We were just like lovers
Lying B everyone
Wait till night time covers
Hiding, everyone.

Ian Rilen
Lyrics from a Sardine song

He took me one day to the place he’d found to live in Cook Road, Centennial Park. At that time there were still grand houses, Federation Houses as they were called in that street. It was a time before the incursion of what Ian Rilen would call, ‘the unit people’.

In the basement of one such Federation home, Bryan (Matthews) had found a cupboard-sized room where he could stay. The house was full of people not quite squatting, because at that stage someone was paying rent. The house clearly had been the mansion of a wealthy family in the recent past. It was paneled with cedar, and everywhere were beautiful leadlight windows. It had large halls, high moulded ceilings, and so many rooms I cannot remember the number. There was a servants’ quarters and a kitchen with an old fashioned wooden register on the wall which somehow, electrically triggered, would show an enameled name of the servant required in another part of the house.

Bryan said the house had been purchased by a developer to be demolished for the construction of a high-rise block of home units. In the meantime, it had been let to one vegetarian hippy, who in turn had invited others to join in paying the rent. By the time I came to visit, the original tenant had long been subsumed by the innumerable occupiers, paying and otherwise, who had moved in. There were musicians, painters, drug addicts, poets, film makers, disc jockeys and a family known as the Rilens living there.

There can be those rare times in life when a place exists which of itself and by itself attracts and generates energy and creativity.

But now, here I had arrived at a place where the memories were not yet in existence. Cook Road had a life of its own, and the participants were like the hippies of ten years before. There was life, love, creativity and always happiness and good feelings.

Bryan took me over to the Rilen’s flat which was in a dilapidated building next door to the mansion. Theirs was one side of the downstairs, and consisted of two rooms created from one large room by the insertion of high cupboards. There was a television set, a large table and a front window looking out onto Cook Road and then across to the Sydney Showground.

Stephanie, Ian’s wife, was busy bathing her baby Tallulah when I walked in, but they were warm and friendly and Bryan and I received an invitation to eat with them. It was clear to me that they had very little money, subsisting then on the dole. I was touched by their hospitality, taking in a stranger and feeding him.

Over the next few weeks I was a frequent visitor to Cook Road. The mansion and the adjoining house had become a convergence for an enormous amount of energy, and most of those living and visiting there were conscious and intelligent enough to be aware of the unique event in which they formed part.

At any time of the day one could wander through the halls of the mansion and listen for a party, or find a door open with someone playing guitar, and ready for conversation. Whatever the day, and whether I should be at work or not I would be organising some way to stop at Cook Road for a short visit. Usually I would allow myself the opportunity to pull the car up at the stone fence. Walk up the steps at steps at the crest of which on either side sat two stone lions, along the tessellated path and then through the beautiful wooden-framed leadlight door, which was never closed. In front would be the carpeted steps leading up to a long hall of high-ceilinged rooms.

This was a truly beautiful house from whose upper windows you could see the edge of the business centre of Sydney, and yet in whose gardens were the trees and shrubs of this grand home providing invisibility to the city which surrounded.

No-one ever asked anyone else where they had come from, what they had suffered from even where they were going. It was the unspoken rule that everyone have as nice a time as they could without hurting anyone else. That seemed fair enough, and it worked. There was a feeling of co-operation and friendliness which was tangible and effective.

From the day of Bryan’s introduction and my tentative peek into the front door, I had become a minor part of the magic in that house. I was not a central figure, but like all the others I was a part.

There would be strange night-time excursions with other members of the house to No Names, a spaghetti house in a back lane of Darlinghurst. Late night talks over coffee at Reggios Italian Coffee Shop. The very late night sojourns to the all night diner on Moore Park Road where the fluorescent lights would drain whatever life was left in our faces at that hour.

There was a tall blond fellow named Leigh who would be wandering around or James Scanlon, the tousle-haired boy-wonder. James would often hold court sitting in his bed.For a short while in later years he actually had a television show interviewing people who sat in bed with him. He was a small cherubic youth, with black curly hair and he wore spectacles in the shape of John Lennon’s glasses. His laugh, high pitched and unabashed would fill every conversation and his perspective on life was elevating and unique. I never saw him miserable or complaining although his life at times would have been trying to another. That was the mood of that house, at least in the beginning. It was a mood of optimism.

