Face the Day

The Zoo Crew has got Face the Day on the turntable right now, pulled off Dark Room by The Angels, and if you have ever stood in a sticky-floored pub while a band made the walls lean in, you already know why this one belongs on the air at THE ZOO. The Adelaide outfit cut the album in 1980, their first for CBS and Epic, with John Brewster and Rick Brewster producing most of it themselves. Dark Room climbed to number five on the Australian charts. Face the Day came out as a single that October, backed with Public Enemy, and it made number 30 in New Zealand and number 67 at home. The single ran a little over four minutes. The album cut stretches past five, and that extra room is where Doc Neeson really gets under your skin.

Writers on the song are the usual Angels triangle: Doc Neeson, John Brewster, and Rick Brewster. Rock biographer Murray Engleheart later called No Secrets and Face the Day the most complete expression of the alienation, isolation, and psychosis that had long sat at the core of the band. He tagged that pair as definitive, rolled-gold Angels. The lyric is a man who does not want to leave the bed, staring at a city of red lights and hungry eyes, feeling like he is on a production line. One old review put it plain: forget the later cover, nobody else could do justice to that declaration of paranoid pressure, because the mania in Neeson's eyes was real. They did not nickname him the Mad Irishman for nothing.

The sessions themselves carried a weight the band never shook off. They were cutting The Moment when word came through that Bon Scott of AC/DC had died. Scott and Malcolm Young had championed the Angels early, and the news landed in the middle of an album already full of closed rooms and bad weather in the head. John Brewster has remembered Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil stopping by the studio with a handwritten note wishing them well on the overseas push that was coming. For North America and Europe the record was issued as Darkroom under the name Angel City, so nobody would mix them up with the American glam band Angel. Two Australian tracks got swapped for Ivory Stairs and Straight Jacket. Face the Day stayed. It became the band's highest-charting album in the States, slipping onto the Billboard chart late in 1980.

American listeners often met the song through Great White, who covered it on Shot in the Dark in 1986 and led with it as a single. That version charted in the UK. Plenty of fans still argue the cover is a photocopy. The original has Rick Brewster's lead guitar cutting harder and Neeson sounding like a man arguing with the ceiling. Decades later the band rebuilt the whole album for the Darkroom Recharged set, studio versions plus a live disc, and the official site still lists Face the Day right beside No Secrets, Poor Baby, and Devil's Gate as the spine of that record. John Brewster has called Face to Face, No Exit, and Dark Room the benchmark albums. That is the shelf this track lives on.

The road to that shelf started in a jug band, which is the part that still makes the Zoo Crew grin. John and Rick Brewster kicked off the Moonshine Jug and String Band in Adelaide in 1970, washboard, washtub bass, banjo, harmonica, the whole front-porch kit. Bernard Patrick Neeson, born in Belfast in 1947 and raised on army postings from Europe to Malaya, had already done national service, taught with the Pacific Islands Regiment, and studied at Flinders. He joined in 1971 under the stage name Doc Talbot, a nod to Doc Holliday, because he hated being called Bernie. He told interviewers he would introduce himself as Bernard and then say, call me Doc. They played Myponga, one of the early Australian festivals, on a bill with Black Sabbath, Daddy Cool, and Fraternity. An EP, Keep You on the Move, even tickled the Adelaide charts.

Then they went electric the way a lot of good bands do when the songs outgrow the washtub. Rick set the washboard down and picked up a guitar at the Modbury Hotel in 1974, and the group became the Keystone Angels so they would not be confused with Red Angel Panic. The first big gig, supporting Cheech and Chong at the Thebarton Theatre, ended with the crowd throwing Minties. They backed Chuck Berry, played Sunbury, shared stages with Ike and Tina Turner, and supported AC/DC on a South Australian run through Port Augusta and Mount Gambier. Bon Scott is said to have told Doc and the Brewsters that The Angels was a catchy name. George Young and Harry Vanda of the Easybeats, the Albert Productions team, signed them and told them to drop Keystone and pick one lead singer. That is how Doc stepped out front. The first single, Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again, arrived in 1976. By the end of the decade they were the highest-paid band in Australia, and the pub crowds had invented the famous answer chant that still rolls out whenever that title gets played.

Doc stayed the voice through the classic years, left after spinal injuries from a car accident, came back for the 2008 reunion, and died in 2014. Guns N' Roses covered Marseilles the following show in Las Vegas. The Brewster brothers are still out there, now with John's sons Sam and Tom in the rhythm section and Nick Norton singing. The old records have not moved an inch. Face the Day is still the one that sounds like a man bracing himself for whatever is on the other side of the door.

If you want the band in their own words and pictures, the official home is theangels.com.au, where the Dark Room anniversary notes sit right next to the current tour talk. Their Facebook page is The Angels (Official), the Instagram account is @theangelsbandofficial, and the X account is @TheAngelsBand. Longtime fans also keep a room of their own in the Facebook group The Angels (Australia), the first fan group set up for the band back in 2008. Spin it again, Zoo Freaks. The groove on this one still has teeth.