BLUDGERS

BLUDGERS: TEN THINGS ⁊ A FAITHFUL CHRONICLE

 

1. The band name is a triple entendre, lads, and that's before the first chord. "Bludger" is Aussie/Kiwi slang for a freeloader, a Quidditch ball that hunts you down like a bee with a grudge, and — per Crowe's Australian Slang Dictionary of 1882 — "a thief who will use his bludgeon and lives on the gains of immoral women." The band itself summarises all three on the front page of their website: "We won't club you in the head. We will sponge off you." Bit modest, that. They do club you in the head — only musically. A chronological footnote, raised eyebrow optional: the first Bludgers record predates Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (June 1997) by a comfortable margin — the lads have been Bludgers since 1993. So the Quidditch ball was named after the band, not the other way round. J.K. Rowling may very well have caught a sweaty Champaign set one summer and gone home with notions. May be true. May very well be true.

 

2. They started as a grad-school meet-cute in Champaign, Illinois, like the world's least-cool indie film. Singer Jon Pheloung and guitarist Paul Colussi met as postgraduates at the University of Illinois in 1993, did the acoustic-electric duo thing, and — per the band's own bio — recruited bass player Craig Walls, who "volunteered for duty and became the soul of the band" while "the trio endured a succession of drummers." Every band has a Spinal Tap era. Most don't put it in their press release.

 

3. They were proper alt-country before alt-country had a Wikipedia page. Bludgers opened for Uncle Tupelo and The Bottle Rockets — the actual roots of the genre — and worked the Chicago-Champaign-Nashville scene that produced Wilco. Set Your Sights Low was cut in Nashville at Sound Vortex by the late Robb Earls; the CD release party was at the Chicago House of Blues, opening for The Pursuit of Happiness. Soft lad behaviour, really, supporting a band whose name is also your business plan.

 

4. One of the guitarists runs the largest rock-history archive on Earth. Andy Leach is Senior Director of Museum and Archival Collections at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland — by his own description "the most comprehensive repository of materials like this that is publicly available in the world." Imagine being the only fella in your band who can professionally appraise your own setlist. Last week he hosted the opening of the Rock Hall's new "Paul McCartney and Wings" exhibit — Macca on Lake Erie, ta very much. He also plays guitar in Cleveland's New Soft Shoe, a Gram Parsons tribute outfit that has gigged the Gram Parsons Guitar Pull in Waycross, Georgia. Files rock history by day, commits it by night. Iconic.

 

5. The other guitarist is a biotech VP who teaches pond scum to make medicine. Paul Colussi is VP of Complex Membrane Protein Technologies at AbCellera, with 30+ peer-reviewed papers and 15+ patents to his name. His specialty: coaxing the ciliated protist Tetrahymena thermophila — basically a posh paramecium — into producing membrane proteins for drug discovery. He recently traded Rockport, Massachusetts for back home in Australia (Sydney's the alma mater, before the Illinois PhD), so one Bludger now spends his days persuading single-celled organisms to manufacture pharmaceuticals from the other hemisphere, and his evenings persuading humans to feel things in 4/4. Versatile lad.

 

6. The frontman is in a Peter Jackson film. Sort of. Bear with us. Christchurch-born and now Wellington-based Jon Pheloung — Shirley Boys' High alum, First-Class-Hons grad of the University of Canterbury, and Court Theatre veteran — has an IMDb credit as an uncredited "Theatre Crowd Member" in King Kong (2005). So technically, a Bludger has shared a screen with a 25-foot ape, even if neither got billing. He spent twelve years lecturing media studies and theatre at the University of Illinois and North Carolina State before sensibly buggering off home to Aotearoa, where he has directed at the Court Theatre (Babylon Heights, God of Carnage, Skin Tight) and toured his solo show One Man Guy: Dirty American Decade — fourteen Bludgers songs glued together with standup. Best title in alt-country, no contest.

 

7. There is almost certainly a famous Pheloung in the family tree. Probably. I'm estimating. The surname Pheloung is borne by roughly 88 people in New Zealand, with about 42% of all Pheloungs worldwide living in Australia — rarer than a quiet drummer. The most famous of them is the late Barrington Pheloung, the Australian composer who wrote the Inspector Morse, Lewis, ⁊ Endeavour themes — basically the soundtrack to every cup of tea consumed in the United Kingdom since 1987. No source I found names Jon and Barrington as kin, so this is informed speculation. But if they aren't related, it's the most ridiculous coincidence in alt-country, and that's saying something.

 

8. A Bludgers song shares a soundtrack credit with an Oscar winner. Per the band's 2013 press, the single "Wherever She Stays" was placed in the indie drama Bottled Up, starring Melissa Leo, Best Supporting Actress for The Fighter (2010). One degree of separation between a Champaign bass riff and an Academy Award is a properly efficient bit of name-dropping. Macca would approve.

 

9. The drum stool has had one true tenant and one extraordinary friend keeping it warm. Sean Fogarty is the Bludgers' drummer — the rhythmic spine from Better Off At Home onward, the man whose pocket made the rest of it make sense. Outside the band he's stacked up serious indie credentials, swinging the sticks for The Mendoza Line (the Athens-via-Brooklyn alt-country lifers on Misra Records, beloved of Magnet and Pitchfork alike) and Chicago's Mount Pilot. For a year or two between Sean's stretches, the kit was minded by Bryan St. Pere of HUM — the Champaign band whose 1995 "Stars" is still wedged in the bones of every '90s alt-rock kid. Bryan didn't need the gig; he just liked drumming, liked the songs, and took a properly large swerve from HUM's cathedral-sized fuzz into twangier ground for the lads. The Bludgers were guests at his wedding reception, where they sat together at one table off to the side — the very picture of a band who came as a unit and didn't know quite where else to put themselves. Bryan died in 2021, far too young at 52. Rest easy.

 

10. They are a five-piece band on five different latitudes, and that's the joke. Today's Bludgers live across California, Ohio, Australia, New York, and New Zealand — rehearsal requires either a satellite link or a calendar that respects no man. They've answered with Separate Ways (2016, knowingly titled), the EP FIVE (2020), and ongoing in-house videos by Colussi and Leach. Dirty Laundry has racked up 16,000+ Spotify spins; "New Orleans at Dawn" pulled 20,255 YouTube views in 13 days. Modest in Drake terms. Statistically miraculous for five middle-aged blokes whose practice room is the International Date Line.