The cliché is true; time flies, accelerates, a lifetime in merely the blink of an eye. With that agreed, I don’t think any of us Octopi have fully grasped that a whole decade has passed since our first single ‘Safe Room’ was released in 2011, for general audial consumption.

But the passage of time - just like an Octopus in Shock – is a rubbery, slippery, complex tangle of evasiveness, guile and changing colours.

In a way, that also describes the mission statement of Shock Octopus. We never wanted to fit in or be neatly categorised. We never wanted to compromise. We never wanted people to find us comfortable. The band has been through many changes in line up and seismic shifts in style since 2011 but the essence always remained – to plumb the depths of human existence and play like our very lives depend on it. But I guess when so many of ones’ songs are about the end of the world, one does have to be a bit ‘living theatre’ about it – there’s not really an alternative way to pull it off.

I remember when the band first started. I had been playing in bands with David Blair in Perth since 2006. Our shtick back then was knocking out epic technicolour pop rock. The songs were great but our reach exceeded our grasp – we hadn’t quite found our voice and the proverbial shit just wasn’t proverbially sticking.

I took some time off, feeling more than a little disillusioned. I set off for Pinjarra to work for a bauxite mining company (as you did when you lived in WA in 2009). I was armed with two new albums of music I had never heard before, that I’d purchased on a whim: Peter Gabriel’s ‘Melt’ and Throwing Muses ‘In A Doghouse.’ I think it was a combination of, a new town, a job involving environmental destruction (quite literally, before my eyes), and the psychotic implosion of the music I was listening to, that birthed this, the first ever Shock Octopus track: ‘A Deer Caught In The Headlights’ .

This was something different – instead of the obvious 3 major chord sing-alongs of yore, ‘Deer’ was angular, disjointed, a little atonal. Time and key signatures would drop out and change as the song chugged along. Piano ballad sections would decompose and reform as a chugging, corrosive 11/8 beast in which the off-rhythm itself masqueraded as the catchy riff. My voice had also changed overnight from something faux operatic to a stoic proxy for Jello Biafra.

Unsure, I took the song to Dave and said ‘I have no idea what this is but I think we’re onto something here and by the way, I want to be lead singer in this new band.’ I think Dave was more than a little bemused in what he heard, but he humoured me by recording a few demos in this freaky new style and in agreeing to form a band.

We found two kindred spirits in Scott Andrews and David Sayers. I knew there was something special about this line-up from day one. To this day they have been the most pleasurable group of people I have ever collaborated with. I always joked that this short lived incarnation of Shock Octopus was the example of a perfect democracy at work, and looking back I don’t believe this is hyperbole at all! Everyone brought in something special to the band. David Sayers was a dedicated guitarist with endless effects pedals and an affection for loud and dirty rock and roll. He brought to the band the gnarled riffs that would soon become our first recorded single ‘Safe Room’. Scott Andrews is a brilliant drummer and percussionist who was willing to keep up with the warped mutations we called songs, often forcing him to change time signature at the drop of a hat. He also provided the band with the lead single for our first EP: ‘Sitting On A Ledge’. The song is a stream of sub-consciousness fed through an angular, neon-coloured, pop-art of chunky riffs and squalling synths – quite a trip. David Blair, mercurial bassist and vocalist, settled in very well with the ‘new sound’ which informed his great contribution to out first EP: ‘Frustrated Crustacean.’ It would be easy to call this a tribute to OK Computer Radiohead – but listen for yourself – there is nothing else quite like it.

Our first gigs were tentative steps into this new uncharted land of trans-genre psychedelia. This was as much the case for our curious audiences as it was for us. Keeping in mind (that) we were knee deep into one of the more conservative eras of Perth’s history (mining booms and all) – people didn’t quite know what to make of the new and weird! After a disastrous band competition in Mandurah I wondered if this was going to work. How long could we pull this off if people didn’t fall into place alongside us?

