Twelve Members of the Vanilla Chainsaws

0:00Viscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to progressive and save hundreds. Because progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more, plus you can count on their great customer service to help when you need it so your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Positive casualty insurance company and affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available on all states or situations. Imagine you show it to friends house, and you think you're just there to, you know, hang out. Right, maybe have a few drinks. Listen to some record. Exactly. But the second you walk through the door, your friend just shoves you into this sweltering commercial kitchen. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Hands you a chef's knife, points to this massive mountain of raw ingredients, and just says, hey, we have 50 hungry people out there. Start cooking. That sounds incredibly stressful. Right. Because you didn't plan on it.

1:00You were prepared for it. In fact, you don't even know how to cook. Yeah. But suddenly you are entirely responsible for the meal. So welcome to this deep dive. Glad to be here. Today we're diving into the really chaotic archives of a 1980s Australian rock band called the vanilla chain sauce. Such a great name. It is, right? Yeah. And we're trying to answer this massive question. How do you keep a creative vision alive when your entire team is basically falling apart, especially when, you know, you didn't even want to lead the team in the first place? Exactly. We're using their run, which was from like 1986 to 1995, as a lens for you to explore the sheer, messy reality of creative collaboration. Yeah. And the struggle to capture that raw energy and the incredibly serendipitous nature of making art. Because that kitchen analogy I just mentioned, that is the exact phenomenon of how this band started. I love this origin story. So let's set the scene. It's in 1986 in Sydney, Australia.

2:02You've got frontman Simon John Drew and guitarist Mark Alexander. Okay. And according to Drew himself, he and Mark were absolutely not trying to start a band. It just wasn't on their radar at all. Right. They were just hanging out. Yeah. But two other guys, drummer Peter L. W. Kelly and bassist Cameron Lee essentially cornered them. They practically bullied them into it. They literally did. They said, if you're going to start a band, we want to be the rhythm section. What's fascinating here is the psychological starting point for this whole endeavor. So. Well, we have this deeply ingrained, kind of romanticized cultural narrative that great creative projects always begin with, like a singular burning vision. Oh, sure. The tortured artist in the garage. Exactly. We love the myth of the lone genius dreaming of changing the world. But the origin of the vanilla chainsaws completely subverts that myth. It reminds us that some of the most interesting, complex projects don't start from grand individual ambition. They start from spontaneous, almost aggressive, peer encouragement, like someone just

3:07pushing you into the deep end. Yes. It's that external push. Someone looks at you, sees a potential that you haven't even articulated to yourself yet and forces your hand. They volunteer you for the mission before you even know what the mission is. But I mean, when you're bullied into forming a band by your friends, you inherently lack a master plan. You definitely. You don't have a five-year roadmap or a clearly defined brand identity. And that total lack of a plan is, well, exactly what led to one of the most confusing debut singles of 1987. Oh, this is where it gets really good. Okay, let's unpack this. Let's paint a picture of the environment first. If you're an indie rock band in 1980s, Sydney, you're playing the pub circuit. Right. The sweaty pub circuit. Sticky, beer-soaked carpets, aggressive crowds, and incredibly loud visceral music. It's a environment built on raw power, heavily influenced by bands like ACDC or the angels. It is profoundly anti-pretension. Totally anti-pretension. So keep that setting in mind.

4:08It's August 1987, and the vanilla chain saws released their debut single on Phantom Records. It's called T.S. Was it really me? Okay. And a reviewer at the time, Steve Gardner from a publication called Noise for Heroes, describes the track as having a, quote, thick dense guitar sound. Which fits the pub rock mold perfectly. Exactly. But then he notes that the lyrics are entirely about turn to the century industrialization in cities of gray and the T.S. and the title. It stands for the 1920s Modernist Poet T.S. Eliot. Wow. They literally quote him in the middle of this heavy rock song. And I have to be honest here, quoting a modernist poet in a sweaty Sydney pub, just sounds unbearably pretentious to me. I can see why you'd say that. Like, why do you think an indie rock band from 80s Sydney felt the need to mix heavy guitar riffs with early 20th century poetry? Were they actually being intellectual or just slapping a smart sounding name on a song to hide the fact that they barely knew what they were doing? It's easy to view it as a gimmick, sure, but I argue it was actually a highly deliberate

