Classic Brisbane punk band RAZAR reunite for the first time in 29 years to headline the second Return To White Chairs celebration at The Triffid.
Located in the Carlton Hotel on Elizabeth Street, White Chairs was a popular hangout for the city’s counter-culture crowd during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, including RAZAR frontman Marty Burke.
“It happened to be the sort of place where people would congregate and have a drink after work or whatever, punks and other people alike. It got a bit of a name; a popularity amongst the punks,” Marty says.
RAZAR were at the forefront of Brisbane’s second-wave (c. 1978-80) of punk bands following the pioneering lead of The Saints who pre-empted the English punk scene with the release of ‘I’m Stranded’ in 1976. “Those days were pretty exciting times, especially for a bunch of teenagers,” Marty recalls with a laugh.
“It was a lot different from today, mainly because you only had to be walking down the road and look a certain way with your hair dyed or cut a certain way or wearing certain clothes and you’d get pulled up by the police and hassled.”
As a punk band in Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s (Premier of Queensland 1968-87) pre-Fitzgerald inquiry Brisbane, RAZAR soon became targets for the Queensland Police who started regularly raiding dances organised by punk bands and arresting punters, usually on arbitrary charges.
“That’s how I wrote the song ‘Task Force’, going to a dance and seeing people being roughed-up and arrested for nothing, or obscene language and trumped-up charges.”
It was the song ‘Task Force’ that drew the ire of the notorious Special Branch of Queensland Police, who maintained intelligence files on the band along with other outspoken public figures at the time.
For Marty and his mates, even though there was serious socio-political messaging in their music, punk was just a way to have fun. To the police and Special Branch, it was anti-establishment rabble-rousing on par with the Communists and other such radicals they were also hunting.
“It came across as some sort of threat to the police and government, and unbeknownst to us they were taking it that seriously they started coming to the dances - as we called them - in local halls and weird-and-wonderful places that we played and they started arresting people and causing havoc when we were just having fun.”
Echoing the punk scenes of England that glamourised anarchism and disorder, RAZAR wrote music that reflected what was happening around them at the time and flew in the face of authority.
“It was purely based on the fact of what was going on in England for us and we localised it and wrote about things we thought were always tongue-in-cheek, but things we didn’t like or that people would find funny.
“It really was meant to be just fun; it’s an over-used word these days, but really that’s the way it was and to think that Joh and his cronies took it rather seriously is a bit weird.”
The Return To White Chairs show sees Marty and RAZAR rock out with bands like Toy Watches, Scrap Metal, Chrysalids, The Bollocks and more in a reunion of the Brisbane punk scene.
Read our recent Q&A about Return To White Chairs 2 here.
“I’m very excited,” Marty says. “It will be great. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for some time.”
