With their formidable discography and cultish followers, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard must seem incomprehensible to newcomers — some never even get past the name. Evocative in its two halves, it resembles the classic format of a front plus backing band; forcing you to wonder who or what ‘King Gizzard’ and ‘Lizard Wizard’ actually are, do they correspond to the people involved, or the topic of the music? The name contains a lot to spur the imagination too: the historical and fantasy tropes of Kings and Wizards. The deep and varied cultural symbolism of reptiles; as well as the concept of ‘reptilian brain’, the core part of the brain shared by all vertebrates that regulates base bodily functions and movement. Then finally the gnarly connotations of ‘gizzard’, the stomach-like organ found in some birds that grinds food. This word leaves the most visceral impression, and somehow best sums up some ineffable part of the band's aesthetic and attitude, as over time it has become the preferred shorthand basis for anything pertaining to them, who can sometimes be just 'Gizz', their creations Gizz-like, and their fans Gizzheads.
But the basic truth of the band is really not much more than loud, fun rock music. Beginning as a joke side project to jam at university parties, Stu Mackenzie, Joey Walker, Michael Cavanagh, Nicholas Cook Craig, Ambrose Kenny-Smith, Lucas Skinner, and Eric Moore started playing together in Naarm (Melbourne) in 2010. Beginning with lo-fi garage and surf rock, they have since moved through various progressive, heavy, and experimental styles all loosely gathered under the umbrella of neo-psychedelic rock; and in the process have become known for their friendliness, their democratic creative process, their extreme generosity, and for the inclusivity with which they treat all fans of the music.
Having risen organically through the Australian, and then international music industries, the band have carved out a distinct niche for themselves and are showing no signs of slowing. This has been achieved with a consistent ethos with the tenets of: fun, musical experimentation, and a high energy anti-perfectionist DIY approach. As well as a surprisingly prolific release schedule, this has produced a strong support network around the band that has allowed them to always stay independent and self-funded with only the minimum of exceptions. Everything is kept as in-house as possible including recording, production, artwork, and publishing. The band has only seen a few major singular points of change, the first being the departure of founding member Eric, who until 2020 was the second drummer, band manager, and founder/director of the independent label Flightless Records that published their music. King Gizzard are now managed by their long-time booking agent Michelle Cable, who also facilitates their self-publication first via the KGLW/Gizzverse webstore and now the label p(doom) Records, made possible by an international merch distribution deal with Virgin records.
Another large evolution occurred as the band started performing live again coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, entering a form of 2.0 ‘jam band’ era with a greatly heightened live show featuring much more diverse and unique setlists, improvisation, and free audience publication of bootleg live recordings, leading to a significant redefinition of the fan base more in the vein of Phish or The Grateful Dead.
However, to get the full picture of how that all came to be, we must start at the most humble beginnings:
Note: This biography is heavily based on over one hundred interviews with the band members found in our interview archive, from primary internet research into social media, Discogs, and everywhere else the band has a footprint, and interviews held with associates of the band. Speculation and interpretation are made clear in the text. This is a work in progress published in segments on this page starting February 2025.
Written by W.B.T.G. Slinger. Edited by Dan Rzicznek and AlteredBeef. Special thanks to Spid and KQ for additional research, and Cwar for research tools.
Stuart Douglas Mackenzie was born in October 1990, in Melbourne, Australia.
A connection with music was established early on in the household, listening as a family to a wide variety of classic artists such as: Neil Young, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Van Morrison, and many others. This connection was deepened by Stu’s father, who would sing and play guitar to send his children to sleep; a practice that Stu later described as ‘meditative’.
The family moved around a lot for his father’s job, but the biggest chunk of Stu’s childhood was spent down the coast in the small (population of only a few thousand) surf town of Anglesea. Another location was the rural city of Wangaratta — best known in Australian music as where Nick Cave was expelled from high school before being sent off to boarding school in Melbourne.
Into Stu’s adolescence, the family settled for good in Geelong, Victoria’s second-largest city, around an hour’s drive down the coast south-west of Naarm/Melbourne. At this formative age Stu discovered AC/DC and Malcom Young, which came with the realisation that music (and guitar playing in particular) could be cool and exciting — not just something his dad was into. Beginning to actively practise guitar gave him something to compensate for his understimulating surroundings (comparable to Detroit, Geelong is a city based on a now defunct Australian motor industry); aside from Australian Rules Football, which he was playing and coaching (including future star Patrick Dangerfield) for his uncle’s club not too far away back down in Anglesea. Better known as AFL, it is comparable to various other forms of football around the world, with a fast pace and full-contact tackling; it is the most popular sport in Australia where grand final viewership can attract over one fifth of the entire national population.
This footy and music scene came to define Stu’s high school social circle, where a bunch of names would crop up frequently: Lucas Skinner, Nicholas Cook Craig, Jack Robbins, Monty and Casey Hartnett, Fraser Gorman, and Zak Olsen among them. All with compatible interests, this peer group began to revolve around playing music, with the general garage rock style of teenagers swapping instruments and figuring out what they wanted to play by simply trying to mimic their favourite bands. Stu became obsessed with guitar, practising multiple hours every day in order to catch up with these other musicians, and then beginning to teach students himself.
Being drawn toward the louder and more primal instinctive aspects of music making, his ability and keen attitude saw him become the local ‘go-to’ lead guitarist or drummer in a burgeoning scene around Geelong, itself a natural hub for the surrounding small coastal towns such as Anglesea, Torquay, and Ocean Grove. With little need for competition, band members swapped around freely and cut their teeth supporting each other.
One of the earliest of these arrangements was a band called The Houses, forming in 2005 (grade 9 of high school for Stu) with Lucas Skinner, Blaise Adamson, and Tim Richards. Stu typically kept it to guitar and bass, while Lucas and the rest of the band would share duties between keys, vocals and songwriting. Their first releases are almost definitely the oldest surviving available collaboration between two future King Gizzard members. Still Stu’s longest current musical collaborator, Lucas Harwood (he changed his surname when he got married in 2019) was also born in 1990 and grew up in the Geelong area with a long-standing interest in footy, and indie, lo-fi, and slacker-rock music. By their final year of high school in 2008, The Houses self-released an album, Uncle Fever + Aunt Ammonia, an accomplished take on the various flavours of popular late 2000s indie-rock, with notable influences landing somewhere in between the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The National. However, this was not the only project Stu was involved in.
Perhaps a better expression of where he was at musically, Almacknjack was a garage rock trio with ‘Al’ (Almo Troup), and Jack Robbins. One album, Taste Of An Orange, was self-released in 2008. It is another surprisingly robust set of songs that can lull one moment with an almost Buckethead-like mechanical pace, but then bust out heavy blues licks and ripping vocals the next, all wrapped up with some deep synth noise experimentation. Their antic live show is where the magic truly happened, bringing a much less serious, more experimental raucous proto-Gizzard energy. Such as when all three members might swap instruments mid-song, or where Stu might grab a drumstick to start strumming with, or pick up Al who would continue singing from atop his shoulders.
These and the rest of the surf-coast bands would all play whatever gigs they could get, from high school events, community markets, or even occasionally the ‘real’ local venues like Geelong’s The National Hotel (also known as ‘The Nash’), or Grace Darling, either in the all-ages dining sections, or by sneaking in with older friends.
Another band Lucas played bass in was named Sambrose Automobile, formed in 2007. Playing in a more distinctly blues and soul style, the band’s title was a portmanteau of its two principal member’s names: Sam Cooper and his best friend Ambrose Kenny-Smith. Named by his father after the boxer Ambrose Palmer, Ambrose was born in July 1992, and grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Preston with his sister Edith. As the children of Broderick Smith, a long-running and successful figure in Australian rock and roll (member of Carson, The Dingoes, Sundown), they experienced a very music-focused home environment. As a child, Amby would go to sleep every night listening to Muddy Waters, and began playing harmonica at age seven. By eight a friend of his Dad’s helped to record an EP, Boy With The Blues, and he was busking on the street playing harmonica inspired by other favourites like Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, or Robert Johnson. Before eventually settling for good near Geelong in Ocean Grove, when Ambrose was around six, the family briefly moved to the regional town of Castlemaine where he started skateboarding. He progressed rapidly and first achieved sponsorship from his local skate shop Speaky’s by age 10; he would go on to gain several more including Volcom and Emerica shoes, Theeve trucks, and Foundation and Stereo Skateboards. With a street skating skillset typical of the era, Ambrose’s style was marked by his feel for technical ledge tricks and unfashionable use of no complys performed sometimes just for the reaction (a very early technique for skating up and over a curb relying the skater to step on the ground with the front foot, since the development of the flat ground ollie the no comply and its many variations have been relegated as kooky). After some of his older skating friends discovered his EP, for a time he became ashamed of playing music and destroyed as many of the copies as he could find, preferring now to listen to classic Punk bands like The Sex Pistols and The Ramones. Despite his obvious talent and the promising start of a career in skateboarding (his mum shot down the idea of moving to the US for it), he would admit in an interview for skateboard.com that ‘I don't think anyone in Geelong takes it seriously’, and most were there to get away from their difficult home situations and just hang out at the park, which provided other social opportunities such as swapping CDs. The local skaters were into a lot of Aussie Hip Hop, which started his love for the genre, growing from there to Cypress Hill and into a taste for faster technical rapping such as by Busta Rhymes or OutKast. This coincided with an interest in breakdancing, which he began performing on the streets; as well as occasionally being roped back in to harmonica gigs supporting one of his school friends who was pursuing music.
Among the skating and gigging scene, at a park up in Melbourne, he met a talented multimedia artist, skater, and videographer six years his senior named Jason Galea. ‘Juicy’ was working for a casino producing motion graphics and web content, and otherwise co-running the fledgling skate brand Steady Bumpen. They began to collaborate, skating and filming together regularly.
As most of this coastal peer group, now a strong network of mutual friends, were beginning graduate high school, they were funnelled into the typical rite-of-passage of moving out of home toward Melbourne, close enough to bring laundry home if needed, but also now right at the core of Australian live music. The pinnacle was Meredith Music Festival, a three-day camping event in December. Being non-commercial and privately run, the festival has withstood the test of time as a fertile ground for up-and-coming underground Australian bands. Keen teenagers would go to great lengths to get in, including jumping the fence.
As a fresh graduate, Stu was enjoying the last summer before making his way out into the world as an adult, and had found his way in for the 2008 edition headlined by MGMT, The Mountain Goats, Violent Soho, and Architecture in Helsinki. After three days of rain he collapsed in his tent still drunk at 11am to get some rest, but was immediately shaken awake again by some friends urging him to go see a band named Tame Impala that had just started their set. With an effortless 60’s aesthetic, the band were loose and loud, vibrating through the rain out to Stu and the few other soaked, muddy festival goers. He returned home with no less than a new purpose in life: to play psychedelic music. With his prospects wide open in front of him, Stu dedicated himself to playing as much music as possible, and began an existence of couch-surfing to the city and back, surviving on ramen, with little more to his name than a beaten up trusty ‘89 white Fender Stratocaster and amp.
In 2008, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) launched a new Bachelor of Music Industry Studies course. Designed to prepare young artists to enter the music industry, the course focused on music performance mixed with the business side of the industry, and in its first year proved successful and popular. Amid a large influx of students, Stu enrolled himself to start in the 2009 academic year (and was followed the year after by Lucas). Their course material had them studying the traditional models of publishing and promoting music, putting together live performance assessments, and various other elective media-related units. Within the course, Stu’s nature led him into a similar groove as in his Geelong scene, and the collaborators began to coalesce. Two of these connections in particular became significant.
One was Eric Moore, who was a couple of years older (born in April 1988) and grew up in the rural New South Wales town of Deniliquin just North of the Victoria border about 4 hours drive from Melbourne. Life was simple in a small isolated town, where he spent his days hanging with friends, fishing, swimming, and riding motorbikes. His love for Australian music was established at a young age listening to Paul Kelly compilations in the car on family trips. Into adolescence, his taste darkened when he bought Rowland S. Howard’s Pop Crimes on vinyl. A new penchant for anything idiosyncratically Australian and jagged was perhaps best defined by his favourite band The Drones, driven by their leader Gareth Liddiard’s distinct rural drawling voice, and rhythmic, angular guitar tones. Eric began to play music himself, and with no other career ambition, he began drifting in this direction down to the city where he could immerse himself in the scene. One of his earlier known music projects during this time was drumming in alt/garage band The Lexies, as far back as 2007. During his first year of uni Eric also played in an alt-country styled band named The Swindlers, who carried a dark tinge through their classic sound.
The other stand-out course member was a multi-talented and already accomplished musician named Joey. Full name Joseph William Quinn Walker, he was born in October 1988 in the Northern Territory capital of Darwin, where his parents met. Raised with his sister Bella in a music loving household, they experienced a thorough and diverse education hearing worldly styles including afrobeat, reggae, and americana, icons of the sixties and seventies like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane, as well as more recent trends such as new wave and post punk. Music became a highly animating force for Joey, and as soon as he was able he started to gather the pots and pans from the kitchen to bash away.
When Joey was four years old, the family moved to Kununurra, an isolated Western Australian town about a 30 hour drive from the state’s capital Perth. This was for the benefit of his father Tony’s job with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation working in indigenous-focused media, and they experienced a subsequent shift in the music experience. Yothu Yindi had just released their hit land rights anthem ‘Treaty’, and groups such as the Pigram Brothers and Warumpi Band were popular in the region. A particularly formative memory for Joey was catching the bus to the brand new indigenous music festival Stompen Ground, alongside Warumpi Band member George Rrurrumbu — and leaving the festival highly inspired by all the acts from across the country.
A couple of years later, the family had moved again to Alice Springs in Central Australia (near Uluru), where he discovered a cheap guitar at a garage sale and began practising, whenever he wasn’t learning AFL.
The final family relocation came another three years on, all the way down to Melbourne — all up about 4800 km/3000 miles worth of moves, never within a full day’s travelling distance of six of the highest populated cities in the country! By this time, the guitar had been replaced by trumpet lessons at school, however, now that he’d started learning to read music he found he could easily teach himself old rock songs which would allow guitar to become the focus once again. Now entering his teens, the obsession grew into taking frequent lessons, choosing music as an elective subject in school, and practising for hours every day on a Fender he’d saved up for at his school holidays job in a music store.
As the teenage angst set in, Joe discovered Tool, which opened up a whole world of darker, heavier, technical music that became highly influential.
