Mourners Recollections – by Ben Vernon
I am indeed a stranger in a strange land. It’s 1986 and my shoes are stuck to what must have been carpet when they built this bizarre suburban “tavern” in Belconnen, one of Canberra’s northern suburbs. The patrons of this place are an eclectic group – giant menacing bikies break character to warmly hug some hot young office worker girls, wild dreadlocked stoners laugh uproariously with a bunch of skinhead-looking guys and despite the incredible breadth and range of this generous demographic, I am definitely “one of these things that’s not like the others” as they say on Sesame Street. And that’s a good example right there, no one else in this place would get that reference, but Big Bird, Elmo and Ernie and Bert are still pretty fresh in my memory. But all that is about to become completely irrelevant, because I am about to hear the greatest live band I’ve ever heard (still true today, three decades later) and have the kind of face-melting transformative musical awakening you remember for the rest of your life.
And that’s the reason all these freaky people are here on a freezing Thursday night, they’re here to see Steve Grieve and The Mourners. They know what’s coming but I don’t. Everything’s new to me. I am 15 years old and still amazed I was even allowed in. An hour earlier I’d faked a yawn, got off the living room couch in my parents’ house in Canberra’s quiet, leafy southern suburbs and told the folks I was off to bed, it being a school night and all. Moments later I was sneaking out the window and meeting up with my ride, a bloke, two or three years older than me who had moved in up the street a couple of weeks before. He was a blues nut and turned me on to people like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Guy, Roy Buchanan, Muddy Waters and Chain and had set this whole adventure in motion by idly saying “if you’re into this stuff we should go see the Mourners one night, they’re awesome”.
He was probably just making conversation but I held him to it and here we were, in a smoke-filled, sticky floored pub as the band casually file out on stage to rousing applause as the sweet, rich and unmistakable smell of strong weed wafts over us in a wave. Master of ceremonies here is singer Dan Myles, a tall, strapping lad with long black hair who greets the applause with the biggest Cheshire Cat grin on his face you’ve ever seen. Forget nerves, there’s never been a more relaxed person on earth. Myles has charisma and confidence to burn, but with good reason – he has some set of pipes. He can howl out the blues like Paul Rodgers but is capable of so much more as well. Deeply rooted in the blues, sure, but there is an otherworldly quality to his tone and phrasing that is like no one else. Either side of Myles are two guitar players, a relentless diesel-driven rhythm guitar specialist on a meaty Les Paul in Dan Stefanac and a wild-haired, Strat-wielding wizard in Steve Grieve. Lots of bands have two guitar players and quite a lot of them suck because both axemen play the same thing most of the time. The way these two arranged their interlocking guitar parts was pure artistry. Add a rhythm section that really swung (Justin McMahon on drums and Pete Cheyne on bass) and a mighty fine piano player in Paul Totterdell and you’ve got yourself something really special. I recognised a few of their songs – they did an awesome “Couldn’t Stand The Weather” by Stevie Ray Vaughan, a ZZ Top tune or two and a couple of others. But most of their set I’d never heard before and the songs were so good and so numerous and so inventive it was hard to believe they were original, but they were. At some point during this, my mate from up the street apparently came and told me he’d met this chick and was heading off so if I wanted a lift it was now or never. I have no recollection of this conversation, but even if I had heard and understood him, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere. The Mourners were now my religion and I had drunk the Kool-Aid. Who knew music could be this good? And this much fun?
Eventually it ended and despite the cold I went outside and walked down the street a bit, just to try and preserve it or make sense of it all or something. Big mistake. By the time I returned the place had closed up, like all the shops around it, and I began to realise I might have a problem here. It was 2 or 2.30am on a Thursday night, Friday morning really. My lift had clearly departed, there were no buses running and even if there was a taxi anywhere nearby, I didn’t have a cent. This was, as they say in the classics, a dilly of a pickle. I knew my mother would be knocking on my bedroom door in five hours and would be more than a tad peeved to discover, instead of her first-born son under the covers, a rudimentary dummy made out of pillows and a football with a beanie on it. So, I was going to have to walk/run/stagger the 25-odd kays home, but I was confident some early-riser or shift-worker or serial rapist would give a lift to a 15-year-old kid who was obviously stranded. But there was a problem with this theory. There was a reason I sailed into that pub without a problem – I didn’t look 15. I was a pretty big lump of a lad with a rough-looking head, and to your average pre-dawn motorist my demeanour didn’t suggest “child in peril” so much as “possible car jacker”. The closest I got to a lift was when a car full of pissed bogans wound their windows down and gave me a gobfull as they went past. I told them to go fuck themselves. Another miscalculation, as it turned out, as they stopped and got out of the car with the clear intention of doing me a damage. As the sun started to come up I heard a car coming and stuck out the thumb without turning around but it just never came. I looked around and it was a convoy of about three cars – one a Winnebago – with flashing lights and such. It was one of those mad old guys competing in the Sydney to Melbourne running race and his support team. It was a surreal postscript to a bizarre and unusual evening. I made it home just in time to be “woken up” and bundled off to school. Didn’t put me off the Mourners though. I pretty much saw as many shows of theirs as I could but then suddenly, just like that, they were gone.
