You could catch a live band any day of the week at a pub somewhere in Perth.

If it was a popular band, the venues would heave. It was shoulder to shoulder.

The carpet beneath your feet was sticky from spilled beer, the air above often thick with cigarette smoke which went home with you.

You didn’t need to spend time thinking about what beer to order.

Buying a round meant squeezing in next to the trays at the foot of the bar — which filled with butts very quickly — and ordering. “A jug please”. It would be Swan or Emu.

And yet the voices on songs which blasted out of old transistor radios at the beach didn’t sound much like Australians back in the early 1970s, even if they were.

We didn’t hear much about Australia in the lyrics either. But got to know the names of plenty of US towns.

Axiom sang about “laying on Arkansas grass”. In that American accent.

But as the decade wore on the cultural cringe started to wear off.

Australian cinema flowered with local voices, actors and stories.

Out of the east, Skyhooks were suddenly singing about Melbourne. Toorak. Carlton. Balwyn.

And in Perth, an unmissable Australian accent hit us between the eyes.

It was Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs.

The “boy from Bicton” and his band didn’t just sing about life in Perth. With a sharp eye for observation and biting wit he painted a picture of that life. It was heavy on satire. But underneath it all perhaps lay bits of the unvarnished truth too.

So we got to hear about the Australian character. Teenage longing. Social awkwardness. The suburbs.

“Put on your football jumpers, we are going down the football,” he urged.

One of Warner’s most famous stream-of-consciousness monologues, Half-time At The Football wasn’t really about the football.

It shot off in multiple directions, sometimes following a spontaneous line of thought. What went down in the suburbs when the footy was on. And yes, it could be pretty raw.

Scattered through the story you might hear about Wella Hair Shampoo. A Supa Furn lounge suit. Countdown on the TV. Plastic Bertrand. Laminex tables. Paper boys. East Fremantle Oval. Lowered Valiants. Venetian blinds.

And then of course there was Suburban Boy. “I wake up every morning with no-one beside me, I wake up every morning my mother will chide me. . . . ”.

What followed were little snippets of the life of that suburban boy. The football. The Sunday session. Luckless pursuits of the opposite sex.

But before Warner introduced us to The Suburbs there was Pus.

Pus had emerged in 1972, and is sometimes billed as Australia’s first punk band, provoking and testing audiences before punk even became a thing in London with the explosion of The Sex Pistols.

Warner, who studied psychology at the University of WA, had been interested in music and writing from an early age.

Left-field bands like Frank Zappa, the Fugs and Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were among his early influences.

“Initially the sort of things I was interested in was satirical songs and I was also really interested in the dynamics of stage performance,” he told The West Australian in 1994.

“I’d been writing songs since 1969 and originally, with Pus, did some of the songs we later recorded.

“And I found when I was doing them that I started doing these monologues — just making them up on the spot. And that became a sort of trademark that I developed.”

But the name?

“I thought what’s really revolting and would make people squirm. So Pus just felt right,” he told Agenda.

The band’s first gig was in a backyard in Palmyra, “behind the old Stammers” supermarket.

The first “official gig” was at Steve’s hotel on a Thursday night in 1973.

Publican Murray McHenry “never booked us again,” he said.

“I finished my uni degree in 1974 and Pus had been doing pretty well,” he said.

He thought Eastern States bands were “all copycats” — until he saw Skyhooks.

“I thought, ‘Oh jeez, those guys are brilliant. They’re doing everything that I’m sort of doing in a way.”

Then he did as we all did at some stage back then. He took off.

First up was a trip with mates around the continent.

Then they settled into the “cheapest reasonable place that we could find” in London — Brixton — and Warner started writing songs there.

“And as often happens when you’re away from . . . where most of your life has been, you see it in a different context or better context.

“And I think that assists your writing, and so I wrote a whole bundle of songs,” he said.

Writing for The West in 2009, Warner said that “nobody in Perth had ever made a career playing entirely original music but I was convinced that because of Perth’s homogeneity, my music could speak to all those like me who had never heard their world reflected in rock”.

