A Piece of Perth Punk History Resurrected With The Victims

Before Hoodoo Gurus, Dave Faulkner was Dave Flick in Perth punk band The Victims.

The Victims were show lived. There was a single, a post-break-up EP but a lot of influences.

The Victims featured Faulkner as Flick, James Baker on drums and Rudolph V (Dave Cardwell) on bass.

In August 2014 Faulkner and Baker reformed The Victims with Ray Ahn of The Hard-Ons on bass. They played Perth again that year. The following year The Victims played in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. In 2019, Faulkner, Baker and Ahr polished off the old songs for a new EP.

“When Ray joined the band we did these shows for one tour and then through ‘bugger it, we are The Victims’,” Dave Faulkner tells Noise11.com. “Ray is the right person and he has such a tough energy and he loves The Victims as well. We were one of the first teenage bands he had discovered. We had broken up for a few years by that stage but he was just discovering indie music and The Victims were a band that poised his ear. When we got him to join the band it was really obvious it was the right thing to do. We have really become cemented into a power trio”.

A show in 2017 inspired the three guys to go back to the studio. “The show we did in Perth at the end of 2017 before we started recording these tracks, I think it was the best show we had ever done. It had the same anarchy and spirit of what the shows would be but the whole band was more finesse I guess.”

Faulkner says the Flick name was both a punk thing and a private thing to do. “Everyone was changing their name then, like The Ramones. It was a punk thing to do and I think even glam rockers were doing it too. It seemed like a way to protect my family from this painful behavior, a scallywag, a punk rocker in a small town like Perth. I gave them anonymity by giving myself a fake surname. Also, there are other reasons relating to my nickname as a kid. I was only Dave Flick for The Victims for six or eight months. But people still called me Flick after that”.

It all began in 1977. “’Television Addict’ was recorded in 1977 and released in 1978,’ Dave says. “We recorded that first and it sold really well and surprised the hell out of us. It was funded by a friend of a friend of the band. He was from a nicer family and asked his parents to invest in this punk band and funded the record. Someone took it over to other states and sold them hand to hand. That got people interested in it. And then the band broke up. The guy who funded us said he didn’t want the money back. He just said ‘use that money and record some more songs’. So we did the EP. We broke up then and the EP came out after we broke up”.

None of The Victims songs went on to become Hoodoo Gurus songs. “There were songs from early Hoodoo Gurus I wrote in 1979. I wrote ‘Tojo’ and ‘My Girl’ then before I moved to Sydney,” Dave says. “Then the Gurus formed in 1980, beginning of ’81. I did those two songs in a band called The Mannequins, a band I had in the 1980s. Cheap Nasties became The Mannequins. I moved to London and then New York. Then I came back, The Mannequins were still going so they asked me to join. I was in the band for nine months. I wanted to see the East Coast of Australia. I didn’t want to be in Perth. The business was all in Sydney and Melbourne. I took my two songs and away I went. I have been in Sydney ever since”.

All of the newly recorded songs are songs from the 70s. “Three of them were demoed on the compilation album. We thought we were doing a proper demo but it was really just a reel to reel tape player in someone’s house. It was amateurish. He wasn’t much of a producer and we weren’t much of a band either. We played like a rehearsal. It sounds interesting now because it is the only recordings of those songs. It always bugged me that we never recorded them properly. So we did those three songs and another song called ‘Everynight’. I don’t think it was every recorded. That was a song no-one ever heard so I thought I’d throw it on too”.

Hear The Victims on Spotify: