Forever Five: Pinky Beecroft (Machine Gun Fellatio)

😈 The naughty soul behind the naughty-as-fuck Machine Gun Fellatio

🎹 Songwriter, screenwriter, raconteur and occasional disappearing act

🐺 Back with Lonesome Wolf, his first full-length album in seventeen years

My conversation with Pinky Beecroft about the five albums he couldn’t live without began like this:

“Five albums I can’t live without? Sure. Ummmm... Fuck. Off.”

It ended, considerably later, with:

“If you ever decide to do a Forever Five Hundred or Five Thousand, count me in...”

What happened in between was hilarious.

Albums appeared. Albums disappeared. Jazz records fought for places, were ruthlessly expelled, reconsidered and replaced again. Pinky thought aloud, argued with himself and disappeared down musical rabbit holes while I essentially sat back and watched his record collection tumble out of his brain in real time. On reflection, that’s kind of how his career has gone too. Nothing particularly straight about it.

Pinky Beecroft, born Matt Ford, first entered plenty of Australian households as the frontman of Machine Gun Fellatio, a band whose very name suggested subtlety probably wasn’t going to be part of the business plan. And it wasn’t.

At their peak, Machine Gun Fellatio were one of the wildest propositions in Australian music. Onstage nudity, sexual theatrics, glorious profanity, chaos and general shenanigans became part of the folklore. Their live shows could feel somewhere between a rock gig, cabaret, performance art and a party that should probably have had its bond withheld.

But the spectacle sometimes obscured something important. Machine Gun Fellatio could write fucking great songs. ‘Unsent Letter’. ‘The Girl of My Dreams (Is Giving Me Nightmares)’. ‘Rollercoaster’. ‘Pussy Town’. Underneath the outrageousness were melodies, hooks, melancholy and a band considerably smarter than the headlines surrounding them suggested. Double J’s retrospective on Paging Mr. Strike similarly places Beecroft and bandmate Glenn Dormand, aka Chit Chat Von Loopin Stab, inside that fertile late-’90s Sydney scene before MGF properly exploded. And Pinky’s fingerprints were already appearing elsewhere.

Before Machine Gun Fellatio became Machine Gun Fellatio as Australia came to know them, Beecroft and Dormand helped Tim Freedman finish The Whitlams’ ‘No Aphrodisiac’. It went on to top triple j’s Hottest 100 of 1997 and win Song of the Year at the 1998 ARIA Awards.

That tells you plenty about Beecroft.

Behind the bloke quite willing to make you profoundly uncomfortable from a stage was a songwriter capable of contributing to one of the most enduring Australian songs of its era.

Machine Gun Fellatio eventually imploded in 2005, but Pinky didn’t simply disappear. Pinky Beecroft and the White Russians followed, including 2008’s Somethin’ Somewhere Better, while Beecroft continued one of those careers that becomes increasingly difficult to describe without running out of commas. Singer. Pianist. Songwriter. Stand-up performer. Television writer. Producer. Storyteller. At one point, naturally, professional billiards commentator. His screenwriting credits would eventually include Farscape, Sea Patrol, Underbelly: Vanishing Act and Warnie.

For a long stretch, though, recording took a back seat. Now Pinky Beecroft is properly back.

His forthcoming Lonesome Wolf, due August 14, is his first full-length collection of new material in seventeen years, preceded by ‘Band Of Gold’, ‘My Heart Is In The Wrong Place’ and ‘I’ll Be Alright’. What began as a recording session with producer Damian Cafarella unexpectedly turned into an entire album, with Beecroft recently admitting that despite his years away from releasing records, he never actually stopped writing songs. An Australian launch tour begins in Brisbane on August 7, drawing from the new album, Machine Gun Fellatio and the deeper corners of his catalogue.

Which makes now a particularly lovely time to ask him about the music that made him.

Because underneath the glorious chaos of his Forever Five, a pattern eventually appears.

Strange humour. Great writing. Jazz. Beautifully damaged characters. Sex and death rubbing shoulders. Music willing to be ridiculous without being stupid, heartbreaking without becoming precious, and sophisticated without constantly pointing at its own sophistication.

In other words, Pinky Beecroft’s Forever Five sounds quite a lot like Pinky Beecroft.

Pinky Beecroft’s Forever Five

Ween – The Mollusk (1997)

Pinky’s first problem wasn’t choosing a Ween album.

It was accepting that he was only allowed one: “I’m trying to figure out which Ween album. I’ve so far got it down to: all of them.”

Then came the criteria: “I was going with: which one has had the biggest effect on my life. (The Pod.) Which one do I play the most now? (The Mollusk.) Which one do I always give people as a present? 12 Golden Country Greats.”

This went on for quite a while. Eventually: “I think I’m going with The Mollusk. I don’t know what I’d do without it. I’ve been listening to it for 29 years without getting sick of it.”

And really, that says more than any carefully constructed explanation could. The Mollusk is what happens when two wildly talented people are given access to a recording studio and apparently nobody thinks to install adult supervision. A nautical psychedelic fever dream wandering through prog, folk, warped pop, sea shanties, Beatlesque melody and whatever the hell ‘Waving My Dick in the Wind’ is, it should collapse beneath the weight of its own ridiculousness. Instead, it is magnificent.

That’s partly because Ween’s greatest trick has always been hiding astonishing craftsmanship underneath the joke. ‘The Mollusk’, ‘Mutilated Lips’, ‘Buckingham Green’ and the absurdly infectious ‘Ocean Man’ are wonderfully strange songs, but they are songs. Melodies stick. Arrangements unfold. Beautiful moments suddenly emerge from something that appeared, seconds earlier, to be taking the piss.

