“Having an ex-policeman [Steve Cafiero] playing drums, Ian [Rilen] morphing from the old school Oz thing to what became the punk movement, my hippie cynicism, and the same with [guitarist] Ian Krahe – even the first gigs we did we were wearing denim flares and white school shirts.”
X evolved from Evil Rumours, the band Ian Rilen formed in the immediate aftermath of his departure from Rose Tattoo. Lucas and Krahe had dismissed Bad Boy for Love, the Rilen-penned Rose Tattoo hit, as ‘old man’s boogie’. But when Rilen approached Lucas and asked him to join Evil Rumours, Lucas discovered Rilen wanted to do anything but old man’s boogie.
Evil Rumours became X, the name chosen to symbolise X’s outlaw status. After a gig at the Bondi Lifesaver in 1978, Ian Krahe died from a heroin overdose, further confirming X’s infamy. Having already been banned from various Sydney live music venues, X found itself lumped into the punk movement. It was a tag that surprised the group.
“It’s hard to say things without sounding cocky, but we weren’t the low end of punk. It wasn’t just about making a horrible noise and telling everyone to get fucked,” Lucas says. “We had a sense of humour, and not a lot of punk bands had the sense of sentimentality that we had. We were different on a lot levels.”
After trialling a couple of replacements for Krahe on guitar, Rilen had convinced Lucas he should be X’s next guitarist. It was the three-piece lineup of Lucas, Rilen and Cafiero that entered the studio with Lobby Loyde to record X’s debut album X-Aspirations. Within a few months, X had split. “That’s the whole thing with X,” Lucas says. “We fought from the beginning, we fought to the end, we fought everyone outside of us, when everyone outside turned on us, we grouped together and fought back. When outside wasn’t fighting us, then we fought within us. Classic rock’n’roll idiocy.”
By the time X recorded its second album, At Home With You, Cathy Green had replaced Cafiero on drums. In the late 1980s, X flirted with the stiffs of the mainstream music industry, signing with Mushroom Records. The deal came unstuck after Rilen and Green – by now in a relationship – celebrated the signing of a recording contract with Mushroom by trashing the Mushroom board room after a cocktail party.
After a final tour in 1989 (which included Spencer Jones on guitar), X fractured once again, appearing again in the late 1990s, with Cath Synnerdahl on drums and former guitarist Geoff Holmes. But by 2006, both Synerdahl and the once-indefatigable Rilen had passed away and X was on life support. To the surprise of some X fans, Lucas revived the X name in 2007.
For Lucas, keeping X alive is as much about preserving a part of himself as it is about playing the soundtrack of his life. “There’s so much of my life that’s been part of X, and all through my life X has been the continual soundtrack. For me to let X die would be kind of like me letting myself die. It’s a part of me, I’m a part of it, there’s no-one else to do it.”
This month, Lucas is joined by Kim Volkman (guitarist in Ian Rilen and the Love Addicts, and sometime X member) and Hunters and Collectors’ drummer Doug Falconer to celebrate 40 years of X. A new album of live cuts and rarities, X-Citations have also been released. In addition to demo recordings from the 1977 lineup of Lucas, Rilen, Krahe and Cafiero, there are live tracks featuring Peter Cataunche and a couple of tracks from the last recording session featuring the Lucas, Rilen and Cafiero lineup.
“When I listen to those songs, I realise that no matter who was playing, the songs were bloody awesome,” Lucas says. “They’re still so alive, they’re so fresh, they’re not polished but that’s what makes them shine all the more. There’s no conforming to a perceived industry standard, there’s no compromise to the lyric content.”
