ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 23 OCTOBER 2013
Canberra-based film maker Michael Kraaz has been developing a documentary on one of Australia’s greatest unrecorded metal bands. Escape: The Great Unsigned is the story of Gawler’s most legendary musical export. Silversun Pictures have come onboard as the support production company. Michael is hoping one of the television networks will take an interest in the project, and one of the great unsung stories of Australian rock music will finally be told. Until then, he’s put together this article for Loud’s occasional Backtrackin’ series:
If you were lucky enough to find an article on heavy metal in any 80s Australian newspapers, chances are it was about Escape. Formed in Gawler, South Australia in 1983, Escape was one of the rare bands to catch the attention of Australia’s usually metal-resistant media. What was the attraction?
“You’d just have to have a look at them,” says their one-time manager Mark ‘Spook’ Winders. “The size of ‘em. I mean John the Beast… when you heard the press release – six foot six, 32 stone (203kgs) on stage when he had all his gear on and everything like that. His brother Tony… the Brute, as they used to call him. Six foot four, 24 stone (152kgs). And then you had these two little midgets running around in between. Escape, you can get it from all different things. I’d say just one big entertaining package.”
“(I) had the guitar that looked like an engine and it was with a real rocker cover with distributor exhaust pipes,” recalls guitarist John ‘the Beast’ Zisimou. “You could flick a switch and it would shoot flames in the air. My brother had a bass that would shoot flames out of it. The first stage set was the big prison. Set like the walls had been blown apart and people had escaped. Within the first four opening bars of our set song we’d let of anything like 20-30 bombs. And we had this huge great prison stage set that was about 30ft wide. We just wanted that so we didn’t have to fork out for millions of amplifiers. We came up with the idea that maybe we’ll make collapsible quad boxes. And then we thought they’d be too easy to spot and too long to set up. So that’s why we came up with the big stage set.”
“We had this huge great prison stage set that was about 30ft wide. We just wanted that so we didn’t have to fork out for millions of amplifiers.”
Tony Zisimou
Naturally the media went berserk. Escape made appearances on Beat Box, Today, Simon Townsend’s Wonder World, Terry Willessee Tonight, Music Video, 7:30 Report, The Midday Show, Good Morning Australia, The Afternoon Show and Sounds. Escape’s great irony was revealed when John swapped yarns with Sounds host Donny Sutherland and it turned out that the band had neither a record nor a deal.
As John recalls, “At one stage we had the record for the most published unsigned band in Australian history. And that was all done without ever stepping into a studio and recording a note. It was fantastic. It was great fun”.
John’s brother Tony is also somewhat bemused by Escape’s media attention.
“Basically it was strange because when we started we were pretty bad,” he says. “And so any media attention we got then was all for the wrong reasons. After getting slandered by the Adelaide music industry, we basically locked ourselves away for a year learning to play our instruments. We brainstormed, put ideas together, and then came up with this product and away we went.”
And what of the songs?
“My favorite was ‘Kill or Be Killed’,” Tony remembers. “It had this heavy riff in it. We had other songs like ‘Maybe I’m Crazy’. Good hard n’ heavy rock and roll songs that where just so catchy you’d walk around and it would be stuck in your head for hours. Basically instead of being full on metal you’d be heading towards the more mainstream stuff. But that wasn’t by choice that’s just the way we where developing. And we didn’t sit down and say, ‘We’re going to write a song today because that’s what the public wants’. We’d write what we wanted to hear. And me and John would always be knuckling it out – should go like this should go like that. Eventually we’d sort it out.”
With such great songs it’s a pity no recordings where made. But being in a band during the 1980s, meant they lacked today’s easier opportunities for laying down tracks.
“We never recorded at all and right until the end we never recorded to put out product,” says Tony. “Which was a shame. I don’t think we were talented enough to do it initially. There was a lack of funds as well. It was very expensive to do anything back in those days. Especially to go into a studio, it’s not like it is today. You’ve got world class quality recording without even leaving your bedroom. You couldn’t do it back then. It’s a big studio; it’s a fortune. So yeah, we never got around to recording. It was particularly a money issue especially after we did the first tour. And we came back massively in the hole. All of a sudden we’ve gotta find more money to go. So we never recorded. We never found the right opportunity.”