It’s difficult not to see why that might resonate with Pinky. Machine Gun Fellatio pulled off a similar sleight of hand. The obscenity, nudity, provocation and theatrical excess could dominate the conversation, but underneath it all was a band that knew its way around a hook. Strip away the spectacle and songs like ‘Unsent Letter’, ‘Rollercoaster’ and ‘The Girl of My Dreams (Is Giving Me Nightmares)’ reveal how much craft was hiding beneath the chaos.

Pinky choosing The Mollusk therefore feels almost suspiciously perfect.

Weird. Funny. Musically restless. Occasionally filthy. Capable of making you laugh one minute and hit you somewhere unexpectedly tender the next. And after 29 years, apparently still impossible to wear out.

Needle Drop: ‘The Mollusk’

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers – Moanin’ (1958)

During our conversation, jazz records kept circling the runway.

Some landed. Some were immediately ordered back into the air.

Eventually Art Blakey refused to leave.

Moanin’ is hard bop with its shoulders back: blues, gospel, swing and enormous rhythmic muscle, powered by Blakey’s drumming and featuring one of jazz’s most instantly recognisable opening exchanges between Bobby Timmons’ piano and the horns. There is sophistication everywhere, but nothing about the record feels academic. It moves. It sweats.

The musicians push one another, leave openings, fill them, pull back and charge forward again.

And perhaps that explains why this was the jazz record that survived Pinky’s increasingly ruthless internal selection committee.

For all the chaos surrounding his public persona, Beecroft is a piano player and songwriter first. Hearing him enthusiastically ricochet between jazz albums offered a lovely glimpse beneath everything else. The outrageous frontman is also simply a bloke completely intoxicated by music.

Needle Drop: ‘Moanin’’

Lana Del Rey – Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (2023)

And suddenly, Lana.

Pinky’s most contemporary choice may also be the record here with the most sprawling emotional interior.

Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is messy, intimate, funny, uncomfortable, grand, conversational and deeply strange. Lana Del Rey allows songs to wander wherever they need to wander, moving through family, mortality, sex, religion, memory and loneliness without much interest in tidying everything up for the listener.

At times it barely feels assembled in the conventional sense.

Thoughts bleed into songs. Songs become monologues. Beautiful melodies appear from the fog and vanish again. Which may be precisely the appeal.

There is a stream-of-consciousness quality to Ocean Blvd that resembles the way Pinky chose these records in the first place: follow the thought, see where it goes, double back when necessary and trust something interesting will emerge.

It also feels connected to Beecroft the storyteller, not merely Beecroft the musician. Across songwriting, television writing, comedy and performance, narrative keeps following him around.

Even when he apparently tries to escape it.

Needle Drop: ‘A&W’

Leonard Cohen – Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977)

Leonard Cohen and Phil Spector should probably never have been allowed into the same studio.

Thank God nobody stopped them.

Death of a Ladies’ Man remains the magnificent oddball in Cohen’s catalogue: his dry, intimate writing thrown against Spector’s enormous arrangements, choirs, strings, horns, percussion and general determination to fill every remaining molecule of available air.

It is excessive, funny, bruised, horny, bitter and frequently beautiful. In other words, another Pinky Beecroft record. Cohen’s writing here feels especially relevant. Desire and disappointment constantly elbow one another for room. Sex becomes comedy, comedy becomes sadness, and the narrator is rarely granted the dignity of emerging from any encounter looking particularly heroic.

Beecroft has always had a similar affection for the flawed protagonist. The joke might be filthy, but somewhere nearby somebody usually has their heart broken. That applies to Machine Gun Fellatio, the White Russians and plenty of the songs now emerging from Lonesome Wolf. Strip away the theatre and Beecroft has spent a remarkable amount of his career writing about people trying, failing, wanting and occasionally making complete dickheads of themselves.

Leonard would understand.

Needle Drop: ‘Memories’

Warren Zevon – Life’ll Kill Ya (2000)

And then Warren Zevon strolls in to finish the job. Life’ll Kill Ya arrived late in Zevon’s life but before the cancer diagnosis that would make his final album, The Wind, feel unbearably prophetic. Even without that later knowledge, mortality hangs heavily over these songs. Naturally, Zevon finds it hilarious. That balance between darkness and wit is his great gift. Death, ageing, addiction, regret, failure and human stupidity are all sitting around the table, but nobody has cancelled the drinks.

The title track practically shrugs at the inevitability of the whole business. Elsewhere, ‘My Shit’s Fucked Up’ turns bodily decline into one of the bluntest existential songs ever written, while his version of Steve Winwood’s ‘Back in the High Life Again’ strips away the triumphalism until something much sadder remains. Of Pinky’s five selections, this might be the one that pulls everything together. The piano, the black humour, the storyteller’s instinct. The ability to make something funny and devastating occupy exactly the same sentence.

Machine Gun Fellatio may have made Pinky Beecroft famous, but that combination has followed him through everything: the White Russians, his writing for other artists, television, storytelling and now this unexpected new chapter.

Needle Drop: ‘Life’ll Kill Ya’

Pinky Beecroft’s Forever Five — The Playlist

A songwriter, pianist, provocateur, screenwriter, storyteller and restless music obsessive whose career has zigzagged all over the place without ever completely losing sight of the thing that seems to matter most to him: the song. And in 2026, after seventeen years without a new full-length record, there is another chapter being written. Lonesome Wolf arrives August 14.

The Forever Five Hundred will have to wait.

For now, somehow, we got him down to five.