5:09strategic move. Really? When an emerging band drops a T.S. Eliot reference into a wall of distorted guitars in 1987 Australia, they are basically engineering cognitive dissonance. Okay. Explain that. Well, as you pointed out, the pub rock scene was visceral. It was anti-pretentious. So by injecting high brow modernist literature into a thick, heavy guitar track, the vanilla chainsaws are signaling this intellectual ambition right out of the gate. I see. It elevates standard genre tropes into something highly thematic. It's a bold statement of intent. They are essentially saying to the listener, yes, we're allowed enough to make your ears ring, but we are also demanding that you pay attention to the text. Huh. You're demanding you read the syllabus before you come to the mosh pit. That is exactly the dynamic they're aiming for. They completely subverted the audience's expectations. If you walked into a pub expecting a standard aggressive rock set about drinking or rebellion, and instead you get a dense literary critique of urban decay and industrialization, it forces

6:13you to listen closer. It's like a Trojan horse. Precisely. They use the raw physical power of alternative rock as a Trojan horse to deliver complex ideas. But having those high concept ideas and a massive layered wall of sound that runs straight into a brick wall when you actually try to record it. Oh, absolutely. The studio is a totally different beast. Right. There are many new project faces, but it's a sparely brutal when your output is that dense. We have this review from October 1987, written by Jim Dwyer in Thurunga magazine. And Dwyer is completely conflicted about the state beer, right? Totally conflicted. He points out that the release clearly have a lot of energy that energy seems, and I'm quoting here, tone down in its production. Yeah. He goes on to say that if the band is as good live as all the local rumors suggest, the recorded song should explode into sheer energy. But somehow it just doesn't. It just falls flat. It's it's flat on the record. It makes me think about trying to explain a wild, terrifying roller coaster ride to someone

7:17using nothing but a spreadsheet. The roller coaster and the spreadsheet, that is a perfect analogy for what is happening here. Because you can hand someone a spreadsheet that lists the exact speed of the roller coaster, the angle of the main drop, the specific gravitational force you feel in the loop. Yeah. It's technically 100% accurate. Right. But the spreadsheet completely fails to capture the visceral thrill. It loses the wind whipping your face and that awful, wonderful feeling of your stomach dropping out. If we connect this to the bigger picture, what Jim Dwyer is isolating in that Thurunga review is the eternal agonizing friction of artistic translation. Artistic translation. Yeah. Because the recording studio and the live stage are two completely different mediums masquerading as the same art form. Yeah. That's a great point. Think about the mechanics of a live show. When a band plays a pub, they're relying on sheer volume. They're literally moving physical air through a room with massive speaker cabinets. You literally feel the bass in your chest.

8:18Exactly. They're sweat, visual spectacle, and an immediate electric feedback loop with the audience. The energy is environmental. Now move that same band into a recording studio. Right. It's completely sterile. The environmental magic is stripped away. Your place in an isolated foam padded room. You're often wearing headphones playing along to a sterile clip track. Separated from your bandmates by glass partitions. Yes. You're trying to artificially manufacture the energy of a riot in a completely sterile laboratory. For a band whose entire local reputation was built on being an explosive live act, that translation process is devastating. I can imagine. It requires a completely different skill set to make a piece of plastic or a digital file feel dangerous, which is something you see in almost any industry. Really? You have an incredible brainstorm session with your team. The energy is electric. The ideas are flowing. But then you have to put it in a PowerPoint. Exactly. When you try to formalize it into a slide deck for the client, all the life gets sucked out of it. The format basically muzzles the idea.

9:20It really does. And it seems like that critique, that realization that their studio output felt muzzled forced the vanilla chainsaws to make a major pivot. Oh, definitely. Because by mid-1988, they release a 5-track EP called Wine Dark Sea, produced by John B. And suddenly, Steve Gardner, from Noisse for Heroes, is noting that the band seems to be actively seeking more moderate tempos and more subtlety. Right. They're moving away from just the supercharged noise of those first singles. Yeah. They aren't trying to force the rollercoaster onto the spreadsheet anymore. They're designing a different kind of ride altogether. Which demonstrates a remarkable level of self-awareness, honestly. It takes maturity to realize that you cannot just turn the studio amplifiers up louder to artificially recreate a live show. They adapted to the constraints of the medium. Right. Leaning into the subtlety. Exactly. They realize that subtlety, pacing, and moderate tempos often translate much better to a recorded format than sheer, unbroken volume.

