Background information taken from the now sadly-defunct, if rightly-named ‘The Web’s Only Gunter Liebe WebSeite [awkward sic]’.
By the time I was nine in 1980, I was more than ready for whatever the new sound was going to be, for I was deathly tired of disco, and the ponderous rock operas my father favoured. Punk and new wave weren’t exactly easy to access in Rural Australia, though I was often given glimpses of something new and fun happening via ‘The Kenny Everett Video Show’. Sure, I could watch Ainslie Abbott and Sideshow Alley awkwardly miming to their latest single in a stark white room, but where on earth did you actually buy a copy for your own?
As such, TV really was my only way of seeing the interesting bands, for they definitely weren’t played on the radio in Australia. To this day, I’m still not entirely sure I’ve ever discovered a band via the radio.
The new wave music I heard was intriguing and exciting, but it was only with the increased need for a visual component that I realised the eighties were going to be really different. The first clear indication I had of just how different things were going to be was from seeing a video clip of Gunter Liebe performing ‘Technical Girl’ as a fill-in bumper, run between the episodes of ‘The Goodies’ and ‘Doctor Who’ on the Government-Run ABC channel.
It was my sister who caught my attention, spitting out each syllable for dramatic effect. “What. Is. That?”
‘That’ was entirely right. We were both too young to have lived through Glam Androgyny, and never would have come across it even if we had been. To quote Luke Haines of the Auteurs: “There was no androgyny round our way”. Still, I thought, being older and far more worldly with her extra two-and-a-half-years, that my sister could obviously clue me in. “Is that a girl, or a boy?”
My sister rolled her eyes. “She’s wearing pedal pushers and high heels!”
Sure, and sprayed on PVC, which was only for girls, but something was still not right to my eyes.
“But why does she have a palm tree on her head? That’s just dumb”. It was bright pink, and it would be another 20 years before I’d see it again, for now I recognise it as some kind of prototype Croydon Facelift.
Then ‘she’ started singing, and all bets were off. She had a worryingly deep voice. Was it a dude? How did it frug in pumps that high, when high heels for my sister always ended in flat-on-her-face humiliation rather than grown-up sexiness, whatever she thought that was? And where was it from? How on earth did it manage to rhyme ‘Technical’ with ‘Girl’?
“See. It’s a boy!” I said. “He’s singing about a girl”.
“ Duh! She might be a lezzo”. I didn’t know what a ‘lezzo’ was, but this proved my sister knew nothing: It’s the Aging Male Rock Stars who look like Old Lesbians.
Before I could ask any of these pressing questions, the camera pulled back from his/her frantic shimmying to reveal, (you guessed it), a stark white room, containing the rest of the band, the sum total of which was one dude in pink tights and sunglasses operating what looked like a computer bank that belonged in U.N.I.T. Headquarters.
I was obviously confused. There was supposed to be a sweaty drummer doing drums fills requiring a stick tossed high in the air on every bar, and a guitarist whizzing his fingers in a blur to prove to you he had learnt all his scales, so was going to damn well show you every note even if you didn’t want to hear them. Where was the bass player, leaning back and closing his eyes, lost in ‘the groove man’. Where was the stupid makeup and explosions?
Basically, where was everything that was so de rigueur, (and desperately lame), about rock music in the 70’s, which meant I thought all the 60’s stuff was far, far better? All I could come out with was, “Where’s the rest of the band?”
“They’re not a *real* band!” my sister said, laughing. “Eewwww. They have no friends!”
Light bulb time! I had no friends, which I’d thought had put a damper on my future career as a mystery-solving musician, which had irritated my teacher to no end on Career Day, when he’d pulled my half-completed drawing of my fully tricked-out mystery-solving van out of my hands with a disgusted expression, before telling me to start again, and ‘just be a fireman or policeman like all the other boys’. More on that in a future post.
