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It’s a bit like naming a bridge after the Go-Betweens.
The opening gala of QPAC’s new Glasshouse Theatre in March was a highbrow affair featuring classical music, ballet, Shakespeare, Indigenous dance, and a literary reading from Trent Dalton.
At the end of the night came the pop music. The Little Red Company, well known for covering beloved songs, launched into a medley of great Queensland tracks – Bee Gees, Savage Garden, Bernard Fanning, Sheppard. And it began with a number by the name of ! (The Song Formerly Known As).
To hear Regurgitator’s funky, narky, anti-corporate, anti-consumerist music played to the pollies and corporate donors at the opening of a $184 million theatre – well, the head spins.
Quan Yeomans and Ben Ely had no idea.
“That’s lovely. I mean, you hear that song in the weirdest places,” says Ely, the band’s Brisbane-based bass player, at a cafe in Ashgrove.
“That’s cute, that’s very sweet of them,” concurs Melbourne-based guitarist Yeomans.
“That song reminds me instantly of the Unit recordings, in that abandoned house that was demolished, like, three weeks afterwards.”
Because of a royalties fiasco over samples used in the song, Yeomans has mixed feelings about !
“But it’s still one of my favourite songs to play live, and everyone loves it. It’s a big party song.”
It’s been a 32-year journey from musical outsiders to storming the gates of the establishment, but Yeomans and Ely can be confident of their place in the city’s – and the nation’s – musical firmament.
They are currently in the middle of the biggest tour of their career (55 dates across the country) playing their longest ever sets (two hours of their greatest hits).
The Jukeboxxin’ tour started in Brisbane last October at the 4ZZZ 50th Anniversary show at Roma Street Parklands. They have gone on to visit every state and territory, some twice, and in April, they’ll return to Queensland playing shows in Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Brisbane and Toowoomba.
They are thrilled with the warm reception they’ve been getting in places as far-flung as Port Lincoln, Ulverstone, San Remo and Dunsborough.
“I thought we’d been everywhere in Australia, but clearly not,” Yeomans says.
The band is only playing on weekends (and the odd Thursday) because Yeomans, who is divorced, has his boys on the other days.
“I’m a dad four days a week,” he says, sniffing from a cold caught from one of them.
“The great thing about this tour is seeing young faces. It’s the first time we’ve seen such a broad spectrum of people: old fans with their kids, but also kids in their 20s just turning up on their own.”
“Old fans [are coming] with their kids, but also kids in their 20s are just turning up on their own.”
Quan Yeomans
Alongside longtime drummer Peter Kostic the tour has added Melbourne multi-instrumentalist Sarah Lim, who played on Regurgitator’s most recent album, 2024’s Invader.
“She’s such a cool person to hang out with, we kind of just want her in the band now,” Ely says.
The band famously formed in 1994 as a side project for the three founding members, who already had serious Brisbane groups on the go: Pangaea (Ely), Zooerastia (Yeomans) and Brazilia (original drummer Martin Lee, who left in 1999).
With alternative music going mainstream in the wake of Nirvana, Regurgitator were signed directly to Warner Music.
Famously, the label had expressed an interest in signing prog-rockers Pangaea, but found it preferred the hook-laden, rap-infused metal-pop on the demo tape’s B-side.
The impulse paid off in a string of hit singles as well as an ARIA clean sweep for 1997 album Unit.
It was released the same year as Radiohead’s OK Computer, and Unit now sounds equally prophetic. Anticipating today’s electronically produced pop and rap, it also captures the existential angst that has only intensified a quarter of a century since the millennium: the unnerving feeling that people are products, society is a charade, and disaster is imminent.
Among fan favourites !, I Like Your Old Stuff Better than Your New Stuff, and the satirical bubblegum of Polyester Girl, the track that hits hardest these days is Ely’s Black Bugs. Turning a video game boss battle into a dark prophecy, its chorus asks: “What’s at the end of Satan’s rainbow?”
The band’s cyberschlocky style of absorbing influences and spitting them back out (it’s there in the name) of course anticipated the thing that is now killing human creativity.
“The problem with AI,” says Yeomans, “is that it’s run by a bunch of tech bros who don’t really care about creating anything, they just want to make money … There is a reason why you call it a work of art, right? Work has to be involved.
“I tried it, I dabbled, and I’m firmly against it now.”
“I’m hoping that there might be a pendulum swing,” Ely says, “where people say, you know what, I want to hear music that’s obviously made by people.”
I’d like to see an algorithm come up with their most recent album, Invader. On the one hand a virtuosic display of pop craft, it veers from the 80s pastiche of Cocaine Runaway (with sax solos and pizzicato synths) to Hitchcockian rap mashup Epic to defiant punk jam Wrong People.
Then there are collaborative tracks with electroclash star Peaches, First Nations rapper JK47 and Indigenous philosopher Tyson Yunkaporta that produce visions of drowned worlds and apocalyptic colonialism. Plus a few cheeky laughs.
“I don’t often get proud of my records, but I think it’s probably the best one we’ve done since Unit,” Yeomans says.
My own personal journey with Regurgitator reaches its apotheosis with their 2019 kids’ album, Regurgitator’s Pogogo Show: The Really Really Really Really Boring Album. They recorded it in a single day with singer Jerico Rose Wallace from Perth band Boys Boys Boys.
I’ve played it to my kids endlessly in the car. We even saw the band live at the Princess Theatre; the support act was a puppet show.
Like Joe Brumm and Bluey, Ely says his daughters being young was inspiration for songs like Farting Is a Part of Life and Pull Your Pants Up, Mr Butt.
“I was driving down Hardgrave Road in West End and there was this big old fella and his Lycra pants were coming down. And my daughter was like, ‘oh! Pull your pants up, Mr Butt!’ And I was like, quick, push record, this is a great song.”
Yeomans admits he found it difficult remembering not to swear, and to relate to child audiences. Unlike the band’s drummer. “I got to see how great Peter is at acting and improvising. He’s really talented at that stuff.”
Ely returned to Brisbane in 2014 when his mother was dying. He remained to raise his family: in addition to two adult children he has an eight-year-old daughter.
When discussion turns to the 2032 Olympics his response is perhaps understandable from a band that released the song Crush the Losers as a Sydney 2000 anthem.
“I don’t think we need it,” he says.
“I think it’s a shame to lose Victoria Park. Out of all the cities in Australia, Brisbane has the least amount of green space. That was a special place for First Nations people…
“Old shopping centres aren’t being used, why don’t you put it there? Or what’s wrong with the old QE2?”
It would have come as a surprise to anyone in the Brisbane of 1994 to think that Regurgitator, here at the end of Satan’s rainbow, are still together and still relevant. The Saints and Custard still perform occasionally, but Powderfinger, Savage Garden and the Go-Betweens are long gone. Not to mention the Bee Gees.
“I think if we were just like a middle-of-the-road rock band or something, we would’ve broken up 20 years ago,” Ely says. “But I think because we have that playfulness, and we play with any genre and any style, as long as it’s got that weird playfulness…
“That’s the nature of Regurgitator, and the reason it works.”
Regurgitator’s Jukeboxxin’ tour continues across Australia through April and May.
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