10:21They stop treating the studio as a documentary tool, meant to just, you know, record what they did on stage and started learning how to use the studio itself as an instrument. But that quest for subtlety and a new, refined sound didn't just change the music. It completely broke the band apart. Oh, yeah. The logistics become a nightmare here. The search for the right aesthetic reshaped who was actually playing the instruments. And this brings us to 1989, where the story turns into pure logistical chaos. Chaos is the right word. The band decides to make a massive global push. They sign to a German label, glitter house records, and they head overseas. It moved. But almost immediately, the lineup turns into a revolving door. First, before the tour even really gets going, the original drummer Peter Kelly is out. He's replaced by Dewey Leornanda. Okay. One replacement, not too bad. Right. But then, for the United States and United Kingdom legs of the tour, a guy named Andrew Marks joins on drums. Okay. So that's drummer number three. Wait, it gets worse. Marks leaves.

11:21So now, the band is in the middle of the European tour scrambling. They literally have to hire local German musicians, check off Helm Kahn drums, and Henning Warner on bass, just to finish the book tour dates. Wow. Pulling people in off the street, essentially. Basically, Simon Drew, the front man, has to switch from singing to playing second guitar. And at other times, he's playing bass, just to cover the gaping holes in the lineup. That is wild. And then, in December 1989, they record their 1000 EP in Germany, and they bring in yet another new drummer, Bill Walsh, from the Cosmic Psychos, just for the studio sessions. So many drummers. I know. If you've ever had to take over a massive group project at work because your entire team dropped the ball or quit, you know exactly how Mark Alexander and Simon Drew felt in Germany. It is the ultimate survival mode. Imagine the sheer friction of that reality. Your thousands of miles from home, operating in a pre-internet era. Oh, man. Right. You can't just post a listing online to find a new bassist.

12:22You're hiring local musicians who might not speak your language natively, trying to teach them your complex literary rock songs in the back of a transit van, just so you don't breach your touring contract. Here's where it gets really interesting, though. It reminds me of the ship of Thesius. Ah, the classic philosophical paradox. Exactly. If you replace the drummer, the bassist, and use local fillings on a European tour, is it still the vanilla chainsaws? Like what actually makes a band a band? This raises an important question about the reality of indie rock survival, because what you're seeing isn't a band playing musical chairs for fun. Right. You're seeing the desperate, necessary adaptability required to keep a project alive on a global scale with practically zero budget. At this point, the band had transitioned from being a fixed group of forefriends from Sydney into this fluid evolving idea. And that idea was anchored entirely by Mark Alexander and Simon Drew. Yes. They were the only two constants through that entire European blur. It really reminds me as a start of company where the entire development team quits the

13:25week before the product launch. Oh, that's a great comparison. The founders, who may be handle the marketing, or the initial concept, are suddenly staying up until four in the morning reading coding tutorials just to keep the servers from crashing. Yep. That is Simon Drew, switching from lead vocals to second guitar to bass. It isn't about artistic expression anymore. It's about keeping the lights on. They stopped being a traditional rock band and became project managers in leather jacket. I love that. Project managers in leather jackets. As long as Alexander and Drew were there to dictate the aesthetic blueprint, you know, the thick guitars, the underlying ethos, the TS Elliott references, the specific personnel holding the other instruments became entirely secondary to the survival of the project itself. Just cogs in the machine almost. Exactly. It strips away the romantic illusion of a rock band as a perfect inseparable gang of brothers and reveals it as a relentless pragmatic hustle. You swap members, you switch instruments, you bring in a ringer from the cosmic psychos

14:27for a recording session. You just do whatever it takes to get to the next show. But you can only sprint on that treadmill of survival for so long before your brain completely fries. Yeah, absolutely. Burnout is inevitable. And that exhaustion brings us to the final act of the vanilla chainsaws. After playing this chaotic game of member swapping across the United States, the UK and Germany, the sheer fatigue of constantly training new people pushes the core founders back to square one. Back to Australia. Yes. It's late 1990. Alexander and Drew returned to Australia. And in the surprising twist of fate, they reunite with Cameron Lee and Peter L.W. Kelly. Wait, the original guy? The exact two guys who cornered them in 1986 and bullied them into forming the band in the first place. That is incredible. Right. They get back together for an Australian tour in April 1991. Now it still gets a little messy from here. Of course it does. When they record their December 1991 album, Red Lights, which came out on Phantom Records, a new guy named Peter D.J. Kelly joins on bass, but Cameron Lee also continues in the

