darren ragle

X were one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands from either hemisphere—a healthy counterpart to the L.A. band and legends on par with Birdman or the Saints in their native Australia. In fact, their closest L.A. counterpart would be Black Flag. X were loud, fast, fearless outsiders whose debut, Aspirations (recorded in a matter of minutes), mated Motorhead ferocity with Link Wray-style broken guitar minimalism to make something fast, loud and to-this-day unduplicated. X’s only surviving member, Steve Lucas, speaks now on the eve of X’s first-ever L.A. shows earlier this summer.

You were recruited into X by a telegram sent to your remote wilderness goat farm?
Steve Lucas (vocals/guitar): That’s pretty much what happened. I was out in northern South Wales living the life of a happy hippie. It was an old shearer’s shed where the shearers used to stay and it was pretty disused and the farmer used to let us have it for $10 a week. But you had to chop your own wood. You had to do all that kind of crap. I got a telegram and it just said, ‘STEVE, IT’S IAN [Rilen] BRING VOICE NEW BAND.’ That was it. From then on in it was just chaos and mayhem. I think we rehearsed for three weeks and came up with songs to venture out live and that was that really.
Didn’t the first place X ever played immediately ban you from returning?
No—I lost my pants at the very first show. The zipper broke and luckily there was sort of a punk dude with about 50 safety pins shoved up his nose. I said, ‘Look—can I borrow one to get through the set?’
You repaired your pants with a safety pin from some guy’s nose?
Pretty much. That sort of set the tone for what was to follow while we were in the band.
Would people show up with ‘X’s carved into themselves?
Yeah! They’d turn up to the door saying, ‘We haven’t got enough money to get in but we love you! Look, see, this is how we love you! You’ve got to let us in for doing this!’ They’d carve ‘X’s into their arms or chest with razor blades. You’d let them in for fear they’d go out and do something else to prove their dedication—it was terrible. At one stage, we were banned consecutively from 32 venues in the city itself. There used to be riots. They would turn up and they’d rip the place to shreds. It would be like brawls in the old west—people throwing chairs through windows. We were pretty anti-everything at that stage. I don’t think we had anything nice to say about anyone or anything. When we were banned from a lot of places, we would just start hiring town halls and we’d get our own security and our own PAs. We knew a lot a stuff was going on but X had a very sort of fuck you sort of attitude so we didn’t really give a damn what anyone else was doing. There were people who were desperate to get on the bill with us or they refused to have anything to do with us—there was never really an in-between. When we did the album, I had a girlfriend and we used to drive around—go from record shop to record shop with boxes of 25 records. Rob Younger from Radio Birdman was one of our good buyers. People like that, when they started turning up to our gigs, it gave us a sort of credibility. We weren’t really consciously looking for that, but it was nice. We were sort of a musician’s band—other guys in bands liked us in that alternative scene but … have you heard of the band Midnight Oil? They refused to let us on the same bill. Didn’t one of those guys get elected to office recently?
Yeah. I reckon that if you’re gonna play music and be a politician, then you should be immediately forced to cease to play music. I mean—everyone’s got a right to an opinion and we used to vocalize ours with our songs, but we weren’t telling people what to do. We were telling people how we felt and I think that was a big difference with most bands at the time. They have observational comedy and we were observational musicians. We’d report on what was happening in our lives. Living on welfare—out here it’s called the dole, relationships … Ian wrote most of ‘I Don’t Wanna Go Out’ because at the time, I didn’t wanna go out! I had gone away to live in the country because I couldn’t stand the shit in the city. When they brought me back, Rilen was initially the main songwriter but then once he realized that I could turn a phrase—that I was sort of quite obscurely witty—he would say, ‘I’ve got a song and it’s called “Dirty, Dirty Degenerate Boy”—you can fill out the rest!’ So I’d write it as a critique of an audience that used to come see us. That’s why when you listen to the lyrics—‘I haven’t got a women/I hang around bars, chat up the sluts/my last dole check it went up my arm …’—it was a critique on our audience. It was meant to savagely lampoon them.
I’m sure they loved it and all sang along.
It became an anthem and people used it as an excuse to do all this shit I was telling them not to. That’s the irony of irony.
