I am indeed a stranger in a strange land. It’s 1986 and my shoes are stuck to what must have been carpet when they built this bizarre suburban “tavern” in Belconnen, one of Canberra’s northern suburbs. The patrons of this place are an eclectic group – giant menacing bikies break character to warmly hug some hot young office worker girls, wild dreadlocked stoners laugh uproariously with a bunch of skinhead-looking guys and despite the incredible breadth and range of this generous demographic, I am definitely “one of these things that’s not like the others” as they say on Sesame Street. And that’s a good example right there, no one else in this place would get that reference, but Big Bird, Elmo and Ernie and Bert are still pretty fresh in my memory. But all that is about to become completely irrelevant, because I am about to hear the greatest live band I’ve ever heard (still true today, three decades later) and have the kind of face-melting transformative musical awakening you remember for the rest of your life. 

And that’s the reason all these freaky people are here on a freezing Thursday night, they’re here to see Steve Grieve and The Mourners. They know what’s coming but I don’t. Everything’s new to me. I am 15 years old and still amazed I was even allowed in. An hour earlier I’d faked a yawn, got off the living room couch in my parents’ house in Canberra’s quiet, leafy southern suburbs and told the folks I was off to bed, it being a school night and all. Moments later I was sneaking out the window and meeting up with my ride, a bloke, two or three years older than me who had moved in up the street a couple of weeks before. He was a blues nut and turned me on to people like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Guy, Roy Buchanan, Muddy Waters and Chain and had set this whole adventure in motion by idly saying “if you’re into this stuff we should go see the Mourners one night, they’re awesome”.

He was probably just making conversation but I held him to it and here we were, in a smoke-filled, sticky floored pub as the band casually file out on stage to rousing applause as the sweet, rich and unmistakable smell of strong weed wafts over us in a wave. Master of ceremonies here is singer Dan Myles, a tall, strapping lad with long black hair who greets the applause with the biggest Cheshire Cat grin on his face you’ve ever seen. Forget nerves, there’s never been a more relaxed person on earth. Myles has charisma and confidence to burn, but with good reason – he has some set of pipes. He can howl out the blues like Paul Rodgers but is capable of so much more as well. Deeply rooted in the blues, sure, but there is an otherworldly quality to his tone and phrasing that is like no one else. Either side of Myles are two guitar players, a relentless diesel-driven rhythm guitar specialist on a meaty Les Paul in Dan Stefanac and a wild-haired, Strat-wielding wizard in Steve Grieve. Lots of bands have two guitar players and quite a lot of them suck because both axemen play the same thing most of the time. The way these two arranged their interlocking guitar parts was pure artistry. Add a rhythm section that really swung (Justin McMahon on drums and Pete Cheyne on bass) and a mighty fine piano player in Paul Totterdell and you’ve got yourself something really special. I recognised a few of their songs – they did an awesome “Couldn’t Stand The Weather” by Stevie Ray Vaughan, a ZZ Top tune or two and a couple of others. But most of their set I’d never heard before and the songs were so good and so numerous and so inventive it was hard to believe they were original, but they were. At some point during this, my mate from up the street apparently came and told me he’d met this chick and was heading off so if I wanted a lift it was now or never. I have no recollection of this conversation, but even if I had heard and understood him, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere. The Mourners were now my religion and I had drunk the Kool-Aid. Who knew music could be this good? And this much fun?

Eventually it ended and despite the cold I went outside and walked down the street a bit, just to try and preserve it or make sense of it all or something. Big mistake. By the time I returned the place had closed up, like all the shops around it, and I began to realise I might have a problem here. It was 2 or 2.30am on a Thursday night, Friday morning really. My lift had clearly departed, there were no buses running and even if there was a taxi anywhere nearby, I didn’t have a cent. This was, as they say in the classics, a dilly of a pickle. I knew my mother would be knocking on my bedroom door in five hours and would be more than a tad peeved to discover, instead of her first-born son under the covers, a rudimentary dummy made out of pillows and a football with a beanie on it. So, I was going to have to walk/run/stagger the 25-odd kays home, but I was confident some early-riser or shift-worker or serial rapist would give a lift to a 15-year-old kid who was obviously stranded. But there was a problem with this theory. There was a reason I sailed into that pub without a problem – I didn’t look 15. I was a pretty big lump of a lad with a rough-looking head, and to your average pre-dawn motorist my demeanour didn’t suggest “child in peril” so much as “possible car jacker”. The closest I got to a lift was when a car full of pissed bogans wound their windows down and gave me a gobfull as they went past. I told them to go fuck themselves. Another miscalculation, as it turned out, as they stopped and got out of the car with the clear intention of doing me a damage. As the sun started to come up I heard a car coming and stuck out the thumb without turning around but it just never came. I looked around and it was a convoy of about three cars – one a Winnebago – with flashing lights and such. It was one of those mad old guys competing in the Sydney to Melbourne running race and his support team. It was a surreal postscript to a bizarre and unusual evening. I made it home just in time to be “woken up” and bundled off to school. Didn’t put me off the Mourners though. I pretty much saw as many shows of theirs as I could but then suddenly, just like that, they were gone.