But here was the evidence it would work. There was only two of them in this room, but the sound that was coming out, although desperately cheap, was a Band Style Effect, and I realised that would probably do for me. Finding five other friends was an intimidating Holy Grail Quest, but now all I had to do was find one other bastard as sad as I was.
Taking this logic further, I realised I didn’t want to go to all the trouble of having to slip into PVC and shimmy like a hyperactive child on a red cordial binge to get attention, so set out paying attention to every keyboard player I saw from then on, determined to become someone else’s Other Sad Bastard, standing in the background.
I have to thank Gunter Liebe for this revelation, if nothing else, though the clip was over seemingly before it began, and I realised I’d have to pay closer attention next time, because I wondered where the drum sound was coming from when there was no drums.
My sister had noticed. “Oh wow... You liked them!”
“No, I didn’t!” Of course, I did. Whilst I can’t say they were any good, they were clearly doing something New and Different.
“They had no friends, and they were lame and you... liked... them!”
“I didn’t. Leave me alone!”
She woudn't let up. “They’ll play them every day and you’ll watch ‘cause you think they’re neato mosquito!”
This is where she was wrong. The ABC never did play ‘Technical Girl’ again, because in the space of the 2 ½ minutes during which that song was airing, the station received a then-record number of phone complaints from outraged viewers over the ‘excessively lewd’ bump and grinding on display by ‘the flaming fruit’, especially during a time where innocent and impressionable children might be watching. (Which is the exactly time when you could usually catch a Hot Gossip video, but no-one was complaining about sexy thrusting if it’s done by pretty girls and Sarah Brightman).
The first result of this was the ABC was very timid with its bumpers in future. Thus, if you’re Australian and of a similar era to me, you can probably sing every cartoon-frog-delivered word of Roger Glover’s ‘Butterfly Ball’ from memory, because it was almost run every single day after that.
The second result of this was instant demonization by the tabloids, talkback radio and religious groups. Mike Willisee led a handwringing panel discussion on his nightly news show over the state of pop music, where:
- red-faced religious leader Fred Nile decreed this was a clear sign of declining moral standards;
- Molly Meldrum promised that ‘Gunter Liebe’ was a degenerate and would never appear on 'Countdown’, the nation’s leading youth music programme, which he clumsily hosted, before once again mentioned Elton John was ‘A Close Personal Friend’;
- Michael Gudinkski conveniently forgot his Mushroom record label was made a lasting concern by the similarly-controversial-for-their-time Skyhooks and reminded viewers that ‘Split Enz’ was a family-friendly alternative, who just happened to have a new album out now.
The third result? Gunter Liebe realised that everyone was suddenly paying attention to him, having gone from total obscurity to downfall of the nation in the space of two minutes... ...and that he really, really liked the attention.
He was all over the news for weeks, happy to throw soundbites at anyone with a microphone. “I am the future,” he said. “You are all remnants of the past. You have every right to fear me.”
Was he out to corrupt the nation’s youth?
“The youth of this nation is already corrupted. I am simply a mirror”.
On the national news, one interviewer asked him if he was a Homosexual. His response: “The barriers between the sexes will fall. In the future, everyone will be AC/DC”.
This statement confused me no end. I thought AC/DC was the dreadfully dull music favoured by those scary, greyhound-muscled older boys with cigarette packets rolled into their sleeve, who made every after-school walk home a possible matter of life and death.
Gunter also predicted that to survive the coming apocalypse, society would have to lose its humanity. I couldn’t have put it into words at that age, but between daily bully beatings, I didn’t see much evidence that society already hadn’t.
Such were the times. The Year 2000 was an impossible dream for a child my age, as mankind’s doom was guaranteed, from a myriad of grim possibilities. Either the government would become totalitarian; aliens would invade and exterminate; robots would become self-aware and enslave; overpopulation would force us resort to cannibalism; global thermonuclear war would scorch the planet; Jesus would come back and prove his love for us, but only after all non-believers died in horrible apocalyptic fury; or Nostradamus would be right.