You once said you always sang your own truth. The Monks also said they always tried to sing the truth—that’s why their music was so ugly. Does being honest mean ugly music?
Yes and no. I’ve listened to the Monks and personally I didn’t think it was ugly music. I thought it was terrific. I only just started listening to them about a year ago when I started going out with my current girlfriend. She’s got the most amazing vinyl collection—just about every band in the world. She’d go, ‘Oh, you’ve never heard of the Monks? They’re very similar.’ And I’d think, ‘Fuck, I had no idea that there were other kinds of people doing this kind of shit.’ I’ve found everything has a parallel somewhere. It was funny to find a band called X that came from L.A. because we thought it was quite clever being X. We all liked the idea of having the letter X in the title of something. There are bands like X-Ray Spex and XTC and we couldn’t really think of any other words that sounded ‘rock’ and then Ian Krahe said, ‘Why don’t we just call it X?’ There was sort of an extreme ‘ha-ha- ha!’ and I said, ‘No, it would be really easy to spell and it will look like a symbol—like the fish for Jesus Christ!’ So we started doing the handmade posters. We’d buy a double broadsheet of newspaper and we’d sit there a week or so before the gig and cook up a big pot of glue and put all the posters in the back of Ian’s Chevy. One of his many—I’ve never seen a man destroy so many cars.
Is that what “Delinquent Cars” is about?
No, that shit just came from a street party. But it was very funny because Ian would buy a car almost every other week and it would end up getting trashed and Steve Cafiero also loved cars but his were immaculate. You weren’t allowed to smoke in them at all. He was the exact opposite. He always had things like LTDs and stuff like that. I remember one time, he ended up moving way out of town in the ’burbs and he was sort of raising those miniature horses.
Your drummer was raising Shetland ponies?
Yeah—they were really tiny. And at the time he had one of those big-finned Cadillacs. It was a beautiful car and it was a soft pastel green and I’d been staying with him and he said, ‘I’ll drive you back into the city.’ We’re cruising along and I’m starting to think, ‘I’m seeing things—maybe I shouldn’t have taken that last whatever,’ you know? And he said, ‘What are you looking at?’ ‘Well, it looks like there’s a green frog sitting on your steering wheel.’ He looks down and goes ‘Fuck!’ and pulls over immediately. They were all over the car—but the color of the car. They were perfectly camouflaged. The whole history of X reads like a Hunter S. Thompson novel. we had the two extremes of the cars and the attitudes. Ian’s cars were always destroyed and Steve’s would be immaculate and we used that in the songs like ‘Hey You.’ That was sort of the real success with X—being able to come up with kind of slugging choruses. And people would take them literally and there were lots of riots.
How did you follow up Ian’s death with an album like Aspirations? Most bands would have fallen apart. A lot of it had to do with denial. Ian Krahe and I went to school together. We were born five days apart in the same little hospital—I would have heard him crying since I had my first consciousness. Even though we lived in different areas as we grew up and we didn’t really see each other, occasionally we’d be playing football on a Saturday and I’d think, ‘He looks really familiar …’ But when it came to going to high school, we both ended up in it. We established our friendship by swapping lyrics to popular songs at the times. ‘Do you know the words to whatever?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Oh cool—can you write them out?’ We’d do the same thing when he bought his first guitar— we were incredibly close. And then he died and I just refused to believe it. I thought, ‘Oh, he’s just gone away for a while—he’ll be back.’ So we got another friend of ours from the same time period who was also close to him and that was Geoff Holmes, but that didn’t quite work. Then we tried another guy and he was really good—an excellent guitar player and a lovely guy but we decided that he was actually too nice to be in it.
Did you reject him for his own good?
