GOATSOUND - Blood, Sweat and the Smell of Burning Hostages
Pictured: GOATSOUND original logo + logo by Xavier Fuller
An Interview with Jason Fuller from GOATSOUND
Written by: Tom Wilson | Sense Music Media
The first time I saw Jason Fuller, he was completely nude, and covered in blood.
It was over fifteen years ago. He was onstage at a club in Tassie, playing bass for infamous Melbourne grind-n-roll crew BLOOD DUSTER. I was right in front of him, my knees crushed against the edge of the stage, crowd-surfers tumbling across my shoulders. The air stank of beer, sweat and cigarette smoke, and it felt about a thousand degrees.
Back then, he went by Jason P.C. – a fittingly ironic moniker for a guy who put out an album called Cunt. Now, it’s just gone 2:30pm on a Saturday afternoon in a locked-down Melbourne, and Jason Fuller cracks a beer. The short black hair is now grey, and the friendly guy in the flannie is a proud father and a somewhat responsible grown-up. Working under the Goatsound moniker, Fuller has a long rap sheet of studio credits stretching back over more than fifteen years. What prompted him to first get into it?
Pictured: Tone Bone, Beltsy, Matt C, Dave Haley + Jason PC - BLOOD DUSTER
Photo courtesy of Jason Fuller
“When I was doing all the BLOOD DUSTER stuff, basically I was the main producer. I don’t like to say “producer” … I did all the stuff that a traditional producer would have done, but I was in the band. So I booked the sessions, made sure that everything was done, right down to what label we were signing to, going through contracts … so I was management, all that stuff … Once you could do recordings from home a bit better, it was like, we don’t want to sit in a studio while Matt Collins does his guitar tracks fifteen times because he hasn’t bothered to learn anything, [so] I’ll just get this little interface. I started doing more, and then bands started asking me to do stuff, and it just [got to] the point where I had a studio, and all the rest of the gear that went along with it.”
How did he balance being in the band with the professional responsibilities of acting as manager and producer?
Pictured: Tone Bone, Matty C, Rizzo + Jason PC - BLOOD DUSTER
Photo by: Zo Damage
“It was mainly necessity. It sounds ridiculous now, because anyone can release anything, but in the early 90s, there was no internet. If you were doing a demo, it was hard to find an electric typewriter to put the graphics on your stuff. You had to go to a graphic designer who had the special gear to make a professional-looking thing. In ’91, me and Jason V from CHRISTBAIT … I remember the first CHRISTBAIT demo, he used a [process] where you push the letters onto the thing, and you go letter-by-letter, to try and get it to look neat, because how the fuck else were you going to get this shit done? You kind of had to do that. There were no labels putting out anything. I think the first band that had a physical [release] that we knew was ACHERON – they ended up becoming ABRAMELIN … You had to make your own avenues and stuff, you know? When Christbait had a CD out, it was like, “Holy shit! It’s an actual fucking CD! This is real shit.” No one was going to help Blood Duster. There was no one who was going to put their hand up and say, “That’s a fucking great idea”, until ’93 when Dr Jim’s Records did the Fisting the Dead CD. We couldn’t get management, even though we could put 300 people in a room any night back then. We just couldn’t get anyone to give a shit … The first or second Big Day Out in Melbourne, Christbait tried to play it. This is indicative of what the scene was like back then … CHRISTBAIT tried to get on that festival, and they were told, “No, you’re too heavy – girls won’t like it.” That’s just the way it was, you know?
Pictured: Big Day Out festival poster - 2004
BLOOD DUSTER would eventually play the Big Day Out in 2004. “There still hadn’t been all the metal festivals, so it was a pretty big deal for us to get on the Big Day Out. We toured nationally – we did all the shows – and we were buried. We were playing good spots. We played right before KINGS OF LEON… When we played in Melbourne, the whole fucking room was jam-packed. We used it for a video clip [SixSixSixteen] so you can see it. After we played, KINGS OF LEON were in there, and it was half-full. KINGS OF LEON were on the cover of every fucking magazine you could possibly imagine. They had so much push.” It’s worth noting that, when you look at the bill poster for the 2004 festival, KINGS OF LEON are second-billed, right next to METALLICA. BLOOD DUSTER are down the bottom, one of only three heavy bands on the festival. “We couldn’t get Beat or InPress to write a blurb about us at that point. There was nothing. There was a photobook that documented every single band … that was their thing – “We’ve documented every single band that ever toured nationally on the Big Day Out.” There was no BLOOD DUSTER. We were just written out of history, you know?”
“We turned up to the festival, we were pulled into a room, and these three women went to us as said, “We know your reputation. We don’t want any of this.”
I said, “Hang on, what are you talking about?”
They said, “We don’t want any fucking about. If there is any, you’ll be kicked off the tour straight away.
I was like, “Did you pull THE WHITE STRIPES in and say that?”
She said, “Don’t be a smartarse. You know what I fucking mean.””
Pictured: Rizzo, Beltsy, James Hetfield, Matty C + Tone Bone
Photo by: Jason PC
“No one wanted us there. Even though the crowds were massive and fucking loved it, and it was awesome, there was this undercurrent of “you don’t belong here – you’re not one of us.” … I don’t know what it was based on. Like, we had a rep for being crazy, but it was a reputation – it wasn’t reality, you know? We were just five funny dudes doing dumb shit. As it turned out, the year we played that Big Day Out, we played on the same stage as LOSTPROPHETS, and I’m just thinking, “You spent so much time worried about us – were you standing around protecting young girls from the world’s worst fucking pedophile?” [LOSTPROPHETS singer Ian Watkins was arrested in 2012 and charged with a litany of child sex offenses. The following year he was sentenced to 26 years prison.]