“I think I’ll get a band together” James said one time, “I might call it the Panic Merchants. Just think, their first hit single could be, ‘I’m Really Worried’”. We’d laugh over his ideas, and it would have you thinking of similar ones. James loved getting around in his pyjamas with or without slippers and dressing gown. The degree of night accoutrements was determined by the weather. This is not to say he was untidy, not at all. His dress was always impeccable. He would love to sit in bed, and one could sit in or on it with him and talk for hours. Often others would wander into the room, or I would wander out to return later and continue the conversation. This series would be punctuated by setting the kettle on the floor to boil, and then preparing a cup of tea to be enjoyed with a cigarette. James’ constant companion was a big Jewish-mama of a girl called Tanya. Tanya was boisterous and good humoured and had come from an establishment Jewish family in Melbourne. She and James would spend their lives enjoying life to the full.

Sometimes you would see Mick Cocks when he wasn’t out playing with the Rose Tattoo. His position was a reverenced one because he actually played with a working, successful rock’n'roll band. He was not just a hedonic consumer, or spectator. His words were measured and spared and his presence was truthfully incisive. His guitar playing was good, and he had a quite assurance.

In one of the better upstairs rooms lived Greg Skehill, who didn’t play professionally but did play guitar well, and was one of the consummate tea makers in the place. He too was intelligent, and although caught in the mood of optimism in the place was more wistful than the others. Greg later joined Stephanie, Ian and Phil Hall in Sardine.

I didn’t see much of Ian Rilen at first because most of my time was spent visiting the mansion and I rarely went to the old tenement next door.

One night Bryan mentioned he was rehearsing with some to the musicians next door and I joined him. In one of the backrooms the amplifiers and drums were set up and I walked over to hear the pounding drumming of Ian playing bass. We walked into the room spilling with sound. Bryan waiting for Ian’s acknowledgement, then picked up the microphone and started singing.

I doesn’t matter how much you think about things, nothing replaces feeling them. To sit next to an amplifier with leads all around your feet listening to drums, bass guitar and any other instrument is separate altogether from listening to a recording. Another thing which emerges when musicians play together is a communication between them which transcends words. The music does not have to be symphonic, it can be bad or good, it can vary from night to night and whatever the expression, it passes first between those playing before it spills out to the listener. Within this “conversation” there is differing levels of articulation, and there are the creators, and those who just play. Of those who are the creators, the ones who can sit down and create enthusiasm are the greatest performers. Ian was one such musician. It was obvious as I watched that a wealth of ideas and structure was flowing from him to the others.

“No, just try a little more of this” he would say to the others with an almost embarrassed smile and they would change and look quickly for his approval.

Most of the dialogue was with the instruments but Ian was clearly guiding.

The night was enjoyed drinking and listening to songs being rehearsed. I had not realised till that evening that Ian was an accomplished musician.

He had a remarkable gift of saying, “I thought of something today, listen to this” and picking up the bass and drumming out a beat which would catch you up. He would smile and sing the words which were simple but true. Here was a new poetry for me, an honest, plainly but cleverly expressed sentiment.

For those of us who spend most of our days working, it is good to meet an Ian Rilen. Often he would hand me the guitar and say “Play something.”

Surprisingly I would start tapping out some primitive rhythms and be amazed at my capacity to do so. In this way Ian would play something and say, “I just need some words for this line” or “I just need a line to end this song” and I would find myself reaching into my creativity to find something to match. I was being shown how to go to the well and reach the water. Every time the bucket went down I would feel an exhilaration, a remembering. Anyone can do this I thought, even I, why haven’t I tried this before?

Ian had a peculiar effect on people. Everyone wanted to be with him and they competed for his time and attention. He had the final word on any subject, not because he was arrogant or self-opinionated, but because he usually saw more than others. He had an affect of making people see some beauty in oneself, but Ian was a public figure. “A legend in his own neighbourhood”, some would jokingly say of his rejection of fame in the past. He was accused by many of arrogance, but they all liked him and in them one could only see the criticism came from envy and competitiveness.

This is not to say the man was saintly. The reverse was true. His behaviour and emotions were there to be seen and judged. This is what set him apart and made him an exemplar. It’s not that his conduct was impeccable, simply that it was honest. I reflected on this as my association with him developed, and I considered how I hid my feelings. If I wanted to be with someone I was too reserved to say so directly. When Ian loved someone, everyone new, thought about it, had an opinion on it and became part of what Ian was doing.

On one occasion, Bryan found Ian in bed with Kerri, an intelligent and sensual model with whom he had been sleeping. There was a fist fight in the hallway, an exceptional circumstance in itself to see someone actually confront Ian. If there were to be anyone to do so, only Bryan had the personal power. As the dissension continued over the next few days it became apparent that Ian was the aggrieved party, incensed with Bryan who had found the lovers and taken Ian=s son over to witness it.