He wasn’t a big enough bastard. They said, ‘Well, you should play the guitar because you were his best friend.’ So that’s how it came to me. It was passed on to me. That’s what’s keeping me going for 33 years—I’ve been filling in for Ian on guitar. And now it just took off again. Ted from Aztec said, ‘I really want to release At Home With You and I want it to be mastered and to have a booklet.’ And he asked us if we could do the same thing with Aspirations. Things kept happening. Then all of a sudden film clips that we’d made but never got around to showing started popping up—people going, ‘I’ve had this in a box or in a chest under the bed for the last 25 years or something and maybe you can use it?’ Like ‘TV Cabaret’ with the credits rolling over it—you were going crazy swinging that light fixture around. Ian and I were both tripping off our heads— we’d been out the night before watching a band called the Mangrove Boogie Kings who were this ’50s rockabilly kind of stuff. I went home at about six in the morning and Ian went somewhere else and I just got my clothes off and got into bed and I thought, ‘Now I can sleep off the bad part.’ And someone climbed into my window because I wasn’t answering the door and said, ‘I’ve been told to bring you to the set where we’re going to shoot the film clip.’ I thought, ‘Oh fuck, I’ve only just got into bed.’ ‘Well, no one knows where anyone else is and you’re the only one we can find so you have to come with us.’ You should have hidden better.
That’s why I had no shoes on in the clip—I didn’t even bother putting them on. We got there and I was like, ‘You can’t be serious. This is the police headquarters.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, they still haven’t finished building it. We’re on the 22nd floor—there’s no wall there and it looks amazing.’ So I was standing there with my red hair and torn jeans with HATE CITY and PIGS all over it and there were all these coppers standing there and I was whistling and trying really hard not to look like I was tripping out, and we got to the floor and I looked out and he was right—there is no wall. I got the most incredible sense of vertigo and locked myself in a toilet somewhere. I think Ian and Steve turned up and they were both really dressed and shaven and clean and ready to make a film clip and they asked where I was. ‘He’s in the toilet and he won’t come out.’ Finally Ian Krahe came and he was in the same state of mind as I was and I thought, ‘OK, I’ll come out.’
This is that balance we were talking about.
Ian and I were the young naïve ones and we decided it was a real sellout to mime for a film clip. I said, ‘Why can’t we just plug in? If the police were going to do anything they’d have done it by now.’ Ian had his guitar on backwards and was singing into irons instead of microphones and I found that big cardboard tube and I was going berserk with that. So that was the end of my hippie pacifist days.
What would you call the phase that came after that?
X phase. We’d always break up or fight about something, or Ian and I would decide that Steve was too much of a capitalist and we can’t have him in the band and sing about capitalist pigs … but he was such a good drummer. There was just no one like him. When Ian Krahe died, I was in denial and it took six months before it hit me and I had a weep about it.
What happened to Steve Cafiero?
Steve lasted a bit longer than that but he had a bad back and he went in to get an X-ray and they put some dye so they can trace it and he was one of the few people who had an allergic reaction to it. He just went into a coma and that was that—died about four days later. And then I really cried and cried. It was like he was a big brother kind of thing. Then it was only Ian and myself. Somebody suggested that we check out this chick cuz she’s a really amazing drummer and we thought, ‘No way is X gonna have a girl in it.’ We did one rehearsal and I was convinced instantly. Ian wasn’t. He had a drummer lined up and all the drums in his car ready to come to soundcheck and I thought it wasn’t fair to Cathy to be judged like that. So we got to the venue early and she was pumping away and Ian walked in and said, ‘Fuck, that sounds awesome.’ So he turned to his guy and said, ‘I guess we don’t need you after all.’
How long had you actually been playing guitar before you did Aspirations? I’ve heard anywhere from a week to three months.
Um. I’d been mucking with guitars for ages but I couldn’t play barre chords. I think I’d been given a classic nylon stringed thing for a birthday present. I could play very rudimentary chords. If everyone was drunk, I could play half a dozen songs. But I just sort of stepped in knowing that I had to live up to the expectations because Ian was a great guitarist. I got three months worth of practice rehearsing the songs and Lobby Loyde—he was an old friend of Ian’s—walked in. He’d just come back from England and he just said, ‘This sounds awesome! I’ve got to record what you got straight away.’ So we went into the studio to demo a single and we couldn’t make up our minds what to do. He said, ‘Just play all the songs that Steve knows how to play and we’ll pick the best one and make a single.’ So we did, and the engineer and someone else said, ‘There’s not a single amongst that shit.’ And Lobby goes, ‘Yeah, you’re right—it’s an album.’
So all of Aspirations is literally just you standing there with a guitar doing scratch tracks?
