CLAG

 

Clag were an influential and brilliantly eccentric Brisbane “kiddie-punk” band formed in the early 1990s by high-school friends Bek Moore (vocals), Rachael Cooke (guitar) and Alison Bolger (bass). With their surreal humour, wilfully primitive musicianship and fiercely DIY approach, they became a cult fixture of the Australian underground. Clag’s songs transformed the mundane into something strange and memorable. Goldfish, chips and gravy, shopping-centre security guards and other fragments of suburban life became material for music that could be whimsical, unsettling and very funny at once. Their sound combined rudimentary Casio keyboard melodies, raw guitar and deliberately atonal vocals, inviting comparisons with the Shaggs, Bikini Kill and children's television, though the resulting collision was distinctly their own.

Their performances could be just as peculiar. The band appeared in hospital gowns and, on occasion, performed facing away from the audience with masks taped to the backs of their heads. This mixture of theatrical absurdity and musical simplicity helped establish Clag as one of the more singular groups to emerge from Brisbane’s independent scene. Moore and Cooke were frequently regarded as the creative heart of the band. Clag released an EP in Australia, with further recordings appearing through the American label Spit And A Half and Canada’s Endearing Records, before the group disintegrated in the mid-1990s.

Its members subsequently played in bands including Beaches, Panel of Judges and Minimum Chips, while Clag’s reputation continued to grow long after the group itself had disappeared. Their recorded work was eventually collected on the retrospective album 'Pasted Youth', released by Chapter Music, introducing their wonderfully skewed music to another generation. What Clag left behind was small in volume but unusually enduring in influence: a body of music whose humour, amateurism, invention and refusal to behave conventionally made the band an enduring legend of Australian DIY culture. Bek Moore died in 2016 and Rachael Cooke died in September 2026.

Members

Bek Moore (vocals), Rachael Cooke (guitar) and Alison Bolger (bass), Nicole Thibault (trombone), Bre O'Neil (keyboards), Mick Adams (keyboards), Greg Brady (drums), Jason Cassidy, Greg Wadley (bass), (drums), Meaghan Block, Laura MacFarlane (drums), Chris Gorman (drums)

EPs
'Manufacturing Resent' 1993 Either Way Records