You don’t want to milk the band until it’s running out of juice: Dave Faulkner

It’s Friday night at the local pokies joint. Glasses clink and voices chatter. Way in the background, a lone guitar strums. “Come anytime, I’m a man of leisure,” sings what’s-his-name who used to be in that band. The scene wobbles and fades like a dissolving dream sequence as the switch flicks to ROCK.

“That’s just me having a laugh at the notion of being a has-been and no one gives a damn,” Dave Faulkner says about the gag opening of the latest Hoodoo Gurus album, Chariot of the Gods. It’s their 10th, in case you thought they were a nostalgia act.

“The fall from the grace, the parody of your former self; it’s obviously a fear, as any artist knows,” he says, sipping his coffee in a regal armchair under a large potted palm in a swanky Melbourne hotel.

It’s easy to laugh because he’s here to talk about an imminent move in the opposite direction to the dreaded public bar of oblivion. In January, the Hoodoo Gurus will front the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for the Symphonic Gurus concert at Sidney Myer Music Bowl.

The Hoodoo Gurus (from left, Brad Shepherd, Nick Reith, Faulkner and Rick Grossman) will play with the MSO in January.Credit:

“Mum’s a big classical music fan. I went to classical concerts a lot as a kid,” says the former punk turned Top 40 maestro. Back then, he quite liked the rock-orchestral flavours of Andrew Loog Oldham and the Moody Blues, even if he never quite got through his copy of Deep Purple’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra.

“Violin is my first instrument. I learnt for two years. Didn’t take to it,” he says with a laugh. “I was jealous of my sister, who’s a few years older than me, and she’s better at piano so she’d entertain at parties. No one ever wanted to hear you drag out your violin.”

He found he was “too lazy” to properly study piano, though he did play keyboards in high-school bands in the sunbaked Perth suburbs in the mid ’70s. “And then punk rock came along ... so I quickly decided to teach myself guitar.”

His parents, local councillors at different times, were “horrified” by Dave Flick. In his teased-up hair, tight black jeans and winklepicker days, it was an alias chosen partly to protect the family name in that seaside paradise of “lotus eaters”. “They didn’t know what the hell I was, dressed like that and acting like that, living in a squat.” His punk band of the time, The Victims, is almost as legendary. “For me, Dave Flick was more about year zero: ‘I’m a new me’. A self-made identity.”

The first line-up of Hoodoo Gurus, in 1982: Brad Shepherd, guitar; James Baker, drums; Clyde Bramley, bass; and Faulkner, guitar. Credit:

He forged it after a false start studying architecture at the WA Institute of Technology, his artistic Frank Lloyd Wright dreams fast fading. “I hated it ... When I failed that first year I had to look at myself in the mirror to see who I was, and that was obviously a musician.”

It’s never since been in doubt. But for a songwriter equally apt to enthuse about Cole Porter or Judith Durham as the Ramones, the punk baggage was a mixed blessing as the Hoodoo Gurus evolved into the FM mainstream with Bittersweet and What’s My Scene.

“Lots of people have ideas about my life and my path. They don’t know everything, but they think they do. There’s a couple of songs on Chariot of the Gods that touch on that.” The rapier wit of My Imaginary Friend and Got to Get You Out of My Life are very much in Faulkner’s wheelhouse as a writer.

“Don’t Try to Save My Soul is me saying, ‘Look, I’m condemned to do what I do’,” he says, raising his palms. “Whatever it is I’m doing, I’m still doing it, and I don’t second-guess it any more. Because, up to a point I did.”

As his 40th birthday loomed in the late ’90s, mounting doubts led him to disband the Hoodoo Gurus – Brad Shepherd, Rick Grossman, Mark Kingsmill – for other musical adventures that kept him in the game, but proved less satisfying. “Mid-life crisis, so to speak,” he recalls now. “I hated my 30s. You can’t say you’re young any more. ‘This is your life. What are you doing?’ I spent 10 years struggling with that. I was working a lot, always touring, but I just wasn’t a happy person.

“I wanted to avoid that pitfall of being that guy in the corner that everyone’s sniggering at, who used to be somebody. You don’t want to milk the band until it’s running out of juice, and we’re embarrassing ourselves.

“But it was weird. Literally the day of my 40th birthday, I felt like a load had been lifted off my shoulders. I had a big party, and something changed. I’ve been happier ever since.”

It took six years before he deigned to “get off my high horse” and get the old band back together. “That’s where I learnt that bigger lesson about the chemistry of the Hoodoo Gurus … You get this strange, shared consciousness; this identity that is actually the entity itself that governs you.”

Today the band’s global cult from here to the Americas and Europe is undimmed. The backlog of hits is handy, but their shows also lean into the new material that keeps them firing. For the journeyman musician out front, the “battleship” that is the MSO represents another opportunity for adventure.

“We chose songs that are more malleable,” he says. “I didn’t want it to just be the Hoodoo Gurus with strings. I wanted it to be a true collaboration.” Ballads, deep cuts and the more atmospheric corners of the songbook have risen to the top. “Rather than just going into a full-on rock song and ‘see you at the end’, we wanted songs with a more cinematic vibe.”

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Melbourne fans should probably grab the opportunity. For the Gurus, 2026 is mostly a designated “year of not playing”, their leader says. A cheerfully confessed loner, he needs his space for those juices to flow. “I’m accumulating little snatches of melodies and things on my travels. I might do a walk in the morning … there’s always a certain tempo, like a background hum in my head … but actually writing a song is always in my workspace, at my dining table.”

Settle Down, another song on the latest album, springs to mind. What would retirement actually look like to a songwriter whose head won’t stop humming? “It’s a question that’s coming more and more in my face right now,” he says with a laugh, “but I think that’s just me again, parodying the whole notion.

“In fact, that song is old. I wrote it around the time we broke up. I like the poetry of that. But really, it’s one of those songs that’s always true. I mean, that was true of me when I was in The Victims. ‘Come on, when am I gonna get real?’”

Symphonic Gurus is at Sydney Myer Music Bowl on January 29.