Ian’s obvious sexual peregrinations continued and in the midst of it all Stephanie kept a fine home, fed endless guests and cared thoroughly for her children through those times. Her love for Ian was great and somehow hinged on the growth that she experienced by being with him. It was not without pain for both of them, and all of us who knew them shared in their relationship because of the nature of Ian’s honesty and Stephanie’s loyalty. I often compared Ian to other people I knew. When they had relationships they were clandestine, sneaky and if uncovered, fraught with guilt and endless recriminations. Here on the other hand was a man who showed his feelings, paid for them at the time and therefore did not live a fantasy.

Notwithstanding his faults, proud for all to see, there was the remarkable compassion of the man. In artistic circles, I learnt it is almost everything to be fashionable, but the approach to that varied with the people involved. To most, fashion involved rejecting certain of the outer members of the people who associated in the house. Turning away when that person was talking, and subtle means of ignoring a being, would be practiced by the pretenders to fashion. Ian was in his own right, “fashion”, and yet, would open his door to the most wayward and forlorn souls. Their words and intentions he would favour with equal time to the “more important people”. I remember going with him one day down to a single-mens’ hostel on William Street. We went in to visit an old friend of Ian’s called Norm (Roue). Norm, Ian said, was a great slide guitar player but he lost his way and ended up living like a derelict. Ian loved Norm and you could see Norm felt the same way about Ian. Norm sat there with the blacks of his pupils wide and the cigarette stains on his fingers talking gently. This was one of the many “uncool” people Ian took lovingly under his arm.

In that way too, I could reflect on the civilised members of society with whom I mixed, and I thought of their petulance, self-importance and cynicism. In the professions there are far more whose psychic motor is ego, than intelligence. In the best practitioners though, are always those whose concern is for all, not just those from whom advantage comes.

To witness this side of Ian’s conduct was particularly enlightening to me. The pleasure of being genuine in my dealings with all people had never really occurred to me until Ian had set the example.

Yet another thing which I learnt from Ian was the pleasure of children. At that time I was in my late twenties, and had always been as impatient with children as I had been with people who didn’t interest me. How shallow I was, and how much I gained from my association with Ian, Stephanie and their children. Ian’s love for his children was unfailing, he would do anything for them and above all else he spent time with them. The time spent was time in which he was absorbed, and in the way he taught me to recover lost feelings, so by this example he taught me that the love for children is not politicised as the love for one’s mate. The love for children is not qualified by their performance to expectation, but is unalloyed and endless, or it has the potential to be.

So in my association with this “punk musician” I was learning to be more honest about my feelings, but there was more to learn.

The current which ran beneath his nature was his unbelievable courage. In watching him it occurred to me that most of my acquaintances were cowards. Cowardice is not a vice of wartime alone, but in every day life one is called upon to choose, between courage and fear.

Everyone who remembers Ian will think of a huge figure, and psychically he was, although in socks, probably stood no more than five feet eight.

One day with Ian and Stephanie, Stephanie said “One night, Ian and I were walking through a park at Rose Bay. Suddenly a vicious dog appeared out of the dark and came at us snarling and ready to bite.”

What did you do? I asked.

“Ian got in front of me and the dog was barking all around us,” said Stephanie. “I was terrified, and then Ian let out this yell like I have never heard before, and the dog became terrified and ran away.”

“Yeah,” Ian said laughing, “I was so angry at the dog, something just came out of me and I blew it away.”

(c)Stephen Loomes 2011

Thank you to Stephen Loomes for allowing this excerpt to be included here.

Ian Rilen was doing a short stretch at Long Bay in 1970 when he made the decision that changed his life. He decided he was going to be a bass player, and not just any bass player, but a great bass player. There were nights, later – and more than a few – when he was just that; when, in fact, he was one of the great rock’n’rollers. The story goes, as he’d told me, that when he was inside there was another young inmate there who wanted to be a drummer, and so the pair would run their exercise in the yard like a rhythm section, stamping out and mouthing their respective parts.

“Got out of jail,” Ian says, “went to the Cross, had a coffee and a steak, it was beautiful, met these working girls, went back to their place, then this bloke comes along, selling pot or buying pot I dunno, we got talking, I said I wanted to play bass, and the next day he bought one around me for me.”