Toward the end of High school, he also started dabbling in electronic music, and had another awakening via a new friendship with a classmate named Alex Braithwaite. Having recently moved from England to Melbourne, his introduction of UK Drum and Bass to Joey opened up another realm of deeper and heavier electronic sounds. The pair began to experiment with production and DJing, practising with Alex’s turntables instead of studying for their final high school exams. After graduating, they went as far as both deferring their university acceptance to focus on the project, which they had titled Trumpdisco. Their very first release paid off, a remix of Muse’s ‘Supermassive Black Hole’, becoming an instant hit in the blog-sphere. They moved from strength to strength, able to book paying gigs, getting commercial radio play, touring internationally to New Zealand, and having their music played by popular DJs in clubs around the world. Their remix of Fatboy Slim - ‘Right Here Right Now’ struck a similar chord, getting played on BBC One and topping online music chart aggregator HypeMachine.
Joey would eventually burn himself out in this scene, at one point vowing to never set foot in another nightclub, and ended up at RMIT to try a different approach to a career in music.
Now being based in the city, the Geelong crew were spoiled for choice with great live music, and the friend group began to expand attending gigs together regularly at venues such as Fitzroy’s The Old Bar, or The Tote, a pub in Collingwood known for hosting live music from independent and upcoming acts since 1980. Several shows in this time would later be named as crucially inspiring.
The first was for Ambrose, still a year off finishing high school and was still listening to lots of classic Blues, Punk, Hip-Hop, and Nick Cave, when he climbed over the wall into the beer garden of Geelong’s Eureka Hotel while still underage to see Tame Impala in October 2009 — walking away amazed, and drenched in the whole crowd’s sweat.
A significant group experience was on December 9th, 2009 when Thee Oh Sees played The Nash down in Geelong. It was a Wednesday night with a tiny crowd, half comprised of Eric, Stu, Zak Olsen, and the rest of the crew who were blown away by the absolute energy, intense stage presence of John Dwyer, and of course the two drum kits.
Ever the proponent of any Noisy distinctly Australian music, Eric would also later nominate one of his most inspiring live music experiences as seeing Dirty Three at Laneway Festival in February 2010 — the free-form Folk-Noise instrumental trio led by the ecstatic, distorted violin of Warren Ellis, primary Nick Cave collaborator.
In January 2010, it was announced that The Tote would be closing down due to the legal costs surrounding a liquor licensing dispute, after new regulations had placed the venue into a high risk licence category simply for hosting live music. This garnered a profound reaction from the local community, including Eric and Joey, who gathered into a rally of more than 2000 people to protest the closure. After several months, the Victorian government altered the regulations allowing the venue to reopen with its old licence; it ran continuously until forced to close in 2020 due to pandemic restrictions, the community once again rallied, this time raising a three million dollar trust to purchase the venue.
Now starting his second year at Uni, Stu’s priorities were shifting. Almacknjack had seemingly ceased altogether, and the two other projects he had supporting roles in were languishing slightly in the new environment and more scattered priorities of their leading members.
Revolver & Sun had been going for a couple years, selling demo CDs at their fairly regular gigs and working away at a studio based debut album. Several tracks were trickling out on Myspace, but are now considered lost due to the botched 2018 server migration; few others have survived on Soundcloud and Triple J’s Unearthed platform.
As the publicly funded national youth-focused radio broadcaster, the Triple J network has remained a crucial pathway for breaking Australian bands for decades. Launching Unearthed in 1995 as a talent competition for unsigned bands, the platform (now a quasi-streaming service for discovering music by unsigned Australian artists) is credited for breaking the careers of Missy Higgins, Grinspoon, Flume, and dozens if not hundreds of other successful acts. It is also known for hosting the Unearthed High competition, where a winning demo upload from an unsigned high school band is selected to be recorded with a professional producer and played on the station, notable winners include The Kid Laroi, Genesis Owusu, and for the 2010 comp, heavy-psych sister quartet Stonefield.
The surviving Revolver & Sun recordings show a lot of promise, but also stand almost entirely on the shoulders of the band’s influences, with not enough material available to form a fully cohesive identity. Ultimately, the album was never finished and the band appeared to diverge into solo-billed shows for Fraser, meanwhile Stu took on a higher degree of creative control in his uni projects.
His other pre-existing group The Houses, were partially disbanded and in need of a new drummer, for which Eric introduced them to an old high school friend new in Melbourne: Michael Cavanagh. Better known as ‘Cavs’, he was born and raised in Deniliquin where his family ran a caravan park and his dad worked as a plumber. He had started drumming as a child after seeing an older cousin play; and would go on to gain inspiration from the likes of The Rolling Stones, Rush, and Foo Fighters.
Stu picked him up from the train station for an audition, and the young and awkward Cavs hardly said a word the whole drive. Despite his reticence, they asked him to join the band on the spot upon discovering he had already learned all their songs and was able to play them through perfectly. They would go on to release a self-titled EP in August 2010 featuring Cavs, which was also promoted on Unearthed. The track ‘Help or Hinder’ was noticed and even put into rotation on Triple J, receiving regular plays on national radio. But even with this backing, The Houses would fizzle away by the time Stu and Lucas finished their degrees.
