FRC

The Zoo Crew has got a chip on the shoulder spinning right now, and the Zoo Freaks are welcome to ride along. Over at THE ZOO the turntable is locked on “FRC” by The Screaming Jets, taken from the debut long-player All for One. Around the station we file it as All for One (Edit), the cut that still makes a room of working stiffs throw their heads back and shout the chorus like they own the joint. The letters stand for Fat Rich Cunts. That is not a wink. That is the whole point of the song, written by the Newcastle boys who were still young enough to mean every word and loud enough to make a major label flinch.

Grant Walmsley, one of the guitarists who built the track with Dave Gleeson and Paul Woseen, later put it plain on the band’s own history notes. It speaks for itself, he said. The rich get richer, the poor get the picture. They were very young working-class lads with a huge chip on the shoulder about the Alan Bonds, the Russ Hinzes and the Christopher Skases of the world. Bond was the corporate cowboy who bought half the country and then watched it slide. Skase was the high-flyer who left creditors holding the bag. Hinze was the Queensland politician the Jets liked to name from the stage when the chant kicked in. Walmsley also recalled that the song picked up Kerrang magazine’s Credibility of the Year nod in Britain in 1991, and that the American company put it out as a limited-edition package. Good luck finding a copy, he said. He already had his.

Dave Gleeson told Noise11 in 2021 that he fought tooth and nail to keep the track on the album. The label crowd at PolyGram heard the word and went pale. He stamped his foot, banged the table and told them if it was not on the record, the record was not coming out. It put the manager through hell, Gleeson said, but in the end it stayed. He figured the Jets were the first band on a major label anywhere to get that particular word onto a commercial release, and he wore it like a badge. Boys from Newie done good, was how he put it. The joke landed a few months later. The same American office that had winced at the title shipped “FRC” first, as a college-radio EP. Gleeson had to walk around the States explaining that back home the word could mean a good bloke as easily as a villain, and every time he said it people looked at him like he had kicked a sacred cow. They got through the tour without getting shot, which he counted as a win.

On the boards the song was never polite. Gleeson would dedicate it to fat rich types all over the world who live off the little people and seem to delight in pissing on their heads. Some nights the name was Michael Gudinski, the mogul who ran so much of the Australian industry. Other nights it was Hinze again. Guest singers from Mortal Sin, the Choirboys and the Angels have taken the mic on it. The United States and Canadian pressings of All for One left the track off entirely and sold it on the side. A Japanese pressing even printed the words out for anybody who needed them in another language. The original Australian album, released in April 1991 on rooArt, climbed to number two on the ARIA chart. Thirty years later the band cut the whole record again with the original producer, Steve James, and that anniversary edition went to number four. Rooms still fill when the chant starts. Gleeson has said he loves the spread of that first album, three or four writers pulling in rock, blues and a bit of reggae, and “FRC” sits in the middle of it like a boot through a boardroom door.

The men who wrote it did not fall out of a magazine. Gleeson and Walmsley met at St Francis Xavier’s College in Hamilton, up in Newcastle, back in 1981, and their first job together was a school dance at the Newcastle Town Hall. They ran through a band called Sudden Impact, then another called Aspect. Paul Woseen came in on bass in 1988 from the local underground scene. Richard Lara took the second guitar and Brad Heaney, already known from the Radiators, sat behind the kit. In January 1989 they stopped being Aspect and became The Screaming Jets. The first gig under the new flag was billed, for one night only, as The Love Bomb, in a Newcastle pub that March. By November they had won the first Triple J National Band Competition. Inside a year they had played something like 280 shows, filling every room in their hometown and picking up support slots with the Angels, the Choirboys and the Radiators. Walmsley later laughed at the overnight-sensation talk. Nobody counted the hundreds of gigs before the single, the Monday nights in a pub at Crows Nest or down in the Cross, the six or seven years of grinding before anybody outside the Hunter knew the name.

Early in 1990 they packed up and moved to Sydney’s Kings Cross, five blokes on a mission who figured nobody was going to get between them. They signed to rooArt, the independent shop that already had Ratcat and the Hummingbirds, and went into the studio with Steve James, a producer with Sex Pistols and Mental As Anything on his résumé. All for One came out of those sessions and hit the shelves in April 1991. “Better,” “Shine On” and “Stop the World” did the radio work. “FRC” did the room work. After the album they based themselves in Britain for more than two years and toured Europe and America under bigger hard-rock bills. The lineup has shifted plenty since. Walmsley left in 2006. Woseen, the bassist who shared the writing, has since passed, leaving Gleeson as the last of the original five still out front. Jimi Hocking and Scott Kingman hold the guitars these days, with Cam McGlinchey on drums, and the band is still hauling the old songs into clubs and festivals. Gleeson’s line on the anniversary re-recording was simple enough. It is our band and we will do what we want.

If you want the camp straight from the source, the official site is The Screaming Jets, where the tour board, the old photographs and the newsletter all live. The same outfit keeps a running page on Facebook, posts the road shots on Instagram, and still flies the flag on X. Fans who want the long memory and the old set lists gather in The Screaming Jets Official Fan Page, a busy group that trades stories, wedding-band footage from the Do-Rites side project, and arguments about which lineup hit hardest. That is the circle. Newcastle school dance, Cross bedsits, a label fight over one ugly word, a chant that still rattles the glasses. The Zoo Crew will keep the needle in the groove. Zoo Freaks, turn it up.