Down Under Sound: Melbourne's 90s Derelicts & The Disintegration of Chapter 24 | Public Record

by Frank KruseListen while you read: Chapter 24 “Instant Life” (1994)

Bionoid Inside (2024 reissue) by Chapter 24

Read to the end for the exclusive Purple Iris demos.

It was a four-year roller coaster ride of tense relationships, ultimately leading to broken friendships and the end of one of Melbourne’s most interesting rock bands.

Chapter 24 was formed in 1994 by four guys in thei r mid-twenties: Andy Hutchinson, Tony Matosic, Jos Morgan, and Dean Champ.

They played the thriving live music circuit that Melbourne was famous for and were developing a small underground following when, at the peak of their ascension, they broke up. Their album Bionoid Inside could be considered one of the greatest nearly lost rock albums to come out of Melbourne in the ’90s.

Making money from your music didn’t immunize you from failure and, in some cases, guaranteed it. Many of the bands pushing boundaries in Australia during this fever-dream of an era never received much recognition outside their friends accolades.

For some, drug addiction, homelessness and mental health problems awaited them or even worse–suicide. Unlike today, you didn’t have access to 100,000 new songs uploaded into your pockets daily. You had music stores selling CDs, cassettes, and vinyl, live gigs, and the late night music-video shows you watched while getting stoned until you fell asleep on the couch, only to be woken up by your house-mate’s annoying friends.

Chapter 24had its roots in rural Victoria, via Jos’ first band, Ice Has No Germs and Dean’s thrash metal outfit Riprendre. Both Jos and Dean had lived in the small country town of Hamilton.

Dean recalls:

“Being in a band had kept me sane and given me some sense of identity, but after my best friend Nuts died in a car accident in 1992, the claustrophobia of living in a country town was literally killing us.”

Moving to Australia’s second largest city was where things fell into place. Melbournians Andy Hutchinson and Tony Matosic were in a band called Alien Trade, which turned into Thursday Night Disease when Jos joined, and then later after Dean was recruited, Chapter 24 came into being.

Andy named the new lineup after the Pink Floyd song.

Kurt Cobain, 27 years old, killed himself only a few months earlier.

If you were born in 1970, by 1994 you would’ve been 24-years-old. If the Boomers had the ’60s, then Gen-X had the ’90s and Melbourne was Australia’s mecca for live music. On any night of the week, you could walk into a pub and hear strange sounds emitting from dodgy PA systems.

There was a coexistence of musical styles and scenes that fed the underground.

At gigs you’d hear punk-hardcore and metal bands like Beanflipper,

Dreadnaught, and Powder Monkeys; and electronic outfits like ORAC, New Waver, and Lung UPC.

The deeper you went, the more you’d find yourself in dark dingy warehouses listening to art-inspired cross-genre bands like Clowns Smiling Backwards and Scarecrow Tiggy. Or the ’60s revivalist outfit like The Freeloaders. Obscure bands that never really recorded like Psychic Boots, The Reasoning, The Red Textas. Home-tapers like Rhesus and Frankie Death performed rare solo gigs. There were hundreds of musical acts contributing to this flourishing creative environment.

Much of the music scene’s intimacy relied on proximity. Those who lived nearby were the fortunate ones. Within this musical melting pot, Chapter 24’s blend of art and hard rock could be experienced. The venues and crowds were often small, which made the experience of live music all that more intimate.

Chapter 24 recorded a bunch of songs on a Tascam 8-track reel-to-reel at Jos’ home studio in Kinglake, drawing from their influences of ’60s psychedelic rock, Americana and ’90s hard rock. Dean named the demo after a short story by Charles Bukowskiand admits that, at the time, the rest of the band didn’t know where the name came from or what it meant (I’ll give you a clue: its an appendage).

Cassette tapes were made and the Purple As An Iris demo was used to garnish gigs. Their debut performance was opening for the fifth Waterstock Music Festivalon December 3rd, and after supporting The Fat Thing at The Espy in early 1995, they embark on a mini-tour with Ballarat band The Dead Salesmen with support by The Severins, and Haystack. The highlight was a gig at The Barwon Club in Geelong, where the crowd went absolutely bat-shit-crazy.

Other bands they shared the stage with include Creeping Jesus, Bzark and Breather Hole. A music journalist in Forte magazine said, “They’ve got a sound based on powerful rock’n’roll but with loads of interesting ideas, sounds and arrangements that help them sound unlike anything else.”

“Chapter 24 was a loud band,” boasts Dean. “And by loud I mean punishingly so. My amp was always cranked with the distortion dialled, Andy pounded his kit hard and often used his crash cymbals instead of the ride.” At the one and only gig at The Empress Hotel, they refused to turn the volume down and, consequently, were banned for life. During a gig in The Gershwin Room, at the famous Esplanade Hotel, Jos upset management by throwing the mic around, emulating Mike Patton, who he’d just seen with Faith No More the night before at Festival Hall.

Ryda, from Ballarat band The Dead Salesmen, recalls:

“In my memory, Jos was about 7-feet tall, you could see him walking down Ballarat’s bluestone streets from about 2kms away. He was a big personality and he never did things by halves.”

Bionoid Inside (2024 reissue) by Chapter 24

Jos’ friend Darren ‘Mini’ Mitchell was brought in as the band’s manager. He had connections in the music industry and was good friends with John Justin, a legendary ’80s glam-pop icon who had commercial success with his outfit The Thunderwings.

