THE art of telling a good story shines through with this band.
Former Ipswich journalist Tony Moore formed The Trams with former Courier-Mail music writer Noel Mengel two years ago.
The two journalists have been friends since they were playing in bands in the 1980s, Moore in This Five Minutes and Dog Fish Cat Bird and Mengel in The Version and Curiosity Shop.
“(In the ’80s) I actually shared a house with Noel, a famous place called Quays St, at North Quay (in Brisbane),” Moore said.
“Everybody in the house, like it was in those days, were in bands. There were three or four different bands in three or four different bedrooms. It was a heap of fun.
“As well as the bands that became really successful, there were literally hundreds of other smaller bands. There were places to play, records to release and it was a genuinely, really fun, thriving place and it still is that, sure, but I’m just at the other end of it.”
Almost four decades later The Trams, which also features former Queensland Times sub-editor Rob Mellett on drums, who played in London band Dirty Water, and Sean Bower from Grand Atlantic on bass, launch their first EP Late Rain at Yeronga Bowls Club on Saturday (June 18).
One of the songs on the EP, Boy On A Bus, written by Mengel, is a reflection on the days playing in bands in Brisbane during the 1980s.
“Boy On A Bus is his observations of what it was like in Brisbane in those early ’80s,” Moore said.
“The boy walking through the bus with a head full of songs is me apparently because I used to always walk around with a head full of songs to everybody’s frustration. I used to have really wild hair and Noel dragged up that memory.
“It goes back to the days when the Toowong music shop was where all independent records were.”
Another of Mengel’s songs, December Fog is about Toowoomba.
The lyrics and sound is unmistakeably South East Queensland.
“That’s very deliberate,” Moore said.
With Moore’s 18 years working in Ipswich as a journalist at the now defunct Queensland Times newspaper, there are many Ipswich references in the lyrics, particularly in Haunt The Mines.
“That’s based around the terrible Box Flat mining disaster,” Moore said.
“One of my friends Andrew Palmer, his Dad worked in the mines around that area and that image sort of stayed with me, that the ghosts of those miners are still around, the same as that concept of underground mining is still very much a part of the South East Queensland feel and fabric. And two years ago, we still had mining disasters with mining deaths.
“That’s such a traumatic thing for everybody. That idea of going to work but not coming back is just a frightening concept.
“The lyrics of that song say Aberdare, Swanbank East. They are coal mines I remember when I used to work at the QT. I was trying to get the generations of miners through a little boy talking to his dad and the dad talking to a ghost of his granddad.
“It is a generation lost because there is no underground coal mining in Ipswich anymore but the city was built on coal mines. It was the alternative capital to Brisbane and much of its early wealth was from coal mining, timber and fabric making at Redbank Woollen Mills. I was answering back to that sort of place because I spent so much time in Ipswich. I remember all of those things pretty strongly.”
While a lot has changed in the music industry over those four decades, changes in the media have been even more dramatic.
“It is dreadfully sad the way regional papers have just disappeared, so to speak from the media landscape, unlike [The Fassifern Guardian].
“I’ve noticed that they are coming back and [The Ipswich Tribune] is one that is doing quite well and I think that is a trend that is going to come back; that niche advertising is going to allow small markets to set up again in regional cities and towns.”
When the QT closed down in July 2020 Moore said he was “devastated”.
“I went out there to see an empty building, bumped into a couple of women I used to work with in the office at the advertising section and it was really, really sad, because it was a century-old newspaper, that just closed its doors and as much as online is very much a viable news industry, a century-old newspaper should not have been allowed to just close like that from a daily to nothing. It was wrong. It was an absolute crime.”