ARCA releases The DUGITES LIVE at Billboard 1981 desk tape

The DUGITES Live at Billboard 1981 is the 49th release of the Australian Road Crew Association’s (ARCA) Desk Tape Series. Due for release on May 2nd 2025.

The series was created by ARCA to raise badly-needed finances for Support Act’s Roadies Fund to provide financial, health, counselling and well-being services for roadies and crew in crisis.

The live tapes are recorded off the mixing desk by a crew member – here, it was the legendary Wayne “Swampy” Jarvis (R.I.P) doing the FOH mix, and the show was recorded by Billboard’s stage manager George Alexander.

The tapes are released on ARCA’s Black Box Records through MGM Distribution and on all major streaming services.

Over 50 artists have now thrown their hats in the ring to help support those in need.

The ARCA Desk Tape Series is acknowledged in media for its historical importance in capturing great live music from great live acts.

Huge thanx to Greg Noakes, Lynda Nutter and Tony Mott for the photos, Nprint for the artwork, Phil Dracoulis for the mastering, and especially the DUGITES and crew for their support of roadies and crew.

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The DUGITES Live at Billboard 1981

BAND

• Lynda Nutter:                  vocals
• Peter Crosbie:                 keyboards
• Gunther Berghofer:        guitar
• Clarence Bailey:               drums
• Paul Noonan:                  bass

CREW

• Rik Van Der Velde:          monitors
• Wayne “Swampy” Jarvis (R.I.P): front of house
• George Alexander:         stage (Billboard)

TRACKS

• 1 Thirteen Again
• 2 Who Loves You More
• 3 No Noise
• 4 Goodbye
• 5 Malcolm’s Got A Problem
• 6 After The Game
• 7 Go To Sleep
• 8 Count On Us
• 9 Let’s Go, Do The Tesco
• 10 Wishing And Hoping
• 11 Being Used
• 12 Waiting
• 13 There’s A Place
• 14 Don’t Say No To A UFO
• 15 Gay Guys

The DUGITES Live at Billboard 1981 live tape and all the ARCA Desk Tape Series recordings are available through Black Box Records – ARCA (australianroadcrew.com.au) and the following:

https://ffm.to/liveatbillboard-1981  (paste into browser if it fails to work)

• Amazon
• Apple Music / iTunes
• Black Box Records
• Deezer
• MGM Distribution
• Spotify
• Tidal YouTube Music

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At The Top

In 1981, The Dugites were at the top. They were signed to Sydney-based Deluxe Records, whose roster included INXS, Numbers and Heaven.

Their first self-titled album went gold for sales of 35,000 and reached #22 on the ARIA chart.

It yielded the hit singles “In Your Car”, ”Thirteen Again”, “Goodbye”, ”No God, No Master”, “South Pacific” and ”Gay Guys”.

Their second album was a month away, also produced by Bob Andrews of England’s Graham Parker & The Rumours. Many songs as “Waiting” and ”Who Loves You More?” were previewed at the Billboard show.

They were being nominated for Countdown awards, including best newcomers and most popular female artist. They were filmed on a cruiser in Sydney Harbour for Simon Townshend’s Wonder World.

“It was a terrific time,” singer Linda Nutter recalls.

“We were on Countdown all the time, and we got the five-star treatment on the Elton John tour.

“Having the finished product of your first album on your knee was a wonderful experience. Hearing our songs on the radio was a thrill … and still is!”

Rik Van Der Velde, who worked with Men At Work before doing The Dugites’ monitors, remembers their shows around the time of the Billboard show (in Melbourne): “They were red hot, so passionate about what they did.

“Lynda was very good, she was true to whom she was, and very enthusiastic.”

Adds George Alexander, who was stage manager at the club and recorded The Dugites’ tape, “I loved their live sound and their tunes, and their ability to put news events in their lyrics.

“They really tried to bring awareness to the public as well as being highly musical. Plus, they were quite nice to talk to.”

Alternate Scene

The current affairs songs also made them darlings of the alternate scene.

“South Pacific” was a protest against French nuclear tests in the region and used on an ABC-TV doco about the tests, and “Cut The Talking” was a plea for peace during the Cold War”.

“Gay Guys” was banned from commercial radio, and subsequently the first song played on 2JJ when it began broadcasting on the FM band on July 11, 1980.

Nutter explains the ban: “It was a period of people being paranoid about the AIDS virus, that we were all going to die from it, not just gay people.

“There was a strong feeling in the community about it. There was a lot of propaganda about it, same as there was years later about COVID.”

