Sunshine & Grease: “Im interested in culture.” Feature by Samuel Miers

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Patrick O’Brien has moved the epicentre of Melbourne’s avant garde music scene back to Clifton Hill.

Pat lives in his aptly titled Sunshine & Grease space – just around the corner from the old Community Music Centre, home to the experiments of artists like Essendon Airport and Laughing Hands, in our last golden era of the late 70s and early 80s. Speaking to Pat means looking through an ever-present pile of CDs on his desk – next to a soap box full of cassettes. Today he is sleepy as he has been at a friend’s drinking into the night with Japanese guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama, who he had applauded the two previous evenings at other Melbourne hubs Make it up club and Stutter.

Sunshine & Grease is becoming more and more essential to the Melbourne musical landscape as our best fringe musicians begin to congregate at the refuge for the increasing number of monumental performances, generally only heard about through a message to the mailing list on the day of the event. “They put on so many great shows – improv, noise, weirdo-folk or punk shows, field recordings, sixty-hour video installations. Suddenly the place transforms into a party, or a church, an exhibition space or some sort of acoustic ecology safe-house,” tells Duncan Blachford of various Melbourne free-form acts such as Snawklor, and the Endless Melt label.

The crowd snuggles together on the floor and lines up the stairs, eyes locked on the night’s star, sometimes having to dodge the odd golf ball flying from a Dylan Martorell set or be confronted with the witch-like screams of Eko Eko Azarak. Some escape out the front for a cigarette on the loudest tram-scrapping corner in Melbourne; others for discussion in the record store with Patrick who can be caught, even in the middle of winter, in a pair of thongs. He has many a story to tell of long lost musicians – like Stephen David Heitkotter, a Californian prone to stealing people’s books, crossing out the name of the protagonist wherever it appears and replacing it with his own alter ego, “Black Orchid”, then holding the books for million-dollar ransoms.

“[Pat’s] knowledge is like a net cast over most of the world, and plunges to the depths in a vast range of genres,” says Alison Bolger (Beaches, Panel of Judges). While Patrick is forever exposing his guests to remarkable sounds both new and old, he isn’t the kind of guy to force a sale or try to up sell you something, even on the quietest day.

Though Pat was constantly frustrated by the quiet days growing up in Victoria’s bushfire capital, he couldn’t get enough of the city. “I would come to Melbourne on the weekends and blow off all the tensions, “cause I had been in Kinglake hating life all week. Everybody was telling me what a freak I was, but I guess I embraced it.”

In 1996 he took off to Canada where his tastes continued to expand. On returning to Melbourne he struck a friendship with Mark from the legendary Synaesthesia Records and ended up working there for three years. Pat had also been on the Bus Gallery board for six years; at the tail end of this time, he set his sights on a small dead space at the front of the building.

So his baby Sunshine & Grease (named after a Royal Trux song) was born in a Bus on Little Lonsdale Street, 26th July 2008. The relocation to Clifton Hill came at the beginning of this year with the closing of Bus Gallery, and the fact that Pat, together with many of his friends, prefers to stay out of the city these days (howbeit not too far away).

Although there are many standout independent record stores in Melbourne such as Round and Round, Missing Link or even Malvern’s Vicious Sloth Collectables – Sunshine & Grease is certainly the most eclectic, focusing on underground music of the past and present by losers and never-weres. It is for Melbourne what Bimbo Tower is to Paris and Volcanic Tongue is to Glasgow. “Sunshine & Grease is the kind of store you can only hope exists in whatever town you’re living in and “the city is a hell of a lot better for it,” says Duncan Blachford.

Pat prefers to deal with labels directly, ordering boxes from his favorite imprints around the globe. While his loves stem “everywhere from folk music to ethnic music, to 20th century composition, to noise and lots of pop stuff”, he has taken a particular fancy to Los Angeles’ hypnotic pop label Not Not Fun lately, whose textural-layer master Sun Araw visited Australia recently.

Furthermore, the store is important for outskirt Australian labels such as Breakdance The Dawn, Trapdoor Tapes, Sabbatical, Chapter, Near Tapes, Inverted Crux, Albert’s Basement and Endless Melt. While these labels have developed a following online, Sunshine & Grease often gives you the only chance to “get a physical clue about a release before purchasing, instead of clicking ‘buy’ on the internet,” as Michael Zuliki of Albert’s Basement points out. Here their latest offerings are given, in Duncan Blachford’s words, “a home amongst great avant-garde germs from the ages.”

Pat has also started his own label this year, releasing music on tape and CD-R from Paul Kidney Experience, Dylan Martorell, Aaron Wallace and Tom Hall. Most of these have already sold out, which has been especially rewarding. “The Paul Kidney Experience CD – I can send that to labels overseas that might be able to afford to produce vinyl or larger-scale editions of things, and by doing that, that music will reach a lot more people. Due next is a tape from Wisconsin’s Pink Reason: a collection of live recordings from his Australian tour last year that included a stop at Sunshine & Grease.

The owner’s heart is certainly not only in music; Sunshine & Grease holds many obscure zines, books, films and art. “It’s amazing how many people you meet who are supposedly into good art and have absolutely no musical taste. I find that really weird. For me my focus is fairly equal, I mean I’m interested in all of these things. I’m interested in culture.”

This is evident in the sort of exhibitions he commissions, especially the Victor Meertens-curated show of 20th century avant-garde artifacts. “He turned the gallery in to very much a living museum,” Pat recalls, “in that he was there every day. He’s a great storyteller and a great conversationalist, and that was a very big part of the show, people would come in to the gallery and spend two and a half hours there, sometimes more. This is a 7 by 4 metre space. There were also musical instruments that he designed and built. He would play those and let people play them. I felt really privileged to have that show.”

With the continual struggle for the post-MP3 record store to survive these days, the gallery/gig space has proved to be a successful diversification for Pat, as he can make a little from renting the space out for exhibitions, as well as the usual $6/7 cover charge for bands. Sunshine & Grease is still only open from Thursday to Saturday with Pat working at the RMIT library the first three days of the week to get by.

The environment is very much a community and is not elitist; everyone is welcome. There is also no rivalry with other venues. Pat often attends Make it up club and Stutter nights, together they’ve provided a laboratory for local and touring experimental/improv artists on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, collectively for around 15 years. The people organising and frequenting these events are also part of the Sunshine & Grease community. At Make it up club, when introducing artists to the stage, curator Sean Baxter will sometimes drop in things like, “you will be able to buy this person’s music at Sunshine & Grease, is that right Pat?” Sean also joined Pat on his multifarious O’ tomorrow radio show (where he is known as Downpat) for the Triple R Radiothon.

In the 30 years since the existence of the Community Music Centre, this milieu has certainly grown. Possibly the most unique thing about this new place in Clifton Hill is not just its evolving impact on Melbourne’s experimental artists but on the pop/indie music scene. Bands such as Panel of Judges, whose members are regulars to the store, can find avenues for their avant-explorations in pop sounds. As Ariel Pink once said, “every time there is a breakthrough in pop is because of the experimenter behind it that lifted it up.”

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