If album credits were anything to go by, The Boys Light Up, which was released in April 1980, was a very democratic project. Each band member, apart from bassist Paul Williams, had at least one writing credit. James Reyne had sole credit on two tracks and shared credit on six others. Guitarist Simon Binks had sole credit on two songs and shared credit on two more. It seemed very much a group affair - an extended group affair, if you factored in Brad Robinson's father, Justice Jim, who co-wrote two tracks. The Sydney Morning Herald promptly christened him "the songbird of the Arbitration Commission".
However, in the years to come, The Boys Light Up album would prove to be a costly learning experience when it came to "ownership" of songs, especially for Simon Binks. In most cases, songwriting publishing was very crudely split down the middle: 50 per cent for the music, 50 per cent for the lyrics. Yet songs could be very organic creations: while someone might bring in the bare bones, other members would work out their individual parts, perhaps even add lyrics, often without a formal credit.
Savvier bands, such as America's REM, agreed early on that their songs would be credited equally to all band members, a gesture that circumvented any bickering about money. But Australian Crawl, like most fledgling groups, accepted what had been standard operating procedure for years. As far as they were concerned, whoever wrote the basic chords and the words was given the writer's credit. Input such as guitar melodies, which would become an intrinsic part of their sound, weren't always credited, denying someone like Binks royalties from songs that would still receive airplay 40 years on.
"I do [now] understand the sense of possession a songwriter feels about their songs, but only after Australian Crawl," Binks said many years later. The fair division of credit, he noted, "has been the cause of more band dissolutions than all drugs combined. [But] I don't blame the songwriter, I blame an inequitable system."
Binks felt that the intro for The Boys Light Up, which he had helped create, was "an intrinsic part of the song". But he didn't push for a shared credit, which he'd come to regret. Drummer Bill McDonough agreed with Binks in principle. "We could have avoided [drama] if we had elected from day one to adopt an equal-share model."
In the autumn of 1980, however, all these dramas were way off in the future. Binks summed up the band's initial reaction to creating their debut album when he said that "it had been an exceptional experience". He was convinced that Australian Crawl would succeed internationally, "and my abilities would have been noted then". Right now, youthful exuberance was paramount, the business of music-making secondary.
On the home front, the record started with a bang. The title track was a hit single, peaking just outside the Top 20 on its release in May 1980, days after the band returned home from Sydney where they'd undertaken a four-night stand at the Revesby Workers' Club as guests of the Little River Band, playing to 1000 punters at each show. The Boys Light Up would become an Oz rock standard, "a caustic tale of middle-aged bourgeois women screwing the help and anyone else", as noted in The 100 Best Australian Albums.
The roots of The Boys Light Up stretched back to their days at The Peninsula School and those dreaded dance classes. The phrase "the boys light up" was, of course, the shared joke between James Reyne and the others about their pre-dance ciggie. The finished song, however, dealt with a lot more than dull afternoons mastering the Pride of Erin with the young ladies of Toorak College. It was another of Reyne's social satires, aimed fair and square at his old 'hood. The song's opening line, "I wanna tell you 'bout my mountain home", couldn't have been more explicit. And this sometimes made life difficult for the Reynes of Mount Eliza, according to his brother David Reyne. "Occasionally he'd write songs that were very close to home, particularly about the area in which we lived. There were references to some people that my mother would try to avoid in the street."
James Reyne discussed the song and its origins during an episode of ABC's Love Is in the Air. Apparently, there was a lot going on behind the comfortably middle-class veneer of the Mornington Peninsula. "You know, I remember lots of friends of mine, their parents would have sort of cocktail parties that would get maybe a little out of hand. And you'd hear these stories about ... things that went on, and maybe one of your teachers from school was at the party and ended up maybe down the garden with someone else's wife ... It was that kind of place."
With its recurring references to smoking and lighting up, some casual listeners mistook The Boys Light Up as a drug song. But that wasn't the case - the type of smoking that inspired the title wasn't designed to get you high. "I think suburban audiences thought it was about dope smoking," Reyne admitted. "And it was pretty easy to sing along to." Reyne wasn't offended by the misinterpretation; he was amused. "I thought, 'That's great'."
In his lyrics, Reyne also described scenes of midday masturbation, featuring "mother's little helper" (a vibrator), "repeated blow by blow". It was a very raunchy track, right up there with the smuttiest of Greg Macainsh and Skyhooks. "It's basically a song about a blow job," Reyne admitted.
It was a lot to air on mainstream radio stations across Australia, but no one - programmers, DJs, advertisers - appeared to cotton on to the racy lyrics. Reyne had accomplished something with The Boys Light Up that had eluded Skyhooks' Greg Macainsh: he'd snuck one past the censor. But it was banned by Countdown; clearly someone on the show had wised up to the raunchier aspects of Reyne's lyrics. Still, there was an upside.
'Being banned on Countdown got us a lot of press," Paul Williams said. "And we thought, 'Good, this is cred - we need this'. It gave us a bit of an edge." Because of its drug and sex references, Cold Chisel's 1978 single Khe Sanh had also been banned from the show, as had international tourists XTC, for bad miming, and The Boomtown Rats' Bob Geldof, for badmouthing pretty much everybody. Australian Crawl were keeping interesting company.