15:31band playing bass. Two bassists. Yeah. And then Peter L.W. Kelly, the original drummer, leaves again early in 1992 to join the new Christ. The band finally officially dissolves for good in 1995. Across a nine year run, they had 12 different members. 12 members in nine years. That's exhausting. I have to ask you about this 1990 reunion. After traveling the world, getting a European record deal with Glitter House and playing with all these different international session musicians, they go right back to the two guys who force them into the project back in Sydney. It seems counterintuitive. It feels like giving up, doesn't it? Is this just a massive retreat because they couldn't hack the global pressure? It's very easy to look at a band retreating to their hometown and linking back up with their amateur friends and label it a defeat, but I would argue it's not a retreat at all. No, it's a homecoming. Think about the difference between technical proficiency and shared history. You can hire the best session players in Germany. You can find technically flawless local musicians who can play your songs perfectly on a technical

16:35level. Right. The spreadsheet musicians. Exactly. But technical proficiency cannot manufacture the intangible weight of shared history. Returning to Lee and Kelly represents a profound, almost desperate desire to recapture the initial, spontaneous spark that birthed the band. The spark from before they were project managers. Yes, exactly. It's a recognition by Alexander and Drew that while international touring is an incredible milestone, the unique chemistry of the people who originally pushed you into the creative act is irreplaceable. That makes all the sense. Those original members shared the DNA of what the vanilla chainsaws were before they ever had to worry about glitter house records or language barriers or European tour logistics. Even with the later edition of Peter DJ Kelly on bass alongside Lee also on bass, which by the way is an incredibly chaotic and muddy sonic choice. Oh, absolutely muddy. But the gravitational pull was always back toward the original, messy, enthusiastic genesis of the project. They wanted the comfort of the people who knew exactly what the band was supposed to feel

17:37like, not just what it was supposed to sound like. So as you're listening to this right now, how does the wild history of an obscure 1980s Australian rock band apply to your life? That's a great question. Think about the things you are building. Maybe it's a startup company, a community organization, a massive group project at university, or even just a long-term personal goal you've been grinding away at for years. The story of the vanilla chainsaws from 1986 to 1995 proves that an endeavor does not need to last forever to be deeply meaningful. It doesn't need to maintain a perfect, unchanging structure. You don't have to cross the finish line with the exact same team you had at the starting line. Exactly. A project can be a chaotic, evolving collaboration. It can completely fracture. It can force you to frantically learn new skills and switch roles just to keep the lights on. And it can still be a mark. Right. They accomplished a lot despite the chaos. They did. The vanilla chainsaws released multiple EPs, two full-length albums, and left a footprint

18:39in both the Australian and European alternative rock scenes. Chaos, turnover, and exhaustion do not invalidate the art you produce along the way. And if there is one lingering thought to take away from all of this, it's about the hidden figures in any long-term endeavor. Ooh, I like that. The historical record of this band lists 12 different people who rotated through the line-up. We've spent a lot of time talking about the founders and the key players. But there are names listed. People like Sabina Collins, Gerard Presland, Marie Shepard, Rudy Morbito, all the people who cycled through. Right. And their exact contributions, their specific moments of holding the rhythm together on a Tuesday night and a sweaty pub are completely lost to the footnotes. The historical record doesn't even specify what year some of them played. That's kind of sad, actually. It is. But they were there. They held the structure together for a moment in time when it desperately needed holding. So think about the transient contributors in your own life's projects. Yeah. The people who step in for just one difficult quarter, one chaotic season, one stressful

19:42launch, and then quietly exit the narrative. How much of your final output, how much of your success, is secretly shaped by the people history forgets? That is a fascinating way to look at it. Keep digging into the hidden stories all around you and appreciate the people who show up to help you chop the ingredients when the kitchen gets overwhelming. We'll see you on the next deep dive. When you really need care, you need 24-7 access to a care team, not a maze of paperwork from a third party. Every day, America's hospitals and health systems show up for you. Navigating healthcare can feel overwhelming, but you can count on real doctors, real nurses, real people, providing quality around the clock care when you need it most. They're in your corner. In communities across America, your neighbors, your lifelines, right beside you holding your hand and helping find answers. That's what putting patients first actually means. Learn more at strengthinhealthcare.org, brought to you by the Coalition to Strength in America's Healthcare. You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy.

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