Yeah—I was terrified. I thought that after we’d done that, I was going to be allowed to go and sit down and play the guitar and not have to sing vocals at the same time and they go, ‘No, that’s finished! That’s it!’ We recorded it in five-and-a-half hours—that included setting up and mic’ing the kit and pulling it all down and leaving the studio. We were only probably playing music for an hour at most.
You had a quote where you were talking about playing with the band—you said you get up there and you can’t surrender. What did you mean by that?
It was like the Three Musketeers—all for one, one for all. Each of us, I suppose, in the band represented an attribute. Steve was like the car engine, and Ian was the fuel, especially at the beginning—he was the main creative thing. Ian Krahe was like a part of that—he might have been the carburetor but when it came to me … I had sort of run out of analogies. I was the conscience of the band. The consciousness of it, I suppose? When Ian died, everyone was putting odds that I was next to go. Oh great! Yeah, thanks! Have you ever heard of positive affirmation? ‘We think you’re gonna die! Come on! We’ve got money on this!’ Then Steve went as sort of a freak accident and Ian was cancer and people would assume, ‘Well, why did everyone else die except you?’ That’s because I am the only one who would have kept doing it for everybody else. That’s why I do it. I want their names to stay alive and I want their music to be recognized way beyond what we had when we first started. I wanted to make it immortal and the only way to do that is to be immortal. I can’t die—I can’t stop because if I do then the music stops and that’s the end of it—we all cease to exist. As long as I’m alive treading the boards, they’re all up there with me. There are times when I feel like I’m standing next to myself and someone else is using my body to do things. It’s a tragic feeling—and of course it’s just love. We hated each other at times and we loved each other at times and that’s what it’s like. We were like a platoon or a squad, you know? No one gets left behind. I have gone back and I dug up— in a sense—their bodies by taking their music and presenting it now.
We were talking earlier about when the band was starting, the music was about practical day-to-day survival. Now it’s about the survival of the music, but I’m curious about how it’s always this theme of survival. What is X’s drive to survive?
I don’t know—maybe because deep down inside we all had a death wish, perhaps. The music itself was violence, we incited violence, people died at gigs. A huge brawl broke out in a pub once and somebody got a pool cue shoved through their eyeball into their brain. It was insane. I think they used us as an excuse to do what they would never contemplate doing. A day-to-day lifelong bank teller or petrol pump attendant or whatever. You get used to someone coming to every single gig, and you say, ‘What do you actually do during the day?’ ‘I work at a bank.’ But at night they have tough jeans and a black T- shirt and thick eyeliner around their eyes and gelling their hair all spiky—it’s crazy.
What do you think X brought out about those people? What did they connect to?
I think they were connecting to the physical energy and the onstage chemistry. To a large degree it was like a performance art piece. There was chaos in one corner and order in the other corner and there was X in the middle. Order was shooting little neutrons in and chaos was shooting little neutrons in and sometimes they’d do what they’re supposed to do and sometimes they’d explode.
You said were anti-everything then—what did you gain and what did you give up? I don’t really give a shit. You haven’t changed a bit!
That’s how we felt. Fuck, it’s performance art—it still is. Now we’re portraying X as it used to be. We’ve got different actors portraying the parts. I suppose if you thought about it long enough—the stuff that I regret? If we had pulled our heads in and played the game, we could have made a fair bit of money.
Been Midnight Oil?
Yeah—we could have been Midnight Oil. But then I thought, ‘I don’t want to be like that.’ I remember when INXS used to support us. I wanted to strangle Michael Hutchence.
How ironic.
They were doing all their little poster runs with a tiny little ‘IN’ and a tiny little ‘S’ and a great big ‘X’ in the middle and doing gigs with us trying to filch our audience. And we were just about to grab him by the throat when his roadies intervened and he was dragged off to one side of the room and I was dragged off to the other. He said, ‘One day we’re gonna be the biggest band in the world!’ And I said, ‘Fuck, I don’t give a shit if you are!’ And they did become really big as we all know, But another piece of irony for you a lá X is a journalist once said to me, ‘Have you ever noticed that when you do a cover of a song and release it, the artist dies? When you put out “Dream Baby” and Roy Orbison died? And you did a cover of John Lennon and he got
shot to death? And there was a bootleg CD of you doing Del Shannon’s “Runaway” and he’s dead? Do you have any plans to do any covers?’ And I said, ‘Yeah—an INXS one.’ And three months later Michael Hutchence was found dead. So if there’s anyone out there who wants to survive, give me some money and I won’t cover your songs.
