Murray Bramwell talks to Doug Thomas about The Greasy Pop Empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Doug Thomas is about to move into the middle-sized big time. He hopes. After eight years his independent record label, Greasy Pop<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(which has released nearly fifty catalogue items – more than 70,000 singles, albums and cassettes – to the perimeters of the known world) has signed a pressing, promotion and distribution deal with Festival Records. The idea is to get that company’s considerable promotional resources behind two Adelaide bands, the Exploding White Mice and the Mad Turks from Istanbul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is an important step for Thomas’s tenacious little company. Greasy Pop has always lived on its wits but on this deal Doug could lose a large piece of shirt. It has meant considerable expense upfront.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The Exploding White Mice album has set me back six months. It owes me a lot of money. I paid for all the recording. It’s a big investment and right now I owe the pressing plant and the printer, and royalties are due for three or four albums which have sold a couple of thousand copies each.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nevertheless, Thomas is managing to look calm about it. Especially since after only five weeks the Mice album has been doing very good business interstate without systematic Top Forty airplay or the benefits of video saturation, and these days the Greasy Pop label has consolidated a brand loyalty not only in Australia but internationally – a just reward for perseverance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It all started back in 1980 when the Dagoes, a band for whom Thomas played rhythm guitar, decided to make a record. Doug formed a company and paid for recording costs and the returns were ploughed back for their second venture “a massively expensive double EP. We blew thousands of dollars on that record. There were recording costs over months, two lots of mastering, and a massively expensive masterly executed Andrew Mc Hugh cover.” Thomas pauses for an aside-<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Andrew’s one person who has supported me all the way through and if it weren’t for Andrew and the Empire Times Press I doubt that the company would exist.” He also wryly thanks his unnamed bank manager for his forbearance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the success of the Dagoes records, Thomas recalls, other bands began to come forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“They’d come to me and say they wanted to make a record. I’d say: ‘fine but I haven’t got the money to do it – all my money’s in vinyl, in stock. Save up gig money. You’ll probably need $1500 or $2000, less if it’s a single. Then give me the tape and I’ll get it manufactured. I’ll see it through from there.’ I’ve always seen myself as the middleman. To me the music is the important part. I’m just the business man, and a shoddy one at that. But I’ve held it together – for eight years.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thomas isn’t the only independent in the business but his peers are all in Sydney companies such as Citadel, Redeye and Waterfront – or Melbourne, where A Go Go Records is based. So is it tougher operating out of Adelaide?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“It is quite isolated here. The musical centre of Australia is Sydney. But creatively it is happening here. Some of the most vital music in the country has been coming out of Adelaide in the past three years. Bands like The Garden Path and The Lizard Train are on a par with anything in the world. I’m very proud of those records and constantly frustrated that their sales figures haven’t backed up my judgement of them musically.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I don’t have the resources to promote them. And radio in Australia is a closed shop. All the alternative stations play our stuff. But on commercial stations there is no rock and roll radio – there’s no AM radio left in Adelaide or Top Forty. There’s SA-FM, sure, they assist and give me the cursory night-time plays and have picked up a couple of my releases and played them. But basically my releases don’t fit their programming which is quite bland – and I don’t release bland records.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what is the Greasy Sound?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“There is a sense of performance. It sounds like there are people involved, performing songs they believe in. If someone gives me a demo I can pick straight away if it has been worked and worked and worked on. You can hear if something is just awash with overdubs because it has usually lost all its life on the first hearing anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A good song has a hook, lyrics which are not stupid and it’s got that snap. It has got to have life which also has to transfer to the vinyl. When I recorded with the Spikes we did Colour in a Black Forest<\/em> in two days. I like to work quickly, go into the studio and bang it straight down. The more you delay the more tired the band gets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything you hear on the radio has been done over and over until every person or computer chip playing it is screaming to stop. They’re saying we’ve done it till we hate it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I like pop music of all forms whether it be one person with an acoustic guitar or seventeen with wild electric guitars and drums. The Sex Pistols, Radio Birdman and the Saints are influences but I go back to the Sixties to bands like The Masters Apprentices, the Easybeats, the Troggs, the Pretty Things, the Stones and the Kinks. In Australia we are very lucky, we get music from everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAlthough I tend to dismiss English music now. I haven’t heard anything original in ten years. The Punk movement was basically from the Stooges and the New York Dolls from America. It was picked up and repackaged by clever people like Malcolm McLaren. The English are the chameleons of rock and roll, I don’t think they have anything original to offer. I guess my taste is a bastardisation of everything I grew up with, with some kind of weird hippie ideal as to ‘honest’ music, not fabricated stuff.