In a dusty woolshed on the outskirts of Dubbo, The Reels, one of Australia’s most iconic bands, found their unique rhythm during jam sessions.
Forty-seven years since treading the shed’s well-worn boards, a new exhibition exploring the band’s success has opened at Dubbo’s Western Plains Cultural Centre.
The Band From Dubbo: A History of The Reels explores the group’s beginnings as Native Sons through to minor chart success with singles such as Love Will Find a Way, Shout and Deliver, and This Guy’s in Love with You.
The band’s 1979 self-titled debut album, 1981 follow-up Quasimodo’s Dream, and their third LP Beautiful, in particular, earned The Reels a loyal following and placed them at the vanguard of Australia’s then-nascent new wave scene.
The Reels scored their biggest chart hit with a rearranged cover of Bad Moon Rising, but the band arguably remains best known for 1981 single Quasimodo’s Dream, which the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) placed at No.10 on its Top 30 Australian Songs of All Time list in 2001.
Dubbo had only officially been a city for 10 years when The Reels formed in 1976.
The band began with frontman Dave Mason on vocals, Craig Hooper on lead guitar and synthesiser, and John Bliss on drums.
“There’s a history of music in Dubbo that nobody knows about,” Mason said.
Core members Mason and Hooper were at the Western Plains Cultural Centre this week to take a first look at the exhibition.
The pair, who met at school, excitedly shared memories and stories about their years pushing the musical boundaries that helped them stand out in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“You kind of get too close when you’re in it,” Hooper said.
“Seeing this, you can see the audience and you realise it brought a lot of joy to a lot of people.
“When you’re kind of in the middle of it and it’s all angst, and your ego’s based off it — you kind of get a bit disconnected from that.
“It’s nice being able to look back at it and go, ‘That’s right, people really did enjoy this, it wasn’t just us being clever’.”
Innovation in music technology
Well-known for embracing technology through their early adoption of analogue synthesisers, the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument and headset microphones, the band’s innovation put them at the forefront of the rise of electronically generated music of the 1980s.
“We were terribly advanced because in those days, from about 1979 onwards, that was the start of synthesisers and all of that,” Mason said.
“Every year there were just incredible advancements.
“It would cost so much money because you’d have to get a new keyboard all the time.”
David Nichols, author of Dig: Australian Rock and Pop Music 1960-85, said The Reels’ readiness to embrace new technology set the band apart from their contemporaries.
“They wanted to use new — particularly electronic — instruments that came. They were very keen to do that, which a lot of people weren’t, and that flew in the face of a lot of what people saw as ‘essential’ Australian music.
“Unlike a lot of music from that time, I think it still really stands out.
“They’re still great records and obviously a really great band and we’re lucky to have had them.”
Hooper said the band’s members expressed themselves in ways that very few Australian bands were willing to do in an era of hyper-masculine, guitar-driven pub rock.
“Musically it was really exciting because you were suddenly making all these sounds that nobody had made before, and doing all these things we thought were pretty original,” he said.
In an interview with Double J’s Caz Tran for the J Files program in 2021, ARIA-winning electropop artist Paul Mac said he connected with the emotion of Mason’s compositions.
“I really relate to Dave’s music,” he said. “You can hear the pain in all of his beautiful songs, like Quasimodo’s Dream and all those songs. There’s this real ache to it that I love.
“The synths are beautiful and the songs are so well written and the production’s awesome; just everything about it is spot on.”
Pioneering a new sound
The band began life as an outfit called Native Sons but after playing one gig in Nyngan, they became known as The Brucelanders.
They played at every RSL and B&S ball from Cobar to Sydney, which helped lift their profile along the east coast.
They moved to Sydney in 1978, where they changed their name to The Reels and gained a recording contract with PolyGram.
Their frenetic performances, together with their distinctive new-wave image, gained them a strong live following.
Influenced by new approaches to instrumentation and rhythm, the band and their audiences energetically pogoed at live gigs, mirroring behaviour seen at ska and punk gigs across the UK.
The band visited studios in Sydney to record their first album, but dissatisfied with the sound and atmosphere, they scrapped that session and returned to Dubbo, gathering at The Angle — a property on the outskirts of town — to record.
The 16-track self-titled album included crowd-pleasers Love Will Find a Way and Prefab Heart.
The band then scored a top-30 album with Quasimodo’s Dream, and its title track was later covered by Kate Ceberano and Jimmy Little.
Tuning in from Dubbo
Coming from Dubbo, the band had limited exposure to different genres of music.
“There was really only the local station 2DU, and then there was the ABC, so because there was one local station it used to play a really broad range of music,” Hooper said.
“There was country, a lot of pop, but you wouldn’t hear things like Led Zeppelin.”
Despite the limitations, the band drew inspiration from various sources, from listening to the radio, reading magazines to watching music videos on TV.
Hooper used to go to extraordinary lengths to keep his finger on the pulse.
“I remember when I discovered that the coils on my bed, my old spring bed, made a really good antenna for the crystal set,” he said.
“So if that was right and the conditions were right you could kind of pick up [then-Sydney-only radio station] Double J.
“Then it would turn to static and disappear and you’d be there waiting for it to come back, maybe tomorrow.”