Q&A-003: “YOU’RE ALL WINNERS!” - an interview with Neil Bramley (Adult Dreams, Language of the Damned, Teargas)
+++an interview with Adult Dreams zine writer and Teargas fronter Neil Bramley
Somehow I’ve never met the great Neil Bramley, but he’s had a presence in my life for ten plus years via glowingly positive and/or hilarious second hand stories by various Brisbane ex-pats. His time fronting cult hardcore act Teargas (mid-2000s to mid-2010s) precedes him (name a better vocal into than what opens ‘The Way of All Flesh’), but it’s his foray into writing via zines and shitposts that got in my head. Around the time I asked Neil to do an interview, he was about to call time on the short-lived Language of the Damned blog (who knew we needed a blog resurgence???) and has since turned those interviews into Issue 3 of the great Adult Dreams zine (those in oz can get a copy from a series of like-minded distros and stores, including Bad Habit, Wasted Opportunities, Repressed Records and more). Read on below and get a copy while they last!
I have a few of these Q&A’s on the burner now, and for sake of continuity I do feel the need to ask the same question as a intro: give us your punk origin story...but to expand on that, have you felt it has come in phases? I feel like for me, I was stunned that music didn’t suck when I first went to a punk show, then was stunned that I could play an instrument without knowing how to, and then more or less felt like remaining of that world was an ethical imperative... and now I don’t know WHAT I feel. (This is a question by the way).
I feel like my punk origin story is pretty typical of mid-nineties coming-of-age in Australia, just with a couple of left turns. I grew up twenty minutes further west of Ipswich and had the obligatory Triple J, Recovery and Rage foundations. I was really into hip hop during the Green Day and Offspring explosion and wasn't especially blown away because it still felt like "grunge" to me, but was apparently just attuned enough to the breadcrumb trail left by my beloved Beastie Boys to find Rancid and NOFX.
I think pivotal to how I turned out, though, was Hot Metal (later HM, then Loudmouth) Magazine reviewing zines and talking up distros like Spiral Objective. While the effects of, say, Shock Records and those small-time but professional touring companies really getting behind Epitaph, Fat Wreck et al can still be felt to this day, discovering a more politicised DIY underground thriving in a different way really allowed me to burn through that phase personally and find what I was probably always destined to.
In that sense, punk discoveries for me are phases, but mostly of changing relationships with long-proven punk tools of expression. Pretty much any of the mediums I use like zines and bands had revealed great truths to me early on, and from then I have just spent subsequent decades refining them and regarding them from different perspectives, I suppose. Sort of like how representations of Native Americans change over the course of John Ford's filmography, zines and bands are my signatures but the meaning is in flux.
Because I never learned an instrument serviceably enough even to play in a punk band and only ever yelled in them, I probably robbed myself of a few of the phases you mention, but I certainly learned a lot about the mechanics of things from my many musically-accomplished bandmates.
This will be one of the most needless interview detours I hope I’ll ever take, but something in that answer just reminded me of your unrivalled ability to create the punk and hardcore subgenre tags we didn’t know we needed until we did. Can you outline for the readers what you consider to be the hegemonic punk and hardcore sounds for the roaring 2020’s?
I try to back away from this tendency a bit these days, but let it be known, gentle reader, that THE BEAR WAS POKED. What defines punk and hardcore in the roaring 2020’s are observable moods more than sounds. Subgenres are more fluid, and I think we are seeing a downturn in the Invisible Backpack Rock that was popular in the late 2010’s and a renaissance in Men’s Shedwave. A couple of quiet years for gigs has allowed The Lads time to regroup from those pesky couple of years of being publicly asked to have at least one woman on stage and get back to business. As a result, I predict the coming years belong to death/black metal/grindcore, grime/drill, hate5six, oi, combat sports, graff and soccer hooliganism. However, I feel the extreme douchebaggery that has historically accompanied a lot of that stuff will remain unhip for some time following its comeuppance in the late 2010’s. What I’m mostly looking forward to is the counterpoints to the hegemony, like some earnest anarcho-punk or rough-edged post-punk.
