that time gives you, it’s pretty good.”
What he’s found, it turns out, is that those songs now “tell a different truth”, one coming from a completely different person who if pushed hard enough is revealed as not really that different.
“I still think a lot of the same things,” he says. “I just forget exactly how I was feeling in those times, what I was responding to. Now it’s a bit of a trigger and what makes it interesting is that it’s something almost fresh because it’s so long ago.”
So, approaching these shows, is this Kim Salmon bifurcated or are the lines between Scientists and Surrealists pretty blurry?
“I would like to say the latter because when I started The Surrealists, it was after the Scientists had imploded in England basically and I thought that was it for them,” Salmon says. “But I was just carrying the same ideas with me, how to write songs for that band. Songs like Blue Velvet, that are on the first Surrealists album, actually appeared in Scientists’ sets at the very end.”
How close were these bands in his head? Salmon confesses that one of the reasons for calling this new band The Surrealists was that he thought that if it was on a poster and you squinted your eyes a bit you might confuse that word for Scientists. “It was bad reasoning,” he admits with a laugh, though in retrospect assuming that many of us might have been blurry eyed at some point looking at the band or the posters was not the wildest assumption to make.
Still, going from a band like the Scientists where “everybody was kinda the star” to the Surrealists where names were less recognisable, sticking his own at the front made sense. “But I quickly found myself writing for very different people”, including people who didn’t have the punk purists’ approach of the latter Scientists where any emphasis on technique was leaning towards petty bourgeoisie, or even worse “showing off playing prog music”.
Maybe my fever dream of this big Salmon group as the Arkestra to his Sun Ra isn’t entirely off the chart.
“Oh wow,” Salmon laughs. “Maybe. Yeah, yeah. They are my muse, all these people in the bands. All of them. That’s what I’ve come to realise. It could be a spin that I put on it, but it seems to fit.
“I can look back now and see if there was a lot there where I didn’t know what I was doing but now I’ve kinda got an idea. It’s taken me that long to figure it out.”
Maybe he did know but he couldn’t articulate, couldn’t verbalise it.
“Verbalise! Yes,” says an amused Salmon. “I quit art school too early.”
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The Scientists & Surrealists Surreal Science show plays:
Corner Hotel, Melbourne, April 10
Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, April 11
Rosemount Hotel, Perth, April 18
HEAR MORE
Hit Me With The Surreal Feel and The Definitive Article will be released on In The Red Records
Smoked Salmon – Freudian Slippers is out now on Cheersquad Records.