He’s told other versions of how he first got a bass. In another story, he put a down payment on one with Reno Tehei, of the La De Das, because Tehie wanted to put a bet on a horse. But then Tehei got busted and deported and Ian still owes him $120 for the axe!

Either way, Rilen – who died in Melbourne on October 30, aged 59 – obtained a bass, and this was the instrument upon which he writ a legend large. Once called a national treasure by Don Walker, you don’t have to trot out all the clichés: The original bad boy for love (he wrote the song, after all), Ian Rilen was a star. A force of nature. Ian was diagnosed with cancer of the bladder only maybe nine months back. But even then it had already spread. Ian was too unwell to attend the benefit held in his honour over two nights at Melbourne’s Prince of Wales Hotel in early October, which boasted a bill including Rose Tattoo, Don Walker, the Beasts of Bourbon, the Hoodoo Gurus, Tim Rogers and Phil Jamieson. The end came quickly but peacefully, surrounded by family and friends at home. Ian was the loving father of four children.

I first met Ian in 1980 when the first X were still just going and he lived in a big house on Palmer St, Darlinghurst, with his family, and he drove a 1959 Pontiac. I wrote reams of material on Ian in the 1980s and we lived in the much the same world, and I’d have to say I considered him a friend. Not close but a friend. But that was one of his great graces – he made everybody feel like they were his long-lost last best mate. He would greet everyone, male and female, with kisses, big wet, tonguey kisses. You just have to start to adjust to the fact that he’s not going to be around anymore.

But if there’s anyone about whom you could say their spirit permeated the scene and the music even in their lifetime, it’s Ian Rilen. Whether in his early bands like Band of Light and Rose Tattoo, or his real life’s work X, or Sardine or Hell to Pay, the Love Addicts and solo, Rilen laid down such a monumental groove and swing and attitude, it not only immortalised all his own music, it spread an influence, a huge influence. If there is any sort of Australian classic rock sound, Ian helped shape a huge swathe of it.

He could have been a bigger name, he could have made more money, but then it probably wouldn’t have been Ian Rilen any more. He was always rich in life and music. His legacy has already survived him.

“He had a special, natural instinct and that’s something there’s not enough of anymore, and something we should admire,” says Sebastian Chase. Chase’s relationship with Rilen had a unique symmetry, since it was Chase who helped him start his career and, as it turned out, helped him end it, as the manager of Band of Light and co-creator of Rose Tattoo and, currently, boss of MGM Music.

“He was just the most awesome dude – he had heart, soul, style, he was a romantic, he had attitude, he could play, he was just everything I love.”

“Rilen is one of the great visionaries,” says Lobby Loyde. “The music industry never understood him.”

“He was full of energy, as usual, right up to the end, until he couldn’t get around any more,” says Cathy Green, long-time partner in crime. “When he had to hang up his guitar, that was hard, and it happened pretty quickly after that. He was all grace and style. I can’t liken him to anyone, like, say, Keith Richards – I can understand why some people would, because they need a reference point – but to me, there was no-one like him.”

The last time I saw Ian, about three months back, the news was out and so I wanted to see him, see the Love Addicts and try and get together. One last time as it turned out. The Love Addicts were terrific. At the Sando in Newtown on a Saturday night after a football match, I inducted a couple of younger friends to the world of Ian Rilen, and they loved it too. Ian, the band, it was great. Really that was what Ian lived for, just to get up there and play. It was his church, his ritual, his transcendence. Part of ours too.

My baby she done left me, didn’t leave me on my own,
She left me with my teenage babies and a hire-purchase loan,
Friends ask me did I see it comin’, I have to answer yes,
Cause I’m a bad man when I’m drinkin’ – you can guess the rest

It was only when Ian came around one Friday afternoon after the Sando gig that I learned, after all these years, that he was born in the same place I was, Bendigo. Birthplace of the Chiko Roll! Ten years before me though, in 1947.

He never ever seemed a day over 23, except you could see every mile on his face. But it was in the eyes. The glint in his eye never left him.

As everyone’s been saying for years now, his life would make a great movie. But no-one would believe it! To say he lived large would be another massive understatement. As he himself told digTV only a couple of months ago, “I’m surprised I’m still here!”

Everybody’s got an Ian Rilen story. Ian made a lot of friends in his life, and he took everyone into his world. For Ian, art and life were intertwined. This was another feed into his music that helped make it greater, more real.