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The paradox of Greasy Pop is that many of the recorded bands are better known in Stockholm or Amsterdam than they are in Adelaide. A large proportion of Greasy stock goes straight out of the country. Thomas doesn\u2019t do mail order selling, it is fiddly and expensive. Instead, he works with distributors in Melbourne and companies like Rough Trade in London who move his stock to France, Germany, Holland and Scandinavia as well as to the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are risks involved when overseas licenses haven’t been properly secured, as Thomas explains:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It not so much a matter of bootlegging as outright lying and thieving. A company in the US owes us royalties for five to six thousand copies of the Mice’s Nest of Vipers<\/em> album. It’s the ‘cheque’s in the mail’ syndrome. This company also released the Screaming Believers and the Spikes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thomas had his suspicions all along but sometimes, he argues, it is a reasonable risk if it enables bands to get their recordings distributed overseas, especially if they have already covered costs with Australia sales. The Nest of Vipers<\/em>, for instance has already been a tidy little earner. It has sold more than six thousand copies Australia-wide which, for an independent, is a hit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the overseas market isn’t always so perilous. The Lizard Train so impressed a Swedish promoter that he flew the band to Stockholm for a rock festival and then organised a three month tour for them. Mercifully, Thomas remarks, the tour broke even and now the band will visit again, and more importantly will sell more records in Sweden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another band, Liz Dealey and the Twenty Second Sect, have attracted a lot at interest from the Megadisc company in Holland who have already released the Triffids, Celibate Rifles and the Screaming Believers. Megadisc are offering to licence the band and give them an advance on further recording. The Twenty Second Sect can hardly get work in Adelaide. Thomas, a vociferous advocate of his fellow musicians, still finds these ironies unendurable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For this reason the Festival link is an important one. “It is a step into the mainstream, not mainstream music but the mainstream industry. You have to join the industry if you want to sell records and get airplay. It’s magic how all of a sudden radio is interested when they’re not on an independent label.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Greasy Pop records and tapes have always been cheaper than mainstream list prices and Thomas keeps a close eye on quality control. In many respects Greasy Pop is a cottage industry. Thomas operates from home, although he is moving into offices in Magill. and he attends to distribution in Adelaide himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A former owner of a record store he knows the trade and makes sure that local retailers are well supplied. He’s a stickler for detail as well. One of the problems in manufacturing records through Adelaide is that there are no facilities for gluing covers. Thomas didn’t like the way the people he hired did the hand gluing so now he does most of it himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for video, Thomas has got nothing against it, except the prohibitive cost. “l can’t warrant putting anything from $1500 to $5000 into one song. I can make an album for that! A video will seldom be played more than once so it becomes far too expensive. I could take a half-page ad in the Advertiser for a week and that would be more effective.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Doug Thomas had been waiting for a question about the Greasy Pop ethic and he just happened to have a press statement handy. He reads aloud:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “l can’t argue for pop music as a new art form. It has been with us under countless aliases for many years. It has been disguised, diluted, synthesised, programmed and horribly overproduced so that now the accepted pop norm is a mechanical disco beat. To me pop music is 4\/ 4 time and Adelaide is one of the few places where pop is being made with energy and an honest presentation of the melodies. The only thing new in pop music is the spirit which creates it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pausing for a moment, he says “I like that. I wrote that to go with the release of two albums by unknown bands – the Handmedowns and Morning Glory. They are barely known in Adelaide, how do I get them through to the rest of the world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n People ask me all the time, what kind of music is it?’ I get tired of saying Power Pop, Paisley Pop, Psychedelic Pop, Garage Pop. It’s Pop Music. That’s the struggle for me, just to get people to listen. But I think I’m starting to break through.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEminence Greasy<\/em>\u201d, The Adelaide Review, October 1988.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Retrieved April, 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Murray Bramwell talks to Doug Thomas about The Greasy Pop Empire. Doug Thomas is about to move into the middle-sized big time. He hopes. After eight years his independent record label, Greasy Pop (which has released nearly fifty catalogue items – more than 70,000 singles, albums and cassettes – to the perimeters of the known world) has signed a pressing, promotion and distribution deal with Festival Records. The idea is to get that company’s considerable promotional resources behind two Adelaide […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,48,21,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-48","category-interviews","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3777"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3778,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3777\/revisions\/3778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}