Nic Dalton

By Maryanne

Nic Dalton is a busy man. Not only is he constantly in a band or three, but he runs a record label, Half a Cow, which also encompasses a music and book store, which he manages. On the eve of a trip to Hong Kong to play at a couple of Hand Over parties, Nic took some time to reflect with me on his career to date.

It all started in Canberra. The political hotbed and capital of our nation. The year was 1976, and Nic Dalton purchased his first record, Ringo Starr 'Blast From Your Past'. "I'm a bit of a record nerd, so I remember exactly when I bought it", adds Nic. Around the same time, Nic got beaten up at an ACDC concert at the local high school and was singing in his first band. About the concert, Nic recalls "I was down the front and I was being spat on by Bon Scott and Angus Young, and then after it I got beaten up by the guys in year 7, because I was in grade 6 at the time, and while we were waiting for our mums to pick us up, all these other kids, realising we weren't from that area, beat us up!" After an experience like that, it's no wonder that this man was destined to rock!

"The first band I was in was with Charlie Owen actually when we were like 11 or 12 I think in Canberra. We used to muck around and do covers and stuff. But the first proper band was a band called Girls With Money." The first song Nic ever wrote was a political protest song called 'Joh Bjelke Blues' at the age of 13, about the scary pumpkin scone eating Queenslander. He doesn't have a recording of it, but it was played on radio 2XX, and he assures me that he remembers how it goes.

Nic's main band for a good chunk of the eighties was The Plunderers, which he formed with his friend the late Stevie Plunder while they were still in Canberra, with whom he went on to play with for 10 years. He started up Half A Cow in 1989, and has been the driving force behind it ever since. Some of the bands on the label at the moment, include Sidewinder, Godstar, Sneeze, Smudge, SPDFGH, Swirl and latest signing Kim Salmon who has just released a new album. Even though there is quite a diverse mix of musical style represented by this bunch, the loathsome 'indie pop' tag still seems to be uttered at any mention of Half A Cow, something that Nic is a bit tired of.

"There's this conception that Half A Cow all sounds like fuzzy pop, and I'm in every band and Tom (Morgan, of Smudge, Sneeze and Godstar notoriety) writes all the songs for the bands, but it doesn't really worry me... One of the first records I put out was by Pressed Meat and the Smallgoods, which was a sort of cabaret record with members of The Jackson Code and The Cruel Sea, and that definitely wasn't indie pop."

After the Plunderers started to wind up, Nic was filling in for the Hummingbirds on bass, playing a national support to The Lemonheads on their first tour here, which marked the beginning of his friendship with Evan Dando and his 2 and a half years as a Lemonhead. At the risk of taking over the role of Mike Munro in 'This is Your Life', where does Godstar fit into all this?

"Actually it's funny, because people assume that I started Godstar after The Lemonheads or during The Lemonheads. I actually started Godstar when I was still doing The Plunderers and I really wanted to start a band where I was playing guitar, and a 4-piece band based around my old 4-tracks. The first line up of Godstar in early '91 was about 6 months before Smudge formed, so we had Al (Galloway) on drums and Tom (Morgan) on bass and John E on guitar, who actually ended up being in the last line up of Godstar."

Godstar continued throughout the time Nic was in The Lemonheads, releasing numerous EP's and 3 full length albums, 'Sleeper', 'Coastal' and the most recently released (The Godstar Reminder)'September'. "The first Godstar shows weren't until September '93" recalls Nic. I remember being at the Punters Club show, and it was a belter!

"Yeah, that was our third show! We did a warm up show at The Annandale...It was the first time I'd played guitar live since Girls With Money.I remember being really excited on that first tour, and I remember that Punters Club gig especially. It was exciting for me to be playing guitar again. I remember I didn't drink at all that whole tour or didn't smoke any pot. I was just on a natural high for that whole month, back doing something I really love doing, playing guitar."

The 'September' album was recorded during that time, featuring what Nic describes as the classic Godstar line up of Alison Galloway on drums, Tom Morgan on guitar, Robyn St. Claire on bass, in addition to Nic on guitar and vocals, but wasn't released until this year, as Nic explains.

"When we did that first tour, at the same time we went into the studio and recorded about 10 songs and we did a live on JJJ thing and we also taped our last show at The Landsdowne. We pretty much had a whole album's worth and the idea of the recording was we wanted to release this single called the 470 EP, which was released on the Bus Stop label in America.

