X

At Home With You
Major, 1985

X are a band with a story, most likely exaggerated in parts and all the more amazing for being true in others, that old Australian rock fans enjoy recounting to each other and nobody else seems to have heard of. Those two facts are hardly coincidental, as the story is – with only minor variation – an explanation of X as the ultimate outsiders of local underground music history. Not punk, nor rock, nor for that matter anything else, more notorious than any other band at the time or since and probably the one most deserving of recognisable acclaim or inclusion in a hall of fame and the least likely to ever get it. "X stood alone," is the motto of this mythology and the one said to interviewers by members of the band almost as if they were speaking about something separate to themselves and outside of their control.

X came up with their name shortly before their first gig in Sydney in 1977, at a pub in Bondi they were never invited back to, by slashing a giant cross in red paint on a piece of newspaper and sticking it to the door of the hotel as a makeshift poster. At the time the band consisted of Steve Lucas, Ian Riley, Steve Cafiero and Ian Krahe, who the following year took heroin after a gig and died in his sleep. The other three continued to play and recorded the ferocious punk album X-Aspirations, gathering themselves a troublesome following of violent skinheads in the process. At one point, so the story goes, they were banned from 32 venues in Sydney and still managed to play regularly.

X split in 1980 and reformed a few years later, eventually settling in Melbourne where new drummer Cathy Green brought a looser style to their music and mediated the volatile relationship between Lucas and Rilen. She showed up to the first rehearsal to find both of them incoherently drunk. In 1985 the band recorded At Home With You, their second and more diverse album including the brilliant art-rock cut 'TV Glue' and slovenly punk track 'Degenerate Boy'. The trio continued to play music, and Rilen continued to drink people under the table, for the next two decades. In the preface to the 2005 reprint of Inner City Sound, Clinton Walker wrote: "As long as Ian Rilen's alive, after all, anything is possible!" He died of cancer in 2006.