Yeah, it surprised me that punk’s answer to a global crisis was ‘DUDES ROCK AGAIN,’ but I too look forward to the counterpoints. I first found your writing through the Adult Dreams issue that featured your discussion of the Toyota Scion record label. I feel like this was a really influential zine issue for me, where I had kind of end of history pilled myself into disregarding the 2000s as a decade that was uniquely co-optive. Can you fill in the gaps for us around how Adult Dreams started, other zine projects, and your writing in general?
As mentioned previously, I did a pretty crummy zine in the mid-late nineties era where I was still navigating wildly competing discourses on punk. For example, between MRR, Punk Planet, the other smaller zines I was getting in the mail daily, local street press, and the Sunday Mail's review of the Sex Pistols reunion all presented conflicting versions of this new obsession. However, I absorbed them all, channelled it into a few confused issues, and got humiliated with a nasty review in what was basically a government-funded zine yearbook that was the defining document of the national zine network in 1997.
Steeling my confidence again (or getting it for the first time, more accurately) with a couple of bands, I did a few issues of a hardcore zine inspired by the "plain-speaking" gonzo-style zines coming out of NSW at the time. I set about documenting the fledgling equivalent of the scene in Brisbane in the early aughties primarily centred around the Gabba Hotel, replete with those zines' selectively-applied antagonistic streak, and built a bit of a reputation for that sort of thing that's easy to acquire but harder to shake.
After that, I guess I focused primarily on music, but plugged away at different times on issues that were never completed for whatever reason until the first issue of Adult Dreams in 2017 with the Scion piece you mentioned. That issue I suppose you could say is a stocktake of those "missing years" that are largely coloured by co-option in my mind as well, but apparently beheld enough sustained appeal that I thought was worth exploring through one of the strangest phenomena. Unfortunately, the piece doesn't really get to the bottom of why a major car manufacturer had similar interests to mine for a couple of years there, but I feel like I retroactively documented the tensions such involvement created between different factions of the underground. I'm glad you liked it, Max!
Can we dwell on Scion Records for a sec? I love that they pre-empted the ageing out punker by marketing family sedans instead of tour vans, but was wondering if you could expand on the ramifications of the Scion story, where a car company starting a punk label to win over the next gen of car buyers. I’m wondering if this was a peak of the first hardcore co-option cycle (maybe the tail was Calvin Klein Rollins.)
We can dwell on Scion Records, I just have the same information you do —that it was weird American stuff— because it was hard to find out about. I have a few theories though. The first is that it was some executive’s kid or a scenester with a degree in marketing and/or the gift of the gab convincing Toyota to try something out. The second and possibly related theory is that advertising is expensive, and it’s just cheaper to give out a few cars and cash to people who are already driving around the country off their own accord. The third is “tax dodge”, which is time-honoured in both the big business and record label spheres.
As for being indicative of a phase of hardcore’s co-option, which every generation of hardcore has had since probably Suicidal Tendencies on MTV onwards, the Scion era seems more like a brief oddball intersection than something very calculated. A local and recent equivalent I reckon would be all those Melbourne bands that had their records state government-funded because there was a bit of post-lockdown guilt money for The Arts floating around or whatever. It’s a fleeting thing and will be forgotten in three or four years like Scion was. I guess you could say I’ve been disabused of any notions that co-option is final, as every generation sort of starts again without getting lumbered with the full weight of their predecessors’ cultural baggage.
How do you think that feeling towards the interventions of large brands in the punk world has evolved? I feel like the past few years have introduced a ‘don’t talk about the war’ attitude to those making concessions to the music, hospitality and advertising industries, which makes me feel insane, but I think you have a more level head for contemporary ‘sell out’ discourse (or the lack thereof).
I’m pretty out of touch with the exact dimensions of brand infiltration in punk right now, but like yourself, I value my own sanity and stay out of sell out discourse. Not because I don’t have the same basic thoughts I’ve always had, but because I realise many of those values were forged in another time and are now irrelevant. Some of them are also just useless personal hangups that even I have no use for. On the other hand, I still find all the usual counterpoints unimaginative. I propose a truce: operate however you want, and I’ll consider the context and then decide if the results cut through all the fluff for me. Not very inflammatory, Max, I’m sorry.
