On Valentine’s Day 1989 in Brisbane, as lovers were getting ready for their evening rendezvous and the singletons were out renting whatever the 1989 equivalent of Bridget Jones’s Diary was, staff at Rocking Horse Records, a record retailer located at 158 Adelaide Street in the city, were in a panic.
As Brisbane radio station 4ZZZ recounted over the weekend, Valentine’s Day 1989 was the day an undercover officer from the police Licensing & Regulation Division entered the store looking for obscene records for a supposed “wild Valentine’s Day party”. Later that day, four uniformed police officers raided the store.
“Owner Warwick Vere was charged with exhibiting and selling obscene material under the Vagrants, Gaming and Other Offences Act, but ultimately found not guilty,” write 4ZZZ. “Albums included The Dead Kennedys’ [Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death] (featuring the classic ‘Too Drunk to Fuck’).”
Among the other “obscene” records that Vere was charged with exhibiting and selling were “Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction (available at many major chain stores at the time), the Hard-Ons’ Dick Cheese and The Champs’ Do the Shag (an instrumental album from the early 60s).”
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News of the raid prompted outspoken Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra to comment in an interview with Gavin Sawford of Time Off Magazine, “If these attempts to shut down record stories because an instrumental band mention a type of carpet on their record helps to galvanise people to vote out the present administration, then by all means let’s see some more raids.”
According to 4ZZZ, even the Courier Mail pointed out the absurdity of the police’s actions, insisting that the magistrate was duty bound to ban the movie Oscar-winning film Rainman as it contained 14 uses of the word ‘fuck’.
In a comment, the radio station claimed the magistrate was ultimately “painted into a corner and said in his findings that ‘Too Drunk to Fuck’ was men’s locker room music but was so indecipherable it probably wouldn’t come to offend anybody”.
For anyone who wishes to make a pilgrimage to the place where one of the most ridiculous and enraging chapters in Aussie music history went down, Rocking Horse Records is still standing and independently owned, now located in Brisbane’s Queen Street mall.