I heard somewhere they’d moved to Sydney and while that was a shame, it seemed like the right move. I figured the next time I’d see them would be at an Entertainment Centre somewhere because it seemed a foregone conclusion they would make it big. They were so good, with a seemingly endless supply of top quality songs – and the songwriting team of Myles and Grieve was becoming ever more sophisticated and adventurous – what could possibly go wrong? They came back to Canberra from time to time to play a show or two and they had changed it up a bit. Gone was Dan Stefanac and with him the signature twin guitar assault, but they had gained the bass playing and distinctive harmony vocals of Paul Woseen (who would later go on to put together the Screaming Jets). But after slogging it out in the beer barns of western Sydney and regional NSW to no avail, at least in terms of record company interest , the band split in 1989 and a disillusioned Grieve departed for northern NSW and soon found his ability on guitar in high demand, touring the country with the likes of Margaret Urlich, Wendy Matthews, Christine Anu and Grace Knight, as well as stints with US blues legends Jimmy Witherspoon and Elvin Bishop. Myles turned up back in Canberra and reunited with Stefanac and a few mates in a band called Duck and they were a great band too, but they too fizzled out and Myles headed for northern NSW, more than a bit disillusioned himself.

But how had Steve Grieve and The Mourners fallen through the cracks? Surely they had sent demos off to record companies at least? “Nah, we didn’t even do that stuff, that was too hard for us,” Myles says with a throaty chuckle. “We didn’t have a clue really, what we wanted to do or how that might happen.” But if the Mourners were guilty of simply expecting fame and success to just land in their lap, they had good reason. Their first ever gig, a support slot for legendary Aussie punk band The Saints at the ANU Bar in the early eighties, was so good it left the audience stunned and even blew away the headliners, a reformed version of The Saints featuring original singer Chris Bailey and members of the Church and Sunnyboys. “It (the adulation) started from day one, our first gig,” Myles recalled. “And it just kept going, I suppose we didn’t realise how lucky we were to just hit it our first go.” From there, the Mourners exploded – ripping it up opening for the likes of Johnny Winter, Chain, Lonnie Mack and a host of others and winning influential fans along the way.

But it wasn’t just dumb luck. Hard work played a large part as did the creative chemistry between Myles and Grieve. “I was at Art College and they gave me this house to live in and use,” Myles said. “It was out near the 2CA transmitter, a fair way from any other houses so it was a perfect place to jam.” “We had 30 or 40 original songs before we played a gig,” Grieve recalled. “We all agreed that we wouldn’t play any gigs before we were ready and so we were rehearsing out there in Giralang sometimes three or four nights a week.” And that is the fundamental dilemma of Steve Grieve and The Mourners, either their greatest strength or most damaging flaw, depending on how you look at it. They simply won’t be rushed into doing anything half-arsed. If the choice is mediocrity or nothing, then it will be nothing. For this reason there isn’t much recorded material out there from the band. There was a CD EP called “The 2XX Tapes” – recorded in 1986 on four-track but in typical Mourners fashion not released until 1995 – and a few live bootlegs, which despite being sourced from old cassette tapes sound incredible. But nothing that does justice to how good they were and could be. It was something both Grieve and Myles knew and sometime around the turn of the century it was decided they would remedy this. Keeping with tradition it’s taken 17 years for Caterpillar Maze to actually come out but it is a seriously impressive album. For some reason I had assumed it would be a selection of gems from the Mourners’ back catalogue but apart from an updated take on old fave “Neighbours” it is all new material and kind of a different sound.

