Battlesick’s official day of release was 28th July 1989 – Friday night at the Tivoli Hotel in Pirie Street with other Dominator label bands the Hot Tomatoes and Order of Decay.
It was raining I believe and really squally with wind gusts – well that’s what I recall, and we thought no fool would ever come out in weather like this to see some Adelaide bands play.
It ended up a great night – pretty packed even with the bad weather and we gave away some albums on stage – We played all of Battlesick, Campbell Robinson on drums, Kim on stage left and myself stage right.
We had recorded it at what was called Artec Studio with Stuart Sheldon recording and engineering. We spent hours getting mixes and then going out to play them on the car cassette player – we never trusted completely what we heard on studio monitors, the test was always what did it sound like in the car!
We’d been rejected from near every label in Australia we had applied to except for Phantom records in Sydney with Jules R B Normington, who put out the first single The Lords of Summer/Can You See Now? Then Dominator records was started by the Hewson Brothers Kelly and Aaron and they approached us if we’d like to be on an Adelaide label (even Doug at Greasy Pop had said no to us).
We are really looking forward to playing Battlesick from beginning to end this coming October 2019. A little older, not necessarily wiser, but still playing as hard as ever had. No compromise.
JRS – TMOC
