Ninety Nine (Go For Broke)

You are locked into THE ZOO, the station that still believes a riff can rearrange the furniture, and right now the needle is on a band that has been rearranging Australian rooms since the jug-band days. This is The Angels, out of Adelaide, and the opener on their 2024 album Ninety Nine. The cut is called “Ninety Nine (Go For Broke),” two minutes and forty-two seconds of pub-rock voltage with a brand-new voice out front and the same last names that have been on the marquee for half a century. If you came in late, stick around. The story behind this one runs from a string band at Myponga to a red-vinyl album on the Bloodlines label, and it still ends with somebody shouting over the top.

“Ninety Nine (Go For Broke)” is track one, side one, written with lyrics by Nick Norton and music by Sam Brewster. Norton used to be the man behind the kit. When the band needed a singer who already knew the angles of these songs from the inside, he stepped to the microphone, and John’s son Tom Brewster took the drum stool. That is how you get two sets of Brewster brothers in the same room: founding guitarists John and Rick, plus John’s sons Sam on bass and backing vocals and Tom on drums. The record was a decade in the making. Rick Brewster has said they started writing and cutting it ten years back, then touring, a lineup shift, and the long pause of COVID got in the way. With a fiftieth anniversary staring them down, they decided nothing else would. They wrote like mad, walked into the studio with finished songs and half-baked ideas, and cut whatever landed. John put it simply: there was a lot of spontaneity, and if somebody had an idea, they recorded it. Norton and Sam threw themselves at the pile, and suddenly the band had a whole new batch.

Norton wrote the words for the title track, and he has been plain about what the number means. It is the ninety-nine percent who have to accept their lot, set against the one percent who take the lion’s share. The super-rich, he said, are richer than they have ever been. That is not a metaphor tucked under a love song. It is a working-band complaint, the kind of line you can holler from a club stage without a lyric sheet. The subtitle, “Go For Broke,” is pure Angels grammar. They have used that phrase on a live album before, and it still fits a group that treats a set like a raid. Two forty-two is short for a band famous for stretching “Marseilles” until the room tilts, but the opener does not linger. It states the case, hits the hook, and gets out of the way so the rest of Ninety Nine can do its work: “Blue Winter,” “Heartbeats,” “Follow the Red Thread,” the long “Heart to Heart,” “Into the Void,” “Under the Stone,” and on through “Hue and Cry.” Rick has called Face to Face, No Exit, and Dark Room the benchmark albums. He has also said Ninety Nine belongs in that company. First studio album in a decade, issued to ride with the 50 Not Out tour, and it does not sound like a souvenir.

The sleeve is a story of its own. Back in the early eighties Rick Brewster was one of the world’s more dedicated collectors of red telephone boxes. He had nine of them in the yard of his Sydney place, and he has kept a shot of those boxes against the sky since 1982. He had T-shirts made from the photo. One day at breakfast John and Sam looked at it and said that was the cover. So the album that argues for the ninety-nine percent wears a picture of obsolete public phones, the old booths where anybody could still make a call. Hard rock does not get more on-the-nose than that, and it still looks like an Angels record.

To hear why a 2024 opener can carry that much weight, you have to go back to the Moonshine Jug and String Band, which John and Rick Brewster started in Adelaide in 1970. The next year they were on a bill at Myponga with Black Sabbath, Daddy Cool, and Fraternity. Electricity arrived, the name shortened through the Keystone Angels, and a Belfast-born drama student named Bernard Patrick Neeson came aboard. Doc, as the country would know him, had grown up on army bases and studied film. He built a stage character out of German Expressionist shadows: dishevelled aristocrat, wild-eyed narrator, a man who could murmur a threat and then hold a note like a flare. AC/DC pointed producers Harry Vanda and George Young at the band. The first single, “Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again,” arrived in 1976 and stalled in the charts. Live, Australia took it anyway. Crowds answered the title question with a chant Doc never wrote, and that answer has followed the song into pubs far from Adelaide. Doc liked that. He said they had tried to write for Australian audiences, and the audiences had made the song their own.

The climb was slow and then sudden. “Take a Long Line” in 1978 was the single that finally made radio blink. Face to Face, released that same year, is the one the history books will not put down: punkish, streetwise, tighter than the boogie around it, with lyrics stranger than the riffs. Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen once called them AC/DC with strange lyrics. Jimmy Barnes has said they changed Australian music. They shared stages with David Bowie on the 1978 tour, and Rick still tells the story of introducing himself on the steps at the Sydney Cricket Ground and getting a compliment back. In America they had to tour as Angel City so nobody would mix them up with the white-suited glam band Angel. “Shadow Boxer,” “No Secrets,” “Marseilles,” “Dogs Are Talking,” a cover of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” that became theirs in the room: the catalogue is a set list you can still build a night on. Doc’s rallying cry before the charge was always the same. This is it, folks, over the top.

The later chapters are messier, the way long bands get. Lineups shifted. For a while there were two groups playing the songs. Doc Neeson died in June 2014 after a battle with a brain tumor, and the country treated it like the loss of a frontman who had given rock a theatrical spine. The Brewsters kept the name and the road. Nick Norton’s move from drums to lead vocal on Ninety Nine is the latest turn, not a reboot. You can still hear the old architecture: martial guitar figures from Rick and John, a rhythm section that knows when to push and when to leave a hole, and a lyric that would rather unsettle you than flatter you. “Ninety Nine (Go For Broke)” does not pretend the clock reset. It argues that the same band that once wrote for the people in the cheap seats still has something to say about who gets the lion’s share.

That is the cut on THE ZOO. No commercials, no focus-group playlist, just the long line from a jug band to a red telephone-box cover. If this one hit the spot, the rest of the station is built the same way: deep cuts, backstories, and the records that still sound like a room full of people who came to hear it loud. Park yourself at THE ZOO and keep the dial where the riffs are.

The Angels keep the lights on at their own place, theangels.com.au, with tour dates and the long trail of the catalogue. The official page on Facebook is The Angels (Official), the Instagram feed is @theangelsbandofficial, and the band’s X account is @TheAngelsBand. Go for broke. The ninety-nine already know the words.