The Mourners of old were always at heart a blues rock band that also drew from a deep well of other influences and pushed the boundaries. Caterpillar Maze pushes those boundaries out quite a bit further and reveals a slightly jazzier and funkier Mourners. “That probably reflects my journey, more than anything,” says Grieve, who has delivered a guitar-playing masterclass on Caterpillar Maze. With an official website at www.stevegrieveandthemourners.com and plans in place to promote the album with performances at selected festivals around the country, perhaps Steve Grieve and The Mourners will finally receive the success and recognition they have long deserved. 

– Ben Vernon is an award-winning journalist and erstwhile musician based in North Queensland. After putting in about two decades covering music and entertainment, news and sport in the mainstream print media with the Townsville Bulletin, Melbourne’s Herald Sun and Brisbane’s Sunday Mail, he currently works freelance from his home on Magnetic Island.

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Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic records once made a sweeping statement – he claimed that all the good riffs had been played! FFS!!! So all the guitarists who were swept up and inspired by all that great music of the 60s and 70s should just hang it up and forget about it?

What Ahmet really meant was that the legacy of those times was a modern template for song writing, and an endless font of great ideas, but where you can still hear the roots of jazz and the Blues.

So where is modern song writing at? After hearing the top ten of JJJ’s “Top 100” it sounds a bit like everyone is writing the same song, but adding different production values. The writers and producers sound more interested in the amount of delay, reverb and synthetic spatial keyboard sounds than anchoring their songs in any obvious referential influences, and they don’t seem to be paying respect to what has come before. Could it be because of that a lot of the songs will not survive the magical test of time? They are part of the throw away culture and fashion of the times – there is good pop but man, it takes a bit of finding – there is a lot of shite out there.

Song writing is a craft that requires dedication and perseverance – writing a simple song can be a complex task. Distilling observations and experience into a vignette, constructing a lyric that has a meter to compliment the rhythm, and then expressing a theme in the lyric sympathetic to the emotion, mood or tone of the melody. Another crucial element is being able to hear and acknowledge the song’s roots, so you can hear where the writing is coming from, what style of song it is.

Now writing a blues or rock song can present challenges, there is no point of a middle class white boy rehashing “she done me wrong”, or “I’m out on the street” lyrics, we all now really know where that’s at. You can allude to those situations and the themes of the greats, but to spell out verbatim isn’t going to cut it. We learn our deepest lessons from myths and fables, and songs should reach in and inhabit the soul – they should stir the memory, touch the longing and pain we all carry, give us a sense of belonging, confirm our deepest desires and pleasure, stir up some happiness or scream at an unjust world – songs celebrate life.

Steve Grieve and The Mourners is primarily a vehicle for the song writing team of Dan Myles and Steve Grieve. The songs are trying to be all the above, out of respect for the craft and all the great artists who came before. There are references and roots in the songs, an obvious nod towhat has come before and an honest attempt to move the craft forward.

Caterpillar Maze is an album of songs touching on our many influences. We like to think we may have succeeded in putting our own stamp on the music we love, and, as far as we can tell, there isn’t another Australian band at the moment that sound anything like we do. We would love to know if you can hear that, and we hope these songs might resonate with you and your own ideas about what a good band is and should be playing. We cover a lot of ground in these songs. The Blues is the primary roots of our band, but there are other influences aplenty, with rock, funk, country and Americana elements in there as well.

Steve Grieve and The Mourners came out of Canberra in the early 80s. The band started out during the declining years of the great Oz pub rock era, when in order to stand out you not only needed good songs but you needed to have a mix of insight, bravado and be tough enough to muscle your way into the scene. You needed be able to play your instrument well and have a band full of players that all understood exactly what their part was in chasing the holy grail of being in a good band. The magic mantra of 1% talent 99% perseverance is a great insight into the process, and the hard work of achieving this goal requires mental focus, discipline and an unwavering belief. Then being able to generate that belief and deliver every time the band walks on stage, slowly brings on the next mystic mantra, the magical illusion of smoke and mirrors, making the difficult task of being a great band look natural and easy. You only really learn if you are achieving these things when the next mantra kicks in, preparation meets opportunity.

For us back in 1984 out of nowhere we got asked get to be the opening act for a one of the major great international blues acts that the planet has ever known, the virtuosic blues great Johnny Winter. We pulled it off, the road manager and the band made an effort to let us know we had it. We weren’t kidding ourselves, we were on our way to being a great band.