The high costs of touring and recording weren’t the only contributions to Escape’s eventual demise. Mortal Sin’s debut album Mayhemic Destruction features a brief cheerio to the band with a ‘Get well John’ wish. Unfortunately, Escape befell an accident just as they were about to peak.
As John remembers: “Just when nothing at all can go wrong in your group – BANG! Someone wraps a tour bus around a tree and three years in hospital is followed by a lifelong injury.”
Drummer Andy Cieala, who joined Escape after the accident, manages to put a positive spin on the incident.
“To be quite honest it’s one of those double-edged swords where if they hadn’t had that accident, they wouldn’t have pushed themselves to that level,” he says. “I know they had operations to do things but they really wanted to come back and show people what the band was capable of doing. When I came into the band we started writing a heap of new songs. It just clicked like that. The songs were just working. It was a fantastic time. Although it probably had a negative affect health-wise, it was probably a hell of a lot more plusses coming from that accident music wise.”
Now playing drums for Adelaide band Imogen Brave, Cieala learned much of his professional ethics from playing with Escape.
“I think they were absolutely desperate to get back on the road. You know you just get a taste of something. The blood was in the water for these guys. They wanted to get straight back into it. They’d done so much hard work to promote the band in the eastern states, as they were a South Australian band they wanted to do something here. By this time they had a really good reputation. The people in South Australia were just screaming: ‘When are you guys playing? When are you playing?’ So we put a lot of time into practice. Every single day I’d do a twelve hour day in my other job, get on the train half an hour trip to Gawler. And we’d practice for another two or three hours and I’d catch another midnight train home.”
Gradually finding their feet again, this period found them appearing in the television movie Rock and Roll Cowboys. It was a move that initially appeared as a ‘right opportunity’ yet again didn’t quite go to plan. John struggles to describe the film.
“Rock and Roll Cowboys was a movie that was put out by Somerset Films,” he says. “I don’t remember any of the directors or producers or anything like that. But it had Nikki Coghill, Peter Phelps, Marcus Graham, Roy from Roy and HG. It was for all intents and purposes supposed to be this great film. A bit of an acid trippy sort of thing about this guy who’s repressed as a child and makes this device to control people through music. And through that he manages to brainwash people and exact his revenge on society. Our part of it was filmed in Piermont Power Station. So I’m up to my groin in plaster, full leg plaster, on top of this twelve foot scaffold or something. It’s rickety as hell and swaying – no barriers around it. I had to spend all day up there doing this rock n’ roll cowboys thing.”
With Rock and Roll Cowboys, Escape finally got into a recording studio, yet their inexperience in this area made the experience slightly disastrous.
John explains: “We had to record two songs for it that we performed in the movie. One was ‘Leave Me Alone’ and the other one was ‘My Way’. The deal was, we’d be paid a certain amount of money but they’d also give us enough film footage for two film clips filmed independently of the movie. There was really good footage. So we’re in the studio trying to record and the guy kept going, ‘No, there’s distortion on your guitar. We’ve gotta get rid of that distortion’. So I’ve wound everything down to nothing to get my guitar to sound as clean, as normal as possible. He’s going, ‘No I can still hear distortion’. Well we’re a hard rock/heavy metal band. I’m thinking ‘Wow, this is what recording is like. You play everything clean and you put the distortion on afterwards.’ That’s how clueless we were.”
The smoke and gunpowder of Escape’s concerts has long cleared. The stains of fake blood have long faded. Yet Escape’s legacy in the Australian metal scene remains. Spook recalls how the Escape media blitz brought metal to the masses.
“People were being introduced to heavy metal that weren’t before. So what was happening was, people were coming to the shows to come see Escape. ‘Oh we’ve gotta go see this John the Beast fellow and this band’. And then of course what would happen is, ‘cause there was more shows and bigger shows, it gave an opportunity for the local bands in the places that you played, who normally wouldn’t get exposure, then come along and have the chance to play in front of more people than they can ever think… So when Escape went back to Adelaide or went to another town, those bands through that exposure could then put their own shows on. And it was just a constant revolving door that way, so to speak.”
