Regurgitator

Regurgitator
Warner, 1994

For the last ten years I have kept a sticker promoting one of Regurgitator's concerts in Newcastle – on the 23rd of July, 1998 – that was given to me by a dear friend. It has a little devilish-looking dude with horns on his head wearing a shirt and tie and offering his arms out to the names of Regurgitator and Tism, which are spelt out up the top in multi-coloured capital letters like the signage of a strip joint. When I decided to write about the band, I couldn't find the damn thing. I went rummaging through boxes of letters from old girlfriends and wads of ticket stubs wrapped in rubber bands without any luck. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd seen it. Eventually, I found it about ten centimetres from where I'd started – under a mess of papers stacked next to my glass of wine and laptop.

For some people the soundtrack to Australia in the 1990s was You Am I, or Silverchair, or Paul Kelly. For me it was Regurgitator. The band formed in 1993 after – according to bassist Ben Ely – he saw future singer Quan Yeomans high as a kite at a hippy party outside the Sunshine Coast in Queensland licking the leaves on trees. Yeomans didn't usually spend his time in outer-space, however. He had been extremely disturbed by the inequalities of global economics during a trip to the World Economic Forum in South America one year earlier and was radically politicised by the experience. Which made it all the stranger when the band signed to a major label before having released anything.

"What the fuck is that piece of shit?" asked the head of Warner Australia after seeing the band's first offering, a bone-crushing stoner song called 'Like It Like That' set to a cheap film clip shot in a shower. To make matters worse, the band had emblazoned the Warner logo on the back of their debut EP as a passive-aggressive taunt. The logo was removed before the record went to print, but it was replaced by a shot of a hamburger on the front – a reference to the mass-production of music and the first blow in what would become a long campaign of mud-slinging against their label, fans and life in general. After sending this column to my editor, I am finally going to peel off that sticker and put it on my laptop.