"Each of us did a song each, and we all swapped around on the recording, because I said to all the other guys, with any money we make from the tour, we'll go and record a single so we've got a document, like a nice little record for that month. But we ended up recording a lot more songs and a couple of them appeared on B-sides and 7" 's. I think that record was meant to come out in May '94, it was meant to be an album between 'Sleeper' and 'Coastal'. It was always planned to come out, the artwork was done back in '94 and different reasons made it not come out until it did."

After the release of 'Coastal' in 1995, Godstar toured quite a bit later, and Nic had a different bunch of players with him. It wasn't long after this that Godstar seemed to fall by the wayside. "I just think I was ready to" explains Nic, "by the time 'Coastal' came out, I just didn't want to sing those songs anymore. I wanted to move on myself. I didn't want to sing all those old songs again. I suppose I've been quite like that anyway, that's why I always seem to start new bands all the time. I just like moving on, I don't like having to sing the same songs."

When Evan Dando asked Nic to join The Lemonheads, he didn't rush at the proposition. "I spent a few months umming and aahing over that one. I didn't want to do it at first because I'd been filling in for The Hummingbirds for a while and I thought, I didn't want to do somebody else's thing, I wanted to do my own thing". Obviously the travel and the financial rewards were a big consideration that couldn't be ignored, and Nic took up the offer.

"Before I joined The Lemonheads, even though I was running Half A Cow, the shop and the label, I didn't earn a wage from it. I actually made a living mixing bands. I was Proton Energy Pills first mixer and Club Hoy and Smudge and Swirl and I mixed The Shout Brothers every Sunday for a year at The Sandringham, and it's funny because I wouldn't ever call myself a sound guy, but that's actually how I made a living, just mixing little bands until they got a bit bigger.

"I was also running The Landsdowne PA and doing the writing on the chalk board outside, running the band comp. I remember mixing You Am I, Def FX and I just used to do odd jobs...So when Evan asked me to join The Lemonheads, it was also just like a break you know, just as a musician, it was just a great break. I was actually going to be making a living playing music rather than just scrounging.

"It's funny, because when I look back at that time, that was when me and Tom were writing lots of songs. We wrote 41 Sneeze songs and he was writing Smudge songs and I was writing songs for The Plunderers and Godstar...it was just a really inspiring time and that's when Evan met us. He just bumped into these guys who were constantly writing songs and recording, and we weren't doing it for release, we were just doing it for our own enjoyment."

Which brings us to Sneeze. What are the origins of Sneeze? "I think it was the end of 1990...I started hanging out with Tom a lot because he was this big fan of all the Sydney bands. He used to be called 'Tom the Punter' cos he's really tall and you used to see him at all the shows, Rat Cat, Hummingbirds, Plunderers, early You Am I, and we just started writing lots of songs.

"The first Sneeze songs were actually, because he and Al were going to start a band called Smudge, this real Descendants inspired pop band, and me and Tom actually started writing all these songs for Smudge, like 'Don't Go Girlie', 'Ripped Jeans' and songs that ended up being Sneeze songs. But that was how we sort of started, writing all these songs.

"We thought we should put out these short songs because we realised that we'd written a whole lot in the Half A Cow shop, just sitting there over the table, and then a friend of ours said 'Oh, well instead of doing an album on 7", why don't you do a double album with more songs?', so it made us think oh, we've got to write another 10 songs and we ended up writing 41 little songs between the end of 1990 and the beginning of '92, just before I went away overseas, so we wrote a lot of songs in the space of a year."

Part of Nic and Tom's inspiring time rubbed off on Evan, resulting in part with the success of The Lemonheads critically acclaimed 'It's A Shame About Ray' album, released in 1992, the title track of which he wrote with Tom, in addition to 'Bit Part'. One of Nic's songs 'Kitchen', also made its way onto that album, and although Juliana Hatfield played bass during the sessions, by the time the tour rolled around, Nic was now the bass player, replacing Jesse Peretz and went on to record with the band on the next album, 'Come On Feel The Lemonheads'.

Curiously enough, the live performance of 'Kitchen' from that moment on ended with an interesting twist that baffled many fans as to what it actually meant. "Oh yeah, because a couple of people have asked me about that. It's actually another song I wrote, it's actually a Sneeze song, which Tom doesn't want to do now because he feels it's a Lemonheads song and part of 'Kitchen', which to me is not, was never a Lemonheads song in the first place. It was one of my 4-tracks that The Hummingbirds covered.

"But that song at the end was a song called 'Young Mum' and it was just a little silly Sneeze song I wrote. When I was touring with The Lemonheads, we did it at a soundcheck once. I just showed the other guys in The Lemonheads and I don't know how, we ended up just playing it and for some reason it ended up getting tagged on the end of 'Kitchen' whenever we played."