No it’s a good thing, I’ll take an ibuprofen. Maybe this is a good juncture to pick up on something we messaged about after the last Barely Human zine regarding Jello Biafra and your theory of his laying some of the stones for the contemporary alt-right. I’ve had a pretty long and conflicted relationship with the canonical edgelords of punk history and don’t think I’ll ever get to the bottom of where I sit on it all. Help me, Neil!
Strangely, it wasn’t just my theory. Someone at that Canadian zine culture mag Broken Pencil also thought it around about the same time, but the article is behind a paywall on their site now. Nothing insidious regarding Jello, more just his mastery of the attention economy (until a point anyway), the dubious “free speech” types he rode along with, the pranks, and the simply never shutting up. Invert the good faith bestowed by being the singer of the Dead Kennedys and you’ve more or less got the archetype for Gavin McInnes, who I can only imagine has openly acknowledged this more or less given his documented punk past. Politically-charged music is fascinating in that way, people always seem to find wiggle room to project themselves on to it, whether in earnest or the opposite.
What motivates you to write? I'm always drawn towards zine writers of your ilk because I can trust that it's not some kind of careerist plan to end up a Guardian columnist (something that I feel like I’ve personally flown too close to the sun with in the past...for shame!) Your writing exists for its own sake, and I think that’s beautiful.
Well thank you, I am always glad when my projects are received in the spirit they are created. I think writing for me has always been an effective way to decompress, organise my thoughts, and share the ones I feel were worth having. I've never really tried to make a living off it, not because of any serious ethical dilemmas it would present, but because I don't think I'd have much fun doing it. I'm more of a dreamer than a hustler unfortunately, and have historically just done any old junk job for money to have enough time to pursue these sort of whims.
I was forced to change that approach about ten years ago when the kind of unskilled work I did was less available, and I started undertaking a very long study path to re-skill which incidentally ingrained writing even moreso. Writing a million essays somehow made completing the long dormant bare bones of a zine a lot easier, which became Adult Dreams.
What sparked your recent shift into blogging with Language of the Damned? I was really taken by it and enjoyed it while it lasted in its brief form.
There were a few things that prompted the start and finish of the Language of the Damned blog project. The main one was that, along with most of my peers in Brisbane, I was a fairly blissfully retired scene well-wisher, but was still consulted as a local contact by interstate friends' bands wanting to tour up here. Rather than simply shrugging at old out-of-town friends I was looking forward to seeing, I responded instead by booking them a couple of shows, which meant I'd have to both find out what infrastructure there was and work with it somehow.
As it turns out, that infrastructure wasn't as immediately forthcoming with the Great Re-Opening as it was in places like Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, and I thought that I might be able to tie together a few loose threads with my writing to encourage it along somehow. My zine writing tends to be more meditative, but since time was of the essence, I figured the immediacy and static presence of a blog was a cheap and cheerful way to avoid being swallowed whole algorithmically.
I feel like the project was surprisingly well-received, as well as serving its intended purpose. Firstly, I'm comfortable it pointed a few potentially active people at one another to realise their ideas together. Secondly, it got me writing for real-world functionality and aiming for a decentred perspective, which I was only able to realise to some degree. Finally, and perhaps most importantly given the constraints on my time, was that I could work on it on my lunch break, at the laundromat, while the torrent downloaded, and so on.
You’re shifting again into what seems to be either a podcast or zine format (which I’d argue are both very closely aligned to each other in intent and form). [Note: the zine became Adult Dreams 3, available here.] Why do you think you drew a close to the blog so abruptly? And what are you moving into?
I am currently putting together another Adult Dreams with the adaptable parts of the blog being reconfigured for the print medium, with the podcast being a distant goal to work towards.
In short, I guess I thought the blog had served its purpose as a sort of flawed, stop-gap placeholder for "the scene" until it regrouped. People in general seem to be slowly making their way out to things again, talking, starting projects together and so on. Some goings-on I'm plugged into, but most of it I'm not, and now that my time just got even more constrained than it was during the blog's short life, my current circumstances are incongruous with being out there living the life to do justice to the "Brisbane sub-subculcher" tagline. I'm pretty happy at the moment to just quietly barrack for the team without wearing the scarf or eating ten pies.