You said once that it’s really good to be famous for being unknown—what did you mean by that?
People were always going, ‘You could have been famous—blah, blah, blah.’ I just remembered a quote—someone saying if more than a hundred people know your name and you’ve never met them, then you were famous. I thought, ‘Well, shit, thousands of people knew about us!’ So we were famous and that’s kind of good enough for me. We were more famous for not being famous. Someone said, ‘What’s the key to your success?’ And I said, ‘A total lack of it.’
Is that the best of both worlds?
Yeah. I think I was born with the immediate belief that irony and paradox rule the world and I’ve just stuck with the belief system.
What is the relationship between X and death?
I remember having a dream when I was about 20 and I dreamt that there was seven of me and one by one in the dream they died. I can’t remember how all the different versions of me died. I’ve been hit by a car—I was with my daughter and it hit me on the side that she wasn’t on and I went under the bottom of the car—smashed the windscreen and then slid down the bonnet. I was totally unscathed and my daughter had a tiny graze on her knee but I felt…at the point of impact all I could feel was this massive hot wind around me, like a forcefield or shield went up. And no one could believe that I came through it unscathed. My daughter said, ‘I never want to do that again.’ And I said, ‘Yes, sweetheart, neither do I.’ I think people refer to X as the band they tried to kill. Or the band that refuses to die. I had a fridge—one of those really old fridges from the ’70s I was helping move in the back of a truck and someone lost their grip and I fell backwards on to the footpath with a whole fridge on top of me. You could hear everyone gasp—‘He’ll probably be flat! His back will be broken!’ I’m like, ‘Come on! Someone help me get this fucking fridge off of me!’ And I had to do it myself. So I have this reputation for being indestructible. I’ve got a mission and keeping X alive is obviously my mission.
It’s been said that when you boil it down to the basics, art is an act of war against death. It’s about making something that’s going to live and making something that is a force for life. Is that part of what X does?
I think it’s in everyone—any artist striving to extend their own immortality through their art has an effect of giving hope and inspiration to other people to survive and carry on. Like the beauty of the painting is not what you’re looking at on the wall—it’s what you are feeling inside. It’s what qualifies it. You could have the best technique in the world but if the painting doesn’t have soul, you wont react to it. Someone asked me a while ago about songwriting and they said, ‘Have you rewritten songs?’ And I said, ‘Of course I have.’ ‘Why do you think you rewrote them?’ ‘Because they had no soul.’ When I get an idea for a song, you have to define the inner being of that song—it has its own identity, its own heart, its own soul. The songs that I throw away are like stillborn babies, and the ones that I keep alive and play, they are living entities.
What drinks should we drink to remember the X members who’ve passed?
We went through phases. There was always beer. But we went through a phase where we just drank vodka or tequila—they were our favorite X drinks. Cathy and I were in a bar once—we’d had a few shots of tequila and so we thought, ‘What it would be like to drink tequila through a straw?’ We were like, ‘One-two-three-suck! Whoa, that was a bit rugged!’ And someone saw us with the straws in our hands snorting tequila shots and they put it in this sort of pub comic strip thing—‘Lucas and Green drinking tequila! I can’t believe my eyes!’ So about two weeks later I was about to go on and someone came up to me and said, ‘Did you really snort a shot of tequila?’ ‘Yeah, I snorted a shot of tequila.’ ‘Bullshit.’ ‘No, it’s true.’ ‘Nobody can do that—if I buy you a shot of tequila now, will you snort it?’ And I said yes. And I can tell you—never ever snort a shot of tequila up your nose because it burns like hell. I did that five minutes before I had to go onstage doing a solo acoustic set and I’m standing there with my head feeling like I’ve just hit bollocks and all the tequila is in my sinuses and is coming out of my eyes like tears and trickling down into my mouth. And so I was on stage crying tears of tequila.
I believe you when you say that you’re indestructible because you test it so often.
I made a promise to myself that I would never ever do it again.

X’S ASPIRATIONS IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM AZTEC. VISIT X AT MYSPACE.COM/XAUSTRALIA.