Joey was also gaining recognition with a totally different music project through 2010: Goodnight Owl. After having been reunited in Melbourne with a childhood friend from Alice Springs, Eddie Alexander, the two started making emotional, wistful Folktronica that evoked a longing nostalgia that could only come from being so far from your hometown. For their debut EP, they commissioned production by Nick Huggins, who had previously worked with some of their inspirations Seagull and Whitley. Like Trumpdisco, Goodnight Owl also gained quick recognition, with their song ‘Maps and Compasses’ also being noticed at Triple J, in this case being selected for the soundtrack of a mini documentary for their current events news program (Hack), leading to the song entering rotation on regular radio as well. The fertile collaborative space around the uni course saw the duo disperse into a kind of collective as it gained several more members. This included Eric, Joey’s sister Bella, and Stu, who introduced another old Geelong high school friend: Casey Hartnett (brother of Monty, drummer in Revolver & Sun). With an updated scope and vision, the name of the group was changed to Love Migrate.
Out of a class mostly still figuring out what they wanted to get out of playing music, their professor, Barry Hill, soon noticed in Stu and Joey in particular a confidence in what they were creating and a focus on the music they were already playing outside of uni. This was enhanced by their strong abilities to instigate and collaborate with a wider variety of people in different musical styles. Eric had become one of the more frequent of these collaborators, who despite his effortless approach to academic work, had also caught their professor’s attention with a high level of natural creativity and ability in drumming and producing electronic music. While they were still all able to excel in the course, Joey later reflected that much of the industry-focused content such as the album/touring cycle, promotion, and seeking management, mainly served as conventions to be questioned in the spirit of a bigger collaborative performance project that was beginning to congeal out of their assessments.
Now that they had all met each other's friends and were hanging out outside of uni, the crew all found themselves occupying neighbouring share-houses in the Melbourne inner-city suburb of Carlton. Living the quintessential student musician lives, they might have consumed little more than goon (cheap cask wine), cigarettes, ramen and convenience store snacks; while otherwise doing uni course work, practising music, working odd jobs, partying, going to see other bands together, jamming, and occasionally travelling back down to the coast and back to hometowns.
Everyone was involved in some music project, taking it seriously and trying to ‘make it’, so while living in such proximity, Stu suggested they all get together sometimes and just play, purely for its own purpose. It would be the antithesis of what everyone was trying to achieve in their other bands, trying so hard to earn credit as musicians and earn income by gigging.
With his more carefree collaborative nature and motivating energy, Stu’s role as main instigator became an opportunity to focus on lead vocals and songwriting for the first time (at this point he still had more experience drumming than singing), shouting lyrics that usually consisted of little more than 2 words.
In order to accommodate the varying presence of each house mate or any of their friends in different combinations, the songs had to be simple enough to learn on the fly. Or better yet, simply jammed out on the spot — channelling their mutual love of Thee Oh Sees, and yearning for iconic Melbourne 2000s garage rock band Eddy Current Suppression Ring to come back from hiatus.
On October 29th, 2010, Professor Hill made the earliest surviving known recording of this new arrangement, on that day consisting of: Stu & Joey on guitar, Eric on foot playing half a drum kit, Lucas on bass, and Cavs drumming at the full kit, playing for an assessment in the performance unit of their uni course in the university’s Kaleide Theatre. They played five original songs: ‘Ants & Bats’, ‘Life Is Cool’, ‘Love For Me’, ‘Oh God’, and ‘Other Side’. The performance is raucous and even slightly antagonistic in a Birthday Party era Nick Cave, or The Cramps psychobilly kind of way (especially noting Joey’s jet-black, highly teased hair and skinny jeans). After the last song, Stu makes a small proclamation that hardly seems necessary in the context: ‘we are called King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’. Barry would later explain that he had been made aware of the project, and that this was Stu introducing it to him.
Depending how you define its genesis, the band had likely only existed for only a couple of months at most, if not weeks. The fact that they had committed to their name is significant, a decision that developed over some unknown time period but finally had to be made when they were asked to play their first actual gig. The core RMIT-based band members felt they needed some backup, so they gathered together the full ‘eight or nine’ share house occupants to make the whole thing a bigger jam. Little is known about this performance (including the specific date). It was almost definitely part of the first iteration of an RMIT community program named Artland that featured temporary student art installations around campus from the 10th to 24th of October; and an associated ‘Art Party’ opening exhibition by Ahmad Oka, who shared mutual friends with the band. One of his drawings was later selected for the 2020 Teenage Gizzard compilation cover artwork. It was the day before the event, and they still had nothing to call themselves or to put on a flyer, so they held an impromptu brainstorming session while a few band members were sitting around (at least Joey, Cavs, and Fraser Gorman were not present). Several other names had already been discussed or used informally, such as: Sea Of Trees (inspired by Eric hearing The Drones’ leader Gareth Liddiard talk about Japan’s Aokigahara forest colloquially called the ‘sea of trees’, known as a common location to commit suicide, it was later used as a song title), Native Plant, and Happy Magic Band, but at this point everyone still had a different idea of what they should be called. Stu solved the dilemma by suggesting that it should just be the dumbest, most ridiculous name they could come up with. “Gizzard Gizzard” was suggested, and someone else threw out a Jim Morrison ‘Lizard King' reference, a few more rhymes were bounced around until “King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard” made them all laugh.