I heard somewhere they’d moved to Sydney and while that was a shame, it seemed like the right move. I figured the next time I’d see them would be at an Entertainment Centre somewhere because it seemed a foregone conclusion they would make it big. They were so good, with a seemingly endless supply of top quality songs – and the songwriting team of Myles and Grieve was becoming ever more sophisticated and adventurous – what could possibly go wrong? They came back to Canberra from time to time to play a show or two and they had changed it up a bit. Gone was Dan Stefanac and with him the signature twin guitar assault, but they had gained the bass playing and distinctive harmony vocals of Paul Woseen (who would later go on to put together the Screaming Jets). But after slogging it out in the beer barns of western Sydney and regional NSW to no avail, at least in terms of record company interest , the band split in 1989 and a disillusioned Grieve departed for northern NSW and soon found his ability on guitar in high demand, touring the country with the likes of Margaret Urlich, Wendy Matthews, Christine Anu and Grace Knight, as well as stints with US blues legends Jimmy Witherspoon and Elvin Bishop. Myles turned up back in Canberra and reunited with Stefanac and a few mates in a band called Duck and they were a great band too, but they too fizzled out and Myles headed for northern NSW, more than a bit disillusioned himself.
But how had Steve Grieve and The Mourners fallen through the cracks? Surely they had sent demos off to record companies at least? “Nah, we didn’t even do that stuff, that was too hard for us,” Myles says with a throaty chuckle. “We didn’t have a clue really, what we wanted to do or how that might happen.” But if the Mourners were guilty of simply expecting fame and success to just land in their lap, they had good reason. Their first ever gig, a support slot for legendary Aussie punk band The Saints at the ANU Bar in the early eighties, was so good it left the audience stunned and even blew away the headliners, a reformed version of The Saints featuring original singer Chris Bailey and members of the Church and Sunnyboys. “It (the adulation) started from day one, our first gig,” Myles recalled. “And it just kept going, I suppose we didn’t realise how lucky we were to just hit it our first go.” From there, the Mourners exploded – ripping it up opening for the likes of Johnny Winter, Chain, Lonnie Mack and a host of others and winning influential fans along the way.
But it wasn’t just dumb luck. Hard work played a large part as did the creative chemistry between Myles and Grieve. “I was at Art College and they gave me this house to live in and use,” Myles said. “It was out near the 2CA transmitter, a fair way from any other houses so it was a perfect place to jam.” “We had 30 or 40 original songs before we played a gig,” Grieve recalled. “We all agreed that we wouldn’t play any gigs before we were ready and so we were rehearsing out there in Giralang sometimes three or four nights a week.” And that is the fundamental dilemma of Steve Grieve and The Mourners, either their greatest strength or most damaging flaw, depending on how you look at it. They simply won’t be rushed into doing anything half-arsed. If the choice is mediocrity or nothing, then it will be nothing. For this reason there isn’t much recorded material out there from the band. There was a CD EP called “The 2XX Tapes” – recorded in 1986 on four-track but in typical Mourners fashion not released until 1995 – and a few live bootlegs, which despite being sourced from old cassette tapes sound incredible. But nothing that does justice to how good they were and could be. It was something both Grieve and Myles knew and sometime around the turn of the century it was decided they would remedy this. Keeping with tradition it’s taken 17 years for Caterpillar Maze to actually come out but it is a seriously impressive album. For some reason I had assumed it would be a selection of gems from the Mourners’ back catalogue but apart from an updated take on old fave “Neighbours” it is all new material and kind of a different sound.
The Mourners of old were always at heart a blues rock band that also drew from a deep well of other influences and pushed the boundaries. Caterpillar Maze pushes those boundaries out quite a bit further and reveals a slightly jazzier and funkier Mourners. “That probably reflects my journey, more than anything,” says Grieve, who has delivered a guitar-playing masterclass on Caterpillar Maze. With an official website at www.stevegrieveandthemourners.com and plans in place to promote the album with performances at selected festivals around the country, perhaps Steve Grieve and The Mourners will finally receive the success and recognition they have long deserved.