Gunter saw this. When asked if he had male or female groupies, he said “It’s confusing these days. The new frontier is love between man and android”. When asked to explain further, Gunter helpfully pointed out it would be explained on his forthcoming single, proving he certainly knew the art of the bally, if nothing else.
The outrage when the single emerged came from all sides, including the Catholic Diocese of Australia; Sisters In Solidarity, a politically-far-left feminist wymyn’s collective; and The Spastic Council of NSW; all of whom had received letters concerned letters of outrage over the lyrics, demanding immediate action be taken, all of which had been helpfully sent by Gunter under various pen-names to begin with.
The tabloid journalist fury was in overdrive. Some of the papers chose to not even print the name of the single. When Mike Willisee once again used his programme to wonder ‘What is to be done?’, they showed a silent excerpt from the video, due to the ‘controversial nature’ of the lyrics.
I was in awe. What on *earth* could be so bad? I *had* to get the single.
The obvious problem was that I was 9, and had no idea how to buy a record, and doubted I could have talked my Dad into getting it for me, as his opinion on the Gunter Liebe subject was perfectly clear by the turd-sniffing expression on his face whenever he appeared on the news. (You've seen the exactly same look on display on every Disney Cartoon Baddie, ever). Besides which, Mike Willisee took much pleasure in explaining that ‘Plaz-tik Sex-O-Matik’ was banned by ‘all good retailers’.
This was Gunter’s mistake: with no radio play, television exposure or access to consumers, his career really had nowhere to go. Left with boxes of unsold copies of the single, The Downfall Of The Nation was rapidly replaced as the Boogeyman De Jour by something else and vanished back into obscurity. No-one has ever managed to track him down since. (Possibly. About 8 years later, I could swear that’s him out of drag playing the bass in the video for the Choirboys’ bogan classic ‘Run To Paradise’ - a record those Scary Smoking Boys would have been all over).
Of course, he had long faded from my memory, until I, (very unexpectedly), discovered a copy of the single in a Second-Hand Charity Store, inbetween the copies of the requisite Dead Granny Records you find at those places: Mrs Miller's Drunk Again; Val Doonican Moos About Ireland; Someone Resembling A Beatific Paedo Sings Danny Boy And 11 Other Songs; A Clockwork Moog Plays The Age Of Aquarius And Other Far-Out Hits!; Music To Drive Your Truck And Beat Your Wife By; and the inevitable Scottish Highland Bagpipe Platoon Upskirt Extravaganza. They all have that unmistakable scent of Iced Vo-Vos, Dust and Despair that these days makes me afraid she's not really sure if her name is Veronica.
So, discovering a copy of ‘Plaz-tik Sex-O-Matik’ there instantly triggered off strange thoughts in my brain: someone had A Very Kinky Granny. Did she shuffle with her kettle into the lounge to pour her tea, then place the record on her Fully-Automatic Phonogram, then sit down and slowly sip her Chamomile, whilst feeling some kind of illicit thrill over the fact that the other egg-suckers from the Country’s Woman’s Association were clueless about her sexual deviancy: ‘Whips and Chains! Call me names!’
Still, fate had delivered Gunter back into my life, so 5 cents seemed a perfectly reasonable price to pay to finally hear experience the society-threatening, explicit pornography of ‘Plaz-tik Sex-O-Matic’. I hurried home with a speed that surprised me.
Much like my childhood fear of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, fuelled by horrific, hush-whispered playground stories told by kids who had claimed to have seen it, but obviously were lying through their teeth, I was hugely disappointed. How jaded did I get over the years that I now could only hear sordid, futuristic sexual deviance as something hopelessly-quaint, like the concept of a meal in a pill, picnics on the moon, or self-driving cars with bubble-domes?
The Future never really did happen for me. I-Pods seem damn unimpressive compared to the concept of getting a Happy Ending from C-3PO. And you know he’d be totally into it.
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