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.