“The most powerful music inevitably came from those putting their world on vinyl. And yet in Australia . . . all we ever did was try to sound like everybody else.

“Our world wasn’t exciting. It was flat and overpoliced and hot, so maybe that could be a virtue?

“My stint oversees enabled me to look back and understand that Perth’s lack of ‘culture’, its sparseness, its relentless brick-and-tile suburbanism gave it its identity.

“But Perth’s most distinctive quality was the homogeneity of its inhabitants.

“In our block, the local doctor lived across the road from the service station owner, who lived next door to a wharfie who lived opposite a menswear salesman.

“Back then, it was as if Perth’s plainness forced us to be original thinkers. Maybe that is why Perth produced so many fine creative brains,” he wrote.

In 1976 suburban rock was born. The songs were ready. The Perth venues were not.

“No one was doing original material,” Warner told Agenda.

“We must have gone to 20 or 30 pubs in the metro area to try and find places that would put us on,” he said.

Finally the Victoria Hotel in Subiaco agreed to give them a crack. It went well, and it was on to the Shenton Park Hotel, the Albion, and beyond.

Between 1978 and 1982, Warner put out four albums. The first, Mug’s Game, featured songs like Suburban Boy, Convict Streak and Australian Heat.

It went gold in eight weeks.

“I wrote about the things that concerned me, some were fun, some were tongue in cheek, generally it was just trying to express what it was like to be there at that point in time,” Warner told The West in 1988.

“I think the reason that my stuff was probably more uniquely Australian than other people at that time was because I started with a concept”.

Other albums followed: Free Kicks; Correct Weight; Welcome To My Planet. All sold in impressive numbers for an artist based in WA, who did not receive much airplay.

Tours of the east took off, and Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder band saw the Suburbs play a gig in Melbourne.

Warner gave them some cassettes which were played on Dylan’s tour bus.

Dylan later named The Suburbs and Richard Clapton as his favourite Australians bands.

Warner has continued to put out music ever since, even as he branched into writing for feature films, stage, television, radio and newspapers

He is the author of 15 crime novels, including the winner of the 1996 West Australian Premier’s Award for Fiction, City of Light, and the 2016 Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Fiction, Before It breaks.

His TV credits include the INXS telemovie, plus regular episodes of primetime dramas such as Packed to the Rafters, Rescue Special Ops, McLeod’s Daughters and Sea Patrol.

Now a resident of Sydney, he’s returned to Perth on a regular basis.

Warner told Agenda that while Perth had changed in many ways since he told us about it in the 70s, it had remained the same in some ways too.

“It’s a lot bigger, obviously, and there are certainly more interesting places — little bars and places,” he said.

“I think it’s always been an aspirational place (with) family-oriented, aspirational people.

“The majority of Australians, wherever they’re from, still want that kind of life — the biggest house that they can get or can afford.

“Preferably with a swimming pool if they could possibly do it.

“But fundamentally, I think it’s really pretty similar.

“I think the dream remains the same,” he said.

Warner is heading back to Perth in October as part of the Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs 50 Years Strong national tour.

The longevity of the Suburbs is a tribute to Warner’s pioneering and unique approach.

“We didn’t sound like anybody else,” Warner told Agenda.

And the audiences felt that “for once, somebody was singing about them”.

“No one was really using Australian culture as a vehicle for popular music.

“I still today have people come up to me and say, ‘Oh, that song Suburban Boy or Mug’s Game changed my life, it was for the first time, someone was singing about me and about my life’.”

Warner said his show this time would be skewed towards the most popular, well-known era of the Suburbs between about 1977 to 1980, with other “bits and pieces” right almost up to the current day.

The band line-up reunites key figures across five decades.

And Pus reunite on stage for the first time since 1975.

The tour’s final show is in Perth on October 24 at the Astor Theatre.

See davewarner.com.au for tickets.