Pyramidiacs

Fairfield, a university competition, and a number eleven

The Pyramidiacs formed in the late 1980s in Fairfield, in Sydney's western suburbs; MusicBrainz dates the group from 1988 and still lists it as active. The record collection behind it was never a secret — the Replacements, Teenage Fanclub, Big Star and Matthew Sweet are the four names that come up in every account of the band, and the writing has stayed close to them: short songs, guitars high in the mix, harmony on the chorus.

The first break was small and practical. In 1990 the band won a competition at Eddie Owen's university and spent the prize money on studio time for a debut single. The track that came out of it, "Can't Keep a Hold of You", reached number eleven on the alternative chart, and the early singles went out through the Zero Hour label.

The line-up took years to settle. The early group ran Owen on guitar, Phil Byrne on vocals and guitar, Mick Baty on drums and Mick's brother Steve on bass. Kendall James took the bass chair when Steve left. After a break the band reconvened with Luke Owen drumming and Bob Susnjara on bass, and the Baty brothers eventually came back in. Byrne's departure brought in the guitarist Mick "Funter" O'Regan. What survived every change was the trio core that the records keep returning to: Owen, Susnjara and Mickster Baty.

The records that carried them

The Krunch! EP arrived in 1993 and set up the album. All You Want followed in 1994 on Pink Flamingo Records, timed ahead of a European tour the band undertook in 1995 — the trip that turned a Sydney suburban band into a touring proposition in markets that had never seen them. The Superstar EP came out the same year, and a split release, Pyramidiacs Vrs Challenger 7, in 1998.

Teeter Totter, from 1996, is the record that has had the longest second life. It first appeared as a Spanish release, which says something in itself about where the audience had settled, and included a cover of Badfinger's "Just a Chance". Off The Hip reissued it in 2003, dropping that cover, adding a hidden track, and leaving the reviewer at PopDiggers, Garwood Pickjon, mildly annoyed at the omission while recommending the album anyway on the grounds that there is "hardly a filler" on it. The reissue credits Owen, Susnjara and Mickster Batty, with Michael Carpenter producing and guesting on guitar and vocals. Pickjon's picks — "The Cleaner", "There's Always Something", "Don't Keep It From Me", "Waiting", "Take A Bow" and "It's Not You" — track the two halves of the band's writing: the Big Star-shaped songs on one side, the plainer melodic guitar material on the other.

Nobody's Fool came out on the Spanish independent Rock Indiana, and marked another personnel shift: Carpenter moved from the control room to the drum stool, contributing vocals and harmonies, and Bill Gibson came in on bass, having previously played with the Lemonheads and the Eastern Dark. Reviewing it, IndyRock described a band working through classic pop from several angles at once — power-pop attack, rock and roll momentum, a touch of new wave. A further release, Teenage Complications, sits in the MusicBrainz catalogue.

Why Spain keeps calling

The documented live history is thin, but almost all of what exists points at the same country. The band's oldest archived setlist is Bikini in Barcelona on 21 December 1996, a year after the first European tour. IndyRock photographed them at Planta Baja in Granada on 5 April 2001. A Spanish label put out Nobody's Fool. The 1996 album was a Spanish release first.

Australian dates are the sparser end of the record. Setlist.fm logs a harbour cruise in Sydney on 12 August 2001 and a slot at the Lost Weekend Power Pop Festival at the Tote Hotel in Melbourne on 16 March 2003 — and then nothing at all until this month, a gap of more than twenty-three years in the public live record.

That pattern — better documented, better promoted and better paid in Murcia and Catalonia than in New South Wales — is common enough among nineties power-pop bands with a European festival circuit still willing to book them. It also explains the shape of the current run, which is Spanish from start to finish.

October 2026: three dates, one on sale

The run was confirmed in stages. On 3 July 2026 the organisers of Caravaca Power Pop announced the line-up for the festival's eighth edition, held on 23 and 24 October in the historic centre of Caravaca de la Cruz, Murcia, with the Pyramidiacs billed alongside The Lemon Twigs and 20/20 from the United States, Mod Lang, and the Spanish acts Airbag, Mi Vida Rosa, Brighton 64 and Los Marañones. The festival also runs vinyl sessions through the old quarter. Its director, José Esteban Martínez-Iglesias, called the bill "another qualitative leap"; the local culture councillor, Joaquín Zaplana, framed the event as a cultural and economic driver for the town, and reported near-full hotel occupancy across the area.

From Caravaca the band move north. Setlist.fm lists a 25 October 2026 date at Octavo Arte in Segovia as part of WIC 2026 — the first upcoming show to appear on the band's page in over two decades. The run then closes in Barcelona on Thursday 29 October at Aclam Club, in the Eixample at Carrer del Consell de Cent 201, with doors at 20:00 and tickets handled through Universe. That Barcelona date is the single show currently carrying tickets on general sale.

The Aclam booking puts them inside a month of related programming at the same room: 20/20 play there on 24 October under a "Power Pop Icons" billing, Will Hoge on the 22nd, Twanguero on the 25th and Tori Sparks on the 30th. It is a club circuit that has kept this kind of guitar pop in work, and the Pyramidiacs are slotting into it rather than headlining above it.

What the show looks like, and what is not yet known

Honesty about the gaps matters here. No support act is listed for the Barcelona show. No current reviews of the 2026 shows have been published, because the run has not started. And setlist.fm, which holds three Pyramidiacs setlists going back to 1996, holds no song-level data for any of them — so the shape of the set, the running order and how much of Teeter Totter or Nobody's Fool survives into a 2026 performance are genuinely undocumented rather than merely unreported.

What is on the record is the format: an 8pm club start in a small Eixample room with a pop and power-pop billing, sandwiched between an outdoor two-day festival in Murcia and a festival slot in Segovia four days earlier. On the Caravaca bill the band sit below The Lemon Twigs and share a stage with 20/20, which places them at festival-set length rather than a full headline show for the first two dates, with Barcelona the one night that is theirs end to end.