“Father, forgive me, for I have grinned” – Knock Me Your Lobes 12”, EP Johnny Panic 12” and Pounding Grace 7”.

It’s so long ago now I doubt I could recall how I came to know of the Plug Uglies. I picked up a copy of Knock Me Your Lobes, their debut 12” in early 1990. I was 16 years old and I lived in the Western Suburbs of Sydney. I was making the transition from flirtations with metal, Dio, Ozzy, Iron Maiden, you know the drill to The Birthday Party, Velvet Underground bootlegs and local bands like Died Pretty. And I still have no bloody idea why I even bought it.

From a Kings Cross basement to the whitewashed walls of a suburban bedroom. I thrashed the hell out of those vinyls. I was smitten. I was bitten. I scribbled the erudite lyrics on school desks, in my HSC journal, wherever I figured a wider audience could see and appreciate it. I found a song of theirs on a largely lame Hopetoun compilation, Big Hope Little Town. It didn’t even last two minutes, but at least it had a photo of the band. I was young and immature and I thought they told the Truth, they had Soul, and if I were able to express it I would have done so in a shitty poem with Lots Of Capitalisation.

See: I assumed the band would be king. It didn’t occur to my sheltered existence that I may be one of only a couple hundred others to care about Plug Uglies. Did I really jump on a train into town after school one Tuesday afternoon, after reading of the release of Pounding Grace in the street press of the day, lest they sell out before I could get a copy? Surely I didn’t? But that is how I remember it. That is how popular I let myself believe the band were. By the time they had broken up I still wasn’t old enough to get into pubs.

The music itself, taken objectively (and why would you wanna do that?), is just simple inner city rock’n’roll. Shambolic pub beats, arcane and cerebral lyrics, a lack of soloing and instrumental flourishes. Unpretentious (mostly), modest and good to dance to (if you were given to such a vice). Which I wasn’t then, because, y’know, it was serious stuff. It had gravitas and gave me kudos and hell, I am glad the music has forgiven me for being such a shallow wanker ‘cause I can shuffle now, right off this mortal coil and into the smallest, squalid room in god’s own house, as Roger would have it. Take off my jacket and shake away while I find my feet.

The band’s tunes nearly always carried an air of high drama, as if Norris were in an endless stream of confession or despair. He managed to channel the spirit and God help me for the use of it, poetry of his heroes, Kerouac, Burroughs and Lowry, over the top of a band still feeling the effect of a decade influenced by The Gun Club and The Boys Next Door. It was never his band but it was always his pulpit. It was street theatre for those who hated theatre. Classic couplets sprayed from the guitar rave-ups,

“And if drinking ain’t your cup of tea,
well that’s okay, I said, ‘cos Jesus ain’t my cup of gin”, or

“The dignity of work is like
A trench that’s six feet deep”.

Perhaps it was this as much as the tense, wild-eyed delivery that made Plug Uglies the band it was okay to take that little bit more seriously. I didn’t need any extra invitation, obviously.

Swansong and sole 7” release, Pounding Grace is the real jewel in this collection. Sublime slide guitar playing takes the edge off the usual jittery beat (too many amphetamines, coffee and existential energy, one imagines) and builds an almost funereal mood as Norris delivers the “carve now, carve away” refrain almost as if he has run out of breath. Or patience. Or the will to fight it. A fable that sees the agnostic meet his maker, Pounding Grace was a serious oversight on the Tales From The Australian Underground compilation of a few years back. Whereas other bands would don trench coats and be photographed smoking pensively on a foggy moor – in effect that is how muted and earnest the song could be read – the beauty of the band was quite the opposite. A bunch of raggedy inner city kids, they instead chose to embrace the misery of life by grabbing some ales, getting fucked up and dancing away into the night. Fuck it, they say, let’s live while we can and laugh in the face of it all. And then tomorrow the day can address me like a sinner.

And the band knew a thing or two about misery. Formed by Norris and original guitarist Johnny Gorman (after a beery afternoon playing The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Never Understand single repeatedly), it is Gorman who graces the cover of the first EP. By the time it was released he had hung himself and the band didn’t know what to do. Highlight of the set The Body Is Dirt was never intended for the Lobes EP but soon found its way into the chocolaty grooves as a sort of farewell to Gorman. His brother Michael Hiron replaced him. And In one of the universe’s more callous jokes, Hiron died just as the disc compiling all their work was to be released in 1991.

Lead track from the EP, Dipsomania (The Drinking Song) - perhaps I came to know of the band through seeing the video on Rage at some godawful hour – features Tina Stevens’ skittish double time drumming. There is almost a cow punk feel toward the end of the track, what with Norris whooping it up over the top of Gorman’s firebrand gunslinging guitar, recorded with maximum treble. It’s a trick repeated numerous times over the course of the two sides. There are more ‘traditional’ rockers in the set, but all feature Stevens’ relentless kick drum and Mark Lock’s overwhelming bass (he once trod the boards with Died Pretty; though soon to be replaced by John Willstead, who once tippy-toed around in The Go-Betweens, avoiding getting between Robert and Grant lest he cop an errant blow). Quite some line up, for sure.

By the time Hiron was in he had dragged with him Clem Lukey (Pineapples From The Dawn of Time) and it began the era of Plug Uglies that produced those mini-epics that the band are (rather, should, and will be) so loved for.

As for the vibe of the twelve or so officially released tunes? Imagine the Velvets during their rave-up era (around the time of Loaded, I guess) but without the ironic chirpiness of tunes such as Who Loves The Sun. And then marry that with an Exile On Main St Rolling Stones but, here’s the thing, it is not Gram Parsons sitting on the window of a French manor getting fucked up with Keith Richards. It isn’t his blue-eyed harmonies at all. Instead it is Townes’ Van Zandt I see over there, his bitter and jarring reflections, his self-destruct button aimed at every chorus line. Ceilings will crack and people as well, you see. Of course, they sound nothing like that, I am just trying to give you a road map you may be able to refer to. They sound, instead, like Plug Uglies. No one else did nor has since.

Tight Sydney alley ways, a Labor government, nothing to watch on television, hanging with mates, “before fringe culture was considered profitable” (Norris’ own words). A sense of trying to define what is important without letting go of the one vital ingredient that most bands miss – you are just a fucking rock group. There’s no Brass Buttons in the Plug Uglies world, there is only an uncaring eternal eye in the sky and we flounder between future and past. Heading straight for the dirt, so let’s pour another one, and another one, and celebrate life while we have a still tenuous hold on it.

For those of you who were never there, or didn’t heed the call, Laughing Outlaw are about to release that long awaited disc compiling it all. The tragedy of Plug Uglies, for me, has always been that it felt unresolved. As if they just fell off the edge of the world somewhere around Abercrombie St, with so much promise and their best work just emerging. Those mini-epics of Johnny Panic and Pounding Grace, still fresh on the lathe, gave a hint as to where they were heading. And while this may be a highly digested version of a Plug Uglies spray which weaves in and out of my notebooks, you’d be an idiot to miss the point: Maybe the greatest band you never heard.