The singer goes on to say, “I don’t think we were a political band, as such. But Peter, as the songwriter, felt it was important to make a comment on the times we were going through.

“We were going to die from a virus! We were all going to get blown up by the bomb!

“We had really silly debates. One conversation we had as a band was that, if war did start, do we keep touring or go home to our families? We ended up deciding we’d keep touring!”

“Malcolm Has Got A Problem” takes a swipe at Australia’s Prime Minister at the time, Malcolm Fraser, for slashing the funding of the all-important community radio stations.

Against a frantic ska beat and strong melody, they sing, “Malcolm’s got a problem because he’s just like us.”

“No Noise” is about muzak, in which Lynda sings, “I can’t go on much longer.”

She explains, “At the time, every public space was filled with this insidious synthetic music.

“It was so pervasive. It drove us insane on the road. Every hotel lobby, every elevator, had muzak playing. We couldn’t get away from it.

“Around that time, there were so much fabulous music and great bands around, the pubs were thriving. And there was this horrid plastic music.

“Once staying at the Diplomat Hotel (Melbourne) and it was in the hallways. The drummer and I stuffed cardboard into the speaker to deaden the sound so we didn’t have to hear it!”

Got Together

When The Dugites got together in 1978 in Perth, taking their name from the brown venomous snake of WA, their music tastes were wide.

Crosbie was just back from London where he worked with prog-rock band King Crimson.

Nutter did musical theatre training, and grown up on ‘60s girls groups as The Supremes and The Ronettes.

“I wanted a sound with poppy tunes, catchy choruses, and would get on radio.”

While both were in the band Tarzans Grip, the others were students of music at the University of Western Australia.

The original lineup included Gunther Berghoffer on guitar, Phillip Bailey on bass and Clarence Bailey on drums. In 1980 Paul Noonan became the bass-player.

As The Dugites Live At Billboard 1981 shows, their early sounds ran a pencil across ska, punk, electronic and power pop.

Nutter: “In Perth you could hear any style of music. We were still learning who we were.

“We were experimenting as musicians because we’d been playing together for a couple of years.

“We were experimenting with any style and hoping it would work.”

There was a lot of joy in their music, as with “In My Car” about Lynda’s excitement of being a teenager driving around with friends, the power pop “Thirteen Again”, “Who Loves You More” and “Goodbye”.

“Lets Go, Do The Tesco”, introduced as “a song about cheap Japanese equipment” on the tape, is a zany staccato rhythmic in which they urge the crowd to do the new dance, promising them, “It’s gonna be bigger than disco!”

Comedy

Nutter: “We were much more of a comedy band in our early days in Perth, with a lot more social commentary and politics onstage.    

“There were crazy moments, like people dressing up as cockroaches. Once we built a PA system from cardboard so we could kick it over into the crowd.”

The crowd was mostly college students. They also had a lot of under-aged fans. “They would turn up with their mums and listen in the car park, and get our autographs after.

“At the time in Perth, there were a lot of serious bands, wrist-slashing and angst, with a lot of pain in their music.

“We came from a different place. Those bands probably didn’t like us!”

The Perth scene at the time was predominantly male rock bands, and Nutter admits. “I felt threatened in those venues where there was a lot of drinking going on.”

Little wonder The Dugites had a strong kinship with The Eurogliders, another band fronted by a female singer (Grace Knight) and who started having hits around the same time.

Nutter and Knight were very close. They lived next door to each other when they later lived in Sydney. They’d make stage costumes together.

“Their guitarist Bernie Lynch and Peter used to write songs together, and at one point planned to form a band together.

“But in the end, they swung off into the two bands.”

One advantage was that with Crosby such a tech-head (he had his own recording studio where he created jingles) where, The Dugites were among the first to buy a sampler.

“The Fairlight was one of the first samplers / synthesisers. Everyone uses them now, but at the time it was special because it made you sound like you had more musicians onstage.

“One time we had to play in Darwin and all the equipment had to go overland through the desert.

“The Fairlight was a very expensive equipment then, so it was stored inside a box inside a box and inside a box inside a truck.

“It arrived in Darwin with powder particles completely through the machine and it wouldn’t work.

“It was a huge show, with Mondo Rock and Mental As Anything, and Peter had to borrow the Mentals’ Greedy Smith’s keyboard, which was a little dinky Casio or something, with two sounds!”

The opportunities of the sampler led to their working on more ambitious atmospheric numbers like “Go To Sleep”, “Waiting” and “Count On Us”.

