Paulie Stewart - Activist, Punk Rocker
Lead Singer of “Painters and Dockers”
Q: Let’s start with music, because that’s how I first knew you—in the pub gigs of the ’80s. Do you give your music a label? Do you call yourself punk?
A: I never considered myself a musician at all. I sort of got into it all by accident, really, because my claim to fame was being a bad trumpet player in the school band. But I used to go to all the punk gigs and ran into this group of guys. One day at the South Melbourne Market, one of them said, “Didn’t you play trumpet at school?” I said, “Yeah, but I was shithouse.” He replied, “Doesn’t matter—it’s punk. Just come along and play one song.”
So we did this benefit gig in Port Melbourne. The drummer was Billy Walsh from Cosmic Psychos. We needed a band name and since the pub was the Painters and Dockers’ pub, we thought, “We’ll call ourselves that—for one night only.”
But that night, the neighbour hated the noise so much he jumped the fence with an axe and started chopping the mixing desk. Kids freaked out, someone rang the cops, and three divvy vans turned up. Of course, the one rule at the Painters and Dockers’ pub was no cops allowed. A huge brawl broke out—beer, blood, vomit flying everywhere. I was on stage playing one song thinking, “I want to do this for the rest of my life.” Forty years later, we’re still going.
Q: You had a reputation as the “bad boys” of Melbourne. Was that deserved?
A: Not at all—we were the softest pussies you’d ever meet. But because we were linked with the union, people assumed we were hard-asses. Like when the Picasso was stolen, the cops came straight to us saying, “Give it back.” We hadn’t touched it! But we played it up.
Our video clips didn’t help either. Mushroom Records wanted us on a yacht with models for Nude School. We said, “No—we’ll do it naked on a pig farm.” Then for Die, Yuppie, Die, we filmed outside the Melbourne Stock Exchange—on the very day the world financial markets collapsed. Time Magazine even mentioned it, saying the crash was “kicked off” by us. We loved the chaos and just leaned into it.
Q: When you play today, do you perform new material or mostly the old stuff?
A: A mix of both, but the crowds mostly want the old songs. Our fans were in their twenties back then—now they’re in their fifties and sixties. They come back to relive their youth, and suddenly you’ve got bald guys stage-diving and pogoing like it’s 1982.
Just last week we played in Brisbane with a huge crowd. Jeremy Oxley from the Sunnyboys joined us, and we did a couple of their songs together. That was special.
Q: The Melbourne pub scene of the 1980s was legendary. What was that like for you?
A: Incredible. You’d know it—you said you were at gigs around 1980. We’re about the same vintage. It was an amazing scene.
These days, I even run the Punk Rock Walking Tour for the St Kilda Council. Fitzroy Street had the famous Thursday Night Crawl—you started at the Prince and worked your way along. I bet you were there too.