Soon, however, we knew something kinetic – even magical was happening. There was a little blip of an alt-rock renaissance happening in Perth underneath the conservative exterior, you could feel the excitement in the air. People were coming up to us after the show to tell us they felt legitimately scared by our otherworldly performances. By the time we launched the first EP our shows were a metaphorical (or in my case, literal) amphetamine rush.

It couldn’t last, could it. What is life but a torrent of stop-start motion hallucinations that end as soon as they begin. After the EP launch, we went our separate ways, including different states and countries. One would have thought it would all end there, however what fate never accounts for is tenacity. My tenacity and gusto then was such that I would see a project through, even if doing so was not only impractical but nearly impossible.

So it was in my new home in Melbourne, with Scott in Perth, Dave Blair in Japan and David Sayers having left the band, that I teamed up with fellow Melbournite Bill Presser to record 6 more songs for the 2014 full LP release ‘A Crisis’. To say the recording was ‘problematic’ and the subsequent national tour ‘not without the odd hiccup’ is a true understatement. But to this day the resulting album still sounds great and was almost worth it – I’m just out of recovery after-all! The lead single ‘Siren’ was something very new for Shock Octopus – a shimmering ethereal wall of mid tempo art-pop. The songs’ style indicated that initial tendencies toward epic major chord rock hadn’t quite left our system – indeed they were here to stay! Dave Blair, all the way from Japan, made a promo video for ‘Siren’ from reclaimed movie footage and live footage of the band on the ‘Crisis’ tour - it is a blast.

Following the near heart-attack of ‘A Crisis!’ (aptly named!) Scott and I decided to continue the band as a two-piece, and record a series of acoustic tinged EPs. This was partly to make our lives logistically easier (as we still lived on opposite sides of the continent) and partly to capture the other side of Scott’s song writing – brooding existential rootsy ballads. Misadventure still continued to follow the recording process like insistent apparition, on reflection I believe our first EP as a two-piece ‘Throughout the Winter’ has a degree of tentativeness to it, as my voice struggled to match up to Scott’s new direction of impressive song writing.

Our next attempt ‘Roam in Silence’ reveals a more homogenous synchronicity, in my own opinion. Fan reaction was positive and lead single ‘Fantasia’ has enjoyed the most listens of any Shock Octopus song to date. Perhaps, just like us, our fanbase was growing older and mellower. We even applied for a gig at a folk festival one year!

However, the ‘wide-screen-multi-layered-epic-pop’ bug was a hard one to shake off. We had a recording of one in the vaults, gathering dust: ‘No Easy Way Down’ has long been a live favourite for band and audience alike. In early 2020, we shook the dust off to release it as a double A-side with another group, ‘Counting Backwards’ as a fundraiser for Extinction Rebellion. This created a new wave of community and media interest which inspired us to create an EP in the same vein.

‘Enter the Exit’ was a new approach to the recording and creative process. I layered the keyboards and arranged new tracks such as ‘Life on a Pier’ before sending them off to Dave, Scott and new contributors Magda Wozny and Damien Langley to add their layers of guitar, bass, percussion and vocals. The sound harkened back to my cinematic pop days before Shock Octopus and it felt more evolved. At any rate, it was great to finally have the confidence and ability to create the sounds that I have heard internally, my whole life.

The indie press loved it, the punters loved it, for us it felt like a renaissance. There were even plans to make a whole album in this style, with four new demos written. Alas the recording curse returned once more, along with a second wave of COVID lockdown, and from these sessions only one new track ‘So Far From Home’ made it to the mastering desk.

Is this the end then? Who knows! The band has had the shadow of entropy lurking over it since day one. Time after time we blew it off only to reconstitute again, regenerated in a manner befitting Dr Who. So I’m in no position to predict an absolute here. Regardless of our future, however, I think this is a fantastic opportunity, 10 years later, to be still, look back, and reflect on what has been an incredibly rewarding and fascinating journey.

Ten years into the darkness indeed.

- Michael Bayliss
Shock Octopus