After arranging ‘mates-rates’ with Johnnie as the audio engineer, night-time recording sessions began at the professional RBX Studio (famous for artists like the Black Sorrows, Yothu Yindi and Kim Salmon & The Surrealists). Jos remembers “Johnnie was living above Revolver like Edward Scissorhands, in his burnt-out bedroom with holes in the floor.”

John Justin, in a way, tried to put his own ‘sound of Melbourne’ into the Bionoid Inside recordings. A dark, guitar-based, intellectual & moody tone first credited to Tony Cohen, who as a young engineer recorded legendary rockers The Birthday Party, Beasts Of Bourbon, and The Scientists. Mini organised a meeting for Jos with Michael Parisi, A&R manager at Warner Music Australia (1993 - 1999). Jos rocked up to the meeting in torn jeans, a ripped t-shirt and bare feet. Parisi may have enjoyed his cavalier appearance but nothing eventuated from it.

Mini observes that:

“Jos was ahead of his time and was maybe misunderstood by many around him. Feeling a sense of failure, in retrospect, my attempt to push Jos into a more commercial arena might not have been the best approach. The rest of the band wanted it and were ready to take Chapter 24 to the next level, but Jos wasn’t.”

With a sense of frustration that the RBX recordings didn’t capture their sound or energy, Chapter 24 recorded more songs at Jos’s home studio, on the 2nd of March 1996. Jos was studying audio engineering at the SAE Institute and achieved a sound the band were happier with. Then out-of-the-blue, Jos decides to leave on a trip around Australia in an old school bus with no clear idea of when he’ll return.

With Jos absent, the band decided to compile the best of the recorded songs into an album, which was then mastered by David Briggs of Little River Band fame. It was picked up by Blah Blah Blah Records and released on CD in 1997. In Memphis, Tennessee, 30-year-old Jeff Buckley’s lifeless body is raised out of the Mississippi River.

“That bond Jos and I had made before I joined the band was straining,” recalls Dean, “The initial excitement of being in a band with so much potential was imploding with constant arguments and tension in rehearsal rooms about the songs and musical direction. It felt like we had no clear future or plan.”

Jos finally returned eight months later in time for the album Bionoid Inside to be officially launched at the Punter’s Club on April 26, 1998. A decent sized crowd shows up, CDs were sold and overall the launch was a success. But what the audience didn’t know is that it would be the last time the band would ever play together. Chapter 24 was cooked. And as the decade progresses, many Melbourne bands suffer the same fate.

Since Nevermind became a commercial success via airwaves saturation, for some, Nirvana came to symbolise the idea of “Selling Out”. An anti-corporate sentiment permeated the air and opportunities for commercial success was sometimes floundered and ignored.

Today’s artists may find this incomprehensible in a world of increasing living costs, economic turmoil, and mayhem caused by war mongering billionaires. But in the ‘90s, independent bands that signed to major labels lost credibility. Opting into the system was, to quote Bill Hicks, ‘sucking Satan’s cock’.

Selling your soul to major labels was incomprehensible for many, and as the year 2000 loomed closer, the end felt near and nihilism was alive. Guy Lucas, frontman of Melbourne’s esteemed band The Freeloaders died of a drug overdose aged 31.

By the late ’90s, venues were closing and radio had resorted to playing pop music again. Despite their promising start, Chapter 24 faced too many challenges to continue. Tony, Andy and Dean decided that they couldn’t handle working with Jos anymore. They turned up to the next rehearsal without their instruments and Andy was tasked with telling Jos it’s over.

Dean says “Jos the creative had evolved into Jos the antagonist. Being in a band with Jos had destroyed our friendship and I never saw him much after that. I still have anxiety-inducing dreams a few times a year of the many things going wrong at a ’24 gig.”

After his expulsion and the disintegration of Chapter 24, Jos played a few rare solo gigs around Melbourne. Not long after, he started to battle with his mental health and was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The ‘90s was a decade of genius and musical misadventure. The underground and independent artists of this period are severely undocumented, especially in Australia.

“Listening back to the remastered songs, they’re eclectic and strange and such a melting pot of influences,” Dean admits that “Jos’ pop and anti-pop sensibilities are much more prevalent than I remembered at the time. There are always hooks in his melodies, where every line he sings explores a different rhythm and phrasing. Tony’s bass playing and musicianship is incredible on every song and alongside Andy on drums they combined for an airtight moving beast of a rhythm section. The album is a testament to what independent music should be, inasmuch as Bionoid Inside sounds like nothing else.”

As for most bands of this period, Chapter 24’s music was only ever available on cassette and CD. And now, for the first time in 32 years, the Purple As An Iris album can be heard by new audiences.

Bionoid Inside and Purple As An Iris were remastered for digital release by Mike Fridmann, who has worked with bands like The Flaming Lips, MGMT, and Mikaela Davis. Bionoid Inside was reissued in 2024 and both albums are currently only available via Australian net label Cosmic Coffin.

As a famous dead Austrian neurologist once said:

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

PR Exclusive:

Chapter 24 “Purple As An Iris” Demo:

Also visit: https://cosmiccoffin.bandcamp.com/album/bionoid-inside-2024-reissue