The Tim “Napalm” Stegall Substack Interview: James Baker, Part Three

In which Our Hero recounts the brief, intrepid tale of “Australia’s fourth-ever punk band,” The Victims.

James Baker playing with The Victims at their final show, Hernando's Hideaway, Hay Street, East Perth, Western Australia, 17 June 1978. (📸 Pic courtesy of the State Library of Western Australia website)

Hey, everyone. Back at it, after a rather full week, some of which you’ve read, the rest probably best left in private. The words aren’t coming easy today, but lucky for me, James Baker never runs out of stories. If you caught Part One and Part Two, you already know that. Those two chapters dealt primarily with that 1976/77 trip to all the early punk capitals, and his brushes with the original icons of iconoclasm. And part of the charm of one of Australia’s most underrated rock ‘n’ roll lifers is that he’s as much a fan as you or I. He was there, and he can scarcely believe it himself.

We pick up as James returns to Perth to form The Victims with fellow future Hoodoo Guru Dave Faulkner, unleashing such killer tuneage as the much-anthologized “Television Addict.” But it wasn’t all drums, punk rock and chaos, was it? Some stories need more than one chapter—James Baker’s is definitely one of them. A few pages barely scratch the surface of a guy who’s lived it all from behind a drum kit. Strap in—The Scientists and Hoodoo Gurus are just around the corner. But first, a glimpse of The Victims in their prime:

TIM: So by the time you get back to Australia, I think word is probably getting out about The Saints and Radio Birdman, isn't it?

JAMES: Yeah, that's about the only two. Maybe The Psycho-Surgeons, maybe three. And then there's The Victims, but we're on the West Coast. They don't count us over here, so no one ever mentions us. But that was it, four punk bands at the time. There might have been a few more that I've left out that I didn't even know about, but those were the ones that were putting records out anyway. That's how you get to know them.

TIM: So you've got all these sights and these sounds swirling around in your head. What was it making you feel at the time, seeing all this stuff rise up like this?

JAMES: Oh, like amazing. It was amazing going to England, because most people did know about the Ramones or the Dolls in Los Angeles, and they did in New York. Again, it was a small club—probably about 150 people. That’s the kind of crowd those bands would pull, y’know. But in England, you go into the record shops there and they've got the New York Dolls on the front of the shop, and The Stooges on the front of the shop advertising what's for sale there. And all these young kids. I mean, I was only 22 myself, but, man—those 17-year-old kids! The English scene was full of younger people in the bands and all that. They were all like 15 to 18 or something. That was “I hope I die before I get old” sort of shit, you know?

No, it was a really healthy time. Lots of new bands were starting. I don't know how long some of them might have lasted, but there were great bands like The Adverts and the Buzzcocks. And, you know, before Joy Division, that sort of changed it a bit as well.

TIM: And you just named a couple of bands that I can definitely see the kinship between, playing music very similar to what you've consistently made through your career: punk rock that's based in the 2:30/three-chord pop single.

JAMES: Yes, The Victims had plenty of them kinda songs, less than two minutes.

TIM: You were very much prototype hardcore in that band.

JAMES: Yeah, our opening song goes for 20 seconds, we taped it at 28 seconds. And we'd got this guy on bass [Dave Cardwell, AKA “Rudolph V”], he'd always start up the songs like Dee Dee– “ONE TWO THREE FOUR!” And he would always tape it, and it would be down, we were down 31 one night. We were like, “Jesus, we’re slowing up, you know? We'll have to make it 28 seconds next time!” The song's called “I'm Just a Dick to Them.”

The Victims were a pretty good band. We didn't really sound like anyone else, and we didn't try and copy The Clash or the Ramones or the Dolls. Obviously they're our influences, you know. But the actual sound, we didn't sound like The Saints or Radio Birdman. They're both different bands, as well.

The Victims, ca. 1977: (l-r) Dave Faulkner (AKA “Dave Flick”), James Baker, Dave Cardwell (AKA “Rudolph V”). (📸 Pic courtesy Dave Laing Publicity)

TIM: Yes, and The Victims certainly weren’t as pop-based as what you did with The Scientists or the Hoodoo Gurus.

JAMES: No, no it wasn't. But whatever you call it, you definitely have to call it punk. Yeah. It was high energy stuff. We've done a couple of reunions and it still sounds good.

The millennial edition of The Victims: (l-r) Ray Ahn, Faulkner, Baker. (📸 Pic courtesy Dave Laing Publicity)

TIM: Right, right. You had my buddy Ray Ahn from the Hard-Ons playing bass, right?

JAMES: Oh, yeah! He joined the band and they recorded it, and If they get around to it we'll put it out. The multi-track thing is normal. You can mix it. So, they've got wonderful machines these days.

TIM: It was so funny, because Ray sent me a message right after he had his first rehearsal with The Victims: “Tim, they have the same amps they used in ‘77!” [laughs]

JAMES: Yeah, yeah! Well, I mean, it’s just a [Fender] Twin on guitar and an Orange bass amp, y’know? I think he was happy to be in the band because he's been a long time fan, apparently since he was in high school, back then. He made his own Victims t-shirt that he used to wear to school.

TIM: Well, that was the punk rock way: you made your own clothing.

JAMES: Yeah, we’re talking about when he was 14 or something, y’know? We were his idols. He's playing with us now, right? He's a fantastic musician, but more importantly, he's a great guy. Anybody can be a great musician, but everybody can't be a cool guy.

TIM: That's very correct. Y’know, one thing that's been a constant through every single musical incarnation that you have had, James, is that you've had a very consistent sense of style. I was just telling [Australian publicist to the punk rock stars] Dave Laing, “James is like the punk rock Brian Jones or something! [laughs]

JAMES: I had the same haircut, I suppose. I still got basically the same haircut. I'm one of the few people who haven't lost all their hair. All my buddies have lost all their hair, most of them.

TIM: You definitely cut a distinct figure, with that Prince Valiant haircut and the striped t-shirts and white jeans and everything.

JAMES: Yeah, well I just ripped off Brian Jones' whole outfit, didn’t I? There's a picture here which appeared in a magazine of Brian Jones in 1964, on one of the local beaches here in Perth. They played, they were supporting Roy Orbison. ‘64.

TIM: So, were The Victims originally called The Geeks?

JAMES: No, that's just before The Victims, after I'd come back from London. But they didn't do any gigs. So I left and stole the bass player. I ran into Dave [Faulkner] at a gig with a band called The Cheap Nasties, which was Kim Salmon's band at the time. And I said to Dave, “What are you doing?” He said he wanted to do a punk band. I said, “Well, get me, I can play.” And yeah, we just took some lyrics along and uh... we sort of hit it off really well. That’s how The Victims started—a chance meeting at a pub.

TIM: So, why was it that The Victims came to an end?

JAMES: I think Dave’d had enough. I think he regrets not continuing a bit more. I know he regrets not making an album, because we had all the songs. And you know, we probably didn't have any money, but we could have sort of arranged those sort of deals, where people would pay for it. But yeah, that's how The Victims started. It was just a chance meeting between me and Dave. There weren't that many people in Perth who were following a punk rock band, I can assure you, back in the 1970s in Old City.

TIM: So was it the sort of thing where the audience was basically all the other bands on the bill?

JAMES: Yeah, basically. And their girlfriends, or boyfriends or whatever. Now we had a few more people, believe it or not. We attracted the art school people, before the Johnny-come-latelys, and now they've jumped on the English bandwagon and became a lot of skinhead bands, like Sham 69 and all that. But they waited until ‘79 before they even knew.

End Part Three

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