The earliest confirmed use of the name was ten days before the recorded uni performance assessment, on Tuesday October 19th 2010 when the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard Facebook page was created (metadata shows it was created with that name). Barry Hill was an early proponent of using online spaces alongside creating music, often assigning his students blog or social media based multimedia projects. This same day was also the ‘last logged in’ date shown on a Myspace band page named ‘Stu and his friends’ that had been created almost two years prior; listing band members Stu, Joey, Eric, Cavs, Fraser, and Lucas, seemingly as a looser catch-all online presence for several pre-Gizzard iterations, as evidenced by a then-recent update to the page: a new banner dubbing the band ‘Suicide Forest’ (though obviously linked, it is unknown if there is a distinction between this and ‘Sea of Trees’). Subsequent Artland events would continue to be held around this time of year, with an exhibition opening night celebration on a weekend — so feasibly in 2010 this first public King Gizzard performance could well have been on Saturday the 9th. This would give 10 days for the performance to sink in, after which Stu may have logged in to update his Myspace accordingly, but instead decided to start fresh on Facebook. That is conjecture of course, but it is also a reasonable timeline for their professor to have become aware that they had formed into a band, and then to find out their final name at the next assessment, but really there could have been several months between the first free-form jam at home and the Art Party.
It was everything you typically don’t want in a band name: too long, hard to remember accurately, hard to spell, ambiguous (they would switch between using ‘and’ or ‘&’), and awkward to say out loud in earnest as part of a normal conversation. It really only had two things going for it, the first was that in typical Australian slang fashion, it was still distinct after being contracted to ‘King Gizzard’, ‘Gizzard’, or even sometimes just ‘gizz’. The other being its exclusivity, while awkward to say out loud, by 2010 music promotion was already becoming more and more dominated by digital spaces than word of mouth and traditional print media. This title was always going to be available as a website URL, or as the handle on any social media platform, where it would eventually gain the unforeseen ability to distribute itself as a meme (usually with a reaction along the lines of: ‘wait there really is a band called King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard with dozens of albums’?). On The Grateful Dead as a band name, Jerry Garcia once said: ‘It’s just repellant enough to sort of filter curious onlookers’, which is exactly what King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard also came to achieve: a joke-like nature that causes particular kinds of people to make fun of or criticise the name (often by swapping the hard ‘g’ for a soft one) before ever even giving the music a chance. This would go a long way to cultivate a niche ‘in-crowd’ of fans who were most readily able to accept the band at face value for their hedonistic fun, another facet that their genesis shared with The Grateful Dead. So the name was a joke that got less funny each time you heard it, but they were only ever going to have to use it to play a house party or two anyway, or so they thought. That first show ended up as little more than a jam session (footage was recorded and uploaded, but host website blip.tv was wiped in 2016, the original uploader doesn’t know where their original source is. An archive of approximately one third of the site’s content is available, however it is completely untagged, requiring manual searching through terabytes of data). To the surprise of the band, it went well enough to want to do the same again the next week — but this time they would prepare some songs.
As they completed their degrees, Stu’s main interest in the project turned to recording, and he began dedicating himself to drum machine based demos of ‘moment songs’ that he would create either himself, in smaller sub-groups within the band often with Joey and Cavs. King Gizzard made their first release sometime around November, several dozen manually burned CDs with the songs ‘Hey There’, and ‘Ants & Bats’, the only song from the uni performance to receive a proper release. ‘Life Is Cool’ was not released until over ten years later on the Teenage Gizzard compilation, and the rest were unknown and lost until the publication of the uni assessment footage in 2022. The CDs were produced with hand drawn artwork, and a fold-out poster commissioned from Blaise Adamson, vocalist of The Houses who was occasionally jamming with the new band. She was prompted to visually interpret what ‘King Gizzard’ and ‘The Lizard Wizard’ were and went for two reptilian figures, one purple with sunglasses, a crown and a royal robe sat on a throne, and the other green in a dark cloak shooting lightning from its hands. The design is loud, colourful, and dynamic, and otherwise incorporates two zombie-like figures in the background with the name of the band in jagged text setting in motion a strong visual identity for the group.
Within weeks of the formation of King Gizzard — Ambrose, only just about to graduate high school himself, left behind Sambrose Automobile to form and lead a new band named The Murlocs. Playing a more energetic brand of garage blues rock, he was joined by more friends from the Geelong area: Cal Shortal, Matt Blach, Jamie Harmer, and Andrew Crossley. This was his opportunity to fully express himself as the gnarly Mouth Organ playing, snarling skate punk vocalist he was born to be. Having attended an early King Gizzard show, Ambrose immediately noticed a certain elevating spark in the band that none of the other related projects had, and was strongly compelled. He began bugging Stu to let him join one of their jams, for which Cook was also newly present. Fitting in well with the group chaos — Ambrose contributing percussion, keys, or harmonica and Cook as a third guitarist — they both officially joined the King Gizzard lineup, cementing a defined band of seven instead of a loose uni jam collective. Live performances had become known for cramming up to ten people on stage competing to make the most noise, including Fraser Gorman and Blaise Adamson, but it has been said that dozens of different people jammed with them early on that either got bored or thought it was too dumb.