Most of the millions of people around the world who own an AC/DC album, or a Rose Tattoo album or Jet album, or a Guns & Roses or Rollins album, or Beasts of Bourbon album, will never have heard of Ian Rilen. This was his blessing and his curse. He was the eternal outsider, the baddest bad boy for love, the most likeable rogue. But as his friend Paul Kelly sang in a song that was always understood to be about him, What makes such a sweet guy turn so mean? He could be his own worst enemy. X always seemed somehow able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Yeah, sure, they were always capable of turning over a record company boardroom table, but isn’t that part of the rock’n’roll job description? It was one of the few things that rankled Ian, his ‘bad reputation’. Sure, see him at 4am after a gig and he could be in any kind of state. But as most will say, did X ever blow out a show without good reason? Did they ever perform giving less the 130%?

“Ian never approached anything half way,” says Sebastian Chase, laughing at his own understatement. “He lived for the music, that time on stage, but after the gig, well yeah, that’s when his outrageous personality really kicked in, he liked to have fun, and he was always great fun. Maybe for some people he was too much fun!”

You don’t have to talk up Ian’s seminal status when you just consider his biography. As a teenager growing up in Geelong in the 1960s, he banged around on guitar a bit, but it was only after he went to the Thumpin’ Tum in Melbourne and saw Yuk Harrison playing bass in Max Merrit and the Meteors that he was given to feel the stirrings that led to the decision he made in jail in Sydney. (That rock’n’soul sound of the Meteors in their late 60s/early 70s incarnation remains vastly underrated.) Ian’s first recording was Band of Light’s 1973 debut Total Union, an album that’s only now getting its due with an Aztec Music CD re-release. To a young teenager like me when it came out, I loved it as much as Chain’sToward the Blues or the Masters Apprentices’ Toast to Panama Red. Great records.

Band of Light was led by former La De Da Phil Key, but the band’s not-so-secret weapon was (not Rilen! but) slide guitarist Norm Roue. Roue had short hair and a white SG and a bottleneck slide; Australia had never seen or heard anything like him. Rilen and Roue left Band of Light and Roue joined Buffalo, alongside guitarist, the late Peter Wells, whilst he and Rilen continued trying to get their own thing together.

But Roue drifted away from music – and that was a nameless loss that Ian Rilen would be the first to tell you about! But then after Buffalo broke up, Pete Wells, who sadly died earlier this year too, learnt to play slide, and he and Rilen, under the guiding hand of Sebastian Chase, founded Rose Tattoo. The Tatts’ story is well-documented. After Melbourne sharpie band Buster Brown broke up, drummer Phil Rudd joined AC/DC and singer Angry Anderson joined Rose Tattoo. Rilen (and Sebastian Chase) left the band just as its first single, Rilen’s “Bad Boy for Love,” produced by Vanda/Young, was climbing the charts. Rilen walked out on the

Tatts and straight into a rehearsal with a couple of young blokes in church hall in Balmain. Nominally named Evil Rumours, they played so hard their guitars were covered in blood and thusly was X anointed.

X are the great power trio of all time. Guitarist Ian Krahe died of an overdose virtually even before the band got out of the blocks, but singer Steve Lucas took a crash course on guitar and for more than two decades he was one of Rilen’s most enduring musical partners.

In a short-lived post on Wikipedia on October 30, Lucas credited Ian as the early ‘creator’ or leader of X, who showed him “how to go to the well and reach the water.” Rilen was already 30 and the father of three kids when X started. He became a godfather to many, many more.

With Rilen’s old mate Lobby Loyde behind the desk, X recorded the album X-Aspirations in 1980. It was brilliant but a cult secret. The band went into retirement. That was when Ian put Sardine V together with his then-wife, the extraordinary and beautiful Stephanie Falconer, mother of Gentilla, J.J. and Talullah. Ian sold his car, a ’56 Chev, to buy her a Farfisa organ. Sardine was inner city modern and looked like a million bucks with Ian in a powder blue suit and his hair all slicked back like a gangster and Steph in an evening gown, but it just fizzled out and X re-formed in 1983.

Taking over on drums was the exceptional and beautiful Cathy Green, who would become another of Ian’s enduring if typically torrid partnerships. With Lobby Loyde at the helm again, the band cut At Home with You in 1985 and it was flooring the Strawberry Hills or wherever. Sometimes in those days Chris Wilson would guest with them on baritone sax and the all-engulfing power became almost unearthly. X is better than sex, all the girls used to say. Hunters & Collectors were a different band after Mark Seymour saw Ian Rilen at work.

