Terence Murray Lewis died on the 5 May 2023. The song Pig City by Tony Kneipp could be Lewis’s obituary. Author Matthew Condon produced the “Lewis Trilogy” but never really touched on the main role of Lewis in the Bjekle-Peterson era, that being to shut down dissent. From 4 September 1977, Lewis was the sole decision maker (with Joh at his back) of who would get a permit to march on Queensland streets. There were over 2,000 arrests of people who defied the ban on marching.
Certainly Lewis was the bagman for Joh in the business of corruption: drugs, prostitution, and gambling. These are covered in Condon’s books: three Crooked Kings, Jacks and Jokers, All Fall Down. Andrew Stafford tried to delve into the politics in Pig City but failed because he spoke to the wrong people, not bothering to speak to any of the organisers of the street marches (1977-79) which were the longest period of political defiance in Australian history (the exception of the aboriginal land rights struggle). Neither Condon nor Stafford look in any detail into the big industrial disputes during that era: Mt Isa Mines dispute (1964), the Ted Zaphir case (1977), the General Strike (1982), the SEQEB dispute (1985).
Tony Kneipp tried to sum up the repression in his song Pig City, but what can you do with a song, especially one written in 1983? Nevertheless Pig City was true 40 years ago and it’s still true now, someone needs to write an update. In this article we post the lyrics and Tony’s interesting story of how the song was made. Ian Curr, Ed., 24 May @2023.
The Making of Pig City
I wrote Pig City some time in the first half of 1983. I decided that I liked the song, and I should try to do something with it. I found out that 4ZZZ had a one inch 8-track tape deck that had almost never been used. It was in a large unused room, studio 4, that was intended to be the recording studio, an unfinished project. Someone had taken a lot of time and expense to build a mixing desk to go with the tape deck. It was more or less completed, but the person building it had moved on before all the bugs were ironed out. Down the far end of the room was a dirty big pile of bricks and other rubble, with a whopping great steel girder sitting on top. Above the rubble was a gaping hole leading to the union complex upstairs. It was a set of stairs that had been pulled out, but never cleaned up.
I made a deal with 4ZZZ that if I cleaned up the mess and sorted out the gaping hole, I could have the use of the 8-track. I was to provide the labour and 4ZZZ would pay for the materials. I had to go to quite a few meetings to get that agreement, there were some who weren’t too positive about it, didn’t think the studio was worth bothering with. My brother Terry did the work with me, we worked on it for months. Some other friends helped too, particularly with the clean-up. I remember a whole team of people moving that bloody great girder with the aid of a block and tackle. We had to drill large holes into concrete to attach the bearers. To get the right level for the floor upstairs we had to have some large steel brackets made up by an engineering firm which were then bolted to the concrete on one side. On the other side we were able to just bolt the bearer straight onto the face of the concrete. We did a good job on it. I remember years later wandering in upstairs and seeing a huge pile of boxes piled up on that floor, and having a bit of a cold sweat wondering what would happen if the bolts or the concrete gave way.
Having done all that we finally managed to get on with the recording. Terry and my friend Nick Paine took charge of the engineering. Terry had a lot of experience with mixing live bands. Nick’s background was in electronics, he used to fix video game machines for a living, but he also had a keen interest in sound recording. He had his own 2-track and 4-track tape decks. The hardest part of the recording was laying down the rhythm guitar track, which was the first thing we recorded, in time to a click track. It took us three or four days before we were happy with it. In the end we cobbled it together from a couple of different takes. Then we got Steven Pritchard in to record the drums. Steven is a real pro and the only difficulty was trying different mike positions and settings to get the best sound. After that things progressed fairly quickly. It only took three takes to get the slide guitar down. The main vocal was done in a single take, as was Ian Graham’s lead solo at the end. Nick and Terry were incredibly patient through all this, but when I did the sax solo last, I was doing a practice run through to warm up, which they recorded, then, in spite of my protests, declared it was quitting time. It took another couple of days to get the final mixdown and to dub some copies onto cassette.
As soon as I had that cassette I walked out of the studio and put it into the hands of Steve Stockwell. I’m sure a lot of people around 4ZZZ were beginning to wonder what was going to come out as a result of all this rigmarole in studio four. Steve took me straight into the on-air studio and sat me down to listen to it being played on air for the first time. By halfway through the song, he had a grin from ear to ear. He liked it. It was mid-October, a week before the state election on October 22 1983.
This next paragraph is about some technical details of the recording, which will be a bit boring for some of you, but a lot of people seem to like this sort of thing. The tape deck was an Otari 1 inch tape 8-track. Otari were a well-respected brand. As of five years ago, Otari was the last firm in the world still manufacturing reel to reel tape recorders. The mixing desk was a standard live mixing desk, not strictly studio standard. We never recorded through it. Everything was lined directly into the Otari. The mixer was for playback and the final mixdown. Among 4ZZZ’s most precious possessions were two Neumann microphones, really top-end large diaphragm mikes with three different selectable polar patterns (omni, cardioid and figure-8), which we used throughout the recording. The guitar amp was my Maton V606 studio recording model, a truly classic 60’s valve amp. The rhythm guitar, an Ibanez Deluxe 59er Les Paul copy, and the slide guitar, a Coronet Rickenbacker copy that my brother Patrick gave me, both went in through a Guyatone TD-1 Tube Distortion unit. I’m pretty sure that Ian used a Telecaster. The bass he used was a Fender too. My sax was a Conn 6M alto made in 1936. The mixdown was done onto Nick’s Tascam 2-track reel to reel. The master tape was then dubbed onto Terry’s Nakamichi cassette deck for immediate playing purposes.
The success of the song on 4ZZZ led to the idea of pressing a single, so we were back in the studio nine months later to record Material Possession so that we’d have something for the B-side. It was a lot easier not having to build the studio. This time my friend John Hunt did the bass. 1000 copies of the single were pressed in September 1984 by Sundown Records on my own label, A Records.
The single even got reviewed by the national music magazines. The drummer from Mental As Anything gave this review in RAM. ** Oi! What’s this then? The Sheik of Araby they ain’t! Pig shit music. Not even the slide guitar can save this one. Five stars for audacity. ** I wasn’t too upset by the review. Given the quality of Ian’s lead solo at the end, I figure this is the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about my guitar playing.
Juke had this take on it. ** An indie from Brisbane and what looks like a swansong for a now defunct punk/garage band. An out and out attack on the repressive right wing politics (read “police state”) of Queensland under Joh done in true angry young man fashion. Minimal, committed and recorded live by alternative FM station, 4ZZZ. ** We did finally get to play live at the Pig City concert at UQ in 2007, the first and only time we ever did.
Without 4ZZZ Pig City would never have existed. It was a perennial in their annual Hot 100. Here are the years it appeared, and its position.
1983 #62; 1984 #5; 1985 #6; 1986 #7; 1987 # 6; 1988 #29; 1989 #93; 1993 #77: 1995 #83. A cover version by Ups And Downs also made the Hot 100 in 1990. In 2000 it was included in 4ZZZ’s double CD compilation of Brisbane bands, Behind The Banana Curtain.
The photo below is of the front cover of the single. The artwork, including the photo, was done by my friend Don Little.
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Tony Kneipp
24 May 2023