In Nic's eyes, nothing compares to the fun he had in The Plunderers. "The Plunderers were a lot of fun and I haven't really enjoyed anything since, live", he still has fond memories of his time on the road with The Lemonheads, but with the fun also came increased pressure as the band gained popularity.

"Me, Evan and David(Ryan) were just really good friends and suddenly once the band got really big, it was like us against the world. There was only us that we could trust and we never fought at all. Sitting in a van or a bus with the same people for over 2 years, I mean, we saw each other more than we saw friends and family in say the space of 5 years. We crammed in a lot of time together and we never ever, ever had fights and that was the reason why we were able to keep playing with each other.

"We just had such a good time together, all 3 of us. After a big long trip in the van, we'd end up hanging out together in the hotel room. We just had a really good time together, but then, the bigger the band got, the fun did wear off, and it was just getting too big."

So how did it feel to suddenly lose that closeness when you left the band?

"I know I really missed the other guys and I know they missed me and missed each other. We all went through this period of, like I had to leave, I had to get back, and Dave Ryan, he had to leave as well. We'd just had enough. We had just done too much for too long and... it really hit Evan hard because suddenly, the next day, The Lemonheads weren't only taking a break, The Lemonheads had broken up, that line up.

"He had no band anymore and that's why he suddenly started touring around with Oasis, even though it only lasted a couple of weeks. It turned into this big mythical thing that he'd toured around with them for ages. But, in a way, you can't blame him for doing that because that was his life.

"I came back to Australia and continued doing Half A Cow and Dave closed the curtains to the world, as you do, and started writing and Evan just, he had nothing. He knows nothing else so he gravitated towards another band that was suddenly becoming a big band as well. If you look at it psychologically, you gotta feel sorry for the guy. He had nothing else to do other than to keep on the road, and it was really sad.

"Then he came out here and stayed with me a couple of times and it was just, you know, he was really angry at me for leaving him...but he had to realise that I had my own life to get back to and that was a really difficult time.

"In fact, just me coming back to Australia, it took me over a year to get back to being a normal person! I sort of used to say to people it was like I'd come back from fighting in the Vietnam war. Like if I'd hear a car door slam outside I'd jump. I was really on edge for a long time and that's why I didn't play anything live until Godstar nearly a year later. I just did not want to look at a guitar."

Which brings us to now. In addition to playing with Tom in Sneeze, Nic is playing in a band called Kombi Nation. "The whole set consists of mainly old songs I wrote in 1986-88. Songs that The Plunderers or Godstar didn't do...I try to make it really quiet. Well that was the idea. I just thought, if I want to start a new band, I want to make it really different to Godstar. So I'm sort of doing a whole lot of different songs and it's more quiet and laid back." In addition to Kombi Nation, Nic is playing in a band called The Ultimate Vanilla, a 70's disco cover band.

"Someone in Hong Kong faxed me and asked me if I knew any cover bands that would be able to go over and play a couple of Hand Over parties in Hong Kong and I actually didn't reply to them for ages. I just thought, I can't be bothered dealing with this cos I'm not really into playing covers, then I thought, oh wow, cool, I've never been there and what a time to be there with the Hand Over. I thought, oh I'll put a band together.

"It was only a couple of months ago I thought of the name The Ultimate Vanilla and thought, oh that's a really cool name, I might start a disco band, a psychedelic disco band called The Ultimate Vanilla. Then it dawned on me, I thought, if we're gonna start a disco band we might as well do this Hong Kong thing first, learn a whole lot of covers and then maybe turn it into an original band when we get back. So you know, there I am again, starting another band. I didn't mean to, but that just happened!"

On the recording and new release front, Nic is working on a top secret compilation album for all of the bands on Half A Cow plus some special guests as you've never heard them before. I won't divulge too much information, but Sidewinder and Nic are the backing band, and Juliana Hatfield has already laid down a track for it under another name.

On the Sneeze front, a new and exciting release is on the way. "Just vinyl only of this song called 'The Four Seasons' which me and Tom wrote. A 20 minute rock epic! We thought the best way for Sneeze to move on is to do the total opposite of 2 minute songs."

Nic says that he and Tom are very happy with the recording, and in typical Sneeze fashion, it will come out on vinyl first, together with a recording of an acoustic set they did for FBI radio. "It's full of mistakes and stuff but it's just got a nice feel. It's like having 12 of the Sneeze songs stripped back. Nic also assures me that Sneeze will start playing again in September, and are travelling to Spain early next year to promote a 'Best of Godstar' double CD that is being released on a label over there that has also released Sneeze.

The Godstar Reminder September, is out now on Half A Cow.

Many thanks to Maryanne Window for letting us use this article