I mention that abrasive metal bands have gone from the red-headed stepchild of the music scene to the likes of Melbourne thrashcore troupe KING PARROT getting nominated for two consecutive ARIA Awards. What the hell happened?
“Twenty years happened! Youngy [Matthew Young - vocalist] is a hardworking dude. He is unrelenting. Like their music or not, you fucking know that they exist … It’s because Youngy put in the work. He was the one driving up and down the streets doing pole posters. Lots of bands don’t do any of that kind of shit. They just sit there and expect someone to go, “Here’s a record contract man. Here’s a great support slot.” It was kind of the same with BLOOD DUSTER. We really worked, you know? Until we got too lazy, and couldn’t be fucked [laughs].”
Throughout our interview, Fuller likes to downplay BLOOD DUSTER’s notoriety, but it’s fair to say that the band’s reputation for crazy exploits was somewhat earned. Everyone has a Blood Duster story. It just so happens that my BLOOD DUSTER story is also the story of my first ever club gig, in Launceston, Tasmania. I was barely 18, and my only concert experience had been seeing INCUBUS at a music festival. I didn’t know what to expect. All I knew was that they had released an album called Cunt.
I was not prepared.
Pictured: Matty C, Rizzo, Jason PC, Tone Bone + Beltsy
Photo courtesy of Jason Fuller
The band took to the stage shirtless and smeared in fake blood. Vocalist Tony Forde was wearing sunglasses, a do-rag and a gold necklace, looking like a gangsta-rap serial killer. The band kicked off with a down-tuned rumble, and Forde flicked his cigarette into my face and started bellowing death-growls while throwing gang signs. Stubbies were swigged and tossed into the crowd, smashing on the floor. A young woman climbed onstage and performed various sex acts with someone I can only assume was her boyfriend. The bar staff were passing shots across the pit to the band. Fuller kicked his pants off halfway through the set to play the rest of the show buck naked.
INCUBUS, this was not.
Pictured: BLOOD DUSTER’s final show poster - 9 December 2017
The chaos and merriment of BLOOD DUSTER was documented in their 2005 DVD The Shape of Death to Come, a hard-R home video shot on the road across Australia. From punching cones behind the wheel of a moving Tarago (with “Filmed in a Controlled Environment” superimposed on the screen) to hurling cups of piss at each other backstage, such footage could have been described as “incriminating” to say the least. The best part? Tony Forde getting sconed with a plastic cup of piss was backstage at the Big Day Out. If only the festival organisers had pulled them aside and told them to behave.
“The funny thing is, when I got a royalties statement saying how much we were never going to get paid, because they’d given us an advance, I was like [points at the statement] “What the fuck is this?” I found out later that [the DVD] actually went out to hundreds of video stores across Australia as a rental DVD.” He can’t help but laugh about it. “I didn’t expect it to go public – I thought it was just going to be for BLOOD DUSTER fans, so who gives a fuck if they see people doing some meth or getting sucked off or whatever?”
Last year, Fuller shared music from a new sludge project called BURN THE HOSTAGES, sounding every bit as caustic and nasty as the name suggests. The band, he tells me, happened by accident, after he purchased a 24-track tape machine. “I was like, “Fuck, I just wanna do a session just on this tape machine – just go straight analogue.”” He enlisted Aaron Osbourne from Canberra metal/hardcore crew I EXIST. “Aaron’s a riff machine,” he explained. “He would do something, or I’d do something, and we would quickly arrange it, record it. The following weekend, we got Rohan [Harrison] from EXTORTION to do some vocals on it. And then we completely forgot about it. I didn’t mix it, I just made it ugly-sounding and rough, and I think Aaron [made] twenty on CD-Rs and gave them away at I Exist shows.” That was almost a decade ago. “We completely forgot about it. No one even mentioned it … It turns out that the label that puts out Extortion must’ve said to Rohan at some point, “Do you have anything else?” And he sent them that demo, and they said, “Oh, we’ll put this out.” And he was like, “Oh, yeah,” and completely forgot about it, [and] didn’t bother to tell us. I was going through a release sheet and I was like, “Oh, there’s a band called “Burn the Hostages”. Oh, hang on, I think that’s us!” It had been released on 12” vinyl. I had to get a hold of Rohan and say, “What the fuck is this?” He was like, “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you man!” So, it’s out now.” They roped in Andrea on drums to solidify the BTH line-up, and went on to play shows, supporting New Orleans sludge innovators EYEHATEGOD last November.
Five years ago, Goatsound hosted a reinterpretation of BLACK FLAG’s 1981 album Damaged, bringing in fifteen different bands over the span of a single day, each group tasked with recording a track from the punk rock classic. In 2017, they took it further, almost doubling the number of bands to record all 28 tracks of NAPALM DEATH’s ground-breaking 1987 LP Scum. All proceeds from the record went to charity. “They all pretty much had twenty minutes to record their song. The gear was kind of set up, and everything was placed where it needed to be, and the bands would go in one by one and just bang out their song. They’d plug their own guitar in, they could put their own head on top, we’d get a quick level, and then they’d bang their song out. So they had to be rehearsed and stuff. Yeah, we went through 28 bands in a day. It was good!”
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