75. The Scientists
Illustration: Lani Morrison
This week, Low Profile presents music and conversation with Kim Salmon of the Scientists. This program was originally broadcast on the KAOS program Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon. Jack has co-hosted and guest hosted previous episodes of Low Profile, interviewing Lavender Country, Jeffrey Lewis, Michael Hurley and James Maeda. Here’s what Jack had to say about this episode:
“A little over a year ago, I connected with Kim Salmon over Zoom to discuss his long, storied career for my KAOS FM radio show. Kim is best known as the singer, guitarist, and driving force of the Australian post-punk band Scientists. Their self-titled debut was released in 1978, featuring a sound that blended classic punk and power pop. In the intervening years, Scientists evolved drastically, incorporating slashes of deconstructed rockabilly, fractured blues, and sludgy no-wave into a unique sound often credited as an early inspiration for the grunge and alternative rock scenes to follow. Scientists’s legacy would cast a long shadow on anybody’s career, but Kim was far from content to leave it at that. After the Scientists initial breakup in 1987, he split his time between his project Kim Salmon & The Surrealists and a reformed version of The Beasts of Bourbon, an aussie rock n’ roll supergroup that Kim had been playing with on the side since the early ‘80s. We’re not anywhere near through the list of envelope-pushing projects that he’s been involved with, either. In this interview we cover his first punk band Cheap Nasties, his acoustic duo the Darling Downs with Ron Peno of Died Pretty, his recent solo work, and the ongoing Scientists reunion. Kim also breaks down a number of his classic songs for us, providing details about their influences and development. The songs are presented here in their entirety, so allow this episode to act as both an interview and a mixtape of all your favorite Kim Salmon tunes!”