When Sydney band Gerling first caught my attention back in 1998, they were pimply-faced teenagers wearing backpacks on ABC-TV’s Recovery and they sounded like nothing else. They shouted their cryptic free-association lyrics (“Tokyo, Denmark, Sweden!”) and bashed sounds out of second-hand synthesizers and beaten-up guitars. To my ears, only just waking up to the possibilities of experimental music, I thought they were unstoppable. This was pop music on the frontier.

On first listen, 1999’s Children of Telepathic Experiences was a bit too avant-garde for my developing tastes, but over time I grew to admire their revolutionary spirit and hear the melodies hidden inside their songs. They were simultaneously the best and the worst band you had ever heard and they didn’t care what you thought.

Despite building a loyal following in subsequent years, their decision to go ahead with the release of their When Young Terrorists Chase the Sun album post-September 11 nearly put to bed whatever commercial chances they had. Which is a shame, considering single “Dust Me Selecta” was a slab of four-on-the-flour disco house aimed straight for the mainstream.

This track seemed like a betrayal to staunchly indie fans like me. They release an album with a provocative title and then proceed to do the least provocative thing they could possibly do—a dance floor filler.

To top it all off, they also collaborated with Josh “totally addicted to bass” Abrahams and Kylie Minogue on “G-House Project.” In a world where we have Annie and Rachel Stevens, this doesn’t seem so shocking, but in 2001, Kylie Minogue was just Kylie Minogue. It seemed like a shameless grab at mainstream acceptance.

While the rest of the album is considerably less accessible, with touches of ambient, hip-hop, and post-punk, it was the “pop” tracks that stuck in the craw of the indie purists.

I’ve changed since then, as has a lot of the indie community (although some Stylus readers still had some harsh words to say about the pop tracks on the Best Singles of 2005 list), and I’ve come to acknowledge that pop and “interesting” need not be antonyms.

Now I listen to Terrorists and realise it’s not the noisecore tracks that were truly revolutionary and subversive—it was the pop tracks. I was attracted to Gerling’s individualism and refusal to be categorised and yet I was caught out when they stuck a big finger up to the fans that weren’t willing to follow them wherever they wanted to go.

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