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The geek radio sleaze Howard Stern was once defending Bon Jovi’s massive success in an argument with some guests. No one in the argument liked the band but Howard’s point was that the people had spoken. 20 million copies of Slippery when wet didn’t mean it was a good album, it just meant that 20 million people liked it enough to buy.

There are three basic types of people, if divide a crowd into 3 categories, visual, audible and kinesthetic (feeling) you have to satisfy one of these elements enough to get an individual’s attention. We all have different levels of the three but usually one is the more dominant. So if you have a room full of punters and you are an purely audible band, with no visuals and no emotional energy, you will only get the attention audible types in the crowd, the visual will loose interest and the kinesthetic may pick up a bit of a vibe off of the audible types and you may get a little bit of atmosphere. The bands that really work the magic and get all three happening are celebrated and revered,we’ve all been in a room with a fantastic band, blowing the place away, you can feel the energy overwhelm you and everyone is in for the ride, powerful addictive stuff

Getting in the pocket is the magic space that great bands can access at will, be it a well rehearsed muscle memory and or a particular chemistry between players. The band knows that feeling and it is as addictive as great sex or a powerful drugs, maintaining access to that space is a deceptive thing and it can haunt a band when they loose that access. It usually calls for someone to be sacked, a sacrifice to the rock gods in hope of a resurrection. My first memory of it in the original Mourners lineup was opening for Ian Moss at a small bar called Billboards in Canberra. Moss had pulled an all star band together, we were thrilled to be opening for him, our band were in a fantastic place and during that time we had taken our song writing to another level, we had some great new songs ready to go.

We got to the gig and it was full house, walking in through the front doors, through the packed crowd to the back stage area you could feel a fantastic energy already. As we got to the corridor leading to the band room and there was mayhem ahead. Moss’s road crew had beaten the crap out of a few over zealous punters and a major scuffle had broken out, we waded in and pulled a few bodies out and with the management and bouncers it was calmed down. But it was clear the roadies were over top and taking their roll and little to seriously, but that’s rock’n roll. In the band room the vibe was crap, we were getting barked at as the blood pressure was still a little too high, there was not going to be a relaxed, easy path onto the stage.

I locked eyes with one of the goons and we had a little exchange, I basically thanked him for the good vibes. There was a lot of tension and before we knew it they were telling us to go on, as I turned to walk on stage I threw up in a bin, something I had never done. The crowd erupted as we came on, there was no time to think about what the fuck just happened it was time to play. Three or four songs in something magic happened,it suddenly felt effortless, like I just had to open my mouth and the singing came out. I looked around at the guys and it was like we were all in a bliss state, we were flying, the road crew were now rocking out with us, pumping fits and yelling from side stage as were the crowd. It was a powerful band in the pocket and that is the space, it is rock’n roll magic. It ruined me, I have never recovered and I have a burning continual need to get back to that space.

Not every gig goes so well, some are absolute nightmares. Promoters will pair up bands just to get your loyal crowd there and make sure some money comes through the door.This is where those three elements can really come into play.We arrived at the sound check to hear a really lame attempt at a John lee Hooker style boogie taking place, we all cut our teeth in a pretty solid garage scene in the Northern suburbs of Canberra and ZZ Tops La Grange was a standard jam tune.We stood near the desk in disbelief when our drummer Justin Mcmahon loudly said what we were all thinking “How the fuck did these guys get anywhere” well within earshot of their roadies and sound guy and um, things went pear shaped real quick.

Hunters and Collectors were a band of their time, successfully riding the punk zeitgeist to national fame. They wrote a couple of solid songs that are now part of national psych of a particular generation of music fans. Unfortunately at the time their music missed us on all three levels, they were competition and that was how we were, we were our tribal about the idea of being in a band .We well knew weren’t a good fit with their local diehard fans either.To top off the good vibes Steve Grieve did an interview in the local music paper Pulse leading up to the gig and gave the band a brutal critique on their lack of musical prowess.

We wore a lot of hostile bullshit from their road crew, they weren’t as heavy as the Moss crew but they let us know we weren’t in for a good night, as did their crowd when we walked on stage. But hey just like Bon Jovi the people had spoken.

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They turned all the lights out back stage and then we saw the dressing room door open, his band leading the way out. His manager walked out of the room backwards holding a torch at the brim of Johnny’s hat. Johnny walked slowly with his hands held forward. For those of you who don’t know Johnny was albino and had 10 to 15 % vision. He was a very rare and powerful looking human being, we were all thrown into a kind of silent reverent shock at the sight before us ,he looked like he has risen from the crypt. He got to side stage and the manager helped him put his guitar on and he seemed to double in size and energy, then he turned toward the stage and off he went, he put on a fantastic high energy show. He was of a whole other level.

