Swingers/Models’ Buster Stiggs, Primitive Calculators’ Frank Lovece, pass

Two influential figures who emerged in Melbourne’s late ‘70s scene have passed.

Drummer, songwriter and art designer Buster Stiggs, best known in Australia for his work with The Swingers and The Models, died on January 7 after a lengthy illness. He was 63.

Frank Lovece was a co-founder of experimental noiseniks Primitive Calculators.

They were an integral part of Melbourne’s post-punk Little Bands scene and appeared in Richard Lowenstein’s movie on that era, Dogs In Space, with Michael Hutchence, playing their song ‘Pumping Ugly Muscle’.

Stiggs was born Mark John Hough in the UK before his family moved to New Zealand. At Hastings Boys High he met Phil Judd, (later of Split Enz) and fell under his spell.

After school Hough followed Judd to Auckland to attend art school and became involved in the punk scene. In 1976, he formed After Hours with a 17-year-old Neil Finn, but that split when Finn was summoned to London to join Split Enz.

In a tribute post on the weekend, Finn, recalling the fun they had sharing a house, summed up, “He put the swing into the Swingers…”

Stiggs joined Suburban Reptiles, one of NZ’s first punk bands, adopting the stage name Buzz Adrenaline and then Buster Stiggs.

Highly ambitious and driven, Stiggs formed The Swingers with Judd and The Reptiles’ Bones Hillman, and moved to Melbourne.

They were signed to Mushroom, and played on ‘Counting The Beat’ (1981) although Stiggs already left before it went to #1 in Australia and New Zealand. It would then go on to be the year’s biggest selling single in the two countries.

Stiggs went on to join The Models for eight months, moving with them to London, “living the dream”, and cutting the mini-album Cut Lunch and the Local &/or General album with them before being dropped.

He worked at Mushroom’s merchandising division and then moved to Perth working as a graphic designer for young bands. He wrote 200 songs (in 1983, he created the music and graphics for the opening theme of music TV show Nightmoves)and was nominated for an ARIA for designing the cover of Pseudo Echo’s first album.

In the last five years, Stiggs had a number of health issues including blood and bone marrow cancer, and kidney disease. Last year he was on dialysis three times a week.

Primitive Calculators formed in outer suburban Springvale as teenagers.

After Lovece’s passing on the weekend, the band’s Stuart Grant remembered, “When we were 16 Frank and I would sit up all night in my mother’s kitchen, writing poems and singing songs and banging on pots and pans…we thought we were beatniks.”

They moved into the inner city and became part of the experimental electro-rock movement alongside Ollie Olsen and Whirlywirld.

The Calculators’ brand of noise combined piercing guitars with a sped-up drum machine and early synthesisers, with snatches of confrontational performance art and poetry.

Their debut single ‘I Can’t Stop It/Do That Dance’ was a mix of techno and punk.

They broke up in March 1980 but their material was released later through Chapter Music and on post-punk compilations.

In 2009, as their legacy grew as innovators, they reunited, first for the inaugural Nick Cave-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties (which they hated) and Chapter Music’s 18th birthday at the Tote (which they loved).

The album The World Is Fucked came out in 2013, and two years later they played festivals in China while working on a third album.