It was only after I’d written half a dozen articles about Ian and his bands that I think I got close to the truth, in a 1987 piece for the late lamented RAM magazine, which opened like this (if you’ll excuse the ripeness): “Love: It’s not a quality you’d usually associate with this sort of sound, something so loud and obnoxious, so mean and nasty and ugly… It’s love that’s the fuel that fires them.”

Music was always purely visceral for Ian Rilen. He said it himself, X was physical music. Elemental. Again, Ian made no distinction between art and life. X was totally about chemistry and nothing else mattered and it oozed through the music like a lightning rod. X didn’t so much play music as the music played them. I coined that cliché so I reserve the right to use it again here. There was absolutely no intellectualisation about it.

When I asked Ian about any Australian sound he might have had a hand in forging and he replied, “I dunno, I never really thought about it,” he wasn’t being disingenuous. He was an intelligent person, it was just that the question held no interest for him whatsoever. He was the kind of person who couldn’t sit still.

Besides, he was smart enough to leave well enough alone: Why mess with the magic?

Ian was a cipher of pure sensual pleasure. I don’t think anybody who knew him would think it a stretch to call him a sensualist. Those who mistook the seeming brutality of X for a lack of sophistication missed the point.

As Iggy Pop once said of the sense of buoyancy and power the Stooges generated and gave him, “The process is far more important than the result.” The connection – for X too – was spiritual, a parched and yearning power-drive.

One thing Ian always took great pride in was the diversity of X audiences. It was a measure of his common touch. From bank robbers to architects he used to say, and he took them all in the same way: Openly.

But in commercial terms, X just couldn’t take that step up. The weakness of their third album, 1989’s … and more (Mushroom), was a harbinger of the band’s second break-up. Rilen and Cathy Green formed Hell to Pay with Ian on guitar and vocals, Cathy on bass, Spencer Jones on guitar and Tony Biggs, drums. After one album for Red Eye Records, Hell to Pay split in 1993 and X arose again.

Along the way, Ian weighed in with two significant bands that went unrecorded, Illustrated Man (in the mid 80s, basically the original Tatts minus Angry) and Skindiver (in the mid 90s, with Bones Martin). In 1999, he played a real Rose Tattoo reformation tour of Australia (he never would play outside his own country; but then neither did Elvis). Angry and Wellsy required that they be treated as separate entities from Ian and guitarist Mick Cocks in terms of travel and accommodation arrangements! “Rilen and Cocksy put the oomph back into it,” Lobby Loyde told Col Gray.

1999/2000, Ian cut a debut solo album Love is Murder. When Cruel Sea keyboardist James Cruickshank first proposed producing an Ian Rilen solo album, people were terrified at the prospect of these two reprobates loose in the studio together, but the result remains one of the great

Australian albums of the era bar none, wth Rilen mining an extraordinary vein of songs and feels. And when he most needed it, Sebastian Chase rode to Ian’s rescue to release the album on Phantom as part of a three-record deal. It was scarily up-close both sonically and artistically, personally. When Ian opened his mouth to sing you could hear every pockmark on his face.

Cath was still playing drums in X but it was another Cath, Cath Synnerdahl, when in 2003, to celebrate the band’s 25th anniversary, they recorded a live album at the Basement in Sydney. When Laughing Outlaw Records released the album, Evil Rumours, following Spiral Scratch Records’ release of a 1978-vintage show called Live at the Stagedoor Tavern, it did seem like an epitaph.

By then, Ian was already lost in the formation of the growling, swampy

Love Addicts with Cathy Green on bass and Kim Volkman, guitar. This band released Passion, Boots & Bruises in 2005. If not for what Steve Lucas called his ‘rejection of fame’, Ian Rilen could always have made more money out of music, but he wouldn’t prostitute himself. He deliberately got himself fired from Ian Moss’s road band. For a wild man of rock, he had very real moral code. Besides, as he always said, he’d been drinking “Bad Boy for Love” for years. Recently, when the song was licensed for a car ad, Ian, armed with a fat cheque, flew straight to Brisbane to buy a new car for himself, a ’63 Buick Riviera. There’s a whole story to that too, but it’s just another of the hundreds there’s not the space for here.

As Steve Lucas put it, Ian was “a man who showed his feelings, paid for them at the time and therefore did not live a fantasy.”

“He was flawed,” said Sebastian Chase, “and he understood that, who he was, he was full of contradictions, but he always wore his heart on his sleeve. That made him a sort of super-human being. He always exuded camaraderie, love and friendship.”