Meeting Peter Haycock of the Climax blues band was another interesting experience, it was at the Workers club in Canberra, they were a world class band and sadly nobody came. Before the gig Peter Haycock and the band walked into the empty room, Haycock he was a very handsome Englishman, he had a crazy orthopedic brace on his right fore arm and hand. He was quite a sight, he oozed a sophisticated cool, he was so comfortable in his own skin, he just looked like a super star. He casually walked up to us and started chatting, I asked him about his hand and he said he had fallen asleep when drunk on the plane over to Australia, he slept for hours with his hand in a upright position, the blood drained and his hand fell asleep big time. An orthopedic surgeon put the brace together for him in Perth, the brace had light sprung metal rods on each finger attached to the arm brace that helped his fingers move enough to pick the strings, he told us the band had just finished a big European tour and thought they’d come to Australia to unwind. Peter Haycock was one of the best guitarist I have ever seen play and he could also really sing. The Climax blues band were a brilliant modern blues band, they had such a contemporary take on the Blues and they played like the place was packed, they were awesome. Hanging out at the end of the night was such a blast as they were really cool relaxed people, in Europe where they playing to 20 or 30 thousand people every night and here they were at the Canberra Workers Club playing to a handful of people. Lucky us.

One of the more interesting greats we got to open for was the fabulous Doctor Feelgood, one of the great British R’n B bands. Along with my other heroes The Sensational Alex Harvey Band they were a huge influence on the generation that brought the world Punk Rock. Both these bands had a theatrical cartoonish image, Lee Brilleaux and Wilco Johnson were one of the great front/man axe man teams in rock music history. In the same vain as Alex Harvey and Zal Clemons and then Bon and Angus borrowed heavily and carried on this British tradition. By the time we opened for them Wilco Johnson had long gone off to become a Blockhead but that didn’t diminish the thrill of opening for them.

It was a packed night upstair in the ANU refectory, there was a really great vibe happening. By this stage we were in our groove and we slayed it. During the show Steve was doing his own shtick of flying around whilst playing a driving riff in the Big City Song, he lept so high he slammed his head into a steel girder and fell off stage, quite a hilarious thing to watch, he quickly regathered and bounced back on stage and we kept playing through it all, we didn’t miss a beat. He had quite a lump at the end of the night.

Back stage after Doctor feelgood finished their set there was a real party happening. Out of nowhere Lee Brilleaux came up and put his arm around my shoulders and said “You’ve really got it mate, that’s a big voice you have and you really have a great presence up there, you’re a fabulous band and I love the name, keep it up and who knows, you may make something of it”. The biggest compliment I’d ever received during my time and it was straight from one of my biggest heroes. I knew a bit about Dr Feelgood so I had a great chat with Lee about his band and career, they had a young guitar player with them, Johnny Guitar, who Lee said first auditioned for the band when he was 14 and they could have hired him then, he knew all of Wilco’s licks inside out. So when Gypie Mayo left they grabbed him, it was quite a night for us, quite a night for me.

But the one we enjoyed the most and the one that still brings a smile to our faces was the night we got to open for the Blues great Lonnie Mack at a packed Canberra Workers club. Lonnie Mack was a mentor to the great Stevie Ray Vaughn, along with Freddie and Albert King he was instrumental in the rise of virtuoso blues rock guitar soloing with early instrumental hits in the early sixties. A true Texas Blues giant. Unfortunately Lonnie missed our set but one of our local heroes didn’t, the great Gunther Gorman who had carved himself out a career as a guitar sideman with stints in Daddy Cool and Sherbert. Gunther loved what he saw and was all over Steve and his playing, he came out back after our set and told us so, it was a blast for us all as we had been watching Gunther do his thing for years and he was the real deal. Suddenly the door to the band room swung open and in walked the man himself, Lonnie Mack, he stood there and all the oxygen left the room and that reverent silence returned, the man had a huge cool presence. I couldn’t speak, Gunther broke the silence and told him he really missed out on seeing our set. Lonnie stood there and slowly, cooly looked us over, then in his cool Texan drawl responded with “y’all look like y’sound real good anyhow”.

Boom! Yes indeed,we’ll take that! Karazma!

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