By April 2011, a King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard Youtube channel and Soundcloud account had been made, and their very first music video for a song named ‘Trench Foot’ was uploaded on the 19th. Once again, the visual is inferred to be an interpretation of the band name, in this case using an unedited clip cut straight from an episode of 1984 sci-fi miniseries V: The Final Battle; where to the shock of everyone on screen a character gives birth to alien-hybrid twins, one appears normal but with a forked tongue, and the other has green reptilian skin. ‘Trench Foot’ is only known to have been performed live once, on an RMIT student TV show called Temperature’s Rising; instead of publishing this footage anywhere, the band of course elected to post only an out-take on their Youtube channel where Eric’s snare falls over just after the beginning of the song, they carry on as though this is completely normal until Cavs literally can’t reach his tom with the stand fallen across his arms. The track was selected for New Centre Of The Universe Vol #1; a Nuggets-like compilation of garage and psych bands from the Geelong scene being collected by Billy Gardner. A local musician himself (member of The Living Eyes), Gardner felt he was surrounded by talented and worthwhile bands who couldn’t find anyone interested in backing or publishing them. Once the compilation was underway, he realised he should just start publishing them himself, and Anti Fade Records was formed. Their first release was a cassette: Sunny Brick by The Bonniwells, a garage rock trio featuring an old mutual friend of the King Gizzard guys: Zak Olsen. A prolific musician himself, his two other bands Hierophants and The Frowning Clouds, were also to be featured on the compilation alongside a number of other mutual friends including The Murlocs.
A distinct aesthetic for the band was forming, and carried forward through the succession of CDs and cassette tapes that had started to trickle out through the new year now that Stu, Joey and Eric had graduated, once again with open prospects. ‘Sleep’ / ‘Summer’, ‘Black Tooth’, and the March 2011 proto-EP Anglesea were produced with a slowly accruing collection of borrowed microphones and gear as fun recording experiments (such as trying to learn the Glyn Johns drum recording method) as much as they were publishable songcraft. As Stu became further enamoured with the alchemy of recording sound, it became clear that King Gizzard would primarily be a recording project; fuelled by a new-found synergy between their hectic style of live performance, and the surprisingly usable outcome of his demos. Though in hindsight highly formative, the band still considered these experiments as little more than jokes, with no real intention that they would be heard by anyone outside the immediate circle of friends and collaborators that were attending their now frequent live performances. King Gizzard were now playing anything they could book around Melbourne and back down the coast: more house parties, warehouses, parks and drains (literally a local DIY ‘generator party’ in a stormwater run-off to a crowd of about 50. At one point Stu’s microphone stand fell over, so he threw himself onto the ground and finished the song there), and were just starting to creep into the more legit small music venues that they had played in their other more serious bands. The setlists were short, and compensated for by extending songs longer than was reasonable in order to accommodate anyone who wanted to join in playing, often to disastrous results. This pace continued through to July, when the next step was to go on their own interstate tour — something that no one in the band foresaw would ever be a possibility — starting in Deniliquin, hitting up some proper Sydney venues World Bar and the Oxford Art Factory, then back down South via Adelaide before concluding at their favourite Melbourne hangout The Old Bar. This route required taking flights, which turned out to be a pretty stressful strategy. Having to borrow equipment from wherever they were playing became quite a burden to arrange and set up for seven people, let alone the in-house audio engineers who then had to integrate with Gizzard’s brutal tendencies and unfamiliar gear.
With the structure in place and a growing pool of original songs, the band set out to Deniliquin to finish writing and rehearsing a selection of nine of Stu’s drum machine demos to create their first ‘real’ publishable release. After some failed attempts to self record it with only a few microphones between them and no experience, they sought out a studio. Landing in A Secret Location, a DIY warehouse studio setup in an old textile factory in Fairfield, Melbourne, they worked with a recording engineer named Paul Maybury (of Rocket Science fame) who helped them lay down their material. It was a sweaty and caffeinated two days navigating the mostly broken vintage equipment, but they emerged with 23 minutes of feral, surfy, garage punk rock. The music was as raw and loose as the band’s party attitude, with highly simplistic one or two sentence lyrics about drugs, violence, masturbation, and conflicting perspectives towards life’s responsibilities. The surf-rock nature of the project was reflected in its title, Willoughby’s Beach, named after a spot on Deniliquin’s Edward River, despite being over 600 kilometres from the coast. It was mission accomplished, but despite having nine tracks, there was a distinct feeling that the length would make for a disappointing ‘album’ purchase, and they put it out as-is, as an EP.
