Band
The Hummingbirds… ‘The good copy, the great steal’
Bios are boring. We try to avoid them. Unless they’re written by Steve Albini, they’re generally self-serving, bloated, clap-trap. So we stole someone else’s words. We don’t agree with all of them, but it get some things right. It’s not chronological. But nothing ever is:
The Hummingbirds’ loveBUZZ married simple, infectious melodies with intricate tree-part harmonies, noisy guitars, fuzz bass and thrashing drums to produce some of the most exciting and prickly powerpop ever made in this country. loveBUZZ was hailed by critics worldwide as a great, thrilling work when it was released in November 1989 and with twenty years hindsight it stands tall and can be read as a) Classic; b) Switched-on/Hip/Contemporary and c) Ahead of its time.
a) Classic: With their two-boy/two-girl lineup the Hummingbirds at times called to mind the Mamas and the Papas, at others they pushed for a Velvet Underground noise edge, while strains of the edge early Fab Four lingered elsewhere. “There’s the Beatles and there’s punk rock,” says primary songwriter and singer Simon Holmes looking back “and to me the ideal was the combination of the two.”
b) Switched-on/Hip/Contemporary: loveBUZZ was produced by Mitch Easter who had played a pivotal role in the breakthrough of US college rock in the 80s via his production of the first two REM albums, Murmur and Reckoning, and the impact of his own band Let’s Active. But equally the Hummingbirds were musical sponges, soaking up everything new and vital, from the metal of Killdozer, Soundgarden, Slayer, to the avant noise of Sonic Youth, Swans, Flipper and the more fragile alterna pop of New Zealand’s Flying Nun label and its bands like The Chills, The Bats, Look Blue Go Purple.
c) Ahead of its time: Without being visionaries, the Hummingbirds were one of the bands who foreshadowed the alternative explosion of the early 90s. They named loveBUZZ in homage to Nirvana’s first single of the same name, a full two years before the rest of the world was to hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” And they were trading in the loud/soft dynamics pioneered by the Pixies well before it became de rigueur: Describing loveBUZZ’s first single “Blush,” Holmes said at the time: “It epitomises our attitude to doing things, which is more or less a full-throttle attack with a 60s chord sensibility. It’s an exercise in employing full-on dynamics, then dropping it out in the middle eight and getting a different feel and then getting another feel again, once it comes back in.”
The band took its seed when Holmes met drummer Mark Temple in a band called Bug Eyed Monsters, in 1982. Yet it wasn’t until four years later that the Hummingbirds, with Alannah Russack on guitar/vocals and later Robyn St. Clare on bass/vocals, began gaining a dedicated live following on the Sydney inner-city scene and released four brilliant 7” singles on the independent Phantom label (“Alimony”, “Swim To Shore”, “Everything You Said” and “Hindsight”). Holmes also worked behind the counter at Phantom’s record store: “my strongest memory of the times is that if you weren’t playing, you were out seeing someone else play. There was a real sense of community – from bands, to venues, to shops, to magazines.”
The Hummingbirds ultimately signed with the new and buzzing rooArt label, the brain child of INXS’s manager Chris Murphy, and set to recording loveBUZZ with Mitch Easter across two sessions, firstly at Sydney’s Paradise Studios and then at Easter’s studio in Charlotte, Carolina. The album that emerged might have been weighted in favour of guitar driven boy/girl blissbombs like “Blush”, “Get On Down,” “Tuesday” and the re-recorded “Alimony” but with strong contributions from all three writers/singers loveBuzz showed a myriad of colours and over its fourteen songs it included mournful dirges (“House Taken Over”), wistful folky ballads (“Miles To Go”) and a mini-symphony in the moody “If You Leave.”
If loveBUZZ resonated with a youthful spunk and naïveté the Hummingbirds would soon learn difficult lessons, becoming embroiled in a nasty battle with rooArt records and revealing strains and complexities in their internal relationships. The band’s follow-up album va va voom was a darker, chastened and more mature outing and while it is an excellent album, it is winter to loveBUZZ‘s summer… and it’s summer that people remember (and long for). Looking back, Holmes says, “my first reaction when I listened to loveBUZZ for the first time in twenty years was that it was by turns brash and beautiful. In my dotage, I much prefer the latter, but I guess that’s to be expected.”