Radios (Re)-Appear : a Deniz Tek interview

"Twenty years ago today, 'Birdman was in full swing - right in the middle of our time, so that really gives you the perspective of how old it really is,"

Radio Birdman did it first, did it harder, and broke up sooner, than any other Australian band. They were too much too soon, and their legacy has been felt, through a slew of eighties pretenders right down to this day.

Not for nothing has there been considerable discussion about silverchair`s rendition of Birdmans New Race with You Am I's Tim Rogers at the ARIA Awards earlier this month; a song subsequently included in their live encores.

"They were doing it at a gig were they?" Tek asks with evident amusement. "Ah, good."

"I'm trying to look at it as though the band had a long break and now we're going to play another show."

"To me it's another gig," he says, "although it is an exciting prospect to reanimate a corpse or breathe life into a dead thing and see if it comes back. I suppose a better analogy would be to start up an old aeroplane that hadn't been flown in twenty years. You just don't know if it's going to go or not."

"That was a boyhood dream that I had," he tells me. "the best way to fly is the military, there's no question of that."

"the Marines were always the last to get new equipment,"

"I learned a tremendous amount from that because up until that time I had a very loner personality partially it was my lack of skill in dealing with group dynamics that screwed Radio Birdman in the first place.
One of the things I learned in the military was how to work as a team toward a common goal. I think that's the best thing I got out of that military mindset."

Present were Tek (guitars), Chris Masuak (guitars), Pip Hoyle (keyboards), Warwick Gilbert (bass), and Rob Younger (lead vocals). Drummer Ron Keeley was not.

"That was really the event that set the tone for being able to get together.
Putting the albums together, especially the remixing of 'Living Eyes' which took an entire week to do - and all the guys were there except for Ron who was in England.

But all the other five guys were there in a room for the first time since the band broke up, and we just realised it was pretty good to be together we've all stopped being psychotic, and we thought, 'Well, maybe we were a little bit hasty in terminating the association', because the music sounded pretty good, and we enjoyed each others` company.

So we thought 'it's not such a bad thing to be together working on Radio Birdman stuff!"

"If the music hadn't aged well we would have called it a day."

"Like everything else in this band there's already been controversy. It's funny, because just being back as Radio Birdman means we're back in control and have to pay attention to everything. It's quite incredible how everybody's focussed again."

"Well he hadn't until June when we met up with him in Paris," Tek admits. "[Deniz Tek Group] were playing a gig and he showed up from London, and he ended up hitting it off really well with our drummer Nik (Reith, ex- Celibate Rifles), and the two drummers got together and ended up becoming best pals.

The next thing I know is that Nik has invited Ron to play a couple of songs, so I look around and there's Ron on the kit, picking up the sticks for the first time in all that time.

He did a pretty good job, I was surprised. He was always able to divide time in such a way that the song sounded like it was going faster than it really was, and it always seemed to be accelerating when it really wasn't."

Does Tek remember all the gigs, I ask?

"It's a big collage in the back of my mind. I'm probably like everybody else, I don't really remember what Radio Birdman was really like. I remember what it felt like to play, but have no idea what it felt like from the audience perspective."

"When there is film, it tends to supplant memory, because that becomes the memory. I know that film better than I remember the event." Flashback to the present: "Me and my ensemble just finished recording, and I'm pretty excited about it. I'm as excited about that as I am about the Radio Birdman stuff."

"I think everybody is holding their breath to see if it starts," he says, suggesting a previous analogy. "If it starts then we'll see where we want to drive it to."

Radio Birdman perform as part of Big Day Out 96. The remix albums are out now.