As for the zine, it's a combo of wanting to give due to the interviewees who really put in for the blog, teaching myself desktop publishing, and of course being a "fanzine type" as already established. Probably as a result of finding myself in precarious employment as previously mentioned, I feel anxious if I'm not learning something new. Processing life like a fanzine type as I do though, this just means I will want to make it relate to self-publishing somehow.
Similarly to the podcast that is yet to be born, making it happen will mean acquiring skills I don't yet possess, but I'm also hoping it's a bit more social and collaborative than the zine is or the blog was. I don't really know anything about the technical side yet, but I'm willing to learn so as to not be as taxing on interviewees' time and allow the conversations to be more dynamic than the blog, which were usually four questions that corralled their answers towards what I imagined the subject's "essence" to be.
I want to put a pin on that idea of developing skills through these kinds of DIY ventures, and punk as an avenue into that. I feel like at one point that was over-discussed to the point of cliche, but “these days” feels like a sorely under-recognized element of what punk has done for a lot of our peers. Where’s the ‘in defence of the untrained training themselves’ screed that doesn’t feel cringey? How come whenever I start talking about these things I feel like I need to give myself a wedgie? (This is also a question by the way).
I guess my answer here ties into abstaining from the sell out discourse. There’s a fine line between wanting to promulgate your lifestyle and undermining others from taking a shot at self-realisation too. It’s this line of thinking that has driven my relatively recent return to punk activities: progressively take bigger swings, both for myself and in the hope others see it and decide “I’ll have what he’s having”. Go and do it, go and do it, go and do it.
I’m now remembering a longish Facebook messenger discussion we had a while back (possibly during lockdown mania) where we were talking about some generational aspects of DIY communities. I think we were saying that we were both waiting for a new wave of young punks to push through and rinse out the old guard, and I think possibly that has already happened. What are your thoughts around this?
Those are my thoughts, and yes, I agree we are in the process of a glorious DIY eclipse. I feel like when I started the blog, I was a bit more pessimistic about the prospects of "the lifestyle" surviving another generation and I suppose a key motivator was passing it on. Now I'm certain the kids have and will continue to sort it out on their own terms, will invite us oldies if they want us there, and ask us if they want advice.
It feels good to be rinsed! In the interest of spotting what’s good in the dishwater, what’s happening in punk land that’s sticking out for you as being of note? How are they fulfilling the great promise of this thing??
I’ve been bumping the new Poison Ruin LP almost exclusively since it came out. I am seemingly drawing blank on all other music, but I wish it well nevertheless. You’re all winners!
+++ Get Adult Dreams #3 at your local zine stockist, available at least at Bad Habit, Wasted Opportunities, Repressed Records and more. +++
+++other updates___
___quick personal plug with some tangential themes to the barely human project: i’ve got a novel called ‘Paradise Estate’ coming out in October that you can now pre-order here! it picks up after the events of ‘The Magpie Wing’ and dives a bit more into the kinda DIY livin that Neil describes above (i feel like one of the supporting characters is very much a Neil-type now I’m doin final edits!) you can pre-order direct from the publisher now, otherwise for overseas subscribers i’ll be getting some copies that i can pack with the last barely human parcel in december to save on postage x
___for those signed up to the barely human tape & zine subscription service (just AUD$50 with free shipping within oz, email for info if overseas), the next edition will be coming in late august…expect a new tape & zine in your mail box featuring a fatal four-way between THE DICKS, THE STALIN, KINA and ZOUNDS (doth thou sense a theme?)
___aaaand if you feel like you need one more 7” in that box of EPs you listen to once a year, our band ROMANCE just self-released an EP, which is a big ask at any time let alone with our very low work rate! we’ve moved most of these already, but another handful will have us break even so get yours TODAY at https://romanceinfo.bandcamp.com/ —if you’re in North America you can sort a copy via Sorry State in the USA. In oz, we have copies via Helta Skelta distro, in Brisbane via Rocking Horse Records, in Sydney via Repressed, 19th Nervous Breakdown and Prop, and in Victoria via Trash Cult. Hit me up if you want to order a handful or stock them in your shop or distro!