Punk Farm

Richard Lawson is a reformed punk rock drummer who toured the world with his band, The Lime Spiders. At the peak of their fame the band members were each earning $600 per week, whether they played a gig or not. In 1986, that was quite a decent wage. They were paid $40,000 by Virgin to record their first album. It was nothing for them to walk out of a gig carrying $20,000 in cash.

“I made enough on that first album to buy my own house,” Lawson says.

Their raw punk outfit played to sold out crowds all over the world, and reached number one on the US indie charts. From their humble beginnings on the pub rock circuit in Sydney, they took to their music to the global stage, supporting Public Image Limited – or PIL – the band that grew out of the prodigal sons of punk, The Sex Pistols, at Universal Amphitheatre in Las Angeles. “It was great having all the other big names of the era there in the audience to hear us,” Lawson says. Names like Iggy Pop, The Ramones, Blondie, Powderfinger, Megadeath, and Metalica. “Megadeath and Metalica used to come and hear us all the time.”

“It was such a huge vibe,” Lawson says. The band played the Ross Kilder festival in Denmark, to a sold out crowd of 10,000 people, attracting a performance fee of $50,000. “That one gig funded our entire European tour”, Lawson says. 

The band were a favourite on Countdown, and were the first ever band to play on RAGE. “My Mum never quite got the band, but one time we saw a clip of the band on Countdown, and there’s my aunty down the front dancing!” Lawson’s family were big into the music scene, and a major influence on his decision to give away his studies at Sydney University as a philosophy major to take off with the band. “Dad was happy for me to be managing bands, like The Scientists. He always knew I would make good money out of that. But when I gave all that away to play full time he wasn’t so sure - then when he started getting postcards from all the places we were touring he eventually changed his mind.

“It’s an amazing feeling when you’re getting paid to travel. You get the call and they say right, you’re off to Europe for 2 months. Then you’re off to America. And suddenly you’re seeing the fiords in Finland, and hanging around beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

Fame is a success that can carry a high price tag. And for Lawson, that price came close to being the highest price of all. “I ended up in hospital with congestive heart failure.” At the time of admission, the doctors found his heart was functioning at a dangerously low 20%. He had consumed so much alcohol and other substances that his kidneys stopped working, and his body filled with fluids. He recovered, but that was certainly the end of the hard core party life, as well as stage diving amongst other potentially lethal activities. “I’d had enough anyway,” he says. “We’d been touring for 18 years, and quite seriously I think if I didn’t quit I might have killed the lead singer. He was really giving the band a bad name with his aggressive behaviour, antagonising the audience, and everyone else around him. At one stage he walked off stage and the rest of us played some hard core Pink Floyd until Iggy Pop said to him, mate, you can’t be doing that stuff. It was after that Virgin rang us from Australia and dumped us from the label. Being in a big band like that goes to people’s heads. ”

Settling down from the party life was the beginning of a new era for Lawson, who sold up in Sydney and bought a farm in the hills at the back of Mudgee, where he planted an organic olive farm. Like the farm, the music he plays grows out of an organic feel, and everything about his life is much more gentle in nature. Lawson now writes songs for himself and as well as other artists, and plays regular solo gigs and with his new band, Honey, which he describes as a mixture of urban folk, bluesy pop. He travels the festival circuit and plays electronica with 2 drum kits and a host of guest musicians. “I’m teaching now and making good money. The band was just really lucky – you don’t get that experience very often.  There’s nothing like the sound of playing a PA stack that would make most of the sound you hear in small venues look miniscule. You whack the drum and it just about blows your head off – it’s an amazing feeling.”

Lawson still loves playing loud – so loud he’s been banned from playing live drums in two local venues in Mudgee. “Yeah, they called the cops on us because we were too loud,” he says. His new outfit, Honey, is mixing its first album this week in the studio of the Lime Spiders’ guitarist Dave Sparks of Pirate Studios in Tathra. It’s a rich blend of drums as well as acoustic sounds – a big departure from the thrashing skin-smashing punk of the Lime Spiders. “I love electronica – like Daft Punk, I love punk. But I love a lot of softer music too, like The Falls and Ólafur Arnalds.” It’s arguably more the music of the pastures, the farms, the soft hills around Mudgee, a long way from the grunge of punk and inner city life.