Iain McIntyre

Iain McIntyre is an Australian writer, musician and community radio broadcaster.

In the late 1980s he became involved in environmental and left activism in Perth, Western Australia where he also co-edited his first publication Freakzine and presented a number of music shows for 6UVS/RTRfm.

In 1992 McIntyre moved to Melbourne, Victoria where he continued his involvement in forest defence, squatting and other campaigns and also began co-editing the Melbourne-based fanzine Woozy with Laura MacFarlane. Woozy ran for the best part of a decade and brought DIY currents around music, politics and comics together in one publication. 22 issues, involving over 100 contributors, were produced and more than 20 benefits and launches held.

During the 1990s McIntyre began contributing to, and later co-hosted, Community Radio 3CR’s Squatters and Unwaged Workers Airwaves (SUWA) show. He finished his involvement with the program in the late 2000s, but has continued to produce music and history series for the station since.

In 1996 the first volume of McIntyre’s How To Make Trouble and Influence People series, which documented Australian pranks, hoaxes and political mischief making, was published under the pseudonym of the Question Mark Collective. Two sequels followed, How To Stop Whining and Start Living in 1999, and Revenge of the Troublemaker in 2003. In 2009 Breakdown Press collected all three of the How To Make Trouble And Influence People books into a single volume featuring additional material and interviews with activists and pranksters including John Safran, Uncle Kevin Buzzacott, The Chaser team, Pauline Pantsdown and The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. PM Press will publish a new edition of this collection in 2013.

McIntyre played bass, guitar and sang in a number of bands in Perth, Melbourne and London during the 1990s including The Stoned Posers, the Sea Haggs, Felafel, the Dennis Lillees, The Barnacle Sisters, and the Authentics. In 1996 he toured Europe as a member of Dragster and ninetynine, later forming the first line up of Kokoshkar in London, a band which continued on in Australia until 1999. In 1999 McIntyre rejoined ninetynine and has

played on all their subsequent recordings and at the majority of their Australian shows, but did not join them on their European and US tours.

During the 2000s McIntyre played bass and shouted in garage band Thee Stag Knights as well as with The Hatchetmen/The Hatchets. 2007 saw him release the A Warning CD/DVD, a “lost 1970s dystopian film” constructed from various period documentaries. A Warning featured a soundtrack primarily performed on vintage analogue synthesizers and included vocals and additional instrumentation from Kirsty Stegwazi, Van Walker, Cat Hope and members of Sir, Scarecrow Tiggy, Tarantula and other Melbourne acts. The same year saw him tour Europe with Naomi Evans as part of anarcho-casio pop duo the Kleber Claux Memorial Singers.

Since 2003 Iain has run Homebrew Press which has self-published a selection of his books and pamphlets. These have included Disturbing The Peace, a collection of pieces on Australian radical history, Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life: The AIDEX ’91 Story, an oral history of the 1991 Canberra anti-arms protest, and Lock Out The Landlords: Anti-Eviction Resistance, 1929-36. In 2010 he hosted a history walk based partially based on the Lock Out The Landlords pamphlet around the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, which was also podcast as part of the People’s Tour series.

In 2004 3CR published Wild About You: Tales From the Australian Rock Underground, 1963-68, a book which McIntyre co-wrote with Ian Marks. A tribute CD featuring Melbourne acts covering the mid-sixties bands chronicled in the book was recorded at 3CR, and a significantly expanded version of the book, also featuring New Zealand garage and R&B bands, was published by Verse Chorus Press in 2010. In 2006 Wakefield Press published a collection McIntyre edited entitled Tomorrow Is Today: Australia In The Psychedelic Era, 1966-70. A subsequent tribute CD, once more recorded at 3CR, was released and a festival held in the same year.

In 2005 Iain produced the Australian Troublemakers’ Calendar, which included a radical Australian date for each day of the year, as a benefit for the SUWA show. The following year 3CR financed a higher-end version and a collective was formed to produce and nationally distribute the Seeds of Dissent Calendar, which came out until 2009.

Since 2011 McIntyre has co-curated the Australian Museum of Squatting on-line archive which collects together radical photos, articles, stories and ephemera related to squatting movements. 2012 saw Ledatape publish McIntyre’s Sticking It To The Man: Pop, Protest and Black Fiction of the Counterculture, a collection of book jackets and reviews of novels published between 1964 and 1975. In the same year McIntyre helped compile the Down Under Nuggets: Original Australian Artyfacts 1965-1967 CD compilation with David Laing and Ian Marks.