For all his rust and scratches and dents, he retained a terminally charming, almost child-like sense of wonder and naivety, and an uncanny ability to bounce back. These qualities are perhaps not unrelated. When he came over to visit, he didn’t seem like a man ready to die. I was disappointed he didn’t drive the Riviera, so we could go for a cruise, but once he got it to Sydney, he explained, he left it garaged at his hotel.

Maybe there was a touch of sombreness there, and certainly tiredness, but in all the mood swings in a long and tempestuous life, Ian had touched on the bottom almost as much as he did the top. No, correct that – he touched on the top more:

Anyone that ever saw him play one of the thousands of great gigs he played in his life can testify to that. It didn’t matter if he had no money, if his life was in a mess, he would get on stage and play it all out and that was his gift, the pay-off. He had a habit of turning conversation around to the now. He never wanted to talk about his place in music history, it was always the music he was yet to make. He was busy. His mobile kept ringing. He was wanting to pack as much in as possible. But again, he was always like that. He had come from the studio, and had to go back there. He was working on a new Love Addicts album virtually up to the day he died (the album will be released by Phantom early in the new year).

He showed me a photo of his new baby boy Romeo. Ian lived on the edge by most people’s standards, but he was dedicated to all his children. Special sympathy must go to one year-old Romeo, and his mother Bridget. Ian was pleased to enjoy the Tatts induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame, but, as everyone felt, it was a shame it was too late for Pete Wells. But what does that shit matter anyway, he said. When was anything but the music a core promise?

Ian was unable to play his last gig. Just a week after his benefit show, the Love Addicts were booked to play the Greyhound in Melbourne.

“He was determined,” says Cathy Green, “he said, I’m coming up, and he drove all the way up. Everything was set up for a sound check, and so he strapped on his guitar and we started “Booze to Blame” and we really only got about half a line into it and he just couldn’t do it, couldn’t sing. He just didn’t have the breath, the tumour was pressing onto his lungs.”

His funeral was held in Melbourne on November 4. Seating for 800 at the service was insufficient for the crowd. Ian’s newest car, a white Cadillac, led the procession, followed by a Cadillac hearse carrying the coffin. All St.Kilda was at half mast.

The corporeal frame of Ian Rilen is gone now and we won’t see his like again. The music was always ageless.

I think I’ll just keep playin’, in those all-night whiskey bars,
Playin’ guitar and singin’, stayin’ up with the stars

Thanks to Clinton Walker for allowing this article to be republished here.

A death that has been very lightly reported in the Australian media is that of Ian Rilen, who lost his life to cancer just 12 days ago. Ian was the original bass player for Rose Tattoo, and author of Bad Boy for Love, a song that tends to get wheeled out whenever some advertising creative wants to show that the product being sold is as tough as nails.  Read the full article on Sydney Morning Herald. 

Ian Rilen, 1947-2006

WHEN a man has lived as wild a life as the rock’n'roll musician and songwriter Ian Rilen, it might come as no surprise to hear he has checked out early. Yet his far-flung admirers are shaking their heads over his loss to bladder cancer at 59. Read the full article at Sydney Morning Herald.

But to focus on Rilen’s lifestyle risks reducing him to a cliché, something he most assuredly was not. Rilen, above all, was uncompromising. Even if Bad Boy for Love was the only Rose Tattoo song you knew, it should tell you something about its co-author that he legendarily left the band in 1977, on the cusp of mainstream success, because they weren’t “hard enough”.

That might be difficult to imagine – the first Rose Tattoo album, released after Rilen’s departure but with his fingerprints all over it, is as tough an album as any released by their only real peers, AC/DC – but Rilen’s new band, X, proved he wasn’t kidding.

Rather than relying on the hard rock/boogie that was Rose Tattoo’s stock-in-trade – and very much Australian rock orthodoxy at the time – X (not to be confused with the Los Angeles punks of the same name) were true originals; stuck for a pigeonhole, writers often simply described their sound as “X-music”.

Neither metal nor really punk, despite being a vital part of the original late 1970s Sydney punk explosion, the X sound was more intense than either. With Rilen’s sheet-anchor bass flanked by novice guitarist Steve Lucas and the late Steve Cafeiro on drums, the band never played with anything less than total commitment. Police were a frequent presence at the band’s riotous early gigs.

X were heavy and incredibly loud, but also capable of surprising tenderness, a quality Rilen had shown as far back as the Rose Tattoo ballad Stuck on You – a song frequently and reverently covered by Hunters & Collectors, whose singer Mark Seymour also adopted Rilen’s blue-collar singlet as stage uniform.

