- A couple of years ago I was at an aboriginal protest camp, where a few participants were sitting around the sound system picking songs. "Play White Dog again!" said someone, and what followed was a slab of punked up pub rock with a chorus declaring "it's a mongrel nation, and your litter's filled with the filth of hatred".
Plenty of anthems for aboriginal justice over the years have been written by white Australians: from Gurindji Blues to My Island Home, Beds Are Burning to Solid Rock. But there was still something surprising about seeing this amped-up slice of bogan rock'n'roll momentarily displacing hip hop as the voice of the oppressed.
That was my introduction to C.O.F.F.I.N., a pub rock band from Sydney's Northern Beaches with more going on than it might appear at first glance. Children Of Finland Fighting In Norway is their semi-self-titled fifth album, and it continues their well-honed art of 70's hard rock riffs, angry yobbo vocals, and lyrics of social observation.
One of the more striking lyrics in that White Dog song was "I'm a white dog too, but at least I wonder/Why the shelter I'm in is void of colour". And it's this perspective that makes the lyrics and politics of C.O.F.F.I.N. most interesting - when they sing about the Aussie suburban bogan, they do so knowing there are suburban bogans in the audience, not to mention in the band.
The line they walk is well-demonstrated by the live album they recorded last year at the Manly Leagues Club - a venue they remind us in the liner notes is on the land of the Guringai people, whose sovereignty was never ceded. If that seems like an unusual juxtaposition, look closer and see that the room they recorded in is the Cliffy Lyons Den - named after a proudly aboriginal rugby league legend.
Politically correct social commentary is not what C.O.F.F.I.N. offer. Children Of Finland Fighting In Norway is full of seedy tales of booze, drugs and violence; set in bars, brothels and prison. They don't play the detached and impartial observer either - Average Death quotes the worrying statistics of women killed by Australian men and questions the role our traditional ideas of masculinity play in perpetuating them. Dead Land is in response to last year's bushfires - for which C.O.F.F.I.N. point the finger of blame at the society who "culled, cleared and pastured" the land, concluding "we're the mistle on the gum, we put the hammer to our thumb".
There is a bit of the street poetry of Don Walker in drummer and singer Ben Portnoy's lyrics, but none of the sweet ballads that helped Cold Chisel cross over in to the pop charts. C.O.F.F.I.N. certainly fit into a pub rock tradition though, a mix of the 70's boogie riffs of Lobby Loyde and the souped-up slide guitar of Rose Tattoo; fed through some of the suburban punk rock of X or Vicious Circle.
Pub rock was always smarter than it got credit for, looked down upon by cultural snobs who would never set foot in a suburban beer barn, let alone a sweaty moshpit. C.O.F.F.I.N. are a reminder that a lot of Australia's best music has come from the suburbs, where of course the majority of the country lives. They are proof you can love rocking out and still have something for the audience to think about, that you can talk about social issues without the detached language of academia. In short, Children Of Finland Fighting In Norway is pub rock as it should be.
- Andy Paine.