Envelope

Although The Dugites got more serious after moving to the East Coast, there were still moments that pushed the envelope.

During a Countdown appearance doing “Juno and Me”, they brought in a mime artist who performed impromptu as a counterpoint to the screaming studio audience.

On another Countdown appearance, they sent up the show’s “miming” policy by jumping frantically up and down for three minutes and playing without a sound.

The show’s host and talent booker, Ian “Molly” Meldrum, was highly offended.

When The Dugites did their first East Coast tour, they were lucky to be both a support band for Perth band “Dave Warner From The Suburbs”.

Some of the members also played in that band.

Warner played to big crowds on the East, and The Dugites got noticed very quickly, both by live audiences and promoters and journalists, and immediately got a record deal with Deluxe.

Touring was, Lynda remembers, “such a joy, it was stimulating and exciting to be playing to new audiences.”

Their road crew kept them entertained. Once when they were bored, they turned all the furniture in the room upside down, even gaffer-taping the telephone and towels to the ceiling.

Another time, one whose father was a pilot managed to talk himself into the cockpit and made announcements to the passengers he was flying the plane while smoking marijuana.

The band relaxed on the road with Nutter painting, Noonan entering bridge competitions and Berghofer doing his martial arts. But Lynda remembers, “Touring could also be gruelling.”

On their first tour East, they didn’t give themselves enough time to travel from Kalgoorlie to Adelaide, or time to recover.

After the hits came, they’d be touring in blocks of six to eight weeks, with just a few days off.

Once they all got the flu and Lynda collapsed on stage, and they went off the road for a week.

At one point she left The Dugites. They asked Jenny Morris to step in. But she wanted to do her own songs, and they coaxed Nutter back.

The videos and album covers showed off good fun and glamour.

But in reality, they were about 5 am starts in freezing weather and running on high heels all day, or posing in a swamp hoping that leeches wouldn’t crawl into their shoes.

Financially, touring could be a headache. As Nutter relates, overheads were so high that you worked 25 or 26 days just to get 3 or 4 days of profit.

If someone got sick, or two gigs got cancelled, or someone forgot to do a poster run or take out advertising of their gigs.

Despite the success and hard work, The Dugites found themselves in debt of $40,000 (about $150,000 in 2025 money).

A 1984 tour with Mondo Rock and Mental As Anything paid off the debts.

But at a band meeting after that, it was decided that there was a risk of getting more into debt if they continued.

After five or six years, it was time to go their own ways.

Aftermath

Lynda Nutter went back to musical theatre with Bran Nue Dae (playing Marijuana Annie) and The Ramones’ Gabb Gabba Hey, formed the band Snakefish, and had a stint working as a singer in Japan where she learned the language.

She also had a fulfilling period teaching theatre at Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

Crosbie moved to Belgium, while the other members continue to play.

Berghofer died of a brain aneurysm. Ironically, his funeral was on the same day that The Dugites played a reunion set at Old Day Out alongside 20 other bands from that era.

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For more information on ARCA, go to https://australianroadcrew.com.au/ and to check out the 41 other Desk Tape releases, go to The Desk Tape Series – ARCA (australianroadcrew.com.au)

ARCA would like to thank the following sponsors of The Desk Tape Series:-

Sponsor                            Industry Roles

• Showtech                         Rigging                           
• CMI                                   P.A and Production                     
• Clearlight                          Lighting                                    
• DSE Trucks                       Transport                                  
• Scully Outdoors               Outdoor Production          
• Gigpower                         Crewing and Staging                            
• Lock and Load                 Crewing                          
• Chameleon Touring        Production and Lighting                        
• JPJ                                      P.A and Lighting                                            
• Novatech                          P.A and Lighting    
• Phaseshift                        Lighting                                    
• Show FX Australia           Pyrotechnics                    
• Event Personnel Australia   Crewing                          
• Norwest                           P.A and Lighting Production
• Nprint                               Artwork

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Ian Peel and Adrian Anderson

ARCA Co-founders and Directors.

Note from founders:-

“ARCA and The Desk Tape Series is a small way we can help our mates get some self-worth and recognition for their contribution to the Aussie music industry and help if they are in crisis. It is a great honour for us to be able to present these memories to all.”

All Hail Roadies and Crew

“Looking after OUR OWN with FEELING and a WHOLE LOTTA LOVE”

All ARCA enquiries contact :

• Adrian Anderson                                0409 789 440
• Ian Peel                                               0415 667 221
• Michael Matthews (Media)         0418 536 637