The band split not long after their first album, the landmark X-Aspirations, was released in 1980. Rilen then formed Sardine v with then-wife Stephanie. Sardine v represented an unlikely move towards electronic pop, even earning Rilen a Countdown appearance, but a 1983 EP titled I Hate You probably ensured he would remain marginalised.

In 1985, Rilen reformed X in Melbourne with new drummer Cathy Green and released a second remarkable album, At Home with You. A third, And More, appeared in 1988. Far from fading away, Rilen produced some of his most lauded work in recent years, with two solo albums, Love is Murder (2001) and Passion, Boots and Bruises (2004). A final album was completed before his death.

Rilen continued to perform until close to the end, including a recent benefit for Lobby Loyde, the producer of X’s three albums, also battling cancer. Rilen himself was the subject of a benefit gig three weeks ago, where better-known luminaries including the Hoodoo Gurus, Paul Kelly and Cold Chisel songwriter Don Walker – who referred to Rilen as a “national treasure” – paid tribute.

The show raised $40,000, which will now be donated to Rilen’s family. He is survived by his partner Brigitte, their one-year-old son Romeo and his three children from previous marriages, Jai Jai, Gentilla and Tallulah.

Andrew Stafford is the author of Pig City: from the Saints to Savage Garden (UQP).

My older brother was 16 in 1976, and an early fan of punk rock. He would go visit his new friends and bring home cassettes of local alternative radio station 3RRR- their signal wasn’t strong enough to pick up out where we lived- and I’d sneak into his room and borrow them. On one tape, sandwiched between the Boys Next Door doing “A Catholic Skin” and the Little Murders’ “Things Will Be Different” was X doing “Delinquent Cars”. That clanging guitar, the bouncing bass line, the strange lyrics in that deadpan voice…I was intrigued and got hold of more, a whole album’s worth in fact, including “Present”, “Suck Suck”, and the anthemic “ I Don’t Wanna Go Out”. Read the full article at Last Tram Home.

Hard-living Australian rock band Rose Tattoo have suffered another loss, with the death today of former bassist Ian Rilen. Read the full article at The Age.

Former Cold Chisel songwriter Don Walker calls him ‘a national treasure’. Hunters and Collectors made his song ‘Stuck On You’ a live anthem. Rilen even sparked a minor craze for singlets on Oz Rock front men when Mark Seymour, then Tex Perkins, imitated his on-stage look. Indeed each new generation seems to rediscover Rilen as an inspirationally authentic figure akin to a modern-day bluesman. Read the full article at The Basement Tapes.

It’s all there in his gritty, streetwise, bittersweet sings, all delivered with a voice Tom Waits could comfortably put a harmony to, simple songs of love, booze, rock ‘n’ roll and the bruises each of them leave behind, all wrapped up in the kind of angry, dislocated guitar sound that makes the White Stripes and Blues Explosion so exciting. The title of the new album from Ian Rilen and The Love Addicts says it all – Passion Boots and Bruises (Phantom/MGM).

“I think most of them are from my own experience, unfortunately!” Rilen wryly admits. “Paul Kelly’s the perfect storyteller, and I remember telling him once “Wish I could write you, tell all these wonderful stories’ and he said, ‘Oh f**k, I wish I could write songs like yo, and get it over with in four words!”

Rilen does manage to get one ‘story’ onto the new album Grey Street, though it’s a song he doesn’t play live much. What’s interesting though is the way songs get written.

“In Melbourne in the late ’90s, there was a spate of prostitute murders around St Kilda, and I was just walking to a gig at the Price of Wales one night, freezing winter, a horrible Melbourne night, and the song just came to me as I was walking along, my footsteps created the rhythm, and I was walking down Grey Street!”

Joining Rilen, who is back from living in Melbourne again, on the record is former ‘rebel’ Triple J announcer Tony Biggs on drums, who first worked with him in Hell To Pay. Sadly Biggs’ health has seen him drop out of gigging. Then there are guest guitarist Kim Volkman and bass player Sean Docherty.

“I first saw Kim busking on a dobro out the front of the supermarket in Ackland Street, and after about the third time I saw him, I asked him if he wanted to join my band. The bass player at the time was Cathy (Green, ex-X drummer_, but she was having a baby so Sean, who is Kim’s half brother, just jumped in straight away, and played with us eight months and did the album. But it was always Cathy’s spot, so as soon as she was up for it, she was back and playing like a million dollars.”