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s ex-frontman of eighties Sydney thrashers The Hellmenn and one of Australia’s most renowned rock poster artists, Ben Brown needs no introduction. Of course, we’ll give him one anyway… The Hellmenn formed on Sydney’s Northside in 1986, a young crew of tearaway surf rats mixing elements of hardcore, power-pop, psych-garage and Detroit rock. Possessing an obvious talent for art, blonde longhaired singer Brown helped define the band’s surfskate-punk image through his striking record cover and handbill designs, which he also provided for other local groups, most notably Massappeal. To this day arguably Brown’s most indelible piece remains the cover art to Massappeal’s 1987 debut, Nobody Likes A Thinker, which became an enormously popular T-shirt print in the late-eighties and early-nineties, even among folks who had never heard of the band. After several seminal releases for the Waterfront label – none better than ‘87’s surf-thrash blast Herbal Lunacy EP – The Hellmen broke-up in the early-nineties, only to reform in ’92 to play the very first Big Day Out and sign a deal with Phonogram development label Id Records, for whom they issued several more EPs before calling it quits in ‘94. The demise of The Hellmenn saw Brown give up music for good, but on the art-front he continues to scribble away furiously. For the past two decades he has remained in demand as a commercial artist, turning his hand to everything from major tour posters to basic CD covers to children’s books, garnering critical praise for his work on posters for the Vibes on a Summer’s Day and Good Vibrations events. In recent times he’s made a slight return to his roots in skate-thrash, as reflected in his T-shirt designs for boutique clothing label Supply and other
brands like Globe, O'Neill and Insight. And he continues to churn out righteous rock art for promoters and bands, as well as contributing toons and sketches to many credible publications including Monster Children, Mad, Stab and UNBELIEVABLY Bad (OK, so maybe that last lot ain’t too credible). One Friday night not long ago, Brown invited UB over the Harbour Bridge to check out the Manly-based studio space he shares with fellow artists, scribble-twin Marty Schneider, painter Marcie O'Neill and photographer Jason Ierace. From the outside, the brick building looks fairly nondescript – you’d walk straight past and not even wonder what went on inside – but stepping over the threshold you suddenly find yourself in an alternate universe, a cubby house-meets-hip art nerve-centre. With Apple Mac set-ups at various desktops, eye-searing designs adorn each wall of the cosy space. Half-done artworks lay strewn about, while on one bench sits a taped-up wad of blank skate decks due to be gnarlified by Brown and Schneider for an upcoming exhibition. Much more than simply a place to work, Brown says the rich creative environment fostered inside this little inspiration factory has given his work a serious arse-rocket of late. After stowing our beers in the mini-bar fridge we head up a narrow staircase to the upper level, an area cluttered with large metal filing drawers, easels, canvases (including a painting by Brown of the classic Nobody Likes A Thinker motif), paint-cans and other ephemera. Somewhere amongst it all there’s a nice spot for Brown and I to plonk our arses, sink a few tins, blaze a few scoobs and talk shit for a few hours...
Did you start drawing before you started surfing? I was into drawing when I was a kid and I always drew. We were Mosman kids so we didn’t live right near the beach but my older brother surfed and he’s about five years older. We all went to Mosman High School and Brett [Curotta – Massappeal guitarist] was a couple of forms above me and Brett’s younger brother was one of my good mates that I played footy with. So I started surfing when I was about twelve and turned into an instant surfing nut – stopped playing footy and everything like that. Then I moved down to the beach when I was eighteen and I’ve always hung around in this area where we are now. I used to live in a house across the road for years. I’ve only really lived in three places over about fifteen years, we just keep getting forced back further from the beach ‘cos it’s fucking expensive. Manly was a slum years ago; it was good. I wish it were like that now. I might be able to buy a house. Anyway, so I was into surfing and I always liked that style of classic seventies surf T-shirt with waves and suns and dolphins and palm trees and things. There was one guy, Rick Griffin, who used to do all the San Francisco rock posters for the Grateful Dead and all those guys but he was a surfer. Griffin was stated as being one of your key influences in the book Plastered: The Poster Art of Australian Popular Music – you liked his little walking eyeballs and stuff. Rick Griffin is one of the greatest designers of the 20th Century. Both his music stuff and his surfing stuff, there’s not really anyone else like him. Since he died – he got killed in a motorcycle accident – his stuff has mostly become museum pieces. So if anyone says like, “Ah, you like Rick Griffin?” It’s more that thing of like, “Well, actually, I’m trying to rip him off!” I think with anything, whether it’s music or art, skateboarding or surfing, it’s the nature of the culture of those things that you have your heroes and that’s partly how your own style gets set.
Who were the fashionable inner city Sydney heroin bands? You’d go see someone like the Screaming Tribesmen and he [Mick Medew] was really this emaciated junkie but heaps of chicks loved it
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Pic: Rod Hunt
When did you discover punk rock? It was Curotta that I would have to credit with turning us on to a lot of stuff. By the time we moved down to the beach we were smoking dope and going and seeing the Scientists and le Hoodoo Gurus when they were still a swamp band with James Baker on drums. So we were seeing those kinds of bands and then Curotta came back from overseas in maybe ’82 or ’83 and he brought back a lot of music and made up a mix tape that he gave to everyone called Septic Yanks, and that turned all of us on to hardcore. The guts of The Hellmenn had already been formed by a bunch of my mates and a guy I was living with called Simon [Jones] on vocals. They were called Fourth Degree and sounded more like Scientists and early-Joy Division when Joy Division were a really rockin’ band. Then that evolved into The Hellmenn some time after Brett’s tape turned everyone onto West Coast hardcore. ‘Cos at the time everything was all about fashionable, heroin, inner city Sydney. And when you saw the hardcore guys, they were just skateboarders and surfers just like us. At the time it seemed there was no real fashion thing that went along with it.