Willoughby’s Beach was released October 21 as a digital download on Bandcamp and a couple dozen at most hand-burned CDrs in the same manner of previous releases. For the first time, they were really seeking to get the music in the hands of more than their immediate friendship circles, so their handmade copy was soon followed by another few hundred CDs manufactured and distributed by a small distribution arm of a now defunct Melbourne record label called Shock Records. Eric had begun shopping the band around for some representation, sending their releases to any label he could find. One opportunity that presented itself was Mushroom Records, the iconic Australian music publishing brand that had recently become independent again after being purchased back by its original founder Michael Gudinski. Mushroom ended up producing a no-label promo CD of the EP, but the relationship went no further once the band realised they would be expected to conform to the regular expectations of a mainstream label in terms of scheduling and marketability. Finding little interest, or plain dismissal at the band’s name elsewhere, Eric took this as a challenge and proved his aspiration to work in the music industry by committing to managing and publishing the band himself; so Willoughby’s Beach became the first King Gizzard release on vinyl, a format each member had some connection with, if not a collection. Pressed in the Czech Republic via Pirates Press, they opted for a spot-embossed sleeve, hand numbered edition of 350 on 45rpm 10-inch transparent yellow vinyl, with a signed fold-out poster and no publishing info of any kind on the packaging or sleeve. The artwork was again bold and dynamic, featuring a violent creature like something out of a classic Japanese Kaiju monster movie emblazoned over a high contrast striped background. It was illustrated by Ican Harem, a guitar student of Stu’s that he had commissioned. It took a while to sell all the copies, but it is fair to say that pressing their own music to vinyl ignited something in the band, and in Eric, who's stronger managerial abilities were starting to shine, packing records in pizza boxes and shipping them out from his bedroom.
To their surprise, Willoughby’s Beach songs immediately made it onto radio, not only being picked up by Melbourne community station PBS, but ‘Dead-Beat’ even entered full rotation on Triple J, reaching potentially millions of weekly listeners.
Still in his uni course, Lucas was undertaking an internship at Forté Magazine, a Geelong-based music and arts publication, another valuable connection that began getting the band’s name in more people’s heads. Otherwise, he was still jamming with his uni coursemates and had got involved with Dark Globes, a neo-psych band formed by Curtis Goodfellow and Oli Grinter out of a group jam for one of their assessments. While the band didn’t last outside of uni, it was an opportunity to try some recording and mixing. Skills that Lucas took with him to another new lo-fi psych band: Atolls, along with Oli and another classmate Sam Ingles.
The 11th of the 11th, 2011 was a portentous day for many. Aside from being the release date of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (a big day for Cook); The Murlocs’ recorded their first EP, and Ambrose had his skateboarding artist friend Jason Galea draw up the cover artwork. Now fully solo after the disbandment of Revolver & Sun, on this date Fraser Gorman also released the double single ‘Lonesome Mother's Son Blues / Come On Back’ with Forever Son, the new solo project of Jack Robbins (formerly of Almacknjack). This double single was recorded by Stu (credited as ‘King Gizzard himself’), and mixed and produced by Joey and Trumpdisco, illustrating the network of friendships and collaborations that was forming around the band.
King Gizzard had just been announced as winners of a competition by Triple J Unearthed to play an opening slot at the 2012 Big Day Out. This iconic staple Australian music festival had been running since 1992 and was known for often securing the biggest international touring acts, on this 20th anniversary edition including Kanye West, Soundgarden, and My Chemical Romance. The festival was very familiar to the band members, particularly Joey who was still carrying the regret of choosing to go see The Prodigy (Ambrose was also at that set, unbeknownst to each other) over Neil Young in 2009 due to set time clashes.
The band was scoring some other good, serious gigs, such as being booked to play the 30th anniversary of the Tote on November 17th 2011, a rather serendipitous event after having joined the rally against its closure nearly two years prior. By this stage, really beginning to garner a following with a preference for packed out shows that get a bit out of hand. The band were shocked to be asked to play Meredith music festival in December 2011, an event that had been crucial in inspiring Stu to pursue music only a few years prior — over a decade later he would call this ‘One of the most pivotal moments for the whole band’s existence’ in an interview with Ben Madden for Junkee. Despite everything that had been building for them, King Gizzard was still the ‘weird band’; everyone’s side project (except Stu, whose only other commitment was occasionally drumming billed as ‘Sturdy Leg Sturt Crusher’ in Fraser Gorman’s house band, Big Harvest) that was oddly starting to get attention. This performance was the band’s most humbling moment so far, and forced them to question what the project meant, and how much serious effort to apply moving forward. They were suddenly sharing the bill with bands they were listening to, like Icehouse, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Kurt Vile & The Violators, Mudhoney, Barbariön, and of course the headliner Grinderman — the noisy Punk-Blues side project of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Stu (and likely the rest of the band) were in the crowd to see one of their icons; so we are forced to wonder what they thought when Nick announced the breakup of the band on stage at the end of the set. Was it seen as an opportunity for a new vanguard in semi-ironic self satirical blues influenced garage punk? Either way, the successful festival performance confirmed King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard as a new force to be reckoned with in the broader Australian music scene.
To be continued.